I have been following a researcher since last three years and have read all most all of his research papers (whichever is freely available). At the same time, I have been continuously upgrading my skills as per his research profile. I have got only one chance to prove my worth. What should I write in the e-mail, should I express my self or proceed as per normal formal applicant?
I know many master's students who get an opportunity to talk to their potential PhD advisors well before applying. In most cases this opportunity is available by the professors with whom they worked for their master's. Moreover, there are many others who establish a contact with professors by mailing them and enquiring about PhD vacancies.   My questions are:   How important is knowing an advisor prior to applying for PhD?  Does an email interaction play a vital role when the department makes its admit decisions? If email contact is important, can a student send out mails to 2-3 professors (working in the same area) in case one of them does not bother to reply? To sum up, is applying of any use (especially in top universities) when you have no contacts and only your credentials to bank on?
Notation problem in integration: write $dx$ or ${\mathrm{d}}x$? Derivative of determinant of a matrix I would like to know how to calculate:  $$\frac{d}{dt}\det \big(A_1(t), A_2(t), \ldots, A_n (t) \big).$$ How could they return the Infinity Stones in their "raw" form? There is this one little thing that I don't quite get at the end of Avengers: Endgame.  After Thanos was defeated, Captain took the stones back to where they were originally taken to "correct" the timeline. However we see that Cap has the 6 stones in their "Raw" form, but that is not how all of them were taken.   For example in 1970 Tony didn't take the Space Stone but the Tesseract, so I assume they extracted the Space Stone in the present (by breaking the Tesseract like Thanos in the Infinity War movie?).   So how could Cap return the stone to the rightful place when he actually needed to return the Tesseract? Or am I missing something here...   The same goes for the Mind Stone, which was inside the Gem on the Staff Loki had in the first Avengers movie. Finding the fallacy in this broken proof Today, a friend gave me a "proof" of $1=2$ and challenged me to find the fallacy.     $1 = 1$      $1 = 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 ...$      $1 = 1 + 1 - 1 + 1 - 1 + 1 - 1 ...$      $1 = 2 - 1 + 1 - 1 + 1 - 1 ...$      $1 = 2 + 0 + 0 ...$      $1 = 2$   My answer was that once you turn the initial $1 + 1$ into a 2, everything is offset so a $-1$ is always left at the end no matter how many times it is repeated. This negative one balances out the $2$ at the beginning so $1=1$ still holds true. I.e.  $$1 = 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 ... = 1 + (1 - 1) + (1 - 1) + (1 - 1) = 2 + (-1 + 1) + (-1 + 1) - 1$$  However, my friend claimed that my answer only applies if the $+ 1 - 1$ repeats for a finite number of times. He argues that because the sequence repeats infinitely and things work differently when working with infinity, my answer is not valid.  Can anyone enlighten me to the true fallacy in this proof? When running 'screen ls' the screen stops with the text [screen is terminating]. I would like screen to keep the session alive and reattach to it to see the output of ls.  Of course the real thing is that I don't run screen ls, but rather a screen fsck ..., so I would like to ensure that the screen is not terminating when this command is finished.  I would love to have an answer that is useful for an already existing running screen session, so some interactive keys like C-a ... or C-a : (Enter command line mode) Drawing text on an image background that has dark and bright parts Often, I want to write text over a background image. If the background image is bright, I use a dark color for the text, and vice versa. But, often the image has both dark and bright parts. So a dark text is unreadable on the dark parts, and a bright text is unreadable on the bright parts.  I currently use one of several solutions, all of them are imperfect:   Brighten the image and use a dark font, or darken the image and use a white font; the problem is that it reduces the beauty of the background image. Use grey text (as in this question:  ). But grey text often looks unappealing, and is still only barely readable. Use dark text, and try to position it on the bright spots of the image (or vice versa). This takes a lot of time because it requires me to position each word separately.   Are there better solutions to this problem?   In particular: is there an automatic tool that takes an image and a text, and positions the text only on the dark/bright parts of the image? Do commuting matrices share the same eigenvectors? In one of my exams I'm asked to prove the following      Suppose $A,B\in \mathbb R^{n\times n}$, and $AB=BA$, then $A,B$ share the same eigenvectors.    