What are /r/AskAcademia's favorite Products & Services?

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IMHO, a good supervisor will do 3. things well:

1. Get and keep you funded. You'll do no good research if you're always looking for money, working part time, worried about funding.
2. Equip you. Whatever reasonable request you make for equipment, tools, software, travel etc. A good supervisor should have a slush fund for making these things happen.
3. Make introductions. This means getting you to conferences, and introducing you to the leaders in your field. If you're going to be a long term academic, these people will become your friends, your colleagues and your references in the long term. The introductions are vital.

Everything else is optional. If you're smart enough to do a PhD, then you're smart enough to pick a topic, do the required reading, and start work. Very quickly, you'll know more about your area than your supervisor, so any advice they can give will be limited generally and stuff you can read in a book (e.g. How to do a PhD, A PhD is not enough), but 3. above will give you far more avenues for help if you get stuck.

> You proposed some bullshit alternative from what the rest of the planet uses.

Slack is used by organizations around the world, including NASA JPL, Time Magazine, BuzzFeed, and Harvard's administration. In fact, the moderator corps at /r/science uses Slack to manage their activities. There's nothing "alternative" about it; it's the de facto king in its domain, team communications.

You're free to do whatever you want. The topic of this thread is collating advice on tools that can be used by academics to help with their job. I've personally found Slack to be an exceptional tool, and I'm sharing my experience here.

It looks like prior to his succession he published as Prince Akihito and his father published as Hirohito Emperor of Japan

So this is a good book to look at: https://www.amazon.com/Writing-Your-Journal-Twelve-Weeks/dp/141295701X

It’s specifically tailored to helping you make your longer papers (dissertation/thesis) into an article for publication. I’d start there !

I mean, do you have anything to talk about? Pubs? Data? If so, FIND ANOTHER CONF to be invited to that is real. ASAP. It's unlikely to be the cream of your field, but find some smaller real conferences - perhaps a Gordon conf (if you are a scientist) or a local professional society meeting (rather than a national one) t. Email the organizers and say "can I present". Once you find one, say "it's more prestigious, persons x,y,z are there, and its from a better known organization".

.....Or get other members of your lab on side. Tell them to tell her that it will damage the reputation of the lab.

Send her this

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/29/upshot/fake-academe-looking-much-like-the-real-thing.html?_r=0

Aesthetics in deaf education -- specifically the role of visual media and the aesthetic experience which allows for a clever side-stepping of the language deprivation paradox via dual channel processing of classroom discourse. More here

Be aware, however, that Mendeley locks your data in and makes it unnecessarily hard to switch to another tool. They even started encrypting their database recently, so that Zotero can no longer import references from Mendeley.

This is a common issue with grad students. While being direct about expectations will certainly help, I also prefer to also tackle these things at the lab level.

I would try to establish a lab culture that requires frequent check-ins. The key components are accountability (I need to hit this concrete deadline) and transparency (I can see that other people are working hard).

I've seen this done by high-powered labs in a couple of different ways:

1. Frequent short meetings (2-3x a week). Students rotate giving 2-5 minute reports on what's new, what they need help on, etc.
2. https://idonethis.com/ - where everyone responds to an email (including you!) about what they got done that day. The next morning, digests are sent to the team.

Learn how to use LaTeX. Nothing makes things easier. For a friendly face try out LyX, which has good integration for BibTeX (bibliography management).

Also if you need to make cartoons/diagrams check out inkscape.

Why free? Most free books are crap. Go to the library and skim the shelf of books on academic publishing, or just look at the ebooks available online. Try The Handbook of Scholarly Writing and Publishing for starters.

I highly recommend Overleaf. It has nice features like autocomplete, commenting, and sharing. It makes working with Latex seem more like writing a regular document.

Full disclosure: that's a referral link.

Ok, it's a book, not a scholarly article, but it's written by the same folks who publish the empirical work. It's "Blind Spot: Hidden Biases of Good People".

https://www.amazon.com/Blindspot-Hidden-Biases-Good-People-ebook/dp/B004J4WJUC/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=blindspot&qid=1610806984&sr=8-3

It's just so relevant to things that happen every day.

I think that Damn Lies and Statistics is a good one. The book talks about how numbers can be misrepresented to spin a narrative. It's geared towards social sciences, but I think a reader can generalize the ideas a bit.

In answering both of your questions - I am not aware of any higher education literature that upholds the idea of what you are framing as "impossibly difficult" courses. Moreover, much of the research that I have come across would actually suggest that this is really quite a poor course design that is doing more to uphold the professor's sense of identity than it is creating positive and engaging learning environment. As you said, this is highly 'gate keepy'. Certainly, I can see some grad students buying into it as they are highly motivated and want to become a part of the field however I don't think this course design would even serve most grad students.

In short - I imagine that he gets away with it as he is a senior professor teaching students who are otherwise highly engaged with the field but on the whole, I think most educational designers would say its quite poor pedagogical design.

However, if you are keen on developing great course design - a couple of great books to read which are widely cited in higher ed teaching and learning. They both offer theoretical and praxis-oriented approaches to course design that you would likely appreciate. they are Teaching as Design Science by Laudrillard and Learning to Teach in Higher Education by Ramsden

Sure. I left three years into my Ph.D. program, between my second qualifying paper and quals proper, circa 2012. (I reenrolled for a hot second in 2013 to brush off my QP, turn it into a masters' thesis, and defend.)

I had some research-related disagreements with my advisor which were the actual flashpoint, but it was really more a matter of weighing my options: looking at just what I would have to do, and what I might be missing out on, over the next 3-5 years just to have that X% chance at a tenure-track job. I'm also really big on work-life balance, and though academia has been making some improvements there very recently, in most areas it's still got a long way to go.

