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Citation of a website: How to determine the year?
If there is a web article (or even a website) without a date of publication, is there a chance to determine a year of publication for a complete reference of it? Or should it omitted in the reference?

The Publication Date may be in the webpage's meta data or source
There may be date information contained in the meta tags in the page source. If you are not using a tool (see below) to extract this information, you can view the page source and attempt to interpret it. There are many different ways publication date information may be stored in meta tags. The most common ones will begin with <meta. The number of ways in which an appropriate date may be stored in in these tags is just too numerous to cover in a single post. If you are not familiar with what these might look like, a tool (see below) to extract the data will be quite helpful.
Extracting the date from meta tags, and picking the correct date (there may be several), can be complex. How, exactly, to do so varies from website to website. In addition, each site may change their format from time to time. If you are going to be referencing more than one or two webpages a well maintained tool to extract the reference information will be very helpful.
As an example, this page (randomly selected for testing some time ago), which does not display a date if you have JavaScript turned off (dates are displayed if JavaScript is turned on), contains appropriate publication dates in the following tags (there are more tags that contain dates that are not appropriate):
<meta name="parsely-pub-date" content="2014-10-14T23:45:00.011Z" data-ephemeral="true">
<meta name="date" content="2014-10-14T23:45:00.011Z" data-ephemeral="true">
<meta name="iso-8601-publish-date" content="2014-10-14T23:45:00.011Z" data-ephemeral="true">
<time class="published-at time-based" datetime="2014-10-14T23:45:00.011Z" itemprop="datePublished">
<time class="updated-at__time" datetime="2014-10-15T05:07:37.564Z">
<meta name="pubdate" content="Tue Oct 14 2014 19:45:00 GMT-0400" data-ephemeral="true">

That page also contains the publication and update dates located in multiple


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Question regarding how to slow down and enjoy academic life
I am currently an undergraduate student taking an Honours Pure Mathematics degree with an additional major in Astrophysics and I plan to go to a good graduate school (as good as I can get into) for Pure Mathematics to research either Geometric Topology or Convex Geometry.
I know that academia is a cut-throat world where only "the best" end up on top and the ability to get a professorship is becoming harder and harder as time goes on. I enjoy Pure Mathematics and Theoretical Physics and would not want to do anything else with my life just because I could not do anything else since I find them too damn interesting. What I do not enjoy is the grade-driven-here-is-the-next-thing-for-the-exam learning that doesn't give anyone the big picture. I have been working non-stop to make sure I perform in my courses, undergraduate research, etc. and I am just wondering if there is any way to learn about these topics at a slower pace or just have more time to think about the topics eventually. I understand I will have to at least get through graduate school and get a PhD (otherwise there would be a chance I'd turn out as a crackpot), but I'm just really tired of having so much information crammed into me without having the time to think about what I am learning. I want to do my own additional research on topics I see connections between, and think more about the big picture of how the different fields of Pure Mathematics and Theoretical Physics are related. There are so many unfinished papers that I have started throughout my undergraduate on embeddings of low-dimensional manifolds, determining knot invariants by unique methods, etc. but I just have no time to think about what I want to think about when there's that Real Analysis assignment due the day after my midterm in E&M which I had to stay up all night studying for because I had three quizzes the previous week in blah blah blah blah... for years on end.
Essentially, my question is this: Is there any other way that someone (after getting a PhD or a few post-docs) can do research at their own pace and just completely go after their interests without having to justify what they are doing to funding agencies, being swamped with administrative work (such as marking exams and writing grants), etc.?
I know that is asking a lot out for a life style, but I would even be interested in leaving academia altogether to just do my own independent study somewhere and travel around to different universities to collaborate whenever I have new findings or need some new inspiration or ideas. Are there any easy part-time jobs one could do to support such a lifestyle? Julian Barbour would be someone who I look up to in that respect, I believe he did this exact thing by making a living translating Russian academic papers into English.
Any comments, helpful suggestions, about how it would be possible to live an non-traditional academic lifestyle where people still take you to be credible and you can publish your work in journals. I just want to avoid working working working my entire life without a chance to reflect and then just die.

In some countries you can have full research public servant position. Maybe this is something that you should consider for the future.

I'm not sure why you're worried; see http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/do-college-professors-work-hard-enough/2012/02/15/gIQAn058VS_story.html  (my comment is meant to be ironic, though the linked article is apparently serious).

@DavidKetcheson is ironic indeed. I have to laugh when I read that, "...we all should object when they receive these salaries for working less than half the time of their non-academic peers." This was written by an apologist for bankers, who do have tenure. No mention here of the overtime it takes to conduct research, direct undergraduate, postgraduate and postdoc research, serve on committees, write grant proposals, seek funding opportunities in and out of academia... The life of the self-paced monastic intellectual requires an inexhaustible source of funds.

"do research at their own pace and just completely go after their interests without having to justify what they are doing to funding agencies..." sure, but don't expect anyone to give you a paycheck.

@Amy: Isn't that just tenure?

The Evolution of Intellectual Freedom, not that serious: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1436

So how did it go? Did you figure out a way? Personally I would have said doing what you want is called a hobby (and funding needs to come from different work)

It may not be necessary to wait until you've reached the end stages of your career to have time to explore your research.
If you are able to get fellowships to fund your graduate career—or to find a suitably understanding advisor—then it may be possible to "slow down" your graduate career. In such a case, you'd be able to handle things at your own pace (within reason). That's how I managed to take my time doing my Ph.D., and it allowed me to work on problems I was interested in, rather than other problems.
Similar funding does exist at the professional level, such as "named" fellowships at the US Department of Energy (DOE) laboratories, and through grants like the MacArthur Fellowship (also known as the "genius grant"). It is certainly not easy and straightforward to do, but it could be a way to get the freedom to work without additional responsibilities.
Outside of academia, I don't think the situation improves much. For instance, at the DOE laboratories, you're only able to pursue your own research if you're able to secure your own funding to do so (or have moved so far up the chain that you are a laboratory "fellow," and can do what you want). Similarly, in industrial research institutes, I suspect similar issues apply (you might not have to worry about writing grants the same way you do in academia, but you'll still be expected to "justify your existence" on a fairly regular basis.

Some of the slower pace and autonomy that you're looking for may be available to you once you finish your classes and pass your prelim (or qualifying exam; the name may vary, but most PhD programs have some sort of exam, after which you are "all but dissertation").  This is an important aspect to consider when choosing your PhD adviser.
My adviser allowed me quite a bit of freedom to work on problems that I picked.  As a result, grad school took me a little longer, but I think I was better prepared for life afterward, when I did not work closely with a supervisor.  Through high school, undergrad, and the start of grad school I had a "get through fast" mentality.  Once I got a few years into grad school, I changed my view more to "take time to learn the stuff you want to learn".  If you do stay in academia, the clock really starts when you finish your PhD.

Yep, it sounds like graduate school may be the answer. Sure, it can be stressful and the pay isn't ideal. But I was lucky to get a research assistantship, so never worried about funding. My advisor was somewhat disengaged, so I worked on what I thought was interesting. Graduate school is really a chance to just focus on research, as opposed to the tenure-track, where you have other worries, like teaching, funding, supervising, etc.. Alternatively a post-doc could work. Maybe jump around from one post-doc position to another every couple years?

@che_kid: isn't getting postdocs as hard as getting funding?

@Blaisorblade: You may be right. I guess it depends on how you define hard. Some funding agencies only have ~10% success rates with only one chance per year to apply. With a post-doc you get to enjoy it until you have to start worrying about your next job (which can be stressful). I've seen some people do well and have no problems getting post-docs, but that is probably another discussion.

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To ask for a PostDoc position in the university X, is better to do it by myself or to ask to my supervisor?
I am a PhD student in artificial intelligence from an European university. This year I am going to finish my PhD program, so I am looking around to search for a suitable Postdoc position.
I would like to apply to an important American university, named X.
In my research group here I have important professors that follow my work. One is my supervisor, an expert of artificial intellingence, and follows my work. The other is an expert of operating systems (i.e. different field from artificial intelligence).
This operating system professor in the 90s spent some years working at the preminent university X, and he still has a lot of contact and collaborations in that field.
Should I take advantage of this and ask him to contact my potential Postdoc advisor at the university to which I want to apply, even if he is from a different field?
Would it be worth?
His mail would be something like "Some decades ago I worked at your university in the operating systems field, and now I would like to recommed this candidate from artificial intelligence..."
Would this have sense?
Would this be useful?
Or would it be better that I contacted personally by myself this professor for the Postdoc position?

