text:
How much involvement should my advisor have in deciding my availability and actions for me?
I worked in the industry for a few years before starting my PhD and learned many do's and don'ts in the workplace for how you guide subordinates to attend meetings and do things you want them to do. I'm having trouble finding the right mix of transparency/professionalism/availability that I can expect to have with my advisor. Some examples that seem to be ok with my advisor related to availability include:

Advisor tells me I should work and come in over academic breaks
When I'm late for a meeting, sends me an email that says "you're late, get here". Advisor is often late for their own meetings.
On a flight back from a conference, holds a research meeting.
When scheduling a meeting, advisor asks for conflicts, then judges the importance of my conflict vs the meeting. Tells me the meeting is more important.
Advisor schedules recurring meeting over the time I have to eat lunch, tells me I should eat during the meeting
Urges that I come to weekend/post-5pm informal meetups, if I say I cannot attend, asks why my conflict is more important?

Other oddities include:

During research meeting with 15 students, the meeting table is crowded. I grab a chair 5 feet away. Advisor tells me to stand for the meeting (with a laptop).
Advisor tells me I must share a room with another student at the conference hotel

I can't help but feel demeaned by items on this list. I'm a bit older than other students and have a family, so my conflicts are more frequent. Is this advisor-advisee treatment common in academia? I'm trying to seek out the norms of this community.

I'm not sure your official "question" matches what you are really asking. I think the body of your question is more about your advisor's expectations with respect to his/her students' availability and time management, not broadly about "professionalism." Consider an [edit] to make the question more focused.

Your list seems like a mixture of things I have definitely seen in industry as well, things that seem more like minor quirks than big issues, and things that I have certainly done myself. Meeting after 5? Check. Quick in-flight post-mortem of a conference? Check.

To add: in industry, your manager has never told you that this no-fun-at-all sales meeting with a prospective customer is more important than whatever you originally planned for the day?

I'm not sure how to rephrase the question, but I am looking for responses like @xLeitix. If I should just get used to it, then that's all I need to know. I wouldn't mind a sales meeting blowing away my plans for a business day, but I do mind privacy-invasive questions about why I can't make a sales meeting.

Advisor tells me I must share a room with another student at the conference hotel - are his grants paying for said hotel room? If so, that's not atypical.

Advisor tells me I should work and come in over academic breaks - If by "academic breaks" you mean "times when courses are not in session," this is 100% normal and expected. Research does not run on a semester schedule.

The point about standing in a meeting is very odd, and there's clearly more to the story. I don't think anybody here could possibly tell you what that is about, and I think you should remove it from the post. I've edited your question to focus on the meeting availability thing, which I think is a much more answerable question, but please feel free to edit the edit if you find it necessary :)

Restructured and refocused it, thanks for helping me narrow in.

@ff524 Well, for many people, research runs almost only in academic breaks! (Unfortunately. If you teach 14 hours a week and have other duties, there's not much time for actual research.)

Does your contract specify any requirements in this area from your side? If it states your working hours as 9-5, your questions are very valid. If it states anything different your flexibility is a requirement.

Are you sure you are taking all of these the way they were intended? Advisor schedules recurring meeting over the time I have to eat lunch, tells me I should eat during the meeting - that one, for example. The advisor wants a recurring meeting at a specific time, you want to have lunch at the same specific time. Your advisor thus decides that you can eat during the meeting. Myself being from a culture where munching during a meeting is rather impolite, I'd see that permit to eat during the meeting as very accommodating.

some of these seem petty. "Advisor schedules recurring meeting over the time I have to eat lunch, tells me I should eat during the meeting". Eat lunch at a differing time or eat during the meeting. I see no issue here. "On a flight back from a conference, holds a research meeting." what a great use of time. Why do you have an issue with this? Honestly, people are very polite on these boards and this is excellent but I would say aside from the hotel sharing (assuming you pay or have a very good reason, ie some religions, spouse may not allow this) then you just need to get over it.

As with most things, tone matters. All the items on your list don't scream terrible unprofessionalism to me, if done in the right tone and in moderation (ok, the "tells me to stand" one is a bit weird). For instance, I would not force a student to blow off their anniversary dinner for a standard meeting, but I have certainly asked them to cancel some other weekend appointments because of an important deadline on Monday. Further, you mention meetings after 5PM - given that much of my research is done in international cooperation, Skype calls at terrible times are unfortunately not unheard of in my group as well.
I can't help but notice that (as ff524 already mentions), the majority of your items are not so much about professionalism than about time planning. Indeed, in academia, you may need to get used to the fact that most professors require students to be flexible, maybe more so than in larger corporations (but not unlike startup companies, for instance). Nine-to-five workers are typically not popular in academic environments.
You added:

Advisor tells me I must share a room with another student at the conference hotel

The exact same thing happened to me as an employee of a large, international company. Not usual, but yeah - happens if funds for travel are low for some reason.

Interesting point about startups -- the most I have ever worked was for a startup and it spilled into all aspects of my life. I never expected professionalism there because we were in the trenches. Maybe this is the most similar?

@JackWade I guess you can say that, yes.

Here are my thoughts on each of the scenarios in the question. Most of these things are pretty normal and common in academia. For the scheduling things, they shouldn't become habit, but everyone is generally expected to be flexible, especially when deadlines are coming up.

During research meeting with 15 students, the meeting table is
  crowded. I grab a chair 5 feet away. Advisor tells me to stand for the
  meeting (with a laptop).

That's weird. Crowded meetings happen. But I can't see anything wrong with sitting in a chair away from the table.

Advisor tells me I must share a room with another student at the
  conference hotel.

That's normal. Is sharing a room that bad, really? It saves money, so I'm happy to oblige. If you have a legitimate reason to have your own room, it shouldn't be an unreasonable request. Though when there are limited travel funds, you might have to pay the extra yourself or forego a future opportunity.
A fun thing to do when travelling is to rent a short-stay apartment, rather than a hotel. It's usually cheaper (so maybe you can afford your own room), and you have a lounge and cooking facilities for dinner parties.

When I'm late for a meeting, sends me an email that says "you're late,
  get here".

Fair enough. Don't be late.

Advisor is often late for their own meetings.

That can be normal. Meetings between my supervisor and myself are scheduled "after the coffee break" - we have an understanding that that time is pretty flexible. Chronic lateness to rigidly scheduled group meetings really is an inconvenience, and I don't think that is acceptable.
If your advisor is late, you can always send him or her an email asking "we have a meeting now, where are you?".

On a flight back from a conference, holds a research meeting.

I'd say that's a useful use of downtime.

When scheduling a meeting, advisor asks for conflicts, then judges the
  importance of my conflict vs the meeting. Tells me the meeting is more
  important.

I don't think it's reasonable to ask for such details. You should (politely!) say that you dislike re-arranging your schedule and ask to find a mutually agreeable time. Try scheduling meetings with your advisor further in advance -- he or she will have more gaps in their schedule.

Advisor schedules meetings over the time I have to eat lunch, tells me
  I should eat during the meeting

I think this is a cultural thing. If it's the culture of the department where everyone actually has a proper lunch break, then you can insist on keeping your lunch break. If everyone tends to work over lunch and eat at their desk, that insistence is less likely to go down well (though you should by all means still have the right to said lunch break).
If your advisor is unusually busy, or there is a looming deadline, just roll with it.

Urges that I come to weekend/post-5pm informal meetups, if I say I
  cannot attend, asks why my conflict is more important?

Post-5pm? Maybe that's a reasonable request, especially if you don't keep regular 9-5 hours. Weekends should be off limits, though, unless something important is coming up.

Re: the split room thing -- having a family changes things. I'll get calls when I'm in the room pertaining to family problems I have to deal with and I value privacy there. Good idea about the airbnb-like reference, we could save money and have nice rooms.

I like your other points - straightforward and highly valuable for me to know.

@JackWade Apart from phone sex I can't think of any reason why you couldn't just take the call outside the room or in another part of the hotel. Requesting a single room just so you can make private calls in peace is highly unlikely to go over well.

It's not uncommon to expect students to come in on weekends.

Some of the concerns that you have are reasonable, some are not.
However, I think the basic issue is that your advisor probably has not had practice and training in being a competent manager. He may be a brilliant researcher, but that doesn't mean he's a good advisor and mentor. It sounds like he may also be following what I've dubbed the academic golden rule: "Do unto others as you had done unto you."
My general advice to you is the following:

Where possible, take an active role in your relationship with your advisor.

What I mean by this is that where you see conflicts arising, head them off by trying to be the one to deal with them first. For instance, if you don't like the way your advisor is scheduling your appointments, try to schedule a regular meeting time with him so that there isn't a reason to schedule appointments at odd times.

Advisor tells me I should work and come in over academic breaks

This may be entirely reasonable depending upon which breaks your advisor is referring to, and the vacation policy at your institution. The typical standard in US schools is only two or three weeks of leave per year. Given that there is typically substantially more academic leave than personal vacation time, your advisor can expect that you be at work.

When I'm late for a meeting, sends me an email that says "you're late, get here". Advisor is often late for their own meetings.

This is a simple matter of brusqueness.

On a flight back from a conference, holds a research meeting.

