How do I communicate to a Teacher Assistant that I would like to fix our relationship?

I disagree with the posted answers and so wanted to weigh in.

It seems you have become the problem student in this TA's mind. I have witnessed this many times, and the pattern seems exactly as you have laid out. The student is overly informal and talkative/particapatory in class. It disrupts the flow of class, making the lecturer lose concentration and taking the conversation down tangents which are typically not relevant to the course direction. Then, rather than have a reasonable conversation after class with the student, the TA or lecturer tries to shame the student into submission by snarky comments during class. Then, because two wrongs don't make a right, both parties are aggrieved. At that point, the TA has labeled you as a "problem" and any even minor infractions are dealt with harshly.

If I wanted to repair the situation as a student, I would stop by office hours and begin by honestly apologizing to the TA for making their job more difficult. Listen to their response and repeat your apology if necessary. Then explain the efforts you are making to rectify the situation and ask if there is anything else you can or should be doing. Listen. Finally, offer an overall explanation for your behavior that might help the TA to see you in a different light. Probably your initial behavior was motivated by misplaced eagerness rather than malice, and if the TA can understand this they can perhaps reframe your current actions in their mind and respond differently.

Yes, this puts the onus on you to fix the situation. However, I think that is somewhat fair, given your behavior initiated the situation in the first place. Hopefully the TA recognizes your olive branch and extends one of her/his own. Good luck.


Do years in parentheses need to be chronological?

The constraints for references are defined by the citation style you're using. If the citation style guidelines do not mention anything about this issue, then it's OK.

Deliberately not using the chronological order seems fully reasonable as it might serve a purpose: In the example, I would assume that the 1964 publication is more informative/relevant in given the context and, therefore, should be named first.


I would recommend asking whoever is asking you to do this for a past example. Different institutions have vastly different styles -- e.g. some places might be OK with including some humor or random facts in your bio, whereas other places are all business.

That said, you can always get some generic examples by googling "bio examples".

(Also, since this is a workplace question, it's probably more appropriate for https://workplace.stackexchange.com.)


The following terms may help.

Proposed method
Suggested method
Our technique
Algorithm devised
Intended design
New procedure

It's not an exhaustive list, but are considered acceptable.


How to leave PhD program without causing problems

I want to leave with a master's degree and move on with my life.
  I don't know how to explain this to my department.

Directly, as though the department chair were an actual reasonable human being and not a soul-sucking tentacled horror from the nether dimensions.

  I fear they will try and force me to leave without a master's degree even though I have met the requirements.

I would suggest starting by finding out the mechanics of getting the master's degree.  Perhaps if you do nothing, the degree will magically appear in your academic record, but more likely there is some paperwork that you have to fill out.  Find out what that paperwork is.  Fill it out.  Collect the necessary signatures, and submit the completed paperwork to the relevant campus office.

You don't have to tell them why you want the master's degree. In my experience, it's quite common for PhD students to pick up a master's degree along the way to their PhD, either as a backup if the PhD falls through, or as a boost on their resume when they look for summer internships / employment.  Once the master's degree paperwork is done, inform the department that you will not be returning next term.  Finish your classes, look for jobs, and move on.

But at a more fundamental level, you really don't have to defend your decision to leave.  You did not promise to complete the degree program.  You did not sign a contract.  You are not an indentured servant.  You do not "owe" the department.  Your departure will do  the department no permanent damage.  Yes, a few people may be disappointed by your departure, but they'll get over it.

  I have never heard of someone quitting after passing the qualifying exams

For what it's worth, I left my first PhD program with a master's degree after passing my qualifying exams.  (Admittedly the circumstances were different — I left to join a different PhD program — but I was far from the only person in that department to leave after passing quals.)


Scientific research paper – how broad should the introduction be?

The answer to your question entirely depends on your field and the venue to which you will submit your paper. Software Engineering papers, for example, tend to have much longer and broader introductions than Math papers. Papers at smaller and more focused conferences and journals have shorter and more focused introductions that those at broad venues, since they address a more specific readership.


Is checking the format of a paper an expected part of the reviewing process?

I would say the responsibility of the reviewer is to judge the content of the paper. So, checking if the format of the journal/conference has been followed is not part of this job. Very large and obvious deviations can be pointed out, but for example spotting that the font of the caption is in size 11 and not 10 is not part of a reviewers task.


study permit for canadian university has taken more than 11 weeks

I think the best solution would be if you could get your university to contact the high commission. In general, they don't provide customer service like a private company. So sometimes it's hard to get hold of them to speed up visa application process.


What are the publisher's obligations when a research paper's term of copyright ends?

No, why should it? Running out of copyright explicitly means a loss of a right. It does not mean the beginning of any additional obligation.

Running out of copyright, however, means that anybody who already owns a copy may duplicate it and make it available under any conditions he chooses (including making it available free of charge). Many university libraries do this.


In Europe, companies exist that primarily live from FP7 or, now, H2020 funding. They rarely contribute much to projects in terms of research, but often handle tangential issues, such as project management, dissemination, marketing, or association with standardization bodies. Their model works because (1) they do things that none of the research partners actually wants to do, and (2) because they are often SMEs, which is generally politically helpful to get your funding proposals accepted. Further, as writing grant proposals is their core business, they usually also have grant writing experts that have the time to actually keep up with the various changes that the european commission is constantly applying to its programmes and rules (something that many researchers struggle to find the time for).

Formally, these companies often camouflage as either consultancies or technology spinoffs. That is, you will not find it on their web page that their core business model is actually to milk grant programmes, as this is strictly against official funding rules (as a company, you can only apply for funding if you plan to commercialise the results, and you are not supposed to make a profit from the project itself). In practice, the project officers seem to tolerate these businesses - for now.

  Can such a company be started (nearly) from scratch?

You will need a reasonable amount of seed money, as the H2020 rules require proof that an organization applying for grants has enough financial stability to likely survive over the typically 3-year project duration. I know from one startup that wanted to participate in a project (for actual technology reasons) which was in fact struggling to cross this hurdle. However, if you have the required seed funding, I see no reason why you would not be able to start such a business. Whether it is a smart business idea is a different question, given that you are basically living off of a loophole in the current funding practices, and you can never tell how long this loophole will stay open.

Edit:

I just saw that I missed this question:

  Would it be feasible to request funds to continue the development of this PoC (still very far from a commercial product) as a start-up or that simply doesn't make sense?

Yes, at least in Europe there are funding sources for exactly this kind of case. You should inform yourself about the concept of Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs, slide 4), and the different kinds of funding available for each TRL. If you look at this presentation and go to slide 32, there is an overview over different funding instruments in H2020 depending on the maturity of the idea.


How familiar should I be with research topics of a potential PhD supervisor?

You should at a minimum make an attempt to understand some of the papers written by a professor you want to work with, but the professor shouldn't expect you to understand every aspect of their work. It's also fine to go into your meetings with some questions about a paper, but do make sure you've made some effort to understand by reading other related papers, etc.


Is it acceptable or normal for professors to ask first semester grad students to teach a class?

Whether this is normal, uncommon, or outrageous will differ a lot from university to university. Where I did my PhD (in Austria), this would be standard operating procedure. Where I teach now (in Sweden), it would be uncommon but not really a huge deal as long as the teaching quality remained reasonable*. I am sure there are other universities where this would be unheard-of.

  Preparing and teaching a class isn't the problem, but I'm just wondering is this normal? I've heard of PhD-level students teaching classes in these situations, but freshmen like us? I'm honestly very concerned.

It would help to answer your question if you said what exactly you are concerned about? It sounds like you feel you can prepare the class well (and it also sounds like you don't mind doing so too much), in that case this sounds more like an administrative matter that should not concern you too much - ultimately, it's your professor's problem if your Dean of Studies (or whatever the comparable role in your university is) is unhappy with how exactly your professor decided to organize the teaching in your course.

*There would likely be some questions if the professor in fact delegated three classes in a row, but not because he delegated it to young grad students, more because designated teachers are in fact expected to do all, or at least the vast majority, of their teaching themselves, not just find somebody to do the teaching for them.


Keeping track of bibliography references for an entire research group

I accomplish this using the groups feature of Mendeley.  It works on all three major OS's, allows you to share bibliographies easily with both your group and external collaborators.  It also allows something that I think is very important -- lots of bibliographies on particular topics within the realm of what my group does.  See, for example

http://www.mendeley.com/groups/1045561/runge-kutta-stability-regions/papers/
http://www.mendeley.com/groups/1070421/nonlinear-hyperbolic-pde-solvers-on-gpus/papers/

I should mention that Mendeley's web interface to bibliographies is awful.  But the desktop interface is quite nice and (most importantly) can export Bibtex.

Mendeley does store your data in the cloud (if you consider a bibliography to be "your data").

Update: I stopped using Mendeley when it was bought by Elsevier.  I haven't found a satisfactory replacement.


Applying for a postdoc when you don't have all the necessary skills

Assuming you believe you can do the job and can make a compelling case in your application, yes you should apply. A person with the exact set of skills listed may not be available, in which case they will have to chose whomever they believe is the best fit of those who apply. Also, the skills you have may be beneficial for the position but may not have been thought of for the job ad.