On the whole, it worked out pretty well: I went into science communication, took a few different jobs, and now I'm working for one of the leaders in the field. I'd definitely set the groundwork for a non-academic career, though, long before I actually left -- volunteering for non-profits, keeping in touch with industry connections, etc -- and I was also fairly successful at turning my academic background into an advantage rather than an irrelevancy: highlighting the interplay between linguistics and communications, bringing quantitative analysis to a field that doesn't always know what to do with metrics, working for organizations which handle scientific research and academic affairs, etc.

So I'd definitely recommend anyone considering a non-academic career (which, frankly, based on the numbers, should be most of us) think about those same things; when I was first starting off, I found Versatile Ph.D and <u>So What Are You Going To Do With That?</u> to be the most useful, but there could be other resources that have popped up since then. No matter which path you take, though, best wishes making it happen!

There is a way to color code LaTeX. Here is a ShareLaTeX tutorial: https://www.sharelatex.com/learn/Using_colours_in_LaTeX.

I'm in STEM, so it was a no-brainer to use TeX for me, but you might want to re-think your migration. I'm not sure if text-only disciplines can benefit much from the typesetting benefits while tossing away all the convenience that MS Word provides.

LaTex is pretty easy to start using. Overleaf is good if you want something web-based and Texpad is the best I've found if you're on Mac.

This explains how to organise a lit review with a spreadsheet. I actually found it quite difficult to draw the different research `threads' together using a spreadsheet so resorted to note cards but YMMV.

Day-to-day I found it almost impossible to get stuff done until I found a day planner that worked for me. There are more complicated reasons for this beyond just being a lazy bastard so don't be afraid to ask someone for help if you find yourself stuck in that sort of situation.

Echoing this - you’re definitely not alone! My dissertation abstract has a major count agreement problem in the second sentence AND a stupid repeat word. Taunts me every time I see it, knowing that it will forever be there with my name in the school’s dissertation repository. Casualty of only having a day between submitting the draft and realizing I needed to get an abstract to the graduate school... I was so burnt out and done with it, so I rushed the abstract.

“I do my best proofreading after I hit send” is such a meme that you can buy it on notebooks and mugs.

I wish I’d read The Professor Is In. It is NOT to early for you to start focusing on what you need to do now to land the job you hope to land after you graduate.

This is a philosophical take on it from Harry Frankfurt. There's also a tribute collection of philosophical essays on the topic.

https://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Harry-G-Frankfurt/dp/0691122946

This book is an absolute must read for humanities and social science students, maybe useful for others as well: The Professor Is In by Karen Kelsky. It’s all about how to prepare yourself and navigate this hellish job market.

I think of tenure track professors as approaching something like professional athletes or artists at this point. You have to be both exceptionally talented and determined to make it, and even then may need a bit of luck. Know what you’re getting into, and only bother if you’re ready to give it 100%.

It's definitely something to come down from. What helps a lot of people (and does for me) is to find some low-stress productivity. Do the grocery shopping, some yardwork, etc. Or if you miss the intellectual connections, wander the stacks of the closest library...grab a few books from a section you're unfamiliar with and just skim. (My favorites are books that are illustrated catalogs of things..."Perennials of North America" kind of stuff. It starts off mindless and then you get sucked into the details of someone else's passion.) Reading poetry is another good one; I go with brilliant poets who use plain speech, like Jack Gilbert: https://www.amazon.com/Refusing-Heaven-Jack-Gilbert/dp/037571085X

I agree that intro level textbooks are a good place to start! And publishers like to update books to make money alll the time, so an older edition of a textbook is not necessarily going to be out dated.

Also, I wanted to recomend The Great Courses many of which I have heard are on Audible. Many of them are written by professors, and are really just quality material!

You might want to check out Lifehacker's list of 5 best personal landing pages. Alternately, GitHub Pages is a decent place for hosting your stuff without necessarily purchasing a domain and hosting.

Hah, no that article is a complete trash (it is not even a scientific paper).

The authors decided on the results before they even run the "experiment" (why exactly is it called experiment without stuff like control group?), changed their methodology in the middle to hedge their bets and by the time they were busted (which in itself could be taken as a proof that you can't write this kind of shit and get away with it), they only managed to publish 5 papers out of 20 (they say 7, but one was actualy a poem and the other one an essey). Yet they claim success.

If you want an actualy good critique of the outlandish parts of social sciences, I'd recommend Sokal's Fashionable nonsense. It's a book though.

I think this would be a tough decision. If you were at the beginning or thinking of applying to a PhD, I'd suggest not doing it. Given that you're half-way through changes things a bit. You might want to read a bit about "sunk cost" (an economics concept).

Could you talk to your supervisor, be very frank with him / her, and see if there's any way you could finish more quickly? If he knows you aren't hoping to apply for tenure track jobs there might be some short cuts you could take. Perhaps if you could wrap your PhD up in a year or so it might be more palatable.

I've been in academia and in "real life" and they're both a healthy serving of bullshit in all honesty. I think your attitude towards work is fine, you just need to navigate the system in the best way you can. I've moved between different jobs and know a lot of people who were also on a quest for the dream job - none of us found it. You might enjoy reading Cal Newport's "So Good They Can't Ignore You" and Scott Adams' "How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big".

A physics PhD MAY be useful for something you want to do outside of academia.

Maybe tough it out (just treat it like a job) until you've figured out what you want to do instead?

Overleaf is a powerful LaTeX editor that compiles the pdf as you go, if you are looking to go more formal than Word or Docs. LaTeX is primarily what I’ve used to write formal papers/CVs/assignments.