This is unusual—but I would chalk this up to the eccentricity of the advisor. My undergraduate advisor once did that with a colleague on a plane—nearly got himself into trouble over it!

When scheduling a meeting, advisor asks for conflicts, then judges the importance of my conflict vs the meeting. Tells me the meeting is more important.

This is baffling, but I think reinforces the notion I've laid out above.

Advisor schedules meetings over the time I have to eat lunch, tells me I should eat during the meeting

This confuses me—I would think this would be somewhat flexible. Advisors don't normally assign lunch hours for their graduate students! If there's some specific reason that you need to eat lunch at a certain time, that's something you should discuss with your advisor (and perhaps the graduate officer of your department).

Urges that I come to weekend/post-5pm informal meetups, if I say I cannot attend, asks why my conflict is more important?

Except in unusual circumstances, this is unacceptable. Your advisor should not expect that you come into work during the weekend. If you personally feel the need to work to meet a deadline, that's a different issue. If the advisor is willing to give you a few days off in exchange for working over the weekend, that might be an acceptable tradeoff. But the pressure should not come directly from the advisor.

During research meeting with 15 students, the meeting table is crowded. I grab a chair 5 feet away. Advisor tells me to stand for the meeting (with a laptop).

This is rather ridiculous on your advisor's part.

Advisor tells me I must share a room with another student at the conference hotel

As a graduate student, unless you have your own budget and resources for travel (e.g., you're on a fellowship that provides a travel allowance), then you probably should not expect to have your own room at a hotel. It's fairly standard practice for advisors to ask their students to "double up" at a hotel.

This is great advice. Re: the lunch thing, I'm in another recurring meeting until 12:00, then the advisor's recurring meeting is 12:00-3:00. I ask for 30 minutes for lunch, but got the above response. As I'm reading, "the advisor's time is more important" is quite the theme.

I had precisely one three-hour meeting with my advisors as a graduate student, and that was entirely unplanned. Is this a meeting just for you, or is it a group-wide meeting?

@Jack sometimes it can be almost impossible to schedule large meetings, with everybody's courses, teaching, administrative meetings, meetings with collaborators in other time zones... I don't think it's unreasonable to schedule a recurring lunch meeting if that's the only time that works for everyone.

@JackWade: I am a faculty member who strongly disagrees with the idea that "the advisor's time is more important." Everybody's time is valuable—which, as ff524 mentions, can mean that some people are inconvenienced because of the need to get things scheduled for everybody.

I'm curious - why did your advisor nearly get in trouble for discussing research with a colleague on a plane?  If they are both there and want to talk, why shouldn't they?  If the colleague wants to sleep then trying  to talk about research is perhaps inconsiderate but hardly something that would get someone in trouble.  Was their research some sort of secret?

@NateEldredge: Largely because blocking the aisle on a plane for the better part of an hour is bound to tick off the flight attendants.

@nate It might also cause problems if the research involves such things as blowing up points on a plane.

Right now, there are 3 close votes, one "unclear what you're asking", two "too broad". I'd lean more towards "opinion-based".
In some academic groups, this is the normal modus operandi, and people are routinely expected to be available at ungodly times. The one other environment where I have observed this ("let's discuss this over lunch, since we both will likely be working until 10pm, and the presentation needs to be done today") is management consultancies. One element that is common to both environments is that most people working there are young, and that it's an up-or-out culture. In academia, you'll either leave with your degree and go into industry, or you end up as a professor - and in management consultancies, you either again leave, or end up at the top of the pile as a partner.
In both environments, there is much less emphasis on work-life balance, and much more emphasis on getting the job done. Young people are inherently more resilient than middle-aged ones, and of course it helps that the typical junior consultant or Ph.D. student does not have a spouse and family - that makes 60 hour-weeks over extended periods of time much more feasible.
Now, all this is very much opinion-based, and I'm sure there are working groups where professors actually respect your outside commitments. However, you seem to have entered a group where the professor has been conditioned by Ph.D. students who don't, like you, have family to attend to. This older answer of mine may be helpful in understanding what I mean.
Right now, I'd suggest you sit down with your professor and have an open discussion with him. Explain that you understand that many of your colleagues can bring youthful energy and few outside commitments to the table - but that you offer more life experience, and that your current situation with a family means that you have commitments you simply can't cancel on short notice, since you may need to pick your kids up at daycare.
Then again, you will likely need to accept a few things that may jar with your previous workplace experiences, like working through lunch, which really isn't all that bad, or working with your professor in judging whether conflicts in scheduling can't sometimes be resolved in favor of the professor's meeting.

Trying to narrow in, but I don't feel I'll escape opionion based. I will note that many answers seem to be clarifying the norms of being a doctoral student. I think your final two paragraphs are strong and found your older answering enlightening.

"there is much less emphasis on work-life balance" - I think this statement is rather misleading as is, at least with respect to academia. It's more that the boundary between work and life can easily be extremely blurry in academia, given that preferrably, your research is one of your major personal interests, and vice-versa, your major personal interests considerably shape your choice of topics and activities during work.

An answer to your 'question' (?) will depend on what you want.
Taken explicitly, the only really idiotic thing is the table. I have trouble imagining a situation where in a 15-people discussion everybody can cluster within 5 ft.
The other stuff: mostly harmless, you should consider that the Prof's time is more valuable than yours -- at least to him; and the Prof. probably needs to juggle more things than you have to. The conference room-sharing thing is actually really usual, conferences cost money, hence it makes sense to reduce costs by sharing [assuming, of course, the usual boundaries].
A better question might be how to handle expectations from your Prof. that you are not willing to say yes to. That depends on how willing the Prof. is to accomodate you. Especially since you have not said what happens if you do not, say, show up for meeting that doesn't fit in your schedule.
None of this means that you are a slave of some kind, but you have to accept that you are subordinate in certain matters. If you can't come to meeting I schedule at 5pm your excuse should be 'Doctors appointment', not 'I want to go home and watch TV'; I probably only have time at 5pm.

the Prof's time is more valuable than yours — [citation needed]

@JeffE the part after the '--' belongs to the sentence as well. And to expand a bit: times between 10am-4pm tend to be filled with lectures, which makes late afternoons possibly the only time available.

You're a grad student. This means you're a slave to your advisor. I was a grad student once and I found the conceit that grad students are human beings and that they are to be treated with dignity beyond comical. Don't talk about professionalism as a grad student - this is not the time and the place, you are off-topic and unfortunately, you are making yourself look ridiculous. If your advisor pulls your chain, you go along quietly, with your tail wagging.
My little brother and I found a preventive cure for this kind of treatment: get a full-time job and go for your graduate degree in the evening. Your adviser is a lot less likely to give you lip if he knows that you, as a grad student, are also a senior engineer at Google :) As they used to say on 42nd Street in New York City in the 1970's: "Money talks and b.s. walks" :)

That's utter rubbish.

@xLeitix I have been a grad student, I have lived through that experience and I have fellow grad students who lived that experience. Yes, there are faculty advisers who are good to their grad students but the fact is, an advisor's power over their grad students is nearly absolute. Especially if the grad student depends on their fellowship or student assistantship to go on.

You generalize from a very bad experience. You should have moved to a different group, and contacted people in position to help.

@cbhoener And who are those people in a position to help?  Be specific. Fact is, I was treated with more respect and consideration where I was moonlighting as an engineer.

Other Professors, colleagues, the dean, family, lawyers, depending on what is going on. I don't know your specific case. Nobody forces you to stay with an advisor you don't like -- s.th. JeffE points out regularly.

@choener That's one reason I left a year after I got my Master's. I would have under a lot worse pressure if I had not made sure I was making my own money while I was going for my Master's. Other profs, the dean - it's the same bunch, pal. Family - what power do you think family has? Lawyers? Not on a grad student's money. Be realistic. Aside from that, being mean to graduate students is not a legally actionable offense.

I think the reason this answer has so many downvotes is that you present it as a universal experience. This may be consistent with your experience (and some of your friends), but that doesn't mean you have to resign yourself to this kind of treatment if you want to be a grad student.

@ff524 US-born STEM students certainly don't put up with this because they have the option to hit the job market - That's partially why there are so few US-born STEM grad students. On the other hand, foreign STEM grad students on a student visa are over-represented.

You're a grad student. This means you're a slave to your advisor. — [citation needed] — Your adviser is a lot less likely to give you lip if he knows that you, as a grad student, are also a senior engineer at Google — [citation needed]

Vietnhi has a point, IMO. I'm in 'industry' and while some of OP's complaints are unreasonable (e.g. expecting not to have to attend meetings at lunchtime and not to have to work after 5pm), others are classic "I am more important than you" social status markers from the senior person. Habitually being late to their own meetings while insisting that everyone else is strictly punctual is a classic one: by making the junior people wait for them the senior person makes the point that they believe their time is more valuable than that of everyone else in the meeting put together. ...

... This goes on all the time in 'industry' of course, but it's not good practice. It sounds as though either the senior person is an inexperienced manager or they are insecure about their work status and feel the need to emphasise their seniority frequently. As OP is a little older than his/her peers, maybe the advisor sees him/her as a threat to their status. Either way, it's certainly not good management, but it is pretty normal, and Vietnhi is right that OP has little alternative than to 'suck it up', while looking for an alternative position with a more agreeable boss.


