Did my former supervisor steal my research proposal? When I was a master student I worked in a PhD proposal with my master's supervisor. I applied with that proposal to obtain a scholarship from the university, however because I did not get the scholarship, and she didn't have money for paying the research expenses for the study I couldn't pursue the project.
Recently, checking the university page of my former supervisor, I saw advertised the same proposal I wrote and submitted for the scholarship application, exactly with the same words, same theoretical framework, same research questions, etc., she did not change a thing, and she is now advertising it as a "possible PhD project" for a new student that would like to apply for it (and probably get the money we needed for the research). Is that considered as stealing work? Can I report her somehow? I wrote all the proposal with constant feedback from her so I don't know if that gives her full authorship of it?

It was a proposal, not a publication. The ethics would depend at least a bit on how much she contributed to the effort. But it isn't necessary for her to leave the research undone if you have gone away and she participated. She can certainly follow up on it, even with another student. It would really only be unethical if you brought the proposal to her, relatively complete. In would have been better had she contacted you before proceeding, of course. I don't know if that was possible.

But if you are still in academia, you might be able to get back into this research, even if not as her student. You need to contact her with a request to participate, reminding her of your earlier work on the proposal. You might be able to achieve an authorship position, provided that you continue to contribute. But your past work probably won't be enough.

Note that I'm basing this on the fact that a proposal for research isn't the same as the research being completed. It is a proposal to study something. It is primarily an idea that might go somewhere.

If you can't participate, for whatever reason, you might still be able to get an acknowledgement in whatever results from the idea. You have to ask, of course.


Can I trust a paper that hides implementation details? In Computer Science, sometimes we're assigned to reproduce the results presented by a paper that already have been published. In many cases (most of them) the code is not available, making the task more difficult.

But this questions is related to the cases where the code is available, however, many things author do in his code are not described in the published paper.

Is this ethical?
How to proceed when many things presented in the code are not explained in the original manuscript?
What if the code disappear from author's page? Will the results exist in the universe once again?

Disclaimer

This is not about minor details in the code, but huge holes of dark matter.
Let's assume that we're talking about Journal papers with more than 10 pages.

As a researcher, I'm generally very keen on including as many implementation details as possible. However:

There is rarely the room available in a paper to describe every detail of an implementation.
Describing every detail of an implementation in prose often takes substantially more work than writing the program in the first place. The meaning of code (which is written in a formal language) is generally unambiguous; the meaning of prose (which is written in natural language) can often be ambiguous. Resolving the ambiguities in the prose takes time, effort and care -- it's often harder than writing the code.
Researchers are generally both very busy, and under a lot of pressure from above to produce quick results and move onto new projects. Resisting this pressure to bring existing work to a tidy conclusion is a good thing, but there are limits to how long you can spend doing this, and sadly the reward structure in academia provides little incentive to do it.

There is a reasonable case to be made that implementation is not valued in academia to the extent that it should be. However, even if it were appropriately valued, and even if there were no page limits for papers, there would still be an opportunity cost for individual researchers when it came to producing copious documentation describing the implementation details of their code. Human lifetimes are finite: the time spent describing every detail of old code could alternatively be spent coming up with and implementing new ideas. Some old code is so useful and valuable that it's worth spending a lot of time describing, but that's certainly not true in all cases. A lot of code (particularly hacked-together research code) just isn't that valuable in the long run: time spent describing it could be better spent on something else.

To directly answer your questions, then:

Yes, it's ethical to not describe every detail of your implementation -- most of the time, you can't, and of the times when you can, a decent proportion of the time it's not the best use of your time. Having said that, I'm of the school of thought that says you should at least make a reasonable effort to write good, clearly-documented code, to publish it on the web for all time (e.g. on GitHub) and to at least describe how the method works in a way that will enable someone reading the code to know what's going on.
If things in the code aren't in the original manuscript, start by reading and running the code to see if you can figure out what's going on. If it's not clear from that, do some reading around to see if other sources can give you any hints. If all else fails, and it's crucial that you understand the details, email the authors. If they ignore you, give up on their method and use something else.
The code can disappear from the author's page for a variety of reasons -- maybe they stopped paying for hosting, for example. If you need the code in that situation, email them. As mentioned above, good practice involves putting your code in a public repository so that it will hang around, but it's not unethical if you don't (just unhelpful).


Professor refuses letter of recommendation request The application for TA fellowship, one normally takes recommedations from previous professors one has TAed under.
What he replied when I messaged him asking for a letter of recommendation:

  If you remember I had major difficulties with the group of TAs of last
  year: the group behaved as if its internships were the most important
  jobs and only if it had time and in marginal hours, it would do its
  job. I rarely got an answer from my emails, I had to send the same
  email several times. The group rarely answered students' emails and
  their assignments' questions.   I asked for the group's support to
  proctor the exam, and at the beginning, nobody was willing to help.
  You were more collaborative than the rest. However, I still had to
  invest a significant amount of time to compensate for the complete
  lack of support of the TA group. So, in these conditions is very
  difficult for me to write the very positive letter that you need to
  win the scholarship. I am sorry that I cannot be more helpful at this
  time.

All of the things he says are not valid for me.

I didn't have internships, students sent me thank you after attending office hours and I went out of the way several times to accommodate his requests. Although, I can remember I replied him a few times the next day due to other work. He also did several things like threatening TAs for complaints which very out of the line at my University and unheard of.

Can I dispute his claims? I don't want a letter of recommendation anymore, I feel under-appreciated for the work I put in. I feel like I should reply to him, but I feel a bit angry for

dealing with him with through the course for this
trying to go the extra mile for a future recommendation.

Background info:
The professor is not from my University and was hired to teach to a summer course.

Possible reply:
Attach a thank you email I received from one of students taking the course, and mention two times I went over the line to co-operate with him.

I am sorry for your situation, no one likes to feel under-appreciated. That being said, it is important to know which battles are worth picking. Your professor was very clear in his answer, and I can't see how can you (or anyone, for what's it worth) gain something pursuing this matter further. It would only create an unnecessary and tense atmosphere. You also said yourself that you do not want his LOR anymore. Let it go, and best of luck in the future.


What can happen to a paper submitted without co-author knowledge Every answer in this related question has some phrasing about it being unethical or, as the first answer "does not have the right".  Does a supervisor have right to submit paper without consents of coauthor students?

Another similar question and answer states simply "No" to being 'allowed' to do this. Co-author blocking publication . Some comments suggest it is extremely rare and unlikely someone would do this.

This question is similar Paper submitted by co-author without authorization, but about how to handle the situation as they still wanted it to be accepted.

Yet, the one case I can find in COPE, the self-described Committee on Publication Ethics, does not seem to consider this a journal issue.

  • The corresponding author submitted an article without the knowledge
  of all or some of his co-authors.
  • The corresponding author was under contract with research centre X at that time.
  • The scientific content of the article is correct. A minor error that occurred since publication can be corrected by an erratum.

The result/answer to this problem:

  On a show of hands, half of the Forum suggested that the editor do
  nothing further, a few suggested publishing a correction or some form
  of note on the paper regarding the authorship dispute, and only two
  people suggested a retraction.

Are there any reasons, legal or society-wise (does IEEE or some groups have specific information related), that this is not the standard?  This is not a question on if someone is allowed to just publish, it is literally asking, so-what if they do? What can possibly happen (to a paper or person) if someone publishes a manuscript without their co-authors permission?

Usually, nothing happens, except damage to the submitting author's reputation.

Anything could happen.  It depends on the coauthor's feeling and the content of the paper.  If the content of the paper is objectionable, then this might lead to retraction.  Potentially the submitting author could be fired.  But most likely, if a coauthor complains, the submitting author just promises not to do it again and nothing else happens.

Don't do it.  Just because unethical conduct has no direct consequences doesn't mean it's okay.  Don't even do it if your coauthors tell you to do it.  Note that the coauthor's permission is needed in addition to their knowledge.


Is it plagarism if the entire paper is copied, but each sentence is quoted? I have some high school students submitting assignments where the entire paper is copied from another source.  They cited every line.  Is this plagiarism?  I'm sure they are just being lazy, but they are a smart lazy.  I can't find anything to back up my suspicions that they should get a 0 on this assignment.
Thanks.

This is not plagiarism, but poor work.

See this discussion on The Chronicle of Higher Education, where several instructors opined that this type of work was not plagiarism but deserved a low grade. One (polly_mer), stated (my emphasis),

  I agree with Summers_off that the grade is low for lack of doing the work.  My syllabi and assignment sheets now have a comment of "Multiple direct quotations or extensive paraphrasing with little original work will result in a low grade" because I have had too many properly cited assignments that were all cut-and-paste with practically no synthesis.

