text:
List of software projects on my CV
I'm a graduate student in mathematics but I've done a lot of open source software projects, some of which have even won hackathons. My question is should I put them on my CV? I've seen academic CVs only contain publications, conferences etc. But, I feel that these projects are very valuable to mention.

Insofar as you're interested in an academic career in mathematics, I would be careful about following advice from anyone except faculty in mathematics who have served on hiring committees. The answer to your question would be very different in different fields, so answers from non-mathematicians are not likely to be directly valuable. And anyone who has not served on a hiring committee can only guess at what might benefit your career, and their guess may or may not be correct.

(In my comment above I was inspired by a recent answer, which I would love to credit if I could find it, which pointed out that it is unwise to get advice on applying to graduate school from graduate students, since grad students' ideas of what contributed to their admission are often very far removed from the truth. The same reasoning applies here.)

You're correct to want to mention them, CVs often probably only lack them because the writer hasn't done them or it isn't relevant to their career (perhaps they do not need to mention them any longer to prove particular skills). My CV included my programming/computing experience and was well received as the programming I had done was relevant; I was applying for computationally demanding PhD programmes.
Relevance is key so when including the projects, make sure the skills you gained from completing the open source projects are clear to the reader. Make sure it is also clear how these same skills are relevant to your application.

I am a mathematics professor and I served on a hiring committee this spring so I've been reading a lot of CVs recently.  If the software projects that you have been working on are completely unrelated to your research or mathematics in general, then I would leave them off.  If he projects are directly related to your research or even just mathematical in nature (e.g. Work on the Sage computer algebra system), then I would include them.

On my CV, I try to list software twice: once as part of a scientific project ("I studied ... and wrote a software tool to allow other scientists to ...") and once as a software project ("SequenceMatrix is a Java application to ... that I developed while working on ..."). The first includes scientific outputs, such as publications, findings and point to research interests, while the second includes development tools, software design and engineering practice. Which one I emphasize -- and whether I drop one entirely -- depends on what I'm applying for.

Which subheading do you use for listing software projects? Should it go under Publications or be its own section?


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How does being a postdoc work?
I've been recently completing what I want to do after I obtain a Ph. D. since my Ph. D will be in math there will be choices for me to go into industry. However, I'm wondering it there's a timeline to go into being a postdoc and conducting further research. Can one postdoc at multiple places?  Especially if they have been in industry for a while (my end goal is to go into academia).

Note that postdoc positions generally require you to have obtained a PhD not too long ago (it varies how long, but rarely more than 5 or maybe 6 years).

@TobiasKildetoft I was not aware of this

Some postdocs in the United States require your PhD to be finished two years or less before in order for you to be eligible to apply.

The details will usually be mentioned in the job posting, so it is a good idea to take a look at the ones that might interest you to see what sort of times are mentioned.

The previous comments about the timing requirements for postdoc positions are correct. On the other hand, people who have worked in industry for some time can be hired into tenure-track or tenured positions in math departments.

This needs to be narrowed down some to be answerable, since the methods and assumptions around postdoc vary wildly between fields.  In computer science, postdoc used to be virtually unheard of.  In many areas of biology, there is an assumption that you will do many years of postdoc, often in a very rigid environment.  On of my colleagues told me of a subfield in which there is essentially a formal "clearinghouse" run by the professional society that matches graduates and postdocs.

There are a wide variety of postdocs available, which makes summarization challenging.  Typically, the goal of a postdoctoral fellowship is to broaden your research experience and better prepare you for a career in academia immediately after your graduation with a PhD.  Postdocs are extremely common in the sciences.  (Perhaps they are a bit too common.)  As mentioned by Andreas Blass in the comments, many positions are advertised seeking recent (i.e., within 2-4 years) PhD grads.
It is possible to do multiple postdocs sequentially, though anything beyond two is a bit of a red flag for being hired in academia.  It's probably best to think of your PhD graduation as starting a clock for academic positions.  If you haven't gotten an academic position within five years, then the application process becomes quite different.  If you are planning on waiting this long, you would likely be better off working in industry or at a research lab and attempting to make the transition back to academia without doing a postdoc.  (I'm not familiar with this process, so I won't comment on it.)
If you're interested in more information about postdocs, I can recommend the following sources:

The National Postdoctoral Association has terrible web design, but there's lots of good information there if you can dig for it.
Georgia Tech's Office of Postdoctoral Services has a lot of great information, albeit targeted towards GT Postdocs.  You should also look to see if the places you're applying have a similar organization.
Peter Feibelman's A PhD is Not Enough!: A Guide to Survival in Science is a relatively short book on how to succeed as a postdoc.  It was recently updated, and is probably the best generic introduction to life as a postdoc available.
The CRA's Postdoc Best Practices Guide is intended for postdocs in computing, but I don't see why it wouldn't be valuable to a broader audience.  It's much shorter than Feibelman's book, and covers some of the same ground.

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text:
Is is possible to anonymously encourage one's US university to make content accessible (e.g., as per the ADA)?
I'm enrolled in a graduate-level program from a major US university, and these courses are predominately online. Classes are held via web conference, and most content is online. (It's not a public MOOC, but rather it's part of a curriculum with full tuition being paid, and relatively small class sizes -- less than 20 people per section.)
As an older student (but not disabled, nor a senior citizen (yet)), I do have many of the associated age-related challenges (bad eyesight, hard of hearing, hand tremors). As a result, I do make use of various assistive technologies (screen reader, captions, mouse-free keyboard navigation).
I find the program content to be not very accessible. Though, I admit I'm not that familiar with the accessibility requirements of the ADA. (I've listed some of my issues, below.)
I have commented & complained to both the administrators & professors. Not being disabled per se, my complaints don't carry much weight. Also, one prof threatened to fail me if I kept complaining & kept having problems (typical response: "none of the other students have complained / are having problems"), so I really don't want to be the torchbearer for this campaign. However, I'd really like them to stop & think about the choices they are making, even if the changes are only realized after I finish the program. They continue to make new content & new changes that impede accessibility. As far as I can tell, they either have no guidelines for accessibility, or they just don't care (the institution does have a documented history of ignoring accessibility requirements.)
Is there a way one can either raise this issue with the University anonymously (to avoid repercussions), or otherwise report them so that they can start taking this issue seriously?
Examples: zero captions for videos; very tiny content (browser zoom to 1000% (10x) makes it barely legible for me, but makes navigation difficult); many slides are "images" rather than text and therefore can't zoom/copy/paste; classes via live video conf, but A/V quality is often poor (profs not provided high-quality equipment, simply using iphone or such); online content is delivered in a proprietary adobe client (not HTML5) with poor accessiblity features; editing files requires using mouse with browser & can't use external mouse-free editors; not cross-platform, requires windows/mac (linux unsupported).

You certainly need to talk to somebody about a professor threatening to fail you for requesting learning materials that you can actually use. Have you contacted your university's disability office? You don't classify your visual and motor problems as "a disability" but they have the same effect: they leave you unable to effectively study for reasons that have nothing to do with your intellectual capacity.

If "A/V quality is often poor", you might be able to rally up students from a usability perspective without having to stress the ADA angle. Same for "linux unsupported": universities are full of OSS enthusiasts; get them active. Working entirely from the ADA angle will not help you get particularly broad support: first, in the eyes of many, it is associated with governmental and lawyerly harrassment (it is hard to deny that it happens; just how much it disqualifies the whole concept is in the eye of the beholder, and you probably won't be able to convince the other side here), and second, ...

... it just is a lot easier to dismiss concerns of discrimination when no one from the discriminated-against group is there to voice them (as you say, you are not actually disabled by formal standards, just finding the accommodations useful to you as well).

Taking to administration, they say "yeah, were working on it", but in the next breath "but there's nothing we can do about X" when bring up specifics. For example, the media delivery platform is outsourced (2U), and it's not something they can easily back out of. And 2U is developed on Adobe, so they can't add support for Linux without a rewrite or Adobe changing course & deciding to support Linux. It kind of seems hopeless without some huge top-down decision.

For those interested in this topic in the future, University of Washington IT has put together this resource as a seemingly pro-active response as many other Universities have had formal complaints against them for violating the ADA: https://er.educause.edu/articles/2017/1/ada-compliance-for-online-course-design

The appropriate place to raise this would be through the Disabled Student Services at your university. Even though you're taking the course as a MOOC, the DSS office still has authority over the course (unless it's being run through a subsidiary or joint-venture similar to Ed-X) as well as the responsibility to make it accessible. C.F. Harvard and Ed-X accessibility settlement.
If DSS does not respond, then the next place to go would be the ADA Compliance Officer on campus. If the university is receiving federal funds, they should have someone designated as such (and this person might share multiple roles, such as the Title IX Compliance Officer, etc.).
If that fails, then the university ombudsperson.
If all university channels fail, then you contact your State office of civil rights or  the Federal Office for Civil Rights (OCR). It's unknown whether the Federal OCR will be proactive and responsive during the current regime, but technically they are where the buck stops right before you go with a full blown ADA complaint.
Also, you might also pursue hiring private legal counsel, especially if you absolutely want to remain anonymous during the initial complaint phase. Ask your local disability center for independent living for referrals to local attorneys who take on ADA/504 complaints against universities (note this is very different from run of the mill ADA cases against private businesses) or consult with a national firm such as Disability Rights Advocates, CREEC Law, or DREDF, etc.

