text:
Does any publication venue make rejected papers available for download?
Is there any publication venue that makes rejected papers available for download?
I am most interested in the field of computer science, and English-speaking venues.

What would you like to do with that? To learn the negative examples?

There used to be a serious math journal called Rejecta Mathematica. Unfortunately, it only lasted for two issues.

I do not know of any, and I can't imagine any that would. Typically, the journal would not have the copyright assignment until after they accepted, though I hear that some venues ask for this upfront. Additionally, this isn't really how academic publication is supposed to work. A rejection isn't the end of the road for a work of scientific authorship. Many works are published elsewhere after being rejected. This would kill that process.
(Preprints notwithstanding, for works in fields where preprints don't count as publication.)

Also, I would never publish in a journal if it was publishing rejected works. I don't need my career spoiled.

One of the most cited Sociology articles (“the strength of weak ties”, Granovetter) was originally rejected (https://scatter.wordpress.com/2014/10/13/granovetter-rejection/). A rejection is NOT the end of the story, especially not when a lot of work has been put into it.

In my experience, the journals that ask for copyright assignment up front do it conditionally in that the assignment is voided if the journal rejects the paper. So that still wouldn't be enough for them to publish the rejected paper.

At Vixra.org you will find papers often rejected from Arxiv.org, and possibly also from the 'printed' press.

Needed to say, from my experience, "rejected from arXiv" means either "we don't have a category for that" or "it was crap".

As Bill Barth said, I don't believe anyone identifies or distributes rejected papers.  However, you might be able to get private access if you are interested in doing statistical analysis.  Of course no journal or conference would let you publish anything identifiable about specific rejected papers, they wouldn't let you access their data at all without some legal paperwork and promises of confidentiality, and they might not even let you do the analysis yourself (instead, they could answer statistical queries for you, so you never got your hands on all the data).  However, if you propose an interesting project regarding what distinguishes accepted from rejected papers, then they might be willing to work with you to collect some statistics.  It's by no means guaranteed, but it can't hurt to ask if you have a project you are excited about.

If you mean a place where people can post rejected papers, any place you can post preprints, such as the arXiv or a personal webpage, will fill this role.
If you mean a journal that will publish rejected papers, normally people try to publish them in another journal, though after some difficulty, they may give up and leave them in the preprint form.  There was an attempt to make a journal specifically for such papers in math, Rejecta Mathematica (this was a serious effort, with peer review), but foundered after a few years from lack of interest.
If you mean a journal that publishes submissions which are rejected (say publishes online papers which are rejected from a printed journal), one would need to get permission from the authors, who are not likely to be willing to give it.  Also, if a journal publishes all papers they "accept" and all papers they "reject", they are just publishing all papers submitted and may as well not be a peer-review journal.

Actually there is one.
Copernicus Publications is an open access publisher that has some journals with an "open review model". Each paper in these paper has its full review process open for viewing to everyone. Each journal is actually two journals. The "regular" one and the "discussions" one, where it's possible to view the original submission, any revisions, reviewers comments and author replies. People who are not the assigned reviewers can also post comments on papers under review.
You can view this for both accepted and rejected papers, which is nice because then you can compare and see what makes one paper strong and another one weak.
Not much computer science in there, but it has some areas which may be tangentially related in the "Math|Data|Informatics" section: http://publications.copernicus.org/open-access_journals/math_data_informatics.html

I tried checking this out (e.g., http://www.earth-syst-sci-data-discuss.net/papers_in_open_discussion.html) but the only discussion papers I see are the ones under review.  Can you add explicit links where you can download rejected papers?

@Kimball sure. http://www.earth-syst-sci-data-discuss.net/5/issue1.html this issue has a rejected paper.

There is the Journal of unsolved Questions JunQ. They collect ‘null’-result research and open problems. This may include previously rejected work.


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Why do companies sponsor academic conferences?
In computer science, I often see companies sponsoring academic conferences. What do companies hope to gain from doing so, and is there any evidence that these hopes are fulfilled?

Really? This can he generalised to "why do companies advertise?".

@StephenTierney There might be other reasons, e.g. tax incentives. Also, I think you didn't read the second part of the question.

Advertisement.

is there any evidence that these hopes are fulfilled

Yes: if it didn't work, companies would slowly stop sponsoring.

"If it didn't work, companies would slowly stop sponsoring." -> yes I thought the same. I was hoping to have some more fine-grained information, e.g. impact of firm X sponsoring a conference on number of future applications to firm X from people attending the conference.

Three reasons immediately come to mind:

Advertising. I have a staggering amount of marketing material from tech companies, and I don't even go to that many C.S.-type conferences. I've got things covered in stickers, a t-shirt or two, etc. And there is something to be fair for your firm being on people's minds associated with the conference.
Recruiting. It's very common for there to be recruiting events, tables, or the occasional pitch during a conference. It's an easy way to reach an audience of people who have a particular skill set you know you're looking for.
Supporting the community. Many commercial businesses are built on software and systems built and maintained by the community, their employees use that software, etc. If a conference sponsorship keeps that going, it's probably worth it as essentially an R&D expense.

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Appropriate ways to propose moving from a single to a joint appointment
Consider an assistant professor who does fairly interdisciplinary work, regularly publishing in journals for more than one field, or where you can make a case that, depending on how you spin it, they could clearly be an X or a Y.
Currently, they have a single academic appointment in X, but are potentially interested in a joint appointment, perhaps to advise students, or to combat the perception that they're "really not a Y" within the field, or another reason.
What's the best way to raise this desire? What practical objections might be raised?

Often it is possible to get a "courtesy appointment", where you get an additional title and an entry in Y's department directory, but you still report to department X.  That's often sufficient for advising students, etc.  Is that something that would satisfy you, or do you really want a full faculty role in Department Y?  (Do you really want to attend two sets of faculty meetings?)

@NateEldredge This is a hypothetical question, so assume the full blown faculty role.

As Nate Eldredge points out in the comments, there are two types of joint appointments:

With a courtesy appointment, you get the public recognition of having both titles (Professor of X and Professor of Y) and you can advise and teach in both departments.  However, administratively you have a primary department that pays your salary and sets your teaching/service duties.  The main drawback is that if you want to split your teaching between the departments, it may take some arranging.  [In my experience this can often be done, but it's not guaranteed by a courtesy appointment.]
With a fully joint appointment, the two departments split your salary and duties in some set fraction (usually, but not necessarily, 50-50).  This makes it easy to do substantial amounts of teaching in both departments, but it can mean a slightly higher service load, since a 50% appointment often doesn't really cut the number of meetings in half.  The biggest drawback of a joint appointment is having to keep both departments happy, especially if they disagree on how you should be spending your time.  [This is a real danger for tenure cases.]

If you'd like a courtesy appointment in another field, you need someone in that department to serve as a champion for your case.  You can sound out friends or mentors privately to try to convince someone to advocate for offering you such a position.  Once someone brings it up at a department meeting, you then need a good enough reputation that the department is happy to have you associated with it.  Ideally, you should be someone they would have loved to hire if you hadn't already joined another department; in practice, you can sometimes get away with a slightly weaker case than that, but you still need to look strong enough that there's no fear you'll hurt the department's reputation.  Once the department is behind you, there may also be some administrative hurdles (perhaps including letters of recommendation).
Switching to a genuine joint appointment is much trickier, since you need to convince the other department to start paying for you.  Why should they do that when they could offer you a courtesy appointment for free?  There are various possible answers, such as:

You're so famous that they'll cheerfully do whatever you want.
They really value you, and offering you this appointment will keep you from leaving.
You'll fill a role in the new department that they would have had to hire someone else for anyway (e.g., teaching certain classes).
There are deals being made behind the scenes.  If department Y takes over half your position, what might department X offer them in return?

If you want to bring this about, you'll need to spend some time crafting a compelling argument.  There are many directions you could go in, but ultimately it will depend on the department's needs.
As I mentioned above, tenure cases can be really tricky for joint appointments.  Both departments end up with a de facto veto, since if one turns you down the other isn't likely to be enthusiastic about coming up with the extra money to save your job (taking the other department's reject doesn't feel good).  Before tenure, I'd consider a courtesy appointment to be a much better idea.  Once you get tenure, you can then reevaluate and see what your options are.

