IRB-questionable research from places that does not require IRB process: How publishable/contributing?

It is (or should be) a principle that any research involving human (and some animal) subjects should be subject to prior independent ethics review, such as is done by IRB structures. If you are reviewing for a reputable journal, I would expect (or at least hope) that the journal has such a requirement on anything they would consider publishing.
Whether they have such a requirement or not, you would be wise to note the lack of a statement of ethical review in anything that you examine. Let the editor know that there is a missing, ethically required, piece.
If you seem sure that no review was ever done, rather than just a missing statement, then you would probably also be advised not to review the paper further. Ethical constraints on such research isn't something that can be patched up after the fact. People have died. People have died horrible deaths after long illnesses. Doing such research without independent prior review is not ok.
Note, of course, that there are some kinds of research that don't require IRB approval. But it is usually an ethical board that makes that determination. See this for example.


What are the motivations for publishing new editions of an existing textbook, beyond new discoveries in a field?

Publishers want new editions so that they can make money selling copies of the new edition and reduce the market for used copies.  The new edition might be significantly updated, but in many cases the updates are small.  For textbooks in lower division general education courses, new editions come out as often as every three years.

It's quite common for textbook publishing contracts to include clauses that give the authors right of first refusal to produce an updated edition but allow the publisher to add a new coauthor and produce a new edition if the authors are unwilling to do so.


As a teacher who has taught many non-native speakers subjects in English, I am quite confident when I say that the time will vary by the person. Some people are quite strong and write faster (and better) than some native speakers but others write very, very slowly.

To have anything meaningful, there must be some quantifiable tie back to English level (what does 'good knowledge of English' mean to you? IELTS 8?)

It seems you are interesting to know if you are performing well enough compared to some standard, but we would first need the standard (and it does look like you're trying to find the standard) and that standard must take into account more than just the information you've provided (how much experience do you have writing in general? how good is your English? what kind of writing are you doing?).


The GRE is not held where I live. How badly does it reflect on me if I ask for it to be waived?

It is fine to ask for a waver of admissions requirements.  Just keep in mind that the university may say no.

To increase your chances of success, clearly state why you want to enrol, why you think you are qualified, and why you need a waver.


Centralized DB For EU Projects' Publications & Deliverables

The EU funded a project termed "The OpenAIRE2020 Project" specifically to address the kind of issues I describe above.

"50 partners, from all EU countries, and beyond, will collaborate to work on this large-scale initiative that aims to promote open scholarship and substantially improve the discoverability and reusability of research publications and data. The initiative brings together professionals from research libraries, open scholarship organisations, national e-Infrastructure and data experts, IT and legal researchers, showcasing the truly collaborative nature of this pan-European endeavor. A network of people, represented by the National Open Access Desks (NOADs), will organise activities to collect H2020 project outputs, and support research data management. Backing this vast outreach, is the OpenAIRE platform, the technical infrastructure that is vital for pulling together and interconnecting the large-scale collections of research outputs across Europe. The project will create workflows and services on top of this valuable repository content, which will enable an interoperable network of repositories (via the adoption of common guidelines), and easy upload into an all-purpose repository (via Zenodo).
OpenAIRE2020 will assist in monitoring H2020 research outputs and will be a key infrastructure for reporting H2020’s scientific publications as it will be loosely coupled to the EC’s IT backend systems. The EC’s Research Data Pilot will be supported through European-wide outreachfor best research data management practices and Zenodo, which will provide long-tail data storage. Other activities include: collaboration with national funders to reinforce the infrastructure’s research analytic services; an APC Gold OA pilot for FP7 publications with collaboration from LIBER; novel methods of review and scientific publishing withthe involvement of hypotheses.org; a study and a pilot on scientific indicators related to open access with CWTS’s assistance; legal studies to investigate data privacy issues relevant to the Open Data Pilot; international alignment with related networks elsewhere with the involvement of COAR."

You can search by project name here. The publication list, project duration, participants and other information related to projects is accessible this way. I'm not sure if the information is comprehensive.
It appears that the OpenAIRE site also stores information from other funding agencies such as the NSF and the Australian Research Council and provides a tonne of functionality beyond what I mention above (search by doctorate thesis, open access, language etc.).
I've found deliverables listed under reports. However, I can't find the deliverables of certain projects I am interested in, so the same may apply to you as well.
As far as I am concerned, I've answered my own question and I'm sharing what I've found with you.
I'll leave the bounty and the question up for another 3-4 days in case anyone else has a better response to add.
Cheers!


Are professors typically financially compensated for advising masters theses?

Yes.  It is called a salary.  And advising is one of the duties listed when the job is offered.


I am a 2nd year undergraduate student. What should I do now to prepare for my PhD?

As an undergraduate student, the best thing you can do to help your admissions case is to get involved in research. This will allow you to demonstrate that you have the capability to do good research, which is one of the biggest things admissions committees and individual professors are looking for when choosing among applicants. Maintaining a solid academic record is also useful, and having an understanding of the literature in the field you're interested in is also good. However, direct experience will let you see if academia really is what you want to do or not.


Is the curse of knowledge a real effect?

It is worth considering at the outset, that both the extent of knowledge possessed and the ability to teach are subjective and difficult to directly quantify. Therefore, when examining research on the subject, we shouldn't forget that quantification is usually based on indicators loosely correlated to these qualities.
For instance, gauging the extent of knowledge possessed would require some sort of a test (I doubt many academics would subject themselves to the indignity!). Luckily, subject matter knowledge has been tested amongst school teachers, so we have something to go by. Unfortunately, there appears to be a weakly positive correlation, or none at all, between knowledge and ability to teach [1]. Of course, ability to teach is measured by student outcomes, which is also indirect and subject to other factors. A bunch of other markers for knowledge have been  examined in the past, with most exhibiting weak correlations [2].
It is interesting that none of these convey the negative correlation that the 'curse of knowledge' suggests.
Conversely, more recent studies show stronger positive correlations between teaching experience and teacher effectiveness [3,4]. It would then be a fair assumption that the more knowledgeable academics would in general be more senior and therefore have more experience, and thereby be more effective teachers.
Certainly, many of us have personally encountered counter-examples. These encounters probably reinforce the idea of the supposed negative correlation, but are quite clearly a case of confirmation bias. Since the question is about actual research, I think we should just treat the 'curse' as a bit of amusing anectodal folklore.
[1] Byrne, C.J. (1983). Teacher knowledge and teacher effectiveness: A literature review, theoretical analysis and discussion of research strategy. Paper presented at the meeting of the Northwestern Educational Research Association, Ellenville, NY.
[2] Linda Darling-Hammond (2000). Teacher quality and student achievement:
a review of state policy evidence. Volume 8   Number 1, Education Policy Analysis Archives.
[3] https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/product/does-teaching-experience-increase-teacher-effectiveness-review-research
[4] https://www.edweek.org/leadership/new-studies-find-that-for-teachers-experience-really-does-matter/2015/03


How do the grades of higher degrees equate with undergraduate qualifications, in terms of quality of work?

You state (emphasis mine):

  "I would very much like to know if the standard of work matches up to the same percentiles, in the UK. So, not how well someone is doing on the course, but if an undergraduate dissertation could be handed in and get
  the same mark on a Masters."

If this were possible surely the need for Master's degrees would not exist. Besides, don't you feel that the standard of your own work at Master's level is much higher than that at undergrad? I know mine certainly was. That's kind of the point.

Say you need to get a 65 at undergrad to start a Master's degree, but you end up failing the course and getting zero. This doesn't nullify the 65 you already achieved in your undergraduate degree- but nor does it mean that you should have also got 65 in the Master's course.

The root of this answer is that you simply can't compare apples and oranges. Undergraduate and Master's degrees are designed to do completely different things, and just because one piece of work satisfies the requirements for an undergraduate degree does not mean it will satisfy the requirements for a Master's (and vice versa).


How much time does a university typically give a professor to draft a syllabus and how long before they are approved?

Academic freedom means instructors can choose the material they teach.  Professor are loosely bound by the course calendar - if you are assigned a course on Greek drama and you teach instead Latin drama you may be reassigned - but otherwise you’re largely on your own: you can choose the Greek dramas to be studied in your course.

If the material is repeatedly too hard (high fail rate) then the Dean (usually in consultation with the chair) may reassign you but in a functioning unit some collegiality will usually resolve such issues, and will efficiently link courses in a pre-requisite chain.

There is usually an administrative procedure to make substantial changes to a calendar entry for a course.  Where I work it takes 2-3 months, mostly because the appropriate meetings (which must be done in a specific sequence) are rarely held “on the spot”.  The change is approved by the department, then by the Faculty, then scrutinized by some academic committee for justifications, additional resources etc, and if approved then onwards to Senate for final approval.

Completely new courses are usually tested out as “special topic” for,one or two years  to see what works and what doesn’t work.


Concerted efforts to digitalize MS and PhD theses?

Has this been proposed already? Have similar mechanisms been proposed?