In answering the selection criteria naturally emphasize the skills that you have which match the job ad. Additionally, highlight the skills which you have that are not listed but you believe would be beneficial and why. Finally, you can also make a case for why you can quickly (and independently) learn the additional skills that you do not already have.


Is a citation typically considered plural or singular in academia?

If you say "Gemma et al." to mean the paper, then it is singular.  This is the usual case.  If you say "Gemma et al." to mean all the authors of the paper, then it is plural.

  Gemma et al. describes the ants of Southeast Asia.

  But note: Gemma et al. have never actually been to Southeast Asia.

added
Comments show this varies by field.  So look at some of the best recent papers in your own area, and see how they do it.  In fact, some areas do not write "Gemma et al." but something like "[7]" or "[Gem 1995]" or whatever code is in the bibliography.  Then of course we may write

  [Gem 1995] describes the exceptional Lie algebras

even if there are three authors.  Or, if you claim papers cannot take any actions,

  [Gem 1995] contains a description of the exceptional Lie algebras


What does "funding" mean for undergraduate students performing research over the holiday period?

There are two things that require funds for a summer studentship:

Paying the student living costs
The cost of the research materials themselves (which might be more or less important depending on the subject, but in my field we budget about £10,000 (~$15,000) a for a full time year per researcher.

As has been pointed out it depending on the local laws, you might legally count as an employee. I would expect that to be the case in many european countries. In fact its a big grey area in UK law, and working out if you an employee, a trainee or a volunteer is complicated.
But the law aside, I personally do not take unfunded summer students because the privilege those that have the means to support themselves without income for several months over those who can't. The system of unpaid internships in law, media, politics etc, has long been seen as a source of the unrepresentativeness of those professions and research is no different. There is a big move to here outlaw unpaid internships explicitly. I do not want to be part of that system and mine is not an uncommon position here.


My professor never answered my email. What should I do?

You can 1) send a reminder, 2) stop by his office in person and ask, or 3) ask him after a lecture.

If it's urgent I'd do #2, otherwise it's up to you.


How do I get my paper sent to the right editor?

This is going to depend on how the journal is set up, but two suggestions:

Suggest in the cover letter that Editor A handle your manuscript.
When asked to classify your manuscript choose keywords that closely match Editor A's expertise. (You probably are doing this already anyway.)

Note that it's not a guarantee that Editor A handles your manuscript even if he/she is perfect for the role - it's conceivable Editor A is too busy, is on holiday, etc.


Student and advisor applying to same job - conflict of interest with recommendation letter

It is helpful that you and your advisor have been in contact and have honest communication about this subject. It's commendable, and doesn't happen nearly often enough.

That said,, for this particular job, if you want to have any realistic chance of getting this particular job, you really need to have someone else replace this particular co-advisor. Otherwise, a rather confused hiring panel may take a look at both applications, wonder what the heck is going on, and throw out both applications.

However, for any job in which you're not in direct conflict, I think it would probably be OK to have your co-advisor as a letter of reference.


As a dissertation advisor, how can I best help a "typical" graduate student?

Let him teach.

Assuming that he decides to make plans for working at a LAC or a branch campus of a state university he will need to be ready to teach the day he starts. So encourage him to take that part of his professional training seriously.

If your soon-to-be student is really going to end up in a small department a very helpful thing is that he can continue his research more or less independently. There is the internet but it is not the same as having half a dozen people working on the same topic just outside your door. This, I feel, is more important to his future than whether or not the topic he decides on has a large or small buy in cost. That being said he will want to have some facet of his research program that can be explained to a general mathematical audience, but this does not have to be all of it.

If all else fails, find a friend of yours or a not-so-recent graduate who teaches at a school like this and ask them what they want to see in a candidate. That should give you a good guide for what outcomes you should work for in your student.


Is it acceptable for a lecturer to refuse to allow their qualifications and work experience to be placed on a university website?

Sure it is acceptable for a Lecturer to refuse to do this, given that it isn't a condition of the Lecturer's being hired that they agree to publicly posting the information, nor is doing so strictly required for the lecturer to do the other parts of the job that are required.

My own view is that it'd be crazy not to make your information publicly available, since there's no harm in doing so, but much harm in terms of lost opportunities from not doing it. Still, there's no legal or even moral prohibition against making poor career choices.


Is it okay for a PhD supervisor to claim co-authorship... even if it's my work, and he didn't ask?

In a number of fields it's standard for the supervisor to be listed as the last author on papers or presentations that their students produce. This is because the supervisor helps in a number of ways, some of them indirectly: they get grant money, they train you to use the lab, they train you to do statistics... or they might make suggestions for the research design, the main theoretical focus of the presentation/manuscript, etc. If I wouldn't list my supervisor on a conference presentation, the only possible reason would be that it slipped my mind to add his name.

I would therefore ask other PhD students in your department what the standard is in this case, because your supervisor might not think that he's doing something wrong.


How to cite an expert's opinion which doesn't have any title? And should I?

Believe it or not, there are guidelines on citing tweets (Chicago & MLA quoted there, others may be available) and you may be able to take a similar approach. (I like the MLA approach, which is reminiscent of the very old-fashioned approach of naming an untitled document after the "incipit", its first words...)

Alternatively, you could give it a placeholder title - Smith, J. (2015-01-01). [Notes on something]. Social network site. URL - here the URL is the key element to find it and the bracketed element is just for the reader's convenience.

As to "should"... if you would be happy to use this as a useful source had he published it in something unreviewed but with a title (eg a personal blog post), then the absence of a title shouldn't really be the problem...


What to do when you're not confident your advisor will be able to write you a strong LoR?

The best practical approach is to try to make it as easy as possible for your "hands-off" advisor to write the best letter about you. Even if they delegate the task to someone else, it will be helpful for whoever is writing to have all the relevant information about you. I recommend at least preparing the following:

A summary of your research accomplishments. If you worked in teams, highlight what you personally added.
A summary of your non-research contributions to the lab. This includes students that you mentored, any responsibilities you took on, other kinds of service to the department or university, and times when you helped others with their research.
A few of your strengths and a specific example for each.

Whether your recommender uses this information is up to them. Having it  can only increase the odds that their letter is more thorough, specific, and helpful to your application.

Finally, having an advisor like yours is obviously not ideal, but it is also far from uncommon. I assume that their mentees in the past have gone on to successfully find jobs, postdoctoral appointments, etc. So maybe your advisor cares more about writing recommendations than you might guess based on their advising style. After all, an advisor does have some interest in the success of their students as well.


Grading term papers and reports written by non-native speakers

Grade everyone the same on things like word choice and sentence structure, but make that portion of the grade a small part of the overall grade for the paper.  (If you are in the United States, you will find students who are the product of U.S. high schools with limited vocabulary and no idea of sentence structure.)

Edit: If you don't grade everyone on the same scale, you will inevitably get complaints.  I'd argue that what is important (for learning) to students in your class is the formative feedback on their writing, not the specific number of points.  If the dean complains, 'splain that you teach computer science.

{Time passes} As Damian has said in the comments, you will need a grading rubric that assigns relatively low points to word choice and sentence structure, more points to overall organization, still more points to quality of research, etc.  Then you'll need to show how the overall grade was computed, using the rubric.  To repeat myself, the formative comments you make, particularly on word choice, sentence structure, etc. will be more important to learning than the actual points.


Does one usually get a notification of receipt of a PhD application?

It really depends on the school, and the channel of communication. I usually follow up after a week of sending an email if I were applying to a specific professor.

Using the example of my school, PhD applications are handled centrally, and you only get an email of further inquiry or rejection.

In either case, there are probably a lot of applications that the professor needs to sort through, a smart follow up is usually necessary.


Dealing with suspects of sabotaging experiments

That would be the time for the PI to call a meeting with A and B and have a conversation among adults. Topics to be discussed are: If A has a grief with B, she needs to be specific and put it on the table. If B suspects A, he needs to do the same. PI needs to say that this is unacceptable and that everyone needs to behave like adults or else.

If the PI does not call this meeting, then either A or B need to be the grown-up in the room and do so.

Ultimately, half-truths, allegations, conspiracy theories, "experiments not working well", etc, is a situation that is to nobody's benefit. The only way to address it is to talk about it.


What types of higher than undergarduate degrees look exceptionally good relative to other equal level degrees?

Those stories exist, but not all of them are true. Be careful and look at the source of the story: Does it come from the institution itself (who is trying to "sell" its program), or from someone who is trying to make her or himself look important by telling about the wonderful job offer(s) they received? Also consider if this is it a selection of success stories or if this somewhat representative of the experience of all the students who finished that course.

Moreover, even if a field of study is now lucrative, that does not mean that it will still be lucrative when new students finish their education. Pork cycles are a big problem for many fields of study.


Is it okay to cite the abstract(English) of a foreign (non-English) article?

Ultimately, you and your co-authors are responsible for the contents of your manuscript. You can cite abstracts of works you haven't read in full, in any language, including your native tongue. However, misuse of such abstracts can always be called out by the reviewers of your paper. You will be responsible for defending your choices in the review process, if need be.

