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How does accepting a full time lectureship position at a top 15 University affect one's chances of future employment?
I have recently seen several positions titled something like "Senior Lecturer in [insert field]" at top notch universities such as MIT, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, etc. The job description usually includes curriculum development for the department and advising undergraduates and early career adjuncts. The position is always full time with full benefits and usually has a fixed multi year contract with a high course load. Are such positions looked highly upon when seeking future employment? Ideally please answer the question for people with the following potential career goals (as I believe the answer would be different for each one, as I want this question to be valuable for as wide an audience as possible)
If the career goal is:

Tenured Professor at tier one research university
Tenured Professor at school that highly values research (but not a T1 research University)
Tenured Professor at a Liberal Arts college or state university (Wants some research but main focus is on teaching)
Tenured Professor at a purely teaching focussed Liberal Arts College or community college

I suspect that the position would be looked highly upon for career (4) and lowly upon (assuming you don't publish much) if career (1) is the ultimate goal. It is, however, unclear to me how these positions would be seen in an application corresponding to the middle two careers.

Lecturer positions tend to overwork you in courses such that research time is little to none.  If you really want a tenure track position at a university with a research focus or semi-focus, you need to continue publishing in quality journals.  If such is the case (in your scenarios 1-2), you may consider a postdoc research position instead.
If scenario 3 or 4 is your ultimate goal, get good teaching marks and recommendations is paramount and a lecturer position is ideal.

I think your answer is generally true. That said, some universities still want/expect teaching experience.

I'm not so certain this is true for (3) given the more recent desires of liberal art and state schools to hire people that are actively publishing. Can you elaborate a bit more on this?

@MHH: Ultimately, if research is a component of the job, one needs to continue publishing...  But if teaching is weighted significantly higher than research, one can make due publishing in less reputable outlets and focusing on obtaining good teaching evaluations.


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Should I reward points for an incorrect answer if it is the result of misinformation presented in a TA's office hours?
So a TA came to me asking for advice. He gave wrong information in office hours leading a student to a wrong answer.
The TA showed the student how to solve the problem via the wrong statistical test - the assumptions for the statistical test he used do not hold in this case. The answer generated from this test yields a test statistic that doesn't make any sense when you think about it's meaning. Kind of like if you were asked to "find the length of the fence that encloses ..." and your method produced the answer of -50 meters. The TA provided the student with step by step instructions, but did not do any of the numerical calculations. Had he done those calculations he would almost certainly have caught his mistake.
The student complains that she should not be punished because her TA made a mistake. TAs can change HW grades, if they have good reason to do so, and this TA wants to correct his mistake by rewarding the student the points on the problem. I told the TA that I would get back to him as I don't want to give my advice in haste. I think I want to say something like this.
to the TA: "Thank you for asking for my advice in this situation; it is indeed a difficult position to be in. However, this situation concerns me, not because you gave wrong info or bad advice, as we all occasionally make mistakes, but because you seem to have told a student the method for answering the question. While it's OK for students to get help from their TAs, it should only be by reviewing concepts and asking them 'leading questions' that nudge them in the right direction. Note I am not saying that what you did is objectively wrong, as I should have been more clear in my instructions at the beginning of the course, but in the future telling students how to do a problem, in my opinion, is unfair to the students who can't make your office hours."
to the student: "Your TA contacted me recently about changing your HW grade. While I sympathize with your situation, and understand that it is very frustrating to receive bad advice/information from your TA, it is ultimately your responsibility to make sure your solution is reasonable, and therefore I can not give you full credit on this problem. Ultimately the majority of the points you lost were not for using this incorrect method (the TAs error), it was for not interpreting your answer and realizing it made no sense. As stated on the first day of class and in the syllabus I require all students to interpret their answers to make sure they make sense. Please come see me if you would like advice on how to check your answers as this is a very important skill in all scientific disciplines and in life in general. TAs, solutions manuals, and even professors make mistakes. Never trust something just because it was told to you by someone with more authority."
Is this the right thing to do?

I would like to speak for the student. IMHO, you're too harsh to him. The reason he is in your class is to learn. If he knew how to make sure your solution is correct, he would be in a more advanced class.

"my solution?" I never gave the student a solution (or anything for that matter). I do however, understand your point but I want to encourage independent learning and use this as a teaching moment. Perhaps I should ask the student to come visit me and discuss error checking, but then at the end of the meeting give the points back.

(I also am inclined to think that not giving points back to the student in this situation is standing on a valid principle but is almost inevitably going to annoy the student to the extent that it will interfere with (i) their performance in the course and (ii) their opinion of you.  Is the principle worth that much?)

this is STEM, wrong means exactly what you think it does; I just removed the quotes

I meant the student's solution. In other words, he is in your class to learn how to check the solution. I was quoting the words you wrote. Sorry about the confusion. At any rate, I think it's your and the TA's responsibility to help him to learn. What I would do is to explain it in the next class to all the students, not just that one, so that everybody, the students, the TA and even yourself learn it as a lesson. Just my 2 cents worth.

"Never trust something just because it was told to you by someone with more authority." Sorry, this is weak. The TA is your assistant. The TA is your representative. If the TA is flawed, that's not the student's fault; that's your fault for not vetting a better TA.

Further, the very essence of your teaching position consists of people "trusting" because you're someone with "authority". Sure, learners should check their work to understand and verify, but it's unrealistic to expect that students should raise suspicious eyebrows to each and every word that's taught until they can check it and verify for themselves. Not all knowledge is as simple to verify as an algebraic equation. As a general principle, yes, it's good to have a questioning mind and not take everything at mere face value. But realistically, it's unrealistic to expect such as an absolute.

@Coldblackice I'm not sure what university you are at. But at most large universities in the US, you do not choose your TA; they are assigned to you (at least for lower level classes).

unrealistic to expect that students should raise suspicious eyebrows to each and every word that's taught until they can check it and verify for themselves — On the other hand, they won't learn to raise suspicious eyebrows unless they're actually shown (not just told) the consequences of not raising suspicious eyebrows.

@MHH Then this is a bureaucratic issue between you and the university; not the student.

@MHH If the university is solely in control of who represents you as an assistant, then I suggest either 1) making sure TA's are constantly up to par with your teachings/pace, 2) petitioning univ for a new TA (if former is unfeasible), or worst case scenario, 3) at least making it overtly apparent to students upfront that TA's are "one of them", so to speak, and should never be trusted at mere face value; though wording it a little more diplomatically, of course :)

@JeffE Then this scenario can double as a great learning opportunity for everyone -- don't penalize the student, use this scenario as an example to teach the "Question everything" mindset, and lastly, redress the technicality of where exactly the TA's "authority" lies; i.e., should TA be considered on par with teacher's authority/knowledge, or on par with any other student in the class, or somewhere between the two -- and then set a future rule for officiating similar occurrences in the future (i.e., whether or not the fault will lie on student's shoulders).

dn't penalize the student — So, there are no actual consequences, then? Also, in STEM fields, instructors and TAs don't have authority but rather expertise; the answer isn't correct or incorrect because I say so, but because it's objectively correct or incorrect. And people's lives depend on your being correct.

I'm building on Pete Clark's comment.  Look up emotions and learning under the affective domain.  Scientific research tells us if a student develops significant resentment or loses trust in a teacher it can seriously impact the students ability to learn from that teacher.   Also, frequently students have not worked enough with a particular field to get a feel for what is a reasonable answer and what is not.

I agree that in principle, the student is responsible for critically evaluating information from all sources and rejecting any that's incorrect.  I wouldn't simply award the student points for the incorrect solution, but on the other hand it seems unhelpful to just mark it wrong and leave it there (and despite your explanation, the student will likely perceive this as unfair).  In similar situations, I've done one of two things:

Allow the student to revise the answer, and regrade the problem; or
Discard the problem for that student, and recompute the score for the assignment based only on the remaining problems.

+1 For the first bullet point. Just ask the student to redo that problem and to ask you any questions about it (so he gets the "correct" help if he requires it) and then you grade the resubmission. As to the second bullet, I'd say the student should do the problem because the student does need to know how to do the problem and HW is a good practice/feedback mechanism.

If you discard the erroneous problem, what would you do to the ones that figured out the correct solution despite the incorrect instruction? Discount their work as well? Award them bonus mark? They possibly had spent extra hours trying to research the problem themselves that wouldn't have been necessary if they had received correct instructions in the first place.