Yes, it was proposed, this was even implemented, partially or at a whole country level. In Russia, for example, all PhD theses' copies are centrally stored, scanned and recognized (if there wasn't already a digital copy) as a part of the degree awarding process. From 2005 the process needed a digital copy submitting, also, most of the old theses(~1.5M total) from 1951 were scanned.


Am I wasting my time as a research assistant?

Many days I will spend 5+ hours on the phone without scheduling a single subject.

I do not think it is unreasonable for someone without any graduate level education to spend 50% of their time doing grunt work in a cognitive neuroscience lab (e.g., scheduling participants, filing paperwork, preparing regulatory reports, cleaning and calibrating equipment, ordering supplies). The fact that so much of your time is spend doing the same type of grunt work and that the cool stuff is limited, means that it sounds like you may be wasting your time.

My suggestion is for you to tell your PI about how you are spending your time and some of the tasks you would like to be involved in. Potentially, there is a happy compromise. Many PIs do not know how long things take.

As for pay and studying for the GRE, those are really personal issues. I cannot imagine it being really beneficial to spend 8+ hours a day studying for the GRE. In general, RAs are paid just enough that they will struggle to make ends meet with rent, car payments, phone payments, and student loans. There is often not much flexibility on the PI side to pay an RA more.


How can I find images to use in my thesis that are free/unrestricted by copyright?

This depends highly on your countries laws and regulations.

For example: The German copyright laws has some limitations for the use of works in the area of teaching and research.

With the CC licenses you risk less mistakes. But you have to take care of the correct distribution.

name the author and source if the license contains BY.
don't change the file and only use it in the original composition when license contains ND (no derivate).
don't use media with licenses containing NC (not commercial) in a thesis or paper that contributes to (pending) patents. That could be interpreted to be a commercial use.
[changed:] according to the (IANAL-)comments one can use SA (share alike) licensed material without putting your thesis under the same license

In any case, pages that give information about the media-license are good sources, because you mostly have a clear licensing statement for any file. So you can easily decide whether and how to use it. I doubt that an author will change the license later on. You could use a web preservation repository service like WebCite to create evidence that the file had a specific license when you found and decided to use it.

Suggestions for search:

Wikimedia Commons
Flickr (thanks to Henning for the suggestion)


Is it possible to work on my thesis on my home country?

That is probably possible, provided that your advisor approves. You will need to set up a communication channel with the advisor, of course. You will also need to make sure the all fees are paid for your degree. But many advisors will permit this. And, I hope, most universities.

I know of at least one such case, but here, the candidate had to make several trips between the US and UK to make it happen. The degree was awarded in UK. The student and advisor were also able to meet at international conferences in this case.

But communication is normally needed, so don't neglect that.

Most likely you would need to start in the country of the university and would almost certainly be required to return for the thesis defense. But the work itself can probably be carried out anywhere. A good local library might be a requirement, which would give you access to needed background papers.


How does time off for a serious illness affect funding and duration of PhD?

I'm at Simon Fraser University in Canada, but I've recently been dealing with this issue as I'm involved with our grad student association, so I wanted to respond to your question. If you don't change your registration status in any way, your semesters will almost certainly count against you in every way imaginable -- everyone thinks you're making progress and there is nothing to say otherwise. You should look into your university's 'on leave' policy, as that will be the formal mechanism that allows other allowances to take place. Here, leave for medical reasons will require going through your supervisor (and in turn, a faculty committee), but is essentially always granted, so I hope that works the same where you are.

Unfortunately, funding entities likely have their own, probably very specific, rules, so it's unlikely any general advice would cover them.

Ultimately, I highly recommend taking formal leave (i.e. changing your registration status), because various negative effects will likely accrue otherwise.


Having a No Pass in major class for a reason

If you do excellent work for the rest of your undergraduate career, consistent
with standards required for graduate school, I doubt that anyone will notice
one NP on the record in your freshman year.

Ideally, one of the professors writing a letter of recommendation 3.5 years from now can make
the briefest of mentions of an 'administrative snafu' at the start being
the only blemish on an excellent transcript. Especially in that case, you can get by
without making a fuss over it in your letter of application. (In any case, I'm not sure you should draw attention to it.)

Two or three years from now, If this still seems an issue for you, you might investigate
whether there is some sort of retroactive withdrawal procedure. With a couple
of years of solid work in the department, you may have more leverage
for a successful investigation. Also, your current department has a stake in
establishing a record of 'getting its best students into' first-rate
graduate programs.

To be sure, there are mistakes one can make that unfairly foreclose future
options. But I would be very much surprised if this is one of them.


In case I upload an unpublished conference paper or technical report of mine to Academia.edu is it protected from plagiarism?

Liability for plagiarism does not depend on whether the plagiarized work was published or not.

If somebody uses your work and passes it off as their own work, it's plagiarism.


PhDs in the arts - what exactly do they do?

In short: yes, and a whole lot more.

A PhD in the arts usually most closely resembles other PhDs in the humanities, like English or History, but often have a more experiential/practical component as well. Depending on the program and field of study, it might be somewhat of a mash-up of psychology, anthropology, physiology, literature, history, political science...whatever relates to one's area of research and study!

I'll give a concrete, real-world example: in the Psychology department of my present university there are faculty and students (undergraduates and those preparing for masters/PhD studies) conducting cross-departmental research with the Theatre & Dance department on the "Psychology of Dance". In one experimental study they looked at inter-rater reliability of those who are not particularly trained or experienced in interpretive dance, and then showed them specially created dance performance videos. They were looking to see if interpretive dance really is a genuine form of communication: can the artists/performers communicate specific emotions consistently to the audience such as anger, fear, affection, companionship, etc? Or is it all just people assigning arbitrary meanings, like people giving serious meaning to a randomly generated drawing? Their results so far indicate that especially for some emotions, there is a very strong inter-rater reliability: even those who have never studied/seen interpretive dance before can identify certain emotions, activities, representations, etc - and as usual they work on writing up and publishing such results, giving talks, etc.

As another example, at NYU they have a Performance Studies program and they have a lot of detail on their website about the kind of things student's are doing. These include things like studying different styles of dance, dance in other cultures, documenting and studying modern performance art, and so forth.

As with most PhDs, the purpose of them is research and instruction, but what one does with it varies. Some will be instructors, professors, researchers, owners of studios, contributors in community organizations, lecturers, writers, performance artists...some will go into 'industry' as choreographers, directors, producers, and so on. It's a far cry from Underwater Basket Weaving!

One thing I'll note from personal observation: many, many people working in the arts choose not to go by the title "Doctor" or even "Professor". This seemed odd to me, but it's a culture thing - they just don't do it. So, many people who have a PhD in the arts, especially in music and dance, don't advertise their education in any way - so you've probably known more people with a PhD in the arts than you realize!


Is it plagiarism if you combine different algorithms to form one algorithm?

Combining various things to form one new thing is valid research. If your algorithm is a hybrid of 2 others, you need of course to mention these 2 and their authors as well (which you seem to indicate that you are doing). Otherwise you risk your readers thinking that everything in the hybrid algorithm is new, especially since they were developed way back.
Long story short, if you're acknowledging the work you are basing your approach on, you're being a good student. No plagiarism there.


Is it appropriate to cite a piece of academic work when the author has been charged with child pornography?

Of course it is appropriate. Why not? They did relevant work, so you have to cite them. With citing, you do your duty -- you are in no way saying you "like" the cited persons.

Of course, I am assuming that their research is sound and is not somehow influenced by the child pornography. It was a different case if there were problems with the research.

On the other hand, not citing them could get you into big (or small) trouble.


There is typically a fixed pay scale (see the UCU page, for example), but where on that scale someone starts may be subject to negotiation.

Within each job "band" (lecturer, senior lecturer) there is progression up the scale on a regular basis (usually, and usually one point per year). Typically people are promoted from one band to the next before reaching the top of the scale, but in principle you would just stop. Different institutions may place the boundaries of the job "band" in different places, but the number quoted in the advert usually corresponds to those edges.

On being promoted to full professor different rules apply, which seem to vary by institution.

There is no difference between fixed term and permanent positions.

Often a probation period will apply - there may be different rules in that time.

The salary scales are not accurate for all institutions - for example, London salaries are increased to account for the increased cost of living.


Are Masters' degrees in Sweden and Denmark free?

I finished my Master's in Sweden in 2009.  I am from The Netherlands.  Higher education is unconditionally free of charge in Sweden.  There used to be a mandatory student union membership with a fee of around 100 SEK/year (a little over €10) but this was abolished by the Reinfeldt government.  It does not matter whether you finish or whether you stay in the country afterwards.

EU does not permit tuition fee discrimination between native and EU students, so as long as higher education is free for Swedes it is free for EU students.  It is no longer free for non-EU students, who in fact pay some of the highest fees in the world.  I believe EEA students are free of charge as well.

However, you still need to finance your own cost of living, which may not be easy as finding a job without knowing Swedish will be difficult.  The Swedish government only provides grants to Swedish students.

To answer your last question, there are plenty of students from other European countries studying in Sweden.


Will American high schools recognize a foreign MA?

