Co-organizing a workshop, does diversity matter?

EDIT: To add after an edit focussed the question:

The convener line-up will be important to attract people to the workshop so getting good names is not a bad idea as a starting point. Having conveners from several institutes may be beneficial since it shows prospective participants that the workshop has wider support. It may also mean that the advertisement can be improved, particularly if conveners come from different continents. Such signals should not be udnerestimated but will highly depend on the field and where research is carried out (geographically). There is of course nothing wrong with having conveners from only one institute. In the end it will be other factors such as convenience and interest that will determine the line-up of conveners.

Answer to the original question as it was interpreted:

The first question you should ask yourself is what is the goal or purpose of the workshop. I am used to workshops focussing on specific questions, perhaps leading up to common paper or document detailing  a problem formulation or providing recommendations for the future. In any case, the persons to invite would be the most suited to provide input to the goal. I have run very small workshops where I could only accept one person from any department/research group due to limited physical space. In other words, getting representation was more important than getting certain names in.

So depending on the goals you have you will probably see how you distribute invitations. If you have the space and time then it may be open but that may not be the most efficient way and invitation only may be the way out. That requires careful thinking so that you can achieve the set goal(s).


I want to do research but I'm too old for a PHD

My father got his Ph.D. (from a highly respected department at a major university) in his late fifties. I brought my regalia to his graduation. There were also two grad students in their fifties in the same program I was in. One was puttering along at his own pace and on his own funds, but the other had a funded position and was working under the same time pressure as the rest of us.

Some departments may effectively limit funded positions to younger applicants, but there is no magic number after which people won't accept you.

If that is what you want to do, then do it.


How to submit 'teaching evaluations' for a job application?

I don't think a modicum of cherry-picking is a bad thing in this regard.  What you need to send is a set of teaching evaluations that describes what is significant about your teaching -- the

  Great teacher!

comments aren't particularly worth it, but the

  Dr. X constantly provided clear examples of the material, and it made the difficult topics more concrete.

samples can provide the insight that will be helpful to a hiring committee.

The committee is trying to get a feel for why you are a good teacher (be that the case), and that's why they want the evaluations.  I have provided bulleted lists of evaluation comments, but I have also provided a link to all of my comments from multiple classes.  The evaluation website at the university where I taught recently actually provided a statistical breakdown of the survey questions on each evaluation topic, so I was able to highlight the statistical takeaways from the surveys.


Why are the acceptance rates of Oxbridge and top US schools not comparable?

For PhD acceptance rates, many schools/departments essentially require PhD candidates to find a potential supervisor prior to applying. My, non-Oxbridge, department's acceptance rate is something like 90% for students who find a supervisor prior to applying and 0% for those without a supervisor. This "requirement" really changes the dynamics of applying for a PhD.

For Masters programs, I think there are a number of minor factors and one large one that result in UK universities having a higher acceptance rate than US universities. Graduate classes/modules in the UK are only taken by Masters students. PhD students and advance undergraduates do not take graduate level classes. This means departments need to accept enough Masters students to make teaching the classes worthwhile.

Getting enough fee-paying students is hard and the competition between programs is fierce. Departments tend not to pass up on students that they think can pass. While "entry tariff" (basically the GPA of admitted students) is starting to count in league tables, in my experience UK universities are not as adapt at manipulating the league tables. Further, UK universities generally have a hard minimum "GPA" of a 2.1 degree classification in a related field. Since undergraduate education in the UK is more specialized than the US this means that a "related" field is much more narrowly defined. Minimum requirements are strictly enforced in the UK so Brits tend not to apply to positions that they are not qualified for. Overall, this cuts out the bottom of the application pool. That said, something like 80-90% of students get a 2.1, and I do not think thesee factors substantiallychange the acceptance rates.

What I think matters the most is the fact that students only apply to a select few schools. My UK students tend to apply from between 1 and 4 Masters programs. I have less experience with US students, but my intuition is they apply to a lot more schools. I think that the reduced number of UK applicants increases the UK acceptance rates.


How to avoid being (falsely) accused of plagiarism when reusing notations and definitions

It is generally known that definitions and restated theorems can cause significant textual overlap between papers to an extent that could be considered problematic. There is no point in worrying about automatic plagiarism checks for journal submissions: If a journal is relying on that alone without an editor checking, it is not a reasonable journal to submit to anyway.


Reply ‘no position’ while the job posting is still there (‘HiWi’ position in Germany)

Student assistant positions in Germany are usually open only to students enrolled at a local university (often where the position is offered, but always in Germany). This is for reasons of social insurance and labour regulation.

You are not enrolled at a local university. In fact, you are studying outside Europe.


PhD application: should I mention more than one faculty member in my SOP?

First, it is always a good thing to mention specific mentors by name - it helps you get recognized and demonstrates you have a grasp on what you want to work on. The fact that there are two faculty you'd be happy with shows you may integrate well, provided the research interests are somewhat similar. The best approach is to contact both of these individuals personally, by email or by phone. This proves your interest and probably guarantees your application will be looked over carefully.  I don't think that listing two potential mentors will set you back, but you could be put into a situation where you have to choose.  If that happens, congrats, you made it into grad school. I've never heard of a PI dismissing a qualified candidate because he/she applied to more than one person.


Your best option is to retake the GRE under fairer conditions. If you have already sent out the current scores, you can also update your application to mention the conditions under which you took the test the first time. Currently, however, if you have taken the test multiple times, as many do, you can decide which scores are to be sent.

But somewhere in your application materials I suspect that you also address your dyslexia and talk about why it isn't a hinderance to your success.

I'll note, as I have in answers to other questions, that admissions is almost never just a numbers game and individuals are examined for evidence that predicts success in future study. Some places that are overwhelmed with applications may need to reduce the number of applicants considered to a reasonable number, but normally, you need to present an application that shows both the background and the work ethic to succeed.

If you have any negative markers in your application then they need to be explained. Hopefully, the system is sensible enough that you can amend an application that requires it. But if you haven't yet applied, make sure that your materials honestly explain things that might be questioned.


Can you be dismissed from a graduate program for attending jury duty?

Serving on a jury is considered a crucial civic duty - I think it would be extremely damaging for any university to directly or indirectly punish a student for serving on a jury.

That said, it is possible that an institution could disagree with how much jury duty impacts your friend. It would be quite another thing for a school to dismiss a student because they missed a specific date of class, but that is different than a project that is worked on over years. That is, they would not be dismissing them for participation as a juror, but for insufficient progress during all the other time they didn't spend on a jury, deciding that the time spent on a jury was not substantial enough to impact performance. Serving on a jury for 1 week wouldn't require a university to give another semester-long extension.

Assuming you are referring to the U.S.: it might depend on your local government, but it can be possible to defer more than once or to be excused entirely if the courthouse agrees. There is often a limit but in places I have lived it was not limited to once.

Usually the phrasing for getting deferred is something along the lines of "undue hardship" or "extreme inconvenience" which certainly applies to a graduate student nearing the end of their program.

If your friend can't defer and has to report, there are also at least some anecdotes and rumors that academics are likely to be rejected from juries for a number of reasons, though I am not aware of any social scientific study of this phenomenon. I would also add that long jury service for anyone is pretty rare - most court cases are fairly simple, and jurors may not even serve on a case if they are not selected or there is not a large number of jury trials during the time of service.

I am not aware of laws that protect grad students specifically, but this is really a question to ask a lawyer rather than Academia.SE. There might be local laws that effectively count grad students as protected employees, but I think it's likely to be a gray area due to the temporary and not-really-employee status of grad students. More likely, your institution or graduate school has some of their own policies regarding jury duty - I would suggest you or your friend consult those policies.


What master's degree is recommended to study at a university for establishing a start-up?

Given that a start up is a business and your education is elsewhere, it would probably do you well to get some specific knowledge of business and the regulations that typically govern business. An MBA might be appropriate if it is focused on entrepreneurship. Economics is probably not what you want, being a more theoretical course of study. Marketing might be an alternative. But it would depend on the particulars.
You can hire business experience, of course, once you have some revenue or can talk people in to working for nearly nothing, but lack of knowledge yourself might mean you need to trust them more than is wise.


Convention for naming something after its discoverers when many were involved

I have heard (I'm not sure how official these things are) that in modern scientific fields people are trying to phase out naming things after the people involved, as it makes learning the subject difficult - remembering a set of random names that don't describe the things as against calling it by what it is or what it does.

So while this might seem like a nice thing to do for the scientists involved, it might make your work clearer and easier to understand if you just describe the thing (construction) and then mention or site the relevant authors.

E.g. the folding solution to the paper box problem presented by Dr. Origami et al. and Dr P. Airplane et al.

(Forgive my silly example, I have no experience of information theory and don't really know what a "construction" is in your terminology.)


Doing two summer research internships at the same time?