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Should undergraduate students be included on papers containing data they collected?
Assume one or more undergraduate students are given a topic by an academic supervsior to use for their undergraduate honors thesis. The task is designed, programmed and set-up by the supervisor, who shows the students how to use the equipment and to conduct rudimentary data analysis/summaries. The students then collect the data and report them in a written, submitted thesis. Later, the academic supervisor analyses the data (from the summaries obtained), writes a manuscript in conjunction with his/her colleagues, and wishes to submit for publication. My question is: should the undergraduates who collected the data, and who did not contribute to the writing of the manuscript at all, be listed as authors? It seems that this decision is often left to personal preference. Thanks.

Are those students mentioned in the paper, say in the introduction section?

No, they merely collected the data and reported seperate theses.

Why not cite the senior thesis in the same way one would cite any other work?

I really like @BorisBukh 's suggestion

Why would they be an author for data collection? Do we also give co-authorship to the database programmer that retrieves data for me?

@Jase I think it depends on the complexity of the program ...

@StrongBad, exactly. Clippy the Paperclip doesn't get coauthorship for an Excel spreadsheet. These folks http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2484870 get co-authorship (or a paper+citation) for their work.

A few comments:

Were they asked to contribute to the paper or was the paper written without their knowledge? If they refused to contribute, then they shouldn't be a named author. If they weren't asked, then it's not their fault they didn't contribute ;)
I think the word undergraduate is a red herring. Substitute it with the word PhD student or RA or Prof from the lab next door, does this change your view? A person's title shouldn't influence their inclusion.
How much work are we talking about here? When I provide statistical advice, I'm happy to give up a few hours of my time for free. But once I'm spending days on the project, then I expect (and make it clear) to be am named author.
If data collection was "trivial", then I would suggest it shouldn't be used as an undergraduate project. Also, I presume that there was some skill in collecting the data?

+1 for all of these, especially that 'undergraduate' is a functionally irrelevant piece of information.

Reading your original question, the scenario you describe makes this situation a little more complex.
If the paper is written in such a way as to draw significantly on the work reported in the thesis—to the extent of using figures and data prepared by the student, then one could very well make the argument that the student should be cited as an author. This is especially true if the supervisor uses any of the text in the construction of his paper.
More generally, I try to use the criterion that my postdoc advisor gave me: if someone believes that their contributions to the research are significant enough to merit co-authorship, then they should contribute to the writing and revising of the manuscript. At that point, they become fully entitled to co-authorship.

If the student (or anybody else for that matter) did not make a novel and significant intellectual contribution to the project, then they should not be included on the author list of the paper. In your question, it seems like all the intellectual contribution was by the professor (and colleagues) and the students just carried out tasks assigned to them or made very minor contributions. As such, the students should be mentioned in the acknowledgement section but not given authorship.
That being said, if your supervisor is only using you for drill work, then maybe you should seek a better supervisor. A good supervisor should encourage their students to take an active role of novel intellectual contribution. If your supervisor is not encouraging you to do this, then they are not training you to be a researcher, they are training you to be a lab-hand (although I guess in some fields you have to be a lab-hand before you are can be trained as a researcher).
Here is the flip side of this question, in particular my answer is inspired by @JeffE's answer.

Thanks. That's what I figured (i.e., authors need to make substantive contributions either to the intellectual development of the project or to the writing of the manuscript itself).

I can see a reasonable argument that collecting the data and performing the data analysis is a significant intellectual contribution.  After all, the supervisor is relying on the students' summaries of the data to derive their own analysis.  (Personally, I would find such an argument more convincing than "I run the lab" or "I wrote the proposal".  When in doubt, I tend to err on the side of giving students more credit and faculty less.) But my opinion doesn't matter; the correct answer depends on the standard publication culture in the supervisor's field.

Given that the students did not participate in writing the paper, I agree with Artem Kaznatcheev that they should not be named as authors.
It is good scientific practice to only put an author's name on a paper if she or he has at least read the complete paper before publication and can judge its correctness. After all, each author is responsible for any misrepresentations in the paper.
However, they definitely should appear in the acknowledgement section.
(Our lab has the informal policy that we ask students who contributed somehow to a research project if they want to take part in the paper-writing process. In this case, they are named as authors, otherwise mentioned in the acknowledgements section.)

The consensus (of course no such thing exists) that I have heard in the biological science goes, if your data resulted in a figure, you get your name on the paper. However, if the person wrote the paper and contributed immensely, they then get the first authorship,
I think part of the question is based on whether or not the ideas of the thesis were influential in the interpretation of the data and if the data had to be recollected. In the situation described our field would be very comfortable with having the undergrad in the middle, the least important position of authorship.
It is very important to acknowledge @JeffE's comment which is "the correct answer depends on the standard publication culture in the supervisor's field"


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How to acquire 3 recommendation letters to apply for jobs when working with 1 advisor?
We all know that usually when applying for a post phd academic position students need at least three recommendation letters. But what can we do if we have only worked with our advisor and we have no other close professors in the department to ask. This refers to the case when the student took classes, had a little teaching experience, but never got to the point to know some professor well, or collaborate with researchers from another place.
Some sub-questions:
1) how well does the writer need to know the student to write a decent recommendation?
2) how research recommendations are looked at when applying for purely teaching job?
3) how non-research recommendations are looked at when applying for research job?
4) what else can we do in a short period of time to acquire those recommendations?
5) is there a way to avoid submitting recommendations, at least in the first stage of the application process?

"But what can we do if we have only worked with our advisor and we have no other close professors in the department to ask." — Don't have done that?

You need to strategize with your advisor, or a trusted mentor, about this.  You need recommenders who have a high opinion of your work, are willing to put in the time to write a good letter, and know how to do so (which rules out more people than you might think).  Ideally, you need advice from someone who knows what sorts of letters different people write and can help you choose who might be most appropriate.
What I recommend for my students is:

A letter from me, which will discuss in detail what they have done, why it's important, what the student's key contributions were, what the future might hold, etc.  I'll also sit in on a class the student teaches and talk with them about teaching, so I can put in a reasonably well-informed paragraph about that, but the focus of the letter will be research.  (I'll have a different version of this letter, which emphasizes teaching more, to be sent to highly teaching-oriented jobs.)
A teaching letter from someone in the department who is well known for excellent teaching and can evaluate the quality of their teaching.
A research letter from another faculty member in the department.  This will be from someone the student has met with at least a couple of times each semester for the last year or two, if not more often, so they will be in an excellent position to write a serious letter.
A research letter from someone at another university, typically someone I know who has interacted with the student at conferences, seen the student give at least one talk, and read at least one paper by the student.  This proves that the student is developing a reputation outside their university, and it supplies a letter from someone who has less of a vested interest in seeing the student succeed.

Of course, it's hard to set up (3) and (4) on short notice.  It's often helpful if your advisor asks someone.  I can say "You remember my excellent student Alice, the one who wrote the paper on X?  She's graduating this year, and I think she's going to do very well on the job market, but she still needs one more recommendation, and we're hoping for one from another university.  Could you help?"  By contrast, there's nothing a student can write that will be as effective.  (From a student's perspective, the letter is a favor to the student, but faculty sometimes think of it as a favor to the advisor.)
The biggest problem is if your advisor can't or won't help with this.  Then you'll have to pick the most supportive people you know and ask them yourself.  It's helpful to offer to meet with them to tell them about your work, to make sure they are fully up to date.  You should send them copies of all your application materials.  It's also helpful if you supply additional background and commentary, to help give them more of a feeling for your work and its context.  This makes it easier to write the letter, by supplying interesting ideas and facts the letter writer can mention.  (That's the lazy approach to writing a letter, but if someone is going to be lazy, you want to make it as easy as possible for them.)  Make sure everyone writing a research letter actually plans to discuss your research.  It can really hurt your application if a letter just says "Bob took my advanced phrenology class and received an A.  I was particularly impressed with his insightful questions regarding retrophrenology, and I became convinced that this bright young man has an extraordinary future in pseudoscience.  I haven't read any of his papers, but his advisor assures me that they are wonderful, so Bob has my strongest recommendation."  When you get your Ph.D., you should be judged based on your research (and teaching), not your performance in classes.
You should request letters at least one month before the deadline.  It doesn't really take a month to write a letter, but it can take a number of hours (looking at papers and application materials, thinking, and then writing).  Any given week may be very busy - for example, someone may be travelling or facing a major deadline - and faculty members often have to write dozens of letters, so if you do not ask far enough in advance, then there may simply not be enough time for your letter.  If you need a letter very quickly, then you are asking for a huge favor, and the letter probably won't be as long or compelling as it might have been otherwise.
As for some of your sub-questions:  The writer does not need to know the student well, but must know something about the student's work (for example, from papers or talks).  For most academic jobs in the fields I know about, there is no way to avoid submitting recommendations with the initial application.

