text:
What does "Reviews Completed" status mean in Springer?
I submitted a paper to one of the Springer Journals through Editorial Manager almost 5 months back. The status changed from Editor Assigned to Under Review and now it is showing "Reviews Completed" since past five days. Can anybody suggest what does it actually mean and is there any other stage before the decision is made?
Does it give any indication about the reviewers not rejecting my submission?

It means: chill out and stop torturing the "refresh" button.

Related: On Elsevier, does “required reviews completed” mean good news or bad?

It's waiting for the editor to read the reviews and make a decision. This could mean one of the following: 'reject', 'submit as new', 'major revision, 'minor revision' or 'accept' (Depending on the journal, options may change).
Any decision above 'major revision' is good, meaning you get a chance to improve the paper and hopefully get to full accept.  Of course the paper can still be rejected at any stage until it is fully accepted.
Best of luck!

Any time frame for this status?

Up to the editor.. who is usually very busy and would be about the last thing he/she would do.....so be patient.


text:
Does the usage of Facebook and Twitter harm a professor's career?
Should they instead protect their tweets and Facebook posts and keep them private / Friends-only in their account settings?
Some profs' tweets / Facebook posts are great and inform the public of their new research, especially stuff in machine learning / data science, while other profs I have seen use much of their tweets and Facebook posts to rant about politics, e.g. rants about Donald Trump.  It seems dangerous for a professor to have all of his political feelings posted publicly on Twitter / Facebook.

I assume that the answer will strongly depend on the institution(s) in which the professor wants to make a career. Some have an atmosphere that supports discourse and the idea of a "marketplace of opinions", whereas others like to play it safe.

I think this question is too broad. There is no general answer. If you only post research results, there is little room for mistakes. If you post about politics there surely is. If you rant about your wifes or colleagues behavior you will definitely face some backslash. So the question should rather be "What things should a professor not share on social media to avoid any harm to his carreer?"

Unless someone has done some quantitative or qualitative research, I think this will be very hard to verify either way. There are certainly professors that are famous and have very vocal political opinions, such as Noam Chomsky, and many philosophers. However, it is hard to verify whether: their opinions help their career, their career helps people accept their opinions more readily, or whether their career could have gone even further without their opinions.
One thing to note, however, is that it used to be many philosophers seemed to take it as a duty to give public talks and so on, on politics (e.g., Bertrand Russell), and perhaps other academics did too. So although we probably cannot give an empirical answer right now, it does seem that in many cases social media is merely an extension of professor's work, even if they are giving thoughts on areas they do not research, as thinkers they may have a duty to contribute informed opinions based on their training.

As has already been written, without research, there's no solid answer.  However, I can tell you that the potential for harm is far greater than the potential for good.
Put your research on your institutional page and keep your politics to yourself.  Use tools like FB to communicate with friends and family.  Even then stay at a level of material that you do not mind being public because you never know what will be shared.
When you are sufficiently famous that you are sought after for interviews, then you can consider making the interview material public.
I explicitly do not allow students to "friend" me.  My syllabus includes, Please do not ask me to join your social network on Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. until after you have graduated, and then only if you earned grades of B or better in each of my classes.    Only the best students, with whom I am happy to be friends, follow up after graduation.

Social media is a tool
Social media can be a useful (and free) tool for getting some exposure for your work and connecting with other academics around the globe. Depending on the size of your network you might catch the eye of a journalist looking for the latest news out of science/art/technology, or a potential collaborator from another institution.
However, like any tool, if you use it wrong it can cause you harm.
Use the tool properly
The general advice that I have heard is never post something online if you would be worried about your current/future employer (or students!) seeing it. If you live in a liberal democracy I would hope that criticizing your political figures is not "dangerous". Whether it can harm your career depends on the nature of the people in charge of making decisions about tenure and/or funding. As long as you air your criticisms or observations in a respectful and thoughtful manner I can't imagine it causing a problem with the people who make those decisions. That would require an uncommon level of vindictiveness.
If you're still concerned
However, if you feel that you absolutely need to be a part of the current political/pop-culture/what-have-you discourse and you don't want to worry about maintaining a professional online presence at all times, my recommendation is to run separate feeds for business and personal stuff. Just like how you shouldn't use the same email for work life and personal life, you shouldn't use the same social media accounts for work and personal life. You can easily create multiple accounts: one under your real name for forming professional connections and getting exposure for your work; and one under a pseudonym where you can lambaste public figures to your heart's content.

My amateur observation is that the most successful people tend to not be on Facebook. As one example, while there is a Facebook page and a website for Noam Chomsky, my understanding is that they are run by other people and he doesn't interact there in any way. E.g., from the website:

Again, please note that the website administrator is not Noam Chomsky,
  and he cannot arrange interviews, or put you in contact with Noam
  Chomsky.

And further:

Also, please note, Professor Chomsky is not on Twitter. Any
  accounts using his name are unauthorized.

The one piece of research that comes to mind is that people who use Facebook are generally less happy after their use of it. From NPR:

A new University of Michigan study on college-aged adults finds that
  the more they used Facebook, the worse they felt. The study, published
  in the journal PLOS One, found Facebook use led to declines in
  moment-to-moment happiness and overall life satisfaction.

I would argue that Facebook/Twitter and other social media are not like public talks where an expert has the floor for an extended period of time. They are (as the name indicates) structured to be a catalyst for ongoing back-and-forth with a multitude of people who may or may not have anything actually productive to say. In fact, we might speculate: Those with the fewest accomplishments/insights may have the most time and interest to repeatedly post, argue, troll, etc. It would make sense to me that if Facebook use makes a person sadder and more depressed, then that would detract from their academic productivity.

-1 for using Noam Chomsky as an example. Chomsky made his most successful contributions decades before Mark Zuckerberg was born.

@lighthousekeeper: I felt it was useful as a counterpoint to the currently most-upvoted answer, which uses him as an example.

There is a very simple test that can help you to determine whether a political post is appropriate for public display. Imagine that the text you are about to post is not political but religious. Replace names of political figures by the names of Jesus or Allah or something like that. If it still doesn't make you cringe then you can post your political text without doubt.

source: Stack Exchange

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

sort: votes


text:
Minor typos found directly after submission of a revised manuscript to a geochemistry-focused journal
I am a PhD candidate working in fields related to environmental sciences and climatology, and have recently finished the revisions/corrections for my first peer-reviewed manuscript.
Unfortunately, I did not get to be the corresponding author for this first submission, for which I collected all data and wrote the paper. Therefore, my first supervisor submitted the revisions instead. However, this was done without informing me and, more importantly, before I could carry out final checks on the manuscript to make sure all the figure references and citations were correct...
Immediately after submission of the revisions by my supervisor, I have checked the manuscript and found the following errors:

One full reference is missing, but cited in-text (out of a total of 80 references).
One Figure reference early on in the manuscript was deleted by my supervisor, which now means the figures are presented in the wrong order...
Another Figure reference has a minor typo ("Fig. 4a" instead of "Fig. 4").

My supervisor has refused to re-submit the corrected version of the manuscript, even though the corrections were only submitted yesterday evening. I am asking for expert advice and opinions on what my best course of action is. Can the above errors be the decisive factor in rejecting my paper for publication, even if the reviewers comments were otherwise addressed objectively well? My fear is that the paper will be rejected as "sloppy" (i.e. the revised paper should be perfect in terms of referencing and citations).

These errors should not lead to rejection. Even if the paper will be accepted now (i.e. no additional round of revision) there will be a chance to correct those errors during proof-reading. The missing reference will probably be detected by the journal and corrected automatically.
Take notes of the errors, so you can be quick once you get to proof-reading stage, since often, publishers give you as little as 24 hours to check and correct a manuscript.
I just remember that there are fields where the authors take care of formatting and editing of the final version - there things might be a bit different. My  answer is based on journals that do the editing for you, after acceptance of the manuscript.

The fact that your supervisor (or any corresponding author) submitted a (revised) manuscript without asking co-authors and making sure, they approve the manuscript, is a different matter and should not have been done. Look for posts regarding "submitted without consent/approval" to find out more (basically, the corresponding author has to make sure that all co-authors have seen and approved a manuscript before submission, at every stage).

Thank you for the useful advice Mark! I have learned my lesson from this I think, and will push to be the corresponding author for all future first-author submissions... I think this particular journal does the final editing and incorporation of figures into the text for the authors.
As for the corresponding authors decision to submit, I will look further into this as I think the other authors got a quick "notification" shortly before submission, but not myself (the first author). I may have to take this up with my other supervisors, at least.

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/


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Half points and IELTS overall band score categories
My IELTS overall band score is 8.5 and I am wondering what to call it, i.e. what's the name of the category for this score. Rounding rules of half scores in terms of categories is not explained in The IELTS 9-band scale and I have not found any other resources regarding this specific question either.
Possible options are:

Rounding it up and calling it an "expert user". This makes more sense as there is no score or band above 9.0, so the "expert user" band could be interpreted as anything between 8.0 (exclusive) and 9.0 (inclusive).
Rounding it down and thus calling it a "very good user".
No rounding and calling it "expert / very good user".