Plagiarism has an inherent gravamen of dishonesty - that the writer is deceiving the reader into thinking that the writing is the author's when it really isn't. Building a paper that is little more than a collection of quotations and paraphrases with corresponding citations isn't dishonest, it's just crappy work. Think of it like buying a car. If someone says that the car has been scrupulously maintained and has only 20,000 miles on it, but it actually has 125,000 and needs a new engine, that is dishonest, and quite likely leaves them open to legal liability for fraud. If someone tells you that the car they are selling is a hunk of rust and oil, then it's a literal hunk of rust and oil that you aren't going to pay that much for, are you? So, the student gets what they deserve - a low grade for low-quality work.


Do any British universities still offer degree registration from afar to those who study alone, without tuition? Forty years ago, London University was still offering degree registration to "external" students, who might be living anywhere in the world. To prepare themselves for the London exams, many studied at local institutions; but it was also acceptable for external students not to study at any institution but to study "privately". Some of these "private" students had private tutors, while others studied wholly on their own, without any tuition, and after being registered for the required period of time they presented themselves in a London or London-accredited examination room and sat the exam papers. Fees were paid both for registration and examination. For many decades, the availability of degree examinations to private students was considered one of the special features of London University.

I am not asking for recommendations, but are there any British universities nowadays that register and examine students who study wholly on their own?

Note that I am not asking about degrees by "distance learning" in which coursework is required and tuition bought from and given by the degree-awarding institution, or by an institution accredited by it, although it is possible that the kind of degree registration I am asking about might be considered a sub-category of distance learning.

The University of London still offers self study courses for international students. The list of courses includes both undergraduate and post graduate degrees in a range of subjects. While these courses are self study and do not include tuition, they are not cheap. For example, the fees for the Accounting and Finance (BSc) are:

  Academic year 2016-2017

  Application fee (non-refundable)  £ 84

  Initial registration fee  £ 760

  Examination entry fee (per full course)   £ 224

  Examination entry fee (per half course)   £ 112

  Continuing registration fee   £ 380

  Total for BSc degree  £ 4,292

  Other fees (as applicable)

  Additional registration fee for students taking law courses (per course)  £ 51

  Application fee for consideration of accreditation of prior learning (per full course)    £ 89

The fees are a little confusing since they are using course in two different ways. I think £224 fee is for a full year module.

At a total cost of £4,292, this is considerably cheaper than the £9,000 per year (£27,000 per for a degree) that most UK universities are charging. That said while program includes study materials, it does not include teaching.


What does “Prof. Dr. ir.” mean? I have a Belgian colleague who is “Prof. Dr. ir.”. What does it mean?

Ir. means a masters degree in Engineering.

source : Belgian Education :)

I added a "reference". This Prof. Dr. Ir. received a M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering and the Ph.D. degree in mechanical engineering from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (K.U.Leuven), Belgium

Also, from wikipedia:
Belgium

In Belgium, there are two types of engineering degrees:

"Burgerlijk Ingenieur" /"Ingénieur civil" or "Master of Science in Engineering" (abbrev. "ir.") - 5 years study (3 BSc. + 2 MSc.)
"Bio-ingenieur"/ "Bioingénieur" or "Master of Science in Bioscience Engineering" (abbrev. "ir") - 5 years study (3 BSc. + 2 MSc.)
"Industrieel Ingenieur" or "Master of Science in Industrial Sciences" (abbrev. "Ing.") - 4 years study (3 BSc. + 1 MSc.)(3 BSc. + 2 MSc. in 2013-future) (for the Flemish Region)
"Ingénieur industriel" or "Master of Science in Industrial Sciences" (abbrev. "Ing.") - 5 years study (3 BSc. + 2 MSc.) (for the Walloon Region)

link


Rote learning in South East Asia I knew from some newspapers that Taiwanese education system prefers rote memorization over creativity. This culture was imported from Japan. This problem is also present in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Korea.

Although late, China seems to be the only country which is reforming its rote learning culture.

How can rote learning, in the universities of those countries, affect someone who is not used to with rote learning?
How do they maintain their quality of higher education with rote learning (apparently, a lot of universities from South East Asian countries are sitting in the top 50 positions)?

Note. I am talking about computer science.

As a European doing a PhD in Hong Kong, I've had the occasion to TA a few CS undergrad classes as well as take my own higher-level courses. I honestly can't say that I noticed much difference in class structures beyond the fact that people are much more shy about talking in class.

So, how will it affect someone not used to it? You will stand out a bit if you ask questions in class, or if you are the type to yell out answers immediately when the lecturer poses one to the class (this is usually met with resounding silence). If you are someone affected by peer pressure, you may end up asking less questions during lectures. Join the trove of students surrounding the lecturer after class for answers.

How do they maintain their educational standards? As far as I can tell, "rote learning" mostly is code for "exercises out the wazoo" here (newspaper articles abound about kids having 30 minutes a day of play time, the rest being occupied by school and homework), and there's nothing better for learning to do a thing than doing it over and over.

TL;DR I'm sure people here had a radically different experience in primary school, but by the time they reach university it seems to all come out in a wash.


How to target possible authors? Ethics of increasing the visibility of open access journals My colleague and I work at an Open Access journal, published by a regional scholarly association. The field is Communication and Media Studies. Recently we started to encounter problems with reaching out for authors. We use a small set of professional email lists, listservers and newsletters to disseminate our Call for Articles, which worked in the past 3 years; meaning we always had enough quality submissions from which we could build up a full and content-wise well-balanced issue.

Problem is that recently, we launched a digital marketing campaign after which we received only a handful of manuscripts with average to good publication potential compared to a swarm of plagiarized/incomprehensive/ below-standard/simply uninteresting manuscript mainly from third world countries, India and China (just for clarifications, we do not collect author fees or APCs and all content are free for our readers, so I thought it was clear for everyone that we are not in the pay-to-publish business). We desk reject the majority but enough will remain to completely drain out our reviewer pool for the next 6 months.

I'm asking the community to suggest a better way of reaching out for professional authors. Locally, we are in Eastern Europe and the journal is not ISI or SCOPUS-indexed, so it is not the best for bean-counting purposes; but we have quality content and peer review process. Are there any techniques that should help us convincing western universities to circulate our calls or publish it on their websites? Anyone in the same shoes as we are?

The key for most scientists is the impact factor. Trying and succeeding to become listed will attract more good manuscripts (MS). The flood of sub-par MS you are describing comes from the fact that you are free. Unless you want to impose a fee for submitting MS you will simply have to maintain a very stringent policy for submissions and hope that the wave ceases with time. In order to attain IF status, you will need to be stringent anyway. But as you probably realise being stringent and building a reputation is a fine balance.

For a budding journal, the most important aspect is to become known and for the right reasons. For starting a journal I would stress making sure you have some good names among the editors and that the idea of the journal is supported by the community. It is never to late to start this but best before your reputation solidifies as a less prominent journal because then the climb will be harder.

So, some suggestions: Thematic issues generally tends to attract citations because they provide the opportunity for someone interested to find other articles within the same field in the same issue. With electronic publishing it is also possible to assemble virtual thematic issues simply by linking to articles with similar aspects and labelling them with a theme, and of course announcing this on list servers etc.

Attracting established, respected and widely referenced authors to provide articles for the journal is also key. You can, for example, provide opportunities to author invited papers on key issues, review articles on key issues in your field etc.

Success will, however, not come overnight and the most important aspect is to gain the interest of your community. This can be a slow process but can be aided by linking up with societies or equivalent in your field. In my field the European Geophysical Union has generated several Open Access journals that quickly has gained IF status. These journals were firmly embedded in the community and emanated from a discussion about the need for journals with a specific target community. So you need to assess your community and see if you can liaise with activities or organisations that are established in your scientific community.

Regardless how you continue, you definitely need to maintain high standards so even if you need to reject the vast majority of submitted manuscripts, make sure you only publish good quality science and make that very clear in your "advertising". Without that basis, very little success can be expected.


Advantages or disadvantages of using public repositories for paper writing? What are pros and cons of using public version control system such as github for writing my papers and reports ?

Is it good to store copies of papers/reports being submitted to conference/journals on such repos. If no, wouldn't it make sense to not use them at the first place itself.

There are a few parts to your question, and I'm not sure which one is most important. If the question is about the value of version control, then you should see the answers to this question (which also has a link to a question about which one to use).

If you're asking about putting it on a shared repository, then here are some reasons:

collaboration with others. If multiple authors are writing a paper, then it's very easy for different authors to edit different portions at the same time without too much worry about conflicts.
portability: I work from different machines, and it's convenient to have a single location to check in/check out from so I don't have to worry about edits on my home machine versus my office machine versus a laptop and so on.

