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Is it true that it is easier to obtain a PhD in Europe than the US on average?
I am a physics undergrad, and plan to pursue a PhD in mathematical physics (string theory?). I have heard from a lot of people, who have personally seen the research scenario at universities both in the US and Europe, that it is much easier to get a PhD from a European university, that it takes about 3-4 years in a good university in Europe, while more than 5 years in American universities. Another thing I have been told is that in Europe you get your PhD after 4 years atmost by default, even if you have not done any original research. Is it true?

'Europe' is not only ill-defined but generally refer to a set of countries with radically different  academic systems.

By far the most ill-defined question I ever read on the internet. Makes about as much sense as asking if King Kong is stronger than Godzilla. But yeah, since you care, it's Godzilla.

Doing research during your PhD is optional all over Europe, that's true.

@gnometorule [Citation required]. I, for one, have to have a minimum of four first author research papers.

@Davidmh; I'm being sarcastic. I find the idea, and someone believing that somehow a PhD gets awarded in Europe for no work naive, and borderline insulting.

@gnometorule All right, then. Poe's law strikes again!

@Davidmh Who is that Poe guy? Some American?

@Joka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law (unless this is applicable again, and it is getting very meta).

I might be wrong about this, but I believe that for mathematics, in Europe students have typically stronger background at the end of undergraduate degree. This allows them often to finish the PhD faster.

Short answer: No.
Long answer: Determining the minimum bar for which a PhD can be awarded is a bad exercise. If you are merely working towards the minimum you will not successfully complete a PhD.
One thing to note is that PhDs in the US tend to be open ended (to the extent you can continue to get funding) while in Europe they tend to have fixed durations. This means in Europe the bar comes whether you are ready or not while in the US you get to chose when you  defend. Neither is easier, just different.

Good points. Even a minimal PhD isn't worth so much these days.

Maybe it should be noted that at least in the German universities I have been in touch with, while you are right that funding has a more or less fixed duration (read: it will not be prolonged indefinitely), the consequence of that is that you may end up with the choice between cancelling your PhD plans or continuing your PhD (indefinitely ...) without any funding, during your spare time, while having an unrelated job.

The duration between US and Europe are not usually the same, mostly because in the US, you only need to have a Bachelor degree to enrol for a PhD (and you can get a Master during the PhD), while in Europe, it's usually required to have a Master degree before enrolling for a PhD. Since it can take two years to get a Master, you also need about 5 years after your Bachelor to get your PhD.
I don't know if you always get your PhD after a number of years, no matter what, but the point in Europe is that a PhD is not necessarily an advantage on the market, with respect to a Master (at least, that's true in France), and is mostly required for working in Academia. In Academia, nobody cares that you have a PhD (because, well, almost everybody got one), so your publications, references, contacts, your CV in general will make a difference, not your degree. Hence, it might be possible that you can get the degree after a while, knowing that it's useless anyway if you haven't done any original research (although in many places, it's now required to have a given number of publications before being able to submit a PhD thesis).
But I wouldn't claim in any way that it's a common practice, and I know several persons who have dropped (or been suggested to drop ...) their PhD program.
As for your main question, I don't know if one can tell whether it's easier to get a PhD in Europe than in the US, because it's hard to define what is "easier". If your question is whether you can come to Europe, enrol to any PhD, just wait 4 years and get your PhD, the answer is no.

@EnergyNumbers: fixed, but I'm not sure there are many academic positions in Europe where you can apply without a PhD.

These days you wouldn't get far without a PhD. Those in high positions without a PhD are only there for historical reasons.

@EnergyNumbers: I reckon it changed over 10 years ago. Things are so much more competitive these days. Without a PhD, you will not make it far. That said, some people can get into the system purely as a teacher, but their prospects are limited, as the do no research. (Whether or not this is right is another matter.)

@EnergyNumbers: Sure. He has already been in the system for a long time. It's not like he just joined academia with only a masters.

@EnergyNumbers: John Polak might not have a PhD, but he started doing research 30 years ago. I think Dave's point is that it would be impossible for someone who just got a Master degree to get an academic position now. I'm currently applying for lectureship positions, and I haven't seen a single one which didn't explicitly required a PhD.

@EnergyNumbers: I certainly would not encourage potential researchers to try to get into research without doing a PhD. (And the fact that you obtained an appointment without a PhD leaves out many facts: what kind of appointment, degree of experience, ...)

@CharlesMorisset "it's usually required to have a Master degree before enrolling for a PhD", yes or a first class Batchelors degree helps if not.

@wonea: At least in France, a Master is mandatory for "regular" students (i.e., for students who come straight from university, it can be different for professionals who want to validate research experience acquired by experience). AFAIK, I thought it was pretty much the same in Europe, but I don't know in details all regulations :)

@CharlesMorisset Good point, about validating research via professional experience.  My own understanding is from an IT perspective in the UK, on what I've been previously offered.

Remember that Europe is a big place, comprised of lots of different countries. It doesn't make sense to talk about a European "PhD". The mechanism and typical PhD lengths between countries can be completely different.
The next few comments relate to the UK PhD system.

You don't get a PhD automatically after 4 years. I can introduce you to a few people who will testify to this!

In the UK, a PhD doesn't involve a "taught" aspect. I believe that in the US, the first two(?) years typically involve examinations.

In most Universities I'm familiar with, PhD students do not have a heavy teaching load. In my department, PhD students are allowed to take some tutorials/marking for additional money, but this is on top of there usual PhD working week. The number of hours a PhD student can work is closely monitored. In particular, it's incredibly rare for a PhD student to take undergraduate lectures.
I believe it is common in the US for PhD student to run a lecture course.

I will testify to 2. with regards to German doctorates.

@crash Any details on that?

There are tough (read respectable) and relatively easy (read weaker) schools and PhD programs in both sides.  You could find a comparatively easy US university v.s. top school in Europe, and vice versa.
I suggest to set your goals a bit higher than you think you can reach rather than wasting time (read life) shooting for an "easy" PhD track.

I have had the pleasure of both systems, US and European. The simple fact is that the average PhD takes less time in Europe than in the US. This does not directly correlate to quality (Although I have a somewhat informed opinion about that which I'll offer later), merely time to completion. Most of this has to due with the differences in Bachelor degrees from the 2 regions, commonly only 3 years in Europe, 4 in the US. Masters are also treated differently in both locations.
The real issue in my opinion is the lack of options for EU students. Both the US and Europe are experiencing a "watering-down" of the PhD, since they are all but required in so many places where they add no value other than haughty title. This is markedly worse in Europe, but the US is doing everything it can to "catch-up." In the US, the better job market allows multiple paths to success if you'd like to forego the PhD, while avoiding an advanced degree in Europe condemns one to worse underemployment than is already seen there (read that a Masters(Europe) is a Bachelors(US)).
Frankly, people want to believe their PhDs were exceptional and that by extension they endow their holders with exceptionality, but this is not true. A prerequisite PhD is a symptom of a sluggish, un-dynamic labor market, that sentences you to underpay for 3-5 years. If you really think you need one, the best advice is to find an advisor you can work with (a lot of them are amoral tyrants) finish it as quickly as possible, and move on. Contrary to statements above, what you get out is not linked exclusively to what you put in, and there are some very easy ones available.

It is good to see sober people in the Academia who don't fall to the "we need more PhDs!" chants...

Which country in the EU is that one supposed to be? In Portugal to enter a PhD program you either need to have a Masters or an exceptional Bachelors with high marks and letters of recommendation from senior researchers (only accepted in cases where applicants already have a publication record). A PhD usually takes around 5 years to complete. Exceptional people may do it in 4 years and quite a lot of students take 6 years or more to get one.
You do not get a PhD without a solid publication record. The requirements vary by institution and may include the number of publications and the impact factor of the publications.
If you are not motivated to spend a considerable amount of time studying that subject you should not bother getting the PhD. Also like others have said the career prospects and financial gains are not worth it either during the PhD or for the first 5 years after the PhD. Even then your position is not ensured. A leading academic researcher with that kind of income will be someone who is good at bringing research funding. Those kinds of people would manage just as well or better financially in the private sector.


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What does a "major revision" mean?
I recently received the reviews/comments for an article submitted few months back to a journal. All the reviewers overall appreciated the content and the usefulness, but also suggested corrections (varying from minor to major) : typos, better title and abstract, reorganizing the material, better exposition at certain places, adding more benchmarks; that need to be addressed before publications. All the reviewers recommended the paper for publication if the reviews were addressed satisfactorily.
The editor, looking at the reviews, mailed stating a major revision of the paper is needed before re-submitting the paper.
My question is, what does this mean, in terms of the chances that my article is accepted, when I re-submit it after making the corrections suggested by the reviewers?
In general, I would like to know what goes in the editor's mind when he suggests minor revision/ major revision etc. If an article needs major revision, will it be reviewed again? How do these translate into chances of the article being accepted?

i got a major revision then after submission of revised manuscript i got a minor revision.after submission of minor revision my manuscript is again under review.i am waiting what will happened to my manuscript. i use to check status of my paper after every hour since a week :(

In my field (chemistry), the practice is: for those journals that make a clear distinction between minor and major revision requests, “major revision” means that the paper will have to undergo further review after revision, usually by the same referees, while “minor revision” means that while changes should be made, no further reviewing is needed.
Not all journals make this distinction, however: for some, the need for further reviewing will be decided by the editor upon reading your response to the reviewers’ comments.