Excellent answer. The only thing I'd suggest is that if the student has maintained contact with someone from their undergraduate university, that might be an additional source of a good letter of recommendation, as it would be with someone with longstanding knowledge of the applicant.

@aeismail: Only if that someone is an expert in the student's research subarea.

Yeah, it's dangerous if a letter writer focuses on undergraduate work and then deals only briefly with graduate work.  It's OK to ask an undergrad professor one has kept in touch with, but it's crucial to make sure they understand the graduate work in detail and plan to focus on it almost exclusively.  (I would not recommend more than one or two sentences about anything from before grad school.)

@aeismail I'll third that sentiment.  I would only suggest asking a professor you knew as an undergraduate if you've had interactions with them since strating grad school you consider sufficient to write a letter.  I've seen one person you got a letter from a Nobel laureate who knew them as an undergraduate which was very positive, but probably hurt more than it helped.

You could ask members of your doctoral committee to write you a letter of recommendation each. They would probably need some details about the job and what it entails. They would also want to see your transcripts and a copy of your curriculum vitae but that shouldn't be a biggy!
Research related recommendation letters are obviously great if you are applying for a research job. Either way, you could ask your advisor to write you a letter that carries a good balance of research aptitude and general work skills.
In my experience, it is difficult to get letters of recommendation on short notice. They could take a couple weeks to a month or so.
Good luck!

If you are applying for a position that involves teaching, you should have one or more letters addressing your teaching.  If you were the TA for the course, they should come for the lead or recitation instructor.  If you were the lead instructor, it should be whoever supervised you, possibly an administrator.  If you apply for a teaching position without any such letters, they will infer you really want a research position and are only applying to them as a fallback position, which does not make you an attractive candidate.  (I've been on both sides.)
I second the recommendation to solicit letters from members of your doctoral committee, as well as anyone with whom you have co-authored a paper, done an internship with, particularly impressed while taking their class, etc.
If you have done impressive service, you can get a letter from someone about that.

In some areas of computer science, summer internships at corporate research labs (Microsoft Research, IBM research, and AT&T research mostly) have become an important part of the PhD process. The main benefit of doing an internship or two is to broaden the student's set of collaborators. This is helpful for them to get exposed to new areas of research that will eventually form a part of their thesis, but it is also an excellent source of recommendation letters. A researcher who supervised a student for a summer, and with whom he wrote a paper (or two, or three!) is in an excellent position to write a strong letter.
Of course, your thesis committee is another good place to look. Many times you will need 4 people on your committee (Your advisor, two others from your department, and sometimes an external researcher). With luck, at least 3 of these people will know your work well enough to write for you.

Really, you should start thinking about who you'll ask to write letters a couple of years before you ask for them.  Then you'll have time to develop relationships with your letter writers.  If you'd like to get a letter of recommendation from someone (particularly at your university), but haven't worked with them, try to start a collaboration.  For faculty other than your adviser, your "researchy" interaction with them will often start with a reading course (or independent study).


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How to accredit my Ph.D. in USA
I got my Ph.D. from the Faculty of Computers and Information Technology, Cairo University in 2007. I want to know if it is possible to compensate or to accredit my Ph.D. from USA. If it is possible, I want to know the steps for that. Advise and tell me if there is any program in USA for a Ph.D. holder to improve and add on to his career.

I have made some edits. Please see if they are what you wanted to ask. 'compensate' has a monetary tone to it and I am not very sure why someone should accredit a PhD degree.

Despite Bravo's edits, I don't understand the question.  Do you want to convince someone (who?) that you really have a PhD from Cairo?  Do you want to convince someone (who?) that the FCI PhD program at Cairo is legitimate?  Or do you want to leverage your existing PhD to obtain another degree in the US?

In the U.S., most academic fields are not like medicine: there is no licensing and for most purposes there are not strict legal requirements for what constitutes a degree.  In particular, there is nothing that needs to or can be done to accredit a foreign Ph.D.  (Other countries may differ.  For example, Germany used to treat non-EU Ph.D.'s differently; see http://www.zeit.de/2008/12/C-Seitenhieb-12.)
Regarding more specific issues:
Employers sometimes verify CVs, but that is not your responsibility.  If they need to check that you have a legitimate Ph.D. from Cairo University, then they will get in touch with the university directly to verify this.  You do not need to help (and in fact they won't allow you to help, to make sure the verification is unbiased), so all you need to do is to make sure everything on your CV is true.
You may run into people who acknowledge that you have a legitimate Ph.D. but have no idea what the standards of Cairo University are.  That will give you a modest disadvantage compared with students from, say, Stanford, but there's nothing you can do about it.  Ultimately, if you publish strong papers in prestigious venues, then that will matter much more than where your Ph.D. is from.  If you don't, then you will not get a research job anyway, wherever you studied.
If you are talking about upgrading the degree somehow - perhaps getting additional certification or even another degree from a particularly prestigious school - then it basically can't be done.  It's not truly impossible, and I know of a couple of cases in which people with Ph.D.s from other countries enrolled as students in the U.S. in order to improve their job chances.  However, most U.S. universities strongly discourage this, on the grounds that it's a waste of time and resources to devote a space in a graduate program to someone who already has a Ph.D. in the same field (or a closely related one).

"Employers sometimes verify CVs, but that is not your responsibility." There is one part of that which may end up being your responsibility. Employers sometimes ask for certified "local language" translations of diploma. That is often provided by most professional translation services.

"there are no legal requirements for what constitutes a degree." Is correct as far as it goes, but perhaps too encouraging. Most organizations (including various branches of the government) have a policy of expecting degrees to come from accredited institutions, and people have gotten dismissed for representing non-accredited degrees as equivalent to accredited ones. They will probably have to deal with foreign diplomas on a per case basis, but they are still looking for an assurance of that the degree means something similar to the accredited degrees they are used to.

@dmckee: Good point.  I'll edit to weaken it a little.

Although it is not possible to "accredit" a foreign degree, there are services out there that will determine if your foreign degree is equivalent to a degree issued by an accredited university in the United States. This type of service might be useful for immigration purposes and it might be necessary to apply for certain jobs in the United States, especially in the public sector. There are lists of  foreign degree equivalency service providers available.
If you look at the services offered by Educational Credential Evaluators, the reports that can be purchased vary in detail (and, of course, cost).  These reports are not cheap and, in most instances, probably unnecessary, so I would hold off on getting one done until I'm positive I'll need one.

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What is a "white paper"?
I recently came across a call for papers by NASA, asking for submissions of possible further missions using the Kepler spacecraft, given the mission-crippling loss of two reaction wheels. The call describes itself as a "Call for White Papers", and I am slightly confused by the term. What is a white paper, exactly? What other 'sorts of paper' can you call for, and how are they different?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_paper

@JoelReyesNoche: The Wikipedia article is pretty general and vague, and IMHO doesn't really help explain what sort of papers are being solicited in this case.

Some funding agencies (e.g., DARPA, AFOSR) use the term "white paper" to mean a brief synopsis of a project idea; this is similar to NSF's "Letter of Intent".  White papers help funding agencies evaluate project ideas quickly, and provide feedback to the proposer about whether or not they're interested, without having the proposer go through the (considerable) hassle of preparing a complete proposal.
Wikipedia shows other meanings of the term (link), but given the context my guess is that NASA is looking for a synopsis of your idea.  You might look at this DARPA solicitation for an idea of what sort of information an agency might want to see in a white paper (see Section 4, and note the length limit).


text:
Are there known issues with Black / glass dry erase boards?
I'm considering using a black erase board in my lab/classroom, primarily for aesthetic reasons.
Are there any issues with using a black erase board in teaching situations?

Don't black-erase boards require fluorescent markers? What's the aesthetic you're striving for?

