When should you stop asking your PhD advisor to do advisor like things?

My advisor, at two different points in my academic career, said:

"I am your advisor for life. You can always count on me."
"I think it's time for my old students to start finding new people to comment on their work."

I took away from this that your advisor should always be available at some level, it's part of the point of taking on students. You are part of their scientific (or otherwise scholarly) contribution. At the same time, post-PhD you have to develop your own network of support, which is part of your growth as a scholar.

But how do you know when to do this? I think the best answer is simply to ask your advisor (see, they're always there to answer the hard questions). Hopefully they'll give you an honest opinion - either to keep asking them for help or that they think you're ready to fly on your own. Either, if you don't feel confident that you have enough peers to count on, it's probably a sign that you both can still ask your advisor for help and that it's time to put some more energy into expanding your professional network.


Conflict of interest: My research reflects badly on my PhD supervisor

I had interesting situations during the final stages of my PhD career, and I found that my dissertation committee was an incredible resource. If you are in the final stages of writing your thesis, that means you have a dissertation committee (or have otherwise established a collegiate network of professional academics that support your PhD training). Now is the time to use this resource. Ask to speak to them in person about the problem. Specifically, you should approach your committee chair (who should be different than your supervisor). If your chair is your supervisor, then just speak to the most senior person in your committee.

The way that I understand the power dynamics / vested interests of the whole PhD situation is that your supervisor has inherent conflicts of interest - they want you to do research that supports them. Thus, they 1) are better off keeping you as long as possible (but not too long) and 2) want your research to support their research. Your committee chair, on the other hand, wants to see you graduate. Your department chair also wants to see you graduate. Your supervisor wants to see you graduate, sure, but as I mentioned, they have other motives.

Ultimately the goal is to keep everyone happy, and especially your supervisor. Having your PhD supervisor on your side is key to a successful career in Academia (or at least makes getting recommendation letters are lot easier).

Use this situation as a learning experience (one of the many tangential learning experiences associated with a PhD) for how to navigate the people problem of science. So in conclusion-

1.) Give your supervisor the benefit of the doubt. Try to understand their points and try to actually discuss it with them - IN PERSON. Abandon email for this interaction - you need the full spectrum of our human communication abilities.

2.) If #1 fails, engage your dissertation committee. This exact situation is a fine example of why dissertation committees exist.

3.) If #2 fails (or you're in a program that doesn't have dissertation committees), engage another trusted senior investigator if you've created relationships with other investigators.

4.) If you get to here, go to the department.


How do I cite / write about something someone has just said during a presentation?

I'd use the form for symposia, adjusted slightly to reflect that it's a keynote speech with only one speaker.

For the APA style, see the second block in this blog entry:

  Symposia

  A symposium is a bit like a live-action edited book: Several authors come together under the leadership of the chair to pool their knowledge about a topic.

  Krinsky-McHale, S. J., Zigman, W. B., & Silverman, W. (2012, August).
              Are neuropsychiatric symptoms markers of prodromal Alzheimer’s
       disease in adults with
         Down syndrome?
   In W. B. Zigman (Chair),
       Predictors of mild cognitive impairment, dementia,
         and mortality in
       adults with Down syndrome. Symposium conducted at the meeting
       of the
         American Psychological Association, Orlando, FL.


Is it bad to update a job application after the due date?

It's not "bad" to update your application after the deadline, but based on all the committees I've been on, the odds are low that your revised version will be looked at. What most of us do is download the full set of applications shortly after the deadline, and then start to read them. We don't go back and look to see if the applications have changed, and even if we wanted to spend time doing this, I don't think it would be fair to all applicants. (And please don't email that your application has changed, unless it's something amazingly important, like your recent Nobel prize!) All that said, it won't hurt anything to update your application, but your time is likely better spent doing other things.


Phd difficulties: waiting to finish, supervisor not reviewing thesis

What should I do?

Talk to a departmental academic that you trust and ask for guidance. Hopefully, they'll help you proceed. Otherwise, contact your department head. (You may ask several academics before escalating to the department head.)


My professor did not cite my article in a review on the same topic

Agreeing with @PeteL.Clark: define precisely what you want as outcome of the interaction, and act following this outcome.

My experience of priority issues and fighting "not being cited" that, unless your work is so promising that a priority/citation fight warrants all-out war to gain or not lose visibility, the loss of concord is usually not worth it; as unfair as that may seem, the one complaining about being ignored is often seen as the one "disturbing the peace". It shouldn't be like that, but this is an empirical observation I made, even in blatant cases of intentional ignoring. Maybe it has something to do that quite a few times it's the ones with the most aggressive "nostrification" tendency who battle the issue of being ignored in the most forceful manner.

Now, there are indeed cases where all-out priority wars may be war-ranted (pun intended) to ensure that one is at least etched in the community's minds, but keep in mind, even then, the outcome is all but assured.

Lots of unfairness happens, to all of us, but it is usually the long-term that counts. Given that your old article attracted a lot of citations, you probably are better off just ignoring the matter, but only you can judge whether entering the war-ring (yes, pun intended again) as response to your latest slight is worth it.


In general, depends on the conference's poster presentation format. Check the guidelines for a given timespan. If there is none, then it is probably no presentation, but a normal poster session where you are presenting your poster in parallel with a lot of other people in a room. People will come by and you can explain your work to them.

In such a scenario, I would not assume to do a fully linear presentation. Rather I'd prepare a very short topic introduction (at most a minute, better 30 seconds). Then check back with your visitor if they seem interested or are asking questions already.
Then based on interaction with your visitor, try to find out which aspects of your work are interesting to them and drill deeper in the respective direction.

Poster sessions are very much about direct interaction, so don't try to shower everyone with a whole bucket of water as soon as they arrive, give them small sips and see if they like your wine. If they do, you may end up empyting whole bottles with one or two of them and drunkenly end up in a bar in the evening to plan your collaboration. Most people will just nod and smile to your short intro and be happy to go on.

P.S. If you can present all your content in about 5 minutes that's however a good indication that you've chosen about the right level of abstraction - I'd just cut it in smaller pieces that you can dish out individually/as layers.


Disclaimer: I do not work in admissions. My answer is simply based on my observation as a computer science student in the US.
When schools send admissions, they already have a yield rate (the percentage of accepted students taking the offer) in mind. If they have 30 spots for a program, they will most definitely send more than 30 offers. If the past yield rate has been around 1/3, they will send about 90 offers and expecting about 30 people to enroll. In general in the case of waitlist, they will only accept people if they have lower yield rate than past years.


How is it possible to buy and publish a Q1 paper?

This sounds like a scam, so I doubt you'll get whatever they promise
It's possible (though unlikely and unethical) for anyone capable of producing the research to exchange money for an edited author list, but the problem of finding a buyer in the same area of your expertise is not trivial and probably doesn't make for a profitable strategy unless... See above
Absolutely yes. It's plagiarism to claim someone else's work as your own, even if you pay them for it.


Can someone collaborate between universities for a PhD?

It is not uncommon to have a formal PhD position at university X, a supervisor at university X, and a co-supervisor at university / institution Y. This may happen for example, if the PhD topic is on the interface of two subjects, or if Y provides essential experimental / lab / other facilities for the research.

It is also not uncommon to have a PhD at university X, a supervisor at university Y, and a co-supervisor at university X. This usually happens when a professor from X moves to Y some time before, or shortly after, the PhD is started. The role of a co-supervisor may be solely to observe the process and make sure that the research will succeed and the thesis will be submitted in time and in good order, to university X's satisfaction.

In the UK, the so-called Doctoral Training Centers, are sometimes organised between several universities, sharing the same direction of research. I have not heard of any examples, but I assume that a collaboration of a PhD candidate with several professors at different universities in this case is more than likely to happen.

Another example, which can happen very naturally, is when a PhD candidate is closely involved in a research project, which is already collaborative.


How can a researcher in his early career attract good PhD students?

Presuming you have some way to fund their work, and you have positions to offer, I suggest you start by recruiting bright undergrads from your upper-division courses. Get them involved in your research before they graduate. Offer them positions as PhD students before they apply everywhere else*. I was so excited by my PhD supervisor's work (our work really), the lab environment, and the place where I was living, that I didn't want to apply anywhere but where I already was.

Some people will object that students should move around between their undergrad and PhD, and there's some merit to these arguments, but if you have funding and can't recruit, you may want to think outside the box a bit. If you don't have any money, or your department won't give you any positions (or whatever the system is at your university), get some!

If you want to recruit from outside, keep publishing. Publish in the best places you can. Become a hot shot. Advertise openings on your website and at the end of your conference talks (if that's acceptable in your field). Be aggressive about finding good students.

*: If they do want to apply elsewhere, write them the best letter you can and wish them well. Maybe they'll stay anyway. Don't be one of those profs with a reputation for trying to control the lives of your students by refusing to write recommendation letters!


Where should a glossary be placed in a book?