If you're asking about making it public, so anyone can read/edit the paper, then I don't see much of an advantage in that. When the paper is done, it might be handy to be able to download the source of course.


Advisor on medical leave only a few weeks before dissertation defense My doctoral advisor has been on medical leave for several months now. As such, he has been extremely hard to maintain contact with. He lives in a different part of the country and checks email only about one or two times a week. This usually has not been a huge issue because I know what I need to do for my dissertation and have been doing it.

In keeping with a discussion that he and I had about three months ago (which was a continuation of several prior discussions on the same topic), I have agreed to terms for a full-time job starting in six weeks. Part of the contingencies of the job require that I actually have successfully defended my dissertation.

Today, he sent me a terse email to inform me that he needs to take care of some of his medical issues, and then he will contact me and we can try to "finish" the dissertation. This is a deviation from previous agreements he and I had. Outside of any last edits he would want to add though, the chapters for the dissertation have been done for some time now. I am just biding my time, waiting for him to give the final go ahead to submit the dissertation to the committee. I have conveyed these thoughts in email to him, but he has ignored these emails.

My question is this: Has anyone ever declared their advisor "medically unavailable" just weeks before trying to defend their dissertation? I am essentially faced with the decision of delaying the start date for my job (while still paying rent all the while) and keeping in the good graces of my absent advisor, or, alternatively, going to my department and seeking to have my advisor declared medically unavailable. Because he would possibly still need to sign off on my defense paperwork, I am worried that my advisor could try something to still block me by refusing to consent to signing the paperwork.

ADDED

I will add here a few details about why my advisor is on medical leave. He is not sick or dying. He had a routine procedure done on his knee about five or so months ago. Millions of people have undergone this procedure and return to work within a week. This is not a case of a poor old man who is terminally ill. I do not think it is unreasonable to ask a guy who had routine knee surgery to respond to emails five months after the surgery.

Something (somewhat) similar happened to a friend of mine. The key to her solution was to get another chair while at the same time allowing her advisor to "save face" in the department. Basically she made it a matter of logistics (rather than irresponsibility or personality).

She approached another (full professor) member of her committee to act as an ally. Then she copied the ally on a friendly email to her chair suggesting that the ally had "volunteered" to be a "co-chair" for the logistical purposes of the defense/graduate school paperwork. She explained that of course she wanted to keep her original advisor as the chair, but that the work start date seemed like it was making that arrangement impossible. She and her ally were able to arrange it so the original, medically unavailable chair would still get credit internally for having her as a student and would remain on the committee (as a "distance"/Skype examiner).

I have found that, in general, difficult professors respond to subtle pressure from their peers (never their students) and prefer solutions where they can save face!


Is using synthetic datasets in sciences the same as using fake data? Sometimes, there are good reasons to use synthetic data in research. In my case I am using data from Synthea, a program that simulated patient data including medications, names and addresses. I know that no hospital would hand me such real data, so there is no alternative. In my thesis I want to reveal specific patterns in patient records.
My idea is to test some statistical methods and neural networks to predict which disease a patient will have when he or she comes to the doctor next visit. Therefore a known statistical process in generating those patterns makes sense as I want to test some methods. I also want to infer which factors are the most important ones to predict the next disease. Therefore a mass of data is needed.
I am still not sure if using such data is useful in research. On the one hand, data protection or confidentiality in my case I would rate as positive cases using fake data, same as simulated data. As I have an ordinary private laptop it is a good idea to work with artificial datasets, as there is no need for special data security and data protection. Medical data are very sensitive and should not be stored on students' computers. Artificial data is also good for testing code and programs, as one knows what is going on under the hoods if the data generating source is documented well.
On the other hand, using faked data is considered as betraying sciences a lot of papers are retracted or removed when using faked data. Data fabrication is also listed as a scientific misconduct incident on the English Wikipedia.
What should I do?

Synthetic data and fabricated data are different. If you want to use synthetic data, you need to be transparent about how the data is generated and not tailor the synthetic data to support your hypothesis. Fabrication would be false data that is designed to support your hypothesis.
Remember that any statistical analysis will be a reflection of the process used to generate the data. It might be that the trend in the synthetic data reflects real data, but you would have to make that case by examining how the synthetic data is generated.


Is single parenting compatible with success in academia? Good day.

I'm currently a PhD student in computer science. I was married and have a daughter with my former wife. There is a probability that our daughter
will live with me. Could you please tell me is it possible to be successful in academia and to raise a child alone? By "to be successful in academia" I mean eventually to receive a professor position. Could you please share your experience?

Additional details: my university has a kindergarten and I live in Germany. My concerns are more about is it enough to have 9 working hours per day for writing the PhD thesis.

Summary: The older your child is, the easier it is. But by no means it will be easy. Personally, I don't even think it is possible. I present my own observations to support my claim.

I am an early career researcher myself, having just graduated with a PhD in a STEM field. I also got married a year before my dissertation defense and became a parent literally a month before I was to defend and graduate.

First, of course, anything is possible. While I may not personally know of any such success stories, I am sure others here do and I am sure you can google and find a few success stories.

But I will describe what I think is the average case instead of the extreme case, resulting from my own experiences and what I saw around me; friends, colleagues, lab partners, advisors, coauthors, other professors, people I met and got to know in meetings and conferences, people with whom I have interacted during my career...a sample size of 30-ish people.

Grad school is hard. Grad school in a STEM field is really really hard. It is very consuming. It consumes your time, eats into your social life, takes up your mental energy, your physical energy, and your emotional energy. It always has an adverse effect on your mental and physical health unless you are very disciplined and exercise, eat, and sleep regularly.

Likewise, being a parent is hard. Being a good parent is really really hard. Kids demand so much energy and they need so much love and attention. Raising a child is more demanding than going through grad school. If there are two of you, sure it helps. But both parents have to put in a lot in raising a child. Being a single parent is even harder because in a way, you are filling in for both parents.

Now on to hard data! Master's is easier so we will only consider doctoral students and above. These are all in STEM fields. I only know of two cases where they had children before starting doctoral studies. One had three kids, another had one kid. One had already made quite a lot of money on wall street and wanted to come back to school to get a PhD so he didn't worry too much about TAing or financial aid. The other was a typical student. They both did finish successfully but it took them about a year longer than was average in their respective fields. And I want to emphasize that they were both with their partners who were both full-time stay-at-home parents.

Next, I only know of myself and one another student, who had children while in grad school. We both had children very late in our studies, when most of our work was done, a paper or two was published, a paper or two was submitted, the thesis was being written or half done. Every single other person that I know of who wanted to have children, were waiting to graduate or even later to have kids.

I have never known nor heard of (a friend of a friend of a friend) a single case, a single parent who has wanted to start a PhD, or has started a PhD, was/in in a PhD, or has successfully finished a PhD.

In all honestly, I don't think that in your case, you can put up hard boundaries between your personal life and your professional life. How can you separate raising a child as a single parent and work on your computer science PhD? It doesn't matter what hours you decide, nine hours a day or 4 days a week. You will come home and think about your dissertation problem. You will think of your thesis. You will think of the comp sci question you are trying to answer. You will think about big and small inevitable conflicts with your advisor, your lab colleagues, your coauthors, your thesis committee, and whether you'll get a TAship next semester or not. Similarly, how can you stop thinking of your child when at work? What happens when the child is fussy or upset and doesn't want to stay with the babysitter or go to daycare? What if the child gets sick or there is another emergency? You'll run out of your lab without even thinking and there goes your rest of the nine-hour-planned-day out the window.

Furthermore, let's say a miracle happens and you get your nine-hours-a-day workdays. From a 24 hour day, taking out the time for sleep, how much time will you have for yourself? When will you decompress? When will you destress? When will you have time for your physical exercise and mental wanderings and distractions such as your hobbies? How often will you be able to just sit in front of the TV and eat cereal the whole day? When will you relax with your own alone me-time? Without hobbies, exercise, relaxation time, grad school will absolutely kill you. Every single person I know who tried this either dropped out or was an absolute wreck by the time they graduated. And these people were not even parents, much less single parents.

In conclusion, the statistics are against you. Sure, your child's age is a factor which makes it easier the older your child is...but it will still be very hard. You are taking two things which are notoriously difficult and intrude upon every aspect of life, and you want to try them both simultaneously, and hope you can keep them separate and succeed in both. I really wish you the best. Good luck!


