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Working with a Ph.D. supervisor that may have to take medical leave?
I'm interested in working with Professor X for my Ph.D. My first meeting with X went very well. I like him and I get the impression that we would work well together in the graduate school environment. Moreover, the research is in a field that I am extremely interested in and I think it would be a good fit for my skills.
In speaking to the graduate students privately, I heard nothing but praise for Professor X. However, one student disclosed that he (the professor) suffers from a disability that required him to be on medical leave for over a year. The student said that this slowed the progress of research and probably delayed his Ph.D by a non-trivial amount. Otherwise, he said that he was very happy working with Professor X and would even make the same decision again.
Obviously, I think it would be inappropriate to ask Professor X about this. However, I am concerned that such a situation may arise again during the course of my Ph.D. I also don't want to discriminate against someone due to a medical condition.
So my questions are:

How problematic is it for an advisor to be unavailable for research consultation for a long period of time?
Is it unwise (or unethical) to make such a decision based on the disability of an advisor?
Would it be inappropriate to ask other graduate students about his condition and how it has affected their work?

I know that the choice of advisor is often considered the most important decision about graduate school. Professor X would be my clear first choice but I'm just having second thoughts due to potential uncertainty in the future of my Ph.D.

One thing to consider: it is likely that the first time it came as an unexpected event, but now it is expected, he may set up a back up plan for you, like having a co-supervisor.

I'm a big fan of saying "donkey" when it's a donkey, rather than beating around the bush and calling it a grey-colored, short-legged horse.
The thing is: Everyone, including the professor, understands that any leave of absence he's going to take will affect you in a number of important ways. It's not like anyone can be mad at you for wanting to bring this up. So that's what I would do, acknowledging the awkwardness of the situation, in a personal conversation:

Professor, I would really like to work with you, but I have one last, awkward topic I'd like to ask you. When talking to others in the department over the past couple of weeks, someone mentioned that you may take an extended leave of absence for personal reasons. It's really none of my business to ask you about this, or the reasons for this, but if I signed up with you, it would be something that clearly affects me as a graduate student. So I wanted to bring it up and see whether that was true or not.

That gives the professor an opportunity to tell you how it is. He will understand why you ask, and tell you about as much as he chooses to share. If there really are medical reasons, you're not likely going to get any better answer by going around his back and asking others in the department.
I'll also mention that over your career as a grad student, you're likely going to have a number of awkward conversations with your adviser anyway. You may have to talk about money issues (grant runs out and it's not clear if the follow-up grant will be approved), breaking up with your girlfriend and falling into a hole for a number of months, being sick for an extended time, etc. Professors have awkward conversations with students all the time, and the better ones have figured out how to have them without it being that big a deal. So talking about something you have a legitimate concern about should be par for the course.

Slight correction - the question did not say that anyone expected the professor to take a leave in the future, just that it had happened in the past.

Same thing -- it's an issue for the potential grad student, so it ought to be discussed.

If you think that you are the sort of person who would be pretty vulnerable to an advisor's extended absence, and if you don't see someone else in the department who could mentor you to some extent during such an absence, then you might want to ask the professor something like the following:

I understand you had to take an extended leave of absence once.  [Pause; if the professor speaks about a health issue at this point, do the usual empathetic listening before proceeding with your question.] Do you expect a similar problem in the future?Do you anticipate having an extended leave of absence from the department for a sabbatical or other reason during the next few years?  If yes, do you have a colleague whom you could ask to fill in and provide some mentoring?

This would give the professor an opportunity to be up front with you.  If he doesn't rise to the occasion, then the next step could be to ask a department administrator.  This would probably work better as an in-person or phone conversation than email.  I would not use the word "disability," but "health concern."
Whether your questions are met with honest responses or not, you should be looking around for other sources of mentoring, just in case; and you need to do some weighing of the various options open to you, and the relative pluses and minuses, just as you would do with a potential advisor who might be about to retire.
I want to reassure you that it is not discrimination to ask for information from the person with the disability, regarding how the disability might affect the work you might do together, or regarding how you and he might, together, work on accommodating the disability.

This seems to assume that the professor will need to take time off in the future, and has failed to "rise to the occasion" if that is not the case. Some medical problems can be completely resolved and unlikely to recur. Why not be more direct: "I understand you had to take a year off. Do you expect a similar problem in the future?".

@PatriciaShanahan - May I have your permission to incorporate your more direct approach into my answer?

Please do. ....


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Is extra time on the GRE looked down upon?
I have a friend who generally gets extra time on tests within my University, but is worried that if she requests it on the Math GRE it'll be denoted on her scores somehow, and places she's applying to may count it against her.  So, I have the following questions:

Does the Math GRE subject test currently indicate whether a student used extra time on the exam (as a disability accomodation)?
If so, how do grad schools in Math/CS take this information into consideration?

I've never seen extra time reported next to GRE scores.  But then again, I don't care about GRE scores.

Not a lawyer but, I'm pretty certain any such reporting would be against the ADA Act. So no it shouldn't be reported in any way.

@scrappedcola I agree I personally would find it very odd if it was reported, but I'm mostly hoping for someone with firsthand experience to confirm/deny it (which JeffE's comment does to a certain extent).

ETS used to "flag" the scores of anyone who took the GRE under what they referred to as "non-standard test conditions". After an Americans With Disabilities Act lawsuit they settled and agreed to no longer flag scores, and according to their website:

I heard that ETS is no longer flagging test scores that are reported to score recipients. Is this true?
ETS has discontinued flagging almost all scores for tests that are
  taken with accommodations. For example, if a test taker receives
  additional time or extra breaks, the score will no longer be flagged
  in the report. In rare instances, ETS will flag the score report as a
  "nonstandard administration" only if the test is significantly
  altered.

This is true for other related tests, such as the GMAT. Note that this last line about "significantly altered" means some accommodation that requires a whole section to be removed, or the test to be heavily altered in some other way, and does not apply to just extra time or similarly regular adjustments.
A person seeking accommodations will still need to request them well in advance of the test from ETS, and will need to provide appropriate medical information in order for them to approve the request.

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How to write a recommendation letter if you are not sure about its appropriateness
As supervisors, many times we are asked to write recommendation letters.
In my case, I have been recently asked to write one for a student, who is looking to enroll in a Ph.D. program.
Due to the short time working under my supervision and the lack of results, it is not easy to highlight their strong points.
In fact, It is also difficult to emit my recommendation.
What would you do if you were in my shoes?

What would you do if you were in my shoes? — Say no.

@BenCrowell perhaps the OP is referring to himself. The OP is a PhD student himself and thus lack of experience prevents him from writing any meaningful letter of recommendation. Those letters should be written be senior researchers. Getting one from a PhD student will be of no value for the applicant.

@Rüdiger so, in that case, is it better not to write it? Claiming the lack of experience of the supervisor...

@siserte Indeed. You should tell him to ask someone more senior, someone who already has had lots of students. His opinion will be much more telling.

If you wrote a lukewarm letter, you probably wouldn't be doing your student any favors!  So here's my suggestion:

I'm excited to hear about your interest in pursuing graduate studies.  But at this time, I don't have enough information to write a strong letter.  If you're still looking for a recommendation next year [next semester], I'd be happy to revisit this decision.

I recommend delivering your decision in person.

Decline on the grounds that, indeed, you've worked too little together.
However (and actually adding to Peter K.'s answer), a discussion in order to understand why they chose you might be useful -- meaning that usually one asks for recommendation from people with whom they've worked longer. If their background and intentions don't seem suitable, maybe also tip them that another career path would be better?

Either decline to write it or get them to write a draft.
The other option would be to engage with the student and have a conversation with them about the "job" and see what their reaction is to what you think the qualities are that would make them successful. Do they have those? Can they convince you that they do?

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Negotiating the number of articles during PhD
I have contacted a professor at a prestigious university. They mention they'd be glad to have me as a PhD student, if some funding gets approved.
However, to complete the PhD program I am expected by them to publish three times in good journals. This to me seems quite a lot, possibly meaning staying in the PhD program for well over the canonical 4 years, say, 5 or 6. There is no departmental rule on this.
Is it commonplace and advisable to negotiate the number of publications to e.g. 2 good journal papers? If so, do you have any tips on how to achieve this?
I expect the answer to be quite negative, also because at such university there will surely be another candidate willing to take my place and commit to 3 journal publications. Don't get me wrong, I am very enthusiastic about starting my doctorate but I need also to look at the medium term and to avoid dropping out because of too much pressure.

I am in Switzerland and in a STEM field.

These things aren't typically negotiable, especially not ahead of time, but they are really, really stupid policies. They encourage publishing in predatory journals, fabricating results, and salami slicing, and leave your graduation timeline up to editors and reviewers who cannot be expected to prioritize your graduation. Rather than negotiation, you could ask whether there is any typical flexibility in this rule (e.g., submitted papers count or some papers can 'count' for 2), and if not go somewhere else that has spent effort thinking about students and the implications of their policies.