The civil servants in any federal government department are almost universally people dedicated to the mission of the department under some reasonable interpretation.  It is very unlikely that they will try to be unhelpful.  That being said, it is possible that the resources available to them will eventually dwindle to the extent they can no longer be helpful. If, due to lack of hiring, investigators end up being given three new cases to investigate every week, it may be a long time before yours would even get on their desk.  These kinds of effects will, however, take years to show up.

Note: not a MOOC; just mostly online content. Class sizes are small, and full tuition is being paid.

Thanks -- I'll try some of these options & see if they help.

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text:
Convention for excerpting from the middle of a paragraph in another work?
A project of mine involves meticulously tracing the source material for a work of literature constructed from an author's unpublished notes. I have established a system for referencing the notes themselves, but to precisely trace the material that constitutes the finished work, I'm following the format:
[ Note # ] [ Page(s) ]
[ Headwords of first paragraph ]
"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..."
[ Footwords of paragraph, either the same one or the end of the last if the passage spans multiple paragraphs ]
"...fermentum eu velit quis iaculis."
However, there are some instances where the material was taken from the middle of a paragraph, continues unbroken through several subsequent paragraphs, and stops in the middle of another paragraph. In order to proceed with my work, I've been using this format:
If the source begins in the middle of a paragraph, include the headwords to that paragraph then include the beginning of the actual excerpt:
"Lorem ipsum dolor [...] Maecenas mattis erat in metus..."
If the source ends in the middle, include headwords in addition to the conclusion of the excerpt itself:
"Lorem ipsum dolor [...] tincidunt dui urna nec diam."
This example supposes material is taken from a single paragraph, so another example spanning multiple paragraphs might look like:
"Lorem ipsum dolor [...] Maecenas mattis erat in metus..."
"Vivamus nec sodales neque [...] quis lobortis nibh porttitor."
Essentially I'm wondering if this system is too confusing, or if there is an existing standard already in use that I can adopt. Including the headwords serves as a way to navigate through the material using paragraphs as an easy visual reference. I've considered assigning each paragraph a section number and referencing them by section marks (§) which would serve as an alternative to including the headwords ("§52 Lorem ipsum dolor..." through "§55 ...nunc sollicitudin lectus."), but I'd like to avoid that if possible.
Any suggestions are appreciated!

I don't do this sort of research, so I can't answer if there is a 'standard approach'.  I have read analytic works on the writings people such as Charles Sanders Peirce, who was notorious for having both a vast and an unorganized body of writing, including personal letters.  Yours might be similar, though in your case it seems even more important to be very precise about what source material you are referencing and quoting.  To my eye, it resembles Biblical analysis in this way.
I like the idea of assigning paragraph numbers to all your source material, but I would suggest using them differently.  In your quotes, I suggest quoting only the relevant words, using ellipses as appropriate to indicate omitted text, and also new lines or paragraph marks to indicate a break in paragraph. But at the end of each quote, in square brackets, you could add the paragraph numbers of the sources, plus any qualifying remarks, such as "spanning both paragraphs" or what ever.
Using your example:

"... Maecenas mattis erat in metus ..." [citation, starting mid-pargraph in §52 "Lorem ipsum dolor..." and ending mid-pargraph in §55 "...nunc sollicitudin lectus."]

This approach has two advantages. First, your quote includes only the text relevant to your exposition and analysis.  This will make it easier to read and understand.  Second, exact and detailed context information is given in the square brackets following, including the citation if needed.  This will serve you as researcher or a reader who needs to follow along in the source documents.


text:
Travel grant for summer conference between PhD and first job?
I am a PhD student in the US (mathematics) and I expect to graduate in May.
I got invited to speak in a European conference in June, which is in the awkward time between graduation and my first job (I expect to get a postdoc, and those start August or September). My current department has told me that they cannot fund me after I graduate.
The conference offers some support for young researchers, but it is very meager and I will be flying trans-continentally. I was wondering if there is an outside source that might fund single-conference travel grants for young mathematicians?

You're an invited speaker and they don't cover your expenses?

I was invited to speak at a special session in the conference.

Here is a travel grant administered by the Association for Women in Mathematics: https://sites.google.com/site/awmmath/programs/travel-grants/mathematics-travel-grants
Here's one by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics: http://www.siam.org/prizes/sponsored/postdoctravel.php (this requires affiliation with a US university; while your current graduate school and/or future postdoc employer might be unwilling to provide funding they are likely to be more flexible with `affiliation')
I've also heard rumors that a postdoc employer starting in August/September might be willing to support travel in the summer before the appointment starts, but this might just be wishful thinking on my part (but it can't hurt to ask?)


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Do I include non-academic works on my ORCID?
A children's book I wrote is about to be published soon. Should I include it in my ORCID account?
ORCID is very clearly concerned with academic works. However, it would be nice if someone who wasn't sure if the author the children's book and the math papers were the same person could check on ORCID and get an answer.

I would include a children's book on my ORCID account.
The vision of ORCID is a world where all who participate in research, scholarship, and innovation are uniquely identified and connected to their contributions across disciplines, borders, and time.
Including math paper and children's books would span disciplines and borders.


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What is the advantage of the two-column journal format?
I am a mathematician whose work often connects with physics, so I often have to read papers in physics journals. I find that the two-column format popular with physics journals annoying, and based on the following questions on this stackexchange I am not the only one that feels that way:
Difficulty reading scientific papers in two columns
How best to present long equations in two-column papers?
Do two-column format journals publish one column for special cases?
I contend that the two-column format is impractical for long mathematical equations and is harder to read, since your eyes have to move in a pattern different from most other printed texts. But I suppose that there must be some advantage to the two-column format, given it is so standard in some branches of academia. But I can't think of a single reason why it would be better than a single column printed page! Enlighten me, please.

I don't think there's an advantage. It's just ... tradition. For similar reasons, the citation styles in certain fields omit the paper name, which I find annoying but manageable.

There's a good discussion in this answer.

A lot of these standards come from the dark ages before personal computers. So don’t be surprised if the answer has something to do with the limitations of punch cards and maximizing the number of articles that can be distributed using a single carrier pigeon.

@Thomas your comment would be more convincing, except that most of the formatting of computer produced documents has been unremittingly horrible (Of course the default options in some well known document-creation apps bear a lot of the blame for this).

I transitioned from an area with majorly single-column publications to an area with majorly double-column ones. I got used to it quite fast and like two columns more now, when reading papers. I'd also say the typical "expected" width of an equation has also something in common with the decision if the layout would be one-column.

What is the advantage of fixing a paper format at all? Most websites can resize to different screens and font sizes decently well. There is no good reason anymore to insist on fixed paper format in the modern age.

There's a widespread belief that shorter lines (fewer characters per line) are  easier to read, because the eye doesn't have to move as far horizontally from the end of one line back to the start of the next.  The left edge of the text (assuming left-to-right languages) may already be in your peripheral vision.  Thus it's easier to visually find the correct line to read next, and avoid accidentally rereading the same line or skipping lines.
This is the justification for the extremely wide margins that LaTeX uses by default in one-column styles, for instance.
I don't know offhand if there is research supporting this belief, but maybe someone can fill me in if they know.
Two columns makes it easier to have short lines, without resorting to small paper size, large font sizes, or huge margins.  Thus you still get a high density of text per page, and it keeps page counts down (and the associated costs).

Some references to studies on line length and readability here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_length. The newspaper industry has known about this for centuries - hence the large number of narrow columns per page in traditional broadsheet and tabloid page layouts.

Reinforcing this, online-only physics journals such as the Journal of High Energy Physics (JHEP) or Quantum, which don't incur printing costs, are often single-column with larger margins.

There actually is a lot of research on this. My copy of "the elements of typographic style" (version 3.2) covers it as:  anything from 45 to 75 characters is considered satisfactory length for a single column work ... for a multiple-column work a better average is 40-50 characters (pg 26)

The correct keywords to put into google to find the academic background are "typographic measure", and 'The elements of typographic style' is a popular textbook for typesetting.

Personally I think this belief is misguided. No doubt shorter lines are easier to read with other things being equal, but other things are not equal. The contortions used to make shorter lines possible - frequent breaking of words across lines (journals/LaTeX) or stretching inter-word spaces to ridiculous proportions (newspapers) - for me impair readability to a greater extent than the line length helps it.

For math, shorter lines forces us often to break formulas on 2 lines, which makes the reading harder in my oppinion.

The "widespread belief" is nonsense (if it is widely believed - I have no idea). There is nothing peculiarly special about academic prose. If a two-column small-font format were actually more readable, then all print books and magazines (whether fiction or non-fiction) would use it. Obviously they don't, and equally obviously that is because it does not increase readability. The two-column format is maintained in journals due to silly tradition and no more.