Put yourself in the shoes of the professor: what would they like best in a candidate? Contacting them yourself demonstrates more commitment than having your advisor do it for you. There may be cases where an introduction by a third party is best, but it seems to me it's better to use that only if really needed: guy is a superstar, your introductee knows him very well, or you are just trying to strategically probe whether a candidature would be well-received without actually getting involved yourself.
Also, you can get your advisor to follow up if you don't receive an answer, or just to help you when/if they are contacted as a reference.

On the other hand, you should name-drop your local faculty colleagues ("I am working with professors X and Y." or "My thesis committee member Prof Z suggested that I contact you.") when you contact potential postdoc advisors.  But ask your local faculty in advance for permission to be name-dropped, since you're effectively using them as references.

@JeffE yes, very true

Another good one is "Professor X suggested I contact you...."

You are asking about having a professor contacting someone on your behalf, which is generally good and positive.
There are other similar notions you may have preferred to ask that have formal terms:

"Should I ask my supervisor to write a letter of recommendation for me, even though they are not from my field?"  to which, the answer is absolutely. You usually get several letters. It would be prudent to consider that a writer who knows your audience will be particularly influential.
"Should I ask for an introduction from my supervisor?"- This is also very common, but less formal than a letter. Your supervisor, if he gets along with you and has contacts in the right area, can send an email and CC you on it. You ask/answer questions and can passively demonstrate that you are amiable and intelligent.

I would recommend doing either or both of these things, so long as you are sensitive to a polite refusal by your advisor. They may not have the positive relationships you think they have, and do not want to embarrass you by a negative association.

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Are there actually students who learn by watching?
I'm a PhD student in physics, and I sometimes tutor undergrads in introductory physics classes on the side. Now, there's widespread agreement among people who teach or tutor physics that the only way to effectively learn the material is to use it, generally by working through practice problems in homework assignments and sample exams.
But recently I was contacted by a student who was interested in "tutoring," where by use of the quotes I mean that what she wanted was for me to do problems, and she would watch and ask questions when she was confused about something. At one point this student wrote a long email full of what seemed like psychological mumbo-jumbo trying to justify her assertion that she actually learns that way, and that the normal method of having her do the work would not be effective. I didn't believe it (thus I declined the tutoring assignment), but was I wrong? Are there actually students who don't learn by doing the work, and for whom it is a more effective strategy to just show them how to go through a problem? I would definitely appreciate pointers to educational psychology research on the matter, if anyone knows of any.
Note that I'm not talking about how to teach a topic for the first time, to a group of students who have never seen it before. In that case I know a bit of demonstration is necessary. The situation I'm asking about is reviewing for a final exam, where the student would (or should) have already learned the material in class and completed a homework assignment or two on it.

Is she an exceptional student? Then,perhaps she might be looking at learning new methods/techniques for solving particular types of problems. In such a situation, observing a particular method for the first time is usually more effective than making her come up with the method on her own.

Monkey see, monkey do.

@Naresh I never met this student in person, so I don't know, but generally speaking, exceptional students are not the ones who seek tutoring. Besides, as I mentioned in my last paragraph, I would be using  methods which she should have already seen in class and used on homework assignments.

If you go to the gym and watch other people pump iron, you may learn how the apparatus is used, but your muscles won't get any stronger.  You will learn something by watching someone else complete the exercises, and you may be able to do that exercise afterward, but it probably won't increase your ability to do any other problem.  Technique can be learned by observation, the ability to apply those techniques cannot.

I do wonder if this is a symptom of students being afraid of failure, of not wanting to have to admit that they can't do something, so they try to work up to it in stages by watching someone else succeed.  This is counterproductive though as a sense of achievement can only come from succeeding at something that is challenging.   It is that challenge that makes maths/physics/programming fun.

I am not an expert in cognitive science or psychology but I have a few years of teaching assistant experience behind me so I will have a go at this one and I suspect that a few others might even agree with me.
My general roles are in leading discussion sections and in lab sessions (information science: so combination of coding and data analysis in context with social science literature)
Now learning by watching aka observational learning is not a new concept. Scientists have been studying this for a long, long time. However, note the example literature cited in the previous links. There is a marked difference in learning how to strike a Bobo doll and acquiring a complex skill such as deriving Newton Law's of Motion
Having laid all of this expository work, I would like to argue that personally, I believe that observational learning exists and happens in the natural world around us. I just don't believe that one can acquire complex mathematical notions and concepts just by observing (unless this girl is some sort of a savant).
I think that this student was just trying to make you do her homework problems for her.

Makes sense to me. Though in this case the problems I would have been doing for the student were ungraded. optional review problems, not a homework assignment.

I cannot answer for the specific motivations for that student. But, if these were ungraded, optional problems, then 2 possibilities come to mind: 1. The student really believes that she can learn physics by just watching and not by practicing or 2. She had extra money to burn. In my present university, I have seen plenty of surprising examples of possibility 2.

+1 for the last sentence.  It doesn't matter whether the student can learn by watching; they're not going to be graded on their ability to watch.

A lot of people watch and listen first, and then learn later. What do you think happens in most University lectures? People watch and listen to someone go through the process. Maybe she wanted to hear you think aloud as you solved problems or made decisions about what to try. That said, there would eventually need to be a point where the student transitions from only watching to doing to be effective.

@Irwin Understood, but as I mentioned in the question, this is for exam review. The student should have already been to the lectures and completed homework assignments on the material, so I would think the transition from watching to doing has already been passed.

I think the student is reasonable, up to a point, then she is unreasonable.
When tutoring a student (teaching of any kind, really), you should give some examples in order to give her the key information she will need in order to do the work which will be expected of her. However, after you have covered the key points, which includes showing her how to work through a problem or two (or three, depending on the situation) then you must assess her learning (and your teaching).
The natural way to assess is to have her produce, for example by solving problems. If she only wants to watch you and does not want to produce then it seems she is not interested in you assessing her and she is not interested in assessing herself. I would not start (or continue) tutoring this kind of student.
So, yes, perhaps she does learn best that way...but part of the educator's job is to see if the education is actually taking hold and the only way to do that is to have the student produce something.

I have done almost all of my math learning so far this way. Consequently, I know a whole lot of math and I know a whole lot about a lot of areas of math, but I suck at proving things, and my knowledge isn't terribly deep. Thankfully, I am finally going to be taking some pure math courses where I will have to prove things and develop my skills.
Less generally, I think that one can learn facts and knowledge and problem solving strategies by watching, but they will not develop skills. For that they need practice.

I have trouble putting I know a whole lot of math and my knowledge isn't terribly deep together.

Breadth, but not depth.

I think that one can learn...problem solving strategies by watching, but they will not develop skills. — Say what?  Problem solving is a skill.

Learn about the strategy, but not be practiced in how to apply them. Knowing problem solving strategies is not the sum total of the skill of problem solving.

I think this is spot-on.  I learned the technique of batting by watching test cricket on television, but it didn't mean I could actually play those shots in practice.  To learn that, I had to go to cricket nets and actually play cricket, and no amount of watching someone else can help with that!

I would like to provide another perspective to this question; regardless whether or not the student is trying to fool you into doing her work for her, you can take a look at it from a practical perspective.
You (=tutor) are required to teach to her (=stuent) and presumably to many others like her. Likewise you are expected to read articles and do research. I would even argue that your primary task is to do research, not to teach undergrads. So, while your responsibilities are to prepare material and give lectures etc, their responsibility is to go through the material and do the work (hw/assignments). Given that you provide enough examples during the lectures, I don't see why you should go through the review or homework assignments for the student(s).
After all it's probably not feasible (time) or reasonable for you to do all that. Are you going to have individual sessions for every single student, so that their thoughts don't get disturbed by others who might ask questions? A compromise could be to hold one lecture where you solve old exam questions for the whole class. Our calculus teachers used to do that. THey would take an old exam, and solve each question, explaining as they go.
I am all for helping people with special needs (hearing aids, dyslexia etc) but "I don't want to do the homework assignments, you do them for me and I watch you solve them" is not a special need, it's good old laziness.

Interesting perspective, though I'm not sure if it quite applies to my situation. Tutoring is a one-on-one activity, privately arranged between the student and a tutor (me) who is not affiliated with the class. I have complete freedom to choose which tutoring assignments I accept and which I don't. So if I do this for one student, there is no obligation to do the same for others.

Oh, ok well I thought you were teaching a class. My apologies.

If one were to wager, the smart money is that it's a con. However, in principle, an exceptional person certainly does not need to be subjected to the orthodox fake-rigor fake-serious pretense. That is, a person with some natural talent catches on very, very, very quickly, while other kids are effectively resisting and thinking of something else anyway.
By this point in my life, I am inclined to give people a chance to "be talented", rather than to doubt that they are, even while I might privately bet against their self-estimate or pretense. After all, letting a few people "game" the system while we treat serious people well is better than brutally policing everything, crushing sincere talented people, just to be sure that no one "gets more credit than they deserve".
Btw, I think it's not about "learning styles", but about degree of engagement, optimistically. (Or else it is a con, but it's better for all of us to try to believe it's not...)

