However, the paper does offer a compelling causal mechanism. Also, it appears they performed follow-up pilot studies on the effects of erythritol consumption—as opposed to its simple presence in the blood. The following quote from the article is repeated in the linked Science commentary:
"The present studies suggest that following ingestion of an artificially sweetened food harboring typical levels of erythritol as artificial sweetener, plasma levels of erythritol remain elevated for many days, well above the thresholds necessary to enhance stimulus-dependent platelet reactivity, even among healthy volunteers."
I agree with Derek Lowe. I'll be avoiding erythritol until subsequent studies prove that it's safe.
This elevated level for many days, actually suggests it's not an intake problem:
> Witkowski et al. note that the vast majority of their study participants were enrolled prior to erythritol becoming a common sweetener and food additive. This, combined with the authors’ finding that erythritol levels remain well above the cohort ranges for at least a day after consumption, suggests that none of the cohort patients were consuming erythritol in their diets, and that the levels measured in fasting plasma samples were instead the result of endogenous production
I need to fix that. Apologies. Somebody already caught it an earlier round of feedback, and I just haven't gotten to it yet with the pandemic. But will soon.
To add a data point, my advisor told me to do the same. In fact, I actually spoke to one of his then-RAs who was leaving to go to the other side of the world (by sheer coincidence).
That discussion confirmed I was making the right decision, and I was able to gauge as well from the "warnings" I received that I was going down the right route. So I would definitely echo the above, and advise you speak to at least one of their previous students. If none are still around, that might be a red flag (or they might all be getting snapped up right away into jobs, but they will make the time to discuss with you, if they felt their advisor helped them!)
I would personally find it surprising if someone who wanted me to advise them didn't seek views from those I had advised previously.
I know of two examples of professors who wrote a detailed syllabus like yours, albeit in different styles. One was my brother's advisor, and the other is my brother. ;-) Perhaps not coincidentally, these professors were also known for having a straightforward approach, and for their students getting through the process reasonably unscathed. That's not to say it was easy for students, or that conflicts didn't ever occur. But there was little or no confusion about the expectations.
You are definitely not every PhD advisor. This is a public service and should be required reading just about every institution that issues advanced degrees.
I would say that as a student, you would be asking a potential advisor what mix of projects would be an example course of the research. What is "their approach" to the sequence of your grad projects over several years? Examples? What combination of risk/certainty does it have? I think you can tell pretty quickly whether the advisor has this concept even in mind.
Former students should have this idea in their mind too, after finishing the program. If they don't, they haven't learned one of the important things about a PhD...
And if you feel that it's too rude to ask, or the professor can't handle such a question (or you're hesitant to ask) -- either you probably want to find someone who is comfortable with such questions, or better find out why you are uncomfortable. Better to be awkward up front and get the answers you want, than be polite and suffer for 5 years to discover the wrong answer.
I mean, that's a whole nother topic -- this is a huge investment of years of your life. You should ask difficult questions before you make the leap. And the professor should owe you such answers before committing to taking you on.
In fact, it's not that different from an awkward pre-nup contract conversation. Only this time you don't have to be swayed by emotion.
Admittedly approaching this with a non-US perspective, but it seems strange to me that PhD students approach their advisors to see what the project/approach is.
Is it normal (in the US?) for a PhD to be as "guided" or prescribed by the advisor as you suggest above? Perhaps my experience differed, but I went for an advisor who takes an old-fashioned "independent research" focus. That's not to say they were unavailable or disinterested; rather they were there to offer input and guidance when needed, but not to steer or even direct. It was up to me to plan what I wanted to do, when to do it how to go about it, what to write up and publish, which conferences to bother with etc. Perhaps this is unusual, but I felt it was a key part of the experience to deliver your own major research programme.
I'd definitely agree that if you can't ask the questions you outlined above, or if they can't answer it, that is a big red flag. A PhD is about learning to ask questions fundamentally, and then set about answering them, so may as well get started by asking your advisor. I'd also try to get an understanding of the culture of the group and practices, since some research groups have more of a "lab" culture where everyone works as part of a bigger project, while I was involved in the opposite - everyone had their own "thing", but would work together when it was helpful.
