What are the academic job ranks in Sweden?

In general, «Universitetslektor» is the closest the Swedish system has to an «associate professor» in the US system, and is close to a «lecturer» in the British system. The more junior rank would be «Biträdande lektor», and the more senior «Professor».

There are some subtleties in play here though; most importantly for the linked position is the phrase «tidsbegränsade anställningar». This means that the position is for a limited time only — they are hiring from March to December, supposedly to fill an urgent teaching need. The limit in time signals several things. One of them is that it is likely to be important to shoulder the teaching required — it might, depending on the department and their situation, for instance be difficult to buy out teaching time with research funds. Another is that it comes with none of the tenure guarantees usual «lektorat» provides. Since the position is time-limited, it will evaporate at the end of the time, to be replaced with a different position if the department finds the funds to hire again.

The hierarchy to figure out how the ranks work would be something like:

Tidsbegränsad anställning: Time-limited appointment. Not subject to tenure-like employment protection.

Adjunkt: Adjunct teacher. Needs not have a doctorate. Fills a teaching need.

Biträdande lektor: Similar to tenure track; usually time-limited to 4-6 years, at the end of which a review takes place deciding whether to upgrade the position to...

Lektor: The most common of Swedish University teaching/research positions. Obligated to teach, but can usually trade teaching time against research grant money. At every University I have ever interacted with, these come with an obligation for a certain amount of pedagogical qualifications — and if you are hired without pedagogical coursework in your CV, you may have to spend large swathes of your first year studying higher education pedagogy.

Professor: Similar to Professor in the UK or Full or even Named professorships in the US. It used to be very rare — one or two per field wasn't uncomomon; but since 1999, Professor is a possible target for promotion from Lektor, which increases the numbers. Before the 1999 reform, a Professor could not be fired, even under usual Swedish employment protection rules.

In summary: «Universitetslektor» is an essentially tenured position. They all come with heavy-looking teaching loads, but it is common in Sweden to reduce teaching loads with grant money. «Tidsbegränsad anställning» is a non-tenured and likely to be teaching-heavy position.


Should I ask my students to contribute in preparation of the manuscripts?

When I did my masters, I had this problem. My old supervisor ended up rewriting a paper from scratch. He never really gave me any feedback except that my writing of the paper was not good and there is no way it will be accepted. I now understand that this approach was a waste of his time and a waste of a learning experience for me.

Now I am working with a different supervisor and when I write a paper, I get a lot of comments and feedback and we end up doing 4-5 rounds or review. I think the initial draft is usually not good. But after all these rounds of review, I end up writing a "good" paper myself.

Maybe your students need to realize that they have a problem that THEY need to address. You writing the papers on their behalf does not solve this problem. Initially, push them to write a draft regardless of quality. Then do rigorous review afterward. With time, their writing will definitely improve


What are some effective ways for someone without a graduate degree to increase their chances of getting hired as a lecturer?

Gain specific professional experience in the subject you want to teach.

In my (engineering) department, all of the teaching staff who do not hold PhDs (or are not current PhD students) have industry experience in the subject they are teaching.

In other words, if you are a professional penetration tester, you may be hired to teach computer security. If you work for a major telecom, you may be hired to teach computer networks. Kickstart a successful electronics startup, and you may be hired to teach circuits. You get the idea.

The point is to have some domain-specific expertise you can bring to the table (because university professors are supposed to be subject matter experts, or at least be able to pretend to be). If it's not from research, professional experience can also work.


Is it possible to apply for Ph. D. program in Physics with a CS background?

I don't know if it's possible. It depends on the country. If you live in one of the members of the UE, it is- this is the so called Bologna Process.

But another question is whether you should do it and I strongly advise you not to. You need strong knowledge of Maths and Physics. I highly doubt you will be able to catch up with that. Even if you do, it will take up a major part of your PhD and you won't have time for real work.


Any advice for my first TPC task as a PhD student?

As a reviewer, you have a dual role: you are both, a gatekeeper responsible for ensuring the quality of the programme, and a mentor to the authors for improving their own work.

As a gatekeeper, your task is to fairly evaluate whether a paper fulfills the standards of the community and this specific conference, whether the paper is methodologically sound, and (notoriously) whether the paper is sufficiently interesting to the community. The last part tends to be the most subjective, and my personal recommendation here is to not put too much stock on this item. By and large, we as a scientific community tend to overestimate our ability to predict what research will have an impact. Further, don't be too strict with regards to methodological soundness - my impression is that particularly inexperienced researchers have a tendency to be overly critical of other people's work. Finally, be careful not to recommend rejecting a paper simply because it is not the kind of research you would have done, or because the authors have chosen a different method than the one that you would use when attacking their problem.
As a mentor, you want your review to be both, honest and helpful. Don't sugarcoat your review, but make sure to highlight positive as well as negative aspects of the manuscript. If you criticise, do so with concrete, actionable recommendations. Don't just write that "approach A is bad", but suggest what else the authors could do that would be more convincing. Don't write that the authors have not taken important related work into account, but list what exactly is missing and why this matters. Always, always make sure that your review is professional and friendly - you may be tempted to give some authors some "tough love" and set them straight. Avoid this temptation at all costs.

Some more recommendations:

Don't write a super-short, high-level review. As you are surely aware, as an author it is very disappointing to receive a 5-lines review for an article that you spent a lot of time on. However, it is ok if the length and detail corresponds to the quality of the paper - for a very questionable submission that is clearly below the bar, you don't need to write pages and pages of explanations if one or two paragraphs are sufficient. For instance, if you are convinced that the method the authors use is fundamentally incorrect, there is no point in detailedly commenting the entire manuscript.
Make sure that the crucial points of your review stand out. If you write a detailed review (as you should), highlight what the most important comments are, so that they are not drowned out by smaller, detailed comments. If you recommend rejecting a paper, I suggest clearly differentiating issues led to you rejecting the paper and things that you think are either easy to fix or less crucial problems.
Give the authors the benefit of doubt. Don't assume that everything that isn't described in sufficient detail is necessarily terrible, or that every mistake in the paper has been planted with malicious intend.
Relatedly, make sure that you don't read anything into the paper that isn't actually described. Our mind tends to fill in the blanks, and sometimes all it takes is a few keywords to fill your mind with an idea of what you think the authors have done. Make sure that you are evaluating what the authors actually describe, and not what your mind imagined after the abstract.
You have a duty to try to understand the work, but if you fail to understand what the authors actually did even after honestly trying to follow, it is on the authors. Ultimately, you are a prototype reader for the paper - if you fail to follow the manuscript despite presumably investing more time and goodwill than the average reader, the paper may need a better presentation.

Overall, remember your own experiences as an author - which reviews did you find helpful? Write reviews that you yourself would appreciate, especially if you recommend rejecting the paper.


PhD in Comparative Literature: how much does the University's pedigree matter compared to opportunties for collaboration?

Since it looks like this question was voted for reopen, I'll move my comment to an answer.

Partial quote of comment from OP:

  ...I read on the University's database that most of [the small European country university department's] graduates remained there for their post-doc, teaching assistantships, etc. And this scared me considerably. I was just wondering if that should be considered a general rule for such small departments... Many of the former PhD students had papers published in good journals but, somehow, did not move from the city (none of them).

That sounds to me like a pretty big red flag - if the department isn't creating graduates that have success elsewhere, and you want to eventually find success elsewhere in your career, then they aren't providing you any evidence that their program is going to help you reach your goals. Further, it might be evidence that the department is fairly insular, and doesn't interact as much with scholars from countries like the US, UK, and Germany, which would limit opportunities to form the relationships that lead to future positions.

Of course it is possible that you could be the student to break their tradition, and it's also possible that those previous students are doing exactly what they wanted to do by staying (and it may also depend on a small sample size). Unfortunately you just don't have any evidence that graduates of that program can get positions like the ones you hope to compete for.

I think that's all the advice I can really give, besides that it's your decision and depends on how you personally weigh the various pros and cons. Eventual faculty positions and even post-docs can be quite competitive, so even at a top-ranked institution there are no career guarantees.

Best of luck to you.


Offer for a pre-PhD visit, how to handle the situation with other PhD applications in the queue?

In general, I think so long as you and the PI in question are forthright about your mutual expectations, there should be very few problems.

If the PI who is offering you the position is planning on having you become a PhD student, then that should be made clear. Similarly, if you'd like to consider other options, then you should let your potential advisor know that a "competition" will be taking place.

However, since you said you'd be writing a PhD proposal, it's not clear that you'd automatically have a guaranteed offer for a position at the end of this position if successful. This should also be cleared up before you make a final decision.


Is a lecturer job early in my career a bad thing?

Generally, yes, in the U.S. "lecturer" is a lower-tier, non-tenure-track job, while "assistant professor" is tenure-track. "Inferior" in that sense, yes, although it does happen that assistant professors fail to get tenure and must leave, while lecturers go on and on... admittedly, often term-by-term.