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How to state that you “rigorified” an existing paper without sounding arrogant or condescending?
I am writing a paper aimed at a physics journal which extends an old paper (not by me), which introduced a mathematical formalism for a physical problem in a rather handwaving way and without addressing most of its mathematical background.
In addition to exentding this formalism, my paper elaborates on this mathematical background and relatedly introduces the formalism in a ”more rigorous” way.
I consider the latter one of my paper’s key features for the following reasons:

One might consider the formalism and the methods derived from it not to be properly substantiated in the old paper.
Though the mathematical background has no other application so far, it is interesting for its own sake and perhaps from a philosophical point of view.
My approach to the formalism might be more accessible to some people and make them give a better understanding of what they are doing when applying the formalism and related methods.

As these points are rather opinion-based, I do not intend to elaborate on them in the paper – at most I might shortly mention the didactical aspects in the conclusion.
(I mainly mentioned them here to give you some idea what I am talking about.)
However, I do want to briefly mention in the abstract or the introduction that I “rigorified” the formalism, where briefly can be anything between one word and two sentences.
For example, my abstract could look like:

[Old paper] introduced [old concept], which is useful for [application].
  We extend this concept to [new concept] and also rigorify its mathematical background.

My problem is that rigorify its mathematical background is far from what I actually want to say.
I am therefore looking for a way to say this without seeming arrogant or condescending on the old paper and in particular without implying that the old paper “did not do its mathematics properly”.
I intentionally do not give my best solutions for now, as I do not want to induce any bias on them, in case I may underestimate them.
I am also torn between Academia and English Language & Usage for posting this question.

The word "physical" can be useful in situations like this (if the other paper was written by physicists).  E.g. "this was done at a physical level of rigor by..."

@NoahSnyder: This is exactly the kind of tone, I want to avoid. And that’s not even taking into account that I am a phyisicist and I am intending to submit the paper to a physics journal.

@Wrzlprmft: The fact that you are a physicist might be relevant information for the question.  Also, if what you are adding is mostly mathematics, have you considered submitting to a math journal instead?  (Or perhaps an interdisciplinary journal?)

For inspiration, here's an example of an existing paper that does something similar: http://synapse.cs.byu.edu/~dan/673/papers/wiggins.pdf . Quote: "I will attempt to make Boden’s descriptive hierarchy more precise. In doing so, I will suggest some additions to the theory, which may or may not be implicit in Boden’s account and show how some of the distinctions over which she has been challenged may perhaps be supported. The formalisation will also make it possible to identify desirable and undesirable properties of creative systems in abstract terms."

I like Kaj_Sotala's comment. You can also add "tongue in cheek" remarks like, "At one level, my contribution can be seen as a mathematical paraphrase of the path-breaking intuitions of so and so; at another level, I like to think that I have built a small bridge to connect two distinct fields of inquiry" or something like that, make a joke about your ambition, to cancel out the possible perception that you're overstretching the importance of your contribution. Maybe.

@PeteL.Clark: I added theis information to the question. I have considered interdisciplinary journals, but my work does either not fit their scope or the journal’s level is far too high.

Something along the lines of "We provide a rigorous underpinning" should be fine. Avoid "rigorify": as far as I can see, it's not a word.  (The only definitions I can find are at urbandictionary, which is completely unreliable.)

It sounds to me like you are viewing the older paper through the lens of the type of paper you would have written in the first place and are finding it wanting.  It also sounds like you are viewing your own work as "fixing the flaws" of the older paper, almost as if you want to replace the older paper in your mind with your paper and pretend it had been written that way all along.  More quantitatively you have your eye on the mark that the older paper should have hit, you are filling in the gap between the actual old paper and your eyeballed mark, and since you are measuring from the eyeballed mark you are giving the difference a minus sign.  This framing seems to be behind most of your problems.  Try recasting the entire thing more positively in your own mind.
1) Someone else published an inspirational paper way back when.  This paper introduced some formalism and concentrated on its application to a physical problem.
2) Your paper gives much deeper attention to the mathematical aspects of the formalism, while also extending the formalism.  Since 1) showed that the formalism is interesting and useful, your work has evident value.
There are no "minus signs" in the above description: 1) + 2) = your eyeball mark.
Unless there are actual mathematical errors in the older paper, you don't need to say that you are fixing or "rigorifying" (not really a word, by the way) the older paper.  By the way, I don't know whether you've heard my rant about this use of the word "rigor" in mathematics and its applications.  As an adult mathematician I have become increasingly skeptical of mathematical "rigor": the other paper either made mistakes (which you will need to correct), made claims which were unjustified or insufficiently justified (in which case you make clear that what you are contributing is the justification and not the claims themselves) or they weren't doing mathematics at all (which is fine: that's what you're adding).  Adding rigor must mean one of the things above, right?  It is not some generic ingredient that you can sprinkle more or less liberally over a piece of "unrigorous mathematics" and make it rigorous.
In summary: unless there are some clear mistakes, you don't need to bill your work as fixing their mathematics.  You can bill it either as adding the math or adding more math.  Both of these are good things added to other good things: no problem.

Large parts of this answer capture my motivation for this asking my question really well: Adding more math is exactly what I consider myself to do, but I lack a word or phrase to describe it that does not sound like I am fixing some shortcoming of the old paper. I like your formulation “giving deeper attention to the mathematical aspects of the formalism“, which is at the very least a good starting point. — I also share your dislike of the word rigor, which is why I put in in quotation marks (except one omission).

How about something like this:

WeakMath et al [foo] introduced a formalism for the problem we study. Their framework conveys valuable intuition* about [the problem] but is not precise enough for further development of the mathematical structures introduced. In this work, we elaborate on their ideas, placing them in a formal mathematical [something] that allows us to [do awesome things]

* if it does
You get the general idea: give them credit for intuiting the right ideas which will lessen the blow when you drop the hammer on them :)

So far as I can see this may still be unnecessarily negative.  The formalism of the older paper was precise enough for whatever their purpose was.  The OP is adding new mathematical structure on something that has proven to have important applications.  Adding to someone else's work is not a critique, is it?

It's possible. Hard to say without details. I've certainly been in a position where the prior work was NOT precise enough, because the paper somehow escaped reviewer attention and was intuitive. In such a case, I'd like to point out that my formalism adds a nonzero amount of value.

In addition to Pete L. Clark’s comment, my “added mathematics” do not allow for anything new so far.

You are taking a problem from another paper and providing additional perspective which will allow future research to solve or add to solving the problem.  This does not make the original paper any less worthy.
To get into the mindset for writing in a non-dismissive fashion, you might adopt the following scenario: "Their paper is the greatest thing since sliced bread!  My model and formalization will allow others to handle this and similar problems with a more formal perspective. How can it possibly be any more win-win?" .  This may exaggerate the current situation, but it is not a lie when framed properly.  With such an attitude, you can write glowingly about the inspiration provided by their paper, and the anticipated benefits your perspective and formalization will give.  I don't see any need to "drop a hammer" on anyone.
Putting myself in such a mindset, and making things general, I come up with:
"We take inspiration from Their paper [1], and provide additional mathematical perspective.
Our model of the problem reflects the intuition in Their paper, and has among its benefits a framework which we feel can be carried to other situations.  In particular, we believe it furthers formal and rigorous treatment of the problem."
Take reasonable precautions: whatever you write, have your mentor or colleagues review it.  If someone in your department who is politically adept approves, you can try sending an advance copy to the authors of the inspiring article, to see what suggestions they may provide.  DO NOT send them a copy without such outside wisdom and approval.

I like “provide additional mathematical perspective”. “we believe it furthers formal and rigorous treatment of the problem” does not really apply however and also sounds as if I was claiming that the treatment in the old paper lacked something (formality and rigor), which is what I want to avoid.

@Wrzlprmft, it may sound that way to you, and of course you have to be satisfied with your choice of words.  I used "further" in an additive sense, not to claim the original paper lacked any, but that you found more to add.  In any case, I hope you find something that works for you.

Also, you may find English Language Usage.SE helpful in this regard.  I don't know if the question is on topic, but the folks there may have useful opinions on the tone of a particular paragraph.

In this paper, we re-examine the results of [OriginalReference], extending its ideas to [X and Y and Z], providing a new approach via [method] to the original which may better illuminate [aspect W].

Essentially, "okay, the original work was pretty cool but we can do more with it, so we're going to run with that to get to this new stuff, specifically by doing this thing here because it makes a point or points more accessible and obvious".

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text:
Can a professor / institution drop absent/non-contributing students from a course (any known precedent)?
In the scope of undergraduate college courses, is there any known precedent of being able to drop students from the course due to excessive absences without reason, lack of any real contribution, or little to no performance?
For example, something like:

Notice: given your grade of 35% you are at risk of being dropped from the course, you have 2 weeks to make a passing grade.

In the US this is a local question dependent on university rules. I doubt that it is commonly permitted, but you have to ask locally. Other places there might be national rules that apply.

"Poor performance" and "disruption" are different things. I had a colleague with a student who got quite threatening and scary. That is different than dropping someone for failing.