One issue is likely to be the need for carefully chosen dry-erase markers.
As most dry-erase boards are white, most of the dry-erase markers you'll find will be black, blue, red, etc. That is, dark colors. That's great for contrast on a whiteboard, but there's going to be very little contrast between a regular dark dry-erase marker and your black dry-erase board. As such, you'll have to purchase special (likely more expensive) markers for use on the black dry-erase board.
If using for instruction, you'll definitely want to test the markers you've chosen, to make sure that they're contrasting enough such that they stand out for the students in the back of the room. If you ever teach someone with visual impairments, you might need to adjust which markers you use to accommodate for them. (That's not really specific to black dry-erase boards, though. You can get issues with marker choices on whiteboards too. But if your marker choices are marginally visible to begin with, it can exacerbate the issue.)
Also, as your department's supply cupboard/the campus bookstore is unlikely to keep such markers in-stock, you'll probably want to make sure you have a reserve of these markers. So when the ones you are using inevitably dry up or wander off, you're not stuck with nothing to write with. (Also keep in mind that the need for special markers likely rules out sneaking in next door and grabbing one of theirs.)

The tip about not borrowing neighboring classrooms pretty much convinced me to get one (I'm more concerned about people taking my markers and not returning them)


text:
Citing a paper for which a corrected version exists online
I need to cite a paper in an upcoming paper and conference talk. The paper appeared in a journal several years ago, and normally I would just cite the version that appeared in the journal. However, several important calculations in the section which is relevant to my work were incorrect, and a corrected version has since been posted to the arXiv. How should I cite it?
One approach would be to just cite the arXiv version, but I feel like this gives the impression that the article has not appeared in a peer-reviewed journal, while it in fact appeared in a top field journal. On the other hand I certainly don't want to cite the version with the incorrect calculations, as they make closely following the relevant section impossible. Is there a standard protocol for this?

I would list the published version in the bibliography, with something like "corrected version available as [insert its article ID] from http://www.arXiv.org" appended to the end of its entry in the bibliography.  When you discuss the article in the text of your paper, you should mention the corrections there too.
You should certainly not cite the arXiv version without explaining that the published version contains a mistake (readers may assume the published version is a cleaned up copy of the arXiv version, rather than vice versa), and it seems weird to say this without actually explaining where the article was published.

I agree, but I recommend that both versions be cited.  That is, there should be two entries in the bibliography, one for the incorrect version, and another for the corrected version (and not just one entry with an appended comment).  (I am assuming that there is no limit to the number of references you can cite.)

@JoelReyesNoche: What's the advantage of separate entries?  I don't have a strong opinion, but I would tend to put them in the same entry if I consider them small variants of the same article and two entries if they are substantially different.  (So, for me, maybe it would depend on how big the corrections are.  Typo fixes would be a variant of the same article, while substituting in an entirely new section would not.)

I, too, do not have a strong opinion on this.  I was more concerned with emphasizing that the two papers were different.  The first has been peer-reviewed, the second hasn't; the first has an error in it, the second (most likely) hasn't.  I agree with what you say in the comment above.


text:
How much background material should a mathematical research paper include?
I've just written my first mathematical research paper. It proves some new results, which while not ground-breaking are (according to an expert in the field) at least somewhat interesting and surprising. At the moment however, I spend more of the paper developing the background material (giving standard definitions and constructions, proving standard lemmas) than proving the main theorems.
Is this a problem? The way I see it, there are several arguments for and against:
For:

The background material is "standard" in the sense that anyone who works on this class of problems would know the definitions or results in some form. However, this is at most a few hundred people, while if I include the background material my paper should be comprehensible to an advanced undergraduate.
Some of the background results are part of the folklore of the field, and I've never been able to find a proof of them in literature. While they are believable and not hard to prove, I feel someone should bother doing it. More selfishly, this is one more reason for people to cite my paper.
I don't know of any one reference which states all the background material I need, so if I don't include it my readers have to chase down multiple sources and I have to use conflicting notations.

Against:

It may be annoying to an expert in the field, although they could skip much of it and mainly refer to the background section for notation.
It makes the paper longer, although even with the background the paper is not long (13 pages).
From what I've heard, it is generally considered bad practice to restate definitions and constructions states elsewhere and to reprove theorems available in literature. In part this is because it gives the impression that I haven't read the literature. This is exacerbated by the fact that I only cite ~5 previous works, mostly for further reading or alternative presentations of some of the background.

I'd like advice on this from someone with experience writing such papers.

I wonder if this might be better suited for MathOverflow.

There are many reasonable answers below, I just want to stress a few principles: clearly separate the background from the new stuff; clearly and plainly indicate that what is not new is not new, and why you include it; especially for proofs of well-known lemmas, only include them if you cannot find a reference after trying at least twice to find one from MR or ZB databases (but in any case, include the precise needed statements). Inside these guidelines, you should be ok whatever choice you make.

I'd recommend putting in as much explanation, context, and background as you reasonably can.  In principle you could certainly put in too much, but in practice I don't think I've ever seen a mathematics paper I thought actually did have too much.  If you structure your writing so experts can easily skim things they already know, then I don't see why extra explanation should trouble anyone.  Tradition requires being concise, but that tradition was based on the economics of publishing.  Space in printed journals used to be a scarce resource, and if you spent it on unnecessary exposition you were keeping someone else from publishing at all.  Publishing still isn't free (and readers have only so much patience, as well), so you shouldn't include enormous amounts of unnecessary background, but traditional writing styles should be adjusted to account for the greater availability of space.
It's possible that a referee or editor will object that they don't like your style.  You may be able to resist making any changes (it depends on how exciting your paper is and how high your own status is within the community), and if you do make changes you can still keep a lot of explanation.
If necessary, it's worth having two versions as Paul Garrett suggests.  If you do, then you should make it very clear which is which and what the differences are, to avoid serious confusion if someone refers to the paper without realizing they need to specify which version.

The background material is "standard" in the sense that anyone who works on this class of problems would know the definitions or results in some form. However, this is at most a few hundred people, while if I include the background material my paper should be comprehensible to an advanced undergraduate.

One reason to be generous with explanation is that it's easy to overestimate how much people know.  Aiming at advanced undergrads is a good way to make sure grad students really can read the paper.  If you aim at experts, you may write a paper only your own collaborators can comfortably read.

Some of the background results are part of the folklore of the field, and I've never been able to find a proof of them in literature. While they are believable and not hard to prove, I feel someone should bother doing it.

This is a great reason to include a proof, although it's important to consult with experts to confirm that there really isn't an accessible proof in the literature.

It makes the paper longer, although even with the background the paper is not long (13 pages).

You should make sure it doesn't look like padding, say with just a few pages of original content among the 13 pages.

From what I've heard, it is generally considered bad practice to restate definitions and constructions states elsewhere and to reprove theorems available in literature. In part this is because it gives the impression that I haven't read the literature.  This is exacerbated by the fact that I only cite ~5 previous works, mostly for further reading or alternative presentations of some of the background.

This does seem like a worry, and five references is not very many, even for a 13-page paper.  You might not strictly need any more, but I'd recommend tracking down additional references for background.  As a general rule it's best to cite generously, giving plenty of credit to other authors and offering many resources to readers.
Regarding giving the impression that you haven't read the literature, it's important to be clear about what's background from the literature (with a citation), what's folklore, and what's your own contribution.  If you reprove something you say is known but don't give a citation for, it can look like you were too lazy to track it down.

Additionally, some journals may allow publishing supplemental material online, which may be a better place to put more background.  References themselves are often a good way to give more background for the reader, I mean... if it's supposed to be well known in the literature then the OP should be able to cite it right?

As you rightly perceive, there are conflicting desiderata for "formal papers". The main tradition for refereed-journal publications is to assume one is writing for the experts, not for anyone who'd need much background or context. Yes, this makes reading such papers needlessly difficult for non-experts. Yes, the necessary background is likely scattered among several prior papers, and some occurs "nowhere", in the sense of being apocryphal... lost in the mists of time? :)
Nevertheless, the highest-status refereed journals would probably want more-discursive broader explanations edited out... and the referees and editors might interpret your inclusion of such things as "amateurish" ("It's just not done..."), to your detriment.
But the expectations or standards of refereed-journals is certainly not the only criterion, and is manifestly antithetical to the obviously desirable outcome of wider dissemination of ideas, collection and organization of otherwise-chaotic literature, and so on. Some people will tell you that somehow it's not ok to "mix" "research" and "exposition"... but this is silly, even if traditional. But, then, given the traditional predilection of refereed-journals, if you want a more discursive version of your write-up, you may have to reconcile yourself to having two versions, one for referees, one for exposition/wider-dissemination.
The for-referees version should probably not cite the discursive version, but, instead, do the quasi-unhelpful bit of citing the disparate standard sources. The discursive version could cite the for-referees version, as well as the standard sources, and still include your own updated presentation, bringing apocrypha to the light of day, and so on.
But, I fear no single refereed-journal-publishable version could meet the nicer-exposition requirements you (completely reasonably) would like to impose.