First off, thank you. I believe every science benefits from interaction with other sciences, and I think CS and psychology have a lot to share with each other.

Before getting into languages, you'll probably want to familiarize yourself with some of the theory of computation. Introduction to the Theory of Computation is, in my opinion, a pretty good introduction to computation theory. It might take some getting use to if you don't typically see a lot of mathematical notation, but the first (zeroth?) chapter provides an overview of the math that is used in the book. For AI, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach is pretty much the textbook of artificial intelligence. If you can get a hold of these, you can get a start on the theory that is probably of interest to you.

In terms of languages, C++ and Java have been mentioned, which are the swiss army knives of programming languages. They certainly aren't bad languages to learn (though, IMHO, neither is a good first language for somebody to learn), as there will probably be projects of interest to you written in those languages. But research or projects can be conducted in many languages, so you may first want to see if there is a particular program or research project that really interests you, and then learn the language that it is written in.

Honestly, if you are really serious about getting into some CS work, you might want to consider a degree in something related to Computer Science. There are likely CS programs that specializing in UI or AI that would be welcoming of somebody with a pyschology background. There are also related fields, such as cognitive science, that more closely merge the study of computer science with human intelligence and might be worth checking out.

njaafari has the correct description of the classes, but I have a few pointers to add.

Reading about calculus will not help, practicing does. Get a text book, work through the examples and chapter problems. Actually work them through yourself, with a pencil and paper.

Older edition text books are inexpensive to get, and have the same content as the new ones. Calculus hasn't changed much recently. I picked up some used, last edition Stewarts Calculus books for <$5.

To help check your work, you can use Wolfram Alpha, but NO CHEATING.

I don't think this is the right sub

>This subreddit is for discussing academic life, and for asking questions directed towards people involved in academia, (both science and humanities).

Anyway:

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/words/words-ending-in-able-or-ible

>You can learn how to write well from a couple of books (I highly recommend The Elements of Style) and practice.

Not true -- at least not for most people. A very important part of learning to write well is getting critical feedback from good writers. Over and over and over again. Practicing without guidance is a poor substitute for critique from accomplished writers.

In certain theoretical areas it's not absurd to finish quickly if you're 'lucky', My advisor was brilliant (he himself finished in 2 years when he was young) and this meant that my doctoral path was fairly straightforward since he had an 'out' for any areas we would get stuck at. I just got lucky and the problem fell into place. It's different in other fields.

Like I said, it shouldn't be seen as a good thing. As long as the program is funded (often tax-free I might add) students should take their time and really milk those years. I personally tell my students to take as much time as possible, and take on new problems or enjoy conferences or workshops outside their area.

The other advice I give to students is to stop thinking of their PhD thesis as some masterpiece. It's easy to spend months working on some aspect of the thesis that actually contributes very little to the bigger picture. I mention to people that John Nash's PhD thesis was 26 pages long and had 2 citations. This is probably more of an amusing anecdote than a desired goal in this day and age though.

If they were my slides, I’d share them. I share my slides under this Creative Commons license. And I include the license info in the slides so people don’t have to go through the trouble of asking me. They can just download then.

Being unwilling to share one’s slides seems counter to the mission of education. (Would you not let a teacher assign your book in their class?)

Overleaf: https://www.overleaf.com/

It's like Google Docs but for latex. I've converted my entire lab. Makes it so easy to do collaborative editing of latex documents, and the online editor is pretty good with tons of features.

you would cite it just like a regular web page. However, because it is a wiki it can change. So you want to cite the specific revision. On github wikis at the top of the page there should be a link to the number of revisions. Click on that and then click on the hash link on the right of the current revision. then cite that url.

example: instead of citing https://github.com/YePpHa/YouTubeCenter/wiki you should cite https://github.com/YePpHa/YouTubeCenter/wiki/Home/fa11d445d5745848fbd6a4594fdb1745e48c4b0f

Overleaf as online LaTeX editor that you can use together with collaborators, automatically fetches packages and comes with version based backups so you don't lose progress. Compatible with all citation management softwares via BibTeX etc. as well.

Zotero for citation management. Free, regular updates, matches my work cycle and the fact that I always want to use external PDF annotators and viewers.

As a compromise between full on LaTeX and MS Word, maybe try LyX? I've never actually used it as I prefer the full LaTeX experience, but I have many equations and figures.

To get LaTeX/LyX/TeXMacs to play nicely with Mendeley, just go to Preferences->BibTeX->Enable BibTeX syncing. I have it create one file for my whole library, and then every change made to Mendeley syncs to my giant .bib file that I keep in the parent directory of my publications folder.

Citations and cross-referencing really are better in LaTeX variants than in Word. I have over 300 figures in my thesis and if I insert a new one somewhere, all of the numbers and references update themselves automatically. I realize Word can do this with the insert->references drop down list thingy, but it's way faster for me to type "as shown in Fig.~\ref{fig:awesomefig}" than it is to go through the whole click insert process every time.

http://scholar.google.com

Lots of people post PDFs of their papers online and Google Scholar will find it if they have. I actually use it over my library since it links directly to the PDFs instead of going through a database. It won't have everything, but you can get a lot.

Might not be helpful, but have you heard of Zotero? It's a organizational tool for keeping track of research papers and help you cite them. I know when I was writing biochemistry research proposal - this thing kept me sane. https://www.zotero.org/

At first I thought I had no experience with this question. But reading this response I realized I did encounter this issue, just earlier on in my academic career, when I left for grad school in a far away country. We tried long distance for a time but inevitably broke up. And if I had foregone grad school and my career to stay with him - well, it wouldn't have worked out anyway. As much as I loved him, his small town lifestyle was too limiting for me.

