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How should I proceed if the author of a paper doesn't reply to my query?
During my literature survey for a project, I came across papers that have very interesting results and have decent number of citations. Unfortunately, the sub-area I am exploring doesn’t have any standard datasets on which I can test my implementation of the algorithm presented in their paper. The authors have generated the dataset by applying certain actions on a subset of publicly available information, which are Flickr images in my case.
So I have contacted the authors, asking whether they can provide me with their code or the dataset that they used for their implementation so that I may use it to perform my experiments and possibly try to extend their approach. But almost a week has passed by, and I haven’t received any response from them. Does that mean that,

My method of asking was not correct? (In that case, what would be appropriate?)
They don’t have the code or dataset available? (The papers were published in 2004.)
They are not interested?

Would it be polite to remind them again?

(iv) They're away, busy, ... . I'd give them a bit more time than almost a week.

(5) They never got your request (email stuck in spam folder, etc.).

Also, it's Sunday, so this means what?  That they have had a couple of working days or so to find the code & dataset from 2004 and send it to you.

I'd like to take this great opportunity to advertise IPOL: a recent journal on image processing, where authors must publish both the article and the implementation in a given language of their algorithms. Readers can then directly reproduce the experiments described in the paper, access the source, access the tested images, use his or her own images on the code and so on. I do not know whether the whole data is asked, but the concept could be extended that way.

The reason for no response may be anything from what Anthony Labarre mentions to what you list. I would wait at least a month before writing off an answer; I have received answers even later than that. It is possible they are working on improvements themselves as well. In short, if you do not get a reply, you can only try again and perhaps express your request differently.
You seem to have contacted all the authors. Sometimes the project leader may be too busy to pick up on questions and the younger team members may be more inclined to answer. They may, however, want to talk it over among themselves, and it is probably not a high priority.
So try again in a couple of weeks. If you do not get any response, then there is probably not much you can do. You probably need to think about what can do to improve the chances for a reply. The word "collaboration" is sometimes a good way to "sweeten the deal". Sometimes, just to give a perspective, I get requests for data that are of the sort, give me this or that, give me everything, and I often end up asking myself, why should I? having laboured to generate the data. I am not saying you must follow such an approach to be successful but considering why the other researchers would want to help you may also help towards solving the communication problem.

If they don't respond to e-mail, I'd try to give them a call. Many people get a lot of e-mail (running projects, requests to be hired as postdoc, etc, etc), so it is hard for you to get attention in this large amount of mails. Calling them makes it personal, you have their undivided attention at that moment. I would first ask them if they have time right then to answer your question, and propose to reschedule your call to a time that they are available.

If somebody I do not know calls me out of the blue to ask for a data set from 2004, he will have my attention for exactly as long as it takes to get rid of her/him again.

Also, I seriously hate the notion of calling busy people to get their attention faster. To me, this hijacks the priority queue of the person you are trying to address, and kind of implies that what you want from her/him now is more important than whatever s/he is currently doing.


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Is repurposing money from companies easier than repurposing money from federal grants?
I wonder whether repurposing money from companies is easier than repurposing money from federal grants in the United States, and if so, why. If the field matters, I am mostly interested in computer science.
Example of repurposing: a student did some TA, and the money could be spent on computer hardware instead.

I suspect this is mostly a matter of the terms and conditions of the grant and/or contract. A general answer is unlikely.

In your example, do you mean the funding was intended to support a research assistant, but the student didn't need support so it was spent on something else instead?  (It sounded at first like the money was intended to support a TA, but instead of paying the student for his/her work it was spent on something else.)

One obvious case that I can think of is that the NIH NRSA stipend cannot be supplemented by federal funds. So if I have both industry money and federal money, I can only repurpose the industry funds.

@AnonymousMathematician Correct.

Sometimes you make a mistake in creating a budget for your project when you propose it. Doesn't matter who you sent it to, public agency or private company, sometimes you make a mistake. Most agencies will let you move money around between buckets within the grant as long as it serves the purposes of the program and you can justify it. Lots of agencies won't let you buy a computer unless you swear on a stack of your mother's graves that you're going to use it 100% for the project and nothing else. They might not check, but they might make you swear anyway, and your university will be looking as well. Companies are similar, though maybe not as caring about the details. Everything, as Jon points out, depends on the terms of the agreement between your university and the granting entity. Lots of corporate money comes in as an unrestricted gift with no strings, whereas virtually no public funds have no strings.
Read the terms.

"Virtually no public funds have no strings".  The law forbidding the use of federal funds for research into the health effects of gun violence by itself guarantees that all public funds have some strings attached.  So I think we can strengthen that to "all public funds have strings attached".

@emory, yes, so, we weren't really talking about that kind of string.

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How to make a one-year study plan for a difficult exam and remain motivated throughout?
In a year, I will be taking a difficult entrance exam at a renowned postgraduate school. There are many competitors, most of whom are smart. Despite that, I'm aiming at becoming #1 in the exam, and that's why I have started preparing now.
I have interviewed a few top candidates of the past years and already learned which books I should read and how much I should study every day.
I think that learning more about planning would help me a great deal. But those books on planning and goal-setting mostly focus on reaching financial goals. I have not managed to find any books befitting my situation.
Another thing is that, because the duration is quite long, I'm afraid that my enthusiasm may start weakening after a few months into it, no longer performing at my best.
So, here is my question: How can I a make one-year study-plan for myself, and remain motivated in the long run?
Also, any suggestions about books, software, etc. that will help me reaching my goal will be appreciated.

Check the Study tag on Personal Productivity SE for some other tips.

short-term goals + reward system is very helpful. For example "In one month I want to be finished with chapter 1 of this study guide, and for accomplishing that I will allow myself ..."

I would recommend you not to rely upon external entities for motivation. Rather then relying upon just some books and software, practice "Self Motivation".
Each day think about the happiness and satisfaction that you will achieve once you got an admission in the targeted postgraduate school.
Furthermore, browse through the list of notable alumni from the same school and make a target that you will also feature in the same list some day.
It will encourage you to put 100% effort each day without losing excitement.

When I went through this, the thing that kept me most motivated was not doing it alone.
To get through this, I joined a group of 4 of my peers who were studying for the same tests.  We met twice a week for several hours and planned out before each meeting which chapters we would discuss.  When someone felt they had a particular understanding of the subject matter for the chapter, they would lead the discussion on that chapter.
There were several advantages to this approach.

I was motivated to attend because not doing so would affect the group
I was motivated to honestly read the chapter and not just skim it if I thought I knew the content already
I found that there were things that I thought I understood that I did not.  Explaining your understanding of something to someone else is a great way to find all of the holes in your understanding of it
In our case, the exams were based on courses we had taken already so we all had notes and previous exams from those courses and were able to share those resources.

In our case, several of us had family.  A structured time to meet and discuss provided us a way to work with our already overloaded schedules.  We chose to meet on campus in the evenings as our department is open 24/7 to students by keycard.  This allowed other students studying for the same thing to drop in and out of our meetings when they were interested in particular topics.

I didn't read the question well enough, the op is asking about entrance exams not comprehensive exams.

I am going to take a different strategy than suggest you need to stay motivated and positive.  You can be super motivated and positive, but still not reach this goal.  Focus on principles of effective and efficient learning.  Create a study plan and use study strategies that maximize every bit of your study time.  Here are a few possible strategies to consider.
1) Establish a fixed study schedule that is realistic.  An overly ambitious plan will likely lead to early failure.  What is a realistic plan that you can reasonably adhere to for the course of a year?
2) Avoid binge-study periods.  Breaking your study sessions into shorter but more frequent times is more effective than marathon / binge study sessions.  You can take advantage of the 'recency' and 'primacy' effects in learning.
3) Be certain that you are monitoring your study sessions.  Make sure you are giving yourself credit only for productive studying.
4) Measure / monitor your progress.  This is important to ensure that you are moving forward in your study plan.  You can do this by specifying measurable objectives, perhaps on a weekly basis.  For example, "By Friday, I want to have accomplished ... "
5) Try to obtain practice tests that are similar in structure or content to the one you will be taking.

making plan is essential for the exam but rather more imp is to excute daily and alway remember ur goal ...
if u able for the exam then u also able for making strategy or plan ownself...
so belive in ownself,hardwork,smartwork systematicity ,mindset,ur god  and positive think ...
never give up...
  always think about ur goal ,goal,goal...so...on

What does "simple se baat hai ydi tumhe exam nikalna hoga to tum exam nikal doge nhi nikalna hoga jitna bhe kosis kr lo nhi hi niklega becuse garmi nahi june me hoti hai nahi uoon me hoti hai vo to sirf jonoon me hoti hai" mean?

I was going to edit it until I got to the last paragraph... @scaaahu I believe it is an arcane incantation.

@Davidmh I would tolerate that paragraph if it is on somebody's blog. But, this is Academia stack exchange. Can people with >10k rep take action on this one?

@scaaahu I think that this does not strictly warrant deletion, as it is just a really, really, really bad answer (but does not fall into any of the deletion categories). I think downvoting is the right thing to do here. I have removed the last paragraph, though.

