text:
What are some good practices for applying to the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program?

Is it possible if I could get 4 letters of recommendation?
How far in advance should I notify those who are writing my letters?
Does activity on sites like Quora, Stack Exchange, and Reddit's AskScience
(as well as a personal webpage/blog of one's research) count as
public outreach?

Short answers: (1) NO.  (2) As for any other recommendation letter, at least a month.  (3) Yes, definitely.

Oh crud, it hadn't even occurred to me to use SE sites as examples of public outreach when I applied. Good idea there!

I think it's helpful to understand how NSF graduate research fellowship applications are reviewed.  [Caveat lector: This answer was written in 2012; the application requirements and the evaluation procedure have both changed significantly since then.  I strongly recommending consulting someone who has been on the review panel more recently.]
Each application consists of the following components: a 2-page personal statement; a 2-page description of past research; a 2-page description of proposed future research, transcripts, and exactly three recommendation letters.  If you attempt to send four, NSF simply refuses the fourth letter; on the other hand, if only two letters arrive by the deadline, your application is rejected without review.
All 10000+ applications are reviewed in a single three-day physical meeting.  Applications are split into 30+ subject areas, each considered by a separate review panel.  Each panel has 20-30 members and reviews 300-400 proposals.  (All these figures are ballparky; panels vary in size depending on the number of applications.)
Before review, applications are divided into levels based on the applicants' time in graduate school: None (30%), less than a semester (30%), less than 12 months (30%), and more than 12 months (10%).  All level-1 applications are reviewed together, then all level-2 applications, and so on.  Expectations are significantly higher for more experienced applicants.  The precise expectations obviously vary by discipline, but in computer science, pre-students need a credible research plan, early students need publishable results, and older students usually need multiple publications.  The "more than 12 months" level is only for people with extenuating circumstances, like a significant change of field.
The 12-month limit counts time that applicants have actually been registered, not time since entering their first graduate program.  So a student who started a PhD program in August 2011 and does not register for classes this summer will still be eligible in September 2012.  If you want to apply in your second year, do not take classes your first summer.
Each review consists of a "letter grade" (excellent, very good, good, fair, or poor) and a narrative evaluation of "Intellectual Merit"; a letter grade and a narrative evaluation of "Broader Impact"; and an overall numerical score.  The panelists use the numerical scores to cluster the applications into four categories: Yes (10%), Maybe (25%), Honorable Mention (5%), and No (60%).  NSF uses the narrative evaluations to decide which Maybes get fellowships and which get honorable mentions.
Every proposal is reviewed twice, the proposals in the No pile are retired, and each of the remaining proposals is reviewed a third time.  Thus, each reviewer reviews roughly 35-40 proposals.  On average, each reviewer spends 20-30 minutes on each proposal.  That's just enough time to read each of the documents once, make a snap judgement, and then assemble a narrative review from a pile of boilerplate sentences.  It's brutal, especially because most applications are strong.
So anything you can do to make your reviewers' life easier will work to your advantage.  Every component of your application should directly address each of the two main review criteria.  In particular, all three statements and all three recommendation letters should include a paragraph describing intellectual merit, starting with the phrase Intellectual Merit in boldface type, and another paragraph describing broader impact, starting with the phrase Broader Impact in boldface type.  Both paragraphs should say something specific, substantial, and credible.
For security/privacy reasons, the review panel does not have internet access; reviewers are not even permitted to use their own laptops.  So if you use your StackExchange participation as an example of broader impact, be specific about how you participate; the panelists can't look up your answers or your reputation.
Another point to keep in mind is that reviewers are probably not experts in the applicant's chosen subdiscipline.  An application by an aspiring astrophysicist studying planetary climatology (to make up a random example) might be reviewed by a high-energy astrophysicist, an expert in planetary formation, and a string theorist.  Yes, your statements must include enough field-specific technical detail in your statements to be credible, but the overall goals and merits of your proposed research should be clear to a broader audience.
For fine details, it's always best to talk with faculty in your field who have experience with NSF fellowship winners, either as an advisor, a reference, or a panelist.  (The most useful letters read "I have written reference letters for x NSF fellowship applicants, of which y were successful; I would rank this student among the top z of those fellowship winners.")  It's also a good idea to talk with past fellowship winners in your (target) department; ask to read their applications and their reviews.
See also NSF's advice.

"For security/privacy reasons, the review panel does not have internet access"?  Is that a new thing, or specific to GRFP?  (The NSF panels I've been on have allowed internet access, but I've never been involved with the graduate fellowships.)  Do you know if there's a compelling argument for why internet access would be awkward or harmful, or if it's just administrative paranoia?

For the "applicants' time in graduate school" part, do they count a Master's degree completed at a different institution?

@ArtemKaznatcheev: Yes.  All post-graduate work counts.

@JeffE In that case does the change of institution count as a "significant change of field" even if you are continuing in the same research field? Or do people with Masters degree just stand no chance on NSF fellowships?

@AnonymousMathematician: I think it's specific to GRFP; it may also be new.  They're much more paranoid about anonymity than the rest of NSF, perhaps because of the perception that an NSF fellowship can make a student's future academic career.

@ArtemKaznatcheev: A significant change of field might include someone with an MS degree in math switching to a PhD in computer science, but switching from one CS department to another, or even one field of CS to another (say, networking to theory), does not.  So, yeah, basically if you have an MS degree, it's too late.  (But don't trust my opinion; double-check with your local grant expert!)

My experience does not match a part of this answer, though perhaps I was an outlier.  When I applied in my second year of grad school, I had not switched fields (not even subfields) and had written only 1 paper, but I got the fellowship.  My advice would be to put together the best application you can, and let the reviewers figure out if you'll get it.

@LevReyzin: You're absolutely right; you lose nothing by applying!  But if you applied in your second year, you might still have fallen into the "less than 12 months" category — one fall semester plus one spring semester is less than 12 months!  Moral: Don't register your first summer!  Or maybe the panelists recognized that your paper was really good!

@JeffE What if it is a requirement of the graduate program that one remains continuously enrolled, even if the summer "courses" are just filler to remain a GRA/GTA?

@Tyberius That graduate prgram will have fewer NSF fellowship winners.

@JeffE from the this years NSF GRF solicitation: "As a general rule, applicants must not have completed more than 12 months of full-time graduate study or its equivalent as defined by the universities attended as of August 1 of the year the GRFP application is submitted." So it seems like any second year student would be able to qualify, even if they were registered over the summer, since by August most students would have completed at most 12 months.

@JeffE also relevant: "The one exception is for graduate coursework required to establish or maintain credentials in a profession such as teaching; such coursework is not included in the 12-month limit."

Ugh, I just finished my first year of a master's program and do not have publishable results. Should I not even bother applying? Some people have said "just give it a shot," but the application takes a lot of time to complete!

By the way, a lot of this has changed since 2012.

Meetings are no longer physical.

I saw you edited, not even just the review process has changed, the requirements you detail in the first paragraph have too

@AzorAhai Better now?

To riff of off JeffE's comment:

Although only three letters of recommendation are allowed to be considered, you should always have an "emergency" writer on backup just in case one of the other writers can't submit the letter on time for whatever reason (sudden illness, job change, etc.). You don't want to miss out on the opportunity because somebody else dropped the ball.
You should notify them as far in advance as is logistically possible. You should already know who your letter-writers will be; you should find out how much advance time they need now, so that you can plan accordingly in the fall.
While most of those sites would count as public reach, I don't think Academia.SE would fall under that rubric. Something discipline-specific, on the other hand, would.


text:
Who determines whether or not a professor receives tenure?
Does the department determine it, or does the president determine tenure after the department recommends it? Or does the process go through both ways?
And how does this vary from institution to institution?

This question can be answered by a quick google search, which returns a few very useful results.

Here's how it works at my university.  There are several layers of votes; I've seen faculty turned down at almost every level.  Once a negative vote is taken at any level, it is essentially impossible for the candidate to recover without an official appeal.  (The appeals process is complicated.)  On the other hand, I know of negative decisions that were successfully appealed at almost every level.

