Which is more important to get into top CS PhD program: High GPA or industry R&D project experience?

Neither.

Top CS PhD progams are looking for strong evidence of future potential as an independent researcher.  Everything else is secondary. Recommendation letters that speak directly to your research potential, in personal, technical, and credible detail, with direct comparisons with other students they have mentored who have gone on to strong PhD programs, will serve you far better than either a perfect GPA or industry internships or even both.  Strong research results are even better.

A better way to way to ask this question is...

  Which is more important for finding a strong, supportive mentor and a fruitful topic for undergraduate research: high GPA or industry internships?

But even this is missing the mark. It's not your GPA that you want to maximize, but rather (1) your mastery of the material, and (2) your interactions with faculty.  A recommendation letter that says nothing but "My class was hard; Oshan got an A." is utterly useless. (We call them DWIC letters, for "Did Well In Class".)

Similarly, industry interships are only useful if they provide you with opportunities for intellectual creativity, or leverage for getting into a specific research project that you care about.  In particular, unless you actually care enough about image processing to want to do research on it, an internship doing image processing is just spinning your wheels.

The most important advice I can give is to talk to your potential research mentors as soon as possible. Ask them what they look for in potential undergraduate researchers. (They might say "a high GPA" or "industry internships", and then you have your answer.)  Ask them about their track record in placing students in top PhD programs.  Ask them what they would expect you to justify a strong recommendation letter. Ask them what sort of research they do, and how to get involved.  If they don't have time to work with you ask for pointers to interesting papers to read, problems to think about, projects to work on on your own.  Do not wait for permission; just start knocking on doors. Today.


It's been one month since the graduate advisor (also the POI) said will get back to me regarding my grad application, should I send a follow up email?

Yes. They have probably forgotten about the correspondence.

  I don't want to sound too pushy and impatient since he already said he'll get back to me asap...should I still follow up? if yes, any advice to ask him about the status very politely?

Reply to his last mail with the same subject line (and correspondence below) and say something simple like:

Hi X,

I was wondering if there were any updates since we last spoke?

Thanks,
Y


Citing into the future on ArXiv – good or bad idea?

Occasionally two related articles are published simultaneously and cite each other, so loops in the citation graph are OK. See for example this article in The Scientist which describes two papers which do so. I was able to verify that they both cite each other through my university's library.


Difficulty being admitted to good PhD programs in the UK

You seem to be operating on the assumption that "I have my own funding, therefore, I can go wherever I want". That is simply not true. Taking on a graduate student is not only a matter of money, it is also a significant investment of time on the part of the advisor and believe me, at top departments, time is a more scarce and precious resource than money. If the professor does not see a reasonably good chance that this investment is going to result in a comparably good outcome (i.e., a student with high-profile publications and a strong thesis), then very likely they won't take you, even if you bring your own funding.


US grad school rankings based on graduate students' satisfaction

You are likely to find there is no such ranking, and if it existed you should probably throw it away without looking at the results - for a rather simple reason! There exists no standard assessment of graduate student satisfaction that is widely applied (I think not even in relatively small regional areas, counties, states, etc), and there is a good chance it could vary wildly according to what time of year you applied it to students. Also, existing published results are not actual research and are biased advertising pretending to be serious academic inquiry.

Published Satisfaction Results Are Extremely Biased

Whenever you see analysis of satisfaction results and such, note how they are remarkably positive slanted? That's because this isn't so much research as it is advertising. I'm going to get a little soap-boxy now, because this bothers me. Take for example the MIT survey and it's results. Note the questions like this:

  Overall, how would you rate the quality of...

  Your academic experience at MIT?
  Poor, Fair, Good, Very Good,
  Excellent

Do you notice something funny with that scale? Of 5 choices, 3 are positive, one is neutral (fair), and one is negative. That perks my ears up, because a normal bi-polar Likert-style scale like this is "Very Poor, Poor, Neutral [Average/Undecided/etc], Good, Very Good". Why would they choose an unbalanced, biased scale like this which would be utterly unacceptable in any legitimate field of psychological assessment and research? The item, as posed, is designed to elicit positive responses.

Further, the vast majority of items are asked positively as in "how satisfied" compared to "how dissatisfied" - in general serious psychological assessments  should ask in both positive and negative ways to attempt to remove a positive-selection suggestion for the measure as a whole. That is, if the measure is designed to get at how people really think and feel, rather than being an exercise in "tell us how great we are so we can tell people how great you said we are".

If this were peer-reviewed research to be published in a reputable journal, it should be rejected. I suspect all institutions run similar games, so
I don't mean to pick on any one institution in particular - but I hope this helps to illustrate how little stock you should put in such reports. It's not science, it's not even good polling - you are reading an advertisement from the institution designed to make you want to buy the product they are selling.

Interpreting People Is Hard

As a matter of psychological assessment, how the question is worded and it's context and framing within the measure itself can strictly dominate how the question is answered, thus the need to compare tests that have been proven comparable. Due to advances in our understanding of people's ability to judge their own satisfaction or happiness, we now know also that how such a question is asked will change how a person evaluates the question. Asking someone "Overall, how satisfied are you with..." will tend to elicit answers from the autobiographical "remembering self", which is based upon a reliably biased self-conscious memory system. On the other hand asking "Lately (or over the last few months), how satisfied are you with..." - or even just generally asking about feelings, emotions, or 'happiness' - will actually elicit answers from the "experiencing self", and will instead be biased based upon things like emotional state and very recent experiences and sensations.

If the questions are worded to call upon the remembering self, with questions like "overall...", based upon the literature I would expect institutions with economically affluent student bodies to show much higher satisfaction ratings than institutions with a less wealthy student base - even if the less wealthy institution were actually a much better place  or at least no worse. Wealthy is positively correlated with this kind of satisfaction, and there is no limit - the more wealth, the greater the satisfaction overall. So a measure of graduate student satisfaction would actually be a proxy test for "where the rich kids go".

On the other hand if the question calls upon the experiencing self, I would expect wealth to have a much smaller correlation generally with the largest effect being seen by students living below the poverty line. So campuses who ensure - through admissions or financial aid - that students don't live below the poverty line would do better than others, regardless of academic quality generally.

Daniel Kahneman gave a nice TED talk about this subject, if you are interested in a nice overview of the topic.

The MIT results are a good example of this - the MIT results show that 88% of students were at least somewhat satisfied with the graduate school, while 81% were at least satisfied with life outside the institution. In other words, people rarely say "gee my life sure does suck in general, but MIT is great!" The two questions are likely to be so strongly correlated that they are actually asking the same ultimate question and respondents may be literally incapable of attributing their general satisfaction to any specific source. "When you're smiling, the whole world smiles with you."

What's worse, this problem would extend to both currently enrolled students and follow ups after graduate school. A useful study of such rating would have to get more than just the answer to satisfaction, and would have to also collect other student information and attempt to control for other known factors (marriage, having children and what age those children are, health, etc) before we could even usefully interpret what a statement like "88% of students say they are satisfied with us" means - is that good, or terrible, or meaningless? We just don't know.

MIT's results alone help to point out how odd the responses are, when you think about them - at least, they are odd if you think that people's answer to such questions would be overtly sensible and comparable. 78% said their academics were "very good or excellent" (not the same scale as satisfaction, note), 56% said the same of student life, yet 88% claimed to be satisfied with MIT - so 1 in 5 say "academics are blah", and nearly half say "student life is ehhh", but 88% say "yeah MIT is great". Well, that just seems odd. And 81% say they they are satisfied with their personal life, yet 35% were not satisfied with their ability to combine the needs of academic and family life - life inside and outside the institution is asked to be a reflection of the institution, but combining both is requesting the respondent to criticize themselves. That's an interesting reflection on the measure itself, and makes the results even harder to interpret.

Some Interesting Actual Research

Graduate student satisfaction is not without some serious research, however. The largest attempt at seriously talking with graduate students and getting their opinions and feelings seems to be the PhD Survey. It managed to get responses from other 4000 students from some 27+ institutions, with a rather high response rate (over 40% at least) on a 20 page survey. It probably has the capacity to be used to make some comparisons between institutions, potentially, but the N of such comparisons will drop remarkably and would require access to the underlying data - and appears to not be published.

The study is so interesting though that I think just trying to rank institutions would be a sad use of such interesting insights, and even at least making comparisons between institutions would still be hard for the previously mentioned readings.

That caveat aside, I highly recommend the reports from the linked site - they make a fascinating read for anyone considering - or enrolled in - a PhD program.

Bottom line (TLDR;)

Even if people were honestly reporting unbiased findings - and they generally aren't - and people's responses could be interpreted in a clear and sensible fashion - and they can't - you wouldn't be able to interpret the results in a useful way or be able to compare different institutions.

A 3rd party poll with peer-reviewed published results using an appropriate measure would be potentially really interesting - but sadly I don't think that exists today. But if it did I would love to read it!

