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

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In American social sciences, political censorship is not only NOT new but its foundation. The Rockefellers, American Federation of Labor, and federal government would bar you from academic associations and universities if you approved of the labor theory of value. American social "sciences" were not out to become aimlessly empirical, but to "scientifically prove what is good about free-market capitalism and American exceptionalism" to paraphrase Dorothy Ross's primary sources.

For data curves/theory curves, I use Python to analyze the data and generate the base plots, and then I combine them in Inkscape. For sketches/schematics, I directly draw them in Inkscape in vector format. I don't have too many images from other sources that are not vector files (i.e. microscope images), so the tools Inkscape provides for these are more than enough

Don't just use LaTeX, use overleaf. It has all the functionality of word (comments, track changes) and Google docs (online, cloud), but for LaTeX. Overleaf also has git integration if you want to use that for version control.

You should be able to use the Zotero plugin for MS Word. There are some instructions for manually installing the plugin here if it is not installed already.

Hi there. I have no idea what your field is, but you can google for the impact factor of most journals and find it. Otherwise, there is an official database that you can probably get to through your University's library (ask a librarian!). Also, you can read this.

If you want to get into high impact factor journals, find a few that would be a good home for your project, then read a bunch of their articles. Look for trends in terms of topics and how they're discussed. When you write up your paper, make sure you have something good and then cite references from the journal you are submitting to.

Not sure there is a magic bullet to publishing in high impact factor journals. I think the most important thing (besides having good stuff) is finding a journal that is a good home for your manuscript. Match is very important, and once you get some more pubs under your belt, you'll understand better which projects belong where.

Finally, if you're reading articles in good journals and expand on those ideas, your work will be a good match for the high impact factor journals.

Good luck!

PS-- Just re-read your post. Create a profile on Google Scholar for yourself. Upload your manuscripts, find any citations you have, and it will calculate those statistics for you. In terms of journal impact factor, in my field a rating above 2+ is decent, 3+ is really good, and then there is a break and you have pubs like Nature and Science above 30+.

One of the best I have attended was AAAI. It had a virtual space that people could walk around in and up to posters or participants and chat with them. I had 2 posters there and got a lot more activity than other virtual conferences. I think the virtual-physical space with people walking around was a really valuable thing. This is the company.

Otter.ai is your best bet. I've tried a lot of automatic transcription sites and even fiddled with the Google API for a long time, but this is the cheapest one (with a discount if you use a university email) and does the job well. Keep in mind, you'll still spend some time editing the transcript, but nowhere near as long as doing it from scratch.

download Kakaotalk or Line (I prefer Kakaotalk personally), and get your students to do the same.

Link to Kakao on the Google Play store. Both have Apple versions too: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kakao.talk&hl=en_US

unlike Whatsapp, once you have them installed they give you a user ID or even a QR code that the students can use to add you as 'friends'. so you can message them via that without having to ever give them your phone number.

both also have the ability to send files, and both have desktop versions that you can install which makes typing and sending messages so much easier.

just create a group chat for each of your classes and ask the students to join. post messages and announcements in the group chat. If you don't want to be bothered outside of regular working hours, you can mute all notifications from the group.

Whatscrapp is so far behind the times it's not even funny.

ps. the emoticons on Kakaotalk are fucken GREAT, your students will love them.

Hey, sorry it took me a minute--wasn't feeling so good yesterday. You can try out this book. It gives precise details on structuring a class between activities, lectures, and discussions. My lectures always go under 15 minutes. If they have a reading, you can use the lecture to fill in what they read or go over details covered in other research related to the topic. I've also found that if I use lecture time to demonstrate that what they read/ are learning about directly affects their lives, the discussion is much more productive and lively. It's weird, but they learn more with shorter lectures because your editing to the most essential facts (and takes some of the pressure off me). Good luck! You're not an imposter--you're exactly where you're supposed to be.

There are a couple of things I'd work on. First, read and read about comparative analysis. If the math doesn't make sense, learn more math.