Do invited talks given via video-conferencing have the same weight on a CV as talks given in person? Appreciating that what even counts as an invited talk in the first place for CV purposes will vary by field (links to related questions: Do presentations given during interviews count as invited talks?; Should I list talks I invited myself to give on my CV?), I wonder whether talks presented remotely via video-conferencing carry less weight on a CV than a presentation in person being physically present at the hosting institution or venue.

A rule of thumb I have learned in my field is that financial reimbursement from the host is a strong indication that the talk counts as invited (this means job talks and presentations given as a proxy for the supervisor are considered invited). With current travel restrictions (2020) and the likelihood that video-conferencing for virtual conferences and interviews will continue to grow in importance, the measure of reimbursement as an indicator of the importance of the talk cannot be applied, as no travel is required.

If I included e.g. video faculty interview talks as invited talks on my CV, I would feel that the place of the talk should indicate video-conferencing: "Host institution (virtual)". Would this limit the value of such a talk on a CV?

Why would you want to try to express it yourself as a "lesser" contribution? You give much of the same value, especially if there is some facility for interaction with "attendees".

One of the reasons for "paying" for talks is that the speaker may need to travel and deal (time and effort) with accommodation - the hassle factor. It also means time away from their normal work. The money given to speakers isn't considered "pay" for expertise in the normal sense and is often called an honorarium.

But the effort required to prepare and actually deliver the talk is just the same as if travel were required in addition.

And, given the current state of things, there are few other options than virtual talks. That doesn't lessen their value. It is just what we need to do now. Just as travel was once required for such talks prior to the internet.

If you mark them at all, I suggest that you do so in a very minimal manner and certainly not separate them out from talks given in person.


How do I articulate my grade dispute in a letter of complaint (student grievance)? I'm filing a formal letter of complaint (for a grade litigation request) over a grade dispute in an English literature course. I've got 90/100 (an A) in each of the 3 exams in this course. These exams make up 85% of the course grade. The other 15% is based on daily work (worksheets and responses). I was surprised when viewing my final grades that the grade in this course ended up being a B+. In the duration of this course, we were given three worksheets/response prompts that were optional. I did all of them and they were recognized with a '+' sign (but not actually graded).

After emailing my professor about this (and him ignoring me until I emailed the associate chair), he said that he added my exam grades (so he got a total of 76.5/85) and with the daily work he was able to bump it up to a B+ (a B+ is an 83-86). So I respectfully pointed out that the 76.5 is over 85 and not over 100 and that the daily work is a 15% that should be properly counted in, he replied saying that this daily work grade was based in comparison with my classmates (which is nonsense as (1) the daily work activities were not graded and (2) I was one of the few students who actually did them), I replied and argued but he didn't reply back. For me to get a B+, I would have been given 53/100 on the daily work grade.

I moved further with the dispute with the chair and was told to file a formal letter of complaint to which a committee will be formed and where the decision issued would be non-negotiable.

I don't know how to articulate my complaint. I feel like the administration doesn't get the issue (this was obvious in the correspondence between me and the chair). Also, I'll lose my scholarship and ultimately my place in university if the grade doesn't change, do I include that?

I feel like it's really obvious that I was done wrong by my professor but still afraid this won't be resolved. Sorry for the long post.

P.S. Several people assumed an A starts above 86 but actually an A is 90+. (An A- is 86-90)

Dear Committee,
This grade dispute seems like a simple math error. As shown on the
attached syllabus, the grade is 85% exams and 15% worksheets and
responses.

On the exams, I scored 76.5/85, which is a 90% (A)
On the worksheets/responses, there were three worksheets and I received a check mark on each of them. To my knowledge, no other
factors counted toward this part of the grade. Further, my class
participation was exemplary, so if there were other factors, they
should have been in my favor.

When I asked the professor about my grade, he said that 76.5 was a B
and he had used the worksheets and responses to "bump me up" to a B+.
But this is not mathematically consistent; 76.5/85 is an A, and the
professor admitted the worksheets/responses would "bump me up," not
down. I never received any evidence or justification for why my grade
would be lower than 90%.
Regards,
Name


How to respond to "When are you graduating" when I'm behind I'm a 5th year Ph.D. student. I've worked on several different projects in the last couple years, some of them not related to my dissertation topic, so I don't yet have enough results to say for sure when I will defend. I'm working solely on my dissertation project now, and I'm working as quickly as I can.

We have group meetings once in a while. Another faculty member and his student also attends because they collaborate with my advisor. In the past several meetings, my advisor has been too busy to attend, and the other researcher, who is not too familiar with my research activities, has been asking me things like:
Are you writing any papers?
Have you formed your committee?
How many years have you been here again?
When are you going to graduate?

When I say "no" "I don't know" etc., he has an expression of concern (or maybe pity). I am really annoyed by this. It's like someone keeps on asking me about my fish when it died recently. I'm already under enough stress trying to do research. The last thing I need is someone reminding me I'm behind schedule - it's demotivating. Not to mention this makes me look bad in front of my group mates.

What should I do? Tell him bluntly "it's none of his business"? Stop attending group meetings?

While it's unfortunate that my graduation is delayed, taking into account my own abilities and changes in research topics, I'm happy about where I am, working on something I'm interested in. I would much rather do some meaningful and quality work than slap together something half-baked for my dissertation. (Of course, I know I could be making more money by getting a real job sooner, but these are the best years of my life and I would rather spend it doing something I love.)

It is well known that "When are you graduating?" or even "How is your research going?" can be touchy questions among graduate students.  But this is well known in part because they get asked these questions constantly, including by each other.  And even if they can be unpleasant to answer, they are still fair questions.  I'm not sure that the problem lies where you think it does.

  I'm working solely on my dissertation project now, and I'm working as quickly as I can.

That's a pretty defensive thing to say straight out of the gate.  Basically you sound like you want to ward off in advance any thought of optimizing or improving your path to the PhD.  An academic who sees no room for improvement is setting the bar pretty low.  I am a tenured faculty member, and if you came to me saying, "I think you could work faster / more efficiently / with greater output if..." then believe me, you would have my attention.

  We have group meetings once in a while. Another faculty member and his student also attends because they collaborate with my advisor. In the past several meetings, my advisor has been too busy to attend.

Forgive my prying, but I have already seen something that to me looks more serious than some other faculty member asking you some questions you don't like.  Your advisor is too busy to attend your group meetings?  You know, I think you might work more quickly if....

  When I say "no" "I don't know" etc., he has an expression of concern (or maybe pity).

Both concern and pity are positive emotions.  This guy sounds like he is -- you got it -- concerned about you.  The fact that he is showing up at several consecutive meetings while your advisor is not makes me think that he is indicating a desire to help you out.

  I am really annoyed by this. It's like someone keeps on asking me about my fish when it died recently.

I find your simile to be pretty strange, but I'll try to play along: isn't it like he's asking about your living fish who has looked a bit less than healthy recently?  Maybe I'm not getting the picture: who or what has died in your recent life, metaphorically speaking?

  I'm already under enough stress trying to do research.

Yes, you sound like you are very stressed out.  People who are too stressed out are not doing things in the best possible way, or even in a healthy way.  Most commonly there is some kind of disconnect between their future hopes and their present actions.  Talking through that kind of dissonance, and adjusting either or both, could be very helpful.

  The last thing I need is someone reminding me I'm behind schedule - it's demotivating.

If being reminded that you're behind schedule is demotivating, then something seems off-kilter.  Being reminded that you're behind schedule should be motivating, unless the schedule is not reasonable, in which case that should be directly addressed with your advisor.  If it has been, then the problem seems to be that you haven't been honest enough about your situation.  If he expects you to graduate next semester because you're an Nth year student, and you and your advisor have decided that you're not going to graduate until the following semester, just say so.

  Not to mention this makes me look bad in front of my group mates.

Your group mates should know your situation better than someone who has been sitting in for a few weeks, so I don't really understand why this makes you look bad.  Unless they don't understand your situation and these questions are revealing it....which is not the visiting professor's fault.

  What should I do? Tell him bluntly "it's none of his business"? Stop attending group meetings?

Stop attending group meetings?!?  Presumably the group meetings are an important part of your own research and progress [although with your advisor absent, I have to wonder...], in which case not going would be a terrible overreaction.  (If they are really not valuable, then okay, don't go.  You'll work more quickly without having that waste of time.  But tell your advisor about it: why is he having you go to meetings that are a waste of your time?)