I think that once-upon-a-time any job other than the deluxe ones would have been a sign that you'd already not "made the cut", but nowadays things are so much tighter that it is widely acknowledged that not managing a "research post-doc" or similar is not a disgrace, but as much just bad luck.

It is true that the same factors that push one to a certain threshold so that bad luck becomes the dominant factor will most likely still be in play, so hedging one's bets should take that into account.

Your experience in doing serious teaching will be taken into account in the positive sense that not everyone is able to cope with this, but it is very much the bread-and-butter of academic mathematics, no matter what anyone says. Not glamorous or heroic, no, but...

So when you ask "will my lecturer experience be considered", well, yes, that's legitimate work, and not everyone manages it. But/and if you're applying for somewhat-upscale tenure-track jobs (=assistant prof), those lecturer jobs are approximately neutral. The question will be about what papers you've written/published... given that you apparently pass the minimum threshold of not-awful/intolerable teaching chops.

The most awkward part of such situations is that, often, doing sufficient adjunct/lecturer teaching to make a living leaves insufficient time/energy for scholarship/research/thinking, and this is not usually taken into account formally...


Professor gave me a higher grade than I deserved. What should I do?

Don't worry about it. No one's going to come after you for failing to turn in an essay in some random course. No one's ever going to check and, if they did, they probably won't care too much.

Should you turn yourself in? No. There's absolutely no reason to turn yourself in. You've done nothing wrong. The professor is the one responsible for assigning your grade correctly. For all you (or we) know, they felt you deserved a B-.

Should you have emailed your professor the essay? Probably not, but mostly because they probably don't care. I doubt they read it and I very much doubt that you caused any problems for them.


What should I do if I think that my former supervisor has published our results without citation or acknowledgment?

People's work on a publication is attributed in two main ways: authorship and in the acknowledgement section. Here, you need to know if your contribution was significant enough for an authorship (it sounds like it wasn't), and whether your work actually appeared in these publications.  There are a number of resources and guides regarding authorship: one, for example here. The typical defining factor is making an intellectual contribution. The information you have provided suggests that you do not deserve an authorship, but probably should have been noted in the acknowledgements.

In my opinion, this is not worth making a fuss over. In my experience, admission committees are unlikely to care about whether you appeared in this section or not. They care whether you were an author on a paper, and how your reference letters discuss you and your work. You will have the latter, as long you don't burn any bridges. In your discussions with potential advisors, demonstrate an understanding of why the project was important, and detail how you assisted the main researchers.

Citing your project write-up is unlikely to be appropriate - and plagiarism would probably only come into play if they copied and pasted your text without your permission.


Is it appropriate to reuse the same illustration in multiple papers?

No, there is no need to suggest removing the illustration. Why would you be concerned about it being reused? There is nothing wrong with re-using an illustration, especially if it "provides a concise metaphor of the framework the authors are working in".

Of course, the authors should state that the figure was previously published and refer to the original paper, as well as obtain permission from the journal it was published in. Given that it is their own paper in the same journal it will probably be no problem to arrange that.


Rankings of Computer Science conferences and journals

There is CORE, an initiative by universities from Australia and New Zealand. On their website, you can find both journal and conference rankings. Most of the rankings are ok, but (of course) there are individual entries that seem too high or too low to me. As far as I know, many research organisations and faculties in the APAC area use this ranking to assign "credit" for papers.

That being said, if your goal is to distinguish good and bogus conferences, I am not sure CORE will actually help you. The main problem is that CORE is only updated every few years, and only with entries which got submitted by somebody during a nomination phase. Hence it is never really complete. Actual bogus conferences (such as the infamous Worldcomp series - see also for instance here) are not listed at all, but so are smaller legit venues as well as any new conference or journal (of any quality). Hence, you can use the presence of a ranking in CORE as a signal that the venue is probably not bogus (it may still subjectively be better or worse than its ranking indicates, but it is very unlikely to be an actual scam), but you cannot use the absence of a ranking to indicate a bogus venue.

Another problem that you may run into is that a few bogus venues have taken up the practice of using a name that is "coincidentally" very similar to existing high-ranked venues (cp. the top-quality WWW conference and the very low-quality WWW/Internet conference). To complicate matters further, in some emerging fields, even more or less established publishers sometimes churn out journals with basically identical names at more or less the same time (e.g., Springer's Journal of Cloud Computing vs Inderscience's Journal of Cloud Computing).

Finally, established conferences occasionally change their name, sometimes as part of a merger with other conferences, and hence "fall of" the ranking if you do not know what the conference used to be called in the past.

All that is to say that CORE is a tool that can help you get a feel for the value of a publication, but it will not relief you from the task of actually looking at the publications themselves to assess their value.


Can a professor ask students to upload a picture ID?

The reason for wanting it scanned is so that it can be checked later, rather than in real time. Whether that is reasonable or not, is a decision for the department or university to make. It might be improper to ask that a non-university ID be scanned, but the use of university documents, such as a student ID, is probably within their proper authority.
I think your position is reasonable, but not necessarily the best option. But it might also be that you didn't read the instructions completely.
However, if it wasn't clear that it should be scanned and they just assumed that you would, then you have cause for complaint.
I hope you can work out something satisfactory and that it was just a correctable misunderstanding.


Is it okay to send my professor humorous material?

If you need to ask this kind of question on Stack Exchange then the answer is no.

You're contemplating engaging with them on a personal level, which requires a some degree of a social relationship with them.  You clearly don't have that relationship.

If, on the other hand, you had a good social relationship with your professor - shared tea and cakes during your supervision meetings, say - then of course this would be appropriate, but you would know that already.


Can a faculty on a 12-month appointment apply for grants?

This will entirely depend on the nature of the position, and "12 month position" isn't actually precise enough to answer it. There are several factors to consider:

There are 12-month faculty positions (including my own, and many positions at medical schools and other institutions) where not only can you bring in research funding, but you are expected to do so. The most extreme version of this is 12-month positions with 100% soft money. In my experience, this is actually the type of position the NIH is used to dealing with, in contrast to the NSF.
"I haven't heard if they can be paid extra" - this will again depend on the position. One institution I was considering a job at had incentives in place such that you could indeed pay yourself extra if you brought in grants (and one place actually automatically paid you more if you brought in more grants). My current institution only covers 75% of my salary, so covering the other 25% is technically "paying myself more", but it's capped.
Buying out coursework time is contingent on the department among other things.

Basically: Yes, but the nature of how falls under "It depends".


How difficult is it to get a paid PhD studentship in physics in Germany?

Is it difficult to get a paid PhD position?

In Germany, most PhD positions are paid. In physics, you would typically get a half to three quarters full-time equivalent position as a university employee. I don't think it's particularly difficult to get such a position, if you have the right qualification for it. This will also depend on the place where you got your Master's degree.

  Does the average play a pivotal rule?

A lot of professors that I know do care for good grades. And many university regulations ask for at least a good degree for admission as a PhD student (in my place, that translates to 2.5 or better, though there's a tolerance for students from abroad to take care of differences in the grading systems).

My suggestion would be to look for position being announced through for example in:

http://www.academics.de
http://www.nature.com/naturejobs/science/
http://www.drarbeit.de

and apply or get in contact with the person there to see how far you can get.

Also try to use your personal network: Ask your supervisors whether they know good labs to apply to, or whether they could even throw in a word for you.


To what extent will your choice of PhD topic restrict your career?

Very few people are static in their careers, in and out of academia. My PhD was in the area of molecular simulations in chemical engineering. My post doc was with a physicist working in computational materials, then I took a staff position in environmental engineering doing fluid flow and geochemistry studies, I have since moved into renewable energy applications and biomedical, with side work in algorithm development and kinetics.

All of this is to say, any limits on what direction your career can take are placed by the researcher, not the field of study. If you’re not willing to branch out, your choice of jobs will be limited. If you’re willing to explore, the options are as infinite as your curiosity and salesmanship will allow.


Counting PhD years for Tvöd salary in Germany

Probably not. "Work experience" assumes that the person is employed on a position relevant for the position that the "Stufe" is calculated for. From my experience, there is basically no flexibility in bending the interpretation of the TV-L/TV-H (I assume you mean either of them, since they are the relevant "Tarifverträge" for scientific employees).


Are sleep stations on-campus effective in promoting productivity of students?

My first thought was, Do you mean a dorm room?

But, many students in the US commute to school, so are overtaxed with having to travel from their residence to campus and back on a regular basis. They also often have part or full time jobs with commutes on top of their studies and many are taking stimulant medications.

It would probably be better to promote affordable housing options on and near campuses and create actual localized academic communities rather than the fractured rush-hour-to-a-degree that we currently see many students engaging in.

What do you mean by a "culture of lethargy?"

Rest is when the body and mind build new connections. Sleep is necessary for humans to function, not just some wasted time where we could be "more productive."

It depends on what kind of campus you are on whether it is a good idea.


If you write about something originally stated in B and C, you should always read B and C to make sure that's actually what they said (which you say you've done) and cite them. (This rules out Option 3.)