The answer to this will vary, depending on location. It might even be so local as to be determined by the local school district, though state level regulations most likely apply. But, I would think that you can make the case that, for some programs, the MA is just as valid, if not more so, than the US "equivalent". Certainly EU degrees are high quality.

But, the educational regulations of the various states are probably available online, or you could send a letter to the highest level administrator in any state and get back the correct answer for that state.

And I'm assuming that the MA is relevant to what you would be teaching.

Private schools, of course, have their own compensation plans. For that, you make your case individually.

But, for example, the New York State regulations are available online.


Withdrawing conference paper (after acceptance) due to budget issue

I'll leave a discussion of the ethics of withdrawal to someone else, but the main consequence of withdrawing your paper will be just that: Your paper will be withdrawn. It's unlikely to be something that's held against you.

It may be a slight inconvenience to the organisers, particularly if you were accepted for an oral presentation, to have to find someone to replace you (or to leave a gap in the programme) but part of taking on the role of organising a conference is accepting that these things happen.

You say that you've not submitted the camera-ready paper, so the proceedings will not have been completed. Therefore I'd suggest that there'd be no real damage done if you withdrew.

To summarise. It might be a nuisance for the organisers (one they may well have accepted as par for the course), but there's no real harm been done.

Edit: This isn't in answer to your question, but if the issue with the submission is simply financial then it may be worth contacting the organisers to ask if they know of any financial support that might be available, as well as conducting your own search for funds, before withdrawing.


My PhD advisor is writing most of an article without considering some of my inputs

I do not know whether this could be an answer to your question or not.

I find it completely normal, especially because it is your first paper. My advised changed 99% of the first version of my first article, and when I read now what I wrote, I laugh about it because it was really low quality. Of course, this is normal because I was new in writing papers. My advisor did not even explain the changes. Instead, he said: "check my revision, and you will learn how to write papers".  Now his revision does not exceed 1%.

Back to your case, I think, your advised found that this paper has a high potential to be accepted, and he wants to increase the chances. Even if a scholar did the experiments by himself, the adviser has an experience of many years in writing papers. In the first paper, we usually try to write all the details, believing that they are all important. In most cases, what is important for a scholar is a part, which took more time. On the contrary, an experienced researcher knows what is important and what is redundant.

Overall, It is too early to disagree with your adviser about what to write, where his experience makes the difference. Try to follow him and if you are right, the reviewers will prove it. Otherwise, you will learn from your mistakes.


Is it acceptable to ask someone for help revising your paper?

It depends what you are asking them to do.

You should definitely ask someone (maybe multiple someone's) to read your paper, give you comments about what was confusing/particularly clear/incomplete as well as suggestions on how to improve the paper. (In fact I would recommend this to anyone writing a paper at any stage, not just an undergraduate.) This might be done by your advisor if you have one, and you should thank them in the Acknowledgements section for their help (and personally too, expressing gratitude is always good!)

You should not ask someone a non-co-author to actually edit your paper and make changes to it themselves. Any actual editing should be done by you or your co-authors, otherwise plagiarism becomes a concern.


Do I have to adapt my reviews according to the quality of a journal?

When an article is technically wrong, describes things that have been done dozens of times elsewhere or is just awfully written, then I recommend rejection, no matter the journal. After that, journal guidelines (not the perceived or actual journal "quality") come into play:

Match with the journal's scope
Journal requirements on novelty of ideas (several journals are ok with articles that fill some gap in an otherwise well-understood field, but some very high-profile journals would like to see papers with significant novelty)
Methodological requirements (e.g. some journals require that simulation results are validated against analytic results or measurement results)

So, there is some baseline, but afterwards it depends on the journal scope.


Online repository for double blind submissions

I think the premise in double blind reviewing is that the reviewers will not try to discover the author's identity. Searching for it is implicitly (perhaps explicitly) discouraged. So an honorable double blind reviewer would not see a signed time stamped preprint on, say, arXiv. Some journals with a double blind policy clearly allow that.


It is unclear to me how you intent to split the papers.

If both theorems are in field A, there seems to be no need to split them.
Having the theorems in one paper, and the background in another, seems illogical.

From what I read, it seems to me it should be one paper.

If however you have in mind a reasonable way to split the result into two cohesive and self-contained papers, please clarify so we can better understand the situation.


Is the correlation between learning a subject and having high grades strong?

There's no general answer to the question. It depends on the individual course.

If the course is designed so that grades are earned for demonstrating achievement of a learning outcome, then there will be a strong correlation between having high grades and achieving the learning outcomes of the course.
If the course is designed so that grades are earned for things that don't demonstrate achievement of a learning outcome, or so that students can achieve a learning outcome but not have an opportunity to demonstrate it to earn a grade, then the correlation will be weak.

Also, your general description of "learning a subject" may not necessarily be strongly correlated with the desired learning outcomes of a course. It's possible to earn a poor grade for a well-designed course even after having "learned the subject" if the course has specific learning outcomes (i.e., "Students will know how to solve a certain class of problem," "Students will have learned this particular skill") and what you are learning about the subject happens to be orthogonal to those learning outcomes.


Reference on the authors' willingness to receive public, online feedback on their work

Here are two studies that appear to focus on this question:

Nariani, Rajiv, and Leila Fernandez. "Open access publishing: what authors want." College & Research Libraries 73.2 (2012): 182-195.
Mulligan, Adrian, Louise Hall, and Ellen Raphael. "Peer review in a changing world: An international study measuring the attitudes of researchers." Journal of the American society for information science and technology 64.1 (2013): 132-161.

Both studies find a lot of ambivalence in current attitudes: in essence, one the one hand, it could be useful, on the other hand Don't Read The Comments.


Is it useful for a student trying to get an undergraduate research position to have a personal website?

As just going through a round of interviews for hiring students to a research lab, I would say it is beneficial for you to have a website, on the condition that it is informative of your work.  Out of your list, the only one that I would view as beneficial is a portfolio.  Without the portfolio section, I would say it is not beneficial.

When people apply to my lab, they send their CV.  This usually includes some bullet points of work, school, extra curricular, etc.  The hardest part to extract from a CV is the type of work or actual capabilities of a student.  When receiving multiple applications, the ones that had a website were taken positively.   I was able to see not just the bullet points, but what type of work the student has previously done (Just be careful to be honest and full disclosure, if it was a group project, specify your role).

On the other hand, if your website gives no extra information than the CV, I would be a bit annoyed if I was directed to the website only to learn nothing more about the applicant.


Teaching a very small class when the students have very uneven proficiency levels

Having been that "advanced student" in a similar situation, I'd like to point out that in such a small class environment, there is really no reason that this shouldn't be an ongoing discussion between all three participants, throughout the duration of the course. Everyone has their own pace. In truth, everyone has their own pace through individual topics.

With a little open communication you can likely resolve this in a manner that is appropriate to the particulars of your context. In my case, I had been worried about the student that I felt was falling behind. I not only didn't worry about going a bit slower in class, but I also invited him to a once-a-week study group between the two of us. I've found that teaching concepts is the best way to cement them myself. The entire experience was quite fulfilling, and I consider the course to be a complete success - even from a purely personal educational perspective.

Your situation will be different, obviously, but the I think the only real answer is consistent, open dialog.


What is a good academic word for "verifiable by scientific data or experiments"? Is "empirical" a suitable word for that?

Data are "derived" from observations. Alternatively said, observations become data when we record them. Otherwise, they remain as observations. By example, the only reason we know what Galileo observed during his observations of the moon is because he recorded his observations in pictures, making them data.
The next step in the chain is to "derive" a result. This involves analysis or interpretation.
In summary, the chain is

observation - (to written record) -> data

data - (through analysis or interpretation) -> result

The one word you seek is result.
When you want to further qualify the level of effort taken in making observations, you can use words such as focused, directed, or even scientific as opposed to random or undirected. The phrase "unscientific observations" is not necessarily a "good" way to express the opposite of scientific. So, data obtained from directed observations have perhaps a higher standard than data obtained from random observations.
Suppose instead that you need a qualifying metric that defines the trust that you have in a result that is obtained by the analysis of data from (scientific) experiments or observations. Consider these criteria:

verifiable - able to be found by others
certifiable - attestable
precise - reproducible
accurate - indistinguishable from truth
measurable - subject to quantification through observation
robust - impervious to unpredictable outcomes
empirical - derived through observation
first-principled - derived through reasoning

You may make variations. For example, a verifiable and robust result is one that others can readily find and that has no ambiguities. A robustly verifiable result is one where the method that one uses to find the result has no ambiguities.
A result obtained from experimental observations is essentially empirical by nature. First principled reasoning may be used to define the accuracy of the result. Replicate, certifiable experiments are needed to establish the degree of precision on the result.


Best position title for International/USA context

Job titles have no international context.  They have only a local context.  (They don't even have a national context.  American academics can all easily figure out that Professors at SUNY Adirondack, SUNY Geneseo, and SUNY Stony Brook - all universities in the same state system - are vastly different jobs with vastly different qualifications.)
Just give your official title (in the local language if not English - this emphasizes that it's not translatable).
In the rest of your application materials, you can explain what your job duties are and what qualifications you have, and people will figure it out.