For example, here are screenshots of the web interface facing the reviewer of ACS and RSC journals when he has to fill in his review. You can see that the categories are different for different journals.
Example 1:

Recommendation

This paper represents a significant new contribution and should be published as is.
This paper is publishable subject to minor revisions noted. Further review is not needed.
This paper is probably publishable, but major revision is needed.
Reconsider as an article in [redacted].
This paper is not recommended because it does not provide any new physical insights.
This paper is not recommended because the material is not appropriate for [redacted].
While the work is good and publishable, a more appropriate journal is recommended such as [textbox]

Example 2:

How would you rate this article?

Very significant (top 10%)
Significant (top 10-25%)
Routine (top 25-50%)
Poor/Unacceptable (bottom 50%)

If you have indicated that the article should be reconsidered after revision, do you need to re-review the scientific aspects of the revised article?

Yes
No

Recommendation

Accept
Minor Revision
Major Revision
Reject and Resubmit
Reject

+1. But, the screenshots added have less relevance to the authors. Think those can be removed; reviewers know what is 'major' and 'minor'. The question IMO is: On the basis of the review report sent by the editor, how do you know if it is major revision or a minor one?

I disagree and found the screenshots helpful. They clarify what might qualify as a major revision by illuminating the possible choices.

As F'x said, a major revision will lead to another round of review, where your answer to the first review will be taken into account. It doesn't guarantee you that your paper will be accepted, but if you address correctly the remarks (and not only in your answer, but also in the paper), you might stand fair chances. In other words, it's worth working on the paper to improve it!

In other words, "there's a good paper buried in here somewhere; now all you have to do is find it!"

To my experience, major revision in general leads to the acceptance of a manuscript reviewed and re-reviewed for several rounds. Minor revision may undergo referee evaluation; however, in most cases, the editor accepts the paper without sending the revised manuscript to the reviewer. In fine, a careful revision, whether it's for major or minor, brings your paper accepted by the editor. Let us keep in mind that satisfying the queries of reviewers is always difficult especially for those journals indexed in PubMed. Therefore, if the paper is initially nominated for the major revision, it means that the work has sufficient novelty to be published.

dont forget that some papers propose a reject and resubmit as a standard...that way, they artificially decrease the time between submitted paper and published paper, which is a simple trick.
So reject and resubmit does often NOT mean that they did not like it...

Where does this tend to happen?  I haven't encountered it... and I'm a bit confused by the double-negative in your last sentence.

Unfortunately, this has become common practice at many journals in the biological sciences, due to intense competition for quick turnaround times. In one recent case, I got two very positive reviews requesting a few changes on the scale of "minor revision" and was given a reject and resubmit. When I resubmitted, the paper went back to the original referees who had little to say beyond that I had satisfied their requests. The paper was then accepted.

If the reviewers have done their job right, and we must assume they have, then the actual to-do list will in and of itself be an accurate gauge of the workload.
So if your policy is honesty: to try and do as much as you possibly can, never pretend you addressed issues when in fact you haven't, and only baulk at suggestions that are unreasonable and or mistaken... then you are in the clear, regardless of which term the editor used to qualify the revision.
However, if your policy is to do as little as possible, try to fix fundamental problems by means of reshuffling material, blow smoke in your rebuttal by discrediting the reviewers and sundry tricks of that nature, then understand that major means You really need to address and redress what the refs are concerned about here.

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Till what point do you do exercises while studying?
I will try to make this as less subjective:
Till what point do you continue doing exercises at end of the chapter to learn something:
I do it in Grad school and that's where I really learn. Do professors/post docs learning about new fields do it too?

I continue to do them in my field when I have the time, and I regularly learn more, even on courses I actually teach! Keep on doing that until it gets thoroughly boring, then switch to another book :)

My quantum mechanics professor said that before understanding a subject, one should first teach it at least twice.

I'm a full professor.  I still do textbook exercises, even from books in my own field.

Learning is a life long activity. Graduating with a PhD is not a license to stop learning, it's a license to (eventually) get paid to do research and learn more :)

Excellent point but is PhD a license to stop doing exercises to learn?

absolutely not.

@Inquest Getting a PhD is a license to decide whether doing exercises will help you learn or not.  Sometimes it will and sometimes it won't; but now it's your decision, rather than the professor's.

To reiterate and "second" other answers... but to try to re-frame the sense of the question, also, ... I'd agree that one should engage with ideas, but not necessarily on the terms dictated by textbooks. As alluded to in other answers, one of the benefits of experience is knowing which exercises might be worth doing... as opposed to being unable to tell, or merely being compelled to do a high volume of exercises toward a grade.
Memories fade with time, even for the best memories, and unused ideas fade out of one's mind. On one hand, this can be an indicator that a highly-touted thing has no genuine utility, at least in one's own professional life. On another hand, sometimes the pay-off occurs so much later than one's introduction to an idea, perhaps decades earlier, that the relevant connections are very dim. To guard against "fatal dim-ness", occasional "refreshing" of memories is necessary. No, this is not quite the same as "doing exercises", in the important sense that, at this sort of "later" point in one's life, it often happens that reviewing larger points is sufficient to revivify specific memories about relevant (as opposed to traditional-pedantic) details.
One not-entirely-realistic attitude, but quite useful as an ideal of sorts, is to consider the notion that one changes oneself sufficiently so that the ideas of a subject seem entirely reasonable, simplest-thing-in-the-world... rather than unintuitive and unanticipate-able. That is, the meta-exercise is to change oneself so that no further exercises are necessary (apart from perhaps the "refreshing" of memories).
These comments have ignored the hugely significant psychological point that one should as-soon-as-possible recover from the burden of thinking in terms of approval of some authority figure. To say the least, this is not an intellectually honest or psychologically healthy criterion to apply to one's activities. Pity that "school" engenders this so powerfully. That is, don't embark upon a regimen for the approval of others, but to achieve your own objectives. Oop, yes, that entails trying to understand what your own objectives might be. Yes, if you are an undergrad or grad student, or even a postdoc or junior person, this is complicated. But, I recommend, do recognize that issue: one should be trying to think for oneself, but with incomplete information, or bad information, and lack of experience... ?
Last, "of course", one should not use "doing exercises" as an avoidance mechanism to allow avoiding facing more amorphous, real issues. "Doing exercises" is not the stairway to heaven, any more than a stringent exercise program guarantees professional athletic success, etc.
The relevant summary might be to start thinking in other terms than "exercises". After all, there are no "exercises" that qualify you to buy lunch, or mail a letter... The fixity of novice mathematicians on "school" and its ... mixed... credentialling system is in many ways very noisy and non-informative. Even if one needs to fit into that, one should not think too much in those terms.

Keep doing it as long as it’s useful to you.
I’m a couple years into post-doc’ing, and find exercises just as useful as I did in grad school; and I know professors at multiple stages of their career who appear (from conversation) to still frequently do exercises.  On the other hand, I know at least one person who claims to have never particularly found exercises helpful.
So it certainly varies from person to person whether exercises are/remain useful; for a given individual, though, I have no idea how it typically changes over time.  For my part, the main change over the last few years is in how selective I can be about exercises: I can now generally look quickly over a page of exercises and gauge pretty consistently which ones will be essentially routine, and which will require some real thought.    Both kinds can still be of interest (at least to me), but for different purposes.

Exercises fall at various levels in Bloom's Taxonomy. Exercises at the higher end of the taxonomy are harder to do, but verify more objectives, since they rely on understanding and applying knowledge from the lower levels.
To try and answer your question, I'll generalize a bit and say that academics are by nature quick learners for the lower-level objectives (knowledge, comprehension). Exercises at this level are probably less useful than Upper-level exercises (application, analysis, evaluation, creation).
However, whenever I haven't taught material in a while, re-doing some of the knowledge exercises is a great way to freshen up and be sharp for class.

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How to effectively supervise grad student calculus teaching assistants (TAs)?
Those of you at universities where calculus is taught in small sections with graduate student instructors;
what sort of structure do you have for supervising/mentoring the graduate students and overseeing the administration of the course?
E.g., does this duty rotate among tenure-track faculty, do you have a dedicated instructor who does this on a long-term basis, or do you have some other structure?

I'm not in math, but I have supervised several times multiple sections of a first-year software design course taught primarily by grad students (usually I also am teaching one of the sections).

Weekly meetings are helpful, at least an hour, especially for first-time TAs
Collaborating on course content (presentations, exercises, quizzes, homework, exams) via the cloud (e.g., Google apps) is great
My policy is to share all my content with new TAs when they come on board, with the agreement that they'll improve and re-share it back.
I try to get extra $ for "tutoring" hours for them, outside the course, so as to make the work less painful. Anything that boosts morale and shows you're on their side is great.
I try to nurture leadership within the group, as turnover is high.
I used to pay (out of my pocket) an end-of-semester team-building social outing (I felt it was worth it, to have motivated TAs). However, when the department chair found out I was doing it, he started covering the cost from then on, if I invited him, too (this has become a normal thing, since it's essential to get and keep for a while the motivated TAs).
If you can approach it as a management problem and apply some management techniques (don't take on their monkeys), it's feasible. Also, I scooped a few good research students (and was able to spot some I wouldn't work well with) thanks to the experience.
My department doesn't rotate this kind of responsibility, since courses are generally "owned" by only one or two professors. We are unionized, and have considered having this kind of supervision recognized formally in terms of teaching load (which it still is not). It comes up every time our collective agreement is re-negotiated, but the % of faculty it affects is small. The P&T committees take it into consideration, however.