Some interesting research does exist about graduate student satisfaction and program effectiveness, but I have not found any that attempts to rank institutions, and I would propose it might very well be because we don't know what to rank them on! As shown in the PhD Survey, graduate programs tend to be focused on preparing participants for jobs they are unlikely to hold and not preparing them for jobs they will have - yet the unemployment rate is low and other studies show clearly that average income is still well above bachelor degree holders generally.

The studies that are done also highlight the fact that each department - or at least major degree field - has some very different experiences. While one field might have 17% of graduates working in tenure track jobs, for instance, another has nearly half of graduates in such jobs; in some fields a minority (30-something percent) of participants are interested in tenure-track faculty jobs, while in others more than 80% are so interested.

As such it would be potentially possible to compare individual departments or degree fields across institutions, but making such comparisons among institutions would likely result in highly deceiving results that one should not attempt to interpret naively.


Having team-members split the grade among them by their personal contribution

A problem I see here is that this scheme may motivate people to divide the points "tactically". Say our group project is worth 10 points and I only need 5 for my goal (which may be the least passing grade or the best grade or whatever). Then of course I would take only 5 points and give 15 to my collegue (which is more than the project is worth).
Also, it might motivate people to look for their partners tactically: If I am somebody who does not trust other people and wants to do everything themselves (something which should ideally be discouraged in group projects), I choose the person who cares least about their grades as a partner and get much more points than my project is worth.
Moreover, with this setting, you treat the grades as some currency. students will find it okay to do less/more work because they can themselves discuss and haggle about the grade they got. IMO this is also not something which should be encouraged.


Does a Ph.D. dissertation usually have an ISBN?

Some institutions publish each PHD thesis as a book, and then they assign ISBN to each. E.g., theses done at CWI, Amsterdam.
To my knowledge, this is quite uncommon throughout the world, but does exist in certain places.


You should try to track down the preprint.  Having to track it down is annoying, but it's usually not hard to do by asking around.  If your friends don't have a copy, and the author can no longer be contacted, then you should feel free to write to someone who has cited the preprint to ask if they know where to find a copy.  (You can also try the author's collaborators, thesis advisor, students, etc.)  When I've done this, it has generally led pretty quickly to a copy, and I've always found one eventually, even for unpublished work from 40+ years ago.  If necessary, you can also do things like post online requesting a copy from anyone who has one, but this is typically not necessary.

If you can't find a copy, I would suggest giving the citations you have seen the benefit of the doubt and mentioning the preprint in your paper; it's possible that the citations are mistaken, but not likely.  If you can't verify the claims, you can note that you have not been able to track down a copy, but it is cited in X, Y, and Z.  (You should only say this if you have seriously tried to locate one but failed.)

For some purposes, seeing the preprint doesn't really matter.  For example, you may be citing it merely to assign credit, in a situation where all the factual content can be obtained from elsewhere in the literature.  In that case, it's perfectly reasonable to follow the consensus in the field about credit, without worrying about investigating it yourself.

On the other hand, if your work depends on the actual content of the preprint in a way that cannot be verified without a copy, then you really need to track one down.  Some people may be lazy about this, but that's not a responsible scholarly approach.

The most frustrating situation is when you're told that something you've discovered may be previously known, but you are unable to access the paper that might contain it.  In this case you need to try especially hard to find a copy, to counteract your natural incentive to give up and decide the paper doesn't exist or isn't relevant.


Unless it is the fact that paper A quotes paper B that you intend to highlight in your thesis and not the content of the quote from paper B itself, you need to read paper B. If you reproduce the quote by itself, you should cite the original. If you need to refer to paper A's reference to B, then you need to cite both.


What are we expected to do when citing literature?

There are (in rough approximation) three reasons for citations:

1. Giving credit

If our paper builds on other papers, if we have taken any ideas from anywhere else, if anyone did something we are doing before, etc, we have to cite them. Questions such as "Is this peer-reviewed?" or "Is this accessible?" do not matter in this category.

2. For proof/evidence

Often we will claim that something is true without establishing its truth within our paper. Then we need to refer to other work for this.

Here, selectitivity makes sense: Citing someones blogpost claiming that X causes Y is not going to me particularly impressive. Citing a mathematical proof written in English available online in a journal is better than referring to a thesis written in an obscure language only availbale in hardcopy at some particular university (although do not forget 1.: if the thesis is prior, we may have to cite both). In sciences, it makes sense to some extent to cite multiple independent sources, less so in mathematics.

3. Providing context

We also cite to provide the broader context our research fits into. Some citations may have a "If you liked this paper, you may also like the following"-flavour. Here we have more or less full freedom what we want to cite. Pointing to one well-written survey article may be much better than citing 25 individual paper without much comment.


Question about the authorship of mathematical equation

If something has appeared, pretty much in any form, you need to cite it. If you don't you will always be open to a charge of plagiarism.

I'll note that the proof is more important, in the grand scheme of mathematics, than the statement of it, so you don't lose anything by citing past work.

Authorship is different from "ownership". You can't own mathematics, but you can copyright your own expression of it (or anything, basically).

But if you don't cite it and someone later asks "why didn't he/she know about this" then it is a negative for you. Always cite your predecessors. Celebrate their work as well as your own advances.

Some of the intervening work has now been put on a firmer ground by your work, but that will only be obvious if you make the connection.


Why does the application portal ask 'To what other programs/universities are you applying?' while applying in US universities?

The questions referenced by GoodDeeds covers most of your question - the why. For the rest:
In the US it would probably be impossible (illegal) for one university to query another about a student's application, so, no, they don't check.
And there will be no consequences if you list a school and then change your mind.
Don't feel any special obligation to answer such a question. I actually doubt that they use such a question to determine whether to accept you or not. It could be counterproductive for everyone.


How to teach students to ask Polya-type questions

Like most things, students need to be actually taught to do it. And "taught" doesn't mean having it explained to them, but rather practicing it via some sort of planned exercise or activity.

It is an interesting idea, though.

What I would do is to periodically hold a brainstorming session with students, assuming that the scale is reasonable. Take a problem that they haven't solved and ask for questions about it. Don't answer the questions, but ask for more questions - beyond the horizon questions - outrageous and maybe only potentially useful questions. Spend time on just gathering questions, making something of a game out of it. Note that I've done similar sorts of "gaming" activities with adult doctoral students, so don't assume that this just works with youngsters.

Talk to them about what sorts of questions are generally useful. What is a smaller problem than this that we know how to solve? What is a related question? Where could we find information about this question? What do these words actually mean, individually and it conjunction?

After you have a bunch of questions, try to have the students sort them in some way. Which are useful for this idea? Which are useful for extending the idea, or a related idea.

If you practice this with them they will start to become more comfortable thinking that way, though you can probably expect more classroom interruptions in the normal course of things.


I’m afraid you are misinformed. Professors (including in STEM) are ordinary humans and are entitled to the same set of feelings, emotions and lifestyle choices as other people are accorded by the rest of society. They certainly might suffer from loneliness, and deal with it in the same way that any other person might.  But what you wrote about “Any projection of any other feelings is discouraged, e.g. feelings of romance”? Respectfullly, that notion is simply nonsense, and to the extent that it is a belief some people hold, it needs to die a swift, painless death.

As for the peculiarities of the situation a professor might end up in of being a professional, highly educated single person of a certain age range living in a small college town where there aren’t many other single people of the same age range and interests who may be suitable dating partners: well, again, that situation is by no means unique to college professors. Many people live in small towns with limited dating options. Somehow they manage, and for those who find this really intolerable, there’s always the option of trying to get a job in a bigger city or near one.


Is it possible to attend graduate school in pure math after undergrad in CSE?

As Dave mentioned, what you want to do will be very challenging.  One possibility would be to change to a different university that offers the math classes you mentioned.  However, I will assume that switching schools is not an option for you.  If you are very dedicated to this goal, here is one possible route.

finish your current studies in CSE
get a job in a town with a university that offers the math classes you desire
start taking one class each semester as a non-degree student.  I don't know about policies elsewhere, but many school in the United States have less strict admission requirements for non-degree students.  Your goals for these classes should be two-fold. (1) Learn the material as well as you can.  Your understanding of this material will be important for both getting into and succeeding in graduate school.  (2) Impress your professors with both your ability and your desire.  When you eventually apply to a masters program, you will ask some of these professors for letters of recommendation.
apply to a masters program in mathematics.  Ask for letters of recommendation from both your current professors in your CSE program and from those who know you from the math classes you take after you finish your BS.
as you near the finish of your masters (where you have worked hard to prove yourself) apply to PhD programs

I know this is a long-term plan, but with hard work and dedication you could make it work.  Here is another question Advice - MS in mathematics to increase competitiveness for PhD programs? that you may find to be helpful.