April: the candidate submits their CV and other supporting materials.
May: The department's promotion committee makes a go/no-go decision about whether to pursue the tenure case.  A very small number of negative decisions are made here, but only in truly egregious cases.
May: The department head chooses a subcommittee of three or four faculty from the promotions and tenure committee to shepherd the case through the department.
June: The department solicits recommendation letters, some from people proposed by the candidate, but a majority from people chosen independently by the subcommittee.
August: The subcommittee writes an internal evaluation of the candidate's research/teaching/service accomplishments/potential.
September: The subcommittee presents the complete case (candidate's CV and statements, internal evaluations, and recommendation letters) to the complete departmental committee.  The committee votes whether to recommend tenure.  Most negative decisions are made here.  Having a positive recommendation turned down at a higher level is fairly embarrassing for the department; it indicates that either the department did not do a thorough evaluation or (worse) tried to hide or excuse an obvious gap in the candidate's record.  So this level tends to be the most stringent.
October: The department head writes a one-page letter summarizing the case and the department's vote, and forwards the complete package to the dean.
November-December: The college promotions committee does its own evaluation of the candidate and votes whether to recommend tenure.  Evaluations are more likely to be based on measures of reputation and impact (reflected in publication record, citation patterns, funding history, and recommendation letters) than on actual quality of research.  Faculty in the candidate's department are recused from any discussion.  Some negative decisions are made here.
January: The dean writes a one-page letter summarizing the case and the committee's vote, and forwards the complete package to the provost.
February-April: The campus promotions committee does its own evaluation of the candidate (mostly, but not entirely, focusing on whether proper procedures have been followed) and votes whether to recommend tenure.  Faculty in the candidate's college are recused from any discussion.    A very small number of negative decisions are made here.  Negative decisions at this level are more likely to involve problems with teaching (or raw politics) than with research, since measures of research quality and impact vary so wildly across campus.
May: The provost writes a one-page letter summarizing the case and the committee's recommendation and forwards the complete package to the chancellor and university president.  The provost also informs the candidate of the committee's recommendation.  Officially, this is the first news that the candidate receives about their case.
July: The chancellor and the president rubber-stamp the provost's recommendations, and then pass them up to the board of trustees, who rubber-stamp them again.  (Officially, I think any of these three can overrule any recommendation for promotion, but I've never seen it happen, and it would probably cause a faculty revolt.)

Yes, the whole process really takes 15 months.

That's almost exactly the timeline for our university.

I have a  question: when a faculty is promoted from asst. to associate or the latter to prof., is the procedure the same? Should the faculty submit an application to consider his promotion?

Wow - very interesting - thanks very much for the excellent analysis! As a side note, couldn't the university president also deny tenure? Or maybe not in your university? I read that Larry Summers had actually specifically denied tenure to a few professors at Harvard.

@Bravo: The promotion timelines are nearly identical, except the start date (#years since last promotion) is more flexible.  The department P&T committee meets in the spring to review all the associate professors and decide who to put forward.  Ignoring lower-order terms, as soon as the committee thinks someone's full-prof case will be successful, they're put up.

@InquilineKea: I think you're right; in principle, the chancellor and the president can also deny tenure.  But I've never seen it happen, and the faculty response would likely involve pitchforks and torches. I edited the last bullet in my answer.

Can a faculty who got turned down re-apply later on (after a year or more), or would that require passing the appeal process?

@Pandora Typically the tenure decision is "up or out" -- Either the decision (or appeal) is positive, and you have tenure, or the decision (and appeal, if any) is negative, and you have one year to find another position elsewhere. But a tenured prof turned down for promotion still has thenure, so they can reapply later (typically after at leat two years).

How large is the department in this model?

Anywhere from 15 to 100 faculty.

The process varies from place to place but in most places the technical determination is made by the department and to some extent the college. Higher levels of approval focus mostly on whether proper procedures have been followed.
Having said that, when things go wrong they could go wrong at any level. Usually it's politics that derails cases at the higher levels rather than straight technical merits.

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text:
How can I change the assignments in the syllabus in a way that is fair to the students?
In my syllabus there is series of writing assignments that are worth 10% of the final grade.  Over the course of the semester there were supposed to be 4 assignments, however as a result of snow days and other extrinsic issues, the students have only turned in one of these assignments and I am not likely to be able to get any more in by the end of the semester.
Additionally, when I designed the assignment, I did not fully appreciate how difficult it would be for the students and how difficult it was going to be to grade.  At this point it is only going to be reasonable for me to assign grades based on whether the student put some effort into the assignment (i.e., check+, check, check-, 0).
So I am left with the situation where 10% of a student's final grade could be the result of one assignment that was graded only on completion.
As I see it, this poses 2 problems:

The final grade of the students that did the assignment will be artificially inflated, and
the final grade of a student that missed the assignment for whatever reason will be reduced to a degree disproportional to the offence.

Is there a way to deal with this situation fairly?
(I have considered moving the assignment to another assignment group (e.g., counting it as a classwork assignment) but then I am not sure how to redistribute the orphaned points in a fair way.)

We could propose a dozen different ways to redistribute the points, but the only way to find out what your students consider fair is to have a conversation with your students.

@ff524 I agree with you but I didn't ask how to come up with a way to assess whether my students think it is fair, I asked for advice on how to make an adjustment to the syllabus that would be fair by an externally defensible argument.  You could argue that the only truly fair approach is to do what the students think is fair but I certainly don't think this is the only answer.

You asked Is there a way to deal with this situation fairly?  As a student, I would think any syllabus change (even one that is unavoidable and "externally defensible") is unfair if made unilaterally. (Still perfectly valid to collect suggestions here; I just wouldn't say that any of them is "fair" unless your students agree)

@ff524 it is inappropriate to get into a in-depth discussion of this in these comments but that seems like an impractical standard to apply and raises the additional question of how to fairly assess student agreement with a change in a class of 100+ students.

OK, I wrote an answer describing my position further.

VERY hard to believe the institution's assessment policy lacks some guidance on remedies. Also, would not expect an instructor to take such a decision without reference to an Academic Policy post holder (Exams Office; Academic Dean, etc.).

Since the assignments did not go as intended, and it is obviously not the students' fault. I would just turn this part of the grade into extra credit. For example, students who did the assignment get +2.5 points added to their final grade, and those who didn't, don't get anything.

Is there a way to deal with this situation fairly?

There have been several proposed solutions for redistributing points: use the single assignment as extra credit, offer an alternative assignment that is feasible, just redistribute orphaned points equally, etc. Any combination of these could be "fair."
But I think it is unfair to unilaterally change the syllabus (even if change is unavoidable) once students can no longer drop the class without penalty.
For example, some students may be thrilled at the option to equally redistribute the orphaned points and use the written assignment as extra credit. But  a student who is great at written assignments, and was really counting on the ten points of assignment credit described in the syllabus to boost his/her grade, may think the only fair solution is to offer an optional alternative written assignment (one that is feasible to do and grade).
This doesn't mean that you have to poll every student individually, just include them in the conversation.
Even with a large class, you can present your preferred solution (or two proposed solutions) in class and solicit feedback. If there is no public disagreement, say "Anyone who has a real problem with this change should send me the details of their objection and proposed alternative by email, and I will seriously consider the objections."
(If the students are split between two proposed solutions, you can offer something like, "Your grade will be the higher of Option A and Option B.")

Same thing happened to my prof last year. Many assignments were planned, however due to things out of our control we were not going to be able to do every assignment. The prof held an open forum during class to collect ideas from us (only about 20 in the class, so it was easily manageable). The final concencus was to have smaller assignments replace the larger ones and any spare % went to the exam. Students who had already started the assignment (started early) had the opportunity to present it to the prof and it was up to the prof to reward extra credit . All the students found this fair and so myself and one other student got extra credit because we started an assignment that was replaced/cancelled.
TLDR: Have an open forum with the students, present a few options and let them decide what is fair. Let them "argue" between each other in a mediated way to present the pros/cons of every option. Just remember it's not their fault, so every student needs to come out satisfied with the outcome.
In my school (University in Canada) you are not permitted to deviate from the syllabus unless every single student agrees. If even one student says no, you are not permitted to deviate. Often times profs will talk to these individuals and give them "incentive" to agree.
--EDIT--
Another thing you should do is talk to professors in your department to see what they do in situations like yours. By no means is your situation unique, and seeing what your fellow professors do and maybe even the school policy may be a good idea.

You could just distribute the orphaned points equally among all other components of the course grade.  Just take whatever percentage they would have gotten over all the other components of the grade, and divide it by 90 (which will be the maximum without this assignment included).  Then their final grade will still be the percentage of the points they earned out of the total available.

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text:
How can I cite interviews for radio and TV on CV?
I have many contributions related to interviews in radio, TV, web magazines and print magazines, and would like to know the different ways it might be "cited" in a scientific CV. I was thinking about adding them at the end of my CV is some section called "dissemination of research results" or something like that.

Interview section in your CV
If you have significant amount of interviews or you want to bring them in your CV, I did not find any special tip to bring interviews in a separate section; but you can open a section like media appearance/interviews and list your interviews in this section.
Citation style
By googling your question, I found many related links in which the citation of the interviews are clearly presented. I bring some of them here for you. One may find a good resource for citation of interviews in bibme website. In this website, you will find the format, examples and notes on correct citation.
MLA

PUBLISHED/BROADCAST INTERVIEW:
  Last Name, First Name. Interview by First Name Last Name. Publication Information. Medium.
PERSONALLY CONDUCTED INTERVIEW:
  Last Name, First Name. Interview Type interview. Date Interviewed.

Chicago

PUBLISHED INTERVIEW FROM PUBLICATION:
  Last Name, First Name. Interview with First Name Last Name. Publication Title. Publication Information.
PUBLISHED INTERVIEW FROM RADIO/TV PROGRAM:
  Last Name, First Name. Interview with First Name  Last Name. Program Title. Network, Call letters, Date Interviewed.
UNPUBLISHED INTERVIEW:
  Last Name, First Name. Interview by First Name Last Name. Interview Type. Location, Date Interviewed.