Second, presentation matters. Science is a culture comfortable with lots of calm-ish arguing. And people that master the calm-ish arguing will often appear correct. Find your path to calm-ish arguing.

Third, remember that there is a fascinating problem with ALL the people who go into higher education. They have all been acing tests for a long time. But learning all of the KNOWN answers and regurgitating them is completely different from creating new knowledge. You will now experience lots of failure, while building new knowledge. It's both normal and stressful. And here's a fun guide to that: http://www.openculture.com/2017/06/the-illustrated-guide-to-a-phd-12-simple-pictures-that-will-put-the-daunting-degree-into-perspective.html

Cannot recommend this book highly enough - changed everything I thought about teaching. https://www.amazon.com/Courage-Teach-Exploring-Landscape-Anniversary/dp/0787996866

I think it depends on how you like to organise yourself.

I had a 9-5 hourly one for a while but I found that it didn't really work for me, because a lot seminars, conference dinners etc. all fall outside of the usual 9-5. I also didn't like it because a lot of my time was unscheduled. Like my plan for the day would be 'research' and I didn't feel like I need to write that in the 9-5 block.

But if you're someone who likes drawing out blocks of time like that, it might really suit you.

I had a daily one and had similar issues, too much space, I wasn't writing enough in it so I felt like I was wasting paper.

I'm also way too lazy for a bullet journal. I get the idea, and I'd love to do it, but I know myself and I know that if I had to set up a layout for every week I just wouldn't do it. I'd lose patience and interest. So I need something already formatted lol.

For the past few years I've had different versions of CleverFox planners. They have a weekly one, which I prefer. The days of the week are just blank so you can write what you like in, there's a to-do list and a blank space for every week. They also have a lot of dotted pages at the back which are handy for scribbling notes. There's a monthly section at the beginning which is handy for big deadlines, major things, seeing the month at a glance.

I'm not much for goal tracking, but their planners do have that. I'm on my third one now, and they work for me! You might have to trial-and-error a couple before you find one that suits you.

Try reading this book. It's about Aaron Swartz. He was caught illegally downloading academic articles from JSTOR and was facing up to 35 YEARS in prison. Unfortunately, he ended up committing suicide after failing to settle on a plea deal. The book I linked gives some great history on the free exchange of information.

"Writing for Social Scientists" by Howard Becker (famous sociologist) is a great book. Even if you are not in social science, it is immensely useful at describing the art of academic writing and strategies to get to writing.

https://www.amazon.com/Writing-Social-Scientists-Chicago-Publishing/dp/0226041328

Check out Zeynep Tufekci. She's a sociologist with a background in computer science. In 2018, she published Twitter and Tear Gas, where she discusses social media and misinformation.

Link here

Search for "active learning pedagogy" in your library catalog or in google. Add your discipline for more refined results. The basic stuff is just think/pair/share but there are endless things you can do, including elaborate role playing simulations (case studies, Reacting to the Past, etc.) at the extreme end. Also a huge 20-30+ year old literature on this topic, so you'd be better off starting with a few books-- maybe start with a classic like <em>Engaging Ideas: The Professor's Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom</em> and go from there?

Talk to colleagues in your field as well, often the best tips come from others in your department or in peer departments at similar schools. My departmental colleagues share teaching materials, ideas, and lessons (good and bad) all the time.

Where did you see this citation "Deci & Ryan 2004". If you scroll down to the bib (last page) you will see the full citation.

But their biggest publication in 2004 was the Handbook of Self Determination Research
Deci E., & Ryan, R. (2004). Handbook of self-determination research. University Rochester Press.

You can get it from your school's library or buy a copy here:

https://www.amazon.com/Handbook-Self-Determination-Research-Edward-Deci/dp/1580461565

It always hurt. Yet your supervisor made it even more painful. But I know cases when supervisors that mean that they say to students that they need to quit their studies because they are unfit for acadmia. So this is not a worst case scenario. I suggest you go meet your supervisor at office hours and ask them to explain to you why your proposal is not good.

