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How do I improve my ability to learn?
I am decent at learning from videos. But poor at learning from textbooks, wikipedia articles etc. Unless the material is really easy to follow, I am unable to learn most of text content. How do I practice this? Last semester, I read 500,000 words to practice my reading, but I mostly learnt by internet pdf slides made by various universities teachers rather than the book itself (I did read the book and highlighted all the  important facts and summarized them but I would never reach any conclusion trying to do so), so I am not very confident about my ability to learn from text. Can you share some tips?
This skill is really important once I enter a job as well as I am acomputer engineering student so that is going to be most important as technology keeps changing. I have never found any good advices related to this in stackexchange.
My issue while learning from textbooks:
I fail to connect the dots. It seems overwhelming for me to conclude something by reading. Whereas while reading slides/notes, it is easy for me to conclude and connect the dots. I don't get bored or distracted, I remember what I have studied if I understand but my problem is that I don't even understand.
Did this happen in past?
I have very light memories. I remember reading textbooks as well but there used to be tons of videos. And most of my subjects were rather numerical(where you need to do calculations), so reading books was easy for me in that case. But here most of my textbooks are literature (computer science so) and maybe some coding (coding isn't really part of most CS subjects contrary to belief). I have a hard time reading theory.
I read this as well.

Welcome here. Could you add more details, about what difficulty you face when reading books that isn't there when reading slides/notes? For instance, do you get bored/distracted, do you find it difficult to follow, or do you not remember what you've read soon after? That may help you get relevant answers.

I fail to connect the dots. It seems overwhelming for me to conclude sth by reading. Whereas while reading slides/notes, it is easy for me to conclude and connect the dots. I don't get bored or distracted, I remember what I have studied if I understand but my problem is that I don't even understand.

Ok, what level of study are you at now, and have you faced the same difficulty at previous levels too, high school for example? (You could add all these details into the question directly, so its readily accessed).

Patience and practice and repetition. Use videos to reinforce what you learn from text.

I feel like there's a key passage here with a typo I can't decode: "It seems overwhelming for me to conclude sth by reading". Could you correct that so we know what you're trying to say?

Also: "I read 5,00,000 words to practice my reading, but I mostly learnt by internet pdfs slides": this is simply not the practice you need. Get better at book-reading by reading books.

@DanielR.Collins- I think that sth=something.

As you describe what you do, it seems very passive. If that is the case, then that is the root of your problem. Reading is a spectator sport. Learning is an active sport. You don't learn to swim by watching others do it. You get wet.
Videos are also too passive.
For learning you need skills, not facts. The skills are learned through practice. For technical subjects it means solving problems/exercises. Lots of them. It also normally requires feedback on your attempts, which is hard to get from using only books or videos. Seeing a solution to a problem is really nothing like producing a solution for purposes of learning.
Think of your brain as a muscle that needs exercising, not as a sponge that mops up information. Even the "mopping" process of the brain requires repetition and reinforcement.
Ultimately you want insight to emerge from your learning. And you want those insights to last. There are very few people who can gain insight from reading and watching, at least until they become experts.
It took Einstein about ten years (up to about 1900) to achieve the insights that led him to discover relativity. That included reading (about past experimentation), but also many many discussions with others.

See this for more, especially the book reference (Zull) at the bottom.
See this about effective note taking - Hipster PDA.

Honestly man, I don't want to be einstein and they are outliers. I will never be even if I try to.. I just want to learn enough to get a job after graduation. I see my inability to learn from text content is going to be a deciding factor between me taking a job or not getting a job.

I'm no Einstein either, but I did learn how to learn. And taught it to my students once I realized they weren't very good at it.

@raveenatandon Are there simulators/emulators that you can use to test your knowledge?  Something where you can design something and verify it works?  I personally don't feel I 'know' something until I can put it into practice.  Simply accumulating information in your head has limited value in any engineering field.  I think you need to do something with it or that knowledge will be lost.

@raveenatandon - you don't need to want to be Einstein to get value from knowing how to learn. The example Buffy gave of Einstein was to demonstrate that even the most intelligent people take time to learn. Indeed, knowing how to learn is generally what distinguishes what most people call "geniuses" from other people - it's not that they're inherently more intelligent, it's that they've learned how to learn.

I saw OP's question and was trying to figure out how to suggest Zull's book as well without trying to write a redundant answer. It's really insightful; I got it to better think about how to present material for others, but it ended up also being really useful for thinking about my own learning experience.

