I guess my suggestion is to think carefully about what you want to achieve in this situation.  It doesn't feel especially righteous to suggest that you do a competent job of working on the notes, try to learn something and don't worry too much about precisely how much credit you will get out of the collective endeavor; however that sure seems to me like the right course of action.  For an original refereed publication, it's worth throwing a few elbows to make sure you get your fair share of credit (and even there it pays to be careful), but it doesn't sound like that's what we're discussing here.

While I don't like saying that, I just can't think of what course of action is likely to actually improve your situation.  if you refuse to participate, you'll get a bad grade and make a poor impression (and such impressions do spread from one faculty member to another); I doubt he will really believe its due to high-minded concerns about authorship credit, as opposed to laziness.  If you make a fuss about getting credit before you've even written the notes, I don't think that will make an especially good impression either.  It wouldn't be right for the lecturer to publish the notes without appropriately crediting the class, but that wouldn't make suing him (or more realistically, making threats about suing) any less stupid. If it makes you feel better to separately post your contribution on a blog as well, knock yourself out.  Hopefully some people will read it and learn something.

I think the productive thing to do is to try to meet the expectations of the class, and if later it seems that the faculty member is doing something shady with the results, you can go to your graduate director or another professor and express concerns about credit.  But complaining preemptively is not likely to achieve much.


Postdoc interview - somewhat positive reply but no news?

One possible scenario is that they have a preferred candidate, who has not yet accepted or rejected their offer.

Another possible scenario is that there is an uncertainty about funding. For example, they may be  trying to hire you using some complicated scheme in which your position is co-funded by a third body. It takes time to organize such things. Or they may be waiting for an announcement of the outcome of their grant application submitted long ago. They may have decided to hire you anyway, but may not yet know which grant to fund your position from. Or they may have been unable to hire you in the intended way and may be looking for an alternative method to hire you.

It is rather a bad sign that they did not take the initiative to contact you and keep you updated, and such a delay seems to be too long to be caused by any official process unless this process is related to an application for some funding.

If I were you, I would be rather pessimistic and would send a frank email expressing my concern. I would ask them to frankly explain what is going on and to tell me the probability of me getting an official offer. I would also ask them when I should expect to receive an official offer. If I did not receive a convincing and credible response, I would immediately start looking for another position.


Should I mention my goal of expanding my family business in my MS statement of purpose?

In my opinion, having a clear reason for going to graduate school can only help your application.  Many people apply to graduate programs simply because it is the next thing after undergraduate.  For you, there is a clear motivation and a source of focus.

With regards to this particular reason, it is not clear to me whether it would be good for a Ph.D., because of the research component.  A master's degree, however, is designed to give you knowledge and skills that can be applied outside of academia, however, and so your motivation of applying this to a particular business is a good match (the fact that it is a family business I think should not particularly matter).


Do German universities consider high school grades?

In theory there is no way to prevent them from doing so, but in general they will focus on more relevant things like bachelors degree.
The reason they ask (apart from the German love for bureaucracy) I believe is a weird quirk in German law. In order to study at a German university you need a "Hochschulreife", i.e. the qualification for university studies. This is normally gained by finishing high school.¹ It is however not gained by having a university degree, even though it is technically needed to get one in the first place. So in order to gain admission into a masters program, you both need to prove that you have the prerequisite bachelors degree, as well as the general qualification to study (i.e. have finished high school).
¹The specifics are a bit complicated, as not every type of German high-school counts. For foreign systems, I believe there are endless lists of what is equivalent and what is not, but in general this is not a high hurdle.


Finding mathematics postdoc opportunities in India

First of all, I am not an Indian, please take my words as a grain of salts. I'll provide what I know.

University Grants Commission (UGC)

  is a statutory body set up by the Indian Union government in accordance to the UGC Act 1956[1] under Ministry of Human Resource Development, and is charged with coordination, determination and maintenance of standards of higher education.

As far as I know, they are in charge of almost all of the high level education matters in India.

I did find one of their web pages Scholarships and Fellowships which lists many scholarships and fellowships in India, including UGC scheme for post-doctoral Fellowships (pdfs) (To be named D. S. Kothari Fellowships), POST DOCTORAL FELLOWSHIP TO WOMEN CANDIDATES (I don't know if your student is a woman or not), etc.

Hope this helps.


Applied vs Theoretical Journals (or venues)

This is not a direct answer, as I do not have that much experience with work crossing the theory/systems divide. I do have experience with the theory/bioinformatics divide, which is quite similar.

First, the publication venue should be chosen according to the intended target audience. If you believe your work is directly relevant to a community, you should publish it for that community. If it is only potentially relevant, you should probably publish it elsewhere.

I frequently read algorithmic papers published in theoretical algorithms, algorithm engineering, and bioinformatics. The fields have very different standards for what constitutes a good algorithmic paper. Proofs and analysis are the primary content in a theoretical paper. Experimental evaluation, if present, is considered secondary. The situation is reversed in algorithm engineering. As a result, a good algorithm in one field is often not that good in the other.

Things get a bit weird in bioinformatics. The algorithm itself is secondary content, as people are more interested in the problem you study and whether you have biologically interesting results. An algorithm is good, if it solves a relevant problem in practice. There are some bioinformatics papers with plenty of mathematical content, but they are exceptions. Proofs are seen more as technical details better suited to the supplementary material than as scientific contributions. Hence the reviewers rarely pay very much attention to them.


Curious case of self-citations and how to monitor self-citers?

I don't think there is a good way around self-citations, since most of the time, your current research builds upon your previous research, and therefore, your previous research (or that of your collaborators) is relevant to your current research. However, from my experience, self-citations form a small part of the overall number of citations.

Assuming the author's group is not the only one working on a topic, there seem to be two other problems here:

other people don't seem to cite his work, which could mean that he is ignored, his work isn't visible or his work is just not good and/or relevant enough.
basing quality on number of citations is flawed. The number of citations is closely related to an authors H-index, which is criticized regularly. The same criticism should be valid for number of citations.

To tackle the "problem" of self-citations (I would not say this is a problem in the majority of cases), some citation-based measures are based on citations excluding self-citations. This does of course get tricky when collaborators are citing someone's work, but the large bulk of self-citations will be removed this way.


Is it possible to "convert" my EdD into a PhD, now that the university I went to offers a PhD in education?

I would petition the school. The same happened to me when I went through the Ed.D. program, and then right after graduation, they became a Ph.D. program.  Because many of my credits were transferred and I did the dissertation through the new school, they originally issued me a Ed.D.; however, my credits and curriculum more closely matched their Ph.D. program. Once I petitioned, they as of this week, converted my Ed.D. to a Ph.D. and reissued me new transcripts and a diploma with the original date of my Ed.D. on it from 2016.  I think it's possible, it's just that many people would not go through the rigor to request it.  Good luck!


How do conferences / journals select reviewers?

In the journals I help edit (all in the medical fields), there are five ways we find reviewers for our manuscripts:

They have published with us before
They were nominated by the authors, editors, other reviewers or peers, or members of our editorial board
Our associate editors approached them through a scan of authors of papers on the same topic
They have volunteered to be placed on our list of reviewers
They work for us as consultants and are paid on a per-review basis (this is mostly relevant when we need specialist expertise such as in statistics or economics)

Once you are found, you are placed on a pool from which we can make selections on the basis of affiliation, expertise, seniority, etc.

As you can imagine, this is a rather valuable resource. We guard this list jealously and do not share this with other journals.

In my experience the response rate is typically 33%. That is, if we require five reviews, we will invite fifteen people. Thus, the pool needs to be deep in order to receive the requisite number of reviews for our purposes.


is it possible for me to Co-author research paper(s)/article(s) and get it published?

Is this possible?

Yes, it is possible that one could volunteer to co-author something and find someone who is willing to let you do it with them.

Is this probable or likely in the abstract?

No, it's very unlikely that someone will just take on a co-author who has nothing to offer but their time to the project. What could increase the probability is if you have some thing to contribute to authoring the paper.  For instance, there would need to be some particular feature of your finance knowledge that they lack or would find useful in producing the paper.

Primarily, the issue is that academic researchers in most fields are not looking for apprentices that can watch the research process and then learn how to do research in this way. Instead, they often co-author things with (A) each other by bringing different areas of expertise or (B) graduate students who undertake the research.


Ethics of patents for research work funded by tax money

It is certainly true that some research funded by some grants in some universities in some countries can be patented. The university should have an intellectual property policy (and the funded may have one). That's the document that will tell you the answer to this question. That policy should also give you some idea about appropriate sharing of the rights between the researchers involved in the project (it's not clear from your question whether you were involved in the research supporting the patent application). And there is possibly a commercialisation group within the university who would be involved in patent applications too.


I don't want to do research (First year tenure-track faculty)

You may be suffering from burnout. You've been running at full speed for well over 20 years (K+12+4+7). You may just need a break.

First, check your department and college expectations for tenure. Talk to newly minted associate professors about their experiences before tenure. You may have to only do a modest amount of additional post-dissertation research in order to clear the tenure bar at your institution. At a small liberal arts college, it could be a book based on your dissertation and a few peer reviewed journal articles combined with some college service and not pissing off your colleagues ("collegiality").