Based on my experience in math in the U.S., you should probably give up one of them. The point is not "can you do the work?", but that such internships have a broader point that is not just some task. The people would want you to really engage, more fully than the allocated hours and salary might indicate, with their projects. That is, it's almost surely not just about getting some task completed, but about a mutually beneficial experience, where you'd get more than just salary, and they'd cultivate a future collaborator. "Dividing by two" is not palatable here.
(For example, if someone told me they wanted to work on a PhD with me, while also doing something else full time (!?!?!), I'd almost surely refuse, on the grounds that it'd just be a source of infinite frustration for me... And, in particular, a very bad investment of my mental energy.)
So, no, don't try to do both.


Using a figure from a U.S. government publication

Yes, this is sufficient.

By law, all US federal government publications are in the public domain, and can therefore be reused for any purpose, without permission, without violating anyone's copyright. Of course, you still need to credit the source of the image to avoid plagiarism, but that's exactly what you've proposed.


Recommended for admission by the department but still haven't received official decision

Polite phone call to the graduate school.  Emails could very well be received initially by students, and given that many schools are on spring break right now, that could delay them (or just student workers losing an e-mail wouldn't be unheard of).

If the phone call isn't able to resolve any doubts, speak with the department you applied to and they can put some pressure on the graduate school.


How can a new PhD Student objectively evaluate how well they are doing?

The reality is that it’s impossible to evaluate how you’re doing in an entirely objective manner once you progress beyond the stage of doing problem sheets with well-defined answers. Once there’s no objective right and wrong, it becomes a question of what is valued and who assesses it. For example, people try to assess PhD students in terms of all kinds of things:

How many papers they’ve published.
Where their papers are published.
How many people have cited their papers.
How much impact they’ve had on their field.
How often they’re invited to give talks.
Where they’ve worked.
How successful their collaborations have been.
If they teach, how successful their own students are.

The reality is that all of these things measure something, to some extent. Different people will value different things, and assess them in different ways.

If you want to go into academia ultimately, and you’re asking because you want to know what the people who will assess you for academic jobs will value, a good place to look is at academic job specifications - they’re often very detailed and make it quite clear what they’re looking for. You can also ask your supervisor, who will probably be able to give you a good idea of what’s involved.

If you want to go into industry, they may be looking for very different things - again, you can find out by looking at the job specifications, and the skills of the people who work at the relevant places.

Ultimately, this is a good point in your life to realise that now you’ve moved beyond standard taught courses, you’ll never again have the same kind of “objective” outside feedback that you once did. Thus far, you’ve been optimising towards someone else’s objective function; from now on, you have to find your own. Other people can tell you what they value, or even what they think you should value, but no one can decide what you value but you.


Does a year of entrepreneurship in an unrelated field affect an MS application?

I think you are forgetting that you do not necessarily need to self-finance your graduate study.  A teaching assistantship would take care of your tuition and would give you a stipend to live on (frugally).  Teaching assistantships are not hard to come by in the field of CS -- as compared to some other fields, because universities generally need a fleet of TAs to grade and/or teach the undergraduate classes.

You may want to consider putting in some applications for grad school this coming December - January.  You can always quit your current job after collecting a strong recommendation from your current supervisor.  Then you would have February - August to try out your entrepreneurial idea and see how it goes.  If it's taking off and you're really enjoying it, you can always cancel (or possibly postpone) the grad school plans.


It calls itself the International Journal of Scientific and Engineering Research (emphasis mine), and it published the following paper:

Nishad, T. M.  "Origin."  International Journal of Scientific & Engineering Research, Volume 8, Issue 7, July-2017, p. 1163.  PDF.

I quote here the abstract and an excerpt:

  Abstract— In this paper the application of Soul Sets in Theology is introduced. Based on reference of various Holy Scriptures, a link among
  some religions is derived.Using that relation, the generalized concept of God is discovered.

  Theorem 1: Origin O intersects with A.

  Proof: To prove that Origin intersects with A, It is
  enough to show that there exist a soul object
  x € O ∩ A.Consider a name of God “wadud”, The
  stem of meaning of which is Love (say x) having
  full judgment. Then x € A.It is obvious that Love
  is a soul object. Since it has full judgment,
  x € O.Hence x € O∩A .

  APPLICATION IN THEOLOGY

  Theorem 1 helps a Devotee to identify the soul
  objects in A and try to implement in life.
  [...]

I rest my case.


Second time chance for applying in one university

No, every year, (at least with majority institutions here in the USA), there is a new applications cycle. They may ask you if you previously applied, and they may compare you with your previous stats, but in the new cycle, you will facing off against new applicants. So for your question, no, every year is a new ball game and a new start. In my experience though, I (personally) have seen a very low success rate of students applying to the same institution in varying cycles. It's best then, to know your capabilities and apply to other schools, and perhaps some that are lower ranked.


How to recruit strong REU (undergrad research) students from other institutions?

Take the HPC REU as a good example (obviously you won't be able to do everything that they can do as an REU Site, but there are many things you can try to do). It was my top choice for REUs when I was a junior undergrad even though I never heard of the school. When undergraduates read the website they know exactly what they're going to do. For a student who doesn't know much about the subjects, showing a list of projects makes them interested even if they do not understand all of the details.

Also, invest some time in training. You are saying that you cannot find "eligible students at our own institution who are both qualified and interested". Do a bootcamp in what they need to know. Most of the students who attended the HPC REU knew how to program but didn't know anything about high-performance computing, so the detailed schedule showed us that we would learn this (and get credit). Most of the time undergraduates take "standard" classes so they will never learn these research skills even if that's what they want to be researching, so showing them that your REU is the jumpstart to their research career in the particular field generates the interest. Also, if you can show that this is applicable to them even if they are not into research, then you have a large crowd. If you look at other REUs they also have a few training weeks in some useful subjects as well.

Another thing is to try and make it a group project. Undergraduates haven't had enough time to learn subjects to "research-level" yet, and if it's an interdisciplinary project, it's almost impossible. Many mathematical biology projects take a group of students where one knows math, one can program well, and another may just be a straight biologist. They work together to solve the problem (or get as far as possible) and learn from each other.

Although I found my REUs via their websites, I know others that found out about their REUs via departmental emails. Send emails out to friends/administrators at other institutions to forward to their administrators. Some of the best places for recruitment can be liberal arts colleges because sometimes the department may not have every subfield. In a liberal arts college there are close ties between students and faculty and so many times the faculty will know about subfields that students are wanting to try out. Then the faculty may even forward the email to some of their students saying "I know you're interested in ______, check this out!".

Also, be ready to adapt what you're doing to the undergraduates. Most REU projects don't result in a publication, so if you're looking for undergraduates who will help you on your current project, it's probably a waste of time. Of course you don't want to go too far out of your expertise, but play around with ideas and try some new things. For example, if you're an experimental scientist who's interested in trying machine learning for your type of data, pair up with a new faculty member who does machine learning and get a group of undergraduates to try doing some machine learning on your data under joint supervision. Again, it's most likely not going to end up with results, but this new collaboration can turn out to be an exciting result itself.

Lastly, think about being the undergraduate. What is the undergraduate looking for? First and foremost, the best undergraduates are looking for what will look good on a graduate school application. Cater to that. Make the summer bootcamp worth credit. Guarantee that at least a technical report will be online. Teach them a few programming languages. Give access to GRE classes. Etc.


Funded PhD in the UK with a Distinction in MSc and a low undergraduate CGPA

Yes, but exactly what, won’t be known until you submit the application(s).


Textbook has two different versions, which to use?

Often if not almost always, "International Editions" (the monicker I know them under) are copies of expensive text books printed in emerging market countries (often India), whose legality I question...at least they are not licensed by the publisher for all I know. Someone here might have more substantial comments on the legal aspect - in fact, StrongBad does in his answer to an earlier question.

From the one I bought before understanding this, I would, in the future, stay away from them for their quality alone. I kept noticing that there were seeming errors where the text diverged in most cases from a supporting graphic; and there were graphics on almost every page. I carefully made a list of errata for the first 100 pages, and submitted them to the author. He was kind enough to reply fast, expressing that he was puzzled: none seemed to be true. I eventually figured out that the graphics and text of my book were from different editions of the original book...my version is essentially useless.


Is it a good idea for a part-time post-grad to start an Academic CV?

I am wondering is it a good idea to start to compile an academic CV?

Start as you mean to continue: it is certainly a good time to start keeping track of all of your academic achievements in a structured way. Later down the line, this will prove invaluable as you will have a record of all your presentations (with dates, slides, venue, etc.), all your publications (with venue, full-text pre-prints, maybe a .bib item), all your reviewing activity, all your visits, and so forth.

Otherwise the cost of trying to recall all these details later might be prohibitive and you might forget things. At the moment, you may be able to remember everything you've done, but trust me when I say that what you were doing four years ago can become hazy.

You could keep your record as a CV in LaTeX format or a database or an Excel file or a HTML homepage. Even a journal notebook would be preferable to nothing. Keep one format canonical so that you don't have to synchronise multiple versions. And keep back-ups!