@BryanKrauseisonstrike Except that I would need to publish in good journals, not predatory ones :-)
Thank you for your comment

There isn't necessarily a red line between them, and it's common that journals once considered reputable are eventually seen as less than.

You'll also see questions posted here by students dealing with the problem that their advisor wants them to publish their paper in Science and is willing to wait years passing the paper among journals of gradually decreasing stature, trying to get a high-profile paper for themselves, while their student just needs the paper to be published somewhere to graduate. A reasonable graduate program would see that the work already done to get something publishable is worth allowing graduation, let the thesis committee judge quality, and let the publishing process take place on its own timeline.

@BryanKrauseisonstrike I would interpret "good" to be a lot stronger than merely "not predatory".

@EspeciallyLime There isn't a lot of room to maneuver there. The most sought after journals expect work to be somehow "impactful", often conditional on particular results; it's not fair to expect a graduate student must get the "right kind" of results those journals expect rather than merely perform solid work. The next tier of journals may typically practice good peer review practices, yet are also under pressure by their publisher to collect fees from authors. It's not always possible to know where those fall and not everyone agrees about which cross the line.

While asking the students to publish X papers in journals does not seem the best approach to me for a supervisor (one big impactful paper can take longer and be worth more than 3 papers in top journals), your question basically boils down to "How can I do less than my supervisor expects for my PhD".

You write "I'm expected to...". I advise to try to find out in the first place what exactly the (written) rules are. It won't hurt you asking "what happens if I don't manage to do that". Also find out how a PhD thesis is ultimately assessed. If this is a fixed and set in stone rule, there is no way to negotiate, but you should try to know as precisely as possible what the rule actually is and how things work. Maybe it's just a recommendation and people quite regularly get away without doing that? (I've seen things communicated as "expectation" that were never enforced.)

Unless you have some evidence that this professor treats others differently, you probably have no basis for complaint. In those fields in which a "dissertation" is a set of published papers, three seems to be about the right number to expect.
Even asking might have negative consequences. What do you have to offer in a "negotiation"?
If you are in the third or fourth year of such a program and the third publication isn't imminent, then you might be able to talk about it with the professor, but it seems unlikely you will find success initially if this is their established standard, never mind the lack of department rules.
I suspect that if you look elsewhere you will probably find the same thing, and even if you are allowed to "get by" with only two it is impossible to predict how it will go in advance of starting the research.
The flip side, of course, is that high standards will actually benefit your career if you meet them.

Is it commonplace and advisable to negotiate the number of publications to e.g. 2 good journal papers? If so, do you have any tips on how to achieve this?
I've never heard of anyone negotiating beforehand. However, it might be worth checking with current students if this is a hard graduation requirement or a guideline. In my department, incoming students are also told that they will need 3 papers. The actual number that graduating students have seems to vary from zero to 6+, depending on the situation and subfield. That being said, if even it if it isn't a hard requirement, it sounds like you'd still be expected to put in an amount of work that should suffice to produce 3 good publications. (Which seems appropriate for a 4 year PhD after a Masters').

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Scientific computing: academic research versus industrial skills
I am trying to evaluate the difference between two professional figures in the field of scientific computing, they are called Alice and Bob:

Alice has earned a PhD in applied mathematics at a top 10 university, she has two publications in rather good journals, and had to write a certain number of python programs to prototype her findings. She has limited industrial experience acquired through a 7 months internship at the end of her master's, where she saw some basics of Fortran/C++ and parallel computing. Her area of expertise is computational mechanics and finite elements - she has developed some new algorithmic approaches there - but not how to write high performant and efficient low level code
Bob has earned an industrial PhD from a university ranked 300/400 in the world, working full time for a well-known scientific computing company. He has two small conference papers where he mainly applied existing methods to his case and compared their performance. He constantly worked with Fortran/C++, parallel computing and low level code. The area of expertise is computational electromagnetism with finite elements, but the focus was implementing mathematical algorithms into a commercial software, and make them fast and robust

Unfortunately, the company of Bob cannot hire him at the end of the PhD, and he finds himself competing with Alice for an opening at another well known scientific computing company, offering a position as a scientific software developer in C++/Fortran, in industry.
Who has higher chances of being offered the position?
The application area of the job offer might be computational mechanics, electromagnetism, or fluid dynamics...
How does industry consider skills, experience and formal education?
Disclaimer: cross posted on Computational Science, where I was advised to also post to Academia Stack exchange.

@Nobody The company is not able to open a new position for Bob (e.g. lack of money)

@Nobody It was covered by research funds from the government, not possible

What  Industry wants are skills and real experience. Alice has limited industrial experience. What about Bob ?

He has I guess lots of coding, in low level languages. A lot of debugging. Precision and methodicity. Designing code that others have to interface with. @Nobody
To name a few, there are certainly more: he is used to working in a team and so on

Bob would get it if I were the hiring manager. Unfortunately, I am not the hiring person. My words don't count.

*Who has higher chances of being offered the position?
The application area of the job offer might be computational mechanics, electromagnetism, or fluid dynamics. I am curious to see how the answer might change.*
It is impossible to answer. All research centre do research, all companies work for profit. Then there are too many varieties of goals and way to get to the goal. A company developing injector for diesel fuel would have a different interests in fluid mechanics with respect to an insurance company interested in climate model, i.e. fluid mechanics.

Alice and Bob are two different persons, with different interests ... you are asking something similar to "what is the best way to spend 2 hours with friends, eating  or going to watch ?"
It depends on you and on the friends you have, there cannot be a general answer.

Could you edit out the ending part ...  *I am curious to see how the answer might change.
I expect that there is no definite answer, as the situation might depend on the recruiters, the specific position etc... But maybe I have overlooked one aspect or the other and perhaps, Alice is much more appealing than Bob, or viceversa.* . Can you conclude with ... > What/How does industry consider skills, experience and formal education?

At the end of the day, both will get an interview, and the respective personality of Bob and Alice will be the deciding factor.

I'm not a recruiter or industry person so I doubt my opinion holds too much weight.
Bob has experience and, presumably, solid references from his previous industry job. I think he also has perfectly acceptable qualifications otherwise. If his hard skills and experience are a better match for the job I would think he is in the running. The caveat here is that it is possible (and this happens literally all the time) that a recruiter or hiring manager may be swayed by the shiny credentials of Alice and overlook her lack of industry experience. My guess is that both are really on pretty equal (although different) footing and the final decision would come down to what the company was looking for, how the interview went, how each candidate fits with the team, etc.
It's literally impossible to know past that. It could be that the boss graduated from Bob's university. Or it could be that there is a mid-level manage who is a snob and only wants people with prestigious degrees. It could be that there is a third person that has both a prestigious degree AND years of relevant experience.

What is your experience with hiring managers in particular?
Note that my field is pretty small: there are not many applicants per job position, it is possible that screening is done more carefully than when many applicants are present

I am not a hiring manager, if that's what you mean. This is just like, my opinion man.

I was rather meaning the "happens literally all the time". I was curious on which stories (personal or not) you may have there. Or to expand on this point.

my field is pretty small: there are not many applicants per job position, it is possible that screening is done more carefully than when many applicants are present
It is actually the contrary: since there are few applicants per position, the screening will be performed on a case-by-case basis and not on rigid absolute criteria, with criteria 100% contingent to the current project/business/team situation, one day Alice is the best fit and 6 months later for exactly the same advertised position Bob is the best fit.

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Does attending many conferences/workshops increase your chances of landing a post-doc?
I am in my first year of PhD studies within science in Europe, and my interest and goal in the future is to to pursue an academic career, where I can find a permanent position in Europe. I am wondering if (and if yes, how much does) attending physically (international -) conferences, workshops, schools etc affect the application of a candidate searching for a post-doc position in Europe? Do you have a feeling for how many attended conferences etc are considered sufficiently low to be not invited for an interview of a post-doc position?

To summarize the good answers so far: quality (/fit) is far more important than quantity.

Just being physically present doesn't do anything.
Networking and meeting people who can hire you or speak well of you to others is valuable.
There's no magic "number of conferences", you aren't earning points that you later trade in. If you never attend a conference and conference attendance is typical in your field, it might look odd on a CV. If you never attend a conference and conference papers are the primary research dissemination mechanism in your field, not attending basically means not producing any research, so that's surely going to sink your chances.
For networking, though, it's going to be somewhat stochastic. You could meet the person that eventually hires you at the first conference you attend, or it could be that no one you meet is hiring when you are ready to apply.
Your PhD advisor should help you decide which conferences to attend and hopefully you can attend some together and they can assist with introductions.

Attendance alone means little. But attendance is an opportunity to start to build a network that can serve you well later. If you, and your work, are known to many people and you are seen as a helpful contributor to the field, then your prospects improve.
So, it isn't the number that is so important, but how much you take advantage of the opportunity. You can and should follow up with people you meet and interact with.
The time between sessions is just as important as the sessions themselves as you get to meet people informally and chat over ideas.
So, zero is a bad number, and ten may be a good number or not. If you are invisible you gain little in the networking area, though you may learn something in the sessions.
At some point, going to the next conference lets you reinforce connections that you've already made. This can get you into a circle of collaboration, meeting friends/colleagues of those you met in the past. So, in that sense, more is better than less. But you have to work at it.