Years later, I did do long distance successfully with a partner who was a better match. But the way to do it is to have a plan for how it will end and ideally an end goal in sight. It's relatively easy to do 6 months, hard to do "who knows how long". This book IIRC was invaluable: https://www.amazon.com/Long-Distance-Relationships-Complete-Guide/dp/0972114807

No one can tell you if you're in situation 1 (where it wouldn't work out in the long term) or situation 2 (where it's worth it). Good luck.

I'm at UCL and work with people in the stats department - they are really excellent and really good teachers of statistics as well (don't know the data science lot since they're in a different faculty).

However, though UCL is a great university, it is undergoing a lot of changes right now as the whole campus is being redeveloped. This means you might get taught in a tent in the quad (though you probably will be in the computer clusters, so might avoid it), and will be surrounded by building works while you're here. UCL housing is also pretty bad (you might have heard about this year's rent strike), but you can avoid that by going on the private rental market (which is cheaper or the same price anyway).

Central London (for both UCL and Imperial) is also massively expensive to live in or commute to, I imagine going to Cardiff will save you a lot of money.

That being said, being in the UCL/Bloomsbury area as data scientist to be will offer you great opportunities. At UCL, there are the Farr Institute of Health Informatics, Administrative Data Research Centre for England, and Big Data Institute, there are the Alan Turing Institute and Crick Institute just up the road at King's Cross, and Google is building something there as well. I work in medical stats, so this list might be a bit biased towards that.

UCL also like to advertise that they're an international university, and that's certainly true. I originally came here as an international MSc student as well, and there is a very active student union that organises lots of different activities, and even more clubs and society's that have stuff on every single day.

As someone who has marked thousands of papers, continuous. Do not, for the love of Gord, restart your footnotes on every page, or your instructor will think she's having a stroke.

Use proper Chicago Style, and use it well. Remember to include page numbers, and indent second lines in the bibliography, which should be in alphabetical order by author's last name. Do not indent or fiddle with your footnotes. You can use more than one citation in your footnotes, and the superscript number (ctrl-shift-f) comes at the end of the sentence, not in the middle, and following the quotation marks, not inside of them. "Like this, ok, even if this is the evidence one is using to argue a distinct point."^1 Also, don't use cliches like "argue a point" or contractions, save that for reddit. The auto-scripting on this page get it wrong. The footnotes goes at the fucking end (askacademia indeed, blech, get off my lawn).

For footnote: Bertrand Russell, The History of Western Philosophy (London: Verso, 1993), 7.

For bibliography: Russell, Bertrand. The History of Western
Philosophy. London: Verso, 1993. <-- This line should be indented (tabbed) but I'm bad at reddit.

edit: the scripting on this subreddit breaks the laws of Chicago and should be shot.

I'd say any major with a strong mathematical and/or programming component (e.g., math, statistics, physics, engineering, CS, etc.) is a good investment so long as you work your ass off and learn the material.

The way I see it, I get my "humanities" exposure through my bookshelf; I can read and learn any of those subjects without dropping however many thousands of dollars. Technically difficult subjects are a different story.

If you want to get a degree in the humanities, you can always double major. There's nothing wrong with that if you want a more rigorous humanities education alongside a quantitative one.

And if you're scared of math, brush up on Khan Academy. I like Cal Newport's blog on study habits, too.

It's your life, not your PIs. If you get the job offer, be as graceful as you can when informing your PI.

Also, an oldie from craigslist: &quot;Free pat on the back&quot;.

From the point of view of a person comfortable with git it's basically the same, since you can add an Overleaf project as a git remote.

I like Screencast-O-Matic.It's very easy to use and allows me to do what I need when recording lectures for my online class. You set it up to capture your screen, so it will let you show ppt slides but also can switch to other sources since it just captures what's in the frame on your screen. The free version only lets you record 15 minutes at a time but a subscription is about $15 a year I think, there's no limit to the recording time with the subscription. I also like that I can have my face in a little box in the corner of the screen while showing my lecture slides or while I show a particular website or something.

I use Zotero for my academic library. It doesn't have a handsome bookshelf layout, but apart from that it's got all of the features you're asking for. It also has plugins for Word and Open/Libre Office and let's extract references to the clipboard or as a BibTex file. I can't image doing research without it anymore.
Mendeley is another popular option. (Not sure if you can set it to open PDF's in an app of choice though.)

I use Eclipse with the TeXlipse LaTex plugin to generate my thesis pdf and everything is backed up to GitHub (from within Eclipse too). References are provided by a BibTex file that is automatically generated by Mendeley. I feel the workflow is simple and self-contained. Compared to Word, I think the generated pdf looks better and I have more control over it.

I started LaTex by googling whatever I needed to do at that stage (how to have Times New Roman 12 point font? how to insert figures? how to do Harvard referencing? etc). There are loads of useful resources/templates online.

One of my supervisors likes to have a .docx version and I use Adobe PDF Exporter for that with pretty good results.

I use Google Keep. I have a separate list/note for each publication, or individual projects, ideas, etc and some other topics like "Thesis", "Job Applications". Etc. Very simple to use and accessible from many devices.

This is a great read on the topic:

Thomson, P., & Kamler, B. (2012). Writing for peer reviewed journals: Strategies for getting published. Routledge.

https://www.amazon.com/Writing-Peer-Reviewed-Journals-Strategies/dp/0415809312

Welp. I also feel like I’ve wasted my life except I’m a postdoc. Not actively applying for jobs — I’ve lost all interest in taking the last steps required to get an academic position, something I’ve been killing myself to get for years now.