Whether or not to cite A depends on how you use A.

You are using intellectual content from A (the interpretation/summary of B and C), so you should cite A also. (Another example of this is How to cite the original source of an algorithm and a secondary source that provides a clearer description of the algorithm?). Option 4 indicates clearly what content comes from A and what comes from B and C, so it's a good way to cite it.
If you weren't using any intellectual content (interpretation, summarization, curation of references) from A, but just happened to come by B and C via A, you may not need to cite A (see e.g. Is there a problem with citing the original source instead of the source where the information was first found?). However, based on your description, you are using A's interpretation, so that rules out Option 2.

The links (1,2) you have given to support your assertion that secondary citations are "bad" are being misinterpreted. Both of those advise against the practice of only citing the secondary source and not also tracking down the original. The third link you brought up (3) says not to use A's statements about B and C without citing A (Option 2).


It depends on the specific license the papers are under, but if you are talking about uploading the full text version of the article to your own website then most likely no it is not permissible to do this.

If they were your own papers, it is more likely that a journal allows you to do this, but still some will not and it is important to check the policies of the individual journals.

You could certainly put a bibliography on your own website though, and link to the journal articles from there, hosted at their original journals or preprints (DOI links would be a good way to do this).

As a practical matter, however, if you host these documents in some non-public place (like a private document or privately hosted password-protected site rather than a public web site), you are extremely unlikely to catch any grief. If they are public, however, you expose yourself.


Does a gap of 10 months after Master's degree affect my chances for a future academic career?

This will have essentially no impact on your career. Clearly it has no impact on your research productivity. So I don't see why anyone would take issue with it. Many professors have taken circuitous routes to get where they are, thus suggesting there are no expectations you complete all your degrees without any breaks in between.


How do I effectively solicit a strong letter of recommendation from a professor?

Start Early

Most of the people you're asking for recommendations are busy.  They are usually happy to do this for you, but they appreciate every effort you can make to help them work this task into their calendars.  Sixty days is NOT unreasonable, but three weeks is what I consider the very lowest time frame before considering the requester to be discourteous.

Ask the appropriate people

We enjoy moving our students on, and do what we can to help them.  On the other hand, we understand that writing recommendations that look like form letters is not going to be helpful.

Make sure that the people you are asking for a recommendation are the right people.  If you got a "B" in a class of sixty students, and never had a real conversation with the professor, that person may not be the right person to ask.  If it's the best you can do, so be it, but some planning in earlier years might have led to a better recommendation.  That said, that prof who gave you a B in a course where you got an A on a term paper that you're proud of might be the perfect person to ask -- for example, if English is not your first language and your ability to effectively communicate might be called into question by an admissions committee, a letter focusing on this might resolve the issue.

Before it comes up, yes, your academic adviser is usually good for a recommendation if you don't have more appropriate letter writers, and to some extent that person will feel responsible to write you as strong a letter as possible.

Ask for an appointment to discuss the letter

This sort of thing should not be arranged in passing, especially if you intend to get the best letter you possibly can.  It also shows that you're serious about the request, and not taking it for granted that this person owes you a recommendation.  As part of that meeting, you might consider giving the prof an overview of your application package, and asking the prof if they see any ways to improve it.

At that meeting ASK if that person is in a situation where they feel that they can write you a STRONG letter

Frankly, there is sometimes a disconnect between the student's view of a faculty member's opinion of them, and the actual opinion.  Make sure you are not in this situation.  Often, people will be very frank about this, and let you know that they can't write a very strong letter for you.  Sometimes you don't even need a strong letter, and just need the writer to make a point that you're otherwise having trouble making in your application package.  If the person says "I can't write a strong letter," you can say "Can you write a letter that helps me make this point?" and see what the answer is. If you're getting desperate, you might even ask something like "would you be able to say I'm in the top half of students you instructed?"  If the prof says yes, and indicates that this is the strongest recommendation that can be written in this situation, at least you know where you stand and what the letter will say.

Explain why you are asking that particular person for a recommendation, and what you would like that letter to say

Consider the example above about communication skills.  Again, if you feel a certain prof is in a position to help you make a point, ask if they can help you in this way.  Maybe you're a member of a large student group that has had a very successful project, and now you're asking the group adviser to write a letter saying that it was an important project, why it was important, and that you were a part of it.  LET THE PROF KNOW that this is what you'd like the letter to say.

Prepare your package

Make it easy for the prof to write your letter, and give the prof all the background material that will help.  This can include (but is not limited to):

Your resume
Your transcript (if appropriate)
Your grades and performance summary for the courses you've been
involved with the recommender for
ANY PERSONAL STATEMENT THAT YOU'VE WRITTEN FOR YOUR APPLICATIONS (this is a big help to me, and I always ask for it.
A complete list of all the places that will need the letter, and
their deadlines
Any special circumstances (e.g., rolling admissions that require
some rushing).
Any language that you'd like included.  It seems silly, but as your careers develop you'll be in many situations where people ask you to give them the letter that you'd like them to put on letterhead and sign.  Doing this for a letter of recommendation is a bit presumptuous, but if you're trying to make a very specific point with the letter, you might offer a few sentences of recommended language.

Follow up

As a last step, tell the person what your process will be.  Let the person know when you will be completing your application, and when they should start seeing the requests from schools.  When you do apply, it is a good idea to send off an email that says "I've just finished these applications, with the following deadlines for letters.  Please let me know if you don't receive requests."

Establish a nagging plan with the profs.  If you tell me the deadline is Apr 1, and I acknowledge that, please don't keep sending emails saying "its not there yet" right up until April 1.  That said, at the meeting you'll hold with me in advance, say "I'll send you reminders of all  the schools with upcoming deadlines in mid-March", I actually appreciate it.  Personally, I have some anxiety where other people are key in my loop, so I can understand it if somebody says "I know the deadline is Apr 1, but I'd feel much less anxious if you could have this in by Mar 26" -- just let me know about it.  Otherwise, the deadline is the date certain for me.  Normally, I try to get these things submitted earlier, but sometimes it doesn't work out that way.

Don't drag this out.  We literally get dozens of emails a day.  Try to complete all your applications in chunks, so we can take all the request messages, slam them into a directory where we can find them when we need them, and not have to go searching at the last minute.  It challenges my organizational abilities when 15 recommendation requests for one student dribble in over the course of a month, especially when I've signed on to write letters for a half dozen students or more.

Confidentiality

We expect to be writing confidential letters.  If you don't intend to waive your right to inspect, please let us know in advance, so we can tell you if that's acceptable to us.  Trust us -- we write the best letters we can.  If you have the frank discussions I've recommended above, you know just where you stand (and maybe we can even nudge things up just a hair).

Results

As a courtesy, let us know how things worked out.  We love to know about our students successes, and it can even help us tweak out our future letters.

Last Points

When someone agrees to do something that directly impacts your future, that person owes you the respect of appropriately placing that action on their priority list.  If it's important to you, and they agree to help, it should be important to them.

If someone hems and haws about providing a recommendation, its probably because they don't feel that they can write a helpful one.  If you keep trying to schedule that meeting and it keeps getting put off, you might be dealing with someone who just is unwilling to give you the straight answer that you need to hear.  I try to be as straight with my students as I can, but it can get VERY awkward in certain cases, particularly if they're currently in your class that requires constant interaction.  Having these conversations is not easy from either side, and some people choose to avoid them.

Keep in mind that when we write letters of recommendation, we are aligning our reputation with your value as a student.  We can not write tremendously positive recommendations for students that don't merit such treatment for too long before admissions committees simply dismiss our letters.  Anecdotally, every now and again I write a letter of recommendation to our own Medical School.  Once, at a purely social event, I had a conversation with my Dean of Admissions to the Med School about a special applicant who I thought might not have looked as valuable as she was in her application package.  I asked the Dean if he would welcome the conversation I was trying to have with him, or whether it would be out of line.  He indicated that he really appreciates such discussions, and he was able to mention by name a good number of applicants who were admitted with a letter from me in their package.  People DO PAY ATTENTION TO THIS STUFF.

NEVER place someone on a recommendation list for an application or a job without their prior knowledge and their OK.  AT the very least, it's annoying to be blindsided.  At worst, you're shooting yourself in the foot.


Is there an online directory listing upcoming scientific conferences?

The first resource that springs to mind is the COMS directory, which lists conferences in the scientific disciplines (physics, chemistry, maths, life sciences etc). I don't know how comprehensive the listings are, but I think most major conferences should be listed there. You can filter the search by subject area (down to subfield level, such as astronomy or condensed matter) and country.

More specific resources exist which only list conferences in a certain country or subfield, for example the IOP (UK physics only), APS (mostly US physics only) or Inspire-HEP (international, but mostly high energy physics only).

Another resource used in my field (cosmology) is the UK Cosmo mailing list, maintained by the University of Sussex. Organisers can mail conference and summer/ winter school details to the list, and it's not limited to UK meetings either. A similar mailing list for your field may exist, although the benefit of such a list is its narrow scope-- after all, people don't want their inboxes spammed with emails about conferences in other fields, so I would use one with caution. Another drawback is that not everyone may be on such a list in the first place.