Have you read this book by the way https://www.amazon.com/Research-Chicago-Writing-Editing-Publishing/dp/0226065669 It may help to gain more cofidence for supervisor talk.

You'll be fine, just move forward !

In my field (Engineering) simple graphs are done directly using Latex and packages like PSTricks. Plots are mostly done using Matlab or Python and then exported as vector graphic or if possible as tikzpicture.

Pictures like your provided example are most likely drawn by hand. I mostly use inkscape, which can export the Text in a Latex Format, so all your Text and Symbols corresponds exactly to the ones in the document.

Another possibility is using XFig (www.xfig.org) which is a rather minimal and unhandy vector graphic program. It was widely used at my university to draw mechanical stuff. Has a great Latex support as well.

Try time blocking. This is a method that many people describe is helpful to them. Here’s one article with an overview. It’s from a company that sells software for reminders, but you don’t need the software to follow the general principles in the article.

https://todoist.com/productivity-methods/time-blocking

One example? Just even one to prove your point would suffice.

This and "whataboutism" gave me the impression you were a centrist. It'd be easier to come forgoe anymore "second chances" with reformism as Thomas Piketty has already done. I won't hesitate to my best to disway anybody who remotley seems to appraise Joe Biden and comfort with the status quo.

Whataboutism is a dismissal of most of the US population's concerns. The "Registered Voter" crowd such as yourself isnists that the only people worth caring about are those able to vote. Voters are white, affluent, and educated which not only influences election outcomes but skews juries towards systemic racism. I've worked election campaigns, and the bureaucracy is tantamount for young adults and non-white & poor prospective voters. Journalist Greg Palst found that voting laws "police" voter registration by throwing lots of Blacks and Latinos off the ballot. How? How many "James Browns" or "Maria Hernandez" do you think are in the US? They're allowed to make not distinctions between "James R. Brown" and "James. M. Brown", but they'll say "James Brown illegally voted 10,000 times." With that said, they can get past all the bureaucracy and still have their vote thrown away.

If you want to address the questions of "why aren't the Democrats doing better", your "whataboutisms" dismissals won't get you very far.

If you are in the humanities this book may help https://www.amazon.com/Research-Chicago-Writing-Editing-Publishing/dp/022623973X

Tge truth is tgat you do not need a superviser to write your PhD. You have written a lot asignments during your studies Just belive in yourself and take some guidlines from books like tge one I have mentioned above.

Good luck!

IEEE has good LaTeX templates, and it’s worth the work to have great typesetting for your equations, and managing your references using BibTeX... you could also try it using Overleaf if you want to avoid trying to install anything in your computer: IEEE Access

I don't think I can because Mendeley now encrypts your database to literally prevent you from doing that.

https://getpolarized.io/2019/01/23/mendeleys-encrypted-repository-is-fundamentally-anti-science.html

I think this is a huge example of how closed data can sometimes beat open data.

It's easy for you to go from Polar to Mendeley but not the other way around.

I use Language Tool called through emacs. I use LaTeX for most of my writing; Language Tool also catches extra spaces and newlines which are allowed in .tex so it can get very messy.

Zotero has a built in function for generating timelines out of collections: https://www.zotero.org/support/timelines

It requires you to have dates in the item metadata, which should be the case anyway.

The result does not really look great, but may be a good start.

Fair point. I don't have experience with it myself, but apparently Zotero does have support for google docs, see here: https://www.zotero.org/support/google_docs

Maybe that would be a solution?

Thanks for this! I agree, I have a set of images and graphic assets that I think I can re-use (so I don't have to draw a new creative brain for every talk) and I think that can be really valuable on the long run. Like you said, I agree that coming up with a whole new design from scratch every time is tough and takes a lot of time. I have a few things I usually immediately go to, which is the scientific color scheme link, and a book on scientific poster design by a graphic designer link.

Incredible resource. Thank you. I would add Weka, an open source collection of data mining and machine learning tools written in Java. I'm unsure how popular it is but I've used it for a few grad courses.

I'd also absolutely recommend GTD. It helps you make sure no tasks slip through the cracks. It can be a bit tough to get started on it though. There's a really good beginners guide here, if you're interested.