I think it actually saves a lot of space.
Think about floats-like elements that need to be placed in between the text. Those include section titles, footnotes maybe, tables, equations, and, more importantly, figures.
When you place each such item, you need to leave blank space on either side since the text can only be above and below. This creates so much wasted space, which I suppose was(is) a big issue for printed journals.
And since normally journals allow for larger figures, tables, equations, etc. to span the entire width of the page - provided they are positioned at the top or the bottom of the page - I don't think there are serious drawbacks with two-column layouts.
In mathematics, I suppose you have larger equations and fewer figures so I can see your point, but at least in the areas I am familiar with, a typical 10-14 paged journal article will have about 5-7 figures and maybe 30 equations (with at most one or two of those will need to be larger than the column-width) so the space saved is considerable. As a matter of fact, when I use the IEEE Transactions template on LaTeX, when I switch from two-column to single column layout, the manuscript nearly doubles in size (I believe margins and fontsize stay the same, though I might be wrong).

Who cares about saving space? Print is dead.

@barneypitt matter of fact, given the huge amount of literature that appears every day, it's no wonder that a 10 pages paper looks less scary than a 20 pages one -- and people are more likely to consider taking the time to read it.

@sonarventu I can't speak for anyone else, but when I see 20 pages of readable paper using a decent font size and a modern font (why do half the papers use ugly eye-tiring serif fonts straight out of the 1970's?!! -- should be called sick page syndrome) I find that vastly less "scary" than 10 cramped pages.

@barneypitt I also can't speak for others, but I usually find the opposite to be readable. It's also much much faster to read. Large fonts and larger movements make my eyes tired, although there are exceptions. Eg. I have IEEE's single page layout, but I find NeurIPS' style very nice.

Let me add the following to the excellent answer of Nate Eldredge:
The origin of the problem is the paper format from the typewriter era: A4 or letter paper has the right size for the large (and wide!) letters from a typewriter, but is too wide for printed text.
Publishers of books know this. The typical width of a book page is smaller than A4.
If you want printable PDFs, you essentially have the choice between the following non-ideal solutions:

Use very long lines, which is usually considered bad to read
Two column format, which is good for words, but not for formulae or images
Use wide margins and/or a large font, which means more pages

But let me add my guess for the future: People mostly stop printing papers, but read them on tablet computers, ebook readers or other screens. So you can stop squeezing your paper into A4.

I feel you. I absolutely hate the two column format. While I can appreciate the argument that narrower columns are easier to read, this only applies to printed papers. Most people are reading their papers in screens, which renders any argument about ease of reading moot. Have you tried reading a two-column PDF on a smart phone? The experience is atrocious. The only academic discipline where I see people use conventional formatting as a default is philosophy, with good reason.
HTML-based paper publication should be the wave of the future. Distill is a great example of this.

I think that reason could be; when reading academic paper, you are often re-reading sentences. It's not like reading literature, that you are just proceeding sentence-by-sentence without ever going back.
In order to grasp written text, sometimes you need to re-read, and having shorter lines makes it easier to go back, i.e. easier to visually capture several lines of text and eventually to advance faster.

Somewhat off-topic, but I re-read sentences in literature all the time. If it's a master of sentence-craft like Martin Amis or Kazuo Ishiguro I probably read 1/3 of the sentences again!

None.
It is true that shorter lines are easier to read, but this only highlights the other main problem with the standard academic paper formatting, namely that the fonts are ridiculously small.
Increasing the fonts sizes (they should be twice as large to achieve the readability of any modern document) reduces the line length accordingly.
Another way to look at this is that the typical academic paper takes four pages of a modern document, and for no other reason than tradition, crams them onto one page, 2 by 2. (Okay. A reason could be to save paper, but it's a silly reason, given that journals are pretty much only read in electronic format.)
Academics don't (often) publish longer theses in this anachronistic format, and haven't for many years. Any arguments which try to make a case that there is somehow something "special" about academic content that somehow requires this antediluvian formatting, have also to explain why modern formatting is used for longer works.
It is high time for journals to enter the 21st century and accept papers only in a modern single-column large font format, using modern sans serif fonts.

The modern age goes even further: leave the format preferences to the end user and publish in a format that is digital first and printing second. Why fix a paper format in the first place?

As mentioned elsewhere, "[t]here's a widespread belief that shorter lines...are easier to read." Regarding,

I contend that the two-column format is impractical for long mathematical equations

Push long equations into one-column figures.

Your solution seems like it would greatly disrupt the flow of any paper with more than a few such equations.

@TobiasKildetoft This is a workaround, not a solution. It will work in some cases and not in others.

@corey979 Indeed: in two-column manuscripts, place one-column figures at the top or bottom. (LaTeX does this anyhow.)

And many journals stick to the principle that a figure is a figure, and an equation is an equation and you mustn't jumble the two up.  There are other workarounds for full-width equations, but they're not great either

@ChrisH Figures may contain equestions

@user2768 there's a big difference between "contain" and "consist (mainly) of".  The former is commonplace, but the latter is very rare.

@ChrisH Maybe there aren't many long mathematical equations

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text:
How to advertise an academic job in a small Asian country to US/European candidates?
I am a mathematician, recently returned home to Malaysia after a decade or so in the United States.
I had experienced for myself the pain of the US academic job search in snagging my postdoc. Now I am on the "other side", so to speak. My institution, Xiamen University Malaysia, is brand new and growing fast, so we need to hire a lot of mathematicians.
From my time in the States, I know there are many brilliant, hard-working people with excellent research records who cannot get permanent academic positions in the west due to the scarcity of jobs. I think my institution would provide an excellent opportunity for them. Obviously we cannot offer the same financial package a western university can, and I'm sure it is difficult for a lot of job candidates to consider a move across the world, but it is reasonable for the cost of living, and we teach in English and offer a teaching load that is conducive to research. I think it would be reasonable for a western-based job candidate to at least consider us.
My question is, how do we get the word out in the west? The obvious solution is Mathjobs.org for the US, but we don't have the budget for advertising there. I have emailed hundreds of department heads in the US and Europe, but I doubt many of those emails got forwarded.  Are there any other avenues to try?

An ad on MathJobs is as low as US$300, and it might be worth asking for a discount; the AMS offers developing-country discounts for lots of its other services.  By contrast, in order to even interview a candidate from Europe or North America, you're going to have to pay their travel expenses from a third of the way around the world - easily five times the cost of the ad, per candidate.  If you can't afford the ad, how do you plan to afford the the travel expenses?

Thanks! I tried asking for a fee waiver or discount from mathjobs.
We have a budget for flying serious international candidates in for interviews (or at least we have done so in the past) but no budget for advertising. It is one of those bureaucratic things.

@Ben Crowell Fair point, but I contend that there are a lot of up-and-coming research institutions in Asia that would be interested in exploiting the large academic applicant pool in the west. Not all of them would use mathjobs for various reasons (e.g., perhaps their jobs are not in mathematics). I contend that for this reason my question is of broad interest.

@DarrenOng You have received the most logical answer: "Advertise in whatever forum that is commonly used for job adverts in your field." (If the question was how to make the position itself more attractive, it'd be a different matter.)

@DarrenOng - presence of stupid bureaucratic constraints is one of those things that makes a job much less attractive in general.  Knowing that your department is unable to spend a relatively small amount of money on advertising makes me wonder what other stupid bureaucratic constraints I would have to put up with were I to work in your department.  This is not a negligible factor, especially since it reinforces a (usually unfair) stereotype of universities in developing countries as being saddled with inefficient and corrupt bureaucracies.

@BorisBukh I don't think for any field there is just a single place to advertise. Even in US mathematics, where mathjobs is dominant, people still put ads in mathematical magazines say, and there are still job announcements passed on through email, etc. Perhaps there are other ways I haven't thought of, and this is the reason for this question.

@AlexanderWoo perhaps, but that is not something I have the power to address unfortunately. I will comment that, having spent many years in US academia, one has to deal with bureaucracy there too.

@DarrenOng - Let me suggest: (1) If hiring talented Western staff is important to you, these kinds of bureaucratic obstacles should be priorities for the limited amount of power you have.  (2) If you have no power at all, this bodes poorly for your hiring and retention b/c most Western academics want to be citizens and not only employees of their universities, and they already come in with a disadvantage since they don't know how to get things done in your culture.  There are reasons why even NUS or HKU have relatively few Western faculty - and for them, it's certainly not the pay.

@AlexanderWoo those are good points. Thank you.

To the OP, I'll chime in. If US$300 is an obstacle, how do you make people believe that your institute is willing to spend at least US$30,000 annually to hire? Your first thing is to convince the admin people in your institute to pay the ad fee. Look at my profile, you'll know that I am not a westerner.

@scaahu As I mentioned earlier in the comment chain, the US$300 amount is not an obstacle, the problem is that one is not allowed to use money budgeted for one purpose and apply it to another purpose.
We have a budget to pay salaries, and we have even paid for the travel expenses for previous foreign interviewees, but we were not allocated an advertising budget.
I have already pushed for ad money for mathjobs. Thank you for your suggestion nevertheless.