Be as specific as you can. When asked for IELTS results, specify a decimal result of 8.5 wherever possible. If specifically asked for text description instead of a decimal result, be on the safe side and call it "very good user". For all my experience with IELTS, a result above band 7 is considered a pass for all purposes.


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How to locate most important literature in an unfamiliar area
I'm a pre-doctoral researcher (does it exist?) figuring out my true interests and learning the craft. When I start exploring a new (that is, unfamiliar) area, I try to find the most influential literature and scholars in that area through a haphazard and unsystematic process (such as starting with some highly-cited papers, consulting their list of references etc.). And because this is an unsystematic process, I'm never sure that I've not left unexplored some really important work.
I wonder if there's a more efficient process. How do you all go about this?
Also, (and this is a more specific question) what are some online forums where I can ask for more experienced researchers' opinion about what they consider to be the most important literature in a particular area?
Edit: To add some context, I work as a researcher in a US business school. My main area of work is entrepreneurship. Since this is an interdisciplinary subject, I have to consult literature in a wide variety of fields (some recent examples: psychology, complexity science, economics; of course, I access a very small part, the part that is the most relevant to my question). Entrepreneurship itself is in the process of defining its own scope and boundary.

The answer depends in part on what is meant by "most important," in terms of what criteria signal that a book or article is "important" to a field:
Important to whom? Americans? English-speaking audience? Foreign researchers? Mainstream scholars or scholars taking more alternative/critical perspectives on topics? (some things are taboo, even in the presumably democratic Western science, due to institutional biases and paradigm norms shared by the intellectual elite in a given field at a given time). Paradigms vary, especially in more subjective fields like social sciences.
For example, a psychologist who considers him/herself a "behaviorist" would send you to read B.F. Skinner, whereas a sociocultural theorist will send you to read L. Vygotsky. Are both "important?" Indeed, but in different ways and to different extent, depending on the needs and likes of their respective audiences.
As you observed, there is a lack of systematic structure in scientific intellectual development and inquiry patterns, despite much work and honest effort aimed to maintain it. The real world is messy. Good ideas may become simply 'unpopular' and 'old-fashioned' for practical/political reasons like shifting of funding agencies' priorities, or the development of a certain methodological approach, or simply higher salaries for researchers with skills in some specific narrow areas (e.g., theories that can be tested through empirical quantitative analysis as opposed to theories that can be tested through logical inference or decade-long ethnographic observation).
Important when? Today, last week, in 2014, in the past decade, the 20th century, or since the inception of that discipline?
As you can see, there is possibility of stumbling into bias at every step of the way, and no single definition or 'correct' answer exists for determining the "most important" works in a given field. The only correct answer is, it depends.
That said, a few guidelines might help focus your efforts on initial stages of inquiry in a given discipline:

Wikipedia it. (Granted, some bias is most likely already present at this step!) Wikipedia, although somewhat 'pedestrian' in its popular, mass-appeal model, can be a great way to discover key figures and references (at the bottom of the pages) in a given discipline. Just google any discipline (e.g., "economics") and browse away. The more narrowly you define your search, the narrower the focus of the theories and publications that you will see. Keep this in mind, and play with the breadth of your search terms. You can also straight-up google "most influential publications (books, articles) in _____ (your field of interest). For example, trying this for "economics" produces this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_important_publications_in_economics

Alternatively, try searching for something like "most controversial figures in economics" and see what you dig up. This could be fun!
(Note: The real fun of science is in taking long shots, i.e. tacking big-payoff mysteries from non-traditional perspectives. It takes a real scientist-at-heart to have the guts, means, and intellectual stamina to make a dent in traditionally established scientific views, and such individuals often risk being discredited in the process, earning a 'reputation' and becoming outcasts. What makes them deserving of respect is that they don't care. Plus, they also get to do real science. One possibly relevant example here, although the jury is still out: http://www.alternet.org/food/meet-controversial-mit-scientist-who-claims-have-discovered-cause-gluten-sensitivty).

For a more 'academic' approach, and in regard to journal articles in particular, you may try some academic databases or publishers that can fetch top-cited articles in a particular discipline or journal. The advantage of using a database is the ability to refine your search (e.g. papers with a specific word in the title or abstract, written in a certain range of years).
One example:  http://top25.sciencedirect.com/archive/57
Ask real humans. Talk to someone (or better, many different someones) who have been in that field for some time and just ask them point-black what they consider most significant works in the field. You might also ask what works made the greatest impact on them, but be ready to get different answers (hopefully, the different answers will contain some interesting surprises).
As far as forums, it really depends on the field. In #3 above, ask folks what forums (or email lists) they read and consider useful for broadening one's perspective in a discipline.

Good luck!

In addition to the points above, you could look for doctoral dissertations that cite the foundation papers in the field, and read their "related work" sections.

The process you are currently using was the basis of my process. Unfortunately, I do not know of any real systemic way. I always found important papers way later that were disconnected to the main body of work.
Here is what I did, using the Papers app (for Mac), but subsitute any paper repo of your choice:

Find the top few highest cited papers in this area; usually these
can be found easily or from pointers from others
Scan the references of these papers to find papers they cite in
common or papers with titles that look very relevent; these are likely prior works that are also relevant
Use Google Scholar to find highly cited papers that cited the
papers found in 1
Repeat 2 on those references list

...
stop when exhausted.


text:
Academic writing software
General-purpose word-processing programs are OK for academic writing. But I feel the experience can be much improved with some specialized software that takes better care of the special needs of academic writers, such as version control, collaboration, reference generation, in-text citation etc.
Is there any such software (either web-based or desktop-based) created specifically for academic writers?

I am not sure this question is a good fit for our site. It seems like a poll question where there are going to be lots of answers with each one arguing for a piece of software.

Your question is too broad and vague to be answerable with concrete advice. I recommend reading the question guidelines of Software Recommendations Stack Exchange. You've given a user story — academic writing — but that could be clarified: papers, presentations and books are pretty different things. In terms of requirements, what kind of typesetting do you need? The need for diagrams, equations, multiple scripts, etc. greatly affects what software is suitable.

P.S. I do NOT encourage migration to SR.SE: your question would be closed as too vague, and academics are better suited to answering this question.

Why not using Latex in MikTEx (Windows) and Texmaker (linux) and a outside version control gui tool (Tortoise SVN) or RabbitVCS (Linux) integrated into explorer (Windows) or thunar / nautilus (Linux)

@Gilles Wouldn't that be two different problems? If the question is clarified, it would seem a good fit for Software Recommendations.

If you are looking for a non-WYSIWYG program, I would suggest Emacs, the version control can be used http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Version-Control.html, also a Collaborative tool is provided http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CollaborativeEditing. I have not used these tools. An Stackexchange website  is also available http://emacs.stackexchange.com/.

@Alexandros Yes, these plus a reference manager, some plug-ins etc. and I'll have a complete solution. But what I'm looking for is one single program that combines the essential tools that academic writers need, so that they don't have to waste time in plumbing.

@Mast They are two different problems, but even if the question is clarified, [academia.se] is still a better place, because that's where the people who can answer it are to be found.

@ba_ul LaTeX in the way to go. To have an easy start, try https://www.overleaf.com/ or https://www.sharelatex.com/. Or https://www.authorea.com/.

First of all, academic writing is all about the mind putting words on paper, you are really looking for tools to help you with the technical side of putting together the material. Looking at your list of examples, I do not see much that is not already implemented in Word (probably being the most common writing tool in academia). A second that contains everything except a solid version control (revision tool) is (La)TeX (which is also free). But, if version control is required you can use GitHub, as I know many LaTeX authors do.
On a more personal side, the difficulty in writing science is not about getting the technical aspects right, it may be tedious and boring but is easily done. What matters is the text and how to be precise and concise and no software will help you there. Version control is sometimes a good tool but really, is it necessary to see everything one has written and deleted? Isn't the present text what really matters and what one has to consider for improvements? It is easy to get bogged down with the wrong details so getting tools to sort those out is never wrong but I do not necessarily see how a special purpose academic writing tool will help much more than with the technicalities than existing tools do.

I love the spirit of this answer, but I think you are poking a straw man with respect to version control. The major benefit of a vcs for academics isn't seeing all the old versions, but efficiently merging distributed changes to a single document. My last conference paper was only 6 pages with 3 co-authors and I wasted an entire afternoon merging edits because I had unwisely distributed a Word document simultaneously.

I would like to add that GitHub is only a Git repository host. You can perfectly use version control using Git without GitHub. The two should not be confused.