I totally agree with your statement about exceptional students. But it would be very odd for an exceptional student to seek tutoring, which is why I don't think that quite applies to my particular situation. Besides, an exceptional student would be able to demonstrate their ability to do the work.

Exceptional students take help,not for their regular studies but for working out problems for olympiads etc. Of course, there are normal students/weak students who need tutoring as well.


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International Student Funding for Graduate Programs outside North America
I'm considering doing a masters or a PhD program outside of North America, in particular Europe or Australia. I had originally expected every graduate program to fund students the way North American universities do - as in, they (basically) fund every accepted applicant for somewhere between 12-24,000$ a year. I also was under the impression that funding covered your tuition and more. But the other day I talked to a representative from a small Australian university and she said that they did not fund international students at all unless they got a specific scholarship, which most did not.
I am curious as to which major universities in Europe and Australia fund all / most of their accepted students, and if so approximately how much. My girlfriend (who is coming with me) has EU citizenship and I do not, so I'm wondering about both cases. We are both currently in Canada and applying for mathematics/statistics.
I am particularly curious about the University of Amsterdam, ETH Zurich, the National University of Australia and the University of Melbourne, because those are the ones that I really can't find information about. However we are also considering other European countries (France, Germany, Spain, UK, Hungary, other places with good programs) and I would appreciate any information you had about institutes there too!
Thank you!!

Note that your assertion that North American math departments fund almost every student applies only to PhD programs - masters students, whether foreign or domestic, rarely get funded.

Your user profile indicates you are studying math. Please specify the program(master or PhD) and the field (math or applied math or other) you are going to study. Those would make differences.

The University of Amsterdam has some of this information for Masters students on their website: Finance - University of Amsterdam. Note that PhD positions are treated very differently in most European universities - candidates are actually in the university's employment. They do not have to pay tuition fees, and instead get paid a salary.

@scaaahu: I am interested in Pure Mathematics (Discrete Geometry, Algebraic Geometry, Number Theory, Logic) and my girlfriend is interested in Statistics.

@Mangara The link is now dead.

@Karlo Scholarships & Tuition - University of Amsterdam is the new location. The old information is also still accessible through the Wayback Machine.

I'm a PhD candidate at the University of Western Australia, a Go8 university which has similar application processes to the Australian National University and the University of Melbourne.
In Australia, funding for international students comes from three separate streams.
The federal government (heretoforth referred to as the Commonwealth) funds several recurring 3 (minimum) to 4 (maximum) year scholarships each year per university depending on total research output. These scholarships are then allotted to the highest ranking applicants for PhD candidature from the respective faculties in a given university. These scholarships are referred to as IPRS (International Postgraduate Research Scholarships) and are extremely competitive.
The Commonwealth also funds scholarships for students from developing countries through the foreign aid program. These are referred to as Australia Award scholarships and Prime Ministers scholarships. The application process is run through the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade website (DFAT).
Individual universities offer university scholarships to applicants and these are usually part and parcel of the application process for PhD candidature. These are highly competitive and based on a ranking process through the entire university and the top (x) candidates who do not receive an IPRS are given these.
The third (and most common) funding stream is via the research funding obtained by individual academics. Depending on how keen a particular grant holding academic is to bring you into his group, he may offer to pay your scholarships out of his own research grant. Australian academics are very used to this so do not be afraid of asking for an assurance from your prospective supervisor that he is willing to pay your scholarship if you are unsuccessful at obtaining an IPRS or a university scholarship.
If you want to do a masters, you will have to pay for it yourself. Hope this was useful.
Cheers


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Are contributions to conference proceedings considered to be "archival" publications?
While technical papers are generally considered to be "non-archival" and journal papers "archival", I couldn't find a clear statement about papers that appear in conference proceedings. Does it matter in which for the proceedings are published, e.g. only online, on CD/USB drive, or printed with/without ISBN?

what do you mean by archival contribution? you mean having it in any form (CD/Book..etc)?

@seteropere I've read that "non-archival" publications can be published again in peer-reviewed venues with/without modifications. But I'm afraid that if I had a good definition, I probably wouldn't have to ask this question.

In what field?  Most computer science proceedings papers are definitely considered archival publications (although standards for whether they can be republished in journals without significant modification is subfield-dependent).  On the other hand, most CS proceedings papers have ISBNs and DOIs, even if they're only published online.

@JeffE The field would be applied CS, GIScience to be exact on a topic similar to http://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/4/1/1

Unfortunately, the reason you can't find a clear statement on this issue is because there isn't one.  The answer depends heavily on the field and the particular conference, and there isn't necessarily an absolute answer even in a specific case.  It may depend on why you care:

You may care yourself, because you want your paper to be carefully archived and made available in perpetuity.  In that case, it depends on whether a long-lasting, trustworthy organization has committed to providing access forever (and whether they have archiving contingency plans in case they go out of business).
You may need to make this distinction to assist in evaluating your CV.  In that case, the evaluators probably care primarily whether the papers are carefully refereed and in their final form, but the only way to know for sure is to ask them what their criteria are.
You may be wondering whether you can publish an updated version of your conference paper in a journal.  This depends on the customs in your field, and it requires agreement from both the conference and the journal.  The publishing agreement for the conference should specify what sorts of further publication are allowable (if it does not, then you should be sure to ask, since saying nothing suggests they do not expect any further publication at all), and the submission instructions for the journal may also address this issue.  If your submission is a revision of a conference paper, you should always specify this fact clearly and give a precise reference somewhere on the first page and in the cover letter, to make sure nobody could accuse you of hiding the previous publication.

The answers to these questions can vary.  For example, major theoretical CS conferences are archival in sense 1 (permanent archiving and availability) but not 2 or 3 (papers are not necessarily intended to be in their final form and definitive versions may be published elsewhere).

One more thing to consider - are you requested to sign copyright transfer form (or sth similar, like consent to publish). If you are - then the publication is most likely archival and you can read on the copyright form if and under which conditions you can reuse the material. E.g., in the above mentioned LNCS-LNAI copyright form it is explicitly mentioned that you can re-publish it only with apprx 30% of new material (more or less standard condition in Computer Science)

The editor of IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SOFTWARE ENGINEERING asked the same question in editorial to VOL. 37, NO. 2, MARCH/APRIL 2011. He did not provide an answer, but it might be interesting to consult your university library and check the issues right after this one, I am sure there was a discussion in the journal. The archive does not seem to hold other than regular paper contributions.
My personal take on this (informed by the research field culture and research community I live in) is that a publication is archival whenever it comes with an assigned ISBN/ISSN. That makes the publication, be it a book, journal, or proceedings uniquely identifiable and thus it makes its source identifiable too. Whether that will make the publication physically, or digitally available on request is another story (publisher going bankrupt, etc.). I would consider this the minimal requirement.
Now to your concrete question regarding archival nature of conference proceedings, note, many conference proceedings come with an ISBN, or ISSN number. Even many technical report series at some universities do. In my field (CompSci/AI et al.) all the relevant top-tier conference proceedings have an ISBN. The lower tier conferences and more prominent workshop series tend to publish their proceedings and post-proceedings as Springer LNCS/LNAI series and thus get an ISBN too. I personally treat all such publication as archival and of course refrain from resubmitting such results elsewhere. This is however not the case for really small workshops (usually one-of), which only print their proceedings and bind them. In all conferences/journals I care for, these are treated as mere non-archival technical reports and thus can be further disseminated, or resubmitted to a better venue, such as a good conference. But again, your mileage might vary. In different fields, there are different habits regarding such results dissemination strategy.


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Why are so many science jobs temporary in the US?
In science in the US, a large fraction of the available jobs are temporary, and typically scientists take on temporary jobs (usually called postdocs) earlier in their careers. Why is this the case? Anecdotally, most occupations have a smaller fraction of temporary positions.
I'm interested in both answers about the historical events leading up to the status quo and answers justifying the status quo as a desirable situation.

most occupations have a smaller fraction of temporary positions. Hmm, can you define what’s a temporary position? Arguably in most occupations (at least in US states with at will employment) all positions are “temporary positions”.

I would have expected that this would be a duplicate.  https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/23613/are-old-35-faculty-candidates-discriminated-against-all-over-the-world

@DanRomik Many academic/research jobs have an explicitly fixed or maximum term. In typical employment the end is not as clearly defined at the beginning. There could be a better definition.

Because they are desperate, it's actually kind of funny that people go through 7-10+ years of education to just land another job that's marginally above minimum wage. It's a very curious question as to how this system developed.