Your target audience probably reads stack exchange.  Maybe your problem is solved.

Try conferences. I'm not in math but in my field most of the job news comes via conferences and academic societies.
It helps if the jobs are for specific subfields, so you can advertise them to the smaller conferences/societies for those subfields.
You may also try focusing on conferences/societies outside of the US, like Australia, NZ, Canada (e.g. Canadian Mathematical Society). Jobs in smaller countries like Canada are harder to come by and people on the market might appreciate seeing other non-US options.


text:
"Dressing down" to impress in academic settings
I came across this highly-upvoted comment on reddit (15,300 karma) by /u/Semi-Hemi-Demigod

The CEO of the company I work for said that it's not uncommon for
  programmers to be asked to dress down for important meetings.
  Apparently investors don't think programmers who dress well are good
  programmers.

I was wondering if this logic applies to academia, particularly in fields like math, computer science, and philosophy where stereotypically many top people  dress sloppily. In other words, are there academic contexts where dressing badly will make me seem more competent at my job?
Perhaps this would be an interesting social science experiment to perform, if it hasn't been done already!

I don't particularly have an answer for this, but perhaps this may also go in the other direction; highly accomplished individuals can 'afford' to dress down since no one will dare to say negative things about them!

Graduate students at my department will often dress in a suit for their qualifying exams (which include an oral presentation), so if the phenomenon you ask about exists, apparently they didn’t get the memo.

It sounds to me like the comment has been made in the context of startup culture (outside of that it's not common that programmers would have anything to do with an important meeting with investors). Quite frankly, startup culture is weird, and often very, very illogical. I would not read anything into this.

It's anecdotal evidence but here's an interesting twitter thread when women in STEM (mainly field ecologists) share their thoughts about make up and dressing down at conferences: https://twitter.com/astrochicana/status/1028516242926305280

If you go back into the history of IBM, starting in 1923, you will find that these things go in cycles.

The logic doesn’t even apply in software development, let alone academia.

I would say it's not actually about dressing up or down, per se, in either case (coder or academic). Rather, it is about trying to fit the stereotypical image of the persona you're going for. For a coder, you'd probably go for jeans and a hoodie, or maybe a patagucci jacket, as opposed to a suit or sweatpants or hawaiian shirt. For academia, you might want some brown loafers, jeans, and sport coat with leather elbow patches, maybe a well-worn briefcase, as opposed to whatever else.

I think that CEO is saying: you don't want to be the only one at the meeting wearing a coat and tie.

One day in my undergrad supervisor's lab he told us students that there was going to be a visit from a funding agency the next day. He usually wore jeans and a sweater that his wife knit, so the other undergrad asked "oh, are you going to wear a suit?" to which his response was "I'm going to dress like a physicist, so I'll probably wear exactly what I'm wearing now"

Would you trust a programer or scientist wearing suit?

I think the CEO is saying: I want to wear all black and a mock turtleneck so the investors think I'm the next Steve Jobs and it'll look even more fake if you show up in your normal business casual wear.

It is not a matter of dressing sloppily or dressing "well", it's that different cultures have different ideas of what that means.  Certainly in most of the western US, many people in STEM fields can go through an entire career without ever wearing a business suit - indeed, "suit" is a derogatory term.  But that doesn't mean it's acceptable to wear dirty clothes or skip on personal hygene.

That was an interesting twitter thread @Droplet . Your comment should be an answer!

It depends on the industry of the startup too. I worked in a Silicon Valley edtech startup and engineers were asked to dress up for our annual partner conference. This is because our partners were largely university professors and admins from all over the world. It was more respectful to dress up more than dress down.

For what it's worth, while working as a developer/project manager for a New England software company in the 1990s, I was discussing an upcoming visit with a (then) Fortune 50 customer in the south.  The salesman said "I'll be in a suit, but I don't want you in one - get a new pair of Dockers and a nice shirt".  The phenomenon isn't new.

@Džuris I would. I am a scientist, and I have seen brilliant scientists wear everything from jeans and hoodies over the stereotypical worn jacket with patches all the way to made-to-measure suits.

Relevant Dilbert comic.

I am a professional programmer of *cough* decades who always wears handmade suits.  I have twice been part of statrtups who pitched and took me rather than 20 somethings. I can talk a much wider and deeper talk than they can. Vectorcast guys who make their decisions by stereotype or jumping on bandwagons don’t last long. My fellow programmers generally rate me higher than I think I deserve, and I have come to believe that a suit can hide a multitude of incompetence :-)

At least in tech I did once come across a senior engineer type who typically liked to dress in a suit at work. But when he was called out to client sites he was final-tier so it basically meant 2 previous engineers had been unable to solve the problem. Those guys typically wore suits but he would "dress down" when visiting the client site because they perceived it as getting one of the "real" engineers when someone turned up looking like a hobo.

On an unrelated note, proforhobo is a thing: https://www.proforhobo.com/

Cédric Villani is a famous French mathematician (Fields medalled, now also a member of French Assemblée Nationale, i.e. parliament) who is known to be very well dressed

Real estate agents are usually expected to dress in suit, but when my grandmother had died and her apartment was to be sold, both I and my brother liked that the agent had a more "down-to-earth" look.

Does "Dressing Well" mean wearing an unconformable and otherwise pointless suit, and whats more doing this because it's part of the (possibly corporate) culture or dress code? A suit does say a lot about a person, I'm not sure that it's all good.

If you're being genuine rather than phony about "dressing down to impress" rather than because it's what you normally wear, it seems to suggest that you lack credibility you desire.

@alan2here If it’s “uncomfortable and otherwise pointless” then, no, it’s decidedly not “dressing well”. For a suit, “dressing well” means wearing a comfortable, suit that looks effortlessly elegant, rather than uncomfortable and out of place.

This is very similar to a case when a television did a short presentation of a lab in a university. They asked the participants to wear white lab coats, because they were in a laboratory, so they should look like scientists! It was a computer science lab. But the filmmakers insisted that they wore white lab coats and should be busy turning knobs and pressing buttons at random all the time in the background.

This is just a complicated race of mind games.
There are many fields where 'dressing up' is the norm, as it gives a first impression of respectability and competence. This is also because in many fields 'dealing with people', being sociable and looking professional and respectable is an integral part of the job.
In the hard sciences, on the other hand, your results speak for you, there is limited interaction with people necessary, and it is widely recognized that "dressing up = being good" is a false association; no amount of tailored suits will hide the fact that you don't know your stuff. The two things are completely orthogonal. Also, many scientists are not 'people persons', to put it mildly.
So when you overdress, this raises a warning in the mind of many scientists: 'Is this guy one of the many people in the world and in other fields who dress up as an attempt of hiding their incompetence? I should be careful in judging him'. But there is nothing inherently bad about it if you really are competent at your job, and you can let your work speak for you. Some scientists routinely suit up for conferences.
Similarly, dressing down is not seen a problem, as long as basic hygiene norms are respected; at most it can raise an eyebrow.

A tailored suit may not "hide the fact that you don't know your stuff," but it may demonstrate financial success.

@user2768 I would think demonstrating financial success is also looked down upon in academia. Also you don't really have to be financially successful to get a tailored suit, so it could be interpreted as the person wanting to appear financially successful when they maybe aren't.

@Kapex I should have perhaps said "expensive tailored suit," I should have perhaps also mentioned that such a suit would be worn in certain circumstances, e.g., job interviews, meetings with government/industry/administrators/etc., ..., rather than in general, since "demonstrating financial success" is only appropriate in certain scenarios

A lot of generalisations in here: "many scientists"...

@user2768 I was more thinking about standard situations like meetings, conferences. But yes, there are of course circumstances where it is appropriate. Any situation that involves convincing people to give you money would likely be easier if you wear an expensive suite.

@awjlogan True, I admit it, but I find it hard to answer this question without making generalizations.

@user2768: But how many people in the academic world would be able to tell the difference between an expensive bespoke-tailored suit and something bought off the rack at Men's Wearhouse?  The problem with signalling success in such a manner is that a lot of people can't read the signals - or misread them, thinking that suit means you're insecure about your professional competence.

@jamesqf An expensive bespoke-tailored suit is surely identifiable.... Okay, I take your point, some won't know. But, those that matter probably will.

@user2768 I actually doubt that, given that "those that matter" might well mean "the most senior researchers", and these might be the least well-dressed by those sorts of standards, still wearing the same tweed suit as 30 years ago.

In Czech Republic, my experience is people dress up to signal they care about the occasion. So for example for job interview it is quite frequent (though not very required) to dress up. There are definitely people who will appreciate the signal and probably also some people who will appreciate you not sending the signal...

@Tobias Kildetoft: And "those that matter" may care about things other than the way a person dresses.  I once worked in the same building as a guy who invented a multi-billion dollar technology.  Typically came to work in jeans and a t-shirt, and brought his dogs with him.  Never heard management object :-)

"A complicated race of mind games" +1 for that alone.