My guess is that the editor didn't read the reports carefully and didn't notice that the reviewers suggested significant extra work.

Contact the editor and point this out, and give an estimate of how much time you will need for revisions.  (Try to be conservative in this estimate so you don't put yourself in an unnecessary crunch.)

It's up to you to decide whether to actually do some or all of the extra work requested.  For anything you don't do, write a response explaining why you don't believe the extra work is warranted. (You might want to consult with colleagues to get another opinion.) The editor and reviewers will reconsider the paper and decide if it is acceptable with the changes you made.


Asking current advisor whether they have funds for remainder of my degree

Things are in flux, but you have a right to plan your future with some confidence. I suggest the direct approach. Ask him if there is any funding risk and how to quantify it. If your advisor thinks there is any risk and advises you to seek funding, then you need to just do it. Even if you fail, but show diligence in the search you will probably be better off if funding gets tighter.

You probably have several years to go, so prediction is an imperfect thing. But the further you go, the closer you are to the end, and so the easier it is to keep your funding stream.

Hope for the best that the current problems are temporary and that the world returns to normal. But don't depend on that happening. Work with your advisor as much as possible.

Just ask. Express your concern. If your advisor is at all reasonable it won't be an issue.


How to phrase authors' contributions when the convention is that all team members are authors?

If there is a requirement to list the contribution of each author, it seems the ethical way to handle it is, well, to list the contribution of each author.  If some authors did not contribute directly to the paper, you should state that.

It is unethical to try to conceal that some authors did not make a direct contribution.  Please note: Your team policy is what it is, and I'm not trying to judge the ethics of your team's policy.  I'm just saying that, whatever your team's policy is,  you must disclose it forthrightly, without evasion.  That's exactly the point of disclosure requirements!

(If you're not comfortable stating your team's policy explicitly, that might be a hint that it's time to consider changing the policy -- but until then, you must disclose it frankly and honestly.)


What to do with a paper with references but no citations?

Reject.

No work exists in isolation. The authors need to position their work in relation to existing work, and this requires more than just putting a bunch of papers in the bibliography section: it requires a detailed comparison. The authors failed to do this.

In any case,  there will always be another conference for them to resubmit to.


Should you respond to a call-for-papers rejection email?

Whether or not you should respond to their e-mail depends on how you
want to be involved with the current meeting and the community
supporting the conference.

  Acknowledgement of a rejection e-mail from conference organizers is
  generally not necessary unless they have requested confirmation or
  further information.

You mentioned an interested in "keeping up to date" with this conference, presumably with the intention of presenting here in the future. However, it may still be possible to participate in the current meeting if you make an effort to politely contact the organizers as soon as possible.

Every conference is a little different, since they are organized according to the preferences and constraints of the core group of researchers that plan and organize the meeting. Often there are poster sessions or other opportunities to present your work in lieu of a presentation if it is suitable for the conference.

Before you decide to contact the organizers, you should carefully re-read the original call and conference description. Since your paper was not selected for presentation at the conference, there may be a problem with: (1) the perceived quality of your submitted manuscript, (2) the format of your submitted work, or (3) the topic that your paper addressed.
Check the call and double-check your submission to make sure there are no obvious discrepancies that would disqualify your work. Make sure your paper is on-topic, in the correct format, and of suitable length.

If you are new to a subject area, or a particular conference, your impression of what it is all about may not match up with the actual meeting as well as you might expect. It may be that your submission was off target for this conference and could be amended with a little communication.


What would an inclusive curriculum look like in a computer science course?

This is an interesting question. The program I am doing most of my teaching in has recently been faced with a similar question (due to comments of an external evaluation), and I can't say we have come up with a satisfying solution yet.

Here are some pointers (in no particular order) that have come up in our discussion:

For exam tasks / homework descriptions: evaluate critically if your tasks (or rather, their descriptions) carry bias. Naturally, you want to avoid the cool developer being called Bob and the silly user Alice or Ahmed, but it goes deeper than that. For example, in an Intro to Programming exam I was giving many years back the task was to model and implement a simulation of a game of football/soccer (the assumption here being that the majority population - white, male college kids in Europe - would be intimately aware of the rules and have an easy time conceptualizing the task). As it turns out, those that did not fall into the majority population (some women, foreign students) did worse on this task, presumably because they needed to spend a lot more brain cycles even understanding the game they were supposed to simulate.
For deadlines: consider that some students may not be able to, if need be, work through the night or the weekend. It's easy to think that a deadline Sunday evening is not a big deal if you think of your students as a homogenious mass of 20-year-olds with no other obligations than to study, but if one of your students is a father / mother of two, or working on the weekend to sustain themselves, the story becomes different.
For extra-curricular activities: the same is also true for extra-curriculars. If at all possible schedule attractive extra-curriculars (e.g., Hackathons, job fairs, whatever your university does) in a way that they can also be attended by people outside the majority population.
For social events: the same applies to social events. Make sure that social events, to the extent possible, not only cater towards the majority population. For instance, when I studied, a lot of the student social events boiled down to "find an excuse to drink", and basically all conversation was in the local language. Both of this together unsurprisingly meant that foreign students, especially Islamic students, never showed up.
Avoiding "hidden knowledge": in many universities and courses, there are official rules and "unspoken rules". For example, a teacher may say that students are expected to learn the entire book, but well-connected members of the majority population know from previous years that in reality most of the questions are about Chapters 3-8. Given that (some) minorities are less well-connected than the majority population, these constructions can disadvantage these students severely.
Diversity of TAs: ensure that not all TAs are always from the majority population (i.e., ensure that there is some amount of representation of non-majority students). This may need active steering, because if you just take the first 5 qualified students, you may easily end up with only students from the majority population (because they are more, because they are better-connected, and because a lot of TA contracts are written in a way to appeal to 20-year-olds).

To summarize: keep in mind that some of your students may have a different cultural background, different life constraints, different priorities, or different access to "common knowledge". Try to level the playing field as well as you can.


How should I indicate on the poster that it's an ongoing work, and the
  presented results are not final yet?

As @buffy mentioned, this is certainly not an uncommon thing to do. I actually really enjoy presenting work in progress via poster, because, as opposed to already-published research, the poster viewers may be more inclined to give feedback on the methodology and/or research questions/hypotheses.

It's not necessarily vital that you specify the research is ongoing on the poster, but if it makes you feel better you can say this is a pilot result or preliminary result.

An aside, but important, I suggest first figuring out why you are presenting the poster--that is, what do you want to get out of this experience? For example, are you at all interested in method feedback? Do you hope to refine your research questions? Are you going for networking only?

Cater your poster and your discussion topics to your needs while designing a poster which helps you achieve your aims while effectively conveying your ideas to the audience.

Also an aside -- don't stress. Posters are pretty fun, especially if you know why you're there.

Another aside -- if you know the conference attendees and there is anyone you want to meet or get feedback from, email them. Tell them you would love if they could visit your poster on Day X at time Y.


Are there meaningful downsides to a "guaranteed" (graduate) admissions program?

If you are sure that you want to be in a particular profession, say law, then these programs can provide a bit of a short cut. However, if you change your mind along the way you may wind up with an "unusable" education as it may be missing critical elements needed elsewhere.

However, if you can change your mind and still have a good path forward, then there should be no real downside. In particular, if the intervening years include a real undergraduate degree in a meaningful field, then there is no reason to actually finish the professional program. There isn't a contract that you have to fulfill.

In some ways this is just a marketing stunt by a school who wants to increase applications of good students. There are no guarantees on either side, I'm sure, as the student has to fulfill the requirements stated to move on to the professional portion, and the student is free to leave at any time that they feel their needs aren't being met.

But a program that is so specialized that you don't get a good general education along the way would, in my view, be a mistake. A mistake for the individual as well as for society. A program that only makes technocrats can turn out people who are actively dangerous as their world view is too narrow.

Moreover, if you want to later extend your education beyond the professional training you get in such a program, you may find that you don't have the needed background. That would depend on the details, of course.

Actually, I also question the wisdom of encouraging people of that age to 'lock in' to a particular profession. A lot of changes happen in the lives of 17-18 years olds. As a parent I would discourage such things in favor of a more general education in which they could put off such decisions until they have more perspective. I recognize that not everyone feels that way, of course. If a kid wants to be a doctor simply because both mom and dad are doctors he/she should really look around first. (I feel the same way about academia as a profession, in fact.)


Is it okay to send a gentle reminder to professor

Yes, it's OK to send a reminder. Generally, if it's been a week since you expected an answer, it's probably fine to ask.


contacting professors when looking for a job even if there are no advertised vacancies in their group

Your question is rather vague -- what does "is it a good idea" mean? If you're asking if you can write to professors? Sure; there's nothing to lose, and there may be people looking for lab technicians. (I've been in this situation of looking for someone to hire in the past.) Go for it! If you're asking if it's likely that you'll get a positive response: no, for all the reasons you state.