Well, my story was 15 years ago and in an area where students were mostly expected to bring their own research questions to the program. I had trouble getting the time of day from potential advisors, to say nothing of interviewing them about potential projects and their advising methodology!
This is brilliant in a way that relates to commercial research in natural science too, generalizing some of the terms and focusing more toward business than academic life:
1. What difference will this work make if you succeed?
a. Whose lives will be made better by this research?
-the client
b. How will this improve upon what’s currently being done?
-the client will be more satisfied
c. Why is this one of the most important questions in the field?
-because a valuable client asked
that was easy
d. Will it create a big policy change at some level (company, government)?
-if so it will be for the positive with consensus, otherwise no costly changes
e. Will it inspire a new class of systems?
-would be good if it was worth building beyond clients' immediate needs
2. Who will care about it when you’re done?
-two clients would be better than one
a. Will government agencies care?
-only in a beneficial way, when the FBI comes to your office you want to be their consultant not their suspect
b. Will platforms and industry care?
-if you do projects which make them money, more fondness can be expected than if you cost them money
c. Will non-commercial researchers care enough to recognize or benefit from it?
d. Will non-commercial researchers care enough to teach it to their staff/students?
e. Will anyone care about it 10, 20, 50 years in the future?
3. How will this change what other people (defined broadly) are doing?
a. Will other researchers change what they’re working on after seeing your work?
b. Will practitioners do something different?
c. Will users adopt what you’ve made, found, created?
d. Will authorities use what you’ve found to draft new requrements/specifications?
-unless no negative impact can be imagined, such a sensitive project might best be shelved until a time of more positive outlook
Professor Gilbert has an _internal deadline_ 7 days more strict than the real publication cutoff, actually allowing for reduced stress and making higher Quality output possible in ways others may never achieve:
>If the paper isn’t ready, we won’t submit it to that conference or journal deadline; we’ll submit it somewhere later.
Naturally deadlines for being AT the conferences are not missed. I bet they can build anticipation about future presentations most accurately when this happens.
I've had a Mint account almost since launch. I've tried multiple times over the years to pick up YNAB. Last week I started taking another stab at it. The two aren't quite equivalent.
YNAB seems to pretty actively want you to "Fresh Start." One of the giant values for me with Mint is historical information. I often will dump a CSV or troll through old transactions since I can't remember which account was used. After not touching Mint for a year I could go through and touch up categories and answer if "eating out" was something I'm doing more of in Nov/Dec than January. Or I could skim through and mark deductions when filing taxes or looking for medical expenses.
My needs have changed a lot since I was clawing out of debt. I don't really see myself setting a budget, but more tracking categories to find outliers. I guess kind of like changing my diet instead of trying to make my next meal "healthy."
That said, I'd love to ditch Mint. There are so many ads garbaging up the interface. I never found their charts all that useful. Their offers seem to be whoever bought ad space this month instead of what would improve my financial situation. YNAB is way better at things like bi-montly bills that use income split up each month.
I'm still on v4, it works great and I had to pay for it once. I know the model is subscriptions these days and $7/mo ($84/annual purchase) really is nothing in the big picture but it still bugs me. Looking through their release notes it doesn't appear that there has been major improvements in the budgeting aspect of the software. If you've used v4 is it worth it?
I used v4 back in 2012-2013 (when I was in college). They switched to nYNAB a year or so after, and I hated that everything was "in the cloud" and there was an option to "automatically import transactions from my bank account." I was like, what? I thought YNAB was about manually tracking my balances so I always knew what was going on.
But I got back into budgeting in mid 2018, and I actually love all of those features. imo the $7/mo I pay is well worth the auto-transactions, auto-syncing across all devices without dropbox, ability to link several different accounts (my checking acct is with a small local credit union, I have a brokerage account, a personal loan I'm paying down, etc.).
I'd go check the YNAB forums, there's a lot of v4 users who really hate the cloud version. I tried to switch and gave it up for two reasons:
- Import from v4 is super broken for credit card accounts and I ended up with weird positive balances that don't add up based on any combination of transactions. Forum advice was "start over".