@LieRyan: I'd give them full credit for a correct colution and apologize to them for the confusion, but I don't think it would be appropriate to award them additional points in compensation for their time.  Grades are supposed to measure the quality of a student's work, not serve as an arbitrary reward/punishment mechanism.  If I felt that in figuring out the issues involved, they had really shown exceptional initiative and understanding, I might consider bonus points.

No other student saw the false instruction in this case. Hopefully if many students saw this false instruction (like in a TA section) than most likely the error would have been pointed out by one of the good students, and likely a very informative discussion would ensue. I'm going to have the TAs go over this problem in section, presenting the wrong solution and then asking the class why it's wrong and truly making this a learning experience for all. I've been told by the other 20 TAs that many students did exactly what this TA did.

I generally like the idea of disregard a problem when the reasonableness of the problem for measuring competence is called into question.

At the moment I'm not sufficiently clear on what the TA did and why it was wrong: in plenty of contexts "[telling] a student the method for answering the question" is exactly what TAs are supposed to do.  But again, I'm not sure exactly what happened nor what your understanding with the TA was.
So let me only address the issue of what to say to the student.  The principle that they are ultimately trying to get at what is actually correct, not what any one other person tells them is correct, is certainly a key one in a STEM field.  In fact, to me this is one of the distinct and pleasant features of mathematics in particular: my freshmen students are very chary to point out even the most trivial errors in my boardwork, but they will eventually learn that if I forgot to multiply by 4-x then (i) my answer is wrong, (ii) it is partially their responsibility to point out that my answer is wrong (the consequences of it being wrong are going to hurt them more than it hurts me, since they are trying to learn how to do problems that they haven't done before), and (iii) if they do point out that my answer is wrong they can be confident that I will react to it constructively rather than defensively.
Students in STEM fields need to learn how to correct the errors that they encounter from teachers and texts, and they do: story about how I mangled something in my graduate course this morning and the students got me to see that what I had done was bogus omitted (okay, drastically abridged).  But lower level students have so much trouble with this: errors which to us look insignificant ("of course it should say this...") can really ruin their day.  They're trying so hard to get a clue, and many of them are working in a state of cognitive dissonance that comes from having 99% of their inherent intellectual curiosity beaten out of them in their pre-university education.  In other words, they have unfortunately been highly trained not to try to understand but rather to do what they're told.  Most university students do clearly understand that more is expected of them and, thank goodness, many of them eventually regain the intellectual curiosity they lost, but you can't be an effective university instructor without knowing that many many students are just going to swallow anything you say which is too complicated for them to chew through in five seconds.
So when an instructor of any kind tells students something wrong, it is a big problem.  (Wrong is really the nightmare limiting case; I spend so much time trying to avoid correct explanations that I have learned from experience they will interpret incorrectly.)  If I say something in a lecture and realize later that it's wrong, I will come back and fix it in the next lecture.  If I have something which is wrong on study materials, I will try to correct it and send out a new copy ASAP.  If I tell them something that's wrong while they're studying for an exam, I won't wait until the next lecture but send along an email owning up to and fixing the mistake.
This is pretty much my point: students should -- ideally, and eventually -- take responsibility for correcting mistakes, sure, but so should we, and the two are not mutually exclusive.  Giving students points back when we make a mistake does not undermine the lesson of their own responsibility, in my opinion: it just does needed damage control.  When I ask a false question on a midterm or final exam (and it does happen, unfortunately) I either throw it out from the grading or give everyone full credit.  I am not testing them on their ability to correct my mistakes: to do doesn't seem instructive to me but obnoxious.  I remember once that a PhD student whom I was preliminarily advising took a qualifying exam which had a whopper of a false problem on it.  As soon as I saw the problem my reaction was "I will be shocked if that turns out to be true."  But I have more experience than the students and the luxury of having that reaction: my being wrong about it has no significant negative consequences for me.  It turned out that the student had received less than full credit for his solution to the false problem!  My reaction to that was essentially "WTF?  Please grade this exam again."  And they did.
I would strongly advise you to give the student the points back on the homework assignment.  (Added: or discount the assignment, or let them redo the problem, or whatever so long as they are not getting irrevocably dinged for the TA's mistake.)
And sure, do make it a teachable moment -- talk to the student about how they can learn to better adapt to the very distressing situation of being given wrong information.  Tell them that at some point they will acquire enough expertise to look at an "authoritative document" and say "I will be shocked if that turns out to be true."  But don't allow the TA's mistake to lower their course grade.  They'll never forgive you for that, and they won't learn how to correct their mistakes in the future.

I edited the question a while ago to include the example. The TA gave a full solution minus arithmetic calculations. Ironically, had he done those calculations he would have realized he was wrong, as the numerical answer was nonsense (kind of like getting int_0^1 x^2 dx = a negative number). I do agree with almost everything you say though. I like the idea Nathan gave of instead of giving the points back, not counting the question for their grade (this way she doesn't get an unfair advantage over students who came up with a wrong answer on their own) but also doesn't get punished.

@MHH: Thanks, I did eventually see the additional information you provided.  And yes, making sure that whatever you do will not give an unfair advantage to the student is certainly a good idea (although similarly to Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, for years I have dimly suspected that given all the "axioms of fairness" I feel like I should apply to grades, I could logically deduce that I must give every student an A).  But really in many courses one problem on one homework will count negligibly to the final grade.  The effect on the student's psyche may not be negligible, though.

Another thought I had, by the way, but managed not to put in my answer: "If I were your TA, I would have kept this to myself: better that the instructor knows about neither the mistake nor the remedy, perhaps.  Better for the TA, anyway."

Having said that: I do get frustrated as an instructor when students go elsewhere for help with their homework and get less than fully competent help, which they then try to take out on me.  For some reason this hasn't happened for a little while, but for years I used to get complaints like "Even my tutor couldn't do this homework problem."  It made me so frustrated: I don't know who the hell your tutor is; I certainly didn't vet his CV or anything like that.  Why are you drawing any conclusion from this other than that you may want to find a different tutor?!?

@PeteL.Clark "...other than that you may want to find a different tutor?!?" Or a different teacher ;)

@PeteL.Clark yeah, I assume the TA confessed to me mainly out of a guilty conscience. The TAs have the power to change grades on HW without consulting me if they see fit, so I suspect most would just to that.

As an instructor, I wouldn't draw a strong distinction between myself and the TA. The TA is part of a team that the instructor leads, and so the instructor should own TA mistakes as if they were his own. That may bear upon what sort of response makes sense.

In other words, they have unfortunately been highly trained not to try to understand but rather to do what they're told. This is a very good point :)

While I sympathize with your situation, and understand that it is very frustrating to receive bad advice/information from your TA, it is ultimately your responsibility to make sure your solution is correct, and therefore I can not give you back the points.

How is a student supposed to make sure their solution is correct, if not by seeking help from external sources such as TAs? I don't think your logic holds up here, and for that reason, it's not reasonable to penalize the student for the TA's mistake.
On the other hand, I'm not suggesting giving points for incorrect work. Some "neutral" solution, like omitting that problem from the computation of the student's grade or allowing them to redo the work, seems appropriate.

Please come see me if you would like advice on how to check your answers as this is a very important skill in all scientific disciplines and in life in general. TAs, solutions manuals, and even professors often make mistakes. Never trust something just because it was told to you by someone with more authority.

I don't think it's really practical to tell your students never to trust something just because it was told to them by someone with authority. Of course they should try not to do so more than necessary, and hopefully "necessary" means less and less over time, but some amount of trusting people with authority is necessary to jump-start the learning process.
It may be useful to make the point that even people with authority - professors, TAs, etc. - are beholden to a higher authority, namely correctness and self-consistency. If a student thinks something seems inconsistent or wrong, they should look into it further, by doing their own derivations and/or comparing multiple sources, until (hopefully) they eventually come to understand the thing that didn't make sense in the first place. If someone has made a mistake, it will be revealed in this process.

"I don't think it's fair to tell your students never to trust something told to them by someone with authority." I think you left out the key word in the passage you quoted: just.

If your teacher told you that the optimal fence like to enclose a pin was negative one hundred meters, you would trust him? This was a case where simply interpreting the answer would have led to suspicion.

Sure, if you're the faculty member who knows the subject. The student is probably very confused, that's why they 1) sought out help, like every faculty member tells them to, and 2) trusted that help. If they understood the material they wouldn't have done (1), so they wouldn't have had to evaluate it or not.

@MarkMeckes fair point, I think I found a way to edit it.