As for how long/detailed such an email should be: you should succinctly (in a paragraph or two) state your skills and goals and possibly point out abilities that are particularly useful for the group you're writing to. Attach a clear CV.

I should point out that the statement "I haven't published any papers during my PhD" is rather worrying, and it may be a good idea to explain this when writing. Good luck!


Shall I give a template to the rec-letter writer?

Asking for a template letter is bad practice, albeit probably not uncommon in some countries.

Generally speaking, I'd avoid volunteering any template, and if the professor asks for one, think carefully whether you really want a letter from them.

When you ask for the recommendation letter, just include your CV, possibly a transcript of your exams, and then ask the professor if they need further information. This may be similar to your point 2, but avoids suggesting a narrative.

You don't specify your field, but I think the above is sufficiently broadly expected in STEM fields (in my experience, even those who ask for a template, frequently recognize that it's bad practice). Therefore, I definitely disagree with the author of the linked HBR article.

Points of view similar to mine, if not even stronger, can be found elsewhere on this site. See for example:

This very detailed answer from Pete L. Clark

This comment from JeffE


How to cite or refer to programming codes in a non Computer Science Master's Thesis?

The standard way is to upload the code in a public repository so that everyone can use your code. In the thesis, you can refer to your repository in the footnote/endnote.

What you really need to cite is the papers/books which introduce the used methods first. The need to cite a library is when it has a specific configuration and it is likely that it outputs different result, such as the method which requires a probabilistic sampling. Here, the output will be different based on the used method.

Back to your case and responding to your questions:

You can publish all the materials of your work in a public repository and refer to it by citing the link (preferably in the footnote). It is unprofessional to add the code in the appendix (unless it is short and in pseudo-code).
You don't need to cite the libraries but the papers of the methods that are implemented in these libraries. If the library has a specific configuration, you can mention it in the text or cite the library (very rare cases).


What to do when you reach a conclusion and find out later on that someone else already did?

Do not despair: your work likely still has value!

In my experience, it's almost never the case that work addressing the same problem has exactly the same solution or exactly the same approach to gathering evidence.  Existence of a previous publication will thus typically make your results smaller and more incremental, but not invalid or duplicative.  Some examples of what your work may provide:

A second, independent confirmation of a hypothesis
Confirmation of a closely related but different hypothesis
A different approach that has advantages in some situations and disadvantages in others

There are even good journals like PLOS ONE that explicitly invite replications and "non-notable" incremental work.  Thus, if you've got a set of results in hand and you discover somebody else has done much the same, you should still write up your work---just be straight and honest about the smaller size of contribution based on the prior work.

If you're still at the "ideation" stage where you're just thinking up possible work to do, however, then it seems more appropriate to move on and work on something else instead---maybe building on their results.


Is it okay to ask a senior academic a question that my advisor is unable to answer?

At the heart of this is a interpersonal social question. When a student comes to me with a question I don't know the answer to, I rarely just say sorry I don't know. As an advisor, our goal is to help students learn what they need. When I don't know something, I try and point my students in a direction (textbook, articles, person) where they might be able to find the answer. While I would not be upset if a student "bypassed" me to talk to someone after finding out I did not know the answer, I can imagine some advisors would be.

I suggest you identify the researcher(s) who might know the answer and tell your advisor that you were thinking of contacting this individual. Your advisor might have some valuable insight and tell you not to contact Dr Jones, but instead contact Dr Smith. Your advisor might also give you an introduction or want to be included in any email correspondence so they can learn the answer too. Your advisor might simply say sounds good and leave you to it.


In the UK community colleges are not part of the higher education system and the US equivalent of a small liberal arts colleges essentially do not exist. That means the vast majority of UK universities hire for "research excellence" and hiring committees are really only interested in if you can teach a needed module and that you will not be awful. The PGCE, unlike the PGCHE, would not satisfy any university requirements and therefore I don't think hiring committees would consider it at all.

As for the PGCHE, while many universities require new members of academic staff to obtain one, The universities that I am familiar with offer the PGCHE curriculum in house via the School of Education. Since it is presented to new staff as a hoop to jump through, I know of no one outside of university administrators and schools of education that think the PGCHE, in any form, is of value. Further, while I have seen many job adverts where a PGCHE is a "desirable" qualification, I have never seen one where it is "essential". During hiring, we briefly consider the presence/absence of a PGCHE, but never more than that.

Overall, I would say that the PGCE is useless for getting a job and the PGCHE is only marginally more valuable for being hired. As a PGCHE is. Requirement once you have the job, it may be beneficial in that it would make your first year, or two, easier since it is one less thing to do while you are drowning in new teaching, admin, and setting up a research agenda. The disadvantage of this is the PGCHE course was one place where I met new faculty members outside my school.


Emailing professors in the physics and mathematics departments

First, your question would be easier to read if you went a little easier on the italics.  Also, it's good to get in the habit of using a neutral tone, even when you're feeling confused or frustrated.

It's fine to send some queries by email, but try to select the most likely people to send your queries to.  You could start with one per program that you're interested in, but be ready with a second name in each department.  Wait at least three business days for a reply before trying name #2.  Keep your email fairly succinct and neutral in tone.  Skip the part about the confusion.  (It's fine to be confused, and they're used to that.)  Make a spreadsheet so you can be organized about this.

I think you should also ask them what to do about the GRE.  My gut feeling is that regardless of which program you apply to, you should take the Physics GRE, but this is something you could ask at Physics SE if you don't get a response from a mathematical physicist here about that particular issue (which you should add to your question with an edit, by the way, since it's an important point).  For example, in an email to someone in a physics department, you could say, "I'm also applying to some math programs, which require the math GRE, but the subject test GREs are offered only once per (year?  two years?  I didn't understand this point) in my country; so I would like to ask whether your department would accept the math GRE in lieu of the physics GRE."  And vice versa.

A tricky part of this is that you may get some answers back that go against what your physics professors have advised you.  If none of them are very close to you, and won't be bothered by that, fine.  But if you think someone might be bothered, then I would suggest you share a sample draft email with this person, and most importantly, confer with him or her about the choice of specific departments and individuals you'll be emailing.  That way, once the answer comes back, you'll be able to share it with this person comfortably.

A word about the choice of individuals to send your queries to.  The ideal person to write to would be someone who is strong in your area of interest, but who seems to have some interest in student advising as well, for example, with a current or former position in department administration, such as "dean of graduate studies," or "graduate program director," or someone involved with department admissions.

If you are talking about applying next winter for a fall, 2018, start, mention that in your email, so the reader doesn't feel alarmed that you might be talking about applying now for fall, 2017.

(If you are talking about applying now for a fall, 2017, start, then just throw some darts at the dart board as quickly as you can, and don't waste any time thinking, since this is March already.)

And by the way, Johanna is absolutely right ("You should apply to the department the professor is associated with"). In trying to figure this out, you'll have to look at the faculty bios rather carefully.

Note that sometimes you can have, for example, a physics department as your home department, but work with an advisor whose primary appointment is in, for example, a math department.  This is easiest to swing when the professor has some affiliation with your department.  If s/he doesn't, then you can still check the program's policies, and also it might be possible to get special permission.

You may want to consider:
- What coursework is required in each department?  Which program of studies fits better with your interests and needs?
- What about the basic exams?  You wouldn't want to get stuck in a math department that requires you to show mastery of number theory, for example.  (That's not a realistic example -- hopefully you get my idea.)

Some departments will provide specific advice on their websites for people like you, whose area straddles two departments to some extent.

It could be overwhelming to delve into a lot of departments' websites in depth.  If I were you I would start with one that has very clear materials, and in which you are definitely interested.  Understand that one as well as you can, and then prepare your first email.  If you are able to cite a specific webpage and a quote or two from their site, as the beginning of your question, so much the better.  (I.e. show that you've done your homework.)

Last comment.  Just as people like me enjoy understanding a question and attempting to say something useful -- there are people in every department who do too.  If the first person you try writing turns out not to be responsive or helpful, that's okay, just try again with a different member of the department.  You can add at the end of your email something like "If there is someone else in your department I should address these questions to, please let me know."


Managerial oversight of Dutch academics: how much permission do I need to ask?

I think (in both the UK and in NL) this is very much down to the personality and management style of whoever is responsible for supervising you and signing off on your expenses. On the whole I would say that attitudes in NL are similar to those in the UK, and provided you don't give anyone cause for concern you'll be left to your own devices.

That said, attitudes are set in a broader cultural context, and in NL conformity and a visible work ethic are valued.  In particular, I would suggest that people in Dutch academia are in general much more rigid about their working hours (8:30-5) than in the UK, with a better-defined home/work separation. "Working from home" as a matter of routine is not really a thing in NL. Continuing to follow the UK pattern will probably be fine with your bosses, but it may be frowned upon by your colleagues.


Should I put reading group coordination / participation on CV?