There is no "correct" answer here. It really depends on what your goal is: if it's to inform the audience of terms before they start reading the main text, then it might make sense to place it in the "front matter." On the other hand, if you expect readers to consult it as needed when they're reading, then typically you'd place it at the end of the book with the appendices.


How many weeks of break (per year) should a graduate student reasonably expect to have?

The official answer depends on where you are located, and the applicable laws in your jurisdiction. For instance, in Germany, graduate students are almost always employees of the government, and are therefore accorded vacation benefits commensurate to that (between 23 and 29 days per year, depending upon age). In contrast, the United States technically does not have any requirements on annual paid leave, so the answer in principle could be as little as zero, but normally is two weeks per year.

Unofficially, that's a matter to be worked out between you and your advisor. Some advisors will be willing to let you take days off here and there as needed, so long as they don't interfere with either your long-term progress or meeting your day-to-day responsibilities. Most advisors will be rightfully displeased if you ask to take two months of leave all at once, but most will not mind a three-day weekend here and there as needed.


Is graduating on the August a problem in admission for PhD programs in the U.S.?

It never hurts to specifically check with your undergraduate advisor and the desired graduate school's admission office just to make sure. My understanding is that as long as your current university acknowledges your completion of the undergraduate program (regardless of whether you physically have the Bachelor degree certificate or not) prior to you officially beginning your graduate program, then there should be no problem. But like I said, you should check in with your undergrad advisor so that they can inform you of any lingering policies or concerns.


What should I take in consideration when planning a Design Science Research?

Talk to your advisor to determine if an artefact-oriented approach is the correct approach for your research questions.
Generally, there are three general approaches to research that different research methodologies can fall into: quantitative/scientific, qualitative/descriptive, and artefact-oriented. In the first you’re dealing with numerical data that you can statistically analyse to prove or disprove hypotheses; in the second, you’re dealing with descriptive information that you can classify and analyse with techniques like coding. With artefact-oriented research, you’re designing a system that you then evaluate compared to the state of the art.
One important consideration for artefact-oriented research is that there needs to be a production of new knowledge that is separated from the artefacts you produce; if you take away all of the datasets and computer systems, if there isn’t anything left, you haven’t been doing research, you’ve been doing development.


How to ask good question at the end of lecturer interview

One good question to ask is, "What is required for a new lecturer to succeed here?" and the likes. I've asked this myself and the Head of School was very eager to share with me the answer.

Asking people whether they would collaborate with you seems too early, as you will need to show them that you have something to offer.


Statement of research interest as an early Master's student

I would write about both.

I usually think the writing of a statement of purpose as a story I want to tell. Write about your past projects to introduce you and your research interests, giving the reader some context on why you are applying for the position and the reasons your profile/know-how fits well in the job description.

Even if you are not sure about the exactly subject of your next project, you must know the topics that are interesting for you and the ones you definitely are not willing to work ever. You are an early master's student, no one is expecting you to tell exactly to where your research will lead you. However, they expect you to give some clues in order to assign you with the appropriate supervisor and in a project that is best suitable for your ambitions.

I would suggest you to read this text where they summarise the main characteristics of a good statement of purpose.


How to Reference a Long Breakdown of a Mathematical Model from Another Thesis?

It sounds to me like your thesis just got about 15% shorter.

Rather than developing the material yourself, you need to instead put a review of the key results of the prior work as they relate to the rest of your thesis.  Presumably you needed to do this analysis because you were going to put its results to use elsewhere.  Well, you no longer need to do the analysis.  Instead, you can cite the other paper and explicitly say that you're going to review the key results that your work builds upon, e.g.,

  A detailed analysis of the X algorithm has already been conducted in [cite].  Further parts of this thesis build upon some of the results of that analysis, which we summarize here for the convenience of the reader.

Then you put in your paraphrased summary of the results you will use and the important intuitions with respect to the rest of your work.  You almost certainly do not need a reader to be familiar with every detail of the other proofs.  Likely some of their lemmas/sub-results don't need to be stated and there may be side-results / corollaries that are irrelevant to your use of the materials as well.  As such, your summary should be able to be much more terse than the original, and can be completely in your own words.  Renumbering and re-organizing material is OK as well.  You also don't need to put citations in everywhere continuously: as long as you write the prose in your own words and make it clear up front that everything in that collection of material is a summary of the material you are citing, the attribution should be quite clear to a reader.


Including additional authors to reduce time

As some comments above indicate, there is an important rule of thumb from the field of software engineering, which is Brooks' Law.

According to Frederick Brooks, in his book The Mythical Man-Month, adding more workers to a project which is already behind schedule, is likely to make it even farther behind schedule as new members are brought on board.

Take the time to consider whether you can beat this effect before attempting to grow your group.


Allowing a student to sit in during class

If you want to find out what exactly is within your legal power as an instructor and what is not, check your university regulations. They do vary from place to place. The general rule is that if there is no official policy in the handbook, the choice is yours, but you may also ask the chairman to be on the safe side (this is a good general strategy, by the way: while in doubt and seriously concerned about any legal stuff, just pass the issue up the administrative ladder). As to the rest, I usually allow people to sit in whenever they request it under two conditions

1) The classroom sitting capacity allows it

2) The student behaves in a non-disruptive way

So, unless you have a clear reason to say "No", I would say "Conditional yes" and tell the student any conditions you care about right away with the understanding that if any of them get violated, the sitting-in gets terminated.


The manuscript does not reach the required quality standard of this journal

The answer you received indicates that your paper was a "desk rejection". The editor did not send out your paper for review as she/he believes that your paper has no chance of getting accepted.
Journals accept some papers and reject others. To save the time of reviewers, editors of a journal often have a look at a paper and gauge its chance of acceptance before sending it out for a review. A few aspects that they look for are:

Is the grammar/spelling sufficiently good? It does not have to be perfect for the submitted version, but reasonably good. Papers for which the grammar obstructs the understandability of the content should be fixed first before doing a proper review.
Is the contribution as stated in the paper substantial enough for paper acceptance in this journal even it the reviewers find that the paper is 100% correct and publishable? If the claimed contribution is not perceived to be on par with the other published papers in the journal, the paper won't make it in, and hence there is - again - no reason to send this out for review.
Does the paper overall appear to have substantial flaws? For instance, are non-trivial claims not accompanied by proofs, does the paper structure follow the conventions of the field, etc.?
Does the appearance of the paper match one of a paper from an established author? Do the figures look roughly professional, is there a change in font in the middle of the text, etc.?

If your paper falls short on one of these aspects (and a few others that I most likely have forgotten), you are likely to get a desk rejection. Note that it ultimately saves you time, as you get the answer earlier in this way. However, the editor could have been a bit more precise w.r.t. what exactly was wrong. The normal course of action in such a case is to ask your advisor for advice if you have one.


Is it hard to start a PhD programme after leaving to work in industry?

Is it hard to resume education after working in industry (assuming 'ideal' conditions such as work related to chosen field, good master project from good university etc.)?

In short: NO.

I did exactly that and I think that was a great thing. Being in computer science, this gave me solid experience in software engineering and pragmatics of "real-world" solutions. The benefits I feel till now (after completing my doctoral studies and working as a relatively senior post-doc (3+ years after thesis defence) are these: 1) good feeling for what "societal" problems are and how does my research translate to practice (at least hypothetically, but in a plausible way) and 2) allows me to be involved in applied projects in any role from low-level programmer, through technical lead to project manager. All this is vital in writing project proposals and project execution. In a nutshell: experience in industry, when used wisely, can give you an "entrepreneurial" attitude, which definitely is an advantage over students who plunge to doctoral studies right after completing their master's degree. The only slight downside is that you might end up as one of the oldest PhD students in the group. But I never perceived it as a problem.

Finally, all the above applies to experience in European context (in particular: DE, NL, BE). I have no clue about the cultural issues regarding your question in other parts of the world.

Later edit:
When it comes to the emotional and lifestyle part of the decision, of course there are issues to consider. Going from an industrial position to doctoral studies is almost always a financial downgrade. Perhaps more in countries where a PhD student has a student status (US, UK), than in places which treat PhD students as university (public) employees (DE, NL), salaries tend to be higher in the latter. My own attitude, however, was this: since at that point I did not have kids yet, I always thought that should the life demand more money, or when I won't like the academic life, with the sound experience from industry I shouldn't have a problem going back any time. This definitely took a huge amount of pressure from my shoulders while pursuing my PhD, since I did not worry about my future (in career, or financial terms) - unlike my "purely academic" peers. Even till now, I feel confident (perhaps I fool myself) that should the academic path not work out in the next few years, it's not going to be the end of the world for me (again unlike for some of my peers). To sum up: with the confidence that I am fit for industrial career, I can pursue my passion in academia, rather being under pressure to produce. So I would add this as yet another benefit.

