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At what age do professors stop taking new students?
Assuming STEM, At what age do tenured professors stop taking new students?
I am a first year PhD student and have my eye on one professor who seems to be really interesting and I feel he finds me as a good candidate too but for some reason that he refuses to discuss he does not wish to take me in. Most of his current students are 1-2 years from graduating.
I have a strong reason to believe that it's his age (60-65). That's when I thought about the more general question I am asking.

The answer to this question is different for each professor.

Yeah, he might be retiring.  Or he might be planning to move to a different university.  Or he might be planning to switch research areas.  Or he might be moving to an administrative post.  Or he might be shifting his focus to his startup company.  Or he might be running out of grant money.  Or he might be seriously ill.  Or he might just not like your hair.  Whatever his reasons, if he doesn't want to tell you, they're none of your business.

@JeffE, But my hair is awesome :| I understand your point. Thanks !

@Inquest, the audience for stackexchange includes people who are not familiar with acronyms like STEM.  I edited the post to include a link.  Please correct me if my understanding is wrong, and please provide more detail.  What does "Assuming STEM" mean?

@JoelReyesNoche, I meant assuming the professor resides in a STEM department.

STEM: current slang for "science, technology, and math"

There are no hard and fast rules for this. However, in general, the question is not so much time-after-PhD, but rather time before retirement. Most faculty advisors in the final stages of their careers stop taking students, so that they can wind their research groups down gracefully. Frequently, the last years before retirement will be spent writing and teaching, and mentoring a few additional students. The amount of time depends on the average career of a graduate student in the professor's particular discipline, but somewhere between three and seven years before retirement, the "wind down" will begin.

In general, I strongly believe that this depends on the professor and department in question. One imagines that there is a time that professors would like to stop taking students and a time that they actually stop taking students, and these do not necessarily coincide. In a small department where there are many graduate students and a shortage of advisors, presumably there is "peer pressure" from other faculty members to continue to advise students.

Whether or not one comes up with a number of years since PhD, since tenure, etc., for faculty to stop taking students, that is not the determining mechanism... except in a few cases where the cause is simply fatigue or disillusionment with the whole enterprise. But the latter seems uncommon.
Rather, the absolutely dominant cause is senior faculty' estimated time to retirement. Not only would it be bad to retire while one has a PhD student still in progress, but, further, it would be bad to retire while one has a former PhD student pre-tenure. Thus, taking on a student is approximately a 12-year commitment, at least, I think.
And, then, it becomes hard to clearly picture one's own energy level and frame of mind 12 years into the future...
Edit: as to why it might be bad to retire when one has a not-yet-tenured former student: very often, unless the student has taken a sharp turn away from the general enterprise of their advisor relatively quickly, the advisor will still be a leading expert concerning the topic. Even with the presumption that the advisor will be positive rather than negative, that opinion is important. If the advisor is retired, or is operationally retired, the expert-ness of their opinion, e.g., toward the future and future developments, is weakened, and their credibility in appraising future contributions of their former student is weakened. One wants to be visibly sufficiently engaged so that one's opinions are connected to current and future events, not only archival or historical or nostalgic stuff!
... and to have this presumably-positive, presumably-helpful letter simply due to retirement or disengagement is a loss that many could not afford. Nothing overtly bad happens, but one has lost a great deal.

Interesting -- can you explain why it would be bad to retire when one has a not-yet-tenured student?

+1 for the pre-tenure aspect. People tend to forget how large a role "former" advisors continue to play in their lives even after they are graduated and in t-t jobs.

I don't know; I think that is expecting too much from supervisors.  Once you graduate your PhD I think the ball is in your court.

Sometimes people avoid taking students if they expect to retire or move before the student would graduate.

I know that, I'm asking the approximate age/time-since-PhD/time-since-tenure that the professors stop taking students.


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Tips for useful note-making when learning by oneself
When I'm learning new material, it helps me if I take notes (I usually use emacs org-mode). I read on Xournal (annotating on the way) and Alt+Tab to emacs to punch in important points. My question is:
How organized should my notes be while I am authoring them?
The way I see it, I can either make chapters-sections-subsections etc. while I am writing the notes (but this breaks the flow and is sometimes I feel it is irritating since I'm fretting on unnecessary details) or I could write the notes as bullets and organize them later (Something I like but overhead time is spent on organization after reading).

I think this is a question only you can answer.  Does keeping your notes organized help you organize your thoughts?  Are you really going to refer to your notes later, or are you just writing them into your brain?  If you refer to them later, does having them organized actually help, or do you benefit from having to reorganize in your head?

@JeffE my question is really about how much I should bother about organisation while I'm writing them. I'll no doubt be organising them sooner or later for my reference.

So, what have you tried?

Both actually. If I organise them while, I break flow. If I organise later, I end up wasting longer time and also lot of time wondering "where should this point go?"

Here's the method I found works best for me:

Read a section
Put the paper down, summarize verbally (mentally or out loud)
If you can't summarize, re-read the section. If you can summarize, write down the summary.

This method has the benefit that your notes don't reflect the stream of consciousness that I found went through my brain as I read the paper, but rather only a concise summary of what I actually understood from the paper.
Note that there were definitely papers where I read a particular section numerous times and had no idea what it was talking about, and I wrote that in my notes (e.g., "The authors then performed a mathematical transform involving  technique, and I was not able to figure out how it works from reading the paper.").

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When do you stop reading books cover to cover?
During my undergrad, we had a reading assignment (for most courses) which would nearly cover up the entire textbook including introductions, summaries, "did you know" and other such fluff material.
In graduate school as pointed out in most answers here on SE, one does not read the whole book cover to cover but just read the parts you need and backtrack if doubts. But is this also true if I'm starting out in a new field?
I had my BS in Engineering and I'm pursuing my grad studies in Math, certain topics like Topology are completely new to me. I don't need the whole of Topology but just certain bits and pieces.
Should I attain some familiarity with the topic by reading a good introductory book cover to cover or just dive in (into a completely alien field) and understand only the parts I need?

"Should"?  Again, I think you're the only person who can answer this question.  What works best for you?  Reading books cover-to-cover is useful for some mixtures of people and topics, but not for others.

You stop reading books cover to cover when you don't need all the information between the covers of the books.
If you take a textbook on topology and flip to the middle, it will probably be largely uninterpretable because you don't know the terminology, previously proved theorems, and so on.  You can still glance through the chapter on the material that you really need to know to get an idea of what you're completely missing.  If you can select a subset of earlier chapters that let you understand the later one, great!  If not, read the whole thing.  If that's still not enough, get another textbook or talk to someone who knows the subject well.
You'll have to make the call regarding when it's better to proceed in this way and when it's more efficient to simply start at the beginning and go through it all.  If you need to know something well, this is often the approach to take not because the other wouldn't work as well in principle, but because in practice the temptation to be less thorough than one really needs to be is often too great.

I think this has been covered here in prior questions, but to continue on anyway ...
You should read material with a purpose or a goal. If the material is helping to achieve that goal (learning new or foreign material that you have a desire to learn) then reading all of the material is fine. There is no point in reading material though if it has no purpose or a goal (e.g. topics you are not interested in, material you already know sufficiently).
Personally for me it is a mix, some material I skim in large parts, some material I read only portions that I'm directly interested in, and if I'm really engrossed in some material I will read it front to back. Currently I'm reading an introduction cartography text book and really enjoying it and reading every chapter! It would be torture for me though to read though an intro textbook for criminal justice, criminology or sociology.
Same goes for journal articles, posts on Q/A forums, etc.

What do you want to gain from reading that book?
I typically find that I only read books (or articles) cover to cover when I hope to work on a very closely related topic.  For example, if I'm trying to improve the result in a paper, I will often read most or all of the details.  However, the vast majority of the time all I need is the big picture.  In that case, I often read the introduction in detail, then skim the remainder to understand the structure of the actual proofs.
In your case as a math grad student, it may be important to understand the types of questions and answers common in topology.  So I would probably recommend reading the book well enough that you can at least solve the easier exercises.  However, if you don't plan to work in that area, and you aren't preparing for a qualifying exam or something similar, then likely the time you'd take to read the book cover to cover could be spent better elsewhere.