Of these options, I would recommend a homepage. It helps your impact to have a public personal homepage where you list all the pertinent details of your research (and to link to it where you can, short of spamming). Also consider getting a personal domain: hosting homepages on work spaces is convenient, but there's a chance you might lose that space (and the associated links/ranking) if/when you move institute. If you get a personal domain, some soft advice is to get a .org ... they're more trendy in academia (otherwise .edu, etc.).

In any case, whatever version you keep canonical, get in the habit of keeping it up-to-date in a consistent style. Mapping the records to a CV format for specific purposes further down the line then becomes trivial enough.


Ways of encouraging companies to participate in survey for my doctoral reseach

From what you've described, you haven't done much, if anything, to provide a compelling argument for companies to participate in your research. Even though it doesn't, from your point of view, take much time or effort, it does take time and effort, both of which cost money.

If you're talking to a company that has 300 employees. You say it takes 10 minutes. Now multiply that by the number of participants and you have 3000 minutes or 50 person-hours. Then multiply that by the labor cost, say $80/hr (you have to consider the entire cost of the employee's time; salary, benefits AND the missed opportunity cost of NOT doing what something that would make the company money) that's $4000 for your 10 minute survey.

You need to think about what you can offer in return for their $4000 and sell it. Access to your findings? What would you offer them if you were asking for that much money to fund your research?


Requests by PhD assistant to Master's Student - Avoiding an unreasonable request

There are three people involved at least, including the professor. I think the request is not reasonable for the reasons you state. Clearly the junior advisor has expectations, but they seem to be un-doable.

You have to judge personalities, but I'd suggest trying to see if you can have a meeting very soon with all three of you present. Try to come to an understanding about what can be reasonably done in the time remaining.

Try to find a backup plan if not all expectations can be met. Don't be shy about saying why such things are unreasonable and that melding your work to the advisors preferred work-flow at such a late date isn't feasible - or even desirable. Your use of R and LaTex seem to be good choices. I don't know why the PhD advisor wants to check your work independently of you and the professor. Maybe you can get an answer to that in a three person meeting.

My personal opinion is that you have been put in an untenable position. Unfortunately, I have no say or authority in the outcome.


Where to take your research ideas when you don't have a PhD/Master's

There is a world of difference between a research idea and a research result.

For an actual research result, the right thing to do is to write it up and publish it in an appropriate peer-reviewed journal.  If one is concerned about intellectual property theft, then put it on a preprint server like arXiv first.

Research ideas on the other hand, are a dime a dozen, and there's often no way of judging their value until somebody has executed them.  Moreover, most scientists have more ideas than they have opportunities to execute, and are frequently offered new research ideas of dubious value.  For example, as a graduate student, I was contacted by a man who wanted help implementing his research idea: all he needed was somebody to get his trash-can robot to understand "All in the family" episodes better so that it could irrigate the Sahara desert and solve world hunger.

If you have a research idea, then, there are really only three basic paths that you can take with it:

Work on those aspects of it that you can work on, given the resources you can get access to (personally, in a community lab, through collaborators, via a startup, etc.)
Keep it in reserve to work on later.
Give it away to others.

Note that none of these actually have any requirement of any particular credential or affiliation.  It is just that credentials are strongly correlated with having gained sufficient scientific skills to construct and present a solid result, and credentials and affiliations make it easier to get access to resources for executing on ideas.


Submit the same paper to several journals/conferences

No. Simultaneous submission is rarely considered acceptable.

Each journal or conference will have a simultaneous submission policy (a.k.a. dual submission policy) that you can look up. Make sure you read it and, if you can’t find it, ask. With a handful of exceptions (e.g., law reviews), they all prohibit simultaneous submission. If you ignore this policy, it is considered academic misconduct and could get you in trouble. And the chance of getting caught is very high.

I understand your frustration with the duration and uncertainty of the review process. However, if everyone started doing simultaneous submissions, the system would get even more clogged up. The bottleneck is a shortage of reviewer time and simultaneous submissions only consume more reviewer time. Simultaneous submission is viewed as a means of cheating the system that is unfair to those who follow the proper policy.


Possibilities of Going to Industry and back to Academia in a Different Field

To get things out there:

Applying for another PhD after your first PhD is possible and I know a few excellent researchers who are now professors who have two PhDs. It does depend on the field you are moving into of course, but coming from Physics I think your options are good. Basically anything that you can fill in while you work will be relevant.
Where do you feel most comfortable? I have debated this myself (academy vs. industry), but it's not always a matter of deciding. If working in the industry doesn't suit you, then there's no point considering it while you are choosing what you want. If you can't choose what you want, maybe it is an option. Try to imagine what a day's work looks like there, and then a year, and then a career. Will you be satisfied with your work? It's a tough question, I can't figure it out myself.
Check all the options! Have your possibilities set out on the table so you can decide knowing that you considered everything. Check PhD programmes, check companies which do basic research along with commercial projects, relevant startup positions, and check all the various living arrangements. It takes time but I think the worst mistake is deciding without the full picture. Remember that industry has as many, if not more different settings than academia, and you could find a suitable niche in either system.

You have loads of options. The end of a post-doc is really a cliff-edge, and I think it is mainly like this because we don't get exposed to alternatives, and something in our head tells us that not continuing to a tenured position in the same field constitutes some kind of failure. That's just one option out of many.


How should I adress (grammatically) a referee whose gender is unknown?

The use of singular they, as in your second option,

We agree with the referee on their comment...

is perfectly appropriate. You can also use some other alternatives, most notably he/she, as in e.g.

We agree with the referee on his/her comment...

I would discourage you from using some of the more niche alternatives, such as Spivak pronouns, in correspondence that's this formal.

On the other hand, your first alternative (We agree with the referee on its comment...) should not be used under any circumstances. It is considered extremely rude by native English speakers, since it reduces the referee to the level of an inanimate thing. If you use it you can hope, at best, to come off as someone with a very poor command of the English language.


Is it better having a bad PhD done or having no PhD?

You can change topics/fields after you graduate. Use what you've learned to find a job (or postdoc or whatever) that fits you better in something you're more interested in.

For the record, nobody who isn't on your committee will read your dissertation. Done is better then good.


A free tool that is capable of selecting questions from a pool and shuffle them randomly?

I would recommend to use ClassMarker, which is a great tool for creating a quiz with random questions.

You can choose questions you select and randomize the order of the selected questions, randomize answer options or add randomly selected questions, so each time the quiz is taken, different questions will be pulled from your question pool.

Also, the option of exporting the tests to word is available.


How many words are considered to become subject to verbatim copy?

There is no single "number of words" threshold, because the issue is the degree of creativity and salience in the choice of words, which is dependent on the exact phrase and context.

If those few words are extremely significant and clearly attributable to a particular person, you might need to quote them, e.g.:

  "Eat my shorts" (Simpson, 1997)

On the other hand, some words are just not very interesting, and have a much higher threshold for quotation, e.g.:

  On the basis of the data presented, this study concludes

My recommendation is that rather than stressing about particular thresholds, you read the original source that you are paraphrasing, then set it aside and do something else for a while.  Then come back and write your summary from memory, in your own words; what you produce will almost certainly be different enough from the original to be not problematic.


Appropriateness of a second-authored article in external review file for tenure

It sounds reasonable to me, especially if explained as you did above.


What should I do if I can't get a copy of original transcript from the institute?

Yes, you should write the coordinator at the program you're applying to, explain the situation and ask for permission to submit a copy of your transcript (I assume you have one?) rather than an original. To remove doubt that you are playing some funny games, offer to append a notarized statement from you attesting to the authenticity of the document, and say you'd be willing to take any other reasonable measures they would like you to take to accept the document.

Since the school is in the U.S., I'm guessing they'll be reasonable.


What factors affect how long it would take to get a phd, either going via, or without, a masters?

The answer, as oft seems true on this site, is that it depends. I'll lay out a couple things that might change how long a PhD might take, and where coming in with a Masters or Bachelors might change that.

Is there a large course sequence? And will your department accept previous coursework? If there's many classes to take at the graduate level and your PhD university accepts the classes from your Masters, having obtained an MS would likely trim the time from enrollment to PhD compared to a student with a bachelors degree starting at the same time. However, if the department doesn't accept those courses (and many good programs might not) then you're not necessarily all that far ahread.
Is it easier to get funding? If your department treats students who have not yet gotten their MS (in a sequence where the path from bachelors to PhD also involves getting an MS midstream) as transient and less likely to be funded, you might find yourself distracted and pulled in the direction of "rent needs to get paid" more than a better funded student.
Your Dissertation. Want to know what makes a PhD take X amount of time? By and large, its how fast your dissertation gets done. How quickly that happens has, in my experience, far more to do with how long a program takes then what letters you have after your name coming in.


How should one turn down academic job applicants?