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Can a publisher publish a manuscript without the authors permission?
This is a follow on from Is it ethical to withdraw a paper after acceptance in order to resubmit to a better journal?
If a journal is willing to publish your submitted manuscript "as is", can you prevent them? Clearly if they want you to make changes you have the right to say no, but once the manuscript is accepted can you really withdraw it against the publisher's wish? Further, who has the final say on copy edits and type setting?
In my field we electronically sign a copyright transfer when the manuscript is submitted that comes into affect if it is accepted for publication.

Have you signed over copyright yet?

@ff524 I am pretty sure most of the journals I submitted to, you electronically sign the copyright release upon submission.

"In my field we electronically sign a copyright transfer when the manuscript is submitted that comes into affect if it is accepted for publication."  One must keep one's head when encountering cultural differences, but....my honest first reaction is that sounds outrageous.  How can you transfer the copyright on a product that (i) doesn't necessarily exist in anything like its final form and (ii) might not actually ever exist?  Could you provide a link to an example of such a form?  I would be very interested to see it.

For some journals copyright transfer happens on submission, for some only when the paper is accepted for publication.

Related: http://academia.stackexchange.com/q/15589/2692

I agree with @PeteL.Clark; how can you possibly sign over copyright to a work that doesn't exist yet?

Of course I'm not a lawyer, but I'd distinguish between two thresholds:

Before the paper can be published, you need to grant legal permission via a license or copyright transfer.  If you haven't done that yet, then the publisher can't force you to let them publish the paper.  That gives a narrow window in which you could still block publication after the paper is accepted (but whether you could ethically do so depends on your reason for objecting).
Once the published version has appeared (even just on the publisher's website), there's nothing you can do without a powerful reason.  At that point, you would be retracting a published paper, which is a far more serious act.

In between these thresholds, I don't know what would happen.  I'd guess that if you asked the publisher not to publish a paper you had already signed a copyright transfer for, then they would probably agree.  After all, publishing a paper against the author's wishes could look bad, even if they were legally entitled to do so.  However, if you didn't have a very good reason (such as a major error in the paper), then the publisher would be rather unhappy.  I wouldn't be surprised if they asked you to cover any copyediting or typesetting costs, and this sort of unprofessional behavior would be terrible for your reputation.

Further, who has the final say on copy edits and type setting?

In principle this depends on the publishing agreement.  In practice, the ones I've seen usually give the publisher final say, but the publisher usually defers to the author about anything intellectually substantive during the proofreading stage.  (On the other hand, the author gets more or less no input into matters of style such as font choice, British vs. American spelling, etc.)

It is interesting that you interpreted the question as "after signing over copyright".  I was thinking of it the other way....in which you are legally golden but there may still be ethical issues if you want to look hard enough.

I focused on the after copyright transfer/license case mainly because it seemed to be the more subtle case, at least regarding whether it's even possible to stop publication.  (Ethically, I think it's the less subtle case: you've now gone ahead and legally confirmed that publication is OK, so you'd better have a good reason to change your mind.)

When do you normally sign the copyright transfer? In my field it is all electronic now, but I am pretty sure the transfer happens upon submission.

@StrongBad: In mathematics the copyright transfer is normally dealt with after acceptance.

@StrongBad In (theoretical) computer science, after the editor accepts, after the paper is copy-edited (if the paper is copy-edited), and after the author approves the galley proofs (if there are galley proofs). Or, if it's an open access journal, never.

Further, who has the final say on copy edits and type setting?

Short answer: everyone. In more detail:
Acceptance of a paper means that the editorial board approves it for publication. Once the editorial board signs off on the paper, some combination of the author(s), the editors and the publishers must arrive at a mutually agreeable final draft.
In my experience, the role that the editors play here is highly variable: sometimes they work directly with the authors on the copyediting: e.g. the American Mathematical Monthly is incredibly picky (relative to other math journals, anyway) about copyediting issues, and they surprised me by withholding final acceptance of a recent paper of mine until I had (myself, under their very specific instructions) completed all the copyediting and formatting.  And they seemed serious about this: a change to the bibliography would be solicited and uploaded as a separate revision.  It ought to be evident that I was not completely happy that the acceptance of the paper was held over my head during a discussion of the copyediting, but that's a way to play it and I'm sure they have their reasons.
(The MONTHLY has, I believe, by far the highest circulation of any mathematics journal.  It is published by the Mathematical Association of America, which is the more teaching-oriented of the two professional societies for mathematics in the US.  On the other hand, there are three selective MAA journals, and of these the MONTHLY is by far the most "serious".  Long story short: many roads lead to them, and they are forced to be very selective indeed in what they publish, although they select for different things than a top research journal.)
I had another experience in which the final editorial acceptance in a prestigious journal was made conditional on the submission of a new draft containing less "pompous language".
More typically the copyediting and formatting is either left to the authors themselves or done by an employee of the publishing company (who in many cases does this for papers in multiple academic disciplines and thus cannot have high-level subject area knowledge most of the time).  In the end both the authors and the publisher have the final say: both parties must approve the final draft in order for it to published, and the documentation of this mutual approval is the publication contract.
Of course in practice this mutual approval is done in an asymmetric way between the parties: the publisher sends you a form in which everything has been spelled out in advance, in the pushy manner of big corporations everywhere.  But if there are clauses in the contract that the authors have a problem with, they are certainly entitled to ask, and in my experience some minor "concessions" (i.e., changes to the boilerplate agreement) are often made by the publisher.  A big part of the asymmetry is that the authors generally have a much larger stake in the publication of the paper than the publisher does, so insisting that one be able to refer to a paper in the bibliography by [Cl14] rather than [3] or one will take one's wares elsewhere looks like a strange arrangement of priorities, but if you really do feel strongly about it you are entitled to ask and who knows -- maybe you'll get your way.  Asking them to mess with aspects of the typesetting that are part of the journal's standard style seems less kosher to me: one would reasonably expect the journal to want to keep its standard style, and if this was really important to you, you should probably have brought it up earlier.
Making sure that one really does send in the copyright form last of all is a good tip.  I stumbled on this point recently when dealing with one of the world's largest scientific publishing companies.  They kept doing something weird in the proofs, I kept pointing out their mistakes and though I took pains to indicate in every correspondence that I was not giving my final approval, after a few go-rounds they didn't get back to me, and eventually I noticed that the paper was published online...still with one strange typesetting mistake that was not in the version I sent to them.  Next time I'll save the copyright form until the end.

This is, of course, the less interesting part of the question.  I want to get some clarification on @ff524's key comment before tackling the ethical question, but short answer: if you haven't signed anything, then of course you can legally cease all dealings with the publisher.  Whether this is ethical depends, as usual, on why you are doing it, but I know of at least one specific case in which this was done for what I consider to be a good ethical reason.

The journal has an obligation to fix mistakes that you pointed out but that they failed to correct (or introduced on their own.) I've had a journal issue a correction because they left off a change in the title of an article (they dropped off an "s" at the end).

@aeismail: I agree.  When I pointed out these issue to the editor, he told me that he had learned that the publisher would not change the document itself (which at that point and even now has only been published online; the print version might or might not appear in 2014) but only issue a correction if necessary.  Since in this case the error was something like an extraneous character like @ introduced in the statement of a result, it would be way over the top to publish a correction.  But still it was a bad experience, and with what I had thought was the world's leading scientific publisher.

If a journal is willing to publish your submitted manuscript "as is", can you prevent them? Clearly if they want you to make changes you have the right to say no, but once the manuscript is accepted can you really withdraw it against the publisher's wish?

You can withdraw a manuscript at any time unless it is officially published (usually on-line). I cannot see that any journal could stop you from doing so and signing copyright forms should not cause problems since those forms usually concern the work done by the publisher to get the manuscript into publishable form. By this I mean copy-editing and type-setting and not generally the review process. Exactly what is covered by the agreement must be checked in each individual case (journal/publisher).
The fact that you can withdraw a manuscript does not mean it is necessarily a frictionless process. A case such as this falls outside of legal terms and into the ethical realm where you can do whatever you legally can or want but it may not reflect very positively on yourself. To withdraw a manuscript from a journal that has put in a lot of efforts, including, most likely, non-paid reviewers and scientific editors, with the excuse that you want to go for a higher ranking journal seems at least morally wrong. You should have thought about that much earlier.

Further, who has the final say on copy edits and type setting?

The journal will likely have rules for how things should look and be expressed. You have the opportunity to agree or disagree with any changes the journal makes, through its copy-editing and type-setting. However, when it comes to journal style, it supersedes your own views and an editor also has the right to remove material that can be considered offensive, rude or unethical in some way. The latter is to protect the journal reputation. Hence, you cannot expect your view to be final in such extreme cases.
Despite what I have just said, there are of course overzealous editors who do not know where to draw the lines. So because human interaction is involved also in publishing, all may not happen as you expect it but usually such circumstances in the extreme are exceptions.