In my view, the time between sessions is  significantly more important than the sessions themselves

For your own professional and personal development, I think it's good to attend at least one conference each year (in Europe that could mean one national and one international every other year or depending on your funds it could be a European one one year and an intercontinental one the other year. Always apply for any travel fellowship you can too, to start building a funding record - even when your lab has money to send you somewhere!
But attending/sitting in a conference isn't going to do anything. Always submit an abstract, try to present a poster or, of possible and if your project is at that stage, select that you also want to be considered for a talk selected from the abstracts. This ensures that you are developing your academic/scientific skills and get feedback on your work - which will improve your science. Plus you get to see other people's posters and get new ideas as well - it's a lot easier to interact with others when you are presenting work yourself - posters are THE academic conversation starter).
Talk to people at breakfast, lunch, coffee breaks, social hours, dinners, poster sessions (yes conferences are exhausting), so you naturally start building a network in your area/field.
Of course, if you want to change fields at some point, or scope out adjacent fields for your postdoc, you can also see (and discuss with your advisor) if you can attend a conference in your "new"/desired field. But make sure you then have some conference experience under your belt, so you feel a bit more comfortable talking to strangers and senior scientists.
I remember that I found it intimidating for the first couple of years (I think everyone does), but everything becomes easier and better with practice and when you know a few faces (and yes, people do get offered postdoc positions or at least invitations or hints to apply).


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What is a Scopus indexed conference and how can I identify one?
What is meant by a conference indexed in Scopus? It's easy to know which journals are indexed in Scopus from the Scopus homepage. Are there any conferences in Mathematics which are Scopus indexed? Does there exist any page like this https://www.scopus.com/sources.uri where I can identify Scopus-indexed conferences?

Conference indexed in Scopus does not exist! Rather, it's conference proceedings.
In the context of conference and conference proceedings, mathematics is as broad as it can be. You might need to narrow down to domains/subdisciplines.
For what you're looking, perhaps Scimago might have a searchable listing
Edit: PS: just noticed this was asked in 2020!

There is no such conference.
Scopus is an indexing database which indexes the publications (journals and conference proceedings). Scopus does not index conferences.
What you are actually asking is: Whether the conference's proceeding is indexed by Scopus?
Many conferences publish their proceedings via popular publications such as Springer, IEEE, ACM, Elsevier. If it is a Springer-publishing proceeding: usually, it is LNCS (Lecture Note in Computer Science) and it's sub-lecture notes such as LNAI. Similarly, there is LNEE (electrical engineering), and many such. These LNXX proceedings are indexed in Scopus.
If it is IEEE, usually the papers will appear in IEEE Xplore (which is Scopus-indexed). Similarly for ACM proceedings, ACM Digital Library.
Elsevier publishes under the name of Procedia Technology or Procedia Engineering and few more. These are indexed in Scopus.
There may be other known publishers such as IOS Press, and many more. In that case, you have to check thoroughly where the conference publishes its proceedings and whether that publication is indexed by Scopus.


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What to do when a section of a published paper has a section which contains similar results as mine?
I had a research article posted in arXiv on November 2020 and it is currently in review by a leading journal, I call it J1.
Today when I was browsing research papers, I found that a research paper has been published in a lower tier journal (let's call it J2) and it has one section with ideas that are very similar to mine.
The paper published in J2 was sent for review on 1st Feb 2021 and it got accepted on 15th Aug, 2021 (per the dates given on the website of the journal).
The section which is similar to mine has results which form the main idea of the paper and I find that it has been allegedly stolen. I am amazed how my paper which is already on arXiv can get scooped like this. Obviously the wording has been changed by the authors but the main idea in the section is the same as mine.
I am confused what should I do now. How do I prove the plagiarism, whom should I reach, and how should I approach this?
Is the fact that their results in Sec 1 are similar to mine and I have published it first on arXiV not a valid claim to prove that my work has been scooped?
I am in my PhD days and the author who has done this is an Assistant Professor.
Note: By "similar" I mean that the results obtained in Section 1 of the paper in J2 and the results obtained in my paper in J1 are the same. The other sections of the paper i.e. Sections 2 and 3 in J2 are different from mine.
But the results in Sec. 1 are very important and form a base for the other sections of the both the papers in J1 and J2.

what do you mean by "exactly similar"? Similar or identical?

Are you sure the other authors did not come up with the same idea independently? Do you have any specific reason to believe they stole it from your paper?

@henning; by similar I mean the idea is similar with wordings changed, yes you can call it identical

@GoodDeeds; even if they come up with it independently , they should have cited my paper in which the idea has appeared first  and published in arXiv

Sure, but in that scenario "stolen" is too strong, it suggests malicious intent. That's one possibility, the other is that they simply did not know of the existence of your paper (especially given how many papers get put on arXiv these days). I am not sure what you should do (since the other paper is already published), hopefully someone will provide a good answer.

@GoodDeeds; is it not necessary to study thoroughly before publishing something?

Why the downvotes?please explain

Related discussion from the opposite perspective (not a duplicate): https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/163374/68109

Did you talk to your PhD advisor about this?

@Math_Freak Many similar ideas pop up at the same time. The are - so to say - in the air. E.g. calculus, for a famous example. Heisenberg and Schroedinger, for another one (although equivalence was not obvious at the beginning). So, unless you can really make the point that they really copied nonobvious statements from you, you should be careful with the word "stolen". As for studying previous work, yes that should be done. But there are so many publications that it is impossible to be sure one covered everything. Many ideas get forgotten and rediscovered multiple times, in all honesty.

I did not downvote, but I suspect many of these negative responses have to do with the work stoten in the title.  Not even "allegedly stolen" as the newspapers do.

@CaptainEmacs; So how should I prove that it is stolen, Should I quote their results and my results and show they are similar? Can you please help?

@Jeroen; I am the sole author of this paper

"Why the downvotes?"  I did not downvote, but in my opinion the problem with this post is that you did not show anything that would suggest that the authors of that paper were even aware of your work, yet you catergorically claim that they stole your idea. If you truly believe that they knew about your work, you should explain why. "the main idea in the section is the same as mine" is simply not convincing—it could be entirely accidental. If there is anything else, mention it.

@Szabolcs; because my paper is available in arXiv and their paper deals with same topic as mine

As said in several comments above, it is not an infrequent occurrence that two people arrive to the same idea independently.

So... I would suggest a rewrite of the question.  Instead of asking "how do I prove", ask something like "How do I determine if deliberate plagiarism was involved here, and what can/should I do if it was?  What can/should I do if it was not?"  Even if there was no deliberate plagiarism (negligence rather than malfeasance) you should still have options.

Only having a similar result reproduced is not "stolen", but yes, you can ask for your result to be cited if you were first. If you suspect that the authors lifted precise formulations from your paper (e.g. because they might have been reviewers), you could alert the editor. Note that with having your paper on arXiv, you can prove priority. Generally, I would advise talking to your advisor. Proving plagiarism is not easy, but can be achieved by finding uncommon formulations. So, "Let V be a vector space" (or similar) does not count.

"My paper is available in arXiv" is not a valid argument why the entire academic community should know about it.

Expanding on @Ian's comment, it is quite possible that not only did the authors of this paper not read your arXiv submission, but the reviewers didn't, either, otherwise they likely would have recognized the similarity and suggested to the authors that they cite your preprint.

This is why you don't sit in arXiv papers.  You submit for publication right away.

It is a bit unclear how "similar" the results are. If one author was to measure body temperature simply by using a thermometer, and another author measures it by taking infrared images, the result would be the same but the way to the result would be completely different.

Simultaneous discovery of research ideas is an entirely normal occurrence in academic research. It happened to me several times over my career so far, and I’m just one guy — some versions of this happen to practically everyone who works in crowded, competitive research areas.

I am confused what should I do now.

What should you do? First of all, take a deep breath and think very carefully about the seriousness of your accusations and whether they are substantiated by hard evidence. You have at least one very clear misconception in your post and follow-up comments, namely the belief that other people must know about your work if they are working in the same area, because it is posted on arXiv. That’s absolutely not true. How would you feel if someone accused you of misconduct because you failed to cite a relevant paper of which you were unaware? Have you read all the literature in your field? I bet you wouldn’t feel that that was a very fair accusation if someone accused you of stealing someone’s work that you never even heard about.
After taking a deep breath, my suggestion is that you show both your paper and the other one to an adviser or senior colleague, and ask for their advice on how to proceed. Quite possibly there isn’t anything you need to do — mathematics journals are quite tolerant of publishing independent discoveries, and in any case your posting to arXiv will establish precedence in the unlikely event that people care enough about this to make an issue of who has priority over the ideas. You may want to contact the authors of the other paper and point them, diplomatically and without any hint of accusation of wrongdoing, to your own work. And you may even want to cite their paper or add a discussion to your paper of how their ideas relate to yours — that depends a bit too much on the details so I don’t feel I can advise you precisely. Regardless, please don’t accuse people of stealing ideas based on such flimsy evidence. That is a very serious matter and could badly hurt your reputation.