Turabian

UNPUBLISHED INTERVIEW:   Last Name, First Name. Interview by First Name Last Name. Interview Type. Location, Date Interviewed.

APA
Although, in the above link, there is no guide for citing in APA format, as indicated Interviews are not supported in bibliographies by APA. Please cite it as an in-text citation., but I have found the following guide in the apastyle website for citation of interviews.

An interview is not considered recoverable data, so no reference to
  this is provided in the reference list. You may, however, cite the
  interview within the text as a personal communication.

How to easily cite your documents?
By the way, I encourage you to use the softwares like JabRef, Zotero and Endnote to prepare your citations and resources. Also you may use some online websites like easybib and citethisforme for easier preparation of your citations.

I advice you use this citing tool at http://www.calvin.edu/library/knightcite/
If it shows an error search for knightcite in their search bar...the tool helps you cite your work properly

There seems to be some problem with the link you provided - "Document Not Found (404)".

In general link only answers are discouraged since when the link dies, as it has here, the answer is useless. Can you tell us why the software you are suggesting is a good answer to the question.

Read my post again...if there is an error search for it in their search bar


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Are master's degrees in the US mostly meant to prepare you for a Ph.D?
I am a Canadian undergraduate student intending to get a master's degree, but not intending to get a Ph.D.
A Canadian graduate student told me that master's degree in the US are really only designed for people desiring to get a Ph.D.
Is there any truth to this statement? Do masters degrees in the US put significantly more emphasis on preparation for a Ph.D than in other countries?

This is a partial representation of the truth. On the one hand, departments are always looking to retain masters students as PhD students; it's better for the department (better numbers), it's better for the professors (more research from PhD relative to masters), and it's better for the university. On the other hand, simply looking at the numbers you'll see that most masters students do not go on to become a PhD student [1]. I think it's safe to say that most students who go through masters programs enter with a goal in mind (academia or industry) and finish with that same goal in mind.
I don't know how it works in other countries, so I can't compare that. Also, regarding whether they put more emphasis on PhD preparation than in other countries, I don't know how to quantify that.

"Departments are always looking to retain masters students as PhD students"? There are lots of institutions that offer masters degrees but have no PhD program at all.

In some fields and universities, masters students provide a pool of talent to do the day-to-day work on long-term department projects, and they know from the start they are probably only going to stick with the masters programs.  For instance, in CS, there are research groups that have developed simulators over the course of a decade, and many times it is the masters students who find a niche to improve the simulator that is more project than research, and they don't have to worry about getting side-tracked away from long-term research.

There are two very different kinds of computer science master's degrees:

Professional master programs involve taking lots of classes, but have no research requirement.  These are almost universally considered (academically) terminal degrees.  The actual degree is usually not "M.S.", but something similar like "M.Eng." (Cornell) or "M.C.S." (UIUC).
Research masters programs require at least a modicum of original research, usually leading to a thesis.  These are generally (but not universally) considered preparation for a PhD program, because of the research component.  The actual degree is usually "M.S."  In some departments, the MS program is equivalent to MCS + thesis; in other programs, the MS program has different (usually smaller but more advanced) course requirements.

It is very important to know which type of master's program you are applying to.

I just want to emphasize that the magic term here is terminal masters, and it's perfectly viable to simple google around or directly ask schools if they have a terminal masters program.

@JeffE I don't think the original question is specific to computer science.

Also keep in mind that this is very field-dependent as well as program dependent. There are no hard-and-fast rules.
In a lot of fields in the natural sciences, an M.S. is the standard working degree, and so in many fields people traditionally do a stand-alone M.S. regardless of whether they plan on going on to a PhD.
As an example, in geoscience, M.S. degrees are one of two types:

Those handed out automatically en route to a PhD (usually after passing quals/prelims).
Those that consist of a stand-alone project/degree.

The big difference with other fields is that the stand-alone, industry-oriented M.S. is the one that requires a thesis.  The other is rather meaningless unless you get a PhD from the same program as well.
Both are common precursors to a PhD (it's very common in geoscience to do an M.S. on a fairly different project than your PhD).  However, the first type isn't seen as its own degree, and is often looked down upon (e.g. "he/she dropped out with an M.S." vs. "he/she got their M.S. at XYZ").

Its extremely field and program dependent. For example, in my field, Epidemiology, there are (I'd argue) actually three types of Masters degrees. Annoyingly, they're not named consistently, so you have to read a program's description to figure out which is which:

Preparation for PhD degrees (MSPH, MPH): These degrees are intended to be stepping stones towards a PhD in the field. Emphasis is on advanced classwork and research, they may actually be joint admissions (get your MSPH and then your PhD), etc.
Post-doctoral terminal degrees (usually MPH): So you already have a doctorate degree of some sort. PhD, MD, JD...and find yourself doing public health work, and in need of a somewhat more formalized treatment of the subject. These are very classwork heavy, often with classes that don't entirely overlap with the PhD-type classes, depending on the audience. They often don't have as heavy a research component to them.
Masters-as-Final-Degree (MSPH, MPH): Tons of public health work doesn't need a doctorate, and everyone knows it. Data manager or statistical analyst for the government, industry or academia? That's a Master's level position. Most local/state public health work can and is done by people with Master's degrees as well. These often emphasize more practical experiences - internships, practicums, etc.

So many master's degree programs are oriented toward the PhD track, but there's a considerable number in some fields that are designed for people who don't want to head into academia, but need an advanced degree for one reason or another - going into industry, government service, etc.

If you look at the description for Cornell M.Eng program in computer science, you'd find it describes itself as:

The M.Eng. program in Computer Science is a one-year (two semester) professional development program designed to enhance professional skills in practical computer science. The program is particularly suited to students seeking advanced credentials for employment in industry

So, I would have said it depends from program to program, but I won't - most MS programs in computer science in US have the same (unstated) goals, and while candidates entering the PhD program find it convenient to have already had a MS degree (reduces course credit requirements), the majority of the graduates take up jobs in the industry. Some MS programs have a thesis option, wherein it takes an extra semester to graduate but provides a platform for tasting research - if you opt for that, then you may consider this as a preparatory semester for a doctoral program.

There are many kinds of masters programs.

Often students intending on going into industry in a technical field will get a masters degree.  Many schools have masters programs specifically designed for such a student; they are usually focused on coursework rather than research.
There are degrees like the MBA (Master of Business Administration) that are designed for business people who have no interest in academic careers, and do not lead to a doctorate.
In some fields the masters degree is terminal, and doctoral degrees are rare or nonexistent.  For instance, in the fine and performing arts, the masters (MFA) is the highest degree offered by most institutions.
A masters degree is typically the minimum requirement for faculty at two-year community colleges; some students in masters programs are headed for such a career.
In many states, high school teachers are encouraged to have a masters degree in their subject.  Some universities have masters programs in fields such as mathematics, history, or English, that are specifically designed for prospective or working teachers in these areas, and are not preparation for a Ph.D.

It's the other way around. That's because America is a nation of "doers" at least compared to Europeans.
MANY U.S. Master's degrees are terminal degrees. Think of a Master's as a "two year graduate" degree, just like an associates degree is a "two year college" degree.
Americans don't like to spend more time on education than necessary. There are Master's programs that lead to PhDs. But something like 40 percent of students in "non-terminal" degrees are foreign, not American, born.
You seem to fit the "American" mold.

I don't think throwing out a bunch of stereotypes without support helps the OP. And what is that last sentence supposed to mean? Sounds like an underhanded insult to me.

@xLeitix: My remarks come from someone who has finished a Masters degree and dropped out of a PhD program. The last sentence means, "You are one of us." Coming from me, it's a compliment, not an insult. The fact of the matter is that America issues a larger percentage two-year associates degrees, and more "terminal" (two year) Master's degrees than most developed countries. You may interpret this phenomenon differently from me.

#notallamericans


text:
Should the slides in a presentation be self-explanatory or be as minimal as possible?
When you do a research presentation, what is usually the focus that you take.
Some professors tell me to make the slides as self explanatory as possible, and I quote:

Someone should be able to understand your slides without you being there

To me, this approach seems counter intuitive to the principle of a "talk". After all, you already wrote a paper that meets that objective.
Other people, for example in things like TED talks or (please bear with me) presentations by Apple, have very bare bones slides, where they only focus on transmitting the main message of the talk.
What is your take, should the presentation be made as didactic as possible or just a cold transference of information?

Personally, I try to keep the slides minimalistic (not too many distracting items at once) and explain the details in my talk. If the slides are to be published, I'll basically write down what I tell about them in the comments. As an additional benefit, that's both practicing and rubber-ducking your talk.

Someone once told me, "if you and your slides say the same thing, one of you two is obsolete." Up to now, I went very well with this advice.

I found this summary of research into how to give good presentations, with links to its references. It may be of interest.