Ultimately, however, citing a foreign-language abstract ultimately is no different than citing one in English. The exact details depend on the citation format for the journal you intend to submit to, so check their guidelines. In general, you do not translate titles of articles or journals into their English language equivalent (unless the journals have done so themselves!).


If your goal is to be a CTO (i.e. more business oriented) then the value of an MBA would be an idea worth considering. Once you reach a certain level of experience, education becomes icing on the cake. So in ten years time, if it came down between you and another candidate for a CTO position, and you had an MBA (or another master's degree), you would more than likely get the job.


How to receive email notifications of newly accepted papers in a specified set of journals?

I have never heard of that. But you can setup an alert on Google scholar and get notifications when publications appear that match your search query or keywords.


What careers not requiring an academic degree might be open to a self-learner who wants to do research on pure mathematics?

Be very wary of doing mathematical research on your own. Even if you read all the books there are, you will most likely go off on a tangent and reinvent a theory that has been known in math for decades or centuries - simply because you never heard about it and did not know the commonly accepted names of the structures you have been working with. Or, as others point out, you might work on something that may be true but is of zero interest to anyone else.

If all you are looking for is the joy of doing mathematics, that may well be fine (although even then I'd say using up-to-date tools and theory would probably be more satisfying, just as I'd prefer to code on a modern machine and not an antique, even if it does run a compiler). However, if you want to make a difference in the mathematical world, possibly publish your findings, then you will need to interact with other mathematicians.

And this is where a formal education will help. A math degree will show other mathematicians that you at least have learned the fundamentals. When you contact a mathematician, you will need to differentiate yourself from a random crank. There are far too many home-educated random cranks in mathematics, and you are lucky if they self-identify by claiming that they can solve the general quintic equation by radicals. Having a degree in math will make it easier for you to get other mathematicians to talk to you. In addition, your advisor will have decades more experience than you and will be able to steer you in fruitful directions.


Is it possible to switch between Ph.D. departments at the same university?

Whether it can be done or not depends entirely on the regulations of your particular institution. What is much more likely to say is that you will probably not be able to carry your funding over from your old department to your new one. Funding very rarely can be transferred, since it is usually attached to some project or department, rather than any individual.


I want to do research in A about its applications in B. Don't know exactly what people in B need from A. What's a good way to acquire this knowledge?

You don't know what they need and they don't know what you can offer. One of you has to give and start getting hands dirty in the other's field. And in this case you'll probably have to do that. Here are some possibilities. I study in the US so there could be some cultural/practical differences, but I would like to believe that they should not be big, if any.

Go to some university research seminars. Most of them are open to public and schedules are often posted online. Stay and chat with the presenter.
Take a few introductory classes. This allows you to acquire proper lingoes to communicate. If possible, I'd also suggest taking it for credit because later when you do your PhD, the issue of not having any coursework in this new area will come up. Some programs allow 1-2 credits transfer so you may be able to hit two birds with one stone.
Identify prominent research organizations in this area. For example, internationally there is IPCC, and in the US there is EPA. These organizations periodically produce evidence-based statements and reports, in which you can glean important research needs.
Regularly do some brief literature surveys in this area and perhaps even the combined area. Sign up for customizable article alert. Pay attention to the studies' limitations and applications. Take good notes and review them time to time when brainstorming.
Examine grant availability by visiting funding agency websites. In the US there is grants.gov and I'm sure there must be a UK or European equivalence. Look for related grant announcements. In most of these announcements, you'll often find problem statements and suggested areas from which the agency would like to see some grant proposals. Having a research plan that appeals to your future supervisor and funding agencies can make your PhD journey a lot smoother.
In the above processes, also pay attention to who are the leading institutes and researchers in this field (or the combined field.) Consider contacting them for a short information interview (15-min or so.) Don't dread doing it because eventually you'll need a person in the env. sci. to be in your committee; might as well start scouting earlier.


No response after PhD interview with good feedback + follow-up emails

It's fairly common in academia that you don't hear back after an interview if they won't hire you, more so if the PI appears to be acting unprofessionally as a rule: they shouldn't compare you to your face to other candidates.
One could go over why that is so, but it's best to simply shrug and accept the offer that is definite.


Possibility of guessing acceptance rate of a journal using its impact factor?

In a general sense, the answer is "no". Different fields have wildly different citation rates and hence impact factors, so that will vary independently of the level of prestige of the journal. Within a field, I suspect it's still "no", but it might be interesting to hear if anybody's studied it.


Should I submit a conference paper (extended abstract) to this chemical engineering conference?

As a chemical engineer, I would recommend against submitting an extended abstract. The primary reason for this is that, unlike proceedings of the Materials Research Society, the extended abstracts of the AIChE annual meeting are not peer-reviewed. Therefore, any such publication will automatically be of lower weight than something that has been published in a venue that provides peer review.

In addition, because the work has effectively been "published," you will find it harder to secure publication for fuller versions of this work later on, as many journals could view the extended abstract as a "prior publication" and reject a paper on those grounds.

Moreover, as David Ketcheson suggests in his answer, the dissemination of your research will be greatly hampered by the relatively low circulation of the extended abstracts.

So, for this conference in particular, and more generally for any conference whose proceedings are not peer-reviewed, I would avoid submitting extended abstracts and conference proceedings.


Teaching a blind student MATLAB programming

Yes, this is all possible, but I recommend seeking specialist advice. Blind support organisations often have technical advisors who are aware of the latest software and hardware adaptions that are available.

I taught a totally blind student through a whole computer science degree, including 3d computer graphics. The student had a box which was connected to the computer and supplied audio through an ear piece. This translated the screen pixels into sound so images could be perceived much as a hand-held scanner might. As the mouse was moved the pixels at the mouse location were translated to sound. In addition to text-to-speech and other features the student had a complete picture of what was on the screen.

Actually, it was better than that. The student could see windows hidden behind windows, because they saw it in three dimensions in their mind and the rest of us were limited to the limitations of a flat 2d screen. We were totally out-classed and out-performed by someone who although blind could perceive the screen images better than we could!

Ask the student if they have looked into the devices available or already have support from appropriate blind organisations. If they do encourage them to follow up. If they do not, go through the appropriate special needs support office at your institution who are likely to have the right contacts.

Never underestimate the abilities of differently equipped students!

PS: I see you are in the UK. The RNIB is likely  to be able to assist. They have appropriate technical officers if the University does not.


Can I recreate/redesign a peer reviewed journal article findings (giving proper credits to author, journal)into powerpoint and sell it?

Probably not, but that depends on the copyright holder and on any license that is attached to the work. If there is no license at all, then the answer would be no. But even some permissive licenses have a no commercial use clause. If so, again, no.

And note that copyright law isn't universal. It varies from country to country.

And note, again, that it is the words (expression) that is normally covered by copyright, not the underlying ideas. Anyone can write about ideas.

But, another issue is how you would be looked upon if you do this. Some things that are, strictly speaking, legal, are still frowned upon.


How can I improve my chance of getting a tenure-track position

Let me add two points to user3188445's excellent answer.

Landing a tenure-track faculty position in computer science, even during this current phase of rampant uncontrolled growth, is still very very hard.  As  user3188445 put it: There's just a lot of randomness in the hiring process.  In this respect, hiring junior faculty is no different from every inherently subjective selection process: undergraduate admission, graduate admission, paper acceptance, senior hiring, even tenure.

There is nothing you can do to absolutely guarantee that the dice fall in your favor, but you can change the distribution.  As one of my interviewers once said to me when I was looking for faculty positions, the variance is a function of the committee, but the expectation is a function of the applicant.

Apply widely

  I submitted applications to about 10 US schools

There's your biggest problem.  Only the very strongest PhD students have any chance of landing a tenure-track job with only 10 applications.  Each position receives dozens to hundreds of applicants; simple statistics imply that you should aim for a wider range of targets.  I'd suggest 40-50 as a more reasonable target.

Hiring protocols vary significantly between American universities.  Some departments practice targeted hiring, where every interview candidate must match a specific research area approved in advance by the dean.  Other departments practice broad-spectrum hiring; these departments can interview anyone they find sufficiently interesting, regardless of area.  Most departments lie somewhere in between these two extremes.  Restrictions can change during the hiring season.  Moreover, the position advertisement does not reveal the department's hiring constraints, or even necessarily preferences.  Some departments publish general ads ("all areas of computer science") even when their searches are targeted; others publish targeted ads even when their searches are broad.

In short, you cannot tell whether your application is in scope for a particular department from the advertisement.  For this reason, you should apply to every department that you might be interested in joining, no matter what their ad says.  The worst they can do is say no.

Quality > Quantity

My second point is one about perception and language: Your entire application package (including the identities of your references and their contents of their letters) should emphasize quality rather than quantity, impact rather than effort, excellence rather than busy-ness.  Even your own internal mental gauges should be calibrated to the strength and potential of your research, not the length of your CV.