Just from a perspective of one who has been rejected a lot of times (although from schools and research programmer, then as an undergraduate), fast and informative feedback is the most important.

For me there is little difference between hearing "the competition was very high" and "get  out". Saying that "there was only one place" when if fact you don't want to hire someone is very short sighted. It may make the decision smoother, but in a long run it will create false impressions and hopes; and, in fact, such approach makes it impossible to say that actually you want to hire someone, but you run out of positions (see How to show interest in a candidate when no positions are available?).

Moreover:

waiting long is bad both psychologically and for practical reasons (i.e. other plans); I don't see a reason for not rejecting as soon as you are sure,
it is important to distinguish if you don't want someone now or at all,
any feedback is of great value;
otherwise one gets no idea what was wrong, if it makes sense to apply again and how to improve; I would love to hear "there were 5 places but only 1 funding for someone with your status; I had expected someone with stronger skills in X and Y (but your Z is more than fine)".


Is it possible to change the application area of research while looking for a postdoc position after PhD?

For whatever it’s worth, I changed my field between PhD and postdocs as well.
In my case, my main goal was to find a thriving field (where I could make some use of my skills and that would match my general interests).
My general rationale was this:
Most fields produce enough qualified and willing PhD graduates to fill their postdoc needs, against which I wouldn’t stand a chance.
The only exception to this is a strongly expanding field.
Hence I just applied to interesting positions and concluded that if I would get a position the respective field would be sufficiently thriving.
(And indeed many other people in my current field came from other fields.)

As you appear to have a specific target field in mind, it may also help to get insights from professors in that field as to how saturated the postdoc job market is.
If you are up against an army of competitors with more experience, seeking jobs here may be a waste of time.
If on the other hand, your main goal is to leave your current field, you can hedge your bets by being open about potential target fields.

Now, there are some exceptions, alternatives, and caveats to consider:

Sometimes, a postdoc is hired with the explicit goal of transferring or applying knowledge from another field.
However, in this case, the job ad will state corresponding requirements.
Whether saturated or not, postdoc job markets are only feature a small number of candidates and positions, and thus they are strong subject to statistical fluctuations.
It may thus easily happen that a professor cannot fill a postdoc position even in a stagnating field, and settles for somebody less qualified than they hope for.
(On the other hand, you are still in a stagnating field then.)
It is possible that a vacancy remains unfilled due to the professor being known to be scientifically or socially incompetent in the field.
So, watch out for red flags.

So, I would suggest to just apply to positions that interest you (if only to get application routine).
I would be upfront about the fact that you are changing fields, and focus on your enthusiasm for the target field and general scientific skills, in particular anything that demonstrates that you can adapt to a new topic and are good at scientific work in general – which after all is at least half of what a good PhD should be about.
Getting a job while lacking a required experience is a disaster waiting to happen.


What are the best ways to find an external thesis examiner?

Start by going through the bibliography of your thesis draft.  For each author, consider whether they might reasonably be an external examiner (e.g. are they established scholars with a reasonable reputation, do they hold positions as professors in your discipline, etc.)  This should produce a large list of potential external examiners.

I'd encourage you to get your advisor to contact prospective external examiners rather than contacting them yourself.


fee structure for school management system software

Pay per module ( with x modules per course) or pay per course , but no diploma or certificate to be issued until full payment received. also, payment by installments possible.


Fair use: Instructor sharing notes from textbooks

I think you mostly are in the clear from an ethical/plagiarism perspective. Making your own notes off of a course textbook is perfectly acceptable as long as you appropriately reference the textbook. You can write a broad attribution in the beginning: these notes are largely based on the material in chapter X of textbook A. If you’re planning to take questions from a book but not more it’s fine to just reference the book for any specific questions you took from there, and list it as additional material.


Is postdoc experience valued by industry?

There certainly is no "correct" answer to this question, as it depends on two factors: (1) the company (some will see it as useful, most probably won't), and (2) the type of postdoc (with or without management tasks? project lead? PI on a small project? independent or highly dependent of a professor?).

However, at least here in Switzerland and for Computer Science, the rule of thumb is that as soon as you are 100% that you won't stay in academia, every further month spent as a postdoc is inefficient in terms of career development. Yes, some companies may count your years as postdoc as some sort of relevant leadership experience, but most won't, and even those that do will consider a similar candidate with the same number of years working in industry to be much more attractive.

There is also another angle to look at this - you are currently looking to move into industry, and you have differing opinions from people that are already working in industry and people that are not. In absence of any other information, you should probably give more weight to the information provided by the insiders.


How to indicate the type of position of a letter writer?

Give your formal title. If the job description is roughly equivalent to Assistant Professor in the US (regular employee, not yet tenured) than say that, perhaps in a footnote: "The writer holds a position roughly equivalent to Assistant Professor in the US, but with no associated title).

People reading the application will probably have a rough idea of the difference between the German and US/Canadian systems.

But, to protect yourself, verify the language with your head/chair.


Where can I do a research paper or thesis without enrolling in a college or university?

It's not impossible, but in this day and age it is extremely rare for individuals unaffiliated with research institutions (academic or commercial) to successfully publish scientific research papers on their own (without research-institute affiliated co-authors) in good journals (bogus journals publish almost anything for a fee).

The main reasons are that in order to pursue cutting edge research, one usually needs

access to all relevant publications;
regular exchange of ideas with other researchers;
access to hardware (for performing the research tasks).
a living and financial support for the research (including possible publication charges)

Points 1&2 are more fundamental, since if you don't know where the cutting edge of research in a particular field is (or don't know the relevant terminology), then you cannot contribute.

I should also note that there are quite a few unsuccessful manuscript submission from unaffiliated persons, but many are often not even considered for peer review by the journal editors for two possible reasons: (1) because the manuscript does not appear to meet the standards and (2) because the editor strongly suspect it doesn't, because of the author's affiliation. So there is another potential hurdle: editorial bias.


How to figure out whether a Masters degree is a "Professional" or "Research" degree?

The main difference is that research MS degrees require a thesis, which describes the student's research, while professional/taught MS degrees do not.

There are several secondary differences as well.  Professional/taught MS programs are cash cows; their enrollments are generally higher, their admissions criteria are generally lower, they almost never offer financial support, and students are generally treated like cattle.  Research MS programs generally have smaller enrollment, because the students require more individual attention, and therefore higher admission standards; some research MS programs offer financial support in the form of assistantships or even fellowships.  In many departments, there is an easy transition from a research MS program into the PhD program; transitioning from a professional/taught MS program into a PhD program is almost impossible.

Of course, these answers are very crude approximations.  The actual difference will vary significantly between departments.


Professor refusing to write recommendation letter to make student work longer

Your professor is not obligated to write you a recommendation letter.
You should think about getting a letter from someone who will write a good recommendation for you.
Your professors' attitude is highly unprofessional and needs to be exposed to their academic community. When you're clear, file a complaint through proper channels to the dean/HOD. If possible, keep any record of your conversations/emails with the faculty members. Given the fact that such unprofessional behavior exists in your university (that they will ask you to work for them for 1-2 years after graduation as a condition for a recommendation letter), may be the human resource, dean office etc. themselves are unprofessional. So, tread carefully if you plan to expose their behavior. Maybe do it after you have received your degree etc. However, such behavior needs to be exposed in any academic institution for the sake of future generations.
If your foreign university asks (e.g., in future) why your own advisors didn't write you a recommendation then there is no harm in telling the truth. However, tell only the truth not your version of the truth. It's common for students at a certain phase in their career to panic, act hysterically, and believe that everyone is out to get them.


Should I mention that I quit my job and give up good salary to take a PhD degree in the personal statement?

In my opinion no. You should mention your current work and any relation it has to doing a PhD, and that you wish to now do research and gain a PhD. Emphasize why you want to do a PhD but do not compare your current job with that. Anyone reading your reference will likely make positive inferences about you having real-world experience and that you are following your heart. Generally try and steer away from any negative comments.


Is it advisable to submit multiple teaching letters for tenure-track teaching-focused jobs?

Yes, I think it is advisable, especially if you are coming from a "research track": e.g., if you attended a university rather than a liberal arts college (or especially if your undergraduate degree is outside the US); if you are currently doing a postdoc at a research university, and so forth.

The SLAC [=Small Liberal Arts College] track is its own subcommunity within the academic community.  Though many research-focused academics view the liberal arts track as being an acceptable second choice [in full disclosure: that is a rather faithful description of my own views!], the liberal arts college community does not see itself that way and is very wary of hiring academics whom they suspect (i) will not understand what a liberal arts college really is and turn out to be unhappy and/or bad at the job or (ii) will make good enough faculty members for a few years and then turn around and take a research job at their first opportunity.  If you don't have "SLAC pedigree", then liberal arts colleges will -- correctly, I believe -- view your application with the above wariness.