There are two things that help me when I’m reading something too obscure or dense. The first is to teach it to someone else. Giving a lesson requires you to think of some logical order of presenting the information that you’ve read, and it requires that you digest and understand it. If there’s a part of the book that is clearly important enough to convey to someone else but you’re lacking the requisite skills, then you’ve identified an area on which to spend more time.
There’s a middle step that helps me as well, which is to talk about (or even complain about) the book. I find that some sections of a book are so dense that I have trouble understanding them. So, I complain to a friend that is willing to listen. But I don’t just say “I don’t like this book, it’s too hard,” I explain why. Maybe the author doesn’t define their terms well enough, maybe they assume knowledge of something they don’t explain—whatever the case may be, talking about the book can help you identify areas where you need more help.
My second thing is to practice. It may not seem like it, but you will get better if you keep trying. There is no need to keep doing things that are definitely not working, but keep in mind that learning is a skill, which takes practice. Try not to get discouraged if you’re struggling or not getting it. If you’re making your best effort, then it is doing something.
Above all, persevere.

I really like the "complain about the book" advice. A lot of times I have found that if I can clearly articulate what I'm stuck on or what I don't like about a given resource, I can then read that resource more carefully to see if that problem is addressed in a way I wasn't expecting, or find another resource without that problem. I suppose the risk is that just complaining without trying to fix the problem is not very productive, but complaining followed by corrective action is great.

Aka "rubber ducking".

It is worth remembering that course notes/slides are carefully curated from a lot of sources and painstakingly compiled into a form ideal for students to absorb. It is no wonder that following the material and connecting the dots is easy; it is designed to be that way. Likewise, a video lesson is designed to be followed along.
The drawback of this simplicity is that course notes/videos present a limited perspective, whereas the actual subject may be much more messy. Books often embrace the mess and are therefore require more effort to follow along. This effort is the active learning that @Buffy recommends. Some books are notorious for being abstruse, but can be extremely rewarding once you get through them.
Coming to the main question, of how to get better at learning from books, practice is the key. You can be smart about it though; scaffold your reading so that you start with simple sources and build up to more challenging books. If you've understood something from a video lesson, try reading it up from some books. It should be easier since you know the background already. Reading will help you develop the skills of visualizing, assimilating and really thinking. Those skills will come in handy when you later try to read a new topic. It won't happen overnight, but if you keep working at it systematically, you will surely see improvement. A reasonable amount of research shows that overlearning through such techniques does work.

In addition to advice in the other answers, which is good, I think another approach that helps (especially with self-directed learning) is to have a goal. (I like to think of it as my ulterior motive.) Ideally this is some small project you come up with yourself or with an advisor, but could also include a list of homework or test problems you want to be able to solve.
"Learning python programming" (for example) is great in the abstract, but most real day-to-day python programmers don't have or need an encyclopedic knowledge of every feature in the language. Instead, a good approach is to have a project that interests you that requires python programming. Then, you will be motivated to learn the parts of python you need to accomplish your project.
This has all kinds of advantages. First, the motivation section of textbooks can be very abstract. Very few people are amped up about learning about list comprehensions by reading the first paragraph of a python chapter. But if you have a specific problem that you want to solve that you can tackle with list comprehensions, then you are already motivated to read that chapter. It also forces you to focus on the parts of a book that are useful to you. A textbook is very general and trying to cover many use cases. Having a specific focus lets you narrow down the parts you need to read to the parts you find more interesting. And it will help you to think critically about the text, because in the back of your mind will always be a question about how you can use this information in practice. It also unbinds you from studying one particular text; you are looking for any resource which conveys a particular concept well, and reading multiple sources is a way to increase the robustness of your knowledge. I often find that after several months on a project, I know the particular area I'm interested in as well or better than the way it is presented in any one book. Finally, at the end of your studies, you'll have a completed project, which is a very powerful demonstration to yourself and to others that you have learned something.
This approach won't always work, since sometimes you need to learn a lot of theory to understand the problems you are interested in. But more often than not, I think picking the pieces of a textbook that are most relevant to your interest and focusing on those, is more effective than reading a book cover to cover. You will also likely find over time that you will need to backtrack to fill in details that initially you thought weren't important, or you may end up needing different parts of the book for different projects and eventually covering most parts of a book.

Perhaps it stems from less facility for, and/or less practice with, longform text organized in paragraphs. If this is the case, you could try reading denser novels, articles and essays (eg in online magazines for the informed layman). If you already read dense narratives, maybe it gives you a chance to reflect on what is different between them and the nonfiction textbooks and technical articles you want to read more of.