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Relative or Absolute evaluation for academic positions?
When a committee is evaluating applicants for a permanent academic position (such as a Lecturer or Assistant Prof. position), do they select the best candidate in the absolute, or do they relativize with the corresponding experience?
Consider for instance two applicants, one who just graduated from her PhD, and the other with 10 years of postdoc experience (for the sake of the example, let's assume that both are "regular" applicants, i.e., none of them is a exceptionally good or bad). Clearly, in general, the second applicant will have many more publications, grants, etc, than the first one.
In that case, will the committee judge them by relativizing the CV of the second one by stating like only the number of publications per year counts, not the total one, or say that the second one has a better CV in the absolute, and therefore is better?

none of them is exceptionally good: Then why would we hire either of them?

@JeffE Do you mean that if you're "only" good, but not exceptionally good, like you haven't a Turing Award, you have no chance of getting a job? :)

There is a wide spectrum between "exceptionally good" and "Turing award".

Well, that's why I meant by exceptionally good: the kind of applicants with whom you don't even need to look at the other applications, you already know they can't be better.

Another way to formulate my question could be: how you determine that a candidate is exceptionally good? Relatively or absolutely speaking?

I don't think there's a single answer to this question. Ultimately, departments look for the candidate who will be the best fit for a given position, and for the department as a whole. If you also subscribe to the view that the department would rather choose a candidate who is more likely to accept a given position, then that also changes the decision calculus.
For the most part, however, I don't think hiring committees are doing "hard" comparisons of citations; that would just be foolish. Grant-winning experience also does matter, obviously, but that's also something that can be learned and developed over time.
So, ultimately, hiring tends to be a subjective process—you can view the data in whatever "objective" light helps you get to the conclusion you want.

Thanks, it's true that there a many factors in the recruitment process that are not only a factor of the number of years of experience. I guess I'm mostly wondering if the fact that you've demonstrated that you can write papers, apply for grants, etc, has an important weight against having the potential to do so, but not having it demonstrated, because you're too "junior".

I can speak for France.
We do relativize the application with the corresponding experience. In fact this is sometimes easier for the "younger" applicant to have a junior position since after a while, the committee expect someone with a lot of experience to have shown more than the ability to conduct research. To tell the truth, if you apply for a junior position with 6 years of postdoc, I will find suspicious that you was not hired before, and ask about that issue. Similarly, if you have 6 years of experience and if you never led a team or had a grant, I will find that highly suspicious (and so will be the rest of the committee).

Thanks, someone told me the same thing once about getting a job in France, that it's not well seen to have too many postdocs. It seems that the French system is based on "you only get a postdoc while waiting to for permanent positions".

Don't be afraid to apply, I personally came back to Paris-Sud after being assistant professor in a private school. It is mainly a matter of connections when you are "older".

Thanks for the advice :) There are actually many reasons that refrain me from applying to positions in France, but yes, I can imagine that after a while, if I wanted to come back, I should try to apply in a different way than a young, fresh PhD student.

I have had the same experience in a few math hiring committees in France, but beware that this is very field-dependent. For example the habits in biology are very different. One is expected to finish one's PhD around age 27 (the European LMD system makes the PhD length formated at 3 years, but 4 years are common an some fields have much longer theses disregarding European and French policy), but the average recruitment age for junior (~ tenured assistant professor) is around 32. In some field it is quite higher than that, so it is not universally true that 6 years after PhD is suspicious.

In the U.S., currently, the usual "tenure guidelines" as well as surrounding department policies in math departments, mostly create pretty narrow windows for competition. For example, "post-doc" positions are only open to those within 1-2 years of Ph.D., tenure-track assistant prof spots for people less than 6-or-so years out. Already-tenured hires are a much smaller fraction of all hires, I think.
Yes, there is the point that someone 10 years out is considered perhaps-essentially-ineligible for merely tenure-track, not tenured, positions. This arose originally as a device to protect junior people from being strung along indefinitely without tenure. But, through the obvious process, now it is essentially against HR rules to hire anyone "too far post-PhD" without tenure.
Thus, the relevant "competitions" are between not-too-disparate populations: people 3 years post-PhD and those perhaps 6 or 7 years post-PhD. Certainly these are looked at in relative terms. If anything, the more-years-out people are looked at more critically, because they really have had an opportunity to get their research program going, while someone just 2 years out could understandably still be getting their first papers through peer-review, etc.


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Should my advisor know if I am auditing unrelated courses?
Question : Should my advisor know if I am auditing unrelated courses?
Motivation : I am a PhD student in Computer Science and at times, I wish to audit courses which are not at all related to my thesis or research.
For instance:

For Fun : Italian Food and Art
For probable post-PhD jobs (but not related to thesis) - Econometrics, Quantitative Finance.

In general, my advisor is cool and won't mind the hour(s) I spend in the classroom. He allows me to work from home or wherever and doesn't care about "seeing" me in my office so long as I keep doing my work on time (which I do).
If I tell him about the courses, he unnecessarily might get freaked or worried and might question my intentions (which I can obviously clarify), If I don't it seems as if I am keeping something important from him.

Worrying about the consequences of keeping secrets from your advisor suggests something is wrong with your relationship with your advisor.  (Note: Keeping secrets is not the problem; your personal life is none of your advisor's business.)

In this case, you should let your advisor know, because the time spent in the classroom is time not spent in the lab. Since he's paying you for your time, if you will be doing daytime activities that will take time away from research he has a right to know about it. On a different note, depending on how auditing works in your university, there may be costs associated with your auditing the course, and he (or his grant) would be covering these costs.
Generally speaking, the more communication between you and your advisor, the better.

You should definitely tell your advisor about the potentially job related courses. As for the fun courses, if they are at your university and/or taught during regular working hours (9-5), you should tell him. If the courses are outside regular working hours and at a different school, then it is up to you. In either case, I would suggest telling him. These are the personal details that don't make anyone uncomfortable.
If your advisor is going to have an issue with you taking courses, you are better off knowing right off the bat.

In general, what you do in your "off-duty" hours are not subject to your advisor's wishes. So long as you're getting your job done, and are not using group resources to carry out those other activities, then what you do is your own concern.
However, if you're doing it during the daytime, or doing it for credit, then you should definitely let your advisor know. This is especially true of things related to your research program, as he or she may have helpful hints or suggestions about what is the right set of courses to take.

As far as I can tell, having pursuits and interests that are fun and relaxing and not-research are helpful to one's continued sanity and (research-)productivity. Since your work isn't suffering and if you're not spending excessive amounts of time on these pursuits, why not just mention it to your advisor? It might be nice for them to see you as an individual with varied interests as opposed to a research-doing machine.
As for job-related classes, perhaps there is a worry that your advisor wants you to go into academia but you want to say, go into industry - perhaps your additional classes are geared towards the industry side and you don't want your advisor to know about them as a result. In this case, I would say that it's better to just let your advisor know your intentions. If there is no discrepancy between the two of you about the courses being beneficial to your future, then letting your advisor know you're spending time and effort bolstering your background and knowledge sounds like a very positive thing to me!

Just let them know! It's okay to be in pursuit of knowledge or hobby but DON'T let it interfere with your research. See, you can take everything from Physics to Fine art and everything in between but at what cost? You will spend more money and more time to complete your PhD and it won't be worth it. The charm is for the first few years/semesters, but when the research takes over and you start loving what you do, you won't find time for other courses.
Your auditing unrelated courses is for your "personal gratification" only and doesn't help your advisor. It's okay to do it sometimes, but keep it at a minimum. For example, I love fine art and thought of auditing a fine art course. It won't cost my advisor and will only be for 1 hour per week in the evenings. I've never got around to doing it! I love my research and spend a lot of time working on that - so much so that my hobby can be put on hold.
Be sure you understand what is being lost and what is being gained - it should be valuable in some form or the other. If it keeps you sane, then a course once in a while is fine. But if you are auditing a lot more, you are going to take a longer time to do your Phd and when you look back you'll realize that you could've done with it.
Whatever you do TELL your advisor - they are your friends (most of the times :)

+1 for "they are your friends". While you do not need to tell your friends about your personal life, it seems odd to keep mundane hobbies a secret.