This is eminently doable even if you take off your first year to recharge your research batteries by focusing on teaching and a recovery of some modicum of sociality.

Finally, you might ask if your university welcomes you taking a leave of absence to do a postdoc somewhere. A writing fellowship in the Berkshires can do wonders for mental health as well as ones’ publications list.


Can I use images showing up in Google search for my presentation slides without violating any copyright?

You can use images showing up in Google Search if and only if the license allows for it.  Therefore, you might be interested in Advanced Google Image Search, where you can search by copyright status. More information about the Usage rights search can be found here.

For example, here are freely useable images searching for "Mars".  Notice how many of them are from NASA or the Wikimedia Foundation.

And here is an example searching for "IBM".

Note: See the important remark by @jb. in the comment below
 —
 you should verify with the original source (1) that the picture really is free to use, and (2) under what conditions

Good luck and enjoy!


A LinkedIn Recommendation as compared to an Academic Recommendation

I believe they are totally different.

LinkedIn recommendation is more towards the visibility of student's soft/technical skills in general while the official letter of recommendation should address the student skills in a more academic/depth way.
Their audience is different. Recommendation Letter is intended to particular institute/committee while LinkedIn is more to the public general and industry recruiters in particular.
LinkedIn recommendations counts nothing for the admission committees while might have good impact on industry recruiters.

In short: Academia:- Recommendation Letters. Industry: doesn't hurt to let your supervisor recommending you - if they do have account on LinkedIn :-)


Award, Scholarship, and Grant on educational financial sponsorship

You don't have a scholarship (they're awarded by universities), you have a grant or an award, I'm unsure of the precise distinction, I suspect grant is more appropriate, since award suggests competition


Is there an online engine like Google Scholar which allows me to sort the papers by citation count?

There are at least four freely available databases which have this function. In random order:

Lens: In Lens, instead of the default Sort by Relevance choose Scholarly Citations (highest)
Microsoft Academic: In Microsoft Academic, choose SORT BY MOST EST. CITATIONS
Dimensions: In Dimensions, choose Sort by: Citations
ScienceOpen: In ScienceOpen, select Sort by cited by count


Should I copy a short a proof from another paper or just refer to it?

A third option is to give your own proof.  Instead of copying it word-for-word, rewrite it in your own words and with notation that matches the rest of your paper, and include a citation of the original source.

Don't do this by taking the source text and just changing a few words.  Instead, study it until you feel you understand the key idea, then set it aside and write your own proof.  Resist the temptation to just recite the original proof from memory.

This solves all your problems and more:

it keeps the paper self-contained
it isn't plagiarism, since the source has been cited (to credit the idea) and the text hasn't been copied
it doesn't require quotation marks or other indication of verbatim quoting
it isn't copyright infringement, since the exact text wasn't used
it doesn't require explicit consent from the original author or publisher
you have gained a fuller understanding of how the proof works
your version of the proof will fit better in the context of your paper and your own writing style
you may be able to improve upon the original proof, or at least to make it better fit the way you think about the ideas involved
the reader now has two different proofs they can look at (yours and the original), which gives them some options in case they find something unclear in one of them.

At least in mathematics, it's most common to either do this, or else to  simply refer to the original.  It's very rare to actually copy a proof verbatim, and is usually only done when one wants to add critical or historical commentary on the proof itself.


Speaking as a combinatorist, you'll be better off being open to both subfields from a knowledge point of view.

Remember: what you choose to write your thesis on does not determine what you'll study for the rest of your life. Especially when we are talking about two subfields so closely related.

If you want to be at a university the state of the fields now matters pretty little, comparatively to the date of the fields in 10-15 years. If you want to enter industry, it's unlikely that the subject of your dissertation matters much at all (field, sure. But subsubdiscipline? Not at all).

Listen to your advisor.


Citing a Youtube video in New Hart's Rules style?

I would take your best shot at getting the citation style correct and then let the copy editor deal with it. I cannot imagine a manuscript being rejected because someone used the wrong citation style for an "esoteric" entry type. Part of taking your best shot would be to scan the reference lists of the past few issues or a through electronic search for someone else who has cited a youtube video.


How to withdraw a paper when advisor insists on having his name

Shall I ask the editor that I want to withdraw my paper citing this as a reason?

Resolve the co-authorship dispute with your advisor first, before doing anything with your paper.

Let's give your advisor the benefit of the doubt.  It is possible that they actually did contribute significantly to the development of your paper, but in ways that you may not recognize.

So I would recommend asking them, directly but calmly, what they believe they contributed to the paper.  And then LISTEN.

If their only answer is "I'm your advisor", start looking for a new advisor.
Same for "I pay your salary" or "I need it for my tenure/promotion case" or "It's a department/university rule".  The only ethical justification for co-authorship is a novel and significant intellectual contribution to the paper.  The requirements are the same for your advisor, your department chair, your office mate, the bartender at your favorite pub, or some random stranger on the internet.

But your advisor might remind you of activities that they consider significant intellectual contributions, even if you don't.  For example, if you and your advisor discussed your research results as they evolved, those discussions could be enough of a contribution for co-authorship even if no concrete ideas from those discussions appear in the paper.  In particular, steering you away from tempting bad ideas is definitely a contribution.

Whether their contributions really are significant enough for co-authorship is something the two of you will have to negotiate, but I recommend erring on the side of generosity.  Not because they're your advisor, or because you "owe" them, but because generosity pays off more in the long run.

Alternatively, they might have expected to be more involved—as a colleague and mentor—in the research and writing process.  After all, their job as your advisor is to help you become a better researcher, but they can't do that job if you don't let them.  That's not a good argument for retroactively making them a coauthor of this paper, but it is a strong indicator that you and your advisor need to discuss your expectations for future research much more clearly.

If you are seriously worried about your advisor overreacting ("spoiling your career"), you should discuss the situation first with your department chair, graduate program director, department ombudsman, or one of your other faculty mentors.  (You do have at least one other faculty mentor, don't you?) Again: LISTEN.  Given the high emotions involved, it might be appropriate to invite the other faculty member to mediate the discussion between you and your advisor, or at least act as a neutral observer. Hopefully, your worries are unfounded.

And if you can't trust your advisor enough to have the discussion at all, I'm afraid your relationship with your advisor is broken.  Start looking for a new advisor that you can trust.


Reusing previous review for similar paper

Open your review with something along the lines of:

I reviewed an earlier version of this work (entitled previous_title), which was submitted to conference_name. The authors have since added a substantial amount of new material and have taken into account some of my previous suggestions. However, many of the issues I previously raised have not been addressed. What follows repeats much of what appeared in my earlier review.

In addition (and if appropriate), you might like to add something along the following lines: If the authors address the issues that I have previously raised, then I'll consider the new material in more detail. As it stands, I consider the previously identified issues sufficient to recommend rejection.


Professor takes our money and goes incommunicado, do we complain to the department or the police?

Obligatory disclaimer: I am not a lawyer...

This sounds like a contract dispute: whether the editor has discharged his side of the agreement. As such it is likely to be a civil matter rather than a criminal one. I very much doubt the police will be interested in pursuing anything. In general terms, the legal recourse would be to sue the editor in the civil courts. I suspect that the costs of doing so outweigh the benefits.

Could you report it to the editor's university? Yes. However, it isn't clear what this would achieve. As @ZeroTheHero says, they (apparently) have no involvement in the dispute so far. From their perspective it will be your word against the editor's; even if they wanted to resolve the dispute, it is not clear how they would go about doing so.


How can I get a list with all papers that cites one person's papers in the last month?

Microsoft Academic provides something close. It creates a profile page for each author, and under the "Cited By" tab, you can see all the papers that cited that author's papers. I do not know how accurate it is in practice, however.
There doesn't seem to be any direct way to filter out citations by the last 30-60 days. But you could still get the information with a little bit of work. In the left pane under the "Cited By" tab, there's a "Filter By" option where you can filter by year. You can then sort the citations by selecting "Sort By Newest First" in the drop-down menu on the right, and then traverse the list for the duration you are interested in. This is not as bad as the case with Google Scholar since you don't need to check for each publication separately, all you need to find is the cutoff point in the dates.
There also seems to be an API to access the data, so you could look into that as well in case it is useful, and it may possibly provide more fine grained access to the data. I haven't tried using it, however.
Screenshot for reference:

Note: I am not affiliated to this service in any manner.


References that are not literature or qualified sources

As a computer scientist, I often encounter this as well. I have seen three main approaches used, in decreasing order of preference

Cite the paper about the software, if one exists: academic software is often the subject of papers, and the authors very much appreciate those citations, often explicitly requesting them in the software documentation.
Cite the software as a miscellaneous reference: most citation styles will have an explicit recommended means for doing so, (e.g., this post on APA software citations)
The first time the software is mentioned, put a link to the software in a footnote or parentheses.

The earlier ones are better for the authors of the software, but I have sometimes had journals refuse to allow me to give a proper citation.


What to do with an overtly exasperating colleague in computer science?