How would one know, a priori, who is 'highly interested' and will remain 'highly interested' once in the course? "Sounds cool! Wait, I have to do hard work???"

As noted above, I think this question should be split in two. Poor performance and disruption are different and should get different answers.

In this case I think I intended "poor perf & disruptive", last year had a low perf student drag class culture down. In theory it seems more quantifiable to drop a stop for a quantitative grade rather than "disruptive". I'll rescope it there.

I’m voting to close this question because is offensive in equiparating poor-performing students to disruptive of the class. This is a dictorial-style thinking

@EarlGrey looks like that remark was added by another editor, I have removed it

Actually, I copied-and-pasted that remark from your comment above. As it is, your question is very vague and has attracted several close votes; so, I suggest you add some rationale about why you would like to drop the poorly-performing students.

Yeah we need to close this... others are trying to fix the question and are just making it worse. I'm voting to close my own question :D

It's not unusual for students to be required to attend class during the first week and to be administratively dropped if they don't but I think you're talking about something less clear cut than that.
In my experience, I've taught for schools with the following policies that I think address what you're asking:

Students who are inactive for two weeks are administratively dropped regardless of their grade.
Students who are inactive and can no longer numerically pass the class are dropped.
Students who have a grade below passing at a fixed point in introductory math and English classes are dropped.

It's worth noting that a good search term for this policy is "administrative withdrawal," which is a process found in many university handbooks, at least in the US.

But those aren't "faculty decision" rules. And they are clearly spelled out to students in advance.

Your example simply won't work in many US institutions.  There are too many ramifications for the student (e.g., failure to reach full time student status, tuition dollars already paid,...)
The time to address this is before students enroll, by being very specific about prereq work.  The catch-all would be "instructor permission required" as a prerequisite.
For the example you describe, the correct course of action is to let the student know they're at risk of failing the course... period. This lets the student determine if there is a mechanism to safely dropping the course.  If the student doesn't drop, and does not merit a passing grade, at the end of the semester, you simply issue a failing grade.
As an aside, if you're providing adequate feedback as the course progresses, the student should be aware that they're at risk of failing without such a notice.

I don't see prerequisites mentioned in the question; I don't think it is fair to assume that the cause of the students' performance is due to lacking prior foundational instruction based on the information provided, nor is it clear that anything could have necessarily been predicted ahead of time about the student's performance, the question is about whether this is an option once the student is present in the class and does not seem likely to be able to achieve a passing grade.

@BryanKrause  The original question asked about advice to make sure only appropriate students enrolled in the class, and this was partially responsive to that.

Most often this is done via prerequisites being enforced.  Generally, in such a course you will need to have received at least a "C" in the prerequisite classes or you will not be allowed to register for such a course or you will be de-registered before the term start (in the case where you enroll in the next course in a sequence in consecutive semesters).
Generally it would be unethical for a professor at a university to outright drop you from a course.  However, you can ask them advice based on your background and they can give feedback as to whether their course might be appropriate given your background.  In institutions like mine where classes can be as big as 200+ students it is almost a given that at least 1 student will fail the class, so professors and instructors generally are not as worried about this.

I don't see prerequisites mentioned in the question; I don't think it is fair to assume that the cause of the students' performance is due to lacking prior foundational instruction based on the information provided.

I'm saying that from my experience, this is the only way where students can be dropped from a course other than them doing so on their own.  Instructors may be allowed to waive prerequisites and allow a student entry into their class but institutions and departments have set rules on what instructors are allowed to do so it depends on such factors.

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Isn't ghostwriting reverse-plagiarism?
Ghostwriting is when an author writes a work and attributes it to someone else.
Isn't this reverse-plagiarism (someone taking credit for someone else's work, but with permission)?  I'm not sure it happens in academia a lot, but I've seen instances where a professor "ghostwrites" course notes for another professor.  Actually those notes are really bad and it seems like he doesn't want to take the hit of delivering the course himself.  Instead he ghostwrites it for other people.  It seems wrong to me.

Unattributed work in academia is generally considered unethical. In my own experience, however, I believe that I've come across very few instances of actual ghostwriting where the real author was unnamed. Normally, at least some acknowledgment is called for, either in an editor's note or introduction.
Now, to answer Mankoff's comeent below, by "unattributed work," it can be okay for authors to choose to remain anonymous, if they feel it is in their best interests to do so. However, to take someone else's work and to pass it off as their own is clearly unethical behavior. However, from an ethics standpoint, even if the ghost author is asked about attribution and declines, the "named" author should not attempt to claim sole credit for the work. Instead, the author should make some sort of reference to those who assisted in the preparation of the manuscript. Otherwise, they're passing off someone else's work as their own.

I wonder: it is ethical (though probably not very common) to pay for proofreading or translation services, or to pay for someone to make graphs, figures or other visualization work for you… what is fundamentally different about writing that it wouldn't be ethical to hire someone to write papers for you? (I mean, just the writing part, based on a draft of your results and discussions, or something like that) Where is the limit?

There are many anonymous academic publications. See, for example, "author:anonymous" search on Google Scholar http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=author%3Aanonymous

@mankoff That search returns mostly results on rsc.org that correspond to editorials of journals of the Royal Society of Chemistry… even though they don't have the metadata properly given in the HTML, you can look at the PDF and the articles are signed by their authors

@F'x you are right. However, I do know of some famous highly-cited anonymous publications. I cannot find them in my reference library at the moment. Regardless, your edit clarifies your stance on this.

In general, I would say that ghost writing does not constitute plagiarism and using one is not an academically dishonest. A scientific writer who is not an expert in a particular field can convert research notes into a manuscript. These words are not the contribution to the field, but rather the research they encompass. While converting the notes to prose could be viewed as worthy of authorship, I think it is also reasonable to say that it is not. If the writer and the researcher agree that the writers assistance is not worthy of authorship, then there is no problem.
While I do not use a ghost writer, I see this as no different then employing a programmer to write code to control my experiment, an RA to collect the data from the experiment, a graphic designer to create the figures, and a statistician to run the statistics, all of which I do do to varying degrees. To me the contribution is the design of the experiment and the analysis and interpretation of the results. I acknowledge these individuals to varying degrees in the manuscripts, but rarely give authorship.
The ICMJE guidelines for authorship are

Authorship credit should be based on 1) substantial contributions to conception and design, acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; 2) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and 3) final approval of the version to be published. Authors should meet conditions 1, 2, and 3.

A ghost writer does not meet conditions 1 or 3.

If an unlisted person is responsible for the production of the actual text of the final publication, then they have a right to be an author. An author could choose to give up this claim willingly, but I don't see a real advantage for the "true" author to do so that doesn't create an ethics issue somewhere along the way.

@aeismail I disagree, I added a link to the ICMJE guidelines which make it clear, in my opinion, that a ghost writer should not be an author.

@aeismail The job done by a hired person is more or less that of a transcript writer; like in medical or legal transcriptions. But to the question OP is asking, the answer is; It is unethical in the part of the professor who actually uses these course notes without sufficient attribution (as long as he/she is not hiring the other professor to prepare the notes).

If you have hired somebody to write a paper for you, then that fact needs to be acknowledged in some manner. Failure to do so—even as an acknowledgment—is still unethical behavior, because you are presenting someone else's work as your own!

Frankly, if the ghost writer has done their job, the author of the study may not meet condition 2. I look forward to an era of authorless papers.

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New proposed theory is the same I asked in this network some years ago
Imagine that I make a post in which I propose a new theory or idea, but I don't write any paper about it.
Then, some years later, a researcher independently and completely unaware of my post, proposes the same theory/idea in a peer-reviewed paper.
In what circumstances could I claim co-authorship of that theory/idea and how could I handle that?
EDIT: As suggested, I rephrased this question. I kept the original question below, for future reference. The context of how this question arose was maybe idiotic, and that was making the answers to drift away from a general view of the problem. As I said in the comments, I was not realistically considering to claim any authorship for the idea or act on it in any way - it is a genuine curiosity of how things could be handled in a generic way. At least, I'm glad to see that this community can engage in a controversial question like this without being disrespectful (no sarcasm).
Some years ago I made this question which was closed soon after.
I was basically suggesting that sleeping could be an evolution advantage as they allow dreams to happen, which in turn allow you to simulate different situations in a safe environment, thus being more well prepared to react in new situations in real life.
Recently, a researcher proposed the same (similar?) idea.
Now, I honestly don't think he stole the idea from my post. It's perfectly reasonable that someone in this field could come to the same hypothesis.
However, I am creature with an ego bigger than one could consider healthy, and this feeling of "I also had that idea before, and I think I deserve some acknowledgment for that" is lurking on the back of my head. I'm sure that with it will go away, but what I would like to ask here is: do I have any reason/right to claim co-authorship of such theory?
I know that history of science has many cases of independent researchers doing the same discover, and I'm sure all around the world there are people who already experienced this "ah! but I had that idea before!".
So, even though this really doesn't matter and it's just food to the ego, I am curious to know how this type of situations can be handled.

I hate to say it, but it isn't like many of us have not had that idea in the past. And, like you, did nothing in particular about it.

Yeah, it's not a particularly novel idea

Recall that ideas are worth a dime a dozen: researchers have all plenty of ideas. The difference is made by those who fully develop the ideas.

