291 karma · joined December 28, 2019
I once was excited about Intel releasing their own Linux distro (Clear Linux), but it has the same problem. It looks like Intel is trying to make custom optimized versions of popular open-source projects just to get people to use their CPUs, as they lose their leadership in hardware.
In practice, the PhD experience is a full-time job for a student, and the one that is hard to quit psychologically. Many students start it right out of undergrad. They have not seen the world outside of academia, and having worked for a couple of years on their degree, they feel obliged to finish. That's when some professors choose to abuse their power and push some students into ridiculous working conditions. I have seen quite a number of students at my school reduced to nervous wrecks, while forced to stay in their programs for sixth year and beyond.
That is, working on a PhD degree with a professor involves adult people who do it consentually for mutual benefit. If such relationship breaks, it is not fair to assume that it is the student who is a dick.
I work in both and routinely interview PhDs in physics. I would not say that the transition is immediate nor easy, as the quote implies. Both tech and finance have specific knowledge, e.g., programming skills and understanding of the markets, and most PhD graduates have to pick those up on their own. Having a degree from one of the Ivies will facilitate the screening round, but past that point it hardly counts.
If you have saved a couple of minutes or hours of coding and are only going to run that code a handful of times, it should not matter if it runs a second or two slower than C/C++. This is the same rationale that Python and other scripting languages have. But unlike Python, you should be able to match the speed of C/C++ or get pretty close by optimizing your code.
Sure, the overall goal is to publish as many papers as possible, but their topic more often than not is solely determined by the advisor. Those papers may not end up helping the student to get a job upon graduation, unless their topic is one of the more exciting ones and the universities are actively hiring new faculty to pursue such things further. Tenured advisors are often not concerned about this issue since they already have their job.
It is also likely that the papers are backed by the current funding received by the advisor. It is exceedingly difficult for a former student who has become a new faculty member to get funding for similar projects because they would literally have to compete with their advisor for it. Some of the more cordial professors that I've seen would actually co-write future grants with their former students, so that everyone could benefit. But oftentimes I've seen professor impose a ceiling on a student's career aspirations, so they would be eliminated from competing for the funding in the long run. Regrettably, this often happens to bright ambitious students, who have made a mistake of revealing their ability to function independently early on.
"In this survey study that included 1441 respondents from during the COVID-19 pandemic and 5065 respondents from before the pandemic, depression symptom prevalence was more than 3-fold higher during the COVID-19 pandemic than before."
And not to antagonize you, but just a post earlier you were talking about protecting people in your community. Caring about their wellbeing is one of the ways of doing that.
Having said that, I can see a case for payment systems to start transacting in existing cryptos, so long as they can satisfy the regulators. They already do that with different real-world currencies. When you have a card in one currency and a business charging you in a different currency, the payment processor does automatic conversion between them for you. With cryptos, everything works the same way, except there may be a crypto-exchange in the middle. The payment processor just needs to guarantee the delivery and some stable exchange rate.
Admittedly, these are not pure crypto transactions. But businesses can already do those directly over blockchain. The major thing stopping them is that there are few other businesses who would accept crypto. Hopefully, payment processors adding support for cryptos could move everyone else to broader adoption.
You have to pick a business based on a short description and some social media profiles. Some of the listings have a business plan or a slide deck, but none present an audited financial statement.
Then there is a mysterious metric called "investment multiple". It seems to be a 6.5-year ROI. When you break it down, it boils down to 3.5-8.5% return per year on the money you lend them. However, the payment schedule is unspecified, and it is not exactly clear what recourse do you have if things go under. A bank would never provide a business loan on such terms.
If you don't have a PhD, you do have to compete with everyone who has it. But it is still possible to gain an edge on them by simply studying what your prospective employers need. For PhD students, it is actually harder to do that unless their PI is doing something closely related.
They get paid well. Most of the stuff they do cannot be published due to intellectual property reasons, so they indeed miss out on academic recognition. This is a trade-off one has to make.
Sad to hear the story of that person. Ideally, you should not start a PhD unless you have a burning question to answer and need ample time to study it. Given that a career post-graduation is not guaranteed, it's best to hedge your bets and study something that has immediate applications and/or gives you transferable skills.
Besides, you've got to think how would you use this degree after you finish. Inside academia, you will be locked in a job with a mid-low salary with scarce options to advance. Outside of academia, PhD is less valued than most people think. I know quite a few people who do great research in the industry with only a BSc degree.
I don't know about biomedicine in particular though. Maybe, something is different there.