What is the origin of this group

Nobody knows.

  and do their awards carry any merit towards a typical promotion for faculty tenure or promotion?

No.

At least, I certainly hope not.  Nobody in their right mind would trust an award of completely unknown provenance.

I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if everyone who signs up is selected for an award and then immediately offered a high-quality leather-bound archival book listing your achievements and those of other winners, all for the absurdly low price of $500, but only if you reply in the next fifteen seconds with your credit card information.  See also "Who's Who".


Choosing which project advisor to ask recommendations from

Definitely contact them both. The email doesn't need to be the same to each, but inform each that you are also asking the other.
But try to write it in a way that gets you some feedback about what each would write in an actual recommendation: "I hope you view my contributions in a positive light. I found it a valuable experience...."
The senior person's recommendation would have more weight. Both people writing would also be good if there aren't other, better, choices. But you need someone familiar enough with your contribution so that their recommendation seems genuine and not pro-forma.


As someone outside academia, how can I get my math paper peer reviewed?

Figure out what journal is appropriate. To do this, there are two aspects. One is essentially "readers interested in the articles published there are likely to also be interested in your work", the other similar level of how ground-breaking the results are. Without a subscription, you should still be able to see the abstracts of the recently published papers, and quite often you'll be able to access the content somehow (preprint on the arXiv, author's website, scihub,...).
Once you have identified the one journal you want to submit to, just look for their "instructions to authors" or similar, and follow them. This will typically be very straight-forward. They might ask you for your affiliation, but you can just respond with "Independent Researcher" there. Then patiently wait for the referee reports (expect something between 3 months and 1 year).
If you've chosen in an inappropriate journal, or if your draft appears to be very off (eg almost no references), the editor of the journal could forgo sending it out to review, and directly reject it ("desk reject"). So make sure that your draft is sufficiently polished, and that you've picked a reasonable journal. On the upside, a desk reject will typically happen much faster.


What are the restrictions placed by copyright laws on reuse of figures in dissertation defense?

If you aren't planning to publish you slides, I would advise you to not worry about copyright law in this case. Copyright law applies to your use of material in slides just like it does any other medium, but there is more possible latitude for fair use claims. That "possible latitude" means legal grey area and lots of possible time and money that can be sunk into a likely fruitless attempt to achieve clarity, since many edge cases may have no official legal determination yet.

Thus, my real advice is this: worry about communicating, not about copyright. Nobody at your defense will report you for copyright infringements. More care is appropriate when posting online, but it is still the case that a) probably nobody will care and b) if somebody does care, the expected action will be to ask you to remove the image from the posted slide.


I don't see a problem with two-part grades where all instructor grades are weighted equally. Your issue seems to be that individual teammates' opinions carry less weight in the larger teams. But I don't see why that is necessarily unfair.

My suggestion would be to calculate the grades based on the same instructor weights for everyone and then make sure, before finalizing, that people in larger or smaller groups didn't get systematically different grades.


How to deal with arrogant e-mail of a student

How to deal with this?

Dear [student],

Thank you for pointing this out.

[1 or 2 more sentences of explanation]

Sincerely, [your name].

  What troubles me is the attitude, which I found it kind of offensive (but I might be wrong).

Maybe the email is offensive, or maybe the student just wrote an email from their phone. Maybe they are actively trying to be a jerk, or maybe they just don't know how to behave properly. Maybe they are just trying to be a troll. In all those cases, I have found the best way is just to not engage and write a neutral response that does not comment on the perceived rudeness.

If it's just a regular student writing an email from the phone, this does not create a conflict out of thin air.
If it's a jerk or troll, this does little to satisfy their hunger for drama.
If it's a student without manners, well, you are not their parent - don't make it your job to educate them on proper email etiquette.

What I certainly would not recommend is "inviting" them into your office for some sort of explanation, just for writing a factually correct but unfriendly email. You are, again, at worst creating a conflict where there is none, and at best spending significant energy trying to educate a fellow adult on basics of etiquette.

  But I feel that the student would create same issues in case some typo is found in the subsequent notes and make similar comments.

So what? If they have a real concern, address them. If they make things up to feel important, either ignore the email or tell them that you do not see the issue.


How badly will my future job prospects be affected after having my PhD graduation date extended by more than 3 years (due to health)?

It will probably have very little effect. Most jobs / grants / fellowships / etc that are time-limited for early career researchers,

Are based on time since submission or graduation, and pay no
attention to when you started;
Allow you to argue for longer if
there has been documented sickness (as well as maternity, and some
other things)

The time taken might raise eyebrows on a CV, and if you are worried about not getting as far as interviews because of it you could consider mentioning in covering letters, but "I took longer because I was ill. Now I'm better" is a perfectly reasonable explanation that no sensible person will hold against you.
(if you can't say "Now I'm better", that may unfortunately be a different matter)


Google Scholar vs other academic search engines

There has already been much scholarship on the comparison of different academic search databases. I leave it to you to ascertain the usefulness of Google Scholar versus all the other usual suspects. Here, here, here, here and here are some of the prime literature on this topic.

The real answer of course, to all your sub points is, it depends.


Is it safe to post one's research on web sites like Math Overflow for "peer review" before submitting to a journal?

If you post under your real name, I think that it is quite "safe" in the sense that your work is unlikely to get stolen because of this.  In fact, posting your work on a public forum is the best defense I know against intellectual theft.

On the other hand, "Is this proof of a known result correct?" is generally not regarded as an appropriate MathOverflow question.  There can be a fine line between asking questions that come up in one's research and asking others to vet your research.  The former is the purpose of the site, whereas the latter is discouraged.  Your question seems to fall on the wrong side.  I think it would stay open, at least, on math.stackexchange.com.

If you have not already published work in the past, I might recommend that you try to get one-on-one help from a qualified (and trusted) mentor, rather than trying to crowd-vet your proof.  It is not impossible to do research mathematics completely independently and with no academic affiliation -- I have seen people do so quite well -- but it is very rare and much harder than doing it with some assistance.  It would be reasonable to seek help from the math department of any university near you.  If the mathematicians you get in contact with can't help you, see if they can connect you to someone who can.

Postscript: I have observed on this site and others that amateur mathematicians often have significant concerns that their work will be stolen.  I think these sentiments are very unfortunate, because they can serve to prevent these people from getting what would benefit them most: qualified help and supervision.  I don't want to say that it is strictly impossible for someone's work to get stolen, but here are two things: (i) I have done mathematics for my entire adult life (more than 20 years), and I have never seen or heard of an amateur mathematician's work being stolen by a professional mathematician.  Reports of theft of mathematical work of anyone by anyone have come to me...but very, very rarely.  (ii) I would estimate that about 90% of the work done by amateur mathematicians is not publishable.  This is not to say that most amateur mathematicians are hopeless or incapable of doing real, publishable work.  However most professional mathematicians train for years and make use of enormous amounts of human capital in order to get to the point where they can do and write up publishable work.  If they had been afraid of showing their work to their mentors, they would not have gotten anywhere in most cases.  Just something to think about.


Can a bad job as referee influence submissions to the same journal?

In principle, an editor probably should not take one's prior performance into account, either as a reviewer or in any other capacity, and should judge solely on the current work.  The workflow of most journals I have dealt with supports this notion, in that there is no way even to readily examine other actions by an author.

In practice, however, a) editors are human, and b) poor performance in one area is often an indicator of poor performance in another related area.

There are, however, two mitigating factors:  first, there are often many editors, and second, for most editors you'd have to be mightily annoying to be memorable as a bad reviewer.

Bottom line: yes, if might affect your papers, but you probably shouldn't be particularly paranoid about it.  Don't use this as an excuse for doing bad reviews, however: it's far better to withdraw honorably from a review you cannot do well.


Is it advisable to follow up journal editor for knowing the status of the manuscript submitted?

yes. you can. but do not over do it. and pls note the editor is not bound to reply. he may do so courteously. but instead of 1 month blank, find the average time cycle for that journal (every journal has different response times) and wait twice or thrice the same. some journals have query/ redressal links; pls use them before email. use email as last resort


Which format(s) for citation files should I offer for my references?

My take on how to promote and make accessible your works for citation is as follows:

For your global library:

Pick a format. You won't get it always right. Mathematicians and physics will prefer bibtex, biologist and health-related researchers probably will rather have something that works directly on their word (EndNote). In any case, I feel that getting all the citations of an author from his/hers webpage is not that common. People will just pick those articles that are really relevant for them.

If you want to, at least, provide those two and you feel comfortable adding javascript to your personal page, you could use something like enw-to-bib to automate the translation upon user's request.

For each individual article:

If you don't want to complicate yourself, just add the DOI. Most journals have citation tools to download in multiple different citation formats. If you want to get creative, this same citation tools will provide the links for quite a lot of formats (I guess some journals will offer more options than others).

This option should be that much easier and allow for a more flexible way for your visitor's to actually pick whatever they are really interested in.


