(Part 2) Top products from r/AskAcademia

Not a new faculty member -- I started out almost 20 years ago -- but I quit a tenured, almost-full-professor position back in 2011 to start over at a different university that was better suited for my goals, in no small part because of questions like these. I could give a very long answer on this because it's something I've thought about a lot, but I'll keep it short and maybe others can fill in their ideas.

Context: I work at a regional public university (26K students) and am pre-tenure but on the tenure track, up for tenure and promotion in 3 more years. I have a teaching schedule of 24 credits every year, which shakes out to three courses a semester (usually two preps) along with expectations for service and a modicum of research production (we're primarily a teaching-oriented institution). Also and importantly: I have a wife and three little kids and they are way more important to me than my career.

With that background, I usually am working on my stuff about 9 hours per day during the week, and maybe 2-3 hours on the weekends although I prefer not to work on the weekends at all. And it works for me, as I just had a successful halfway-point review for tenure and promotion and all signs are indicating that tenure shouldn't be a problem for me when I finally come up for it.

You asked a bunch of questions in that last paragraph that seem unrelated but actually I think they all hinge on one thing -- making sure that there is a space in your life for work and a space in your life for your life, and making sure that there is no unwanted invasion of one space by the other. What works for me is:

1. If you want to have a space for stuff in your life that isn't work, you have to set up hard boundaries around that space and defend it.
   
2. You have to know exactly what you should be doing at any given moment and also what you should not be doing at any given moment.
   
3. You have to choose projects and tasks strategically and manage them rigorously.
   
   To focus on #2 and #3, I practice the Getting Things Done or "GTD" system of task/time management promulgated by David Allen. It would be well worth your time to go read this book, maybe over the holiday break. I won't try to summarize it other than to say, the cornerstone of GTD is having a trusted system into which you put ALL your projects and tasks organized by context, priority, and energy available and focus ONLY on the next action for each project. This way of thinking will train you to distinguish what you should be doing right now from the many things that you could be doing, and also train you to let go, mentally, of anything other than the next available thing until it's time.
   
   So I highly recommend GTD. It's no exaggeration that when I discovered GTD a few years ago it changed my life. You asked about what I do to relax and feel peace -- the first thing I do is keep all my projects and tasks organized and under my control. Otherwise there is no peace!
   
   As for #1, I set aside evenings and weekends for family. That for me is an inviolable law. So, I shut down the computer and don't check email from 6pm to 6am. (I tell students this, and explain why, and they respect it.) I get up at 4:30am so that I can grade from 6-7am every day and not take time out of the weekend. Sometimes (like during finals week) I do have to bring work home. But I've found that I can get a lot done during business hours if I just remain ruthlessly efficient with managing my tasks (see GTD).
   
   So another aspect of having peace in my life comes from the fact that I never worry that I'm not doing enough to give time and attention to my wife, kids, church, or friends. Making hard boundaries around that personal space and fighting to maintain them makes it possible.
   
   TL;DR -- I've managed to maintain a good work-life balance and a productive career by practicing GTD and being deliberate about setting hard boundaries around work and family life.

Griffiths is the go-to for advanced undergraduate level texts, so you might consider his Introduction to Quantum Mechanics and Introduction to Particle Physics. I used Townsend's A Modern Approach to Quantum Mechanics to teach myself and I thought that was a pretty good book.

I'm not sure if you mean special or general relativity. For special, /u/Ragall's suggestion of Taylor is good but is aimed an more of an intermediate undergraduate; still worth checking out I think. I've heard Taylor (different Taylor) and Wheeler's Spacetime Physics is good but I don't know much more about it. For general relativity, I think Hartle's Gravity: An Introduction to Einstein's General Relativity and Carroll's Spacetime and Geometry: An Introduction to General Relativity are what you want to look for. Hartle is slightly lower level but both are close. Carroll is probably better if you want one book and want a bit more of the math.

Online resources are improving, and you might find luck in opencourseware type websites. I'm not too knowledgeable in these, and I think books, while expensive, are a great investment if you are planning to spend a long time in the field.