Finding it extremely difficult to get through with my Masters thesis. Stuck with a mediocre thesis

First, I suggest that you talk to a professional counselor about your frustration and how to cope with it. If you don't do that you could wind up in worse shape than you are.
However, "mediocre thesis" is probably a misstatement. You are stuck and you aren't getting the feedback that will help you advance. Your advisor isn't providing it and may not be able to. However, there might be other faculty that you can speak with that will have some ideas.
Many students at about your position find themselves in a bit of a burnout situation, having worked hard for a long time without a break. I went through that and also once worked with an unhelpful advisor. I had to change institutions to break the cycle, but, had I been braver, I could have shortened my process by insisting on a change of advisors. Later I found that things like regular (aerobic) exercise helped me maintain a more sensible work flow.
For the thesis work itself, you need someone, probably a faculty member who can get you through whatever technical block you are facing. You say the topic is relevant and interesting. But you may be missing some important insight. Doing the same things over and over may not lead you to that. It may be a small thing or not, but try to get some assistance. If you can't change advisors, and they can't help, look elsewhere.
But first, deal with the emotional/personal issues.


How do I go about acknowledging my sources of funding when I am supported by 2 different grants equally?

You should only acknowledge the grant(s) on which the publication was actually based, i.e. where the funding/time/equipment came from.

(Co)Authors should only be people who have actually contributed to the publication. There are already some good answers to this part of your question, see for example this one related to PIs.


Distributing published papers if I am the first author

Different publishers have different guidelines, but I think they all allow your first case. For example, Elsevier's author rights page states:

  Authors transfer copyright to the publisher as part of a journal publishing agreement, but have the right to:

  Share their article for Personal Use, Internal Institutional Use and Scholarly Sharing purposes, with a DOI link to the version of record on ScienceDirect (and with the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC- ND license for author manuscript versions)
  ...

If you're worried, I do recommend checking each publisher's page to verify your rights.


Mental health problems affecting performance in coursework. Who (advisor, professors) should I talk to, and how?

Get professional treatment.

That's step one. The rest is details to worry about later.

I actually don't know the answer to the rest of your questions although I am positive seeing a professional sooner than later is going to make everything go better.


Shirtless picture on the academic page of a Ph.D. candidate seeking postdoc

First, there is no rule that you need to have a picture of yourself on your professional webpage.  Most people do, but there's no rule.  It's nice to have some image that represents you (giving people's visual memories something to hold onto), but that could as easily be something from your research or anything, really.

Second, I would not recommend posting an image of yourself shirtless.  Your page will be looked at by (hopefully) a lot of different people with radically differing cultural and personal backgrounds.  Many of them are likely to have no problem with it, but some may.  When you are in an early and vulnerable stage of your career, it is generally safer to choose a relatively conservative image. Please note that I am not saying: "You Must Conform!"---instead, I am saying that failing to conform can have a cost, and that you should choose whether paying such as cost is worth it to you.

Finally, there is a simple solution that will nullify the question of being shirtless: just crop the picture to zoom in on just your face.


Is it weird to give your new PhD supervisor a "thank you" gift for supporting your application?

I guess this matter is related to the nationality of your supervisor and to the country you are going to work in.

In Europe, especially France where I'm doing my PhD it's somehow weird to give gifts to your supervisor, since they consider the help they are offering is a part of their job. Yet they understand that the people coming to work in Europe are of different cultural backgrounds.

An important note to add, the people like the cultural exchange, so if you are giving him a part of your culture it will be appreciated, I got used to getting  them sweets from my home country and everyone like it.

My advice if you want to do that, try to give it to him when you are alone, doing that in front of others is weird.

And as we Lebanese say the act of kindness need no questioning.


As a postdoc, should I spend time learning new subjects or focus on applying what I know?

While "learning new subjects" vs "focus on applying what I know" may sound like a dichotomy at first it really need not to be one: Try to apply the things you know to new problems and learn what you need to learn to do this successfully.

Put differently: Learn new things more focused on the problems you are facing. It is really rare that you encounter a problem that you can solve by just applying what you know. In most cases, the actual problem at hand has some new structure that can be exploited in some way and this usually forces you to read up something new.

On the other hand, it can not hurt if you learn some things that are not totally related to your current research just to broaden you expertise. I do this when I got stuck on my problems and, coincidentally, it happens frequently that I stumble upon just the right thing to help me with my current problem.


Corrigendum submitted by my PhD supervisor 1.5 years after I left?

I concur with the comment. This would be a highly unusual way to add new experimental results. Surely if the person was interested in applying or extending your work and had new experimental results they would publish on their own!

I would email them and ask what the contents of the changes are. Ethically, it's up to you if you think that you shouldn't be listed as an author on the corrigendum. There has been discussion about corrigendum authorship in the past, see here. The answer at that link agrees with what I've seen in practice: corrigendum authorship is identical to the original paper authorship even if not everyone worked on it.


Postdoc to transition from theoretical field (Statistics) to applied field

Answering perspective: I'm a PI with a degree in Epidemiology currently actively looking for postdocs.

  Is it possible to transition from (bio)statistics to epidemiology during a post doc and then be competitive for an academic job afterwards?

Absolutely. This would be a good way to get applied experience that would definitely help you reframe yourself as a methodologically sophisticated epidemiologist, and there are a number of departments that you could then fit in - either combined Epi & Biostatistics Departments, or Epidemiology departments that heavily value methods.

Alternately, there are also a number of smaller "groups" which have biostatisticians in academic jobs where their primary tasks are working on applied problems. These often appear in medical schools or research institutes, where there is a need for consistent, good, but not necessarily groundbreaking biostatistical support. Some of these might also be staff scientist positions, but I've also encountered some with biostatisticians in faculty positions (albeit ones that are largely soft money funded). For those, having a postdoc in an applied area where you can show that you've done work in a setting with real data (and real data's problems), and can produce results that are interpretable in an applied field is potentially a considerable boon.

I know a number of people who have gone this route, moving from a more theoretical discipline (either statistics or applied math) towards epidemiology, and their skillsets are often viewed as quite valuable.


Why do journals ask authors to classify their submissions using taxonomy or a list of topics?

A taxonomy or topics will help the editor to find proper referees.


postdoc with professor that I had email exchanging for PhD

Yes, of course. Your earlier decision doesn't reflect at all on either of you as you had a variety of criteria for choosing. You don't need to defend that decision in any way. The prof in question was interested in you at one time and may still be interested.

The professors needs may have changed, of course. But if you apply you an even remind him/her of your earlier exchange, providing thanks for the earlier guidance. Of course, make sure that you have some knowledge of the potential position and the work of the professor and how you can contribute to it effectively.

There is no ethical issue and while there might be cultural issues in a few places, one hopes that those are minor in the modern world.


Is there an inflation in the number of authors per paper?

I take inflation to mean that the number of co-authors grows faster than what the content/effort of the research merits: that would imply that if there is a non-negligible amount of such an inflation, it does affect the value of the authorship.

Number of co-authors per paper is increasing
Co-authorship inflation is perceived as a problem
Perceived amount of contribution depends greatly on the position in the author list: first, last and corresponding author are perceived as contributing much, middle authors are perceived as contributing only a bit.

Long version:

First of all, the number of coauthors per paper is clearly increasing, e.g. pubmed provides statics about such questions:

Let me mainly take the optimistic position and list sensible valid reasons for increasing numbers of coauthors.

Some are well known and widely discussed

large combined scientific efforts like big instrumentation, the practical implementation of such long author lists widely and somewhat controversely discussed.
Increasingly interdisciplinary research
But I think that also the density of researchers has increased, which greatly facilitates collaboration.
E.g. I'm in a 100 000 inhabitant university town. The university has about 20 000 students and 7 000 employees (incl. professors - not sure whether this count includes technical personnel or only research staff). That alone is more than the whole town had inhabitants in 1900. PLus we also have a university of applied sciences and a number of non-university research institutes. I'm in of those reseach institutes, with about 300 employees.  So there are several thousand researchers with whom I can collaborate even person to person by bicycle/foot.
This high concentration of researchers facilitates intra- as well as interdisciplinary collaboration. These papers then naturally have more co-authors. Say, an "instrumentation" group develops a customized sensor for a group tackeling some application and yet other people develop the data analysis for the paper.
In addition, email, skype and cheap travel (plus I'm in the luxirous position that there are basically no legal travel restrictions as I'm German and EU citizen) makes it much easier than, say, 30 years ago to know, meet and collaborate with colleagues from all over the world.
Specialization, particularly now that I'm at such a big institute.
E.g. where I'm now I usually receive readily prepared samples for measurements. Actually, being specialized on data analysis I often receive just the measured data (and I'm very lucky if people bother to have a chat beforehand on the design of experiments with me). Someone else prepares the samples and someone who mainly works on instrument development does the measurements. On contrast, where I was before everyone did all of that for their own topic and samples (of course also having emphasis on some part of this work flow). Of course all these people here contribute significantly to the paper.
But it also means that there is a continuous distribution size of contributions. I've somewhere seen a notion that weights the papers by 1/total no. of authors.