I agree with your council to the TA but you should give the student the points (or not use this assignment toward the calculation of the student's grades).
Is it fair that the student is receiving credit for incorrect work? No, but the point of any learning environment is to promote learning and I think your draconian adherence to grade fairness in this case would undermine that environment.
This student appears to have made a good faith effort to learn, and the TA appears to have made a good faith effort to assist learning. Exercising some compassion will ensure that this continues.

If you were the one that taught the material incorrectly, would you still hold the student accountable for your mistake?
The TA is your assistant. You must take responsibility for what the TA is teaching. The TA's words are your words by proxy.  However you resolve the situation, you should address it as if you personally made the error.
Perhaps the error was so obvious that you'd expect the student to catch it even if it came from you, and finalizing the grade is reasonable. The fact that your TA made the error instead of you is immaterial to that decision.

A student cannot be expected to trump their instructor's judgment when they know who grades the answer.  What if the student said, "yeah I had my doubts as well, that's why I spoke with my TA?"
Although I think you should give the student points or a redo in any event, I think you should also consider whether it was realistic for the student to be able to point out his TA's mistakes?  Would most the other students awarded points be able to do this?
Often in statistics the mathematical derivations require a much deeper understanding than simply learning to use the tools.  True in many disciplines in fact.  It sounds like you're holding this student to a much higher standard, which is why I think you should reconsider your position.

So if you were told by your instructor that an optimal pot of coffee contained negative 30 grams of ground coffee beans, you'd not try and figure out if the instructor made a mistake? This particular example didn't require deep intuition; It required thinking about the problem rather than blindly copying a recipe from a cook book. I have told my class up front that this will be different than the standard intro stats class and that I will expect them to think and interpret data (within reason). This has surprisingly led to great teaching reviews (I thought there would be more resistance)

That said I am glad I posted this question, because I do agree that this time, punishing the student via their score is a bit too harsh. Thanks for your feedback.

If you think his/her error demonstrated a lack of understanding that other students demonstrably posses, then it's harder to fault your stance.  But did the question allow the other students to demonstrate such proficiency, or to borrow the cooking book analogy, did they get points even if they just followed the recipe?

Oh yes this student and others that followed this cook book method were rewarded partial credit. The student wants full credit.

From my experience, homework exercise are there to help students learn, and are graded fairly lightly. The fact that your TA showed your student how to solve a problem, might or might no be a problem depending on the circumstances. For example, if a student had showed effort and reasonable understanding of the problem, and the TA explained the problem so that the student understood. No Problem. Of course if your TA just did a problem of the student, then there is a problem.
How difficult was the problem that you TA explained wrong? The fact that your TA doesn't understand the material, at least not all of it is a problem, in my view. Does your TA come to your lectures? Your TA should understand the material well, and they should be able to explain it. It is his job to help the students, not confuse them.
I would explain the right method to the student and give them full credit for the problem, and have a talk with the TA to make sure that they understand the material.

the TA made a reasonable mistake; the problem arose because he only told the student what to do, like a step by step recipe without asking the student questions to see if she was following (a full solution minus numerical calculations). He did not get to see the numerical answer that resulted. If he saw that he would have realized his mistake (since the answer that method would give is nonsense). After seeing the answer I am sure he would have been able to redo the problem correctly. I think this was just an honest mistake by the TA.

OK, I still think the fact that the TA gave a wrong method is a problem, perhaps he should be more careful. You could advise him to due the assignment themselves first. As for the student, if the answer obviously made no sense, like negative variance, I would probably still give her full credit as the mistake was on our part, but advise her to be more careful next time.

I worked as a tutor the last few years of my undergraduate studies and I wanted to add that to a student seeking help, a TA (or tutor) is someone you believe. Your student would not think that what the TA said was wrong because they are a TA. If the TA made an honest mistake, as a teacher, you should bring both the TA and student together and explain what was wrong. You could then give the student half credit if they answered in the way that the TA erroneously showed them. You could use this experience to help the rest of the class. I do not profess to understand STEM, as I have a degree and History and am working on my MA in education, but I understand teachable moments. If you want to prevent this in the future, meet with your TA and make certain that they are helping students using the correct process.

This is very specific to STEM. In history it would require an unreasonable amount of work for a student to verify everything an instructor or TA said. In some STEM classes we cover about 5% of the material covered in a history course. A class may only go through 70 pgs of material total over the whole semester! We focus on understanding and independently verifying nearly all of it. Answers to questions should at a minimum always be checked by interpreting the results. The student failed to do this. They were not punished for the error, they lost points for not checking their answer.

I think the best thing to do is let the student re-do the task, and have a talk with your TA. Making a mistake is human, but if he worked out the whole problem using the wrong method - without realising the result didn't make sense - I'd say that's an issue.
You expect your students to interpret the results of the calculation, and you expect them to choose the right method of solving it on an exam, so when a TA makes such a mistake, I'd question him.
I'm not saying that making a mistake is the problem, it's the nature of the mistake. When I lecture on programming, I sometimes make "thinko's" or get a design element wrong, but I won't   make a whole algorithm in a faulty matter. It's a bit hard to compare lecturing programming to the more mathematical courses, because blackboard mistakes in a calculation are easily made and overlooked.
Yet, I have never used the wrong  throughout a whole problem, I'd realise I'm using the wrong method as one point or another, surely when the result is wrong (Once again, easier to notice in programming), but you'd expect a TA to be able to interpret the result, no?
Ofcourse, I have no idea what the actual mistake was he made, but from your post it seemed like a key mistake.

Invalidate the question and apply again, if possible, renormalize the grade if not, to the whole class, to be fair...
Expanding:
Sorry to be blunt, but, as others said, you made a mess. Any attempt to rationalize it would be pointless, just take the hit (remember: your TA... and everybody makes mistakes, how do you deal with them that's important).
If you just award the points, you risk other students coming out of the woodwork saying the same thing or worse, because it is not really a fair option, neither is not awarding the points. Since both options are unfair, redo the whole deal.
My point is that this part of the assignment/exam is now tainted. Any result from it, should be removed. For the whole class. Drastic, I agree, but, IMHO, the best way to deal with it.
If you still have time/availability, re-explain the topic to the whole class, making perfectly clear the right way, the wrong way and why the wrong way doesn't work and re-apply the assignment/exam. This way you even expand what they learn by showing one possible pitfall...
If you can't, remove that item from the grades and scale the value of the other items to fill the void.
Either way, make everything public and clear to everyone. Sometimes even the smell of "cover up" is worse than the mistake.

Can you please expand a bit?

The notion about the "fairness" of reliance on TAs for advice being in question because not all students may be able to attend a TA's office hours is an utterly false premise. Instead of being "equal protection" it's "equal jeopardy."  Bad idea.
If a student is so brilliant that they need no instruction to get correct answers, or if you're such a brilliant lecturer that you reach every single student with the exact best way to deliver the material for 100 percent comprehension...then eliminate TA/student interaction entirely.  However, in my experience, such students and such teachers together are countable on one hand in a given university, usually with fingers left over for other tasks.
If the student came up with the answer that she should have, using the incorrect method, then she should receive credit...if she redoes the solution using an appropriate method, which in your grand mangnaminity you should bestow upon her.  And yes, she should be chagrined to have not noticed the nonsensical answer.

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Late recommendation letter
I'm about to apply for postdoc positions in the US through mathjobs. I already did it last year, so I have my reference letters from the previous time (which are probably pretty good).
Now here's my situation: During the last year, I was lucky to solve some well-known open problems in my field (well, it's not going to earn me a Wikipedia entry, but the tiny group of researchers in my esoteric field is impressed), which will probably turn my application from "good" to "outstanding". In order to really make my application look better, my reference letters should address the recent results, so I asked my letter writers to update their letters. Most of them did so, except for one (who didn't reply to my emails). The problem is that I should submit some of my applications by November 1, and as I didn't hear from that letter writer for several weeks now, I'm afraid that he might not update his letter by November 1.
Question 1: When job ads on mathjobs say something like "screening of applications will begin on November 1", do they really mean it, or do they mean something like "screening of applications will begin on mid December, but we want you to submit your application early"?
Question 2: What would you do in my situation (assuming that the relevant letter writer is currently abroad and I have no other way to contact him)? Should I contact the relevant search committees and ask them to check that reference letter a bit later, once it gets updated?
Question 3: If a letter of recommendation is updated on mathjobs past the submission of an application, which version of the letters is available to the search committee? What should I do in order to make sure that they read the updated version?

It might not be a bad idea to try to contact someone else that knows you and/or your work for a recommendation letter, to replace the writer that doesn't reply to your e-mails.