Just a paraphrase of some other remarks: you should not get into the habit of thinking that your employer/boss "owns" you, or has priority to all your time.
It may be that you and your boss began the relationship with some explicit or implicit understanding, say, that M-F 8-5 your time is their time, maybe with an hour for lunch. Or, starting down a slippery slope, perhaps it's 60 hours per week, or even understood that there's no upper limit? That "the larger enterprise" takes precedence? That people who "sacrifice everything now will be rewarded later"?
Although there's non-trivial content there, it is unwise to "buy" that propaganda too easily. For one thing, very few people are able to function at a high level more than a handful of hours in a day. The usual "40-hour workweek" is not predicated on _high_level_ function every minute of that time.
At the same time, yes, some of us are aware that we are just messing around, or just fretting, or just hanging out at the coffee machine, or water cooler, or... That this happens surprises no one, especially with confusing, large-scale projects where the novices participating find it very hard to understand what they're supposed to be doing.
Nevertheless, your employer does not own you, and does not have a claim to all your waking hours.
Yes, your demonstration of commitment to your employer/advisor/mentor's goals makes a positive impression on them. Self-deprivation is not the same as constructive work! Some sort of false converse. :)


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Good practices for skipping chapters when reading
Assuming I am reading a textbook/paper or any kind of rich material and then there is a point where I feel that the chapter I am reading is unnecessary or insignificant (I can get back to it later if I am wrong) or at times unmotivated or boring, what are good practices to skip such chapters?
(Assume Math/Engineering books)
How do you make sure that the content you skipped doesn't get in the way of the subsequent chapters? (i.e. Skipping does not carry any drawbacks)

It really depends on why you are reading the textbook.

I'm usually backtracking, i.e., I try to read a subsequent chapter, then I usually discover that there are some definitions/concepts that I do not understand, so I go backwards to look these up, and, once I've understood these notions I can resume the reading of the subsequent chapter.

That's a really good approach: get the "big picture" first, then fill in the details later.

Often the authors will tell you which chapters or sections are prerequisites for others.  The most common place to find this is in the preface or forward.  If you don't find it there, you may also find this information throughout the book.  One book that I'm working through right now has 25 chapters, grouped into 9 sections.  At the start of each section, the authors spend about a page outlining the goals of each chapter.  Nearly any time I plan to read much of a book, I first read or skim the introductory material.  These sections usually don't take much time, and they often give me a decent sense of what to expect from the rest of the book.

There is absolutely no compulsion to force yourself to read every section ... on a first pass, or second, or on any particular pass through a book. Often, seemingly obscure choices become clearer only later, and, even then, often only on the fifth or tenth time through. That is, genuine reading of sources is essentially never linear, and takes many passes through, both to get an idea of the content, and to absorb it in varying degrees. Certainly we should not feel bound by artificial rules, although the physical linearity of books and papers perpetually misleads us.

In addition to the existing suggestions, if you know someone else who has read the book they might have very good advice on which sections are essential or can be skipped.

How do you judge that the chapter is unnecessary or insignificant without reading it?
I know it is tempting to skip the boring stuff, but I don't see how you can decide that a section is not needed except in hindsight.


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What will happen to non open-access publications in the UK after 2014?
The UK recently decided that from 2014, all research papers supported by public funds must be published in open-access journals.
For instance, the Research Councils UK announced a new policy stating that:

The new policy, which will apply to all qualifying publications being submitted for publication from 1 April 2013, states that peer reviewed research papers which result from research that is wholly or partially funded by the Research Councils:

must be published in journals which are compliant with Research Council policy on Open Access
must include details of the funding that supported the research, and a statement on how the underlying research materials such as data, samples or models can be accessed.

My question is the following: what could concretely happen if someone does not respect this policy? For instance, if someone publishes both in open-access and in paywall journals, does that mean that only those in open-access count in the report to the RCUK? Or does that mean that you can get "black-listed" if you publish in paywall journals?
EDIT: Directly related question: what happen if one publishes a paper in a paywall journal and publishes at the same time the pre-print on a freely accessible archive?

What happens right now if you violate the terms of a grant you've received?  Presumably it will be the same.

@DavidKetcheson It's a very good point. Do current grants have term concerning the publications of the result?

It seems slightly annoying, but not insurmountable. From the UK Research Council's Policy on Access, I quote,

The Research Councils define Open Access to mean unrestricted, on-line access to peer reviewed and published scholarly research papers. Specifically a user must be able to do the following free of any publisher-imposed access charge:

Read published research papers in an electronic format.
Search for and re-use (including download) the content [N.b.: footnote specifies including but not limited to the text, data, images, and figures] of published research papers both manually and using automated tools (such as those for text and data mining) provided that any such re-use is subject to proper attribution.

Open Access therefore allows unrestricted use of manual and automated text and data mining tools, as well as unrestricted re-use of content with proper attribution – as defined by the Creative Commons CC-BY license. The Research Councils acknowledge that some publications may need to amend their copyright
conditions if they are to meet this definition of Open Access.

Furthermore, about compliance by journals:

The Research Councils will continue to support a mixed approach to Open Access. The Research Councils will recognise a journal as being compliant with their policy on Open Access if:

The journal provides via its own website immediate and unrestricted access to the publisher’s final version of the paper (the Version of Record), and allows immediate deposit of the Version of Record in other repositories without restriction on re-use. This may involve payment of an ‘Article Processing Charge’ (APC) to the publisher. The CC-BY license should be used in this case. OR

Where a publisher does not offer option 1 above, the journal must allow deposit of Accepted Manuscripts that include all changes resulting from peer review (but not necessarily incorporating the publisher’s formatting) in other repositories, without restrictions on non-commercial re-use and within a defined period. In this option no ‘Article Processing Charge’ will be payable to the publisher. Research Councils will accept a delay of no more than six months between on-line publication and a research paper becoming Open Access, except in the case of research papers arising from research funded by the AHRC and the ESRC where the maximum embargo period is 12 months.

For individual grant recipients, the most important bit is probably the following:

RCUK have in the past provided support for APCs through both direct and indirect costs as part of grant funding. From 1st April 2013 and until further notice, RCUK will support the payment of APCs and other publication charges related to Research Council-funded research solely through block grants to UK Higher Education Institutions, approved independent research organisations and Research Council Institutes. Research grant applications will, therefore, no longer include provision for Open Access publication or other publication charges.
In all cases universities and research organisations upon receipt of funding should transfer these charges to
their institutional publication fund. A university or research organisation can then access these funds to pay
for APCs for any article resulting from research council funding.

and from the "guidance" document:

The Research Councils will be amending their conditions of award to reflect these new requirements and will be extending existing mechanisms which capture research grants outputs (such as the Research Outputs System) to include compliance monitoring on this policy.

To summarise: much as Daniel Shub anticipated, the policy allows for either a fully open access publication or publishing in a pay-walled journal which allows you to deposit the Accepted Manuscript in certain repositories, with an acceptable embargo delay. And enforcement of this will be much in the same way other conditions for grant dispersal are enforced. (They tell you what you can do with the money; if you don't follow the rules, they take the money back and/or not give you money ever again.)
The only thing to additionally note is the small caveat that pay-walled journals, to qualify for the second option of "open access" cannot charge article processing fees. (Which is not too unreasonable: a journal is to charge either the author or the reader but not both.)

+1, great answer. Just to make the picture complete as I'm a bit confused: is it OK to publish in a pay-walled journal that have an open access option, i.e., can make a particular paper open access for a fee (this is usually called an open access fee to distinguish it from the publication fee) ?

@just-learning: I am not a lawyer, but my reading of the rules is that there's nothing in the rules that excludes the scenario you've described.

My guess is that non-open access publications will not be able to be counted towards the REF (or whatever replaces the REF), used in annual progress reports, or be considered by grant reviewers when evaluating your track record. If Research Councils (RCs) catch you publishing in a non-open access journal, they likely will be able to charge the university for the costs associated with making it open access and possibly black list you from further funding.
I think these punishments will be rare, because I don't think the UK RC model is very different from the US NIH model. The US model requires open access after an embargo period. It is not clear if the UK model allows for an embargo. The US system allows for the version accepted by the journal, but not yet copy edited and typeset by the journal, to be made open access. Many journals just make the final copy available after the embargo, but not all do. It sounds like the UK system will require a creative commons licensing, which I think would allow publishers to copy edit, typeset and sell the open access version. Complying with the US regulations is relatively easy, so I doubt it will be hard to comply with the UK regulations.

