Approaching researchers about collaboration?

To show interest is never wrong so from that point, I think such an approach would be fair. What complicates the issue is the picture of prerequisites. When you approach someone, does not matter at what level, you need to show how you can be of interest. What that entails is showing you have the background (courses and scientific literature) that allows you to be efficient help. I think this is where the plan is most likely to fail because the recipient of the request will not likely be interested in taking on help that needs much coaching to function. If your request is within the department where you study, matters might be easier but if you contact someone in another university of perhaps even department the difficulties may arise.

So, I cannot see anyone being offended by a request such as this. The problem lies in seeing how you can fit in and be a contributor without to much costs (in terms of e.g. time) for the researcher or research group. However, a personal visit is far more likely to lead somewhere than a letter or E-mail.

Requests such as these are not uncommon but in my experience have most often been very uninteresting. Again, some have visited which has provided a very good possibility to assess the common interests and in what way a possible "collaboration" would work.

As for the last question, I cannot see a problem except that a PhD student may not be in a position to bring in an external person into a project that in essence is run by their advisor. A PhD student, on the other hand, may be a good way into a research group since they may be open to a meeting more readily than a busy project leader.

So, showing interest is good but you need to be able to show clearly what you bring to the table to wet the appetite of the person you target.


Why are some academic research datasets not available to people who only have freely available email addresses?

If the owner/hoster of a database wants to provide that data only to a certain group of people (e.g. researchers, EU-citizens) and wants to keep the administrative overhead as low as possible, he has two possibilities:

open the database for everyone, put it under a specific license and a trust that the data is only used according to that license
provide only access to people with email addresses from a specific domain (i.e. official research institutions)

Verifying each registered user personally would be to much work.

The second way is a common concept for scientific databases. Some databases have a two step model (I think, ECMWF uses it): you can register with every email address but you cannot access all the data.

Often, there is no bad faith behind these restrictions. The server capacities might not be sufficient to provide the service to each possible user or the data (pictures, texts, ...) are provided by third parties, who only want to provide those data for free for a certain audience.


Contacting multiple professors for supervision

You should definitely shop around before selecting a research supervisor.  This is expected.  You do not need to declare it.  Just do not make commitments to more than one research team.  It is part of the faculty's job to compete to recruit honors students.  But prospective students have no responsibility to work for faculty until they agree to do it.


For a career in academia you basically need a doctorate. There are jobs for secondary school teachers and low level jobs at university. The secondary school positions are actually better than the low-level university positions, in most cases, however. Many places require additional certification for high school jobs, of course.

Most people who earn an MS/MA either go on for more learning or head to industry/government where there are positions available. If you want to do research but without a doctorate, the best place is in some industry lab or (for CS) a software development company. The research will be pretty applied, however.


Importance of GPA and GRE scores for grad school admissions

I am not doing my PhD in CS or maths but based on my experience, I believe it's a yes and a no, more specifically:

  I don't think these items have much predictive capacity as to whether or not someone can complete a Ph.D.

... is an accurate assessment of the situation. Being a grad student is sort of waking up in a different world, what you have done previously isn't really indicative of what you are capable of doing during your PhD. Most PIs are aware of that...

  GPA? I don't care if it's 2.0 or 4.0. I won't even look at it. The school you went to? I'll judge you the same whether you went to Nowhere State U or a top-ten school. Transcripts? Never seen one. GREs? Irrelevant.

Sadly, I don't think this is all that common. How a professor chooses a student varies a lot, and I don't think your GPA etc will be irrelevant to some profs. Especially not if you are in a number-driven, cold-heart-competitive place...

What's more common however is that your grades won't be the only criteria. They will most likely not be a deal-breaker. You will most likely get a chance to explain why you did good on some courses and worse on others. Primarily you will get a chance to explain what you like to do with your career.


Should I contact a potential PhD supervisor who strongly encouraged me to apply after not having heard from my application?

From my experiences in an engineering program at a public university, I've heard that domestic applicants are processed first. I don't think it would hurt to follow up with the potential supervisor. I agree with astronat above about sending a  polite email to follow up with the potential Ph.D. supervisor. You could also ask this professor when you can expect to hear back from the university.


In Germany and Austria academic freedom is part of the constitution.

German Art 5.3 GG:

  Kunst und Wissenschaft, Forschung und Lehre sind frei. Die Freiheit der Lehre entbindet nicht von der Treue zur Verfassung.

translated to English:

  Art and scholarship, research, and teaching shall be free. The freedom of teaching shall not release any person from allegiance to the constitution.

Austrian Art. 17.1 StGG:

  Die Wissenschaft und ihre Lehre ist frei.

translated to English:

  Science and its teaching is (sic) free.


How does the lockdown affect the application and admission processes in the Western Europe, Scandinavia, and the US?

The main problem for you now is not COVID-19 but simply the summer holidays. If you are looking now, you won't find much. The number of job offers may increase again in September, October.


I am really interested in doing phd, need help for title/topic, please help me

Unfortunately, it is very unlikely for you to finish a PhD if you persue it to follow your father's footsteps.

And persuing a PhD is not buying a car. You cannot just list your interests and your budget, and wait someone to advise you a programme. You must already have a research topic in mind by the time you finish your MSc thesis. Or, you must be able to say that you will not pursue a PhD.

All that being said, I prefer you to pick computer networking.


What's the point of a MSc if I can just enroll in a PhD program?

If you know you're going to continue on to a PhD, then there is no need to pick up a MSc, unless a specific program you're interested in requires you to acquire the MSc before continuing on to a PhD.

Some people want to have the flexibility that comes with acquiring a MSc, but this is a matter of personal interest, rather than a requirement. The danger is, of course, that if you decide to stop your PhD studies, then you run the risk of having worked for several years without any degree at all.


How to calculate/decide impact factor of a new journal

Deal with it honestly.  Say exactly what you said here.  "Since only two issues of the journal have been published, there is as yet no impact factor."


How to make citation for a new paper in arxiv?

As Christian mentions, there are already BibTex entries for your articles.

On NASA ADS: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-bib_query?bibcode=2017arXiv170309438T&data_type=BIBTEX&db_key=PRE&nocookieset=1

On the University of Trier database: http://dblp.uni-trier.de/rec/bibtex/journals/corr/TatarchenkoDB17

Whether you use one of these or wait for the one from Google Scholar, the main issue will be how your bibtex style renders the citation. You may need to adjust the fields "journal", "pages" and/or "eprint" to obtain a suitable result.

EDIT: I found those links on the arxiv page https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.09438 on the right column, as mentioned by ff524


What formatting guidelines should I follow for my bachelor's thesis if some of them are not specified by the university?

I would check other submissions and ask your mentor / supervisor. In any event, I would choose a font with spacing etc. that is clear and easy to read with suitable line spacing.

Some "cursive" fonts look nice but are not "easy" for extended reading.


How to react to a reviewer’s comment when he is completely right, but you do not like the consequences?

First of all, I love the title of your question.  What an open, honest way of phrasing things, which makes for a question which just about every academic I know can identify with.

Whenever you get a "revise and resubmit" referee report, the two key questions are:

How many of the revisions do you want to make?  How many can you make in a reasonable amount of time?
Almost certainly you will resubmit, yes, but: to the same journal or to a different journal?

I take it that by "completely correct" you mean that you agree that all of the suggested revisions would improve the paper.  That still does not imply that you want to make all of them: if the revisions ask for significant further work, then it may well be that, yes, you are in the midst of this work / planning to do it in the future but nevertheless you are seeking to publish what you have done so far.

Of course if you agree with all of the suggested revisions and you feel that you can do them in a reasonable amount of time -- e.g., in time to meet the deadline for a conference -- then it seems pretty clear that's the way to go.

I take it though that in your case it is not practical to complete all the suggested revisions in the given amount of time.  Your remaining choices are then: (i) complete only some of the revisions, explain very carefully in your reply why you considered the other proposed revisions but did not make them, and hope for the best;  (ii) indeed resubmit, but elsewhere; and (iii) withdraw the paper until you can complete the suggested work.  Then resubmit (possibly to the same place, if applicable, but starting over again in the formal submission process).

These are tough choices, and obviously they cannot be made globally.  All I'll say is that the more (!!) "completely correct" you feel the reviewer's suggested changes are, the more likely it is that if you do not satisfactorily incorporate these changes then the paper will not be accepted.  This still does not mean that revising and resubmitting is a poor choice: you have to do an expected value computation (e.g. if you can respond to 2/3 of the suggested revisions within a few days, maybe give resubmission to the same conference a whirl: why not?) to decide what is your best option.  This decision also includes how important it is to you that the paper be published sooner rather than later and how important that it be published in this specific venue.  Ideally speaking, you should take the necessary time to publish a "complete" version of your work rather than an unsatisfactorily partial preliminary version...but in reality, many academics do not have the luxury of fully indulging this ideal.


Career Professional now working as a Professor and being pressured to publish - Where does one start?