Absolutely yes. This is an important and cool activity. You can write something like:

2016-18 Coordinator of Journal Club at XXX research group, YYY Dep. - Task: pick topics, schedule talks, present papers, on a weekly basis. 10 participants.


What do camera ready figures mean nowadays?

There isn't any real, single standard as to what "camera-ready figures" means. Different journals/publishers may use different publishing processes and workflows, which can result in different requirements for file formats, resolution etc. (Or even color spaces.) However, 96 dpi is indeed quite low. 300 dpi is a more reasonable minimum guideline for raster images - but obviously vector graphics should be preferred whenever possible.

In lieu of a standard, we can look at typical recommendations. A review by J.H. Lee in Science Editing titled Handling digital images for publication states that

  The most commonly recommended resolution for printing on paper depends on the nature of the images: 1) 300 dpi for color pictures, 2) 300 to 600 dpi for black and white pictures, 3) 600 to 900 dpi for combination art (photo and text), and 4) 900 to 1,200 dpi for line art.

Note that this is the printed dpi, which isn't necessarily the same dpi as seen in the submitted manuscript. The same author also suggests a universal guide to avoid issues with publishers rescaling figures etc.:

  It is the opinion of this author that a universal recommendation could help authors prepare their images. The standard figure size of most academic journals is about 86 mm (single column). The standard pixels per inch for line art is 900 to 1,200 ppi. Therefore, an image file of 900 ppi and 4 inches is of sufficient quality for most publications; this means 3,600 pixels in a horizontal line. It is recommended that authors use this number as a universal guide.


Need a good, inexpensive app to catalogue journal articles and books

I recomment to meet some librarians and talk with them about your requirements in more detail. There are a lot of software solutions that could fit.

I assume from what you wrote that Invenio could fulfill your requirements. It's an Open Source Software for publications and can be used for repositories and as an integrated library system. Invenio is developed by CERN as a framework and everyone can create its own overlay. I know at least one library using it with RFID but none with bar codes so far. It allows to catalogue all types of publications.


How is it perceived to withdraw an application to graduate school?

As an undergrad at a large, prestigious university, part of my work study job was sorting the department's PhD applications as they came in and went through various levels of review. There was absolutely no penalty to withdrawing. They received thousands of applications and the sheer number of those reviewed means that faculty are unlikely to remember your specific application (since you said this was a top school, I assume the same is true for yours). Also, most of the shifting around was done by me, an office assistant. If you've merely applied, there is really nothing to worry about. Now faculty might remember you if you had some kind of outstanding or unusual experience, or were interested in a VERY narrow program (one sub-program had only 3 applicants...). But again, no one is going to be very invested in you or your application until they have admitted you, so the time to withdraw, if that's what you're sure you want to do, is now. No one is going to take it personally given the number of applications involved.

If you have already been accepted, you can consider a deferral, as mentioned above, but even if you just withdraw there is unlikely to be a penalty. People have many reasons to decline--family, health, accepting elsewhere, unique opportunities. If you feel the need to explain and are very concerned about future chances, then perhaps consider a thoughtful letter to anyone you spoke with who accepted you (perhaps you applied to work on specific research in a field relevant to a faculty reviewer) saying that due to circumstances you cannot accept this year, but intend to reapply in the future and hope you will have the chance to work with them when you reapply. Honestly, being accepted in the past would be a great thing to put in your reapplication.


Is there a bibliometric that weighs citations based on their number?

If I understand you correctly, you are referring to a concept called citing-side normalization (see e.g. Waltman & vanEck 2013), where the number of references of citing papers are used as weighting factors to account for the different lenghts of reference lists in different fields (citation density). This type of normalization is relatively common within bibliometrics, so I think that the other answers are incorrect in saying that they don't exist. One well-known example of such an index is the SNIP-indicator (see Waltman et al., 2013 and Leydesdorff & Opthof, 2010), which is a journal-level indicator. Another example is the recently proposed article-level CSNCR-index (citation score normalized by cited references, see Bornmann & Haunschild, 2016), but this uses the mean number of cited references in a field to normalize citations (so not references list length in individual papers).

If you look for references to "citing-side normalization" you will find other examples of similar approaches, at journal or article levels. I'm not sure if I've seen author-level indices based on this though (but averages of article-level indicies can of course be used). In general, there are a number of bibliometric indices that control for the different citations densities in different fields (not only using citing-side normalization). These are all based on some sort of field normalization, which can be done for field classes (in e.g. Scopus or Web of Science) or other article groupings (see e.g. the cluster-based normalization used at CWTS in Leiden).


Words to avoid when talking to a blind student

They want to be treated as normal - so phrases like “it can be seen that the result changes X “ are fine but “ take this and divide by this” are not if you are pointing at numbers for example.

One of my friends who is in a wheelchair will say "I walked down to..." it's just part of "normal" conversation...


Some results of my grad research have been used in a recent paper, but I was not told. Should I do something about it?

You should have been cited, at least, if the old figures were used and you created them. There may even have been a copyright violation here as figures are sometimes (often?) considered to be a "complete" work for such purposes.

You could ask for an explanation. You could express disappointment for the lack of acknowledgement. I can't predict the outcome, however. It might be an apology. It might be rage. What should happen is a correction, but that doesn't seem very likely.

I'm assuming, of course, that the figures really were re-used, rather than just being similar and generated from the same data.

But you have to judge whether to rock the boat a bit. It is your right to do so. If you need her as a source for your future advancement, then tread carefully.


Students not answering emails about plagiarism

First, some important caveats:

It is certainly worth checking their other work to see if you find any further evidence of plagiarism. In the absence of such evidence, you must proceed under the assumption that the only case of plagiarism is the one you have evidence for.
You should check your university's regulations; you may be required to proceed in a certain way (e.g., to advise the students of their rights, or to turn this over to a committee rather than handling it yourself).
Since you are a PhD student, speaking with a more experienced professor is probably also a very good idea. In particular, if you are not listed as the "instructor of record," you should speak with the instructor of record before proceeding (different universities will have different policies about whether the grad student who does the "actual work" will be formally listed as the instructor of record).

Still, let us assume for the sake of this question that you can and must handle this yourself. In this case, my advice would be to send an e-mail along the following lines:

Dear Student: it has been over a week, and I have received no response to my below inquiry. If I do not receive a response by Friday, I will assume that your report was indeed plagiarized and will accordingly assign [some appropriate but relatively harsh penalty]. If you believe you are not guilty, or if you have mitigating factors you would like me to consider, please let me know, either by e-mail or by scheduling a virtual meeting. Regards,

As for what penalty would be appropriate, I reiterate my advice to discuss this with someone locally; campus cultures vary, and your department probably faces issues like this with some regularity. Still, my experience is that for something like this, a proportionate response would be to (1) give a zero on the lab report in question, which should cost them about a letter grade overall, and (2) file a report with the college so that they cannot have a new "first offense" in a different class.


There are two components to this question. "Is it okay to work on my own 'independent' project in a PhD?"

Yes, definitely. The purpose of a PhD is to train an independent researcher. An advisor who feeds their student the tasks or jobs to do throughout their PhD is probably doing them a disservice, as they would not have the opportunity to learn how to devise and carry out their own independent research projects. Being in the third year, you have probably finished your classes and accrued enough research experience to do so. Of course it is expected that you keep your advisor in the loop if you do decide to work on such a side project.

Now, with regards to "What would my advisor think if I worked on my own 'independent' project?"

That depends entirely on the advisor and your funding situation. If you are full supported by a specific grant, it is probably a bad idea to work on an unrelated topic. Ideally, you should work the problem into something which can be related to the grant. Of course, if you are self-funded or have a no strings attached fellowship, things can be more flexible for you.


How to set high class expectations and still maintain a good class relationship

Let me second the post of Massimo Ortolano and especially point 2. there. But you can do more.

One way to keep students happy, both the really hard workers and the strugglers, is to give them a second chance when they fail to live up to standards. One way to do that is to permit students to resubmit work with corrections after grading. My experience is that you can be as demanding as you want to be as long as students don't feel trapped or disadvantaged by what they see as small errors.

I've permitted students to resubmit work even after I've discussed the correct solutions in class. Just going through the motions of typing out the correct answers is an educational experience - reinforcement. I've usually permitted more than one resubmission of the same work. You need to set a limit, though, if students neglect new assignments to re-do old ones. A bit of balance is needed.

To be fair to those who get it right, it is also useful to extract a bit of tax on the re-work. Say, only 90% of the difference between the first marks and the full marks can be achieved through rework. This also keeps people from being lazy about deadlines.

Note, of course, that regrading requires that the number of students not be excessive and that you develop efficient ways to see what has been changed when re-work is submitted. I just had students submitting new work also submit the old (with my comments) as well as highlighting changes.

But with respect to the point of students needing a while to learn to live up to new and higher standards, I also experienced this when I brought new and higher standards to a new job. Students in a Masters program had gotten the idea that good grades were pretty automatic. They were a bit shocked when I told them that it was possible for all to fail and that I would read and comment on all of their work. It required backup from the Dean, actually. But it didn't take too long in my case. Word spread quickly.