P.S.
To a more extreme note: I can point fingers to at least two people who after a long career in industry embarked on doctoral studies in their 50s and became successful researchers in their fields afterwards. Similarly, there are many people who after completing their PhD went to industry for awhile (5-10 years) and later came back to academia - though that feat seems to be harder to manage than the previous one. So everything is possible...

Even later edit (8 years later): I do no longer work in academia, at certain point 1) my family had enough of moving, 2) I ended up in a region with very competitive universities, 3) since I probably did not belong to the top notch, but let's say just slightly below, at certain point my funding dried out and I did not get a suitable professorship in that region. This led me to first seek job in industry again and later to start my own company/statr-up trying to capitalize on all the scientific knowledge I collected. Retrospectively, my career as an engineer before joining academia turned out to be a great asset once again. I could claim very solid history in my CV and I was immediately hired to senior positions. Also, the academic training in research creativity turned out to be a very useful asset when I started my own company later on. All in all, I am happy about this career path. Maybe this later edit will inspire others too... Good luck!


What are the chances for an H4 international masters student to get a teaching job at a US community college?

You clarified that you have an H4 visa. As you know, you are not normally permitted to work under an H4 visa. Even unpaid tutoring might be considered a violation of the H4 terms. So you would need to first change your visa status by either:

Applying for a green card
Getting your own H1B or other work visa

As far as getting your own H1, unless you are located in a place where there is an absolute dearth of available faculty, I think it highly unlikely that a community college will sponsor a work visa for you. The amount of paperwork that needs to be done is tremendous (the Department of Labor certification itself is an inch thick)-- as well as the filing costs and attorney's fees. They may also have no experience doing this, unlike the international scholar's office at a larger institution. Finally, many CC faculty are part-time so you may not even qualify for a H1B to begin with.

I would ask your spouse to apply for permanent residency for the both of you and then go on the job market once you have employment authorization.


Am I required to hand out private encryption key to head of institute?

This seems like an X-Y problem. Why is important work data only kept on a computer on your desk, in the first place? I would expect it to be on a Git repository, or on the shared storage space of a workplace server.

Once you fix this problem, the issue you mention becomes irrelevant: your data will not be lost if your disk suddenly becomes inaccessible.

So a practical way to address the issue could be offering to put more of your work data in shared servers and git repositories, so that the problem disappears. Ask your superiors which data they are worried about, and offer to keep them online preemptively.


How to refer to a source with "minor" typos in the title?

Depending on where your sources have been published, the format/style guide you are using, and where you have found them, the definitive way of referring to a source is to cite it using the title as it is written in the source publication.

In some cases you will find character accents missing as it is not always a trivial matter to write accents - this depends on the character set you are using. I have seen that older papers and articles that were typeset for English publications simply did not have those characters available in the character set used at the time. Thus accents and special characters were "anglicised" - for example, château as chateau, leçon as lecon, etc.


Could a Masters degree actually make someone a less employable candidate?

I would actually think it is precisely the opposite: generally, a computer science Masters requires a thesis, and that thesis usually involves writing a big chunk of functioning code of some sort.  Accomplishing that indicates that person is capable of a accomplishing a large and complex task with minimal supervision.  With an undergraduate degree, you don't necessarily know whether they've ever built a real program that wasn't handed to them as a pre-digested problem as part of their curriculum.

Now, if somebody was a giant company looking for "cannon fodder" programmers to grind out massive repetitive projects, maybe that could be a minus.  Likewise, you have to pay people better when they've got a Masters, commensurate with their increase in skill, so if somebody is looking for low-quality coding work, a Masters could make a candidate overqualified.  However, if you're thinking about eventually moving toward more research in your career, do you really want those sort of jobs?

I know for a fact, however, that the company group I'm in rarely even considers hiring people without at least a Masters.  A number of others I know are similar: the more cutting-edge or research-oriented a company is, the more that they are likely to value that extra education.


Will already having a masters degree make it harder to get funding for a second masters in Europe?

It really depends on the exact degree you already hold and when and where you earned it, and what you want to study at this European school, and why. For admissions purposes you should explain in your SOP why you need another degree in the same field.


Appropriate recognition for contribution to a book

Sometimes the cover gives only the book's title and the name of the principal author but the title page says:

THEORY OF PARTIAL DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS

by WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

with contributions from

Madeleine L'Engle


Is there a way to filter publications by their grant information (say NSF grant ID)?

Grant giving bodies typically rely on self-reporting: the progress reports submitted to them will typically include information about publications generated during the funding period.

That said, one option is to check the OpenAIRE database. The OpenAIRE initiative aims to create a database of publications and research data, and as part of their design, asks the individuals who deposit the material for funding information. This certain does not encompass all funded projects (as it also depends on the researchers doing self-reporting), but does create a searchable database. (See, e.g. this link for a list of NSF funded proposals.) (Note, the OpenAIRE project was started by the EU and they currently have about twice as many items funded by the European Commission in their database as there are by the NSF.)


Should a teacher help if the student does not ask for it?

Part of teaching is figuring out if what you want to teach is actually understood. This is something you should be doing continuously. As part of that you automatically find the students that struggle more than others, and that typically offers natural moments in which you can discuss what that student can do to improve things. So I don't see how someone can teach effectively without answering "yes" to your question.


How should a university deal with outsourced essay writing?

First, let me say that you should read the answers to my related question. One answer is quite clear that you should not even bother checking (the author of that answer did admit being uncomfortable with that answer...as I am).

This is a significant problem at my university. One way we try to address it is that we have students verbally answer a quick, random question about their assignment.

Good news: This does catch some students when they can only answer "uh, ah, ummm."

Bad news: Some students still use ghost writers and just memorize the paper so they can answer any question about it. If the assessment covers all the learning outcomes then it can still result in students learning.

One thing that I generally do is, throughout the semester, I keep track of the "quality level" I see each student is at. This takes several sessions and when classes are quite large there might not be enough interaction to support this strategy. However, if you do have this information, you can use it to compare to the overall quality of their written work. If they never know anything in class but they write "golden" work, then it is a warning sign.

It is important that it is just a warning sign because there are some students who write well but are not so great at in-class interaction. You always need to use your judgment.

As far as how we handle it, we consider using a ghost writer an identical offense to plagiarism with identical punishments.


Inclusion of `computer code` in a thesis

You should add source codes scarcely and when it is interesting to add the code. Loop does not sound one of the interesting headings. In those cases you should include source code as figures and discuss them in your text.

in other cases, you can give complete source codes in appendix or in a CD/DVD as an attachment.


Adjunct offered and accepted a Full-time 1-year contract, then told to "disregard" by HR staff

You're receiving the runaround because someone at your university breached a signed contract. Since the payroll system updated, that means that the contract was processed, so it can't simply be taken back or invalidated because HR sends a "Disregard" notice.
It sounds to me like the Dean didn't want you to make additional money, so somehow convinced HR to send you the "Disregard" notice and draw out the process.
Or if not the Dean, someone in the hierarchy decided you were making too much and decided to cancel the deal, thinking that you do not have the time, money, and energy to pursue legal remedies.
The "Disregard" notice is meaningless as a matter of policy & law unless it's specifically authorized by other university documents, so what happened to you is probably a violation of law, although only the Union & an attorney (or the Union's legal counsel, if one exists) can determine that.
Universities treat people in your situation like this all the time because they--like so many employers--wager that they'll get away with it. They don't treat tenured faculty members this way (or, at least, not tenured faculty members who put up a fight).
So, the harsh truth is that you may have little recourse beyond what you've already pursued.
Good on you, however, for fighting that fight.
As someone else mentioned, you may not want to work there anymore unless the university makes this situation right.
Otherwise, you'll simply be treated as an exploitable, disposable employee whom they'll shortchange any time it suits them.


Attending Conferences as an unaffiliated listener

Go for it ... probably.

There are no doubt aspects of conferences that are specific to individual fields, so my answer based on experience in Computer Science may not apply to Mathematics.  But I'm guessing the answer to this is somewhat general, in that some conferences are small (and may be largely limited to people who are actively participating/presenting) while others are larger.  If you pick a large enough conference, with many more attendees than presenters, no one will think twice of who you are or why you're there.


Contacting A Professor for Master of Science (Thesis)

Professors get credit with their departments for supervising graduate students and getting them through to their degrees. Depending on the department, university, type of program (is the master's degree terminal? etc.), and country, the importance of supervising a master's student for a professor relative to a PhD student can vary a lot. In some places the PhD students may be all that really counts towards the professor's direct incentives, or they may be more or less equivalent. In a terminal master's program, the master's students are everything (if that isn't obvious). I don't know of anywhere where a master's student would count more than a PhD student towards a professor's supervision requirements, but it might be common in some professional programs that also grant PhDs.

Now, that being said, there are other incentives for professors that master's students can affect. Professors generally need to publish peer-reviewed works, and master's students can definitely contribute to that. Perhaps less so than PhD students, but most master's students are working towards at least one significant publication. Professors also must staff the grant-funded projects that they win and produce whatever deliverables they promised (or at least try to), and master's students are hired for this purpose as well.