At least one of the metrics we use to choose interview candidates is the question "Is this person likely to get tenure?"  The more you present yourself as someone who is already ready for tenure, the more your achievements shine on the metrics faculty use to judge each other, the better your chances will be.

  ABD from a highly reputable university outside US (equivalent to, e.g., Toronto, EPFL)

The number of non-American CS departments that your prospective American colleagues would rank in the same equivalence class as Toronto and EPFL is very small.  Are you sure?  Are you sure because Americans have told you so, or only because that's what everyone at your home institution says?

In any case, the reputation of your home institution is not as important as your personal reputation as a researcher.  (These are strongly correlated, but they are not the same.)

  10 papers, all in top conferences (5 first-authors)

That's certainly above-average productivity, but productivity is not the same as impact. Did your papers win awards?  Did they create any buzz?  Have they been cited?  Did they inspire follow-up work?  In short, were your papers actually good?  Sturgeon's Law applies even at the best conferences.  Do your external letters (see below) describe the novelty, quality, and impact of your work in specific and credible detail?  Are you, personally, known for this work, as opposed to your advisor?

  4 recommendation letters (one from my advisor, 3 from other reputable researchers)

"Reputable researchers" is too low a bar.  You need letters from recognized intellectual leaders in your field, including a significant fraction from outside your home institution.  As user3188445 points out, you especially need letters from people who are calibrated to the social norms (as some put it, "gushing") of American academic recommendation letters.

It's also important to have American references so that they can give you direct and brutally honest feedback about your application package from the point of view of your target audience.

  extensive internships in industry research labs

Were your internships successful?  Did they lead to publishable or patentable results?  Did they have significant impact within the company?  Did your internship sponsors write you strong recommendation letters?

  extensive TA experience

Unless you are aiming for undergraduate-only institutions or a teaching-only position, this is at most of secondary importance.  Your research matters first.

  experience in grant-writing (assisting my advisor)

Was the grant-writing experience successful?  Did you and your advisor actually get the grant(s)?


Why don’t some PhD students publish their thesis works in a journal?

The obligatory journal publication of scientific work done for a degree, no matter what (think: "publish or perish") is a fashion that spilled over from the US to Europe and especially Germany around the late '80s-'90s. Before that, people bothered only publishing work that they felt was outstanding, and sometimes not even that.
I am aware of work that exceeded in thoroughness and quality by far other publications on the same question that were published more than a decade and half later, where the original authors did not feel that it was up-to-scratch for publication and refused to do what they felt was a "half-baked" work.
One may say it might be desirable if some this self-critical attitude would still be maintained (not in its totality, so much good work went effectively lost this way), it would save one a lot of sub-par reading and reviewing duties today. However, this ship has sailed long ago.


How can I get copies of library of congress's archival manuscripts?

This is not an answer, but too long for a comment.

I used to live around Washington DC metro area. I went to Library of Congress very often. They don't have open shelf policy. You sit in one of their reading rooms and pick a desk. You request for materials to read. The librarian will find them and put on a cart. Somebody moves the cart out to the desk you sit. After you finish, they'll put them back to the shelf. I never checked out books from them. Don't know their check out policy.

I remember there was a certain limit number of books for the request. 5 seems to be correct because you can only load a certain number of books on the cart.

It is definitely worth while to ask a Congressperson to help if you live in the US. But, it sounds like it's worth making a trip there to examine everything they have. 106 boxes is a lot. It takes half a container. I am afraid no libray is willing to take such a huge task - I assume you're thinking of inter-library loan. My 2 cents.


Should I be worried or does things like this take time?

No, it often takes much longer than two weeks to organize a postdoc job.  Remind them every three weeks, and be patient.


Preprint services for environmental and earth sciences?

I just found the following article (open access version) published in 2013 which lists 7 repositories for the earth sciences:

CEDA Repository
Earth-prints Repository
Institution Aquatic Commons
Organic Eprints
AgEcon Search
Open Knowledge Environment of the Caribbean
antbase.org

I haven't checked the actuality of this list.


How do I understand the main concepts in a paper by just skimming through it?

If the paper is well written, then the abstract should tell you most of the story at a high level. Then the introduction should give more technical coverage again of the whole story – you should then know the problem and the results obtained, though not all the details. The remainder of the paper then will contain just the details.

Of course, most papers do not do that, so you may also need to read the conclusion, the discussion section, and perhaps any other introductory sections. In the end, you may need to read the whole paper before you get what it is about.

However, to really understand the paper, you will need to go through it very slowly, with pen and paper at hand, and try to replicate the reasoning/ideas given in the paper, filling in the gaps – possibly with the help of additional literature.

Not all papers need to be read so deeply. Reading just the abstract and maybe the introduction and conclusion should help you decide how deep to read the paper.


Should I include web links in my statement of purpose?

My feeling is that whether including a link is a good idea or a bad idea depends on how you are using it.  A statement of purpose should be a generally self-contained document.  Thus:

If your statement of purpose is difficult to fully comprehend without following the link, it would be in a problem (whether in computer science or elsewhere)
If the statement of purpose is complete without the link, however, and the link is essentially an faster alternative to googling for more information, then I would find it a useful courtesy to the reader.


If you know a family member who is much more qualified and capable in mathematics than you are, should find another field of specialisation?

Research in math (and I assume in general) is hard. It doesn't get better over time, but rather we seem to get used to the accompanying depression and angst.
When I feel down, I try to remind myself that I do math because I enjoy it, not because I want to be the best at it, and for some reason people continue to pay me money to do it. If they stop, I'll figure out something else. In the meantime, I get to think about problems that I love, even if the process of that thinking isn't always fun.
The above is also hard. There are still rough days. It helps me to know that other people, including really smart people doing great math, experience the same feelings.
If you want to switch fields, go ahead. But in general, any field will have someone (seemingly) faster than you - this is not personal, we all feel like this.

[Picture Credit: David Whittaker]
I would recommend reflecting upon why you are in mathematics in the first place. If you're in it because you love doing it, does it matter if someone else is a bit faster? There is plenty of mathematics to go around.


Have any academic superstars succeeded in a subject while disliking it?

To succeed in any highly competitive endeavour requires long, concentrated, hard work. To put this into something you hate would certainly be a novel type of masochism, even if not successful.


What are the potential pitfalls of having a PhD in machine learning?

As a person who has hired quite a few people in industry, I will simply say that advanced areas (or even areas that are perceived to be advanced) often see PhDs being preferable. In this respect I completely agree with Bitwise.

I do not, however, agree that you might earn less. Those with sought-after skills get paid well in industry. It is about supply and demand but supply (people who can do the job) is not high and demand is growing.

Machine-learning is hot in the business literature. That is, managers are becoming well informed about the potentials of machine-learning and they are becoming worried that the only way they can compete for the long-term is by taking advantage of this area.

While lower-level programming jobs might not see any benefit from higher qualifications, areas like machine-learning are not seen as lower-level.

To answer your main question, are there pitfalls of having a PhD if you want a job in industry? The answer is no. I am unaware of anyone who has ever thought lower of a job candidate because they have a PhD. Yes, you could get a job without one but for your areas of interest, a PhD will give you lots of advantage when it comes to getting job offers.


How to make my papers accessible to other researchers?

From the context of your question, I assume you are a computer scientist graduate student.  (Computer scientist because you mention DBLP, and graduate student because you're worried about people finding your research quickly.) My answer is specific to computer science, especially the first two points.

Just post your papers on your web page already.   Among other things, posting your own papers will allow Google Scholar to find and index them after only a few days. Despite scary legal language to the contrary, neither ACM nor IEEE (or SIAM, or AMS, or Springer, or Elsevier, or...) has any interest in suing individual researchers for providing copies of their own papers.
Post preprints of your work to the ArXiv and/or your institutional preprint server.  Again, despite scary language to the contrary, granting a license to the ArXiv to publish your papers does not deprive ACM or IEEE (or SIAM, or AMS, or Springer, or Elsevier, or even ACS) the right to later publish peer-reviewed version of your papers later.  Many publishers explicitly allow you to publish post-reviewed but pre-copy-edited preprints on the ArXiv and similar servers.  Posting camera-ready versions is technically illegal, but neither ACM nor IEEE has any interest in suing individual users for such violations.
Post publication announcements on Facebook/Google+/Twitter/your blog.  Yes, this works.  Really.
Give lots of talks.  At a minimum, you should give talks about your results in an appropriate local seminar.  But especially for really strong results, you (or your advisor) should also arrange to have yourself invited to a few other institutions to give a talk.
Send copies of your work directly to a few colleagues.  Just send them email with a link to your web page.  (Don't blindly send papers as attachments; remember that some people read email over the phone and pay by the byte.)  But don't just spam the whole world.  Limit your email to the small handful of influential people that you are sure will be interested — other researchers working on the same problem, people whose results you directly improve or extend, your advisor, and—if you're nearing a point like graduation or tenure where you need letters—a few potential letter-writers.
Take the long view.  It really is not important that see your results RIGHT NOW THIS MINUTE ZOMG NOW NOW NOW !!!!111¡¡¡CXI.  Relax.  Yes, DBLP and other indexing services operate with a delay of several months.  (Although my impression is DBLP has gotten faster, thanks to some outside funding that allowed them to hire more than one human being.)  And yeah, that's frustrating.  But in the long run, those few months of publication delay are not going to make a bit of difference.