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Can you get expelled for taking pictures on college campus?
I've heard that many colleges, including the one I attend, say that to film on campus requires a permit from the chancellor. However, I've seen thousands of people post pictures of themselves, their group of friends, events, and the scenery of campus, onto social media sites like Facebook & Instagram. Can they get in trouble for this? Is it against the rules to photograph on college property and post online?

I don't think this is answerable in general. It would depend  on the actual rules in place at the particular school, the particular punishment specified for violating them, and how strictly those rules are actually enforced by the administration in place at the time.

The tags you originally chose didn't seem to have anything to do with this question. Tags are important for helping your question find an interested audience. I've changed the tags; please choose them with more care when you post here in the future.

To me, "film on campus" means making an actual movie (say a documentary or similar) to be published officially (for money or impact) not just taking moving pictures for personal use. What is the actual wording you have in mind?

I think it is exceedingly unlikely that any university (at least in Europe/USA; perhaps other cultures would be different) will discipline a student for taking personal photos. Of course, action might be taken if the student's behaviour is disruptive, intrusive, harassing, etc - but this would be a response to the behaviour rather than to the photography.

I looked at what UC Berkeley web site says, for example. https://bcbp.berkeley.edu/brand-protection/request-permission/filmingphotography#commercial I think a monetizable Instagram would fall under "commercial".

It would probably also depend on the size and character of the expected audience. You probably could not do anything against some rando that photographs your house, but if this becomes a regular occurrence or grows exponentially, you would want to put a stop to it if you can. That being said, if the area in front of the house is public ground, you might have limited recourse, as politicians and film stars will know. Also, if you live in a culturally remarkable building, you might have copyright powers, but probably cannot prevent anything, unless the ground is your property.

One case is where I video a professor during class saying something controversial or outrageous, then post it on social media.  If it becomes a big controversy, then yes, I could be expelled.

I doubt that taking pictures of yourself, friends, and family will be considered improper. Or even taking a picture of the department offices where you spent a lot of time.
The issue is that for some, probably commercial, purposes, the university doesn't want the campus used as a backdrop for some narrative that might, if not vetted, reflect poorly on the university.
Another issue with such films that will be widely shared, published, and/or commercialized, is the possibility that people not involved in the film, but recognizable, will be caught on tape and their likeness uses without permission.
So, it is a matter of protecting the reputation of the place and the privacy of the people.
I also doubt that such rules would/could apply to news organizations filming when some unfortunate thing happens (shootings, bombing, ...). They might like to keep the news out, and might want someone along with the film crew for the reasons given above, but probably can't stop it - especially for a government funded university ("Public" in US terminology).

Ah, yes. Some sorts of pictures are improper and likely illegal. For that you could be expelled or even jailed.

The specific guidelines that limit what you can post and how you can post it will vary from institution to institution. They can include trademark or license limitations on the use of institutional icons or backdrops. Copyright guidelines provide a more general framework to define what you can and cannot post. They prohibit you from distributing content that you do not own by copyright. In a nutshell, a photographic reproduction of a work is itself in most cases considered a copy of the source, and only the person who owns the copyright has the right to determine how to distribute copies of the work the (hence the term copy-right). Therefore, while you can take photos of copyrighted content, you cannot post any of them.
One specific example is the Nittany Lion statue at Penn State University. Plenty of folks talk their pictures with it. No one is permitted to take a picture of it to use in marketing or promotional content without prior (written contractual) permission due to trademark limitations. Correspondingly, I imagine icon buildings at a university are wonderful backdrops for personal graduation pictures, yet those same backdrops may never be used in marketing or promotional distributions (again without prior written permission). Another example is a class lecture. You might be fine to take a picture of your class instructor without asking in advance (but you truly should ask in advance) and posting that picture to a friend in the class. You will walk the line for copyright infringement by taking a picture of the lecture notes from that same instructor and posting to a classmate because the instructor owns the copyright and you have no permission as such to distribute the content in any form.
So, when you post a picture of a campus setting on-line without the intent to obtain a market value or promotion but rather because you are displaying a personal picture that you have as a representation of some aspect or exchange in your personal life, no problem. Here is the Nittany Lion statue that I visited while at PSU last year. OK. Good. When you post that same content for marketing purposes -- Here is the Nittany Lion Statue to support my call to all PSU alumni to donate to my GoFundMe Page -- you likely have crossed a line on trademark or licensing limitations. When you post a celebration picture with you and your family at the iconic MIT central building, OK. When you post the same to promote your qualifications to a job (here is proof that I attended MIT), you may cross the line again on trademark issues. Finally, never post or otherwise distribute pictures that contain images of content that is copyrighted to someone else.
The consequences for violations of specific guidelines (trademark, license, or otherwise) are defined by the institution. The same may be true of copyright violations, whereby the copyright holder also always has their own recourse through the broader country-wide legal system.

Universities may impose conduct rules on their students, completely independent of intellectual property law. Violations wouldn't result in lawsuits, jail, fines, etc, but by internal discipline such as suspension or expulsion. So this question can't be answered on the basis of IP law, or any other law for that matter. (As I commented above, I don't think it can really be answered at all.)

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How to list the second edition of a book
If an author has published a second edition of a book and he is in his earlier career stage as a mathematician, how do you recommend to include this second edition into the list of publications appearing e.g. in the CV? For example, should it be mentioned at all? Should it replace the first edition? Should both editions be listed, in particular when the second edition is a massive revision and 20 pages longer?

I can't imagine there's any rules about this, but presumably if someone reading your CV were to see a book listed amongst your publications which was marked as the second edition, they would assume you had been involved in the first edition as well. Listing multiple editions of the same book could also give the impression that you're trying to pad out your CV.

@Ian_Fin: I agree that typically one should only list the most recent edition.  But it does sometimes happen that, say, Author A wrote the first edition by herself, and then Author B joins the project to work on the second edition.  So B was involved in the second edition but not the first.  Sometimes this happens for textbooks that continue to be revised long after the original author has retired or died.

@NateEldredge That's true. As I was writing that I did think of several multi-edition textbooks whose original authors have long-since surrendered the reigns. Perhaps a sensible default would be to only list the most recent edition you were involved with, and include a note if you weren't involved in one or more preceding edition.

Normally you would just give the bibliographic information for the most recent edition.  If you feel it's important to say when you first wrote it, you could add a parenthetical like (First edition published in 1987).
If the book was originally written by someone else, and you joined as a co-author on a later edition, then include a note like (Co-author for editions 5 and later).
This would be the same regardless of what stage of your career you are at, and as far as I know it would be the same in any field.


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What should one look for in a statement of purpose (from the admissions side) in mathematics?
I'm a youngish (recently tenured) faculty member at a reasonably, but not extremely prestigious university in the mathematics department.  While I've looked at some graduate admissions files, this is the first year I have been on the actual committee and thus been responsible for reading many files.  I feel like most aspects of the application (CV, transcripts, test scores, letters of rec) I understand reasonably well, but all statements of purpose read like meaningless gobbledygook, and I tend to completely ignore them unless there's some aspect of the student's file I'm confused about and hope to find an explanation for (and of course, I often don't).
I've seen a lot of questions on this site about how to write statements of purpose, but not much about how to read them on the other end.

Is it normal/reasonable to essentially ignore the content of SoP unless you are looking for specific information on something unusual in the student's application?  What other things should a reviewer look for as positive or negative signs?

I've asked about mathematics in the United States since that's my field, and I want to avoid stupid replies like "But how can you know what lab they want to work in!" but obviously, I am interested in thoughts from people in other disciplines.

Good question.  I worked on graduate admissions at my math PhD program (at UGA, in the US) for several years, and after a few years off I am the new Graduate Coordinator, so I will shortly be wading through a sea of applications and personal statements.  Here is how I see things at the moment.  I'll modify my answer if upcoming experiences change my mind.

Is it normal/reasonable to essentially ignore the content of SoP unless you are looking for specific information on something unusual in the student's application?

You could put a more sugary coating on that for public consumption, but: quite reasonable and probably rather normal, I think.

What other things should a reviewer look for as positive or negative signs?

A statement of purpose is a great place to address things that are out of the ordinary.  It's really the only place for that.  There are a lot of math PhD programs in the US, and most of the applicants to most of the programs (i.e., not Harvard/Princeton/Berkeley/Chicago/UCLA...) have applications which are "uneven" in some way.  Giving context and explanation for the weakest part of your application could be helpful for many students.
I look at the personal statement first as a writing sample, second as a very broad measure of (mathematical) cultural awareness and sophistication and third as a chance to show that the applicant received a decent supply of rope and managed not to hang him/herself.  You are right that there is a lot of cluelessness and ignorance displayed in personal statements...but usually of a rather standard sort that just means that the person is not yet in a math PhD program so has quite foggy ideas of what such a thing is.  However some kinds of clueness, ignorance, stubbornness or hints of anti-social behavior are less common and could be red flags.