Of course, also abuse of co-authorship, such as honorary authorship, does happen, and maybe the specialization can become a salami-slicing of contributions.
I very much like the possibility of including a "contributions" section and decided to do that whenever possible. I think it can help checking against the abuse. At the moment (in my field), I think the existence of such a paragraph alone is a quite strong sign of no abuse of co-authorship.

But I think there are also valid reasons that mean that nowadays more authors are on a paper without the amount of work of the different persons involved having changed:

Nowadays, sometimes technicians who did a lot of the work (and often also contribute to the development of the lab methodology) are mentioned.
Also I believe that students who do research nowadays have a far better chance to end up on the author list.
Maybe a gray zone, which also depends on customs/tradition is how to deal with the higher-up levels of supervision:

Vancouver says: providing funding alone is not sufficient (and of course the DFG goes along the same lines)
German tradition says: head of the institute is responsible for all that is going on in his/her institute, and thus is always included.
To be clear here: this does not mean (and AFAIK has never meant) only an organizational responsibility, but a scientific responibility, i.e. supervision of the project. The gray zone IMHO comes from the fact that the proper contribution can superficially look similar to improper (i.e. no proper contribution) -- it is difficult to judge from the outside: A very good supervisor may guide in a way that is hardly perceived. If this good supervisor is looking after a good student, after putting his intellectual facilities to the project may find that the good student does well, and not many changes are needed. This is a proper contribution. Yet it superficially can look very similar to a bad supervisor who does not contribute his intellect to the project or paper and just waves everything through - regardless of whether the input is good or not.

I think this paper is interesting:

Wren et al.: The write position. A survey of perceived contributions to papers based on byline position and number of authors,
EMBO Rep. 2007, 8(11), 988–991.
DOI:  10.1038/sj.embor.7401095
PMCID: PMC2247376

  In addition, we also asked respondents for their perception of general trends and attitudes towards authorship of scientific publications. Forty per cent of the respondents (35/87), for example, agreed that granting authorship to someone who does not meet journal authorship criteria was a common occurrence. Half of the respondents also agreed that author inflation makes it significantly harder to judge whether or not a candidate merits promotion.

While this does not answer the question whether there objectively is an inflation in co-authorship, it means that this is at the very least widely suspected and perceived as a problem.

Also, the outcome of that paper IMHO boils down to: perceived as authors are the first, last and corresponding authors, the middle authors are generally perceived far less.

Personally, I share the suspicion that a significant amount of co-authorship abuse happens. However, my field is small and I think I have a reasonably good overview of what is going on. This includes a (subjective) idea of where I'd suspect honorary authorship or small contributions and on the other hand also some idea of who likely contributed what (specializations) to the paper. In addition, of course the listing of the instituions makes a lot of that clear (e.g. if someone from a statistics department, someone from a clinic and someone from a spectroscopy lab is listed that gives me a very good guess who
did what).


Letter of recommendation for postdoc position

When a job posting asks for X research letters plus Y teaching letters, mathjobs still allows you to submit more than X + Y letters.  (If mathjobs has an upper bound on the number of letters you can submit, I don't know it.  I have seen files with at least ten letters, even though we ask for 3 + 1.)

In general, I think it is almost certainly okay to submit either the number of letters asked for or one more than that.  For each additional letter that you want to submit, I would advise you to think about why you are doing it.  Here are some things to remember:

It is not guaranteed that the hiring committee will read your entire application.  If you submit, say, twice as many letters as asked for, there is a good chance that some of them will be read only very cursorily.  This may not be what you want, since:
Virtually all letters I have ever read are "positive," i.e., they say good things about the candidate.  But the impression created by sending Z letters is not the sum of the Z impressions created by sending each of the letters.  Rather, unless each letter writer has qualitatively different very strong things to say about you, the total impression is some kind of weighted average of the letters, with the worst letters getting a higher weight than the best letters.  Thus I think that for all but the most senior candidates it is probably a bad idea to submit more than four research letters: any more than that and it is very likely that the average impression would be raised by removing one of the letters.  (Of course you still have the task of figuring out which are your best letters.  But you should try to figure that out, not just admit defeat and submit way too many of them.)

In your case, it sounds like that they really are asking for 3+1 letters, and you want to send 4+1.  That should be fine...but now is not too soon to try to figure out which of those four letters are the strongest and which are the weakest.


How to reference original paper in expanded journal version

You write the journal version so that it is entirely self-contained, as if all results were new (regardless of whether they were already present in the conference version).

Then, in appropriate places, you refer to the conference version and explain how the current version is different. For example, you could have a footnote on the first page or an acknowledgement in the end of the paper, along these lines:

  This is an extended and revised version of a preliminary conference report that was presented in FOO 2015 [1].

Here [1] is a reference to the conference version, and you include it in the list of references as usual. There is no need to cite it elsewhere.

If it makes sense, you can also discuss the difference between this version and the conference version in more detail e.g. in the "Related work" section. This might be a good idea especially if the journal version is not just an extension but some results are fundamentally different. However, in straightforward cases this is not usually necessary.

(Please note that this answer is specific to computer science, which has its own peculiar approach to conference publishing. All other fields are different.)


Can a paper be rejected for only detailing an algorithm mathematically and not programmatically (via pseudocode)?

In theoretical computer science (I cannot speak for other fields) it is very common not to give pseudocode, but only a high-level description of the algorithm. Your paper should always explain your ideas as clearly as possible, and as an author it is your job to select the most suitable presentation. This does not necessarily need to be pseudocode. Painstakingly presenting every little implementation detail may not add much to the paper and instead distract the reader. If you think foregoing pseudocode results in a better paper, by all means do so (unless the journal you are submitting to specifically requires it).
If your paper presents an implementation in Python, I would expect the source code to be publicly available somewhere and referenced in the paper.


Reasonable number of person-months for a full time academic?

If you are working full time on the grant (e.g., as a post doc or research scientist with no teaching or administrative duties), then 100% of your time is not unreasonable. If you have a standard faculty position with a breakdown of maybe 40% research, 40% teaching, and 20% admin, then you might be able to get away with 40% of your time, but most people would expect you to have other, possibly "unpaid" research commitments. In my field, funding agencies generally do not like to see less than 10% time (half a day a week) from the PI, because that just does not leave enough time to administer the grant. For young investigators, they want to see commitments of at least 20%.


Is a journal that is on Beall's list but is also in Scopus a predatory journal?

Indexing in Scopus does not necessarily mean that a journal is not predatory. From the guidelines for being indexed in Scopus:

  -The Journal should consist of peer‐reviewed content

  -The Journal should be published on a regular basis (have an ISSN number that has been
  registered with the International ISSN Centre)

  -Content should be relevant and readable for an international audience (at minimum
  have references in Roman script and English language abstracts and article titles)

  -The Journal should have a publication ethics and publication malpractice statement

These guidelines could potentially be satisfied by a journal that Beall's list considers predatory. Many pay-to-publish journals advertise "peer review", but it may not even be solicited/may not matter in the "decision" to accept the manuscript.

There also can be information on why the specific journal or publisher is considered predatory on https://scholarlyoa.com. I generally have high confidence in Beall's list--predatory journals do not have a great incentive to turn legitimate.


How do non-LaTeX users handle citations?

It isn't exactly hard to do references by hand, in any word processing system, just boring and a bit fiddly at times. However, given the number of questions here on references it isn't like the citation managers aren't fiddly as well.

Having in the deep dark past written citation handling/numbering preprocessers/code for nroff, spinoff, and straight TeX (since LaTeX was too foofy for real scientists), those aren't that hard to do either with a modicum of programming skill. After the pain of writing the system in the first place, it is all gravy from there.

Even 30 years ago programs such as EndNote made it pretty easy to get a citation manager that integrated well with Word (plus or minus various perversions caused by Word itself). Nowadays there are more options, and it mostly comes down to finding a word processing system and citation manager that work together and that you will stick with for long enough to make it worthwhile.

That last part is key - after investing the time and energy to build up and learn a system that works for you, it is a pain to change. All of a sudden you move from grad school to a post-doc, and your advisor doesn't use the same tool set -- what now? Do you switch from LaTeX to Word (and the citation manager as well)? Or do you do all editing/revisions on paper? Once you have switched (for whatever reason) a few times, one might decide that doing it all by hand really isn't so bad.


When applying for grants, does the NSF care that I'm "poor"?

Interesting challenge. I haven't served on any of the panels. From word of mouth, my assumption would be any proposal will be evaluated mostly on scientific merit. It might help your case that you've been productive without much funding, but then the lack of funding might also be a perverse signal of less previous success. We can all hope they evaluate the proposal on merit, but the history of decision making even among experts suggests other heuristics are likely to matter. In your case, I would hesitate to explicitly signal the lack of funding.


Is it ethical to request the advisor to share the registration fee for submitting a conference paper?

Talk to your advisor, now.  Dealing with funding and finances are a significant part of academic life; they aren't some shameful taboo thing.

Most academics don't pay for professional travel, including conferences, out of their own pockets; often funds are available from your institution, or from any grants that may be funding your project, or from the conference itself.  It's entirely reasonable to ask your advisor about funding sources that might be able to pay the cost for you attending this conference; you should also research possible funding sources yourself.