Many of these positions are "soft money" positions - that is, they depend on grants. Since grants are temporary, the jobs they fund are also somewhat temporary. That said, this doesn't tell the whole story since temporary positions typically have a shorter term (for example, a year) than the grants that fund them.
For post-docs, it's a bit different. Post-docs are officially "training" positions - they are meant to be a step in the development of a scientist, a stepping stone towards more independence. Both employers (that is, universities) and funding agencies often have limits on how many years someone can be considered a "post-doc" because the idea is that this training should be temporary.
You could argue that the grad student to post-doc to professor track follows the apprentice/journeyman/master structure in the trades (I'm not certain whether it was explicitly inherited/motivated from that system, though).
Comparing academic to industry jobs in the US, while there are certainly differences in the hiring schemes I'm not sure they're actually all that different. "Permanent" jobs come to an end all the time as employers go through cycles of growth and layoffs. In most (probably all?) US states it is far easier to end someone's employment than it is in other countries like the UK or Germany.

In some industrial sectors, a corporation will have several divisions competing against each other. First one with the desired marketable product wins, the others, well, layoff. It sounds brutal, and in a way it is, but then the panorama of human temperaments kicks in: There are people who are energized by this cycle.

"officially "training" positions"  Officially, yes, but in reality this is mostly a lie.

@AnonymousPhysicist Not in my experience.

Thanks for your answer. Do you have any ideas about why so many "hard-money" academic/research jobs are temporary? E.g., I recently interviewed for a "postdoc" in a group that apparently receives steady funding (at a government funded lab), yet their postdocs have a maximum term of 2 years. They call this a "postdoc" but on a day-to-day basis the work does not differ from that of the "permanent" researchers as far as I can tell.

@JEs9X I'd guess the answer is that they are not actually funded by "hard money."  For example, LDRD seems to be "soft money."  https://www.directives.doe.gov/directives-documents/400-series/0413.2-BOrder-C

@JEs9X For a "post-doc" position then probably what I said about training is most applicable. If a post-doc is a training position it shouldn't have an indefinite term. However, what AnonymousPhysicist says is also likely true - it doesn't really sound like you're describing true "hard money", just a robust variety of soft money. A third explanation would be for consistency in an environment with a mix of hard and soft positions.

It's a myth that "science jobs are temporary."  The reality is that all jobs are temporary.  Employers go bankrupt and employees die, but more frequently employees find a better job and switch.  In the US, many employers are able to terminate employment at any time, which is less secure than having a one year contract with a fixed end date.
Many science jobs have a fixed duration of one to two years because many employers have one to two years of funding available.  If the funding available increases, the job duration may be increased too.
The current situation is desirable from the point of view of awarding grants:  If the funding is temporary, you can decide not to renew it when the awardee performs poorly.  From the point of view of scientific staff, longer employment contracts would be better.
Short contracts will continue to be offered to scientists as long as scientists continue to accept them.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text:
How does a graduate program's admissions committee operate?
How does a typical graduate program's admissions committee operate? (In the US --- I understand that in Europe admissions are often structured differently.)
My mental model at the moment is several professors sitting in a conference room with a stack of printed applications and a few piles: accept, maybe, and reject. Three or so professors will read an application and then make a decision. If the volume of applications is large enough, multiple meetings might be required. This is purely my imagination --- I don't know how accurate this model is.
Of course, I'm sure that how admissions are handled depends greatly on the school, program, and department. I'm interested in a few data points to get a rough idea of what the average is.
A few more specific related questions:

How much time does a typical committee spend on each application? I suspect there's a distribution. Obviously unqualified applicants will probably have their applications tossed into the reject pile pretty quickly. Qualified applicants' applications might receive more attention.
Do admissions committees look online for more information about an applicant? I've read some professors (in CS --- not my field) will look at a student's research/project website, but I have no idea how common this is.

I've been on the grad admissions committee at my university for 30 years, and have been Dir of Grad Studies in math on two different occasions, so I have a good sample of what goes on here.
First, in the last few years all our applications are electronic, so the admissions cte doesn't have to be in a little room with piles of paper any more. This also allows much more asynchronous appraisal of files, which allows not wasting time trying to figure out common meeting times.
Typically, a preliminary screening is done in a "distributed" sense, that is, obviously-not-qualified or misguided applicants are removed from the "active possibilities" queue. By this, I mean engineering or computer science students, or crackpots, who declare interest but have no documentable mathematics background, no letters of recommendation from mathematicians, no GRE subject test, no nothing. :)
Even after this initial filtering, we have many fewer (funded as TAs or RAs) spots than approximately-qualified candidates. Even though we expect maybe 50-percent accept rate of our offers, the number of approximately-qualified candidates is still too large by a factor of 2 or 3 or more.
Candidates from small colleges in the U.S. typically have a very thin background, whether or not they've done special summer programs, so are at some initial disadvantage in comparison to candidates from Europe or Asia who have seen much more coursework, if only due to the structure of "college" there. This also precipitates discrepancies in GRE subject test scores. Nevertheless, we have found that this discrepancy is often very temporary, and after two years, or less, success in our program is almost completely uncorrelated with such things. Thus, many of the pretend-objective measures of prior success are of very limited value.
Further, the import of letters of recommendation depends greatly on the author, and their prior experiences, basis for comparison.
So we are left trying to compare candidates from widely varying backgrounds...
To get to the "final list" of offers thus consists partly of winnowing out candidates who are perhaps vaguely qualified but indicate no genuine interest in anything about our program, while putting onto the "definite" list candidates who seem to be focused and have a particular interest in the research program(s) of our faculty.
Documentably strong background and prior success is good, obviously, but, again, undergrad work, summer REUs, and such are a different enterprise than genuine graduate work and long-term research. Success in a highly structured environment gives very ambiguous indication about success in an unstructured environment. Success when there are unambiguous answers to questions that can be answered in a few hours is different from success in situations where the program can take months, and one is not quite sure what the question is.
So there is considerable discussion and re-reading of personal statements and letters of recommendation, trying to project into the future and a new environment, based on our prior experience. Not easily turned into an algorithm.
As to the specific questions: an obviously implausible applicant could be appraised in 5-10 minutes. At the other end, the final decisions about the better obviously-qualified applicants may involve repeated appraisal, so that the total time spent might be 5-10 person-hours in the end.
As to whether we look at on-line manifestations of applicants: this is a potentially delicate issue. The default approach would be to absolutely not do so, certainly not look at Facebook or other social media. If the application gives a pointer to a "professional" web page, of course this is considered useful, and positive if that site gives evidence of good work of the applicant. But "snooping around" would be unethical, inappropriate. Even if there is a pointer to a site in the application, if the application is not otherwise plausible I don't think I'd look at the web site.
EDIT (29 Aug 2020): since this thread got bumped to the top anyway, I thought it'd be not too disruptive to update remarks about GRE subject tests: the ETS (Educational Testing Service), which creates and administers the GRE, have cancelled the subject tests for this autumn (in the northern hemisphere, I hasten to add, having someone recently note my hemisphere-ism! :)... As I've said in this thread and others, in fact my dept does definitely does not consider GRE subject test scores good predictors of future success. The only aspect of interest has always been whether or not students succeed in understanding that (in the past) many or most places did consider a subject test score essential to an application... so we here would wonder why a student wouldn't have that score, even if we didn't care what it was...
Now, the Dir Grad Studies office is composing a highly revised statement of our attitude about the GRE subject test, at least saying that we are not interested in it, do not require it, and do not want to see it. (Apparently my math dept does not want to make any remarks that might be interpreted as "snarky"...)

"Obviously-not-qualified or misguided applicants are removed from the "active possibilities" queue. By this, I mean engineering or computer science students [...]" - Do applicants coming from other math-related backgrounds really have no chance? It sounds strange that a computer science major applying to work in an applied topic would be automatically rejected.

@Pandora, of course, labels have no truly precise reference, but in my observation computer science majors do not learn much actual mathematics (by standards of mathematicians), but do occasionally feel that they surely must have learned as much math as a math major, etc. And if an "applied" project needs so little mathematics that a person who doesn't know much math can do it, then maybe it's some other sort of science or engineering?

@paulgarrett is it true that acceptance letters are sent very earlier on to the applicants whom the department really wants to recruit? Thank you,


text:
Why would one choose a particular advisor, other than having shared interests?
I'm applying to a graduate program, and one of the application's requirements is to select at least one advisor, along with a reason for the selection. Specifically, this is the requirement:

In order to match you with a faculty adviser, tell us which faculty member's work most closely aligns with your interest.

And there is a list from which I should choose the advisor's name, and a text field in which I'm asked to write a reason for the selection.
I already know the advisors whom I'd like to work with, and the reason is simply that I'm interested in what they do (based on their recent papers/projects). But I'm not sure if this is what they're looking for, because they've already said this in the quoted text above, and also I will choose more than one advisor, and writing the same reason doesn't seem right.
My question is: What other reasons that one may have for selecting an advisor, other than having shared interests?