Question 1: When job ads on mathjobs say something like "screening of applications will begin on November 1", do they really mean it, or do they mean something like "screening of applications will begin on mid December, but we want you to submit your application early"?

It depends on the department.  It is however well known that many faculty members drag their feet with recommendation letters, and this happens more or less independently of the quality of the applicant.  So in my experience it is common to allow a grace period of a couple of weeks to allow the letters to trickle in.

Question 2: What would you do in my situation (assuming that the relevant letter writer is currently abroad and I have no other way to contact him)? Should I contact the relevant search committees and ask them to check that reference letter a bit later, once it gets updated?

Frankly I think you're too worried about the entire situation.  You did some exciting new work: great.  All but one of the letters will describe this exciting new work.  The other letter may not.  So when people read the letters they will see that your exciting new work is so new that one of your writers is a little out of the loop.  I see no big problem here.  If one of the letters is more negative than the others, that drags your application down.  If one of the letters is less informative than the others...frankly, that usually happens and is really much of the reason why you get multiple letters.

Question 3: If a letter of recommendation is updated on mathjobs past the submission of an application, which version of the letters is available to the search committee? What should I do in order to make sure that they read the updated version?

Hmm.  I believe what happens is that if the file has not been read by anyone, the letter updates without recording the change.  If it has been read, then both versions of the letter appear.  But I am not completely sure about this.
In summary: you solved some well-known open problems in your field. That's the dream.  You say that this will probably turn your application from "good" to "outstanding."  Well, I agree.  Congratulations, and I hope you enjoy your postdoc.

Question 1:  It depends.  In my experience on hiring committees it means that no one will look at the applications until after November 1, that some industrious members of the committee will immediately start looking at applications on November 1, and that other members of the committee won't get around to it for some weeks after November 1. A well organized committee might meet in mid November and screen out 90% of the applicants at that point.  A badly organized committee might not do anything until January.  You have no way of knowing, so the best that you can do is to have a complete application in place by November 1.
Question 2:  I'd get a complete application together now, and submit it for those jobs with early deadlines, even though you don't have this new letter of recommendation yet.
Question 3. You can update the letter of recommendation later, but there's no way to be sure that the committee will look at it.  In particular, if you've been screened out in the first round, they'll probably never look at any updates to your application.  If you're invited to participate in some kind of an interview (at a meeting, by skype, etc.) than they might look at the updated material.  When/if you're contacted to arrange an interview, be sure to mention that you've updated your material on mathjobs.org and ask them to look at the updated material.

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How to cite a source that has vanished due to link rot?
My colleague is writing a manuscript about a subject that is rarely reported in the mainstream literature (predation events). A few years ago on a fishing forum she found a photograph that demonstrated this phenomenon pretty well and saved it to her computer, but unfortunately between then and now the original source has vanished: Google Reverse Image Search can't locate it, the website is no longer running and is also unavailable in the Internet Archive. The original URL to the photo was also not retained.
What's the proper way to cite this source? It's not critical to include but it would definitely improve the final manuscript.

Can the photograph still be found on the internet archive?: https://archive.org/ - if yes, you may cite (1) the additional url and (2) the archive'd URL. Also, the archive may still have owner information.

Maybe this is silly, but has she tried to put the image in "Google Images" and see if she can find a new source?

Before worrying about the citation your colleague needs to gain permission to use the image in her work. She needs to contact the owner of the image and ask them for permission. The image could then be used and the citation could be a "personal communication" or the URL of where the image was taken from with the access date.
Finding the contact details of the image owner will undoubtedly be difficult, especially given that the image is not actually on the forum anymore. But if the forum is still active perhaps a question could be posted on there (with the image) asking if anyone knows who took the photo / how they can be contacted and perhaps she'll get lucky.
Edit: As pointed out by StrongBad if your colleague is not planning on actually reproducing the image in the document then seeking permission for its use is not required. If she just wants to describe the image, I guess the only option would be to cite it using the URL where it was, with the access date. However, given that the reader could not then actually find the image themself and look at what your colleague was describing, it probably wouldn't provide that much useful information to the manuscript.

You do not need permission if you do not include the photo in the manuscript. Without permission, you could still describe/analyze the photo, but you would want a citation for this.

@StrongBad very good point. I have updated my answer to reflect this.


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Avoiding "Zoom bombing" in virtual conferences and seminars
With travel restricted by the COVID-19 pandemic, many academics are organizing online seminars and conferences as a substitute for regular in-person university seminars, colloquia, and research conferences.
In real life, seminars are usually open to anyone who wants to drop in, and every attendee can be seen and heard and may ask questions.  So an obvious approach is to organize the event using video meeting software such as Zoom, and simply post the link on a public website so that any interested person can participate.  However, this also opens the event to "Zoom bombers", random people who just want to disrupt the proceedings with annoying or offensive video / audio / text chat - such abuse has unfortunately become very common in public Zoom meetings.
What best practices exist to keep such an event as open as possible to legitimate participants, and let them interact with each other and the speaker in a reasonable way, while reducing the risk of disruption and abuse?
What are the pros and cons of these strategies?
Strategies could be general, or involve specific features of certain software.
Some strategies I've thought of, and their drawbacks:

Create a password for the meeting.  Then the question is, to whom should the organizer give the password?  If they only give it to people they know, it excludes people who might be interested but whom they happen not to know.  If they distribute it to large mailing lists of interested academics, it raises the chance that it will fall into the wrong hands.
Offer to share the password by email upon request.  This requires extra time from the organizer to respond to those emails, and to manually verify the credentials of each requester.
Require a nominal registration fee, as real-life conferences often do.  This requires setting up an online payment system, which can be a lot of work, and may exclude people who are only casually interested, or who don't have funding, or who work in less wealthy parts of the world.  It may also involve the organizer in a lot of bureaucracy with their university as to how the fees will be managed and spent.
Use a "waiting room" feature, where participants must be approved immediately before joining.  However, as far as I know, the host only sees the participant's name.  If they see an unfamiliar name, how can they tell whether it is a troll, or a legitimate researcher whom they just happen not to know?  Conversely, I don't think there is anything to stop a troll from masquerading under the name of a famous academic.

I am wondering if people have thought of better solutions, that are specifically appropriate to academia.  Such strategies might take advantage of specific features of the academic community, e.g. to authenticate genuine researchers (.edu addresses? accounts on preprint servers? ORCid IDs?).  Answers could also address the pros and cons of such strategies as they apply to academia in particular, and how well they fit with people's existing expectations for academic conferences.

Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat. Please read this FAQ before posting another comment.

Conventional public meetings have always been susceptible to abuse. The usual approaches apply: (1) Put a bouncer at the door to prevent uninvited or bad characters from entering (2) Don't give everyone a microphone or a billboard (3) If a participant does something unacceptable, warn them. If they persist, kick them out. (4) Moderate/Censor/Filter anything that goes through the microphone / projector (5) Take legal action against persistent abusers.

@Xantix: I thought about that, but the parallel breaks down in a few ways.  First of all, for someone to disrupt an in-person academic seminar, they actually have to travel somewhere; for a virtual seminar, a few mouse clicks suffice.  The cost of an attack is orders of magnitude lower.  Second, #5 is effectively impossible; there is no easy way to identify a Zoom bomber, who will typically have taken steps to conceal their IP address, and it's unlikely that law enforcement will take an interest.

@Xantix: Indeed, not only can't you punish a Zoom bomber, you can't even prevent them from logging back on with a new account five seconds later.

@Nate Eldredge: The cost of an attack may be lower, but so is the cost of blocking offenders.  You don't need a team of bouncers, just a few key clicks.  It should be fairly easy to identify & block their IP addresses, too, which increases their cost of attacking.

@jamesqf: See chat for response.

How about using something other than Zoom? Other softwares support features that can help with this. Moreover there are some serious security and privacy concerns about Zoom (see e.g. this statement by the FBI and this investigation by the NY attorney general; Bruce Schneier has written an overview of the concerns here).
In our department we use BigBlueButton (website, Wikipedia) for our classrooms and seminars. It's a completely open-source and free web conferencing system. There are a few services out there that host servers but they're completely overloaded at the moment. I'd say your best bet would be to get your IT services to host a server for your department. With BBB by default new users don't have their webcams activated, and you can prevent them from doing so. You can even prevent them from using their microphone and require them to virtually "raise their hand" before a moderator allows them to speak. That should cut down a lot of the abuse. You can also set up the service so that an account is required before accessing the meeting. Unless the abuser is very dedicated, they probably won't bother creating dozens of accounts to continue bothering people after being kicked out, I hope.
Also, something obvious: many abusers are specifically targeting Zoom and going into random Zoom meetings. Unless you've somehow attracted abusers who are specifically targeting you, if you use something else (especially something hosted by your own department), you probably won't have any problems.
Note: I'm only recommending BBB because that's what we use at our department, but there are other services out there. I know another department has set up something called "Panopto" for example, and another something called "Classilio" - you'll have to look that up, I don't know much about it. For informal meetings we use Jitsi but it doesn't seem adequate for hosting a seminar. But in any case, if a software doesn't meet your requirements, you should definitely look into switching to something else, especially with the privacy concerns...