If funding isn't available, or can't cover the full cost, it's up to you to decide whether you want to spend your own money to go.  If you decide that you can't, that's okay; you just won't go.  I don't think people would see this as stinginess on your part, but rather a misfortune that no other funds were available.

However, by the same token, if your advisor tells you that he doesn't have any funds available to pay, you shouldn't expect him to dip into his own pocket.

Ideas like your  "50/50 split" don't usually come up, unless there are multiple outside funding sources that could pay, and the question is how to apportion the costs between them.


Should I apply for PhD with a 4 on my master thesis?

You  should apply, for the  following reasons:

First, you really  want  to do  a PhD. This should  be reason #1
A PhD is an adequation between a candidate, an advisor and a subject (possibly  a team), thus:
Grades matter, but adequation is more important. And you have timelessness.

A MSc is a first time test into research, but:

The topics are often not the same. You can excel in a PhD, while having performed modestly in a MSc. The  converse may happen, too, because:
MSc and PhD are quite different, require seemingly different skills


Stranded in a taught MSc CS Program. What should I do?

Be proactive. Identify the professor(s) that could be your thesis adviser and keep  asking for advice on how you can participate in his or her research and how he/she can officially become your adviser. You could also talk to the department chair.

In the mean time you could look into participating in some open source project, which could score some bonus points for you when applying for PhD or internship.

Another option for bonus points and priming your skills is participating in (programming) competitions that require more than just coding skills but analytical and creative thinking as well.

If all else fails, consider applying for a different school, although this may mean time lost. On the other hand, I did retake several classes while in a grad school although I already had a MSc, which was well worth the time spent, offering deeper and more research oriented perspective on the subjects.


Copy pasting definitions and theorems from other papers to my own paper

Please do not borrow sentences

Instead, borrow sentence structures. If the original sentence is, "Our results also have implications on the study of öhkömönkiäiset.", you might write "Our main result also has implications on öhkömönkiäis-studies."

First, this way you are not copy-pasting. Second, this forces you to think about the language and therefore learn it, thereby reducing the need to copy and making writing a lot easier.

Also, go ahead and improve your English. There are many free resources online, but simply reading a lot is a great help. For more specific advice on how to learn the language, https://languagelearning.stackexchange.com/ is a fine place to ask. For specific questions about the English language, maybe ask at https://ell.stackexchange.com/.

(The easiest improvement to the English in this question would be to capitalize "I".)

Quoting definitions and theorems word-for-word

For many basic definitions, there are only a small number of ways of writing them clearly and compactly. Just use an established way of writing.

Sometimes, if a definition or result is complex or not yet established, there are better and worse ways of writing it and maybe even several variations that define slightly different things. In this case, cite the source, since the exact definition matters.

Usually you are somewhere between these two cases, in which case I would recommend you to write the definition or theorem by yourself, so that you are more likely to write it in the same way as your other results and to use the same notation.


Is it rude to use tracking softwares for the emails that you send to potential advisors?

My sense is that the vast majority would not notice one way or another but that some potential advisors might and would find it intrusive and and inappropriate. In many other cases, (like myself) professors use text-based email clients or systems that that block this kind of tracking. In these cases, folks won't think you're rude but you still won't know if I've read it. For that matter, I may have opened an email but not read it carefully. In some cases, people will notice and and think it is rude or unethical.

Critically though, I can't see why knowing whether your email was opened will help.

The reality is that many professors receive between dozens and thousands (really!) of emails from prospective students. This has been discussed at length. Many answers on this site explain why it's just not possible for everybody to reply to every email and there are many reasons why people do not. They might not reply because they are overwhelmed by teaching. They might not reply because it's simply not a good match. They might not reply because they don't have funding to take on new students this year.

My advice is to pick a small number of perfect potential supervisors. Read their papers. Write emails that make it clear that you're not just mass-emailing anybody you can find but that you want to work with them. Send an email. If you want, send a follow-up after a week or so. In either case, I don't see how knowing that the email has been opened helps.


Applying for a postdoc before defending your PhD is a very common situation which your adviser should be familiar with. Just say to your adviser that you are applying for a postdoc and that you would like him to write a letter of recommendation; there shouldn't be any more to it than that.


How best to organize a review paper that includes some of my own data?

I have seen examples of the type of paper you're writing, but it's not a very common format. Most likely, the journal is going to dictate what you need to do. That said, my decision in this situation would depend on how much your simulated data contribute to the overall manuscript.

For instance, if your example is included solely as a sort of cartoon illustration, then very little or no explanation of how it was generated would be necessary. This does not seem to be the case with your example though.

An alternative approach would be to give a bare minimum description of how the data were generated in the same paragraph where you describe or expound on the theoretical point you're illustrating. Whether or not this makes for a clunky paragraph depends mostly on how much information you think you need to convey.

One final thought: if the simulated data are enough to develop into a separate methods manuscript, you might want to go that route, and leave your review article a standard synthesis of previous work.


CS conferences not indexed by Scopus or Web of Science?

That is correct: most good computer science conferences have not been indexed by the standard journal indexes (maybe this will change someday, but it hadn't last I'd heard).

A good alternative for evaluating the quality of a conference or to search for decent conferences is to use Google Scholar's "venue metrics" function.  For example, searching for "programming" finds top programming-language conferences, such as ASPLOS, PLDI, POPL, and OOPLSA.  It is interesting to note that in these results, if one ignores the non-field "Mathematical Programming", the first journals don't show up until halfway down the list.

Three caveats:

The search isn't currently very smart; it's very literal in its use of words.  Thus, for example, searching "programming languages" doesn't find ICFP.
Only the top 20 venues for a given query are returned, and you can't look for more.
Some decent but highly-specific venues still don't appear.


What kinds of degrees are there in Europe that can be completed in 12-18 months?

I don't know of any 1 year degrees in Europe - maybe somebody else can say something about that - but here is one alternative idea (not sure how feasible some of it is though, I only tried some of this from one European university to another):

Go for a masters degree in economics. It's usually 2 years but

some universities do a 7 semester bachelor + 3 semester master, so if you can convince them that your bachelor is equivalent to theirs, you might be able to get into a 3 semester i.e. 18 month master.
if you have leftover credits from advanced classes in your bachelor or you can tolerate a heavier workload than most, you might be able to finish a regular 2 year master in 18 month. Ask lots of questions beforehand though, to make sure it's really possible - I almost did this and was right on course for the 18 month master but then I decided to take a side job and did the master in 2 years.
if you ask your current supervisor, he might know a professor in Europe, who will agree to supervise your master thesis together with him. Then you can do your coursework in Europe and get started on the master thesis there but finish it in Sydney.

As you've noticed, a bachelor is not feasible, because it usually takes 3 years.

Another thing to keep in mind - you didn't say anything about your language skills - is that bachelor level classes and any other entry level degrees you might find are usually taught in the local language. Even on the master level your choices might be limited (or it might not be possible at all) if you can only take classes taught in English.


The skills required to become an Olympian are (with the exception of athleticism and a talent for a particular sport, which I’d imagine are the least exceptional part of the package) obviously transferable to the setting of college education. A letter from you attesting to your firsthand knowledge of the young woman’s skills would be, as others said, extremely valuable and useful to the colleges she is applying to.
My suggestion is that you simply describe your experience of working with her, and what good qualities you are convinced she has based on that experience. Focus on things that would help a college predict that she would do well as a student and enrich the educational environment for her peers. For example, you mentioned she is hardworking and “laser focused”. Those are obviously awesome qualities. Anything else along those lines would be similarly useful. Does she have good leadership qualities? Is she an inspiring person to be around? Etc.
Also, given that you seem to have a lot of experience with the world of international competitive sports, it could help if you manage to describe a bit of that world and put across just how hard it is for a young person to get into the Olympics in your trainee’s particular sport or event. Of course, it’s common knowledge that this is an insanely impressive and difficult thing to achieve, but more concrete details from you are sure to drive home the message that this person has exceptional abilities and would be a coup for any college to admit.


Software developed by multiple parties under university funding is implicitly covered by the copyright of the university.  The attitude towards intellectual property ownership varies by university, so you should search to find out your situation.

A few universities are very liberal about intellectual property.  See https://uwaterloo.ca/research/waterloo-commercialization-office-watco/intellectual-property .  Other universities are more traditional, see http://www.research.utoronto.ca/faculty-and-staff/inventions-commercialization-and-entrepreneurship/invention-disclosure/ .  An invention leads towards a patent.  Software development (and publication) lead towards a copyright.

From this point on, you might have to consult a lawyer, but here's some intuitions that may help (but could be wrong).

Practically, if the source code has been published in a book, the copyright may have been transferred from the university to the publisher.  If the code was rewritten and then put under an open source license, with attribution to the original sources, this could be considered a new work.  With copyright, the analogy is relatively clear in the academic world.  It's okay to cite the source, or use snippets as "fair use", but copying the whole text outright would be plagiarism.