I'm reminded of a colleague who was approached by a prospective advisor: "Work with me. You'll get an excellent job." She said: "Doesn't the work I do matter?" He repeated himself. She worked with someone else and got a very good job, arguably not excellent.

Many don't speak about this too often, but with an advisor you are not only choosing a field of interest, but you are choosing a mentor. By all means, you want to "tick well" with him/her. There is not much good for a PhD student having a star researcher advisor whom they see once in a quarter and who is a sociopath on a personal level (this is a bit too extreme, but think about it as a continuum between extremes). Choose somebody with whom you will be able to work, whose example it is worth to follow, from whom you want to learn, not only the scientific stuff, but also workstyle, level of quality he/she strives for, etc. These soft reasons are often more important than anything else. For highlighting of all the examples of stuff you don't want to fall into (but will anyway :-) ), go and look at the PhD Comics.
P.S.
I am speaking with a European-centric attitude, where you choose your advisor, since he/she will be your boss, rather than being assigned to one as it seems to happen in the US system. Still, the point is worth to consider. Germans have a good term for this, your PhD supervisor is your "Doktorvater", i.e., "doctor father". That very much speaks how the relationship should end up in an ideal case.

The US system is not "being assigned to an advisor," either. There is an element of free will in picking advisors in the US. But it's more often organized at the departmental level, rather than at the research group level, since admissions are also done at the departmental level.

@aeismail: obviously it's me having too little knowledge of how it works in the US system, I thought that prospective students apply to graduate school and then professors "pick them up" during a selection process of sorts. Still, I decided not to edit the answer. Let this comment stand as a disclaimer of my ignorance.

There is a selection process, but it's more of a "matching" process—students generally choose their preferred advisors and advisors choose their preferred students, and usually things work out.

Many US departments assign each incoming PhD student an "academic advisor"; one of their jobs is to help the student find a "thesis advisor".  Only the thesis advisor is known to the outside world as the student's "advisor".

+1 for the "tick well" comment. I'd call it chemistry, respect, admiration, but it should be personal (not general). I'd ALSO add it's OK to choose a well funded researcher (it usually means well published, connected, etc.) and you won't go into student-loan debt, especially at the PhD level (perhaps funding is a non-issue at your university, but it's not true everywhere).

all good and correct... in theory. You may happen to find yourself in a perfect-match situation when you first start you post-grad programme, but three/four years is a long period, and it's quite easy to change opinion on people (especially around deadlines). I find that ratemyprofessors.com gives a good hint on the general attitude of a teacher

Pick someone who is good at what you want to be good at. If you want to go into academia, look for someone who has published regularly, recently, and in quality journals. If you lean toward working in industry, find someone who has connections with industry. If you want to become a teacher, find someone who teaches regularly and has good reviews.
Having said that, I think they are just wanting to make sure you are a good fit for their department. They don't want to accept someone into their program if they're not interested in the type of research that is being done there.
Having said that, you can usually change advisors during the first year. So you probably shouldn't sweat this too much.

Some things I can think of (I'm a PhD student in my final year):

An advisor may be famous in their field, which in turn affects your abilities to make academic contacts.
An advisor may be known to be good at advising, to prioritise advising PhD students, make time when needed, etc. Having PhD students is good for an advisor, not least because PhD students produce papers.
An advisor may be a pleasant person to work with.

It may be hard to find someone meeting all three. I know of cases where (1) is met, but where the advisor is so busy that they hardly have time for their PhD student(s) (now I need to write a proposal, please come back in three months) so that other seniors in the same group do most of the supervision in practice.
There are probably other factors that I'm not thinking of right now.

My guess is that this is not a binding selection, especially since you say you're asked to list at least one, rather than just one. This strikes me as being a "have you done your homework about our department" question.
That said, picking an advisor involves making sure that they are a fit both with respect to your research interests, but also your working style. That also means talking to their research groups: are they the kind of people you can see yourself fitting in with for the next few years? Do you see yourself "meshing" well with your advisor?
Unfortunately, those are issues you can only determine after you've been admitted. But making sure you've identified a few people that you can work with will make sure that:

You're not setting yourself up for disappointment, because you want to work for popular professor X, who can only take two of the ten people who want to work with her, but nobody else.
The department can try to match applicant interests with available projects—in part, again to avoid everybody trying to go into the same subfield, and so that the distribution reflects the distribution of available projects.

None of the answers addressed the funding dimension of an adviser, so I'll add it here. My PhD adviser was well funded, which allowed me to:

Incur no student-loan or other debt during the 5 years of my PhD (I went from bachelors to PhD, by the way).
Travel easily when I published papers at conferences.
Understand how research proposals are written, as the professor worked on a lot of them and we were involved in that process. Useful for when you'll have to write proposals IF you become a professor.

When selecting my advisors, I identified my areas of interest/need for the research I wanted to pursue, then requested those professors who were experienced/focused in each of those areas (my research was somewhat interdisciplinary). Early on, a very helpful professor encouraged me to consider my dissertation experience as a unique opportunity to have specialist scholars working with / guiding me through the research process -- a collaboration that may be difficult to find once you are "out there".  It helped frame my approach to my dissertation which was not only successful, but ended up being a fantastic learning experience...I was fortunate.

So far the answers do address your explicit question "how do you select an advisor?", but I think you may (also) have a slightly different question that is currently not answered.

So, what do you put in that text field?

Evidently, "Prof. Smith's research interests are the most close to mine" is kind of boring, since, as you say, the instructions already say as much. Putting in "Prof. Smith is a nice guy and I would love to work with him" may be true, but also not a very convincing answer (in selection and interview processes, "correct" and "convincing" are not always the same thing).
Instead, what you should do is be more specific. Prof. Smith will have lots of (slightly or completely) different research interests. Which of them speaks to you, and why?

Prof. Smith has published recently on hand waving in underwater basket weaving. In my own undergraduate research, I have investigated the anthropologic impact of hand waving in industrial processes, and I would love to continue this line of research in the context of underwater basket weaving under the supervision of Prof. Smith.


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"Telecommuting" in academia
In business (e.g. IT industry) remote work (aka "telecommuting") can be relatively common (see e.g. a recent StackOverflow blog post). It is exceedingly rare (or even nonexistent) in academia, even though most part of academic work consists basically of thinking and writing, which can be done in any environment. Are you aware of any successful implementations of "remote work" in academia?
Of course, there are many factors making it less feasible - an academic employee usually has other duties (e.g. teaching) which can't be done remotely, there is also the social aspect of research, meetings etc. (although this is not that much different from similar aspects in a programming job, unless we argue that doing science is "more creative" than mere programming and thus requires more physical presence). Also, currently available tools still make e.g. making a web seminar or math meeting difficult (no blackboard), although this too is changing (see e.g. G+ Hangout seminars: TCS+). However, given the scarcity of jobs, "N-body problems" etc., it seems to me that the potential for remote work (even part-time) is, as of now, underutilized in academia.

"t is exceedingly rare (or even nonexistent) in academia, even though most part of academic work consists basically of thinking and writing, which can be done in any environment. Are you aware of any successful implementations of "remote work" in academia?" - Citation Needed. I work remotely, and have worked with others who were working remotely more often than not.

Most of my papers were written with coauthors thousands of miles away, including a few that I have never met in person.  Does that count?

See also: http://academia.stackexchange.com/q/1887/1033

I am in CS, and most people I know are working remotely at least part time.

It is easier to be distracted by the wonders of internet at home.

@Paxinum: really? I find it is at least as easy if not easier to be distracted by the wonders of internet office-mates find...

There are also experimental scientists who spend time in labs that do not only consist of computers, and usually are not available at home ;-)

@cbeleites yes, but it probably depends quite a lot on who you share the room with. Besides, it is convenient to have colleges around to ask stuff, instead of having to look in a book or online, and you learn exactly what you need.

@Praxinum: sure, and it also depends on how many are in the office. Personally, I find something like 2 or 3 people sharing an office my optimum. Where I'm now, we're 7 and our office is known as "laying battery" (and we all wish there was a kind of answering machine at the phone that everyone who calls has to listen to for half a minute to think over the call before it starts ringing...) - so we frequently do writing at home. If someone is needed (we have responsibilities for lab instruments), a skype or phone call gets the person into the lab within half an hour or so.

While there are advantages to remote working for individuals, my feeling is that it is used too much and leads to a bad work environment. Unlike industry, academics are not evaluated as frequently or in as meaningful of a way. When some people work remotely and others don't this can lead to resentment and a feeling that they are not pulling their weight. Academic departments are often on the verge of dysfunctional and generally have cliques each representing their own interests. Extensive remote working exacerbates these problems. Problems can often be solved much more efficiently over a coffee/beer than the telephone.