This is either an abuse of an adjunct (I doubt they are paying you enough for this!) or they're grooming you to bring you properly on board.

If it's the latter, or if your interest is coincidentally piqued, I suggest you start with two things:

Find a mentor.  This person doesn't have to be in your department, and doesn't have to be an expert in the same area as you.  If you don't find one quickly by yourself, have whoever is pressuring you suggest someone.
Go to Google Scholar and type in some key words from your area.  Just start reading.  Don't read anything you don't find interesting.  After some reading, find out a bit more about the features of Google Scholar (for example, once you find an article you're really excited about, click where it says "Cited by").

It all starts with "I wonder...."

Have fun!


When and why a scientific technical report is written?

The main advantages of a research report is that it's published very fast, and without reviewing process. From what I've seen, a research report is basically used:

to publish a longer version of a paper, for instance including proofs or detailed examples that couldn't fit in a version submitted to a conference.
to put a timestamp on an idea, in order to be able to claim "We did it back then"
to create a reference that can be cited for project reporting, even though the work has not been published (yet).
to make a pre-print document freely available, for instance if the published version is behind a paywall.

Such features are particularly useful when one wants to disseminate (for instance sharing with some colleagues) some unpublished material. Basically, I'd say that most of this can also be achieved by submitting the paper to a public repository, such as arXiv.

EDIT: considering the language question, intuitively, I would say that when research reports are used in the publication process, it's likely they are written in English. If a non-English speaking university does not offer a mechanism to submit research reports written in English, that might explain why it's not used. However, I've written research reports in France and Italy (in English).


Research statement ideas got used by interviewing committee

There is of course the possibility that the person you've accused actually had the same idea independently.   It's certainly suspicious, the moreso if when you were interviewed that person did not say "I like your idea and have actually been working on something similar".  I agree with the suggestion that you contact the chair and raise the issue, but be polite and nonconfrontational about it.  If you say "I think this guy stole my idea" it could be less effective than "I came across something similar to what I had proposed ... since Prof X didn't indicate he was working on this, I found it interesting that he published something so similar to what I proposed."

The thing to keep in mind is that it is a very gray area... this person might have come across your idea, forgotten about it, and later decided to pursue this idea without actually being consciously aware the idea came from your proposal.  And, you say much of the work goes beyond what you actually proposed.  So I think the chair should be informed, but I wouldn't expect much to come of it unless he's known as a repeat offender.


Advice on acquiring letters of recommendation and from whom

I doubt that your supervisor has managed to work through their entire academic career without developing knowledge of how to write a letter of recommendation. The best thing you can do is to get in touch with them again and re-iterate that you would like them to write you one. If they still hold off from doing it then definitely use your fallbacks.


Using Tech. Reports to 'protect' IP before presenting unpublished work in a conference

If you main concern is plagiarism, then any mechanism for creating a persistent, externally accessible, date-stamped copy of your work will clearly establish priority: arXiv and institution-specific technical memos each work just as well for this purpose.  When I was a graduate student at MIT, I used to use the CSAIL Technical Report series in exactly the way that you describe.  In computer science, at least, most publication venues seem to have no problem with this type of 'prior publication,' although it is not the same for other fields.

Note, however, that this will not actually stop you from being plagiarized, and may actually increase the chance, since it's another copy of your words out there online. It will, however, make it clear that they are your words and not those of the plagiarist.


How to notify admissions that one quit another program?

The important thing here is that you realize that you do need to report this information to schools to which you will be applying, as it will matter in their deliberations over your application. That said, you do have some degree of latitude in finding the best way to inform the schools of this. If they have a "special notes" or "additional information" question in the application, that might be a good place to put such information. Otherwise, you would want to mention it somewhere in the cover letter (if you get to include one) or personal statement (if you don't).

However, this information should be provided by you; don't leave it for the people writing your recommendation letters to mention. That will just raise more red flags.


Should I disclose cheating incident if I am not asked?

Why complicate your life? Hopefully you have learned from your errors and moved on. I see no reason to bring it up, but would be careful to reply honestly to any questions that actually do arise.

Many students have some transgressions in their past. Many are never called to account. Most, we hope, overcome the need and tendency to cheat and develop better life skills.

I think that if you were intending to repeat bad behavior in the future then you wouldn't be asking a question like this. The application materials for graduate study never, to my knowledge, ask you why you should not be admitted.


How to motivate people to participate in a survey, can I include a call for participation in a paper?

Putting a call for participation in a survey in a paper is a bad idea for several reasons:

You would be putting an ephemeral request in an archival publication that people may be reading a decade from now.  That's just plain gauche.
It is likely to be difficult to get appropriate human subjects approvals
Scientists reading your paper are a highly distorted sample population.

As a more effective alternative, may I suggest looking into Amazon Mechanical Turk, which has gained a lot of popularity in recent years as a means of recruiting study participants?


Review paper authored by a current collaborator

If one author is too close to you, you should decline. I do not review for recent co-authors and current collaborators of mine but I start collaborations with people I reviewed.


Is it appropriate to buy a "thank you" gift for a PhD supervisor?

After your defense, and final submission to the university; you can give the gift, with a thank you note. Right before your defense is a big no, in my opinion.


Should I avoid using personal pronouns in an abstract?

The requirement you have found refers to the text of the graphical abstract, not to the textual abstract. A graphical abstract is an image with little text: thus, it is reasonable to have stricter requirements, with respect to standard abstracts, on what is allowed or not.

See also this page on graphical abstracts.

As for standard abstracts, I quickly checked a few author guides from IEEE, IOP and AIP and none of them seem against the usage of personal pronouns in abstracts. Also The Chicago Manual of Style, 16ed, does not mention anything about the usage of pronouns in abstracts. I've used the pronoun "we" in several abstracts and no one objected.

In general, the main requirement is that the abstract should be self-contained: no citations (if really necessary they should be written inline), or references to figures and tables.


How much public funding do private universities in the United States receive, directly or indirectly?

Estimating indirect subsidies is a much more subtle question than it sounds like.  There's no way to answer it without some economic modeling, and even if you do that, you'll get a debatable answer.

For example, consider tax deductions for charitable donations.  To what extent should they be counted as a subsidy?  (For scale, current-use giving and endowment distributions amounted to 40% of Harvard's budget last year, so how you account for this really matters.)

Imagine a well-off donor, with a marginal tax rate of 33%.  If they donate $1000 and deduct this money from their taxable income, then the government loses $330 in tax revenue.  Should we count the $330 as a government contribution?

One argument says yes.  Imagine that the donor has chosen $1000 because that's how much they feel they can spare.  If they had been charged the $330 tax, then they would have been able to spare only $670 if they wanted to end up keeping the same amount.  This means the tax-deductible donation is really equivalent to a $670 donation from the donor plus a $330 subsidy from the government.  Under this theory, a substantial fraction of charitable giving is really a government subsidy in disguise.

Another argument says no.  Many donors, especially small-to-medium donors, don't make carefully optimized financial decisions based on the tax consequences.  They probably chose $1000 because it sounded like a reasonable number, and would have made the same donation regardless of the tax situation.  In that case, the $330 in reduced taxes ends up as a reward to the donor for being charitable, and it has nothing to do with the university's finances.  To the extent a change in tax policy wouldn't change the donation rate, it's unfair to count the tax deduction as a subsidy.

Of course these aren't the only arguments one could make on this topic, but let's focus on these two.  Now the question is which argument better describes charitable giving practices.  The truth is undoubtedly somewhere in between: donors are in fact influenced by tax deductions, but don't make all their decisions on this basis.  To give a principled number for how great the effective subsidy is, you'll have to model this effect, and the answer may even vary between universities based on differences in their donor pools.

What makes this whole issue even more subject to debate is that politics comes into the picture.  If you view the $330 as tax money that by default belongs to the government, then the whole $330 should obviously be counted as a subsidy.  If you believe the government has no business taxing charities or donations to them, then none of it is a subsidy because the government never had any right to this money in the first place.  Many people lie somewhere between these views, but some pile up at the extremes.

The net effect is that if you really want to figure out how much of an indirect governmental subsidy private universities get in the U.S., you'll first have to articulate your political position, and then do some economic modeling if politics hasn't settled everything yet.  Whatever you decide, someone will tell you you're doing it all wrong.  There is no answer all reasonable people must agree with.


Is it possible to get my habilitation in France while being in industry?

Yes, you may obtain an habilitation as a non-academic, but in fact you may not need one, see below.

An habilitation is a diploma. You would need to register in the doctoral school of a University, so the right person to ask is the director of the doctoral school. I know at least one person who obtained an HDR while working for a company.

However, it is not a simple matter.
For example, the HDR procedure in Mathematics-Computer Science in Bordeaux has five steps before the defense:

File an application. Note that there are prerequisites, such as mandatory training in directing thesis work.
Evaluation of the application by the doctoral school.
Evaluation of the application by the University Academic Council
Formal response. If the response is positive, the candidate must complete their HDR within two years.
Registration as an HDR candidate and constitution of an examining committee.