To get past this wariness you have to demonstrate real understanding of the SLAC track and teaching interest and credentials which are both more intensive and also different from what one is expected / asked to do as a typical university PhD student / university postdoc.  Teaching calc I/II/III every year, getting really good evaluations, and maybe eventually winning a teaching award is not a recipe for success on the liberal arts track.  Whereas many research faculty teach calculus, graduate courses in their specialty, and advanced undergraduate class related to their specialty when they get around to it [again, this describes me pretty well], at SLACs faculty get called upon to teach a much broader course load, often including things that a larger university may not even be housed in the same department (CS, statistics, mathematical biology...).  A good candidate for a SLAC will have a broader teaching experience.

Many research universities nowadays have some "broadening" alternative teaching choices for students and junior faculty interested in this kind of career.  At my department all PhD students start teaching precalculus and then go on to teach calculus.  They can also be involved in a Writing Intensive Program (WIP) and teach elementary education / math for future math teachers courses.  If you are coming from such a place and want to make a good SLAC candidate, nailing your calculus teaching and having teaching experience -- and possibly even additional coursework / mentorship / administrative experience / volunteer work -- in less traditional teaching opportunities is somewhere between extremely helpful and mandatory.  The best way to be convincing in the breadth of your teaching success and skill is to have multiple people write letters about the different aspects of it.  So...yes, two teaching letters sounds wise.

Added: Any additional teaching letters you get should not come at the expense of research letters!  As I wrote in an answer to a related question by the same OP: don't be afraid to send along 1-2 more letters than the application specifies.


Is it preferable to cite the dissertation or a publication based on the dissertation?

If there is a published version of the paper, you usually want to cite that first. The main reason is that it's the version you're most sure has undergone rigorous review and revisions. As a bonus it will often be easier to find (e.g. through DOI numbers), and citations for papers "count more" so it's nice for the author(s) too. The latter two points should be in favor of also preferring citing preprint versions instead of dissertations, if that's all that's available, but it's a less clear-cut case.

However, if you find that the dissertation provides particularly helpful exposition or, as is often the case, contains information or details not published elsewhere, absolutely feel free to go ahead and cite both! (If you specifically make use of that information you clearly need to cite the dissertation.)


When to give up and ask the research community?

This is a type of question that you could ask on MathOverflow.

In my experience, one of the best uses of MO is if you have a "research level" question that (i) you want answered, and you're not particular about how and (ii) you think "Probably[/maybe/I wonder if] someone with the right expertise could solve this almost immediately."

If both of the above apply, I would encourage you to ask on MO.  On the other hand, if you want to keep maximal control over your involvement with the question and its solution, less wide disbursement is probably best.  (Most of my own MO questions have been things that come up in my research but are not exactly the questions I am trying to solve in order to write my next paper.) If you really see yourself getting a paper out of these questions, I would vote for spending more than two weeks thinking them over.


Is it usual that a master’s program refuses to reveal graduation percentage?

The comments above are all correct that this information is available and you have every reason to want it. In reality, it may simply be that the person you are asking does not have ready access to this information, especially if you are contacting a grad director or some kind of advisor. She could manually do the calculation (or, better, should make a habit of compiling it each year so she can answer such questions).  I have directed grad programs and can say that I have access to applications in our online system, so I could tell you how many applied and were admitted, but if I want to know graduation rates, I have to track down each student myself and find out. At the university level, this is probably more straightforward and you can get a rate, but it might not be broken down by program.

So, it may not be fishy. On the other hand, that adviser should know how it is perceived, and should compile the information each year. If it is a university with an entirely online curriculum, it would raise a red flag for me. Especially if it is a for-profit online university. But if it is a major on-campus university with an online offering, it may just be what I described in the first paragraph.


Changing field from Computer Science to Philosophy

Since you're interested in life and consciousness, you might want to explore cognitive science (including artificial life), which draws from philosophy, artificial intelligence, neurology, and other fields. Your computer science background could help you enter a program like this, and once in, you could take philosophy courses to strengthen your background in that area. Perhaps you could do an MSc in cognitive science, and then you might have the background to enter a PhD program in philosophy.


What is appropriate compensation for faculty mentors in an REU program?

The NSF's guidelines are that you can generally pay one faculty-month of salary.  In principle, you can propose to divide this money up however you like, but if you try to divide up the compensation among all the faculty members involved, it may not be enough money going to any single person to really be worthwhile.

As the PI of an REU site, I do not pay the other faculty supervisors anything.  However, my field is not mathematics but physics.  The faculty mentors, most of whom work in experiment but some of whom are theorists, would all be on campus doing research even if the REU students were not present.  Most of them are getting paid summer salary off other research grants.  The only direct faculty compensation goes to me, since I manage all the advertising, admissions, and logistics for the program, which really do amount to about a month of full time work.  Some other programs have a PI and co-PI who share the responsibilities and compensation basically equally, but I would suggest not dividing the money up too finely.


Graduate Recruitment Weekend Lines Up With My Vacation

No.  They are used to some people not coming from conflicts.


What are some good things to make explicit between a student and his supervisor when beginning a PhD?

Having a discussion about the PhD project specifically and expectations in general is always a good idea. If there is a clear project lined up it will be useful to discuss the details, possible directions, publications etc. In some cases (systems/programs/traditions) it is useful (in fact mandatory) to write a research plan or to write a review of the field as part of reading up on it. It is necessary that both you and the advisor has the same view of what should be achieved to the extent the specific program allows.

Apart from the science it is useful to discuss expectations so that you can agree on how work should proceed. Should you meet regularly? if so how often? How much feedback should you expect? Well the questions are many but having such a discussion is useful, particularly if you can also note what you agree upon on a piece of paper. In my country, one actually signs an individual study plan that is followed up annually showing progress in terms of course work and research. having such a plan is actually constructive in that it makes it possible to see if you are on track and also identify if and when your plan needs revisions and goals may deviate from the originally proposed. But, of course, all this is something which to some extent is dictated by the traditions in the specific program.

So do take the opportunity to have a good talk about the future collaboration. you will robably sense if the discussion is received well by the advisor and adapt accordingly.


How to handle a bib source with no author?

Modern Language Association (8) dictates that when one piece of information is missing from a citation, one simply skips that piece of information within the citation.

For example, if I published a book called "Dogs", the final citation would start:

  Fey, Mercurial. Dogs.

If I had published it without an authors name, the citation would instead start:

  Dogs.

Both citations would then continue with editors, volumes, and publishers.


Academic Dishonesty: Do cheating students learn from punishment?

In my opinion, yes. They learned to cheat by seeing their classmates cheat, and cheating is a learned behavior. Since cheating was learned, they can learn from punishment, that this will negatively affect their reputation as a student and their future.


Assuming the formatting requirements of your journal say to include DOIs, I would do so. One of two scenarios seems most likely:

Paper #1 will appear in press (or online) before Paper #2 is published, at which point it is a trivial edit to change the in press citation to the proper published citation, with the DOI.
For some reason this doesn't happen, and Paper #2 sees the light of day before the DOI in Paper #1 goes live. For a relatively short span of Paper #2's life, readers won't be able to get to the DOI for paper one - but for what is likely the majority of the paper's useful life, the DOI given in the references section will be live, and will point to the published Paper #1.

It's only in that really brief span of time where a reader might try to access the DOI and not be able to. I think optimizing for that time (which may be zero) is counter-productive when you view a paper over its entire lifetime. At best, you have what is essentially an auto-updating reference. At worst, a reader goes "That's odd..." and emails you to see if they can get a preprint.


Is there an advantage in including quotes from teaching evaluations in a teaching statement?

I would consider student comments in teaching statements as "standard optional": they are not required, and probably the majority of teaching statements do not include them, but a substantial minority do and it is certainly quite reasonable to do so.  Here are some things to keep in mind:

Your teaching statement is your chance to convey your philosophy of teaching and, in so doing, show yourself to be a clear thinker, competent writer and to possess fluency in English (assuming that you are applying to a job where English is spoken).  Including too many quotes by other people in a short statement works against this.  I am a wordy person, but for me I think a teaching statement should be at least two pages long.  If you have a 1.5 page teaching statement and a third of it is quotes, then I worry that you're using the quotes to evade the short essay you've been asked to write.  Succeeding in an academic job is a lot harder than succeeding in writing a two-page essay, so that doesn't inspire my confidence.
The positive side of the last comment is that it would be much better not to just include quotes in a pile at the end but rather to use them to illustrate points about your own teaching.  Drawing an explicit moral from each quote would not be overdoing it.
Including quotes in your own teaching statement is a bit like including quotes on the back of a book saying how good it is.  These quotes can be part of a successful sales pitch, but let's be real: they are cherry-picked.  (If you're not cherry-picking the very best quotes, you're losing ground to everyone else who is. In particular, think ten times before including a quote that has the slightest hint of negativity or even measured praise about your teaching.  Saying something negative about yourself in application materials is a black belt level sacrifice throw.)  The idea that you fundamentally gain legitimacy from a teaching statement by including the students' own words is a dubious one to the jaded eye.  Most of the eyes reading your application will be highly jaded.
Consider feeding the quotes (especially if you have more than one or two) to a faculty member who can put them in a teaching letter.  It is harder to write good teaching letters than good teaching statements.  Along with cold, hard statistics about your teaching (but be careful about introducing negativity, as above), including quotes from students is a good way to personalize the letter.  (Saying that Ms. X is clear, attentive and well-liked by students only fills up so much space, and almost everyone else is saying it too.)