I think the recent paper/proposal/idea is based on new and recent information about how the brain works. Especially the speed with which parts of the brain can be  "repurposed". Not my field, but I think that is new.

I work in neuroscience, specifically in the area of consciousness and anesthesia which relates a lot to sleep. This is a really old idea, not novel at all. I knew Erik when he was a grad student. I don't have access to the full article, but I suspect the novel contribution he's suggesting is a specific mathematical approach to this particular hypothesis. He's not suggesting he's first to the generic idea.

I would consider generalizing this, as Massimo suggested. The answer here seems to be a trivial no, because your idea is not novel/specific enough. But if you generalized to consider, say, a proof on MathOverflow that was later presented in a publication, the question might be more interesting.

@MassimoOrtolano "Ideas are a dime a dozen." - this sounds plausible, but is so often untrue, that it's practically vacuous. There are some ideas that are not worth much unless they come with an implementation, these are ideas easily imagined, but hard to realize at first (flying, remote control, etc.); but there are ideas which are really hard to see ahead of time. Relativity, integration, public keys, quantum mechanics, paperclip; yes, once seen, they cannot be unseen and are retroactively obvious. But it does not render them cheap ideas.

@BryanKrause, if you are interested the (pre-print of the) paper in question is here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.09560, specifically it appears to suggest that dreams are a biological equivalent of human methods to counteract over-fitting in machine learning by adding noise to your inputs. Based on the intro the novel idea is the analogy to an approach in AI, and he claims there are some testable predictions you can make from this idea.

@NAMcMahon Thanks, that's something like what I expected. To OP, if you read this you'll see he's making a specific prediction not related to what was previously posted on SE.

@BryanKrause, I've added a new answer with the link and a comment on the differences, so the OP should see it

Thank you for your comment @BryanKrause. I'm really sorry that the way I wrote the question was interpreted as I would seriously considering acting on it. I didn't know that this was an old idea (my original post of some years ago was actually to question if this had been proposed by anyone). This situation just triggered me into thinking what could happen in a situation like this, if I really wanted to act on it and if the idea was really original. Clearly my example was a terrible one, but I hope now, that I rephrased the question, this can get a different type of attention.

A question based on a vague idea is not "a theory" in the scientific sense.

No, you have no reason/right to claim co-authorship, or I believe any acknowledgement at all.
For those curious about the paper a preprint is here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.09560
I have skimmed through the paper and have some background in AI, but even ignoring the fact that the topic of the paper is different to what you wrote about, what you have linked to is no more then a random thought. Any contributions from you can be summed up in the following hypothesis:

Dreaming can be a significant advantage since it allows you to experience a virtual world, simulated situations and reactions, without taking any risks. In this way specimens who could dream were better prepared to face new situations and how to react.

This statement is very vague and doesn't actually specify anything. How are dreams simulating a virtual world? Why are dreams better than being able to run simulations while awake? How does the specimen decide upon which simulations to run? Possibly a good starting point to develop a more specific research question but not a research question by itself. The statement was also after you asking if anyone else had ever looked at this kind of idea.
Even if the author had read your statement and that had inspired him to start thinking more about the subject I don't believe there would be any ethical issues by not referencing you since the statement above feels lacking in substance to me (just like you wouldn't reference a handwaved/madeup science fact from some sci-fi book if it had inspired you to look into a topic).
Now considering the actual paper, and based on my skim of the paper a few months ago, the topic is actually different to what you suggested. The paper proposes that dreaming solves the problem of over-fitting. This occurs in reinforcement learning (AI) where the algorithm is trained on a data-set and can perform very well on classifying/responding to that data-set, but when input that it wasn't trained on comes in the algorithm does something stupid.
So instead of simulating the situations and reactions that the creature may run into, the paper suggests that dreams are the result of training yourself from your daily experiences, but with added random noise to the input training set (your daily observations). This means that you won't assume that everything will occur exactly the same as what you observed today, and that will be beneficial. Specifically it balances against the innumerable number of variables that you couldn't have been aware of which impacted your daily experience.

Posting an idea on stackexchange does not count as prior publication when thinking about coauthorship or some other way to establish priority. The scientist in the post you link to seems to have done some actual work on the hypothesis in question. I don't think what you have done amounts to "discovery" or calls for any acknowledgment.
In your situation I might consider a polite email to the author, saying that you had a similar idea several years ago. If you actually followed up on your idea you might try to engage with them to see if your thoughts ran along similar lines. Your goal should be to advance the science, not to get some credit.

Next week on Academia.SE: "I published a paper, and now someone has emailed me claiming they had a similar idea and posted it on a now-deleted website... how am I supposed to respond?"

I mean, you're right of course. I was not realistically expecting to get credit for this and  I understand that the author did some work based on AI. But again, imagine that I'm fully driven by ego (not the case)... I am curious to know in what situation could I demand co-authorship for a theory.

@avid ahah! it won't happen because of me I assure you :)

I can imagine a situation where you could expect (not demand) co-authorship. This isn't one. In any such situation the actual chain of events, not your ego, should determine what happens.

"Posting an idea on stackexchange does not count as prior publication": I severely disagree - in the sense where "publication" means "claiming priority" (which I assume it does). There is no "rule" what establishes priority on an idea, it can be a published paper, a preprint (which in the past also did not count), a talk, or a SE post.  Sometimes even just the knowlegde in the community that someone found a result (and how) is sufficient reason to establish priority.

@avid This is nonsense. A traceable and timestamped post and a unfounded claim of priority are in no way the same.  Next, only publications in ISI-indexed journals will count.

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Is it reasonable to cite published computational results rather than reproduce them yourself?
In computer science, when we write an academic paper, we often have to include comparative results that our method has some kind of quantitative advantage against some other state of the art results.
While it is sometimes easy to reproduce a cited paper's results (e.g., classification of small datasets), other times it is very time consuming and you could spent the better part of your research time just writing code testing the other methods.
However, it sometimes happens that when we reproduce the method, we do not get the presented results. So it can be tricky to do that as well.

Is it reasonable just to cite another paper's results at face value?
What suggestions would you give to this conundrum?

I treat computational results as in silico experiments. They have been published in a peer-reviewed journal, so I trust them by default, unless I have a reason not to. I cite them without a need to recompute them.
Sometimes, I have a reason to doubt them: they don't match my intuition, or they don't match my own results in a related case; they seem incoherent; they don't match experimental data; etc. Then, I redo them, possibly in more than one way (different software, try checking the effect of some of the assumptions, etc.). If I learn something from it, I consider publishing this study.

Well, if you need to compare performance of your algorithm to the performance of the cited algorithm, the only fair way to do it is to run both experiments on the same system under controlled and as similar conditions as possible.

@walkmanyi yes, indeed. But the question was not about algorithm timing the computational results.

our method has some kind of quantitative advantage against some other. My understanding is that the question does indeed cover performance results, those are the quantitative advantages.

My most-cited work arose because we couldn't reproduce an earlier published paper in the field. We did a much more extensive study, and demonstrated conclusively why the previous results were unreliable.
So, while you don't need to reproduce every single result that has previously been published, it can serve a useful purpose to try to reproduce at least some of those results—because then you can be sure that your model is working the way you would expect it to (provided the previous data can be trusted; as my case showed, this isn't always the case!).

Is it reasonable just to cite another paper's results at face value?

In my opinion, there are only few limited cases where this would be acceptable. For example, when comparing industrial-scale systems, or comparison of qualitative features of the works. Also in the case there exist an established set of benchmarks and your algorithm can solve some of those the other can't, you do not really need to reimplement. Possibly also when testing the algorithm cannot be done in a reproducible manner (industrial-scale field tests). When it comes to experimental efficiency, however, I think you usually do not have much choice and should reproduce the others results - if possible at all.

What suggestions would you give to this conundrum?

Depends on what you need the cited work for. In the case you developed an algorithm which is supposed to be more efficient than the cited one, to prove your point you need a controlled experiment when both methods are run under same conditions (e.g., implemented in the same programming language, and run on the same system etc.) and with the same set of benchmarks. In such a case, if you want to demonstrate your point properly, your best is to reimplement (or ask the authors for their implementation and adapt it to your conditions) and run head-to-head. Otherwise your performance curves are going to be incomparable. For good examples of how to do this, see for example comparisons/evaluations of experimental performance of planning algorithms, or SAT solvers.


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How should use of a preprint server be incorporated into the publishing workflow?
I am a biologist and very recently there has been a movement to increase the use of preprints in publishing biological research.  This has generated a lot of discussion about preprints and their merits and has spawned a few servers (e.g., bioRxiv) but I have not gotten a good sense of how I should incorporate the preprint server into my normal publishing workflow.

What specifically is not clear to you?  What options have you considered?  What considerations are/aren't important to you?  Why do you want to use a preprint server?  What are your goals, specifically?  This question is subjective, unclear, open-ended, and does not show much evidence of effort to articulate a well-posed question, so it might not be an ideal fit for this site.

Why close votes? There are so many question on Academia.SE which are very specific (page-long description of one's situation), very broad or in general "give me a life advice" that don't get down votes. This one is short, clear, important and re-usable.