Once awarded, and HDR confers the right to be sole advisor of a doctoral candidate. It is a sufficient but not necessary condition for applying for a professorship: formally, the prerequisite is a qualification aux fonctions which may be accorded to non-academics (Appendix 11).

Note that a scientist working in industry may co-direct a doctoral student, if at least one of the other director(s) (there may be two others) has an HDR. I don't have my draft of the décret on hand, but if I recall correctly it is not necessary that the scientist have an HDR.


I suggest that you keep a notebook of anything that occurs to you as a possible research question as you go along. Make it a formal notebook with different ideas on different pages. Leave space so that you can add to ideas when they occur to you.
Also, review your notebook(s) periodically and perhaps summarize ideas.
You never know when you will hit a block in your current line of research and need a mental break. Paging through the notebooks can be fun and get you going again.
And mine those notebooks in the future for research ideas.
It is also useful to carry index cards with you at all times so that you can jot down ideas for later entry in the notebook. I find paper is best for all of this, but younger people probably prefer electronic means. But paper lasts. Will you still have that iPhone in 50 years?
So, this would include more than just your communications with your supervisor, but, yes, those too.


Is publishing in your university journal considered a conflict of interest?

In academics, conflicts of interest are generally thought of as conflicts that involve monetary issues. The fact that a publication may contribute to an author getting a promotion or tenure is not considered a conflict of interest. That said, if the university owns a stake in the idea being published, there could be monetary benefits to both the university and author. Authors, however, need to disclose their conflicts of interest, and it this case, they would be expected to mention that the parent company of the publisher also has a conflict of interest.

In these cases, as in all cases, it would be left to the reader to decide how to interpret the results and conclusions. It is worth noting that most editors (regardless of if they are at the same university as the university owned publisher) have a fair amount of autonomy from the publisher and if forced to publish something they disagree with, would likely leave in a vocal manner. Similarly, peer reviewers provide another independent form of input (although they can obviously be overruled).


Is it self-plagiarism if I am up-front about similarities?

As long as the new paper extends the prior one, presents new data or analysis, and you cite properly, you are fine. It is best to pretend you did not write the prior work and cite accordingly, because you assume no special status even though you authored it. This would only become problematic if you attempt to pass off the same work (even if edited) as a distinct novel work.


Applying to PhD programs as a Masters student with no Internship experience

In the UK an internship is not necessary.  In general, an internship is just one way to prove yourself, a paper is another, but good letters of reference can compensate for these.  Generally it's good to have a good mix of skills in your lab.  Don't be defensive about it; just talk about your assets.

On the other hand, if you don't get the PhD offer you want, you might find a research position (or a job) and get some additional research experience that way.  There's always next year for applications.


How can I reference an insight taught in Cousera's Lecture?

A citation like that would be fine, although I wouldn't include 'Technical Report'.  Some citation styles have formats for lectures or other presentations.

However, the Coursera lecture may not be the best thing to cite.

Does the instructor communicate the insight in writing somewhere? For example, in a paper or in published lecture notes for an in-person course?
Does the instructor provide a source for the insights? In which case you may want to cite that. The source may be indicated in supplementary readings or lecture notes.
Do you need to cite it? When in doubt, you should always cite, but you often don't need to cite things that you would ordinarily learn in a class on the subject. The line for this one is pretty fuzzy and nuanced, though, and it depends on how cutting-edge the insight is.

I would not let the ephemerality of Coursera stop you from citing it, but if you can find a better citation you should use it. It is better to cite something that disappears than to not cite.


Is it considered okay to mention all the correction in an accepted article which is typeset by the press

If there are so many issues, I would suggest to not mention every last one of them but instead write a short email to the editor.
Don't go blaming people, ask if there is something you can do, maybe you sent your sources in the wrong format, maybe there was a misunderstanding.

If this journal frequently publishes mathematical papers, they should have proper ways to do things and what happened here is most likely not a small typo that can be mentioned while reading the proof, but a deeper problem that should be solved before doing the final proofreading.
(If, on the other hand, they only use MSWord 2003 and just copied stuff from your .tex-file or PDF, then maybe you need to reconsider your choice of journal...)


How can I find the first researcher who wrote about a specific subject

I'm a little unclear about why you might want the very first, but at least in CS you have a limited history to work with.

The most detailed way to find this is to start with current papers (maybe a good review article) on the subject and to track back the references until you find the first one, paper-by-paper. If you already have a few early papers, obviously looking at their references is a better place to start. You haven't given us the topic area, but you might just ask for the earliest papers on the CS Theory Stackexchange. You might also try searching on Google by year if you are certain that you know the right keywords--binary searching the years back to 1900 or so will probably be most efficient.

Finding the right paper might be a little challenging, especially if the topic has changed names a few times since it started.

Edited to add: If you are at a university with a good library system, you might find a research librarian who does this kind of thing for a living and ask them for help.


Perhaps your dim view of you paper isn't because it isn't good, but rather a reflection of your growth in the field since you wrote it. You have more knowledge and higher standards now. Your old work may seem naive now, though it didn't then, and it might not to other readers.

Yes, I'd list it in grad school applications. As you say it shows some understanding of what research entails which is pretty rare among undergraduates in some places such as the US.

And for most people, your first paper is never your best. It would be a disaster if it were.

Many writers, not just scholars, look back on their early work with a bit of horror. "How could I have been so bad and still succeed?"


Effect on image of a vanity award on CV/Profile

If I saw a vanity award of this type on somebody's CV, I would have a hard time ever taking that person seriously.

At least with predatory publishers, there is often a reasonable excuse: it's easy for people early in their career or at smaller institutions to get tricked by the slicker operations.  Indeed, sometimes the line between low-tier venue and vanity publisher is quite unclear.  As a result, real, sincere scientific work can end up getting sent to a horrible venue. It's unlikely to be very good work (just by correlation, since poorly connected researchers are less likely to be producing good work), but any shame associated with such a publication can be readily diluted by publishing good publications in good venues.

A vanity award of the sort you describe, however, I can see no such mitigating circumstances. When random people you've never heard of before ask you for money to call you "Scientist of the Year," you can only accept if you are very gullible or very vain.  Moreover, unlike a publication in a bad venue, there is no reason to keep such a terrible award on one's CV unless you still believe it is somehow valid.

In short: I would consider a vanity award on a CV to be quite ridiculous, and a good reason to have a high degree of suspicion of a person's work unless given strong evidence to the contrary.


Can a committee reject thesis after approving it

There's no way to give a definitive answer without knowing your specific university's policies, but here's how it works in general:

If the degree has not yet been awarded, then the approval can presumably be reversed fairly easily.

If the degree has already been awarded, it can still be revoked if the university decides it should never have been awarded in the first place, but this would be rather dramatic.  It's not going to happen unless something is terribly wrong with the thesis.  In particular, you don't need to worry about this unless the problems are much worse than you have portrayed them as being.


Can leader position in a team make up for post-doc experience?

I'm not exactly sure what your dilemma is. Normally a post doc is valuable because it helps you get a good position (i.e. not as a post doc). If you can do that otherwise, a post doc seems to me to be of little value. Of course, it can lead to broadening your circle of collaboration, which is a good thing, but there are other ways to do that also.

I think that most post docs would rather be post post docs. With real and secure positions.


Looks like you don't need any permission.  See https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/


Can we buy licenses for e-books and lend them to students?

Generally speaking, when you purchase digital content, you are usually purchasing a license for said content. You will have to read the license to find out what the terms are. For example, here is the general license agreement for the Kindle store. It states that as a general rule:

  Unless specifically indicated otherwise, you may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense, or otherwise assign any rights to the Kindle Content or any portion of it to any third party

which would prohibit the scheme you suggest in the general case ("unless specifically indicated otherwise").

Similarly, for books sold in the Google Play store, the license terms include the following:

  You may not lend or co-own any of your Books on Google Play purchases with another person.

The specific license terms can vary by content distributor, publisher, and individual book.

In cases where lending is permitted (e.g. some Kindle books), it's usually very restricted - for ordinary customers. Libraries can purchase licenses for some books that are more permissive for lending purposes. You should consult with your university librarians about what options are available to them.

You may be able to find an appropriate book for your purposes with a permissive license that allows lending (maybe even some open educational resources, if you're really lucky), but this will probably take some work.


How to deal with a colleague who always puts you down?

I favor the Confusingly Positive/Neutral Response in these situations.

"So-and-so did Awesome Thing and you --" "Wow, that's great! When will it be published? I'd like to read it."
"What was your undergrad GPA?" "Uh, I don't even remember. It got me in here, though, and I love it here!"
"Bah, what you're doing is garbage." "I'm finding it a lot of fun, and learning a lot!"

When she pulls these stunts in front of others, you will look infinitely classier than she for refusing to play the game.


Do medical doctors publish academic papers and write grant proposals?