Advice I've seen for programmers, which I'd imagine applies equally to academics (and other writers), is that version control lets you give yourself "permission" to throw stuff away, rather than leaving it commented out, bracketed, or suchlike. This means that it's not there to distract you when you write new stuff.

@TRiG : Exactly. Git allows you to throw everything away, write something else, and revert your changes if you think the first version was better. The key here is that it keeps all the changes you want it to keep. When you work with other people simultaneously, merges are also possible. This is an excellent way to collaborate and keep track of all the work done on a project.

Once you delete something, it's almost certainly going to stay deleted. But there's a possibility that you might want it. So you hang onto it. And your code gets cluttered with comments. Git gives you the freedom to actually get rid of the stuff. And you can go back for it if you need to, which is almost never. So it makes the code (and your brain) clearer and cleaner.

Version control in not only for checking history. It's primarily to be able to go back if anything goes wrong (for articles: if someone messed LaTeX, or if a paragraph was accidentally removed, ...). I use it even for one-person short notes. For longer ones, it saved me a lot of headache (and time!).

I am personally a big fan of using Scrivener. It was originally designed for writing novels and organising all the research and drafts but also works well for writing research papers. Scrivener can also be set up to export to latex and to work with a backup folder containing .txt files (to enable version control trough ex Github).
I use Mendeley to store my papers and handle references as it is quite a hassle to keep organised.
Here is a link on how to set up scrivener with latex:
http://harrisonsweeney.com/posts/scrivener-multimarkdown-and-latex.html
Edit: I should also mention writing in plain Latex.
Latex is a markup language designed for writing printable text (as opposed to web text), all the formatting is done by typing commands. This means that it can be written in any text editor and that there are generally no buttons to click for formatting (such as in word). Latex is used a lot in the exact science as it is a standard in rendering equations. The drawback is that it has a learning curve.
I'd say that Scrivener is the way to go if you are looking for a tool that aids you in organising and structuring your writing process. However if you require extensive rendering of equations and/or prefer the more direct control of latex go for that.
Although any text editor would work for latex finding the one which works best for you is an entire question in itself.

May I ask: Are you associated with Scrivener?

Nope, not at all. I actually routinely switch around between several tools. I actually switched back to writing in plain latex (using the sublime text editor with the excellent latexing pluging) when I wrote my master's thesis and have used evernote to keep my notes as that is what the rest of the lab is using. I just switched back to Scrivener as I don't like organizing my notes in evernote.
That being said, the latexing+sublime combo is superior in writing raw latex.

Scrivener is good. I checked it out a few months ago and was impressed by a few features. But I didn't migrate to the program mostly because of its lack of integration with reference management programs. At the end of the day, it's designed for fiction writers, whose needs and workflows are different from academic writers.

Using a good editor for latex that auto completes commands, enables easy insertion of common commands (or more complex macros), outlines of your code, shortcuts to see the compiled document, etc etc definitely improves the experience over a plain text editor. Sure no sane person wants to have to click a button to format text, but a shortcut to avoid writing \texttt{} all the time? Yes thank you.

OVERLEAF
Overleaf it is a collaborative web service for writing and publishing academic writings based on LaTeX and is especially design for this purpose. I think nowadays is the most used software for publishing in academics. The website describes its mission very clearly:

Overleaf is a collaborative writing and publishing system that makes the whole process of producing academic papers much quicker for both
authors and publishers.
Overleaf is a free service that lets you create, edit and share your
scientific ideas easily online using LaTeX, a comprehensive and
powerful tool for scientific writing.
Writelatex Limited, the company behind Overleaf, was founded by John
Hammersley and John Lees-Miller, two mathematicians who worked
together on the pioneering Ultra PRT Project and who were inspired by
their own experiences in academia to create a better solution for
collaborative scientific writing.
Overleaf is supported by Digital Science. Digital Science is a
technology company serving the needs of scientific research. Their
mission is to provide software that makes research simpler, so there’s
more time for discovery.

From Tex to Overleaf: a not so short history
I think is important to have a look at the history of the technologies that are used by overleaf to see that they are designed by academics and used by academics. The history is basically an encapsulation of powerful complex technologies in a more user-friendly platform.
TeX is the core technology it was designed by Donald Knuth who was a professor at Stanford University  this is an excerpt from this site:

As it turned out, TeX was
still a lot closer to a research project than to an industrial
strength product, but there were certain attractive features:
it was intended to be used directly by authors (and their secretaries)
who are the ones who really know what they are writing about; it came
from an academic source, and was intended to be available for no
monetary fee

LaTeX was set of macro to make TeX more accessible it was actually created at SRI International (SRI) an American nonprofit research institute by Leslie Lamport here an excerpt form an interview:

When Don was creating TEX80(?), the second version of TEX, the popular
macro package at the time was one written by Max Diaz  I've forgotten
its name. I was in the process of starting to write a book, and I
found Diaz's macros inadequate. So, I needed to write a set of macros
for the book. I gured that, with a little extra eort, I could make a
macro package that could be used by other people as well. That was the
origin of LATEX.

Then it comes Overleaf so all these technologies are now on a server with ready-to-use templates from the most popular publishing companies and conferences.

OP:

Is there any such software (either web-based or desktop-based) created specifically for academic writers?

Yes: Nota Bene is a software package that was purpose-built for "academic writing", and that in the context of the humanities. I used it heavily in the 90s, but needed to move on when development didn't keep pace with my Unicode requirements. It's fascinating software: essentially a suite of tools comprising a writing environment, textual/note database environment, and bibliographic database, all seamlessly integrated. It really is a powerful package.
But the further answer in all likelihood depends on what area the writing is for: "academic writing" is simply too broad. "Humanties", "social sciences", "[hard] sciences" would give a better spread of suggestions. The possibilities also depend on personal work habits: what makes for a congenial writing environment varies according to personal habits and taste.
TeX provides one good example: rare for most in the humanities, but common for mathematics and linguistics.
On the other hand, some of my colleagues are now doing all their writing in Markdown, and that has its own appeal, as well as limitations and challenges.

Yes, this is the kind of software I'm talking about. This one, unfortunately, looks dated.

@ba-ul It looks a little Windows 3.11, doesn't it. If you can get past the cosmetics, it really does what it claims to do. For me, however, it's no longer worth the expense. I know some who use it (top international scholars in their fields - I could name names!), and love it, though.

You have plug-ins and storage methods to take care of this.
Software such as Endnote offers a plug-in to 'cite while you write' (as they call it). Microsoft Word has a referencing system itself, but I have no experience with it.
Using the revision options in Microsoft Word you can track all changes made to the document (giving you more advanced features then normal versioning). However you can also set up your computer to copy changed files to a backup location, storing multiple versions there.
I do not necessarily disagree with your suggestion that general-purpose word processors are not really suited for academics, however the questions that you have can be addressed using general-purpose word processors.

What advanced features does word's versioning offer that you can't just as easily get with git and some diffs? Not discounting that there are some things that I missed, but when I checked word the last time it definitely seemed more primitive.

I am approaching the problem the other way around OP claims there is no version control in standard Word Processors. Microsoft Word (and maybe others as well) offer Track Changes. This is more advanced then keeping a copy from every saved version (which is what versioning basicly is), as you can easily see what was changed.

So just a misunderstanding about what "versioning" referred to, ok!

I'd be worried about long term accessibility with software such as Word and Endnote, especially the latter would be rather expensive for an individual outside of organisational/institutional access.

I haven't found anything that was perfect yet, but I have found the combination of Circus Ponies Notebook (for content outlines) and Scrivener (for stress free writing) really workable. This posting covers a lot of it.

Wow. Excellent article. Also, I'm so glad I found out about your blog and ebook through this.

In terms of the mess you can get into with multiple versions, multiple authors, that @Tim mentioned -- I like Draftable for Word.
I like to have a shared dropbox folder with collaborators so we all have access to all the previous versions.
A feature of Word that I like is the outline view.  It makes it easier to do restructuring on a large scale.

authors: rтемный Лорд


text:
Transferring PhD programs after leaving a PhD due to medical issues
Let's say that I was given unacceptable conditions for returning from medical leave; basically I had to self-fund at least the following year of a physics PhD. Knowing that doing so would result in a financial disaster, I am definitely withdrawing from the program, with the understanding that, if I still wanted to earn a PhD at some point, I would have to transfer.
I could always mention, in an addendum (if there is space for one), medical problems, going to medical services, such as a physician (on-campus and later off-campus) on a regular basis for 75% of the only semester I ended up attending, and leaving school to take better care of myself. (I feel I did what was right from a medical standpoint) But when there is no space for an addendum in an application, I was advised to just drop a line about "personal problems" or "extenuating circumstances" (now resolved) and I am excited to do research again.
And also, I have two publications on file by now, whereas I had none when I applied to PhD programs the first time around (2015 cycle). Because I do not feel my GRE scores were an issue, I do not feel the need to re-take the GRE, general or physics, since they are still valid. But TOEFL, on the other hand, I would have to retake because the scores are no longer valid.
P.S.: I never had Ws before that particular semester, but still somehow ended up with 3.80 for what coursework I still managed to complete. If you need more information about my file or anything else, please, let me know.
How will an early departure from a PhD program (in its early stages) due to medical reasons affect future PhD applications?