Workflow may be different, but the one I am familiar with is:

put preprint on arXiv along with sending it to a journal
after the final version is confirmed, update the arXiv with the newest version of text (with your formatting)
(in case there are serious mistakes or omissions, update arXiv at anytime)

Sometimes version on arXiv is put before the submission to a journal, for example:

there is some work that need to be done before the submission, but we want to have it before a conference we are attending, or a talk at another department (so we can point the preprint to the reader),
we haven't decided yet where or if we want to send it.

And in some cases, arXiv is used instead of a journal, especially if:

the work is not suitable for publication in a journal (e.g. a PhD Thesis, textbook), but we want to disseminate it, preserve it and make it easily citable,
the author prefers it that way (e.g. it is a short note, or the topic is unconventional and the author prefers to avoid struggling with editors).

The role that pre-prints have in the collective workflow of people in a field depends half on each person's preferences and half on how it gets established as a means of communications. There are no 'right' or 'wrong' workflows for using a pre-print server (though there are wrong ways to use one), and you should use the one that fits you best personally and lets you communicate best with your colleagues.
There is a broad spectrum of reasons you might want to upload a preprint, which are explained in detail in this question. To give a brief summary, you might upload a preprint or postprint

to provide free access to your content to researchers and students in institutions without subscription to the journals you publish in, which is also a way
to help increase the use of your papers by the community, and hence the number of citations;
to establish priority of a result, and particularly as a way to get more widespread credit for having introduced an idea at an early stage;
to open a manuscript up for public comment from your colleagues after you feel it's mostly ready but before you're prepared to set it in (published) stone;
to make it visible to people who browse it often as a way to see new results;
to cite as-yet-unpublished work in some other paper, in a way that referees of the second one can see it;
to fulfil open-access conditions on a grant;

or for many other reasons. Whether these (or others) apply to you will determine how you use the repository. Some of these are personal choices, and may come down to how much you feel you stand to gain from non-institutional readers having access to your work. Some of these are field-dependent, and hinge on there being a significant fraction of the workers in your field that regularly check the repository.
The appropriate time to upload will typically vary on a case-by-case basis. You might upload at an almost-finished stage, at the time of submission to a journal, at time of acceptance, at the time the paper is published, or even six to twelve months after that. Each of these corresponds to some or other of the motivations above.
One thing that's important to keep in mind is that you must have a good idea of prospective journals you'd like to publish in, and of what their preprint policies are, before you upload, as it can rule out certain publication venues if you're not careful. This is again field-dependent; many physics journals take that as standard but biology ones might not.

I'm compelled to add an answer to this question from the biologist's point of view. arXiv and bioRxiv are extremely important in the field (both wet-lab biology and dry-lab bioinformatics/computational biology) for 3 reasons:

Getting your work out there ASAP (since peer-review can, and often will, take over a year).  As such, if another paper gets published that's very similar to yours in study design, methods, and research, then you have the benefit of the timestamp of arXiv/bioRxiv submission and can claim precedence.  Which brings me to the next point:
From personal experience, I've been in situations where my work was in the middle of peer-review but someone publishes a related paper (in the same subspecialty as me) in an Advanced Access issue of a peer-reviewed journal (e.g., Bioinformatics, Nucleic Acids Research, etc).  Their paper did not include a citation to my bioRxiv work, so I emailed the editor of the respective journal drawing attention to my preprint and timestamp.  The editor sent my query to the authors and all agreed to cite my bioRxiv work in the next edition of the paper (which came out the next month).  If I had not posted my preprint to bioRxiv 6 months beforehand, the situation would have been very different.  Once my paper got accepted, the bioRxiv citation transferred automatically to the journal article.  Hence, I did not lose a citation needlessly.
arXiv/bioRxiv is indispensable if you feel that giving away your work to peer-review might open you up to the "non-public domain", which is slang in our community meaning "opening yourself up to getting scooped."  This is important if you're publishing in a very hot, fast-moving field and/or there is academic funding/grants at stake (think study section at major organizations).  There are many reasons (not all of them noble) for why people volunteer their time to journal editorial boards and/or grant review panels.  I'll leave it at that.


text:
How do advisors typically apply pressure on PhD students to get work done?
I tend to get much work done when some external force (a teacher) applies pressure. Skills such as speed reading and rapid writing come to me only while working under pressure. Also, sometimes the best solutions only come to me immediately before deadlines. I am interested in starting a PhD, but nervous that there will be long stretches where I will not have to submit progress or there might not be much pressure for me to get work done.
Do students working towards a PhD thesis typically face frequent deadlines and pressure in the form of specific targets? How do advisors typically apply pressure to their PhD students?

I feel that there is no single good answer to this. Many advisors don't apply any pressure at all (this can happen when the buy-in for the advisor is too low). Those that do, do so in various forms.

@xLeitix definitively. Anyway, you have many different flavors of pressure, if you are worried only about the lack of pressure then you can set deadlines for yourself, either for whole papers or parts of them. Sure, you mentioned an "external force", but you can take the PhD as an opportunity to learn many skills, including being self-driven, which is only going to be good in the long term.

Some supervisors don't.  Some do it well.  Some do it badly.  You'll need to take particular care in who you work with if this is a major issue for you.

Enthusiasm is an important factor in research, if you are not eager to pursue research without external pressure, you might not enjoy the sort careers for which a PhD is a requirement.  As a researcher you need to be self-motivated.  A PhD is three years of study, and you might want to consider whether it is something you really want to do.

When I was a postgraduate research student (MPhil) I had weekly one2ones with my supervisor where we'd review what I'd done and what i was going to do in the coming week. He did the same for all his PhD students and this meant we all had some regular pressure applied to us. Some students tend to drift a little when their supervisors are absent for weeks and months but under this regime it was impossible. If i ever undertake a PhD i'm going to insist on weekly meetings with my supervisor.

I am interested in starting a PhD, but nervous that there will be long stretches where I will not have to submit progress or there might not be much pressure for me to get work done.

Congratulations for having identified one of the major differences between research projects on the PhD level and earlier levels even before starting a PhD! In my opinion, dealing with problems on your own and without real pressure for weeks ore maybe even months is really a characteristic feature of PhD research. One of the competences which you should acquire before the PhD degree is to go through such phases successfully.
That said, there's of course different types of support (or pressure, if you prefer to call it so) from your supervisor and your fellow researchers, mostly your supervisor's group or collaboration partners.

Your supervisor may ask you or suggest to submit a paper to a specific conference, which has a submission deadline.
You may be involved in a collaboration project, where regular meetings with project partners take place, and a presentation of the latest results will be expected.
A third-party funded project may require regular reports on research results, which you may be asked to provide if you work on that project or a related topic.
Many groups have regular meetings where people discuss their latest research results. You'll be expected to contribute some results of yours from time to time.

But of course, how much pressure is built up by such expectations varies from place to place.
Also, a difference to undergraduate research or coursework is that consequences usually do not come immediately if you fail to "deliver", but will only be visible on the long run, over the course of one or two years maybe.
Generally, I'd say that a young supervisor with a growing group will put more pressure on you to deliver research results than a more established researcher with a large group, because the young supervisor depends more on your results for his own progress, and should have more time to work with you closely.
Also, the group you're involved in matters a lot, because discussion with colleagues stimulates research ideas, and also puts you into a mode of "having to deliver something". Check a potential group for jointly authored publications (not only PhD student + supervisor) to get a feeling for how active it is in terms of collaboration. The latter point is especially important for a large group with an established senior supervisor.

I was wrong. This is in fact a great answer.

I'd say that a young supervisor with a growing group will put more pressure on you to deliver research results than a more established researcher with a large group — And what about young professors with large groups, or established professors with small groups?  (I know the former, and I am the latter.)

I agree, many undergrads and failed PhD students need somebody directing them towards solving the problem, including providing the pressure to do so. Finding self-motivation and self-pressure is a key point to develop independent research skills. One must be careful though as too much self-pressure during a PhD easily leads to burnout.

@JeffE I'm not sure I can provide better advice than "it depends" here. Many established professors with small groups work very intensively with their few students, providing an excellent research environment, but I also now persons at this stage who don't even care to recruit students, much less working closely with them.

In my opinion, the most important thing that one should learn during the course of a Ph.D. and postdoc is how to be an independent researcher, directing one's own line of research.  Part of that is learning how to acquire your own motivators.  If you need external motivators, the academic world is full of deadlines that you can apply to yourself: conference deadlines, journal revision deadlines, project review deadlines, grant application deadlines, collaborators who need you to hold up your end of a bargain.
If you find a framework of deadlines is important for you, you should be able to arrange for weekly meetings with your advisor, which can provide a running set of deadlines for you to target.  Early on in your program, much of the goal-setting is likely to come from your advisor.  Later, as you mature as a researcher, hopefully it will shift to be more coming from you.  Depending on your field, your advisor, and your personality, that may come sooner or it may come later (which is why I included postdoc above).
At the same time, I will warn you that deadlines and short-term goals are a good way to avoid one of the hardest things about research: finding the perspective to step back, take a look at the bigger picture, and figure out what is actually important to do. At one point in my Ph.D., my advisor told me that now was the time that I needed to just go sit under a tree and think for a while.  He was right, and I didn't like what I found when I stopped doing and thought seriously about how those things related to my actual dissertation goals.
It's entirely possible to do a Ph.D. and postdoc in an entirely project-focused and deadline-driven way, while never developing as an independent researcher, but instead becoming sort of a "super technician."  In fact, pressure from grants provides incentives for professors to push their students to do so, creating deliverables rather than learning to self-direct.  You can have an excellent career in industry or a non-PI position in academia on the basis of such work, and that's fine.  If you want to be an independent investigator leading your own line of research, however, then at some point across Ph.D. and postdoc, you will need to learn how to handle the dreadful freedom of managing your own time and expectations.