Yes. Medical schools generate large proportions of the grant funding at many major research universities. Most faculty (except possibly research-only faculty) in medical schools have an M.D. degree. Research expectations for clinical-only faculty are often meager but faculty that conduct research at major universities often need to PI large grants to receive tenure.


What is the best way of keeping track of academic readings and persons?

Although you are aware of this already, I feel I need to state how satisfied I am with mostly using google scholar + a feed reader + a bibliography manager for this. Although it is not integrated, I don't currently feel any need to search for a better all in one platform.

I use google reader to subscribe to RSS feeds for online first and published articles for journals I am interested in (any reader which you can organize feeds into folders and search should be fine - I suspect many have better search capabilities that google reader). The vast majority of journals this is not much of a time suck to read all the titles and peruse abstracts I am interested in. The most prodiguous publications (e.g. Science/Nature) are only borderline annoying with 60+ posts a week, but even that is not that difficult to quickly navigate through.

I have a few fairly specific google scholar alerts (as well as general google alerts), so as to not get too much in my inbox. I basically have a few key words in articles specific to my research interest, and I have alerts for specific authors. I also have alerts to people who cite my articles.

I use CiteULike to manage my bibliography + personal database on my local machine to export various formats (e.g. bibtex or specific citation format). This has the added benefit that I can send articles directly from google reader to citeulike, but I suspect the same set-up could be crafted for other bibliography managers (Zotero, Mendeley) and possible other feed readers.

Basically in a nut-shell,

feed reader to stay up to date with newly published articles in journals I am interested in,
google scholar alerts for potentially related material that isn't in those journals, and
a bibliography manager to store articles to read later on.


Returning to academia after a year in industry

Sure, why not? What you write makes me think that you could tell them exactly the way you tell it here: Being recovered from the PhD and full of fresh ideas.

It is not unheard of that PhD students need to recover from the PhD by doing some different kind of work for a while (such as a couple of years in industry, I've even heard of running a store in a completely different retail sector).
Personally, I think that it should be taken as a warning sign if this happens regularly. However, that consideration doesn't have anything to do with your position, but I think it is worth while remembering when you enter the side of PhD supervisors.

Regardless of how much enthusiasm you've gained back I think it would be a good idea to sit down and recall what exactly drove you away and what caused you feel (close to) burned out - in order to avoid getting there again. I somehow think it unlikely that a postdoc position would be more calm than a PhD.


Where can I get a cheap, virtual, high-performance server suitable for academic use?

In most countries, there exist high performance computers that researchers can apply for access to.  For example, in Sweden there is the National Supercomputer Centre, and other countries have similar projects.  When you get access, you get a limited number of core-hours (for example, if you have 5000 core hours, you can run 50 cores for 100 hours or 500 cores for 10 hours) to be used over a specific period of time (for example, one year).

To apply for access, you may have to go through someone who is employed at a university, if you aren't.  If you are a student, you hopefully have a supervisor who can apply for your project.  Or they might have special services for students!


How much actual funding does a Marie Curie fellowship entail?

The website has a bunch of information if you look in the right place, in the applicant guide. All your questions are essentially answered by this paragraph:

The living allowance is the EU contribution to the gross salary costs of the researcher and amounts to EUR 4,880 per month. It can only be used to this end.
This amount is adjusted through  the  application  of  a country  correction  coefficient (CCC) for the cost of living according to the country in which the beneficiary is located. For the outgoing phase of the Global Fellowship, the country correction coefficient of the TC partner organisation will be applied. However, the adjusted amount will not change in case  of  secondments  to  a  partner  organisation  in  another  MS  or  AC.  The  country correction coefficients that will be applied are indicated in Table 1 in Part 3 of the Work Programme (Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions).

I'll let you read the rest. There is also a mobility allowance of 600€/month and a family allowance of 500€/month. There are also a few annex costs. Bear in mind that this is a gross amount.
I didn't search for the Work Programme (it's somewhere online, I imagine), but in France, the resulting net salary is around 3000€/month, which is extremely good for a postdoc; to give an idea, the median net salary for employees is 1789€ nationwide. I have a few friends who got or supervised postdocs like this in several European countries, none of them had to complain about the salary, quite the contrary.


Appendix subsections: Group by content or topic

I think that depends on how big your appendix is. If you have, say, only five items in your appendix, sectioning them would seem like an overkill. If you have fifty on the other hand, putting them into sections according to you thesis layout would seem fit. Usually they just get numbers like "A1", "A2", etc. regardless if it is a table, figure or something else.

Grouping by type of appendix item does not make any sense to me (tables, then figures, then raw data). Sorting should be according to the order the items are mentioned in the thesis.


How to query gender in a multiple-choice poll/survey?

I have previously seen this done in the following simple way:

Female
Male
Other (fill in blank) ________
Decline to Answer

This makes the common case (Male/Female) easy to code, allows unbounded expression for people who don't fall into that category, and also allows people to opt out of providing the information.

Your IRB, of course, will need to review this just as they do with all other parts of your survey.


How can I convince my instructor to allow me to self-study?

It may be that you just have to comply with the instructor's wishes and do what is asked. Words are probably not going to convince them.
But, if you really want to convince them that you know the material, ask them to give you an exam, perhaps an oral exam, on the required material. If you do well, then they may be convinced. But if not, then you have the information you need that you really aren't ready.
An oral exam need only take 10 or 15 minutes, actually. Either you struggle or you excel. It can become obvious quickly which "bin" you fall in to.


Is it possible for MSc (India) student to pursue MS in US?

So long as you meet or exceed (but not by too much!) the graduate admission requirements of a department, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to study there. There's no fixed rule that says that you can't do a master's in India then do one in the US as well. (If there is such a rule, it applies only to the departments or universities that impose them; there are no universal rules that govern US graduate admissions.)

The best bet is, of course, to contact the schools you're interest in attending and ask them directly what their policies are.


Asking the professor to advocate my application in admission committee?

Notice that pretty much 95% of the time the faculty "encourage" applicants to submit an application, unless it's an obvious bad fit. This is to say, if he says "don't apply," it'd be a strong evidence not to; but if he says "please apply," its meaning can range from neutral to highly positive.

A less risky way to partially achieve your goal is by setting up an environment for that conversation between the committee and the professor to happen without asking the professor to do so. One usual way to do that is: i) contact the said professor and ask if you can mention his name in your personal statement; and if yes, then ii) in your personal statement, mention that:

  ... the conversation with Prof. So-and-so was very encouraging and
  reinforced my desire to study in this program,

or anything along that line. Don't exaggerate, don't write anything that's untrue. If the committee does need extra input, they may approach the faculty member.

Let's say, you submitted the package already without doing the above, then the best you can do right now is to contact the professor and i) thank him for the time and encouragement, and ii) tell him that you have submitted an application, and that your desire to enter the program remains very strong. That's it. Do not ask for any favor as this behavior can be viewed negatively. If you truly did leave a strong impression, the faculty member may mention your portfolio to the committee.

And lastly, don't feel despair if this does not happen. An individual faculty member's input rarely makes/breaks the deal. One of such possibilities is if you're financially sponsored by the person (Aka, if he has a lab and a grant to fund your study, then his recommendation is essential.) In other cases, I'd guess most of the decision would still be based on your academic records and research-related experience.


What percentage of PhD candidates drop out in computer science?

The Times Higher Education looked at PhD completion rates in the UK. In the UK, PhD programs are nominally 3 years long, and the Times reported that, averaged across all fields, 70% of students obtain a PhD within 7 years. They predict that 80% of students who start a PhD in the UK will obtain one within 25 years. There are some data for MIT students which shows completion rates asymptote at around 80% after about 8-10 years. There is a fair amount of variability across fields in how quickly the asymptote is reached (e.g., the average PhD in Business is short compared to Medicine), but in all fields about 80% of students obtain a PhD. I was not able to find any numbers for German universities or CS specifically.

These numbers, however, leave out the substantial number of students who stick out grad school because they do not want to "fail". While trying out grad school might sound good in theory, just make sure you are the type of person willing to drop out if it is not right for you.


Some people think it's ok to call yourself PhD ABD when in the Canadian or US system, you pass the qualifying exams and coursework, but haven't yet, or fail to ever, deliver the thesis.

But simply do not call yourself PhD ABD.

It's not attractive to advertise failure.

You're either a PhD candidate, or you're a PhD, or there's nothing to say on the subject (bar a line on the CV filling in the black hole on your timeline with discreet mention of an aborted doctorate). PhD ABD is a ludicrous pseudo-title.

A PhD that's All But Dissertation is like an espresso that is All But Coffee. It's hot water with a bit of sugar, thus defeating the entire purpose of the exercise.