If an academic is dressed in an unusually casual manner, I generally ignore it.
If an academic is dressed in an unusually formal manner, I assume one of these:

They are an administrator, or manager, rather than an academic
They are here for a job interview and they don't know it is not necessary to dress formally
They are going to an event outside academia, like a funeral

I do not think anyone is impressed by either dressing up or down, but it can send a signal.

Isn't formal dress for interviews somewhat country-specific?

Or "they are a group leader in Mechanical Engineering department" also works.

Fourth possibility to an academic dressing formal (as least where I am): thesis defence committee!

Before my first conference I was told by my PhD supervisor to dress smart but don't wear a suit because "people will think you're trying to sell them something"

@AnderBiguri I've noticed most of the engineering professors tend to dress well as normal every-day dress.

I'd add to my experience in a biomedical field that I might assume they are an MD rather than a PhD, or just as likely in a conference setting, a salesperson.

@Emilie I think I wore shorts and a t-shirt to my dissertation defense. Nobody gave me advice on how to dress. The committee was wearing shorts and polo shirts, which they wore every single day anyway (replaced with pants when it's cold of course).

@BryanKrause That's what I came to write. Odds are if they're dressed up in my field, they're a clinician.

I'm rather appalled that, "They wish to project a professional and capable air," is not on your list, as this is the most common reason for dressing formally in any professional setting.

@jpmc26 - The quid of the question is that in some settings dressing up doesn't project a professional and capable air.

@MattSamuel yeah, it seems to vary a lot. Here, ppl dress up and unexpecting external members are sometimes surprised....

Another possible reason someone is "dressed up" is that they are at a hearing about their own incompetence. In which case it's not necessarily a good thing. The only reason PE teachers at my school would wear suits was when a kid broke their arm / leg / etc. and there was a mini-formal inquiry.

@Daniel, care to tell what "dressing smart" is, except from the obvious Smart Dress that measures your blood pressure and has blinkning organic LEDs all over it?

@Ghanima Smart dress usually would be no trainers, a shirt with buttons and a collar, jeans ok but not ripped. Not sure what the female equivalent is exactly.
Imagine you were going to meat a partner's parents for the first time (and wanted them to like you).

@Ghanima In this context, at least in the US, "smart" means "upper-middle class".

That funeral killed me.

When I worked at NASA/GSFC, if I saw someone dressed up who wasn't new, I'd ask "job interview, date after work, or you just need to do laundry?".  Once in a while it was a funeral or they were giving a talk, but you'd be amazed at how many times dressing up was just a sign that they didn't have anything else clean to wear.  (or technically, that was all they'd admit to).  When I worked for a university, 'interview','date' and 'laundry' were about even.

I was certainly a bit irritated by that prof in one of my oral diploma examinations (each of them worth 1/7th of the final grade, +2/7th for the thesis) turning up in a longsleeve with threadbare collar. Slightly disrespectful towards a student getting the final judgement on what he learned in the last five years of his life.

Let me add a German perspective, biased by an interdisciplinary field of computer science where "the other discipline" is more formal than CS.

In day-to-day life, students, doctorate students and post-docs are dressed as they would do in other aspects of life. Some are more dressed up, others dressed down, nothing special. But no one would appear in a suit or nice dress (like e.g. in economics / law where it is quite common in Germany)
Professors are usually dressed a bit more formal, also depending on the field. In general, the closer they are to economics / business studies, the more formal the dress. I usually attend in a jeans / shirt combination  as long as we don't have guests or formal ceremonies.
In formal settings (guests from industry, formal speeches, interviews, ...) a suit / business dress is common, for most a tie as well.
In conferences, it's about the same, but the range is broader. Some dress up a bit more then usual (e.g. most presenters wear a suit / business dress). I personally would recommend this (and recommend it to my PhD students), because it shows some kind of respect to the audience. But maybe this is because I have a background in performing arts as well and stage presence is a must there ;-). If someone is dressed informally, I personally don't care.
In contrast to some answers, in Germany I would highly recommend to wear a formal dress in job interviews at least for faculty positions. For PhD candidates / postdocs it is not necessary.

I never heard of someone dressing down intentionally.

I am PhD student in maths within a CS group in germany and I observed that in average CS people are dressed much more formally than in maths (especially in conferences, maybe this is due to the presence of industrials).

@YYY It's definitely due to the presence of people from industry - I noticed that most when I switched universities from one with loose ties to industry but strong ties with the stem fields, to one with very strong ties to industry in most groups. At the first university, it was jeans an t-shirt all around, maybe jeans and shirt and maaaybe a jacket if you had important visitors. At the second university, most professors wore jeans and shirt day to day and had a jacket in their office because you never know when your industry partner is going to drop by, and of course suits for important days.

One comment: Wearing the combination of jeans and a (formal or semi-formal) shirt is a European thing. You wouldn't see this in the US as jeans there did not enter every-day office culture there so much. In line with YYY's comment, how much a PhD student dresses up for a conference depends on how applied the topic is. If it's theoretical computer science, going full suit would be odd.

In inverse problems (applied mathematics, more or less) conferences I have seen people dress in a dark suit, hoodies, and everything between. I notice the extremes, but everything between them I ignore, at least to the extent that I could not tell how most people were dressed at a given conference. Any assumptions I make about their mathematical ability based on their dress is mild and unconscious.
At mathematics departments where I have been, some senior people in leadership positions dress slightly more formally (but not all), and some individuals dress more formally, but I do not see much attention paid to this, aside (again) from extreme cases that might be noticed. One typically has some idea of who the people are, so assumptions on their ability are not done based on their clothing.
I do dress slightly more fancily at job interviews and conferences, because I do believe it has a small effect on self-confidence and response from others.

"I do dress slightly more fancily at job interviews and conferences" i.e. I put on a shirt and not the nerdy old T-shirt, in my case :D

This is BY FAR the best answer, dress so you feel the most confident/comfortable. Your performance in the interview is what matters - dress so you perform your best. Don't dress down or up for other people within reason.

I wore a suit to my first astronomy conference, where I was presenting a poster. I had several people come by and joke: "First conference?"

I don't know about "dressing badly", but not wearing a jacket and tie was reasonably standard for the professors and professional staff that I encountered in getting my two master's degrees - one in Oceanography and one in a Computer Science-affiliated field that often interacted with teachers.  (I'm in the US, btw.)
In the Oceanography school, given that it was a 'wet' science (i.e. lab and field -based), ties and jacket would get in the way and just be prone to extra wear and tear.  Even the folks who had more of a desk job (many people specialized in computer modeling) tended to decent casual to business casual - usually only going to business casual on the days of seminars.  So the dress norms for the campus were everything from bathing suits / other clothes for field work up to business casual; ties and suits as everyday clothes were an indication that someone had moved on from lab or field work and was in administration.
In the CS-related field, obviously, 'wet' field work wasn't a thing.  Most grad students wore kinda whatever.  Most professors wore business casual: khakis and a button down shirt; some routinely wore jeans (especially on Fridays).  It is true that the higher up the food chain you got, jackets and ties became more of the norm again.  At the time I started the program (part time grad student), I was also a high school teacher.  My typical clothes were khakis, pressed shirt, and a sport coat.  I was definitely the most formally dressed in the grad student office.  I got confused for faculty fairly often.  There were also a fair number of professional staff working on the team.  E.g. the chief software engineer for the group I was with was not faculty.  He normally dressed in jeans, but this was not out of place.
Your question seems to be about meetings.  I figured it was useful to discus normal dress norms first, though.  For presentations at conferences or poster sessions at the university, grad students tended to find more formal clothes (some went for full suits, most went for khakis/shirt/sport coat/maybe a tie).  For internal group meetings, there was no effort to wear anything other than what a person normally wore.  If there was a meeting with a prospective new faculty member, people might dress a bit more nicely than normal, but there was no effort to break out (e.g.) ties.  However, the CS-related group often had conferences for teachers.  During these events, grad students and staff were expected to dress 'nicely' (e.g. khakis and a nice shirt).  Grad students from my group often went into classrooms; they were expected to dress at least business casual.
On the whole, I don't think anyone (besides the students, when they could get away with it) dressed "sloppily".  Hygiene was good; nobody was working in sweatpants at the CS school; folks doing field work in oceanography wore what they needed to, but usually kept decent clothes nearby.  Certainly nobody was told to dress down appear like they were better at their job.