Typically, professors may have as many students as they can support with funding. That may be grant funding or departmental funding, but I know of no hard caps. Obviously, departments will want students to get good supervision, so if a professor has an inordinate number of students, say 100, then a department chair might try to slow them down or otherwise act to insure that the students are adequately supervised. On the other hand, departments tend to stay out of the way of extremely well-funded professors.

Professors may decide how to select their students in almost any way they choose as long as they do not discriminate based on legally protected statuses in their country (e.g. race, sex, religion, etc.) and as long as they comply with their university's local regulations. My PhD supervisor took me on knowing, since I was applying to the same university as my undergrad, that I knew virtually nothing of his research. I didn't have the mathematics, fluid mechanics, or really even the programming skills to contribute strongly on day one. That being said, other professors may do things differently, especially for master's students who are expected to be there for only a few years. This is a personal choice, and so it will vary a lot. However, university degrees are at least partly about educating the student, so they can't expect you to know everything already.

Finally, admissions processes vary wildly across departments, universities, etc., so it really depends. In my limited experience based on watching others at one US university, master's admissions tend to be looser than PhD admissions in the sense that master's students who can pay are frequently admitted without a supervisor lined up under the assumption that they will find someone to supervise their thesis while doing the required coursework during the first year. PhD students usually aren't admitted directly to a PhD program unless some professor puts up their hand and volunteers to take them on. In other countries, I understand that students apply directly to a potential advisor and as long as they meet minimal criteria, they will be admitted to the university. Many US programs may be de facto like this but separate the university/departmental requirements from the professors' requirements on officially.

Finally, it's my understanding that many students are admitted to master's programs with the implicit expectation that they will transition to the PhD program over time after they find an advisor.


Section for "main results" and use of "conclusion" in a math article

Can I provide the proof in the "Main Results" section, or is it not
  customary to include any proofs there?

It is fine to include a proof of a few lines in a section titled Main Results, if you feel that that helps your narrative, if it adds some insight that is useful at this point in the paper, or if the proof is extremely elegant or interesting. It is also fine not to do so. Good writing cannot be summarized in a few rules, one needs to always think about what makes sense for the particular context one is thinking about.

  Should I do the same and not add any conclusion?

Pure math papers almost never have a Conclusion section. If the reader reads the introduction, the results and the proofs and still doesn't know what conclusions are to be drawn from the work, it is a bad paper and no final section will save it. For this reason, many if not most math papers simply end after the end of the last proof. Others will have a final section titled something like "Additional remarks", "Final remarks" or "Open problems". This section will usually be short and forward-looking, addressing possible extensions of the work, or containing some half-baked thoughts about aspects of the work or related questions that the authors still don't understand well.

Conclusion

I don't have any. :-)


Do you have to follow the instructions for a statement of purpose/personal statement?

Yes
If you've ever asked a question here on SE that goes "hey, I need help with X" and someone answers with "I think you're actually asking Y, here's the answer to Y" you'll know how annoying it can be. It's even more annoying when the person apparently didn't read the question before writing the response, or when the submitted statement of purpose reads like it's written for another university with minor modifications for this one.
Answer the question that is asked, not the question you wish was asked or the question you wish to answer.


What should you do if a co-author has an unethical affiliation?

To my mind, this case is very similar to the question of whether somebody can essentially pay for co-authorship.  We see many questions of this sort on this site, a particular apropos example of which is this one, which asks in part:

  Suppose I'm a billionaire who knows nothing about science, but I take it into my head that I want to be (regarded as) a famous scientist.

The case of the Saudi Arabian affiliations looks to me very much like a parallel construct:

  Suppose I'm a billionaire institution which does little significant research, but I take it into my head that I want to be (regarded as) a famous institution.

I think that it is completely reasonable to find this problematic, and to object to a co-author adding this institution, just as one might object to a co-author adding the billionaire know-nothing as another author.

Now the question is what to do about it, and, as in these authorship questions, the advice tends to depend strongly on the power dynamics of the situation.  On this site, we often advise students to leave bad situations rather than creating a confrontation, due to the power imbalance with faculty.  For people in positions of power, however, like tenured faculty, it is an effective endorsement of unethical behavior if you are aware of it and do not call it out.  It may not be a hill to die on, but either you care enough to make your voice heard or else you accept the behavior as legitimate.

In this particular case, the student may have acted unwisely with regards to safeguarding their own future, but it may also have been important enough to them to take that ethical stand.  It's impossible for us to know how important it was to that person, and it's easy to engage in post-facto critique of their tactics, but I think the concern is legitimate and the actions taken are within the range of reasonable options, depending on how strongly the student felt about the ethics involved.

In short: some people choose not to take military money, not to work on espionage-related research, or not to publish in non-open journals.  Choosing not to be party to what you perceive as bribery for prestige is just as legitimate an ethical choice to make.


When should a graduate student accept a peer-review request?

Writing peer reviews is a vital part of academic life and you should eventually partake in such service to the community. In order to write a good review, you need

time to actually read the manuscript and write the review;
sufficient scientific expertise in the relevant field;
some idea of what constitutes a good review;
confidence in your own judgement and in your critique of (potentially much more senior) authors.

Reviewing is always much easier and pleasant if the manuscript is good. When there are problems with the manuscript, that's where it becomes tricky (unfortunately, many submitted manuscripts fall in the second category).

You should definitely discuss this with your supervisor.


What you can and cannot claim in a patent is a highly debated area. You should really consult a legal expert.

If you're affiliated with a college or university, they probably have an office that handles these sorts of things. They'll guide you through the patent process and help cover some/all of the fees. You might not have any choice of working with them. Depending upon your contract, the school might own part of your work and have the legal option to attempt to monetize it first.

If you're not with an organization or you know that you're free from any legal obligations, you should get in touch with a patent lawyer. They can help you draft the patent, help look for prior work, and advise you on the intricacies of international IP.

You can try to patent it on your own, but I really advise against it. A lawyer will help you understand what parts of your work you can patent. They will also help to draft the patent in as broad a way as possible to allow you to claim as much as you can.


Found mistake in my professors book: Tell her or publish? If so, how?

First: Slow down.

In the academic world, books are simply collections of known things presented in a unified fashion. In fact, in some disciplines, it's almost unheard of for someone to release something novel in book form. Additionally, while book chapters are reviewed by editors and (occasionally) peers, it's not the same peer-review setting as we have in journals. To that extent, people don't typically write papers rebutting an interpretation put forth in a book; they write papers rebutting the article(s) upon which the book chapter is founded. If a book chapter does indeed contain an error, then it'll just have to be fixed in the next revision, if there is one. As such, your concern about publication is probably far overstated.

Secondly: Are you sure you have found an error? Has anyone else reviewed your work to validate what you've seen? Are you sure that you fully understand the topic? If I was a betting man, I'd place my money on the professor who's been studying the field for years and has (presumably) thoroughly reviewed the literature, so much so that they just wrote a book on it, over first- or second-year graduate student, as a simple matter of statistics.

Thirdly: You should definitely just go talk to your professor and ask her, respectfully, to clarify what she wrote. If anything, she'll probably be appreciative that you're going through it in such detail. If you have found a real issue, you'll make her aware of it, and if you're lacking some background she can explain it.


Using a data set collected against the terms of service of a company?

Most serious organizations (journals, conferences, etc) have standards of ethics they abide by, and individual peer reviewers also have their own standards of research ethics. In some fields these are very explicit and written out at length, such as with the American Psychological Association (APA) or the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM).

When submitting to a venue, there is almost always some statement of ethical/legal compliance which you must agree to. As such, violating any aspect of the codes, ethics, or legal principles the organization (or editors, or reviewers) value is absolutely grounds for rejection of a paper, or retraction if violation is discovered later. The editor is fully within their rights to reject a paper that violates any of their standards, and the individual reviewers are free to suggest the paper be rejected on any such grounds.

Various people and organizations value things differently, so some venues might be more comfortable with some types of violations than others. Some might be OK with violating a terms of service to scrape data, while some others might be happy to reject you outright for such a practice. I'm certain this area is also changing and evolving quite rapidly, so even venues that previously published similar papers might no longer be interested in such methods. Some will even way your methods against the outcomes, and if the research is interesting enough they'll look past the other failings - and some just don't care at all; your research could have been about electrocuting kittens to see how loud they cry and they'd publish it just the same.

I would encourage you to think more long-term than whether or not a paper gets accepted, however. A single accepted paper which shows a researcher to be dangerously negligent, in terms of legal responsibility or ethical guidelines, can quickly find themselves considered a liability to future collaborators, advisers, and employers. Academia heavily relies on reputation, and a reputation of taking short-cuts, ignoring ethical guidelines, and not caring whether what they do is illegal or could result in losing lawsuits...I don't know whether such a reputation will open the kinds of doors you'd be happy to walk through.