Status and selectivity of open access journals

Open access vs. closed access is a totally separate issue from quality of journal.  There are high quality open access journals and low quality ones, and high quality traditional journals and low quality ones.  There may be some correlation because open access journals tend to be newer and so less established, but nonetheless if you want to determine the quality of a particular journal you should look at that specific journal not try to extrapolate based on whether it's open access or not.


approximate time for indexing a conference proceeding

Yes it is possible for a significant amount of time to elapse between the conference and appearance of articles on IEEE Xplore. For example, here is a link to one of my papers which appeared in the proceedings of an IEEE conference that was held in September 2016, and it was added to IEEE Xplore in the end of February 2017.

Note that you can actually see both the Date of Conference and Date Added to IEEE Xplore on that page as well, right below the abstract. So you could also look up some articles from previous editions of the specific congress that you went to, and see how much time it took for that congress in previous years (but of course it doesn't have to be the same this year).


It depends on the university. At most of the universities in the UK I know, a position is usually called research fellow if it either is a temporary position or a position with less teaching obligations.
However, there is no general rule about what one calls a research fellow. It may even be different from department to department (Oxford is an interesting example, there it can mean pretty much everything).
If it is a suitable academic career option depends therefore more on the university itself and the conditions of the position (how much teaching, is it a permanent position?), than on the name of the position.

About the difference between the countries: There are large differences between countries, not only in the names (which differ of course, due to different languages). For example in Germany most positions are only temporary positions without tenure track.


Is it OK to accept that your name be included in the authors list of a paper you have done next to nothing about?

No

This is called "gift authorship" and is generally regarded as unethical.

The widely accepted Vancouver Protocol gives the following conditions for authorship:

  The ICMJE recommends that authorship be based on the following 4 criteria:

  Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND
  Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; AND
  Final approval of the version to be published; AND
  Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

If you have not done those four things, then it is not ethical to be listed as an author.


Importance of grades when applying to Master's degree program?

Actually, admissions to master's degree programs are quite different than PhD admissions. Doctoral programs are research programs, and therefore promise as a researcher is perhaps the most important criterion of all to satisfy.

However, at the master's level, this may or may not be the case—many master's programs feature no research (purely coursework), or only a small amount of research (for instance, a one-semester research project, or a lab course, or something similar). In such cases, research is not emphasized nearly as much, and undergraduate track record takes on greater significance. Similarly, "terminal master's" programs—ones that represent "end degrees" in their own right—will likely have less of a research background focus than degrees that are intended to prepare a student for doctoral studies.

The other issue is the style of admissions: for "US-style" admissions, research will likely be more important than it is in "European-style" admissions, where research plays essentially no role at all in admissions to master's programs (although research is a prerequisite for PhD studies!).


If a paper or software is released to the public, can the university still file a patent?

Yes, in most cases, dissemination of a patentable invention by academic publication (papers, talks, code) constitutes prior art and will result in a later patent application being rejected. That is why people and institutions who intend to patent their discoveries are very careful about what they publish, and when. (Basically, publish after the patent application is field.)

Regarding your patent evasion scheme, it would probably work in practice, but could lead to severe retaliation from your institution. You said yourself that the policy is to report all patentable inventions. By not doing so, and publishing without first enquiring whether your employer wants to patent the invention, you violate the policy... And, given your question, you would be doing so willingly and in bad faith. This sort of thing could get you fired. And, the could get the papers retracted (look at some of the examples of this on Retraction Watch).

Finally, on piece of advice: if you're so afraid that your employer owns the IP you create, enough to look for strategies to remove from them some of the IP they pay you to create, you should consider quitting. It doesn't look like you have a healthy relationship with your employer.


What is the chance of an 'invited manuscript submission' to be accepted?

In my experience from my own invited submissions to those of my colleagues' being invited means the journal trusts you to produce something worth publishing. Therefore, unless you mess things up, your manuscript should be easily accepted for publication.

However, that means you should be extra careful. Your public exposure relies on your publication record. You don't want to look bad. So make sure (i) the journal is truly respected in the area; (ii) nothing silly gets published. There is a tendency to slacken peer review whenever authors are invited to submit, meaning overlooked mistakes may more easily make it to final publication version. I'd recommend you find yourself one very picky colleague to peer review your manuscript on the side, prior to submission.


Is it a violation of copyright if I draw and publish a figure very similar to another person's published figure?

Copyright protects not only the original content itself but also anything which is clearly derived from the original content.  That is why plagiarism doesn’t depend on whether you copied, retyped, or minorly reworded.

If you created a figure using a figure that somebody else drew as a template, then it does not matter if there are minor differences between your figure and their figure. Because your creation is closely deirved from their creation, then it is still their copyright, from both a moral and legal perspective (personally, as a scientist I find the moral perspective more compelling than the legal).

If you had simply created a figure from scratch, then it is highly unlikely that it would appear closely similar to another person’s figure – there are simply too many possible personal choices in how to diagram the same ideas, even for fairly simple ideas.

At this point, there are two ways to proceed (assuming that the rest of your content is intellectually honest):

Create your own diagrams from scratch with significantly different content, reflecting the different ways in which you think about the area.
Obtain rights permissions from the original publisher, and include “(figure adapted from […])” in your paper. Many publishers have an automated online method for obtaining fragment reuse rights, which can then be sent to the publisher handling your paper.  If the original figure was posted in a free-reuse medium (e.g., a US or UK government report), then you may not have to do formal obtaining of rights.


Is it reasonable for authors and editor to ignore review comments without explanation?

Remember, your view of the process is incomplete. Don't jump to conclusions. For example, this could've happened: the editor sent the manuscript for revision, which the authors took a few weeks to perform. The editor was able to check the revision without needing your help, so they made a decision without inviting you to review the revision. You mention that given the "very short time" between you submitting the review and the decision, the paper must've been accepted without revisions, but "a few weeks" is not a short time.

Another, more drastic possibility is, during the review period the lead author died, and the none of the remaining authors were sufficiently motivated to perform the necessary controls. The paper then became a "either you publish this or it'll go unpublished" paper and the editor made the judgment call to publish it (you did say the work is valuable!).

I suggest saving your anger until after the paper is published. You can read it then and compare against the version you have. If you indeed find that the editor ignored your review, you can write to the editor then asking why they ignored your review.


How should a prof assign duty for a course with a discussion forum/board?

You ask "How should a professor assign duty ..." which is really an unanswerable question.  I think the real question is "How can the team of TAs handle this workload in a way that is fair and not overwhelming?"
As other people have said in the comments, I think you need to set some boundaries about amount of time, but also that you will not answer all individual questions. For example say there are multiple questions about problem 8. You do one answer for all of them. That's one reason not to rush in immediately, rather wait until you see what the pattern of questions are.
It's a little hard to address this without knowing the subject matter or the kinds of questions. Also in covid times it is important to be kind to and understanding of  students and the way that technology challenges are now a hundred times greater.  Further, problems that used to be solved in 2 minutes during a live class now take hours, both for you and them.
I know you are limited by what your supervisor will allow but I'd like to make some suggestions.   But before that I will also say that it is okay for you to set boundaries on when you will answer questions and response times. Don't be mean, but explain. For example, maybe a TA will come in at noon every day and try to answer questions, and another will come at 6.

First, discussion boards are not really a great way to do questions
and answers, and definitely not for expert answers (and the TAs are
the experts).  They can be great for peer to peer support and
that's what I'd suggest you encourage.  Can you ask your supervisor
if you could give extra credit (or even credit) for students who
answer questions?  Or even without that, can you encourage students
to jump in and help each other?  (I've found that my students can
often answer the technology questions really well, maybe they have
the same brand of phone or computer with the same OS which I don't
have.)

Second, notice on how Stack Exchange -- which is a set of sites
devoted to answering questions -- there are well defined rules
including obsessive refusal to answer duplicate questions.  Get
yourself and the students in the habit of searching for an existing
answer first. Teach them how to search effectively.
Also, write up a document "how to ask a good question" and revise it
as you get better at managing this. Put links to it everywhere.

Third, build up your documentation and knowledge base. You could
potentially use other features of your LMS for this (e.g. Blackboard
has so many ways of doing things that no one can use them all).  For
example, if the class is not using the wiki feature, start using
that. Or you could use Google docs. Or a lot of other things. You
could do FAQ but you can also start other things. Again, you can also
get the students contributing if it makes sense. Also if you are
answering questions that are strictly informational, post the
information prewritten (or less good, with well described links) at
the top of every page or in your signature. Try to do this in a way
that it can be used again next semester.

Fourth, teach students how to answer their own questions by showing
how to find information online or in their textbook or syllabus.
Many actually don't know how to use the index or table of contents of
the text books. Or, for example, "I searched with keywords x, y, z
and found this useful video."   This gets to asking good questions,
but also, don't just answer, do things like say read page 329 and
then come back with questions based on that.

Fifth, once you have figured out how to actively sort questions where
students are really having complicated problems from the rest,
consider going into a meeting 1:1 or with a small group.  It's much,
much easier to answer the questions that way because you go back and
forth in real time.  If you record (and everyone involved is
comfortable) you can also post the recording of the answer.