How would the version for wider dissemination be disseminated? Through the arXiv?

Sure, arXiv is one reasonable venue for wider dissemination of a more discursive version, if you don't have a personal web-page that's well-known and that'll be stable.

to your detriment — And the journal's.

It's not entirely clear whether the background material is just background, or is needed as scaffolding for the results you prove. Also, if certain lemmas are "standard" why are you proving them ? surely there's some text or other paper that proves these lemmas, and which you can cite ?
In general, in a paper you provide the scaffolding needed to prove your results. It's not necessary to provide other atmospherics unless its part of a larger discussion of related work.

Most of it is necessary for the theorems I prove. Regarding the results being standard, as I stated in the first point for including the background: The background material is "standard" in the sense that anyone who works on this class of problems would know the definitions or results in some form. However, this is at most a few hundred people, while if I include the background material my paper should be comprehensible to an advanced undergraduate.

And as I said, some of the lemmas are widely-known but I've yet to find anyone who knows where to find a proof.

My personal preference would in this case to state the lemmas without proof (stating that they're "folklore", and then add proofs in an appendix "for completeness". As for the background material, @paul makes the correct point that unfortunately or otherwise, you're not expected to cater to an "advanced undergraduate" audience in a formal paper.

I've considered adding an appendix. Also, not including any background material is the difference between an advanced undergrad being able to understand the paper, and only someone who has worked on irrational billiards being able to understand it.

One factor to add is that in many mathematics papers, there are many different definitions and notations for a subject. Some of these approaches may make your results seem more or less natural. Even someone who is familiar with the subject may become confused by the way in which you present things.
One good reason for a background section is so that you can "set the scene" using the presentation that you think is best. Sometimes just setting things up in a coherent way is more valuable than the new results themselves.

Warning: I have experience with "mathematical" papers in the Computer Science community. In our field, papers are supposed to be (to some extent) self-contained; moreover, it's more the writer's responsibility to make stuff clear, than the reader's responsibility to study the stuff (this generally helps to get more readers and make your research have impact; also, readers don't have time to read all papers they'd want to, so be gentle to them).
I'd optimize background for skippability. In fact, optimize all sections for that, but especially such background.
For concreteness, I'll give an instance of what is reasonable/can be recommended in our field.
\section{Background}
In this section, to make this paper self-contained and to fix notation,
we summarize
the theory of representable functors % don't be as vague as
% "background on X"
which we'll use later in the rest of the paper/in Sec. YYY. % Help readers figure out
% whether they actually need this background,
% if it's only needed for part of the paper.

\subsection{Standard definitions}
In this subsection, we summarize background which is available in the
literature, though spread across different references~\citep{1, 2, 3}.
% Don't order the material necessarily by reference, but by how they
% are best presented.

% ...

\subsection{Folklore theorems}
In this subsection, we present some basic results. Although they appear to be
folklore/almost obvious/believable % what you prefer
for experts, we found no proof in the literature, so
we include the proofs for completeness.

You can include something that is part of the literature; to show you know the literature, you just need to also add a citation — doing otherwise can be bad practice (if it's very clear the result is not yours), and might be taken for unethical by somebody who misunderstand what you claim.
But you should decide whether to re-include the proofs though — can you lift the statement directly, adapting the notation? Or is the setting different enough that you need to adapt the proof? Or is it important that a reader knows the proof to get your paper, because you reuse similar proof ideas?
However, things in mathematics might be different; advice still should have similar consequences, but conventions are different. Let me say that the habits of mathematicians are quite frustrating to e.g. computer scientists. I've seen at least one respected computer scientist define some standard references (in mathematical style) "unreadable" or "write-only".


text:
Model for the number of citations an article receives over time
Is there a standard model for the number of citations an article will receive over time? If not, is there a good source for data on citation counts for articles divided up over time? Furthermore, does this vary by field
It seems plausible to me that the number of citations decays approximately exponentially, with the rate of decay depending on the article, but I have empirical evidence for this conjecture.
Such a model would be useful because a few years after an article was published, one could use the MLE method to estimate the number of citations the article would receive over any time period. This would allow us to count citations in a way that does not bias older articles, one of the chief problems with straight citation counts. Additionally, it would give us a better idea of the inaccuracies of metrics like impact factor.

in fact now that I think about it, you might want to ask this question on [stats.se].

@Suresh I'm familiar enough with statistics to do what I want given the data (assuming it's possible, which is looking less likely). The main questions I have are about the data for citations over time and whether a model for this has already been produced (since of course I'd rather do no work at all).

I imagine you'd have an initial publication lag where citations might be lower for example in year 1 than in year 2 and that then aggregate citation counts over time would have to be monotonically decelerating. You'd also have substantial variability in terms of individual articles. For example, I've heard of articles which accelerate in their citation count over time as they become the standard citation for a particular topic.
Independent of overall number of citations received, journals and fields  differ dramatically in the rate at which citations accumulate. A good starting point is to look at "citation half life" (i.e., the median time it takes a journal or field to acquire half of its total citations). If you can access ISI you can examine how different fields and journals differ in citation half life.
For example, I just had a quick look at a few fields from ISI 2012 which yielded the following data:
Field                       Citation Half-Life (in years)
PSYCHIATRY                  7.6
ASTRONOMY & ASTROPHYSICS    6.9
MATHEMATICS                 >10.0
PSYCHOLOGY                  >10.0

So clearly psychiatry and astronomy tend to cite more recent articles, whereas mathematics and psychology often cite older articles.
The implication is that impact factors (which are based on the last 2 or possibly 5 years post publication) should be higher in psychiatry/astronomy than in mathematics/psychology. It also means that early career researchers in psychiatry/astronomy should accumulate a better h-index more quickly than researchers in mathematics/psychology, all else being equal.

I think the model for all kinds of papers is very unlikely to exist. Certainly, the trajectory will be different for very strong and fundamental contributions vs. small incremental improvements, that often become more or less irrelevant in a few years. Further, looking through Google Scholar data (already mentioned by Anonymous Mathematician), I would hypothesize that there is also a difference between fields. In my rather hype-driven research field (services / software engineering), citations often seem to roughly follow a bell curve:
Example 1
Example 2
Example 3
These papers, if they are timely, generally need one or two years to pick up steam, then there are a few years with lots of citations, after which interest in the presented ideas dies down again.
More fundamental work often seems to have a less clear trajectory:
Example 4
And then of course you have publications which are just "weird":
Example 5
Note that all examples I have provide have a not-too-small number of citations on them. I would say for publications < 50 citations on Google Scholar (i.e., most of them), all bets go out through the window anyway. Fluctuations are too large for any sort of statement over the shape of their trajectory.

Google Scholar will plot the number of citations over time for papers.  I don't know whether it will do so for arbitrary papers, but it will for any paper listed on an author's page (e.g., Terry Tao).
I haven't studied the data systematically, but some things are clear from browsing:

Citation statistics for individual papers can be incredibly noisy.  For example, a paper may have 5 citations one year, 15 the next, then 7, 2, 12, etc., with no obvious pattern or explanation.  Furthermore, different papers written by the same person on similar topics and with similar citation rates sometimes show visibly different levels of noise, and I don't know why.  For papers with particularly high citation counts (e.g., 50+ citations per year), noise is not as big a factor, but such papers are uncommon.
Different papers can take radically different trajectories.  For example, some of my papers have a consistent growth in their yearly citation counts over ten or more years.  Others seem relatively stable, probably decreasing a little over time but with yearly fluctuations that are substantially larger than the decrease.  Some have fallen completely off the map and only get cited occasionally (perhaps a Poisson process).  These different scenarios are correlated with how good I consider the paper, but only loosely, and I think the trajectory would be tough to predict from the first few years of citation counts.

Thanks for the google scholar link, I wasn't familiar with that feature. Your observations do put a damper on my hopes, although looking at Dr. Tao's graph of citations per year, it seems very smooth. Perhaps the sum of the citations of all papers will behave better (conditional on certain assumptions about consistent rate/quality of production).

Yes, aggregate data should be much smoother (although Tao's total citation counts are particularly smooth, since he has published a ton of consistently highly cited papers; for widespread applicability, the important question is how things work for people who aren't famous or highly cited).