I think the bottom line is that this faculty member is trying to be helpful, but if you have fallen into an interaction with him that from your perspective is only getting you down, then you should talk to him directly about that.  I would suggest making an appointment with him privately and at that appointment have the conversation that he wants to have all at once.  Tell him about your situation.  You can tell him that you think he might be concerned about you but that now that he knows Extra Information X, you hope that he can see that you are now firmly on track.  If he disagrees, then he can share his opinion with you privately and perhaps even give you some actual help.  At any rate, one can only ask questions like "Have you formed your committee yet?" "How many years have you been here?" so many times.  If you give him the chance to spend as much time as he wants asking those questions, then with any luck he won't ask them again at your group meetings, and if he does you can say, justly, "We discussed this thoroughly last week, so I don't want to take up everyone else's time revisiting it now.  We can talk later if you like."

Anyway, please don't dismiss the idea that this faculty member could help you out.  Good luck.


Does it make sense to reward the entire class with better grades if (and only if) no cheating is detected? In online classes, I've seen academic integrity cases skyrocket, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.  It got me wondering if it is possible to create a grading scheme based around reward instead of punishment.
I acknowledge that ending cheating is probably unlikely, but I am not interested in that.  I'm interested in reducing the temptation to cheat, or at least providing an incentive to not cheat.  My idea is:
If I fail to detect cheating on tests and assignments, then the assessment's denominator is reduced by 5% or so.  For instance, if my exam is worth 50 marks, and no cheating is detected, then the exam is marked out of 47 or something but still has 50 marks possible.  This would apply to the whole class, and one detection of cheating would nullify it.
I have one major question: Is it ethical to peg the entire class's bonus on the potential bad actions of one person? (a sub question might be: do you imagine this would work?)
Note, I am obligated by department policy to hold a midterm and a final.
Update: I think "back to the drawing board" is appropriate here :p Thanks everyone!

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.


How to proceed when a mathematical result contradicts existing literature? An author has proven an interesting mathematical result, but notices that this result contradicts existing literature.

Does the author have to find an explicit error or counter-example to the existing literature before considering submission? Can she submit the proven result to a journal, if she cannot find an error in her own proof?

Certainly the fact that there is a contradiction with previous literature must be prominently advertised; to do otherwise would be scientific misconduct. I would not be confident in publishing such a paper unless I found the mistake in the other paper, or could give a counterexample showing they are wrong.

After having carefully worked out the other paper and my own paper, and asked any experts with whom I have an established connection, I might contact the authors of the contradicting paper (if they are still active). After their response, or lack thereof, I would consider publishing a preprint and after that submitting to a journal. The journal is the slowest and most uncertain way of finding out where the problem is.


Implications for the candidate if a contacted external evaluator declines I seem to have reached the phase of my career where I receive regular requests to externally evaluate faculty: this means that I am evaluating the research program of tenure-track faculty (so far always at US institutions, so let's concentrate on this case) and writing a letter to be used in some ways for the pre-tenure / tenure / promotion processes.  If it makes any difference, I would be more interested in answers that apply to the field of mathematics.

Well, sometimes I have reasons that I might not want to do this.  Here is a list of reasons that either have occurred to me or seem plausible that they might occur with others:

I feel that I am too busy: either too busy to do a good job in the time allotted, or just so busy that it would make my life easier to decline.
I don't have much insight into the candidate's work, and I feel that many other people could do a better job.
In order to do a good job I would have to investigate certain things, e.g. whether and why a certain paper has not yet been published.  It's hard to investigate things in academia completely anonymously, and whether this type of investigation would be well-received or even appropriate is not completely clear.
I feel that the candidate's work is not very strong.  (Note: not very strong compared to what is a key question here, but a sticky one.  I have found that institutions which are more teaching focused often ask their candidates to be evaluated by standards which sound very rigorous and exacting to me, a faculty member at a major research university.)

Especially in the last case, it's not so clear "what's in it for me" to write an evaluation that says that a candidate's work is not as good as that of many other people I know in the field.  They are still working in my field, so I would rather have them there than not.  I have no idea what the chance is that my letter would be taken seriously in a failure to hire/promote them.  Either way, there are reasons for concern on my end.

My main question is: if I decline to write such an evaluation, is the act of declining likely to have implications for the candidate?  (E.g. is it likely that the declination would appear on the candidate's dossier?)  The subsidiary question is: if I have reasons like the above that would make me prefer not to write an evaluation, is it nevertheless important to write one?  Is it "the right thing to do"?  (Of course one wants to do a certain amount of service to the academic community.  On the other hand, many/most academics get offered so many service obligations that they have to turn some down.  This question should be understood as relative to doing other service tasks, not doing less overall.)

Chairs / deans / provosts will tell you that declining will have no effect. This is the official and morally as well as legally correct answer.

However, I've had the great pleasure (not) of serving on a committee (at a private, elite R1) where the promotion review chair did not like the candidate and raised the issue that there were a certain percentage of declines to strengthen their tenuous case against the scholar ("no one likes/respects this scholar thus they are declining to serve as reviewers).

This was counter to policy and in my mind immoral and possibly illegal depending on the circumstances.

If you do decline, please include a phrase that you are declining due to personal / workload reasons and that the committee must absolutely not use your declination to in anyway prejudice the candidate's case.

Now as to your subsidiary question as to whether you should feel obliged to write, this is more of a moral question. As a tenured full professor, I do feel an obligation to my discipline to do these reviews.

However, I will only do a review if I can do it well. If a candidate's work is out of my field of expertise or if my workload prevents me from doing a good job, I won't write. My first obligation is, after all, to my research agenda and my students.

Furthermore, there have been cases where I know too much about a candidate to write an objective review. In those cases, I ask to be relieved due to a conflict of interest.

There are varying opinions on whether one should write negative letters and this should really be a separate question. My own philosophy is that my letter is a third-person's neutral observation of the strength of the candidate's application for tenure. I thus write about the strengths that I see for this case, but whether the strengths are sufficient for tenure is ultimately a decision that should be made by the tenuring committees.


Career change for a mathematician - from academia to ...? I'm looking for good hints for my professional life.

I am a mathematician (32 years old) who worked up to now in academia in Europe.
My short CV: PhD + three and a half years of postdoctoral fellowships.
Domain of expertise: dynamical systems / ergodic theory (no applied math).

It's been some time that I have been losing progressively motivation for research, I do not manage to obtain a permanent position and I start wondering what I could do elsewhere with my expertise (besides teaching, which is of course a possibility).

However I fear that I'm too "specialized" in my domain and I don't feel adapted for the industry. I have some programming skills, but not enough in my opinion to work in a big data company.

Do you know some examples of mathematicians who found their way in industry with a 100% academic CV like mine? And where? In which areas? Do companies hire mathematicians with no experience outside academics? Do they invest in people with pure-theoretical background and competences?

Rumors say that the financial industry hires Ph.D.s in math and physics, having found that those guys are smart in ways that matter there.

In the US, the largest non-academic employer of Ph.D. mathematicians is the National Security Agency.  But they hire US citizens only.  I do not know if there are similar opportunities in Europe.


What information to put in Bibliography for a Online Course In preparation for my honours thesis, I recently completed a (free) Online Course on the broader field, presented by a world class expert.
I would like to (am ethically required to?) put this in my bibliography,
though I will not cite it directly, instead citing papers that it referred to.
What information should I put in my bibliography?
I'm not interested in the exact formatting, I'm using software to generate that.
I'm interested in what information I should put.

What category of material is it? It isn't a lecture as it contained 16 lectures and a bunch of assignments etc. Is it a Internet Document? A Unpublished Work?

Should the teaching assistants be listed as Co-authors? They wrote the assignments.

Should I not be putting it in the bibliography at all, but instead acknowledging it more informally?

It should be appropriate to acknowledge the "head-start" you got from that course in the acknowledgements section of the thesis. It would be unusual to list a course in the bibliography unless there really was no more authoritative source available for some information or a method that you directly used.

The purpose of a bibliography is to cite the primary source of any information directly used in your work. If you use something from the online course worth citing, then you should cite it. However, it's unlikely the information in the course is new, so you should try to track down and cite the original source in a peer-reviewed article or textbook.


How we can look active both in class and after class in our supervisor's mind? I have started my master's degree and I am a fully funded student.
I want to get perfect marks and do my research perfectly.
What steps should I follow to become an outstanding student in my supervisor's mind?
How can I be a perfect student?
I also have a class with him this semester. I am also doing research with him.

It really does matter to me to have a very good relationship with my supervisor.
Please, give me any advice that you think is useful.

Try not to "show yourself as an active student", be it! There is really a difference in it.

As an active student, you are genuinely interested in the field, you are asking question no mtter how stupid they seem, you are going an extra mile in assignments, be helpful to others (even if no one notices it), be active in students activities, ...

In fact there are way too many things you could do to do them all. So try to be you and pick what's best for your personality. Then you will shine.