Every scientific grant I know of has a clause stating that continued disbursement of funds is contingent on compliance with the the terms of the grant.  So the most likely result of violating those terms is that they'll stop funding you.  I think there would also be a strong effect on your professional reputation, since you signed an agreement to abide by those terms and then willingly violated them.
If you violated the terms of the grant after it expired, you would probably not get funding from that agency in the future.


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Is it harder to transition from Industry Research to Prof than PostDoc to Prof?
Assuming someone just received their PhD (in say, Computer Science) and chooses to step into Industry RnD rather than taking up a post doc, a year or two later, he/she realizes that Academia is where he/she truly wishes to be.
Is it tougher to transition from an Industry RnD job to a professorship as compared to a parallel universe in which he would have chosen a PostDoc instead?
Can an Industry RnD job double up as PostDoc?
(Assuming that one keeps publishing and works on important problems)

The "assuming one keeps publishing and works on important problems" bit is the hard part.  If you are working at a serious industrial research lab doing academic-style research, then moving to academia is doable.  If you are in a more typical R&D job but doing cutting-edge work and actively publishing, then it's still possible (but you may face more resistance, depending on your subfield).  On the other hand, the vast majority of industrial R&D positions in CS do not put one in a good position to apply for faculty jobs.
It's easy to be overly optimistic about this.  I've seen a number of students take industrial jobs and declare "I'm going to keep my options open by continuing to publish, even though it's not a job requirement."  This rarely works out.  It's far from impossible, but maintaining an active research program when it's not your primary job is difficult.

Well, in my field, people who go into RnD still end up working on problems similar to their thesis but in giants like Microsoft or Google or IBM. Sometimes they can publish, sometimes policies prevent them from but their research is still, well, research.

@Inquest, in CS, getting a "researcher" position at MSR or IBM is roughly equivalent (in both difficulty and job description) to getting a job in academia, and switching back to a university is not really any harder than switching between universities. At both of these places, your main job is to produce top publications. Research labs at other companies do not have this property (to the same extent), and so transitioning will be harder. But don't think of MSR as something you can do instead of a postdoc -- its hard even to get a job AS a postdoc at MSR.


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Tuning the PhD journey for Industry jobs
I have just started my PhD and although I love research and everything that accompanies it but I am put off by Academia a bit and would prefer an Industry job at the end of my PhD.
What can I do differently during my PhD years with this ambition in mind?
I have read "PhD Grind" by Philip Guo wherein he states that at the end, he disliked Academia and thus his motives at conferences and other events changed from "crazy networking". Further, he spent more summers working in companies (Google and Microsoft Research, in his case) than with other research groups.
Specifically, should I handle the following any differently:

Relation with Advisor
How I spend my summers
Conferences
Publications

I recommend A PhD is Not Enough.

Waiting for Suresh to chime in...

If your goal after grad school is to get a job, then during grad school

you should do the things needed to impress the people you want to hire you and to be accepted and esteemed in their community.
Slightly more concretely, find people who now have the career that you would like to have, and during grad school do stuff that they have done.

I still think networking is key, but now you may be networking with a different group of people.

I think the number one thing you can do is plan your internships appropriately. Want a job at Google? Spend a summer there in a product group. Ditto for twitter, facebook, ebay, etc: all of these companies have large internship programs open to PhD students. Not only will this give you contacts inside the company, it will give you an idea for the kinds of problems that they need to solve, which can (if they are interesting), inspire the direction of your research.

I think it is really critical that at each stage of academia you are thinking about the next stage and how to get there. For those interested in staying in academia, I take the often controversial view that you should do everything possible to delay getting to the tenure review (extra time as a student and post doc). For someone interested in an industry job, it is all finishing asap. For industry, PhD and post doc experience just isn't that valuable. With that in mind ...

Relation with Advisor

You should tell your advisers that you are interested in industry jobs. This will help them tailor how they market you to your colleagues. It might mean they are more receptive to adding an industry contact to your committee or changing your topic slightly. They also might help you finish faster.

How I spend my summers

Summers should be spent working on your PhD (i.e., trying to finish as quickly as possible) and picking up skills useful for industry.

Conferences

If your goal is industry, conferences are no longer about meeting colleagues and selling your research. It is about hanging out with the vendors and industry reps. Small conferences, which are great for meeting a post doc adviser, are probably less useful.

Publications

Back burner them. Take second authorship and let someone else spend the time writing them. They are not going to be critical for getting you an industry job or promotion.

From my own experience:

Do well in all your courses. Those who will be hiring you in industry generally places a higher importance on grades than those in academia.
Publications are still important, but not nearly as much as in academia. Having a few papers under your belt will demonstrate that you know what you're talking about and that your research has been reviewed and accepted by your peers.
As was stated in other answers, find out what skills are necessary in the field you wish to enter, and master those skills. Oftentimes this will involve familiarity with a set of techniques or understanding of a very specific field. This is significantly different from academia. Remember, people in industry will want to hire you so you can help their business make money. The faster you can do that, the more easily you'll find employment.
Network, network, network. If you know specifically what you want to do in industry, talk to everyone you can (people in your academic program, friends, relatives) about possible leads in industry. If you don't know which field you want to enter, start talking to people very early on so that you can appropriately customize your training to your needs.


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Can international students in USA intern in summer in industry?
Can international PhD students go do internships during summer in industries?
Does their F1 visa status allow this?
From how I see it, this is neither an OPT or a CPT.
I asked my International Office and they said I could spend a term at another university because then I'm still enrolled Full Time (just at another institution) which I believe is fine with some paperwork. However, they are getting back to me (it's been a while so I am asking here) whether anyone else has done something similar?

Yes you can, and this is exactly what CPT is for. (assuming you get paid for the internship. If you are not being paid - I'm not sure what the rules are, but it might be easier than CPT)
You can do it for up to 12 month (not necessarily consecutive) during your degree. Check again with your international Office for the exact rules (you might still need to be enrolled to 12 units if not summer quarter/semester).

Are you sure? From what I gather, specific programs have an internship as a part of their curriculum and ONLY they are able to issues CPTs for their students. Further, aren't CPT students required to have coursework left (& not just their thesis?). The rest can file OPTs but that's AFTER graduation and not during summers or other vacations. I'm a bit mixed up with all the data. Can you point me to any official/government website?

AFAIK, CPT is for any during-studies internship and OPT is for after-graduation work. I'm not aware of programs in which CPT is not authorized since "it is not required". You might need to have your advisor justify why the CPT is relevant and required as part of your studies (that is, if you are, say,  a maht student, performing an internship in a restaurant should not be authorized.)
[I'm currently internshipping in industry, with F1 and CPT. Other F1 students have CPT as well]

Great! Thanks! I'll contact my DSO on that front. +1 and Accepted.

I was an international undergraduate in the US and I participated in summer research programs twice during those 4 years. This is slightly different from what the OP is asking, since I was working at a different university as opposed to a company. The way it worked for me was the following: I needed a faculty member at my home institution to be my 'sponsor', and I had to register for a 2 credit course over the relevant summer. Having finished my summer research, I was required to give a presentation (to some sort of relevant audience, for example, once to an 'Introduction to Research' class) and submit a journal/report. I believe my supervisor from the institution where I did my summer work was asked for a short report on my activities. That was all.
The biggest hurdle for me was to find summer programs which are willing to accept international students, or at least to fund us (in mathematics, for example, REUs are typically funded by the NSF, which prevents them from accepting international students). In Math I was only able to find 2-3 programs which would do so. There were many more in biology/biochemistry. I have a list around here somewhere if anyone is seeking such information. On the other hand, this might be different if one is looking at industry.

F-1 visa and his corresponding OPT and CPT are some or what the same for bachelors , Masters and PHD. , you can do internships whenever you want if you are a international student provided the following status.

you want to do 40 hour intern in summer - you can apply for CPT.
you want to do 20 hr. intern in fall or spring - you can apply for CPT.
you want to do 40 hr. intern in fall or spring - you can apply for pre OPT but please note that this is you OPT period.

But all these would work if your university or college agrees on your intern , in my case , I had intern in spring in north and my univ was in South my department denied my CPT since it was far away from my univ stating that it would effect my academic performance.


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What to do when principal investigator publishes your work without putting you down as a coauthor?
Say I am post-doc in the USA, and my PI (principal investigator) just published a review I wrote, with pictures I took of my experiments without putting my name as the author. What tools do I have at my disposal to get what is rightfully mine?