Authorship determination for a paper in IEEE journal

You have many questions as about authorship, and I am afraid some of your questions/comments indicate a certain level of confusion about authorship. You could browse the authorship questions on this site, and it may Enlighten you to some extent.

Regarding your specific questions:

Should I include my supervisor as a 2nd author as he wants?

First, you should check the policy on authorship directly from the publisher. IEEE Publication Policies states that:

  Authorship and co-authorship should be based on a substantial intellectual contribution. It is assumed that all authors have had a significant role in the creation of a manuscript that bears their names.

  Therefore, the list of authors on an article serves multiple purposes; it indicates who is responsible for the work and to whom questions regarding the work should be addressed. Moreover, the credit implied by authorship is often used as a measure of the contributors’ productivity when they are evaluated for employment, promotions, grants, and prizes.

  The IEEE affirms that authorship credit must be reserved for individuals who have met each of the following conditions:
  a. Made a significant intellectual contribution to the theoretical development, system or experimental design, prototype development, and/or the analysis and interpretation of data associated with the work contained in the article;
  b. Contributed to drafting the article or reviewing and/or revising it for intellectual content; and
  c. Approved the final version of the article as accepted for publication, including references.

Unless you performed research entirely without any input from your advisor, it seems unlikely that he did not make a “significant intellectual contribution”. Possible types of contribution include proposal of research subject/project, any guidance in the choice of method to pursue the project or on intermediate results, guidance on how best to interpret results and present them, etc.
Will the ownership of the paper will be 50% to me, while 50% to him?

No, co-authorship does not necessarily mean equal contribution (and is not understood as such by the readers). To go even further, some journals offer the option of writing an explicit statement quantifying (to some extent) the respective contributions of the coauthors.
Won't people think he contributed in making the cipher?

Not necessarily, as above. They will think he contributed to some extent to the research project, but will understand that he may not have been the one who came up with the idea.

I'll end by adding that you should be really wary not to dismiss your advisor's role too much. Even if you had the breakthrough idea and implemented it yourself, surely the guidance offered by your teachers and supervisors are to be credited, maybe more than you realize right now. Also, that he gave you the opportunity to pursue a worthwhile research project, and then helped you transform that into a publishable (quality) paper, are important contributions.


At least in Germany, the difference is that everybody (including locals) has to pay enrollment fees. Those are fees that cover some administrative costs and also often include the compulsory purchase of a semester ticket for public transport and money used to subsidize the student canteen. Tuition fees actually cover some of the costs for teaching you.

All Bundesländer, except Baden-Württemberg which charges 1500 € from international students, have abolished tuition fees for undergrad studies and many for grad studies.

References:

http://www.internationale-studierende.de/en/prepare_your_studies/financing/cost_of_education/


Can I submit an extended version of a conference paper or a journal, if a better algorithm exists?

This is a perfectly normal timeline in theoretical computer science:

Result A is published in a conference.
Building on result A, someone else publishes followup work B in other conferences.
A polished version of result A is submitted to a journal and published there. The journal paper refers to result B and also discusses how follow-up work B has already improved on the results of the paper.

Here the fact that there is already follow-up work is a good sign that will help you to convince the reviewers that this is an important result that deserves to be published in a good journal.


I may not get as much feedback in a Poster Session, if I am to present it to an audience

If anything, you may have a better chance for feedback. If you give a talk, you only have time to answer a couple of questions, whereas if you are standing beside your poster, you will probably have the opportunity to have more detailed discussions with people who stop by.

  This is just a Poster Session and that's it. Is it worthy during graduate applications etc.?

Your C.V. will presumably list your publications, and the name of the journals or conferences they were published in, but would probably not specify whether they were presented in a poster session or a talk. Of course, if you don't get to publish in the conference because you didn't attend, then you wouldn't be able to list it at all. (This does assume that there exists a full paper that is published in the proceedings; some of the other questions I've seen here suggest that not all fields do it that way.)


Should I mention my co-authors while tweeting about our publications?

It would be a polite thing to do to at least link the co-authors, for example, something along the lines of:

  Paper title, paper link, #co-author

It also depends on the amount of space available in your tweet - their names will be written on the paper itself in any case. At the very least, let them know that you are tweeting/posting the link/paper, which would give them an opportunity to retweet/share it.


Is it possible to move past bad decisions made during PhD and hope for a bright future if I do a good job in postdoc?

First of all, congratulations for your achievements!

I did not a complete a PhD, not to mention a postdoc, but I had my own bad experiences during my academic and professional career.

From reading your question, it seems you have all conditions to succeed in this new stage of your life/career. Obviously, you had your low moments a few years ago, but you saw with your own eyes they can be overcome. I believe this could give you the extra confidence when facing obstacles later that you can spot them and know how to resolve them by yourself or with help from others.

Regarding obtaining future positions/jobs, I am confident PIs, universities and generally employers do no look that far in the past, but rather focus on the performance of people in recent years. In consequence, I believe you should keep a positive attitude and when the ghosts from the past appear realise they can be again defeated.


Publishing in multidisciplinary open access journals in computer sciences

What is the reputation of multidisciplinary journals in computer sciences like Plos One and IEEE Access.

It is not possible to comprehend the answer as 'reputation' is undefined.

  Both of these journals have impact factor higher than 3 while IEEE access was started just four years ago. On the other side, it took a long time to get even an impact factor for computer science journals.

This is trivial. Thomson Reuter has to generate the statistics related to the number of articles published, the number of citations, etc. for a long period of time to generate a number called Impact Factor (IF).

  What would be the reputation of the articles, from computer science discipline, published in these journals.

As @JeffE pointed in his comment, it absolutely depends on the article itself. Every article published by a specific journal should not be weighted the same.

  Can we compare the impact factor of these journals with other computer science journal having similar impact factor.

Comparing two different journals based on their impact factors is pointless and inconclusive.


Grant funding for independent researcher with no past track record

Ok, this is going to sting a bit, but, practically, this is not going to happen, no matter how brilliant your research idea and plan is. In practice, the scientific credentials of the proposal author / proposed principal investigator are very important to project / grant acceptance. Having no affiliation with a well-reputed research institution is already a strike against you, but not having a track record is a knockout criterion for each funding agency I am aware of. To give you one concrete example, the Austrian Science Foundation (FWF) will, according to their published rules, not even scientifically review a proposal with an insufficiently experienced principal investigator. From what I have heard, other agencies have similar formal rules. In short: you will need a co-proposer with sufficient standing in your field, otherwise you are essentially wasting your time preparing the proposal.

Maybe this seems unfair to you, but try to see it from the point of view of the funding agency. While you may have strong confidence in you and your project, you are a huge risk factor to the agency. You have no demonstrated experience in leading a project, maybe not even in participating in one, you are not embedded into on of the traditional research environments, you do not necessarily have the resources to even conduct the research project, and, from a legal point of view, if you just take the provided grants and run away, there is no organisation that the funding agency can sue to get their money back.


Publishing at a venue without ACM/IEEE brand?

Not being affiliated with an organization such as the IEEE or ACM is not, on its own, a bad sign. For example, what is currently the IEEE Conference on Computational Complexity has decided to end its affiliation with the IEEE and go solo; the Symposium on Computational Geometry likewise just left ACM. STACS is also unaffiliated.

It's not great if the proceedings are only distributed on CD. On the other hand, if you're already going to be preparing a journal version (and you should!), that will completely supersede any conference version, anyway. I would never read a conference version ("extended abstract") of a paper if a full version was available: in my area (theoretical CS), the conference version generally has the proofs missing and the peer review isn't very rigorous.

STACS publishes proceedings through Dagstuhl, which is basically a computer science conference centre in Germany and has close links to DBLP. In this case, copyright is retained by the authors. Note that, regardless of who owns the copyright, most CS conferences won't accept papers which have either appeared at another conference with published proceedings or have been submitted to such a conference. You don't get to double-dip your papers.


I may not be admited to the school that have the professor I have interest in. What should I do?

Don't put all your eggs in one basket.

Until you've actually been admitted somewhere, it's a really bad idea to pin your hopes on only one advisor, only one school, or only one set of research directions.  Sure, there may be one particular advisor that you seem to "click" with more than any others, but you should not think of that as your only option until you actually know that it's an option at all.

Even under optimal circumstances, there is a good chance that you won't be admitted to a particular school, or that a particular advisor isn't taking new students, or that your newest grant proposal won't be funded by a particular agency, or that your latest paper won't be accepted by a particular journal, or that your latest experiment will fail, or that you won't be able to hire a particular student into your research group.  It doesn't matter how hard you want it, or how much you deserve it; you will never get everything that you want.

And you are applying under less than ideal circumstances—your TOEFL is below the minimum requirement for your first-choice department.  Unless you can improve your score before they make admissions decisions, it's safe to assume that you will not be admitted.  Don't worry about it; don't be afraid of it.  Accept it and move on.  But don't withdraw your application!