Shameless plug: do the same, you would do, if you were "just" interested in that other paper.

So far, nothing in your question at all indicates they have indeed stolen your results. You can claim you came up with them earlier, but the history of science has had plenty of occasions where the same results were formulated independently with years, sometimes even decades or centuries (!) separating them. This seems the most likely conclusion.
In general though, if you have a more reasonable suspicion (similar or identical wording, order of points they make, similar-looking data, sometimes even stolen figures), that is an ethical issue to be raised with the editorial board of J2. Make sure to have proofs, and these proofs should be as rigid as the proofs in the articles you're writing.

It could be that the paper in  J2 first appeared as a preprint much earlier than Feb 1, 2021. It could be also that it was first submitted to another journal and was rejected there. So before you make any accusations, you should contact the authors of the paper published in J2.

Actually you should contact them for lots of reasons. But don't contact them with an accusation.

Your arXiv preprint shows that you had the idea first. Does the subsequent paper in J2 harm you in any way? You can still demonstrably claim credit for your work in subsequent papers, job applications, etc.
Finding whether there was plagiarism or not, in addition to being difficult, would not be useful to you. It might be useful to your competitors' employers and more generally to the community, but this is probably someone else's business.


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Reviewers want me to cite their barely related papers
I recently sent a paper to a journal which has now been reviewed by 2 reviewers. Both of them have some good points that I should change. However, both reviewers also suggest to include specific papers to "enhance" my paper.
However: These papers are barely related to my paper.

In case of reviewer 1 the whole research group of the papers suggested by this reviewer is identical for each paper.
In case of reviewer 2 five papers have been suggested. Even though different authors are listed two identical authors appear on each of these papers. Sometimes as a first author, sometimes not. But it seems obvious to me that one of these two authors must be reviewer 2.

I don't know how to deal with that. Should I write the editor? Should I ignore their suggestions? Should I include at least one of these references to make them happy? Their general opinion about our paper was good.

Note that the answers to the marked duplicate address  (1) what to do when the suggested papers are relevant, and (2) what to do when the suggested papers are not relevant.


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Should I add my business experience in my application of master program in math?
I'm going to apply for the master program in math in France next year. I plan to do pure math (real and functional analysis, probability, computing, PDE, etc) in the 1st year to equip myself enough technical background, then do applied math (stochastic processes and probability) in the 2nd year. It's optional for candidates to add their experience in their applications.
My background is:

I got my bachelor degree in Statistics last year.
At the moment, I'm studying 3rd year in pure math.
I co-founded an IT startup and have run it for 2 years (at the moment I involve very little in the business as I have to spend most time on studying).

Should I add this experience in my application? Does adding this give me any signifincant advantage? Personally, I find this business experience very irrelevant to a very academic program like math.

Hi, and welcome to Academia.SE! This is an interesting question, and I have taken the liberty of adding a few tags to it, in particular [tag:france], since I imagine answers could be different in France than in the US.

Yes, you get my point. My very personal feeling is that in France, the boundary between academia and business is quite clear. However, as @Eusebius mentioned, I find it reasonable to add it in (Btw, my current 3rd year is also in France)

[Context: I am a CS lecturer in the target country] I really see no reason to hide an achievement of this nature, even if it is not tightly related to your application field. It shows that you are capable of committing to a long-term project with responsibilities. Perhaps it will not give you a significant edge over other candidates at this stade (application in master 1), but in the future, researchers interested in choosing you for an internship will certainly find this information useful.
It does not harm to mention this experience, and it might be useful now or later. Also, if you don't mention it and someone finds out, they will wonder why you wanted to conceal it. Really, I can't see a valid reason to do so (except maybe if what you founded was an escort agency or some other adult business, and you wanted to keep that for yourself).

Ah I understand. It may give me more or less edge but at least, it does no harm to me.

The only harm in mentioning/bragging would be if they suspected you have divided loyalties, which might indicate a lack of serious commitment to the idea of going to graduate school.


text:
Is your advisor allowed to read your emails?
In a typical workplace (North America), it is accepted that all communications through your work email are not personal property, and can be accessed by managers, IT department etc. Is this also true for graduate students? Assuming the student works in an university or research institute, the IT department obviously will have access to all emails. Does this also hold for advisors/supervisors? Are they allowed to, or typically have access to student emails?

I don't think so. Is this something that's happening to you or someone you know?

In public universities in the United States, some emails can be subject to federal or state "sunshine" laws e.g. Freedom of Information Act. I assume you're not referring to that kind of disclosure?

I am not an expert on this by any means, but I did come across this: http://blog.internetcases.com/2011/08/11/email-privacy-school-account-stored-communications-act/

Apart from the legal angle, which I am not qualified to answer, I can certainly say that an environment where this becomes an actual question sounds highly toxic to me.

Probably not the superviser per se, but in general, a private university may have the right. On whether this is a good thing, see xLeitix answer. I suspect that the superviser is not - by default - entitled to that access, though.

Do you receive a stipend?  That would make you an employee.

In a technical legal sense, in a public university it's quite possible that not only your advisor, but anyone else, is allowed to read your work emails. In a practical sense, any attempt by the public or by your advisor to exercise such a right would be very likely to stir up a huge scandal and to not succeed.

What is the method of the email access?  If it is provided through the university or accessed on a university-provided computer, then it may be the case that they have a legal right to those contents.  This was the case at at least one of my workplaces in the USA.  If you are using your own email address, and your own computer, then I don't see how they could have the rights to access it.
Either way, it is best to have a separate email for all personal/private communication rather than risk it on your school email.


text:
Is it a faux pas to offer a favor to a professor who has written you a letter of recommendation / served as a reference?
I have a long and very good relationship with a previous professor of mine. I took two of his/her courses in college, got A+'s in both, and spent hours chatting with him/her on various academic topics even outside the scope of those classes. In addition, he/she has written me two letters of recommendation, both of which have served me very well in my career, and functioned as a reference for several jobs I've applied for (and for all of which I was given an offer).
This professor recently again agreed to function as a reference for a job application, and in our email exchanged asked me if I could recommend any resources for him/her to use when making a new website. I provided said resources, and also offered to make the site for him/her if they wished (I have several years of experience as a full stack web developer and would be able to make them a high quality site in a relatively short amount of time).
My question is this: did I put this professor in an awkward situation by offering to make the website for him/her? I understand that writing letters of recommendation and serving as a reference is an expected part of a professor's job, and I am worried that by offering my services free of charge, I may be putting the professor in a potentially questionable ethical position (i.e. making it look like writing me a letter of rec was a quid pro quo). Of course, the reality is that I'm just happy to help someone whom I greatly respect and consider a friend, but I'm worried that it may not be perceived as such.

I can only answer for myself. Had you made this offer to me, I would have been grateful and certainly not put off. I would have found a bit of money to pay you -- probably not what you could garner on the open market, but something -- and I would have gratefully taken you up on your offer. We all draw on our friends and associates for the skills that they have and we do not. You've simply given your professor this opportunity.

This may vary greatly from person to person, but I, at least, would feel it was inappropriate to accept such a favor from somebody who I had written a recommendation for (unless it would already have been appropriate between us otherwise).
Personally, I feel that writing letters of recommendation for good people is not a favor, but a responsibility, a duty, and a privilege.  It is a responsibility and a duty because it is one of those little pieces of service that is vital to supporting the scientific endeavor and maintaining its quality.  It is a privilege because my opinions get to help shape the future of the field, and by supporting people who I believe in, I get to help make it the environment that I wish it to be.
In short: gratitude from a recommendee is appropriate.  Quid pro quo is not.  I would not hold it against somebody who offered a favor in return, but I would politely decline.
As I said, however, opinions on where the boundaries lie vary.  For example, I would not have requested information about web resources in the same email, as the professor did for you.  I personally think that is a faux pas (but, as noted, I'm pretty hard-line in my opinions here).  Thus, in responding, I don't think that you committed an error, though I would find the whole interchange a bit dubious myself.

(+1) I have always considered writing letters to be a part of a professor's job.  In some cases it is explicitly one, whereas in others it is implicit--promotion decisions can hinge in part on the performance of students associated with you, for example.  Which is not to say a professor is required to write a letter whenever asked, but certainly is to say that the person asking should not feel like they are asking for some exceptional and unusual service that they must return in kind.  A respectful and short thank you statement is all that should be expected in return.

Thank you for your insights. I agree that it really does boil down to a case by case basis; both in terms of the beliefs of the professor, as in your case, and in terms of the prior relationship between student and professor. In my case, I have known this professor for years, and I think enough time has passed where our relationship is slightly more casual than the standard professor | student paradigm. I will keep your advice in mind for future instances though.

If there's any awkwardness, it's because the two topics were mixed in one email thread.
If you yourself see the website as a separate matter from the LOR, and if you are pretty confident the professor does too, then you'll be fine.
In short, if you're making the website as an expression of your appreciation of the teaching the person did for you, then you're fine.