I guess I came here to say you aren’t alone in this feeling of despair. But at this late hour in our lives we have to keep moving forward. Make a list of things that need to be done and knock things off your to do list. Finish your PhD. Even though it doesn’t feel like it, finishing it will give you a sense of relief.

In the meantime, I found this book on getting jobs out of the academic market, still reading it, but maybe it would be of use to you: https://www.amazon.com/Next-Gen-PhD-Career-Science/dp/0674504658

Maybe others have other suggestions for books that describe ways we could spend our careers other than just keep on carrying on....

A PhD is Not Enough! A Guide to Survival in Science by Peter J. Feibelman Amazon link

Make Your Mark in Science: Creativity, Presenting, Publishing, and Patents, A Guide for Young Scientists by Claus Ascheron and Angela Kikuth Amazon link

Detox Your Writing

I cannot recommend this book enough. When the going gets tough, this book is great for putting your head back on.

I think it makes sense to have specialized assistants for the grant writing and administrative work, but I definitely think part of a professor's job is to do both teaching and research. After all, if I just wanted to learn, I could go online and presumably learn from the information posted in the depths of Google's arse.

In addition to learning to from the leading experts, teaching also makes sense in that it is good to force researchers to be stimulated by questions from students and other external noise they might not encounter in the lab.

" When I was at Princeton in the 1940s I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially selected for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever. These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves, OK? So they don't get any ideas for a while: They have every opportunity to do something, and they're not getting any ideas. I believe that in a situation like this a kind of guilt or depression worms inside of you, and you begin to worry about not getting any ideas. And nothing happens. Still no ideas come. Nothing happens because there's not enough real activity and challenge: You're not in contact with the experimental guys. You don't have to think how to answer questions from the students. Nothing! —Richard Feynman, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, 1985 "

Send the thank-you note immediately.

The note needn't be long. I found that by writing on both sides of a standard thank-you note, I was able to express all that I wanted to without perseveration.

A gift accompanying the note isn't necessary, but will always be appreciated. If you're in a position to be applying to programs, $30 is probably about right. Speaking of which: hint

agree on all fronts and add on: it depends on what field, but conference tourism is a thing, so i'd caution against having high expectations of an engaged, attentive audience. it's likely some are there just to kill time before they can buzz off and get a tan.

Don't forget about Google scholar -- easy access to constantly-updated impact factor numbers for all journals; lists of citations for articles. You could look up the journal in question, or look up an article that you know has been "published" in one of those journals, and see the number of subsequent citations.

http://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=top_venues&amp;hl=en

Look, being published means a couple of things -- yes, it means actually appearing on paper, and yes, it means going through some sort of peer review process. But it also means being distributed to a wide audience that might actually respond to, incorporate, critique, or at least be aware of the research. And while the scam journals might put articles on paper through a rough review process, publications that lack that wide distribution are missing the point of publication; one would be published by the letter of the law, but not the spirit. While I detest the implied specificity and elitism of the h-index, I can't deny that it's a measurement of that wide distribution of a journal and its content.

Just go.

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=psychology+of+video+games

Look at some of the top articles, read them. Find some that interest you and read them in depth. Read the references that deal with the specific parts that you like most. Be critical. When you see something that doesn't look right, look to see if someone else has caught it. If not, that's your in. Start looking for related things to that specific problem. Start thinking of experiments, surveys, etc that could help make your point. Start writing.

It's a process. Just start. Advisers are great for setting deadlines and oversight, but regardless you'll be doing most of the work.

I have tended towards Evernote recently. Most browsers support addons to clip interesting media from websites too.

Glad it helped. I can't speak for the industry component, but it sounds like you have perhaps your next way stop planned out. As for shifting the "existing paradigms" ... yeah, a PhD is likely the way to gain the credibility to do that, but there are of course industry focused ways to achieve that as well. Dissertation does involve empirical research, yes. It is qualitative but empirical nonetheless. If you are interested in reading some of my theoretical (this study was a lit review) work, you can check out this manuscript I've been shopping around. It's not perfect and I have largely moved on from the digital epistemologies problem space, but I thought it might be useful to you, given your interest in technological approaches to disability. Good luck in your journey.

Pressbooks + H5P. https://pressbooks.com/ http://h5p.org Both are open source but have hosting for fee options. Both are WordPress plugins. If you're willing to make the book OER there may be funding from your institution/state. In Ontario, eCampusOntario pays for premium hosting and it's free to use. Premium hosting supports LaTeK Markup & hypothes.is annotations.

Full title: Weinstein S (1968) Intensive and extensive aspects of tactile sensitivity as a function of body part, sex and laterality. In: Kenshalo DR, editor. The skin senses. Springfield (Illinois): Charles C. Thomas. pp. 195–222.

In this: The skin senses; proceedings. Compiled and edited by Dan R. Kenshalo. Author: International Symposium on Skin Senses (1st : 1966 : Florida State University) Published: Springfield, Ill., Thomas [1968] Description: xvii, 636 p. illus., port. 26 cm.

It is available at my university but I am out of state ... or I would go scan it for you.

Here is a different article so you can see the cover page info https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Kenneth_Casey/publication/286882411_Melzack_Casey_Determinants_of_Pain_1968_from_original/links/566ed81808ae62b05f0b6585.pdf

Here is the worldcat link so you can find it at an institution near you http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/239118

Maybe these Coursera courses?

• Think Again: How to Reason and Argue - started last month and lasts until December, so I think you could still join and catch up
• Critical Thinking in Global Challenges - starts next January

Here's what Boeing CTO John Tracy had to say when asked what he looks for when hiring college grads.