Just to make two more probably-obvious points: first, people may make subliminal, subconscious judgements that they will act upon without being willing to defend the basis for the action if it were brought to their (conscious) attention; second, people may/will (thinking of the first point) presume that you've made a conscious choice to dress however you dress (and comport yourself).
The second point may need some amplification: people will (perhaps only subconsciously) presume that you "know what you're doing" in dressing or behaving how you do when you interview with them, etc. And, then, perhaps subconsciously, they may wonder why you'd choose to dress/behave in a fashion that you could/should have known might distract or offend or ... them.
For that matter, and not without at least a slight reason, it's not surprising that a person could subliminally think "If this person is so willing or eager to disregard my preferences/opinions/whatever at this point, how can I trust them to take care of my interests subsequently?"
Yes, I know, this touches on various volatile issues... but, apart from what people should or should not do in reaction to one's dress or behavior, the present question (and, often, others) are about what will/may happen. How to "win friends and influence people"? :)

While it probably varies by field, most academics seem to fall on a spectrum from "pyjamas" to "business casual", depending on how much they personally care about fashion. There's a few factors influencing it like age, student vs. postdoc vs. faculty, whether they have an event (meeting, talk, teach), whether they work at a desk or a bench, but I don't think there's really any universal rules. The one thing that seems extremely rare is formal dress like a suit, that you would wear, say, in court (I'd say job interview for a company, but then companies also vary a lot).
Because the suit (or the equivalent for women) is so rare, I think if you dressed up that much, you would get some pushback. Presumably if you kept it up everyone would adjust to it after a while and just accept it as a quirk of yours. Although, often, people who dress in suits are either coming to interview for a job, or they're sales reps from a company or similar non-academic people, so perhaps you might not want to be confused with them.
As for dressing down to be perceived better in a meeting, not knowing anything about the audience, I doubt it would work. As I said, there's a spectrum from utter slop to business casual, so long as you're in that spectrum, it's "good enough" and it doesn't really matter where you are inside that spectrum. The guy wearing gym shorts and flip flops isn't going to like you more or less for wearing nice pants and a button down shirt, most likely he will ignore it because he's used to working with many people who go with either option, and does not consider it a remarkable trait. Like I said, if you go outside the spectrum and wear something like a suit, people might be surprised and/or confused.
Now if for instance you're about to have a meeting with a bunch of people who you happen to know are all strongly prejudiced about wearing one kind of clothing, and not the other, obviously dressing in that particular way will help make a good impression. But this isn't something that can be guessed easily from field or institution. You can also never know if people will generally like you more for being on the low or high end of the usual spectrum. It all varies tremendously from person to person (and not really with any useful groupings like field) so if you really want to go down this route your best bet is probably go to the office and see what people actually wear.

There are articles theoretically showing when "dressing down" is interpreted as a favourable signal: Too Cool for School? Signalling and Countersignalling and the articles citing it on Google Scholar.
I do not know of an empirical test with clothing, but in the context of hotel advertising, higher ad expenditure is sometimes associated with lower quality: see this Tourism Economics paper.

are there academic contexts where dressing badly will make me seem more competent at my job?

In my experience with CS in the United States, no.

You rarely have someone making important snap judgements about you. In a situation where they need to evaluate you -- a talk, job interview, etc -- they have something meaningful to go on.
Most people you need to impress have seen plenty of smart and less-smart folks of all sorts, so they distrust the stereotype anyway. Smarts and reliability/maturity are treated as separate axes and you want to impress on both.

The only context I can think of is if teaching a class of impressionable undergraduates, maybe this strategy could make an impression on them for a lecture or two. But I think your teaching will be much more important after that.

"You rarely have someone making important snap judgements about you." How about meeting new people at conferences while giving a talk or otherwise? At least as a junior scientist, those people might be hiring you in the recent future.

@TommiBrander, In my own experience - as in (1), if giving a talk then people evaluate you mainly on the content, if meeting them briefly then they won't make an important snap judgement (e.g. decide to review your application or not based on 5 minutes). Further, as in (2), someone making important decisions like hiring is even less likely to rush to judgment based on superficial cues, and if they did, dressing down/sloppily is not a good bet: more likely to make a bad impression than good. Just my experience.

I would think that there is a non-zero chance that someone decides to follow or not follow your talk on frivolous reasons, or that if you made an impression, they might be curious about you and hence give a little more attention to your application than otherwise, etc. My best guess is that such snap judgements are made all the time and that they can have real effects, but I can not point to a study to support this, as this is very far from my field. I agree that dressing down is not a good bet.

@PascLeRasc Neither would many others, but academicians being humans, things like appearance and first impressions do affect our decision making. The effect might not be terribly large, but it almost certainly is there.


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Etiquette on contacting publisher of a multi-author book after one co-author passed away
I am asking this question on behalf of someone who does not want to create a stackexchange account.
Suppose one author on a multi-author textbook that is used regularly in college courses has passed away (on the order of many months ago) but author royalty checks are still at the same amount as before, so the publisher apparently does not yet know that one of the authors is no longer alive.
Here is the main question: what is a proper way for a still surviving co-author to point out to the publisher that one of the co-authors has died without making it come off like a living co-author is just looking to increase the percentage cut of the royalties?  (The living co-author suspects the royalty structure should change, but doesn't want to be so crass as to emphasize this point in the message.) You may assume there is nothing in the contract saying that in the event of a death, royalties should be sent to the one of the deceased co-author's relatives. Does the publisher usually just pay the living authors as much as before or draw up a new contract to pay out the same amount of royalties in a new way?
I suppose that if the author of a single-author textbook dies and no provision was made for royalties to continue to be sent to a next of kin, then the publisher quietly cancels the royalty contract with the original author and either (1) keeps all income for itself or (2) makes a contract with a new author to create a new edition at some point. For those in mathematics, like me, an example of the first case is probably what happened with Springer-Verlag after Serge Lang passed away while an example of the second case is Cengage after James Stewart (author of the famous  calculus books) died.

I believe that the common contracts with publishers have royalty payments going to an authors' heirs.  There's no reason that the split among authors would change.

@BrianBorchers, that is an answer. Royalties accrue to the estate. (laws vary, of course)

This question is about law and not academia.  See https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/67407/what-are-the-intestate-succession-rules-for-intellectual-estate-literary-works.

You've kind of got it backwards.  The only way that the payment situation would change with the author's death is if the contract explicitly stated that it should.  The default, as Wolfgang says, is that the deceased author's share goes to his estate, and eventually to his heirs. That's how practically every contract works, not just publishing. If the other co-authors were expecting that share to be redistributed to them, they are mistaken (unless of course the deceased co-author left it to them in his will).

This is strictly speaking a legal question, but in the jurisdictions I am familiar with, royalties that are due to someone are inherited by that person's heirs upon death unless stated otherwise in a will.
As a consequence, my suspicion is that you can contact the publisher but all that will happen is that they will send the check to someone else, rather than to the deceased's co-authors.

Probably the author's executors need to be the ones to contact the publisher.  In the meantime they can keep sending the checks payable to the deceased author, and the executor should deposit those checks into the estate's account, where they will be eventually distributed to the heirs.  Once the estate settles, the publisher can be told to start making the checks payable to the heirs instead.  But I don't think the co-authors have any role in any of this.


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What tools do you use in academia to jointly review a thesis?
I am giving a thesis for review by several supervisors, who will comment and request changes. It's written in LaTeX, but I don't want to bother the people involved with having to compile that themselves. Instead, I would send a PDF as it'll represent the final product most accurately.
My question is, what can I use / do you use for the review process?
I know they can just comment inside the PDF, but maybe there is a tool that allows everyone to see everybody's comments?
If supervisor A and supervisor B disagree on something or don't want to have to correct the same mistakes, then it'll be easier for them to see the other persons comments. Kind of like a shared Dropbox file, but something that's a bit smarter about keeping the history of all comments.
Have you used anything like this or do I just have to rely on built-in PDF highlights / notes?

Haven't written a thesis, so I don't know how it works, but can you send it to them sequentially so that you aren't doubling up on grammar comments, etc?

Technically, yes, but practically I would prefer to send all at once, since review might take a few weeks for everyone and if they don't do it in parallel, then I have to wait a few months rather than weeks...

Fair enough, I also agree with David's answer that many reviews probably don't want to see other's comments anyway.

You may be able to send it chapter-by-chapter so every supervisor sees every chapter but they're not looking at the same chapter at the same time. Either: pipeline it (so that every chapter goes you->A->(you?)->B->(you?)->C->you; or send a chapter to each supervisor, make your revisions from those comments, send each chapter out to the next in turn. But whatever you do, aim to maximise how much the supervisors' wishes are accomodated. Also try to have colleagues (newish PhD students in your group who may learn some background, postdoc coauthors) read it first for grammar/spelling/sense.

I work in academia but don't review theses, but I'm pretty sure you'll have to do it the way they darn well tell you to do it. :)

@RickHenderson as I said before - it depends on your relationship with the supervisor - sure, if they are people, who don't care for such considerations - don't make them. But if your Prof. is curious in trying something new sometimes as well... why not suggest it?

Print a hard copy and get your supervisors to write on it.

Adobe Acrobat has a feature called Shared Review.
It lets multiple people in real-time comment on a single PDF so long as the PDF is hosted in a single place (e.g., if your department has network storage or there are services online to host such files).
It works pretty well and is already built-in.
Alternatively, you can email them each the PDF and then use the merge comments features to combine them, then send out that PDF. Not as nice but it doesn't have to be hosted.