Thank you for your answer, but I don't see how making the site in appreciation for the professor's teaching would be circumstantially different than making it in appreciation for the letters of recommendation (though again, I didn't offer to make it as an appreciation for either, but rather as a favor to a longtime colleague and friend).

As a favor to a longtime colleague and friend is a wonderful reason.  //  A letter of recommendation is something that must be freely given, with no quid pro quo, otherwise there's something dirty feeling about it.

Yes, it's faux pas if you're a current student. Once you've left the program, you could offer the services.
I don't know if you've put the professor in a particularly difficult situation. The professor should know the departmental restrictions and he/she is probably used to turning down friendly offers from unassuming students. Worst case scenario for you is that he or she graciously declines.
I agree with previous poster that you shouldn't look at letter writing as a favor from your professors. It's part of their job to write letters (be those good or bad ones).
I've had close relationships with professors, and while I also agree that he/she probably should have sent this in a separate email (big university brother is always watching), it's understandable that tacked it on at the end. Don't fret about it too much. I'd send a follow-up email with external sources, and then maybe follow up after you've left the university if you really want to pursue helping the prof with his or her site.


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The French school of mathematics "has entered a demographical dip"
In an interview made for the 25th anniversary of the Institut de Mathématiques de Jussieu-Paris Rive Gauche, its head Professor Loïc Merel says at 1:25:

Les doctorants que nous formons aurons une lourde tâche: celle de reprendre le flambeau de l'école mathématique française, qui est rentrée dans un creux démographique.
[Personnal translation: The graduate students that we educate will have a daunting task: that of taking up the mantle of the French school of mathematics, which has entered a demographical dip.]

What are references backing this claim, and how pronounced is the effect ? For instance, will there be an actual shortage of talent and even some areas taking a toll, or just slightlty less competition for a while ?

Not sure I understand what is the "French school of mathematics". Or is he just speaking of a drop in numbers and a difficulty, therefore, of collaboration within France?

I could be mistaken, but it seems that he means "mathematicians educated in France". But I cannot understand if he means that there are fewer graduate students coming out of that system, or not enough compared to the number of people retiring. And I think he's refering not just about collaborations within France, but really a potential drop of highly regarded researchers from France (say, like invited speakers at ICMs).

@Buffy As far as I know, France is known to have a good tradition for what concerns certain topics of mathematics and physics, which is reflected not only in the publication record, but also in the way in which these subjects are taught. For instance, I have several many French books about mathematics and physics and they have certain characteristics that cannot be found in other literature and which I appreciate very much. That is what I call a "school", and which is probably the intended meaning in the quote.

Actually, you could ask him directly: https://webusers.imj-prg.fr/loic.merel

As suggested by Buffy in the comments, I've now written to Professor Merel and have obtained his answer. Since he didn't mention that I could give it here I'll keep it private. I'll just say that a relevant reference is this publicly available page on the Opération Postes website. Edit (given the comments): the plots on that page show a very subtantial decrease in the number of offered positions in the space of 10 years. On the other hand, it is known that the number of new PhDs per year has not decreased.

Self-answers are fine, but this answer doesn't have enough information to be useful to the rest of the community without following the link, and links can die over time. It would be better to put at least a summary of what you are referencing in your answer itself.

It is also like saying: I found the answer on my own, and am not going to tell you what it is.

So how is an extreme shortage of jobs a "demographic dip"?

Here is some additional info compared to the other answer (which does not have a lot of detail).
Loïc's comment is mainly about fundamental (AKA pure) mathematics. The IMJ-PRG is a pure math research institute. There is a trend in French academia that funding is going more and more towards research that has immediate applications, with some level of disregard for fundamental research. This is the case in pretty much all fields of science (maybe with the exception of computer science). It goes without saying that the situation is dire in social science and the arts, apart from economics, management, and law. (I did not choose these at random, they are legally treated separately from the rest.)
The French ministry periodically releases some demographic information. Here is the latest one for faculty in Section 25, i.e. pure math. Even if you can't read French, the graphics speak for themselves. On the first page, the first graphic is about professors, the second about lecturers (maîtres de conférences), the third about the total. The brown line is pure math, the light blue line is "Group 5" (pure math + applied math + CS), the dark blue line is Science, the black line is the whole of French academia. The graphics are normalized at 100 in 1998. You can get graphics for other years and fields on this page.
To summarize: the number of faculty in pure math has decreased by 15% in France between 1998 and 2018. This is enormous. The number of students increases every year. Administrative tasks are always increasing. This puts an enormous amount of stress on the remaining faculty. (As a comparison, the number of faculty in applied math increased by 11.4%.)
The situation is also dire for new doctors: finding a permanent position is an ordeal, even more so than in similar countries. In the PDF I linked, Figure 3.2 on page 4 is especially telling: in 2018, there were 420 candidates for 22 lecturer positions, and 136 candidates for 14 professor positions. This does not include candidates who were rejected from the "qualification" (94.7% of candidates for professorships and 88.7% of candidates for lectureships are "qualified").
Note that this graphic also shows that there is not much shortage of talent. The number of candidates per position (column "Ratio B/A") decreased between 2014 and 2015, but it's increasing since 2015. The decrease in 2014–2015 was due to the fact that there was an exceptionally low number of available positions in 2014.
A remark, for intellectual honesty: not all French math researchers are faculty. Some are full-time researchers employed by the CNRS. Update: According to the CNRS's official statistics, the total number of researchers in Section 41 (pure maths + applied math, no, it's not the same section as the CNU) is 373: 210 junior and 163 senior. To compare, in 2018 there were 1321 faculty in pure math and 1776 in applied math. That's 3097 total, so CNRS researchers represent about 12%. I cannot say what the distribution between pure and applied is. "Common knowledge" tells me that it's around 10% for pure math.
PS: The ministry's website has a wealth of information. There are statistics about pretty much everything, as well as explanatory notes about the conjonctures. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to learn about the evolution of French academia. However, be careful about aggregates: data about a "Group" (e.g. pure+applied math + CS) may not tell you everything about a "Section" (e.g. pure math).

France was and is a pioneering nation for pure mathematics  -- The nation that produced Serre, Grothendieck, and Cartan in the 20th century could be no less. It is sad to hear that they are succumbing to the Anglo-Saxon disease of chasing areas with "immediate applications".


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Learning Disabled Students and Untenable Instructor Workloads
I am an instructor at a community college in California.  On occasion, a student with a documented learning disability will sign up for one of my courses.  I do my best to provide them the additional care required with the aim of providing an equivalent learning experience.  This often results in many extra hours of work beyond my contract.  I don't mind, as I can usually find time to do it fairly well so that I feel right about it. I typically have just a few of these deserving students every semester which makes volunteer time manageable.
I have an amazing coworker that has an abundantly caring persona in addition to being a hard worker.  She has been great with disabled students over the years, and has garnered a reputation with students, counselors and others as being the "go to" instructor for learning disabled students.  In any typical semester, she could have 10 to 20 learning disabled students choosing her class over other instructors' classes.
This has made her workload impossible to do well over the years and decreased the workloads of others.  As this point, the amount of work required to be effective for her students is way beyond her contracted hours she gets paid for and not reasonable.  She is doing everything she can do, but her workload has become literally untenable and is now causing serious health issues.  Unfortunately, her caring generosity is well known with counselors and online through sites like www.ratemyprofessors.com.  The counselors have been asked not to push students specifically into classes based who teaches it, however, the problem persists. She is taking the lion's share of work while other instructors' workloads have lessened.  Consequently, her health issues have worsened.
The instructor is not interested in extra pay. She has already repeatedly asked the college for additional support to no avail.  As a last resort, I would like to know if there is any policy or law on the books at the state or federal level that limits the number of documented learning disabled students an instructor is required to take on.  Surely, there has to be an upper bound.  Case in point, I would think it would obviously be unreasonable and impossible to manage a workload like mine if all students in all of my classes were learning disabled.  I would not be able to do my job effectively as there are not enough hours in the day to do all that is required for these deserving students.
The goal here is to find an immediate solution that will reduce the extreme number of hours of extra (off contract) work that my coworker is taking on so that she can can get healthy again and also provide our disabled students fair access to a quality education, which they are not getting as she is overworked.
Is there any law that limits the number of disabled students that any instructor must take on in a given semester? If not, do you have any ideas for other solutions?

You're thinking about the wrong end of the problem. The correct end is your college administration, who needs to a) pay you and your colleagues for the reasonable work you do; and b) resource enough additional support to make the workload managable.

@Arno Of course.  Thank you for pointing that out.  However, I should have mentioned that we've already fully explored a) and b).  There is no administrative support in in either area.  This is why I am asking this question above.  It is a last resort.

I don't think it is a question of pay as @Arno suggests, but one of support. Perhaps she needs a team. Perhaps the entire faculty needs to organize the courses so that faculty have more or less balanced workloads and students get their needs met. Team teaching, or something like it.