Teaching uninterested/under-engaged students in science courses

From a pedagogical standpoint, you always want to teach with a couple of things in mind:

You have to have a standard for the class.
The standard you set should be influenced by the level your students start at.

These two criteria frequently are at odds with each other, which is a shame: you want to teach the most engrossing, intellectual class so that each student can obtain a mastery of the important details of the subject, yet sometimes your students don't have the background and are not prepared to learn at that level, or are unmotivated for other reasons.

A third issue, and the one that you brought up, is the question of what to do when you have a heterogeneous set of students where some are unprepared (or unmotivated) and others are well prepared. If you are at an institution where the standard is very high, one option (and probably the right one) is to teach the material with the expectation that everyone will try their best and that it will be challenging for everyone, and let the cards fall as they may. Do your best to point the struggling students who want to learn the material to avenues for help -- office hours, tutoring, key reading material, etc.  Don't worry particularly much about the ones who don't care -- if you're teaching an engaging class and they are bored because they don't really want to be there, that isn't your problem.  If you find that you do have too many panicked students, you probably need to re-evaluate your teaching style or assessment plan, and slow things down.  This is just the reality of the situation: too many of your students aren't prepared for the class as you envision it.

From your comment:

  This is a community college so many of the students are working parents who juggle multiple demands on their time.

I believe in this case you may end up in the situation I just mentioned more than you'd like. I would venture a guess that many of your students have academic priorities that are less about getting every bit of learning out of your course, and more about doing well enough to graduate and be prepared for whatever the next step in their career is.  I urge you to try to put yourself in their shoes (this is always a good idea) and try to see from their perspective what the course means to them.  I have taught a college physical science course to non-science majors at the community college level where I was happy to give them the exposure to the material -- most of them had never taken a physics or chemistry class in their life (high school or otherwise), and I knew that it would not have been a good idea to try to force a lot of math-heavy science down their throats.

So I haven't really answered your specific question about how to "engage the interest of these students without dumbing down the course material or slowing the pace of the class." My suggestions are (1) to re-evaluate why you think you're already engaging (and tweak it to meet your students' level), and (2) to make sure you are providing concrete assessments for them to study for (or work on in lab).  If your students know what they have to do to get a "B" versus an "A", this might lower the level of panic if they see that shooting for that "B" will be obtainable while still giving them time to keep the other priorities in their life straight.


Can I add more corrections to page proofs?

In my experience, this is usually fine, as long as your changes are fairly minor and localized.


Should you conform to journal formatting requirements for the initial submission?

I'll venture a minority opinion (I'm in mathematics, where the culture is very possibly different than in other fields).

As a referee, I have an instinctive negative reaction if I know that an author has taken the time and effort to conform to a particular journal's style. The grounds for this is that most journals employ typesetting staff for this purpose. Especially considering the very high price of many (if not all) journals, for authors to refuse to do this suggests to me a principled refusal to waste their time.

That said, I can see that many people hold the exact opposite opinion, and even that my own feelings may be a little bit silly. So I certainly don't actually hold this against authors when evaluating submissions. (Indeed, if I receive something formatted, I never know if it is the author or the editorial staff that has formatted it.)

My impression is that most (but maybe not all) mathematicians wouldn't hold it against you if you don't bother. Moreover I believe that most mathematicians in fact don't bother with such formatting guidelines.

I have never heard anyone voice @jakebeal's opinion before. Of course, counting the upvotes, he speaks for at least eight other people! You might take this as evidence that the answer to your question is dependent on what your field is.


Could/Should I cite a paper that I am refereeing?

Reviewers obligations in general include respecting the confidentiality of peer review and not revealing any details of a manuscript or related communications, during or after the peer review process. Detailed for example in the COPE Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers.

That said, by citing a confidential manuscript you reveal the title, potentially giving away a scientific message, and the authors, disclosing the fact they are working on a specific research question.

You can however cite a different version of the work in case it was previously published on a preprint server for example.


How do you respond when students submit the wrong assignment, but you only notice after the deadline has passed?

The fact that you're left guessing at unknowable motivations suggests a deeper problem to me.  I always found guessing games like this very frustrating when assignments are due; giving students the benefit of the doubt sounds harmless... unless you're a student who scrambled to meet the deadline, while your peers took advantage of the professor's good will.  This is especially true if the class is curved.
The policy I use now leaves my opinions completely out of it:

Give clear due dates and turn-in proceedures
Give students a "budget" for late assignments.  I like to give three 12-hour tokens they can use at their discretion, no questions asked.  If they turn something in late, I automatically use whatever tokens they have left to cover the time.
Anything beyond that requires an issue serious enough that we're probably involving academic affairs as well.  Things like serious illnesses and hospitalizations, for example.
Anything turned not turned in on time, or within the scope of one of their "late tokens", gets a daily penalty added onto the score.

That way you're never faced with trying to ascribe motivations to what students are doing, and the rules are laid out clearly for them, which I find students like.


What is the normal length for a research paper?

If you're trying to get a paper that you can publish in a journal, then it really depends on the journal, and if it has any specific requirements or constraints. There is no "standard" length for a paper. I've had papers that were 15 manuscript pages, and papers that were 50.


What to do about a Master's thesis where most of the introduction is a literal translation of my own work?

About 80-90% of 10 pages have been copied verbatim from my work.

80 TO 90%?!
This is a significant amount of content. Even translated, I feel like it demonstrates purposeful intent to plagiarize (akin to using Word's auto-summarize feature to summarize an article), rather than paraphrasing an amount of text to show a point. Translating word for word, as per my APA link above, with proper citation, for a single point is one thing, but when the bulk of the introduction is someone else's work, this seems to me as academic misconduct rather than poor use of citations. I mean... EIGHT TO NINE PAGES. It is literally 8 pages worth of your work, translated, as his introduction. It might as well be YOUR introduction, given how much you've put in, and someone else translated it.
Translated books are still accredited to their original author, with a translator tagged. The way this sounds cited, he's basically taking credit for what you've written, citing you as the person who provided information for the idea, as opposed to the person who actually wrote it and facilitated by his translation.
Unless he's cited and mentioned that it's a direct quote translated after every sentence, this seems like willful plagiarism.
I would recommend you talk to the advisers about this issue now that you've demonstrated the scope of the issue. While you may not have a significant vested interest in the outcome of the situation, the advisers definitely will, and they will likely know how to handle the situation. Also, confronting the student in question is not a good idea. The university awards the degree to the student (and the degree's worth is determined by the integrity of how it is awarded), so it is probably in the best interest of the university as well to determine the action resulting from something like this.


Should someone giving a second opinion on an article be a co-author or just acknowledged?

To just evaluate a manuscript should not result in co-authorship. Authorship implies a certain contribution to the article. There are many interpretations of what is sufficient and some are really bad. Criteria for co-authorship that has gained support has been given by the Vancouver Protocol (see e.g. the BMJ description of their use of the terms in practise)

Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work;

AND

Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content;

AND

Final approval of the version to be published;

AND

Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

An advisor for a master's project sounds as a reasonable candidate for co-authorship since that person likely has provided much input on original ideas through to the final written product. How that applies in your case is for you to decide.
It is, however, never wrong to add a new person as co-author, if that person provides contributions that qualify them according to the list above. So consider who may be considered co-author and do not promise co-authorship without explaining the terms.
For additional input, please search on the authorship here on Academia.sx and look into the concept of contributorship, a concept more clearly related to contributions than what the term authorship implies, by also searching the internet.


Is Mx. the default title for Male non-phd holders?

Mx is a gender-neutral honorific.  It's probably not a typo.

Dr would typically be used if you have a doctoral degree, and Prof if you are employed in a professor-like capacity (it means different things in different countries, but generally any semi-permanent faculty job is reasonably included).  Otherwise, you can decide which of Ms and Mx fits you better.

If you feel that there isn't an option that's appropriate for you, you can take it up with the journal.


What should I do if I found too many typos after my Ph.D. thesis being approved but before my oral defense in mathematics?

Talk to your advisor.

When I defended, my committee came back with a number of such corrections to be made. I made them and they signed off. Then the thesis editing office took the document and came back with even more corrections. I made those, and eventually they signed off. Trust me, you aren't the first to deal with this problem, and likely not the first that your advisor has seen.


Difference between International edition of a book and a non international one

International editions are cheaper

They are sold cheaper, in English speaking countries (or countries with education in English) outside North America: India, China, etc. The content is equal to that of US/North American versions.

There are two reasons why they are cheaper:

because they are printed in cheaper version: paperback instead of hardcover, sometimes black and white
because the publisher knows he cannot sell them at their US price anyway, so they are willing to sell them at the price people will buy them (better to sell them cheaply than not at all)

Sources:

http://www.thetextbookguru.com/2011/04/20/international-textbook-editions-a-cheaper-alternative-2/
http://www.abebooks.com/books/Textbooks/international-editions.shtml
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080825164810AAGRN80

There was also a case about import of international edition textbooks in the US supreme court last year (http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/thai-student-protected-by-first-sale-supreme-court-rules/).