Sixth, provide structure (and you may have to experiment with what
works.  For example set up separate boards for questions about
technology, questions about due dates and other syllabus related
issues, and then questions about each topic or chapter and then you
can have others like "careers" and "random."

Seventh, have some prewritten templates so you can just fill in specific information.

I'm sure that there are lots of other things you can do too.


What are typical formats of “scholarly work”?

Yes, a simple list of citations of your scholarly works. In most fields, that's journal articles and books, in others it would also include conference papers. If you have a small list of papers, you could also include poster presentations.
Even if your field typically uses really brief citations, I would suggest something like APA with complete author names.
If possible, people often bold their names in the list of authors, or star their first/shared-first-author papers.


How/when to become independent in research as a graduate student?

Context: I'm an older PhD student (mid-50s) and had a couple of publications before entering the PhD program. I'm in an interdisciplinary field where there are few well-established research programs. It's very common for PhD students to embark on their own research interests that are different from their advisers.  Myself, I started submitting papers after my first semester based on class projects and side projects. I even developed a paper that started as my answer to a question on our Candidacy Exam. I was a research assistant for three years with sole responsibility for a very complex Agent-based Modeling simulation.

  To what extent should a graduate student be dependent on faculty members? How can he be more independent and start his own research activities?

Start as soon as possible to develop your own intellectual curiosity. This involves thinking hard about the research in your field relative to the fundamental questions in the field. This is more than "picking sides" in intellectual debates. It involves developing mental models of your field, the various research methods, research questions, and research results.  What's important?  What is not?

You might start with a single important paper.  Look at the section of the paper where they describe opportunities for further research, or maybe limitations. Read other papers that critique this important paper.  All the time, you should be asking yourself: "What do I think should be done to improve/extend/solidify this research?"

You could also start with a survey paper, which often include extensive discussions of future research directions.

As soon as possible, you should put your intellectual curiosity into action.  I'm fond of class projects and papers for that but not all disciplines have courses that support project work.  Either way, "directed reading" courses are ideal settings to write conference or journal papers of your choice under the supervision of a professor (not necessarily your adviser).

  Is it a good idea [to do] the graduate work on another topic with the faculty member or work independently on a more recent research topic?

If your intellectual curiosity leads you to research questions/methods that can be successfully done in collaboration with a faculty member, then approach them and suggest a collaboration.  If, like me, your interests and ideas lead elsewhere, then do your research independently.

  If the person is in a research group or at the university, is it a good idea or is it ethical that he develop his own research interests, besides to the topics which are being developed in that institute?

It's a good idea to develop and invest in your own research interests if they diverge from your research group.  There is no problem with ethics if you are open and forthcoming about what you are doing and why.  This might go against the cultural norms of the university or research group, but you should make decisions you feel good about in terms of your ethics and values.  If other people aren't happy with them or push back, then my view is that is their problem. If they have power, you may suffer negative consequences.  So be it.  Don't bow before people in power just because they are in power.

  How should a graduate student manage this and make some progress in the research fields of his own interest? (In particular, sometimes the faculty members are not interested in the topics you are interested in and the person has to start his own research activity.)

Make a work plan.  What is your output (results, papers, articles)?  Where will you submit it?  In what sequence?  How much time will it take -- daily, weekly, monthly?  If you can't make a plan that answers these questions, recruit a mentor.  It could be anyone who you respect and who knows your field, maybe faculty at your university or maybe someone far distant.

In general, the more you can weave your independent research into your other activities and projects, the better off you will be.  That's why I like class projects.  But same goes for research assistant work, industry work, or other work.  Look for as much synergy between all these activities as you can.

  [...] if this research is part of his independent research, [...] what affiliation should be used in the publications? Should it be "Independent Scholar" as mentioned in this link or something else?

No, you shouldn't use "Independent Scholar" as affiliation as long as you have an official affiliation as a graduate student, post-doc, or other. You should always use your primary affiliation, even if it is Physics and your paper is in Art History.  The exception is if you have multiple official affiliations (e.g. Visiting Researcher) and your research was done at or was supported by these other affiliated institutions.


I read recently in economics a single publication in a distinct top-tier journal earns you professorship. Hard to understand for me as a physicist, but if it is really like this and I know the ratio PhD students/professors in economics is much much smaller than in experimental sciences (at least in Germany), then you have to live with the fact that the acception/rejection is more difficult/sophisticated and more lottery-like than in other scientific branches. On the other hand, your chances to get tenure are likely also much higher than in those. I hope this solaces you a bit :-)

And if you got 2 papers published already, you know there is nothing wrong with the way you write your papers in general.


How to minimize cheating while running a computer-based quiz?

If you have control over the lab software

Have your IT dept install software that will allow you to monitor the activity on each system. I think the term is Classroom management software. Sit back and watch for suspicious activity.

Otherwise - adapt

I like the strategies discussed in this question about take-home exams (How to prevent cheating on take-home exams)

The TL/DR - think about how you might test learning of the material in a situation where students ARE going to collaborate and ARE going to access materials on the subject.

My two cents on the concept of computer based exams

  it seems to me that this is a better way to evaluate students' programming skills than a paper-based quiz/exam, given that in the real world, people write code on a computer, not on paper.

I don't agree with this statement, because in the real world people also have access to other supports like references and peers while writing code on a computer.

I don't think writing a coding exam on a computer actually tests knowledge of coding any better than writing code on paper. In fact, in some ways it hampers student performance because they must focus on creating properly formatted, compilable, code instead of getting their knowledge of the concepts on paper.
Pseudo code is faster to write and easier to evaluate.

If you want to test their ability to write executable code, give them assignments.


Choosing between a one page abstract in conference proceedings and full version on arXiv, or publishing full paper in conference proceedings

You are basically choosing whether you want this paper to be considered "published" in its current state, where "published" means "published in a peer reviewed venue."

If you decide that this paper should be "published" now, then you may be precluded from "publishing" it again in essentially the same form. Hence the option to "publish" only an abstract, which won't preclude later submission to another publication venue.
If you decide that this paper should not be "published" now, then for many purposes (e.g. promotion and tenure at some institutions, hiring processes that count the number of publications) it isn't credited as a publication. This may seem like a useless distinction, but bureaucratic processes are often a little bit stupid like that. Furthermore, there is a possibility that it won't ever be "published": it is accepted for publication now with 100% probability, but once you decline that offer, you no longer have 100% probability of acceptance somewhere that you'd like to publish.

Depending on the maturity of the work, the quality of this conference proceedings, and your future plans for the work, you may decide that you are ready for this paper to be "published" now in this conference proceedings, or that you're not.


Would I have to conduct an experiment to write a scientific paper?

A scientific paper doesn't necessarily have to be based on an original experiment. You can write a paper that's a review (whether systematic or just comprehensive literature review) of the current body of literature for a specific topic or a meta analysis. You can also write papers that are derived from original experiments that you ran or secondary analyses of data from experiments run by others.

It depends on what the purpose of the paper is. If it's to introduce an entirely new phenomenon or theory, original experiments are pretty common. If it's to argue that current theories or concepts may be flawed in certain ways or you want to add something to existing literature, then meta analyses, original experiments, and secondary data analyses can all be relatively common and appropriate. If it's to introduce a new perspective to a theory or concept, then comprehensive literature reviews may suffice. This can also depend on what field you're in, so consider what the norms are in your field and whether the journal you want to publish in accepts the specific paper type.


Use of automated assessment of programming assignments

TL;DR

We did something along this lines for Java-based programming assignments. Students and TAs generally like it. It was a lot of work for us.

(Very) Long Version

I used to teach software engineering at a large public university in Austria. We implemented a similar approach for two courses back there, for a 400+ students bachelor-level distributed systems course, and for a 150 students master-level course on middleware and enterprise application engineering. Both courses included large, time-consuming Java-based programming assignments, which students needed to solve individually three times per semester.

Traditionally, students would submit their solutions for both courses as Maven projects via our university-wide Moodle system. After the deadline, TAs would download and execute the submissions, and grade manually based on extensive check lists that we provided. There was usually a bit of huffing and puffing among students about this grading. Sometimes, TAs would not understand correct solutions (after looking at dozens of similar programs, your mind tends to get sloppy). Sometimes, different TAs would grade similar programs differently (the sheer size required some parallelization of grading and the tasks were complex, hence it was impossible to do check lists that covered all possible cases). Sometimes, the assignments were actually under-specified or unclear, and students lost points for simple misunderstandings. Sometimes, applications that actually worked on the student's machine failed on the TA's machine. Generally, it was hard for students to estimate in advance how many points their submissions would be worth. Given that those two courses are amongst the most difficult / most time-consuming courses in the entire SE curriculum, this was all but optimal.