One of my favorite stories about a personal statement was told to me in a departmental information session when I was an undergraduate applying to grad school, by the head of the CS department at the University of Chicago.  (I think it was Lance Fortnow, but I am not completely confident of this.)  He said that he once got a personal statement that said that the student wanted to go to grad school in CS because he thought that any other career would involve a lot more work, and he was trying to take it easy.  This put the department head in a bit of a pickle.  As he proceeded to explain, this was exactly what he did not want to hear in a personal statement.  But how seriously does one take the personal statement?  Maybe the student was trying (and failing) to be funny.  Because the application was very strong in all other respects, the applicant was eventually admitted.  He failed out of the program less than a year later, because he was not willing to do any work.  The department head said that he had learned his lesson: the next time a student said something like this in their personal statement, they would not be admitted.

+1 I've been an on-again, off-again member of my (math) department's graduate committee, including a couple years as chair of the committee, and I agree with all of this.  The very limited extent to which I've found SoPs useful is mostly to look for red flags; another is to determine whether students are applying to the program they actually want to be in (pure and applied math are separate programs in my department).

Thanks for the answer.  Regarding the sugary coating: there's a reason I posted anonymously.

I'm actually rather shocked that anyone (especially Lance) would see that statement as anything other than a red flag.  On fire.  With sirens.

In addition to @PeteL.Clark's good-advice answer, I would also want to say that I have come to find the Statement of Purpose quite-often useful to "hear the voice" of the applicant. Sure, also quite-often, this voice is immature or ill-informed, but that's expected. But enthusiasm and interest and curiosity are hard to gauge from a transcript.
Yes, letters-of-recommendation give more mature appraisals of students, but, given the likely immaturity (mathematical and otherwise) of undergrad students in the U.S., it is not at all clear that they will communicate effectively-enough with faculty so that faculty will really know what goes on in their heads.
So, through the filter of acknowledged inexperience and immaturity, I do want to hear the "voice" of the applicant. Diffidence or misguidedness (or angry crackpottery) are typically visible (based on my own unfortunate observational experience... protracted anecdotal) in the statement of purpose.
It is also interesting in that applicants typically do not "know what the admissions committee wants to hear". Exactly. It's a sort of Rorschach test, on which it's hard to "cheat", and "there's no right answer".

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


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What is a common way to tell if an academic is "above average," or outstanding in their field? Is their h-index (Hirsh index) one of them?
If one claimed that a particular scholar was "above average" or "noted" in their field, is there any good metric by which to support or deny such a claim?
Is there a generally accepted way to indicate that a particular professor or scholar is outstanding, or above average, in their field? I understand there are certain indicators, such as chairs, endowments, prizes, etc. But these don't really seem to help to compare one scholar to another, except in a sort of gross, simple count way (i.e. one professor has had more chairs than another)
Is it theoretically possible to create a "ranking" of professors in their fields, by some metric? Could their h-index serve as such a metric?

Answers in comments and general advice has been moved to chat. Please read this FAQ before posting another comment.

Yes, there is one and only one standard method that is universally employed by reputable academic institutions worldwide.  This is how you evaluate a researcher:

Read their papers.
Attend one of their talks.
Ask the opinion of other experts in the field.

This is how hiring committees and promotion committees do their job.  There are no shortcuts.  Parts 1-2 require that you have some relevant expertise; if not then you must rely entirely on #3.
Every academic is regularly asked to give an expert opinion through reference letters, which often are expected to include some sort of ranking (e.g. "Assistant Prof. X should be promoted because she is clearly as talented/better than Prof. Y who was recently promoted at Prestigious University Z").  How does one justify this kind of claim in the reference letter?  You guessed it:

Read their papers.
Attend their talks.

Well, this is perhaps how committees and panels should work, but definitely not how every hiring committee works in practice.

While I certainly agree with this for things like hiring and promotion, there are other instances where faculty are asked to evaluate other faculty where they may not be able/expected to solicit expert opinions (e.g., annual faculty evaluations, certain prizes, etc).

@Tryer Well, that's what points 1 and 2 are there for. If the researcher in question is right, but neither you nor their colleagues can tell, I don't think there's any rating available that will do that job for you.

@Tryer Which is why you have to read his stuff and come up with an opinion on them yourself. Which sort of metric could you imagine that would help there, short of making everything a popularity contest? There's no metric that will allow you to extract truth from papers.

Please note that when the person judging has no subject matter expertise - and thus has to resort to point 3 only - he is basically averaging subjective rankings (the typical letter starts or ends with “candidate XXXX ranks in the top 5/3/1% in her field”). Given the small amount of data and the inherent letter bias (I am not going to ask a letter to people who thinks of me less than outstanding) point 3 amounts to a quite poor ranking algorithm. This is where objective metrics come handy. Also, students can’t afford the luxury of choosing supervisors asking recommendation letters.

@famargar But choosing a supervisor based on how good/productive/famous they are as a researcher is kind of stupid. The right question to ask is how successful they’ve been (or are likely to be) as a supervisor. And no, those are not the same thing.

@JeffE fully agree - in fact, I never said that. If you were to read my answer, you would actually see that I count academic success of students as an important parameter of the ranking algorithm. Would a score that is broken into supervising score, research score, and others subareas suit your case? This is similar to the ranking I have been assigned as an instructor to my institution (see a previous comment of mine).

Absolutely not!  Every student has their own career goals and their own advising needs.  A student who needs/prefers close supervision should not prefer an advisor who gives his students free reign.  A student who is aiming for industry research positions should not prefer an advisor whose students all either stay in academia or work as code monkeys at Twitter.  A student who wants to study complexity theory should not choose an advisor that specializes in computational geometry. And so on.  Choosing the right advisor is a subtle, individual judgement call; there is no algorithm.

@JeffE your earlier comment seems to say that the problem was in subdividing reputation in "research reputation" and "reputation as supervisor", hence my answer. Here instead I see a bigger problem: you are saying that the world would NOT be a better place if someone gave young aspiring academics a tool to support their choise of a supervisor among the 99% of professors who self-proclaim to be in the best 5% in their field. This is exactly where an objective metric would be the most helpful, as the people making a decision are the ones with the least information at hand to do so.

@farargar I'm not objecting to tools.  I'm objecting to the suggestion of using a single simple tool to make subtle, subjective, and individualistic decisions. Would you consider a similar "objective" metric suitable for choosing a city to live in, or a house to buy, or a partner to marry? (Also: I know very few professors who proclaim themselves to be "in the best 5% in their field"; your 99% claim is nonsense. To first approximation, anyone who makes such a claim about themselves is wrong.)

@JeffE I am advocating for using a metric, not a simple metric - please see my answer below. And yes, there are plenty of available metrics these days which are great for choosing a city or a neighborhood or a car. Again, the problem is not if a good metric can be built - of course it can - but where such a metric would be useful. And the answer is to determine decision making when other information is absent, or to support it when subject matter expertise is available

@JeffE as for marriage, it is a great example of where human fallacies lead to wrong decision making - approximately 50% of the times, indeed

I am advocating for using a metric, not a simple metric — Yes, you are. Any metric that provides only a single number is simple. (And in case you missed my point: People generally buy cars only after driving them.)

@JeffE I deduce that you are not familiar with statistics. A ranking algorithm is indeed a number. A “simple number” as you say. That simple number would be the result of a regression model that can use a large number of inputs (numerical and/or categorical) and can combine them in an arbitrarily complex fashion (from linear regression to deep neural networks). Not that simple, as you see

As for cars, people buy them after asking around, reading at experts review, look at average of customer reviews, gas mileage, price, brand, drive satisfaction. All mental parameters that are combined in a mental regression model whose outcome is “I like car A more than car B and less than car C”. But as we are all different, for cars (and for professors too) we may decide to just look at all the inputs objectively and then combine them arbitrarily.

If one claimed that a particular scholar was "above average" or "noted" in their field, is there any good metric by which to support or deny such a claim?

No. As a rule of thumb, this isn't the kind of thing that you can measure with a metric. Elvis Presley was the king of rock and roll. Why? Is it because he pumped out more albums than the others? Because he sold more? Because journalists wrote more about his albums than the others'? No. It was because he was the king and few people contested that. It's the same in academia. Either you can say that someone is "noted" in the field and be reasonably confident that you won't be contested when saying that, or you can't. If you can't, then you should avoid it, on pain of looking pretentious or like a toady.

Is there a generally accepted way to indicate that a particular professor or scholar is outstanding, or above average, in their field? I understand there are certain indicators, such as chairs, endowments, prizes, etc. But these don't really seem to help to compare one scholar to another, except in a sort of gross, simple count way (i.e. one professor has had more chairs than another)

In general, you can't compare people. This isn't a video game, people don't have a numeric level associated to their academic ability, someone with a 12 being better than someone with a 5. It doesn't work like that. There is a multitude of factors, most often not measurable or not comparable. Trying to make a sum out of these and comparing the result for two different people will only lead to crap. Ask any hiring committee if determining who is the best candidate for a job is easy, let alone determining who is the best researcher.

Is it theoretically possible to create a "ranking" of professors in their fields, by some metric? Could their h-index serve as such a metric?