I will try to present yet another approach than the ones in the answers above. I don't consider it a definite solution, rather a way to go that may work for someone and may not for someone else. (And also, I would much more prefer to speak to someone higher-up, if you can; that's what the other answers discuss.)

The thing is: Be honest, but without judging the other person's qualities at all. I had been in such a situation before: person coming to me with simple problems that fall in the "googlable" or "in every book" or "in every course" or "in every tutorial" category, again and again.

The honest answer was, for me at least: Well, we have discussed a similar thing before. I'm sorry but I have got other things to do as well. I'm willing to help you with the burdens, but please, try to [point out some good resources here] before approaching me, and if you approach me, please make it specific enough so that we don't lose too much time solving the problems.

It is true, honest but not rude. After all, it is your time, your studies and you yourself who'll go on the market to sell your results, and you need to be productive. If this is a serious annoyance that makes your productivity drop significantly, they need to know it.


What is a citation style that mentions full details of a paper?

It looks like the APSA citation style recommends full author names in its style guide. I'm more used to an APA citation style myself, but that does abbreviate first names. Oh, and I conpletely agree with Piotr Migdal in the comments that a citation that could use a DOI but doesn't is just plain wrong.


Voting by faculty after a Search Committee recommends a candidate for a TT hire

I'm sure it varies from one place to another. In my experience, our search committee (TT position at an R1) had to come to an agreed upon decision in terms of the order in which we were going to recommend candidates (#1, #2, #3). From there, our recommendation had to be approved by the dean of our college, and from there the offer was made.

If you're asking about what criteria a committee uses for recommending candidates, a lot of aspects are weighed: how the campus visit went - particularly the research presentation, publication record/plans, does this candidate's research align with and complement what the department already offers or is there too much overlap with other faculty, can we see this person fitting in our department, can they teach what we need them to teach, etc. Ultimately, however, the big question is always: who is most likely to stick around and manage to get tenure according to our standards? In other words, who's the safest investment?


Is it OK to call a professor by his first name when he/she signs emails by only first name?

If you are a foreigner, then you can just ask. Most academics are used to deal with foreigners and know that such subtle and unwritten rules are hard to know. They recognize that just asking is often the least awkward solution.


Does the number of references influence reviewers decision?

There won't be any hard minimum or maximum number of references that a reviewer will be looking for.  In my particular field (engineering/robotics) and in my experience, 20 - 40 references seem to be common, though twice or half that will not necessarily raise any eyebrows. The most important factors are that the author is covering previous work sufficiently (covering keystone papers in their area of research, as well as recent similar work) while well establishing their current contribution, and that any included citations are relevant. Too many or too few papers beyond a reviewer's general expectation in their field will probably prompt a closer examination that these are upheld, but won't necessarily lead them to immediately conclude the work is incorrect. The correctness of your paper is an almost completely separate issue that should be recognizable by a reviewer who works in your field based on your paper content.

As a reviewer, rejections I've given due to lack references were because of specific missing references that, if considered, effectively invalidated the author's claim of novelty or reduced their stated contribution significantly.


Academic Job Mobility in the European Context

From the perspective of the Netherlands and the social sciences I can say that international mobility is certainly common, but staying in your own country is even more common. I would say a small majority does indeed limit it's search to the Netherlands.

This has consequences for the job market. Since the Netherlands is a small country the (sub-(sub-))discipline typically consist of a small number of people who will regularly meet. So if a position is open, then most candidates are known to the people who are hiring. So networks are important, and you typically get introduced to those networks by your advisor during your PhD. So doing a PhD in the Netherlands would set you up well for a subsequent career in the Netherlands. It is certainly possible to enter the Dutch market later and it happens regularly, but it is easier if you started as a PhD student in the Netherlands.

An important part of the reason for limiting yourself to your own country is probably the language barrier. You may be able to do a Postdoc with just English. However, when your job includes teaching, then you will eventually be expected to teach in the local language. Similarly, if your job requires you to participate in the self-government of the university, you will be disadvantages if you don't speak the local language. Moreover, your social live will be much easier when you speak the local language. Many languages in Europe are fairly similar, e.g. Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian, or Dutch and German, or Spanish and Italian. However, it is still a non-trivial investment to become sufficiently fluent to teach or negotiate in the other language.

I am now living and working in Germany, and my impression is that mobility is less common here than in the Netherlands.


How to make sense of a 2019 paper published in 2016 journal issue?

I would pull the paper. I would be worried that the issue is never going to be published and that the paper is going to sit in limbo for years. The fact that the journal has no web page, even in the social sciences, is concerning to me. Are you sure that libraries are going to get this newest issue when it comes out for it to be archived?

If I were to keep the paper in the pipeline for the journal, I would want some reassurances. I would look at the journal editorial board and review process. If the review process was exceptionally speedy and the initial decision was accept as is (or very minor revisions), I would worry the journal is desperate. A high rate of turn over in editors or reviewers (i.e., different people on every iteration) would also concern me. I would put a time contingency on the copyright transfer so that it expires if the issue is not published in the next few weeks.

Then you have all the issues with playing with the timeline. How are people (e.g., tenure committees or search committees) going to know when you did the work. Even saying that it was published in 2019, isn't the issue, committees want to know when you did the work. I can only imagine the headaches that it could cause with funders when trying to explain why work funded in 2018 is in a 2016 issue, regardless of when it came out. Screwing with the timeline is also probably going to mess up a lot of bibliometrics (e.g., 5 year impact factor would only go for citations through 2021 or really a 2 year window).


How to Fight Imposter Syndrome as a student by myself?

Even with proper psychological treatment at your university, imposter syndrome (IS) is tough to deal with. I agree with @erwan: recognizing you experience IS is the first step.

I suffer from IS, and can only make recommendations based on my experience and what has worked for myself and those close to me. I highly recommend joining or fostering a community of those who experience IS (this can be online or in person, and can comprise students, faculty and staff!). Organizing groups to talk about IS, or even chatting with a fellow grad student over coffee about IS will likely yield revelations. There are probably some students in your department, or lab, who think that you really have your shit together, when you think you don't!

If you're on Twitter, I have found it a great place for IS. Following people (post docs and faculty) who publicly post about how they are handling their IS (and mental health issues) has been great for me--when I see someone who I consider successful posting about how they don't feel they are good enough for X, or how they don't think they can complete Y makes me think, 'if they are suffering from IS then surely I can excuse myself!'.

Is there a cure for IS--imo, no. What would you have to do, or what goal would you have to achieve to consider yourself successful? Is this an attainable goal (by yourself or others)? When you think about a peer or mentor who you consider successful, how do you measure that and why do you use those measures? Is it fair to compare yourself to others?

Briefly,

Join or create a local community to discuss issues with IS in academia (this group could meet regularly, or not!).
Remember that you're not alone in dealing with IS -- follow people who talk publicly about IS/issues in academia on social media.
Don't define yourself by only your academic achievements--you're more than that.
IS doesn't have a cure, rather, you'll have to employ coping mechanisms to ameliorate or prevent the symptoms.
Find a way to measure and celebrate your successes.


How to follow up with a master's advisor who abandoned me?

This is a peculiar situation. Your supervisor did not honor your agreement, but at this point she has nothing to gain from continuing to be involved with your thesis, and being angry about that isn't going to help you in any way. Realistically, do not expect any more input from her, and move on.
Getting someone else to look at your thesis could be useful, but keep in mind that you are asking someone to put in a couple days of work for nothing in return. Try to find someone who could be at least slightly interested in this, and see what you can do to minimize the effort for them. Maybe approach a lecturer whose class you took during your degree, or enroll in a new course if you think that you have burned bridges in that university? Search around if there is some other researcher, even elsewhere in the world, who has published on a similar topic -- in particular, someone early in their career might be more excited to help.
Even then, clean up the writing as much as you can by yourself, maybe send them just the key proofs, and ask targeted questions -- in other words, approach this always keeping in mind that you are asking for a favor -- and you are more likely to get a reply.


If the program is really a pilot, then there are likely some people somewhere in the department who would like it to succeed. I would definitely recommend finding those people and seeing whether they can assist with any of your issues, both logistical and advisor-related.

Past that, though, I would definitely also seek other options. For many PhD graduates, their advisor plays an important individual at the start of their career, and not having that resource can make things very difficult for you. Given that you are already in an academic vacuum, you probably don't want to have that kind of handicap. Take care to make sure you're giving yourself the highest likelihood of success.


Level of difficulty of exams in math PhD and anxiety over being able to do well

This depends very much on your university and your professor. There is a whole range of opportunities spanning a wide range of difficulties. This issue alone shouldn't be the reason to drop the idea of the PhD degree itself.

If you are really interested in the field and are willing to work for it, then by all means, continue; don't let a little test put you off. PhD is not about exam scores, it is about research quality and how much you could contribute to your field. If you are able to hold your ground on that, stay strong and move on.

My best wishes!


Is education in Europe really this cheap?

Yes European higher education can be fairly cheap for the students, especially in those countries where universities are mainly public, and hence are largely funded by their respective governments. This means that they do not need to charge high fees to their students to cover for costs. Nevertheless their campuses offer all the facilities their students need, in terms of libraries, food canteens, lecture rooms, laboratories, etc..