@zenbomb And from the other side of the desk, I took catnaps whenever I realized the teacher was still reading from the beginning of the slide I'd just finished reading...

"Someone should be able to understand your slides without you being there" is a good advice if you are making slides for lectures, student who miss the class or doesn't take detailed notes could then refer to them. For real presentations/talks, go with the minimal slide to better engage the audience and let your own voice shine.

I've always gone by the old adage: The slides are there to support your presentation, not to give it for you.

It depends what you're going to do with your minimal presentation. If you're just going to give a talk, why use slides at all? I typically don't find slides very engaging when there's a presenter. People find themselves creating slides because they think they need to. Even worse, they stick them on SlideShare.net later 'just-in-case', forget that, minimal presentations have no place there. I often encounter a blog post in my feed like "I just spoke at X conference, slides available at Y", I usually flip through the slides with increasing speed thinking "I have no idea what this is even about".

Related: Why do most people think it's a bad idea to read from slides?

Keep in mind the slides are to make audiences interested to read you paper, not a substitute of it. If he number or content of the slides are enough to convey what you say, that will be optimal.

Matt Might, a rather young professor, has an interesting style, encompassing the minimalistic approach. Have a peek at this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaPsYmOmgcI
He also provides some useful guidelines for preparing a presentation: one of the most important is considering your audience: http://matt.might.net/articles/academic-presentation-tips/.
It is important to engage your audience, not necessarily to tell them every piece of information, and, in a way, advertise your work so that they will read your paper.
If you are aiming to get feedback, then you need to focus your story on what you want to get feedback on.
If you are teaching, you will need either more details in your slides or accompanying notes. Perhaps in this case, you might want people to be able to understand your slides without being present. But for regular scientific presentations, I would not aim to make the slides all encompassing. That's what the paper is for.

heh: matt's my colleague at Utah. and this is the first time I've seen a talk of his.

I have a paper with him, but I've never met him.

Funny how that happens a lot nowadays :)

That's a fascinating presentation style.  I wonder what technology Matt Might uses to prepare his slides?  Can that be done in Keynote/Powerpoint?  Do you have to use fancy animation software?

@D.W.: It looks like Keynote to me. You can animate within Keynote. It's time consuming, but possible.

A slide being self-explanatory? Why would you be presenting then? What's the purpose of YOU being there?
IMHO the slides should enhance your presentation not be the presentation. YOU are the presenter and the slides should help you convey your message better. Having self explanatory slides takes away the attention from you which is a nonstarter for a good presentation. At any given time during your presentation you should aim for having sufficient material on the slide (sometimes just a picture or a formula or at times a couple of bullet points, etc.) to help you convey your message.

When you do a research presentation, what is usually the focus that you take.

Talks are advertisements for papers and (more generally) for research agendas.  They are not substitutes for papers.  The primary aim of a research talk is to provide the audience with the intuition and motivation to get involved in the described research, at a minimum by reading the paper.  Technical detail should be kept to the minimum necessary to provide that intuition and motivation.  (How much detail is actually necessary depends on your audience.  If you give too few details and focus entirely on intuition, your technical audience won't be motivated; on the other hand, if you give too many details, you'll obscure the intuition.  But since almost everyone errs on the side of giving way too many details, it's better to aim for too few.)
Talks are not papers; they're performances.

Someone should be able to understand your slides without you being there

I strongly disagree.  Slides are an augment to the talk, not a substitute for it.  Again, the point of the slides is to help provide motivation and intuition.  Text should be kept to a minimum.  Technical details should be kept to a minimum.  There should be lots of pretty pictures that provide intuition.  It's perfectly fine to include complex formulas or charts or graphs as pretty pictures, but don't expect the audience to absorb the fine details.  It's also fine to have complex pretty pictures that you can (literally!) point to during the talk, to keep the audience engaged in your story.  But the slides shouldn't distract from your presentation, by (for example) giving the audience something to read instead of listening.
Slides are not talks or papers; they're props.

I used to take the point of view you refer to, but I don't believe in it any more. In my current way of thinking, slides for a talk are a dynamic accompaniment to the story that you're telling - they're visual aids for what you're saying.
Unlike TED talks or the Apple talks, a technical presentation necessarily has more content on slides, because even a visual aid needs to lay out notation, formal statements, diagrams and so on. But I don't think it's necessary to make the slides completely stand alone. Make the slides relatively clear and uncluttered, and make sure they flow along with your story, and you should be fine.

I’d question that: does your talk really need all those formal statements and so on? In most cases (unless you work in mathematics / theoretical physics) I’d argue that this is unnecessary and distracting: a talk is usually advertisement, and sometimes a discussion starter. It never replaces a paper. I agree that it’s very hard to strip all this complicated stuff away and still have something worth saying but I advocate trying exactly that.

I like to play devil's advocate… while I agree in general with the other answers that it's not a good idea to put too much information on slides, I will list a few of the reasons why sometimes, you might want to have self-explanatory (or at least, rather dense) slides:

Meeting of a technical nature, with some participants absent but who will be able to read the slides afterward. In such meetings, the slides serve not only as a support for your oral presentation, but also as a written reference for what was said in the meeting. As such, they will be consulted later, both by persons who missed the meeting and some who were there.
In such a case, ideally you would make two different contributions (two versions of your presentation, or a presentation and a “technical note”). However, that's more work, and a good compromise can be to simply have self-explanatory slides.

Language issues: if you fear not being understood by everyone, either because their language may not be strong enough, or yours may not. I advise this sometimes for students who do not feel sure enough.

Language issues, take two: having self-explanatory slides allows you to make a dual-language presentation, with oral in language A and slides in language B. I often do that myself, working in a French-speaking country where there are a number of students and post-docs who don't master French. For national seminars/conferences, it is sometimes considered more polite (especially by senior professors) to present in French, yet having slides content in English helps those who do not speak French follow your presentation.

If you feel you may get lost, and want to be sure to have a backup under your eyes. I see it as a last resort, and prefer in that case to have a few keywords per slide displayed on the presenter screen (maybe your laptop).

For meetings to be followed by non-participants, the best way IMO is to have meeting notes.

In a similar vein to gerrit's comment Ed Tufte suggests for such things to have an accompanying technical report, because the self-limiting format of slide shows prevents really divulging information in such detail. A slide is only so big and legible with very large font, and points can't always be condensed into bullets (or are at least better disseminated in natural prose).

@AndyW yeah, I understand that an attached technical report is the best choice… but it takes more time. Self-explanatory slides are a good (in my opinion) cost/benefit tradeoff.

This. It is about the purpose of the talk. In particle physics many more talk are given inside collaborations than to the wider world, and your slides will subsequently serve as references for your colleagues. Those slides need more detailed than than the "talk" demands. Or at least feature some URLs pointing at the "real" documentation.

@dmckee: if your purpose is to give detail to your colleagues, who need to know in detail what you have done, isn't it easier to present your paper in the screen?

@Ooker What paper? These inside-the-collaboration talks are given a regularly scheduled meetings (weekly or monthly), and only occasionally do they represent enough progress to be connected with another document (technical report, say posted to the document server). Particle physics is Big Science and it requires continuous  interchange to keep everyone in synch. There will be a document, eventually, but people need to know what is happening in the mean time.

@dmckee: in the meantime waiting for your reply, I have made my idea to an answer. You can read this in http://academia.stackexchange.com/a/28751/14341

Good question, and actually the source of much debate when preparing or discussing a presentation...
As Charles mentioned, you should feel comfortable with your own slides. Different people have different presenting styles, and will rely on different types of slides. It also depends, to a certain extent, on what you are presenting, i.e. if it actually makes sense or not to use pictures instead of text.
I usually make more-or-less self-supporting slides. I put statements in full sentences, equations, and the odd figure. I even have statements in there that I will repeat almost verbatim to the audience. This is a huge no-no for many people, but it all depends on the delivery: If you repeat the statement without reading it, if it just flows with the rest of what you're saying, then there is, in my opinion, no shame in that.
I have two personal reasons for making my slides self-contained. The first is that the slides contain the points/statements that I absolutely need to make, i.e. the stuff that I don't want to forget because I got distracted by a question or some detail.
The second reason is that usually the slides are all that's left after you've given the talk. Unlike TED talks, which are available as videos, most conferences will only put your slides online. If your slides are just a collection of images and keywords, they will be of very little use to anybody who goes over them without you in the foreground.

+1 for the publishing of slides only (also it is easier to dig the information inside presentation as video is non-searchable and watching takes a lot more time then reading).

Why not make two sets of slides: one for supporting the talk, and one for going online?

@TRiG isn't the second set called a publication?

I'm with @TRiG here.  It's trivial in almost every slide-making software (from Powerpoint to LaTeX/beamer) to have notes pages.  Just put the notes pages online, and leave your poor slides un-tortured.

@AriB.Friedman: so basically you suggest that we should have three kinds of publication: the paper, the note slides and the visual slides?