Related questions:  http://academia.stackexchange.com/q/975/64, http://academia.stackexchange.com/q/2280/64

I think the additional complication due to the supervisor/supervisee relationship makes this question sufficiently different. My answer would depend on if it is a junior person "stealing" a senior person's work, a senior person stealing a junior person's work, or someone stealing the work of a person with equal seniority.

As per poster's request, name and comments identifying poster have been removed.

The first thing to do is to realize that you are on dangerous ground and that nothing good is going to come out of this situation. Having your colleagues (including your PI) think that you are accusing your PI of academic dishonesty is a major black mark against you, even if your PI has done something wrong.
While it is important to vent, you need to do this very carefully. You cannot vent to any of your work colleagues or anyone who knows your PI. Even a post in a public forum like this is dangerous. Yelling in your closet at home is probably best. Even better would be in a closet in a hotel in a foreign country. I am not kidding, no one can know about this until you can deal with it calmly.
Once you can calmly deal with the issue calmly, schedule a meeting with your PI to ask what you could have done to get authorship on the review. Do not accuse your PI of stealing your work, or even hint that you deserved authorship. Hopefully this discussion goes well.
If the discussion doesn't go well, or even if it does, after a little bit, schedule a different meeting to discuss authorship on all the work you are currently undertaking. This is something that doesn't get done enough, and can cause major problems like this.
At that point you will hopefully have a clear understanding of your PI's policies on authorship. Now you need to decide if they are unfair, or were not applied in the case of this review. If the PI's policies are unfair (or not applied fairly), you need to find a new advisor ASAP. Once you have secured another position, but not before, think about leveeing accusations of academic dishonesty.

This is certainly the safest option, but I think it's a bit too safe.  I strongly recommend finding another senior faculty member, perhaps in a different department, who you can trust to keep confidence and who can act as an advocate if your initial meeting with your PI goes badly.  Meanwhile, gather hard evidence (lab notebooks, emails, paper drafts, camera) for a factual and objective case that you deserve coauthorship.  See my answer to a related question: http://academia.stackexchange.com/a/991/65

@JeffE I agree that it is amongst the safest options. Having a public fight for the benefit of adding a single paper to your CV seems like a bad choice.

@DanielEShub: I agree with you there.  But the fight doesn't need to be public.  Moreover, the real fight isn't over a line in the OP's CV, but over the PI's (apparently) unethical behavior.

The Committee on Publication Ethics has published reports on a number of cases of this sort.
I do not know very much about this, but it appears that the COPE is an independent organization who investigate and provide advice on ethical questions involving scholarly publication, upon request; they do not have an enforcement role.  As one might expect, the cases they discuss vary widely in circumstances and in outcomes (and in many cases the outcomes were never reported back to COPE).  They generally begin with the objecting author contacting the journal's editor, and in some cases the defending author's institutional authorities become involved.  As to outcomes, when the complaint was determined to be justified, a common response was to publish a note in the journal correcting the authorship; in some other cases the article was retroactively withdrawn.
I am not offering this as advice on how to proceed; I don't have enough experience to offer any useful advice at all.  I just thought it might be helpful as context.

I've down-voted this response because the SE format discourages single-line answers. A brief summary of the results of the cases reported on the website would greatly improve the quality of your answer, and provide value to everybody reading this site.

I've upvoted because I knew someone would downvote because StackExchange thinks people are too lazy to click on links.

@JeffE AIUI, single link answers are discouraged not because it is thought that people are too lazy to click on links, but because the point of StackExchange is to be a repository of information; not merely a list of pointers to information elsewhere. And many links rot with time. Without a brief summary of the key findings from the reports that are relevant to this question, this answer is not a good answer by StackExchange standard, and could get deleted.

Go to the graduate college with proof and talk to dean. It's unethical and the PI should at a minimum be reprimanded publicly. I don't think it matters what others think as long as you are honest and can prove your points. The exception is that you are happy in your position.. Of course talk to the PI first if you haven't already and find out why. There is nothing dangerous about this and its cut and dry. Stop fearing these A-Holes and cut them of at the knees - they aren't as immune to the system as they want you to believe and I am sick of the fear factor. The person that should be worried is the PI if they are behaving bad, just saying!

I know a PhD candidate in Norway that had the same issue with one co-author (the supervisor). Right after the paper was submitted without consent, the candidate sent an email to the journal editors and they rejected the paper based on evidence and for the sake of doubt. They asked the supervisor to re-submit the paper with signed declarations by all the authors and contribution declarations. At the end, the supervisor recognized that the paper was submitted without consent and the paper re-submitted with a new approved version.

So what were the implications on the student prof relationship?

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


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Does disability impact on prospects of employment in academia?
The impression I get in my field of research (theoretical chemistry) is that candidates for postdoc and more permanent research positions are judged partly upon their publication record. I suspect this is true of other fields, particularly the sciences.
I suffer from a long term chronic illness which means currently I cannot work full-time. I manage 75% of full-time hours  working on my PhD currently, so while I am well enough to do research, I am not well enough to do as much as I'd like. I am concerned that, should my health not improve, this will prove problematic as I try to move from being a student to an employee. My academic output would likely be less than an able-bodied person in the same position. While it may be of the same quality, there would be less of it.
There is legislation in many places that prevents discrimination against disabled people, but I suspect this would not apply where candidates are being judged based on previous academic output. My worry is that because academic employment seems so performance/output-oriented, I will be left behind, even if my work is of good quality.
Thoughts and experiences regarding how disability is treated in academia, particularly with regards to selecting candidates for a new position, would be greatly appreciated. I would also welcome advice on how to mitigate the possible issues arising from this.
I was initially unsure whether to post this, as it would be possible for potential employers to identify me from this posting. However, I think this topic is important to discuss and there are potentially other PhD students in the same situation as me.

Self-identifying a disability at some stage during the interview process is usually in your best interest. Being upfront with a potential employer can make all the difference, especially because of the legal protections it affords you in most academic settings. It's also important because then expectations are properly set at the beginning of the process, rather than having to "adjust" later on.
Additionally, many application processes (at least in the EU) allow for self-identification of illnesses and handicaps that could "slow down" one's career. This allows one to "lengthen" the eligibility clocks for many programs. This helps to ameliorate the problems you mentioned of being judged against a cohort that has had more time to work.

I'm not a recruiter (we have some here, I hope they'll answer to you), but I've been applying to quite a fair number of positions in the past years, so I can tell you how I've felt I've been judged and evaluated.
For a project postdoc (i.e., a postdoc where your research plan is already predefined), you need to prove that you can address the research problem of the project. I've usually felt that the evaluation process could be quite fast, and in this case, you might be judged a bit in the absolute: if there is another candidate with a better application (which is of course not limited to your publication track), she might be selected. Furthermore, in this case, the problem could mostly be the fact that you can't work full-time: if I have a budget for a 1 or 2 years postdoc, I might not be able to use the 25% of the budget elsewhere, so I might have little incentive in hiring a 75% postdoc.
For a permanent academic position, there are a priori hiring for life, and you might be more judged on your long-term research agenda. I've been applying to some positions in the UK, and all the forms ask you to indicate if you have any disability and if you need some specific treatment (for instance, if you are in a wheelchair, you might not be able to access some parts of the building). I would think that having a part-time is not necessarily a problem, as they can probably reuse the 25% of the budget (but of course, that would completely depend on the university).
In general, I've had the feeling that you're judged before all on how you have used the resources you had, and how you have progressed, rather than a simple look at your publication list. An academic application is quite huge, you can have a cover letter, a research statement, a teaching statement, a description of your best publications, a full academic CV, and some recommendation letters.
So, in summary, from how I can see people think and act in academia, I don't think they would care about your illness, and you should be evaluated taking that factor into account. The main question might rather be whether they would be interested in a part-time position.


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Ethics of a journal requiring that submissions cite existing articles in the journal
Recently, I became aware by own experiences and friend's stories that some international statistical journals (whose names I prefer to omit) are rejecting papers because they do not include a reference of the journal in question. This is, if you do not cite a paper from journal X, then you cannot attempt to publish a paper in journal X.
This, of course, has an influence on the Impact Factor of the journal and the administrators are trying to increase this.
Are there explicit regulations regarding these issues? Is it possible to denounce this kind of behaviour?