How to present preprints that are not publicly accessible on a CV for math academic job search? In the context of preparing a CV for a math academic job search

Is it advisable to list preprints which are not yet accessible to the wide public in the CV?

If so, should it be in a rubric of its own (i.e. separate from "research publications"), or can I put it in the same rubric but write something like "(draft, available upon request)" or "(in preparation)", depending on its actual status, to its side?

If the paper has been submitted, then of course you can list it as "submitted", whether it's public or not.

Otherwise, I think that about all you can do is to say "in preparation", but this won't really have much impact.  My impression is that "in preparation" means about as much to a search committee as "I had this idea for a paper", i.e. practically nothing.  They aren't really likely to believe a candidate's estimate that the paper is "99% done", since it's obviously self-serving.  And anyway, the last 1% is often where you discover a critical gap that takes months to fix, or can't be fixed at all.

If the paper really is done or nearly done, your best bet is to work hard and try to get it submitted or posted publicly (preferably both) before you send in your job applications.

If you can't get to that point, then the next best thing is to make sure that at least one of your recommendation writers is familiar with the project.  (If you have co-authors, ask one of them to write you a letter.)  They can write about how awesome it is and assure the committee that it really is practically done.  In this case you still say "in preparation" on the CV, but you have some third-party backup.


Is Lecture Notes by Springer a journal? Sorry for asking maybe a too-specific question. I've searched the internet and in this site but I still want a specific answer.

Is the Lecture Notes in (enter the name of field here) by Springer a journal?

Some universities require the PhD students to publish in journals in order to graduate, so I want to know. I am in Computer Science field.

The Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series (and its related sub-series) are rather odd publications.  The DBLP bibliography server marks them as a journal in one way, but categorizes them as a series in another way, and they are structured and reviewed more like conference proceedings or collections of book chapters.

I personally would not think of them as being the equivalent of a journal publication.  Whether they count as a journal publication for a particular organization's set of regulations, however, is something that only that organization can determine.


Is it popular to request TA presence in the classroom for all lectures & is it right? A Professor normally send his TA to conduct some sessions of his course (e.g., for problem solving).

It is also possible to ask the TA to attend all sessions to keep the track of the course. This is helpful if the TA is responsible for reading the essays of students, as he can be aware of discussions in the class.

How much the second scheme is popular?

Is it right to force a TA to stay and listen to the basic topics? When someone provide TA service for a course, he knows that topic well, and it is boring to sit and listen it again.

Yes, attending lectures or other class sessions is a reasonable duty for a TA. Of course, if your contract specifies a maximum number of weekly hours to work, time spent attending the lectures would count toward those hours.

Keep in mind that even though you may be familiar with the basic material, the professor may feel it would be helpful for you to see the same presentation that the students are getting, so that your teaching will be consistent with his.

If you don't agree that this is the best use of your time, and there are more productive ways you could spend that time, then you could certainly suggest to the professor that you try something else. (Be polite about it - I would avoid using the word "force".) But ultimately it is his decision - he is the boss and you are being paid to work under his direction.


Physics dissertation: Do I give a reference every time I mention a certain piece of work? I'm currently writing my BSc Physics dissertation and I'm using LaTeX with BibTeX so the format of the references is all correct, but there are a number of other papers that I talk about at several points throughout the paper. When referencing one of these papers do I need to include a reference each time I mention it?

Example:

  Throughout this paper I will adopt values for cosmological parameters
  obtained by the Planck Collaboration [1].

and later on in the paper...

  ... there have been numerous projects attempting to measure features
  of the CMB including the COBE satellite [2], the WMAP [3] and, more
  recently, the Planck Collaboration ([1]?).

Yes indeed. For several reasons:

people might not read your work sequentially, from page 1 to the end;
people might forget that there was already a citation somewhere;
people don't want to recall all previous citations;
the context is different and people don't assume that the reference is the same.


How to conduct an effective regular group meeting? My research group has regular group meeting but I usually think it is not effective. In particular the research area of the group is very diverse, every time I just listen on something I cannot understand and have totally no interest on it, and I believe other members think the same way as I do when I am presenting. While it is a good way to expose to something new, and know other group members what they are doing, this is not effective for my own research. I know group meeting has its point (What is the purpose of the weekly research meetings that advisers often have with their research group?), but how can it be conducted in a more effective way?

As a supervisor:

How frequent should a regular group meeting be? It depends on the field, and I hear something like daily to three months.
When should a regular group meeting be? I know some groups insist on Monday morning, some groups choose Friday evening which is terrible.
How long should a group meeting be?
What level of detail should a supervisor comment to one's work? From every experimental concepts, to a vague conceptual suggestion?

As a student:

What should a student prepare before a group meeting to have an effective meeting? To present every problem he/she faces, or just some significant results (if there is)?
Should a student question other's member work? Sometimes it may be constructive, but it can also be an interruption.

If you are a faculty, how do you conduct your group meeting? As a research student, what can you suggest for an effective group meeting? An effective group meeting can greatly help on one's research work, otherwise it is just a drain of energy, time and motivation.

You have a lot of questions interspersed within your question, but it sounds like the main issue is

  the research area of the group is very diverse, every time I just listen on something I cannot understand and have totally no interest on it, and I believe other members think the same way as I do when I am presenting.

I have had the same problem in the past.  I'm a professor who works in a variety of related subfields, some very theoretical and some fairly applied.  Most of my students and postdocs have been focused exclusively on either something theoretical or something applied, and their backgrounds range from computer science to mathematics to electrical engineering, so there is often a disconnect when they try to communicate what they are doing.  Here is my advice.

For students:

Try to broaden your focus and interests.  It is natural that you have a very narrow research focus as a grad student, but if you want to get and keep a job afterward you'll almost certainly need to broaden your focus.  I find that in general the best researchers almost always have broad interests (though they are able to focus their energy narrowly when needed).  Group meetings are an opportunity to become acquainted with topics that are on the horizon of your current knowledge.
Use group meetings as an opportunity to improve your communication skills.  Teaching non-experts about your work is a critical skill in any research career.  Other students in the group do not know nearly as much as you about your research topic, but that doesn't mean that you cannot make it interesting and accessible to them.  Often this means leaving out the "details" and explaining just the essence of a problem.  Trust me, some day soon you will need to make your work interesting and intelligible to people who are much further removed from your specialty.

For advisors:

Help students to present their work in a way that the others can understand.  Often this means prompting the student, especially at the beginning of a presentation, to add important assumptions, motivation, or background.  The student has started to take these things for granted, but without them any non-expert is quickly lost.
Don't let the conversation drift too far into a very specialized discussion.  If you and the student are the only ones who have any idea of what is being discussed, it's probably time to say "let's discuss this further after the meeting".
Use meetings for skills development.  This was already mentioned in this related answer.  Instead of focusing exclusively on research, group meetings can also include discussions of things like:

How to write papers
How to read papers
How to search the literature
How to manage a bibliography
How to give good presentations
How to write a proposal
How to keep a lab notebook
How to keep up with newly published research
How to stay organized and be productive
How to referee a paper
Software tools for all of the above, and for research

These topics are useful and interesting to anyone involved in research.

Answers to other parts of the question

I hold group meetings once a week, and they last 1-2 hours
Students are strongly encouraged to question and comment on each other's work
We meet at lunch time, and there is food.  That doesn't sound important, but I think it is.
I try to save very detailed comments for my one-on-one meetings with students.  Otherwise, the group meeting can devolve into a conversation between the advisor and just one student.


What should TAs do if students disrespect them? TAs are responsible for answering students' questions. But sometimes there are bad-mannered students who don't treat the TA with respect during the interaction. Should TAs just take it and still answer students with patience? Otherwise, they may be complained about by students. Or do TAs have a right to ask students to behave politely before answering them, or to just simply refuse to meet them?

The TAs in question should speak with the director of the course first and foremost - it will be important to have that person "on their side", and they likely have a better idea of what actions are available to the TA.

In a more general sense, my opinion is that you try to treat those students with a sort of detached professionalism, but you are under no obligation to go the extra mile to help them. And you are absolutely within your rights to ask them to behave politely.


Can I do PhD from different country after getting one PhD from one country? I am currently pursuing doctoral research in Chemical engineering department at IIT Kharagpur, India. I am about to complete my Ph.D. within 2 years. I am thinking of doing another Ph.D. possibly from outside India. But I would love to do a Ph.D. in the same area.

In general, yes, this is possible. More concretely, it depends on the rules of the institution your apply to (and on the people reading your application).
What you cannot do (at least in most reputable institutions) is to use the same research for two degrees.

However, do expect the question on why you want to do a second phd and prepare a good (and honest) answer.