@Ooker Yes. The latter two being really one in terms of effort (typing notes in PPT or Beamer is just as easy as typing the same information into a bullet point on the slide itself).

I heartily vote for (mostly) self-explanatory slides.
One conference I attend usually has eight parallel tracks. I frequently am interested in different talks held at the same time, attend one of them and afterwards read through the slides of the others. And it is extremely frustrating to then get slides that are unintelligible on their own.
Yes, I understand that I am supposed to just read the paper in this case. To which I reply:

Often the paper is not yet available (or even written) when the authors present work in progess. After all, that is what a conference is there for.
Reading a few slides is a lot faster than even skimming a full paper. I will usually decide based on the slides and the abstract whether investing the time to read the full paper is worthwhile.

In addition, suppose that three months after the presentation, you get into a conversation about the topic you presented on. With (mostly) self-explanatory slides, you can just send the other guy the presentation for a first idea and then follow up if he is interested (related to the second bullet point above). With a minimal presentation, the best you can do is to recreate the entire verbal talk... if you still remember what exactly you said back then, since a self-explanatory presentation also serves as a reminder for the author himself.
Finally, preparing a (mostly) self-explanatory presentation also forces me to think beforehand about what I am going to say, how I am going to structure my talk and allocate my time, and it helps me not to forget about important details.
And yes, I do understand that slides will never be completely self-explanatory, which is why I called them "(mostly)" self-explanatory. On the other hand, neither will the published article be - a lot of stuff is not documented even in the best published articles. I believe that (mostly) self-explanatory presentations yield a good balance between communicating a rough outline and not going to the whole trouble of writing resp. reading a full article.

I understand why people would prefer minimalist slides. However, I do not believe that a difference in opinion merits downvoting my post. Therefore, I assume that whoever downvoted it finds something objectionable in my logic or the presentation of my argument. I would very much appreciate a short comment about how exactly I went wrong. Please point out my mistakes so I can learn from them. Thank you!

I would say the slides should be as concise as possible. Absolutely no formulas or sentences that go more than 2/3 of the line width. If you can put one picture and spend one minute talking about it, it makes a much better slide than one with the points of what you are saying written there.
I have reasons against texts in slide. The obvious exception being presentations on things that are text in nature, for example programming languages.

People read the text while you are speaking. If you are going to say that, why make them read it too?
Text is distracting. Text and speech are of the same form in our minds. You may listen to music and read a book, you may see a picture and listen to a talk, but you can't read and listen to a speech at the same time. You may have had noticed this, if you often found yourself forgetting what the speaker was saying while you were reading his slides.
Text usually gets long. That means, unless you have a bullet point like "- Scalability", anything else you write there becomes a whole at least 10 word sentence or phrase. This makes the effect of the previous points stronger.
Slides do not replace notes/books. Many teachers do this! They make the slide as if it's a summary of the book they are teaching and students study the slides and pass the exam. That's horrible. There are far better formats for summarizing a book than using slides. That's worse than watching a 100 hour documentary over 10-minute youtube pieces.
Regarding formulas, they are boring and no one is going to pay attention to them anyway. It may be the most important thing in your work, but again, no one cares. The only exception is during a university course, where the professor may want to explain in details how the formula is derived. If not, again simply presenting it is quite useless.

It's not just that full slides are terrible, but also that slides are not created for it either. If you have ever tried to talk without slides, you would understand me better. Traditionally, we would use blackboards (or whiteboards!). If during your talk you felt like something would be better drawn, you would use the blackboard. Slides were created so you wouldn't have to waste time during the talk to draw a possibly elaborate image. Or, like I said before, in case of presentations on all things text, you wouldn't want to write by hand a 4~5 line piece of code if you could just type and format it with a computer.
In summary, I would like to emphasize again that slides assist the speech, not carry them out. They are there to help you (as the speaker) demonstrate what you are trying to say, rather than replace you by being completely self-sufficient.
Final note is that, some amount of text is usually inevitable. My point is to try to get them to the minimum possible.

From my point of view, a wall of text in a slide that you're just going to read is boring.

There is no added value in reading it unless your audience is under 6.
Most people read faster than you can speak which means they are ahead of you and don't care about what you're saying.
It gives an impression that you don't know about your subject because it doesn't give you opportunities to elaborate.
It keeps your eyes attached to the wall where you should be facing your audience and looking for eye contact.
It also removes everything that is enjoyable in a natural speech like rhetoric questions, pauses, small jokes, suspens, etc.

The best (in fact only but there may be others) resource I know of for making presentations that avoids this concern is the book from Garr Reynolds : Presentation Zen.

Welcome to AC.sx While providing links in your answers is fine, the general policy (http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/how-to-answer) is to provide some context. I have downvoted your answer, but would be happy to change my vote if you a little more information about the link and why you think it is a good answer.

@DanielE.Shub I tried to improve it. Hopes this help.

And thus you learned that a difference between a good and bad answer is about 3-5 minutes of your time :D

The answer depends strongly on your audience. I agree that keeping the slides simple is nicer, and more engaging. Your not tempted to just read your slides, but they serve as a visual anchor for your audience and help them follow the talk. If your doing a sales presentation or similar, a Steve Jobs-style presentation can help you "wow" the audience. Also, you can use slides mostly to convey information that you can't with speech, e.g. graphs, screenshots, etc..
However, as I said, you have to consider your audience. In my field (particle physics), typically half of the audience is staring at their laptops during a talk. Some of them are following your slides there, some are doing something completely different. There are dozens of plots and numbers and technical details that you have to show, so the slides are typically pretty dense. In fact, the whole purpose of many talks is to "present plots", so your talking is auxilliary to the slides, not the other way around. You explain certain features of the images, guesticulating, and answering questions. The other thing is that our slides serve as documentation for the talks, so people expect to understand the gist of the talk by looking at the slides afterwards. As an (advanced) student, people would even give me their research talk slides instead of papers or books to learn from.
So, giving a "nice", "best-practice" talk in a work meeting of physiscists, you'd probably confuse and disappoint them, if they are listening at all. If you are in the humanities, you'd probably not use powerpoint at all, or just one or two slides with important quotes.
My tip is to look at what your colleagues are doing, and to start from there. It can never hurt to clean it up a bit, make it concise and legible, but at the same time try not to alienate your audience.

I'm a theoretically physics student and having this idea when presenting my work to my teacher. I don't use slides. Instead, I just present my work as a paper and show it up. I think when we need to ask and answer in middle of the talk, using this method is better cause you can scroll back easily. What do you think?

Slides should be

minimal
goal oriented
not full of text
Graphics and Visualizations are highly appreciated

The key in preparing slides is to know your message and try to approach the audience without burden them with big portion of text slides.

Less Wordy & Short Statements / Points on Slides - Concise, Brief, Clear
Crisp well-defined visual representations

Diagrams / Charts - they can eliminate the need for many slides & needed text - as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words
Even better if you have the ability to create InfoGraphics or similar visual representation

Yes, for when you are not around to talk about the slides.. Some presentation notes below the Slides could possibly add a little fencing or meat to the brevity of your concise slides
For academic paper presentations, You can tune up or down the level of detail/ depth & breadth based on who is the audience and what/ how much you want to expose them to.. based on your audience psychology.. It's a fine judgement call
Again, I cannot stress enough on great VISUAL representations that consolidate CLEANLY what could have taken many slides of text / points - A great diagram will take effort to build but pay off many times over:

It also forces you to clearly organize, sanitize and align your matter.
It's possible to for different parts of your STORY to not align or flow well when spread over many slides, but a diagram will force you to refine it or will just look wrong or become a disaster

PS: These are some quick thoughts after a long night flight that can be refined on another fly by.

I'd also say that a good image can be your hidden prompter! It will can serve as a safety net for you.

@Dror I dislike using notes during a speech and usually rely on the images to keep me on track. Having mostly images on my slides also prevents me from just reading the slides!

I agree J.Zimmerman. Picture.. = 1000 words :)

In your slides, do not use bold words so much :)

There are valid arguments for both sides. What you need to decide is which arguments make sense to your situation:

were you asked to make your presentation slides available after your presentation? Is it expected? In that case, you should probably add more information to your slides than bare bones (somebody who looks at your slides 6 months after you gave the presentation should find complete coherent ideas inside).
are you invited as a guest speaker? that implies that people are more interested in you and what you have to say than your slides (keep your slides minimalistic)
are your slides going to be used as documentation later? Are they going to be reference lists? That gives you two options: use minimalist slides with an accompanying document (text / images / movie / whatever) or use an exhaustive presentation.

For example, we are often asked to "prepare some slides" in the absence of a presentation (in my current workplace). That means making exhaustive slides, with explicit exposition of ideas and as much context as possible.
We also have internal presentations (organized as one hour seminars), presenting general aspects of new technologies, summaries of conferences, the ideas behind some of our projects etc., to our colleagues. Those presentations are made to capture and hold attention and contain images, sometimes a joke or two and so on.
I guess the most relevant questions here are:

what is the scope of your presentation?
who is your audience?