- You cannot tag income as "available for next month", instead all income must be immediately budgeted. Which is different than the old YNAB advice of being a month ahead. Forum advice is to earmark it a special category then fix it when the next month lands (https://support.youneedabudget.com/t/63pgpp/budget-using-onl...).
- No side-by-side month view. You can only view one month at a time.
The differences were too much for me and the import was so borked that I immediately gave up and stuck with v4.
I don't think your 2nd bullet is completely true, although I don't think it's the same as how it worked in v4.
You can receive income in January, then switch to February and allocate it to a category. When you switch back to January, it will not show that money in your To Be Budgeted total. So you can zero out January while having the next month already budgeted for.
My system is to switch to the next month, select all categories, then click the "Budgeted Last Month" button to automatically apply my previous budget to that month. Then I switch back to the current month and fix any underfunded categories and allocate any overflows to get the balance down to zero.
Longtime YNAB user here. It was rough moving to nYNAB at first, and I missed features for awhile. It's generally caught up and surpassed YNAB 4 in most respects. Things I still miss: the red right arrow (good reason to abandon it, but I still liked it), and being able to see three months side-by-side. Starting over occasionally is not a bad thing, IMO, and I did a fresh start with nYNAB. I created a "Next Month's Income" category, and use it exactly like YNAB 4; I don't budget beyond the current month. It woekd just fine that way. I generally ignore "Age of Money", which took over as the "Live on Last Month's Income" rule, and still follow the latter.
YNABaaS brings automatic integrations to the table and the 'sync' story is, obviously, much easier since it doesn't involve Dropbox. That's all I noticed. I did a trial and just was not impressed. In my opinion, using the SaaS version when you own the desktop software should get you a charity write-off.
What does bug me is being forced to store all my data on their servers. I'm sticking to v4 until I'm forced onto something else (or I build my own replacement)
Page and Brin were both initially funded by the National Science Foundation to do the algorithmic work that led to Google [1]. Page was supported by an NSF grant from the 1994 Digital Library Initiative program; Brin was at Stanford on an NSF Graduate Student Fellowship.
One of the authors here. That's correct. The spillover to other sites is not studied.
Based on an (admittedly imperfectly) related paper with Stevie Chancellor & Munmun De Choudhury [1], I would expect that the spillover to other sites results in a 1) smaller, but 2) more committed group of users.
Tanushree Mitra wrote a computational paper on this in 2016 [1], finding something similar:
"Using four years of longitudinal data capturing vaccine discussions on Twitter, we identify users who persistently hold pro- and anti-attitudes, and those who newly adopt anti-attitudes towards vaccination. After gathering each user's entire Twitter timeline, totaling over 3 million tweets, we explore differences in the individual narratives across the user cohorts. We find that those with long-term anti-vaccination attitudes manifest conspiratorial thinking, mistrust in government, and are resolute and in-group focused in language."
I agree with most of this. However, I might take issue with the motivation you ascribe to professors: "only car[ing] about increasing the number of academics who studied in their lab." Another explanation, one that I find myself feeling sometimes, is simply mismatched incentives. Practicing academics and students headed to industry simply have different incentives, and that can add friction to the relationship.
I think it would be helpful and useful for departments to consider other ways to facilitate industry pathways that don't so heavily rely on the advisor.
I get what you are saying, but the incentives do not have to be misaligned. It makes total sense for both the professor and student to be aligned in pursuing the goal of completing and publishing interesting and original research. It shouldn't matter what the student does after completing said research! But, some professors distribute their resources unequally and give the most time/money to the students who are trying to become professors.
"The present studies suggest that following ingestion of an artificially sweetened food harboring typical levels of erythritol as artificial sweetener, plasma levels of erythritol remain elevated for many days, well above the thresholds necessary to enhance stimulus-dependent platelet reactivity, even among healthy volunteers."
I agree with Derek Lowe. I'll be avoiding erythritol until subsequent studies prove that it's safe.