God no. Of all the metrics, you've probably picked one of the worse ones. If I write two dozens pieces of trash that all cite one another and publish them in vanity press, I will have a great h-index. Will I be a good researcher? No. On the other hand, if I write a single article in my whole life solving the Riemann hypothesis, then I would probably become one of the most famous mathematician in the world overnight, but my h-index will be crap.

Could you suggest a metric which is better than h-index?

@DmitrySavostyanov Why would you want any metric at all?

Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat.

If you want to rank two professors against each other, you might be tempted to use the h-index. Don't. As many of the other answers point out, it's a severely flawed metric, and it doesn't really tell you a lot.
However, if you want to figure out whether a given professor can reasonably be described as "noted" or "outstanding", then that is a quite different question. And here, yes indeed, I would say that you can use certain indicators, namely awards, honors and prizes. I do not think anyone disputes that a scientist holding a Nobel prize is outstanding. (Peace and literature, maybe not so much.) If a mathematician wins the Fields medal or the Abel prize, the same.
Many societies award fellowships. To get one of those, you have to demonstrate academic excellence, and often also things like service to the society in question, outreach, teaching etc. The advantage is that the "overall package" a professor offers has already been evaluated by people who are presumably experts in the field. For instance, here is a list of the Fellows of the International Institute of Forecasters, which I happen to be involved with. Some of the Fellows are a bit contentious, but nobody from the field would dispute their being noted.
Best paper awards are similar.
Of course, you need to use a little expertise in deciding whether a Best Paper Award from a journal on Beall's list is truly a mark of excellence, or whether a Fellowship from an academic society that offers little more than a one-page webpresence is. But unless you go with the extremely well-known marks of excellence like the prizes I noted above, there is simply no shortcut that will avoid having at least a passing knowledge of the field.
And note that this allows you to decide whether someone is distinguished or not. It won't tell you whether A is "more distinguished" than B, like one might try to use the h-index to indicate. Which, as I argue above, is impossible.

Is there a generally accepted way to indicate that a particular professor or scholar is outstanding, or above average, in their field?

The generally accepted method for assessing a particular scholar's merit is to familiarize oneself with their work. Such an assessment requires a solid basis of expert knowledge.

I understand there are certain indicators, such as chairs, endowments, prizes, etc. But these don't really seem to help to compare one scholar to another, except in a sort of gross, simple count way.

This applies to any "metric", although some are worse than others. Any sound assessment would have to be qualitative and require some substantive engagement with the scholar's work. Therefore, any comparison, to the extent that it would be useful at all, could only point out qualitative differences that don't lend themselves to a ranking, "except in a sort of gross" way.

Qualitative differences DO lend themselves to a ranking, just as much as quantitative differences: “condition XXXX increases by YY.Y% the likelihood of a patient to develop disease ZZZZZ within K years”. Condition XXX can be quantitative (age, number of alcohol units per week, etc) or qualitative (sex, existence of other diseases). They are equally good to build a ranking and qualitative variables may very well be more important than then the quantitative ones.

The negative proof to the question here is far broader than academics: is there a metric for the best car? Best parent? Best programming language? Smartest person? No, because all these things have many orthogonal dimensions that simply can't be collapsed to one without unacceptable information loss. Researchers can be creative, well funded, methodical, hard working, well versed in literature, collaborative with peers/students, etc.
I concur with David Ketcheson's answer on what to do instead.

Your comment assumes that no multidimensional problem can be analytically quantified. However, this comment comes a decade after machine learning and artificial intelligence (in english: algorithms solving complex multidimensional problems) became pervasive in our society. And a few decades after the mathematical/statistical groundwork to do so were born.

It also misses important contributions to psychology and behavioural economics that proved when and how humans take wrong decisions (hint: all the time ;)

All metrics that used (e.g. number of first/senior authorships, sum of impact factors, percentile ranks of impact factors, citations, H-index, grants and other funding etc) have all their advantages and many more disadvantages. Never the less they are used in hiring processes in one or the other way because otherwise it is not possible to assess several hundred candidates that apply for a faculty position. Which of these factors are important in a certain sub-field is very different. Only the ones scoring top in these metrics will make it to the interview where then other factors might count as well.
For someone who is not familiar with a certain field the easiest (but still not always correct) way to see how good a professor might be is the name of the university. e.g. a professor at Cambridge will most likely have achieved a lot in his life. Someone at a no-name place will not have made much impact that impressed other people in the same field and if such a person does make a big impact one day then he will most likely get offers to move to a place with a better name.

If one claimed that a particular scholar was "above average" or
  "noted" in their field, is there any good metric by which to support
  or deny such a claim?

The only "generally approved" quantitative metric is the h-index. H-index is a metric, is OKfor your task as it allows you to define above or below average. As a matter of fact, this is the way some national educations systems stamp their professors as good enough for tenure. It is also agreed that it is not "good enough" - famously, Peter Higgs, 2013 Nobel in Physics, would fail miserably a ranking based on h-index only, as he published very few paper, although with huge citation count. Also, h-index is a measure of lifetime achievements, thus needs to be corrected for the academic age. Which brings us to the next point.

Is there a generally accepted way to indicate that a particular
  professor or scholar is outstanding, or above average, in their field?
  I understand there are certain indicators, such as chairs, endowments,
  prizes, etc. But these don't really seem to help to compare one
  scholar to another, except in a sort of gross, simple count way (i.e.
  one professor has had more chairs than another)

Other, mostly qualitative metrics are regularly used, consciously or not, in academic's minds, although no official ranking exist. I will mention a few, the ordering only reflecting the stage in an academic career:
1. Institution where PhD has been obtained
2. PhD supervisor
3. national prizes
4. national grants
5. number of PhD students supervised
6. chairs at institutions or conferences
6. international prizes
7. academic success of PhD students mentored
8. more I could not think about now :)

Is it theoretically possible to create a "ranking" of professors in
  their fields, by some metric?

Of course it is, there is entire field about it called Scientometrics. You have to 1) fix for h-index known limitations 2) combine with the variables above to come up with a more comprehensive algorithm that will rank any researcher in any field. The reasons why this has not been done before are twofold. First, it is not easy at all to define objectively how much every metric listed here should weight in the ranking algorithm. Second, and most importantly, academics rank every day for jobs, promotions, accepting papers or conference contributions, prizes etc. However, they prefer their ranking algorithm to suit their individual minds, rather than adopting a common framework.

Could their h-index serve as such a metric?

As described above, h-index has many limitations that make it impractical for most purposes. But an entire field of research exists around it - Scientometrics - so rest assured there will be developments.

I disagree with many of the things you say: h-index is not a good metric because it led to more or less submersed citation rings to artificially boost that metric and get promotions. Second, "academics like to rank": who said that? Most of the academics I know are certainly not interested in ranking anyone.

Academics rank all the time other academics for a job, a promotion, a prize. However, they don't like to use commonly shared algorithms for doing that.I will specify that. H-index is good in the sense that is well-defined, sensible and allows comparisons. It is not a comprehensive metric however, as I specifically write.

The fact that they have to rank for certain specific purposes doesn't mean that they like to rank. Furthermore, as I said, the h-index brought several distortions in scientific publishing and that's definitely not good.

Thanks. I did edit the answer integrating your inputs. I think I made clearly enough that h-index is not good enough. As for the bias induced by ranking, this applies to any ranking, explicit or not. See the fact that most of US professors come from Ivy League schools - nobody attached points to it, however most committees do take that into accout.

Since academics rank each other all the time for jobs, promotions, prizes, etc. do they use the H-index as the whole or as a part of that ranking calculation?

@user151841 when h-index is used, it is normally used as part of a hiring/promotion selection. I have never been in a prize committee, but I suspect h-index rarely or never matter there - the reason being that a single, monumental scientific contribution will basically not alter your h-index, but will alter history (again, Petet Higgs and the 2013 physics Nobel prize being an example)


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Permission for changing the title of a paper
I am revising a paper and want to change the title of the paper and send for editor-in-chief.
My Question: Is there an formal sentences to announce to editor-in-chief and reviewers that I want to change the title of paper in this revision.
For instance, is it acceptable that I write the following text?

With the editor-in-chief’s and reviewers’ permission, the authors want to change the title of paper because of ...

Generally speaking, communications in academia don't need "formal sentences".  Just explain what you want to do, clearly and concisely.

@NateEldredge An excellent suggestion. Thanks

During the peer-review process, you modify the manuscript until the editor accepts it (who in turn consults the reviewers for their opinion as needed).
This applies to the entire manuscript, including the title.
The latter may very well change due to the reviewers’ recommendations, in particular terminology is often changed in my experience.
Thus, explicitly asking the editor-in-chief for permission to change your title seems overkill to me.
You don’t have to do it for the same reason that you do not have to ask for explicit permission for every other change of the manuscript.
That being said, a change in the title can easily be overseen, even if a diff is employed.
Therefore I would recommend to simply mention the change of the title where appropriate in your resubmission, but without being overly submissive, e.g., like this:

Please note that we changed the manuscript’s title to […], because […]
We followed the reviewer’s suggestion and now speak of gorgleflorps instead of florplegorgs whenever appropriate, including the title.