Slides in no way have to be "self explanatory". Theres nothing worse than punctuating an energetic presentation with a slide that takes more than 10 seconds to understand. Full sentences on a slide force the viewer to read them, while you are saying them (have you ever watched an english movie with subtitles?). This is pointless and can be distracting.
Slides are there to enhance the talk by adding info that is best presented visually. Graphs and pictures are the most important examples of this.
Unlike what other have said, I believe you should not incorporate what you are saying, into text on a slide. Yes, it might help people with language barriers...you could present the slide in multiple languages, and have have someone doing sign language as well. But back in the real world, the objective should be:
Presenting the information, as clearly as possible, to the "main" audience, while captivating them throughout.
Once you accept this objective, you can focus on the presentation itself, not how your slides will hold up on their own or in other languages etc..
Learning to give a lecture is best done through experience. It is important to actually pay attention to your audience. You have to give new information time to settle in, which may not be natural because you (the presenter) already know the information. You will begin to get a feel for your audience and find a good tempo.
If you want something didactic, it should be put together separately than the talk and have its own clear objectives in mind.

Minimal slides are no slides. That is often fine, but the question is what to put on slides conditional on having decided to use slides.
This is really a pseudo-dilemma. Slides should not be a substitute for your talk. They should not be projected handouts. They should not be summaries of your paper. They should not be your notes to read off. They should not include lots of distracting information and walls of text.
But that does not mean they cannot be self-contained. Let's look closer what that means. That slides are self-contained does not mean that they have "all the information," whatever that is supposed to mean. Your talk will not include all the information from your paper (I hope), so your slides need not do so either. That slides are self-contained means that you can understand what they say without hearing the speaker. That's a good thing, we often do not hear everything a speaker says. Attention is scarce, and it is easy to get distracted for a moment. But for this to work, your slides will need to contain much less information than your presentation. But that little information they do contain should be self-contained. Here are the first four slides from an example presentation:

It's not a particularly good set of slides, but the slides are clearly self-contained. Hopefully, Holmes can provide more information during his talk then one can find on the slides. They still serve a purpose. If someone gets lost while listening, it should be absolutely clear where Holmes is in the talk and easy to find a way back in.

A useful companion to this would be "Some Pointers for Preparing Presentations" by Busse and Zettelmeyer. Your example helps emphasize that the talk should help people easily keep up with the big picture, even if the speaker fills in more details.

Presentation style is something that I have made a conscious decision to change. When I started doing presentations at the start of my PhD I used to put everything on the slide so that I didn't forget anything. Every graph had about 5 bullet points of text explaining what it meant. Although this is an effective survival mechanism for those new to presenting, it hardly makes the most engaging talk.
Soon after I started my postdoc I attended a conference, and on the way home I found I couldn't remember the message from a single talk, out of the many I attended - almost all of which used the same style with lots of text and information on every slide. At the same time, a senior colleague of mine always gives memorable presentations - partly due to his lively personality but also because he concentrates on a single important idea on each slide, and no more.
As a postdoc I now have quite a lot more experience of giving talks, and so I was determined to experiment and learn how to give better presentations which engage with the audience. Before I usually had very few questions, which is a sign of either the talk was boring, or that nobody understood what you were trying to say.
What follows are my general guidelines for conference presentations to specialists in the field.
Rule number 1 is avoiding information overload. Stick rigorously to trying to present no more than three ideas in a talk. It is important to highlight those important points/results and often tell the same idea in different ways if possible to give it chance to sink in. The objective here is to convince a largely captive audience that your work is relevant to them. If you achieve this then they will invariably follow it up by looking at your relevant papers and hopefully citing them. Also important here is to focus on the executive summary. The full details are available in the paper, so focus on the highlights. Researchers will invariably give you the benefit of doubt, so don't waste time asserting your cleverness by putting up complicated equations or algrithms - you will just lose your audience.
Avoid putting more than a single equation/figure/phrase on a slide. Some ideas are complicated and can take a while to explain, but what you want is for the audience to process the minimal information on the slide and focus their attention back on you and what you are saying.
Presentations which are minimal are much harder to write, as you have to know what you are going to say with minimal prompting, so practise is a necessity. But since adopting this style, I have had a lot more engagement with the audience and questions about the work.

I remember one of the most important thing form presentation skills training. Normal human brain is capable to remember 4 things. This means to have simple, goal oriented slides with approximately 3 strategically selected points. Just two is a waste of energy and four can be already to much for some people.
There is a lot of info about this topic. Check this article The Limits of Memory
And drawings, pictures, schematics....picture is worth a thousand words. This doesn't apply to super heavy duty cliparts and similar stuff.
There is no simple guideline "how to make perfect presentation". Can't be. Every presentation is different, even about the same topic.

To paraphrase the Bard: "The talk's the thing".
If you've already written (and published) a paper about the talk contents, then your aim for the talk is to get across the information to the people in the room.
So, think about what slides will facilitate you oral delivery.  Clearly, this will depend on the audience.  Some areas of study appear to require 1,000 words per slide; others get away with zero.
Larry Lessig has a very minimalistic approach to slides that works very well.

Most answers focus too much on the merits of text on a slide. More focus needs to be given to other slide elements.
Slides with overly complex or too many figures are far more problematic than slides with text. At least with text, I can understand it quickly if I want. Figures on the other hand are often exactly what you would find in a journal article, making them inappropriate for a talk.
Most people need to simplify their slides, or at least build up their figures piece by piece instead of presenting everything at once. For example:

It depends. If you are going to present the slides, you can keep it minimal and still self explanatory as much as it can be. Because since you are presenting it, you know it in and out so you can explain during the presentation.
If you are going to share the slides with people who could not attend your session or altogether it is for distribution only then it should be self explanatory obviously.

I use no slide at all when I need to present a work closely in detail.
Many answers above have discussed this question deeply, I don't need to repeat again. For summary, most answers stand on the minimal slides side, and the answer of F'x  is a good explanation of when using self-explanatory slides.
The purpose of slide presentation is for advertising your work. For example, in conference, most of your audience don't know what you are doing. (Yes, in the physics conference, you talk about physics, but most physicists on the room may not work on your field). But what if all of your audience work in your field, know all basic concept and need you to give a presentation in higher detail? Or particularly, your work is highly full of math and math transformation/calculation, which needed to have a close looking? Or when you present to your colleagues, who need to ask you in the middle of the talk, not after the talk like in conference?
When you use slides, you need to condense sentences, break ideas into bullets and slides. Although it is good for getting the ideas, I don't think it's good for getting it fluently. If you have ever seen a long math proving by slides, you will get anxious. Every time an audience raises a question, the presenter needs to go back (and forth) several slides. That will disrupt your thinking. Instead, I just write all I need to say in a document and present it.
I rather not to use slides, than use it with wrong purpose. Its purpose is on the presenting side, not explaining side. For explaining purpose, I make a document (.doc, .pdf) to present.

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text:
How to reduce a paper's size for a page limited conference?
This is a usual problem of mine, I have a page limited conference (usually 8) and my paper is 15 pages long, or in a less dramatic case 10.

How do you go about taking stuff off the paper. Do you have any rule
of thumb?
How do you know what is "irrelevant" enough for you to take it out
of the paper?

that's very topic dependent, isn't it ?

A 50% cut isn't an edit, it's a rewrite.

I found removing content hard and painful. Usually a shorter text needs different structure, so you cannot do it by just deleting auxiliary stuff. Or even if the structure can be the same - often a section requires rewriting to make it more concise. But when it comes to "what to remove" - it depends of you field, your initial content, your tastes...

Maybe put many figures next to eachother; this will save some space.

Before you go about the longer process of deciding "what to delete," have you first tried to remove the "dead weight?" Academic writing is often quite leaden in style, and can be trimmed quite substantially. Following Strunk's commandment to "omit needless words" can often cut down a page or two out of your manuscript without sacrificing "actual" content.
If, having pruned your text, you find you still need to reduce things, ask yourself the following question:

What information do I want my readers to retain?

Then ask yourself:

What sections of the paper do not provide information necessary for the reader?

Those should be a fairly good guide about what to delete.

"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

I'd suggest to follow the highlighted questions in the answer before minor edits such as removing needless words.

The first thing I do when trying to cut material is to make a backup of the paper (or a branch in your version control system). Cutting 20% is relatively easy while cutting 50% is much harder. For a 20% cut, the first place I look is the methods section. In my field we often include descriptions of methods that have previously been published. You can often save some space by simply referring to a previous published account of the method. In my field the methods section might be 10% of the paper and if you are lucky you can cut that in half, saving you 5%. The second place I look is my figures and tables. In my field figures and tables take up 25% of a paper. If you unneeded figures and tables, combine a couple, reformat and scale the rest, you can save another 10%. The third place is the efficiency of the writing. Obviously being succinct helps, but I find it helps to read your conclusions and then prune anything that is not directly relevant. These steps can help reduce a paper without changing the content.
If I still am not under the limit, I look at my conclusions and decide which one I want to cut. I then go back and remove the portions of the paper that lead to this conclusion. there is usually some setup in the introduction, a piece of results, and some discussion. This obviously changes the content of the paper.