Criteria for authorship depend on the journal, but generally follow something along the lines of the ICMJE recommendations. To be an author, you should:

have made substantial contributions to the conception or design of
the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data
for the work; AND
Drafted the work or revised it critically for important intellectual content; AND
Approved the final version to be published; AND
Agreed 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.

You don't mention who conceived or designed the study, but unless he made a substantial contribution to this he hasn't met #1, since you acquired and interpreted the data (if he initially provided the data but was not allowed to, that doesn't count). It doesn't sound like he's met #2. If you've showed him the final version he could claim he's met #3 and he would probably agree to #4 even though this would be misrepresenting his ability to follow the rest of the work.

Basically, you leave him off the author list but (potentially) acknowledge him.


How to anonymize self-citation of source code repository in IEEE double blind peer review?

I think most reviewers for IEEE Communications Letters are unlikely to visit your source code link and try and validate your code. It's fairly unusual in this field (I say this as someone in the same field.) Certainly the reviewers will not expect access to your code. So if you want to anonymize everything, that would be fine.

If you want to preserve the ability of reviewers to access your code (which is a very good thing!) and don't mind going to a little bit of extra trouble, you could always just upload an anonymized tar.gz archive containing the source code (without the version control metadata) to any file sharing site. Then use that URL in the version you submit for review. (When the paper is accepted, you can update the reference to point to your non-anonymous repository.)


When should I reply "thanks" to a professor's email?

Summarizing all my comments as an answer,

  I am not sure if I should reply with a simple "Thanks" or if I should
  just let it be.

It depends on the number of students the professor wrote to. If it is an invidualized e-mail for a limited amount of people (apparently your case), yes, a little "thank you" is the nice and polite way to go. (On the other hand, if the class is a huge auditorium of a hundred people, the professor probably doesn't want this amount of e-mails arriving in his/her inbox).

  Also, the email was sent about 6 hours ago if that matters

6 hours, 24, 48, it doesn't matter. E-mail is not the same as instant messaging, and it is generally okay to skip a few days - especially in your situation: the professor is not waiting for your answer, it's just a nice thing to do, but if you wait three days or don't write at all, noone will notice.

Just write "Hi Professor X, thank you for taking the time to notify me!" and that's it!


How can I make my engineering MSc dissertation look professional?

It is important to use format templates i.e. do not format a heading as 12pt and bold but format it as "heading 1" (and change the properties of a heading 1 as you like). Also for the flow-text and figure captions use the Word in-build features instead of doing it manually. By this way you can change the whole document within seconds if you are unhappy with the layout. And yes, you can make your word document look exactly like a TeX this way. In my opinion learning TeX is not worth it (I wrote my MSc and PhD thesis in TeX) as you will hardly need it every again (I never used it again after my PhD) as any type of later collaborative work will most likely be done in Word.
Word is very mighty if you use it correctly but few people use it that way.


How can I gain access to a database to which my university does not have access

I would ask your university librarians -- they tend to be resourceful and under-used! At least for journals to which the university does not subscribe, there are typically ways to request single articles, often through inter-library consortia. I wouldn't be surprised if similar things exist for brief access to databases.


On a Paper, Change the Methodology or Report in Results Section?

This should be worked out with your advisor. If it were me (as advisor), I'd suggest that you explain the original methodology and show how your work implies that it fails. That is a valid research outcome. Then, show how a modification of it would work and why. How is it that the "technical details" make a difference.
But if you change the methodology and just pretend that it didn't happen, you are losing an opportunity to extend knowledge. A proof or demonstration of why something doesn't work can be just as valuable as one that it does. Perhaps even more so in a case like this. If your thesis gives insight into a problem, or better, a class of problems, you have done well, no matter the outcome.


How relevant a PhD that takes >8 years would be, specially in STEM fields?

You don't wait with publishing till you finished your PhD, especially in such a fast moving field. So by the end of your education you will have made a contribution, even if at the time your PhD is finished your contribution is already less relevant. This is fine. A PhD is supposed to show that you can do independent research; think of it as vocational training for researchers. So if you show that you made contributions that at the time were good, then you have shown what you needed to show. Nobody expects of PhD students to be able to see the future.


Is it normal that my adviser presented my work at a conference while I was there?

It is normal assuming (a) your advisor is actively involved in the research project, i.e., would be a co-author on any publications coming from the work and (b) your advisor acknowledged your role in the research during his/her presentation. For most faculty advisors (at least in my specific STEM field), much or all of their research is done with advisees, so any research talk they give will likely describe work done with others.

For reference, my advisor gave a seminar in my own department on a project that I led. I had no problem with this -- it was nice to get their perspective on my work, and they acknowledged that I had done much of the legwork.


How can one carry out a "Russian style" seminar?

I use a version of this in the weekly research seminar that I run.
This format typically works best when

the speaker knows ahead of time that he/she is likely to get questions during the talk and
at least a few of the audience members feel comfortable asking such questions.

If the speaker is a regular attendee of the seminar, then (1) works itself out naturally; otherwise, I recommend that the organizer mention this ahead of time to the speaker.  Generally, more experienced speakers are more comfortable with this model.  As I'm asking questions during the talk, I watch the speaker's responses.  If the speaker starts to get flustered or is unable to answer well a few questions in a row, then I often will stop asking questions.  Actually, I usually talk a little with the speaker ahead of time about what I'm hoping for from the talk, who the typical audience is, how long the talks usually go, etc.  I find that a few minutes beforehand can save you from the awkward experience of having a talk that is at too low or too high a level.

For (2), I am usually quite comfortable asking questions, and I generally find that at least one other faculty member in the audience is.  As Jeromy mentioned, typically this model works best when the questions are asked by well-informed audience members (since they can more easily discern which questions will and will not be helpful to the rest of the audience).  If you find that no one else in the audience is asking questions, I suggest that you talk with a few of the regular attendees and ask if they would be willing to start asking questions.  (This conversation probably will work better outside of the actual seminar.)


Can I give back my Master's Degree and remove my Master's Thesis?

You're in a tough situation. If the university is smart and if the Title IX Coordinator has power (big ifs), they will do everything they can to keep you from suing or otherwise bringing bad publicity to the university. This could include finding a way to count your Master's research to your dissertation.

I infer from your reference to Title [IX] that you are in the United States. I recommend that you look into the Legal Advocacy Fund of the American Association of University Women (whether or not you are female, which you don't state). They might be able to offer you some free advice or point you to a lawyer who can give a free initial consultation. It is possible your university will be more cooperative if they know you are well informed.


Should I list people who are in competition with me as reviewers to exclude for "conflict of interest"?

In my experience, when a conference asks authors to identify reviewers that are conflicted, they want you to identify reviewers who fall into certain categories of people who should not review your work because they have a relationship with you personally that could bias their review. For example: your advisor, your colleagues, your current collaborators, your family members, etc. They are not asking you to list reviewers who you consider to be your competition.

For example, the instructions for POPL 2017 say:

  As an author, you should list PC and ERC members (and any others, since others may be asked for outside reviewers) which you believe have a conflict with you. While particular criteria for making this determination may vary, please apply the following guidelines, identifying a potential reviewer Bob as conflicted if

  Bob was your co-author or collaborator at some point within the last 2 years
  Bob is an advisor or advisee of yours
  Bob is a family member
  Bob has a non-trivial financial stake in your work (e.g., invested in your startup company)

  Also please identify institutions with which you are affiliated; all employees or affiliates of these institutions will also be considered conflicted.

  If a possible reviewer does not meet the above criteria, please do not identify him/her as conflicted. Doing so could be viewed as an attempt to prevent a qualified, but possibly skeptical reviewer from reviewing your paper. If you nevertheless believe that a reviewer who does not meet the above criteria is conflicted, you may identify the person and send a note to the PC Chair.


Unfortunately, there's no way around crappy grades (other than explaining what happened in your personal statement). But as far as showing that you are competent in these subjects on a grad school application you could:

Do a project which would clearly require knowledge of these topics.
Take the Math Subject GRE and do well, assuming you're applying to programs which care about the subject GREs. The risk here is that what's covered on these exams isn't a perfect match for your integrated courses, but there is a lot of overlap.


Does economy of scale apply to universities?

Yes, economy of scale does apply to universities.  Having more students reduces the operating cost per student.
The universities you have listed are research universities.  They prioritise spending on research, and not students.  They do not care about revenue as they have plenty of money and do not exist for the purpose of gaining more money.
For institutions that have little money and get most of their money from students, I've sometimes heard it said that 300 students is "enough" to achieve economy of scale.
Some universities achieve economy of scale using purchasing consortia.  In these constoria, several universities work together to negotiate a favorable contract from a vendor.  This is quite common for public universities.


Do journals issue any certificate when they publish an article?