Personally, I create Anki flashcards for the basic vocabulary, basic notations, and basic diagrams I do not fully understand yet. Then, I'll put the textbook away for two weeks.
Putting the textbook away ensures that there is enough time for the information to automatically get uploaded into my brain using spaced repetition.
Then, I can come back to the book and try to read it again. But this time, reading requires much less mental energy because I've already memorized some of the basic jargon and some of the basic concepts already. This strategy is known as incremental reading.
Then, I'll use deliberate practice and I'll do as many practice exercises as I can. Deliberate practice is not the same as spaced repetition, but it's just as crucial.

Since «putting the textbook away» is a hint to offer breaks where one does not engage active thinking about the topic read, Marty Lobdell's video Study Less Study Smart fits into the perspective provided by your answer.

Starting off a bit tangential... You are not alone.
I don't mean I'm like this as well, quite the opposite - it's utterly incomprehensible to me how a person would prefer a video detailing some problem over text description, provided that text is of a good quality (we also have taught courses to help with textbooks specifically!).
However, I find this increasingly common among my students. In fact, very recently I was completely baffled when instead of following a detailed set of written instructions an undergrad student chose to look up youtube videos of another person performing the task (and reading the selfsame set of instructions while doing so!).
So, to me there are two extremes - one is fighting extremely terse explanations in a textbook having difficulties connecting the dots, another is listening to explanations/watching videos, main pitfall here being that perceived competence is usually a lot higher than real. This, and code bootcamps are two major things mass-producing students who feel they know how to solve real-world problems yet seem completely and utterly stuck when given one. No, it wasn't all dandy in days of yore, rather this kind of imbalance seemed less prevalent.
Given these issues, what is one supposed to do, then? And the answer to that is tried and true by generations upon generations.
Combine the approaches.
It is perfectly reasonable to seek alternative explanations when you don't get something but first, think about the problem yourself. Put the book aside and consider how you would approach it. Get back to book. If stuck, ask professor or a colleague or, indeed, find a video. When you feel like you totally understand something, find or invent an adjacent problem and see if you can solve it (or, at the very least, are not entirely paralyzed by it). Finally, connect the dots yourself: a good book would in all likelihood mention why some theorem is important; your brain needs to connect whatever you learn to what you already know. Thinking of possible implications is probably the single most helpful skill in learning.
Consider how something essential like Calc I was structured: theory/textbooks, lectures with explanations, problems, seminars, more problems... It is like so for a good reason. @Buffy is 100% right here: if you don't get your feet wet, you are just avoiding the hard part of the work and it's going to massively backfire a few years later when you find out that your feeling of understanding the subject was very shallow and you haven't really learned to think well enough to solve problems on your own. Unfortunately, this does happen, quite a lot, and this is not the kind of career you want. So if there is no problem provided that you could try solving with that newly-acquired knowledge, invent one!


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PI advertising the same project I'm working on
I'm a new postdoc working in a project I really like. I've been there for three months and I'd say I'm doing an acceptable progress. My PI is lovely and we get along quite well, however not long ago I found she's advertising the EXACT SAME project that I'm working on, but this time to get a PhD student. It's the exact same team of supervisors, same techniques, everything, just the position changes. She said the student will be coming around January or February and that she'll make sure they have an independent project, but I just don't understand how this will happen as there aren't enough results to get another project out of this same topic. Is this normal? Should I be worried?

You say you two get along well, so why don't you ask her? Because she is the only person that can answer this. Could it be that the PhD will be working with you/assisting you on your research?

Yeah it could be, what surprised me is that I found about this via Twitter, she didn't even bother to ask or anything. I get that it's her project, but still.. anyways thanks for your answer. I guess there is no other way of finding our than asking her

is this project in Europe, EU funded? I think it is typical

Both that and you being territorial here is normal :)
For a good lab, there is rarely no use for an extra pair of hands. Possibly barring some abstract fields where it's common to work on a problem alone or labs with dozens of people where PI can't supervise them all, too many students is never an issue.
Your goals and capabilities are now different from those of a PhD student and, in turn, different from those of an undergrad. If you both were MSc students it'd be more concerning. Still, the best way to handle that is approaching your PI, ideally knowing which parts of the project are you specifically interested in. An example of PI reasoning might be that for an experiment, you'd need however many samples and that would imply either the new postdoc (you) working over 60 hours a week, scaling the experiment down, stretching it out (which makes the whole project increasingly irrelevant as the time passes) or... well, getting a new student.

Hmmm, being "territorial" and keeping things to yourself is a good way to slow things down. Slowing things down is a good way to get scooped. Getting scooped is a good way to .... you know.