There are many technical ways to reduce paper length without affecting your content.
If you use LaTeX for your papers (I highly suggest it), there are many web pages that help you reduce the number of pages without changing one bit of text.  Do a Google search for "squeeze space latex" and you'll find plenty of information.  My favorite one-liner command is \linespread{<factor>}, where <factor> is a decimal number, such as 0.99 or 0.98.  I've reduced a twelve page paper to ten pages without any noticeable difference in formatting using that single command.
Obviously, you must stay within the paper formatting guidelines, but I've never had a problem with conferences and judicious use of re-formatting.
Other tricks that don't require significant content changes:

Find all paragraphs that have one or two words at the end and find a way to rephrase the sentence to make it fit on one line.  This is relatively easy in many cases.
Make sure any figures are tight (while still looking good).  For instance, don't have a title on graphs with captions -- the caption takes care of the title.
Make sure paragraph/section titles are a reasonable font size, and limit the space between the titles and sections.  Make sure your titles fit on a single line.  Sometimes you can get away with bold titles in the same font size instead of larger titles.
Reduce the font size for references.  I've used footnotesize references without anyone batting an eye.

Be very careful before tinkering with font sizes, line spacings, and margins. For a conference paper, this is probably no big deal, but as the "stakes" become larger—for instance, grant applications, and so on—do not try to use gimmicks to get around page restrictions. If you're caught out, you could find yourself thrown out of the competition for that reason alone. Better to focus on honing your writing rather than trying to cram more than what is actually allowed.

There are definitely some good tips already listed, in addition, here are some things that I've found really help:

Go back through your sections and write a bullet point outline of what you want that section to say.  Assign 1 bullet point per paragraph and put it right above that paragraph.  Go back through and re-read that paragraph making sure that each sentence supports your paragraph's point.  If it doesn't, remove it or put it someplace else.
Go through your work keeping an eye out for terms that you use repetitively in each section or throughout the paper.  If it's appearing more than a couple of times, consider creating an acronym or abbreviation for it (unless it's really going to make your paper difficult to read).
Ask someone else to read your paper and tell them that it is too long.  Ask them to cross out or to mark parts they thought were unnecessary.  If possible, have several people do this.  Sometimes as the writer it is difficult to decide where to cut because you're too close to it.  Having others read the paper and cross things out gives you a fresh perspective on if you're being repetitive or if some parts don't need to be there.
Take a break.  If you have the time to do it, try not looking at your work for a few days or a week and then on your first time re-reading it make sure to mark any parts that stick out to you as unnecessary.

I don't know a single academic who's been able to get close to deadline and not say, "Look we're right on the page budget!"
Here are some strategies;

Don't cut too early. Cutting too early is a good way of losing some important numbers or paragraphs that your co-authors will keep asking you about.
Cut stuff that doesn't fit the story. I'm in computer science, so conferences are archival, but in general, if something isn't important to the overall contribution, then it goes away.
Make really nice tables and figures. Much of the time, having these separated and somewhat self-explanatory may actually save you the space of having to explain what's in each figure. As above, if your figure/table isn't related to the story, then cut it.
Write more concisely. You could either write, "The participants we recruited for the study were students who came from a wide variety of majors including computer science, electrical engineering, chemistry, nuclear engineering, and physics." Or, you could write, "Our participants were science/engineering majors". Different details, but functionally equivalent.


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What query language is most common for e-journal searches?
I need to teach a quick lesson on e-journal searching, e.g. to search for one item, excluding certain terms, or another item.
What is the most common query language that students will most likely encounter?

I've seen conflicting uses of AND and OR a lot. The AND keyword should be an intersection, but at my campus it is a union. So, tl;dr, ymmv.

Academic databases are built for people who have no idea what a 'query language' is. I agree that the world would be a much better place if everyone knew a little bit of SQL, but it's not like that.
The only exception that I know is Zentralblatt, an academic database specialized to mathematics which includes a sort of text-based query language.
Every other academic database that I have worked with uses custom-made input masks where you can select manually fields to search on and logical operators; they look like this example, again from Zentralblatt.


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Are women overrepresented in the field of child development studies?
I have the impression that many female scientists, especially after they gave birth to a child, start to develop a research interest in the learning, growing, and developmental behaviors of babies. I got this impression because over time I heard about a couple of female university professors and industry scientists doing research about babies. I personally know 0 male scientist whose research interest is in this area.
I'm wondering whether this trend I see around me is real, and thus wondering: are women more represented in the subfield of child development (or developmental psychology) than in the broader field of psychology?
I'm concerned, and intuitively don't like this (possibly imagined) "trend". I think it may encourage some people to think that female scientists just pick up certain research topics and don't want to touch others. I also see this "trend" as a destruction of many years of effort encouraging women in the "hard-core" science and technology.

a couple of personal anecdotes do not a trend make. One counterexample: the famous BABY lab at Cornell is directed by Dr. Goldstein, a gentleman. http://babylab.psych.cornell.edu/

I have reworded the question to focus on data: are women more present in child development research, compared to neighboring fields? It is certainly on topic for the site, and I think it actually is an interesting question.

Child development studies (and Psychology in general) can be just as scientifically rigourous as any other branch of science.

Males have historically outnumbered their female counterparts in the field of psychology, but this has changed in recent years. According to the American Psychological Association

Psychology, once a man's profession, now attracts mostly women. Data from the 1986 APA report, "The Changing Face of American Psychology," and the National Science Foundation show that the percentage of psychology PhDs awarded to men has fallen from nearly 70 percent in 1975 to less than 30 percent in 2008. (The data do not include PsyD degrees.)

Not only are females over-represented in psychology as a whole, they appear to be even more over-represented in the sub-fields of developmental and child psychology. This article from the APA states

In developmental and child psychology...female PhD recipients outnumber men by more than five to one.

Are women overrepresented in the field of child development studies?

No. They have more than 50% representation, yes, but that doesn't equate to overrepresentation in the sense that it should be 50%. Men and women are different. Women are drawn naturally towards certain things that interest them, just as men are.

I think it may encourage some people to think that female scientists
  just pick up certain research topics and don't want to touch others.

They do, just as men do. Why are you so concerned about what other adults willfully choose to do with their lives?

There is a huge body of evidence that women in academia are not basing their decisions solely on there interests, but that they are in fact being steered away from certain fields both actively and passively.

@StrongBad There's even more (actual, not nonsensical biased perception) evidence (just look at the OP) that women are not only NOT being steered away from those certain fields, but are significantly being steered TOWARDS those fields and yet still women as a whole still reject them, because what a shocker that they are individuals and don't agree with YOUR views on what they should do with their lives.

You've chosen a subjective interpretation of "overrepresented", i.e. "more than there should be", but the usual interpretation is objective, i.e. "more than in the general population".  In the objective sense, the statistics quoted by J. Zimmerman suggest that the answer is simply "yes".

@NateEldredge Correct. I thought I clarified that though with the rest of my sentence: "but that doesn't equate to overrepresentation in the sense that it should be 50%."

Yes, but it gives the impression that you have deliberately misinterpreted the question in order to air your opinion on a politically controversial topic. Hence the down votes.


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How to make notes on journal readings – necessary, or emergent skill?
I'll preface by saying I honestly have a load of anxiety associated with this by now, such that it detracts from reading.
I have never been a note-taker (only taking them when forced to by teachers, specific things such as formulas, as outlines of topics in preparation to guessable exam questions, or as a bullet-point list of what I am going to say – on the document that I am writing). Going into the third year of my undergraduate, I began to feel: ‘Well OK, now I need notes, because I am reading a lot of papers.’ A lot of time passes, and I am falling behind. I speak with the study skills folks about my concerns, they offer me some tips about summarizing and stuff, most of which I already put into practice, and their conclusion was that I was probably just anxious.
However, I kept falling behind, despite putting in more hours than most of my peers. It is apparent to me that I do not know how to take notes – possibly because I do not know how to use them.
Most of my notes essentially end up as paraphrasing. While I can then go through and summarize, I always feel this is an aimless activity, that doesn't really aid my understanding. In one case, I have literally more pages of typed notes than I the article has (25 pages of notes for a 22-page article), and certainly my handwritten notes are similar, and are often just lines and lines of prose summaries of paragraphs. (I can comment with examples of both typed and written notes if it'll help clarify.)
This leads me to ask for thoughts: How can I rectify this moving forward? It's gotten to the point where my academic future literally seems to hinge on this silly issue, because it takes me so long to make notes on content that I fall behind, all the while feeling that I am struggling to understand, etc. (Before, in the previous years, I just did a lot of reading, often wider and more extensively than most of my immediate peers, and it lead to positive interaction where people came to me with questions; now, I have really had all confidence shattered, I feel I cannot understand the papers I have spent a lot of time making notes on, even if in principle I do understand them as shown by my ability to answer questions on them. I even have pages of notes on how to make notes, and I certainly feel like I don't understand that.
Is note-taking an essential skill? Would it develop naturally if I 'needed' it? I can't help but wonder if I would find it developing as and when I needed it, without the thought and the stress, and the failing, but it is very clear that, because I never developed these skills, I really have no clue. At this point, I certainly feel as if I would probably understand more of my field at this point if I relied only of reading, because we are talking about days a week to make notes on single papers, and, again, I have not found single-two page summaries of the papers (as many prescribe with several questions about them) to be useful.