In my department, there was an administrator who coordinated the TA's. Sad to say, he provided none of the things Fuhrmanator described.  However, he did step in and take over a class if a TA was out on medical leave.

I'm disappointed that you do not offer any training to your TAs on how to teach effectively.

@AnonymousPhysicist the weekly meetings are precisely that (specialized coaching). Also, my department has a standardized set of procedures (how to prep a syllabus, decide letter grades, etc.) that it shares with all TAs each new semester, and the school has a teaching support group that does seminars (to any instructors including TAs).


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Relative importance of research publications for grad school admissions (theoretical physics/pure mathematics)
A dilemma that is confronting right now is knowledge versus research. I am a second year physics undergrad, with a strong interest in mathematical physics, QFT, and an even more strong interest in pure mathematics. Right now, I am not sure what to pursue, hence ideally I would like to try out a lot of both the fields. However, most of the people I meet are advising against me saying I should just pick and area and stick to it, and try to publish papers, even if I want a remote chance of getting into the top grad programs in the US. So , I am confused if I should stick to a field, and get research papers published or explore a large number of areas. This boils down to the question how much importance does a uni give to a research publication over the knowledge the person has?

Why choose?  Why not (try to) publish research papers in several different fields?

@JeffE: obviously, that would be hard to do..One needs to study a considerable amount, before publishing papers in an area, especially so in theoretical physics and maths.

Well, yeah, of course it's hard.  That doesn't mean you shouldn't try.

The main thing that graduate school admissions committees are looking for are good researchers. Publishing papers demonstrates such ability; publishing papers in well-known journals is even better. However, it's difficult, as an undergraduate, to publish papers as first author (which is the most important position when one is applying as a student). Typically, they will be working in consultation with a more experienced student, who will be the lead author. In that case, while the credits are of themselves useful, they need to be coupled to strong letters of recommendation from the co-authors, testifying to the student's original efforts in executing the work.
At the same time, one should not totally sacrifice depth in a single area for breadth; grad schools want to see some evidence of concentration, but complete devotion to one area is also too much of an extreme. Try to balance the two somewhat, so that you've explored a few areas, and worked at least one or two areas in depth.

Thanks for the answer. I get your point. Howeever, as an high school student, I was completely unaware of this competition for grad school, and the specialisation required. I had big plans for exploring a wide range of areas. But, after coming to university I am disappointed.

In pure math (which the OP describes as an interest), papers do not usually have a designated lead author. It is still true that people will wonder to what extent the student was a major contributor, and that reference letters are key for this, but the specific question of being lead author is not relevant.

@DavidSpeyer: Thanks for the information. I come from an engineering background, where the authorship system is definitely a lot more formalized than it is in math.

@ramanujan_dirac: You can still pursue different subjects, but the danger is if you try to do too many different things, you won't stand out in any of them. Moreover, two of the core skills for a graduate student are perseverence and persistence. People who constantly move from one thing to the next are going to have a hard time convincing graduate committees that they will "settle down," rather than try to jump from topic to topic in grad school, too.

@aeismail: yes, you are completely right...what one can do is just feel bad about the state of affairs of academics, and stick to a topic, or risk everything to enjoy whatever one feels like doing(whenever one wants). Obviously,  the former one should be the unfortunate solution. I am concentrating on QFT right now, but I always think I would enjoy some other field more, but afraid to try it out exactly for the above reason.

Moreover, 'trying out an area' means spending atleast 5-6 months on it.

Two or three areas does not constitute jumping around. Six or eight or ten areas would. Picking one area without trying anything else is probably not a good idea, either, because you'll run into a "grass is greener" situation.

To add to other answers... thinking of mathematics: It is difficult to somehow-deliberately acquire intellectual maturity. Attempting to "force it" or "fake it" will produce outcomes worse than doing nothing. A more honest and productive attitude is "engagement", which may or may not produce papers. Even a very capable novice should not focus on "papers" because this has a corruptive effect on the clarity of one's thinking, and tends to create possibilities to look silly, if not worse.
Awareness of current events, engagement with them, are the most important. No, the GRE Math Subject Test is essentially completely disconnected from this, but does test for a certain facile cleverness and quickness. Grades and standard coursework are relevant only to the extent that they prepare one for more serious, live things. Getting a perfect score on a drivers license exam does not mean much about one's capacity to drive in Formula One races, or NASCAR, either.
As an advisor and mentor to quite a few PhD students over the years, I've found that the worst liability is believing too firmly that one has already "arrived". True, it can be debilitating to doubt oneself too much, but that is closer to sense than believing that no one knows anything, so that one's trivial observations represent publishable progress that should "impress" people. If anything, one should manage to communicate that one is aware that other people have done many things.
Probably the most essential element in applications is letters of recommendation from experienced research people who know you well, who (hopefully) can attest your potential. Being "best in a class" is good, is nice, no downside, but is somewhat tangential to "research potential". Writing childish papers as an undergrad does not certify anything at all about one's potential for serious professional work, and one should be careful about misunderstanding this!
Admission to an elite grad program in math (in the U.S.) is difficult without excellent GRE score (=filter), maybe a good Putnam score to show you're clever, undergrad degree from a "Research I" school with many graduate courses on one's transcript (since undergrad courses at best don't quite get anyone up to the starting line of awareness or knowledge), and glittering letters from people who are established research people, who've made a contribution themselves. (Otherwise how in the world would they know what they're talking about when they say you have the potential to do serious things?)
Having said all that... I guess an indirect point is that one ought not expect to have any meaningful publications. Sure, one can probably arrange meaningless publications, but, if anything, real mathematicians are not moved by that. (Such things are handy for impressing university-wide panels on this-and-that, but that's a different story.) So far as my (limited, but not exclusively anecdotal) experience indicates, a tiny minority of applicants to the best grad programs in math have any real publications at all.

Ideally, research publications give a strong indication of not just how much knowledge a person has acquired, but how much has he been able to contribute to the existing body of knowledge. That, coupled with the fact that there aren't very reliable metrics to gauge a person's knowledge (grades are a very poor metric in that regard IMO), makes it obvious that you would be best served by focusing on churning out as many high-quality papers as you can!

You should try to think just like a professor. Just think that you are allowed to have some students to work under your supervision. So, do you prefer to have a student who is able to conduct research and publish paper or some one who does not know how to do research but have good grades? Graduate school is all about doing research and showing that you are able to do that will surely help you to get accepted by grad schools. They want to know if you are able to cope with such life as a scientist or not. It is possible if you devote yourself to research your grades become low, but it is normal and no one is able to publish great papers and at the same time obtains good grades. All in all, publishing papers surely helps you. A little advice, make a team with your friends and divide the works to be able to make a balance between both sides.


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Overlearn in undergraduate College - good or bad idea?
I have no choice but to take courses I've already learnt in college.
So is it a good idea to overlearn?
Would overlearning help me to get into graduate school?
There are many ways for me to spend time:
research, gpa, heavy courseload, or studying stuff beyond my current syllabus
According to my course plan, I'm supposed to start learning Multivariable Calculus in about 5 months and Linear algebra in about 11 months from now. In between now and then is just some humanities courses and a bunch of Physics/Math courses I've already learnt.
How important is a high GPA and to get into a good graduate school?
And why is it important to get into a good graduate school?
note: I'm a Physics major...

questions on undergraduate study are off-topic for this site.

@EnergyNumbers: Like most "questions on undergraduate study", this question is also relevant to graduate students who are still taking classes.  In particular, MS students also worry about the balance between mastery and good grades in PhD applications.  I strongly oppose closing.

I agree with @JeffE. Questions about getting into graduate school have been considered on-topic, and your behavior as an undergraduate is very important for getting into graduate school. If this question could be edited to focus more on the impacts of these decisions on the grad school application process, then it would be much better.

maybe you could ask this question on this site proposal: undergraduates. Follow it if you find it interesting!

Having a good GPA is important; having a great GPA is not.  Assuming your GPA stays above a certain threshold (about 3.5), other factors like research experience are significantly more important, at least for admission to the best departments.
In particular, if you get a C in a distribution class because you spent "too much" time on that experiment you later published, nobody will even notice the C on your transcript.

Thanks! This means I won't have to spend incredible amounts of time on humanities trying to get A+

In the US, how does 3.5 GPA map to the % of your cohort that you've beaten (approximately)?

@Jase: Yeah, I too would be interested to know where in the bell curve you are, to get a CGPA on 3.5? In India, we are given a CGPA out of 10, and though grading may vary, a CGPA of 8 is average, and a 9 is avg. + std deviation. Do US universities follow such rule?