@Buffy My understanding is that OP and their colleagues are paid hourly; and I assume that doing some more work than their current contract hours is feasible. But then that should be paid, too. Beyond that, your points are spot-on.

Probably the best bet would be for the students with disabilities to sue the college if the college is not providing sufficient resources, but this seems like a legal advice situation that isn't well-supported here. I'm not a lawyer but I doubt very much that the ADA puts the responsibility on individual instructors to carry all of the weight for their institution in compliance.

@Arno  She is full-timer and not hourly and does not want more pay.  This an over work problem that has become a health issue.  The college is aware and not offering her assistance.  I know this person well.  They need help.  The college claims it is is not their responsibly to help her.

@Bflat Oh, then I had misunderstood. So the question then is: How do you make your administration do their job, which is supporting and enabling the teaching staff to deliver good quality teaching without working themselves to death.

@Arno Yes, exactly.

What does the college's disability services office say? Do they know about this? They might be able to exert more leverage to reallocate resources.

Also, if you're in CA, is this a union shop?

@ElizabethHenning I reached out to them today and was directed to speak with our department chair.  I believe the instructor tried this route already, but it can't hurt to try again and document it. Thank you!  No union membership.

One small comment - it's probably unsurprising that pushing the counsellors did not work. Their job is not to manage faculty workload, it's to best advise their students. If you ask them to purposefully direct some students to other teachers who they know will not support these students well I can see why they would push back. This is a problem for teaching administration to solve, not for the counsellors.

What sort of learning disability are we talking here? Are we talking "mainstream" problems, such as dyslexia, dyspraxia, ADHD, or rarer, more complex divergencies?

Why does having 10-20 LD students add much more time than having 2-3?  Is it because she needs to make different accommodations for different students?  Or that the accommodations cannot somehow be done "in batch"?

Exactly what kind of extra support is your colleague giving? Is it just extra instruction in the material?

The criteria for disability accommodations is that they be "reasonable" and that they maintain equal or equivalent academic standards. The school also must provide "equal access" to students with disabilities. So the case your colleague needs to make for an administrative solution is that what she is doing is (1) necessary for equal access compared with both her own nondisabled students and with nondisabled students in other sections and (2) unreasonable.
It certainly sounds like (2) is the case, but for (1) she would need to convince them that she isn't just being "too nice." Postsecondary schools have pretty much no legal obligation to uphold any kind of standards for quality instruction, but they can't provide better instruction to nondisabled students.
On the other hand, she could lean into this and get the dean to set up a section specifically for LD students. I don't know California law and I have no direct experience with CCs, but this should be perfectly legal, although I suppose there is some risk of a lawsuit being threatened from nondisabled students angry that their favorite teacher has been taken off the market. But you would need the disability services office as an ally, and the fact that they bounced you back to the dean makes me think that they are under-resourced as well and that the school just doesn't care very much about serving LD students.
As a final suggestion, she could try to restructure her course on her own so that it is designed with the needs of LD students in mind (ie, "universal design") instead of designing it for non-LD students and then doing a lot of supplementary work to adapt it to LD students. Possibly the dean could also restrict enrollment through more conventional methods such as just putting her in a smaller room. If there is a campus organization for students with disabilities, it might be possible to enlist their help as well.
It's too bad there is no union. This story is a textbook example of why faculty need to be unionized.

By far, the best suggestion yet.

The instructor should not inherently be doing extra work for learning disabled students.
This answer will not be a happy one. Like the OP, my teaching career has been composed of teaching at community colleges (two sites in the U.S. northeast). In both cases, there was a dedicated office of disability services that coordinated and provided extra support and services to learning-disabled students. The instructor is not obligated to provide extra services on their own recognizance.
To be clear, the instructor may be contacted by disability services as they arrange certain services, e.g.: permission to use a calculator, have an assigned note-taker in class, extra testing time (proctored at the dedicated office), etc. Once in a while there is even a bit of debate over things being asked of the instructor by the disability office, and (successful) pushback from the academic department.
I'll also say that, unlike the OP, I'm at an institution that is well unionized, and has a very clear contract for faculty. Extra time spent on engaging with learning-disabled students is not among the job obligations.
Sadly, yes, the community college does get lots of learning-disabled students, and it is a great challenge and a great heartbreak to see them struggle with college, and in most cases fail. In the past I've very roughly guessed that maybe half of our overall student population may be in that situation (I'm certainly no expert!), and that the disability services clearly don't have resources to properly serve them all. (Related question.)
But that doesn't mean that the instructor should sacrifice their personal time and health to fill this gap. Nor can they; the abyss of need is far too deep.
What is the solution to the individual instructor? The pickings seem slim.

Some have suggested "universal design" for teaching, in which course procedures are learning-disabled-friendly from the outset in some way. However, when I've researched that for my subject (math) in the past, the suggestions (from non-math-proficient education writers) were painfully infeasible/incoherent for the discipline.

I know of one college near me whose math department commits to seeking multi-million dollar grants annually, on a perpetual basis, so as to provide extra corequisite teaching supports for students with special needs (not necessarily specific to the learning disabled). Not something an individual instructor can arrange.

The OP states that they've exhausted all options for extra support with local administration, and I'll assume that's true. To their core question:

Is there any law that limits the number of disabled students that any
instructor must take on in a given semester?

To my awareness, there is no such law in the U.S. (or California, not that I'm an expert there). Such a regulation would frankly be counter to the overall practice of around the institution, in fact. U.S. states use the community college to pretend that anyone can achieve a higher education degree, taking the entire population of poorly-prepared and certified high school degree holders, funding it at a relatively indigent level, and mostly shrugging at the 20% or so graduation rates that result.
It's a hard job to be on the ground here, trying to help, trying to manage your own emotional well-being, and witness the pain and failure. In the past I've compared it to being in a MASH triage unit.
A seminal essay on this subject was written in 1960 by Burton Clark, who taught at U. of California, Berkeley, titled The "Cooling-Out" Function in Higher Education. It uses as a case study San Jose City College, a community college in San Jose, California. I found it to be quite eye-opening when I read it, and stunningly on-topic for our landscape today. I highly recommend it for you and your colleague. From the abstract:

The wide gap found in many democratic institutions between culturally
encouraged aspiration and institutionally provided means of
achievement leads to the failure of many participants. Such a
situation exists in American higher education. Certain social units
ameliorate the consequent stress by redefining failure and providing
for a "soft" denial; they perform a "cooling-out" function. The junior
college especially plays this role. The cooling-out process observed
in one college includes features likely to be found in other settings:
substitute achievement, gradual disengagement, denial, consolation,
and avoidance of standards.

Judging from the last 60+ years of the institutional dynamics, it seems monumentally unlikely that any more assistance is coming for you or your colleague. As I've said to colleagues many times: you need to defend your time, and your mental health, first and foremost. Your colleague is taking on extra work (a Sisyphean amount of extra work) of her own volition, which is not part of the employment agreement. Your colleague's choice is clear: she either needs to stop, or else she will become irrecoverably sick. Self-care is essential.
Take care of yourself first, or else you will become unable to help anyone else in the future.

Such a large fraction of our students are neurodivergent in some way which affects their learning needs that we plan all our classes with common needs of such students in mind. As such:

All classes must have any audio/visual aids (such as powerpoint slides) available ahead of time, and be designed with dyslexic, ADHD and autistic/aspergers students in mind as much as possible.
Notes must be availalbe in printed form for all students
All lectures/classes are recorded and made available to all students. All recordings are automatically subtitled.
All reading lists are annotated with what is absolutely essential, what is recommned, and what is just for interest.
It is policy never to demand an answer to a question from a particular student in public.

These adjustments deal with a large fraction of the needs of divergent students - not all, but they mean that a minimum is just part of the standard process of preparing a class, and the time alloaction to all classes provides for this work, irrespective of whether there are neurodivergent or disable students signed up.
Implementing such a policy has several benefits:

Time allocations already take account of some of the extra time neccessary to make classes accessible to disabled/neurodivergent students.
All instructors will be forced to improve the accessibility of their classes, and so the gap between them and your colleuege in terms of attractiveness to students with different needs will be reduced.
Less time will be required to make adjustments for students with very specific needs.

Exactly. When divergent students are regarded as needing "special" attention, it's worse for everyone.

This is really a great list and I'm stealing it. What is the policy regarding in-class work that requires focus and attention (eg, problem sheets) or in-class group work?

@DanielHatton Yes, hardcopy has cost implications, but I print, like, 20copies for a a 40 student class (most students won't want a copy), and yes we have softare that auto-captions our recordings (kalutra, not panopto), but I write up and annotate reading lists my self without any software.

@ElizabethHenning We don't have rules about in-class work or group work, although so many of my studients have LSPs (Learning Support Plans) that suggest they should not be forced into gorup work, that Id proabably never insist on it, unless it were a major outcome of the module.