Zoom has also features like "mute all participants", "do not allow participants to unmute themselves", etc.: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/203435537-Mute-All-And-Unmute-All

To be clear, BBB has the same problems that Zoom has with the possibility of vandals "bombing" meetings, and the same solutions and their trade-offs applies. The problem seems simple: without authentication, anybody can enter the meeting, no matter what platform is used.

I know the host can mute and unmute participants, but how do you tell whether the person you're about to unmute is an abuser?

@NateEldredge: You only unmute participants individually, either because you know who the participant is or because they asked to be unmuted via chat.

@NateEldredge Just have them type in questions to the moderator, and the mod filters the questions and only unmutes askers with good questions, or the mod reads good questions to the speaker. It works for radio stations, at least.

@user3067860 good point, I was writing something similar.
But remember that this requires that you have a moderator (separate from the presenter) and that the moderator have at least a basic understanding of the topic.

@HansOlsson I've seen livestreamers do it with just one person, if you can pause to read through questions (no typing responses, just respond out loud). But it is easier with a moderator. Even if the moderator is just filtering out obviously not-real questions and banning anyone who asks joke questions.

The features discussed in the comments seem sufficient in the case that the organizer knows the participants, e.g. classes, committee meetings, etc.
I don't think this question has a single right answer.  I'm going to answer for the case where the conference is open to interested academics and the organizer doesn't know all the potential participants.  This isn't specific to Zoom, either.  I think this would work for most on-line conferencing systems.
Require preregistration using Google Forms or a similar tool.  Ask for full name, email address, and some vetting information such as the URL of the applicant's academic web page.  The vetting questions will likely change depending on the nature of the audience, and perhaps with experience.  You'll need a registration deadline so that you can send out passwords.
There are several tools for sending bulk email from a .csv spreadsheet such a Google Forms provides.  I use the mail-merge add-in for Thunderbird.  I'm told Microsoft Office has an email-merge feature.  Look through the list, delete any that don't pass vetting, and mail the meeting link to the rest.
"Look through the list" will be the time-consuming task.  If one expects more than perhaps 50-100 participants, I'd download the list daily, clear it out, and vet applicants one day at a time.
Edit: It will be hard, but not impossible, for a troll to masquerade as a famous academic because the invitation will go to the address in the registration, which, for famous academics, is likely to be well-known.
I've just done some poking with Google.  Excel appears to have a way to highlight cells that do not end with a specified string.  So, the Google form says "academic email address required" and the formula lights up in red any addresses that don't pass the filter described just below.  Deleting them is still a manual process unless one wants to learn the Visual Basic stuff used to "program" excel, but finding them becomes easy.
Further to Federico Poloni's comment, start with a simple rule, e.g. addresses must end in .edu in the US, or .ac.uk in the UK.  Look at the addresses that get flagged and adjust the rule accordingly.  Of course, that means no automagic deletions, but you can group the flagged addresses using a filter for manual deletion in a batch.  Yes, this is a certain amount of "make it up as we go along," but I imagine we'll be doing a lot of that for many months.

Outside the US, people have academic addresses such as @unipi.it, so the approach in your last paragraph won't work in an international setting.

You don't need VBA to do this, conditional formatting and IF() can be used.

@FedericoPoloni  Sure it will; one just has to work through the exceptions.

@SolarMike  You can mark them with conditional formatting.  The only way I know to delete rows based on cell values required manual intervention.  If there's a better way, a hint would be much appreciated.  Although I've retired from teaching, I still run workshops for my institution, and I do this a lot.

@bobbrown I think most universities in the world  do not have an .edu domain.

@Dirk  Didn't read the last paragraph, did you?

@BobBrown you can filter based on color, select all rows showing by shift-clicking, then right click and delete. That's still technically manual, but it only takes a few seconds.

In addition to Zoom "meetings," they have a "webinar" option for calls:
https://zoom.us/webinar
(Note that this feature is only available in certain paid versions, I believe)
This option is designed for meetings at which most people are silently listening. The audio and video of participants are off by default, and can only be turned on by one of the hosts. Alternatively, there is a mechanism in these for submitting text questions, which go to a moderator queue and then are shown to everyone.
I recently attended a webinar of this type, and it ran smoothly. I think it would be much more difficult to disrupt than the usual meeting style.

It looks like this is an extra-cost add-on to their paid versions.  The ability to host a webinar with 100 participants is currently USD 40 per month, with more participants costing more money.  I guess you can compare it to your regular seminar budget for tea and cookies.

We had the same problem and ended up with a solution like this:

The seminar series web page contains information about the seminar program, plus instructions for joining the seminar mailing list.
The Zoom link is shared only through the seminar mailing list some time before the event.
There is no password.

The mailing list subscriptions can be moderated, but I don't think there is need to really "check the credentials" of those who are joining the list.
This is low-effort for the organizers and legitimate seminar participants, and it would be relatively high-effort for someone who wants to do Zoom bombing (in particular, you will need to plan ahead and subscribe in advance, so if you are just right now bored and drunk and would like to do something silly, it doesn't sound too exciting to subscribe to a seminar mailing list that would make it possible to maybe do some Zoom bombing next week).

From what I understand, there are various internet forums where bored students can share a meeting password and ask for internet trolls to bomb their teacher. See e.g. this news article that discusses them.

+1 for the low-effort solution which is enough in most cases. Just like cheap bicycle locks can be easily defeated by an experienced thief, but they are still useful in most cases, as they prevent casual passers-by from stealing your bike.

It would more useful to have a password and put the password in the email with the link. That way, you would at least prevent Zoom bombing from people trying random meeting numbers,

The current phenomenon of "Zoom bombing" seems to come from the fact that Zoom meeting IDs can easily be guessed.
So you may be overthinking this and should try to publish the conference password on the institute website. This will not be found by people who just try to bomb random conferences.
When someone is explicitly targeting your conference, you won't have much chance to prevent it, while keeping it open to everyone even when you do not know them.
I would consider at least trying to use a meeting with a rather public password and only change when you actually run into problems.

I think most times a student in the class gives away the Zoom codes. I've seen people on social media specifically ask for other people's "zoom codes" so they can join.

@MCMastery: This might be true for high school and low-level university classes, but not so much for seminars and conferences, whose participants are a bit more mature. Also, I don't remember a talk so boring that I'd ask 4chan to raid it :)

@MCMastery but are these codes being given to people who will create problems?

@MCMastery When someone especially wants to interrupt your meeting (maybe a student with a bad grade) you will need to make it private in some way, e.g., by communicating a password via a mailing list. But this is true for any medium that is open to everyone. And bold people may even come in and disturb real meetings until security forces them to leave.

It seems to me that the current state of things is that you can't, without some support from Zoom's side. Even if you set up a meeting password, a malicious participant can give it to a bomber. Even if you vet names, a bomber may spoof the name of a legitimate user.
You need accounts to solve this problem.
The crucial issue is that Zoom (EDIT: at least the way you are using it) has no concept of users or authentication. The problem can be solved if you require a form of personal authentication: a malicious user won't give their personal password to a bomber, because their name is attached to it.
You need trusted accounts.
This requires you to have some form of trusted authentication: if you have accounts, but users can create one in two minutes with randomaddress@gmail.com, that's as good as nothing. Orcid may be more vetted (I don't have experience in how easy it is to create an Orcid account if you are not an academic). A "walled garden", such as schools that use Microsoft Teams or a corporate Google Suite for their internal needs, may work if all participants are inside the garden (and have independently authenticated accounts).
You can require academic addresses to create accounts, and check manually that their domains are legitimate. If we had a working global academic authentication infrastructure, it would have helped solving this problem probably. There are some attempts to create one: Shibboleth, Openathens, Eduroam. Probably Eduroam is the most widespread, so they may help. But you can't just use their credentials without some support from both them, and the video-conference service.
Of course firms are pushing for their walled gardens instead, and schools and universities blindly use Microsoft or Google because they are cheaper.