Lecturer in Math position application - UK - Teaching statement

Having applied for jobs in both North America and the UK, I can confirm that unless the advert and "further particulars" specifically mention it, there is no need for a teaching statement.

I thought I would add some further comments, which aren't exactly relevant to your question but which came to mind since you mentioned UK vs NA.

For a standard "lectureship in pure mathematics" (presumably entry level?), I was told by a 3rd party, when I applied for my current job, that in many UK places a list of courses in the CV, plus remarks of the form "my teaching was rated in the kth decile by student questionnaires," would be sufficient.

The important thing is an up-to-date CV, which should emphasise the extent of previous teaching experience. Success in getting grants, either as a graduate student or postdoc, is probably also worth including. Other information such as conference participation and refereeing work is rather secondary; you can include it, but I don't think it would make much of a difference.

Due to the sheer volume of applications, it may be worth including things like the publication list at the end of the CV rather than in a separate document. You might also wish to highlight your four best papers in an early "Selected publications" section; sadly the spectre of REF-fability is always on the minds of committees. The CV is often what is circulated when drawing up a longlist. The research statement should probably remain separate, and is roughly speaking the same kind of thing that one would prepare for a North American application.


Impact of gap year during phd program on future post-doc and employment options?

It is not uncommon to have a break doing a PhD program, especially in the U.S. where it normally takes longer than in other countries. A list of reasons to have a gap includes maternity, health conditions, family situations (in some countries / cultures), or even temporary financial reasons. All these explanations seem fair to me, and I would not hold such them against the candidate.

What is very important, though, is

how (and whether) you will address the gap in your cover letter
how your supervisor will speak about this in the recommendation letter.

If you are open to your colleagues and do not let them down without a reason (in other words, if you are doing your best given the situation), I do not see why the situation itself should be held against you and diminish your chances of future success.


Papers written with the sole purpose of finding flaws in someone else's paper

Whether papers like this will be published depends on the journal and the editor. It usually is preferable to show how a problem can be solved correctly. However, it might be well justified to solely point out weaknesses in existing work.

Keep in mind that very few things are actually "bullet-proof". The more you know about a method (new or old) the more this will become obvious. Most methods have their limitations. Newton's laws are still "pretty good" although Einstein and others have shown their limitations.

If you have confidence in your new method, you will probably highlight the advantages it has over existing methods in your paper. However, you should also be open about the limitations of your own contribution. Be clear about what your method can and cannot do and where and when it is applicable. In being honest about your own work you are making a true contribution to science. However, if you’re starting to have severe second thoughts about your method, it might be better to double check what you're doing. Talk to other people in your field and openly discuss your concerns before publishing.

As long as you don't over-egg your own contribution you will be close to bullet-proof. It won't be bad for your reputation or career if somebody were to find a weakness in your work and improve your method or the knowledge of the field. That's part of how science works. You can only make contributions to the best of your current knowledge and move on when you have new information. The only thing negative for your career would be to ignore new evidence and trying to hide past mistakes.


Is it acceptable to use mainly websites in a literature review?

Website or not website is not the point. Printed journal articles are favored over website because i) they are peer-reviewed, carrying some degree of authority, ii) they are archived and retrievable, with payment or free of charge, and iii) once published, the contents do not change until they are formally revised, rebuked, or retracted.

So, it would mean that when citing websites, a few more steps need to be done to increase their worthiness. First, you'd need to assess the credibility of the website and be able to critically evaluate the contents. In journal articles this step is done to some degree but in websites you're on your own. Second, you may need to do most of the archiving (including downloading, dating, and archiving the data sets you may download, or printing and dating website into PDFs, etc.) or use website archiving to save a cross-section of the websites. There are free services like http://perma.cc and http://www.webcitation.org available.

Once they are archived, in your paper, it is a good practice to cite both original link and the archived link as well as the date you accessed the original link. For details, consult the project leader or editor. Some journals specialized in publishing Internet-related research such as Journal of Medical Internet Research may also provide useful format-related examples in their guide to the authors.


So, after the first round of review, you were asked to revise your manuscript extensively. And you made changes accordingly and resubmitted a revised version. Two months has passed since then, but it doesn't seem like the revised manuscript has been sent out for external review because the status of your submission you can see online hasn't been changed and is still "with editor." (Edit: I know some journals use "being handled by editor" or something similar at any stage of the review process except when the manuscript is with the author. You're sure it wasn't "with editor" during the first round review, right?)

If that's the case, most likely it means the editor is having hard time finding referees for the second round or maybe simply taking their sweet time examining your resubmission. Or possibly they forgot about your submission so you need to remind them.

I don't know what the norm is in your field. But if I were you, I'd send a short and polite email to the journal to ask what is up with your paper, probably after waiting a bit more. If it doesn't work, I'd send another polite email to someone else working for the journal. In any case, you should understand that the editor is a volunteer (unless you're submitting to a journal with fulltime editors like Nature, Science, PRL etc.), and sometimes it takes a while to handle your submission for various legitimate reasons. So be polite when asking what's going on.

Edit: And the best way to know if two months is too long is to ask experienced researchers in your field like your advisor if you're a student.


Why would a conference discourage authors to submit their papers to pre-submissions platforms (e.g., arXiv) before submitting them to the conference?

Here is a nice article that explains your question from ACL2017 . Main aim is to protect double blind review system.


Should a professor discuss his/her reviews (given by students) in class?

When I was teaching at a German university and we received course feedback, we were required to inform the students about the feedback. So while the feedback was anonymously given by each student (online), the students should get general feedback on how the course was evaluated. For some that meant simply sending the questionnaire summary to the students, but many discussed the evaluation in the last lecture.

For me it made sense to discuss the results:

You get an opportunity to thank the students for positive feedback.
You get an opportunity to clarify contradicting or unclear feedback (e.g., talks to fast vs. talks to slow).
You can also address 'below the belt' feedback. I think you can say anything if you do it with respect. And giving feedback -- even highly critical feedback -- with respect is something that students should learn, if only to prevent huge problems in the future where a lack of respect is ... less tolerated.
You can show students how to constructively deal with feedback (if you can deal with feedback). I think you should both take the feedback serious and add some humor (i.e., take yourself lightly but the job seriously). Otherwise, you are not only alienating the current students but also future students.
You can get feedback in the very last lecture. In some courses, the feedback was requested during the phase with the highest stress levels. Students only saw what they had learned and how they had benefited later.


Does citation refer to paper or authors?

I guess there is no definitive answer, but I would use "state". From what I learned from my supervisor, the citation should not interfere with the original sentence. And the sentence is "Gneiting and Ranjan generalize these findings and state that..."
(My supervisor also disapproved of it when someone used "[XY] stated that ... ".)

Also, I can't remember ever seeing it the other way.

Just make sure that you have the same form for "generalizes" as well ;)


"Dressing down" to impress in academic settings

If an academic is dressed in an unusually casual manner, I generally ignore it.

If an academic is dressed in an unusually formal manner, I assume one of these:

They are an administrator, or manager, rather than an academic
They are here for a job interview and they don't know it is not necessary to dress formally
They are going to an event outside academia, like a funeral

I do not think anyone is impressed by either dressing up or down, but it can send a signal.


I'm in the health and social sciences and I have never attended a conference that has used this format for submissions. This seems like a lot more work for conference abstract reviewers and program committees (all who are volunteers).

I have seen a movement towards "late breakers," where you can submit an abstract for a subsequent round of reviews, often after the initial acceptance/rejection notifications are distributed. You typically are not able to re-submit a rejected abstract, but could potentially revise or (ideally) propose a different project for the conference. I guess there are pros and cons of each approach.


Does it make sense to reward the entire class with better grades if (and only if) no cheating is detected?

The problem with your proposal is that, despite you framing it as a reward rather than a punishment, it is trivially easy to reframe it as a punishment instead of a reward:
"The exam is graded out of 47 points with three bonus points, unless someone tries to cheat."
is just as valid as:
"The exam is graded out of 50 points but will only be graded out of 47 with three bonus points if no one cheats."
And I am entirely certain that many disappointed students who aren't the ones involved in cheating will reframe it as negatively as possible.  And no one likes collective punishment, because it isn't fair.
I've certainly noticed an uptick in cheating, as has my department.  I've tried to be proactive, and it seems to have helped.  Rather than just putting my academic integrity policy in the syllabus and talking about it on day 1, I involve it more directly.  For example, my first homework always comes with a quiz on my classroom management portal, that they get full credit for just for completing.  It asks questions in a way that I designed to make it more personal.  Things like:
"One of my friends is struggling due to real-life reasons, and can't keep up with their work.  Out of a desire to help, I share my work with them, and they copy it.  What will happen?"
I've only completed one class with these sorts of warnings, and my sample size was small, but that class did better than my previous class.


What are the guidelines for minimum "implementation/proof-of-concept" requirements in computer science research?