How would you know if this was the cause in the first place? I'm skeptical; even if you found an EIC that would cooperate in such a scheme, putting a request for citation of a related paper into the reviewer/editor report would seem like the way people might go about it rather than by overt demands or paper rejection. NB I am not suggesting that this would be ethical behavior either. Are these from for-profit or non-profit publishers? Are they affiliated with any of the major international statistics organizations?

See this recent article in Science (summarized in this blog post).

@JeffE, I recommend that you submit your comment above as an answer.

There are no explicit regulations regarding impact factors; the definition is too simple. (In terms of complexity, it's a lot like calculating a slugging average in baseball. So it's open to a lot of manipulation, and all of it is permissible. However, permissible does not mean ethical, and this is clearly a situation where, if true, the journal editors are trying to manipulate statistics to make their journal look better. Such a policy, if done with the intent of manipulating statistics, is deplorable, and should be denounced—via web campaigns, blog posts, open letters, and so on.
That said, there is a counterargument that is less nefarious in aim. It is possible to argue that you should, in general, cite some article from the journal you're submitting a paper to. If you can't do that, why is your article suitable for submission to that journal (let's call it journal X)? Presumably, there are a number of other journals (A, B, C, etc.) whose works you have cited instead of X. In that case, the journal could argue that your paper is a better fit for journals A, B, and C instead.
Since it's not clear for which reason the journal has the self-citing policy, I would make sure that you can determine it convincingly, one way or the other, to avoid embarrassing yourself. The last thing you want to do is spearhead a campaign that turns a molehill into a mountain.

It is possible to argue that you should, in general, cite some article from the journal you're submitting a paper to. — Of course one can argue this position, but one would be wrong.

Well, since once of the common refrains in selecting a journal is "What papers are you citing?", it's not farfetched. If I haven't cited any papers from a journal, I need a pretty good reason to submit to it, because that suggests that my article might not be a good content fit for the journal in question.

Not quite the same thing, but I was once requested by the EIC of a journal to add some references to papers published in the journal in question to a paper that I had submitted, explicitly to promote the journal by improving its impact factor.  I did not comply with this request; the papers that were relevant were already in the reference list.  Sadly this sort of thing is becoming increasingly common (as is manipulation of review times etc.), although rejecting a paper on such grounds would be taking things to another level!

The impact factor is what, 3-year moving average? 5-year moving average? Cite something that is 17 or 20 years old, let them have it.
I wonder, though, if you can find any suitable wording in the Ethical Guidelines of the American Statistical Association, say,  that would indicate the editor stepping over them. Article A.10 requires

Disclose conflicts of interest, financial and otherwise, and resolve them. This may sometimes require divestiture of the conflicting personal interest or withdrawal from the professional activity. Examples where conflict of interest may be problematic include grant reviews, other peer reviews, and tensions between scholarship and personal or family financial interests.

If the editor is paid more for the greater impact factor, or is more likely to get promoted, then of course this constitutes a clear conflict of interest. This is not as ridiculous as it sounds: if editorship of a prestigious journal is considered to be a part of the service component of a university professor evaluation, and the said editor claims in their annual report that the IF of the journal went up last year, and finally that on the basis of this claim the professor gets their annual raise, then the causal chain does link the greater impact factor with money.
Articles H.4 and H.5 state:

Support sound statistical analysis and expose incompetent or corrupt statistical practice. In cases of conflict, statistical practitioners and those employing them are encouraged to resolve issues of ethical practice privately. If private resolution is not possible, recognize that statistical practitioners have an ethical obligation to expose incompetent or corrupt practice before it can cause harm to research subjects or society at large.
Recognize that within organizations and within professions using statistical methods generally, statistics practitioners with greater prestige, power, or status have a responsibility to protect the professional freedom and responsibility of more subordinate statistical practitioners who comply with these guidelines.

So the editor, being in the position of power, has this responsibility to protect your professional freedom of citing whatever you consider relevant. You, however, also have the ethical obligation to expose the corrupt practices... which you are doing here on this website, and I commend you for reaching out.
I think it is appropriate to send an email to the leader of whatever professional organization you expect the editors to be members of, and inquire whether the request for citations would constitute a breach in the ethics. Knowing a little bit about how ASA works, I can help you identify the relevant person.


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How does the ranking of a university relate to a future career in mathematics?
Although I am an active user of SE, I have chosen to remain anonymous because of the nature of this question. I am currently a graduate student at a university that lands in the mid 70s among U.S. News' top graduate schools in mathematics, which by my understanding is very poor. My grades were quite good and although I didn't do terrifically on the subject GRE, I had a few offers from schools in the mid 40 range which I turned down. This was partially because I think I undervalued the importance of choosing a better school, and for a variety of personal reasons. My university has some unique opportunities in applied math, but is otherwise unremarkable.
As I enter my second year, I am increasingly convinced that a career as an active research mathematician is what I want for myself. However, I've heard so much contradictory information that I'm unsure if this is a realistic goal given the status of my university. While a variety of people have told me that there are plenty of desirable jobs available in "industry," the general consensus is that graduate students from low-ranking schools tend to end up as community college professors. The fact that most universities (including my own) are full of doctors from strictly high ranking schools seems to support this.
I have the chance to receive a terminal masters at the end of this year, rather than continue on for another four and complete my PhD, so I'm considering trying to retake the GRE and reapplying (I am unclear whether this is frowned upon in the math community in general, although at my school I have been reassured it is not). On the other hand, my university has a few professors who seem to be well known within their niche, mainly because their particular specialties are very unique.
My general questions are these: How important is the quality of the university when it comes to having a full career in pure mathematics research? Is a well known adviser a factor, possibly outweighing the school? Is this significantly different among applied mathematicians?

Think this is covered here mostly: http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/90/university-rank-stature-how-much-does-it-affect-ones-career-post-ph-d?rq=1

First, let me answer an easy question.  It is not frowned on to get a masters at one school, then transfer elsewhere for a Phd.  In fact, this is often encouraged.  Next, let me confirm that yes, the ranking of your PhD institution really does matter for a future career as a research mathematician.
In some sense, Gerry is right when he says that the ranking of importance is (1) quality of dissertation, (2) reputation of adviser, and (3) ranking of department.
One big problem though, is that many of the people evaluating you won't know how to evaluate criteria (1) and (2).  Hiring committees often include many (all?) people who are not familiar with your research area.  So they will often rely on what they (at least think that they) know, which is quality of department.
I have written elsewhere about why you should go to the strongest program that you can get into, particularly if you want a career as a research mathematician.
I don't know all the details of your personal situation, but I strongly encourage you to at least take the GRE again and reapply.  It may be possible for you to wait to see whether you get accepted to a school that you prefer before you decide whether you'll leave with a terminal masters or not.

My opinion, which is worth what you are paying for it:
The most important thing is the quality of your dissertation.
The second most important thing is the reputation of your thesis advisor.
The ranking of the department only comes in third.
Of course, these things are not independent of each other. It may be that at a higher-ranked department you'll get a better education and write a better thesis.
Probably best to speak to someone at your current institution (or your undergrad institution) who knows you well and can give you better advice.


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Are there any mobile application for conference attendees?
I'm currently attending a conference, and considering that (almost) everybody has a smartphone, but not necessarily an Internet access (because of roaming charges), it could be nice to have an application that could cache the program, the local map, the list of attendees, that could be updated with program changes.
Does anyone know such an application? Ideally, that should be a "meta"-application, that could be instantiated for specific conferences (a bit like Easychair).

considering that everybody has a smartphone — [checks pockets] Nope.

@JeffE: fixed. Maybe you would get one if there were such an application ;)

that's a great Question for any android/iphone forum. Why can't the mobile browser just cache webpages (and avoid refreshing them when there's no internet, so that they will not be replaced with the "page not found" error). Seems to me as a simple feature that is missing from all  current mobile browsers

Most of the conferences I have attended recently offered free wi-fi access for the participants in the conference venue. (sent while at a conference)

@FedericoPoloni: The problem is that the coverage is not always perfect, and also might not exist outside of the conference venue. Clearly, it's possible to deal with it, I was just wondering if there were a cool application that would make my life easier :)

Having a good wireless connection available in a large conference venue with thousands of people is not an easy task, check this ServerFault question for an example.