Possible duplicate of How does the admissions process work for Ph.D. programs in the US, particularly for weak or borderline students?

Now that I modified the above post to reframe the question in more specific terms...

In the public and private R1 universities that I have been in, we do not accept transfers for doctoral students. If you're previously pursued a Master's or taken some graduate courses in the field as part of a doctorate at another institution, you can petition the department / graduate school for a partial waiver of some of the requirements after you've been accepted and matriculated into the doctoral program.
For example, you might be able to petition out of some of the breadth or depth core course requirements; or request that your years-in-residency be reduced.
Note that because many programs run students in cohort-years, there may be good reasons why you may elect to run the standard pattern even if you've had a waiver of some requirements.


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Value of having done applied math research when applying to PhD programs in pure math
I will be a second year math under-grad in September, and currently doing an internship at applied math research institute. Most probably, I will come up with a research paper at the end of the internship.
However, my interest after my bachelors is to do PhD in pure math from a top math school.My question is this:

Would the admission committee consider my current research since it is in applied math?

In addition, if anyone can suggest me some ideas on how can I bridge the gap between my paper in applied math and my interest in analysis, I would be extremely grateful.
P.S.: Here is a related but different question also of mine.

Would the admission committee consider my current research since it is in applied math?

Certainly.  In my experience, nobody cares at all whether an applicant's research experience is directly related to their proposed specialty in graduate school.  There are several points to keep in mind:

There are only a limited number of research opportunities available for undergraduates, so finding one on your very favorite topic may not be possible.  Nobody would hold this against you.
Some topics just aren't accessible to undergraduates in the first place (e.g., motivic cohomology).
Most applicants don't really know what they will write their dissertations on, even if they think they do.  Many will change their minds a year or two into grad school.
Undergraduate research in mathematics is generally not as deep as grad student research, and the specific things you learn are not crucial.  Instead, the point is to see whether you have an aptitude for research and whether you enjoy it.  For those purposes, the precise topic doesn't really matter.  (Unless, of course, there's only one thing in the world that you would like to study, but I would consider that sort of narrowness to be a problem itself.)

+1 for: "the point is to see whether you have an aptitude for research and whether you enjoy it."


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Are publications on arxiv.org valued by graduate admissions committees?
Please see this question of mine first.
My question is: Does the admissions committee in grad school consider publications in places like arxiv.org as a significant achievement given the student has only completed bachelors?
I am asking this question because I have seen many math papers in arxiv.org that have not made new contribution to the field. In other words, those papers have not made new discoveries or solutions of the unsolved problems. This makes me wonder whether publishing at arxiv is considered a big achievement.

If the publications are good, then the recommendation letter writers should say so.

"Publishing" on the arXiv is not a big achievement; actually, it's not an achievement at all.  In terms of how prestigious it is, it's not really any different from putting an article on your own personal website.  The arXiv isn't a publishing venue, it's a preprint server---it's purpose is to serve as a public repository for potential articles.  It has various benefits (it's probably more reliable than your own website, it gives credible evidence about when an article was posted and modified, which is sometimes desirable), but it achieves those in part by not refereeing the articles on it.
However, writing an article as an undergrad is certainly a meaningful achievement, and given that it can take a while for a paper to make its way to being in print, an appropriate unpublished article is still a positive for an applicant.  Of course, the admissions committee wants to distinguish a good article from a bad one, and since posting on the arXiv isn't a good proxy for quality, the committee will look for others (recommendation letters, for instance, or possibly just reading the article themselves).

If the admission decision is made by individual faculty rather than a committee, then he/she might also have a quick glance at a paper (at least I do that, and so do others in my dept). So publishing a badly written paper on arxiv might backfire.

@Aditya, How do you define a badly written paper? One with no new contribution to the field? Poorly structured paper?

@ILOVEMATH: I primarily use papers to evaluate the candidates' writing and logical reasoning abilities, rather than their research abilities. Good communication skills are almost as important as good research potential. Papers, irrespective of whether they contain original research or simply present a proof of the Pythagoras Theorem, are a good way to evaluate logical reasoning ability.

It depends on the paper.
If you post a good paper to arXiv, it will definitely be valued by admissions committees, especially if you (and your references) make a compelling case to read it in your statement (and their letters).  On the other hand, if you post a bad paper to arXiv — poorly written, making no new contribution, or both — it will also be valued by the committee, but as an easy excuse to reject your application.
In other words, it's exactly like any other publication.

I agree with JeffE's answer.
One of the things the admission commitee look for is your research potential when they review the application.
You need to show that you do have the potential to do research. How do you show that? A well-written paper on arXiv is the evidence. Whoever writes your recommendation letter can use that to say it. You can mention that paper in your application. If the commitee has any doubt in your research potential, they can look at the paper and draw the conclusion themselves.
As long as the quality of the paper is good, I believe it's achivement. Whether or not the achievement is big depends on the quality of your paper. Of course, you may kill your chance to be admitted if the quality of the paper is bad.
In order to improve the quality of the paper, I would suggest you to let somebody (your prof/advisor) review the paper before you put it on arXiv.

I think it is important to highlight one exception to the different answers given above. There are a few subdomains of research, mainly in physics, in which repositories such as arXiv are the primary means of communication. (This applies to topics such as string theory, and I believe some high-energy areas as well.) If you happen to work in one of these areas, then an arXiv publication will carry much more weight. Otherwise, the warnings given above do apply.

The answer to your question is not really. This is because the people in Grad schools see if your publication has been submitted to a known conference or journal, or at least that they are peer reviewed. In arxiv.org anybody can publish their own work, being more like a big database of not or pre peer reviewed papers. I mention you this because I usually put my articles, the drafts that has been accepted in conferences, in arxiv.org, but there are some people that put only its ideas and even some articles that do not contribute too much to the developing of an specific field of science.

Putting papers on arXiv is publication, but it is not a referred publication. People use it for various reason but most importantly to timestamp their work and communicate their works with others earlier.
That being said, publishing on arXiv itself is useless, since no one has read on your paper yet. I bet that the admission committee won't read your paper at all. There are hundreds of applications, why do they want to waste time to go to arXiv and read a newbie's paper.
However, situation could be different if you can show your work already "reviewed" in other way. For example, it is discussed by journals like Science/Nature, or very well known website like arxivblog before the referred publication. Or, the arXiv version is already cited by independent research groups. Remember to mention that if you have.
In any case, you should put it in your CV if your papers are good. If possible, you can a try to attach a short excerpt from your paper such as abstract or the first page. It might be useful to show your work in progress and support your research interest in your application. In particular, if you already have at least one referred publication, the extra arXiv papers should sound much better.

In our university, the admission decisions are made by individual faculty rather than a committee. So, many faculty shortlist a two or three students based on their CV, and then carefully go through the application. In such a cases, if a student has a publication, there is a high likelihood that the faculty who is interested in the student might take a quick glance at it.

@Aditya That's good, because I think that most US university have a "central" committee. So, they may not know what the students doing because of different research field, and certainty they won't bord to read those paper

I bet that the admission committee won't read your paper at all — Having served on my department's admissions committee for many years, I can say for sure that at least one admissions committee does read applicants' papers, whether or not they are formally published.

@hwalu: Most US universities have a central committee for each department when it comes to graduate admissions. Every member isn't going to read a paper by each applicant, but when it's down to deciding among a small list of people, I think it's common for some committee members to go look at the paper. It certainly isn't necessary for a paper to be discussed in top journals or have already made a significant impact for it to be a significant positive.


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How to Remain Competitive at a Mediocre University?
I am attending a university with a mediocre mathematics department. The courses at my school cover fewer topics and are less challenging than the same courses at top universities.

How can I avoid becoming behind in coursework compared to students at top universities?
How can I ensure that I am competitive when applying to mathematics graduate school?

Close voters: would you please care to explain?

Voted to close because this seems to be an undergraduate question, hence it is off topic and should rather be on productivity.stackexchange.com.

Voting to reopen. OP asks "How can I ensure that I am competitive when applying to mathematics graduate school?" - Questions relating to graduate admissions are on topic. "Transitioning from undergraduate to graduate researcher" is listed at What topics can I ask about here?. The first bullet question is not as on-topic, except that it is a principle assumption of the second question.