The thing about GPA, is that if you want to get into a good Grad School, is one of the few things that basically distinguishes you from your peers (which percentage are you in)
If you're in a known American School, having a good GPA is extremely important then.
Don't you have the possibility to take those courses before, I'm not sure about the American System, in countries like Japan, you can actually take the courses in whatever order you think fits you the most (given certain serialization)
I've also can recommend you studying those topics ahead of time, so when you take those courses, you can ace them, and devote your time to other extracurricular stuff that might pump up your application to a grad school.
Many grad schools love it when you have published work before, so having a couple of papers might help you, and you can get this papers from your extra time.

Thanks! Look like I'll study now and enter research in my sophomore. Now, I plan to 'overlearn' so that I can spend time on research later. I also plan to focus on getting into a good grad school instead of simply learning all the courses as fast as possible or trying to graduate fast. Note: I'm a freshman.

Research is an awesome way to exploit your knowledge.
Just join the undergraduate research program in your college: if you know significantly more than your peers in college, you can do much more advanced research which would boost your grad school application.
Of course, as a Physics major, you'd need some basic knowledge. Knowing introductory Physics and single variable calculus isn't enough: try to learn some computer language (C++), Multivariable calculus, linear algebra, differential equations and some upper division Physics courses. Having more knowledge would help broaden your choice of what research project you want to join.
If you've overlearned so much that you're learning graduate courses while you're still a sophomore, you can join the Theoretical Physics research projects: these tend to need lots of knowledge.

(I'm not familiar with what overlearning exactly is, so I go by what Wiki says it is)
Depending on the field of science there are things where overlearning (as in vocabulary) is beneficial or even needed. E.g. I'm chemist. Unfortunately, there are priciples behind chemistry that cannot be explained like you explain how to derive a formula. But knowing lots of these things allows you to extrapolate to new situations. During undergrad studies we all complained that if we had wanted this style of studies, we had chosen medicine and started learning the phone directory by hard.
It is a bit like learning a language like children do: without being told, structures will emerge.
These structures of the knowledge that form by experience are also important for topics/techniques that can be explained in a logical way. They allow you to become fast and efficient. They allow to "automate" certain tasks, and that leaves conscious capacity to think about less well-known things.  In physics, it will certainly be beneficial if you have your intellectual capacity free for thinking about physics because you mastered the relevant maths to a level where you see possible ways of solving instead of digging through your brain and notes for that. Ultimately, this level of mastering subjects is also what is needed to arrive at truly new connections ("Good mathematicians see analogies. Great mathematicians see analogies between analogies." - true for physicists and chemists and whole lots of other researchers as well).
This means you need to exercise the stuff you learned. Doing textbook excercises is a boring (but possibly efficient) way of doing that at intermediate levels. But of course, you can try to do this with research projects as well. The important thing also with undergrad research is that you train your research/physics skills and not only do what you are told to do, but also take the time to understand why things are done this way. What alternatives would exist, what would be the disadvantage of that etc.
About studying ahead of schedule: in my university (Germany) it was no problem to participate e.g. in written exams ahead of the "regular" time. If you passed, noone asked you to go to the course. In some subjects, it even gave you the benefit that if you wanted to try again when your year was doing the exam, you could redo it and pick the better mark. Also, noone would have kept you from attending advanced lectures/seminars. Or if you went for subjects that were not strictly on the plan, like another language. I also heard some philosophy, took some computer science and some economics and an introduction to general and patent law - you get the idea. We did not do much research that way, but that was probably because we had research projects on schedule, so the research groups had rather more research students than they could handle (I don't count fetching stuff from the library as research job).

Sorry, by overlearning I meant studying stuff beyond my syllabus, for example according to my course schedule. For example, I'm supposed to study Modern Physics in something like Fall 2014 but I'm studying it now. My use of the word 'overlearning' was not according to the right definition.

"...Experts suggest that after you can say, “I know this material,” that you should continue to study that material for an additional one-fourth of the original study time... In an experimental study, students who overlearned material retained four times as much after a month than students who didn’t overlearn." quoted from http://www.csc.edu/learningcenter/study/studymethods.csc


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Where does Computer Science background students fit in Theoretical Physics
I am basically an Electronics student - background in Computer Science (that's where I want to work). I applied for an internship in USA in a research institute where the group is focused in Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics, Chemical Physics, Physical Chemistry, Materials Science.
I got selected. Now, I would like to know where area could someone with CS background  would actually work on?
I am looking for a detailed answer.

When you switch topic like that, especially if you are there for an internship, just do what you want to do. That’s where you’ll be at your best, if you love what you do. If you’re really afraid that you won’t fit, you could always try to bring it up when you meet your future team: just tell them again your background, and check that they don’t have hard prerequisites that you don’t meet.

@Rahul: What aspects of CS and Theoretical Physics interest you the most?

@rahul, you will work on whatever your supervisor wants you to work on. Obviously the supervisor has an idea what you will be doing or you wouldn't have been selected. Perhaps you will be working on the code for an computer simulation to model whatever condensed matter or materials science system is being explored.

@rahul, however your question is too localized. Could you edit it to make the answer useful to more people (than just you)?

Given a background in CS, that probably means you have a sophisticated view of software development—at least one that is far more advanced than the average physicist or materials scientist.
It seems to me that you would probably find that you would be working as a programmer on a computational project: perhaps a new numerical method needs to be implemented, or the performance or functionality of the existing code base needs to be improved. Or perhaps they want somebody to help prototype new interfaces between experimental hardware and computer hardware or software? There are a lot of possibilities.

you would probably find that you would be working as a programmer — ...unfortunately.  All too often, other fields view computer scientists as mere programmers rather than intellectual peers.  (For example: a new algorithm needs to be implemented, not designed, even though algorithm design is squarely in the domain of computer science.)

@JeffE: Algorithm design does fall under computer science, but it still has to be done with the cooperation of the people who understand the physics, if the programmer doesn't. However, I've changed the text to "numerical method needs to be implemented," to allow more freedom for algorithm design.

That's no improvement.  Numerical methods are algorithms.  And of course algorithm designers must understand the problem at hand, which requires working closely with — but not for — domain experts.


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Will advanced knowledge help my undergraduate research?

Possible Duplicate:
Overlearn in undergraduate College- good or bad idea?

I'm about 0.5-2 year(s) ahead of my course plan* depending on how you see it, but I don't want to waste my time so I want to self study stuff beyond my syllabus. I'm a Physics major freshman now, and I plan to get into research in my sophomore.
Let's say I have self-studied lots of Math/Physics stuff in my freshman year, and get into research in my sophomore. Will knowing advanced stuff give me an advantage in my research? (one of) My goal is to have a good grad school application
Here's a related question I asked previously on overlearning in college Overlearn in undergraduate College - good or bad idea?
*I was preparing for Olympiad so I learn Calculus and Introductory Physics. But I don't get to skip courses in college. So I'm relearning stuff all over again.

I find the question a bit ambiguous and too similar to the previous one, could you care to rephrase it in some other way. You are basically asking is learning more going to help my research, in which case the obvious answer is yes

This is a duplicate, and it's about undergraduate study so off-topic. Voting to close.

@EnergyNumbers: You're saying undergraduate study does not classify as "acedemia"?

Knowledge always helps, and learning by oneself for oneself is a great and fruitful thing (just you need oneself to motivate) - on-one can learn for you; otherwise I find this question vague.

@RodyOldenhuis As per the FAQ, undergraduate questions are off-topic for this site.

@EnergyNumbers: Link please? Because the first sentence in the FAQ is "This site is for academics of all levels [...] as well as anyone in or interested in research-related or research-adjacent fields.". AFAIK, that generic enough to include undergraduates. The second entry on what questions can be asked here is "transitioning from undergraduate to graduate researcher", and a bit down it reads "a question that will help people like me.", so...not sure how you get to that statement.

@Rory this is a question from an undergraduate about their undergraduate studies. It should be closed. Then deleted. As should the question that it's a duplicate of.

As I commented on the OP's previous question, this question can be edited so as to be both 1) not too broad, and 2) on-topic if it is focused on transitioning from undergraduate to graduate level work. However, this question is basically a duplicate of the last question. There is perhaps one good question hidden in the text of these two.

@EnergyNumbers: 1) please spell my name right. 2) you still have not given a proper reference to a section in "the FAQ" that prohibits people from posting questions like these. I agree the question should be closed, but only because it's a duplicate.

I don't know about undergraduate research, whether it actually requires advanced knowledge or not. So far, my advanced knowledge hasn't really helped me, so I was quite skeptical that knowing lots of Physics and Math would help me make better research.

@EnergyNumbers: See my comment on the linked question.  Quetions that are only relevant for undergraduates may be off-topic, but there are remarkably few such questions, and this isn't one of them.  This is a question about how best to prepare for research, which would be firmly in scope if it weren't a duplicate.

@EnergyNumbers: Any chance of getting a reference to that section in the FAQ supporting your statement on deleting all undergraduate questions?