If the university is not interested in commercializing the software, there may already be a process in place to have it reassigned under an open source license.  The MIT license may be the simplest to implement.  The Apache license and LGPL 2.1 licenses are also popular.


I'm writing this in my role as an editor: if I had assigned a younger colleague as a reviewer, and said colleague asked me for the other reviews because they want to learn what others see in a paper, I would usually be happy to forward them to her. Everyone wins if we help younger researchers find their bearings what is or is not expected in a review.

That said, there must be an understanding that the other reviews I forward will remain confidential and will not be distributed further. I imagine if you write to the editor who had assigned the paper to you, ask for the other reviews and explain why you'd like to see them, and promise confidentiality, then you may be able to get them.


How do you actually select colleges for Ph.D. application

I spoke with a few professors for informational talks and they helped me find professors doing research of interest.  One professor I spoke with, I mentioned my research interests and she gave me a list of all the professors who do that research and their schools.  That ended up being the list of schools I applied to.  The most important thing for acceptance into a PhD program is a professor who wants to work with you (and ideally willing to fund you).  I would say base where you apply on the professor(s) in a program you'd like to work with based on topic AND personality. Also, when reaching out to professors for informational meetings please do some research on them.  I find it frustrating when I have potential students reach out who clearly haven't done a basic review of my research area. When I was applying I would normally check the website out before writing an email and then read the abtracts of 1-3 papers that interested me before I met with them.


Should dropping out of a PhD program be treated the same way as quitting a regular, industry job?

This answer addresses the idea that the work a PhD student does is just like work at another job, and therefore quitting the jobs should be viewed the same. (My answer suggests that it should be unusual for people to enroll and then quit without there being a serious problem, and also that potentially elements of society might place stigma on that action to keep people from wasting educational resources.) There also seems to be an indication in the question that people should be free to casually start positions as Ph.D. students without the intention to finish the degree. (I may be overstating the poster's view, but that extreme version is what I address below.)

I believe that for an individual, leaving a program or leaving academia can be the right choice for all involved, and that work as a graduate student is valid work experience to list on a resume. However, it is harmful in the long term if people enter graduate school without the intention of completing the degree.

A huge part of the compensation for being a PhD student is funding one's classes, training, library access, access to lab materials, potentially travel funding, and access to smart peers and smart professors. It costs a lot to create a learning and research environment.

For instance, a postdoc working a similar job in a lab will get paid more; partly because they need less supervision and training, have more experience, and have more responsibility, but also because the professor does not have to fund the tuition and student benefits for that postdoc. And a professional lab worker should be paid even more.

If, as you say, being a PhD student is just another job, then people who do not value all of the parts that support academic success could value those things at zero and realize they are getting a very poor wage. They could work at a private lab for the same work--but without the support for learning and autonomous research--and get paid much more for the same style of tasks.

Again, it costs a lot to create a learning and research environment, and universities are investing in their students' success. Hoxby has a model of university funding that likens university founders (and later donors) to venture capitalists investing in human capital and in research: http://www.nber.org/papers/w18626.

As Hoxby writes: "Because some of the students' returns will presumably be social, the obligation on them can be multifaceted.  Those who earn private returns on their human capital can be asked for gifts in the form of money. Others could be asked for gifts in the form of expertise. Others could be asked to use their political influence to sure that the university is treated well by the government.  And so on." Hoxby 2012, p. 19

If people are taking Ph.D. positions as mere jobs, they are less likely to fully contribute to the educational environment, less likely to take full advantage of the costly investment in their educational environment, and less likely to give back to the institution to help it sustain itself.

TL;DR: It is extremely short-sighted to think that students are merely workers. It is to academia's detriment if students, professors, schools, and governments act as if they are.

(These models and my thinking are largely based on the U.S. system, which the poster addressed. I would be interested in thoughts on how this compares to other funding models.)

Note: I do not intend this answer to say that grad students are or are not employees for the purposes of unionization or other purposes. However, I believe this account of why schools fund tuition for advanced students as an uncertain investment helps us understand why the rebated tuition should not be taxed as regular income (as a recent US tax plan suggested doing).


What to write in the followup email to a professor for a graduate teaching assistantship

In such situations, it is always beneficial to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they have either (1) not seen your email or (2) seen it, but forgot to reply. Seeing that many academics are busy, let's assume that with such schedules any of the above two options are viable.

You can perhaps write something to the effect of "...I am writing to you once again, because I don't think you have received my earlier email...".

Good luck!


How to answer a non-specific point of a review?

I guess I won't be too popular for saying this, but you seem to have the wrong idea about what is going on. The point isn't to "defend your paper" or "rebut the reviewer" but to take constructive criticism of the paper so that you can improve it for the conference and for the future. It isn't a debate. It is a search for a way to express some scientific truths through a cooperative process.

That said, you can't respond to what you don't know. As user Miguel says in a comment, the editor may be able to help you here if you say that you don't understand the comment and ask if the reviewer can give more specific advice.

When you get the advice, hopefully you will, you can take it into account for a revision. But not just to complain about it. You won't win much by arguing. Your paper will only be accepted if it stands on its own, without side arguments in its favor.

Please note that I'm not being insulting here. Nor were your reviewers if they made suggestions about the paper that you didn't really want to read.


How to teach from a tutorial-style book?

I'm concerned by your statement "That seems lazy" because it implies that you are focusing on yourself when really you should be focused on the student, specifically what the students are learning.

It is very easy for us to think from our own perspective but we must consider the perspective of student learning to be of primary importance.

If you believe the text is a good text (which you seem to) then it would seem the right path to take is to have students spending their class time working through the book (as a workshop) with you there to guide them if they get stuck or if they want some more advanced information.

In general, it's easy - that's good. Remember the old saying "Those who do, learn." So, you want the "students to do" rather than "you to do."


Should I include my StackExchange profile in my CV?

You may get a small bump by being a good answerer on the technical stacks, like Physics or Cross Validated. I've heard MathOverflow in particular has a decent recognition among mathematicians. Especially if you are applying for a teaching position, showing a good track record wouldn't hurt, even if only 1 in 25 people have heard of Stack Exchange (which would be a very high proportion in my experience).
By "good" I'm thinking of rep north of 5,000 at least, but I'm not familiar with the standards of those Stacks in particular.
That said, your thought about:

I have learnt a lot from the community and when I post a question I try to make an effort to formulate it in a proper manner to avoid downvoting

... is, I'm sorry to say, pretty meaningless and confusing to explain to someone looking to hire you in an academic position. No one cares that you didn't get downvoted when asking a question online. That is basically the bare minimum to participate in these sites, even though I do acknowledge the communities can sometimes be harsh.


The PI isn't asking for anything unreasonable.  In fact, I really like the idea of participating in the lab meeting via Skype.  This way the mentor can see how you interact with the whole lab without adding major inconvenience or expense.

As to "Should I agree...?"  -- if you'd like the job, you should probably do it.


I ran many tests for my thesis, should I report tables and graphs for all of them?

The comments are correct when they say that it is absolutely wrong to try statistical tests until you find one that you like and then report just that one.

That said, there's a little ambiguity in your phrasing

  Only one test was able to answer my question while the rest (3 tests)
  couldn't.

If they couldn't answer for some reason you can explain that's not simply "I didn't like the result" then you could discuss those  tests, explain why they were unsatisfactory, and perhaps provide the tables and graphs in some kind of supplement.

Whatever you do, you cannot just ignore them. You tried them and you must say so.

For all of this - talk to your advisor.


Mediocre Thesis Topic. Does this Hurt my Reputation

A PhD is documentation that you can do your own research.  You don't have to take what you're given.  That said, maybe your advisor considers the "toy problems" a warmup for more advanced research?  You should talk to your advisor and also to other faculty members you trust.  Let them know that you are concerned your topic may be weak.  Perhaps they will have some ideas on how you can make it stronger.  Depending on the outcome of these discussions, you may want to shop around for a different advisor who is a better fit for you, both in research interests and personality.  The key is to take charge of your own dissertation.


How to find the paper that initializes a new field

THe Wikipedia article on this topic is reasonably good and has some references.  I would look at that article and the references within.
Try tracing back "references of references" of reviews or important papers.  (You don't have to read in depth.)  But you may figure out the better papers.  May also find those that have a perspective on (3).
In general, I think "machine learning" is a misnomer and a buzzword.  Talking about it as some organic "thing" is not correct.  You should see it as a bit of a fad (especially the use of the term) and within the broader fields of statistics, algorithms, optimization, etc.  It's not like discovering X-rays or something.


How to cite an ISO standard where I can only get access to the drafts?

It sounds like you're at a stage where it is somewhere between important and crucial for your project to have access to the actual standard: if the information you want to cite is in the standard, then that's the core document to cite, and if it didn't make it to the final version, then you may want to revise the text around the citation or even the research or code itself.