As to the specific question at the end of the post: "Is there any law that limits the number of disabled students that any instructor must take on in a given semester?"
The answer to this is almost certainly "no" because I cannot see how anyone would legally define terms such "disabled student", "take on", etc. There is no reasonable way to say that someone cannot teach 1000 disabled students in general -- for example, I see no particular reason why teaching 1000 students with physical disabilities some mathematics cannot be done.
The question you are really asking is not actually one related to "taking on" special needs students, or about any specific number. The question you are asking is about an instructor having a work load related to the teaching they do that is above and beyond what an employer can expect from an employee. The situation is really no different than a McDonalds branch asking an employee to grill 100,000 hamburgers per day -- it simply cannot be done reasonably in an 8-hour workday.
So, if you want to go seek out relevant laws, you should look for laws that limit the number of hours an employee can be expected to work given the contract they have. This is something the law can regulate. Of course, in the end, the law still isn't going to give you what you probably want: Is it productive to sue the university? In the best of cases, the university provides the support for this instructor that is necessary to actually guarantee that (i) students receive the support they need, (ii) your colleague gets to have a reasonable workload. But this is something that the university should really come to understand even without a lawsuit, and a lawsuit is unlikely going to improve the relationship of the instructor with the university.
In reality, I believe that the only real avenue forward is to continue talking with the administration to make them understand the severity of the situation, and to make clear that there are only two possible outcomes: (i) the instructor is provided the help they need, (ii) the instructor burns out and quits their job. Any manager who comes to understand these kinds of choices will recognize that (i) is by far the less painful way, but it may require that multiple people with knowledge of the situation and the trust of the administrators make this point in a forceful and convincing way.

Color me cynical, but my guess is that the administration de facto wants the instructor to quit so that they can be replaced with someone who will just pass all these students without a serious attempt at helping them learn anything.  Almost all public universities in the US are under serious political pressure to look like they have as many successful students as possible without sufficient resources to actually help them succeed (as opposed to having the appearance of success).

@AlexanderWoo It's not just about resources. American higher ed in general has a long and dishonorable tradition of treating students with learning differences like crap.

@Wolfgang Wow!  Thank you for your incite and you make strong points.  On a side note... although I agree that lawsuits shouldn't be needed, they are sometimes exactly what's needed.   Often the threat of a lawsuit is enough.  Yes, I have to agree that it's not optimal for some relations, however, it can also be very beneficial for some relations.  I have experience with this and do not regret doing the right thing even though it disrupted some of my relationships on campus.  It strengthened and improved the lives of many others on campus and was worth it.  : )

You mentioned that "there is no reasonable way to say that someone cannot teach 1000 disabled students..."  That may be true but it is not practical.   If 1000 physically disabled students showed up a 1000 person capacity lake, I would think the lifeguards might ask for some backup from the lake supervisor to ensure a reasonable level of safety don't you think?  I think what's missing here is practicality.

@Bflat I agree it's not practical unless their disability is that they are hard of hearing. The issue at hand is that it is very hard to define what "disability" actually entails in a context. It is about the needs of someone, not that they are disabled. And it is that the needs of people drive workload, not the fact that they are disabled.

Yes, treating people as individuals would be ideal given infinite time and resources.  Categorization isn’t ideal but may be practica and is often used in many areas of life to make things better.  If the average disabled students requires extra care over other students on behalf of the teacher, then I would think we could use this categorization to help the situation. Although I do understand your point.

Statistically speaking, female faculty do more of certain tasks than male faculty.  This might be an example of that, in which case gender discrimination laws might be of use to your colleague.
Unfortunately, there is no guaranteed way to fix this problem because students with learning disabilities will inevitably be undercounted.
I'd suggest that your colleague should seek a new job.
It might also be possible to avoid telling students who is teaching this colleague's courses until the day classes start.  This may be difficult to organize and of little use if your students are prone to late registration.

Thank you for your suggestions.  I am hoping she can avoid seeking a new job as she is an amazing instructor.  Also this will inevitably push this burden onto another popular instructor.

And will also likely disadvantage the students even more.

Our dean did tried to help out using your solution a few years ago.  She removed instructor names from the schedule and was immediately threatened by lawsuit.  I believe the claim was that students have a right to know who is teaching the course.  It created quite the controversy and the dean felt forced to fold.

@Bflat It's also kind of a crappy thing to do to the students, however well-meaning towards the instructor.

"students have a right to know"  I do not know your local laws, but this looks like utter nonsense.  Courses are routinely redistributed among faculty based on enrollment.

@AnonymousPhysicist that may be true, however, the threat came from someone in a position of power.  In addition, I'm guessing the optics aren't great in support of hiding names. However, I don't have an opinion on this either way.

Every college I've ever heard of lets you drop and register and the first day, so it would still be possible for people to switch sections, so blocking instructor names just creates headaches for everyone with very little effectivity.

@AzorAhai-him-: Consider that (a) there is often an extra fee once the term starts, (b) sections may be filled by that time, (c) LD students may not have the capacity for quick turnaround time on a particular date (esp. if handlers/helpers are busy). I've worked in a dept. where that policy held for many years (against my wishes).

Shouldn’t learning disabled students be separated into different courses from students without disabilities? It doesn’t make sense to teach everyone the same way if people have differing needs and some people have needs that require a great amount of attention. One size fits all education doesn’t work, because additional resources must be provided regardless. I would recommend establishing a separate program or major of study for students with differing needs or transferring disabled students to a different program or college that can serve their needs without overworking any current staff. Otherwise, hiring additional staff specifically to address the needs of learning disabled students would be the only other option. The current staff who is known to be competent and popular can train new staff on addressing their needs. Limiting enrollment of disabled students would help the overworked staff but doesn’t resolve the issue of providing adequate education for disabled students since they will need to find alternate programs.

Interesting points.  Thank you.

Typically the law expects learning disable students to be mainstreamed as much as possible.  Or they may have a choice to be in a special class.  At the school district level special ed classes may have students who are oppositionally defiant or very difficult in other ways.  Being in a mainstream class can be a much better experience for the student.

@nickalh Mainstreaming is really only an issue for K-12.

Not sure why it was downvoted. People should leave comments. @nickalh I don’t believe being in mainstream class would be a better experience. How so? Thur might feel left out if they weren’t, but I’d say they would feel left out anyway struggling in mainstream classes without adequate support.

-1 This is simply not a thing (in U.S. higher education). I suspect it may even run counter to certain state or federal laws. I'd challenge answerer to find such an example documented at any U.S. higher education institution.

@DanielR.Collins Requiring neurodivergent students to segregate would probably be illegal. Offering classes designed for them and restricting enrollment is not, and I've seen it done for certain required courses in math or writing.

@ElizabethHenning: That would be quite surprising to me. As I asked above, do you have an example documented reference for such a case?

@DanielR.Collins A quick Google search shows that American University does this and so does Iowa. Why are you skeptical about it?

@ElizabethHenning: A proper citation will provide links to specifics, thanks.

@danielR.Collins It is a thing in higher education. Classes are already separated between regular and honors at several universities including UC Berkeley, NYU, etc. I think people are just reluctant to increase spending on education. Also, why do people in this thread without definite knowledge on education laws present views as facts?

I'm expressing skepticism. If you make a positive argument that such learning-disabled-only college classes exist, then the burden of proof is on you to cite examples. Otherwise no one will believe you. As an academic I'm sure you agree that's standard practice since forever.

@DanielR.Collins I never argued that disabled-only classes exist, I merely recommended them, elizabethhenning stated they exist, but you did say it is “simply not a thing” without prior research. I know of math classes separated by ability between regular and honors across universities, but don’t know specifics, and I don’t see why it can’t be the same for disabled students’ classes.

Remove instructors names from the courses prior to signing up.
Quite frankly, a university should design its courses so that it doesn't matter who's teaching them, simply as a matter of equity to the students - students who get taught by instructor A shouldn't have any particular advantage over students who get taught the same course taught be instructor B. There should be processes in place to make sure that all the instructors teaching a course are marking consistently, for instance. As a result, it shouldn't matter to the students who the instructors are - so there should be no reason to publish who is going to be teaching what course prior to the commencement of those courses.
You mentioned in your comment that one of your students threatened to sue the last time the university tried to remove this information- and my response to that would have been "Go ahead, we have more money than you do," since unless the student in question was the child of a multimillionaire, it's highly unlikely that they'll have a budget that approaches that of even a small university. Additionally, I'm not a lawyer, but I really doubt that they have any legal grounds to sue over.

Quite frankly, a university should design its courses so that students with disabilities aren't at an unfair disadvantage in the first place. But they don't.

I do understand the idea that the instructor of a course should not matter... but, especially at R1 places in the U.S., it is most often a definitive feature. The notion that "math is independent of people" and so on is arguably false, and ridiculously so. There is the invidious mythology among "research mathematicians" that "teaching" is the thing anyone can do, after they've lost interest in research. Yes, this is awful, but... well, anyway, it's not my fault... and I do push back on this in my own dept, but there are many dynamics that preserve this...