While many of these skills are technical in nature, many others (teamwork, communication, planning, open-ended analysis, etc.) are best learned as part of a more well-rounded education.

You might also want to browse the LaTeX poster templates on Overleaf if you are willing to make your poster with LaTeX. There are some pretty nice portrait templates on here: https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/tagged/poster

Since no-one had mentioned it yet I'm going to suggest Igor Pro. Quite powerful once you get your head around it and you can produce some absolutely awesome graphs.

Well, if you're looking at it as one long file (a single-page HTML version, for example), then there are technically no page numbers to cite.

But if you're looking at the epub version, then you may want to look at a resource like this for aid with citing the version you're using: http://www.citethisforme.com/guides/harvard/how-to-cite-a-ebook

You can do (1) in Zotero but only with a bit of a crux, as far as I know. You can enter advanced search and instead of entering "men" you enter " men ". Note the spaces around the word indicating you want those letters to be surrounded by spaces, e.g. it will not trigger for thinks like "women" or "mending". For a quick overview of Zotero searching, see https://www.zotero.org/support/searching

It can also do (2) if I'm understanding correctly. Its "search everything" or at the very least advanced search mode should be able to do that.

I use Zotero for reference management. Making sure you're a proficient user of Word, and using it correctly, will get you much farther than adding lots of different types of software.

LaTeX for sure.

ShareLatex is a good resource, but I did it a bit differently using \include{...} and \includeonly{...} commands (instead of \import{}) to break it up into small chunks.

I had a folder called CH which had CH1.tex, CH2.tex, etc, a folder called PRE for abstract, acknowledgments, etc, and a folder called APX for appendices. Then the document part of the main.tex file looks like:

\includeonly{CH/CH1,CH/CH2} \begin{document} % Early stuff \include{PRE/titlepage} \include{PRE/abstract} \include{PRE/acknowledments} \tableofcontents

% Main chapters \include{CH/CH1} \include{CH/CH2} \include{CH/CH3} % etc

% Appendices \begin{appendices} \include{APX/APX1} \include{APX/APX2} % etc \end{appendices} \end{document}

The \includeonly{...} makes it so only those chapters are compiled, which saves time once your document gets big. And note you edit the chapters (like CH1.tex) individually as separate files, and the main.tex file just ties everything together and provides formatting.

This might not make sense now but it is easy to learn as you go. People talk about it being difficult to learn, but there really isn't anything stopping you from actually writing in a latex file and worrying about the formatting later. Formatting will be handled automatically based on the main.tex file -- the chapters themselves are rather plain and straightforward.

Check out: Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900 - 1985 (Studies in Writing & Rhetoric) by James Berlin. Here is an Amazon Link to the book:

https://www.amazon.com/Rhetoric-Reality-Instruction-American-Paperback/dp/080931360X

Your local library, like mine, also might have it. There is also a book by the same author about colleges in the nineteenth century. It might not have stuff specifically about assessment, but it has some solid details about the system of college English classes in general and it is not very long.

Source: I gave a short presentation about this book. B. A. in English

"As We May Think" by Vannevar Bush in the Atlantic and "The Psychology of Everyday Things" (now published as "The Design of Everyday Things") by Don Norman. I'm in Information Science, but this is also true of the HCI-Focused cognitive science lab I used to work in.

I think they make interesting reading for anyone, although of course I would :P

I think a good way to learn philosophy is to read the original text from the original authors. Granted they are translated from an ancient language to English so things arent exact but it pretty close to being taught by taught by these great philosophers. Try reading Discourses by Epictetus or The Republic by Plato.

my personal opinion is that there are questions with factual answers, and then there are prospective questions with open answers.

The point of the first is easy to understand, and very useful, but also easier for the candidate to prepare for. This of course shows that the candidate is motivated and done some preparation for the interview. On the other hand, it is more difficult to differentiate between candidates, for the same reasons (even if some prepare better than others). Examples include description about previous experiences, experimental details, explaining the conclusions, or otherwise specific academic questions about relevant topics: also, what does the candidate know about the university, lab, supervisor, or topic.

The second type, though, are not easy at all to prepare for. The candidate must be able to articulate his/her thoughts, in a meaningful way, and in real time. The point of course, is to access the "maturity", for lack of a better word, of the candidate. This can be a question to probe how much thought he/she put into his/her academic trajectory, what decisions led to this point, and forethought for the near future. These are no "right" or "wrong" answers so the downsides are that a "smooth talker" can breeze through easily; but also that it is difficult for the interviewer to score the performance. Examples include many of the questions given by /u/dl064.

To minimize personal bias, I made a questionnaire that I consistently use for interviews for a same position. Each section is given an appropriate score and especially relative weight, depending on what I'm looking for: "experience" if it's a short intern; intellectual maturity if for a post-doc, etc. In the end I always pick the one with the highest score, regardless of my personal impressions of the interview. I update it every time if I think it can be improved.

edit: english

I got the idea from the book "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman

I cannot speak for historians, but there is a lot of crossover work to be had in the sciences. I've met several physicists that have gone on to become mechanical, materials, and electrical engineers. If you are involved in engineering at all, some mentors have told me that once you graduate you are simply an engineer, no prefix.

What I'm trying to say is that choosing your major isn't as big of a deal as it seems. You should even be able to change majors in the next year or two with only a small penalty in terms of extra time required at college (and if you go into engineering, taking 5-6 years to graduate happens a lot). And there will be time to change your career path later, too. The goal now is to get "close enough" so that you can spend time exploring the intricacies of what you are interested in.