ISO standards are indeed not the easiest documents to get ahold of, but that's what libraries and librarians are for. Approach your institution's librarian and tell them that you need access to a document that's not in the library, and they will get it for you (that's their job!) either by purchasing the document for the library, if they consider it a good investment, or via inter-library loan. This can be a lengthy process, so you should approach them as soon as possible, but the upside is that if the standard's text does not change from the draft then all you need is a look at the full standard before you submit, to confirm that your provisional citation is appropriate.

In any case, even if you do get access to the full standard before you submit, I would encourage you to think of readers in your situation, who might have a hard time getting the standard, and I would thus recommend that you cite both the full standard and the working draft:

give the full standard as the main citation, but also
state that the same information is available in a working draft, and give it a separate citation that includes precise information on where it can be obtained.

As to how you actually cite it, that'll depend on the style guide you're following, but you can start with the format in this answer.

If you can't get a copy of the final standard, then it may or may not be appropriate to cite it as-is; for more on that, see Is it unethical to cite a paper or book that you have never looked at?. In that situation, it basically becomes a judgement call between the chance that the information won't be in the document you're citing versus the awkwardness of citing a working draft of a document that's since been Published, and we can't make that call for you.


How to cite and build on the work of another paper that is still under peer review?

Cite your arXiv preprint, just like you would cite any other prior work.  Peer review is not a prerequisite for something to be citeable.


Follow-up project on a paper in submission

I think you should never delay your projects based on unsure events. The referee report may take a long time, and you'll have wasted precious time. Also, it's unlikely that a referee will change your mind about your own work. You probably know what the questionaire should look like by now.


I found an error in my exam that caused me to lose time on other questions, resulting in a lower grade. How can I appeal?

How could I tell him to upgrade my grade and explain to him that I really deserve it and that I really need to have (19/20) so I can pass my semester?

Don't tell him how to fix the error, and don't open with this being a make-or-break for passing your semester. This will probably put him on the defensive, and make him less likely to be sympathetic. In fact, the first time I read your question, I thought you were in the wrong, but upon closer reading, I understood your issue better.
I was in a similar situation, except one whole quiz section learned about the error half way through, whereas the other two learned about it at the start of the test, through a TA's error. It was a headache for the professor. If I recall,  they ended up giving everyone in that section a percentage boost.
Be polite, and straightforward:

Hi Professor,
In our last exam, I pointed out an error in the last part of the test. I spent 15-20 minutes working on the question before I figured out the error. Since I like to start with that section, I wasn't able to finish the first part of the test. Because of this, I didn't score as well as I could have.
Other students didn't have to spend so much time working on this question because I found the error for the class. Is it possible to adjust my score to reflect this?

Honestly, he probably didn't even think of it, or forgot by the time he was grading. You have a totally reasonable request.


Where am I supposed to report a broken DOI?

It's not likely that the DOI itself is broken. However, a number of things might be happening to prevent you access to the material (I'll assume it's an article) or, more commonly, human error is at play. First, make sure that there's been no change to your the proxy settings, firewall or security settings on your computer. Sometimes, these settings return a "DOI not working" error.

If you're sure that there's nothing wrong with your system (say because you're accessing a DOI for an article from the same issue of the journal), then I suggest that you inform the journal about your error. The web staff of a journal are able to respond to these reports rather quickly. They'll also be able to determine whether the result is due to a coding error or an editing error. In one case just recently, we caught an error in the DOI from being published on the manuscript. The error was due to an intern who was unfamiliar with copyediting notations on the galleys. (As I said, human error.)

I don't suggest that you report to doi.org. They'll collect information, but pass it on to the journal and may miss something material. Contacting the journal is more efficient. Finally, contacting the journal will also allow them to send you a copy of the article you wanted to access, while you wait for them to correct the issue.

PS. I remember a while back when there was a DOI "blackout". None of the DOIs for our articles would work. We were swamped with requests. Our webteam went nuts looking for the error. It turns out that this was a human error issue, but at the DNS level. I'm not a computer expert but the head of our web team explained it to us like this: "Someone forgot to renew the license for the dx.doi.org account."

Good luck!


Are P-hacking and hypothesising after results are known considered misconduct in academia?

The Declaration of Helsinki was updated in 2013 to "mandate" that research involving human subjects must be pre-registered. While not perfect, pre-registration prevents many of these statistical manipulations. The idea of pre-registration is that publicly stating your hypotheses and the details of how they will be tested in advance reduces questionable statistical practices. For example, changing the number of subjects, the inclusion/exclusion criteria, or the statistical model are not allowed.

From my understanding, failure to comply with the Declaration of Helsinki would be considered unethical in Medicine, while in other fields the pre-registration aspect is being actively ignored. For example, articles are now being published with disclaimers like "this research was conducted in accordance with the 2013 Declaration of Helsinki except the study was not pre-registered".


Acknowledge previous advisor/collaborators for ideas in article

Acknowledging the contribution of someone, however small it is, is seldom a bad idea.

Usually, when I acknowledge the contribution of someone, I send a copy of the paper to acknowledged people before the final submission, informing them of the acknowledgment. In possible critical cases, I ask whether they are ok or not with the formulation of the acknowledgement, specifying by which date I intend to go on with the submission.

I think that the above approach can be used also in your situation, and should there be no reply by the specified date, I would keep the acknowledgment as it is.


Why does research on the busy beaver function get funded?

Extremely likely, this concrete example is useless. So is any other concrete example. However, there are many of these examples, and we do not know which handful of them will be useful.

Some ancient people wasted time on research in number theory, some of which ended up being practically useful. Some studied motion of stars in detail far exceeding calendaring and navigational needs. This also proved useful.

Many, many studies also led to dead-ends. At the time, one could not tell which of them would.


This happens often, lecturer A does micro economics then lecturer B does macro economics.

As students you may prefer A over B but they also like to work towards their strengths...

As long as they cover the material and the assessments are appropriate then 2 lecturers or 1 is not an issue.

You don’t give any negatives but I have mentioned some perceived issues.


To publish or not to publish a paper in an ERA "type C" conference?

You should have asked yourself this question before you submitted to the conference. Withdrawing your paper now, after it's been accepted, means you wasted a bunch of people's time (editor, reviewers, ...). Do unto others ...

Additionally, given that it was accepted as a borderline paper and was rejected at two previous conferences may be a hint that your work is not perceived as top of the line by external referees. I doubt you can shoot much higher than what you have now.


Submitting similar work to two conferences

Certainly it isn't unethical to present new and improved results at a conference. However, the reviewers may have questions about novelty if your earlier work overlaps too much. But that is up to them to decide.
Just cite the old work in the new so that it doesn't appear as if you are doing a double submission. Then, let the reviewers decide.


Can I tell my advisor I want to finish my PhD in 6 years?

I suggest, fairly strongly that you go along with the professor and make four years your target. There are a number of reasons for this.
First, you want your advisor happy with you and with the opinion that you are making progress toward a common goal. They may actually need your results as part of a larger picture.
Second, there is no guarantee that any doctoral student meets their time target. Things happen in research that can't be predicted. Some of these lead to additional time. You have a cushion that you can fall back on in this case.
Third, if you do finish in four years, there may be additional opportunities that arise are not visible now and that might make sense at that time. Perhaps you can find a way to just stay on with additional research if your funders are happy. And you may find that you can find something suitable elsewhere, but still in a place you want to live.
Things happen over six years that aren't predictable. Who would have guessed six years ago that the US and the world would be in the current state it is? We hope that in six years it will be better.

“If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?” ~~Albert Einstein


I think this is a situation where you should try to 'have your cake and eat it', that is try to do both.

If you get the Marie-Curie it usually comes with the stipulation that you should start it at some point in the next 12 months, chosen at your convenience. So you have some flexibility there but presumably not quite enough to just start it at the end of the university fellowship. The university on the other hand could be more flexible and should also be willing to be so as a Marie Curie fellow is prestigeous for the university as well. So if you do get the Marie Curie, I would suggest to go to the funding office of the university and ask them whether you can pause your university grant for the duration of the Marie Curie fellowship. It seems quite likely to me that they will accept such a proposal.

Best of luck with the fellowship applications.


Do superficially encouraging statements within rejection letters for faculty job applications mean anything?

It could be both an honest statement or generic fluff. Unfortunately, there's no way for you to distinguish both, and to derive useful information here. (Maybe unless they comment on specific things they found impressive, but that doesn't seem to be the case.)
The more informative fact are the rejections themselves. A single rejection means hardly anything, but if you only received rejections, there would be some problem that you need to fix. The fact that you got some invitations is indeed a good sign.


The Harvard citation system does not use reference numbers.  It uses, as you describe, the author's last name and publication year.  (This is similar to the APA citation style.)

The reference lists should be at the end of the document, not listed as footnotes.  So your understanding of the Harvard style seems to be basically correct.  Some more details about the Harvard citation style are given here: http://www.citethisforme.com/harvard-referencing

Personally, I too prefer referencing by number rather than author, but if you are supposed to use the Harvard style, then you just have to use it.