Excuse me can I ask you to explain more about two words gorgleflorps  and florplegorgs? Thanks

@user0410: They are arbitrary words to represent some terminology, whose actual nature is not important for this example. I might as well have used numbers and digits, species and clades, or graphs and networks.

What you write seems fine. Until very late in the process, the title should, in my view, be tentative. It should best express what the paper says. Especially if recommended revisions have changed that, or your view of it, by all means change it and just let the editor know.
If you get pushback, or refusal, from an editor, you can deal with it then. But, IMO, it would be improper to refuse.


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How much does participation in online predictive challenges (DREAM, Kaggle, Innocentive) improve your resume?
I'm getting curious about all these online predictive challenges going on, such as DREAM, Kaggle and Innocentive.
Surely they all are good occasions to work on new projects and new ideas, to know other collaborators, to get important training about science, and to possibly win some money
And also they could represent a good point in one's resume. So I was wondering: in job application processes (in both industry and academia), do candidate selectors care about the participation of the candidate in any of these challenges?
If yes, how much?
If no, why not?

Related: When applying for a phd, does a hiring committee cares about winning in various programming/data-mining contests? and Are participations in competitions well recognized for a Ph.D. application?

I think the part about whether it has relevance to industry job applications is off topic here.  Relevance to academic job applications is on topic, but I'm almost certain the answer will be "none whatsoever".  I've certainly never heard any suggestion that things like this are ever considered in academic hiring.

At the very least, it shows you are actively interested in the subject.  Participation can be enough to show you are more enthusiastic about the subject than other applicants.  It is also helpful for entry level data scientist positions where experience isn't necessarily expected, but appreciated. If you have won any competitions, or if you are at the 'Master' Kaggle level, definitely include it.

I don't think that just "participating" would be an advantage. Because if you paticipate but perform very poorly, it will not demonstrate that you are better or have some special skills. However, if you win some prizes in these competitions or are highly ranked, it would certainly help. It will show that you have good skills in statistics/data mining / etc. Now, how much it would help depends on the candidate selectors and even on the job that you apply for. But if you are highly ranked and win some prizes, it should be positive for your CV.

Are you on the selection panel for academic jobs in data mining or machine learning?

I'm not currently on a selection panel but as a data mining researcher, I have discussed both with students applying for jobs in the industry as well as some company who want to hire some employees, and had some industry collaborations.

@Phil I see your point Phil, but think in life activity is always more valued than inactivity.


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Does mentoring an undergrad give an edge on job or grant applications?
Simple and short question: as a postdoc (or a senior grad student), is it a good idea to mentor an undergrad?
How much edge will it provide perhaps for a future (NSF) grant, or a job application?

Assuming the mentoring has a measurable successful outcome (student goes to grad school, student writes paper), the NSF would definitely look kindly on such mentoring. Whether the time spent doing this will (minute for minute) be a better value than writing an impactful paper - probably not. But that reasoning is of course flawed - you don't know ahead of time whether the time you spend writing that paper will pay off :).
As with most other things, do it if you care about the mentoring process and enjoy working with undergraduates. Don't do it if the primary goal is to get the bullet on your CV.

I don't know whether your grant or job applications will benefit from the experience. However, it will provide you with some immeasurably useful management experience, which you may not be able to gain otherwise. I know that my experience managing undergraduates during my graduate career - directing their research project with them, helping them design and put together experiments, and helping them write papers (or, more likely, having them help you write papers) - was an excellent first experience for me in dealing with issues that professors managing a lab have to deal with on a regular basis. For that alone I would strongly recommend mentoring.

As an addendum, if you are already managing other members of the lab, or if you're lucky enough to have technicians whom you help manage working on aspects of your research, this may not be as relevant.

I have to take a middle road between Suresh and eykanal's answers: mentoring of undergraduates will most likely help you in job applications; I'd believe this to be true whether you're applying to academia or industry or to non-traditional jobs. The reason is that supervising students provides you with direct management experience, which is almost always beneficial when being considered for employment.
However, it is less clear that mentoring an undergraduate would help you in a meaningful way on a grant application. The reason for this is that, in general, there's no logical place to bring such information up in the grant application! In a standard CV, you could list "students supervised" as a normal part of the document; however, according to the current guidelines for the NSF reduced CV format, the only real way that they can be counted is if they wrote a thesis under you, and perhaps as an aggregate count. In the long run, though, the NSF is really interested in graduate students and postdocs supervised.

My experience on NSF panels corroborates Suresh's answer.  All else being equal, NSF prefers to give money to PIs who mentor undergraduates.  (Of course, ceteris is never paribus.)  The information fits perfectly under "synergistic activities" in the CV, and under "broader impact" in the proposal itself.

@JeffE: When you only have a limited number of synergistic activities, is the expectation that you'd use one of them to list undergraduates mentored? And "broader impact" wouldn't run to any more than "Professor X has mentored Y undergraduates" or something similarly cursory. But I do agree that it's better to have the experience than not to, and that it can give an edge if there's no other factor to distinguish. (How common that is, however, is unclear to me.)

Cursory is old and tired; credible details are the new hotness.  The right way to phrase it in the proposal is "The PI will continue his years-long habit of mentoring undergraduates.", followed by a few sentences of actual details of past mentoring, followed by a few sentences of actual details of future mentoring plans.  What makes it credible is the actual past experience.

I've sat on graduate student committees that have met with faculty candidates for our department in a research university with a sizeable undergraduate population. The mentorship track record and the result of that mentorship are probably the most important factors that we considered after the intellectual capacity of the candidate.
In our case, dealing with whiny grade-obsessed premeds who don't understand basic concepts is part of the job description. There is also a noticeable volume of undergrads who do research. A future PI who doesn't want to be in a teaching environment is already in the wrong place. A future PI who hasn't considered the fact that they would be in a teaching environment doesn't have a clear vision of where they want to be.
As a potential faculty mentor, they are a potential mentor to a graduate student like yourself. An ability to mentor undergrads without a high attrition rate tells you that they are able to create an environment that doesn't scare the student away as well as an environment that keeps the student to come back. Sounds like a faculty advisor that I would want to have available for future students like me. Conversely, an inability to mentor suggests that they mentor either drove their student into pieces or wasn't able to or weren't patient enough to design suitable experiments to teach difficult concepts to a young mind. If one wasn't able to do this with an undergrad, what would happen with a 1st year PhD student who may be stuck with them for the next 6 years?
Mentoring undergrads provides a solid and universal metric of a candidate's ability to mentor. They are probably the most difficult type of advisee to mentor and the past history of mentorship does provide a nice projection to one's path as an academic.

On a job application: I would not consider u/g supervision all that weighty. I worked in maths, so it was always nice to have evidence that the candidate could interact with other human beings, but other than that, nah. P/G supervision is a different matter of course.
On a grant application: the short answer is no.
However, if you are asked to take care of u/g students and you always say no, that will mark you down as uncollegeal and adversely impact what your seniors have to say about you. (If you always say yes they won't respect you either. It is a hard game to win.)


text:
How common is faculty members changing jobs in the US?
Faculty members switch between universities for many reasons, but how often does this happen? Has there been any study/report on the frequency of job shifts and resignations in academia, especially in the US?

I don't know if there's a report, but faculty movement is quite common. Often faculty will take a leave of absence instead of resigning, and this can drag for a while .

The frequency with which faculty members switch departments varies by field. For example, it happens much more frequently in Economics than in Computer Science. I remember lunch-time discussions proposing an informal study aimed at testing the hypothesis that this difference in mobility was partially responsible for the income gap between econ and CS (economists make substantially more money), but looking for it now, I can't find it. Maybe it was never written up...

Also, it really depends on the health of the field.  CS faculty were much more mobile (and salaries increased accordingly) during the .com bubble than they are now.


text:
Learning contracts
I'm starting a new program in the spring and one of the first things that we will be tasked with is the creation of a 'XYZ Learning Contract'.  After a bit of digging in the search engines I see that there is a pretty broad spectrum of thought on the value and composition of learning contracts.  Having never dealt with them before I find myself wondering:

How common are they?
If the contracts can be, and some sources say - should be, modified then how is obligation and adherence managed?
Following on to the last question, how are they enforced?

I understand that every department is going to be different and that an advisor's milage may vary but I'm also curious if there is some general consensus on learning contracts among those that have had to deal with them.

For those of you who, like me, have never heard of this before, see this detailed webpage from wpi.edu outlining what it is and why it's used.

We have compulsory learning contracts (called study plan) at our uni, see this question: http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/12066/how-to-make-good-use-of-compulsory-study-plans-in-connection-with-phd-studies

You may want to ask as well about the relevance of these contracts and whose interests exactly they serve...