Read as many mathematics books, lecture-notes, and published articles as possible. Not just "textbooks". Not just "undergraduate textbooks" as these contain very little substantive mathematics.
Even if your faculty people are not stellar mathematicians, they surely know some advanced mathematics and can give you guidance about what to read. Uninformed self-study can be a huge time-waster so you will want some direction to be productive and your mathematics faculty will be the best & most available people to provide you with productive guidance.
Definitely talk to faculty to get guidance! This can be done officially through a "reading course" or "directed study." It can also be done informally through frequent check-ins with interesting questions. Either way this will enable those faculty members to write excellent letters of recommendation about your interest and motivation based on your capacity to appreciate the things you will have read and your perceptive questions.
It's not so much whether you (as a novice) can handle random questions, which novices rarely can, but whether your sensibilities are heading in the right direction, which would be manifest in your reaction to substantial mathematics.

As a student who just graduated from a school whose math department is outside the top 50 and going to graduate school in applied math, I offer the following advice:
Definitely get to know your professors well so they can write recommendation letters for you. One way to do that, as paul garrett mentions, is to take reading courses with professors.
It is important which classes you take: For pure math want to have at least taken classes in algebra, real/complex analysis, and topology. Note that if you plan to go to graduate school in applied math, you would want to take classes in programming, real/complex analysis, numerical linear algebra, ODEs/PDEs, and numerical analysis. Also ask your professors for advice on which classes you should take. The classes I have listed are just the bare minimum. By junior/senior year, you should be taking graduate level math courses if you plan to apply to the very best graduate schools.
Research: Although I cannot speak for pure mathematics, if you are planning to go to graduate school in applied math, try to do research with a professor at your school or a summer REU.
GRE: Most Ph.D programs in pure/applied math will require that you take the Math Subject GRE (which is not the same as the general math GRE). Although recommendations will have the most weight on your application, the subject test should not be taken lightly. In order to prepare for it, re-do problems from your calculus and linear algebra textbooks. For the other 25% of the topics on the subject GRE, look for problems in textbooks. Also try the practice tests online.
Something I really wish I had done as an undergraduate would have been to study material ahead. For example, if you were going to take real analysis in the fall semester, I would find a real analysis book in the summer and try to work my way through it by doing as many problems as I can. Doing this will make classes easier and you learn the material much better.
And if you didn't know already, https://math.stackexchange.com/ is an amazing resource for students learning math.
Good Luck!

How can I ensure that I am competitive when applying to mathematics graduate school?

Be a student member of a professional mathematics organization, such as the Mathematical Association of America, the American Mathematical Society, or the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (even if you are not based in the USA).  This will help you be up to date with recent developments.
Try submitting some answers to problems posed in publications like The College Mathematics Journal and Crux Mathematicorum.  Publication of your name in the solutions section might help you in your application to graduate school.
If possible, attend at least one conference in mathematics.  This will let you interact with students and researchers in other schools.

@MichaelHeff : Joel Reyes Noche has some good advice above (Joel, hope you don't mind that I put my comment here.  I want the OP to read your answer.)  I would add the following: compete in the Putnam competition and score well (there may be other competitions, I don't know); compete in the MCM or ICM (see comap.com - you'll need a few teammates): even if you don't place high, you effort may impress people; and take a graduate class as an undergrad, if one is available and you have the background.

Have you heard about Yitang Zhang's story? If not, I would suggest you to Google for it.
Had you asked about other disciplines, my answer would be different. However, your major is math, I think top university or not does not matter much.
All you have to do is to study hard. That's it. We are Internet age now. You have all kinds of resources available online. Our sister sites, Mathematics Stack Exchange and MathOverflow, can be very helpful to you. I myself am a retiree. I learn quite a lot from them.
Bottom line, study. Good luck!

One thing that makes the top schools "top" is that they only admit the students who would get a great education anywhere, even if they had to go outside channels to find additional resources -- get involved in research, take the most serious classes you can, do additional personal projects that stretch your skills, take advantage of cheap student memberships in professional organizations, take advantage of the library including any journal subscriptions they're getting, read some of the past Masters' theses if your school keeps 'em available and well indexed...
As Tom Lehrer  misquoted, "Life is like a sewer. What you get out of it depends on what you put into it."


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Hiring academics for very large industrial consulting projects - how to find an arrangement without full-time employees?
As described in Hiring a faculty consultant, we need to hire a faculty consultant. The initial stages are perhaps only 100 hours, but subsequent stages may blossom to ten times that.
Will good professors be able to deliver that much consulting time? Would I be better off with a grad student or postdoc - could they deliver that much time?  Or with a less accomplished professor with more time on their hands?
One alternative we've considered is to hire a fresh Ph.D. looking to enter industry. The problem is that we are not ready to commit to a full time employee - it's only if we get good results in the initial stages (and our investors agree!). Is there a solution for this?
One last alternative is to work out a research arrangement, where the professor would direct some of their research towards our needs. They'd get to publish the papers (with the application details removed, but the algorithms there) and we'd get ownership of the IP and control over the research agenda. Is that an option?

Something to note: when you say "mid-level professor" I assume you mean someone who is in the earlier stages of their career, i.e. they are perhaps associate professors but do not yet have tenure. Professors in this position generally have the least free time.

...professor with plenty of time on their hands? — Say what now?

It appears like you believe that research works like an assembly line where x amount of hours equals y amount of results and can be done by anyone remotely qualified.

@T.F. What we need isn't advancing the state of the art, but taking the existing state of the art and applying to our application (which no one has done yet).  Not an assembly line, by all means, but not a stroke of inspiration.  It's crossing the chasm from R to D (in R&D).

@JeffE - Clarified, I mean a less accomplished professor who has more time available.  In any field, the people at the top are usually extraordinarily busy.

Even if you find someone willing to work with you, 1000 hours is around 60% of a work year. Someone already working full-time as a professor is not going to be able to spend that kind of time on you.

Professors at all levels of seniority and accomplishment are very busy.
They have courses to teach, institutional committee service, and their own research programs.  Neglecting any of these for any length of time can have a permanent impact on their career.  Professors who are less accomplished or have fewer duties in one of these areas will typically have more in the others.
Even a professor who is very motivated to work on your project may only have a few hours per week to devote to it.  One day per week would probably be a maximum.  Teaching schedules are often inflexible, so it may be particularly hard for them to visit your site, especially if it is far away from their home.
Senior people (tenured full professors) may be more likely to be able to make time for your project, but they also have lots of other interests.
One thought: you might consider approaching an expert who has recently retired.  They should have the time available, and may be interested in your project as a way to continue their work in the field and earn some extra income.  But they also may not be interested in working a lot of hours per week, and they may demand a fairly high hourly rate (as they're probably not in desperate need of money).
Keep in mind, also, that research by its nature is very hard to predict.  It may be difficult or impossible for your consultant to accurately estimate how much time they will need to solve your problem, unless it is so straightforward that they can solve it almost at once.
As far as fresh PhDs, note that a new PhD has just spent several years working long hours for low wages.  It may be hard to entice them with an offer of unstable, part-time work, unless you can offer some other perks like stock options or an unusually enjoyable work environment; startups are a dime a dozen.  Of course, a lot will depend on the overall strength of the job market in your industry.
Your third option ("research arrangement") doesn't strike me as particularly feasible.  A major reason for being in academia is the ability to choose the direction of one's own work.  I don't think you'll find many professors amenable to being told how to direct their personal research program.  They not only have to publish papers, they have to publish good papers which are novel, interesting to the research community, and spur further work in the area.  If your project doesn't lend itself to that, in the professor's view, then the right to write papers about it is useless to their career and won't be seen as a benefit.  Moreover, if they're going to work on your project as part of their own research, which is on their institution's time, then you can expect the institution to get involved in any IP issues, and they often have lots of lawyers.  Not to mention outside funding agencies.

"It may be hard to entice [PhDs] with an offer of unstable, part-time work, unless you can offer some other perks like stock options". For any part-time jobs stock options are unlikely. What is likely to attract some of them, is a high salary (especially for consulting). (Source: I am turning from a PhD into a freelancer.)

Foreword: I smell a contradiction… you talk about “very large industrial projects”, but “we are not ready to commit to a full time employee”.

You need to hire a consultant… but why a faculty consultant? In pretty much any field of science, you can find decent consultants outside academia, working in, well… consulting firms. From what you describe, it seems than you need a rather large amount of work done, rather rapidly, and the benefits for the academic would not be immediately clear. That doesn't align well with the constraints and career goals of most academics, as Nate Eldredge explains very nicely. However, consultants from outside academia do not have such constraints, and it seems like a better fit for your specific case.

+1 He most likely search for a consultant. And there is no shortage of consultants with PhDs or other strong academic background. While some academics do consulting on side, I don't see why he restricts to searching for faculty consultants.