Will I be held responsible for working with a supervisor accused of sexual misconduct?

The matter is best left to the official circles. Do not pry, do not gossip. As for being tainted, you are just a student and dependant, and if you neither enabled nor profited from the prof's (alleged, we don't know) misconduct, you should be fine. But if you start poking your nose into matters yourself, you'll get into a lot of trouble, from being seen as a nuisance to the officials, to getting the prof upset, to violating privacy laws, to unwittingly becoming a witness.
A career-limiting move.


A paper was published with material from my thesis without my knowledge: Correction or Retraction?

See note and caveat at the end.

I suggest that you have a retraction done. You didn't participate directly in the preparation of the offending paper, so adding you as an author is a bit fishy. Moreover, adding you would connect you to people who seem to have no ethical boundaries. I'd guess that you don't want that association.

If the retraction is issued, especially with an explanation, it will be a warning to the others not to continue to abuse you and your work.

Once retracted, you should be free to use your own work in any (legal) way you choose. Especially since any copyright assignment by the others would be cancelled as well, since they had no right to issue it.

When I wrote the above, my assumption was that the "other" authors here were not personally known to the OP. Clarification has made that assumption false.

So, let me add, primarily for others who might, in future, wind up in a similar situation that it can be extremely dangerous to one's career to accuse your advisor of wrongdoing. My normal advice in such situations is to try to work with the advisor long enough and politely enough so that you can get away and out from under any influence they might have over your career. The exceptions might be for the case in which the transgression is extremely blatant and for the case in which the person has already developed an independent career. The first case is still dangerous, of course, but necessity may require it. In that case, however, you need allies so that you don't become the focus of hate directed by a powerful person. Another way to say it is to take a long view about your career. Any given paper is only a small pert of your reputation. Optimize for the future, not necessarily for the present.

I think the OP here, however, is already in the second situation, having shown independence and development past the degree. I'll therefore leave my original answer in place.

Note that the ethics is the same, whether the transgressions are by people known to you or not. But self preservation is often necessary for a young researcher until that certain level of independence is achieved.


Trying to collect information on grad schools

Here are some ways in which different schools differ from each other:

Size. Both small schools (personal attention) and big schools (lots of seminars, people to talk to) have their advantages. Which is more important to you?
Research focuses. Even large schools will be dominated by a couple of research groups. Do you find their work interesting?
Program structure. Some programs are very structured, with lots of requirements; some are more free-form. Which is best is a matter of individual preference.
Competitiveness. Some departments are friendly and competitive, some departments are friendly and less competitive. (And a couple of departments are unfriendly and you should avoid them.) Do you thrive under pressure? If so, choose a competitive place.
Quality. (This one is obvious.)
Geography. Some places (Harvard, Wisconsin, Michigan, Washington, among many others) are located in towns where it's a lot of fun to be a grad student. Some are not.
Support. Some places offer more money, and/or less teaching requirements in exchange for funding. (Typically private schools fare better than public in this regard, but not necessarily.)

All things to keep in mind when you compare schools.


Skimming through a math paper with a group

My answer may not be completely relevant but I still thought it was worth putting in. I have had a few such sessions and I realized a few things. Not all of them could be true in general and I might have been a bit extreme with what I treat as knowledge. Here goes:

Your level of understanding is directly proportional to a few things:

Your ability to frame and ask grammatically correct sentences as an individual. This also encompasses communication of ideas/questions to experts of the field. For instance, suppose you are learning Linear Algebra in a group. You have a few gaps which are filled by others in the group. However, unless you can form sentences using Linear Algebra "handles", its unlikely you'll get far in research. Literature is way to dense in keywords. Unless you can talk in terms of Column Space, Rank and Eigenvectors (Rather than Linear Combo of all column or the vector which only scales) you are far from knowledgeable.
Your ability to participate in discussions. Its not difficult to lag and be left behind in a group of impatient, overachieving academics. Further, it can be a bit demotivating at times when the senior students who read the same content (owing to their heightened intuition) seem to grasp more. As junior students, it is often necessary to substitute the lack of intuition by more work.
Your ability to appreciate the nuances of the field. I cannot stress this enough from my experience. If you cannot appreciate the subtleties yourself, you didn't learn much. It doesn't take much to learn Elementary Fluid Mechanics per se. But, IMO, you actually "learn" when you go OMG when you see the transport equation and play with it till you are satisfied. An extension of this is motivation. When some concept is developed by an author, he doesn't write in random order. One of the most important aspects is to be able to understand why something is being developed. For instance, most Aerodynamics books start off with Euler Angles and then move on to Quaternions. Its simple to understand what Quaternions do and how to solve equations based on them. However, unless you know that they are used to prevent gimbal locks, there is no point of knowing about them.
The usual: Your ability to write alternate proofs, write codes (if possible), interpret the results of these codes and the usual other-than-textbook stuff.

One ending comment : Your level of knowledge is a function of how good you are in the group and how good you are without them. If you are able to develop proofs in those 3 hours together but aren't able to get started on your own later, you need to investigate whats wrong.

If you want to know how good these group sessions are, find out how good you are getting at that field as an individual


Post-doc priorities: "Laundry list" vs. "Research trumps all"

I think this is an interesting and multi-faceted question. As a postdoc, I was very much on the laundry list side of things. I did a lot of teaching, organized events, went to plenty of conferences, helped with department service, collaborated in projects that I probably should have gotten out of months ago, started a lot of long-reaching initiatives which would not lead to any papers in the short term, wrote grant proposals, and so forth. My publication track record was good, but not nearly as good as the track record of some of my colleagues who tried harder to fend off non-publishing activities.

I think ultimately this made job searching harder, as hiring committees in virtually all research-oriented institutions put an overwhelming emphasis on published papers. However, I also feel very strongly that I am a better and more well-rounded academic now than what I would be if I had locked myself in and wrote one paper after the other. I especially feel like I am pretty well set-up to achieve my tenure requirements (which, at least in my institution, are much more well-rounded than just looking at papers alone), and the change from a postdoc to a faculty position has been rather smooth - I did not get the "shock" that some others seem to have when they suddenly need to do teaching, department service, etc.

All in all, I think a good way to see it is that the "publications-over-everything" strategy maximizes your chance to get as good a tenure-track position as possible, while the laundry list strategy trains you better for a long, well-rounded career.


Is it legal to publicly share questionnaires from research articles?

Would it be legal to share these survey instruments as long as I cite them properly?

You cannot legally share documents without permission in many jurisdictions, regardless of whether you reference the original source.

  If not, would it be legal for me to reference their questions outside
  of the context of a survey (so no measurement or scoring) with a
  citation?

You can probably cite the document (assuming the document's existence isn't confidential), but (in many jurisdictions) you can only quote the question if you have permission to do so, given that the document isn't public.

Ask your institute for guidance.


You follow the publisher's instructions.

If your target journal asks for CMYK, you give them that.

If they ask for RGB, you give them that.

If they (are one of the few IME that) express no preference, then have a think about whether the charts will be viewed more on screen (use RGB) or printed on 4-colour printers (use CMYK).


How do I protect my idea before presenting to a large company?

First, while there are cases of companies "stealing" an idea and giving nothing to the inventor it is uncommon (as far as I know). The reason for this is that ideas tend to be plentiful. It is the execution which is where the hard work comes in (and the risk of loss of investment).

Second, if you want to protect your idea, then you need to know what protections are appropriate for your idea. Some things are patentable and some are not. Some are patentable in some locations and some are not. So contacting an attorney in your area is a good idea (it won't be free but for a few hundred dollars you can get some advice which could make all the difference for your future. Besides patents, you might consider having everyone present in the meeting at the company sign an NDA. Keep in mind, some people refuse to sign NDAs for philosophical reasons (if you want an NDA you should bring this up well before your meeting, do not surprise anyone with it).

You might also consider checking out Law.SE but it sounds to me like you really need a one-on-one with an attorney.

Being able to find simple, innovative solutions is a great skill to have. It sounds like you do need to have the right team around you (to provide the skills you are missing) but do not sell yourself short.


TV-L is the German public servant remuneration grade table (Tarifvertrag für den Öffentlichen Dienst der Länder (TV-L)). It is how civil servants Germany are graded for their salaries and similar conditions for their work.

Depending on where your position is, you'll be under TV-L West, or East, or Berlin, or Hessen. Something in your letter might specify this. Either way, there is information on the details at the Öffentlicher Dienst website.

Assuming you'd be in West Germany, taxed as a single (i.e., not married or living with a life partner or children), this boils down to a basic salary of €2103/month with a net salary after all taxes and health insurance payments of €1383/month.

This will increase as you remain hired, you'll go up the staircase of salaries, going from 1 to 2 after 1 year, from 2 to 3 after an additional 2 years, etc. Each step is a monthly salary increase of about €150/month net.