Generally, once you have a manuscript published, you don't receive a certificate, but you get something far better and far more practical - a published paper that would be read by a wider audience and potentially, cited (which can be considered as validation of your work).  Additionally and importantly, you'll have a bibliographic record that you can add to a website, CV, Christmas Card etc. - that is a true 'certificate' or your work.

Having said all that, a little while ago, I received a small A4 'certificate' for having an article published as a featured article - but that is very journal specific.


How to not get lost during bibliography research?

I believe you are on the right track. Of course you don't need to read everything, only what is more important for your research. Hence, the most important thing would be to be focus for long periods of time and not to question the time spend. AT first, probably the best start would be to read  the review articles, which discusses different approaches in the field, and then to move to a particular direction. After one have an onset of the phenomenology one can start to digest the mathematical details, and to find the most pedagogical papers which explain the basic details. Do not hurry in your research, keep in mind that there are also research projects also for long time, for 2-3 years for example, or even for decades. Looking at my senior peers, I think the best thing would be to have an continuous effort for many months, every-day(of course, you can take short vacations). Finally, getting lost in the literature makes you adapt more quickly to changes and to different ideas, it is a normal thing.  Good luck!


Requesting endorsement for arxiv from future professor as a high-school graduate

This sounds to me like a great opportunity to introduce yourself and possibly find a mentor relationship in the bargain.

Just be succinct and straight-forward about who you are and what led you to contact this particular professor.  I would also recommend taking the opportunity to invite the professor to give you feedback, which 1) may be sorely needed and 2) might be the beginning finding some interesting research connections as an undergraduate.

An email you write might go something like this:

  Hello, Professor Ridcully:

  You don't know me yet, but I'm going to be a student at Unseen University this Fall, and I am interested in mathematical research.  I've already been working some on my own, and have put together a manuscript that I would like to post on arXiv.  I'm contacting you because I need somebody to endorse my submission, and noticed that you have recently posted on arXiv as well.  If you would be interested in giving me feedback on this work, I would be interested in that as well.

  Please let me know if you are willing to help, and I will send you my manuscript.


How the US Dept of Education define a school year for purposes of Pell Grant eligibility?

Yes and no.

You can only use your Pell grant money for summer classes if you've already been enrolled in classes  the previous year:

To be eligible for using this federal aid for their summer courses, students must have completed 24 credit hours toward their degree programs during the prior fall and spring semesters and have received passing grades, and they must enroll in at least 6 hours of courses during the summer.

So if you want to attend summer classes in 2016, you had to have 24 credit hours of schoolwork done at the same institution during the 2015-2016 academic year.

Campus Explorer, Pell grant can be Used for summer college courses, starting in summer 2010.


"Will be recommended for publication in IEEE Xplore." What does it mean?

If it is an established IEEE-sponsored conference, then I would expect that it means they will definitely be published in IEEE Xplore.  Typically, the IEEE simply transforms the conference proceedings directly into an IEEE Xplore collection, and that is the official archival proceedings of the conference.

The only publications that typically do not make this transition are those which are not presented at the conference (e.g., the authors don't show up), which the IEEE does not generally allow to be published as part of the final proceedings.


Experiences with air travel CO2 emissions offsetting funding rules?

In general, grant or contract money cannot be spent on anything except the designated purposes permitted by the funding agency.  If the funding is coming from an agency of the US Government, those purposes probably are not allowed to include carbon offsets.

That said, it does appear that at least one university has figured out a way to pay for carbon emissions.  The key seems to be imposing the cost as part of departmental overhead, such that it's not directly associated with any grant, but mixed in with all the other things the university supports and the funders have no control over, like pencils, daycare benefits, on-the-job injury insurance, and deans of student happiness.


What are some tools to effectively synthesize information from research?

For Qualitative coding and synthesizing of information, there are number of tools you can use (specifically addressing your concerns 1 & 3):

NVivo

  NVivo is a powerful workspace for your qualitative analysis and mixed
  methods research offering tools so you can deeply analyze your
  unstructured data.

Leximancer

  Leximancer automatically analyses your text documents to identify the
  high level concepts in your text documents, delivering the key ideas
  and actionable insights you need with powerful interactive
  visualisations and data exports.

There are many other tools, but the above two are fairly standard practice among PhD/Researchers. Also, needless to say, they will require significant investment of time (if not financial - given most universities will have institutional subscription) and quite a lot of practice in order to use them appropriately.


Is there a place to review journals or conferences?

There are a few sites that do this:

SciRev
Journalysis.
HelpMePublish.

Of these, I think SciRev is the most active, but I'm not certain about this. That said, in my experience, the actual rating information on these is not of much value. Uptake is pretty slow, and most of the reviews I've seem to just very high marks indiscriminately. As a result, you can't infer too much from the tiny sample sizes available. The information about time to result, review quality, etc. might be useful in principle, but in practice again you've got tiny sample sizes and probably a selection bias as well in terms of who submits reviews -- though I don't know which way this selection bias would go.

Nature wrote a news piece (not paywalled) about these sites in early 2015.


Nothing you've described sounds like a serious academic problem.  Taking weeks to understand a paper, and working on a problem for weeks without results, are entirely normal in research mathematics.  And there is always a large gap between what you learn in coursework and what you need for research.

Trying to get better by just working harder or longer can be counterproductive.  It is important to spend time on other things, even when you feel like you're way behind.

Clearly you have some problems with mental health right now.  I'm not qualified to advise you on that, but it's good that you're getting professional help, and it's only been 1.5 months - such issues don't usually get "cured" as quickly as that.  Even if it takes time to get better and delays your academic progress, that's not a major problem.  Academia works on very long timescales and several months of low productivity is nothing in the big picture.

At the end of the day, maybe you'll decide you just don't like doing mathematics research.  That's okay too, there are lots of other things you can do with your life.  Math is particularly difficult in this regard, in that math coursework has a very different flavor from doing research (exercises with short elegant solutions, versus long messy problems with awkward solutions that only accomplish half of what you really want).  Liking coursework is not necessarily a good indication of the same for research, so a lot of people do leave the field at this stage.  Again, there is nothing wrong with that.

Professional mathematicians tend to be people who really do enjoy doing mathematics research, and they tend to describe the work in terms that make it sound like it is inherently enjoyable and anyone that doesn't like it must be broken somehow.  But that's not true.  If you get better and discover that you enjoy it, great.  If not, that's great too.


It's once again LOR season and I've been writing a bunch as well.  I don't think it's so much a question of finding the right language as it is how you present your case for recommending the student.
I'm not sure if you'll find this directly responsive, but here's how I think about it.  I expect the reader has no idea who I am or what my standards are.  I need to give as much objective information about my relationship with the student and their performance as I can so the reader can understand the basis for my judgement and can decide for themselves whether they agree.  That starts with the classes they took with me or the semesters I hired them as staff and their duties.
Sometimes, I don't know much about the student except their grade in my class (which the reader will already know from a transcript.)  An example would be a sophomore who was in my section in one of our 1000+ student intro computer science courses.  So, I'll describe the class, the assignments, how grading was done, emphasize the difficulty, give the student's final rank and add any additional information information I have, e.g., they were a top participant in our Piazza forum, or at least, that I've discussed the student's plans with them and support them.
Once I give that objective information, then I attest to their knowledge, skills and abilities, suitability for teaching and research, etc., inserting a few superlatives, and give my highest recommendation (assuming I can; if I can't, I try to politely decline) and invite them to contact me if they have questions.
For me, an LOR is usually about one to one and a half pages, including room at the top for the letterhead and inside address, and signature at the bottom.  (Yes, I think it's worth using a letterhead template; it  communicates that you cared enough to put some time into it.  I also think it's worth a signature, but that's just another .jpg in my template.)
By now, it's pretty formulaic for me and I'm usually able to bang out a new LOR in an hour or two.
The really hard LORs to write are the ones where I've known the student for several years, they've been in one of my smaller classes, I then hired them to help me teach it, they've been in my office a ton, they're smart as all get-out, and now I really care about them.  Had one of those a couple weeks ago; I struggled for days how to write the letter he deserved.


Less desirable graduate school vs. more undergrad

My reading of your question is that you already know your answer. You don't seem to be time or resource limited (as many others would be) and you express pretty strong preference for a second undergrad degree.

The only caveat I would have is whether you are feeling inadequate when it isn't called for (Imposter Syndrome).

An undergrad math degree (outside the US, at least) might not require you to repeat a lot of things as it is probably focused on just the Maths. So it wouldn't be backing up, really. Actually I don't know how similar the Canadian Educational System is to the US. Down here an UG degree requires a lot of things outside the major (Language, history, ....). Other places an undergrad degree is more specialized on one topic. Doing it in a year or so would depend on the university hosting it. Your original institution might be the best place for that.

Also, rusty is bad. You will want to somehow bring your work process and thinking process back up to speed. Any sort of study can help with that, but a grad program is typically more intense.


What does notification date mean (CS conference)?