One note: teaching yourself is great, but a grad program will be concerned if it doesn't show up on a transcript. This being said, the big four in US institutions are Classical Mechanics, E&M, Thermodynamics/Stat Mech, and QM. You should have all four but you can sometimes get away with three. Expectations of other courses vary by school, which is why programs don't always expect things like GR, fluid mechanics, etc.

I hope that helps!

Since you asked for books, if you want a general introduction into scientific writing I really liked The Craft of Scientific Writing. It might be a bit much to read though, if you only want to write one paper for school. If you plan to write more papers especially at University, I definately recommend that book.

Another book which I liked even more was more generally on non-fiction writing. I wish I would have read that one years ago. It's called On Writing Well

Another great thing to do is to just read research papers. You could find real papers with Google Scholar though it might be hard in the beginning to get a grasp on it, since it might be pretty different from what you have read so far.

Lastly I found this blog really interested when I started out writing papers and theses.

I hope this helps

The ordering of questions and even the ordering of options to answer questions can have interesting effects on decision making. The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making by Scott Plous offers a nice introduction with some information that makes it really interesting to evaluate surveys once you know what to look for. Here's the Amazon link but hopefully you can find it in your library.

Surveys always require IRB, at least here in the United States, so taking the time to have someone look over your questions before you submit your proposal for human subject research will be well worth your time if you're new to this type of research design.

Freedman, Pisani, and Purves is the text I have used for teaching undergrads. Maybe start there for a refresher on probability theory, then move to Degroot and Schervish after if you have time/desire. FPP is very basic and mostly intuition, then DS gets more technical.

You should also brush up on calculus. At least be able to take (and understand) first and second partials. This will save you a lot of trouble later. Then work on linear algebra. Although you’re a psych person, a very good text that will give the basics of both calculus and linear algebra is Chiang and Wainwright, a math Econ book. Despite the difference in substance, it’s the most lucid as well as basic of texts I know of on the subject. So if you’ve never done calculus or linear algebra, this is a good place to start. Chapters 4-7 for basics, 8-10 for more fun.

https://www.amazon.com/Statistics-4th-David-Freedman/dp/0393929728

https://www.amazon.com/Probability-Statistics-4th-Morris-DeGroot/dp/0321500466

https://www.amazon.com/Fundamental-Mathematical-Economics-Wainwright-Professor/dp/0070109109

You can definitely find used, older editions, and international versions that are relatively cheap.

Have you seen their Highlights for High School feature?

Also, there are sites like Academic Earth that might be useful.

Here are a few blogs with potential. You'll have to decide for yourself if they have inappropriate content.

Here are a few book recommendations covering various fields, in no particular order (though they should all read #1):

1. A Short History of Nearly Everything
   
2. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
   
3. Einstein: His Life and Universe
   
4. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
   
5. The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
   
6. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
   
7. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
   
8. The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
   
9. This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession
   
10. Cosmos
    
11. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language
    
12. The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes' Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy
    
13. Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind
    
14. The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human
    
15. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
    
16. Thinking, Fast and Slow
    
17. Chaos: Making a New Science
    
18. Isaac Newton
    
19. Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
    
20. The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales
    
    And here's a video interview with Richard Feynman they might enjoy.

I would get something like this:
http://www.amazon.com/Schaums-Outline-College-Algebra-Edition/dp/0071635394

And work through it. You should be very comfortable with algebra and probably trig too. You should also just get used to working problems again. Good luck!

Ah, you say something like "Algebra" on /r/askacademia people are going to assume you mean like graduate level pure math.

I think the first step for someone with your background is to just get comfortable with basic arithmetic and numbers again. At least I've found when trying to teach people without a strong math background that before you can get to things like algebra you have to instill a sort of "trust" in calculation. I think the best way to do that is probably repetition, repetition, repetition. Perhaps something like this:

http://www.amazon.com/Schaums-Outline-Elementary-Mathematics-Outlines/dp/007176254X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1458739566&sr=8-1&keywords=schaum%27s+arithmetic

And do the shit out of the problems. That is absolutely crucial. Do them until they're second nature, move to the next section, then the next and then a couple weeks later COME BACK and always be mixing it up but pushing forward.