Your implementation needs to be good enough to evaluate the concept you want to evaluate - no more, but certainly no less. What this means in practice is largely dictated by what kind of evaluation or experiments you want to do. I have basically seen four broad classes in Computer Science:

Proof-of-Concept (PoC): you only want to show that your idea can be implemented, so you only implement your idea (often in a fairly naive or bare-bones manner). Note that this is often good enough for a quick demo, but not good enough for a paper (because reviewers usually feel that the conclusion that something can be implemented is not satisfactory by itself).
Evaluation Prototype: in addition to the PoC, you want to evaluate how well your idea works in some quantitative manner. For instance, if you are building some novel file system, you probably want to not only show that it can be implemented, but also that it works better in some dimension (e.g., faster) than existing systems. Your prototype can still be bare-bones, but you presumably need to build the core parts well because otherwise your evaluation may end up showing primarily that your prototype sucks. In a way, your prototype results show a sort of lower bound on how your idea works - that is, if your results are good your idea is validated, but if your results are not good, it may be because they idea does not work or your code is too bad of an implementation.
User Study Prototype: in addition to quantitatively evaluating your prototype, you may want to run one or more case or user studies with it, or conduct a controlled experiment. Now you need to improve your evaluation prototype with at least a limited amount of bells and whistles, because it is hard to run an expressive user study if your system is almost unusable to anybody but yourself. In this stage you may be adding a GUI and a bunch of features that are unrelated to your science, but which may be needed even in trivial practical usage.
(Simple) Product: the final stage is that you plan to actually release your implementation in some manner to the public. Maybe as part of an open source project, as a consulting delivery to a company, or even in the context of a spin-off company. You will now need to add many more bells and whistles unrelated to your science. Further, now you need to start caring about documentation, a release cycle, not doing breaking changes, etc., all of which are basically irrelevant as long as you are just building a prototype for your science.

So what does this mean for your project?

  For example, if a "novel" work requires a persistence layer and a researcher uses a file based method e.g. csv. Will that be wrong? Will his architecture point to a database or a file system ?

I generally suggest my students to follow a lean approach:
what kind of experiment do you plan to do? Will it matter what kind of persistence layer the prototype has? If no, then build whatever you can do quickest and where you are most confident that it will work correctly - but keep in mind that even the simplest prototype can sometimes run through all the phases above, so at least plan for the possibility that you may need to swap out your persistence layer for something a little more state-of-the-art than a flat text file later on.


What is the difference between AP A and AP B?

AP courses are designed for US high school students to gain some transfer credits when they begin university study by passing a standardized exam with a sufficient score, effectively giving a jump on their first year.
There's no such thing as "AP A" and "AP B" except in the context of particular courses. Some subjects may have multiple parts, but they aren't named in any cohesive fashion across subjects.
I suggest going directly to the College Board for info on what the AP courses cover, but from Wikipedia it seems that both AP Physics A and B are defunct, with AP Physics A never fully existing.
You can see a full course list here: https://apstudents.collegeboard.org/course-index-page
Looks like AP Physics 1 is Newtonian mechanics, AP Physics 2 is electricity and magnetism.  They have a separate track AP Physics C: Mechanics and AP Physics C: Electricity and Magnetism which use calculus. Of course different universities are different, but probably 1&2 are roughly equivalent to 2 semesters of a US university "not for majors" physics track, and the two AP Physics C branches are roughly equivalent to 2 semesters of a US university "for majors" track (including majors in engineering, physics, possibly biology and other science/quantitative areas). Whether a university actually would accept even high scores on these AP tests as equivalents to their own courses is up to the individual schools.


Is it generally acceptable if reference letters for postdoc or faculty jobs are submitted after the application deadline?

Unless the search committee is swamped and is looking for reasons to reject a candidate, a late letter will not tank the application. But here's what can happen: letter requests are sent out for candidate A and B. B's letters are delayed. In the meantime, A's letters come back and they are quite good. The committee starts going ahead with interviews for A. Then, for other reasons, the committee feels that A might suffice to cover the area that A and B both overlap in, and they might move on to other candidates.

This would only happen if the letter is REALLY late (multiple weeks). And if candidate B has any level of interest, there's always someone who'll chase down the letter writer.

So overall I'd say not to worry greatly, but make sure the letter isn't more than a week or so late. Also it wouldn't hurt to check with the committee on the "hardness" of the deadline.


How to in-text cite a series of paper with nothing in between in APA?

I do not believe there is a rule that covers this. the best I can find is on the APA Style Blog:

  When multiple studies support what you have to say, you can include multiple citations inside the same set of parentheses. Within parentheses, alphabetize the studies as they would appear in the reference list and separate them by semicolons. In running text, you can address studies in whatever order you wish. Here are two examples:

The running text example has each citation in a separate sentence so it is not a perfect match. I think the main point is that in the text, you can do what you want. That said, this is one I would either let the copy editor deal with or more likely try and write the sentence in a way that allows the citations to be parenthetical material.


Benchmarking my research results with related work's results

If the paper was accepted, it means that the reviewers and the editor / chair considered it to have sufficient merit for publication. Comments in the reviews are suggestions to improve the paper, but being the author, it is finally up to your discretion as to what is appropriate.

In your case, assuming that you now need to send the final camera ready version for publication, you could update the paper with the reasons you think such a comparison would be invalid. This would also help future readers of your paper who may have the same question.


Public dataset without license: what is allowed?

This may vary by country, but in the US at least, the default terms (if no alternative is specified) are "all rights reserved", which means that you are not allowed to reproduce the work (the dataset), prepare derivative works from it, sell/rent/lease it, or publicly perform or display it. In particular, redistributing it to others is not allowed. In practice, the authors may be fine with it, but legally speaking, you're not allowed to redistribute the dataset in the form it was published in, without having explicit permission (which could be provided by a Creative Commons license, for example).

If you wanted to reproduce the dataset in a different form that conveys the same information, that may or may not be allowed. It would be up to a court to decide whether that counts as a derivative work or just a use of the underlying ideas, and a copyright lawyer could advise you better on whether your desired use is legally acceptable.

You are allowed to read the published dataset and use the ideas contained within it (i.e. the data) to draw conclusions. Copyright law does not allow for the restriction of those rights. I think doing an analysis on the data and publishing the results of that analysis (but not the data itself), as you would do in the process of writing a paper, is generally considered to be fine.


Is it a good idea to escalate if my masters advisor is incompetent?

I think you should find a new advisor.  You should definitely discuss the situation with an appropriate faculty member, perhaps the one in charge of the master's program, so that nobody will think you were not proactive in solving your problems.

The word "escalate" is vague and negative.  Don't use it.


Is it allowed to write notes during the "read instructions" stage of a TOEFL exam?

I watched the test procedure video. At about 2:47 the paper was described as "scratch paper for your use during timed sections of the test". To me, that suggests you are not allowed to write on it outside the timed sections. You should be able to ask during check-in.


Should patents be included in review articles?

Yes, everything relevant should be included.

For citation ruels see How to reuse a figure from a patent? Is it free to reuse? .


Commercial company wants me to list all prior "inventions", give up everything not listed

I work at an R&D company that has a pretty similar clause in its contract, and in fact most R&D companies will.

The core reason is that things change quickly in R&D, so an area that the company has no interest in today may be a big part of their in business in 5-10 years.  Moreover, employees like you are likely to be the ones who create new business areas like that, and if they don't put in a very broad clause, there's nothing to stop you from taking work you've done at the company to a competitor or spinning off your own company (see, for example the fights going on over self-driving tech).

So, what should you do?  Well, it really depends on the reason for your objection.

If you've got moral objections to IP being controlled by companies, don't work in commercial R&D.
If you want to keep contributing to existing free and open software projects, put that down as a general reservation in the "prior inventions" section. Most reasonable R&D organizations will accept that in some form (though it may take a bit of back and forth on the wording), since for most companies that's never going to be their competition.
If you want to be able to pursue new side projects: embrace the clause! Don't think of it as "the company wants to steal my ideas" but instead as "the company might want to pay me to do my side projects".  In a healthy R&D organization, what you do with a potentially commercially interesting side project is essentially give them "right of first refusal" -- and if they don't want to support it, then it's yours.

Now, unhealthy organizations are a whole different story, of course, but there's lots of better reasons you wouldn't want to work for one of them in any case.

Adding in a clarifying note based on the comments:

While we can't know for sure without seeing the full statement, what has been shared, however, doesn't actually say the company is claiming all prior works. Instead, it appears to follow the usual practice of clarifying which IP the company agrees cannot be claimed, due to their origins in prior works. Prior works not listed, if they come into dispute, just have to have their origin established in other ways (e.g., scientific publication, date-stamps in metadata).


I sent an email asking for a letter of request almost a week ago and have not received a response, thoughts on how to proceed during COVID?

With due respect: these people don’t work for you, and you have 5 weeks before deadline.
If they promised letters, one must presume they will write the letters at a time convenient to them.

If you have not heard with 10 days to go before deadline then ask again.