"Verge of dysfunction" captures it nicely! Yes, the non-scientific component of "work" is hard to do remotely... but when it does pervade every one of our work-days, this itself is destructive of the scientific work.

Doing it part-time is rather common at least in places i have worked. At moment me and most of my colleagues work from home two days of the week (usually Mondays and Fridays for most and Thursdays and Fridays for some) on the days that no teaching is involved. If there is an important meeting we will show up otherwise we skype. I think i generally work on average 6.5 days in a 22 day work month from home.

Yes, at the very least this "fractional telecommuting" saves the travel-time those days. Similarly, for library access, "in the old days" I would go to campus Sat and Sun, as well. But, now, I can use MathSciNet from home, and save two more days' travel time and car-maintenance.

In my subject area (computational physics) telecommuting is certainly possible, and in fact I am very lucky to be able to spend a significant fraction of time working off campus. As a post doc I generally find that when it comes to research (in terms of developing and running code and writing papers) I am much more productive working in an isolated environment without distractions. However, it is also very important to maintain links with other researchers and students in the group and department. This can partly be done with tools such as Skype, but the importance one-to-one interaction should not be underestimated, as well as just 'being around'. Many problems are solved over coffee, and this interaction is a critical part of collaborative research.
Overall though I think that telecommuting, at least for researchers for some of the time is a good thing, particularly in conjunction with flexitime for those with families.

Good science starts from good definitions. You have not given your definition of remote, and I personally can think of at least three different scenarios:

Work in office some days, from home some other days, but the office is withing commuting distance. It is true that academia does not care which computer you write your papers on, especially if you work is only on a computer (pure math, theoretical sociology, may be some computer science). Many companies allow their staff to work like that, especially if their roles are well defined and can be performed off-site.
Collaborate remotely: you write a paper together with somebody in another university, in another country, etc. At the extreme, you meet the person with whom you published that paper only a couple years later at a conference where you are presenting it. I think nearly every paper with more than one author is written that way... although in some disciplines, a team of 10 authors means the personnel of a single lab.
Work from home full time, with the nearest office being a few hours away. (My worst commute was get up at 4am, drive 2hrs to the airport, take a flight with a connection, total 4 hrs, spend 3 hours in meetings, take an 8pm flight, drive back, back home 1 am next day. Don't want to do this very often, thank you.)

All the responses so far addressed options (1) and (2). To me, "remote" means (3): I am sitting at least a time zone away from the rest of the company (I work in a private sector). There is absolutely no freaking way this could work in academia even if your work only involves a computer. (Obviously, if you are a biologist with a lab to attend every day to look at your mice, your question simply does not make sense.) If you raise a question like that in a job interview, you can bid it farewell, pack and go: there are dozens Ph.D.s waiting in line, and nearly each of them will take a job on any condition. (Yes, there's overproduction of Ph.D.s, which they probably did not tell you when you applied for that highly coveted degree. If there were no over-production, there would be no point to have this website, as university managers will be hunting Ph.D.s, not Ph.D.s hunting jobs.)
While you what you seem to see from your Ph.D. student perspective about academic work seems to be research (which is of course doable across continents if needed), you will HAVE to teach, and you will HAVE to do some service (department committees, qualifying exams, colloquia, campus involvement, etc.), and then later on take graduate students that you are supposed to pamper and educate. If you are thinking about post-doc options, then again the expectation is that you learn from your mentor, their lab and their department by being present there and working with them. You can't do this remotely.

"While you what you seem to see"?

Are you aware of any successful implementations of "remote work" in academia?

Yes: quite a few people I know are (or claim to be) more productive working from home than going to campus; they only go there for teaching, when they need a lab or when they need to talk to someone.
But of course, it depends on the area where you are working; engineers will eventually need labs, test equipment etc...


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Why does NIH study section website robot.txt disallow search?
NIH posts their study section members who review grants online (e.g. Aging Systems and Geriatrics Study Section (ASG)'s roster is provided here). I was trying to search the study sections to find whether a particular reviewer served as a study section member. However, this is not easy, because their website does not provide a search function that does this (as far as I can tell), and the website NIH study section rosters that contain grant reviewer names disallow search engines from crawling and indexing them via robots.txt.
http://internet.csr.nih.gov/robots.txt
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Clearly, I can do a manual search by going to each page and finding if any of the study section contains the name I'm looking for, or manually make a database for personal use.
What are the possible rationales for disallowing search engine indexing reviewers?

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it's an administrative question for the administrators of a particular website.

@Memming, this could be done for any number of reasons.  The two I can think of off the top of my head is 1) to prevent site slowdowns especially due to what is likely to be the duplication of information developed by indexing the NIH site and 2) to protect (to some extent) the privacy of the participants.
One suggestion, have you tried using Google to search the site?  Search is not the same as indexing.  So if you're looking for sections with "Joe Brown" you can try searching "Joe Brown site:csr.nih.gov".  I was able to get results with this approach using a name I picked at random from the study sessions.

Thanks for the reply! Interesting that you got results using the "site:" restriction with Google. I do not get any results from the "intranet.csr.nih.gov", only "public.csr.nih.gov".

Notice that I dropped off the first part.  Just csr.nih.gov.

I did try that first. It only gave me results from public.csr.nih.gov. Google search is known to give heterogenous results, so this might be one such case.

Yeah, hacking Google is a clumsy and inexact science but sometimes it works... ;-)


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NSF two-ninths salary rule vs. NIH model
National Science Foundation (NSF) in US enforces a limit on salary compensation over all grants, often referred to as the two-ninths-rule:

Summer salary for faculty members on academic-year appointments is
  limited to no more than two-ninths of their regular academic-year
  salary. This limit includes summer salary received from all NSF-funded
  grants.

So, for a 9-mo faculty who can fill up to 3 months of their own summer salary, NSF as the sole source of salary compensation doesn't work no matter how many grants one has.
Compared to the NIH model where there is no such limit, in fact 100% of salary can be recovered in theory via NIH grants, this is a rather strong limit.
What is the motivation of the NSF two-ninths-rule? Why not three-ninths to cover the whole summer salary?

I don't know for sure if this is historically accurate, but the story I've always heard is that the two-ninths rule was an attempt to avoid the vacation issue.  If you take three months of summer salary, then that leaves no time at all for any vacation, since you can't accept summer salary for any time not spent on research.  The fear was that if three months of summer salary were allowed, lots of people would request it (since a 9% salary increase would be tough to resist), but the public would be concerned that many of them were probably cheating and going on holiday with their families for part of that time anyway.  The two-ninths rule minimizes the extent to which the NSF has to deal with this issue, since there's one month reserved for vacation or other activities.
Incidentally, this fits consistently with Bill Barth's answer: solving the vacation problem this way is probably more attractive for an agency that has less money in the first place.

LOL. So the public choose to ignore when most R1 professor overwork? None of my peers would have a vacation for more 14 days. Because most likely your spouse is not in academia so 15 days total for a year. What? You go vacation by yourself for the rest 15 days?

One way to look at this is actually look at your question slightly differently - what assumptions do NSF vs. NIH funding make about who you are, and why they're funding you.
The NIH model is clearly meant to support dedicated, purely-NIH funded research positions run on 100% soft money, or something very, very near to it (a floating hard money fund for like, 5% effort to cover proposal development time, for example, is somewhat common). This implicitly implies that the NIH is funding the usual employment-related absences - sick days, vacation, etc. And that anything they don't pay for might as well not exist, in the case of a 100% soft money position.
In contrast, the NSF model is clearly paying for directed research time, under the assumption that someone else (presumably state/university funding) is picking up the rest of the tab. There's no reason then, for them to pay for things like vacation time or the other things. They only want to pay for the time one might reasonably be expected to be working directly on NSF-funded projects, and between other summer responsibilities and travel, that's probably not your entire summer. As some other's have said, that they're also cash constrained probably helps inform that position.

The motivation is to reduce the scarceness of money the NSF has available. It's there to encourage everyone to apply to other agencies and sources of summer salary. NSF grants are very competitive, and if everyone went for 3 months salary, NSF'd run out of funds sooner, or program officers would spend more time cutting budgets to try to fund everything that reviewed well.
It's also not a hard and fast rule. with PO permission, you can get around it if necessary. Plenty of large instruments have full-time staff funded by NSF grants alone.

Bill Barth already outlines one part of the reason: to alleviate the scarcity of resources. Another one is that NSF's mission includes education, and allowing faculty to only do research instead of paying their salaries exclusively from external funding would undermine their ability to integrate research and education.
This might call for a 3-months rule instead of the current 2-months rule; the difference may be explained using arguments such as Bill's.