Let's take France as an example. The French Ministry of Education defines, for each academic year, the fees to be applied by all public universities across the country. Here are the fees for 2015 (in French). Just to quote a few numbers (all fees are for one academic year):

Bachelor's: 184€ | 122€ (reduced fee for low-income students)
Master's: 256€ | 168€ (reduced fee for low-income students)
5-year Engineering Diploma: 610€
PhD: 391€ | 260€ (reduced fee for low-income students)


Should bullets appear before animations, or animations before bullets?

Here is what I would do:

I would move the ball first. Show them what is happening then use the text to support/explain it.
Only change one thing on the slide at a time. There should be a delay between the ball moving and the bullet being added. Too many things moving is confusing. But one thing moving is a great way to guide someone's eyes to the important information.
Possibly gray out the previous bullets. If you end up with a wall of text then it may be unnatural to dart your eyes from the very top (where the figure is) to the very bottom (where the new bullet is). Putting them side-by-side might help too.

Slide design is an art so don't feel compelled to follow any strict rules. Try it out and see how it works.


Is making minor adjustments to an online tutorial for a coding assignment considered plagiarism?

General Rule: Make it clear what your own contributions are, and where the other stuff is coming from.

Simply adding an explanation to your coursework on how you followed the tutorial, how far your modifications went, etc makes sure that you are not committing plagiarism. However, it is still perfectly plausible that your lecturer decides that the extent of your own contribution is insufficient. Thus, I would recommend checking in advance of the deadline.


Most efficient way of developing a comprehensive understanding of a field

The answer of course is "it depends" on the field, the handbook, your ability, and what exactly you need in terms of learning the field.

In general, I think you are better off getting an easier review article or a textbook.  But a handbook may have a lot of condensed information and be a sort of "encyclopedia" of the field.  But generally, it is written more for practitioners than for newbies.  It is not (usually) written exactly for your problem.

To evaluate handbooks, ask others opinions, look at Amazon reviews, and skim it in the library.


Is it acceptable to put the blame on an instructor during an oral exam for a mistake?

That is an annoying thing that happened to you, and I can see why it would bother you.  University instructors are human, and we sometimes make mistakes, or misunderstand a question from a student, or have blind-spots in our knowledge.  It is certainly annoying to a student if this leads them to error.

However, there is a bigger issue here.  Setting aside the interpersonal issues of whether or not it is advisable to "blame the instructor", I would suggest you take a broader view of your responsibilities as a tertiary-level student.  By university level, it is expected that students are no longer children or adolescents, and they are old and ugly enough to critically assess what they are told by their teachers, and proceed on the basis of rational inquiry and evidence, rather than on the basis of faith-in-authority.  If you are told by an authority figure like a university instructor that X is true, then it is up to you as a student to seek evidence/argument to confirm this claim, and treat the claim with scepticism if there is not a clear and convincing explanation.

In your case, you were told something that was false by an instructor.  Since that thing was false, presumably your instructor could not have backed up the claim with a water-tight argument, had you inquired about the reasoning for the claim.  You say you "took her word for it", but that is not what tertiary-level instruction is about.  By taking her word for it you rejected the standard of reason and instead adopted the heuristic of believing that which is plausible, and is confirmed to you by the assertion of an authority figure.  You paid an appropriate price for that by getting caught in an error in your oral exam, so hopefully, lesson learned.

In this case your instructor probably just made a mistake when she asserted that error to you, or misunderstood your question.  However, in my view, it would even be legitimate as a teaching exercise if she intentionally gave you a wrong answer and then tested to see whether you would parrot it back to her in an oral exam.  The point here is this: you do not go to university to learn to uncritically repeat the assertions of authority figures with PhDs; you go to university to learn to reason rationally, based on evidence and logic.  You failed to do that in this case, so you made a mistake.  That is great, because university is where we go to make these mistakes, get penalised for them, and then learn not to do them again.


Oh my. We are quite a history-less field, aren't we, in computing? I programmed an OPAC system in the 1980s and we were not the first by any means. What you mean by "bibliographic information" is called metadata. There were many different systems (MARC - Machine-readable Catalogue) around. We argued about things like having multiple of the same tag for all the different authors or having different tags so we could model the order of the authors. In Germany the art of cataloging literature goes back more than a century. There is the Regeln für die alphabetische Katalogisierung (RAK) that was put forth in the 70s to get away from that horrible Preußischen Instruktion used since 1899 or so.

We used index cards for keeping track of references in our own publications. We used pen and pencil to write on the cards, or even typed them up on a typewriter. The cards were very easy to sort (and re-sort), so the last thing you did was type up the reference list. Or you used BibTeX, if you had access to a machine that could run it. There were lots of computers before the IBM PC, they just weren't personal computers. If you didn't have access to a computer, you used a typewriter and lots of Tipp-Ex. Or you ended up retyping every page when the number of errors got to be too many.

I suggest reading up on the history of library catalogues (VOX will point you to a book in English on the subject) and then about OPACS if you want to look a bit deeper into the history. But you need to go back more than 25 years.


How to gain admission to a math PhD program when as an undergrad, I didn't do research, take pure math classes, or form relationships with professors?

How can I get into grad school when I am unable to procure stellar recommendation or show that I took classes in pure, theoretical mathematics? (I took more classes that concerned mathematics applied, like statistics and practical life models and such)

I think you need to take courses in pure, theoretical mathematics.  You can do so:

As a non-degree seeking student at a reputable university, probably self-funded.
As a master's student at a reputable university, possibly self-funded.

By a "reputable university," I really mean one with a solid math PhD program or a very strong master's program.

Presumably you want to do this while still keeping gainful employment, so I would start slowly: maybe take one solid course, really try your best, and then reevaluate whether this is what you want to do.  If that goes well, repeat and intensify.  I would plan to spend at least two years doing so.

Once you start doing well in courses, make a point of talking to the instructors and getting advice from them.  Maybe they will encourage you to apply to the PhD program there, or maybe they will have other good suggestions for what to do next.


Will mathematics journals accept a non-novel theorem, but with different approach

There is more to mathematics than theorems. Sometimes the best part is the  methodology of the proof, especially if it can be used to also solve important problems in the field. If everybody has been thinking in a certain way about a class of problems for a hundred years and you give them a new way to think about it, you have made an important contribution.

So yes, a journal would publish that. But your paper needs to be clear about the novelty and importance of your approach.

My own dissertation had interesting theorems, but was noted for the proof of one of them that was something entirely new and unexpected.


How to cite a work in a manuscript that is under review?

Yes.  Under review or "in review" are normal and I have used them myself when publishing several papers near simultaneously.  (They were separate enough, different chemistries, that I thought made sense to cut into separate articles.  But, for someone interested in the general area, they likely would want the citation.)  It is to be understood that "under review" does not mean it will EVER get published (but likely will).  You are doing the best you can, at the time.  If the paper never makes it out or shifts to another journal, so be it.

You may also see citations that say "in press" (meaning accepted, but you are lacking the issue and page numbers).  I have even used "in preparation for" and listed the journal I planned to, and did submit to.  And I've even used "unpublished" for work that never saw the light of day (e.g. another worker's parallel chemistry study that was pretty finished, yet shelved as uninteresting...but was relevant to a chemistry to chemistry discussion.)*

The key thing is that you are not trying to get away with anything nefarious.  You are simply doing your best to give citations to other work.  And that will include some not-yet archived research.  You just do the best you can, at the time you submit.

[Obviously if you are claiming some super insight and your current paper is fundamentally dependent on the other work, the editor/reviewer may cavitate and reject.  But if you are just doing good stuff and other work is comparative, not dependent, people will appreciate the citation, not resent it.]

*Even this still has a use.  For one, a simple (non-controversial) insight may be shared, that is scientifically relevant.  In addition, if anyone ever really cares, they might still track down the author.  I. R. Lazyguy; structure of unimportant chemical; 1989; Random Federal Agency; unpublished.


Will uploading a copy of my paper to Academia.edu harm the journal it’s published in?

Making the paper accessible to everyone who can't look behind the paywall might hurt the journal's publishing company a little bit by diverting some demand. However, it won't really hurt the people you have been dealing with. Moreover, the journal has given you explicit permission to publish a pre-print, so you're not going against their stated request.

At the same time, you are providing a service to

yourself, by increasing the reach of your paper and the citations that it will receive
the journal, to the extent that the preprint will attract interest to the journal and to the extent that people will cite the journal version rather than the preprint
the public who would otherwise not be able to look at the research. This applies in particular to readers outside of academic institutions and to scientists from poor countries.

Please upload your preprint to a freely accessible repository.


Should I do a doctorate straight after my master or work for a while first?