Zoom does have a concept of accounts and authentication, though, if you pay for it. See this page for integrating an existing authentication systems with Zoom. The fact that the US government doesn't use it when they should and get problems because of it doesn't mean that it's unavailable.

@ErikA Interesting, thanks! In particular it does already support Shibboleth, which is already quite common in academia.

Would be cool to have a capcha-type question, which is very specific to the seminar.
I am moderating a facebook group in a very specialized research field, mainly for researchers (all members either have a PhD or are on the way to get one). Hence, I ask a few questions which are very basic for the members, but highly non-trivial for laypersons.

That could be a solution, but you would need to have only a very specific answer possible. While in maths this is doable (say, a basic integral and you expect a number back), even in physics it becmes more complicated (except if this is a name such as Maxwell, or the answer of a basic physics problem). OK, after reading myself I think this is a cool idea :) (+1)

One of my questions is to provide the canonical next integer in the sequence 1,1,2,5,14,...

Yes, for mathematicians this is probably obvious, or they can look it up in OEIS. An absolute deterrent for anybody else, though (I am an ex-physicist and had to look it up :-| )

You could publicly share the meeting ID (and password, if required) before the meeting. Once the meeting has started - or maybe a few minutes later - you lock the meeting such that no new participants can join.
This will not protect you from determined troublemakers that attend the meeting from the start, but it prevents Zoom bombers from randomly dropping in.
This approach is the digital equivalent of locking the door after the meeting has started.

What happens in a locked meeting if someone's connection breaks down and they want to rejoin?

@darijgrinberg Good catch. I couldn't test a loss of connection, but if a guest of a locked meeting leaves the meeting, the guest cannot rejoin.

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How to type a foreign language author name with special characters?
How do you cite (in APA) the authors last name when it is a foreign language with special unknown characters that can't be identified by most word processors.

characters that can't be identified by most word processors How did the journal print it?

If you want to get the most helpful answer then you may benefit from saying what the character is, and what language it comes from. It may be worth looking how it's been cited in existing publications though.

Most modern word processors support Unicode, which contains code points for the characters of basically every language on Earth. So unless your co-author is Klingon, I find it difficult to believe that your word processor does not support these characters. Maybe it is a problem with the font that you are using. (By the way, there is a proposal to include the Klingon alphabet in Unicode).

You take the necessary steps to make sure that you can type the character in your word processor. In this day and age computers can represent pretty much every script used (remember people in your author's country also use word processors from day to day).

Have you tried closet English equivalent? For example leaving an accent mark or similar.

@Greg if you do that, the citation won't be correct and harder to connect to the author's work

@Greg There's also the question of what's an accent mark that can be left out and what's an integral part of the letter that might look like an accent mark to others. For example in my language we have common issues with c, ć and č. In Latin, they look similar and foreigners tend to think of them as a variations of a same letter, but they're different and in original versions, it's quite easy to see the difference: ц,ћ,ч.

@Greg Then we also have the Đ letter. If you leave out -, you'll rename George into Dorde, which makes no sense and instead a different transliteration of Djordje is used, which probably won't be immediately obvious if you don't know the language.

@Emilie Many reference database cannot handle such characters, so it is an issue that already exist, without OP doing anything and most probably handled by the author manually.

@AndrejaKo If you don't like how foreigners spell your name, use a professional name with reasonably clear spelling, it is that simple. If we don't asume foreigners shoudl be able to read Chinese or Japanese character sets, we shouldn't assume they read other character sets ( of much more minor languages). I use standardized name for professional purposes, others can use too.

@Greg Or people could figure out that it's 21st century, not 19th and that other cultures exist too and not assume things about them. Also database point mentioned in the other comment is completely moot. If a database can't accept a Unicode name, maybe it's time for an update.

@Greg: "If we don't asume foreigners shoudl be able to read Chinese or Japanese character sets, we shouldn't assume they read other character sets ( of much more minor languages)." - I have thought about that reasoning various times before, but I have come to the conclusion that people do not think in "character sets". Character sets are somwhat arbitrary, and arguably, Unicode is just one big character set, anyway. People rather think in scripts. Seen like that, it seems indeed reasonable that someone using Latin script should be able to use a previously unknown diacritic on a Latin letter.

Some foreign languages don't include strange letters like J, K, Q, W, X, Y in their alphabets. But usually they have the courtesy to represent English names properly. Why shouldn't we do the same for their letters?

Try shapecatcher.com and detexify.kirelabs.org to identify the characters.  Then proceed from there by inserting a Unicode char in a Unicode font or a latex command (depending on whether you are using MSWord or some form of LaTeX).  Once you have identified the character, also try an online search engine to find out spellings easier for you, e.g., the romanized ones.
If everything else fails, ask the sources where you got the name from. The contact person can be an editor, a publisher, a coauthor, or the author himself/herself. Some authors maintain homepages with a correct spelling of their name; if it is the case for the author in question, take a look at their HTML code.

One very important addendum to this answer. Detexify does not recognize most characters from foreign alphabets. Shapecatcher does.

Google the webpage of the author. If this is unicode, then cut and paste the special character into Google. Otherwise, find his name rendered in unicode somewhere on the internet, and Google the character. This should take you to a webpage that tells you what the character is. You can then Google to find out how to type it in your word processor. Or (depending on the word processor) you can just cut and paste the unicode.


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How should undergraduate student respond when the PI of their lab asks them to provide feedback on a research paper?
I worked on a research project earlier this year with a group of people. The paper has been written up (not by me) and sent to the team to review it, give feedback and approve it before it is submitted for publication. I am just an undergraduate student and this is my very first experience with this. Most other people on the research team are much older and more experienced than me; so I do not have any critical feedback to give. The paper seems great to me.
Anyways, I am wondering how to state my approval when I email the PI? Replying with “I approve of this paper” seems too entitled for me since I am so inexperienced. So what would be the best way to reply back with my approval?

I think experienced people know what you can contribute.   Just look over your parts, double check them and say, your parts are good to go, or X,Y... need to be done.  You may want to check whether other parts of the paper have a link to your part.  For example, if you did the experiments, the abstract or intro may not highlight your results or claims are not supported by your results.

You can always check the grammar. There are always commas missing, and fixing them you can contribute positively to the paper.

A reply such as "Thank you for the opportunity to review this; I see no changes that need to be made."  is appropriate.  This confirms that you

Read the paper and
Are in agreement with the content and presentation.

As a participant in the work and especially if you're listed as a co-author, point 2 is important.  However, point 1 lets the organizer know that you've completed your task so that they needn't wait any longer on your feedback.
An additional thought:

Most other people on the research team are much older and more experienced than me; so I do not have any critical feedback to give.

Don't let age or experience of other team members influence how you perform your review.
You have every right (really, a responsibility) to raise any issue you identify so that it can be addressed.  Furthermore, I've often found that less-experienced team members tend to make very rigorous reviews of all the details, often catching details that others miss.  Take this as an opportunity to dive into the work and learn the intricacies of it (especially the parts you weren't involved with).  This will allow you to gain understanding of the field and allow you to more effectively perform another type of review: that of the overall nature of the work and the cohesiveness of how it's presented.
Also, as you perform the review, you should bring questions to your team members.  They understand you have little experience (you're an undergraduate, that's expected).  However, displaying interest in the work and gaining knowledge in the field is a good thing.

I am slightly at odds with “Thank you for the opportunity to review this” as it would be unethical (or even misconduct) not to have every author review a paper before submission.

It's not clear if OP is a co-author or just someone who participated in the work.  I agree: everyone on the team should be given the chance to review the publication and pleasantries shouldn't be needed regardless of role.  However, the 'thank you' also alleviates some curtness in the response if it was otherwise omitted.

@Joel Although I didn't write any of the paper, I am listed as a co-author. So I participated in the work and my name is listed as an author on the paper.

@aspire94 Thanks for clarifying, it might help to note that in your question.  The use of 'please' and 'thank you' in email correspondence is my personal style but a response such as "I've reviewed the paper and see no changes that need to be made." is perfectly acceptable.  The main point of my answer is to clearly communicate the two points I listed.

@aspire94, +1 to Joel for pointing out that it is still very useful for less experienced eyes (who haven't been glazing over) to read the paper. It is quite possible that you'll notice something that might be unclear to a general reader, (or an obvious typo) but that the authors did not notice because they are too familiar with the prose.