I'll check it out - do you actually use it :) ? I asked the question that way to see if people also actually consider that tool useful (and got their peers / supervisors / professors to use it as well)

It looks like features requires a subscription, correct? Do you know if everyone involved needs that subscription or just me (the person initiating the review) https://acrobat.adobe.com/us/en/landing/acrobat-pro-ipm-pricing.html?trackingid=KRRST&ttid=cllctcmmnts1&DTProd=Reader&DTServLvl=SignedOut

@Chris I do not have a subscription and have used it. I'm guessing that is actually just for hosting.

@Chris Added an alternative option, which is a simpler but not as convenient way.

I'll see if I can merge comments, but trying to use the Shared Review feature always sends me back to that annual subscription website.

I generally dislike if people want me to make use a specific software. Note also that people may have different workflows and needs. It may well be that some of the guys wants to read the thesis on paper and send back a feedback on paper! If they do you a favor, make the work most easy for them and go with everything they propose.

There are a few products that do this... pdsurf is a free one that just started, I forget what the bigger online one is called,

This is a good question and I don't want to discourage you, but let me explain what you will likely find most of the time.
They each already have a preferred way of giving you their feedback and some or all of them will not want to use whatever tool you choose.  Since they are doing you a favor, you will need to respect their preference.  For instance, I prefer to take a hard copy and a red pen and go to a coffee shop or library in order to focus.
Also, when I review a thesis I do not want to see comments from other reviewers before I form my own opinion.

I understand your concerns - this of course depends on the people you work with and your relationship with them. Your last point is one I had not considered - maybe I'll revery to a network / dropbox download link that'll I'll update along the way and anyone can get the latest copy (without comments) whenever they want.

Since they are doing you a favor. Is it really a favor or duty?

Agreed, it depends a little what kind of review you are thinking about. If we are referring to the Prof, who took you on and initiated the project, they surely have an obligation to review your work, but there are obvious limits to this. In the end - you are still the author.

@DavidKetcheson I assume you don't always get to do reviews the way you want to, though, right? At least when looking at journals / conferences, everyone also has to agree to a common review system and they can't possibly accomodate every persons preference. So I think it's save to assume that everyone does have some flexibility with the reviewing process.

Not really a tool for commenting, but very useful for review: if you go through many iterations, you might want to consider using a tool to generate a "track changes" PDF file, which shows the supervisors what parts of the thesis have changed since the previous version. Especially if you are at some point making many changes scattered throughout the thesis.
I would recommend latexdiffcite for this purpose. It's an improvement over the earlier latexdiff program. latexdiffcite even understands git and can give you diffs between different commits.  Illustration:

Definitely good for one of my reviewers, who always wants to see all the changes I made since the last iteration :) !

Also see rcs-latexdiff for differences between latex files
https://github.com/driquet/rcs-latexdiff

Also LyX and LibreOffice provide similar diff capabilities, and you can change how the content is highlighted. I use it to review and merge the changes the reviewers have done on my paper!

I've been a reviewer for many thesis, and here is my 2 cents:

It is preferable that you ask each reviewer for her review process and stick to it. For instance, I will always print the thesis and write my comments with a couple of pens (color value = type of the comment) and then send back the annoted manuscript (paper or a scanned version). Why? Because I read and comment mostly in transportation, in the waiting room at the doctor/local administration, etc. All places where it is not convenient/possible to use a laptop or similar device.
I don't need and want to see the comments by other reviewers. As an author, it is your responsibility to arbitrate in case of contradictory comments
About grammer/spelling/etc. Those errors must be anecdotal in a manuscript sent to reviewers. My policy is that if there is too many typos/grammatical mistakes in a sample of 5 pages, I'll send a message to the author saying that I will wait for a "more final version". As a reviewer my job is not to correct the spelling, but to assess the quality of the work.

I laughed at "Two many typos" :)

@Bernhard Indeed ^^

A good option that I have used for effective shared review is Overleaf, an online shared LaTeX system, plus the LaTeX todonotes package.  Overleaf means everybody is looking at the same shared document (and also has a git interface, if you wish).  LaTeX todonotes let you annotate inline or on the margin, and can be customized in various useful ways, e.g., with a different color for each reviewer.

Would this work for people who don't know how to use LaTeX (some of my collaborators do not)?

They'd have to learn at least very small amount by rote---I have found this isn't a problem for people who aren't ideological about their document editors.

It's a very good suggestion, but I didn't want to share the LaTeX source, probably very useful for collaborative writing, though.

My preference, as a reviewer, has been to print a hard copy from the pdf file and then attack it with a red pen. As my handwriting becomes less legible ("benign essential tremor"), I'll switch to the second-simplest system: Ask the student to send me the TeX file and insert my remarks into it. (I have some simple macros defining an environment for my remarks, causing them to show up in red in the pdf file.)

I would recommend:

sharelatex : https://www.sharelatex.com/ - an online collaborative LateX editor
Authorea: https://www.authorea.com - sometimes called "google doc for academics". It's online and collaborative too, but you can also work offline because the document is stored under a git repo which you can clone to work offline. On the online version, everyone can comment on the document and edit it. There is a chat too. This is also present in sharelatex I believe.

HTH


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Advice for a new journal editor
I was recently appointed to the editorial board of an academic math journal. I'm excited about this position, and I want to do the best job I can. I have no experience with the role however, other than my interactions with journal editors as an author and reviewer.
What makes a good editor? Those of you who are academic journal editors, what do you wish you knew when you were just starting out?

Here's my advice to you, as a long-time member of editorial boards and, more recently, (co-)Editor-in-Chief: Ask!
Many of us get thrown into this role at one point or other in our lives, and think that we can figure things out, but the reality is that there will be many cases where you simply don't know for sure what to do. In that case, ask around. Ask your older colleagues who've had this role for a while. Ask your editor-in-chief. (In fact, you should have probably asked the questions in your post to your EiC to begin with!) Ask the other members of the editorial board. Don't try to muddle through by yourself, but use the resources you have and assume that the people around you are there to help you figure out what to do.
In addition to this, here are a couple of guidelines you should also follow:

Act ethical: If it is conceivable that a reviewer you have in mind might have a conflict of interest on the paper, don't assign them. If you could possibly be conceived as having a conflict of interest yourself, ask the Editor-in-Chief to assign the paper to someone else.
More than anything else, the reputation of the journal (and, by extension, your reputation as an editor) rests on whether you turn around papers within the timeline the journal strives for. You will frequently assign papers to reviewers who don't respond to your invitation; or who say that they will do the review, but then don't end up doing in a timely manner or at all. Don't let things drag on. Email them again. If they don't respond, call them. If you can't get a commitment from them, unassign them and assign the paper to another reviewer with the request to turn around the review in a shorter timeline (whatever time you have left after the delay). That will occasionally involve calling in a favor from a friend, and sometimes doing the review yourself. In any case, don't let things sit forever -- problems with timeliness don't tend to work themselves out magically.
If you disagree with a reviewer when you make a decision (say, because the reviewer writes a rather short review and recommends publication; but you feel that the review is not of sufficient quality and want to discard it and instead go with the other reviewer who was more critical), then explain your decision. In fact, explain any of your decisions to both the authors and the Editor-in-Chief. People sometimes think of editorial boards as composed of these inscrutable people who nefariously make decisions in smoke-filled rooms based on their current mood; but in reality, editors just do the best they can with the information they have, and then forget to explain their thinking. In other words, whatever it is that's on your mind, communicate it to the people who might want to know, rather than letting them guess.

I'd say the thing that I wished I knew most when I started handling journals is, reviewers are fickle.

Don't expect that if you invite a reviewer, they will accept or decline. Some never respond. My personal guideline is to wait 7 days before concluding they won't respond and therefore invite new reviewers. You might need a different timeline, depending on your field.
If reviewers accept, it's not a guarantee they will submit a review. My personal guideline is to wait 7 days after the deadline before giving up on the review ever being submitted.
Per the above, if you want to be confident that a decision can be made on a paper, you'll need multiple reviewers who have agreed to review the manuscript.
If a paper is taking a long time to process, the most likely person to remind you about it is the author (sadly).

I'd also recommend getting familiar with the journal office. After all, the journal staff is there to help. If you're lucky, you'll have a motivated desk editor who'll do everything possible to make your task easy, e.g. by configuring the editorial management system to suit you (e.g. what is the default time to give reviewers to submit reviews? What is the default reviewer invitation email supposed to look like? etc), reminding you about late papers, answer questions about processing time, potential special issues, and so on. Unfortunately there are some desk editors who'll simply do nothing unless explicitly instructed ... fingers crossed.

Check your editorial management system to see if it sends automated reminders at a reasonable pace; if it doesn't, configure it to do so because it's a great help.
If you have trouble using the editorial management system, ask the journal office. If you want to know statistics like "how long is our average time to first decision?", ask the journal office. There's a good chance the required data is stored by the editorial management system.
Odds are, as an editorial board member, the publisher will be willing to do you small favours. So for example if you invite a review article or publish an article in the journal, the publisher might be willing to offer free open access or at least discount the price. However, you'll have to ask.

Finally, I suggest making some personal guidelines (similar to the two I mentioned above). Because I was handling so many papers, I found it difficult to remain unbiased. Guidelines helped me treat every paper on an equal footing so I didn't find myself waiting optimistically for a late review because I don't have any other reviewers, for example. I know one editor who waited six months for a late review. Poor authors - they continuously asked, and the editor continuously responded with "it's under review, be patient".
Good luck!