Changing interests after joining grad school

Things were said between the two professors that you couldn't control. It puts you in a difficult position, but might also be an opportunity.

To switch fields you need to satisfy the university about some things, but also find an advisor in the new field. Either of these could be a stumbling block. The worst case, I think is that you need to find a new university, but that isn't entirely uncommon. It would cost you a bit of time, of course.

But there is little worse than spending your life doing things that don't interest you. There is no replay button on life.

Re-evaluate both your desires and your options. But also connect to those at the current university who see you in a positive light. They can also give you advice.

FWIW, I think your advisor behaved badly in making accusations against you. I don't see your explorations as unethical in any way.


A professor I know is becoming head of department, do I send congratulations or condolences?

That would depend on how well I knew the person. If they were a very close friend of long standing, I'd probably offer condolences, just as a joke. But that would take a special relationship.
In the general case, only congratulations are in order.


I am not a lawyer.

You should talk to a copyright lawyer before getting into contact with the publisher, as the lawyer may be able to provide additional insight. Having someone who knows the ins and outs on your side helps in such a case, and will protect you from any issues that may arise.

As it stands, this does seem like a copyright issue, and you definitely need to talk to someone on the publisher's side before you do any publishing or distribution on your own.

The material is originally the publisher's, and there's probably legalese already included in the book that indicates the content may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

I'm sure it'd be less of an issue if the exercises themselves were not included, but even then, there's a lot of red tape you'll have to navigate.


Is it unethical to edit the text of my undergraduate thesis prior to sharing online?

IMHO it depends on why you want to make it available.

If your primary reason is that you want to make information available more publicly, you could produce a "revised edition" of the thesis and add a preface stating that this is a substantially revised and edited version of your thesis - just like other books do. If you just correct typos and grammar, just say that.
There is also the possibility to comment on the conclusions you don't see like that any more in a way (formatting, footnote) that makes clear that this is a point where your opinion now differs.  (like a commented edition of some work).

If your primary reason is to give the text your online CV refers to, then leave it unchanged.


Computer Science - final year project being too focused on the engineering

I have heard this kind of comment before as well, and then it meant that the proposed work was too much about (solving) implementation aspects, too little about novel 'research' or 'scientific' work.

It helps to ask the question: 'could this work potentially be published in a scientific venue (workshop, conference, journal, etc)?
If the answer is 'no', then it might be considered to be too much about engineering.

For the record: it is not my opinion that 'engineering' work is less valuable or educational than 'scientific' work. Or that there is even a clear distinction. I just want to shed some light on what people mean when they say these kind of things.


Why can't applicants ask for letters of recommendation on potential employers/bosses?

Short answer: supply and demand. Established universities are comfortable that they can get qualified applicants even with requiring letters; candidates would have a very difficult time finding a job if they required their employers to submit letters of recommendation to them.

The early stage (making a short list) is asymmetrical for sure, but it's sort of apples and orange.

There are only so many departments that work in a particular subfield, so the applicant is likely already familiar with the department and potentially even with the faculty members in that department. Thus, letters wouldn't provide much new information. (Possible exception for small R&D companies rather than universities, but such jobs rarely require letters).
Conversely, there are many applicants for any particular slot, and the hirers will know very few of them. Thus, without letters, there are few practical, effective ways to know which candidates should interview.

In later phases, the process does become more symmetrical. Both sides tend to make their own judgments at this phase rather than relying on reputation or letters.

These interviews should be both ways -- I would be surprised if any hirer would hesitate to discuss their interests, backgrounds, expectations, and style with a candidate they are seriously considering hiring.
You are also likely to have a chance to meet with the supervisor's group, colleagues, and employees at some point. If not, no reason you couldn't request such a meeting, or just set one up directly.


Is there a common standard for the title hierarchy of research positions in English?

Is there a common standard for the title hierarchy of research positions in the English language?

No.

There is no defined, consistent hierarchy of research job titles anywhere in the world, at least to my best knowledge. Essentially, every university, often even individual departments, handle job titles, responsibilities and hierarchies slightly differently, even if of course a lot of common patterns exist. Don't assume anything about hierarchy purely based on titles.


Should I use italics and different typefaces for foreign words, file names, class names, variable names, etc. in a master's thesis

How do I write those terms ? (Maybe in Italic.)

No, don't write every occurrence of a technical term in italic, or you will make your readers sea-sick.

Treat those terms as you would treat any French technical term, and possibly use italics just on the first occurrence, where the technical term is defined or introduced.

Even though it's not a French style manual, I think it's worth reading what the Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition, writes on the topic:

  Italics for unfamiliar foreign words and phrases. Italics are used for isolated words and phrases in a foreign language if they are likely to be unfamiliar to the readers [...]. If a foreign word becomes familiar through repeated use throughout a work, it need to be italicized only on its first occurrence. If it appears only rarely, however, italics may be retained.

The sentence

  If a foreign word becomes familiar through repeated use throughout a work, it need to be italicized only on its first occurrence.

aptly applies to your thesis work.

As for your last point,

  I want the reader to distinguish between a variable name, a file name, a class name ...etc. by only looking how the word is written.

In books, authors frequently distinguish code snippets by using monospaced fonts, but I would avoid using too many different typefaces (or too many colours) to highlight different syntax elements. I suggest you to have a look at the LaTeX package listings and to ask on TeX - LaTeX Stack Exchange for further information.


Are Undergraduates allowed to collaborate with other students for their dissertation research?

Yes !

Undergraduates are definitely allowed to collaborate with other students (undergraduate/graduate) for their senior thesis/research project/dissertation etc.

Of course, the degree to which they can successfully collaborate depends on many things including their faculty adviser.

For instance, as an undergraduate I collaborated with students from Civil Engineering/Construction Management and used some of the results we obtained in my undergraduate thesis.

Currently, I am a doctoral candidate and I have worked with undergraduates in the past whose thesis has sprouted from the results of our active collaboration in a project.


Moving to a different PhD program in the United States

Most programs will not fault you for wanting to change disciplines. If you can obtain the necessary application materials (letters of recommendation, specifically), changing programs will likely not be a massive issue. Be clear in your statements of purpose that you are interested in changing disciplines. If you are open as to why you are changing programs, I do not see application committees being overly turned off by such a decision. (I personally would not be at least. If a candidate is a good fit, I will pursue him or her). Explain the situation much like you have in your question. Emphasize that you feel that you could be a more successful researcher in a research program that is more inter-disciplinary. (Your background is likely to be more well-versed for an inter-disciplinary program anyway it sounds like).

Do not obscure the fact that you are looking to start a new program. You have nothing to hide as far as I can tell. (This will obviously be contingent on potential complications you may or may not have fully disclosed).

One comment I will briefly add deals with the "grass is always greener" aspect of graduate studies (and life). Make sure that changing programs will actually be a better situation than remaining with your current program. I would have a contingency plan in place for the event that you apply to new programs and are accepted into none of them. (Or maybe your plan can be to apply to one or two schools you know you will get into). There is the old adage "A bird in the hand is better than two in the bush." Make sure that if you put down the bird you have in your hand that the one in the bush is actually going to be a bigger, better bird.

Because you provide no details about why choosing an advisor will be a problem, I am not going to be able to give any advice in that regard.

As for career prospects, an inter-disciplinary PhD in math can be a blessing and a curse. My personal anecdotal experience has been that academia prefers more of a focused "single discipline" PhD (although this is changing to a certain extent) and industry prefers inter-disciplinary studies.

As for what you need to tell your department right now, I would figure out first how you are going to get your letters of recommendation. If you feel that you have three people who will write you letters (and then maybe one backup), I would then speak to your graduate coordinator about terminating any support you have. Make sure that you close out any financial considerations that must take place. This will go a long way in ensuring you do not burn bridges when you leave.

Some students invariably will leave a graduate program from time to time. Any admissions committee knows this. Declaring your intentions sooner rather than later will make your current program significantly more willing (and able) to help you find the best fit for your future studies. I would not be too concerned overall with trying to apply to other programs as long as you are open with your current program.


What should I do if my advisor urges me to do a project that I have no interest or faith in?

Sometimes it is necessary to "bite the bullet" and demonstrate that the method doesn't work. But you need to provide clear and irrefutable evidence in a way that can actually convince people, not just a vague claim.

A classic example of the failure to do this is the Challenger explosion: all of the information needed to delay the launch was known, but because the engineers who had the data didn't present it in a clear manner–just a raw output of data—their supervisors overruled them. If they had come in with plots showing failure of the O-rings as a function of launch conditions, anyone could have recognized the danger of the situation.

So if your advisor is insisting, you probably need to demonstrate why his approach  is infeasible or he will continue to insist upon it.


Typical start date for lectureship (UK context)

1) Doesn't seem too strange. I agree with @strongbad: it's probably an attempt to get your research productivity into their REF schedule. May also relate to when they set their teaching curriculum.
2) It's appropriate to push back. At worst, they just stick to their original offer.


Asking for more time to respond to admission offer

Just ask straight out. They won't be offended, but may not be able to hold a position open for very long. I'm pretty sure that they know already that you have several irons in the fire. If you find their offer attractive then tell them that but say that you also need to weigh other options. Perfectly normal.