I use Zenkit to manage it all - it's like Asana, Azendoo and Trello all rolled into one. It's also a great option if you already use Google Calendar extensively since there's a 2-way sync with GCal and you can import your already existing calendar events.

By far my favourite Windows and Android pdf reader and editor is (Xodo)[https://www.xodo.com]. It supports comments and a minor editing, but IMO its main appeal is that it is very lightweight and lightning fast.

Highly recommend that you check out Notion of your currently using Evernote. I used to use Evernote but switched to notion because of the customizability and just the general look and feel of Notion. In my opinion it was the platform that I have been looking for a long time. It also has an awesome feture that allows you to create a sharable of any of your note pages that can be opened in a web browser.

Definitely check it out. I don't think you'll regret it.

https://www.notion.so/?r=face9efa5a8a408c8e2954b9548af1b0

I’m starting to pair Zotero (citation manager/paper database) and Obsidian (notes manager). There are some folks who link the two and make their notes and highlights in the PDF stored in Zotero and export them to Obsidian. I haven’t yet tried this, but here’s a video.

I don't see how postmodernism could be made into a scientific theory. It is a philosophical framework that offers no testable hypotheses. The main object of contestion is the theory of truth, which is a hard philosophical topic. While natural scientists believe in an objective reality and believe that the goal of science is to create theories that approximate to the objective truth as much as possible, some of the social scientists have lost the belief in objective truth and believe that truth is subjective and constructed. And that is the primary issue that is the source of conflict. Is their any middle ground possible? Maybe some neuroscientifically grounded theory of truth, such as this one?

The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding

Are you looking for a job? There is a free app that helps you find a right job with your skill set. Just search with skill, location or company names and find thousands of jobs.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.ctapal.globaljobs

They're not much different, as the public university has served the purpose of dumping the R+D costs of corporations and the DoD off of themselves since WWII.

Source- https://www.amazon.com/Capitalist-University-Transformations-Higher-Education-ebook/dp/B01M7OXCAP

The earliest pioneers of higher education would be aggrieved with sentiments like yours! To confine yourself to do what it says but not where it goes makes you a subject, not a citizen. Even worse, you're voluntarily advocating to be at the whim of anyone, even if it means the destruction of the institution. By telling people to shut up and about get back to asking questions about bureaucratic technicalities, you're eroding the spirit needed for students and fellows to be self-governing and to construct a functioning demorcay.

Chair, Supervisors, colleagues, they don't know about that. Their writing is a trial-and-error process based on their experience from reading papers. In fact, I'd argue that their writing is no different that Ika Antkare's work. The true difference is just that their writing has a tangible idea (not necessarily concrete, but tangible, acceptable, maybe a bit of salt on the state of the art).

In reality, they do not have a functional framework as to how to write. Their writing is just an amalgam of mimicking papers they have written before.

Ideas aren't the biggest hurdle. The biggest hurdle is how to write well quickly. We just develop our own framework for that.

I am in Engineering, but I believe that the Zettelkasten - which comes from humanities, particularly Luhmann's sociology - is a good part of a writing workflow. Phrasebanks are another aid to actually express ideas properly using the right words.

Where are you looking/shopping? There are tons of simple laptop bags in so many different colors, fabrics, prints, solids. . .

Try Amazon (maybe search for laptop bag, rather than "messenger"). Your biggest problem will be that there are way too many choices and it's hard to narrow down!

I can't find the exact one that I have, but it's in the same line as this one linked (which should be $30, not $80. Amazon pricing is weird!). I can't say you'll like this print for yourself, but there are a million different options.

https://www.amazon.com/Dachee-Bohemian-Laptop-Messenger-Briefcase/dp/B013UN2RNG/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=dachee+bohemian+laptop+bag&amp;qid=1552192848&amp;s=gateway&amp;sr=8-2

~~that doesn't narrow it down too much ~~ ;)

edit -

http://www.amazon.com/Science-Higher-Education-Step-Step/dp/1515206467