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How do you find out about upcoming conferences in your research area?
Once in a while I find out that an interesting conference in my research area has taken place, but I did not hear about it. Usually when I find out about upcoming conferences it is when a friend, colleague or collaborator lets me know. But sometimes interesting conferences are organized by people outside my immediate research circle, so I don't hear about them until it is too late. Is there a way to keep tabs on what conferences are going on in a particular research area? My area is math/mathematical physics, but I imagine this is a question that academics of all fields might be interested in.

Here is short list of tips:

Ask your supervisor. They should know a lot of upcoming conferences.
Learn about the "yearly cycle" in your field. In which month in which conference, when are deadlines usually…
Subscribe to mailing lists in your field. Follow some societies or active people in your field on social media.
Do regular searches on the internet (e.g. every two or three months.

On top of that: You will get familiar with more conferences over time and you'll build a network where you'll get information also about smaller meetings.

At my university, there is an internal website (and staff!) devoted to precisely this issue. The site shows the conference topic, conference website link, dates of the event and submission dates for papers. The great thing about the list is that it is curated, so one does not have to wade through an overwhelming number of pages  about conferences that are either scams, or not well respected.
I know that my university is not alone, at least in my part of the world ... so it would be worth your while to inquire at the office of the VP Research at your own university about something similar.
You might also have a look at this page which is a list of links and guides to various conferences. It's not as well curated as my university's internal list, but it's a good start.

Wow, I've never heard of any such offer. Is your internal website attempting to cover all research areas? It almost seems wasteful, as I'd often expect there to be at most one faculty member at a given university to be potentially interested in a given conference.

For me, a common way to find out about conferences and workshops in my area stems from being registered to a few mailing lists. These often also cover job advertisements for my field.
In my experience, most events are either part of an annual conference series or by invitation only. For the latter, you'll obviously find out if you are invited (by receiving the invitation), and don't really need to know it otherwise. For the former, once you've learned about the conference series once, you can actively check for the next years edition. It's common that people are aware of stuff like "The deadline for conference X is usually in January", which then informs a more specific Google search.


text:
How to find job seekers in a big conference? (Like the AMS-MAA Joint Meetings)
I am heading to the AMS/MAA Joint Meetings in Boston soon. My mathematics department in Xiamen University (Malaysia) has a couple of open permanent positions this cycle, and I would like to meet job seekers at the Joint Meetings and ask them to consider applying. We have had some success recruiting American postdocs in the past through online advertising on the AMS's Mathjobs website.
This conference attracts a lot of job seekers because many American universities hold interviews during the conference. So what is the best way for me to meet and get the word out to job seekers at the conference?

Many conferences have a recruiting center set up for just this purpose. For you, see https://www.ams.org/profession/employment-services/employment-center/employment-center?_ga=2.175695266.1005756068.1672586784-983556044.1672586784

By "job seekers" do you mean people who are looking for a faculty job in general, or people who have already submitted an application to your position?

@NateEldredge I mean people looking for a faculty job in general

Announce it at the end of your talk. Most potential candidates would listen to your talk because it is similar to what they are doing and that is what, I think, you need. (As Moishe Kohan pointed out in the comment, this might not be suitable for AMS-MAA meetings but it is common in other events/disciplines)
Distribute flyers.
Use coffee breaks to communicate with people you think would be an asset to your department.
Send (semi) personal messages/emails to potential candidates after, for example, listening to their talks. You can easily find people by googling their names.
Use the recruiting centre.

Did you ever attend an AMS/MAA Joint Meeting? Just AMS has about 130 special sessions...

@MoisheKohan no, but what makes it special?

That what I thought. "Special" is just a word used by AMS, it means that there is a particular main topic, say, "symplectic geometry," of the talks at the session. Now, think of your advice #1: OP is not trying to recruit in their particular area, say, symplectic geometry. Such an advertisement will reach out to, 25 people or so.

@MoisheKohan I added a note to #1. However, I think that's the point: to reach less but to hit the target (systematic search). I don't see the point of reaching 100+ but only 1 is adequate for the position. Also, when giving a talk is also about advertising oneself as an attractive colleague or supervisor.

@MoisheKohan Yeah, but it still helps  because people in a talk can think "Ah, hmm, Moishe is looking for a job, I should tell him to check out Darren."

It is almost certainly too late to implement the following for this year, but for future reference...
Many such large conferences have an exhibits area where various organizations (book sellers, etc) set up booths. There is a fee for this, of course. You could in future set up a booth advertising your university and its faculty needs. Staff it with people who can be helpful to a prospective hire. That could include students, actually.
Then, you could rent a hotel room at the venue and contract with the hotel to set up a buffet in that room on one of the nights during the conference. Use the exhibits area to hand out invitations to the buffet to anyone who seems promising and use the buffet room itself to have conversations with people. The invitation should indicate that the buffet is for recruiting, so people come prepared.
This might be costly and requires advanced planning. Some companies do this at some conferences in CS, for example, as part of recruiting.

This page shows some options: https://www.jointmathematicsmeetings.org//jmm


text:
Should I send a manual email as well as an autogenerated email to potential reviewers?
I am an editor for a math journal. When I select and invite a reviewer to referee a paper the journal's management software automatically writes and sends an email invitation to that reviewer.
For a couple of recent papers where I was having trouble getting reviewers to accept an invitation I started sending a manually written email (from my university email address) to the potential reviewer asking them to consider reviewing the paper,
My response and acceptance rates are much higher when I do this, which is great, but I worry if I am being overly pushy this way, or if emailing reviewers directly is outside the norm.  When I get requests to review papers myself, I almost never get a manually-written email from the editor, just the auto-generated one.
So is it OK to send a manually written email to potential reviewers, when the journal already sends them an autogenerated email invitation? This manually written email would be in addition to the autogenerated one.

I wouldn't send both up front - that seems a bit spammy.
It seems perfectly reasonable to me for an editor to reach out to potential reviewers however they communicate with other humans: email, in the pub, at a conference.
If you're getting a better response with your personal communications, I'd recommend reaching out that way first, and if someone shows interest, that's when you can follow up with the autogenerated email.

Long time editor and editor-in-chief here:
I would say putting on a human touch is a perfectly legitimate approach and, as you are finding out, is improving your response rates. So go with it.
In the system we use the journal where I'm the EiC, I get to see the auto-generated email before I click "send". I often put a personal preface at the top. This way, the recipient gets only one email, but it has a personal element to it.


text:
Is it appropriate to bring to an editor's attention non-ethical publishing that can't be directly proven?
The situation concerns ephemeral facts, that can't be proven to an department outsider.
The sole two authors of an accepted paper have virtually no contribution to the result, but both hold prominent positions of authority within the department and are on top of that have close family ties with each other.
The main theoretical research was done by two computer scientists and the experimental setup & execution by a whole team of software engineers. Both groups are routinely engaged in R&D, but are affiliated with a company, that is owned by the two authors.
These affiliations are nowhere stated in the accepted version of the paper. And there is no chance that anyone will publicly come forward for fear of retribution. So, there is literally no physical evidence.
However, I feel that the conditions warrant that the editor of the journal that accepted the paper be made aware of the circumstances.
I stand to gain nothing from either accepting or retracting the paper, nor am I employed by said company, but I am affiliated with the department and feel that such behavior corrupts out department and science as a whole.
So the question is whether it is appropriate to write an email to the editor stating the above and additional information?

Imagine you are the editor. What could you do with such information? You could not say "I heard from an anonymous source who does not give proof that you acted unethically, so I retract your article". If you want to take action, you need to give the editors something they can work with, otherwise it is just a waste of your and their time.

@MaartenBuis I don't mind providing proof. But what coul constitute sufficient proof, given that I won't have witness accounts? Even if I had those, how could I communicate them to the editor, i.e. from the editor's point of view, I could just made witnesses up

Contacting the editors may not have an effect at all. They simply cannot tell whether your accusations are facts or are just made up.
If you really want to do something about this, you should rather write to their institute or university and inform them about the suspected scientific misconduct. They often have specialists nowadays who will try to resolve such issues. Be prepared to be asked for proof.
Please note, that it might be completely valid to only have these two authors: authorship is not automatically gained by implementation work but rather by significant contribution to the paper. Please check which criteria must be fulfilled in your institute or field to become an author of a paper.

I would upvote this except for the last sentence: institutes do not get to make their own rules about who can be an author.  You need to know what authorship norms are in your field.

Thanks for the feedback. I extended my sentence, however, at my current university we have these (local) authorship guidelines. So there might not be one answer that applies for all countries, fields and universities.

Well, I would say that if your university's guidelines aren't consistent with community norms for your field, then it is inappropriate to follow them.

The university guidelines are more strict. For example, I have seen that many PhD students list their professor as author by default. However, my university is more strict and requires active authorship for him to be included (he also enforces this and does not want to be listed as author without any contribution)