Hence, we decided to move to a more automated solution. Basically, we codified our various check lists into a set of hundreds of JUnit test cases, which we gave to our students in source code. Additionally, we kept back a smaller set of tests, which were similar but used different test data. The tests would also serve as reference implementation - if the assignment text did not specify how e.g., a given component should behave in a given borderline case, what the tests expected was the expected behavior. Our promise to the students was that, if all the tests for a given task pass, and the student did not game our test system (more on this below), not much can go wrong anymore with the grading (it was possible to get minor point losses anyway for things impossible to test automatically, but those things could not amount for more than a small percentage of all points).

EDIT after comments
Note that I was saying more automated, not fully automated. Human TAs still look at the code. There is no grading Web service or something like that (this usually does not work, as keshlam correctly notes). On a high level, what we did is that we provided the requirements for students not only in written text anymore, but also in form of formal executable unit tests. The new process is roughly like that:

TA downloads submission from Moodle and starts tests (takes about 10 minutes).
While tests are running, TA browses over the code, does some spot checking of code, and checks a few things not covered by the tests.
When the tests are done, the TA notes down the results of the tests and his own observations.
If something severe happens (e.g., compile error), the TA sighs, takes a deep breath, and falls back to manually grading (and, likely, complaining a bit in our mailing list).

Advantages:

Students now have a good feeling about how many points they will get in the end. No nasty surprises anymore.
The TA effort for grading is now much, much lower, maybe 1/3 of the previous time. Hence, they have more time to look at problematic solutions and help students actually produce assignments.
The tests, good or bad (more on this later), are the same for everybody. Lenient and strict TAs are much less of a problem.
Working solutions now work no matter if the grading TA understands the solution or not.
Students get rapid feedback on the quality of their solution, but not so rapid that it makes sense to just program against the tests without thinking. One good side effect of the way we built our tests is that simply executing the tests for many tasks takes  10+ minutes (starting an application server, deploying code, ...). Students need to think before starting tests, just like they would if they would test against, e.g., a real staging server.
Students do not need to waste time writing test applications / test data. Before, one problem that made the student effort in these courses skyrocket was that students did not only have to program the assignments themselves, but also needed to write various demo programs / test data sets to test and showcase their solutions. This has become entirely obsolete with the automated test framework, significantly reducing the amount of boilerplate code that students need to write. In the end, we can now focus more on the actual content of the labs, and not on writing stupid test code.
All in all, our personal impression as well as student evaluations have shown that the majority of students appreciates the automated test system.

Problems:

The initial effort for us was certainly non-trivial. Coming up with the first version of the tests required a concerted effort of 6 or more TAs and 2 junior faculty over multiple months during the summer (not full-time of course, but still). Note that this was even though we utilize a widely used, standard testing framework - the effort was just in codifying our grading rules, finding and defining all corner cases, and writing everything down in useful tests. Further, as the assignments are complex distributed systems, so were the tests - we had to start application servers in-memory, hot-deploy and undeploy code, and make sure that all of this works out of the box on all major OS versions. All in all, writing the tests was an actual project, that required a lot of leadership and time commitment.
While, overall, our total time spent arguing about grading has decreased, it is not zero. Most importantly, as students can now see the grading guidelines clearly written down in source code, they seem to feel more compelled to question requirements and grading decisions than before. Hence, we now get a lot of But why should I do it like that? Doing it in X-Y-Other-Way would be much better! questions and complaints (incidentally, in practically all cases, the "much better" way is also much less work / much easier for the student).
While we were able to cover most of our original assignments, some things are impossible to cover in tests. In these cases, TAs still need to grade manually. In addition, in order to make our test framework technically work, students are now a bit more restricted in how they can solve the assignments than before.
Some students feel compelled to try to game our grading system. They spend significant efforts into finding solutions that do not actually solve the assignments but still get full points. In general, these efforts fail (as we actually have pretty sophisticated backend tests that do not only check whether the behavior is correct on interface level, but also look "under the hood"). Occasionally, they succeed, leading us to improve our tests.
Initially, we received some flack from a few students for a small number of bugs in our tests. The bugs were easy to fix and mostly not particularly severe, and most students understand that if you roll out a couple thousand lines of Java code for the first time, bugs will happen. However, some will take the opportunity to complain. A lot.
We had the impression that the number of copied solutions (plagiarism) was up the first time we rolled out the automated tests. Note that we had automated plagiarism checks long before, and nothing had changed in this regard, but apparently students assumed that cheating would go unnoticed with the automated testing.


Master's degree in science is generally not free in US, CANADA, UK, OZ, NZ? (Tuition)

In the US, PhD students typically have their tuition paid by the federal grant that also pays them a salary or waived by their universities. It is not exactly free, but it may be paid on your behalf.

My understanding is that also typically any student paid on a grant as a graduate research assistant has their tuition paid. This covers master's and PhD students. I don't recall if this is my institution's policy or NSF's, but it is pretty common.

These are both common situations, but neither is guaranteed. The vast majority PhD students in STEM have their tuition covered somehow and also get work as GRAs or TAs or have some sort of fellowship or stipend. There are lots of models. Universities don't want to take on a long-term (4-6+ years) commitment to get a PhD student through to their dissertation while running the risk they might have to leave or work an unrelated job to cover costs. Master's students are less commitment (2ish years), but there are opportunities for them, too.

The vast majority of GRA seekers that cold email me looking for positions are master's students without a job looking to get their tuition covered and make a half-time salary. PhD students mostly don't have to do this because they get some sort of package when they are admitted.


Now that you have discovered the issues, you need to get to the bottom of whether they matter. If they typos make the conclusions wrong, you have a more serious issue than if they don't change the overall results.

It doesn't seem like a figure caption is likely to matter (unless it implies the exact opposite of the correct caption, like "Death Rate" instead of "Survival Rate").

An equation typo is unlikely to matter unless it invalidates a proof or gives the wrong values in the final form of an expression. You ought to be able to determine this now.

The citation mistake is annoying because a stickler could accuse you of plagiarism. I think that's unlikely, but it's probably worth fixing if you can.

My recommendation would be to show these three errors to your advisor (assuming your relationship is good) and ask for their advice. Helping out with these kinds of issues is their job. Also, they can probably help you navigate/find your university's policy for dealing with thesis errata. Given that pretty much everyone makes mistakes, I'd expect there to be some sort of mechanism for correcting inconsequential mistakes.

If the errors are more important or change the results of your work, you're really going to need your advisor's help. I think talking to them and working through the consequences together are your best bet.


Is there a point to setting assignment deadlines and late penalties besides practicality?

Your proposed system reduces to the case where all assignments have their deadlines effectively at the end of the course. Courses with such a system do exist, but I am not aware how common this is.
One reason I can think of as to why early deadlines may help is the ability to give feedback. Providing feedback for each assignment before the next allows the students to catch misconceptions and flaws in problem solving approaches early, which in turn can help them perform better in subsequent assignments. While this reason still does not require that there be early "hard" deadlines (e.g. students could get feedback whenever they submit), I still think it counts as an argument in its favour as it helps in better achieving the learning objectives.


How to change career as a software engineer in UK at 30 s' age? I am BSc graduate(Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry)

You will want some sort of training - even self training. If you aren't a programmer already you will need to become one in some popular language. There are online courses and other face to face instruction that you might be able to find locally. It can be hard to learn from some online programs since there is less of a "goad" provided by a professor who grades your work and gives feedback.

There are a lot of self taught programmers, of course. Many of them are deficient in key areas required for actual development. Even such things as data structures and algorithms might be missing. Don't fall into the trap that all you need is some familiarity with, for example, Java or C. Go a bit deeper.

The UK has an excellent "distance" program in CS run by Open University. You can use them or other 'local' UK universities to give you what you need.

You might also be able to connect up with some open source project, initially as just an observer and later, as you learn some things, as a contributor. You can do this sort of thing from anywhere that has internet connectivity. But better if you can find some assistance. Even another person or two with similar interests so you have someone to discuss issues with.

Your background will make some parts of your learning regimen easier, I think.

Learn a lot and write some interesting programs. Large ones if possible. And don't neglect the human/organizational side of software development. Modern programs are built by teams for the most part.


Using one's middle name in place of their first name in academia

Why do some people use middle name for their first name like attorneys?

Perhaps they don't like their first name, or maybe there's already a well-known person in their field with the same name, so they need to distinguish themselves.

  And is this ok in the academic venue?

Yes.


Updating Paper Status after Applying to Graduate School

Yes, a paper acceptance may be worth updating a graduate school application.  It probably won't make a difference, and the update might not even get noticed at all if your application has already been read.  However, it's worth a try.

Updates to your application should be submitted sparingly.  Most people should not do it at all, and nobody should do it more than once.  It's inappropriate to submit an update that you could have included in the original application, since that would just be circumventing the application deadline.  However, it can occasionally make sense for external validation such as prizes or paper acceptances, because the timing is not under your control.

  If so, what would be the appropriate way to do this?

First, you should check whether the online application system has a method for submitting updates after the deadline.  I would bet that it doesn't, because nobody wants to solicit or encourage updates, but if it does then you should submit the update this way.