To be clear: no it is a disservice to students to not announce the instructors. Yes, it is a disservice to the good teachers that they have a higher load. Yes, this does effectively reward less-than-the-best teachers... No, higher admin has no incentive to change this. No, bad teachers have no incentive to compensate good teachers. ... Dang. Sorry.

@nick From what I understand, the threat of the lawsuit did come from someone powerful with important ties to the college.   Also, I think it is quite literally impossible to normalize student learning across different instructors.  I suppose blind standardize testing could be used for assessments but I don't think that's an option.  Even so, instructors are vastly different in their teaching.  And students are vastly different in their learning.  A good experience in one class can be a terrible experience in another. An argument can still be made for hidden names though.  No opinion for me.

@Bflat "Also, I think it is quite literally impossible to normalize student learning across different instructors." My university does moderation for assessment in its teaching teams for each course as a matter of course. You get all the teaching staff together during marking, have them each produce a work that they think looks like an A, a B, a C, and so forth, and then everyone goes over it together to make sure they're all holding the same standards.

@nick012000  Yes, this would help some and have proposed this here. However, tests are just one component.  Also this doesn't actually normalize grades unless you control for all other variables many of which can't be controlled without robot instructors. Consider that some instructors will know questions ahead of time and some may be better at teaching to an exam than others.   Some instructors share, hint or focus on old exams giving their students the advantage.  This already happens now as some instructors give practice exams that are just like the exam and some a hard against it.

@Bflat The instructors should all be teaching the same material, ideally from a central learning management system, of course. If you don't have one of those set up, I sort of wonder how your university is even functioning in this pandemic environment.

@nick012000 The idea that it shouldn't matter who is teaching a course is absurd and dehumanizing.

Every college I've ever heard of lets you drop and register and the first day, so it would still be possible for people to switch sections, so blocking instructor names just creates headaches for everyone with very little effectivity.

@nick012000: "The instructors should all be teaching the same material, ideally from a central learning management system, of course." This one statement almost has too many facts wrong to count. At minimum, there's academic freedom issues/overlooks meta thread on "academia varies more than you think".

@DanielR.Collins I don't understand how you'd be able to teach online students without a central learning management system - and given the pandemic, online students are at least half your class (and rapidly become your entire class whenever the government decides to do another lockdown). And yes, every instructor teaching a given class should be teaching the same material - the instructor of record should come up with the class's material, and the teaching assistants should coordinate their delivery of it.

-1 Not how any of it works. LMS's, synched material, teaching assistants don't exist at many institutions. E.g., no TA's at my school -- highly unlikely at community colleges as in OP's case.

@DanielR.Collins Again, I do not understand how any institution can function during covid without an LMS, when the government can proclaim a lockdown at any time and thereby force all study to be done online for weeks at a time.

Email, YouTube, Zoom can get one very far. I'm not sure what features of an LMS you think are necessary.

@DanielR.Collins Having a central location for all of the documents and files that the students need? Having the ability to release marks for homework or assessment individually, without everyone else seeing them? Zoom is useful bordering on necessary, but how are the students going to get to the sessions if you don't have a site to post the Zoom links on? You could email the link, but then the link will become impossible to find ten weeks later once the email's been buried under a hundred other emails.

I know many instructors who solely use email for all that and no LMS.


text:
How to cite JavaDoc?
Writing a technical Master's degree thesis in the IT field, I need to cite sentences that are in the JavaDoc, where are no author and no year. Ex.

From: java.util.Queue

The Queue interface does not define the blocking queue methods, which are common in concurrent programming

From: org.springframework.boot.actuate.health.HealthIndicator

Strategy interface used to contribute Health to the results returned from the HealthEndpoint.

Unlike the first one, the second has a base webpage Spring Boot Reference Documentation which shows 14 authors (I know to cite multiple authors). Can be the latter JavaDoc be cited with these authors? How about the first one?
How to cite both of them?

Edit: I have checked the How should I cite a website URL? question, however, the point of my question is that I might cite from multiple classes, where the URL changes. Yeah, little, but still, so it is actually a different source.

Does this answer your question? How should I cite a website URL?

I have checked that. The point is I don't cite a website from a random anonymous article, but a reference and API documentation that was/is written by either authors mentioned in the root website or by company representatives.

Related: https://writing.stackexchange.com/q/31786


text:
Applying to a lab as a post-doc; I am peer-reviewing their work
I'm applying to a lab whose work I happen to be pretty familiar with, due to peer reviewing one of their articles.
Is it ethical to mention this information to them?  I feel that if I don't mention it, and they find out later, they may feel that I mistrusted or misrepresented during the application process.
Does the answer depend on whether the article has already been published, or whether it's still in the review process?

If you have previously peer-reviewed their work, you are obligated keep that information confidential unless the journal policy says otherwise.  If your potential employer somehow finds out you reviewed their work, they will know you did the right thing.
If you are currently reviewing their work and applying for a job with them, you should stop reviewing and contact the editor.  Tell the editor you now have a conflict of interest and cannot continue reviewing.

“you are obligated keep that information confidential” — says who? I’ve never heard of such a policy. It may exist, but it’s far from universal. I’ve reviewed articles and I don’t generally treat any information pertaining to this process as confidential (after the review process/publication).

I believe many journals allow the reviewer to disclose themselves if they so wish, so this is not necessarily confidential. But you have to check the policy of that particular journal. However not telling anything is the safest option.

@KonradRudolph Interestingly enough, even AMS (my etalon for publications ethics) seems to mention only this: Editors must preserve the anonymity of referees unless there is a credible allegation of misuse. I'll check with someone at AMS and report further.

You should almost certainly not tell them. While I have seen a certain amount of "friendly" post-review disclosure, even if this is accepted in your field, I think the circumstances here strongly weigh against it.
If the paper is currently under review, you should first let the editor know, and absolutely not tell your potential advisor. If you told your prospective advisor, it would create the appearance of a quid pro quo. No matter your intentions, if someone told me this while I was interviewing them, I would be shaken and question their trustworthiness.
If you have already reviewed the paper, and you gave it a good review, and the paper has been published, it would be less blatantly offensive. I understand the urge to say, "I became interested in your group because of this paper, which I refereed" - but this is still not a good idea. Simply showing your strong interest and understanding of that paper is better, and creates no impression of a quid pro quo.
The one circumstance in which I can imagine a lab being offended that you did not disclose your involvement is if you gave a notably harsh review to a paper. The key issue in this case would be finding out if your idea of what is important in a paper, or what methods are useful, might be critically different from your prospective advisor's. If you join the group, but then have major issues with how some experiments are conducted, your advisor might be bothered that you did not disclose that - whether or not this had its origin in a refereeing situation. Disclosing in this circumstance will almost certainly not improve your chances of being hired - no one likes harsh criticism - but it could tell you more about whether this is a lab you could work with.

I really do not understand what the question is meant for ... You are applying for a post doc to them, so I would suppose that you know all of their publications, at least those inherent your PhD thesis or - in case you want to give a very new cut to your research career - those papers who attracted your attention. That you were or were not referee for their paper is really irrelevant and you should not discuss it.
Sounds "take me, I did recommend your paper". Beside that they won't care..... Perhaps, in a certain time, you can drop "ah yes, I was referee" whenever the existence of that paper will come into discussion.
The only point that I can see as realistic, is that you got a special interest on that very paper content and would propose you to work on that line. If it is indeed the case, and no previous work by that group on the specific subject is already in the wild, than obviously you cannot tell them without saying something like "I got to know of this because I am referee and.........". Making clear that you recommend the paper. I do not see anything dramatic on that. Waiting the few weeks until it gets online might cost you the position.
In brief, you can disclose that you were referee if there is a scientific reason to do so, and to show you are passionate about that otherwise unspeakable line of research.
I have assumed that you were no nasty nor sarcastic in your referee report, and overall you liked it and recommend for publication


text:
Waiting to hear back from a professor—how long should I wait?
I have been contacting professors about openings in their lab for a PhD position. One professor who I really want to work with contacted me back immediately and told me he would turn over my info to senior lab members (CV, transcripts) and that they will then get in touch with me.
It has been 10 days since that correspondence, I have not heard from anyone else in that lab and I do not know the contact info for anyone specifically, i.e. the professor did not mention exactly who would be looking at my info (although on their lab webpage they do list post-docs and PhD students with contact info).
I would like some feedback about when and how one might contact the professor to check on the status. My thought is to reach out to the professor if I have not heard anything in 3 weeks. I would say something like "Hello Dr. Soandso, I really appreciate the opportunity to be considered for a spot in your lab. 3 weeks have past since our last correspondence, and I just want to check that I did not overlook any communication from the senior lab members you mentioned. Thank you very much for your time." I keen that 3 weeks is a good amount of time for a follow up email.
Thanks everyone!

This is business, send a nice and polite email to your professor to ask him if he has news since you don't.
Don't wait 3 weeks on a job application.
Obviously, maybe he'll say 'it's summer everyone is on vacation', maybe he forgot, maybe his colleague forgot. Show that you're willing to work with them, just don't spam their mailbox every couple days.

Thanks for the advice. I reached out and got a positive response right back.