My advice? STEM fields are the only ones that are practically a guaranteed return on your college investment. You can learn how to write well from a couple of books (I highly recommend The Elements of Style) and practice. Being well-versed in scientific history is paramount to being a talented scientist/engineer/researcher, so you could easily have a sort of hybrid there, as well. You might also consider a history minor.

The math is not bad for engineering; most of it is plug-and-chug and simple algebra. Besides, engineers take calculus to get good at algebra. Make a point of going to all the math help sessions you can (your math department probably provides several), and try to find an informal math tutor that can make mathematics make sense to you.

Yep--the study was done at a single, elite private university (Northwestern) and compared full-time NTT faculty (not exactly the "adjunct" that is being discussed here in general) with TT faculty. Further, the difference between the groups has a relatively trivial effect: "On average, students were 7 percentage points more likely to take an advanced course in a discipline after starting off with a non-tenured prof, and earned around 0.06 to .12 grade points better in their second class (on a four point scale)." (see http://finance.yahoo.com/news/tenured-professors-really-worse-teachers-143700266.html for a critique of the study)

I like the courses included in the Data Science specialisation on Coursera. They're a good introduction to get you started, specifically with R.

For an introduction into programming languages, which I needed as had more of a theoretical stats background, CS50X: introduction to computer science is a great course.

I think it’s important to remember to keep an eye on the research direction of your reading material. It can be quite daunting and it’s quite easy to get led astray to go down a rabbit roles especially when considering the arguments of the paper. I find that having some visual aids help clear my mind when I’m stuck.

Try using this essay structure key to reflect upon your work and some of the papers that you read. https://tinyurl.com/y88oayqe

The problem with finding an average salary is that you don't know what the credentials of the employees are. Have you looked at Indeed.com? Not sure how accurate the info is but there are jobs posted and it would give you an idea of the range of qualifications.

For managerial roles, you could find leadership opportunities. Start or lead student organizations. Plan events for 20+ attendance, recruit members, network, find sponsorship, etc. For example you could lead a kickstarter campaign

For consultancy roles, you could look for unsolved problems and solve them. Or you could find ways to improve currently known solutions. For example you could keep an open science notebook

For either type of roles, they require a certain level of comfort in being an independent thinker with critical thinking skills, as well as a pretty large dose of knowing how to collaborate as well as lead a team.

Okay. An MA from CSUN will not help you get a job as a professor with the possibility of tenure at a community college.

If you don't believe me, here's some random HuffPost article and an NPR one too about how much it sucks to be an adjunct. You will not be eligible for raises and will have zero job security as your courses can be cut without notice. You're considered "contingent" faculty and will not be given a contract -- your pay is contingent each semester upon if the college needs you or not. If they don't need you, they are not required to pay you.

I'm going to step away from this thread now, but you asked for the truth, and everyone in this thread has given it to you.

https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome/releases/tag/v1.7.8

this extension is fantastic if you can load a chrome extension from source code (very easy)

You can use Python for anything if you find the right libraries and have the patience to install them (once you get Python working, it works fairly well... but it can take a lot more effort than you'd imagine to get it working).

If you're doing a lot of image/video work you might also look into Processing. It can be done as Java or Javascript and in my experience is waaaay easier than Python for anything relating to images.

If you don't know about The Programming Historian some of their intros/tutorials for digital humanities work are useful.

Hey everyone, I've just graduated from high school and am looking forward to joining uni and had already chosen which one I'd like to pursue my studies in, however I'm confused about what path I should take.

Basically I'm stuck between two options, the first is software engineering and the second is what I'd translate to Industrial data processing and automation, "Informatique industrielle et automatique" in french.

This is how the latter is described in the university's website :

>The aim of the Industrial and Automatic Computer Science sector is to train engineers able to master automated production tools based on state-of-the-art computer techniques (real-time system, control, control, robotics, etc.). The training, focused on the study and the development of all types of servocontrols, robotics, control of systems by PLC, allows the control of the specific technologies of the modern industry as well as all the aspects related to computer control, and the tools of industrial computing. Through their training, these engineers will be able to contribute their skills in the development of industrial applications that aim to improve production processes, product quality and improve working conditions. These engineers will be able to work in production units, quality control, standardization, environmental and research laboratories, and in general, they will participate in technology watch.

I love all tech stuff thus I'm okay with both, but the curriculum of each one is different and I'm hoping to make the right choice as to what would contribute to my knowledge the best and as to what is better in general between the two and that's why I need you guys for, please give me your guidance!

Here are both's programme : The software engineering programme seems richer to me.

Software engineering programme

IIA programme

Thank you for your time!

You move up the hierarchy, they are not separate tracks.

fyi here's a google doc showing salary scales

TikZ is a package for LaTeX, that is used to create figures, using the appropriate commands (see link). The figures are rendered during the LaTeX compilation process.

Matlab2tikz is a tool that converts your MATLAB figure into tikz code. By altering the resulting code you can change almost every part of a figure.

Yup. He's got mad skills at both Latin and Greek, can speak Spanish, and read German.

have a look at his ratemyprofessor. He takes pride in the fact that his helpfulness and clarity ratings are really high, while his easiness is really low.

Cheap tablet with stylus (this one's only about $30 on amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0049BY6FQ/ref=oh_details_o01_s00_i00) plus Smoothdraw: http://www.smoothdraw.com/ (same program used for Khan Academy vids)

Whiteboards are pretty useful, and I'd never been a big doodle fan before then. Once I found out how expensive dry erase markers were, I gave a tablet a lark. Works great!