Otherwise, you should look at the graduate admissions webpage for the department to try to find an e-mail address for inquiries.  Usually there's a special e-mail address for graduate admissions inquiries, which is handled by an administrative assistant.  One of your letter writers could write to that address and ask whether they could please add the paper acceptance to your file.  Whether they will actually do so probably depends on departmental policy, but this is your best shot.  (You could also write to them yourself, but having a letter writer do it avoids the issue of whether you can be trusted.)


It isn't a good career move to counter your advisor in things like this. You need him to sign your thesis (already done) and to write you a good letter of recommendation - maybe still to come. If you anger him, whether rightly or wrongly, it will be you that pays the price.

As I said in a comment, this kind of "authorship" is common, accepted, and perfectly natural in some fields, even if it is a bit stupid.

Having joint authorship with a professor can actually be a help to your career, even if he takes first authorship. Some people will just assume that he did all of the work (no matter the order of authorship), carrying you along. Others will just assume that you did all the work and he is first author by courtesy.

This is something you can't control.

But a publication with your name on it anywhere is a plus for your career.

If you want to fight a system that you think is stupid, wait until you have some power and standing in academia to back you up. Otherwise you get squashed before you have a chance to fly.

Work with him and get a good letter.

I realize this isn't the answer you wanted to read. But think long term, not the short.


Is the maintainer of a database a good or bad reviewer in principle?

It is impossible to say whether they would be good or not, but it is fine to suggest them. It will be the editor that chooses, in any case. And they are unlikely to be the only reviewer. Don't worry about it. If you think they have the required skill it is fine to suggest. You don't need to make a judgement.
The editor, being human, will use their own judgement. But a reviewer, promoting their own work and giving unwarranted positive reviews will probably be easy for the editor to see.


PhD CV with not experience in academia job

Don't worry too much - just apply (you cannot to much different things anyway). Most people have no real research experience before the phd. Phd is meant as learning how to research. So apply and good luck!


Should an e-mail application to a lab for a masters thesis include attachments, or should I wait for these documents to be requested?

I do not know what the customs are in physics, but professors get requests like this a lot, and most of them feel like form letters (i.e., as if a student is sending out a bunch hoping someone will be interested).

If you want to get noticed, be very explicit as to why you are interested in this person and their lab, and if your desired research aligns with projects you know they are doing, say so with explicit references.  Your paragraphs above sound very generic, something you could have sent many places.

Also, please consider:
- if you are excited about a large project the professor is doing and would be happy to do a project for the professor that they need done, say so.  Typically, if you have an idea already, that might be less appealing than being interested in doing something that the professor wants/needs to be done.  Of course, having as specific interesting idea also shows you understand the area and the professors work.
- if you have funding and will not cost the professor anything, say so.  Oftentimes, professors don't have spare funding to pay for a visiting student (especially one they do not know) ever if they wanted to.
- I would somehow (perhaps in the longer document) give an indication of experience you have (don't just tersely list it on the resume).  A big question a professor would have is how much experience you have and how likely you are to be able to do something good in a short few months.

I would also definitely include the attachments of the long statement and resume in your first message.  If the professor gets through your note and is interested, they would probably appreciate knowing more about you before replying.

Remember: the most precious commodity to a professor is their time.  You need to convince them that the time they will invest in you is worth it.


How to stand out in mathematics PhD admissions as a student from an online school, with no research or opportunities to get strong recommendations?

tl;dr
Get a MSc from a top Israeli university first. It will practically ensure that you will get accepted to just about any PhD program that you want to. And a math MSc from a top Israeli uni is a pretty good thing to have. (edit see below)

I'm an Israeli currently studying outside of Israel, so I might give you a more relevant perspective on the issue. Although I'm in earth sciences, and not math, I think you will find this useful.

I am having a hard time understanding some of your circumstances. You claim that you will graduate in a year and a half. Assuming you are studying full-time, you are only halfway through and it may be too early to start thinking about your PhD, let alone fly to institutions in the world and meet with them (unless you happen to be there as a tourist).

You are correct that graduating from the Israeli Open University is hardly beneficial in terms of reputation and prestige. It is also close to impossible to get meaningful and honest recommendation letters. I do not know how much people trust GPA scores from a distance learning institution, and this may also hurt your chances. Unfortunately, as hardly any research is done at OU, I doubt that you will find a research partner to work on a publication. Even if your numbers are right, the fact that you do not study in a university where you have day-to-day interaction with other students and senior stuff is not going to help the admissions committees to choose you over other candidates.

Instead of thinking about PhD research abroad, I suggest you start with a MSc degree back home in Israel. There are several reasons for that:

Math degrees in Israeli universities have excellent reputation (particularly Tel Aviv, HUJI and Technion). This alone might boost your chances.
You are still an undergrad, halfway through. You have not been exposed to research yet. If you were in a physical university, you might be exposed to research around you, which is something. Yet you don't even have that. You do not know if research is what you want to do. Who knows, you might get offered a job and leave academia. Going for MSc will be your "introduction" to research and will give you a chance to get your desired publication, if you wish to pursue this further.
Starting a PhD program with MSc background will make you a much better student. I can sometimes see the difference between PhD students with and without prior MSc experience in the institution I am currently at.
Admission committees, in general, look favourably upon applicants with proved research experience in the form of MSc.

I will give you an example from my own experience. Having graduated my BSc with a research component, I was eligible for PhD studies abroad without having to get MSc. However, I did study for MSc in Israel, mostly for the reasons above. It made getting accepted to my institution of choice much easier, I had more than one publication by the time I applied for the PhD, it gave me a different perspective on what research is and what is it that I want to do, or more importantly, do not want to do.

EDIT

OP mentioned that conducting research in Israel is not possible due to personal reasons. I don't see how this sits with OP's idea of taking MSc research in Israel, but here are two more ideas:

Go for a one year Honours degree in countries that have it (for example, UK or Australia). This is something that's usually done straight after BSc and is one year of research.
Go for MSc in a country where doing this is common as a precursor to PhD research (continental Europe mostly, also Israel btw).

These two are very expensive solutions because you can't usually get funded or a scholarship for this, unlike doing PhD research. I would personally go for number two from the list above.

Again, getting straight to PhD after finishing your BSc in the Open University is almost impossible. If you do get it, it's probably in a low ranked institution and that might not be the best thing for your career. Regardless of whether you are accepted or not, I still think that you should have some kind of research experience before going for a PhD, particularly as you're done your education so far in a research-free environment.


What are the disadvantages of having postdocs or visitor in the lab?

This can vary a lot from professor to professor or even school to school. Some ideas:

Cost. This varies heavily from school to school. At some schools, tuition is waived for graduate students but not for visiting students, and the professor would have to pay tuition for a visiting student. If tuition is waived and the professor only has to pay the research stipend, the graduate student stipend is typically cheaper than the postdoctoral stipend. If visiting students come from abroad, there can also be immigration costs and living stipend requirements that the professor must provide for.
Training time vs. research produced How long it takes to train someone varies from field to field. In my field, it's probably about a year of training before you can really pull your own weight. If you're a visiting student who will only be here for one year, you might be a net-drain on the research production in the group: we spend a lot of time training you, and then you immediately leave. What do we get for that sunk time?
Fear of being scooped. Less so for a postdoc, but with a visiting student present for a short time, some professors in highly competitive fields might be concerned that the visiting student will go back to their "main" lab and work on very similar projects, potentially scooping the group that hosted them.
Desire to focus on graduate students. Some professors especially later in their career, enjoy mentoring and working to develop new scientists. Often you see the most progress and development from graduate students, who are with you longer and have had less training. For some professors, this can be very gratifying.
Minimizing group turnover and recruiting. Some professors might prefer to have students for longer periods of time, to allow them to focus more on research and less on the periphery of recruiting and training new members, especially if professors are retired or near retirement. Graduate students are typically around for 4-7 years, whereas visiting students may be around for as little as 8-10weeks, or postdocs only 1.5-3 years.
Transitioning into retirement. Some professors when they are considering retirement will try to focus exclusively on getting their last few graduate students finished with the program. (On the other hand, some professors might prefer postdocs who could more easily be pushed off into a job whenever they decide to retire.)

Edit: If you're seeing this on a website, the professor may not have a standing rule against visitors or postdocs, but may simply not have room or funding for them right now.


Is a research article the most comprehensive information available about a research project?

Is there usually a more complete documentation available which delineates the whole process of the experiment/research-project?

Typically not all of the details of the research can feasibly be published. Different areas have different methods to cope with this. Some journals will allow supplementary material to be submitted that's made available online through the publisher's site. Some authors will add links to homepages for the project where more details are available. Sometimes authors will publish an extended "technical report" (e.g., with full proofs or full methodologies that would not be feasible under a page limit) and publish it on their institute homepage or a site like arXiv. I believe some biomedical journals allow for publishing databases containing micro-data on experiments ...

So it varies widely. The most generic answer, however, is simply to get in contact with the authors and ask them if more details are available! Their contact details should be provided in the paper.