My attempt is let $\xi$ be an eigenvector corresponding to $\lambda$ of $A$, then $A\xi=\lambda\xi$, then I want to show $\xi$ is also some eigenvector of $B$ but I get stuck. Mouse acceleration seems to be on by default, and I can't find anywhere in the launcher settings or the in game settings to turn it off.  It's very annoying as it makes it feel as if the mouse is lagging. Is there any way to turn it off? How to evaluate the integral $$\int_{25\pi / 4}^{53\pi / 4}\frac{1}{(1+2^{\sin x})(1+2^{\cos x})}dx\ ?$$ How to plot periodic function's graphic? How do I determine the result of a Saving Throw? I'm a pretty new player, and I'm building a bard in D&amp;D 5e. I understand how saving throws work in general, but I am a little confused about one thing. Say I cast Blindness/Deafness on a humanoid. They must then make a Constitution saving throw. My question is: what value do they have to roll in order to make the save? Does their roll (plus their constitution modifier) have to beat my constitution (plus my modifier)? This is more of a general player question than one specific to the Bard or that spell. I'm actually at the cemetery at White Orchard. There is a white question mark and some little red arrows.  What are this little red arrows?  Do they point to something dangerous? While the etiquette of dealing with duplicate answers , there hasn't been a great way to deal with these, "Uh, yeah, I said this, too" types of behavior than the almighty downvote.   It would be nice to have a "Duplicate Answer" option on the flag menu. Five flags auto-deletes the answer, as with any other flag. In order to prevent abuse, the flagged answer would have to have the last owner edit (including original post) be younger than the original answer's original posting by at least 2 minutes.  Also, this ability should be a 5,000+ rep privilege, since we currently have no fanfare of rep from 3,001 to 9,999, and a power like this has a bit more umph than closing a question.  Thoughts? Caps-lock remapping stops working 17.10 Super key to open applications How does Ubuntu flavor iso differ from a desktop package? TL;DR: how does an Ubuntu flavor iso installation ( for example Lubuntu ) differ from installing a desktop package via apt-get ? (for instance sudo apt-get install lubuntu-desktop)  Context for the question:   Some time ago I answered a question on AskUbuntu , where I tested in virtual machine removing unity-desktop and installing ubuntu-gnome-desktop. That makes the boot logo ( plymouth ) change, desktop changes, different packages get installed (gnome-network-manager instead of network-manager , if I am not mistaken). It appeared that in effect I've switched to different Ubuntu flavor, even though I started out with the standard Ubuntu system. Hence the question: what differentiates the pre-made Ubuntu flavor iso from installing a package ? Is it all the same base underneath the hood or does installation from iso have specific configurations ? If it's possible to install a flavor via package manager, why then separate flavor iso's exist ? (obvious answer is user convenience, but I think there has to exist other reasons. Canonical is a business , and it makes not a lot of sense for a business to provide additional flavor iso , if a sysadmin or end-user can get the same thing via package manager by themselves). Why pendulum does not follow SHM for larger angular displacement? Considering an ideal case(neglecting drag of air, damping etc.), a pendulum follows SHM if the angular displacement is small (upto 10 degrees). But, for large angular displacement(more than 10 degree), it does not follow SHM. Why? What force cause the pendulum not to follow SHM? 0 byte file created in a simple script I have a script as below:  #!/bin/bash df -k | tr -s " " "," | awk 'BEGIN {FS=","} {print $1,$5}'|sed 1d &gt; file1.txt while read partition percentUsed do if [ $percentUsed &gt; 75 ] then echo Partition: ${partition} space is ${percentUsed} else echo Pration: $partition: OK!! fi done &lt; file1.txt   The script is executing properly, however, it is creating a zero byte file by the name 75. Any ideas why this is happening?  $ sh diskUsed.sh Partition: C:/Users/Public/Documents/CYGWIN/bin space is 75% Partition: C:/Users/Public/Documents/CYGWIN/lib space is 75% Partition: C:/Users/Public/Documents/CYGWIN space is 75% Partition: C: space is 75% Partition: H: space is 91%   $ ls -lrt total 2 -rwxrwxrwx 1 diwvibh Domain Users 284 Nov 21 04:17 diskUsed.sh -rw-r--r-- 1 diwvibh Domain Users 133 Nov 21 04:29 file1.txt -rw-r--r-- 1 diwvibh Domain Users   0 Nov 21 04:29 75 How to gracefully handle files that exceed PHP's `post_max_size`? zsh I/O redirection: redirecting and then piping; what is going on?