Work first. There're many reasons for this:

It's not true that you can't work with cutting-edge technologies without a PhD. You certainly can, and it might even be a better use of your time since you avoid the administrative processes that you must do with a PhD. Check out the various graduate programs that employers offer. There might be high entry requirements, but if you can do PhD studies you can clear that bar also.
You likely earn more. It's not just for the next 3-5 years that you need for a PhD. If you do a PhD, after you graduate, you'll need to find a job. If you get a job now, you'll already have a job. If you do well you might even command a higher salary in 5 years' time compared to entering the market as a fresh PhD.
You might find you don't need a PhD. This could especially be the case if you work with other PhD-holders. You might find that you have the same duties, or that you're already capable of doing what they do. In this case a PhD is not very useful for your career and you might as well stay put.
If #3 doesn't happen, then you have a better idea why you're doing a PhD. You know what you want to learn, why you want to learn it, and how that skill is going to be useful for you after you graduate.

It's my observation that people who work first and then go to a PhD are much more likely to have thought seriously about why they're studying. That is a good thing. I'm not saying you shouldn't do a PhD, but you should have good, clear reasons for why you're doing it to avoid possible future regret.


Student requests to know their "grades so far"

If I were a student, I would prefer your second suggestion: A number along with some caveats.
Basically I would want to know what I have to do in order to pass.
When I taught my first class this summer I was giving my students a number and then a short note which explained that I wouldn't be assigning letter grades until the end of the course, so I don't know their letter grade along with a sentence or two about how I personally think they are doing and what I think they can do to improve. This seemed to work pretty well.


How can I complete the prerequisites for Masters in Computer Science on my own?

I had two bachelors in Music and Art, minors in Marketing and CS. I then held a Computer Science career. When I went into the CS Masters program 7 years after obtaining my last bachelor degree, I had several deficiencies. I was accepted with two understandings. (1) I will complete the deficiency courses that are prerequisites to Masters courses I am to take, and (2) my current career in CS demonstrates I have the aptitude to succeed despite my entering the program with deficiencies.

I believe your best option is your #2, to enter the Masters program and complete the deficiencies in your coursework. When you write your letter of intent for application to the Masters program, I would describe these two aspects as they apply to your situation, personality, and drive to complete your degree.

Your other option for the US market is your #1, to complete the deficiencies from an accredited institution, then transfer the completed coursework with you when you apply. You must be careful with this option, to ensure the University you are to apply for a masters with will accept the coursework from the other institution. Before taking the coursework, it is best to call the University to ensure the courses will transfer.

This other option is best if you are under the following circumstances:

Currently working, and can take the deficiencies at night through an online University, or through a local college offering.
You will save money/time from taking the deficiencies from the alternate institute.

Your option #3 will not work, as they require the coursework credit from an accredited institution. Internationally, they usually require a demonstrated bachelors degree in CS. But post-bacc work needs to be completed as previously described.

Otherwise, you are best to just enroll in the University Master program and take the deficiencies there.

When I took the deficiencies for my masters program, I'd take deficiency courses one semester, and then the Masters courses that required the deficiency the next semester. In this way, except for the first semester, I was taking at least one Masters course every semester. Look at the University course catalog to see which courses have the least number of prerequisites that are your deficiencies, and then take those deficiencies first.


Is it ethical to withdraw paper that received poor reviews in first phase of reviewing and resubmit it without significant revisions?

There is absolutely no ethical concern or constraint at all here. The reviews you get in academia for such works are a gift to the community and to you. You have complete control over the paper until you give up your rights to it. The reviewers aren't paid by the conferences (or journals). If I as a reviewer help you improve a paper you have submitted to conference A and it later appears at conference B instead, everyone has gained. And you aren't bound to take my advice. There is no contract to that effect. If I review your paper, I get no rights to take over its content or ideas.

Moreover, it may be that the paper without change is actually appropriate elsewhere and the reviews were colored to some extent by the nature of the conference.

Most academic conferences aren't held as profit making concerns and nearly everyone involved is a volunteer (some support staff may be paid). It is a service we do th the idea of scholarship itself, nothing more.

If I give you a gift, it is yours to use as you like or not and welcome. You have taken nothing that wasn't given freely.

Over the course of your life you have gotten a lot of advice. Some of it you even solicited. But much of it you probably ignored. It was advice, nothing more. Use it if it is valuable.

While there are no ethical concerns, there are some practical ones. The sets of reviewers in the various CS conferences overlap somewhat. And if you got particular reviewer for one, there is a non-zero chance the same person will come up again, especially for topics with few available reviewers.


International Student Funding for Graduate Programs outside North America

I'm a PhD candidate at the University of Western Australia, a Go8 university which has similar application processes to the Australian National University and the University of Melbourne.

In Australia, funding for international students comes from three separate streams.

The federal government (heretoforth referred to as the Commonwealth) funds several recurring 3 (minimum) to 4 (maximum) year scholarships each year per university depending on total research output. These scholarships are then allotted to the highest ranking applicants for PhD candidature from the respective faculties in a given university. These scholarships are referred to as IPRS (International Postgraduate Research Scholarships) and are extremely competitive.

The Commonwealth also funds scholarships for students from developing countries through the foreign aid program. These are referred to as Australia Award scholarships and Prime Ministers scholarships. The application process is run through the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade website (DFAT).

Individual universities offer university scholarships to applicants and these are usually part and parcel of the application process for PhD candidature. These are highly competitive and based on a ranking process through the entire university and the top (x) candidates who do not receive an IPRS are given these.

The third (and most common) funding stream is via the research funding obtained by individual academics. Depending on how keen a particular grant holding academic is to bring you into his group, he may offer to pay your scholarships out of his own research grant. Australian academics are very used to this so do not be afraid of asking for an assurance from your prospective supervisor that he is willing to pay your scholarship if you are unsuccessful at obtaining an IPRS or a university scholarship.

If you want to do a masters, you will have to pay for it yourself. Hope this was useful.

Cheers


How to check the postdoc opportunities in a specific lab even if there is no position-call from them?

Yes. This is how it works.
Once you find a lab, find a professor who you would like to work.
And then,

Read his publications
Read them again to look for potential areas where you find yourself as a useful asset to that lab, like methods or instruments you are familiar with and used by the professor too.
Email the professor asking for available positions. Send in your email your CV and statement of purpose.
If you could add a document where you could be an essential asset by proposing additional ideas related to the professors published articles, it might add value if you don't sound arrogant.
While involving in such activities, if you find a wonderful result try to publish it and cite the professor's work on which you are trying to develop. This will make your application be outstanding and successful.

The right time to do so is when you are in the middle of the year before your last year of Ph.D. Also, you should let the professor know that you are writing him a year ahead so as to plan accordingly.


How should I write a "Personal History Statement" - does a lack of "challenges" mean I cannot contribute to diversity?

The previous answer was great, but since it didn't assuage your doubts, I'll try a different approach.

I will rewrite the instructions for you, removing the parts you're having trouble with.

  Describe how your accomplishments led to your decision to pursue the graduate degree for which you are applying. Include any educational opportunities relevant to your academic journey. Your department may have special prompts and directions for the Personal History Statement; be sure to check the requirements.

Sample response: I always felt that my math teacher and I were on the same wavelength.  I always loved going to math class, and my math assignments were always my favorite part of doing homework.  I had a wonderful opportunity in 9th grade when I was invited to participate in _________.  It was an honor to represent my school, and participating in the event, with scores of other math geeks, was thrilling.

You have my permission to stop there.

Now, if you decide to make a stab at addressing the diversity question, consider this: what is the demographic make-up of the state of California, and how did that come to be?  (I will let you find the answer to those questions, as homework.)  Has there been a historical gender imbalance in your field?  Is there anything about you that would make you an effective graduate student instructor, mentor or outreach specialist, enabling you to effectively support the success of underrepresented groups in your field?  Perhaps you have had experience communicating with someone with a different dialect.  Perhaps you had more patience with this than some of your fellow students.  Perhaps you have been lucky enough to be educated in a system where women were not underrepresented in your field, and this experience left you with a firm belief in the role of women in your field. (These are just examples to give you an idea.)


How do some PhD students get 10+ papers? Is that what I need for landing good faculty position?

I think at least part of the answer lies in different cultures across fields. I did my PhD in computer science/artificial intelligence. There a huge focus is on conference papers which tend to be smaller contributions. Often incremental progress on a single project is reported in multiple conference papers and it was expected that a paper corresponds to several months worth of work. Frequently you would publish in a conference and then have an extended version appear in a journal. All in all, 5 first-author papers upon PhD was not exceptional. Also we had a lot of within-group collaboration so I got to e.g. run a few statistical routines on someone else's data, help write the manuscript and become a coauthor for about a week of work. I ended my PhD with 23 publications, 8 of which were first-author - this was above average in my group, but not exceptional.

Now I do bioinformatics and collaborate a lot with biologists. Their papers are usually longer and for any result you need a lot of tedious manual work in the lab. In turn, the papers represent years worth of work. Many people - even brilliant ones - end their PhD with 1-3 first-author publications. I've heard in some areas, publications are even harder to come by. In other words, the number of publications is not a very good proxy for brilliance, especially when you are ignoring quality and comparing across fields.

As for the 100+ citations - my best bet (since you mention bioinformatics) is that this is because the students co-authored some software/tool/protocol that ended up being useful => cited. (tool papers tend to be the most cited ones). This is obviously a success, but once again does not necessarily imply that failing to produce useful tools is a sign of non-brilliance.