I've seen learning contracts been suggested for two types of situations:
1) As a motivational tool, to make students realize that there are things that they want to learn to accomplish their career goals. The idea is that once the student realizes that what (s)he is being taught in particular course is important for them, (s)he should be more motivated to make an effort in learning the material because it is really in his/her best interest to do so. In this type of situations, it seems to be that the enforcement is very soft/flexible.
2) To ensure fair, non-subjective grading of students in independent studies, research programs and internship programs. Departments undergoing accreditation programs (like ABET) tend to do this because they need to prove/show that there is consistent grading, that the students know what is expected of them, and that they know their grading criteria. These learning contracts are obviously more strictly enforced, but it is up to any individual department implementing this to decide whether they can be modified on-the-go to adjust to unexpected challenges that may arise during the semester.
In the end, though, it doesn't matter if they are "typically" very strictly enforced or not, because you should not care about the general/average case; you should care about your particular institution and we cannot know what their policy on learning contracts is. Just ask them. I am sure they'll be happy to answer any questions you may have.

cabad, you get the win here.  Your point about not worrying about the 'typical' situation is a very good one.  I can get a little too wound around the decomposition/generalization axel and you are correct that all that matters to me is my situation.  However, there is real value to having a grasp on the socialized understanding of the concept.

Are Learning Contracts Common?
I have earned over 169 undergraduate credit hours and earned a Masters degree from decent state schools (in Florida). I have also taught at some small business schools in NYC. I have never seen learning contracts in practice. I would venture to guess that they are uncommon, although one may find reference to them in academic literature. I would also venture to guess that the reason that they are uncommon is that they would require a great deal of individual attention per student from the institution offering them.
About Contracts
Legal contracts while having set components have many possibilities of variation, and I would expect learning contracts to be no different. For example, legal contracts require competent parties, legal subject matter, meeting of the minds, offer and acceptance, consideration, etc...
Some relevant aspects of legal contracts:
Legal Subject Matter
The subject of the learning would have to be restricted to the scope of the institution's design for offering the contract. It is important that the contract should be as specific as possible in this regard
Offer and Acceptance
One party should propose the terms, likely the student, and another party would have to accept, likely an advisor on behalf of the institution. When one party accepts the other's terms, we then have a contract.
Performance
The terms should be clearly stated. For example:

Deadline, degree of flexibility allowed
If keeping a journal and/or writing a paper, Quantity of Content
If keeping a time-sheet, degree of completeness, terms for making up missed times
Subject Matter, scope boundaries
The institutional representative who will determine completeness

Consideration
There is consideration, i.e., compensation, for the one obliged to complete the contract (the student), if considered to have performed, as meeting one of the terms of completion of perhaps a series of hurdles towards earning a certificate or degree.
Modification
On the question of Modification, if the original agreed-upon terms allow for future modification, then so be it. There would likely be an expected period after which the two parties would assess the progress, and then determine if the terms of the agreement should be adjusted. If no agreement can be reached, the original agreement will remain in place.
Enforcement of Performance
If the terms of the agreement are reached, then the contract can be fulfilled. That is, when the student delivers evidence of their learning, likely contingent on an assessment agreeing that it is good delivery, the institution can deliver their consideration.
Conclusion
These contracts do not appear to be common (if we exclude academic codes of conduct). They can be modified by agreement, but terms for their modification should be clearly stated prior to the performance period to properly manage expectations. Enforcement is managed by the terms of the contract, likely that the institution has to agree that the student's evidence of learning is sufficient to merit verification that they have performed.
My impression, although unevidenced, is that students with learning contracts tailored to their educational goals would be more likely motivated to focus more on the objective of learning than those checking off boxes in a standardized curriculum.

I just noticed that the link in your post contains a reference to the book that I think has really answered my questions, 'Using Learning Contracts in Higher Education'*.

Stephenson, Laycock; 1993

Started to think on our concept of "learning plan", which sounds bit light-weight version of the learning contract of the original question(?)
Commonality: In our universities everyone has the opportunity & obligation to do a (short) personal study plan (and this applies to all student levels). One example  here: http://www.helsinki.fi/socialsciences/studying/new/HOPS.html . Each university/department/professor might had some small differences of the content, but basically it was a self-made "project plan" for year(s)/goal ahead.
Obligation & Adherence:
Personally, I think making the plan was really useful as it helped to outline the schedule and requirements, and helped to think how to get all done. However, main drive was assumed to come from student herself - the desire to advance in timely manner.
Enforce: (?) One enforcer is/was to obtain a certain minimum quantity of credits that had to be done per year to get the student benefits. Anyhow, I think our system relies mostly on the students' personal drive. It's relatively hard to get to desired faculty, so most of those who get in won't waste the opportunity.
Anyhow it's bit tricky - one can has "perfect" study plan, but still studying can get stuck, for one reason or another...

This is excellent information, Tuula.  I did not realize that this concept was such a fundamental component of so many programs.


text:
Advisor interferes too much with my research
I have an advisor who interferes too much with my research. When I am in the lab he always comes and sits near me telling me exactly what to do even the tiniest details, and most of the time he is just doing the design himself (Actually holding the mouse and doing the design) and I am just sitting and looking at him. The only tasks I am asked to do on my own are the simplest tasks that require no brain abilities at all.
Once, he got angry because I was trying some design I found in a book and he got angry and told that I am wasting time and I should do only what he tells me to do. I come to work at weekends only to find him waiting for me, and doing the same all over again. He calls me at weekends and during work days when I am not in the lab to come and work just to give himself an excuse in front of other professors to sit on my station and design.
I have to submit my thesis very soon, and when he sees me writing it he tells me that I am wasting time and I should do the stuff he asked me to do. I told him the I have an external examiner which have to see a draft very soon when I defend my thesis, and he said "Yes and I am in your committee and you have to make me happy".
Seriously, I just want him to back off! I feel very offended by this treatment and that I am just a "trained monkey" who does only what he asked to do.
What words can I use to tell him that he should give me my space and that I want to do my research on my own ??

Are you a PHD, Msc or undergraduate student? What year?

I am a Master's student. Sorry I didn't mention this.

"I'm switching to another advisor. Goodbye."

@JeffE  Although your advice is good, the OP has to submit his thesis very soon (he is at the end of his project), so I am not sure he has that choice.

Could you discuss this with the external examiner? Especially the issue with being discouraged from working on the draft thesis.

I feel for you, but ... when your project is pretty much finished seems like a very late point in time to tackle this problem. Now just rolling with it seems like your best bet, honestly.

If he's young professor (i.e. assistant prof) one interpretation for his behaviour is that he wants to get the results and be ready to the associate promotion. Some young professors are in hurry for this.

When children behave inappropriately often the best course of action is redirection. Doesn't he have other students to bother? It sounds like he has too much time on his hands. Perhaps you should ask yourself what makes him behave in this way before trying to make it stop. Advisors with a lot on their hands don't act this way - they simply don't have the time.

The basic issue is that your advisor is a micromanager, and if you have to submit the thesis shortly, it's unlikely you're going to get him to change his behavior in time to affect your thesis positively.
Therefore, I think your best course of action depends on the relative "cost" of switching projects. If you are somewhere What you should do depends on the rules in place at your institution. If you are able to easily switch projects and restart your thesis in a new group under a different advisor, that may be the best possible outcome you can achieve.
However, if you're at an institution like mine, where the topic, advisor, and timeline of the thesis have to be approved in advance, starting over may carry serious consequences. Rather than run the risk of not being able to complete your degree, I would recommend that you consider just "toughing it out" and putting up with your advisor for whatever time you have left.
If you are determined to raise the issue, though, the best thing might be to indicate politely that you believe his supervision is making both of your jobs more complicated: you're not learning as much as you could if you were working independently, and he's not as productive as he could be if he weren't spending all of his time watching you work.


text:
Failed to get tenure then hired by another institute, is the new position tenure or not?
Due to bad personality a person was not granted tenure after working for six years in a university. Eventually, the person left and got hired as an associate professor in another university. Would this be a tenure position or tenure track position?

Is this a riddle or something?  In real life: ask someone at the institution in question for the answer.  The department chair would certainly know.

It's not really possible to know, just from this person's job title, whether they have tenure or not.
At some universities, the title "associate professor" automatically implies "tenured". But at others, it is possible to have the title of associate professor but not have tenure - unusual, but possible. Since this person has had a relatively unusual career path, this is a little more likely. Still, you can't be sure unless you ask them, or unless the university makes their tenure status public in some other way.

It's quite common in my experience for someone with several years of experience as an assistant professor to be hired as a tenure track associate professor at another university, typically with a shortened tenure process.  It's also possible that this person was hired with tenure as an associate professor, but that's less common in my experience.

Another example I'm familiar with is a tenured associate professor at a "lesser" school getting an offer with the same rank of associate at a "better" school, but on a shortened (relative to an assistant professor on the tenure track) tenure process.