Does it count as academic dishonesty if I use the references of someone's assignment?

For purposes of homework it would be good to acknowledge the source to clear up any claim of misrepresentation.
I hope you actually read the referenced articles, however. Otherwise, I'd worry about the honesty of it. If you just copied the references without further exploration you are on very shaky ground. And if you didn't go beyond those references in a search then you haven't learned anything from the assignment. The professor would be justified in marking you down, of course.
Assignments aren't about producing results. They are about learning. If you bypass the learning step you are defeating yourself in the long run.
Moreover, if you are using the other person's work, generally, without citation, you are engaged in plagiarism.


Co-author does not want biography+photo in paper submission

Rather than trying to determine whether it is common or not to get the EiC involved in this matter, I would like to suggest that you ask a more "productive" question: are there established ways of handling the case when a co-author does not want to include a bio and a photo? The answer to this question, as far as the IEEE is concerned, is "yes."

Next to the author's name, simply state:

  Randy D. Fuddles, photograph and biography not available at the time of publication.


How do we know if something relevant is already published?

That title summarises a large fraction of all research ;-)

You need to spend a significant amount of time browsing through scientific literature. This illustration from PhD comics illustrates the problem:

My strategy is as follows:

I start with an arbitrary paper with a title that seems relevant. Let's call this paper A.
Using an online service such as Scopus (payment or subscription required), I look for:

All references, e.g. papers cited by A.
All citations, e.g. papers that cite A.

Both the references and citations can be sorted by the number of citatons, so you get the most highly cited papers first. Select the papers that seem relevant (at this stage, reading the abstract is usually good enough).
For all relevant papers left in step 3, repeat step 2. You should find considerable overlap already. By now, you should have already found the important papers as well as one or more review articles.
Iterate steps 2–4 until your hard disk is full ;-)

Of course, if you iterate this process indefinitely, you will soon have downloaded all scientific research ever published. But by being selective but not too selective, this process should lead you to any relevant publications. Even if nobody has cited the relevant publications, the relevant publications themselves should cite other publications, so via step 2.1 you will still find it.

The only caveat here is that databases like Scopus are incomplete, probably in particular when it comes to conference proceedings (in my field, those are rarely relevant). Maybe other databases work better in your field. Hopefully, there is a scientific database that is reasonably complete for relevant publications in your area of research!


Importance of Variety for PhD Recommendation Letters

Generally speaking, strength outweighs variety, with a caveat. If your two letters from Company A are both vary strong and they say different things about you, that's the way forward, especially if you think that the letter from Company B would be quite weak. However if both letters from Company A comment on your same attributes, discuss the same responsibilities and outcomes, and essentially tell the admissions committee the same thing twice, you are better off with the weaker but different company B letter.


Submitting multiple distinct papers to the same journal

I imagine this may be field and journal dependent, but in mathematics (where we have lots of journals that can be good fits for the same paper, unlike some other fields), this can reduce the chance of acceptance.  Editors are under pressure to reject lots of submissions (e.g., they may have quotas), and if you have two (or more) simultaneous submissions, and the decisions are not no-brainers, many editors like accept one and reject the other(s).

Note: in mathematics, there's a tendency (not a strict rule) for people not to publish the in the same journal too often, and one of my colleagues recently got a rejection because they has "published too recently" in that journal.  (I don't think it's good to enforce this practice as a rule, but apparently some people do.)


Paper Withdrawal before Publication - Can I send the paper elsewhere

As long as you can prove that you withdrew your paper, you can submit to another journal. The possibly delicate point is with the proof.

I would think that in case the first submission comes up, any sensible editor would take a copy (with all headings) of the emails you sent to withdraw as a decent enough proof. Moreover, what you describe points to the first journal being predatory, which might be easy to decide for the second journal editor depending on how obviously predatory it looks. Then the first journal would not have much credit, even if they would go as far as forge emails.

If you want to be completely safe, you can mention in the cover letter that you submitted your paper to another journal quite some time ago, and then decided to withdraw it (precise that you mentions this because the first journal never answered you emails). It would make your case bullet-proof in case the first submission ever comes out. This might not reflect too well on your submission however (it might prompt the reason why you withdrew, or it might make the editor fear you could withdraw again while he or she bothered to get a report), but I would not think it would have a significant impact.

Last, it seems you might have submitted to a predatory journal, and that would mean you should have been more cautious. If you don't know a journal, don't publish there without getting an opinion by someone well established knowing the journal.


Is it my responsibility as an undergrad student to figure out if my thesis is affordable?

Usually, no.  This is an example of where your faculty advisor should help you.
Do take a few minutes to research costs before discussing it with your advisor.
There might be exceptions if, based on your area of study, you were expected to know about costs already.


How does one ensure their knowledge of a field is complete when doing a literature review

This seems like an impossible task.

You're right, it is impossible.  One can really never hope to gain a "complete" knowledge of a field, or even a subfield.  You just have to do the best you can, in the time you have, to identify the most significant basic work related to your area of interest, and work that specifically addresses the questions you are studying.

Part of your advisor's job is to help with this; they should have a broader knowledge of the field, and be able to help direct your literature search and point out any glaring gaps.  But despite your combined best efforts, there will almost certainly end up being significant work that you overlook, or whose relevance you don't recognize.  That is just part of doing research.  Someday you'll learn about it and wish you had known it earlier, but all you can do is move on from there.


Can a person who doesn't like to talk much still become a good lecturer?

Absolutely, a person who's not naturally inclined to be a speaker can become a good lecturer and scientist.  One of my best professors, actually, was a person with such inclinations.  Finding that speaking was not something that he was good at, he turned it into an object of study and began collecting heuristics about what made a good and effective talk.  By studiously applying these heuristics to his own teaching and professional communication, he could at least ensure that his talks did not fail on any identifiable dimension.

Talks need to do a lot of different things at once: holding attention, identifying key salients, speaking at different levels to different parts of the audience, providing "breadcrumbs", etc. Because of this, it often turns out that it's much less important to do any aspect brilliantly than to make sure that no aspect has been neglected. This professor might not have been a brilliant and exciting comedian, like some who are natural lecturers, but he often gave better lecturers than the naturals.  The more natural lecturers were often simply less consistent: following their enjoyment and intuition produced brilliance in some aspects and weaknesses in others, while his stolid application of heuristics ensured an across-the-board solidity of presentation.

In short: ultimately, it's not a matter of talent but of choices for how to invest in acquiring skills.


Who to cite as referees for a post doc position?

This answer applies most directly to my field of mathematics, but it probably applies to similar fields as well.

Most genuine postdoc positions are extremely competitive. You need to apply well in advance (typically, in December for a position starting the next August). Postdocs will be difficult to obtain if your thesis work is substantially unfinished a year before you apply. I am not counting temporary teaching positions for new PhDs, which are a different kind of job entirely.

For competitive postdocs, you want to have very strong letters, both from your advisor and from senior researchers at other institutions. The way to obtain such letters is to build connections throughout your graduate program, particularly in the later half. Ideally, you should plan to give one or two seminar talks at other institutions while in graduate school. In addition to disseminating your research, these talks help to get your name out as someone up and coming. Your advisor can also have a role, behind the scenes, in getting invitations.

Competitive postdocs are given to people who seem to be up-and-coming in the field. There are usually only a handful of postdocs each year, worldwide, in each particular research specialty, so the committees have a collection of strong candidates to choose between, all of whom have the minimal credential of a PhD. So, if you want to pursue the postdoc track, your goal in graduate school is to develop a vita and letters that are competitive in that environment.


There is no such thing as "the precise h-index".

The h-index is defined as the largest integer h such that at least h of the author's publications have at least h citations each.  But what's a publication?  Do first-author publications carry more weight?  Do ArXiv, technical report, conference, and journal versions of the "same" paper (all of which may have citations) count as four papers or one?  Or does it depend on the difference in content between versions?  (How do you measure that difference?)  Does the quality of the venue matter?  If so, which venues count as "real" publications?  Do survey articles count?  Popular science articles?  Blog posts?  StackExchange questions?*  Do self-citations count?  If so, does a citation to a paper by X and Y, in a paper by Y and Z, count toward X's h-index?  How much (and who) are you willing to pay to make sure you've really counted every citation to every publication?

The different sources of the h-index make different well-reasoned decisions about each of these issues, none of which make sense for ALL areas, even within computer science.

  I think h-index is a better metric than the number of publications alone.

This is a pretty low standard.  You can do better.

*At least one of my StackExchange questions has more citations than at least one of my papers.


Is it okay for me to show some other publication's data for data comparison reasons without prior permission if I properly reference/cite their work?

Utilization of data sets (acquired from other academic resources) is fairly common; specially when you need to compare your analytical method with the other one's in view of performance, precision, etc. In such case, people often try to use a pre-assessed data set of their own or some other study. All you need to do is referencing the used data set, carefully.

Answer to question #11, here, says:

  Data cannot be copyrighted, so you are free to use data to create any figure you like *[or any analysis you need]*. The source of the data must be properly acknowledged