TL;DR: If you do not find anything to criticise on a paper, strongly consider the possibility that you were too coy.
If I give a paper of mine to a bachelor student for internal review and they do not have anything to criticise, I assume that they did not thoroughly read it, underestimated their concerns, or are afraid of criticising senior collaborators.
This particularly holds if they are a co-author.
(And this also applies to peer reviewers by the way.)
Every paper that has not already received feedback by thousands of people will be imperfect.
It does not necessarily have to contain hard mistakes, but there almost certainly are parts that can be misunderstood and explained better – not to mention spelling or grammar flukes.
The challenging part of writing a paper is not to correctly write down your results; almost everybody¹ can do that.
The challenging part is to explain your rationales, methods, and conclusions to readers that may not be extremely familiar with all the details of your research.
Therefore taking this reader’s point of view is essential for good paper writing.
However this gets increasingly difficult if you are very familiar with a subject, such as your own research.
Therefore somebody like you is probably a better proxy for the paper’s intended audience and a better person to provide feedback on the paper.
This does not only apply to subject expertise but also to language:
I often write sentences that I consider to be to the point and easy to understand, just to find out that my internal reviewers had to read them three times to understand them – which means that another reader may not understand them at all and they need to be fixed.
If your seniors are wise, they are aware of this and will take any criticism coming from you seriously, not only regarding the paper’s didactics but also regarding possible mistakes:
If anything seems fishy to you, it may also seem fishy to reviewers and the paper may need to be improved, be it by fixing an actual mistake or by better explaining why there is actually no mistake.
Also, consider that your seniors may judge you like I did if you do not provide any criticism whatsoever.
You may even waste their time as they may feel the need to consider another internal reviewer due to your lack of criticism.
Therefore I strongly suggest that you carefully read the entire paper again and be as nitpicky as you can, in particular with respect to easy understandability, consistent notation, spelling, and grammar. You will almost certainly find something.

¹ who is capable of obtaining publishable results

Beginners are often already nervous about "doing it wrong."  It's fine to advise OP to read with a critical eye.  But you can make this point without exacerbating the anxiety a beginner may already have.  I think this answer would be strengthened by taking out the first sentence.

@aparente001: Fair point, let me rephrase this.

Hey there, Wrzlprmft -- the first sentence doesn't hit me between the eyes any more, but it still makes me too uncomfortable to be able to upvote the otherwise strong answer.  I don't want to keep arguing, but I did want to acknowledge the improvement, and let you know my honest reaction.  Anxiety is very real, when it occurs, and in that case, nothing is gained by making it worse.  I can see that your way of seeing this question is a simple if no defects or errors detected, then student not trying hard enough or not being honest.  But I don't think that criticizing the student will...

... help him or her notice more things in the paper that could be improved.

@aparente001: I can see that your way of seeing this question is a simple if no defects or errors detected, then student not trying hard enough or not being honest – Yes, but the lack of honesty comes from good intentions. Anyway, let me add a third option to this (see my edit). — Where do you think I am criticising the student in a way that fuels anxiety. Saying that they are probably too coy is only one step short of saying you are being too anxious.

Well, I interpreted "coy" as being not honest, and I did take it to imply that the intentions weren't bad.  But it's still a criticism, largely from the way you put it.  "You are almost certainly being too ____" doesn't feel the same to a person who's already feeling anxious as "Be careful not to inadvertently _____".  And note that I've never seen anxiety be reduced by just telling the anxious person not be be anxious.  It's more helpful to validate whatever mix of feelings and thoughts they are having.  In this case, OP wrote, "I do not have any critical feedback to give. The paper seems ...

...great to me."  If our goal is to help someone learn to read manuscripts with a more critical eye, are we really going to succeed in that goal by telling him that if he can't find anything wrong, he's "doing something wrong" or "being too coy"?  I don't think so. // By the way, the advice I gave in my answer, of finding at least one thing to give positive feedback, is, in my experience, surprisingly helpful in developing critical thinking. // Thanks for asking; that's how I see it, and I just want to say once more that it's okay if we don't agree on this.

Cute edit!  (I still think the best way to develop critical thinking abilities in students is to (a) ask them to identify what they liked best, and (b) catch them doing what you want them to do, and give positive reinforcement.)

@aparente001: Sure, but that’s rather hard in a Q&A environment like this.

We can do (a) here (see my answer), and although (b) is primarily the PI's job, we can notice that OP bothered to come here and ask, and bothered to get involved in a research project as an undergrad, and bothered to read the paper and try to look for something to improve.  So, there are actually already things to provide positive feedback about, if we want to.

If you've checked the paper to the best of your ability, particularly those parts with which you were closely involved, and you have no criticisms or concerns, then just say so.  There isn't any special wording to use - just be clear that you consent to submitting the paper in its current form (it would be unethical for them to submit without your consent).
For instance, you could say:

I read through the paper and it looks good to me.  I think it is fine to submit.  Thanks everybody!

Just don't delay - it sounds like you've made your decision that the paper is okay, and your co-authors will be very frustrated if the submission of the paper is held up while you agonize over how to draft your email.

You are required to read an approve the final version of a manuscript to be included as an author. This is common practice. It is recommended criteria for authorship by many journals and the Vancouver convention.
You should at least check the sections based on your work and make sure that you agree with how they are communicated and the overall message of the paper (abstract and conclusions). All you need to do is confirm that you have read it and approve of the current version.
However, some specific comments will make it clearer that you've actually read the manuscript. It is not uncommon in our research group for students to suggest changes or even take a role in writing or submitting manuscripts themselves. This is a crucial part of research and you are being trained as a researcher.
Do not hesistate to suggest revisions or point out mistakes. Believe it or not supervisors still make them and need proofreading assistance too. Of course do so in a polite manner, it is likely an honest mistake or ambiguity given how pressed for time most academics are. They'd rather have it raised now than once it's gone to review or to press.

Read it with a critical eye, don't assume that as a beginner your contribution isn't valuable, and send a brief message to give it a thumbs up; a quick turn-around will earn you brownie points.
All that's been said here already.  But I wanted to add:

In your thumbs-up email, mention at least one thing that you really like about how it turned out.  This positive feedback will be most effective if it's honest and personal.

For example, I especially liked the section about possible applications of the technique.  I wasn't involved in that part of the paper, but it helped me appreciate the big picture better.  (That's just an example.  It could be anything, really, as long as its from the heart.)


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How to know whether references, tables, and figures are included in journal word limits?
Whenever a journal asks for "Articles should be limited to 3500 words + 5 figures/tables", do they mean the texts in the tables and figures will not be counted in the 3500 words limit?
Also, will the reference section be included in this word limit? Or, it just means only the Abstract, key-words, introduction, methods, results, and discussion sections will be bound to 3500 words limit?

In my experience the answer depends on the journal.

@AnonymousPhysicist The journal do not have further explanation regarding this. They just mentioned "Manuscripts that do not adhere to the following instructions will be returned to the corresponding author for technical revision before undergoing peer review." Will I first submit it, then check what they tell? Or, can I send an email to the journal regarding this? This is the first time I am submitting a paper.

Ask your supervisor AND check recent papers in the journal.

Ask the journal

Voted to reopen since the question is answerable. See my answer.

That depends on the journal. Therefore you should ask them.
E.g. https://aip.scitation.org/mmm/authors/jsprep (mirror):

Contributed MMM Manuscripts should not exceed 3500 words. Abstract, title, author list, references, and acknowledgments are all excluded from the 3500-word limit. Figures, tables, and equations, however, are included and must be accounted for by calculating a word count equivalent to the space they occupy.

https://jasn.asnjournals.org/sites/default/files/ASN/PDF/jasn_ifa.pdf (mirror):

Original Articles are limited to 3500 words (including significance statement, abstract, and main text, excluding Methods) and eight data figures. Methods, references, figure legends, and tables are not included in the word count

FYI  Why do so many publishing venues limit the length of paper submissions?

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


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Using the h-index to compare researchers from different fields
We are all aware that the h-index of a researcher is the metric for evaluating the cumulative impact of his/her research publications. I am asking the question regarding a doubt that arises when we compare researchers based on the h-index.
I come from a background of theoretical physics where we come across two types of researchers: (1) those who works on theory and (2) those who works on data analysis (mostly within a collaboration). For example, consider the following two researchers:

One is a senior professor who works on quantum field theory and string theory and has produced several outstanding papers over 25 years. His total citations = 7311, h-index = 40, i-10 index = 57.

The second has obtained his PhD in gravitational wave astronomy about 3 years ago and is presently a postdoc at Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics. Most of his papers involve doing data analysis as part of the gravitational waves collaboration. His total citations = 31121, h-index = 46, i-10 index = 75.