@Buffy it is. It is also a very much relatable experience for me at least; I like to think of that as an adolescent researcher stage with all the same hallmarks as adolescence in the general sense: it is normal that it happens but one would eventually "grow out" of it, gain more self-confidence and become able to pursue big and ambitious goals more harmoniously.

I will add a bit to the previous answers.
A project is typically for the funding, aka money. Often there is money left even after hiring one or multiple people, regardless of the status (e.g. postdoc, PhD). It is very common (at least in EU) to hire multiple people under the same project and even shift them here and there depending on the time frame of the funding.
I would say there is nothing to worry about. To make sure you can talk to the PI and ask what would be the responsibilities of the PhD student and if you should help co-mentor and score some additional points there if you want to continue in Academia.

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Can a paper be assessed again by the same journal after a retraction?
Can I resubmit my previously retracted paper to the same journal?

Of course you can. But are you asking if there is a chance that the journal will not reject it?

Are you asking whether you can (meaningfully/successfully/…?) submit the exact same paper, or rather a revised version?

This question is meaningless if you don't tell us why the paper was retracted in the first place, and what you did to the paper to make it publishable again.

This might be really stupid, but does the OP mean "rejected" instead of "retracted"?

@Begnnier The commenter is not calling you "really stupid", they're saying that their own comment might be stupid/silly, and they are asking that you confirm that you really mean "retracted".

It rarely makes much sense to ask "Can I ...?" questions of this kind, because the answer is almost always "obviously yes". To resubmit your paper to the same journal, you go to the submission site and, well, submit it!
But you probably actually want to something along the lines of:

Is it unusual to resubmit a previously retracted journal to the same journal?
Do you know of any instances where a journal has republished a revision of a previously retracted journal?
Am I more likely to be successful if I submit my previously retracted paper to the same paper, or to another paper?

My answers to those questions would be:

It is almost certainly unusual.
No, I know of no instance of a previously retracted paper being published in revised form in the original journal (confined to my familiar domains: economics, psychology, medicine)
And yes, I would expect that a new editor (i.e., new journal) will look at your paper with fewer preconceptions that if you were to resubmit it to the same journal.

The chances for success (i.e., publication) will depend very much on the details: was the original paper retracted after publication or during the review process, was it retracted for scientific misconduct or a serious-but-honest error, what has changed in the new version, and so forth.

To add to PDB's answer, such "retraction and republication" in the same journal is possible in principle. Per the COPE Guidelines (emphasis added),

An author may republish some of the work if not all of the content was found to be unreliable. In order to do so transparently, authors should notify the editors of the new journal of the prior retraction and it is likely appropriate to cite the retraction, indicating why the work was flawed and what has been corrected in the new article. Permission to republish also needs to be agreed with the copyright holder of the retracted work.
In some instances, journals may wish to work with authors to concurrently retract an article that was found
to be fundamentally flawed while simultaneously publishing a linked and corrected version of the work.
This strategy of ‘retract and republish’ is not commonly used, but may provide an opportunity for journals
and authors to transparently correct the literature when a simple correction cannot sufficiently address
the flaws of the original article (eg, see Retraction and republication – a new tool for correcting the scientific
record? European Science Editing (https://b.link/ese-1). In this instance, the original article should not
be completely removed or ‘replaced’, but should be retained and linked to.

Note: I've preserved the defunct URL in the quote, but replaced the link with an archived version.
I've mainly heard about this practice in medical journals through reporting by Retraction Watch. Here is an example. Here's also an example where a journal apparently retracted an article due to legal threats, and later republished it with some modifications. Here's a tragicomic example where the journal mistakenly retracted the wrong paper and issued the statement:

This is a retraction of a retraction notice. Due to technical errors at the Editorial office of the journal, a retraction notice[1] was published retracting the article titled, “Sample size estimation and power analysis for clinical research studies[2]. However the actual article which needs to be retracted is titled, “An overview of randomization techniques: An unbiased assessment of outcome in clinical research” by the same author[3]. The correct retraction notice will be subsequently published and the incorrectly retracted article will be republished in the forthcoming issue of the journal.

As for the question of whether you can republish your paper in the same journal that retracted it, well, that really is up to the journal in question. Given that the practice is not commonly used even in fields where it is sometimes employed, I expect few journals will have a developed workflow for such republication, or even a policy allowing it. Among journals that might allow it, I believe editors would primarily be interested if they deem the paper to be important, and deem the issues to be limited to honest errors or to be caused by the journal itself.

"In some instances, journals may wish to work with authors to concurrently retract an article that was found to be fundamentally flawed while simultaneously publishing a linked and corrected version of the work." This does not seem to match the OPs situation.