How do I include a non-technical critique or line of thought in a technical doctoral thesis without being off topic?

An excellent doctoral thesis in software engineering must have passages of non-technical thought, the more the better. Such passages make the work accessible. Of course, technical aspects must appear to. The non-technical passages complement the technical aspects, the former provides the story of how the latter came to be.

To explicitly answer your question: Non-technical parts aren't off-topic, include them wherever necessary, just like technical parts, I don't see a need to explicitly distinguish between the two, the author will know.


Reference on how often "To the best of our knowledge" assertions turn out to be false

To the best of my knowledge, it is unlikely anyone has done the gruelling work of trawling through the literature, looking for such statements, and then doing the detailed work of finding out if the claim was true.
On the other hand, if I state such, you'd have to prove I did have prior knowledge to refute my statement. In itself, that could come close to an accusation of plagiarism in the context you cite. Or at least of sloppy checking of previous work.


What time of the year do government agencies in the United States typically hand out funding?

The agencies I'm familiar with (NIH) have published review cycles, and list not only the submission dates, but the approximate dates of first disbursement. Failing this, an email to a program coordinator will probably get you the info you need.  Also, many institutions have grants coordinators whose job it is to know exactly this information (since it accounts for a large proportion of a departments' income). See if you have access to one


How to publish my PhD as a monograph when examiners are unable to oversee the process?

Be upfront and honest, and ask!

Make contact with these select few. Explain that you've received interest in producing a monograph, but those doing so later declined their support because their qualifications or subject knowledge are, described much lesd tactfully than you should, inadequate.

Describe your reasons for contacting them in particular - yes, personalise these requests. Ask if they are available to lend support, and whether they would desire to do so. Don't send a copy of your thesis, but make it clear that you will on request, that is, if they don't indicate that they looked it up already.

If you get declined, thank them for their answer, and for any helpful critique or advice they give. If they accept, discuss with your university to see what support you can get from them -  if you have their backing already, this is a good thing to mention in your approach to potential collaborators.


Can a first author omit the "equal contribution" for a publication on the CV?

Let's be clear: You are trying to claim more credit than you are due by omitting information. Phrased like this, does this sound ethical to you? If it does, you may want to re-consider your standards. If not, you got your answer.

As a general rule in life, of course, you want to be treated the way you treat others. That means being generous in your praise, and modest in your claims. In the current context, you can't reasonably be expected to only put the "equal contribution" asterisk only next to the other author, but you'd probably be annoyed if your coauthor reversed the order of first and second author in their CV. So don't do the equivalent on yours.


How to evaluate student team members who did minimal work on a team assignment?

Evaluating your fellow students should be a supervised exercise of constructive criticism, e.g., after a presentation given by them. I hope this is what the lecturer will do.

Anyway, if you are assigned this you need to do it. I would give the bare facts for the students that didn't really involve themselves. I.e., I would state exactly what each team member contributed to the project. And if they only suggested a color for a button then I would state that. I would then proceed with providing an honest evaluation of the student that did all the work with you and for the others just say that they could have involved themselves more in the project.

I know that this feels a bit like being a tattletale, but it is actually them that behaved unethically by not working with you on the assignment. The only thing you should have done differently is having a frank discussion regarding their involvement (with them and with the lecturer) at an early stage. Resolving issues like this during team work is actually something you need to learn during your studies. And it appears like you haven't. Thus, you should add this as self-criticism to the evaluation and ask the lecturer to teach you methods of handling such issues.


What do I do if my part-time master's program is changed to full-time?

1) I have no answer for this one.

2) Pretty much the same way you explained it to us. Your seem to have legitimate reasons for lower grades and/or dropping out. If you decide to apply for graduate programs abroad make sure to explain this in your statement of purpose. Take your time to word it perfectly. It can make all the difference. The fact that you committed to a six year graduate program while working a full-time job shows passion and dedication. You want to make sure that comes through in your statement.


Is "working from home" a bad thing in academia?

The answer is it depends - both on the student and the culture of the department.

There are of course some situations where working from home is impossible - graduate programs that are heavily lab based come to mind. Below is a summarization of my thoughts from a more data analysis driven field, having done both.

Positives

Lots of departments these days don't have lots of graduate student space. While some labs might have dedicated bench space, and there may be an RA/TA office or two, there's not "a place" where students can work anyway, which makes "is it bad to work from home" something of a moot point.
Working from home benefits certain work styles. If you're the kind of person who prefers to work in a spread out, sprawling fashion, with multiple monitors, tons of stacks of paper, and a whiteboard or two, that's just not feasible in most grad student offices, even when they do exist. And when the only spaces that exist are transient ones, like shared desks or cubicles, library study areas etc. you also can't customize your work space at all - and expensive textbooks and laptops are theft bait.
It facilitates more flexible schedules. Universities tend to be closed at 3:00 AM. I tend to do my best work at around that time. This seems to be relatively common in academia, and as academia seems to promote an "always working" lifestyle, having a single centralized space you have access to 24 hours a day is nice.

Negatives

You do lose out on departmental interactions somewhat. The concern about missing seminars is I think a bit of a non-issue. Those are easy to miss when you're working on site, and can be attended with just a little bit of diligence on the part of someone working from home. What I've found missing more is the transient, passing in the hallways interactions. I realized, for example, one day that I had gone several weeks without talking to anyone about  my field. That's not good. It also does some harm to cross-polination and ideas from unexpected places.
It can get lonely. Seriously, this seems to be a major challenge. It's possible, and the workload sometimes promotes, just disappearing into a cave.
It's possible to get distracted, as it always is working from home. "Real life" has infinitely many things to take care of, and its much easier to defend "work time" if you're at an office. But then unless you have an office its easy to get distracted in a department where your friends and colleagues are around.

Overall, I wouldn't say its bad. I know successful academics who work almost entirely in their office, and who work almost entirely from home. I'd say the best way to promote on-site work, if a university is trying to accomplish that, is not to focus on the bad parts of working from home, but on addressing what makes it appealing. I finally moved entirely to a working from home setup because I got tired of "work" involving camping out in cramped spaces, without the materials I needed, fighting for power outlets.

As for whether or not your physical presence is important to the department - it depends on the department. I've known some who don't care as long as you show up to what you need to, and others that absolutely want you there, and subtly penalize those who aren't around.


Are there risks in sharing a paper after submission and before reviews?

I work in CS and know of no issues with distributing work to a small group of people. I know a number of researchers (myself included) who share their work with colleagues before and after submission. Sometimes it's to gather feedback, sometimes because a friend is curious about your work or working on something similar. It's generally understood that the research will not be distributed further without the authors' permission.


How much code to include in a Physics paper?

If the goal of your paper is to show that your code solves a particular problem or performs a specific task, then it is your responsibility to prove to the reviewers that your code does what it claims to do. The easiest way to do this is to include the code as part of the supporting information for your paper.

However, reproducibility—which is what you're asking about, to a certain extent—is a not-so-simple question when it comes to showing codes do what they're supposed to. For instance, a code that runs one way under one configuration may return a slightly (or perhaps _very) different result when run under another configuration. This doesn't mean that one result or the other is wrong—it just means that this behavior needs to be taken into account when evaluating the correctness of software.

One way to help this is to provide as much information as possible on your testing environment, so that any differences between the system on wich you were working and the conditions the reviewers and future potential users of your code will have can quickly be identified. This would be included, perhaps, as a text file that accompanies the code in the supporting information.


Can I ask my advisor to drop authorship for a journal submission?

This is not about the relationships with the former advisor at all.

The list of authors is supposed to be determined based on who actually worked on the particular research (which sometimes – however good or bad it is – may mean simply being a supervisor and providing funding). If the researcher contributed to several of

the formulation of hypothesis
data collection / measurements / numerical simulations
data analysis
writing the actual paper
insert here other field-specific steps

she should be an author. Certainly, different criteria for being an author of the paper can be applied, and the list is very field-dependent.

However, the unfortunate amalgamation of facts that

you want to submit to a certain journal X
this journal X has a certain conflict of interest policy
the presence of one co-author who normally would be listed in the list of authors does not allow to submit to X

should not be used as a reason to exclude one from the list of authors. At least, the initiative should not come from the other authors who could benefit from it.

So, I would strongly consider submitting to a different journal.

Alternatively, you (or your colleague in the potential conflict of interest) can ask the journal X editor to arrange a submission/revision process through another associate editor(s). There might be other associate editors willing and qualified to do it for the paper in your field and your particular research direction.