It's not specifically built for this task and I don't know how well it would work, but I've used Pocket in the past to cache webpages. https://getpocket.com/

Most conferences have a program and even book in pdf, which works well on smartphones. It won't take updates, but do conference websites update their program once the conferences started?

Conference4me will do this more or less automatically. It displays the conference schedule including talk titles, authors, and abstracts, as well as maps of the venue, the list of participants, and other information. All this can be browsed offline but the app will automatically update it every several hours if it has an active internet connection. You can add sessions to your agenda and the app also makes it reasonably easy to add them to your calendar system of choice (at least it works with Google Calendar on Android).
However, the app's functionality depends on some cooperation from the conference organizers. For starters, it can only pull information from Indico, EDAS, and OpenConf, so the conference has to be organized using one of those systems, and all the relevant information has to be uploaded. Additionally, the conference organizers will have to ask the app's developers to manually set up the link between the conference website and Conference4me's data stream. It's apparently not a very involved process for the organizers, but you can't just download the app and immediately use it on any arbitrary conference with a website.

conference4me is very cheap compared to other alternatives. But unfortunately, it doesn't support easychair.

AFAIR Lanyrd offers such an application. It works mostly for programming conferences, not so much for academic ones.
Personally, I use Dropbox and upload conference book (pdf) there. For maps and additional info (on travel, accommodation, etc) I use Evernote.
However, they are not very specific solutions and I'm missing an app that would make it easy to collect all conference stuff. Including "which talk to choose out of competing ones" and to tick talks and participants I would like to attend slash talk to.
And also, sometimes it's hard to beat printed maps, and a combination of the conference book + a pen.

Lanyrd is pretty nice, and you can add events yourself. I need to check if they work offline though.

I recently attended the annual meetings of the European Economic Association. They had a quite nice mobile version of the conference web page combined with free wifi at the conference venue. I had good use of the webpage (almost a web application). The page is apparently still up, at:
http://www.eea-esem.com/eea-esem/2012/m/

The Event App Bible is a free and very useful PDF download from the Event Manager Blog. It outlines and compares the numerous event apps that are available - there are now lots of these! The guys there recently released the 3rd edition for 2015.

CrowdCompass develops native mobile apps specifically for conferences. A native app works perfectly for conferences because it doesn't depend on the Internet to work. Our content management system (the backend) is easy-to-use and lets you make updates any time. All of these updates happen in the background so it doesn't affect the user's experience.
The app shows the contact info for all the attendees who download the app. This lets attendees start networking with each other before the event even starts, and it makes it easier to stay in touch when the event is over.
Attendees can also use the app to navigate the conference area and find speakers, exhibitors, and sponsors more easily. They can use the map feature to find local attractions (which is especially nice if they're not from the area).
The top 3 features for attendees and organizers are listed here: http://www.crowdcompass.com/blog/best-mobile-app-features-for-attendees/. We've got a lot more resources if you want to do some mobile research. Just check out http://www.crowdcompass.com.

There's no generic application. However, some conferences offer features geared towards smartphones (customizable calendars being the most useful one). I also use Dropbox and a note-taking application to cobble together a conference environment.

One recent conference I've heard that supports such an application is Ubicomp 2012. They have mobile applications with the content of conference programs and they are available on Android and iOS.

Another app in this space is ConferenceToGo - this app is specifically geared towards multi-day medium to large academic conferences with multiple parallel tracks going on. Has all the features available in general conference apps, and a bunch of others that are specific to academic conferences, like complete offline use, exhibitor list, session discovery based on interest etc.
Check out the app at the website

Do you have any affiliation with this application?  Your affiliation is not declared, and we like to know if people are promoting their own sites (it's OK, just must be declared)

Both the Society for Epidemiological Research and IDWeek have had phone apps that interact with calendar apps to help you build schedules, find local restaurants, etc.
I'm not sure who developed them, but I will say that I found the IDWeek app, which was heavily dependent on being able to download information to update itself, to occasionally be stressful in the dubious connection space that is a convention center.


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Is it a faux pas to ask for a colleague's figure in a separate but related publication?
I'm an undergraduate with virtually no experience with the expectations of academia (so I apologize in advance for the silly question). I'm finishing up a paper describing my research and would like to include a figure to describe something in my "Background" section.
There is a graduate student in my lab who has a paper dealing with the background topic and has a perfect image that I'd like to use as said figure. The paper has been accepted but not yet published. Would I be violating some protocol if I asked to use the identical figure? If not, what is the proper way to attribute the figure to the original source? In the caption?

"I want you to know that I've been admiring your figure...". Yep, that's a faux pas.

You can always ask, then it is the choice of the author to accept or not. As for the citation, if the paper is accepted but not published, you can have a note in the citation "to appear". For instance, your text could like:

Following [Alice12], we describe ... as illustrated in Fig.1.
[Alice12] Alice, paper, journal, accepted, to appear.

I would give credit much more explicitly in the caption: "Figure from [Alice12], used with author's permission".  Don't lie.

I would go so far as to say that you need to include the following: (1) the citation, (2) the phrase "used with permission". Failing to do so could place you in plagiarism territory, as the figure was taken from another paper without proper referencing.

But, OP is asking about using an identical figure, not the exact one, right?

@NobleP.Abraham According to my dictionary, identical means: "similar in every detail; exactly alike"  So "identical figure" means the same one.

(http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/identical) In anyway permission is needed.

One note: if the paper is accepted for publication, it is possible that the original author has signed a publication/copyright waiver for the journal. In which case to re-use the identical figure one would need not only permission of the author, but also the permission of the publisher.

(See, for example, AAAS's policy for re-using material appearing in Science.

@eykanal: Could you elaborate on why "used with permission" is necessary? I do not deny there may be some convoluted legal reasoning behind this, it's just that I'm regularly amused by that statement, wondering "So what? Why are you telling us? Why should I, as a reader, be interested in the fact that there is a bilateral agreement between you and the creator of the figure?" In any case, I fail to see how there could be any chance to be placed in plagiarism territory when the figure caption literally says that the figure was copied from a particular external source. Legal copyright ...

... infringement, maybe yes (because indicating the source does not automatically mean having the right to copy), but plagiarism (as in, the ethical failure to wrongfully reproduce someone else's work as one's own, or one's own work while pretending it is novel)?

I agree with O. R. Mapper: Whether you have the author's permission is important for matters of copyright (figures are copyrighted, as far as I'm aware) (also note that it's the copyright holder's perminssion that is important, which often will not be the author), what counts for issues of plagiarism is just unambiguous attribution of the figure to the author.

@O.R.Mapper - See my comment, "failure to do so could place you in plagiarism territory." Do not use other people's work without their permission, many problems may arise.

@eykanal: Yes, that's exactly what I do not understand. I fail to see how anyone could call out plagiarism (in the scientific sense) when the caption explicitly contains the original source, thereby making it clear the author does not claim to have created the figure, or that it is new. Also, "Do not use other people's work without their permission" is unquestionably true, but we normally don't point out we're allowed to do what we're doing. For a sentence like "Survey results were compiled in Google Docs.", no-one would expect or request the remark "used with permission". Likewise, ...

... a paper that says "We used the algorithm by McDuff [42].", the addition "with permission" is not expected, either. So, why would it be different for figure captions? What makes the information that the author had a permission to use the figure valuable to the reader, when the author's permission to use, for instance, their text processing software is simply taken for granted?

@O.R.Mapper - Lets take this discussion to chat.

Assuming that an identical image, either modified from the original or made based on the original, is being used, here is a better way of citing the source.
This is from APA,

Material adapted from a journal article. Note format is different from References.
Figure #. Description/Note. Adapted from “Title of Article,” by F. M.
  Author and C. D. Author, year, Title of Journal, volume, p. xx.
  Copyright year by the Name of Copyright Holder. Adapted [or Reprinted]
  with permission.

See this from Wiley

If you wish to republish an already modified figure or table,
  permission should be obtained from the source of the modified item,
  but the credit line should include reference to the original source(s)
  of the material as well as to the source of the modification. If you
  wish to republish a previously published figure or table originally
  compiled from data from other sources, permission for its re-use must
  be obtained from whoever owns the copyright in the compilation. The
  credit line should include reference to the source of the compilation,
  and to the sources of the original data by using the words ‘Based on’,
  ‘Compiled from’, or similar, or by using the credit line appearing on
  the original compilation.
If you wish to make changes or further changes to content which is
  already in the process of being cleared, you may need to reapply for
  permission as it is possible that the copyright owner will not like
  the new proposed alterations and they are entitled to refuse
  permission.