I can't think of a single situation where having more knowledge than expected or required was ever a bad thing...
You will have to "suffer the system" here and there, that's a sad but simple fact (just because you say you know something, does not mean the schooling system will believe you. Nor should they--truth be told, most of the time you actually do learn something from courses you thought you mastered).
Anyway, always talk to your teaching assistants/professors about this. Work them a bit, see how flexible they can be. Often, you'll find that some could not care less if you come to class or not, as long as you pass the exams and do all the practical work required to pass the course. Others, unfortunately, will have mandatory attention and the likes, that they consider holy. Going against them and their reules at all costs is pointless and will cost way too much time and effort. Just sit out the classes.
In time, and when your approach is indeed successful, it will get easier and easier to pull off.
Whether it's a good idea or not, that depends entirely on how fast you can learn. No matter how good it might make you feel to know so much more than your peers and to be able to skip so many classes, and get into such high-profile research, the time you spend studying should never cost you your social/networking/extracurricular life. In time, the stuff you'll have to master will also become harder and harder to learn. Before you know it, sticking to this approach blindly will cause you to you spend all day and all night, all year round, in some dark corner of some smelly attic. And that, is never a good idea.

I have to disagree with "most of the time you actually do learn something from courses you thought you mastered". In shorter run, yes, you learn something. But in a longer run doing thing below one's skills or knowledge is devastating for motivation, de facto making learn less on this subject, in the future etc.

@PiotrMigdal: I didn't make any statement on the usefulness of following the class that is below your level. The intention of that statement was to indicate that this is the prevailing view in many educational systems.


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Advantages and Disadvantages of learning mathematics and physics subjects through lecture videos
I have been contemplating studying some subjects by watching video lectures, more specifically Topology and Quantum Mechanics. I was wondering, if anyone has tried studying a subject on his own  by watching just lectures. Alternatively, I could work systematically through a book. What are the advantages and disadvantages of learning by watching lecture videos, compared to reading a book? I am more concerned more about courses in Maths and Physics.

I strongly recommend checking out the answers on this question and this question.

For postgraduate research, neither watching video lectures nor just reading a book are going to help you enough.
You're going to have to actively engage with the subject matter, by solving problems, and keeping up with current research literature in journals.
Following on from the OP's comment: I do understand that your question is "which is better - books or videos". And the answer to your question is neither. It's a false opposition.
Neither are necessary, and neither are sufficient. You have to learn the core content of maths and physics by solving problems. And to do postgraduate research, you have to keep up with the current research literature in journals (including preprint archives where appropriate).

I understand. But the question is, if it is better to learn the core content of the subject through video or by reading a book. Obviously, problem solving, in depth learning of some concepts, and doubt solving by referring books will come after that.

@ramanujan_dirac Thanks for the comment. I've updated my answer to take account of it.

That very much depends on personal details. I am comfortable learning from books, and don't care for videos; others I know prefer videos.

The most important advantage/disadvange IMHO is personal preference.

Advantages of video lectures:

a good video can teach the important ideas in a very fast way. It is not that a book couldn't do that, but it may be easier to start with a introductory video and then dig more in-depth into a book.
some things (experiments in natural sciences) can much better be shown by video (and even better in reality)
lectures by design come in "digestible" pieces
It may be easier to schedule time for video, as it is known how long it will take.

Advantages of books:

you can better set the pace
you can better decide where to stop in between
easier flip back/forward to recall things.
things that take much thinking/working time of you fit better with the concept of books. E.g. calculation of examples/excercises. In depth study that derives the formulae. Few lecturers take the time to develop the exact formulae.
I find it easier to have a number of books open for quick reference (and papers).
The screen is not only needed for video, but possibly also for editor (sorting notes, computing examples, etc.), web pages etc.

Looks rather complementary than exclusive to me. Additional self-study (by book) is usually recommended also for (live) lectures. I think it even more important for video lectures, because you cannot ask questions. It will depend on what level of understanding you want to achieve, though.

I have studied through difficult math topics using basically three approaches:

Videolectures
Books
Tutorial Papers

To get the basics of the topic you are studying and "leveling up" with the other people in the field, I think this three resources are very good. I do not see why would you single one out in favor of the other. I've basically seen like 4 Machine Learning Summer Schools, 3 Online Courses, 3 books, and that was only to be aware of what was happening around me.
After that I had to engage a lot on Online communities, conferences, papers, etc.
I find that a good practice is to set alerts for authors that you wish to follow and are prolific in the specific area you are doing your research on.


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Substantial update of an arXiv paper
I put on arXiv several months ago a paper that has been submitted at the same time to a conference. The conference paper was rejected, and using the reviews, we have started improving the paper, and one thing leading to another, we have substantially changed the paper, to the point that the title has been changed. However, the new paper is similar in many points to the previous one, in particular about the technical results (the most important changes are rather on the presentation of the results).
We plan to submit in a near future the new version to a journal, and to also put this version on arXiv. My question is therefore the following one:

Should we withdraw the previous version, and submit a new one?
Should we replace the previous version by the new one, even though the title has changed? The arXiv paper is indexed by DBLP, would the DBLP citation be also updated?
Should we keep the previous version, and the submit a new one?

This MO Q&A may be helpful to you. In particular, the answer from an arXiv moderator.

Since you raised the question, here some short information on how dblp processes arXiv papers: 1) dblp only indexes arXiv papers which belong to a cs.* category 2) Once per month, all relevant publications of the past month are included to the bibliography in bulk 3) Any changes in arXiv after that point will not carry over to dblp. Unfortunately, dblp currently cannot handle "live" documents.

You cannot completely withdraw a paper from arXiv; instead, the system can add a retraction notice on it. So, if you follow option #1, you'll end up with 1. an old paper, 2. with a retraction notice, 3. a new paper. It's a bit of a mess…
I would suggest the following:

Consider your much-improved version as a new article: get it published, upload it on arXiv. In the arXiv version, you may refer to the older arXiv paper (“This article is based on the same results as …, but the presentation of results and the whole discuss have been reworked substantially”). Put it either in the introduction or, if you don't want to disrupt the flow of text, as a footnote or “banner” before the introduction.
Most importantly: make a update to your old paper, for a version that links to the new paper. That way, you make it completely clear that a improved discussion is available.

This addressed the only issues I see, namely making sure that people can find your work, and that you're not suspected of duplicate publication (which, on an open platform like arXiv, doesn't make much sense anyway…).

Shouldn't this also be stated on the "main" arXiv page for the paper? That way people see it before they even download it.

@aeismail I don't think you can introduce HTML links into the abstract… but otherwise, yeah, why not

I didn't mean the abstract. I mean in the "Notes" section, you could at least list the URL or arXiv paper number.

@aeismail ah, “comments”… I have never used that field, so I forgot about it


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Measure of review bias
I was reading the other day this blog post, about "how to peer review", and one passage struck me:

Don't review like a grad student
Reviews written by graduate students are among the most negative.
Grad students are often on the receiving end of negative reviews, because they are just learning how to write papers.

So, even though I'm no longer a grad student, I sometimes have the feeling that I tend to be a more negative reviewer than others, but it's actually hard to measure (maybe I'm just reviewing mostly bad papers?!), since I don't always have access to the other reviews of the papers I'm reviewing (due to the fact that I've been more often acting as an external reviewer than as a PC member).
I believe that the quality of my writing has improved with the feedback I've received from the reviewers of my paper, but because I don't have any feedback on my reviews, it's hard to know if and how I can improve them. So my question is: is there a way to measure my own reviewing bias?
The first thing that would come to my mind would be a set of papers reviewed by many other reviewers, and a result like: "you're in the x% more negative reviewers". Of course, I'm not implying that I would be automatically less severe when reviewing, but sometimes, in case of doubt, it's good to know one's own bias.

I’ll add a comment here because there are so many things I disagree with in the blog post you linked to… I don't think justified, documented criticism is necessarily bad. I value criticism as long as it is constructive, and I welcome external review even when it's rather hard to hear. (And, many times I have said to myself upon reading the review the second time: “duh, should have thought about that”.) Never be afraid to rewrite a paper, gather some more data, or reply to the editor making a stand and arguing why you do not agree with the reviewer's assessment…

@F'x: I'm not saying I'm agreeing entirely with the post, but I'm not sure where it said that justified, documented criticism is necessarily bad. It actually advises to provide constructive criticism.

There aren’t many ways for your to evaluate how your reviews stand against others, but there is at least one. You can keep a tab of the papers you have reviewed, and look for them a year or so after the review. See if your reviews correlate with the publication (or lack thereof) of the papers in the respective journals… if papers you have suggested to reject are frequently accepted by the editor, then you give typically more negative reviews than other reviewers of your community.
Of course, this is a very black-and-white picture (rejection/publication). But, I don't think you can actually do much better, because “negativity” can hardly be measured quantitatively.

PS: I wouldn't call it a reviewing bias. A review is the editor asking you your frankly assessment of a publication. Toning it up or down because you fell that you do not conform to the “mean” of your field would probably diminish your value as a reviewer. If the editor does not think your reviews are helpful to him, he’ll just stop sending you paper to review!
I'll finish with an anecdote: there's a journal for which I have recently given a series of quite negative reviews (well documented, and justified in my eye), and I have actually received some positive feedback about my reviews from the editor.

I try to keep track of the paper I've reviewed, but one thing is that most reviews I'm doing are for conferences, where it can be the case that papers with "negative" reviews are accepted (if the others have even worst reviews).