Reapplying for a PhD position at another institute after failing the qualifying exam

You can't let one setback keep you from pursuing your goals or dreams. Yes, it's bad that you failed your quals, but that doesn't mean you should just give up. Having supportive committee members will help a lot when applying to other schools or programs.


As a prospective PhD student, is it bad that I have interests in multiple areas of my field?

5th-year phd student, soon to be postdoc here.

The perception that anyone in academia has a laser-tight focus is not correct. In my experience, most of the people have rough idea of the field, and then stumble or got assigned a project that interest them well enough. Never feel guilty for not knowing exactly (or not having) specific interest, nobody does.

As a phd student you will have to learn a lot of new stuff, so having different interests is a plus as most of the work is interdisciplinary anyways.

That being said, when you join department, you will be expected to rotate in several labs (usually) in order to find best fit. In that process you might find out that best fitting lab is neither PTSD nor language-processing one, and that's entirely OK. Remember: you will be signing up for 5-7 years of work with a specific PI, not a topic.


Transitioning between two advisors who work in the same department

It depends on the personalities of the professors involved and in how the student handles the switch. If they really are working in two distinct fields, and if that is the real motivation of the student for switching, most likely there will be no issue.


What do statements of interest, teaching, and research mean when applying for an academic job?

That is a rather confusing request, actually. However, what I think the job offer is looking for in a "statement of interests" is a description of the research areas you are interested in, while the "statement of research" would be a listing of projects you'd plan to start if you were hired.

However, in many job postings, those two items would potentially be conflated into a single statement. So I'd recommend that you contact the department. I'd recommend doing this by phone, if possible—that way, you don't have to give as much identifying information.


How to know a supervisor's working style before joining his group?

...never disturb to other colleagues. When I discussed with other colleagues...

Good for you!

  My question is how would I know about these things before joining his group?

By talking with other members of the group, away from faculty, during your interview visit (or some other time before accepting the offer).

Conversations with students outside the professor's group would also have been useful. Also with the clerical staff. Even if unhappy group members themselves are hesitant to talk with strangers, for fear of reprisal, people know who the unhappy research groups are.

If the professor didn't actively encourage such conversations, that's already a red flag.


Can a postdoc write a letter for someone applying for a postdoc?

In every situation I know of, a postdoc would be allowed to write you a letter.  In general it's not a good idea to get a letter from a postdoc when you're applying for a postdoc.  But that doesn't mean it's never the best option.  A strong letter from a postdoc isn't going to actively hurt your application, it's just not going to help you the same way a strong letter from someone with more experience would.  The main problem is that a postdoc doesn't yet have the perspective to see what makes people successful in the long run and doesn't have a broad enough pool to compare you to.  It matters here whether the postdoc has great work and is relatively well-known, and it also matters how far out from PhD the postdoc is.  There are strong senior postdocs in my field whose opinion I would give a lot of weight to.  I don't know all the details, but it sounds like asking the postdoc might be a reasonable decision in your unfortunate situation.

All that said, I think your question misunderstands the purpose of letters in a way that's quite common among graduate students.  It's not necessary that your letter writers all know you so long as they know your work.  It's better to have a letter from an important figure in your field who understands your work, than to have a letter from someone local who knows you really well.  I always encourage graduate students to try to get one letter from someone at a different school.  If you gave a talk somewhere and had a productive conversation afterwards with the person who invited you, that person might be an excellent choice for a third letter.  It's pretty late in the process right now, so it might not be possible to get a third letter from an outside expert in a timely fashion, but in general it's something graduate students should be looking for.  You should not be getting letters from local professors who know you from class but who can't understand your work.


How far ahead should you search for a faculty job?

The field of academia is hypercompetitive due to the excess amount of PhD-students and Postdocs vs a low number of faculty positions (read this). Even people doing postdocs at top places have difficulties finding faculty positions and apart from a network also luck becomes an important factor if there are >100 applications for a faculty position.

Therefore you should start searching for a faculty position at least 2 years ahead (no, this is not a joke).


Would it be inappropriate to cite wikipedia for something trivial in an academic article?

The real question is whether you should cite anything at all. You're not writing an article on golf clubs. You're writing an article on statistics.

Is your example so complex that you need explanations upon explanations about why you're choosing this parameter, and that, etc, and if a reader doesn't know all this then the example is not understandable? It it really that important? Then you're wasting your reader's time with a digression that's largely irrelevant to your scientific work.

Is the example sufficiently simple that to understand it, very vaguely knowing how golf works is sufficient? Then why would you want to cite anything? I don't need a scholarly article to explain that if I were to choose a golf club, I need to consider its length, its weight and so on. It's pretty much common sense. Do I know more than that? No. Do I care? No. Is a statistics article the place to learn about such things? No.


Transitioning from MS to PhD - International Student

However, I was told that I will most likely be assigned another mentor upon starting the program.

Does this mean, you haven't yet corresponded with the professor you have in mind? If this is the case, why not write to him directly and express your interest in joining his group? You can also try to meet with him once you join the program. I would think that mentor assignments are not set in stone.

  What is the best way of approaching a professor about receiving support as in funding?

Are you asking about seeking financial support from the professor you have in mind? If yes, write to him first to see if you can join his research group. If there is interest, the professor might let you know whether he could provide some support or not.

If you have more flexibility about to who you want to work with and/or the research area you want to be in, you can also write to the departmental graduate program coordinator and let him/her know your research interests and see if he/she can circulate your interests among the faculty working in those areas.


Is it reasonable to evaluate spelling/grammar in reports for students diagnosed with dyslexia?

I’ll go for a legal answer, at least valid in my current place of employment (France): dyslexia, which must be medically characterized as a learning disability for an individual, is covered by the laws regarding disabilities. As such, students impacted can request that exam conditions be modified for their benefit: most commonly by giving them additional time to “compensate” for their disability, but it could also include changes in setup (such as having access to a dictionary, spellchecker, or even a secretary). On the other hand, no leniency should then be granted on judging the exam paper.

The operating principle in all cases should be that of equal opportunity. (See here a summary of jurisprudence by the Association lyonnaise de droit administratif.)


As pointed out by xLeitix, there aren't really any standards on this. Another possibly clearer way to report that ratio is:

  The data were not evenly distributed with a ratio CN:AD = 16:84.


Comprehensive Guide for Ph.D. thesis in Mathematics?

It could also be helpful to check this and this short guides and the books by Steven G. Krantz, in particular

A Mathematician's Survival Guide: Graduate School and Early Career Development
A Primer of Mathematical Writing

The first one contains subsection 4.6 which deals specifically with writing a thesis, the second one is on mathematical writing in general but it does not really deal with the theses per se.


If I refereed a paper at one journal (and it was rejected) should I referee it again when it's sent to another journal?

There are no problems associated with you reviewing a paper again, regardless if it resubmitted to the same or a different journal. Since you have seen the paper earlier and know its earlier problems you can better judge how it has improved and to what extent it is now publishable. You should definitely let the editor know that you have been involved in the process of this paper earlier even if he/she has not indicated the paper has been rejected somewhere before. That information provides the editor with a better perspective of the development of the paper and can make the decision to accept or reject easier since the willingness or capability of the author(s) to improve the manuscript is set in perspective.

You can always contact the editor and state that you are willing to take on the review but felt it was necessary to convey the information. I do not see it as necessary but it is of course a nice gesture.


Paper unknowingly describing technical bias as if it was a biological phenomenon of interest

You have to live with the fact that academia is an imperfect system like any else and scientific knowledge underlies evolution. Seeing the bigger picture, in the long term journals that don't allow or implement criticism/replies on their journals papers will likely vanish.

Your (very hypothetical premise) is simply very wrong that you have to find a way to correct wrong/bad content (in your opinion) in every journal.

Technically, this is the same answer as Wolfgang gave, but from a bigger different perspective.

You can also see it like this: Scientific reports doesn't believe that in the long term negative comments on their articles help to avoid more the publication of falsehood than for other journals or just creates "editorial noise/extra-work" (unworthful extra-work probably being the main reason to not offer this option). Do you rememeber facebook offering a downwote button, now it's gone. Or look at stackexchange, upvote +10, downvote -2 karma. When you have scientific branches like biomed/psychology in which over 70% of studies cannot be reproduced, it's questionable if article replies overall and in the long term have much value as this evolution is driven mainly by affirmation, reproduction by other groups instead of scientific discussions in a journal, as the system to create true new scientific knowledge works differently, less efficient and theoretical than in branches like mathematics or physics, which is not surprising if you have a bit of interdisciplinary methodological knowledge.


Can analyzing data from an existing public online database be considered orginal work?

Yes, the analysis is original, provided that you haven't been beaten to it by someone else. Data is just data, but it is the analysis that gives it meaning. Extracting that semantic content is what is important in research.
But "summarizing" may not be enough, depending on what you do.
And the source of the data has little bearing on the validity of the analysis.
Of course, editors and reviewers will have a say in the value of the work.