See also MTU

I modified a figure from a journal article. Do I need to ask for permission?
It depends. Significant modifications result in a figure that is
  uniquely yours. The source of the inspiration or base of the figure
  must be acknowledged in your caption. To clarify the source and figure
  creator, we recommend a credit line in your caption similar to,
  "Figure adapted by author from SOURCE." where SOURCE would be replaced
  with an appropriate citation. If the figure is just a tracing of the
  original figure, or does not contain a significant amount of
  creativity, you have not created it, and must ask for permission.

It is perfectly okay to ask for the figure knowing well that the other person may not give.
I assume you would get the permission to use the figure. As @eykanal, pointed out we need to put the phrase "used with permission" or write "Source: Citation" in the figure caption.
Example below:

Figure 1: An example flow chart [Source: http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-05-2003/images/jw-0502-java1013.gif]
You may also write
Figure 1: An example flow chart [Source: Alice et al. to appear in Journal,Year]

This is fine if you are using the exact one. But what if a modified version is used?

@NobleP.Abraham If it's modified in a substantial, e.g., conceptual way, then you could say "based on..."; otherwise I would just say that you copied the figure.


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How do professors change research interests?
My question is along the lines of How do professors usually discover "new" research interests? but more to do with "HOW"? The above question deals with how professors discover new areas, my question is once a professor or a grad student has found an interesting lead, how do they pursue it?
Consider Prof. X who is a mathematician and just talked to his old MS student who is now working on Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence. He speaks to the student for 20 minutes about how is applying math to AI. Where does he go from here?
Does he:

Go to Wikipedia/Encyclopaedia to get a rough overview of the subject.
Search for papers.
Search for a good book to read.
Speak to someone in his institution who works on AI and ask them for reading references.
Something else?

How does a professor make sure he gets the right resource considering his expertise in some subject? For instance, the professor would definitely want a book which starts from a primer on Linear Algebra

"All of the above"... but maybe not wanting a book that started from a primer on Linear Algebra. (Probably the latter remark in the question is a result of a misunderstanding of some sort.) In short, all possible sources are used. I have little interest in connections to textbooks (which typically feel an obligation to include busywork exercises, etc. and express reverence to the founders of the subject by recapitulating "troubles of the old times" (which have been solved, often).)
The operational point is that one skims all these resources, looking for key points, rather than reading ploddingly, slavishly. I look to be persuaded... or, equally interestingly, to be persuaded that the people doing the thing don't adequately understand it so as to be able to explain it simply. Quasi-ironically, the latter affords more possibilities for making genuine progress. :)

I've actually done this 2 times.  First going from pure theory to 50/50 theory/experiment, and then switching departments.  I'm a physicist but I think the following observations may hold generally:
1) don't quit your "day job".  I.e., work gradually into the new field.  I wouldn't take on any grad students in the new field until you were really sure.
2) start going to meetings in the new field.  talk to the experts, get to know them.
3) if you have a sabbatical coming up, try to do it at a place that is a real focus of your new field.  In my case I did a sabbatical at a place that allowed me to do theory and experiment.
4) some people switch fields to go after funding.  I don't recommend this.  If you have a real passion for something, find some way to fund it.  who knows what the fashion will be in 10 years.
Finally, an observation.  I found that colleagues tend to put you in a box and 20 years from now they'll think your doing the same old thing.  I know very few academics who have worked in the same area their whole careers.  No one expects this and it would be pretty boring if you ask me.  Switching departments is harder, but switching fields I think is pretty easy if you're motivated.

The answer can best be understood in terms of the intended goal of the researcher making the switch. When moving to a new field, one is typically doing so because something they had heard/read/seen about that field was professionally interesting to them—i.e., they heard of an interesting research field or specific research problem—and they are considering trying to work on that problem themselves.
Given that framework, our researcher will learn everything they can about the research question that they can, using whatever tools make the most sense in a given field of research. In neuroscience, I'd start with recent review articles and gradually move towards more and more specific journal papers. If the field is entirely new to me, I'd probably try to find a good overview online somewhere before reading the review papers. I might try books, but they take too long to read, and will likely contain far too much information that I don't care about and too little that I do. If I had a colleague in the field I might ask them to point me to some good resources, and maybe discuss the field with me over coffee.
In the end, you want to be versed in the field enough to (1) understand the problem that interested you and (2) be able to formulate your own related problem for you to work on. Any resources that can help you achieve that goal can and should be consulted.


text:
PhD in the US with an MSc from another country: coursework exemption?
I'm currently studying for an MSc in theoretical particle physics in Israel. After I finish it I would like to study for a PhD abroad.
In the UK it seems that a PhD degree does not generally require taking any courses. In the US, on the other hand, all of the PhD programs I checked require at least one or two years of coursework as part of the PhD studies, and the actual research only starts after that.
My question is: do you know whether universities in the US allow students with an MSc degree, who have already done most or all of the graduate courses as part of that degree (and got good grades), to begin research immediately instead of taking the courses again? I really don't want to repeat the courses and waste two years.

It depends on the department. I have been looking at various applied mathematics departments in the USA and all of them want PhD students to go through the coursework and obtain an MS, even if they already did a masters degree before.
I think in general, there is no chance to skip coursework. This is probably because different universities have different standards and syllabuses for the same course. And they want to ensure everyone is up to the same standard and have taken the same syllabus.
But do check with the department, there are always exceptions.
P.S.
However, it doesn't have to be a "waste" of two years. The level of the course might be higher and you are probably able to choose different courses to get broader experiences. If all else fails and you are able to ace all the courses with no problem, you can always spend the extra time looking for a thesis adviser or find research collaborators.

Even at schools that have course requirements, you may be able to satisfy some requirements by taking a proficiency exam instead of an entire course.  Check with the department!

The answer greatly varies. I was in the same situation, and in my school, a Phd student with a previous MSC gets exemption from 3 courses out of the required 12.
In other schools (I think it was Stanford, but I might be wrong), the required amount of (real) classes for a Phd student, is 4.
As @Legendre said, the best way is to check with the school itself. The Graduate Students Office (GSO) should be able to give you the details or refer you to the right website (yet, many times the website is not 100% accurate..)

Agreed, some department websites are ancient or just 404. Best to email them directory and ask. (although for applied math the answer is generally no :( )

Many US schools generally offer a partial/full "course waiver" depending on the course load and syllabus of the previous MS degree.
However, there are some problems with MSc (by research) programs from the UK (i.e. anglo-saxon system), as such program does not require any course work.
I know one person in our lab who did MSc (by research) from the UK and had to complete a full course load during his PhD, it took almost 3 years to finish the course work (only, and getting a second MS), even being one of the most competent/experienced members in our lab.


text:
How essential is your GPA for admissions to PhD programs to US universities in Theoretical Physics?
I am a Physics undergrad aspiring to pursue mathematical physics(string theory etc) as a future career. How much importance is given to your GPA by grad schools in the US or Europe for admitting students to PhD programs. A comprehensive account of the importance given by universities of different tiers would be appreciated. Example what are the guidelines followed by unis like harvard, princeton in comparision to something like texas, rochester, UCLA, etc. Also, what GPA is considered 'good' by a uni like princeton compared to the lower tier universities.

See What are some red flags that even the professors cannot help in the admission?

The importance of any single metric is binary and its value (important or not) depends on the size of the department. If the department is big admissions committees use metrics to weed out candidates. Basically anyone with GPA/GRE below X is triaged (doesn't matter what school you went to, how good your references are, etc). Smaller departments generally look at all applications. Once your applications is looked at, it is considered as a whole. There is no formula by which good GRE scores can offset a bad GPA. Obviously a better GPA doesn't hurt, but you really want to worry about the things you can control. For example, good research experience tends to trump everything else.

Thanks for the answer. Please could you be more specific and tell me about my field, if you have the knowledge. I am interested in mathematical physics, where intake by any university is pretty law. Also, I am not sure, but not a people apply as well. So should I assume GPA would not be a major factor.