Yes, exactly.
No, as this would reveal the reviewers' identifies. Normally, you will receive the reviews with the notification or shortly afterwards from the program committee chairs.
Most conferences do not actually have proper revision cycles. Either your paper is accepted or not. If it is accepted, then you get the chance to take the reviewer comments into account by submitting a new final version. There is no formal review of the final version of the paper.

There are conferences that have some minor deviations from the plain process:

Some conferences have a rebuttal period in which the authors can see the reviews and respond. This gives the authors the chance to answer to questions or point out errors in reviews. This will be taken into account for the acceptance/rejectance discussions.
Some conferences have a shepharding process, in which promising by not yet good-enough papers get a second chance to be brought into acceptable shape, with the shorter second reviewing round.
Some conferences have a two stage process, where after the first stage, papers are only conditionally accepted, and the authors need to make a second revision, which is also subject to review.


Incentives for professors to write recommendation letters

The principal reason for writing any letter of recommendation is to benefit the person for whom you are writing it.  If a student is talented, helping him or her get into a good program is its own incentive.  I can't imagine writing a letter with the motive of showing off my perceptiveness.

An additional motive is that others wrote letters for the writer once, and he/she can show gratitude by paying it forward.  From David Keyes' excellent essay on procuring reference letters:

  Everyone in a position to write a career-changing letter of reference
  is there by the grace of earlier generations of mentors at school or
  work who poured their lives into today's writer and then wrote about
  the results in now dusty letters. The only gifts today's authors
  expect from today's candidates are those "in kind" or better to be
  delivered to tomorrow's candidates, in one-way cross-generational
  equity. Writers have their own rewards in the success of their
  protégés, and though they will moan to each other about the burden,
  they recognize that reference letters are key components of an
  imperfect system that nevertheless is on the whole effective in
  keeping their discipline healthy and growing.


Prestigious institutions with open admissions policies

There are two fundamentally opposing ideas here. Yes, it would be nice if everyone could afford, and be admitted to, a top-tier university. But that's simply not how prestige works.

If you admit lower quality students, the number of truly excellent graduates is diluted and your university will lose prestige.
The loss of prestige may mean a gradual decrease in the quality of faculty, as the very best are hired by other prestigious universities. You'll certainly need to hire more professors to teach the extra students, and can you be sure that all the new hires will be just as good as those you've already got? There are only so many researchers in the world worthy of Nobel prizes.

An everyman's university will never have the prestige of a university such as Oxford, Caltech, or MIT. The key to the success of these top universities is consistency. Damn near every one of their graduates is a top performer, which is very desirable to employers (and also quite attractive for prospective faculty).

Once you lower the barrier to entry, their perceived quality will head downwards, and the flow-on effects will snowball.

There are many very excellent (and open) universities that are not as prestigious as they perhaps deserve, for example ETH Zurich is a truly excellent university that is open to all Swiss citizens who have passed their high school exams. This Times Higher Education ranking page shows somewhat quantitatively the elitism that is at play.


When should I send a reminder email for recommendation letter?

Given the new understanding of the issue, I'd suggest that you write to him, apologizing for the mail, and with an explicit request to let you know if he will do this. Perhaps your first mail wasn't clear on that point.
But most professors receiving a request would normally assume that the default "yes, I can do that" is understood by the asker and only needs a reply if they won't or can't do it. I'll assume that is the case here if you haven't heard otherwise. But if you need this to be explicit, ask, but say you're sorry for the inconvenience.


What to do if a referee plagiarises the result after rejecting a paper?

I suggest that you write a formal letter to the journal editor who handled your submission.  (Make sure it is the same editor.)  Give all the relevant details, including dated copies of all correspondence (whether electronic or printed).

The editor should know who refereed your paper, and although the editor will not reveal their names to you (I assume that blind refereeing was done), he or she would be in the best position to act on the matter.

Perhaps the best thing that could happen is the editor agrees that some unethical behavior occurred, the editor helps you file a case against the erring referee, the erring referee gets penalized, and proper attribution is given to you.

Perhaps the worst thing that could happen is the editor does not believe your story, thinks you are just looking for trouble, and tells other editors and referees that you are a "bad, crazy person."  Or the editor does believe your story but is a close friend of the erring referee and so acts as if he or she does not believe your story.

Either way, at least they know that you are aware of this unethical behavior and this will perhaps discourage the erring referee to continue with the unethical behavior in the future.


Timeline for notification of teaching duties for Grad TA

Most likely something fell through at the last minute and they had to find coverage. It could have been handled better (i.e. asking rather than just telling, explaining the situation), but it does happen that a class might suddenly need to be reassigned much closer to the start of the semester than normal.

(Adjunct professors often get last-minute teaching assignments, and last-minute cancellations.)

You can certainly ask them if they can reimburse you for the cost of the textbook shipped to you at home. I've had my department reimburse me for expensive overnight shipping for stuff I needed for prep when they assigned a class to me at the last minute (a week or two before classes started, in a subject I barely knew. That was fun.) You can also ask if, given the late notice, they can help you out with materials and lesson plans from the last person who taught it.


TOEFL IELTS GRE scores expired but with work experiences in English speaking countries

If a school requires test scores and they’re expired, you will likely be required to take the test again. Some schools may accept expired scores for evaluation purposes but will require valid scores to complete the matriculation process. In many US public schools, the TOEFL/IELTS scores are required to establish ability to work as an RA or TA, so having valid scores is necessary.


How concerned should one be if he/she does not get referee invitations?

It's quite possible the editor never read the recommendations.  Some journals invite more reviews than they need.  If some reviewers decline, but enough reviewers return reviews for the editor to make a decision, then the editor will not consider inviting more reviewers.  If the decision is to reject, it may be made after only one review is returned.
Never getting invited is a bit odd, but could occur by chance.  I only get 33% of my fair share of invitations, even though my reviews are faster and more detailed than the other reviewers.  Most journals in my field have never asked me, other very similar journals ask repeatedly.  I have received no invitations for many months, and then gotten two from different publishers on the same day.  Don't overanalyze it; don't be concerned.
Most publishers have a form you can fill out indicating your research fields.  If you complete this it might increase your chances of getting papers to review.  In my experience, it is not necessary to publish with a journal or publisher in order to get asked to review.


Who owns intellectual property from research funded by an external company at a university?

It should be negotiated and specified in a written contract.  Each contract could be different.


What can a student do if he has problems with homework problems that he is unable to solve?

In higher education, the role of educators is to help facilitate students' learning. One of the main mechanisms for that is to provide students with high-quality feedback on their assessments. Simply delivering lectures is not very efficient.  Testing students using multiple-choice questions through automatic tools is also not very efficient. Even giving students a grade without explanation how it was produced is not very efficient.

If you are struggling with a task, you should approach your lecturer/professor, show them your best attempt, and ask for feedback, specifically, an explanation what is incorrect in your attempt and what you should work on to improve your understanding of the subject. And no, "your answer is wrong because computer says no, now go away and try again until it says yes" is not good enough. Politely ask for clarification of the relevant material, not mechanics of the automatic assessment.


Is it ethical for an author to cite their own work with themselves as first author when they are not first author?

The only reason I would use a formulation such as this is if the work being "cited" were multiple works performed by a changing group of members with a "constant" member who was probably the group leader. And, even in that case, I would use the formulation "X and coworkers," rather than "X et al.," to indicate that the it's not a "direct" citation, but a matter of convenience. The reason for this is that it's quite distracting to have to write:

  as discussed in A et al. [cite], B et al. [cite], C et al. [cite], A et al. #2 [cite], . . .

when there's a bunch of different references that are all part of the same research effort.


Can I send my journal article (under review) for a invited Elsevier book (not-to-be-refereed) chapter?

If you had published your paper on a journal and you had transferred the copyright to that journal, it's a violation of copyright. And typically you transfer the copyright at the time of submission.

If you want to republish your paper somewhere else, you should first ask permission to the copyright owner.

Beware, moreover, that most of the invitations to "publish your research" in a book come from predatory publishers. In case, you don't want to send them any of your works.


Is it acceptable to add a result to a paper when a journal asks for revisions?

You can make whatever changes you like in revision.  The key point is that the paper is being refereed again. (Maybe the referee isn't paying so much global attention to your paper the second time around.  But by the way, maybe the referee wasn't paying so much attention the first time around!  There are never any guarantees of that, but you have done your due diligence.)

It is quite common for revised papers to contain many small to moderate changes, including those that were not called for by the referee.  If you think about it, it is probably better not just to make precisely the changes asked for -- you are also responsible for your paper as a holistic document, and localized technical changes may necessitate other changes for the sake of unity, coherence and so forth.  However, as a referee it is a bit disconcerting to get a paper that has too many changes I have not asked for: at a certain point it begins to feel that I have to referee two papers when I have agreed to referee one.  For instance I recall getting a revised paper that was almost 10 pages longer, and I didn't like that much (but I did recommend it for acceptance).