Meanwhile, cultivate other options.  One of those options might be to spend a year improving your language skills.  Another might be to apply to other advisors in the same department (although that's unlikely to work given your TOEFL score), or to other departments.  Yes, that might mean changing your proposed research, but your research career will span decades; there's plenty of time to go back to your initial proposal later.  Or you might be able to find other advisors who will work with your original proposal.

How do you know which option to pursue?  You don't.  Try them all.

I generally advise undergraduates in my department who are interested in graduate school to apply to 5-10 different departments and simultaneously to apply for industry jobs.  Apply to options that you think you might be a good match.  Remember that any particular application has a small chance of being accepted, especially at top schools like Berkeley.  Play it as a numbers game — your goal is to set up enough options, with a wide spread of probabilities, that you can reasonably expect to get a couple of offers.

Once you have those offers, then start making a decision about which one to accept.


How common and expected is it to have published papers or patents as a Master student in Europe?

While it would be a good indicator of research interest and definitely a good merit to have published prior to graduate studies, but I have never heard of it as a requirement. Definitely not at my home university, but also never from my friends and colleagues at other universities around Europe.

Also I would venture to guess patents are very rare at Masters level students, as it's not as common for universities to apply for patents, as it is in the U.S. The only people I know whose work ended up in some form of a patent application were my friends/classmates who did their thesis work at a company.

Also to answer your question, I don't see why it would be bad to have a patent in your resume, if anything it shows interest in the business side of things. Whether it weighs as much as a publication is difficult to say, however. Practically, it depends on the admission committee, or the group leader for the position you are applying for.


Do community college transfer students have a disadvantage when it comes to graduate school admissions?

Simply having attended a community college earlier in your academic career is not going to hurt you if you have a degree, good grades, good letters of recommendation, etc. from a top program as well as all the other stuff that matters like good tests scores and research experience. Having attended a lower status school is not a permanent black mark and simply will not matter if your subsequent work proves that you are top-notch student and researcher.

Having less research experience than your peers who are applying for the same graduate positions will put you at a disadvantage. Ben Bitdiddle's answer on how you might go about getting that given your relatively shorter period of time at a research university is good as are the answers to many other related questions on this site about getting research experience as an undergraduate.


For a transfer applicant, is it wise to ask the university applied to, not to contact my current one?

I don't think it is wise. Such things would probably do more harm to your case. I see no reason for C to be "repercussive" to students trying to transfer. I've heard about particular professors to act that way, but never about institutions. In any case, their repercussions towards you are clearly an issue and should be addressed. However, this has nothing to do with the institution A, which will follow its procedures. If you issued such request to A, they would probably think that you have something to hide.

As for C, you should clearly transfer to another institution if the claims you have laid out are true. Don't fret about what they will think. It is your education and your life and you are free to make decisions which suit you best.


PhD supervisor is not willing to co-supervise?

I think @BobBrown summarized everything that needs to be said.

  Brown's Rule for finishing the Ph.D.: Listen closely to what your
  supervisor tells you to do and do it. You can do the other research
  later.

In detail:

You have some publications from your cooperation with your main supervisor. Excellent.
Publish another paper with your new collaborator, if you have not done already.
Then do another paper (those minor results) with your advisor. Finish everything there is to be done on this direction fast.
Finish PhD.
Do whatever you want afterwards.

This is by far the easiest route to your PhD.


Can a referee request a paper referenced in the reviewed paper?

Yes, if the paper is crucial to the work, I don't think there is anything wrong with asking the editor to provide it to you. I think the editor would probably check for it himself first (in order to save time), and if not possible would relay your query to the authors. As an extreme measure, if the editor was unwilling to do this, I would simply consider writing back saying you are unable to fully review the paper because access to this crucial reference was not provided.

So, in short: do not let your lack of subscriptions get in the way of doing of thorough review.

Now, there are some other ways around this. First, maybe you can find that paper in the usual ways: through interlibrary loan or on the “grey market” (ask a friend who's got more comprehensive subscriptions that yours). Second, maybe the editor offers reviewers some service that can be of help already (for example, Elsevier journals offer a 30-day free access to the Scopus database to their reviewers).


Is it accetable to request independent-study for graduate courses which are cancelled?

Talking to a dean is probably not the place to start.  Independent study should normally be arranged directly between a student and a professor, so it'd be best to start by identifying a professor you'd like to work with - typically this should be someone who's taught the course before - and asking them whether they'd be willing to supervise you in an independent version of the course.

However, independent study is typically not "compensated" the same as regular teaching.  This varies between institutions, but it's quite possible that the professor would have to work with you on top of all her existing teaching, research and service responsibilities, without it increasing her pay or performance ratings.  As such, don't be too surprised if no professor will agree to do it - it's not that they're being mean or uncaring, just that the incentive structure does not make it worthwhile.

If you can't find any professor willing, then you could consider approaching a dean or department chair who may be able to pressure them a little.  But I still wouldn't be too hopeful.  Using independent study to compensate for cancelled courses is a pretty unsustainable model for the university.

At this point, it would be wise to look into the possibility of doing your masters somewhere else, and seeing if at least some of your credits can be transferred.  A program this small may be at risk of being cancelled altogether before you can finish.


How to hold back from interfering with students' inefficient-but-not-wrong work?

What if you were to write up a list of "general development tips"?  Then you can share it with everybody once instead of constantly giving unsolicited advice.

You can also then give it to future students and hopefully get them started off well from Day 1.


Mailing a relevant researcher before starting to think about the problem

I would not email people before thinking about a problem. People are busy, so you need to respect that. Instead I would do the thinking and if you have concrete questions, then you can contact others.

If you want to "brainstorm" with someone, you can try to attend a conference that that person also attends. You can sent an email before, and ask if (s)he wants to set half an hour aside for you to discuss this or that problem. Again it would help if you narrowed the problem down, such that it can be discussed in half and hour and the person can prepare a bit if (s)he wants to.


Can a professor I didn't mention in my application accept me as his M.Sc. student?

The simple answer is: yes.

At many schools it is often the case that professors discuss the applicants outside of the official application system. Other professors may have recommended your application to the professor in question, which is why they are asking for an interview with you now. I suggest you concentrate on doing as well as you can for the interview.

Don't worry about the details of their internal process - you don't have any control over that. If the professor wants to work with you, there is usually a way to make it happen.


Am I likely to struggle in a high-ranked PhD program, if I struggled to get GPA of 3.5 in my master's?

Michigan's EECS department is basically in the same tier as the others you cited.  If you struggled but succeeded at Michigan, you should probably expect a similar experience at any of those other schools.


Searching a pdf journal paper for mathematical symbols

This can be a tricky one, and you can sometimes have similar issues with accented and greek letters. If you cannot find words that have been hyphenated to break a line, in my experience this is reader-dependent and Adobe Reader has never given me problems.

Some PDFs just were not generated with the proper character mappings, so they will never be searchable with the affected characters. With regards to the format of superscripts and subscripts, the PDF will be searchable with them in the same format that they appear when you copy-paste out of the document. With other special characters, if you cannot copy-paste them, you cannot search for them.

If you urge everyone using LaTeX to do \usepackage{cmap}\usepackage[T1]{fontenc},  those packages should solve most problems. Notably, cmap makes math characters (such as the integral sign) searchable.

Unfortunately, as far as I know there is no way to "repair" a PDF that is not properly searchable, unless you re-create a fixed version from the source.


Citing my work that appeared in a many-author paper

My opinion, in biomedical field: I think your last suggestion is fine. Something along the line of:

  "Previously, I (or, ugh, "The author of this paper") contributed a
  review of the history of making omelette using rice cookers in a joint
  paper (cite the old paper). In this paper, I/The author of this paper
  will further document the application of rice cookers with fuzzy logic
  and pressurization mechanism in omelette making."

I think it's important to take credit and show the work development stream. But more so, you should make sure the audience will not credit this new work to the first author of the said article. That'd be unfair to those authors.


Is copying an image from a previous paper of mine and citing its source considered self-plagiarism or unprofessional?

There is such a thing as self-plagiarism, but I would say that your case (reusing a figure that you created and providing a citation to it) is not an instance of it.  I also don't think it is unethical or unprofessional.  As Ran G. says in his answer, just make sure you ask permission from the copyright holder (if it isn't you).


Do references, notes, and tables count towards journal word count restrictions?

Yes, the references/notes/tables are to be included in the word count.


There's no possibility whatsoever that this could work.  To elaborate on Pete L. Clark's answer, here are some reasons:

The purpose of a teaching requirement is to have courses taught by the professor, not to have the professor arrange for some random person to teach instead.  The administration and other faculty members would be exceedingly unhappy if they found out this was going on.  Note that there are certain circumstances (called a course buyout) under which grant funding can be used to hire a replacement lecturer so the PI can focus on research, but this can only be done with university approval in advance.  The replacement would be hired through the usual university hiring process.
I suppose this depends on the laws in your country, but I can't imagine labor laws permit hiring someone informally in exchange for food, shelter, and conversation.  No university would tolerate this, since the legal risks are enormous.
Even if it were legal, it's obviously exploitation.  Universities sometimes exploit people, but I've never heard of any university going so far as this.
What if you do a terrible job, or stop showing up, or assign bizarre grades, or harass the students, or try to blackmail the professor?  No university is going to let a random person teach a course without at least some minimal screening or oversight, and no sane professor would accept an unknown stranger's offer to teach their course instead of them.  Even if you just want to be an informal teaching assistant, there's still way too much potential for things to go wrong.