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Royalty distribution negotiable?
It seems many US academic institutes co-own patents filed by their employees, and have policies for redistributing the royalty (minus costs) back to the inventor. For example,

Stanford: 1/3
MIT: 1/3
University of California (UC) system: 35%
State University of New York (SUNY) system: 40%

Are these numbers negotiable? In particular, can the academic institute force a lower proportion for inventor redistribution by making a deal with the inventor?

I'm not completely clear on the last part - do you want to know if the institute can force the inventor to accept a smaller percentage (less pay) than what their official published policy states (1)? Or do you want to know if you can possible negotiate a higher payment for yourself as inventor, in exchange for the institute taking a lower percentage (2)? In the first case, it seems like it would be easy to argue that the institute is trying to violate their own published policy and that would be bad faith, but would be a legal question.

@BrianDHall It could be either case. This is a hypothetical question. Not looking for a legal advice. Anecdotes would be helpful.


text:
Are book reviews peer-reviewed? Are news articles peer-reviewed?
A couple of simple questions:

Books are not peer reviewed in general. Are book reviews that appear in academic journals peer-reviewed? Since they represent personal opinions, I would think they cannot be peer reviewed.
What about news articles? For example, journal Nature has various short news focus and research highlights that discuss other peer-reviewed research articles in a broader perspective. Are those peer-reviewed? Due to time pressure, I would think it would be difficult to peer review these in time.

Book reviews, opinion pieces, and news articles are generally not peer reviewed.  That's not to say there's no review at all: editors read and approve these contributions, and they may request changes before publication if they feel it is necessary.  It's even possible that an editor would ask for an opinion from a third party.  However, peer review (by an external expert) is not a standard practice for these sorts of articles.

Books are not peer reviewed in general.

Books can be an intermediate case.  Acquisitions editors often solicit external reviews of book proposals or manuscripts, to decide which ones to accept and how they should be revised.  However, you are right that the level of review is generally not as comprehensive or detailed as it is for journal articles.

It depends entirely on what you mean by peer review.  Using Australia's Higher Education Research Data Collection (HERDC) criteria for the collection of publication information, peer review amounts to substantial review by appropriate experts.  Books are either reviewed by proxy by commercial publication in this research data collection scheme, reliant on the habit of scholarly monographs being sent out for readers and scholarly collections being edited by the book's editors, or they have to be explicitly peer reviewed if published in an electronic only format.  The quality of review of monographs varies considerably from field to field and from publishing house to publishing house.  It matters quite a great deal for my discipline as my discipline is monograph driven.
Book reviews are sometimes peer reviewed.  Book reviews of more than one work which advance original scholarly arguments are regularly peer reviewed in my domain (HASS: Humanities, Arts, Social Sciences; the converse of STEM).  These reviews contribute either a critical reflection on current practice, or they contribute a substantive account of the field (literature review / review article / field review).  HERDC recognises this to the extent that reviews of more than one work which otherwise meet the criteria of a journal article (contribution to scholarly knowledge, peer review) are accepted as full journal articles.
Some news articles in journals formally meet the standard for peer review of HERDC, but fail other criteria, such as an original contribution to scholarly knowledge.


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Is sending a CV with recommendation letter a good idea?
My coworker requested me to write a recommendation letter for an academic position  (postdoc). I myself am a postdoc, and afraid that my name may not be known well enough.
In order to support my credentials, I was thinking of either including a short bio or attaching a full CV with my recommendation letter. Is this a bad idea?

It's a little unusual. Typically you insert relevant material into the letter. Something like

Dear So and So,
      I'm awesome in these 10 different ways
Now let me tell you about Candidate.


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Building a workshop website
I am organizing a one day workshop as a part of a major conference in my field.
I would like to have a website to

introductory text (static html)
announce things (some content management)
keep everybody up to date (mailing list)
maintain a pre-workshop and post-workshop online discussion forum

Is there a web service that would implement these things easily?
Also, I don't want the visitors to register accounts. Perhaps a mailing list accessible via web would be sufficient, since I do not expect anybody to regularly visit just to check the forum (except for myself). Is there a mailing list/forum service suitable for such purpose?
Free would be best. I am capable of building such website myself, but I do not want to host it nor spend too much time setting it up. In the past, I used wordpress.com, google sites, google groups and such...

If you used Wordpress (and maybe Google's Blogger), why don't you create a blog and set its privacy settings? You end up with a few people having access to your website and getting notifications if they subscribed to it. The only thing is that there is no such thing as a forum, but you can still create a post to initiate the discussions.

And what was wrong with WordPress? Unless you want to have something really specialistic, it should work seamlessly.

This question appears to be off-topic because it is not about academia: it is seeking shopping recommendations for a web service

@EnergyNumbers the question has criteria that are specific to a given academic settings, and at least one of the current answers is a tool specific to academics… I don't see how it is “not about academia”

@F'x none of those criteria, either jointly or individually, are specific to academia. Furthermore, it's a shopping question, which is also off-topic. Either of those grounds are sufficient for closure and deletion.

I was asking about other's experiences and best practices in academia setting. But I agree that it is a shopping sort of question that may not belong to SE.

I would recommend a generic tool for making websites.
WordPress.com (or WordPress.org if you are more tech-savvy and want to host it on your univ. server) is a popular option (e.g. NetSci2013).
In both you can add comments for discussions.
Other CMSes would work - for example Wikidot (e.g. Offtopicarium).
When it comes to mailing, Google Groups are one easy solution (unless you want something more sophisticated.)
The only general advice is to use as many made tools as possible, so you don't waste time on reinventing the wheel (or dealing with too many services at once).

Some large institutions maintain platforms for such tasks: some of them are restricted to their members, others have a more liberal policy. For example, the French CNRS (largest national research institute) has developed SciencesConf.org. It fulfills your requirements, except for the forum (which, as far as I can tell, is rather unusual for conferences to have).

forum is not a must. more of an experiment. It looks like participants have to create accounts for sciencesconf.org, is that indeed the case? Can anybody use sciencesconf.org?

@Memming the only limitation is stated on the front page: “This tool is reserved for academic and research institutions”… other than that, there is no restriction. And participants don't have to create accounts if they don't want to be on the mailing list

If the forum is not a must, for static web pages Google Sites is another easy-to-setup option which has inter alia a visual editor available.


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Online Education in a Civilization of Scarce Energy
In the context of a transition to lower energy consumption, one considers, among other things, the energy consumption of the Internet. Among the various uses of the Internet, it seems that the transfer and "consumption" of video takes a lion's share (and that 3d material is motivating the accelerated transition to 5g technology). Among those videos, the share of educational videos has increased during the forced lock-downs of 2020-2021 due to the covid19 pandemic.
If academics were to anticipate the maintenance of academic structures in a world with lower energy consumption,

would it make sense (energy wise) to consider replacing Educational Videos by Educational Sound Podcasts as a way to reduce the storage space and bandwidth required for educational material, eventually with a synchronized set of illustration slides?

Do we need a special data format for those (especially the synchronized set of slides), or will video compression algorithms do the trick?

What existing examples of such teaching material (with synchronized set of slides) are there online?

I don't have data on that, but I would speculate that educational videos, albeit maybe growing, only represents a tiny, tiny fraction of Internet data traffic. That is to say, if you want to conserve energy on the Internet you need to look at YouTube, Netflix, or TikTok, not lecture recordings.

If you're still around 40 years from now, I suspect your question will be quite amusing to read. My perspective is from reading numerous future forecasts about the use of radio and filmstrips and TV programs for grandiose visions about the future of education, written roughly in the 1930s-1940s, 1950s-1960s, and 1950s-1970s respectively (in various magazine and periodical library volumes I've looked though for various reasons during the past few decades).

One finding for educational videos is that "Students appear to find videos which include the instructor’s image to be more engaging, or they engage more with course content as a result of instructor presence in video". I would expect a static picture of the instructor that is updated each time the slide changes to be less effective.

@DaveLRenfro Far from a grandiose future, I fear one where the lack of huge amounts of cheap energy (which use coincided with the end of slave trade, the beginning of paid holidays, trade unions and the explosion of secondary and tertiary education) coincides with an extremely fast reduction/destruction of academic structures... I can only wish to be wrong and that any people left then will be able to read the question and to find it amusing.

So what were your thoughts in 2000 and 2001 when, at least in the U.S., Napster was creating huge problems for universities? Recall this was not because of the illegal downloading aspect (although there was that issue), but instead it was due to a large percentage of a university's internet bandwidth being used by students downloading and sharing music files. Surely this was a far greater problem at the time, and yet here we are, storing and downloading music files without any concern about bandwidth.

I was not aware of this problem in 2002, but surely, we can agree that the context concerning the cost of energy production and consumption between 2002 and 2022 are quite different?

A world of scarce energy will be a world of constant warfare where everyone is trying to take everyone else's remaining energy resources by force.  We hardly need to worry about universities in that world.