We're getting into [stats.se] territory here, but some kind of stratified approach where you build models differently for different kinds of papers might work.


text:
How to increase the odds of becoming an invited speaker at science conferences?
Invited talks are important for moving up the academic ladder, so I'd like to know how one maximizes the odds of being offered to be an invited speaker at conferences.
I am aware of the most obvious things like having important results to report. However, apparently this is not always necessary: one often sees in the list of invited speakers some fresh PhDs neighboring the really big shots. So, are there any non-obvious strategies to increase the odds of becoming an invited speaker at a conference?
I realize that the advice may be field-specific, and I am most interested in the tips for conferences in mathematics and physics.

Give some colloquia (departmental seminars or lab-specific talks) in the departments of organizers of conferences. You can sometimes invite yourself by writing to the organizer of their seminar series and offering yourself as a speaker but better might be having your phd advisor write and recommend you.
This will increase your name recognition with the critical people and can give you a reputation for giving good talks. Organizers are unlikely to take a chance on someone that is junior and none of them have heard speak. If you can give a talk somewhere that will be videoed and posted online, that would also help with this issue.
Finally, if you work with a more famous friend (or phd advisor) in the same area who is frequently invited to give talks, you could mention to them that you are trying to do this and they may recommend you for talks they have to decline.

this is one of the best answers, I agree completely

Do great research.
Give great presentations of your research.
Become known, not only for your research, but by actively participating in conferences, workshops and other meetings.

I don't disagree, but where you say "actively" and no doubt mean that in the best possible sense, folk will be pushy, busy-body, credit-snatching, backstabbing...

Find out which conference organizers your PhD advisor knows and see if he'll recommend you to them.
Present an amazing poster at a conference and spend some time getting the word about prior to the conference about your work, so that when the organizers come by the poster session, they see your poster mobbed with people.
One thing you shouldn't do is respond to any of those conference solicitations for conferences you've never heard of, usually located in some Middle Eastern or Asian country. It's spam and they usually just bought a list of email addresses and did keyword targeting.

There would be many genuine "conferences you've never heard of, usually located in some Middle Eastern or Asian country", especially for beginning researchers (~ OP). Of course, some may be spam too. Unless you tell the OP how to filter out spam from the genuine ones, the advice in Para 2 is not very useful. Besides, this type of advice, given on a platform which isn't specific to any specific country and is certainly capable of catering to the "Middle Eastern or Asian countries" can easily land you up in deep trouble.

Volunteer to help organise meetings yourself & invite people.  Even if this doesn't directly help you get attention (which it might), at least you'll understand the process better.


text:
Is it appropriate to reuse the same illustration in multiple papers?
I am a referee on a paper. I am concerned with the reuse in this paper of illustrations that appeared a year ago in a different article by the same authors in the same journal.
In the earlier article the illustration was found in the body of the paper and in the later article it appears in the Introduction section.
The illustration is of reasonable quality and it provides a concise metaphor of the framework the authors are working in, but the details of the illustration are not discussed below. I am concerned that the exact same look of the illustration might cause confusion to the readers who may come across  the two papers.
On this site I have found an excellent discussion regarding the reuse of text. The accepted answer points to COPE Text recycling guidelines where a comment suggests that the practice regarding illustrations might be different.

In my field (Pathology), and probably in others as well, a much bigger
  problem than recycled text (probably not so bad in an invited review
  article, in which the authors are specifically invited to discuss
  their previous publication/s, obviously with appropriate citation) is
  recycled photographs, diagrams/drawings, Tables and the like. Again,
  the rule we usually follow is to require permissions from the original
  publisher/s and, obviously, citations. I must say, however, as an
  author as well as an editor, that it has always annoyed me to have to
  get permission from a publisher to reuse my own original
  illustrations.

Should I suggest the authors remove the illustration in question?

Maybe you could suggest that they alter the illustration or even better that they highlight/mark the parts that this paper is focusing on. So a reader who remembers the original illustration will remember the old publication and immediately sees what the new paper expands on. This would serve your concern and "improve" the paper.

@JayFromA I like the idea to alter the illustration.

I'd ask them to include a citation in the caption.

No, there is no need to suggest removing the illustration. Why would you be concerned about it being reused? There is nothing wrong with re-using an illustration, especially if it "provides a concise metaphor of the framework the authors are working in".
Of course, the authors should state that the figure was previously published and refer to the original paper, as well as obtain permission from the journal it was published in. Given that it is their own paper in the same journal it will probably be no problem to arrange that.


text:
Chance Of Getting A Research Internship In US/Canada For Non-US Residents?
I completed my undergraduate study in computer science outside of the US. I hope to obtain a PhD degree in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) in the US, but I don't feel that I am qualified enough (in terms of research experience). So I am hoping to find a research internship opportunity in US/Canada.
I could probably find relavant projects in my own country, but I feel that trying US/Canada first is more straightforward. After all, it's in US/Canada where I am looking for a PhD degree.
I have a few HCI professors in mind, with whom I would like to work very much. Should I contact them for internship opportunities? What are my chances and more importantly, how can I improve my chances?
Some facts that I think are relavent to the question:
I am not a US resident so I will need a VISA. I don't expect assistantships (it's up to the professor). I have already learnt the basics of HCI and I know the fundamental research methods (through reading and auditing classes). My undergraduate university is not the best, but it's surely one of the best universities in my country.

You should simply send an email to the supervisor you are interested in. Your best help to be accepted to any program is to have the support of a professor. In US/Canada you should just start by, Dear Mr/Mme, X.
Now, to convince the professor that you are a good fit, you need to convince him that you are have research potential. This is what the university will be looking for too.
You could talk to him about your interests, and how they recoup his (assuming they do by OP post). If you have done any research in that field you could mention it.
If you can find and read first a relevant paper he wrote and have questions about it, ask. I you can't because they are too complicated (which may really happen), or behind a paywall to which you don't have access, you could ask for a few classic references to get started.

Assistantship is upto the professor (Research Assistantships) as well as the department (Teaching Assistantships). It is highly likely that you will be supported by both over your phd life. That being said, I don't think US universities make distinctions among PhD applicants based on their nationality (in general) in terms of funding or admission. Best of luck for your application.
You might mail professors who you have in mind, but do check in their website whether they explicitly prohibit that.

I don't think you answered the question. The OP wants to know about research internship, not typical RA.


text:
Will a paper in A help PhD application in B?
I understand that as an undergraduate student, when you apply for a PhD degree in the US, you have to demonstrate adequate research capabilities, such as publications. But will areas matter?
Let's say that a undergraduate student Q has been working on a networking project and she published a paper about that work. But Q is applying for PhD study in human-computer interaction. Will that paper help Q in getting the HCI PhD she wants?

Yes.
Admissions committees are looking for evidence of research potential.  Having a research publication in any area is direct evidence of that potential.
(One of the first hurdles that I encourage my own PhD students to jump early is publish something.  Anything.  The point is for them to see the publication process — writing, editing, submitting, reading reviews, revising, resubmitting — and to kill off any doubts in their minds that they can do publishable research.)


text:
Conference sponsored by a top conference?
How related two conferences are if B is sponsored by A? If A is a top conference, does this make B a worth-trusting conference also? For example, SIGCOMM is a top conference in computer networks & communications, and CoNEXT is sponsored by it. Does that automatically make CoNEXT a quality conference?

The top conference has reputation to keep up, so if they associate themselves with the other conference this indicates that they trust the organizers of the other conference to do a good job. So, I'd see the endorsement as a sign that the level of the conference is probably good, although there are no guarantees.

I'm not sure what it means for one conference to sponsor another. In the particular case you mention, "SIGCOMM" is both the name of a conference and the name of a group within the ACM that sponsors that conference. So it's likely that SIGCOMM (the group) is sponsoring CONEXT, rather than SIGCOMM (the conference).


text:
How to find the h-index of a professor?
I am an Computer Science undergraduate student and I am looking for my potential mentor for my PhD study. I guess besides research interest, personality etc., h-index is an important factor one should consider. So I wonder whether there is a way to find out about the precise h-index of an arbitral author.
I've been using Microsoft Academic Search. It's cool, it often finds the right person and gives you his/her h-index. However, I believe that this tool has underestimated the h-index of many researchers. (I think so because I've tried typing in some very famous professors' names and the h-index that Microsoft gives is about 10~20 lower than the actually value).
Moreover, since I am mostly interested in Human-Computer Interaction so I am also referring to ACM SIGCHI's Most Frequent Authors Page. The page is awesome: it gives you the most brilliant professors ranked by their number of publications. However, I think h-index is a better metric than the number of publications alone.
I could, of course, go to the professors' websites and read their publication list. But I want to know whether there is a better, more efficient way of finding h-index.