You could offer to give a guest lecture as a volunteer, but I doubt anyone would take you up on that offer unless they knew you well enough to be confident you'd do an acceptable job.  Aside from one-off possibilities like this, you don't have any options outside of the regular process.  You could try to become a graduate teaching assistant or adjunct (depending on your background), but working under the table is not an option.


Should previous final exams be released to students?

I don't have an opinion on releasing solutions, but the exams should definitely be released.  Some students will have access to them through previous students, one way or another. Making them officially available makes sure everyone has the same access.


Purpose of meeting with the dean and provost during campus visit

Meetings of this sort are pretty standard, but my experience is they're usually at a later stage of the process, like a second visit. Deans don't like to waste the time if the candidate doesn't pass muster of the faculty.

For better or worse, the Dean and the Provost carry a very big stick.  Your recruitment can be halted in a split second if one of them decides that way. The way it goes is that search committees make recommendations to Chairs and Deans.  At intermediate stages, they will advance a handful of applicants for consideration.  If the Dean or higher up says to the Chair "I would prefer if you don't hire that candidate"  that's usually a done deal.

In subtler cases, they can come up with "extra" resources to make your package a bit more exciting if they feel you're worth it, such as bumping the size of your startup package with discretionary funds.

If the Deans or other high level officers want to meet with you at an early stage, that's could be just due diligence, providing a reality check, but it could be almost anything.  Could be a young department or chair, and the Dean feels the need to keep an eye on the process.  It could also be an indication that the search has advanced to a fairly late stage, and they want to make a hire quickly.  It could also mean that these officers take a very active role in the management of their faculty, which could be a good thing.  It could mean that they take a very active interest in a campus with a family-like leadership style.  It could also mean that you're being considered for a very strategic hire and that they have a key interest in making sure just the right person is brought in to advance their programs.

There's also the possibility that you're a desirable candidate, and they want to impress you by showing high-level interest in your recruitment right from the start.

It's very hard to know exactly why they're directly involved without asking them.
In any case, be responsive to their questions.  Use earlier meetings with other faculty to try to get a feel for the slot you're being recruited for, and in your big meetings, be the person they're looking for.


Can I rearrange the given names of authors in Pubmed for importing to EndNote?

Just import the reference as Pubmed outputs it and then change the output style within Endnote to match your preferred format. If it's a standard format for a well known journal, you should be able to directly select that output style, otherwise, you can make a custom format using the formatting code for the style you want. There are several online guides out there that give details how to do that.  Examples:

http://libguides.usd.edu/content.php?pid=63203&sid=755800

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbq-naXl8r4  (see ~8mins in)


What should be done about a professor who treats foreign students worse than domestic students?

Your university almost certainly has an office devoted to considering situations of racial harassment and discrimination. If the behavior is in general towards international students rather than just Chinese ones, this is usually also explicitly prohibited as "national origin" rather than race. You should Google your university name along with the phrases "civil rights office" or "discrimination." Usually you can make a report to them, often anonymously, and in theory you ought to be protected from retaliation.

Note that from what you've said here, I would be surprised if serious action was taken against the professor -- his actions were bad but no single action crosses the line, you say, and behavior like this is sadly common. However, it may result in a reprimand (which can, after all, change behavior if he feels pressured). In addition, I would encourage you to make this report so that, if his behavior ever escalates, there will be a case history. So often I read stories about harassment cases in academia where the defense is something like "well this was just one offense" and it seems it almost never is in reality; just the first one reported. If you say something, then the next person who says something (and may have a more serious complaint) is more likely to be believed.


Obligation to tell journal of flaws in paper previously reviewed?

Now that the paper has been published, your role is not that of a reviewer anymore, but is the same as any reader. Anyone might read the paper and draw the same conclusions as you.

As such, you can act just as any reader would act, without having to disclose your earlier role as a reviewer. It seems to me that you then have a choice of three options:

Write to the authors
Write a comment to their paper
Write to the editor, mentioning your doubts about the adequacy of references to the existing literature (including previous studies by the authors)

In your particular case, the only additional information that you (as a former reviewer) have is that the authors have been journal-shopping for their paper, and do not want to make the necessary modifications to it. This means that solution #1 is probably not going to be productive, because the authors acted in bad faith. So, you're left with #2 and #3.

If you choose to write a public comment, you definitely cannot say that you were a reviewer for a previous version of the journal. On the other hand, if you write to the editor, I think you could reasonably give him that information (“I was a reviewer of this particular paper for another journal”), because (i) it may change his point of view of the author's honesty, (ii) he will treat it as confidential information.


Withdrawing a chapter proposal: Is anything else required here?

Tell the author service manager again that you are withdrawing your proposal. Use clear language: explicitly say that you're no longer willing to contribute to the book. It sounds like the author service manager didn't realize you're withdrawing and is still expecting a submission from you, and it would be unethical to not correct them.


PhD in finance/econ vs PhD in mathematics

These are incredibly differently fields, and I feel like you should gain a much firmer grasp of these differences before looking into PhD programs in any.  It's also meaningless to consider which field is "harder", since there will be huge variation between different programs within each field, and between how individuals experience those fields.

Finance and econ USE a lot of math, but they aren't math degrees.  Between these two I would at least recommend econ over finance unless you know for certain that you want to work/research in finance.  Most econ degrees include some work in finance, along side other econ areas, so you can cast a broader net while still learning what interests you.  In my experience the majority of econ PhD programs require no practical experience, and in fact skew very heavily toward theory.  Econ is also not necessarily related to business - there are a lot of specialties under the "economics" umbrella.

Also, I think it's great your goal is to teach (I also like teaching), but your PhD will be very heavily focused on doing original research.  Do you also enjoy this?  Consider that strongly before embarking on this path, because completing your degree will hinge almost entirely on you being able to sustain a multi-year research project, while practically not at all on your ability to teach.


Reporting results that are significant even with correction, without losing my unadjusted ones?

First of all, I'd say this question is off-topic here, because it relates more to statistics than academia as a whole.

In any case the answer by Janosch is accurate, when doing a statistical test, an observation is either significant or not.

Sometimes people use stars to annotate the level of significance a particular result would be able to clear, for example:

* for p < 0.05
** for p < 0.01
*** for p < 0.001

Here's another example from an R tutorial article:


Accused of copying code for autograded assignment

Honestly, your best course of action is to apologize to the professor, admitting your fault and vowing to do better in the future. You can beg weakness and panic, but don't try to justify it to them or others. Such an apology is best made in person, possibly impossible now, and embarrassing, but it adds an extra element that you understand the error.
If you learn from your mistakes you are becoming a better person. But if you refuse to learn, others will cease to respect you, with long term consequences.
But by stepping forward with an apology you might assure the professor that you understand the issues, in which case they won't feel quite the need to watch your every future step with a jaundiced eye.
You screwed up. Own it. People aren't perfect. We can learn, however.


How should I cite an open letter with a large number of signatories?

I got an answer from APA Style on twitter.  They say to use the group name that appears in the byline, and make sure to capitalize "Writers".
Source: https://twitter.com/Zupancia/status/1309502673406881792


How can code be classified in a Thesis(Figure, Table, Listing, etc)

Insert it as a listing. The convention is to print code verbatim in monospace font. If you're writing in LaTeX, the listings package exists for this purpose.


Recommendation letter submitted by applicant in application

Instead of asking the professor to give you the letter, tell him about your predicament. Mention that you checked with the internship program and were refused any alternative, and ask for advice. Be clear that you completely understand if the professor is not comfortable sharing the letter with you, and consequently would be unable to help you with this particular application.

If the professor is fine with you seeing the letter, he may offer it anyway. Even if he is not, it should not look bad on you, since you were left with no choice and were just trying to work around the program's requirement.


Maybe a workaround would be to explicitly assign credit in the paper. This seems to be used in some disciplines and I think it makes a lot of sense, especially in an interdisciplinary project where customs about authors order might differ.

It simply consists in a footnote at the beginning of the paper or a section at the end where all the authors are listed and their contribution is summarized, e.g.:

A conducted experiment X
B collected Z for experiments X and Y, prepared Z and conducted experiment Y
C proposed the approach and designed experiments X and Z
D proofread the paper
...

In my domain I'm not very familiar with this usage, but I've seen it in a couple of papers (in medicine as far as I remember).

This could be a way for you to avoid a serious conflict in the project, while making clear to any reader which author did what.


When and how do I start writing a conference paper?

How early should I start writing a paper for a conference?

Well, there are different approaches. Some people think "there is this conference coming, I need to write something for it", others think "I have this nice idea of research, let's see where I could present it". In the first case, you might need to start very early, since you need to do all the research, while in the second case, you might just need to start early...
Seriously though, it depends a lot of the content of the paper, the mechanical action of writing it (i.e., typing and formatting the text on a computer) is not what takes long.