How comfortable are you with math and at which "level" do you want to understand the concepts of weather? I.e., do you want to learn the physics behind it, or just know what fronts, cyclones etc. that they talk about on TV are?

For the former the book Atmospheric Science: An Introductory Survey is a comprehensive introduction, but I wouldn't recommend it to laymen who are just interested in weather.

I happen to teach compensation at the grad level, so I wanted to suggest you get a copy of this textbook or find it at the library. Used, old edition, whatever. It has a lot of discussion on pay structure and some citations to important research articles. It might help you structure your ideas a little bit more, like what aspect of pay structures you want to look at and their effects on which outcomes.

For scientific writing, I like this online course: Writing in the Sciences. As someone from a science/maths background who didn't get to do a lot of writing during my degree, this was great.

For science writing, I've got very practical books that I like: A field guide for science writers, and Science blogging: the essential guide.

I have a friend who uses these. She loves them, but I know they're a little on the expensive side.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07F24KN8N/ref=twister_B07L8P6CXY?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1

Additionally, you could punch one hole in each corner and loop 50 on one binder ring then those on a larger binder ring.

I think you are thinking of a reader: like this or this?

https://www.amazon.com/Research-Write-Create-Connecting-Scholarship/dp/0195447417

and the making sense series from oxford will help

Yeah, people never let their personalities or biases affect chemistry in any way

https://www.amazon.com/Cathedrals-Science-Personalities-Rivalries-Chemistry/dp/0195321340

Try Meditation. There is a large body of evidence that it improves attention in addition to a number of other things. Here is an article about one such study http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/05/study-meditation-improves-memory-attention/275564/

It's also taught at Google for this reason. They wrote a book about it that I highly reccommend. It also mentions more studies if you still think meditation is just religious nonsense

August apparently, but he's been out and about doing talks.

Check this one out too.

The current understanding of the financial crisis is that a decline in housing prices caused disruptions in the financial system, which showed up in several related but distinct markets, such as derivatives transactions. Most economists would disagree that the recession was caused by derivatives sales. However the story of "what caused what" during the financial crisis is not at all fully settled, and the bigger question of why we have recessions in the first place is fraught with debate.

It's also not the case that the money has to "go somewhere." Suppose I own a house worth $500k, but then housing prices fall by 20%, and my house is only worth $400k. My net worth just decreased, but nobody profited from it.

The general understanding of money is that it can be created and destroyed by the financial system, through a similar mechanism. A very basic example is the
fractional reserve banking model. When things are running smoothly, the financial system is able to lend to businesses to make new investments and expand profitable operations. However when things don't go so well, like when a financial firm enters bankruptcy, they are unable to provide loans, and the real economy is impacted.

A more fruitful question is asking why we saw such a large multiplier effect, where a moderate dip in housing prices precipitated worldwide strain on the financial system. This has to do with the inner workings of financial markets and can get quite complex. For example, turmoil in the repo market is best understood as a classical bank run, and many of the hardest-hit markets, such as the ABCP market, were primarily transacted through the so-called "shadow banking system." I can recommend a good textbook on money and banking if you're interested in learning more.

http://www.amazon.com/Economics-Money-Banking-Financial-Markets/dp/0132770245

I'm generally against the practice of assigning moral blame to the financial system by default. Yes, it is morally reprehensible to sell uninformed individuals financial products they don't understand (subprime) or to sell financial products that you are fully aware are worthless (Abacus). On the other hand, we see bank runs as simply part of the nature of banking. If they occur it doesn't mean bankers were negligent. Instead, we solve the problem through deposit insurance, e.g. the FDIC. Although we don't fully understand the nature of the financial crisis, I expect the biggest problems worth correcting are of the latter type.