Illustrator, or if your department doesn't have a license, the free open-source, and getting better all the time, alternatives to Photoshop and Illustrator are Gimp and Inkscape.

http://www.gimp.org/

https://inkscape.org/en/

I've had similar issues; I've already done my MS and I will hopefully begin my PhD soon, so I have some nuggets you might find helpful.

The most basic divide in AI is between symbolic (logic) and connectionist (neural networks) approaches. Symbolic agents are good at performing complex tasks and functionally modeling high-level cognitive faculties, but they are bad at learning and they can't really be used to test hypotheses about cognition because their behavior has to be predefined. This is why you see AI being used more in industry than in academia. Connectionist agents are good at learning and modeling low-level neural processes, but they can't perform complex tasks and they can be unweildy and difficult to analyze. Right now there is a major trade-off between having your agent behave in an intelligent-seeming way and having its internal processes remotely resemble those of humans. You can't have both. This is largely because brains are magical and complicated and we don't understand them well enough to design a system that functions like a brain at both low and high levels.

If you are really into naturalism and modeling actual brain-stuff, then I suggest going for computational neuroscience over AI per se. Computational neuroscience is largely concerned with creating empirically-grounded models which can in turn be used as ideal conditions for testing hypotheses. If I could go back in time that's what I'd do. This is a bottom-up approach so your grad research is unlikely to pertain to cognition, but you'd be contributing to what I'm betting is the best path toward gaining a truly fundamental understanding of cognition. To compare, the top-down approah entails formalizing psychological findings, and the brain doesn't really process symbols so there's not much room to go "down" from there.

Not really related, but favorite theory of consciousness is http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Integrated_information_theory you might be into that.

Good luck :D

You should investigate your local college. Most contracts allow people on site to use the resources. Bring your laptop and most college libraries have free wifi.

Also, check with your local public library. If you identify books and articles through Google Scholar or WorldCat ( http://www.worldcat.org ) you can probably order them through inter library loan.

> I know better than to select on passion (have that for all three anyway)

If you're trying to get an academic career, you should definitely do what you're best at, which is hopefully and most-likely also what you're most passionate about.

But as to your question: I don't know exactly what you mean by "academic life." In any field in the humanities you pretty much read and write scholarship in that field, and if you end up doing it professionally you'll lecture, lead seminars, visit conferences.

That said, the kind of academic works you read/produce can be very different in these different fields. You might consider visiting some lectures, or finding audio/video lectures online, reading a work or two in the three fields. Philosophy is all about rigorous arguments concerning very general knowledge which doesn't fit into other fields. English is about analyzing literary texts, but can also be very philosophy-heavy, if you're into it (though this will be continental philosophy/cultural theory rather than the analytic stuff.) History is, of course, about narrating what's happened on this planet since the written record, but I can't say too much about what scholarly works in this field are currently like.

The online resource I like best for lectures in the humanities is The Teaching Company:

https://www.thegreatcourses.com/category/history.html?CFM=category_slider

While it may make little sense to do something else while you're already busy, this class on writing in the sciences might be fun to take as a change of pace.

Not as close as I thought, then.

The 10 is an issue number. They only want the volume for journals with continuous page numbers, it looks like.

And six versus four authors before et.al. is unusual, but fair enough.

Zotero is a free citation manager that offers citation style editing. You can create what you need there.

More than that, if one’s current financial balance doesn’t allow extending Zotero’s free membership capacity (which is only 300mB ATM), they can put and organize all the metadata in Zotero and keep the files themselves safe and portable via Dropbox (2gB starter free pack + marketing BS bonuses).

It's like I am reading my own experience put down by someone else. I used https://unicheck.com/ to check my thesis last year, and it was great as it recognized all citations and references in my paper. I know that they have a free option for schools, but I am not sure if it is free for individual users. When I was using it, I paid something, but it was not much.

It has its pros and cons - I like how simple it is to add photos and other media right from the site. Sometimes editing can be slow and tedious; its one of those programs where you move one textbox or photo and the rest of the project needs adjusting. But, I find the animations to be rather seamless, and the design templates are visually appealing. It's much less kitschy than Prezi but more interesting than a boring old PowerPoint. The responses I've gotten from students have been positive so far!

Here is an example Sway I made if you want to check it out - https://sway.com/6vriipKUJgTHGXGT?ref=Link

A few tools I've used:

• Explain Everything to make explanation videos of some concepts seen in class

• Otter.ai to generate captions for my lectures. We have access to some tools but none of them managed to accommodate my accent (French) and the technical terms used in my field, and it cut down the time spent fixing the captioning from 20 minutes per lecture to a quick 3-5 minutes read.

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned WYSIWYG editors for LaTeX. I do almost all of my writing in LaTeX, and find that the benefits of using an editor like LyX. Although there is an upfront cost to learning the interface and, the benefit of being able to edit equations and view output in real time far outweighs any difficulties. Ultimately you save keystrokes due to the various useful keyboard shortcuts.

(As a new LaTeX user this will not be important now, but LyX is only a hair's width from the underlying TeX code, so it is technically possible to reproduce any document you'd like within the editor, and furthermore, once you are comfortable editing within LyX you can learn to work in plain LaTeX very easily.)

I recommend <em>Are You Still Procrastinating</em>? to you an other folks who might struggle with this as a longtime pattern. The perfectionism and consistently putting things off is something I see in myself in my colleagues a lot as a reason (or maybe excuse lol) of putting things off because we base our self worth on our professional performance. It sucks and isn't sustainable– especially for those of us already struggling with not-so-great mental health!

I have ADHD too and if you don't have one already, I highly recommend a weekly accountability group! It's really helped me plan ahead and stick to my weekly plan. And it has the added bonus of seeing that your peers aren't as flawless and productive as you image to be... :)