Do academics get paid for examining thesis? Easy question, I know, and it may be obvious to some people.

I am an academic, so, let me be specific. Universities usually pay their external thesis examiners, and, I have heard that some pay their internal examiners as well.

I want to know if it's common practice to pay their internal examiners?

Thanks.

No, examiners are not always paid.

This also holds for external examiners. I have been asked to examine several theses in the last years, some internal, some external, and have never been paid. However, if the examination involves travelling, then I usually got reimbursed.

(This is an answer for Germany and Austria.)


The "why it matters" of a research proposal I have heard from academics in various fields that the usefulness of their research is not always immediately clear, but sometimes, a piece of research will inadvertently become important at some point in the future.

If this is true, i.e. if the usefulness of a research idea is not immediately clear, how could one write a convincing research proposal when a research proposal is supposed to address the importance of the idea? Does one resort to generic lines such as "to expand our understanding of x, y, and z"?

This has a lot of possible answers. One wants to say, as many answers as there are research proposals.

In mathematics, some things matter just for the pure beauty of it. The same may be true in other fields. Probably true in the arts as well.

In CS one can often search for improvements on current best practice - faster, more secure, smaller, simpler.

Some problems matter because the search for answers has been long and unfruitful. Some things in physics are like that.

Some things matter because they provide synergy between existing ideas thought to be distinct. Drug research, pedagogical research.

Some things are useful. And, as you say, one can hope that other things become useful in the future. Very fresh pure math may have few current uses. But potentially future uses.

Think about why you want to do the research. Think about how it will complete something from the past. Think about how it might foreshadow the future.

I'm sure you can come up with something. And it need not matter to everyone. Sometimes it will only "matter" to a small group of specialists. Math can be like that too.

And they aren't mutually exclusive. Quite a few of these were manifest in my own doctoral research.


"The Immigration Reform and Control Act" (IRCA) for EU applicants I'm a European Union citizen living in EU and applying for an assistant professorship position in US. The application form asks the question

  For purposes of compliance with The Immigration Reform and Control Act, are you legally eligible for employment in the United States?

I know too little about U.S. immigration laws, and the text of the mentioned act looks complete gibberish to me. Could anyone say what the standard answer to this question would be and why?

Remark: this question is formally different from the one stated in a question on general eligibility (first, here the context is a particular legislation act with its own terminology, second, there the question contains "presently", and, third, there no answer refers to IRCA explicitly). In law matters, this difference may be important.

As far as I know, these clauses in application forms, are there for legal and nominal reasons only. The university is legally obliged by law to put this clause. This does not mean the committee will actually take this into consideration, and my experience is that they don't.

You should thus write that you are not eligible to work currently in the US, as indeed you are not. But this should not constitute a cause for concern.


On citing books as references in papers I am an undergraduate student with no experience and no guidance from any teacher whatsoever.

I have done research on Recreational Mathematics (Maths tricks). I have a lot of new tricks to introduce, in a completely new format.

But the problem is that there doesn't seems to been any research paper on this topic before, but there are many books. Can I quote books as a source of reference instead of research papers published? (I am quoting research papers related to the theorems and concepts I have used - but there is no reference to the trick on which I have worked upon.) Also the trick seems to be age-old and extremely simple, and I think that the inventor of it is not known to the world at all.

Can I cite the book? (I know that the author of the book didn't invent the concept behind the trick.)

You can and you should.

Sure, peer-review papers are preferred over regular (not peer-reviewed books) but if the information you want to cite only is written down in a book (peer reviewed or not) rather than in a research paper, of course you should reference to the former.

Technically, you can refer to whatever you want (a painting, a tv show, a private discussion with a friend of yours or The Journal of Ghosts and Humbug). However, if you want to write a believable paper, you should strive towards citing as trusted and/or high quality sources as possible.


How to work efficiently under loose supervision during graduate studies? I work in a very cross-disciplinary field, which has caused me some headache* over the past couple of years, partly due to the fact that my supervisor isn't very knowledgeable regarding the day to day (technical) details of my projects. He typically leaves any mathematical, or CS, aspect of the projects to me to figure out, and provides guidance when I have questions regarding the biology or biochemistry, as those are his fields of expertise.

From what I hear, he's similarly loose in supervision even with the other grad students who are less cross-disciplinary and more aligned with his expertise. While I see the point in the supervisor providing the freedom to the grad student to develop as he/she likes, in my experience it can be troubling at times, allow me to explain:

I often have extensive periods where I don't have concrete goals to work with, but only vague ideas. Similarly, since I don't get a lot of technical guidance there are often weeks-long periods where I don't "produce" anything but instead trying to dig information out on publications, CS blogs or StackOverflow, in order to solve a problem I encounter.

It's at times like these my daily concerns (stuff usually unrelated to work) take precedence over what I am actually trying to figure out. I find myself browsing for gadgets, or looking over my savings or reading the news etc. I have no illusions that this amounts to procrastination no matter how you look at it. Since I don't really need to report anything to my supervisor on a regular basis, these periods can be extensive which often leads to frustration. And having realised this, I would like to be more productive even when I am stuck at my project, hopefully minimise the time it takes until I come up with a solution to whatever it is that's hindering progress.

So my question boils down to: how can I make sure I work efficiently, i.e. I don't get distracted or succumb to procrastination, when I am stuck and only get very loose supervision?

* See relevant questions:

Is it possible to measure/evaluate one's progress or development in quantitative terms?
Ways of developing non-core skills during PhD studies?

I think the more general form of the question is: (a) what do I need from my supervisor and (b) if my supervisor cannot/will not provide this, then what can I do?

Here's a few things I think supervisors are most important for early on in graduate studies:

Discipline and Motivation

So you need to put in long hours to succeed in graduate studies and oftentimes you need to work "blind": you need to work on things you don't know will succeed or not, or where you have no fixed goal in mind. Discipline can thus be a major issue for any relatively normal human being. Supervisors are supposed to track your progress on a regular basis and ensure you are putting in the required levels of effort, to encourage with a carrot and to use the stick if necessary.

If your supervisor is not tracking your progress and setting goals for you, then you need to take your own discipline into your own hands. The simplest method is to set your own goals with deadlines, focusing on achieving one thing at a time. Make TODO lists that follow a rough plan you have in mind. If a task is too broad, it will never get done: each task should be small enough and phrased in such a way that you know how it can be achieved (even if the task is just "problem solve X for one hour").

Assign yourself regular hours to work. If procrastination is a problem, just start. Starting is the hardest part so unplug yourself from whatever you were doing, minimise the potential for distraction as much as possible, take a deep breath and start. It's that simple.

Experience

It is not enough to work hard, but you need to work smart. Inexperienced students often tend to invest more effort into unimportant minor details that they feel they can control, rather than important details where the outcome or process is uncertain. The job of the supervisor should be to provide context on the relative importance of various tasks, to stop students from getting bogged down in minor details and to keep the bigger picture in mind.

Experience comes into play in other areas. For example, if you're starting out in publishing, or trying to publish to a venue you haven't before, experience is crucial so as to know what form the paper should take, what sort of narrative is accepted, what sort of "boxes" have to be ticked.

There is no replacement for experience. However, you can find experience elsewhere than your supervisor. Are there more senior students or PostDocs you can collaborate with? Maybe there's a group outside of your institute you can collaborate with remotely? Working with other people (i.e., not having a monogamous relationship with your supervisor) is an excellent way to quickly level up your own experience and gain new perspectives!

Technical Expertise

Your supervisor is also supposed to apply his/her technical expertise to your supervision, particularly in the early days. But if they do not provide you sufficient time and effort in this regard, or if their own technical expertise does not cover your interests, or as you progress into more detail on your PhD, you will need to find sources of expertise elsewhere.

Again, talk with other people. Try to seek out people with the skills that you require and try to develop a mutually beneficial working relationship with them (i.e., don't expect them to help you out of the goodness of their hearts). Perhaps you could even find a co-supervisor or a "mentor" who can be credited on a thesis?

The Web is also your friend. When I was a graduate student, I learned far more from playing around and trying things and from reading (on the Web) than from anything my supervisors (or lecturers) taught me. One of the most important lessons from graduate studies is "independent study" ... learning how to learn. When you do a PhD you are supposed to be the world's leading expert on your chosen topic. The only way this can happen is if you develop your own technical expertise in your area beyond that of your supervisor and your other colleagues.

Funding

Presumably if you already have a supervisor then you have a fixed source of funding. However, you may need additional funding if you go over length or funding for conference travel, etc. This can be very difficult for graduate students to get involved in.