And I call it a bias more in the sense that the age or experience can have an impact of the overall review process. So I don't necessarily know if I'm too negative because that's just the way I am, or if because I'm biased :)

Two possibilities, both not ideal:
1) If the paper is revised and resubmitted, it often comes along with detailed replies to each reviewer as to how the authors addressed each review. You may get at least these replies to the other reviews, which will allow you to judge whether they were more or less severe than you. In addition, editors often send the reviews back to the author in ascending order of severity, so "reviewer 1" will be the most enthusiastic and "reviewer 3" the least. If you are significantly more often "reviewer 3" than "reviewer 1", this may say something.
2) You can always gather anecdotal evidence by simply asking the editor to provide a little feedback on your review. Of course, the best of all editors provide this feedback (in a constructive manner) without having to be asked.

“editors often send the reviews back to the author in ascending order of severity” — I was very surprised by this assertion, so I checked in the reviews of my own papers and this is absolutely not true for journals of the American Physical Society, American Institute of Physics and American Chemical Society. Maybe some editors do it, but that's very far from a general rule…

OK, this may differ by field. This practice certainly holds in psychology (perhaps psych editors like to soften the blow?).

@StephanKolassa: as I said, I review mostly for conferences, where most of the time there is only one round of review, and you don't always access to the other reviews. I've also reviewed papers for some journals, but there wasn't any obvious ordering of the reviewers, although I didn't have access to the actual score, only the general review.

I'll tackle the other question: "maybe I'm just reviewing mostly bad papers?!"
I think with the same "right" that lets you ask for your personal bias, you may also ask whether there is an "assignment bias":
Possibly the "nice" papers are reviewed by the more famous people (who refuse to review everything that does not sound extremely interesting because they are always suggested) leaving the not-so-exciting-looking stuff to younger not so famous researchers.
However, the first thing is maybe to calculate whether you really do more negative reviews.
Assuming a jounal accepts 1/3 of the manuscripts, and has the policy that if the first 2 reviews conflict, a third is done. Majority wins.
This situation is in accordance with 50 - 70% of the reviews being negative:

50%: PP for the accepted, PNN for the 2 rejected thirds
70%: PPN for the accepted, 2 x NN for the rejected

Do you return less than 2 positive for every 5 negative reviews (or whatever is the acceptance rate for the jounals you review for)?

It's a good point, but it's actually hard to say, because I'm mostly reviewing for conferences, and it's often the case that I don't know the other review, and it's also possible that a paper is accepted with a majority of "negative" reviews.

@CharlesMorisset: hmm, that makes things even more difficult. In my field, we're more focussed on journal papers. Conference proceedings are counted basically as "without peer-review". Many conferences now don't publish proceedings, but a special issue in a journal, and the papers undergo the normal peer-review process of the journal.

is there a way to measure my own reviewing bias?

Why should even think about such a thing, like "reviewing bias"? Isn't scientific pursuit striving for the maxim of pushing the knowledge of humankind? The only thing we should care for then is whether our critique provided in the review is valid, whether its underlying argumentation is correct, to the point and appropriate with respect to the objectives of the field we are in, etc. - that is, as objective as we can do at the moment. There shouldn't be any bias involved. A review should strive for a pure argument why the presented work advances the state of the art (which should be as close as possible to "has an impact on a scientific pursuit in a given field"), or it doesn't.
Now having said that, of course even for the same honest review you can sometimes  come up with two different final recommendations in the case the paper is borderline. In that case, I consider whether I myself could fix the paper to a clearly acceptable state. If so, I provide the constructive advice to the authors and lean rather to the positive side. If not, the critique stands. We are not in this game to play our career games. We are here to advance the knowledge of the humankind. Point. Of course, sometimes emotions tend to overrule our reason, if that is the case, the reviewer is most probably in a conflict of interest.
I would strongly oppose to "measure" ones "reviewing bias". We should rather measure correctness and validity of our argumentation for, or against the presented submission. If 100 reviewers of a given paper give it a thumbs up, but you can by no means agree or get in line with their argumentation, why should you try to accommodate? Wouldn't that defeat the purpose of peer-review? I am not saying we shouldn't learn from such encounters of course.
Disclaimer: I really appreciate your question. Of course I do share your concerns very much and very often. But it helps me to put the maxim stated above before this concern.

"There shouldn't be any bias involved" ... well, the point of the bias, is that you don't really choose to have one or not :) Of course, I value the fact that different people have different opinions, but I was just interested the argument "grad students usually receive negative reviews, because they just start, so they tend to write negative reviews", and because I'm a scientist, I like to measure things rather than believe in established ideals ;)

@CharlesMorisset: a possible explanation for the leaning of grad students to the negative side may be  their tunnel vision and lack of broader understanding of the topic. I myself was stung by this in the past. Fortunately, most CS/AI conferences I am reviewing for have an open discussion phase where an incorrect review gets trashed in a very straightforward manner. The bigger ones also have a author rebuttal phase, so as a reviewer I get quite a lot of feedback on my reviews. These are good for sharpening ones knives and swords over time :-).


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Are the Newton fellowships (UK) prestigious enough to warrant low post-doc pay?
I'm nearing the end of my graduate studies (1-1.5yrs remain) and have been looking out for post-doc opportunities. I came across the Newton Fellowships, which provide funding for up to 2 years of research work at any participating university in the UK.
The fellowship requirements seem very competitive — a full fledged project proposal and multiple independent evaluations of the said proposal, in addition to the usual requirements. However, in the end, the pay is about 24k £. They do have an 8k £ allowance for research related expenses, but that probably is reserved for publication costs, travel, computer equipment and not a personal allowance.
From my research into pay scales in the UK, the lower end of the post-doc pay scale begins at about 28-29k £. More over, there is no cost of living adjustments, so if you're in an expensive place like Oxford or London, it's definitely not sufficient.
This brings me to the question — is the fellowship prestigious enough to warrant the low pay? Does anyone have experience with this fellowship (past fellows)? Are there opportunities to supplement the income? Don't get me wrong here... I'm not in it just for the money. Like every academic, the research topic is more important for me. But at the same time, I do not want to be working for well below what's normal and have to severely pinch pockets to support a family.

Is it pay, or is it a stipend? If the latter, then it's tax-free, so worth a significantly higher amount as salary (this will vary, depending on your other tax arrangements). And if future Newton Fellowships still come with the £6k/yr for 10 years after, that's worth a lot too.

@gerrit At this point (Dec 2012), it's reasonable to assume that I'm gunning for the 2013 deadline ;) It's an annual fellowship and they still have the old page up since the next one opens in Jan 2013

@EnergyNumbers Oh, that's interesting! I never thought about that. In the US, stipends and salary are taxed the same (unless if non-citizens have different tax agreements). The website (and the pdf notes) don't say much more than: "They provide grants of £24,000 per annum to cover subsistence". Don't know if that counts as salary or stipend. I agree that the £6k/year for 10 years is very attractive too (although, it doesn't help support a family in the immediate future).

Where did you get your idea that the lower end of the post-doc pay scale starts at 28 - 29k? Most sources I've seen gives 28-29 the average pay in 2010 and 2011, and the low end near 23 - 24. (High end 35). The numbers are a bit field specific (biology tend to be around 25 - 29 for first postdocs) so I don't know whether the national average applies.
According to the UCL webpage the Newton is tax free. Your stipend would fall into the 20% band were it taxable, so you should compare it to a roughly 30K starting salary for normal PostDocs.
At effectively 30K, the pay is extremely competitive for early career (read first time postdoctoral position) holders, provided you don't live in London. (Oxford is not that bad.) London allowance is usually worth around 3 - 4k, so if you live in London your pay would be comparable to the lower-end of a reasonable post-doc salary (with London allowance included).

"Oxford is not that bad": update, Oxford is still not expensive as London, but apparently is now the least affordable place in the country, defined as the ratio of average housing/living costs (I'm not sure exactly which) to average income. Go us!


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How much info should I put in my CV under education
In an academic CV, how much information do you put in the education field for each degree (assume the person is a post-grad/early career)?
Option 1: Degree, Specialization, Department, University, Year, Advisor, Thesis

Ph. D. in Foo science (2012)
Some Named School of Science, University of Bar,
Thesis: Qux control in Baz networks
Advisor: J. Q. Public

Option 2: Degree, Specialization, Department, University, Year

Ph. D. in Foo science (2012)
Some Named School of Science, University of Bar

Option 3: Degree, Specialization, University, Year

Ph. D. in Foo Engineering, University of Bar (2012)

Option 4: Degree, University, Year

Ph. D., University of Bar (2012)

I've often seen options 1 or 2 and in some cases, where there is a bigger body of work (publications, grants, etc.) to speak for the person than their degree, I've seen option 3. Option 4 is rarer, but one common trait among those that I've seen it with is that they are now working in a field different from what they did their PhD in and do not wish to bring attention to that (lest it hurt any chances). For example, a PhD in Physics now working in Computational Biology. I think CGPAs are pretty silly when it comes to research positions, but I'm not sure if I'm the only one.
However, I don't know what the expectations of the person seeing my CV are. I don't mean random visitors to my website or corporate HRs, but other academics who might be interested in working with me. Granted, if they're an academic, they'll probably focus on my publications more, but there's also something that's expected from a CV.