Google scholar is another possibility, but this is likely to be inflated.

I totally disagree with your assessment that h-index is an important factor one should consider when choosing a supervisor. That said, it is irrelevant to your question about how to find the information.

Okay :) I just put it there as part of my motivation for finding the h-index. Meanwhile, I would be glad to hear other guidelines about finding a good supervisor.

@CherryQu please ask a new question about how to find a good supervisor (have a search through past questions also). Also if you start your comment with an @ (as I did here), the person will get a notification.

@CherryQu Things as h-indexes are accumulative, so older guys have it a lot higher (don't even compare people of different age with h-index!). Whereas, looking at friends, it seems to be the best idea to get a very young, energetic prof, just starting her/his career. There is more energy, fresher topics, (s)he is still hands-on in research and can have time for you, on daily basis (also, because then usually group isn't that large). But still, there is huge variance with respect to personality, topics etc. But  they get low h-indices, since they are not cited yet and there are just starting.

excellent point @PiotrMigdal: as a young apprentice, would you go work in a 1-michelin star restaurant striving to get its second star, or would you go to a boring, posh, immaculate 3-michelin star where they serve the latest food craze?

@DanielE.Shub: it seems to me that the "social web" at large is giving the opportunity to anyone to "say something about themselves" in a numeric format. This stackexchange is an example (how large is your reputation?), and the h-index is of course another example. Clearly there are ways to game these systems: on MetaStackOverflow there are dozens of questions about the issue. But these numbers are used nowadays, in more or less formal contexts: when I was interviewed for my new post, I was asked for my h-index, both to show that I knew it, and to place my research in a larger context

@ElCid there very well might be times where the h-index is informative and important. I stand by my statement that it is not important for choosing an advisor.

Not a real answer, but relevant: look also here: http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/4793/

when I was interviewed for my new post, I was asked for my h-index — Don't walk.  Run.

"h-indexes are accumulative, so older guys have it a lot higher (don't even compare people of different age with h-index!)" At least in some fields h/(years since first publication) isn't a bad metric for sustained output. Of course, it still does not do to compare across subdisciplines, so it is always better to compare someone's h to that of their peers rather than to random other acedemics.

h-index is almost useless as a measure of how good an academic is and just tells you how long they have been hanging around and publishing continuously.  James Maynard only has h-index of 11 on Google Scholar and below 1000 citations, and he has been awarded the Fields Medal.

the h-index is an interesting measure, but it changes all the times

microsoft search does it
Google author search does it (see an example here)
the freely available tool PoP does it

you could try and triangulate the numbers that you get and find the average, as a possible solution

Google author search is cool! I heard it's partially maintained by the researchers themselves! Thanks!

The author profiles are maintained partly by the authors, but not the h-index search.

As a note, google author search only works if the author has opted-in to make their profile public.

Microsoft does not document h-index anymore. https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/11436/28895

There is no such thing as "the precise h-index".
The h-index is defined as the largest integer h such that at least h of the author's publications have at least h citations each.  But what's a publication?  Do first-author publications carry more weight?  Do ArXiv, technical report, conference, and journal versions of the "same" paper (all of which may have citations) count as four papers or one?  Or does it depend on the difference in content between versions?  (How do you measure that difference?)  Does the quality of the venue matter?  If so, which venues count as "real" publications?  Do survey articles count?  Popular science articles?  Blog posts?  StackExchange questions?*  Do self-citations count?  If so, does a citation to a paper by X and Y, in a paper by Y and Z, count toward X's h-index?  How much (and who) are you willing to pay to make sure you've really counted every citation to every publication?
The different sources of the h-index make different well-reasoned decisions about each of these issues, none of which make sense for ALL areas, even within computer science.

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

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

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

interesting questions Jeff..  How much (and who) are you willing to pay to make sure you've really counted every citation to every publication? That's the big question. Shocked by the SE citation; what is the objective of citing a SE question?

what is the objective of citing a SE question? — The same as the objective of citing anything else: Giving the author credit for their ideas.  Why does it matter whether the idea was formally published?

I may say credibility (if the word correct). i'm new to SE but citing online discussions in scientific papers seems odd to me.

I have cited a MathOverflow discussion in one of my preprints. I asked for the solution of a small problem there and I got an answer; this was the only way I had to give credit.

Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience is full of papers on "doing better" than the h-index in some sort of automated way.  If you have clearly better ideas of how to do it, maybe you can share (or publish them, if you haven't already)?  It's a tricky problem.

It's not a "tricky problem"; it's impossible even in principle to automate evaluation of research quality.

@JeffE: although I agree that it's not possible to evaluate the absolute quality of research, it's being done already, by many institutions, that you like it or not... Any research project is evaluated on "quality", on various factors (the infamous "impact"...?) and on a scale between 1 to 5. Papers quality has started being evaluated on the number of citations; researchers will be evaluated on their h-indexes (or similar...). In my view it's an inevitable process, due also to the current collapse of the university system and traditional "approach"

@ElCid: Of course.  And for precisely that reason, I feel compelled to argue against the practice at every opportunity.  (What "current collapse of the university system"??)

@JeffE: maybe the analysis below is not 100% correct but it is anyway an interesting read

h-index is not an important factor to consider potential supervisors rather recent projects and publications count more for me. Also, h-index might misguide you (it has its limitations).
For example, if a new professor published 10 articles each cited at least 200 times the h-index will be only 10 ! .. Also, old researchers have advantage over young ones.
Returning to the question:

So I wonder whether there is a way to find out about the precise h-index of an arbitral author

I am not aware of any engine/program gives a precise h-index. There is no precise h-index out there and finding a mechanism to find it is an interesting work..

I believe for the UK's upcoming 2014 REF exercise the bibliometrics are based on the Scopus database (http://www.ref.ac.uk/background/bibliometrics/). This likely has to do with both Elsevier political power and the quality of the database.


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What's Adjunct Proceedings?
I came across a paper today:

Plink It: Paper-Based Links for Cross-Media Information Space Jurgen
  Steimle, Nadir Weibel, Simon Olberding, Max Muhlhauser, and James D.
  Hollan. Adjunct Proceedings of ACM Symposium on User Interface
  Software and Technology, 1969-1974, 2011. (PDF)

I am curious: what does Adjunct Proceedings mean? The paper's style and format looks quite different from Computer Science papers that I used to read. Could anyone explain this to me?

Large conferences have "main tracks" where the normal papers are received, peer-reviewed and published/discussed in the traditional format. In these conferences there is more and more often the tendency to provide researchers to write "cutting edge" research, that should not undergo the formal peer-review process, or simply the acceptance rate has a clearly lower bar than the normal tracks of the conference. This second type of papers will be published in the "adjunct proceedings".
One would then have two sets of proceedings, one where the normal papers are, and the other one where more experimental papers are. This separation has got a reason: the program committee of a conference wants to keep the two types of papers separated, since the papers in the normal proceedings will be cited more often than the ones in the adjunct proceedings


text:
To what extent does the prospect of a guaranteed-for-life job (tenure) motivate researchers to stay in academia?
Is there any research/study that looked at the extent to which the prospect of a guaranteed-for-life job (tenure) motivate researchers to stay in academia?
I am most interested in the United States and the field of computer science.

Do you mean: "for recent PhDs, the prospect of a job for life entices them to stay in academia"  or do you mean "for tenured faculty, how much does the prospect of a tenured job encourage them to stay" -- because I think these are two different questions.

@RoboKaren I was thinking about both cases, and more generally any stage of the researcher career. I'd be happy to split into two different questions if you think it's more appropriate.

I couldn't say whether it needs to be split, but there is indeed a drastic difference: for many recent PhDs, the prospect of having a lifetime job is probably worse in academia than outside it, and is likely motivation for many PhDs to leave academia. This is obviously not the case for those who have already made it as tenured faculty.

@David Z: I am not sure that the chance of a lifetime job outside academia is very high, particularly in companies that would hire a PhD in computer science.

@OswaldVeblen I suppose the chance of having a guaranteed job for life (i.e. something akin to tenure) is low or nonexistent outside academia. But I think the overall chance of spending the rest of your life doing skilled work that is at least somewhat related to your PhD field is much higher if you restrict yourself to non-academic jobs than if you restrict yourself to academic jobs.