Let's deal with the 'easy' part first: hiring someone for ~100 hours of consulting.
How easy or difficult this will be is going to be based on what answers you need to the questions "When can you start?" and "For how many hours are you available per week?" If you need them to be available during set hours, this will also effect the situation.
When can you start?
Most busy/qualified/established professionals book their time out in advance, very often 3-6 months out or more. I'm not some super-in-demand expert or a professor, and yet I've turned down four offers in the last few months because I have already dedicated myself to things that would make my first availability to be summer of next year - unless it was just an amazing offer with triple the money, at which point I'd still only be available a fraction of the time for the next 3+ months.
Especially with teaching, grants, budgets, and research schedules, finding someone who could dedicate more than a few hours a week within 3-12 months will not be common.
If you only need someone for a few hours a week spread out over the next 3-4 months, you will likely have a much easier time of finding someone who is at least available and potentially interested.
Sabbaticals, Summers, Internships, and Finding the Time
If the initial stages go well and you need hundreds of hours of consulting or extensive research, this will not fit into the schedule of a professor under normal circumstances. It's not to say it can't be done, but if the person is really interested - both by the project and by how much money they stand to make - there are a few ways to make it work.
One way is for academics who have flexibility in the summer. While senior faculty will often direct labs, summer research, and some even have teaching duties 4-5 days a week over the summer, there is still often more time that can be squeezed out for consulting than other times. If this has been arranged a year in advance, or if the person happens to have already arranged for a light/no summer load, they would potentially be available for consulting for this larger work load.
Once you start needing more than 20-40 hours a week of consulting, it is reasonable to start considering having more than one person. It would not be unheard of for a professor - especially in fields that are highly tied to industry like in technology/computer fields - to arrange for a summer internship/research project where they and their hand-chosen grad students might be available to do work.
This sort of arrangement would allow sufficient time and expertise, and allow a faculty member to get a sufficient return for their invested time - teaching, helping students, conducting applied research/work, and bringing in some extra personal wealth.
Approach a Prospect and Be Open, Honest, and Straightforward
You have a situation where the industry lags behind the state of the art research, and you feel you have a great financial opportunity if you can close the gap - and need an expert to help you do it. That's great!
Professors and researchers are humans too, and are interested in things like making money (especially when it brings the potential for even more money), working on interesting problems, etc. If it is applying existing knowledge/research to a problem it might not result in interesting research, but this is very field-dependent as case-studies and applied techniques are standard in some fields and unpublishable in others.
Most people who have any experience in industry also understand the funding cycles are surprisingly similar to academics - you have a little bit of funding available to invest into exploration, and what happens from there depends on the results you get. So be open about this - if you know you have budget and money to pay them for the exploration phase, say so. If that phase doesn't work out then it will mean you don't expect to have any more immediate work - say so. And if it works out and you get the funding you are shooting for and will need a lot more work done - again, just say so.
Start a conversation and see where it leads. As with most professional tasks, it is not uncommon to have an offer come across your desk that just isn't something you are interested in, but perhaps you know someone who you might refer the opportunity to. Perhaps you'll find the professor who wrote the papers that attracted you to them in the first place will say that they actually don't feel they are the expert, and that actually the student they were working with would be better able to help you. Maybe they'll insist they are a package deal - you hire them and their collaborator. Perhaps they just aren't interested. Perhaps they already had a sabbatical planned and haven't 100% decided what they wanted to do, but this would fit the bill nicely...etc.
With a clear plan, seed funding in hand, and an open and honest discussion about your situation, goals, and what you can offer, most professors will be happy to take a meeting with you and discuss the matter! Few people are so busy as not to be able to talk about extra money, and most higher-level professors reserve a portion of their schedule for consulting gigs anyway (again though, this varies by field).

I think hiring a new Ph.D. to a full-time job is the best approach.  For the initial consult you may be able to hire a current Ph.D. student or two to a temporary summer job.  They would both be able to help you sort out if the idea is likely to pan out, and let you determine whether that person would make a good hire.


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Referee reports I have written in tenure packet?
I’m currently preparing a tenure packet. I have reviewed a few papers for journals in the last few years. I am wondering how I should include this activity.
Certainly I will be including evidence of this professional activity (e-mails with the editors acknowledging the receipt of the report, etc.), but I presume that it would not be standard practice to include the reports themselves. It already feels a little odd to quasi-publicly acknowledge that I was an anonymous referee for some papers that didn’t get published (Hmm, I wonder what my report was like), but this seems like the right way to go.

I'm voting to close because this is really a matter of the specific regulations at your university and does not generalize from one university to another.  When I prepared my tenure packet, I listed the journals I had refereed for (and how often) in the CV I submitted, but no evidence was included, because no one really wants to go through pages of evidence for points that (1) make very little difference and (2) you're very unlikely to lie about.  Certainly if someone asked I could provide such evidence.

I agree with Alexander. Furthermore, journal reviewing is counted very little in terms of tenure 'points'. If a monograph or journal article in a major journal  is +10 fictive tenure points, then doing a peer-review would be +0.1 points. Not nothing but very little.

Absolutely not.  Referee reports are confidential, especially for papers that were rejected.  Including them in your tenure packet would violate that confidentiality.

Back when I still needed to pad my CV, I included doing peer-reviews in the "Academic Service" portion of my cv:

Anonymous peer reviewer for Journal of Slack Exchanges (2015, 2017)
Anonymous peer reviewer for International Journal of Critical Yoyoing (2015)

but I did not have to provide any evidence per se. However, with anything tenure related, you should speak to your chair  as well as recently tenured colleagues at your university and follow their advice -- as each university has its own particular way of doing things.

I agree with this answer, but the exact format isn't crucial.  To give another example of how you might do it, I put a list of journals that I'd refereed for (without years) on my service statement.

If the requirements do not include actually including the reviews, then I would not do so. I would instead just resort to including the email exchanges acknowledging that the reviews have been received.

This is true if the university requires some evidence of this. Otherwise, providing the email exchanges (which often have the title of the paper) would be violating the confidentiality of the process.

I was assuming that the OP had to provide some sort of documentation. Of course, it is also possible to redact the titles of the articles and the names of the authors before submitting the email acknowledgment.


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U.S.C. sex and drugs scandal: would attending such a graduate school hurt one's chances at an academic career?
The University of Southern California (U.S.C.) medical school is currently rocked by a sex and drugs scandal involving the dean of the school -- and possibly other faculty and administrative leaders that worked to cover up the scandal.
Would attending a graduate program rocked by scandals hurt one's chances of landing academic jobs afterwards?
Sources:
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/25/us/usc-scandal-carmen-puliafito.html
[2] http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-usc-dean-pasadena-overdose-20170725-htmlstory.html

"and possibly other faculty and administrative leaders that worked to cover up the scandal" -- I didn't see this in the articles you cited, with the possible exception of the USC president.  Also, "scandal involving the dean of the school" doesn't seem to fit.  The scandal seems to be about the dean exclusively.  I'm downvoting the question, since it seems a little bit sensationalist in tone.  FYI, currently the question has +5 and -5.

One cannot, of course, guarantee that there will be no negative outcomes for going to a school currently being rocked by a scandal. But I cannot imagine they'd have significant repercussions outside the occasional comment about "What was that like?" Especially given the current scandal appears primarily focused on a Dean (a position fairly far removed from the average graduate student) and his colorful private life.
If that scandal had major repercussions in terms of academic fraud, human subjects protections, or specifically involved the lab you were in, the answer might be different.

There is no guarantee that there will be no scandal in another university you wish to attend.
It's just evanescence news. Every university has somewhat dealt with different types of scandals. If you dig further, other universities had similar ones in the past. The fault of individuals cannot damage a university reputation unless the number is high enough for making a generalization.
The answer is that it is least of your concern when choosing a university.


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How to obtain an evidence of teacher effectiveness when I never was evaluated?
I have spent my career working in the field and have recently been approached to teach some classes that are specific to what I do. I have been asked to turn in an “evidence of teacher effectiveness.” I do not have any evaluations or proof that I would be a good teacher. I have guest-lectured a few times and can probably get a few quotes about how I did. Apart from this, what could I use to fulfill this requirement?

What is your question?

What level are you teaching? University?

Course evaluations would be nice but I don't think that's the only or best way to answer the question.  It's more about what you are doing or what do you plan to do to be an effective teacher.  Are you just going to stand in front of the room and talk or are you further knowledge via reading and other assignments, testing, study sessions, guest lectures, videos, optional homework, etc., etc.
Think of this question in that context.  What is the "whole picture" of you as a teacher?

Were you ever invited to guest lecture for the same person/organization a second time? Being invited back would be evidence that at least the person giving the invitation found you effective.

If someone is asking you to teach classes before you've had any experience doing it, then I'm going to guess that they don't expect you to produce a full dossier.  In that case, letters of recommendation from the people that invited you to give guest lectures, or people who saw them, might be sufficient.  You might get some clarification on what's expected by asking the person who's asking you to teach the classes.