+1 for "short term goals are a good way to avoid ..... looking at the big picture.." There is a time to focus on tangible short goals driven by deadlines and there is a time to step back and take a long view of things. The hard part is to know when to do what because sometimes sitting under a tree is the best way to avoid getting anything done.

I would offer two suggestions.
First, the structure of the relationship between a grad student and their advisor is partly dependent on their individual styles, but is largely what they make it.  So don't expect that your advisor would automatically set deadlines, targets, etc (some might and some might not), but if that is something that would be helpful to you, ask your advisor to help you by doing it.  You could arrange a system where at each meeting, the two of you agree on what you will have finished by the next meeting (or by intermediate deadlines in between if needed).  You might find it helpful to describe it as "accountability" rather than "pressure".
More broadly, I completely understand your tendency to "work best under pressure" (I sometimes feel the same myself), but I would suggest that ultimately, rather than relying on people around you to impose that pressure, you might consider working on changing that aspect of yourself.  In my own experience, I found that saying "I work best under pressure" turned into "I only work when there is pressure, and until then I procrastinate." (Sometimes this is due to the work being consciously or subconsciously stressful; perhaps paying attention to a project brings up the fear that maybe I'm doing it all wrong, I must be an idiot, I'll never graduate, etc.  So it's easiest to avoid these thoughts by avoiding the work until it can't be avoided any longer.)
The work got done in the end, but it wasn't my best work: it was last-minute and only marginally acceptable, and had I started earlier I could have produced something better.    It's not easy to change one's own habits and thought patterns if they are ingrained, but it's something that can really be a long-term benefit.

For your coursework, if any, you will face the same sort of deadlines you'd find in any college course.  Expect little or no slack on late or sloppy work, though.  In one of my courses, grades were 100% or zero.  For the dissertation, it will depend on your supervisor.  Mine required biweekly reports.  When you get near the dissertation stage, ask potential supervisors or committee chairs how they do that.

In many places, PhD studies do not include coursework.

@CapeCode: Thanks.  (My experience is a sample of one.)  I'll adjust the answer.

There is no unique answer for this question of course. So I would like to add also my view:
Some supervisors "apply pressure", by being very passive and not setting any deadlines at all, but giving students a lot of self-responsibility. For some people there is no greater pressure then the pressure they set themselves. So the idea is they are learning you to create your own pressure.
It is kind of in the same way as the most horrible teacher, can in the end be the best teacher. Because in case you didn't understand anything of his/her horrible explanation, you had to figure it out yourself, and after you did, you never forget it. Whereas the good flowed story of the great professor, saved you a lot of time, and boosted fast understanding but might have hindered you to question important assumptions, or to study fundamental aspects firmly.
If supervisors help you by setting a lot of deadlines, chopping up the work in small pieces, and specifying the targets, it may help you, but also it could hinder independence. This is why I think its very difficult to compare PhD's because even of 2 people would have done the same work, but under completely different supervision, and resources, the grade or rating, should be different.
My recommendation is that you tell him, how you liked to be supervised. In my case I would have asked for a gradual transition from very structured with deadlines in the first year, to complete freedom in the last year.

Don't bother. You will be wasting your time and others, and possible stopping someone more deserving from the getting opportunity of a lifetime. I expect someone with or aiming for a PhD to be telling me what needs to be done, not expecting me to tell them.
The whole point of having a higher level certificate is not to prove that you can be taught, it is to prove that you can learn and you can work. As an employer, I want someone that I can present with a problem and get back a solution. If I have to stand over your shoulder asking "have you done it yet?" then you wont enjoy my company, and I certainly wont enjoy yours.
---- edit to address some of the comments below ----
I was being deliberately harsh but not (intentionally) insulting, I apologise for any offence taken. I did not criticise the OP for his or her self-organisation, only their self motivation, and it is this I am hoping they will re-evaluate. In academia, as in commerce, it is expected that a junior will have to be told what to do, and that a senior will already know and be getting on with it. This is often the most useful distinguishing feature between them. I would expect a PhD candidate to be a senior, or one their way to becoming one, but I accept that opinions can differ.
I do not understand how the certificate of achievement can be considered as anything other then a significant accomplishment. In industry, I do not much care what subject you have mastered as it is unlikely to be relevant, and extremely unlikely that I will be able to ask you meaningful questions on it, but I do care that you have mastered a subject, and I will want to know how you solved problems and approached difficulties. For it is that ability to overcome obstacles in the pursuit of knowledge the makes you a master in the eyes of your peers.
To the original poster, I suggest you find a way to internalise those external pressures you say you need. Whether it is your diary or your professional pride that is applying the pressure, you need to find a way to keep focused and keep working when you are bored, tired, distracted and/or frustrated. When not only is no one pushing you, but when people are telling you that you are wasting your time, wasting their time, that you are wrong or that you have already failed.

That's just insulting, and terrible advice. Half of my PhD students are horrible in self-organization, and they are certainly not "wasting my time".

Note that a significant fraction (perhaps a majority) of students seeking a PhD are looking toward careers in academia, so they have no interest in working at a "company" in the first place.  In academic research, one rarely faces the situation where the boss presents a problem and demands a solution.

The whole point of having a higher level certificate — Sorry, no, having the certificate has no point at all!  Surely, even as an employer, you look at the applicant's actual accomplishments.

To address your edit: In your terminology, I would say the entire point of getting a PhD is to make the transition from "junior" to "senior".  In most fields, a student entering a PhD program definitely fits into your "junior" category.


text:
How to check and correct editorial changes to a manuscript post-acceptance?
A journal which accepted a paper of mine has made some alterations to the text of the paper as part of their editing process.  They sent me the edited version for approval, and I discovered that at least some of these changes are erroneous (for instance, one of the changes included a typo, and another was changing the spelling of a technical term incorrectly).  I asked for a list of all the changes made, and was told that this was "too messy" (I assume because the alterations to the text are mixed in with the changes to the formatting of the paper, which is a more standard part of the editing process).
At this time the journal is waiting for me to approve/make changes to the final proof before publication.
My question is how I should deal with this situation.  I feel like I have an obligation to be responsible for the contents of a paper published in my name.  (Though, if I'm mistaken about this, that would be a helpful answer.)
I can think of a few solutions, ranging from the tedious (compare the PDF files line by line to identify the changes myself), to the demanding (insist on a list of changes anyway), to the passive-aggressive (either withdraw the paper or add a sulky footnote disavowing responsibility for the unknown changes to the paper).  These all have problems, so I'd appreciate more constructive ways to approach the situation.

Sadly, this is normal.  Do the tedious and move on with your life.

Various programs exist to make the manual proofreading less tedious — most notably, versions of diff adapted for PDF, which can take two similar-but-not-identical PDF’s and highlight the specific differences. I personally like DiffPDF, and find it takes a great deal of the labour out of this kind of re-proofreading.

@PLL: I wasn't aware of DiffPDF.  That looks like it may be a big help

Failing that, so long as the paper isn't too mathematical, you could copy/paste to text files and use diff :-)

I've run into bad editing situations like this. In these cases, I've gone through the paper line by line, with a fine tooth comb. Yes, it is painful, but it is a  good idea even if the journal editors aren't obviously screwing up. (This can get doubly horrible if you have complicated formatting in your paper.)
You should bear in mind whoever is doing this is unlikely to actually understand what you are writing, and my experience of people doing this sort of thing is that they can be well-meaning and not too bright, so they can take it upon themselves to "correct" your manuscript, while not understanding what they are doing. Additionally, if you give them last minute changes to the paper, make sure to check they have applied them correctly. Are you the sole author? Can you get anyone else to help with this? It would make it less awful.
Your other ideas sound less viable. Asking for a list of changes assumes that there is someone there who actually knows what those changes are. My experience is that journal staff are often amazingly technically incompetent, and probably have never thought of using version control for example. though I'd love to hear about the exceptions. But you can certainly try to insist.
Your passive-aggressive ideas just sound bad. You don't want to withdraw your paper over an issue like that. And if there are errors in the paper, they will reflect badly on you, and nobody else will care.
At times I've thought someone should start a site like ratethisjournal.org where people could discuss their experiences dealing with different journals.

I've run into bad editing situations like this. — I don't think I've ever had a journal paper where the copy-editor didn't introduce at least one (usually minor) error.  So I go through every copy-edited paper line by line with a fine-tooth comb.

PLL's practical solution (use DiffPDF to make it easier to find the changes) is probably the best answer to the practical question, but it's helpful to get a little background on how the paper got into this mess in the first place.