Example: DeSeq2 software for comparing gene expression across samples has > 10 000 citations on Google scholar while the first detection of gravitational waves has just above 6 000 citations on Google Scholar.

Also me and some of my colleagus have landed reasonable jobs with roughly 0 citations (excluding self).


Terminology: Pagraph subject identification prefix text

In my experience, this is just called the (sub)section name --- as driven by the LaTeX styling used in many STEM disciplines.  No fancier title is needed.


Can i continue studying architecture in Germany after i did two year of bachelor degree in architecture in Lebanon

The way this typically works in Germany is that you enroll at the new university for the desired degree. There will be requirements regarding what modules you need to pass for this degree. You can then apply for courses you have completed elsewhere to be considered as equivalent to some of those modules (this is called "Anrechnungsantrag"). The department will examine what topics were covered (which may require you to obtain translations of the syllabus etc), whether they consider the standards of the previous university sufficient, etc.
It is common that there are quantitative limits on how many modules you can do this for. Since you will ultimately get a degree from the new university, they'll want you to have done substantial studies with them. It seems far more plausible to me to get 1 year worth of modules acknowledged than 2 years.
Getting a definitive positive answer before enrolling is not likely, but if you haven't chosen the German university yet, getting in touch with the relevant
Prüfungsamt at your candidates for a pre-inquiry might give you some indication of how open to the prospect they are.


Should I explain a solution to a problem that only existed due to a mistake in the fundamentals in a bachelors thesis?

If your advisor is an approachable person, ask them! Standards for bachelor theses vary a lot between fields, universities and graders. It may also be that your advisor is the only person who will ever look at the thesis (if at all).

Learning to ask higher-ups is an important skill to learn for your life which is sometimes not tought well in schools.

So, let me summerize my answer: Ask!


Do research-only postdocs harm chances for tenure-track opportunities?

It depends. At my R1 university where the only thing that counts is research, you would be an ideal candidate for our hiring committees.

At other R1s which balance research against a modicum of teaching, you might face a little bit of an uphill struggle. It might be good if you could at least pick up some teaching experience or certification1 to help you in the job market.

You face the most problems at small liberal arts colleges, where you would face two issues:

The concern that you don't know how (or really care) to teach
The concern that you would think yourself ultimately destined for R1s and thus leave the SLAC at the first opportunity possible

You would have to counter these two prejudices in your job letter and interviews.

1. Even at my august institution, we're realizing our graduates are having problems on the job market because they have little to no teaching experience. So we have instituted a teaching and learning center where they can take seminars and workshops on pedagogic methods. They get a little annotation (certification) to this effect on their transcripts. Certainly not comparable to the teaching experience that doctoral students receive at public R1s.


Posting previously published content on Arxiv

Take a look at the copyright agreement you signed when you published the paper. It usually states under which conditions uploading the paper to other repositories is acceptable. Usually, you are only allowed to upload the "authors version" (or some variant thereof), which usually needs to contain a specific phrase like (in the case of the ACM):

  © ACM, YYYY. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in PUBLICATION, {VOL#, ISS#, (DATE)} http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/nnnnnn.nnnnnn"

There is also a web service that makes this a bit easier to figure out: SHERPA/RoMEO. There you can put in the publisher / journal, and it will give you a human-readable summary of their policies (for example, here is the page for the ACM). But note that publisher policies change, and the binding version is the one you signed when you published the paper, so the data from SHERPA/RoMEO may be incorrect.

Note that, in my experience, almost all publishers allow uploading to an "institutional repository", so even if ArXiv may be disallowed, you can still make your work accessible via your institutional repository (if your institution has one) or your homepage. But, again, check the specific policies that apply to you on that.

Finally: I am not a lawyer, but as I understand it, since you no longer own the copyright on the paper, you cannot put it under a creative commons license (which is an option on ArXiv). So, you'll have to take the minimal license they allow, which only gives them permission to distribute your work (If someone else knows this better than I do, feel free to correct me in the comments or edit the answer).

Also, you can always just ask the publisher if you want to be extra sure, but in my experience, this may be a long process (I waited for over a week for a reply by the ACM, and am have now been waiting for over a month for a reply to a followup question).


Find out author’s name in foreign writing system (Chinese, etc.)

I don't know much about other languages. I'll answer the question in Chinese case since I am a native Chinese speaker.

The literature you have is not in Chinese. The best way is to contact the authors. They will give you the correct answer.

As far as I know, there is no such reliable resources at the moment. There is no unique and consistent way of translation between English name and Chinese name. As you already know, Pīnyīn and  Wade–Giles are two of them. I don't think there is one-to-one correspondence relation. There are other issues, such as traditional Chinese character and simplified character. You won't know the correct answer unless the author tells you.

If you have no way to contact them, try their collegues or others who might know. Don't use the Chniese name unless you are sure. Use whatever the name appears in the literature if you are not sure.


How important are CS courses for a pure mathematics PhD admission?

Other than lowering your GPA, I don't think these two grades will matter much in a pure math PhD application.  After all, many pure math applicants take no CS courses at all, so it is certainly not the case that admissions committees are systematically screening for CS skill.  Moreover, not everyone in pure math values programming ability, skill or experience (not as much as we should, probably) and those who do are probably math-centric enough to believe that an applicant who is mathematically strong could become a good programmer if they put their mind to it.

Anyway, what's done is done.  I wouldn't worry much about it, and in particular I would not feel the need to try to spin / justify these grades in your personal statement.


Legality of collecting/distributing a dataset of screenshots of websites

Given the state of copyright law, this sounds like a minefield. There are people trying to sue Google, just for indexing sites.

It isn't so much that you want to do research on these "images", which is likely ok, but I think that distributing them will be almost impossible. Many sites won't want to give you permission and will complain (via lawyers) if you haven't obtained permission.

The general law about copyright is that people own what they produce, whether they register a copyright or not. If there isn't a clear license offered such as a Creative Common license, then the owner retains all rights to the work unless they explicitly put their creation into the public domain. Most of the sites you will probably want to visit likely will NOT have given up rights. The deal is supposed to be time limited, but that idea has been nearly eliminated in the law.

Places like wikipedia have clear statements of licensing and rights transfer. But individual users at reddit, twitter, etc. likely still have rights unless they have yielded them (as part of signing up) to the hosting site. I don't participate much in social media so haven't investigated these user agreements.

Attribution isn't enough. You need permission. Once you have that, you need to provide attribution.

However, if you want to "process" images, gleaning characteristics of the sites (but not text and images...) you can probably do it without permission.

Also note that copyright law is in flux and varies greatly around the world. The EU is currently trying to work out very restrictive laws, for example.

The core problem is that IP owners often have a lot of political power. Disney, for example will declare war on you if you try to compromise their rights to Mickey Mouse. Common understandings that once permitted Voltaire to make a living from his writings have now expanded to unlimited rights to lock up the culture forever by large commercial firms.

Another problem is that many formerly lucrative publishing strategies have been money losers lately because of the internet. The NYTimes, for example, if it wants to continue in business needs to achieve income somehow. They can't do it printing on paper anymore, so their web sites have value to them and they are fearful (maybe overly fearful) that re-publishing, or even indexing, their material will cost them enough that they can't sustain their business model anymore.

It is even worse for sites that show advertising. You not only have issues with the site itself, but all of the images shown by the advertisers are, themselves, likely copyright protected with teams of lawyers ready and willing to go after you.

That said, you might be able to do your research on a wide range of sites/images without formal permission, depending on what it is, but then only publish a smaller set for which it is clear that you have a right to do so.

Note that there are a few exceptions to strict copyright law. These fall into the realm of formal criticism, and parody. There is a notion of fair use that is being eroded, so can hardly be depended on anymore.

If you are part of an institution, such as a University, then the institution probably has an Office of Research that can give you explicit advice for your locale. That office probably has access to lawyers that can provide explicit legal advice. Tread cautiously.


This may be a special feature of CS or not. We depend a lot on conferences for publishing work. The conferences usually publish proceedings. The first version is distributed at the conference to attendees and may have a limited run. It typically has the conference name on the cover. In the case cited, SIGPLAN, as is typical, will put a separate cover on the proceedings, turn it into a (regular) issue of the Notices and distribute that to all members whether they attend or not. It is really a service to the community, since not everyone can attend an important conference. It is possible that corrections are made between the two versions, but I don't think that is common.

If they are identical, you can cite either one with confidence that readers needing to follow the citation will find the paper.


Why does arXiv have a multi-day lag between submission and publication?

I guess the arXiv staff have to approve the article before is being published .... is my guessing correct?

Yes, arXiv moderates all submissions before posting them (there is some description of this here). This is not anywhere near as rigorous as peer review; rather, someone just flips through it to ensure that the submission is (1) not complete junk and (2) classified correctly. This approach is used by many pre-print platforms (SSRN, socarXiv, etc.).


Should a reference letter for a student always be positive?

The general answer is yes, a reference letter should always be positive.  If one cannot write a positive letter for a student, one should decline to write a reference.