I use 1. for academic CV and 2. for non-academic Resume, see http://migdal.wikidot.com/en:cv. However, as a PhD student, I don't know what is exactly expected.

do not wish to bring attention to that (lest it hurt any chances) — Weird.  I'd expect having a degree outside your current research area to help, not hurt.  (I've served on CS faculty hiring committees for years, and my current CS department head does not have a CS degree.)

@JeffE In most places, CS as a department was established only in the 80s and later, and a good number of the older folks in CS probably have degrees in EE or Math (perhaps Physics). Besides, these areas have a decent overlap with CS (depending on the sub-specialization). However, for older disciplines such as ME/ChemE/EE, the requirements are a lot more rigorous. For instance, I know someone who did his Bachelors in ChemE., Masters in BioEng., and finally, a Doctorate in EE! Don't ask me how that happened, but it did, and he sometimes suppresses the Chem/BioE part of his academic background.

...the requirements are a lot more rigorous. — Them's fightin' words.

@JeffE Rather than "rigorous", I should've said "the requirements are a lot more traditional" i.e., they don't simply go by your body of work and pay unnecessary weight to the title of the degree. I didn't mean to imply that CS/other departments have less rigorous requirements :)

I would agree that option 1 is the most likely option for someone who is just coming out of graduate school, and is looking to continue in the same field for a while.
The department should be listed when relevant—that is, if the program in which the degree is awarded is different from the specialization in some where. For instance, if your PhD is in engineering, but the department conferring it is materials science, you should say something like number 2, rather than number 3.
I don't think there are many instances in which number 4 is very useful, because it looks like you're hiding what you did for a PhD. There are very few circumstances I can think of where this would work—except if the job call specifically required a degree from a particular subset of disciplines, to which you don't belong. But then something will probably come to light from the letters of recommendation, or from some other part of the application.
So, I'd stick with options 1 or 2, for the reasons I've outlined above.

First of all, I would never use option 4 since the most important information (subject!) is missing and in my opinion it is more important than the school or the year.
To answer your question: Maybe a combination of the option 1-3 would be appropriate in such a sense that the latest degree is used with option 1 and the oldest degree is used with option 2 or 3.
For example: If you have a PhD and a Master degree in some subject, no one is interested in the name of your Bachelor Thesis or your advisor. People then are normally interested only if you did your Bachelor in the same subject and maybe in which year.


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Is it generally acceptable if reference letters for postdoc or faculty jobs are submitted after the application deadline?
I am currently applying for post-doctoral and asst. professorship positions. One of my letter writer is most likely to submit the letter a week late. Some of the positions I am applying to clearly state that "applications submitted after the deadline cannot be considered". Couple of people (my fellow grad students/post docs) whom I talked to, seemed to indicate that the reference letters can reach late. However, I would appreciate if someone (preferably one who has been part of the search committee and/or has reviewed applications for such positions before) can throw some light on this.

If possible, you can have your letter writers send their letters to an office secretary in your department. He/she can then just upload them to whomever as needed. You can even put the secretaries email in place of the letter writer's. I've had no issues with this. Not sure if this is possible where you're at though.

Unless the search committee is swamped and is looking for reasons to reject a candidate, a late letter will not tank the application. But here's what can happen: letter requests are sent out for candidate A and B. B's letters are delayed. In the meantime, A's letters come back and they are quite good. The committee starts going ahead with interviews for A. Then, for other reasons, the committee feels that A might suffice to cover the area that A and B both overlap in, and they might move on to other candidates.
This would only happen if the letter is REALLY late (multiple weeks). And if candidate B has any level of interest, there's always someone who'll chase down the letter writer.
So overall I'd say not to worry greatly, but make sure the letter isn't more than a week or so late. Also it wouldn't hurt to check with the committee on the "hardness" of the deadline.

A call or email to the contact person for the search the day of or the day after the deadline politely asking if they received everything is a good way to start a conversation with them. It is also a good way to show how interested you are.

Thanks @BenNorris and Suresh. I emailed the committee and got a reply that they will start looking at applications beginning of Jan. In the meantime my other referee has also uploaded his reference letter (3 days after the official deadline). So I guess everything is now fine. Thanks again.

The policies for late letters may vary, depending on the sort of position.  My impression is that for most universities (certainly the ones I have been at), slightly late letters are fine as long as they arrive before they are needed.  I.e., your application may suffer if people read it before the letter arrives, but they are unlikely to read it on the day of the deadline.  This is in agreement with the other answers here.
However, there may be certain cases where a single late letter will lead to absolute rejection.  For example, government funding agencies sometimes have very strict rules about deadlines, in order to guarantee a sort of formal fairness.  They may say that nothing will be accepted after the deadline and no incomplete applications will be considered.  (I don't know how common this is, but the NSF graduate research fellowships work this way.)  If you are applying for a postdoctoral fellowship from a funding agency, then I strongly recommend asking what their policy for late letters is.

The pure and simple answer to your question is answered by asking a question to the committee: when will you start reviewing the applications? Usually it's not the day after the deadline, likely a few days later, and maybe a week later.
The same happens for PhD applications, some departments don't start until two weeks after the deadline. If all your material is in then I am sure they will look at your application regardless of one missing letter.
Just call the department and ask when they start reviewing.

Different universities take different approaches to letters of recommendation. Some departments request letters of recommendation for every candidate; others only request letters when they're highly interested.
In general, however, the difference here is that the letters of recommendation are not normally considered as part of the application itself. Thus, a little leeway is certainly possible, particularly when you'll have "N – 1" letters of recommendation in on time. But again, as others have mentioned, the best advice is: when in doubt, ask.

Upvoting and reiterating @Suresh's comment: a letter just a little late does not seriously disqualify you (except, as Anon Math'n notes, perhaps for government agencies, NSF grants...), but may allow other people into the pipeline before you.
The strategy on job offers is typically to make more offers than a dept expects to have accepted, and to have quite a few of the first offers rejected, because often the most-attractive [sic] candidates have several offers and cannot take them all. Thus, if the delay in your letters is a week or two, it will probably have no impact.
However, the potential for trouble grows sharply as the delay increases, insofar as scheduling for interviews is made as early as possible... and unexpectedly high acceptance rate may use of all the offers unexpectedly early. (Not bad from a dept's viewpoint, but bad from not-yet-interviewed applicants' viewpoints, since, in effect, they didn't have the same chance... but through the early error of incompleteness in their file.)


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How to build research paper based on a unpublished paper?
A few days ago, I read an article that I found through Google. I analyzed it and find that article is correct, and then I prepared a paper of my own built on the basis of that article.
But when I tried to complete the references section, I realized that the source article had not been published.
Now I do not know what to do. On the one hand, the article is correct, but on the other hand, it has not been formally published.
How to send my article based on another paper that has not been published?

You can give credit to another author referencing as "unpublished", but it means you will have to include the statements that you consider correct and use in your paper, with the proofs as an integral part of it, so that the referee can check the correctness of your paper.

Actually, the paper in question has been published, otherwise you sure couldn't read it :)
I admit that may sound stupid and unhelpful, but I think there is more to it that you recognize. The paper you built upon has been published, but not through conventional means. It doesn't mean you can't use it, but a few specific “rules of thumb” have to be observed:

Refer to the paper by its URL and, if identifiable, the owner/editor/publisher of the website. Example:

“Link between al dente cooking time and a change of slope in the pasta fractal length”, A. N. Onym, http://bigpasta.com/paper42.pdf (publisher: Pasta Inc.)

Because this content may have a shorter lifetime than academic publications, you should quote directly all necessary claims made into this work in your paper, rather than merely using the reference on a vague claim. Your paper should be standalone, and fully understandable even if the other one disappears.
You may also contact the original paper author, if possible, to ask how they would like to be cited. Perhaps they have another related work which you missed, that was published in a more conventional way?

@Md.GolamRashed a “white paper” is usually a committee report or proposal by an authoritative organization. There may be many other types of “not conventionally published papers”, including someone posting it on their personal website, or whatever…

@F'x it is not so simple guys that its look.
in physics
you can not send your article based on air.

@Neo why don't you elaborate in an answer? I don't think publishers consider non-commercially published papers as “air”, but I would be interested in where you draw the line…

infact, physics reviewers (Title: Prof, Dr...) are Slightly aggressive to these types of papers

even Wikipedia articles must not contain original research

@Neo: You are making excuses. You found the refernce you want to use somewhere. That "somewhere" is a citation. And yes, if it isn't a peer reviewed paper the reviewer are likely to look twice at it. If is isn't peer reviewed does looks suspicious and  your paper relies on it, then your paper might be rejected, but that situation is no worse the if you don't cite it.