  Is it reasonable to write and do experiments at the same time?

Sure. Even if you can't finish your experiments by the deadline, it's very likely you can reuse a good part of what you've already written for another conference.

  How many references should you check? one professor told me: check 200 use 30.

You don't check references because you should, but because they are relevant to your research problem. You should cite what you've read and what you think is important with respect to you work. You should cite the approaches that laid the basis for your own approaches, and explain how you build on them, which assumptions you are challenging. You should also cite the approaches that are similar to yours, and explain why yours is better.

There is no magic number: there are excellent papers with only 10 citations, and bad ones with 50 references.


How does hiking in Himalayas show academic promise, as an admission criterion?

I've never seen a graduate admissions committee take anything like this at all seriously, and I would certainly not recommend it as a strategy for getting into grad school.  If anything, emphasizing irrelevant experience makes applicants look clueless and may hurt their chances of admission.

But I agree that you can read all sorts of strange things in discussions of graduate admissions on the internet.  Some commentary is by people who simply don't know what they're talking about, but some is by faculty who have actually served on admissions committees.  The best explanation I can give is that certain faculty are just eccentric.  If you gather opinions from enough professors, you'll presumably find people who honestly believe that some non-academic experiences (such as hiking in the Himalayas) are so formative or telling that they are enough by themselves to salvage an otherwise mediocre application.  I haven't run across this particular opinion myself, but I've certainly worked with admissions committee members whose judgments differed from the rest of the committee's in other ways.


Is it appropriate for a graduate student to ask faculty whether they would like assistance in writing a grant?

On the one hand, bid writing is a laborious and unforgiving activity, so any offer of help, one would hope, would be gratefully accepted; on the other hand, bid proposals do need to be written correctly and a lot rides on their success, so you are likely to encounter colleagues who are very possessive over them.

Offer to assist would likely be taken more positively than offering to write - and this could involve all sorts of things, attending and minuting meetings with stakeholders, working with administrators to develop costings, doing legwork around gathering information needed for the bid as well as drafting an argument and a case.

How to offer your services?

This will depend upon the culture within your department, however if a research coordinator or other kind of support officer is employed, perhaps they would be someone to approach first.  They would be immersed in the network in your dept and will know what's coming up.

I'd dissuade you from sending a round-robin email as this would just be annoying; an informal/social offer of help might work better - perhaps your supervisor could point you in the direction of someone currently or about to work on a bid?


"Communicated" means the manuscript is submitted to a journal and is currently under review.


Feeling like stuck in a wrong field of study due to inept technical background. Seeking advice on how to sustain in academia and research?

I think I know what you're going through, since I'm also from a materials background and need to work with teams comprising mechanical engineers/physicists on mostly inter-disciplinary topics. Through some limited experience with your specified sub-field, I am quite confident that materials science by itself has very unique and valid contributions to make, even without the mathematical/statistical tools that you mentioned. (Those tools, incidentally would be great assets in almost any field, IMO).

The key fact is, on such teams it is necessary to speak the same language. You must pick up on the shared jargon and to resist the temptation to view everything through the lens of individual specialisation. This will force you to acquire a basic familiarity with other team-member's work. Once you acquire that and have a generally pleasing personality, you will likely find a lot of help and resources coming your way. In some sense, your team-members will become force-multipliers, and it will get increasingly easier to learn the ropes and find a niche where you can contribute uniquely. This may all take some time, so don't worry if there are some lows along the way.

Even while learning new things (it goes without saying that you must be open to this!), don't forget your primary specialisation/skillset, and look for problems that can be solved using that. If they aren't any obvious problems, look for places where you can help to optimise or enhance something. If even that doesn't work, start off by considering parametric studies, where you vary certain parameters unique to your specialisation and see the effect it has on the overall process. This will also accelerate your learning and help you get a feel for the field. Naturally, you will need to convince others that such studies are reasonable, so adequate background work and literature surveys will be required.

Finally, don't overlook the personality aspect, because you would like people to work with you, not against you.


Is there a convention for referring to a scholar's academic status?

There is no international standard. You will at best find national standards. The problem is that an undergraduate degree can range from 3 years (there may even be shorter ones but I have not heard any examples) to 4 or 5. In some countries a masters degree is a graduate degree in some it is an undergraduate degree. moving to graduate school, Phds range from fixed three years through fixed four years to "individual length. A masters is not necessary to do to move from an true undergraduate studies to PhD, which means it will be an optional step in an education for some.

This means you will have problems defining a solid difference between undergraduate and graduate with the masters belonging to both. You can of course call students by the year they are at at each level but it would probably be beneficial to then know if it is m'th year out of n years to be possible to evaluate. The terminology for undergraduate students at different levels common in, for example the US, which you mentioned in your question is certainly not used internationally.

Based on this "mess" you should probably try to find a system that is as simple as possible and, for example, in the case of the masters simply define it for the site as undergraduate or graduate. Referencing to the year into an education will probably be understood by everyone. There are attempts, for example, within the European Union to synch levels and educational systems but so far there is much left to do to reach such goals if it ever will happen.


Will my job have a negative impact on my profile as a graduate student applicant?

Masters degrees are often funded not by the university but by an employer.  Generally with the requirement that you continue working during your program, which constrains choice of school geographically (has to be close to the employer), the rate at which you complete a program (part-time, not full load), and only works for the degree most closely associated with the job you do -- companies don't fund you to move on to bigger and better things elsewhere, they invest in making their employees provide more value back to them.

Your job history shouldn't have a lot of impact other than whether it enables you to be employer-funded, and in the case described of working in your field but outside your desired specialization, it pretty much rules out receiving that benefit.

On the other hand, most Masters (MS, MSE, or MEng) in Engineering programs even at highly ranked schools don't have extremely competitive admissions.  So you might focus on trying to find employment (and the necessary visas) compatible with the program you want to enter.


How to know I have done enough work in one semester?

Everyone works at their own pace; moreover, the pace can fluctuate a lot depending on the time of year, your personal life, and "position of stars in the sky". Even though the semester seems like a decent amount of time to average out those fluctuations, I don't think it is.

I would try to use the following criteria to estimate the term success:

feedback from your advisor
how did the term go compared to the original plan (yep, here I assume that you make the plans for your term/month/week and correct them accordingly. Hopefully, some milestones are discussed with the advisor as well)
feedback from your committee (in some universities, Ph.D. students meet with their committee regularly or send them the progress report to hear their feedback)

I would certainly not recommend comparing your progress with other students because they are different, they have different goals, and you don't have complete information about their progress either. It is very easy to get discouraged for no reason.

To sum it up, I would stress the importance of initial planning and correcting the plans throughout the term. Then, you will have a very good measure of your success. You will end up with a different question of "how to plan", but that is a totally different problem.


What is the relationship between graduate coursework and research?

It depends. My PhD supervisor got me involved from Day 1 in research projects in his lab. He was down on programs where things were much more serial (do the required classes, pass the qual, do a proposal, do the research, defend). His students all had some research tasks from the beginning. If the student was unprepared for the task, there were papers to read or book suggestions, etc. This worked really well for me, though it may have resulted in me being somewhat under-prepared for the quals the first time I took them! I eventually passed and graduated.

Some advisors and programs take a different approach. They really want the student to concentrate on nothing but getting through courses and the quals until they pass the quals. Then it's the proposal (if they require one). How one gets the knowledge to get from proposal to defense is up to the student and the advisor to work out. I didn't complete my coursework requirement until late in my program, so I used courses to close knowledge gaps where a relevant course was available. Where it wasn't, I worked through books and papers that I could find that helped.


How might I get hold of a dataset from an old paper?

Lots of old datasets still exist and are stored in repositories, exactly to solve the problem you face. So my first port of call would be to look there. Which one depends on your discipline.

If that is not the case you can try track down her or his PhD students from that time. Chances are they worked with that data, and may know what happened to it.

Sometimes data is just lost. I remember a case where data was stored on punch cards in a university cellar, and there were also mice that liked eating cardboard in that cellar...


Should I put funded projects/grants on my CV where I am not PI?

In my mind, this will depend on how much you contributed to the grant, and what stage of your career you're in. I'll also ignore things like the NSF or NIH requiring reporting research support even if you aren't the PI for biosketches and the like.

If you're a graduate student or (depending on the grant) a postdoc, it's reasonable that you wouldn't be the PI, because you can't be the PI by institutional rules, or because in the current funding climate, or with the scope of the grant, etc. there's just no way a postdoc-PI grant is going to get funded. Never the less, putting it on your CV shows that you're thinking about funding and participating in the process, even if you aren't heading it up. It's the grants equivalent of being a middle author on a paper as an undergrad.

What's important though is, as with every element of your CV, that you be able to cogently talk about what it was about, and how you contributed to the writing of it. It's one thing to say "My supervisor was the PI, but I did the bulk of the writing and planned out the grant" and something else entirely if you were just along for the ride.