However, there are often calls that are aimed at students and require minimal input from a supervisor. These include student travel grants for conferences, governmental scholarships, prizes for submitted work, etc. Furthermore, other senior researchers will often have funds they can provide for part-time contributions; talk to people if you are stuck.

Summary

I think some of the most important lessons that have to be learned during graduate studies are:

How to discipline and motivate yourself and organise your own work
Understand the nature of research itself, the broader research community and how your work will be viewed by them
How to find, initiate and follow through on fruitful collaborations with other researchers and research groups
How to find your own sources of funding

The main goal of graduate studies is to gradually reduce your dependence on your supervisor until, by the end of your PhD, you don't need them any more. A good supervisor should understand and support you in this, particularly early on, but if this isn't working out, then you need to learn how to rely on yourself more (or find another (co-)supervisor).


Do prestigious mathematics journals discriminate against young (undergraduate) authors? I am an undergraduate mathematics major. I have made a draft of a paper on group theory. My paper is not a breakthrough. After scanning through a lot of journals I have come down to Journal of Group Theory and Journal of Algebra. Both are prestigious math journals. And the recent history of both journals doesn’t support undergraduate authors.

I do have the support of my advisor so editing will not be a big problem for me.

Do undergraduates have a decent shot of publishing in these journals?

In fact, I published a paper in the Journal of Algebra based on work I did as an undergraduate (I was a graduate student by the time it was published).

Certainly, there's no policy discriminating against undergrads (or anyone for that manner).  It's hard to rule out very subtle ways that cues affect people's judgement; it's actually quite rare that I am asked to referee a paper by someone I've never heard of, so I do notice and probably adopt a more skeptical attitude when asked to referee a paper by someone whose work I have no experience with. Still, this is a subtle effect, and there's nothing to be done about but to do good work and get your name out there.

Actually, there's a decent chance that the editors and referee won't notice that you are an undergrad.  (If they do notice, it will likely because you are affiliated with a university where they expect to know any professor in your field, and thus will investigate when they see an unfamiliar name.)


What happens in a thesis defense when the non-committee members leave the room? I've been to many PhD proposals and defenses, but I've yet to give either myself. At every talk I've seen, after the speaker finishes his/her presentation and the non-committee members ask their questions, we're asked to leave the room. I assume the committee then asks the speaker questions.

Are these questions any different from normal questions you would get at a talk or do they function as a sort of impromptu oral exam? Do students prepare for them in a particular way or it is just assumed you'll pick up on what you need from your studies and work on your thesis?

I don't think there is any universal answer to this question.  I just defended about 8 hours ago, in my case there was a pre-defense and a defense.  The pre-defense in our program tells the student what needs to be done to successfully finish the program, the actual public defense is largely ceremonial.  When I met in private with the committee they just shook my hand and that was the end of it.

I am aware of other defenses, where there is an oral exam after the non-committee members exit the room.  But, from what I have been told the questions in this exam are largely for clarification, and to determine what needs to be done to graduate.

I'm sure some others can clarify, but usually your dissertation advisor has your back, and you have already done the work at that point.  So the defense is more of a chance for you to share your work, than a second order comprehensive exam.

It really depends on your country, institution, department, and program.


What is the difference between AP A and AP B? I am a British person, currently studying a book designed for the American market.
It is for students studying the AP B course.
I know that AP stands for Advanced Placement, which is similar to the UK A-Level courses we study at 17-18 years of age.
However, I do not know what the difference is between the A and B part. For example, AP Physics A in comparison to AP Physics 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 wise to ask a PhD supervisor about the quality of my work? She says, why do you want to hurry? Let's put the defense in December, then you can have several publications out till then.

I am thinking of asking directly, "What do you think about my PhD work? Are you not happy with my work and is that the reason you are delaying correcting my manuscripts? "

Will that be appropriate? What should I do and tell/ask her?

Yes, it is appropriate to ask her what is going on. This is your PhD and she has no right to delay it in the way that she is currently doing. As a supervisor, she is supposed to support you in finishing your thesis, and if she is not doing that, you have a good reason to complain about it.

I do not think that it is even important what she is thinking of your work. If she thinks that your work is bad, that would make it even more important to give you this kind of feedback. So that is not a good reason to not give you feedback, and I also think it's highly unlikely that this is the actual reason why.

I would simply argue with the facts. After 5 years of doing your PhD, you want to be finished soon. In order to do that, you need her to give feedback on the manuscripts. If she says "why the hurry" again, there are several things you can point out, for example:

Postdoc positions usually start in autumn, so in order to get one of
those it would be good to have the PhD rather sooner than later,
since there is a lot of work to do for applications etc. beforehand.
You feel that you cannot use the additional time productively, since
you have done all the work that you wanted to do and do not need to
delay any further.

But actually, the question is beside the point, because it is your decision, not hers, and that is not why you are talking to her. If she really tries to derail the conversation in this way, I would call her out on it. "I feel like you are avoiding the actual issue I am addressing here. I have waited for your feedback for 1.5 years now. I think this is clearly too long, and now that I am ready to finish my PhD, I really need that feedback. I can understand that you are busy, but I have the feeling that you are frequently giving my work a low priority. I do not know why you are doing this, but it is frustrating. I currently do not feel appropriately supervised by you."

Well okay, I might have a slightly confrontational nature, so take this with a grain of salt. But I think in such a case it is adequate to criticize her for the lack of supervision that you have experienced throughout your PhD.

A last tip would be to give her deadlines. Usually people prioritize things where they get a clear deadline, even if the deadline is arbitrary. In the best case scenario, you can tie the deadline to an actual milestone of your final phase of the PhD - like maybe you want to say that by the end of March, you want to be done with the actual research and only focus on structure and design of the thesis, so that the deadline for her would be somewhere in March.


How to leave a postdoc prematurely without burning bridges? I am in the middle of a postdoc that I want to quit to move to another postdoc. I don’t have experience with changing jobs in academia so I am looking for an advice how to accomplish this in the least painful way.

There are many threads on SE about quitting a job, mostly on the workplace. In industry it’s simple: upon finding a new job, one gives notice without prior announcement and completes the notice period. And in most cases it’s understandable and it doesn’t burn bridges.

Academia might be different: relations are more sensitive, and circles are smaller as one needs recommendation letters, get papers and grants reviewed, and so on.

So the question is how to leave a postdoc prematurely without burning bridges?

Is it better to just quit without much explanation or to gradually announce to my professor that I would like to start looking for a new postdoc because I am not happy with the current one?

The main reason for quitting is that I don’t find the department to be a nice environment and I am doing menial work from which I don’t benefit. Explaining these reasons won’t be received well by the professor and the department because they think that the project is great. People are nice to me but discussing this won’t help nor much can change my mind. On the other hand, I’m not sure if suddenly quitting will be received well too and might jeopardize my future career.

Speaking as someone who has seen how disruptive unexpected departures can be to a project, earlier notice is almost always better for your advisor, and I think you are less likely to burn bridges if you 1) let them know as soon as possible, and 2) try to finish things up / leave them in a state where someone else can take over.  All this is probably similar to industry, except that the lead time is probably much longer (since it takes longer to be hired, usually).

The caveat here is that you have to make a call about your advisor's temper. If you think your advisor is a bitter or petty person who will dislike you for leaving under any circumstances, waiting until later might be your only option, because you will burn bridges either way, and you do not want to be abused for several months. This is a rare circumstance, and it doesn't sound like your case.

Here's the other big point: unless you think there is something you can do to improve the environment which would make you stay (doesn't sound like there is), being too detailed about why you are leaving is only going to make people angrier. Saying "I don’t find the department to be a nice environment and I am doing menial work from which I don’t benefit" - whether or not it is true that your tasks are menial - will aggravate people, as you guessed. Saying, "I haven't found this line of research as exciting as I hoped" is probably enough, and (if you know) saying "I want to move more in the direction X" might be good.


Is it ethical to request the advisor to share the registration fee for submitting a conference paper? My advisor and I have decided to present some resent research results in a well-known conference, selected based on our discussions. Now the aforementioned joint paper has been accepted and the clock's ticking to consider the payment of the registration. We have never talked about the financial aspect of this process. The cost associated with registration and transportation is quite high, but my advisor has not yet told me anything about any plan to take that into account and there are just a couple of days left until the payment deadline. I am wondering if he assumes that I myself must pay the fee, but I cannot afford the whole cost . If he expects me to pay all of that registration fee, I have to get over finalizing the registration and the conference, at all. In my perspective, the 50-50 code of ethics sounds fair enough.

Is it ethical to talk about such a thing with the advisor?

If so, how would I supposed to explain and handle the case?

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

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

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

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

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