A Copy Editor speaking. I have couple comments:

It is true that it is impossible to seperate the changes in the text and changes in the formatting, even in good systems like LaTeX.
Good Copy Editor never changes any scientific terms as is. Sometimes we have to change a formula (split in two lines, etc.), or we are dubious about a comma, preposition, hyphen or whatever. Even though the Language Editor corrects these, I sometimes don't make the changes if I feel it is against the intention of the author. Honestly, this is a complicated process, even inside the Editors' Office, not speaking about communication with the authors. As well, we put some notices in the Proofreading version if we're unsure about something, so that the author can be aware of it. Unfortunately, it seems to me that not many journals do quite a great job in Copy Editing.

What can you do:

Read your manuscript really carefully during the proofreading. No matter what
happens, you can get as angry as possible at the Editor's, but if there was a mistake in the proofreading version and you did not point it out, it's your mistake, not the journal's.
Prepare the manuscript as perfectly as possible. Use the correct template (esp. in LaTeX), follow the (typo)graphic manual of the journal etc. This way, you minimise the changes the Copy Editor/Typesetter has to make, thus minimising the chance of something going wrong. My experience is that the amount of mistakes that appear is highly dependent of the quality of the manuscript when you send it. (Example: We work in LaTeX, and when I receive an article in Word, I have to re-write/revise all the math formulas. Imagine how many mistakes I make during this very stupid process.)
There are tools that allow a document to be "linearised". Then you can linearise the accepted version and the proofreading version and compare them. However, I don't have any how-to for this.
If you find a serious mistake after the publication, see what errata policy the journal has. In our case, the online version (we're open access) can be corrected, and additionally, Errata are printed in the next suitable issue.

A copy editor writes “I have couple” and “seperate” as the first few words in their answer. This is why we have so much trouble with them.

Well, I had fortunately been backed up by a Language Editor during my years at the publisher, so this wasn't really my concern.

My point is that that would be the concern of anyone who reached high school.

Copy-editing is a normal part of the publication process, and a few errors can be introduced that way. A good proof-reading is in order, of course, but if you miss a typo or two it's not the end of the world. Moreover, if you later come to realize that a critical error has been introduced, which was not present in your initial copy and which you did not find in the your proof-reading, you can always ask for a correction at that point.
However, many publishers give you more information to help review the copy-edited proofs. For example, many publishers will gladly give you (automatically, or upon asking) the list of changes made (“edit track” or something like that). Something a bit like a latexdiff output, in most cases. It's a crowded document, and hard to read through because there are many formatting and copy-editing changes, but it can be helpful with some details.

Some background. Many copy-editors (I would say most) are not experts in any field but are experts on the house style of the publisher. I have experienced how copy-editors new to the journal make lots of mistakes, they sometimes edit several journals with different styles. They should not make such mistakes but sometimes the communication between the publisher and the copy-editor does not work well for one reason or another. Note that the journal and its editors may not be involved in this part of the process; I cannot say what applies in your case.
I would suggest you contact the editors of the journal, or the contact to which you are supposed to return the comments. State that your manuscript has been corrupted by the copy-editing and ask how they suggest you should proceed (considering that the state of the paper is completely unsatisfactory). What you can also do is to try to summarize the systematic errors you have observed so that the journal/publisher can provide these comments to the copy-editor. Unfortunately, the copy-editor will not likely be able to make any better judgements on the corrections without input from others, so I think it is safe to say at least some will most likely fall back to you to correct in the end.


text:
Is there any published research on pedagogy of the semester vs trimester systems at the high school or university levels?
I have found some anecdotal evidence, but I only found one systematic study by Bair and Bair
I'm specifically interested in the answers for Mathematics, Physics, and Engineering disciplines.

Could you provide details on the bibliographical search you have already carried out in relation to your question? Sounds like it would be a great question for a subject librarian in an education department.

@user65587 It's not like there's a reason to assume that a document pulled from trimesters.org is going to have a bias one way or the other.

I do not know about semester vs. trimester, but I have seen research showing that taking 2 semesters to learn Calculus I prepares students more completely, and makes them more resistant to leaving STEM majors:
Nelson, M. (2014, September). Oral Reviews: Retaining STEM Majors. In Innovations in Teaching & Learning Conference Proceedings (Vol. 6).
and
Nelson, M. A. (2010). Oral assessments: Improving retention, grades, and understanding. PRIMUS, 21(1), 47-61.

Two semesters vs one semester? Or two semesters vs two quarters? Three quarters? Your control group / comparison group is unclear.


text:
How to write a review for a strong paper?
I was asked by Program Committee members to be a sub-reviewer for some papers related to my research. The PC members are big shots and I really want to impress them.
It is easy to write a review if I can discover weaknesses in the paper. However, if the paper is strong or I am unable to find any weaknesses, I feel my review is useless.
Unlike the flaws, the authors tend to repeat and highlight their contributions. So my review is just rephrasing the contributions and how I am impressed by them.
If I'm unable to give any suggestions to improve the approach or the narrative of the paper, what should I do to write a good review? How to show the PC members that I didn't just skim through the contributions, and agreed with the authors (strong papers are often written by well-known researchers)?

Would you mind expanding PC? Does it stand for paper committee?

@mkennedy: I am used to PC serving as an abbreviation for "program chair[persons]" and therefore implicitly assumed it meant that, but the author should indeed clarify.

@O.R.Mapper that makes sense. I understood the question, but couldn't decide if the OP was reviewing for a conference or journal, or something else and thought expanding PC might help to clarify the point.

@mkennedy: PC stands for Program Committee, those who review or assign sub-reviewers in (CS) conferences.

While it is understandable to think in terms of "impressing", this is a very corrupting element to add to one's thinking. I'd recommend trying to pose and answer (for yourself, for example) the question without such self-emphasizing qualifications/words first, before starting to think about the professional game-playing aspect. Sure, the latter is present, and often very important, but complete prostitution is undesirable.

I got reviews that consisted of "correct the typos X,Y,Z, otherwise the paper is good and fit for publication". Nothing wrong with that, but, as the other answers mention, it would be even better to explain the strong points (as you'd explain the weak ones).

The key principle is this: just as with a negative review, you need to demonstrate that you have read the paper thoroughly and are making your judgement for sound scientific reasons.
If you like a paper, you should be able to say why you like it.  Beyond the paraphrased summary of goals and contributions (which should begin any review), you can spend a sentence or two saying what aspects of the work or its presentation you found particularly compelling or particularly elegant, and why.
It's also a rare paper that doesn't have any minor errors or needs for improvement, and you can also point out those, prefaced with something like, "The only things I see needing improvement are a few minor points of copyediting and clarification."
In the end, your review might be quite short, and that's fine.

I suppose you implicitly mean this, but it should probably be explicitly written down: If you can find a few minor issues this is a good indicator that you actually thouroughly read the paper. In particular if you are doing a regular review, it’s more beneficial to the editor and author if you list some minor issues than if you have nothing negative to remark at all.

@Wrzlprmft True.  I have however, had a couple of occasions where I literally had nothing bad to say about the paper because the authors were apparently better proof-readers than I.  Which is why I think that giving good details on why you like the paper is an even better way to show that you have read and comprehended it.

Personally I wouldn't both to work hard to find minor nits to pick. Why waste everyone's time trying to make the authors (and the editors/reviewers) do more work if the flaws are only minor and do not really affect the conclusions, nor the ability of the reader to understand them.

@IanSudbery My view is the complement: if I notice minor changes that would make the paper stronger, why wouldn't I give the authors those suggestions? But that's the context I put it in - "things that will make the paper even better" rather than "homework you must do to satisfy Dr. Gatekeeper"

It is easy to write a review if I can discover weaknesses in the paper.

That is because you comment on the weaknesses. You do this to show to someone who is convinced of the paper why you think the paper is weak.
For a strong paper, you would do the opposite: You highlight the strong points, in order to show to someone who is convinced that the paper is poor that it is not.
If it helps you, you can create a checklist for yourself, listing aspects that you expect to find in the paper. For instance:

Is the contribution clear?
Do I understand all parts of the novel idea?
Are there any examples of how to use the novel concept?

Often, some of these questions are already provided in the invitation for the review. In any case, you can highlight the answers to these questions in your review, and thereby corroborate your suggestion to accept the paper.

In all the cases, I'm unable to give any suggestions to improve the approach or the narrative of the paper.

You do not need to do this. If you really think the paper is great, and if that impression is supported by the aforementioned checklist, there is no point in suggesting changes for the sake of providing some suggestions.

How to show the PC members that I didn't just skim through the contributions, and agreed with the authors

That is exactly one of the reasons why you should explicitly highlight which parts of the paper you liked. One way to show that you actually understood the content of the paper is by writing a short summary of the paper in your own words at the beginning of the review. Later on, when you highlight positive aspects of the paper during the further text of your review, you can refer to the various parts of the paper content that you already mentioned during your short summary. This should be sufficient to show to both the authors and the PC members that you based your positive evaluation on actual comprehension and thought, rather than a cursory impression.

Just write a thoughtful review on why you think the paper is strong.  If the paper is well written, then say how it is well organized, and why the idea is clear; again, justify, justify!  You may include its significance and how it will contribute to the discipline as a whole. ...
You will give a good impression if you show that you have been diligent and reflective in your write-up.