@David Z: indeed; I thought this might be a difference in what "job for life" means to each of us.  To me, it means having a high chance of never (unwillingly) applying for a job. It used to be more common for people to work 30+ years for a single large company like IBM, from graduation to retirement. These weren't guaranteed jobs for life, but a job in the tech sector now isn't even a plausible job for life.  When I talk about risk-averse people in my answer, the risk they are worried about is having to apply for jobs (and thus risking being unemployed).

@OswaldVeblen yep, you've hit the nail on the head. To me, as a relatively young person, the prospect of never (unwillingly) applying for a job - except for the very few people lucky enough to get tenured positions - seems so far-fetched as to not be worth considering. In other words, it's practically guaranteed that you will be applying for new jobs every so often. So for me, "job for life" is about the ability to convert those applications into concrete offers.

I'll respond based on anecdotal evidence, but over 30+ years, worrying about my several PhD students, and partly in a role as director of grad studies in math, giving career advice, etc. My experience is in math, not comp sci, though.
In any case, even 25 years ago, it was clear (both anecdotally and documentably by the AMS at the time, although not so accessibly, due to lack of internet...) that the "golden days" of academic math (at least) were waning, because of growth of PhD production that surpassed growth of academic positions. There had indeed been a boom of branch campuses, but that had roughly stabilized c. 1990. Some very good people (including some of my own students) got tenure at a branch campus in rural areas, but/and decided that the heavy teaching load and isolation was not what they'd signed on for.
By the mid-90s, the job market was consistently tight enough so that new PhDs with partners very often opted for non-academic trajectories, but so they'd not have to commute crazy distances, and so they could have a family with both parents participating. Hard to argue with that. The former "monastic" model of academe, or of infinitely-accommodating spouse, etc., is not acceptable these days. (I've tried long-distance stuff myself, too, and, sad-to-report, it really only works well when one is secretly glad to be apart... uh,...)
In the last several years, some of the most able and motivated grad students have had the sense to realize that, in particular, their chances to make a big-enough contribution to get a permanent job at an R1 place were pretty slim... and they didn't want to stay in academe "at all costs", so shifted their energies to avenues where being smart, motivated, and hard working had a better chance to pay off (these days). (See @DavidZ's comment.)
I've followed up with some of the people who did stay in academe and settled in relatively remote areas at small branch campuses, and, while they're "ok", they have "confessed" that it wasn't at all what they'd hoped for. Some speculation (obviously plausible) that without forced retirement, there's a lot of "waiting around" for better positions to open. (Not unlike situations in Europe, as I gather from friends there, where saturation had occurred much earlier, apart from mandatory retirement issues.)
The palpable corporatization and commodification (or at least the greater visibility of it) of higher education does also seem to have a consistently disenchanting effect on undergrads' choices about what to do after their B.S. in math (e.g., going to work for an insurance company... is (even?) more attractive now than it may have been in the past, and for some people seems vastly more viable than "grad school"...)
Although I suppose one should always be wary that possibly one's own cumulative disenchantment interferes with perceptions of others' opinions, I do have a rough idea of our local "stats" about academic versus non-academic positions for PhD'd people: once upon a time, everybody went into academe, but nowadays perhaps as many as 1/3 of each year's PhD's do not.
Even disregarding the mandatory retirement issue, it's simply not a time of expansion for higher ed... but/and the element of Ponzi-scheme of academe has no mechanism built in to reduce PhD production without finding someone else (adjunct faculty!?!) to exploit... or else (in the case of math) teaching loads would skyrocket, etc.

The American Mathematical Society has data on the jobs that new doctoral recipients take. The latest report, at http://www.ams.org/profession/data/annual-survey/2014Survey-Prelim-NewDoctorates.pdf , shows that about 74% were employed in academia the fall after receiving their doctorate. There is much more data available, at http://www.ams.org/profession/data/annual-survey/docsgrtd

@OswaldVeblen, thx for the data... !

(This answer is about tenure in the United States.)
One convincing economic interpretation of tenure is that it is a form of non-monetary compensation. Of course, not every field is ripe with high-paying industry jobs. But academia is generally full of bright and motivated people who could do other things if they chose to leave academia, and salaries in academia are often lower than jobs in industry. This is particularly true in computer science at the moment, because of the booming tech sector. Tenure helps universities keep at least some faculty who might otherwise leave.
Sure, someone might be able to raise their salary by leaving academia, but they would also gain more employment risk. Small businesses (e.g. startup companies) often fail, and even larger businesses often lay off workers by the hundreds. By comparison, universities may seem quite stable, and with tenure someone has a much higher expectation of not needing to look for alternate employment.  So the security of tenure may help to compensate (through lower risk) for the lower salary.
There are changing circumstances in higher education, and the analysis just presented may not be as compelling as it was 20 year ago. Not all universities seem very stable nowadays. And there are challenges with the tenure system that evolved in the 20th century. But perhaps the bigger question is whether academia, by promoting security over salary, might over-attract people who are simply risk-averse, rather than those would would be the best professors.

Good game-theoretic analysis... Thorsten would be proud. :)

And, further, indeed, the question of the influence of "risk aversion" is non-trivial, and completely different from the assessment of risk (which may be subjective in itself, after all). My own subjective perception of actual academic climate is that there is less appeal these days for risk-averse faculty than 20 or 30 years ago, because it's relatively much more difficult these days to "get a spot" in the first place, so that no "rational" risk-averse person would have chosen the route... In contrast, yes, there did indeed once exist a sub-population of academics, even in nowadays-R1 ...

universities who'd gotten there early on, and had not written too many papers after their thesis, and did not exert themselves too much, ... but it seemed not to matter. In those days, it did not even seem to be any sort of moral or ethical failure, just a small personal embarrassment that no one would mention. After all, 30-40 years ago, it was apparently not the case that too many other people wanted to teach calculus (or would have been able), so... it just didn't matter. It misrepresents those people to call them "deadwood", though...

... that would be a popular and convenient caricature. In their times, and still into the last 30+ years, the idea of academe as an abstracted "monastic" existence that did not make one rich, but allowed one to forget about worldly cares, and only required a certain bit of smartness and occasional focus... was it. Now it's a business...


text:
Why do some publication venues add the degree type next to the author name?
I've noticed that some publication venues add the degree type links to the author name, like MS, PhD, MBA or  MD. What's the point? (example)

I don't know why, but I at least find it obnoxious and problematically elitist.

It should be noted that listing names with the degree type in all professional contexts (business cards, presentations, letters, documents, ...) is completely normal and expected in some cultures. Maybe the respective publication venues were strongly influenced by someone from such a culture, who was either unaware of different customs in English-speaking cultures, or who did not see a point in omitting that information and thus kept requiring it in the styleguide for publications.

It depends completely on the journal's editorial criteria.  Some journals will expect that the degrees are included (see JAMA) and some will not (see Research in the Teaching of English).  Professional ego will not come into it -- the journal will want to maintain uniformity from article to article.
Academic cultures differ as to whether degrees are typically appended to names.  In the academic culture in which I spent 30 years of my professional life, use of the "Ph.D." was seen as unnecessary -- if one identified oneself as "Associate Professor of English" or "Professor of English," the Ph.D. was assumed.

I thought English was one of those fields where it was common for professors to only have an MA.

While it's possible that lecturers or part-time instructors will have an M.A. (and will get teaching experience while completing the degree), I don't know of anyone on the tenure-track line in English, in all my years at a university, that didn't have a Ph.D.  You may be thinking of those who teach creative writing, which at my university was a separate department -- many professors in Creative Writing will have an MFA, a terminal degree in a creative field, equivalent to the Ph.D. in other fields.

P.S.  Just to clarify, in the U.S., a lecturer is generally a part-time instructor.

I cannot generalize, based on your single-document example. There might be various reasons, such as publication outlet's requirements or authors' professional ego (see egocentrism and/or egotism). However, in that particular case, it can be argued that the degree attribution has been done to clarify that some of the authors are not Ph.D. holders. Not that it matters much (or should matter much or at all, that is), but, perhaps, the authors wanted to be more precise in attribution in order to prevent confusion due to implied assumption that all authors are doctoral degree holders.

All of this is wildly speculative and the bit about egocentrism, judgmental.

@CapeCode: What is speculative about listing some potential reasons? I have not argued any definitiveness about any of those. As far as egocentrism being a potential factor, do you believe that such argument can be referred to as being judgemental? Moreover, the OP haven't asked about existing research on the topic, but about people's opinions, so I have offered mine. Thus, it IMHO cannot be speculative by definition.