Time overlap between two postdocs? Simply keep two affiliations or quit the first position earlier?

Around here (in Nordic countries), many institutions and non-academic workplaces include terms about informing the employer of other work besides the one the contract is for. As such, I would be contractually obliged to inform the university that I am also emplyed (presumably full-time) by another institute. Since both of them would have a claim to my full time work, it would be unlikely that I could satisfy that requirement, I would expect them to not accept the situation.

In your case, I would discuss the situation with my current and future superior and give up one position at the same time as starting the other, so that I am only employed once. At least in mathematics, there is typically flexibility to adjust the starting and ending times of the contracts by a month or two, as convenient for everyone.

Also, you can just resign. Out of courtesy, as Buffy noted, please make a clean exit where you finish as much unfinished business as possible and take care that all duties you have (teaching, running a seminar, etc.) are transferred to someone else. Make sure your data or code is available and documented and your collaborators and superiors know where to find it, if this is relevant in your field and country.

At least in pure and applicable mathematics, it is expected for one to continue previous research projects at the new institute. This might be very different if you are hired for a concrete job as a part of a team, but I would guess that most academic jobs allow a measure of flexibility in the matter, as outside collaborations are usually valued. Discuss with your future supervisor if you are in doubt.


Does being unemployed after a PhD reflect poorly on my advisor?

I'd say yes, you are overthinking it. Any problems you have are not due to him. He seems to be doing what he can, though his connections are, perhaps, not the ones you need now. Your unemployment might be due to any of several other factors, from the economy to how you present yourself. I would continue to thank him for his advice and care, whether effective or not. He might wind up in the future being an effective advocate.

Your lack of employment shouldn't have any effect on his tenure. Not if anyone in the system is reasonable. As I said, any difficulties you have are not due to his inaction or inattention. His tenure is (should be) determined only by his own actions and things he can control.

On the other hand, tenure decisions are often not especially rational. Sometimes they are just determined by personalities. Other times by the perceived need of the institution at that moment.


Student doesn't want to take credit for his own extraordinary paper

If he's a PhD student, he has to publish papers regardless of his age. I doubt many journal publishers would ask for the authors age (even the top tier ones). Make him understand the importance of publication and his destiny as a researcher.


Is there a need to cite a general idea in the introduction which shall be later developed with a reference?

Citations are only needed when you make a statement that requires external justification.

Thus, if you say: "This paper will examine X people in Y country" there is no need for external justification, since it is a statement about the paper itself.

When you say "X people in Y country are characterized by a habit of doing A, B and C", however, that's a statement that requires justification, either by external citation or by data presented in the paper.


Where do English/History or Humanities professors post their research publications?

It's possible that this question will be closed as a "shopping" question, but I'll try to provide some general information.

In the humanities and social sciences, scholars have been slow to adopt the practice of putting preprints of articles up on the web for other scholars to read.  There are some preprint servers for various areas in the humanities and social sciences, but these are not nearly as heavily used as (for example) ArXiV is used in many areas of science and mathematics.

A further issue is that much of the scholarship in these disciplines is published in the form of books rather than articles.  For example, a typical expectation of an assistant professor in these disciplines is that they publish one book out of their dissertation within the first few years after the Ph.D. and have a second book published before the end of the tenure period.  Publishers of scholarly books in the humanities are mostly unwilling to allow the authors to make versions of the books freely available.

In my experience, Google Scholar does often include journal articles in the humanities and social sciences.  Furthermore, it's quite common for the web pages of faculty members in these disciplines to list their publications.  Thus I'm surprised that you say you can't determine what they've published.  Are you saying that you can't find any information about what they've published, or are you asking why you can't find freely accessible copies of this material?


How was funding handled in the medieval university?

Your question is based on a wrong premise: There was no funding specifically for research, because there was no research at medieval universities. Initially, they were created as "self-help" groups of students wishing to learn, first and foremost, the practice of law that was becoming more and more important to urban life. For this purpose, they banded together to pay teachers. (You can find detailed accounts of this in the Wikipedia page or the answers to this question on History.SE). This quickly included also canon law, which brought increasingly many theologians to teach at universities (who, as Stephan Kolassa points out in his comment, did make many significant contributions to the knowledge of the time).

As Darrin Thomas points out, the first research in the modern sense (that cannot be described as doing philosophy) was carried out in the Renaissance by individuals not affiliated with any institution of learning, who were funded either through private means (inheritances, church postings that left them ample free time) or patronage -- in particular, by dedicating self-published monographs to various members of nobility. These later organized themselves outside of the universities in learned societies such as the Royal Society (founded in 1660, but the first seems to be the Sodalitas Litterarum Vistulana, founded in 1488 in Cracow). These initially received no funding (apart from the wealth of their members; for example, Robert Hooke, who built many of the experiments for the Society, became very rich by his involvement in the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire), but later received (modest) grants from the government (hence the name, Royal Society). The role of the universities (as opposed to individual researchers, which might or might not hold posts at one) was seen as that of disseminating the new knowledge.

The idea of universities as a place where research should be done (i.e., professors being hired and paid specifically for their research in addition to teaching, rather than research just being what a good teacher did on their own) is a modern one, arising in the beginning of the 19th century with the foundation of the German universities based on Alexander von Humboldt's ideal (which also strongly influenced the new American universities). To quote:

  Just as primary instruction makes the teacher possible, so he renders
  himself dispensable through schooling at the secondary level. The
  university teacher is thus no longer a teacher and the student is no
  longer a pupil. Instead the student conducts research on his own
  behalf and the professor supervises his research and supports him in
  it.

Much like modern universities, they were funded by the state: A portion of the tax money was distributed among the universities, which distributed their portion among the departments, which distributed their portion among the professors to pay for their salary and any staff or resources they might require for their research. (Needless to say, there was heavy fighting at all levels about how the money was distributed.)

Funding of specific research via grants is an introduction of the 20th century, when technical and scientific innovation increasingly required expensive equipment. Initially, this was done by corporations and private industrialists, but World War II lead to increasing government support of science and technology. This lead to the creation of national funding agencies after the war. (For example, the NSF was founded in 1950, although the German DFG, founded in 1949, actually has their root in the "Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft" founded in 1920.)


Do grant proposals with no funds for faculty members have higher chances of being accepted?

This of course depends on the kind of competition, agency, country, etc. Those agencies and competitions I'm familiar with, always rank applications based on merit and not on financial need.


How do I get rid of a mental barrier with respect to continuing research work that I have already done?

This feeling is the worst. Ways I've found to alleviate it:

If possible, get into some kind of collaborative rhythm with someone. Having a meeting or a short-term deadline can be a really good motivator for just getting yourself over that initial hump of icky feelings about your work.

Along the same lines: Instead of thinking "where am I in this mess, and what come next?" it's sometimes better to think, "How can I explain what I've done so far to someone else?" Again, meeting regularly with others helps. You can also accomplish this by writing up some slides as if you are presenting what you've already done for a future seminar. They will probably come in handy, and it can get you back in touch with why you liked the problem in the first place. The next steps usually come naturally when you're familiar with the details of the problem again.

brute force method: set a 20 minute timer and force yourself to work for 20 minutes, then take a 10 minute break. Adjust the time you commit to working down as much as you need to. I keep the 10 minute break constant, as I've found longer makes me feel like I'm starting over at the bottom of the motivation hill, and shorter isn't enough of a break to look forward to. This can be highly inefficient but sometimes it's the only way to get started. For me, once I'm in the groove I typically start snoozing the timer because I don't want to stop working.

Longer term solutions: working through your feelings of shame around your work. There are some free resources online for this: journaling prompts or meditation exercises. The point is to get used to  acknowledging awful feelings like fear or shame calmly without feeling panic, and over time you decondition your anxiety. This is supposed to help with avoidance behavior, though I haven't found immediate success here. If it works, it takes a lot of practice.


Is it OK to submit a poster version of an already accepted full paper to the same conference?

Some conferences explicitly encourage (or even require) poster presentation of papers.  In this case, there is typically an option to simply request that your existing paper also be given a poster slot.  Thus, it may in fact be quite reasonable to seek to present in both ways, if the conference supports this.

It would not, however, be appropriate to submit a separate poster paper that pretends to be different than the accepted paper.  That would be self-plagiarism, and the conference organizers might look very badly upon you for doing that.

I would thus recommend getting in touch with the poster chair and asking if they allow accepted full papers to have an accompanying poster as well.  If so, that's great, and you probably don't need to submit anything more than a formality at most.  If not, then accept that there will be no poster and don't submit anything!


How to turn down a MSc supervisor after we had already agreed to work together?

Skip the "better-ranked" part (don't be petty); say you couldn't hold up your end of the bargain - to find your own funding -, and Max Planck offered a fully-funded position. I don't foresee any issues or grievances after a short, to the point mail to this sort.