It would help a lot if I knew which field you are in.

For starters, try reading papers with a clear question in mind and only note that which is directly relevant to this question.

@FoldedChromatin I am in linguistics, and had intended to continue to study it at a higher level, or switch to a closely related field. Before I became too busy failing my course, I was very interested in a number of 'adjacent' fields and have read a deal of academic literature in them.

@henning I'll admit I have trouble with this unless I am critically going through methodology/results/assumptions/conclusions. Part of this is a lack of background info.I feel I 'read' mostly for the sake of learning, whereas when critically responding, I feel I am putting that learning into use. I can read a paper and very readily pick up on theoretical issues - they fail to motivate x, y methodological problem, but these would go into notes I would be making 'for a review' rather than 'for myself,' and it's this that I am unsure of, possibly because each paper forms part of a wider discourse

Sorry for the run-on replies: I have little issue with notetaking from textbooks, and much less issue taking notes from studies that explicitly define their terms and so forth (as they should be doing, but many fail to). But the feeling I get with most papers is the same I would get if I were presented with one of those old-school 'History' monographs, like the 'Oxford Histories of' - it is hard to parse. I can generally answer 'critically framed' questions about papers as well as being reasonably capable of responding to issues I do understand, but 'notes' don't seem intrinsic here.

Please [edit] your question to incorporate clarifications.

@aspen If you're reading Chomsky, or any advanced syntax, please for the love of god forget about understanding everything in them. Syntacticians rarely define their terms, and every paper makes you ask more questions than it answers. If I were to take notes on such a paper wondering how a proposed change actually impacted the predictions we're making, I'd probably also come up with more pages of notes than the article you're taking notes on.

@aspen And from reading your comments, that is really the crux of the problem: You're trying to understand every paragraph and summarize it. That will take you forever, and most papers simply aren't worth that kind of effort. They're not something you have to learn by heart, they will just come up with some theory and throw everything they have at you that could possibly influence you to believe them. These things are often nearly obviously wrong, but then of course if you make not-unreasonable-additional-assumption A, it's less clear, and then of course you wonder if that proposed change for

... Japanese can be falsified by a counterexample in English, but the paper only suggests a way that the two could be related, and formalising that suggestion is complicated, because it could be implemented in one of three ways, and the implications of none of these three ways are really clear to begin with, yada yada yada. Don't waste your time trying to a) show clearly that a paper is wrong, or b) show what formal assumptions you need in order to make it right. Only do that for papers that are vital to what you're working on.

I work in the field of biological sciences, specifically computational biology and am a newly graduated PhD. I say this, because I may make statements which are field specific.

Is note-taking an essential skill?

Partly no. While I do not consider note-taking to be an essential skill (because I have never been able to take good notes), now I lend much higher import to organisational skills and tools for the job.
For example, I have never been much of a note taker, but I have good contextual memory. So for most of my PhD, I invested in a reference manager, where I can quickly access my papers. I read papers end-to-end in the beginning because everything was very new at the time. But, for the better part of my PhD I have never read a paper end-to-end, I start from 1 paper and within the next 2 hours, I will have skimmed through another 5.
Afterwards, for the rest of the day(s) I will keep on thinking about what I had read, what it means, how does it conflict or fit with previous literature and how it relates to my work. These are all my mental notes.
If I need to go back to the paper, I can open up the reference manager and I can locate the paper to read the paragraphs of interest once again. There are many cases where I may not remember the author, title or journal and year of the paper (rarely happens). In such cases, I fallback on other papers which cited the paper of interest and which I may have happened across the same time.

Would it develop naturally if I 'needed' it?

In my experience, my current process works the best for me. Note taking did not help me when I needed it (under-grad, masters). But, the above process which I developed during my masters works the best for me. The only time I take notes, is when I need to visualise some ideas. Even then, they are not notes, but rather abstract drawings.

How can I rectify this moving forward? It's gotten to the point where my academic future literally seems to hinge on this silly issue, because it takes me so long to make notes on content that I fall behind, all the while feeling that I am struggling to understand

I would suggest that you make your peace with the idea that you (like me) cannot suitably apply note-taking procedures that have been developed by other people. Once you do this, you can try to tailor a procedure that works best for you. This should also help you boost your confidence. This, I think is key towards increasing your productivity.

Thanks for this. I think by now I am making notes for the sake of it. My general method has been to literally summarise each and every paragraph. At this point, I don't really know if this is actually (in)effective, and I have just been too low-functioning to put the hours in, or if it is most definitely ineffective, and that I should just go back to what flows naturally. I think I'm just anxiety-ridden, and want to get back into enjoying research literature rather than bashing my head into a wall. The hours I do put in seem to give little result, and it is hard to think clearly when anxious.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text:
Does the candidate usually get notified when a request for a reference letter is made?
I applied for a university position and gave the named three persons as a reference: A, B, and C. I am not very much in touch with A, B, C, but I already have permission to use their name as reference.
Would the university I applied to let me know that they sent a request to those persons – and whether they answered or not? For example, would they state that they contacted A and C and only A has sent us the reference letter?

Normally no, the university contacts any or all of a, b or c as they see fit.
They do not have to tell you who or when they contacted them.
They may contact a in the first round and b or c in the second - if you get that far...

On the other hand, if you ask them nicely, your references might agree to tell you when they've been contacted.

No. The candidate will not be notified when, or if, the reference letter writers are contacted and asked to provide letters.
There are also some rare cases where we might ask for a reference letter from someone the candidate did not list as a reference but who we believe may provide an important perspective. This latter concept becomes even more important during the promotion and tenure process when it is often the case that some letters are explicitly required from people not listed by the candidate. If you move into academia, you should get used to the idea that external reference letter writers will have an important influence on your career trajectory, that you sometimes can pick them and you sometimes cannot, and that you will usually not know that they were asked to write a letter for you unless you (bravely) ask them.

There are also some rare cases — Not so rare, really. At most US institutions, every tenure decision requires multiple letters from references not listed by the candidate.  (At my university, "multiple" = "a strict majority")

Yes for sure. My point is that it is rare when hiring a faculty candidate to ask for a letter from someone not on the candidate's reference list. And I agree it is definitely not rare when the hiring decision will come with tenure!!


text:
How can I find somebody to chat about papers?
I’m a computer-science PhD student. I want to find people to chat about papers (by others) online. How can I go about this?
I was looking into the chat of this website. I was also looking at some IRC channels.

Heard of "reading clubs" for people to do novels etc but papers? new one on me, possibly because most students doing PhD's read different papers.

You could organize a paper reading group with the people from your lab. Each meeting has a different moderator who picks a paper (which should be interesting to the group). I have made good experiences with that kind of set-up.

If you want to do something like this, it’s probably best to do it locally. I created a group in my department where graduate students can present on anything they feel like - paper, concepts, non-academic things, etc so that students can get comfortable talking out loud to their peers. Perhaps you could do something similar, but you may be hard pressed to find people that want to converse about the same papers as you do, for that, I feel like a conference is probably best - or go to Twitter.

Ask your supervisor and other people at your institute if something like this already exists, maybe you can join an existing group.
If it doesn't exist yet, maybe you can get their endorsement and assistance to set one up. It could help if they spread the word a bit even if they don't have time to join themselves.
Another avenue to explore is Meetup, trying out a variety of keywords in your field. Although that might end up being a bit more industry. Which doesn't have to be bad, if you had thoughts about going into industry after your PhD.


text:
Removing a part of a paper during major revision
I submitted a paper and got it back with a major revision recommendation. There were many revision comments, and to answer some of them, I added appendices. Now I got the paper back with a second major revision (with many other comments). When I look at the paper as a whole, I see that it has now grown very long. Moreover, some of the results I put in appendices are stand-alone results that can potentially be published separately. I would like to remove these appendices from the paper and make them stand-alone technical reports (e.g. put them on arXiv). This has several advantages: shortening the original paper, increasing the visibility of the side-results, and maybe allowing me to expand them and publish them as a separate paper.
My question is: is it common for an author to do such a thing during the revision process? I understand that I can ask for the editor's opinion, but I would like to know how common is it to ask for such a thing?

What is common is for the author to improve the paper as much as possible, hopefully making the reviewers happy. What you suggest makes sense, though so would factoring out the removed material into other formal publications sooner rather than later.
You could ask the editor, making your case, or you could just resubmit your best version according to your current understanding. I'd include a note as to what you have done along with your reasoning.
But there is no reason why you can't also prepare the long version in parallel, in case the editor would rather have that.