So, in my opinion, it wouldn't be a wise idea to compare them based on their citations and h-index since the more experienced researcher has a much lower h-index even though he has produced several outstanding papers in his area of expertise.
My Question:
In view of the above example:

How do you compare the  quality of two researchers when they are in different fields of research? Are there any other means to evaluate the quality of research?
How do you evaluate researchers where most of their citations come from papers where they are one of a large number of co-authors and their non-collaborative works are cited much less often?

Do not try to compare the quality of researchers using metrics such as h-index.  It cannot work.

Following @AnonymousPhysicist, it cannot work especially over different fields. Differences are completely meaningless. Elementary school math should tell you that.

... especially meaningless when one person is part of a large group of collaborators.

You could look at their actual research instead of some number. See also What is a fair metric for assessing the citation impact of journals across disciplines?, and How to measure achievement in a field where large collaborations are normal?

See also https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/105632/how-is-an-experimental-particle-physicist-evaluated. One answer claims that in some areas it is common to have a 40+ h-index on PhD graduation.

Reliance on any single index has many confounds. And these flaws are amplified when you attempt to compare academics across disciplines.
That said, there are more thoughtful ways to make use of metrics.
Here are some of the main things that should temper your use of h-index:

Proportion of first-author or lead-author papers (e.g., 1st, 2nd, last author): All else being equal, the esteem attributable to an author in  publishing an academic paper is increased when the author leads the work.
Number of authors per paper: All else being equal, fewer authors per paper suggests that the author of interest is contributing more to each paper.
Average time since publication: Papers accumulate citations over time. So, an academic with many recent publications may have many papers that will ultimately contribute to their h-index after a period of time has elapsed for those citations to accrue the requisite number of citations.
Discipline-specific citation practices: Disciplines vary in their referencing practices. The two big differences are (1) number of references per paper, and (2) citation half-life, which is to say the time it takes an article to receive half of all the citations it will ever receive. People who are in fields with more references per paper, get more citations and as a result, a higher h-index. People in fields with shorter citation half-lives see a more rapid rise of their h-index, although eventually (10 to 15 years after publication), differences in citation half-life will generally matter much less. In addition, citation databases vary in coverage of different fields (e.g., web of science probably makes biomedical researchers look much better than computer scientist compared to  Google Scholar).

What are you trying to measure?
Here are some fairly orthogonal elements from which you can conceptually derive other indicators:

Annual Output: Their contribution in partnership with others to Annual Academic Output, where output corresponds to overall value: some kind of  product of both quantity and quality (or impact).
Personal Contribution: The proportion of their contribution to that output.
Career length: The number of years that they have been making this impact.

So, from this perspective, h-index is mostly a function of annual output, career length, and the vagaries of discipline-specific citation practices.
Personal Contribution Indicators:
If you are interested more in personal contribution, you might get some of the following indicators:

Number of first-author and lead-author papers. This could be broken down based on the quality of the output as indexed by things like discipline specific journal ranking (e.g., Q1 on Scimago) or annual or total citation counts.
Fractionated paper or citation counts. E.g., sum of papers where the value of each paper is one over the number of authors. This would mean than one sole-author paper equals 10 10-author papers. Other weightings are possible to incorporate the value assigned to first-authorship or incorporate the assumption that actually having 10 10-author papers is more valuable than 1 sole-author paper.

Productivity indicators:**
If you are comparing researchers at different career stages, it can be important to control for the fact that people with longer careers have had more time to publish and more time for those publications to get cited.
If you are more interested in research productivity, then you probably want to focus on indicators of either average annual academic output or output over some recent time period (e.g., last 3 years, last 5 years, etc.).
A few indicators include the following:

H-index divided by years since first publication. Variants include the annual rate of increase of h-index over the last five years. Note that this does not control for variation in personal contribution or discipline citation practices.
Number of first or lead author papers per year. This could be adapted to focus on number of such papers in journals of a certain quality.
Average annual increase in annual citation counts over the last x years.

Summary:
All citation-based metrics have issues. That said, if you are aware of the limitations of the different metrics and draw on a complementary set of indicators, you are more likely to make a considered assessment of an academic's research impact.
In general, it makes most sense to compare researcher metrics to discipline-specific norms. It's important to characterise their publication style: quality versus quantity, degree of involvement in each paper, small number of authors per paper versus many authors per paper, etc. And it's also important to be clear on whether you are interested in recent productivity versus total career output versus total career impact.
More importantly, metrics are heuristics. Where important decisions are being made, they shouldn't replace reading the person's actual work or seeking out assessments by knowledgable experts.

Thanks for the detailed answer. Are all these factors considered during postdoc selection process and faulty recruitment process?

Comparisons are often difficult even within a single discipline due to varying practices. For example, I publish in algorithms and bioinformatics. Algorithms papers tend to have equal authors, while author order matters in bioinformatics. Bioinformatics papers tend to have more authors and get more citations. Metrics get weird if you regularly publish algorithms papers that people in bioinformatics find relevant.

Seems like relatively easy problems to solve.

How do you compare the quality of two researchers when they are in different fields of research? Are there any other means to evaluate the quality of research?

Compare to the median in their field. For example, search up the metrics of ~10-20 researchers in the first field and calculate their median h-index. You can also calculate the standard deviation. Then you can place the researcher into a percentile, and compare that.

How do you evaluate researchers where most of their citations come from papers where they are one of a large number of co-authors and their non-collaborative works are cited much less often?

You can exclude outliers by removing them from your sample before calculating the h-index.
By the way, there's a relevant section in the Wikipedia article on h-index you might be interested in.

Thanks for the Wikipedia link


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What to do when a manuscript is still under review after 14 months? withdraw?
I have submitted a manuscript to a journal, but after 14 months they have not given me any answer while I have sent email to them many times. Now, What can I do?
(I only received  a revision 12 months ago, and after I sent the revise version of the manuscript, I have not received any response. Also, a mailed them many times to everyone who I can find his/her email,  but no response. It's current status is under review.)

Have to tried contacting the publisher or calling someone in charge of the journal?

Have they not responded at all? Or have they responded with "in review"? Is it a topic with significant theoretical components (which may take time)?

Please register your account so that you can edit and comment on your own question. You may also need to follow these instructions to merge your two accounts.

Can you clarify your question. The first part implies that you you submitted a manuscript for the first time and have waited 14 months. Then you say something about it being a revise and resubmit and waiting 12 months.

I was an ejournal senior editor for four years. Although few of them are really professionally acceptable, there are numerous confounding factors that can cause a break between an editor and authors. These include unanticipatable reviewer declines, lingering sponsoring institution policy changes including threatened journal cancellations, journal management system breakdowns, and of course, gross editor mismanagement.  A submitting author should hold a journal to a published timeline (including any extensions the editor requests and the author formally accepts) and withdraw their manuscript quickly for resubmission elsewhere if that timeline or negotiated extensions) isn't being met. This withdrawal should be written (electronically is fine) with copies to the Journal editor AND the Department Head of the sponsoring department/institution. An acknowledgement from either is to be welcomed but not necessary to terminate the relationship and allow the author to move on. When resubmitting elsewhere, an author may be requested to submit evidence of previous submission termination. I only made this request once (out of 300 manuscript submissions) and it was willingly supplied.

In your conditions I would withdraw the paper. Find the editor surface mail and send a formal withdraw letter explaining your reasons and precisely says that if you have no answers within a month you will consider your paper as withdrawn.
Send the same letter to the editor via email. Wait a month and in case of no answer start submitting elsewhere.
It arrived to a friend. After the surface mail letter, the editor answer that the paper for some unknown reason was simply lost!
It arrives, we can simply hope that it won't arrive too frequently ;-)

although the most simple way, but it is not reasonable to withdraw after 14 months!! There must be a solid reason for this unethical irresponsive behavior of the journal. As an author, you have unveiled your work for a privileged community and your work/ideas might (might be with a low probability but it is a might!) be exploited/hijacked simply by various individuals correlated to the editor-in-chief/editor/guest editor/JEO Assistants/whoever that has access to your submitted paper. Suppose your precious experiments and ideas are studied by members of paper generation business networks that absolutely exist nowadays (call for pubpeer.com researchers' comments to get the picture). Unfortunately the editor who is not committed to make a first decision according to the journal's timeline is not ethical and also not reliable at all, and so is not the journal for employing him/her. There are some legislations such as ethical codes held up by some publishing companies that may help, however not prevalent. In serious cases filing lawsuits against the editorial board or even the publishing company is absolutely helpful, although costly. The scientific community must make a solid plan for such unethical behaviors of some editorial boards.