A few universities routinely use the title "associate professor without tenure." Even at universities like mine, where associate professors almost always have tenure, there are (at least) two situations where an associate professor might not have tenure. (1) The person has done research commensurate with the title of associate professor but has no teaching experience. (2) We are trying to offer a position (to someone at another university) quickly because of competition with other schools.  Getting approval from the college administration and the provost for a tenured offer takes more time than getting approval for a non-tenured offer. So we might offer a non-tenured position quickly with the understanding that it will be upgraded to tenure when we get the necessary administrative approval (and, if we don't get approval for a tenured offer, then we'll recommend promotion to tenure next year).


text:
Should I remove a coauthor if he did something detrimental to the project?
I am corresponding a paper and the status of the paper is under review after first revision.
Recently, I realized that one of my coauthors had done some bad acts against the project (related to the paper) in the past and now I want to delete his name from the author list.
Meanwhile it should be noted that his contribution to the study had never been scientific and I wrote with negligence his name. However, my big concern is now that removing his name might be unethical.
How can I deal with this important issue?

Why not just leave his name as is?  Then, make sure you never co-author another paper with him in the future.

some bad acts against the project — I don't understand what this could mean.  Did he deliberately try to sabotage the project? — his contribution to the study had never been scientific — So he did contribute to the project, then. — I wrote with negligence his name — I don't understand this sentence.

This is a tricky one but you might just have to bite the bullet and keep his name on the paper, making a mental note both not to work with him again and being careful about who you name as co-author.

one of my coauthors had done some bad acts against the project
  (related to the paper) in the past and now I want to delete his name
  from the author list.

But have these acts impacted on the quality of the paper? It sounds like they have affected the project but not specifically the paper. This is a similar criticism to people complaining against the internal bickering and politics of e.g. software development which affects how software is made, yes, but doesn't necessarily affect the quality or accuracy of the overall output product.

Meanwhile it should be noted that his collaboration with study had
  never been scientific and I wrote with negligence his name.

So he did make some contribution? What was this contribution? Conceptual? Literary in some way? I would doubt that you included his name with negligence at the time you did so, but now it seems negligent in the light of new information.

However, my big concern is now that removing his name might be
  un-ethic!!

I think it would certainly raise some questions that might be difficult to answer without possible repercussions on yourself. I would grit your teeth and let the paper go through further revisions, it sounds like it's too far down the line to remove a co-author's name, but be careful who you include - and why - in the future. Academia is a learning process in more than one way.

It is noted in this answer - but it bears highlighting, make sure the paper is sound and correct.

Your question is unfortunately a bit vague and unclear, so it will be hard to answer definitively, but my basic take is...No.

I am corresponding a paper and the status of the paper is under review
  after first revision.

I've very rarely encountered a journal or editor that was okay with major changes in authorship after a revision, and expecially rare one that is alright with the removal of an author.

Recently, I realized that one of my coauthors had done some bad acts
  against the project (related to the paper) in the past and now I want
  to delete his name from the author list.

Here your vagueness is a problem. "Bad acts" could mean anything from being petty and backbiting to outright scientific fraud or criminal activity.
But without more information, my general stance is this: If he met the criteria to be an author in the first place, merely being not a great person to work with isn't grounds to remove him.

Meanwhile it should be noted that his contribution to the study had
  never been scientific and I wrote with negligence his name. However,
  my big concern is now that removing his name might be unethical.

I'm a little concerned that this reasoning is a little...post hoc. Why was he on the paper in the first place. What originally drove your negligence (his name didn't end up on the paper by accident)?

How can I deal with this important issue?

You choose not to work with this person again.


text:
Advisor delaying response, proposing changes every now and then in last week, how to deal?
I have read various posts on SO related to my question, so the parts I got answer I am not putting here.
My advisor has asked me to write a paper and when I sent the draft it's with him until the last week of deadline for journal. Then he called me for meeting and I could clearly see the nice and crispy pages just printed without a single dot, and also he roughly turned pages and then told me do this and that. And these changes would take a lot of time. Then he again did the same and proposed such changes that are close to a whole revision and most of the times I ended up having to revert the changes. If to be honest, I want to tell him that please at least for one time read the whole paper, propose changes and let me do it then, it will save our months of time instead of keeping it with you for more then a month without reading. Same thing happened when I was writing my first annual report which had to be submitted before the 9th month of starting PhD, I submitted in my 7th month and ended up passing first year in 16th month after starting date.
I can't change advisor due to my study leave rules and my tenure of leave as well as the scholarship he gave I can't even talk to him as he is very reserved, not open for discussions or arguments.
Should I just do as it is or do I need to ask someone from management for help?

Writing papers is hard work. Learning how to write papers is hard work.

"Then he call me for meeting" - Why wait for him to call the meeting? When you send him the draft (nice and early), tell him "Here's a current draft. Are you available for a meeting next Monday to discuss it?"

Is it possible you may have a deficiency in your English language skills that bears on what it takes to produce a publishable article and that your adviser is having difficulty helping you overcome it?

Well i guess its not that bad, and also ibhave publications and so far no reviewer asked for English proof reading etc, any how he dont tell me to correct grammer or anything except rubbish changes like getting the balll out of his court. I also did ask him to have meeting and he say i will email you when there is need to meet.

I also did ask him to have meeting and he say i will email you when there is need to meet. — Repeat after me: "In light of the volume of feedback you've given me in our last few meetings, it's clear that we should be meeting more often than we have been.  Let's schedule the next meeting now.  Are you free next week at this time?"

It is your PhD, not his!
While it is true that writing papers is hard work you really need to take some initiative here. You need to arrange the meetings and make sure things are done by the deadlines.
In all honesty he probably has more important things on his mind than your deadlines.

As far as i know he dont have more then 3 phd students. So in that case he can manage easily if he wants. He comes too late as well, so definately he has no other duty there

He sounds like a pain-in-the-behind advisor.  But you said you don't want to change advisors.  Can you find someone else to mentor you, somewhat informally?

Should i just do as it is or do i need to ask someone from management for help?

There's nothing wrong with having a conversation with an administrator in your department.  When requesting the appointment, you could say you would like to ask for some advice.  Then in the appointment, describe your difficulties in a very calm, neutral tone, stressing the difficulties meeting deadlines.  Take notes on the advice you are given; appear optimistic and grateful.  Ask if you may come back in a couple of months to check in on how things are going.
That may be enough for the administrator to have a helpful conversation with your advisor.

I am afraid he might mind this and then make further hurdles for me.

It sounds like you are concerned that if an administrator had a gentle word with your advisor, your advisor might take it badly, and take it out on you. Hm. A lot depends on the culture in your department, and the leadership style of the administrators. Perhaps you could take a month to collect as many observations as you can about the problem-solving skills and style in your department. Take a little time every week to get to know people in your department. Go for coffee with other students who've been there longer than you, hang out at the cookie table at seminars, and keep your ears open.


text:
How does one organize their publication pipeline?
In the field of computer science, there are numerous conferences and journals to seek publication in. It's almost overwhelming! How does one go about organizing, prioritizing, and planning a workflow or "pipeline" for meeting the variety of submission deadlines?
For example, is there a "definitive" resource like wikicfp that most researchers use? Do you simply track your deadline dates on a calendar, even years in advance?
Or do folks tend to just write the papers first, and see what CFP dates are in the near future, and submit to what's in the near future? (Submitting "now" to what's available, as opposed to waiting/planning/timing in advance for particular avenues of publication.)
Or do folks tend to target just a handful of top-tier conferences and journals, and then investigate, ad-hoc, for other opportunities after being rejected from the top-tier publications?

ConfSearch tracks a lot of CS conference dates. Might be worth a look.

I too am in CS but I found the schedule of conferences to be fairly simple and I strive to submit to the same conferences each year.
First, identify the handful of conferences in your field that are both reputable and aligned with your research topics. Then you can form a mental model that is made up of (A) the deadlines and (B) the prestige.
For example, all of the conferences that I would submit to all  have deadlines that cluster around two times, Fall (August/September) and Spring (March/April). I can also group them into top-tier or second-tier. At that point, it is pretty easy to know where I am going to submit each piece of work based on whether it is Fall or Spring and whether it is suitable for the top-tier venues.
One side note. I have been given the advice to find 1-2 conferences that I can call "home." That way I can get close to the community, network, and they will become familiar with my work. I have been told to avoid shooting papers off to a dozen different conferences because they will be forgotten in those communities.

Having a home conference is indeed important. There's no reason not to go to others, but you should always appear in certain places.

@Fomite Time and money are great reasons not to go to others! But sure, it is definitely good to try out other venues from time to time.

There is no "definitive" source for papers - indeed, in many fields, calls for papers don't actually drive the publication pipeline at all - for example, only a very, very small percentage of my papers have ever been as the result of a call, and in both cases, it was more "Hey, this will fit really well in our special issue on $thing..."
In general terms, I keep an eye out for special issues and other calls that are relevant to me, and after awhile, you generate a feel for the ones that are recurring. I use a Kanban board to organize my papers generally, with lanes like "Planning", "Coding/Analysis", "Writing", "With Coauthors" etc. If there's a particular targeted call and deadline, that gets written on that research idea's index card as well.

Thanks for the Kanban board tip, I'll have to integrate that into my workflow.