In this case, the student is having difficulty, perhaps even internal conflict, in choosing programs to which to apply.  Captain Emacs has it right in the comments; that's not relevant to his ability to complete a Ph.D. program.  If repeated requests to suggest programs are becoming tiring for you, say, "Repeated requests to suggest programs are becoming tiring for me.  You are an adult.  Find and select the program that you believe will suit you best.  I've already suggested those I believe will best suit you."

While you are having that discussion, set a limit, perhaps three to five, on the number of recommendation letters you will write.  Applications are usually kept to a reasonable number by the fact of application fees, but sometimes students get carried away anyway.


What terms should be better to set when creating a Startup with your PhD supervisor?

I strongly suggest that you hire a lawyer to get this advice. Failing to do so could lead to a huge amount of conflict later. It is likely that your interests don't completely align with those of your advisor.
I'm not a lawyer so can't help much, but it might be possible to set up a joint meeting with a lawyer and the advisor to work out an equitable arrangement. Your joint venture will need legal advice in any case.
But you also need to consider what a conflict would mean for finishing your degree. Don't put that in jeopardy.


Do you need published papers to apply for a postdoc?

All you need to apply for a post-doc is a the ability to write an application - getting an offer is another matter.  Most post-docs will have their PhD and will have published (or at least submitted) one or more papers in the course of that program.  If your friend has not yet published or submitted any papers then he will indeed be at a disadvantage in an application for this kind of position.  Having said that, you've got to be in it to win it!  If he does not mind taking the time to write up an application, it can't hurt to apply.  In the meantime he should keep working on his paper and pushing for further progress with his co-author.  If he can succeed in publishing this paper in a high-tier journal then that will substantially improve his applications.


Who is the publisher of the SpringerOpen journals?

SpringerOpen is just a brand of the company Springer Nature. You can find some info here. It's also the name of the website where you can access the articles. It allows them to cram the word "Springer" in more places if they brand every single one of their open access journals. It's like how McDonald's chicken nuggets aren't just nuggets, they're mcnuggets. Springer's open access journals aren't just open access, they're "SpringerOpen".
Citations of journal articles do not typically include the publisher. The journal's name is sufficient. In fact, if you go to to your journal's website, they explicitly say:

Citing articles in EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking
[...] Article citations follow this format:
Authors: Title. EURASIP J Wirel Commun Netw [year], [volume number]:[article number].

Since journals can (and do) change publishers, there is no point in listing the publisher. In fact, this could be actively harmful if the journal changes hand at some point in the future. People will wonder if they're looking at the correct thing.
If you look, you will also see that the copyright holder is "BioMed Central Ltd", which is owned by Springer Nature. So if you are really intent on listing something, I would list that. The company's HQ is in London.


Is it possible to submit a preprint to viXra and then submit my physics paper to PRA?

Physical Review is unlikely to notice or care what you post on viXra, or nearly anywhere else, so long as you hold the copyright and your work has not been accepted by a journal.
For opinions on viXra, see What are the differences between viXra.org and arXiv.org?.


Supervisor published my thesis figures without including me as an author

is this academic misconduct?

That depends. Your thesis is published, just not in a journal. It’s published as part of your alma mater’s repository and anyone can access it, your advisor in particular. Regarding the figures: it really depends on how they did it. If they copied them without citing your thesis that’s pretty clear cut plagiarism which is wrong under any standard of academic publishing. If they cite you (saying something like figure taken from X), that should probably be okay. This is especially true if your advisor helped design and generate these figures (they’d be a coauthor of sorts). Again, you should be credited regardless, and if a citation is missing it should be noted. I’d be extremely surprised if your advisor wouldn’t be willing to cite you, my guess is that the student who wrote the paper forgot to (remember hanlon’s razor!).

  what is the appropriate avenue to correct this?

You could first try and reach out to your former advisor. Ask them. Maybe there’s a simple misunderstanding here. If there’s a dispute the most direct course of action is reaching out to the department head, or vice dean of research and inform them. If you have contacts on the department (a trusted professor who’s sufficiently senior), might be good to hear their opinion on the matter.

Contacting the journal or anyone external should be a last resort I think. But if you feel like you’ve exhausted your options with the department and nobody’s listening, it may not be a bad idea. Again, expect a laconic response: some journal editor will be extremely hesitant in dealing with such cases, especially since the paper is out.

Good luck!

EDIT: I missed this part

  the other student has replicated one of the chapters of my PhD thesis

That is unacceptable plagiarism even with citation. Lifting entire chapters (even paragraphs) is never okay. The figures are a much more minor issue. Start with that!


I find my masters topic extremely hard what should I do?

It's a bit hard to bring this all together to give good advice but let me make a few suggestions.

With regard to the Python code you are looking at, it is possible that it is just terrible code that no one could understand easily. That may not be the case also, but it happens. On the other hand, if it is a sensible program, then it is probably based on some underlying model that doesn't itself depend on the code. If that is the case, you could find that model and understand it first, then attack the code. The paper you have found probably has some bibliographic references that may help you understand everything.

Furthermore, you could try to find someone locally who is a Python guru and have them look at the code and give you advice about it - perhaps with the model in hand.

But your advisor seems to be giving good advice. He or she is the one who will need to approve your result in the end, so it is good to take the advice offered. If doing a bit less is acceptable to them, then it is acceptable, and probably easier. Doing a simpler project should also give you more experience and better enable you to take on harder work later. As a Master's level student it may be a mistake to go beyond the understanding of your professor. Doctoral students normally need to do that, but they have a lot more experience by then.

Running out of energy (burn out) is a serious academic issue. One way to avoid it is to make a plan, in conjunction with your advisor, that you can execute properly. Once you have a plan it won't feel like you are just thrashing around, as long as you follow the plan.


Postdoc exploring tenure track faculty jobs against the wish of mentor

It's your future and not that of your adviser, so I'm surprised that an adviser would say that they want you to work as a postdoc "for a few more years" -- which sounds far beyond the usual 3-year postdoc period.

My recommendation is essentially the same as for at least half of the questions on this forum: Communicate with your adviser. Have an honest talk about your future, why you desire to look for tenure track jobs, what you need from him in this regard, etc. You will very likely need your adviser's support (through letters, introductions, and in other ways), and the only way you'll get that is if you have honest conversations about what each of you want to get out of your current relationship.


What advice would you give students applying for graduate school in mathematics?

I personally had the experience of applying to graduate school from a very small college that has not produced many math Ph.D.s (though oddly enough, I'm not the only 2002 BA graduate working at an R1 university in North America) not so far in the misty depths of time.  Of course, I only have a couple of data points, but let me try to give my thoughts.

I think one thing is you've really got to get the basic stuff right: take the hardest classes available to you from the selections you have (and you should note in your letters that the student did this!) and ace them.  Do well on the general and subject GREs.  I assume you could have told them those.

I think the biggest non-obvious thing is that it's essential to seek out experiences outside your small program.  If you're at a large school with its own graduate program, probably you have all the resources you'll need at your fingertips, but in a smaller program, I don't think you really have the ability to fully prepare someone for graduate school.   Study abroad is good for this (I went to BSM in Budapest, but there are other programs).  So are REU's (I did the one at LSU).  On a smaller scale, you might be able to take more advanced courses at a nearby college (for example, students at Smith and Amherst can take graduate courses at UMass), or do a guest semester somewhere in the US (like at the Penn State MASS program).

These will, of course, be generally enriching experiences, but they also help by giving some real points of comparison.  Graduate schools know what an A at BSM means (where they might not know it for your school); a professor who supervised you at an REU can speak with authority about having supervised many talented young people, and having some experience with which of them succeed in grad school.

Another possibility is working at summer mathematics program like PROMYS  or Canada/USA Mathcamp (there are many other) though I think you should give some weight to activities like REU which are more likely to result in letters.

EDIT: I'll just note that what I've written about is still advice from the Web 1.0 world, but it's not so clear to me what Web 2.0 has changed about the admission process.  I think it has made communicating with other people going through the process easier (for example, you can see in essentially real time which schools are sending out acceptances and rejections.  This seems more likely to drive you insane than help though).  I think for students at a smaller school this can be a boon (for example, the applicant profiles in this thread could be helpful for understanding where they might get in, though it's worth a reminder to take things with a grain of salt).

I think one thing I didn't know was that it's very reasonable to contact the Director of Graduate Studies at programs that interest you if you have questions.  Don't be a pest about it (only email if you have a real question), but communicating with applicants is part of the job, though my DGS may not appreciate me telling the internet that (sorry, Tom).

The Web, of course, has also changed research about grad schools a lot.  In theory, you can know a lot more about individual professors now than it would have been easy to figure out even 10, but especially 20 years ago.  It's not super clear to me that this will help very much though.  I generally feel like researching individual professors before starting grad school is a mug's game, since you're so likely to shift interests.  I think it's much wiser to choose based on the program, and then worry about getting an advisor after a year or so of grad school when you know a bit more.