As an author I can think of several cases where I have added significant material to the paper in revision, so it certainly does happen, and at the moment I cannot recall a situation where adding the material seemed to adversely affect the status of the paper.  If there is one extra result that you want to put in the paper and its proof takes only a couple of pages, I think you should probably go ahead.

Although I think you'll get away with it fine, whether it is really better to put more theorems into a math paper in revision is a different question that I am a bit too daunted to fully address here.  It depends on so many other factors, many of which are cultural.  E.g. another answer writes:

  I would lean towards publishing a followup paper instead. Does more for you on pub count.

In most parts of pure mathematics having "more papers than theorems" or "more papers than ideas" is looked down upon.  If in a certain paper you prove four cognate theorems and then later you try to write up a paper on a fifth cognate theorem, there is a good chance that the journal in which you can publish that little paper is so much worse than the first journal that it doesn't specifically help your career to do so.  Whereas if you just appended the fifth theorem in the first paper, you probably wouldn't get any more credit for that either...but at least the fifth theorem would appear in print with little additional trouble on your behalf.  I can definitely think of theorems that I have added to papers in this way (not necessarily literally in revision; sometimes just as offshoots of the main project): I proved them so I want to publish them, but I do not always want to play the "How good is this?" game if I don't have to.


Don't like my choice of grad program and don't know what to do

It sounds like you do not have the passion for the study you are in - and this will invariably affect your effectiveness to be able to succeed in the Masters you are doing.  At 26 years old, rather than being 'too late' to try anything new, take this as an opportunity to explore new fields, to find where your passions are and most of all, find a path that you will both enjoy and feel fulfilled by.

The ultimate decision is yours; however, a few things to consider:

Just because the course is perceived as being "the thing to do", does not mean it is the best thing for you to do.
Consider if that field is a career that you want to devote your time to in a career.
Is there chances for innovative new research in a related field?


How can my organisation's published reports get indexed by Google Scholar?

We found that by submitting our content to SSRN we were able to see the content (once approved and distributed by SSRN) subsequently indexed by Google Scholar.  This method is, therefore, an appropriate solution in our situation for this problem, without the need to restructure our website.


Citing an URL using the Waybackmachine (web.archive.org)

This should be fine, though editors get the final say. But since the web is volatile, it is pretty hard to cite a current page and hope that it will be there in a few years. The wayback machine was created for just this purpose.

Referencing potentially volatile information is always dangerous, and any such citation should be accompanied by the date the information was accessed, as you have done here. But the wayback machine (internet archive) is a series of snapshots that shouldn't change.

Even worse than online information disappearing, is that it can be changed outside your control, making information you relied on say quite different things.

And, for what it's worth, it is a good idea to donate a bit of money to such resources occasionally to help assure that they don't disappear for lack of support.


How do you respond when people talk about the possibility of profiting from, rather than the exciement of, your research?

Let's pretend that it's not an academic field that you are passionate about, but instead something like train spotting or fantasy football or competitive button collecting.  Seriously, pretend that when you are talking with non-practitioners, that every technical word that comes out of your mouth is replaced with something like "'Jaques Israel' Pink Latticino Swirl" or "1820 Georgian British Livery button."

Would you feel upset by their disinterest then? Depending on the answer to this question, I think that there are two ways to approach the issue:

If you would still feel upset, then it's not so much that you want the people close to you to be button enthusiasts too, but that you want them to be excited for you and supportive of your enthusiasm. A way that you can address this in your relationships is by talking less about the subject that you care about, and more about your little triumphs and setbacks in pursuing it.  For example, if you are elated because you have just figured out a difficult problem, tell about your struggle and your joy, or about how it can affect your relationship with your fellow button collectors, but don't try to explain the problem or the solution.
If you would not still feel upset, then it seems that you feel there is something important about your field that means that non-practitioners should care about what is going on in it.  In this case, you again need to drop the technical vocabulary, but instead talk about how the ideas that you encounter may come to affect the world that we all live in or our understanding of it.  A personal example: some of my synthetic biology work focuses on the study of translational regulation of Sindbis replicons via calibrated flow cytometry ("1851 Goodyear Patriotic Lady Liberty Button"), but I talk about it with non-practitioners in terms of the ways it could make vaccination easier, safer, and more accessible.

I either case, in my personal experience, the core of the solution is to drop the technical language and talk about whichever human dimensions it is that you really want the other person to engage with.


What would be a more academically acceptable name for a cluster of four courses?

Such mini-programs are sometimes called certificates.

Certificate programs are sometimes meant to be completed stand-alone, often by students who are not enrolled in a degree program but are looking for continuing education in a particular area, e.g. to help with their career.  However, they can also be taken on top of a bachelor's or graduate degree. They often consist of just a few courses.

As an example, you can read about my own institution's Certificate in Music Technology, which consists of 12 credit hours.


Value of a degree from an unknown univeristy

Your publication record at the end is what will count most.


How valuable is being in an A+ rank CS conference with a short paper?

I'm wondering how valuable is to have a short paper in a top conference?!

That depends a bit on what you define as "valuable". As Buffy says, having a presentation and presence at a top conference is certainly very valuable in terms of visibility in the community and opportunity to make connections (never underestimate the importance of those!).

However, in my experience, as a line in your CV, everything that's not a full paper counts for very little, even if it's a short paper at a top conference. In other words, if that is intended to be the main paper of your PhD and you intend to go onto the job market with this work, you need to get it accepted as a full paper. If it's just a side project, or just one in a longer string of papers that together form your PhD, leaving it as a short paper and taking the opportunity to attend the conference and get your name out there may be worth it.

I should also say that, assuming your reviewers are right and all it needs for this work to become excellent is some presentation-level cleanup, it feels like a pity to not do this small additional work and try again at the next deadline for a top venue, rather than downgrading it to a short paper.


How to deal with a student who most likely has a mental condition, and keeps arguing with me in class?

I have responsibility for students with alternate needs within a Computer Science department and thus have professional experience of the situation you describe. It is not uncommon in our subject.

Our experience is that computing attracts a higher proportion of students on the Autistic Spectrum than do other disciplines. We are operating with about (my personal guess) 2-3% (of total cohort) diagnosed and perhaps double that number undiagnosed.

Some of these students are often not aware of the rest of the class being present and treat teaching as a personal one-to-one dialogue with the teacher. They act as they would sitting with you across a desk. Sometimes it is more extreme and the social norms and boundaries of even working one-to-one are not clear to them. Although, as a spectrum condition, each person may be different, it is common that they wish to understand every point of minutiae before they can build the big picture understanding; becoming detailed obsessed is often a common trait. This leads to question after question as a form of quest.

You should seek advice from a more experienced professional in your institution. It is likely that the student's condition is known, but details are often considered confidential and perhaps not shared with you, because that is what the student may wish. The student may be receiving support elsewhere, perhaps in the form of mentoring. If that is the case then the mentor may be able to assist in explaining the social situation to the student and also give you guidance on how to reply.

Sometimes such students are not diagnosed with any specific condition and are not receiving support as it has never been needed. They are likely to have achieved high grades in earlier studies and the good results have propelled them through to your class.

For a student who is unaware that their behaviour is different from others in their class it is more difficult to handle. I ask such a student to speak to me in a one-to-one appointment in my office. I do not assume that they have any named condition, as this is not really relevant. I just talk to them to explain how lectures work, clarify my role and how I can answer questions. I often have to explain, sometimes in great detail, what makes a good verbal question in class, what makes a good verbal question, what makes a good written question for email, what makes a good question for the class VLE, what makes a good question for StackExchange and so on. It is often the case that no one has ever explained how information is obtained. It does take a degree of tact and experience to do this, which is why I suggested seeking more experienced advice.

Remember, some of the achievements in our subject have been made by people who others found difficult to work with. Look at the movie "The Imitation Game" and you can clearly see (in a fictionalised portrayal) Alan Turing is shown displaying tendencies similar to those you describe. I'm sure if you had a current student with similar attributes you would have been pleased to have had the opportunity to have someone so similarly gifted in your class.


Working for one professor, want to write paper with another party

Ask your professor if it is okay with him.

During my PhD it was never a problem to work with other PhD's, it was actually well received and encouraged. Even collaborations that go beyond the professor's own group. Of course your own work should have priority, but spending some of your time on other projects has not been problematic.


Redundancy of letters of recommendation for scientific and mathematical majors

Most universities want some independent advice about candidates. This should come from people who know the candidate and can attest to their suitability and likely successful outcome. It is hard to gauge that with material provided only by the candidate, even in an interview.

And there is more to graduate school (or a job, for that matter) than raw competence. There is a social aspect and so a desire to accept people who will get along well in the program or job. (That is why I asked the question in the comment, actually.)

But it is what it is, so in your case, you just need to live with it. I'm surprised that few teachers know you, actually. Think about others who can help. But I would keep trying with the three that you mention in the comment. Let them know of your need and the difficulty of finding others to help.