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Should I inform the Editor that I won't resubmit after a "Reject and Resubmit" verdict?
My paper has been rejected (with a "Reject and Resubmit" status), and the Editor has recommended resubmitting it with the revision contents that incorporate the reviewer's feedback. I am considering not resubmitting it and submitting the article to another journal. Should I inform the editor that I won't be resubmitting my article to the journal?

Not necessary to inform
This is a line that the editor knowingly crossed when they sent 'reject and resubmit'. If they didn't want to increase the chance that you'll submit elsewhere, they would send 'revise'. (Functionally the two decisions are the same, but the first is more final in the sense that it increases the chances that the author never resubmits it.)
If you do resubmit it, then you should alert them that the manuscript is resubmitted (there'll almost surely be an option to do this in the editorial management system). If you don't, they'll forget about your manuscript.

Superb answer. One could add that if you want to go back later to that journal that gave you  a "reject and resubmit" decision for whatever reasons, the option is still there. If you inform the editor now about your thoughts, then this opportunity might be gone.

Would it be fair to view "reject and resubmit" as "rejected without prejudice", meaning that if revised and resubmitted the paper would be neither more nor less likely to be published than would be an paper that was identical to the revised one but hadn't been submitted the first time, while a revision request would indicate that publication would be likely after revision, and a straight rejection would indicate that publication would be unlikely even if the paper were revised?

Should I inform the editor that I won't be resubmitting my article to the journal?

Essentially, your paper has been rejected (Fomite, 2015). There is no obligation to formally withdraw or inform the Editor. However, there's also nothing stopping you from informing the Editor if you so wish.
I understand that 'reject and resubmit' is not explicitly covered in the Academia typical workflow of a journal.
Depending on which lens on looks at it, reject and resubmit is synonymous with revise and resubmit or major revision. Yet, there're (subtle) differences between them. They also have different implications in terms of publication metrics.

"They also have different implications in terms of publication metrics." Out of interest, how is that?


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"Exceptional candidates from other areas may also be considered". What does this mean?
I'm a fourth year mathematics postdoc and I am looking at tenure-track jobs this year. I see some jobs that have a targeted research area but often have a caveat sentence along the lines of "Exceptional candidates from other areas may also be considered."
I am trying to decide if putting my file in there will cloud their applicant pool (since I am in a related field but not in the advertised discipline). What do caveat sentences like this mean? What does "exceptional candidate" mean? Should I apply?

I'm not familiar with postdoc jobs. Do you have to have a solid research plan to be hired, or will you be assigned for a problem to get it done, like how industry works?

@Ooker In my experience it varies from job to job, but it's typically a bit of both. You have to develop your own topics of research as well as working on problems designated by your supervisor.

but if you are postdoc already, then you don't need anyone to supervise you, is that correct? Are professors (or tenure) the only ones who have their own independence?

@ooker In math it is common for postdocs to set their own research plans.

Do not filter yourself out. You do not know what the hiring department wants (and they might not know/agree themselves). Just send your application in.
Do not worry about clouding application pool. The application pools are huge, but most applications are dismissed within a minute. As a member of a hiring committee, I prefer to spend an extra minute on one more non-competitive application than miss a chance to hire an excellent colleague who will work side-by-side with me for years.

In particular, their definition of the targeted research area might not agree with yours.  If your work is interesting to the people working in that area in the department, then they may be interested in hiring you.  Someone could be interested in your work for reasons unknown to you, for example if your area has an unexpected application to their area that you don't know about.

It could even be that the official wording was crafted for reasons other than being most descriptive. Do not guess, just apply to wherever you might remotely be interested. If you get an offer, decide if you are interested.

It has happened that the higher administration encourages a department to search broadly, not focusing exclusively on one or two specific areas, and that the same higher administration authorizes the department to hire people in just one or two specific areas. The resulting job ad can look like what you describe. The "meaning" is that the department can consider all sorts of candidates, but, if it wants to hire someone outside the one or two specified areas, it has to persuade the higher administration that this person is really wonderful.

Most applications require non trivial work.  If we believe a priori that our application will be dismissed in under one minute then we are not highly motivated to put in the work.

In math, because of mathjobs, the marginal effort of one more application is quite low.  This has obvious upsides and downsides.

A lot of schools may not be able to hire someone in the desired area. If they can get a qualified person who will take the money that they are willing to pay, then they count themselves lucky.
I agree with the previous poster. Don't sell yourself short. Give the search committee reasons as to why you would take THAT job. Rise to the challenges of the job you take.

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