Number of pages for a Cover-letter to apply to postdoc position

Please follow the link. Everything is properly mentioned as follows.
http://www.nature.com/scitable/ebooks/english-communication-for-scientists-14053993/118520525#headerAndCitation

The structure of a letter written for an entry-level position will differ from the structure of a letter written by a master's or Ph.D.-level researcher.
Typically, a more advanced position will require a lengthier cover letter.
In all cases, however, remember that your readers are extremely busy. Therefore, keep your letters from extending beyond two pages, unless the job advertisement specifically requests more details about research or work experience.


Status change from Ready for Decision to under review

The editor received the reviews, but there was some problem that meant that they could not make a final decision about acceptance.  Usually, when all the reviews are in, it is not too difficult to reach a decision, but there are plenty of cases where there is real difficulty.  The simplest explanation is that the two (or more) referees disagreed, and the editor did not feel entirely convinced by either of them.  That would mean some further evaluation of the paper is required.  If the editor is sufficiently knowledgeable about the subject matter, they might evaluate the paper on their own.  They might send it back to the same referees, to see what they think of each other's comments.  However, the most likely alternative is that the editor sends the manuscript out to one or more new referees, and that is probably what happened to your paper.

(There are other situations in which additional review might be needed, but they are less common.  The editor might feel that a referee report is clearly too carelessly done or otherwise unsatisfactory.  The referee might submit a carefully reasoned report, but be unwilling to make a judgement about whether the paper is suitable for publication.  In any case, the editor's response is probably going to be the same; they will most likely send the manuscript out for another round of reviewing.)


A few journals/publishers publish statistics about their acceptance rate, but this data is usually rather sparse, and not communicated on the journal webpage itself.

However, publishers often allow researchers in the fields of scientometrics, ethics or psychology access to their (anonymized) database of paper review/acceptance/publication timelines. You can find papers such as this one (and references therein), which then analyze the raw data and publish some statistics about it. We learn, for example, that the acceptance ratio for Physical Review Letters in 2012 was at 32%.

Other nuggets of information one can gleam include:

  in the Europhysics Letters study Michael Schreiber expressed concern about comparatively high acceptance rates for July-submitted papers

which is always good to know if you happen to work in that field :)


Plural or singular in CV section titles?

There is no general answer, I'll answer for the specific cases:

Research Experience (singular)
Publications (plural), or "List of Publications"
Education (singular). A better term is "Academic Record" IMO.
Honors and Awards (plural)

In points 2 and 4, going for plural makes sense because there is more than one publication and more than one award involved. In pt. 3 there may be more than 1 institution involved, but it doesn't say "institutions", it says "education", which means sum total of everything you obtained by going in these institutions. In point no. 1 also, the phrase "research experience" talks about all the research you have done in your academic career. "Experiences" would refer to the experiences you had during the course of your research. That's not what they are asking for!

Hope that helps :)


Mention impact factor or conference acceptance rate in CV

You should not put journal impact factors in your CV.  Here's why:

By doing so, you imply that the IF is a useful indicator of the value of individual article(s) you have published in a journal.  However, the IF is not a useful indicator in this regard, and was never intended to be.

You also give the impression that your research does not stand on its own merits -- that it is worthwhile only because it was stamped by a high IF journal.  If your research really is important, use the grant application to explain why.

As other comments have stated, anyone in the field already knows the good journals -- and they're often not the ones with the highest impact factors.  IF is poorly correlated with expert opinion.

You may still disagree, so I will appeal to your self-interest.  Including the IF will leave a poor impression with evaluators who understand the limitations of the IF.  They may even be signers of the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), which states among other things:

...the Journal Impact Factor has a number of well-documented deficiencies as a tool for research assessment. These limitations include: A) citation distributions within journals are highly skewed [1–3]; B) the properties of the Journal Impact Factor are field-specific: it is a composite of multiple, highly diverse article types, including primary research papers and reviews [1, 4]; C) Journal Impact Factors can be manipulated (or "gamed") by editorial policy [5]; and D) data used to calculate the Journal Impact Factors are neither transparent nor openly available to the public [4, 6, 7].
General Recommendation: Do not use journal-based metrics, such as Journal Impact Factors, as a surrogate measure of the quality of individual research articles, to assess an individual scientist's contributions, or in hiring, promotion, or funding decisions.

In short, by trying to use the IF to establish value of your research, you're only broadcasting your ignorance, as even Wikipedia can tell you:

It is important to note that impact factor is a journal metric and should not be used to assess individual researchers or institutions.


No, but you'll want to choose the institution(s) you apply to rather carefully, take great care with your application, and have some bang-up recommendation letters.

Before sending your applications, perhaps you'd like to take a little time to enroll in some upper level courses in your target field(s) as a non-matriculated student, hopefully with some excellent grades coming out of those.

The fall semester would be a great time to do that.


small sample for an article proof, how to deal with it?

The proper way is to conduct a power analysis and present its results in the manuscript. Of course, such an analysis

might show that your sample size is too small for conclusive results
should have been conducted prior to the study.

As a result the paper might be rejected during review, but one could argue that it should be rejected. If the power analysis shows that you need to increase sample size, you could repeat/extent the experiment until you achieve sufficient statistical power.


Physics masters with undergraduate in computer science

I would say you would absolutely be able to get in to a physics masters program as long as you have taken the pre-requisites for the specific program.  Most programs have a list of courses that must be taken to be considered for admission.

I got my undergraduate degree in Geology and Geophysics, but I became more interested in engineering towards the later part of my undergraduate.  So I was sure to take all of the requisite engineering courses that I needed to get into an engineering masters program.  Now I'm actually working on a PhD in Civil Engineering.

Moral of the story... It is absolutely possible, but be sure to check out the program requirements for the physics programs you are interested in applying.


Removing co-authors after re-running study

Just ask them if they’d be okay with you reworking the paper and cutting them out of the author list, or they’d still like to contribute to it.
So your paper has a flaw that you need to rework to get published.  Your coauthors aren’t interested in doing so, so why not just do the polite thing and ask them if they still want to be involved?
If they agree to be cut out of the revised paper, they wouldn’t have any reason to be upset with you for doing so. If they agree to take an active role in revising the paper, they don’t have any reason to be upset, either.


Should tenured researchers be "encouraged" (forced) to retire at a certain age?

Here in Germany, professors are public servants and automatically retire when reaching retirement age. This has the equally automatic consequence that they are not paid a wage out of the university budget any more but a pension. And pensions of public servants work the way that any money they earn is subtracted from the pension.
Thus retired professors are typically (as long as they don't mess up the working atmosphere of the department) a net gain: any lecture they hold is essentially for free, any exams they take administer (they keep the ability to act as examiner) save work for someone else in the department. OTOH, they typically have to move into some small office, and can keep lab space only if they have grant/3rd party money to pay for that.


How to establish a collaboration with other researcher?

It is generally good to be explicit about your expectations. You don't want to end up in a situation where one person thinks it is her/his project and the other person has a well deserved place in the "thank you section", while the other person thinks she/he deserves to be a co-author. Such a conflict is really bad for everybody involved.

So when I propose a collaboration or someone comes to me with a proposal, I will discuss co-authorship from the beginning. This makes the discussion less informal than you suggest in the question.

It may still happen (and it has happened to me) that someone comes for advise, and I give that advise under the assumption that I am not a co-author, and the original author is so happy with the advise that I end up being "upgraded" as author.

Similarly, but more tricky, it may happen that I am "downgraded" when my contribution is not significant enough to warrant authorship. Maybe because I did not invest enough time in it, or the sub-problem I am supposed to tackle turned out to be less relevant to the entire project than originally expected. The tricky part is that ideally the downgraded person has to agree otherwise we are in a conflict of the type we were trying to avoid.


Does becoming good at scientific research force one to become one dimensional?

You can do it, but you might not be a professor. I have a PhD in Aerospace Engineering, and I work in CFD, HPC clusters, and BigData/analytics when I do research. My primary job is running the HPC department at a large-ish computing center. If I were a professor, I doubt I could pull this off. My research output is much smaller that professors my age, but I still have a pretty satisfying career.

You best chance for doing lots of different kinds of research is to find a center who appreciates you for your broad interests and to help it grow its mission while pursuing your more esoteric interests when you can.


What do you do if a person in your group purposely misleads you?

Unfortunately it happens, not just in undergraduate research.

What you should or could do strongly depends on your evidence and the perceptions of other people involved, here supervisors. However, assume you are right and you have evidence, still then supervisors often do not like to hear you complaining about someone they like or value. You will not change their minds easily.

So my advise would be to follow what you expressed already. Just perform well independently. But also make sure that your work and effort is visible. You may need to step out of your comfort zone and be more extrovert and assertive. If you do not occupy your space, others will.

You can see this as an excellent learning opportunity to improve these skills. Try to park the negative emotion for now if it does not help. Do not deny it but promise yourself to assess it later. Experiment with different behaviour and approaches and consider it as a training in personal leadership. After the summer make a list with behaviour you considered effective and less effective.

Wish you all the best.


How to obtain an alpha-numeric endorsement code to give to my potential arXive endorser

Whether you will need an endorsement code or not depends (among other things) to which category you submit to, which suggests that you will be given an endorsement code during the submission process (if necessary). The help page also mentions "during the submission process".