Never a teacher, but as a recent student, here are my suggestions:

Record one of your lectures of both the speaker (you) and the audience (students). If you can command the attention of your students, then I can argue that this is an indicator of "effectiveness".
Polls and opinions, much like how the Political Campaigns take polls of their constituents, you can take straw polls from your students on how well you did. "What was unclear?", "What should I focus on in the next class?" Etc.
Recommendations from senior instructors, I am not sure if this is viable from the other side of the podium, but certainly if it applies, then it is another means.


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How to denote the contribution of a co-author who did not do any experiments or analyses?
We are resubmitting a paper. One co-author was part of the project from the beginning, assisted in all group discussions, gave intellectual feedback, but did not do any experiments/analyses. He also wrote a small part of the discussion. What should I write regarding his/her contributions in the respective section?

Sounds like he contributed to planning of the project, interpreting the data (I guess - by giving feedback and contributing in discussions) and writing the paper. What is the problem? What is special about this case?

You should write exactly that. Author contribution sections are precisely for you to describe how people contributed. Why does that not satisfy you

"Investigation, discussions, writing", if you want to be succinct.

This does not sound like a special case at all, but rather like a typical contribution of a supervisor.
When describing such a co-author’s contributions, I would let myself be inspired by other similar descriptions for supervisors.
The definite answer may depend on the particular style of this section and details of the contribution, but one suggestion would be:

X designed the study, supervised the research, and wrote the manuscript.


text:
Forwarding a student’s question about exam modalities to a professor as a TA?
I am currently working as a teaching assistant.
My tasks this semester include writing/putting together a formula sheet containing a lot of formulas and some graphs that the students should not have to memorize.
This sheet will be used in the final exam.
A student recently send an e-mail asking whether he should print it out himself or will be given a copy upon taking the exam. Since I am not responsible for the exam or anything grading-related, this mail should have been addressed to the professor, since I can only guess
(although I am fairly certain it would not be useful to let students bring the sheets themselves and thus giving them a chance to alter them).
Now how I see it, I have the following options:

Forward the e-mail to my professor.
Answer the student vaguely, recommending to mail the professor.
Contact the professor; ask him what to do.

I’m unsure whether forwarding this mail would be appropriate. I’d also feel stupid for asking the professor about something that should be obvious.
Which of the outlined possibilities would be the most efficient, yet still appropriate way to go?

"Since I am not responsible for the exam or anything grading-related, this mail should have been addressed to the professor" - I do not think the former implies the latter. At my (German) university, it is very much expected that TAs answer such questions (of course, only after making reasonably sure they have the correct answer based upon what the professor intends), precisely to balance the workload a bit and keep the professor largely free from this kind of "detail requests" (that may, presumeably, asked a 100 times by 100 students in the weeks leading up to the exam).

@O.R.Mapper - The professor can act like a mensch and answer the question the first time, which would allow the TA to answer with confidence, and without having to bother the almighty professor again.  Note, the professor could have prevented anyone having to bother him/her by conveying the information to the class during lecture, and/or in a mass email.  Then instead of 100 repetitions of the question, there would be few if any repetitions.

@aparente001: "The professor can (...) answer the question the first time" - yes, that is what my remark "after making reasonably sure they have the correct answer" boils down to in practice. As for telling students upfront, not every question that might come up can be anticipated.

@aparente001 Since the TA is writing the formula sheet this semester, it is a fair assumption that the professor has not used such a sheet before, or the TA would be revising, not writing.  For me, at least, missing a detail like a pre-announcement is not unusual the first time I do something.  I'd cut the professor some slack.

@O.R.Mapper - Thanks for explaining your reasoning.  I think what the OP was trying to express was that he didn't know the answer, and the only person who would know, at that stage, was the professor.  I don't think he meant it as a bureaucratic, procedural principle, that students should by default address all questions to the professor. // By the way, both the professor and the TA can prevent 100 repetitions of the same question through the use of an email blast.  I would strongly encourage you and your colleagues to consider using such a tool if you aren't already.

@BobBrown - Sure, as long as we're good-natured about students and TAs asking for clarification.

@aparente001: I see. I understood the OP to mean "The student should have sent the mail to the professor rather than to me." and just wanted to point out that's not necessarily true even if the OP has to contact the professor the first time the question comes up. I admit the question at hand sounds like it's interesting to the whole class, so your suggestion of an "email blast" is a good idea. We have merely found that most questions come up from several students and yet do not concern everyone, so channelling such questions through the TAs (yes, more than one of them, otherwise it's ...

... kind of moot) makes sense to minimize both the number of individual organisational requests the professor has to handle to the number of information e-mails each student has to read. (Also, wouldn't that be nice if we could send out an e-mail with some important information to the entire course, and all students in the course read and acknowledged that e-mail rather than asking the very same thing later on (I know, I'm just dreaming here ;) )).

@O.R.Mapper - Maybe there's a difference between countries/cultures.  In my experience in the US, instructors email students and assume that (a) the email has been read, and (b) students will send a follow-up query if something isn't clear to them.

You cannot answer this question, so you have to ask the professor.
You do not want to be responsible for the potential confusion caused by a wrong answer.
If your professor already made up their mind, it’s a matter of seconds for them to answer the mail (this is a clear case of this PhD comic).
If not, they need to make up their mind anyway some time, and you were right to redirect the question.
Check that the forwarded mail is concise; otherwise summarise it when forwarding.
Also make sure that the response goes to you as well (include yourself and the student in the reply to field) as you may get further questions along this line.
This does not really apply to this case, but for more complex or exotic questions you can also include a suggested action and rationale and just have it ratified by the professor, e.g.:

A student asked me whether they should bring a print of the formula sheet or it will be provided. I would guess the latter since it makes it easier for us to control that the sheets have not been tampered with. Can you please confirm or correct this?

Since you don't know the answer, you have two options.  You can (1) forward the email to your professor asking the answer, then respond to the student after you've heard back, or (2) hand it off to your professor by copying your professor on your reply.  Personally, I'd go with the latter, replying something like this:

[adding Professor Jones]
Professor Jones, I don't know how to answer this.  Should students print copies
  themselves?

This gives both your student and your professor a quick handoff and a clear expectation that your professor should reply to both of you with the answer and then you'll both know.

Which of the outlined possibilities would be the most efficient, yet still appropriate way to go?

You’re way, way overthinking this. Since you seem to care so much about efficiency, have you considered what a huge waste of time and effort it is for you to bother to post a detailed stack exchange post and solicit opinions from multiple people around the world?
Do not be paralyzed by a fear of making a mistake on such a trivial matter - it’s your tendency to hesitate so much (that I’m reading from your question) that will be the ultimate efficiency-killer for you in the years ahead. Instead, just go ahead and choose the option that makes the most sense to you and act on it. You will learn much more by doing so than any of us could teach you with a brilliant analysis of your dilemma that points you to the “correct” (a meaningless concept here anyway) answer.

Dan, I understand your frustration.  Sometimes students doubt themselves so much that they drive themselves and the people around them nuts.  I do understand that.  But I'm not sure this approach actually helps.  Analogy: the first thing new parents need to learn is to trust themselves and their judgment, and to believe that they are the best experts about their baby.  If they go see the doctor racked with self-doubt, how can the doctor influence their thinking?  Probably not by scolding them for not trusting their own judgment....

It sounds like this is your first time working with this professor, so why not use this example to broach a conversation with him/her about what his/her preferences are for the semester in regards to receiving questions like this from the students. In general, do they want to be more hands off, or do they want you to forward questions like this? This is going to happen a lot over the semester, so you might as well ask the professor what he/she prefers so that you can best perform your job.


text:
Am I aiming too high if I am applying to physics graduate schools in Canada?
So I'm in the start of the process of applying to graduate school in Canada for a Masters in experimental physics, and am kind of overwhelmed and wondering about some things:

I'm not from Canada and didn't study there, but have Canadian
citizenship. How much help, if any, will this be?
I have somewhat bad overall grades in my undergrad degree (GPA just over 3/4 in a B.Sc(Hons) of 3 years normal undergrad + 1 year higher level courses & research, a high B+ in my uni's system, or 2nd class (1st division)), but am reasonably confident I can get a decent physics GRE score, having done okay on a practice test with no prep. How much would a good GRE score make up for poorish grades, and should I be limiting the schools I'm looking at to less respected ones based on this?
Between 3rd and 4th years of my undergrad, I did a 10 week summer research project, as well as the whole year project in 4th year. Would this amount of research experience be typical for students from north American universities, or not?

I was looking primarily at the University of Toronto, U of Ottawa, and Simon Fraser University, and then just sort of started feeling like maybe I'm wasting my time & money even applying for them. Any help or suggestions are appreciated.

I recommend asking whoever will be writing your recommendation letters.

The academic department won't care about citizenship beyond any funding hassles re: government grants for research. The admissions department will care about the transcripts (translation, equivalency), English (French) language fluency testing if needed, and some programs may have set of number resident/non-resident spots (international, out-of-province, and in-province) due to government funding. I know this restriction exist for professional schools - engineering, medicine, and law in several provinces.