Using figures from my thesis into publication post defence

This is a quite common situation, so it will most likely be OK. The main points you will need to check are the following:

What copyright are you assigning your institution? The universities I have dealt with in the past all asked for a non-exclusive license, meaning you can publish all or portions of your thesis again if you want to. However, your institute's policies may differ; check your handbook or ask the administration.
Will your thesis count as a prior publication? This will depend on the venue you submit your paper to. In some places the thesis is even formally published (and has an ISBN assigned to it), which may increase the likelihood that the journal or conference will consider this work as already published. Check the venue's rules for submission and if necessary ask the editor before submitting your paper.


Is a paper that takes existing techniques to solve a practical and more specific problem valuable enough to get published?

In my opinion, yes.

You paper will prove that those techniques are useful and usable by using them to solve a practical problem. I consider it a contribution to human kind, thus valuable to get published.

Whether or not it will be accepted by journal/conference is another issue. You should try. Please send it to be peer-reviewed.


Could I change part of my paper after acceptance

Since you have not proof read the paper yet, you simply ask the editor to make the changes to the table as part of the proof reading process. This is perfectly fine as long as the changes you make are trivial and does not change the basis for your conclusions. The worst case would be if the paper was accepted due to the data you reported and your changes will change the results so that the conclusions no longer can be made. The proof-reading stage comes after an accept and it is not allowed to make substantial changes. By substantial, I mean both by volume (changing a lot of text) or by quality (changing data upon which the decision was made).

Supply the changes to the editor as part of the proof reading process but make sure you explain that the changes in the table does not influence the results and conclusions of the paper.


How can I cite research material from meetings or presentations?

It depends on whether the material has been published or not and in what style you want to cite.

A general way is: Author Surname, Initial(s) Year of publication, 'Title of paper', paper presented to Name of the conference, Place of the conference, date held. viewed Date month Year,

So it might look something like this: Eric T. Identification of Antigens Targeted by Tumor Infiltrating Lymphocytes to Enhance Adoptive Immunotherapy. Presented at: SITC 2015 Workshop on New Perspectives for Target Antigens in the Changing Cancer Immunotherapy Landscape Nov. 5, 2015

Now I haven't included some information, like where it took place, but you get the idea.

Here are some guidelines for NLM, APA and Harvard style:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK7255/
http://www.easybib.com/guides/citation-guides/apa-format/conference-paper/
http://libguides.scu.edu.au/c.php?g=356711&p=2408708

If none of these is the style you want, you can look it up now that you have an idea of what it should look like.

If you don't know in what style you should cite, you might want to ask an advisor.


Don't give the same exam as a makeup exam.  Rather, write a separate exam to use for makeups.  Even if you haven't given out a set of solutions or returned graded papers, students  who took the main exam are likely to have shared information about the exam with students who need to take a makeup.


Harvard has a page on their website dedicated to this exact question, and the answer turns out to be simply "contact the specific school and request verification of the degree."

To speak to the general case, just call the university registrar and ask how they go about verifying degrees. This is a very common scenario and they will almost certainly have a process in place for it.


Are there examples of a postdoc at an institution being awarded an NSF grant to stay at that institution (before their postdoc runs out)?

Yes, it does happen.

  Are there any particular pitfalls I could find in applying at an institution that is already planning on paying me for three years? That is, if the NSF funds me then the job market "lost" a job in the sense that my postdoc position won't be replaced by my institution.

Assuming you are talking about the MSPRF program, it can be combined with your postdoc at University X.  One common pattern is to use the NSF postdoc half-time for the remaining two years of your current postdoc (to reduce teaching) and then full-time for one more year after that.  This is called the Research Instructorship option in the MSPRF instructions.

Combining NSF postdocs with university postdocs is very common in mathematics, so you shouldn't worry that it will be viewed as strange or problematic.  The only case I'm aware of in which the job market clearly "loses a job" is that if you are offered an NSF postdoc and do not accept it, then the position disappears for that year (there is no waiting list of backup candidates).  So if you decide it's not what you want before the awards are made, you should withdraw your application.


Is it unethical to give students a sample math test as a study guide?

I give a mock exam that gives example questions from the topics that are covered in the exam but not the actual questions themselves.

This enables specific words or formats etc to be used in the mock so that one is sure that the students cannot say that they have not been covered...

Edit based on my comment:

For the nine topics covered, there are 15 or so practice questions which are part of the "coursework" for each topic, so there is plenty of practice. The exam questions are based on any of those questions, with a different story, different numbers or part A is the same but part B is then different etc


Is it necessary to report every single finding, even if they're not relevant?

You can consider including this in your "Supporting Information", which is available in many publications. Sometimes, for the sake of presenting a coherent and concise manuscript, it may not be necessary or could even be detrimental to add portions which are orthogonal or simply irrelevant to the main line of your argument. However, by including it in the supporting information, it can still provide the necessary exposure of these findings without disrupting the flow of the paper. It can also have the additional benefit of allowing reviewers to see additional work done or preempt certain questions they may have in their review.


Is it possible to edit the names of Bibtex entries on Google Scholar?

It is unlikely that this is specifically documented anywhere, but the answer is almost certainly no.
Article entries in Google Scholar, which contain the BibTeX link, are based on information crawled by Google on the web. This itself cannot be changed by you, even if you are the author. This is also mentioned in their help page:

The description of my article is wrong and I am appropriately
irritated. How do I correct it?
We apologize, and we assure you the error was unintentional. Automated
extraction of information from articles in diverse fields can be
tricky, so an error sometimes sneaks through.
Please write to the owner of the website where the erroneous search
result is coming from, and encourage them to provide correct
bibliographic data to us, as described in the technical guidelines.
Once the data is corrected on their website, it usually takes 6-9
months to a year or longer for it to be updated in Google Scholar. We
appreciate your help and your patience.

The articles on your profile, for which you can edit some fields, are connected to these existing Scholar entries.
It appears that Google Scholar uses the format <last-name-of-first-author><year-of-publication><first-word-in-title> for its BibTeX entry names. Since you cannot change the title in the original crawled Scholar entry (which would not make much sense in any case), it is unlikely that you can change the BibTeX entry name either.


Paper accepted by a journal without comments

This has happened to me twice. The first occurrence was for a paper that was accepted in a decent computational fluid mechanics journal with a single reviewer. The comments were purely aesthetics ( Color change to some figures, etc.). The second time was in a chemical engineering journal (also a pretty good one), and there were absolutely zero comments from the single reviewer that reviewed the paper.

Initially, I found these occurrence quite alarming because the papers had been accepted after significant delay (2-3 months at least), but had been reviewed by a single reviewer. With time, I think this is just a proof that the review process is by itself flawed, but there is little we can do as researcher except carry our own reviews with as much care as possible.

However, from a career point of view, no one knows how many reviewers actually reviewed your paper once it is published (except for some very specific journals). What I did, and maybe I can suggest you do the same, is to take extra care when you do the proof reading of the paper and the corrections. I would even ask some colleagues or at least your co-authors to help you as much during the proof reading.


Editor would have rejected it immediately, if it was clearly unsuitable. Though sometimes editors do make mistakes.

Now it is up to the reviewers and the editor. Nine months is not an alarmingly long time. I would not make any deductions based on how long the paper has been under review.


How to Deal with Boisterous Officemates?

If your only concern is for your reputation, I think any such concern is entirely unwarranted, and your best course of action is to do nothing and simply not worry about it. You are in no way becoming "associated" with the other student's poor behavior by occupying the same office as him, which you have been assigned by the department. The student's behavior will not reflect well on him, but unless you and him are identical twins or just happen to have extremely similar voices, which I find difficult to believe, as long as you do not emulate his behavior or egg him on in some conspicuous way, I don't see any chance that anyone will think you have a role in the way he behaves.

If the student's behavior bothers you for reasons unrelated to protecting your reputation, or if you are unwilling to accept the advice in my first paragraph, some options you may want to consider are:

Remind him again that his behavior bothers you, perhaps pointing out that you noticed that the professor in the office next door is unhappy with the noise and are concerned that his loudness may hurt his reputation.
Send an email to the department chair pointing out the student's loudness, and ask to be assigned to a different office and/or for the chair to do something to make the student improve his behavior.
Send an anonymous email if you prefer that it not become known that it was you who made the complaint.
Talk to your other officemates to try to get their assistance in getting the loud student to change his behavior. (Peer pressure can be a powerful inducement agent.)
This is a defeatist option that I would not recommend, but if all else fails you can stop coming to the office (or at least minimize your presence there as much as possible) and find some other place to do your work.


How to cite online articles that don't have a publication date?

The APA blog answers this:

Determining Website Dates
If no date of publication is provided, use the letters n.d. (which stand for “no date”). The copyright date on the website itself should not be used as the publication date for particular content on that site.

(Note that you should use the updated date if there is one.)
When you have multiple citations for the same website and both have no date, you should append a letter to the end, similar to an actual year: “n.d.-a”, “n.d.-b”, etc.