It's unclear from your description whether you've just written your own version of the earlier paper, with no new results of your own, or whether you've significantly extended the results in the earlier paper.  In the first case, you cannot publish your paper.  In the second, you must cite the earlier paper, using whatever information would be necessary for your readers to find it, just as F'x describes.
In either case, I strongly recommend contacting the author of the earlier paper and asking them how they would like to proceed.  They may invite you to be a coauthor on their paper.  They may invite themselves to be a coauthor on your paper.  They may use your email as a kick in the pants to formally publish their paper, but without you as a coauthor, leaving you to publish your new results on your own.


text:
Second undergraduate versus masters with qualifying year
I was a bit unsure whether this question belonged here, but after finding many questions requesting advice with respect to mathematics studies I decided to go ahead.
Over the last year I have developed a strong interest in mathematics and would like to pursue it at the university level. The long-term goal is graduate studies.
My original intent was to first pursue a B.Sc in mathematics. I had met with the undergraduate coordinator at a university I would like to enrol in and he recommended that based upon my background that I may be better off pursuing a masters degree with a qualifying year comprised of advanced undergraduate courses.
My background is:

Degrees: B.Comm (Economics), M.A. (Economics)
Mathematical Courses: Business Calculus, Mathematics for Economists (includes calculus, linear algebra, set theory, optimization, topology), Introductory Statistics, Econometrics
Research Experience: Four RAships, two upcoming publications (not in mathematics)
Self-study: Calculus (Stewart), Linear Algebra (Strang), Currently working on: A Course of Pure Mathematics (Hardy)

I would like to ask that given an individual with a background in a quantitative field, what are the pros and cons with pursuing either of these options.

If possible, avoid the 2nd undergrad. To see if possible, pick an online copy of a typical textbook, level advanced undergraduate/graduate, and browse it for fun, and do some of the early exercises. Examples: Artin: Algebra; Munkres: Topology; Spivak: Calculus on Manifolds (or more advanced; Guillemin & Pollack;: Differential Topology); or better yet, browse whatever the curriculum of your chosen university indicated for this fall semester as text books. It doesn't have to appear easy, as you are supposed to learn it; and learning math is hard, no matter what your future classmates will falsely claim: most of them struggle too. But it shouldn't terrify you either.

I'm unsure whether the 2nd undergrad will actually help you at all, because I'm not sure how good Undergrads in math are in the US, you might end up re learning a ton of stuff you already knew to begin with. And that can lead to some frustration.
I've gone over Stwart's and Strang's books and they are overall very nice. Try to see what particular topic interests you and go over some papers, see what is missing in your pool of knowledge and build a consensus of where is it being thought.
If you find that most of your deficit can be solved with some Undergrad Courses, and many Grad courses, go for that Graduate degree directly, but if you find that many of your deficits are in an undergrad level, perhaps doing that second undergrad is not such a bad idea, since you would be starting with a handicap against other people coming from a math undergrad.


text:
Do I have any potential in the academic field?
I live in a third-world country. Although I have a second-class degree in IT, I work in the general banking section in a private banking organization. This is possible because, in our country, private banks recruit engineering students (among others) as Management Trainees. They are rotated among various sections in the bank and are trained up for two years. After two years, they are promoted as Executives.
After joining the organization I found that there is huge amount of study involved to get confirmation and to get promotion. Moreover, I don't know Accounting.
Now I am thinking, since I have to study anyway, why not take the GRE and TOEFL, then study apply for a MSc in IT or computer science and then a PhD degree from USA.
I have already been away from academia for almost four years. And, since I am doing a full-time job, I think it will take 2 years more to prepare myself applying for higher education in the USA. At that point I will be 32 years old.
Is a PhD degree from USA enough to find a job at that age?

You didn't say what kind of job you'll be looking for after PhD?

@scaaahu, May be a software developer.

Then you do not want a PhD.

@JeffE some companies [that develop software] value PhDs. If the skills obtained during a PhD are of no use in industry then we should question whether the "ivory tower" has become a speculative bubble where resources are invested and only returned in a fictional bubble that could burst at any time, rendering all previous investment as useless due to the disconnection between this tower and the "real" world.

@Trylks JeffE never said the skills obtained during a PhD are of no use in industry. The question really is whether they are of more use than another way to spend the same amount of time and effort (this includes 'just' being in industry). For some industries, having a PhD is very much worth the investment. For software development it tends not to be.

@MarcClaesen Well put, thx. I still see great potential in a PhD to develop any piece of software that involves solving a new problem (which is basically research, advancing the state of the art), moreover, we would need to ask ourselves whether developing software to solve problems that are already solved with other software makes any sense. Is software like cars where each person needs a different material car? Or is it more like mathematical formulas where one can be used infinite times and it never wears down? Going off topic, maybe capitalism is the state of the art that should be changed

"Do I have any potential in the academic field?" Just the title deserves an upvote :)

since I have to study anyway, why not go for GRE+TOEFL, MS in IT or Computer Science and then a PhD degree from USA
Maybe you're aware of this, but "studying" has little to do with getting a Ph.D. It might suffice for an MS, but a good MS involves more than just "studying" as well.
In other words, if (as stated) your idea is that instead of "study" to get a promotion, you want to study to get an advanced degree, you're in for some disappointment. A graduate degree (especially a Ph.D) involves a lot more "doing" and independent creative thinking.

"A graduate degree (especially a Ph.D) involves a lot more "doing" and independent creative thinking." - meaning is not clear.

what I mean is that "studying" in the typical "classroom" setting is not what a Ph.D is about. A Ph.D is about learning to create new knowledge (i.e research). It's a different skill set.

This is not how it works. A degree doesn't mean you will get a job. Actually, a degree only proves you passed a certain education course and wrote your dissertation.
In order to get a job, you must be proficient / or at least well-familiar with specific requirements of your chosen job posting. Whatever the job requires, you need to know it before applying and have some experience with it.
The degree contents is not enough to please your potential employer. You must study also around the curriculum from day 1 to match the real job requirements [as you have found them in job postings]
Further, a PhD is a highly specialized research degree focused on a very tiny, narrowed-down area, in which you will most likely never find a job in your lifetime [unless you are very clever or lucky and research something that companies or universities dream of].
Master's degree is already an advanced degree. Chances are, you won't even find a position in your Master's specialization because it is too specialized. For example, what you say about your company that makes you a trainee manager, that already means you didn't find a job matching your Bachelor's.
Regarding positions in Academia, there are very few, if any, and the number of PhDs competing for one such position might be around 500. This is one thing to consider. There are many extremely bright PhDs who really want to teach and cannot find any university to go. There is also something called "tenure". When you get it, you can stay at your post for the rest of your life. Professors rarely leave their posts, and when they do, the role may be filled by the associate professor, in some cases. So that you would eventually wait 10 years as a postdoc before becoming the professor that you want to be. During that time, there is often a very low pay as these postdocs are cheap labor working ~55h / week.
The supply of PhDs is so much exceeding the demand, that I would recommend to re-evaluate the situation and make more realistic goals, such as look at available positions and their requirements before studying. If you study, pay for access to extra contents relevant to your desired profession and learn from these resources as a part of your advanced degree to bridge the gap between real job requirements and the academic curriculum.

Moreover, all else being equal, a PhD decreases your ability to find a job and decreases your earning potential.  Unless your goal is to become a professional researcher, you're better off stopping with a Master's degree.

@JeffE What's a professional researcher?

Although I don't know whether the answerer answered this with a predetermination, this is a good analysis.

I don't know what you mean about an assistant taking over the job of a professor. That's not how it works in the US at least.

@Suresh Is it not? I have seen a few cases from the US where the prof. has forever gone and his assistant was then made a professor. It is based on 2 stories, but I might have that part wrong.

@user13107  A professional researcher is someone who gets paid to do research (either in academia or in industry), just like a professional golfer is someone who is paid to play golf, and a professional actor is someone who is paid to act.

@MarekCruz: Correlation is not causality.  In the US, "assistant professor" is a temporary title that does not mean "assistant to the professor".  After a fixed time period, usually seven years, every assistant professor is either promoted to associate professor or fired.  "Associate professor" is also a formal title that does not mean "associate to the professor" (in the US).  Many associate professors are later promoted to "(full) professors".  Meanwhile, faculty members eventually retire.  But retirements and promotions are independent events.

@JeffE Agreed, correlation != causality. I've seen specific cases where the associate prof. took over after the full prof. has retired. However, it is good to know this is not the rule. Your comment is very useful. +1

I am having a feeling that you want to go for academia or at least r & d of some company, after PhD. If you really really have 'the calling', then and  only then take such a risk. I know only few student who actually took such a risk. Do not come in academia with a very romantic thought and be prepared for hardship, toil and trouble. These things increases, if you can not manage to get in one of the the top places. Also consider the financial matters as well.
If you can sponsor yourself, then perhaps you can go to some reasonably good university in USA, without any recommendation (your job experience can help you in certain ways). Since I have never been there, someone else can answer it better. Otherwise, go to the best institute available in your country for getting a MSc(Engg), MSc (by research), MTech or similar degree. Make sure, the the faculties of that place are active in research and (better) have some contact in USA. In this way, even if you do not want to go for PhD after 2 years, you still have some placement options from the institute, you are studying.
I myself never appeared for GRE etc. So some others can tell the procedure better. All the best for your future.

I did a PhD and then went into the software industry followed by banking. I did the PhD because I love science rather than for career enhancement so I never regretted doing it. In the software industry the PhD is not well valued. Three years of work experience would be much better. In banking the right PhD is useful for certain roles such as quants, hedge managers, analysts etc. In general a suitable PhD helps in some roles, has no benefit in others and may make you overqualified elsewhere.
My advice would be to do a PhD only if you are inspired by research, not as a career move. Only continue into a postdoc academic career if you are really sure it is your lifetime calling.
However, it is possible that coming from a third world country the PhD may open more doors for you. My own experience does not address that.