Let me address each of your questions.

How helpful is Canadian citizenship?  I'm guessing the answer is maybe a little, but not a lot.  This is reasoning by analogy from the United States.  I think typically applicants to grad schools in the U.S. are grouped by "where they went to undergrad" more than "where they have citizenship".  I believe that often the standards for applicants from the U.S. may be at least different from those for internationals, but it's still a very competitive pool.
What about my GPA? You're right that just over 3/4 is not great.  In this case I would encourage you to take the GRE.  Good GRE scores could help convince admissions committees that you know more than your grades show.
Does my research experience make me stand out? Over the last 15 years or so, it's become much more common for grad school applicants in north america to have research experience.  Over this time, we've seen a dramatic rise in the number of REUs (research experience for undergraduate).  While it's by no means universal, I think you will not stand out for simply having a summer of research experience (or having completed a senior project).  However, you could stand out based on what came out of that experience.  Did you publish a paper?  Give a presentation?  Convince your mentor that you are the greatest thing since sliced bread?  If so, then your application should highlight this aspect of your experience.

You asked about U of Toronto, SFU, and U of Ottawa.  These schools are all pretty highly rated, especially the first two.  I would guess that getting admitted to grad school there would be a stretch for you, but I don't say that to discourage you, just to encourage you to apply elsewhere, too.  (Once you're putting together an application for one school, it's typically not too much work to apply to another school.  You're right that it costs money, but it's a relatively small cost, when you consider the potential impact it could have on the rest of your life.)  You may want to read an answer I wrote recently to the question: How should I choose which graduate programs to apply to for the PhD?
Finally, let me comment on something you didn't ask about.  Your recommendation letter writers can dramatically impact your chance of being admitted to a given school (and getting a desirable job later on).  You should choose these people carefully, and do all you can to help them do their job well and on time.  Remind them how they know you (whether it's through a class, or some extracurricular activity).  Remind them of some of your accomplishments, and make sure to give them information about why you're applying.  Speaking as someone who's written a number of recommendation letters, I am more comfortable writing a stronger letter when I feel like I know more about the students.  Obviously, you have to have impressed me (or in your case, your letter writers) with your performance already.  But that is only part of it.

Citizenship matters much more than it used to. Many international applicants will find it tough to gain admission to departments in the University of California system, for instance. (This is because of tuition charges which vary for US and international students.)


text:
What is a Pro-Chancellor?
I was looking at a document describing setting arrangements for a ceremony and ran into the phrase:

The president of the Student Guild shall sit in the front row, with
  the Vice-chancellor, the Chancellor, and the Pro-Chancellor

What is a Pro-chancellor?
I've never heard of one before.
In-case this is a regional term, I am at a Australian university.

A "pro-chancellor" (or similarly a "pro-rector," which we have in Germany), is a deputy to a chancellor (or rector), who handles certain duties on behalf of the chancellor (or rector). In the particular case of Commonwealth countries from which you hail, the pro-chancellor is the person who heads the university's executive council on behalf of the chancellor.


text:
Are there any trustworthy Mathematics fee-based open access journals?
Some open access journals, like Integers for example, don't charge the author any fee for publishing their article. Other open access journals do charge the author a fee and the author has to pay the fee so that their work can be posted online. Are there any trustworthy fee-based open access journals?

Virtually all mathematics journals have fairly liberal policies about allowing authors to post preprints (and in many cases even the published paper) on repositories and personal websites. (This is not an answer to the question, but may be useful to those who arrive at this page).

I'll try to link to pages which describe the open-access policy of the respective journals.
Both Proceedings of the AMS and Transactions of the AMS allow the author to pay a fee to make their article freely available electronically from the journal.  If the author chooses not to pay the fee then the article is not freely available from the journal (but the author may post the final preprint on the arXiv or their personal website).
The (few) Elsevier journals I have looked at have a similar fee for publishing open-access.  One example of which is the Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications.  You might try their Journal Finder, which has a checkbox to only search for journals with open-access options.
Springer offers a similar program for some of its subscription-based journals which they call Open Choice.  Not all of its journals have this option (e.g. Acta Mathematica doesn't).
We also note that Elsevier and Springer both publish a number of purely open-access journals, but I can't comment on their "trustworthiness".

You may need to view the last Springer link in incognito mode (or equivalent) if Springer's website keeps you logged in from your institution.  This will ensure that only those journals which are completely open-access will be shown.

Acta Mathematica is no longer a Springer journal and is now open access with $0 fee.

While fees are unusual for Math open access journals (and I would initially suspect any journal charging them), there are trustworthy fee-charging journal, e.g. Pi and Sigma (http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displaySpecialPage?pageId=3896).

Note that at present, Pi and Sigma do not actually charge fees.

Fees are slated to begin for papers submitted on or after January 1, 2016.

Journal of Mathematical Physics, which publishes articles by mathematicians, is a serious journal published by AIP that follows the AIP fee-based Open Access policy : http://publishing.aip.org/librarians/open-access-policy

The recent Analysis and geometry in metric spaces, while maybe not yet well-established, is as far as I can tell (after exchange with the editorial board at some occasions) trustworthy as any math journal; this is witnessed by the impressive editorial board.

The UK as a whole is moving towards using open access, so most of the UK maths journals, and a proportion of others, now offer open access in some form (although that can mean allowing you to put the final draft on a repository, called 'green open access'). The LMS has created the Transactions, which is fully open access ('gold').

The UK as a whole is moving away from author-pay open access

In general, journals reviewed in MathSciNet are trustworthy.  So check there for the journal you are considering.

I would say that a "fishy journal" is going to be dropped by MathSciNet sooner or later.  I have, unfortunately, a paper published in a journal which I think is on the borderline between being legit and being fishy.  One of the things I did was look to see that MathSciNet covered it, as you suggested.  However, I did not notice that MathSciNet has stopped covering it almost a year before (this is much clearer a year or two later than it was then, but I should have looked more carefully).  And when I submitted they advertised as being covered on MathSciNet!  Anyway: be careful out there...

Research in the Mathematical Sciences is very reputable, if new. The editor in chief is Ken Ono.

For the down-voter: when I wrote this RiMS was in fact fee-based open access, but it has since been converted to a subscription journal with the usual double-dip-risking optional pay-for-open-access. See https://mathoverflow.net/questions/309002/what-happened-to-research-in-the-mathematical-sciences for some details.

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text:
How to convert Australian grade to US GPA?
I am wondering how to convert Australian grade(HD, D, C, ...) to US GPA (A+, A, B, C ...)
I tried few websites but those showed me which I think of as "too good to be true" results.
For example, according to the website I used, a grade of C in Australian grading system is equivalent to B grade in US.
Is that realistic? and is there a formula to convert ?

Flagged as duplicate of http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/9058/how-to-convert-from-one-grading-scheme-to-another

HD=4, D=3, C=2, D=1. Say, if you studied four units (you got HD,D,C,D in the exam respectively), your GPA should be (3x4+3x3+3x2+3x1)/(3x4)

@DavidWashington If you refer to this website http://www.foreigncredits.com/Resources/Grade-Conversion/, it shows a different conversion. Are you sure about the conversion you proposed ?

@Noushad, that was the one I found on Monash's web.


text:
English requirement for Teaching Assistantship for Ph.D students
I am applying to Ph.D programs of universities of America as an international student.
I currently have an 8.0 IELTS with 7.0 Speaking, and a TOEFL with lower points: Reading, Listening and Writing:20, Speaking:26
Usually programs require a high speaking score (equal to or over 26) if I want to become a TA, right? Clearly my IELTS speaking is not high enough, but TOEFL speaking is.  But the overall scores have the opposite order.
So can I submit the two certificates and become a TA (assuming I am admitted, of course)?

So are you needing assistance or offering to be an assistant? Not clear from the title.

As you might expect, the specific requirements to be eligible for a teaching assistantship vary from one university to the next, and from one department to the next.  The only people who can answer your question are staff at each of the departments you're applying to.  Ask them!!
To give one example: My public US R1 university has a strict requirement of a 24 or better on the speaking portion of the TOEFL, or an 8 or better on the speaking portion of the IELTS, in order to be a teaching assistant.  Minimum TOEFL/IELTS requirements for admission without a teaching assistantship are somewhat lower; however, many PhD programs (like mine) have a TA requirement, and so the requirements for TAships are also de facto requirements for admission into those programs.  Some graduate programs have higher TOEFL/IELTS requirements than the campus-wide minimum, and some graduate programs also assess English proficiency independently through interviews, writing samples, and the like.
Of course, meeting a department's English-proficiency requirements for a teaching assistantship does not guarantee that that department will offer you a teaching assistantship.  It just means that you're eligible.

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