In your first link it is claimed that watching one hour of youtube videos produced 11.13 kg of CO2 emissions. Whenever I read such figures I'm wondering how video streaming is supposed to produce more CO2 per time unit than driving my car during rush hour in a city. The answer is: it simply doesn't. For instance a 2020 IEA analysis gives numbers that are several orders of magnitude lower, ranging below 100g CO2 per hour even for countries with high-carbon elcectricity. [...]

[...] Now, the topic is obviously complicated, and it might be to fair to say that IEA is probably not the avant-garde in slowing down climate change. And yes, obviously university infrastructure should do its share in an effort to reduce CO2 emissions. But claiming that educational videos somehow were (or were to become) a significant factor in global electricity consumption seems really way off the mark.

"a world with lower energy consumption" is not a plausible prediction of the near future.  Planned expansion of non-fossil fuel energy sources, which are often cheaper, will only accelerate energy consumption.  Reduced poverty will accelerate energy consumption.

The sudden increase due to the lock down, was due to the lock down. Now that is over again, there is very little interest in online education in my surroundings. That makes sense, these online courses were forced to be made in a very short time, by people who had no experience with it, and the unsurprising consequence was that for most students and teachers this was pretty awful. So when it was no longer necessary, they happily moved back to in person teaching, vowing to never ever ever get close to the internet for teaching ever again. So my guess would be that that problem will just solve itself.

Are you are answering the question, or rather stating that the question is meaningless? In any case, beside practicing the Flipped Classroom methodology (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom) where students study at home and practice in class, as one currently self-isolating because of a covid19 infection which in all probability occurred while proctoring a control in a small non ventilated room where students did not wear masks (I did), I quite strongly disagree with your guess that "that problem just solved itself"... :(

The premise of your question is that the number of educational videos will at least stay the same as during the lockdown. My observation is that that is unlikely.

Good point, but my premise is more that companies currently offering video hosting and transmission for free (e.g. Google via YouTube) will start charging for it when/if the cost of of storing and transmitting such videos will rise, something which could occur if energy production costs themselves do rise. And that the amount of educational videos will collapse as a consequence.

Ok, that solves the problem too right? It reduces the energy use and thus saves the planet.


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Research Funding conditionned to the signing of a debt acknowledgment with amount and debt in blank
Question
Are there other countries than Chile where the government requires researchers to sign a debt acknowledgement with date and amount in blank, validated at the notary, to be filled some time after the signing, as a condition for receiving research funding?
(Related: I asked on
https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/89105/requirement-to-sign-debt-acknowledgement-with-date-and-amount-in-blank-to-be-fi about the practice outside of academia)
Context
Many years ago (circa 2010), the institution distributing state research funding ANID (formerly known as CONICYT) via various "Fondecyt" competitions ("Fondecyt Initiation" for young researchers, "Fondecyt Regular" for other researchers, etc.) was asking researchers to sign a promise that they would return the integrality of the funding received in case they did not achieve the research objectives described in their accepted and selected research proposal.
Some years ago (circa 2015), the same institution replaced such requirement by a more drastic one, requesting researchers who had "won" the competition to sign at a notary's office a debt acknowledgment with both the amount and the date in blank, as a condition to get access to the research funding. Only a few notaries accept to validate such documents, but only because they normally compute their fees for validating such a document based on a percentage of the amount of the debt acknowledgment (which they cannot do when the amount is left blank).
Motivation
I thought that this would be illegal: signing a document is supposed to mean that one has read the terms of the documents and agrees with them, which is of course does not mean that one will agree with the terms of the documents once it has been modified. I was told that such document was indeed legal in Chile.
As an academic in Chile, I am expected to apply for state research funding, and to sign such debt acknowledgment if awarded such funding (and told "not to worry, as such debt acknowledgment is never enforced by the government"). I find this the most note worthy example of systemic corruption, in the sense that the very meaning of a signed contract is corrupted. I would like to gather arguments in order to try to convince higher instances of the inadequacy of such a policy.

This seems mostly to be a legal question. It certainly is quite unusual…

I would say doubly unusual that there is a someone willing to notarize a document with the expectation that some information will be added after they have notarized it. Doesn't it defeat the purpose of the notarization in the first place? You know, unimportant pieces of information like the amount of the debt.

@DavidA.Craven, actually a notarization only validates the document as presented and signed, not future alterations of it. The notary keeps a copy, for example, as does the presenter.

@Buffy I checked and in many US states for example it seems illegal to notarize such a document.

they would return the integrality of the funding received in case they did not achieve the research objectives sounds pretty crazy to me - it is the whole point of research that the result is not known beforehand. I work in heavily a bureaucratized system, but it is still a responsibility of a grant committee to make sure the proposal is plausible. Contracts with a clause "result provided in full or money back" are more common in the industry, the amounts may be discussed beforehand, but never be backfilled. If an applicant backs off at the last moment, they may get blacklisted.

@Lodinn My reaction exactly.
Other researchers' answers range from "nobody forces you  to take the money if you do not accept those conditions" (except that you are expected to "win" some of those projects for promotion and to be allowed to guide students) to "have some trust: the research ministry added such clause because of the ministry of contraloria, but they will never apply it" (but I feel that a contract's role is to AVOID the need for trust!).

@DavidA.Craven If you could give the list of such states (and some sources) in an answer, that would be (extremely) useful: one could list those as examples of why such process is a BAD idea (at many levels).

It is hard to prove a negative, even if the list of jurisdictions is finite. Either way, it is nonsensical to request such a document over a clause at the time of signing the contract... I have seen my share of bureaucrats covering their asses, but none were as brazen. Being generous here, it is possible to see grants as zero-interest credits, but one would never take a credit with the sum left blank to being filled by the bank, right? Further, the potential for abuse is vast because the criteria for the successful completion of objectives can and will be gamed, and bribe would skyrocket.


text:
Should a Kickstarter funding be in an academic CV?
In humanities, would a successful kickstarter project which supported relevant professional work belong in an academic CV? I think a "grants and fundraisers" category can have crowdfunding, but my friend thinks not. This is in the context of faculty job application in the US.

How much money did you raise?

@DanRomik Let's say $10k for a production of an art project.

That's a pretty nice amount. I'd say put it in, it probably won't help you very much, but can't hurt, and could serve as a useful icebreaker/conversation starter in an interview setting or at a conference etc. Besides, you never know who's checking out your CV online and may approach you some day asking for advice, a collaboration, or wanting help with their own Kickstarter project that involves much bigger amounts of money. Bottom line is, you did it, and it was to support an academic professional activity, so it certainly sounds relevant to me. Disclaimer: I'm in math not the humanities.


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Useful software resources for reviewing papers
I have a paper for review and I would like to include comments (on clarifications/suggestions/errors) over specific paragraphs or statements.
What are some ideal software resources that could help reviewers? I would prefer them to be Linux-based.

If you have access to the LaTeX source, there are a number of packages that will help you. Some include todonotes and fixme.
However it's more likely that you have a PDF only. In that case, you need a PDF annotating package. A free cross-platform solution is Xournal, which runs on windows/linux (and maybe Mac).
If you're on a iOS device, then Goodreader is a nice app that does annotations.
There's always Adobe Acrobat as well. Both of these solutions are not free though.
Update: (by @atiretoo)
One issue to be careful with providing comments on a pdf or other document is maintaining anonymity. Adobe Acrobat (and probably other software), automatically flags your annotations with information about you unless you are careful to remove that from the document before commenting.

On Mac OS X, you can just use Preview.

Xournal is very nice.

The approach taken by many reviewers (myself included) is to simply reference the page and line number, or to insert a copy of the statement in question in the referee report, e.g.:

On page 7, line 6, the word "mispell" should be "misspell".

This is probably the easiest approach if the number of such comments is not too large, since it doesn't require any extra software and doesn't require the authors to search through the PDF for your annotations.

When I get back my own papers after review, I much prefer those that include a list of changes by position like David has suggested. That way, all of the suggested changes are in one spot and I am less likely to miss one.

This is a good option, but how do we get line numbers if a pdf was provided? Esp. in IEEE format, it gets complicated - page 3, column 2, line X!

Note that the GoodReader suggestion in the other answer (and other annotating softwares) will export the notes with line numbers, giving both this preferred format and a visual markup format on the PDF also.

For journals which do not provide PDFs with line numbering, I usually indicate by both position and context. E.g. 'On page 7, top third of the page, in the sentence "In this work we will demonstrate the following nonobvious face" perhaps the authors intend to write "nonobvious fact".'

For most typos, you do not really need to provide that much context or pinpoint a specific location. Using @WillieWong's example, this would be usually sufficient: "p. 7: nonobvious face -> nonobvious fact?". The authors can easily use the search tool in their text editor to find the right spot.