Landscape has a super old history, but it made the most sense where it originated, which was the stage, with curtains, for live theater. It got carried into film and then streaming video as a kind of analogy
You are living through a transition in human tech and society on the level of the printing press! The switch to vertical video makes sense right now because this is how people tend to consume scrolling content and hold their phones one-handed. I think it isn't better or worse, it's just different and interesting and a sign people are relating to the medium in new ways
The reason why landscape is used in film is not analogy, but the fact that humans move a lot horizontally, almost never vertically. Portrait orientation may be good for portrait photos (although landscape is often also very good, or better, depending on the specific case) but not for films. Filming human movement in portrait makes for a claustrophobic feeling, requires the camera to move all the time, and cuts out context (including other people). It has its place, but it's a poor default. I've seen some videos which were recorded from such a long distance that they looked bizarre. The only reason for that distance was the use of portrait orientation, the film wouldn't work without the horizontal context. But it was meant for TikTok, so of course it had to be vertical.
I walk forward a lot more than I walk side to side, and the stuff I pay attention to when walking is more generally arranged vertically than horizontally.
All I’m saying is the appeal to nature of landscape mode doesn’t seem like the whole story.
Aspect ratios were surprisingly all over the place in early film. Now I'm wondering what parts of aspect ratios were driven by the actual physical characteristics of film.
If videos had to match the field of vision, and this was the audience's primary concern, I'd 100% agree! I think it's close to their primary concern when watching something like a nature documentary or a historical drama or playing a video game where you walk around a landscape. Vertical video has convinced me that you can tell some kinds of stories and convey certain kinds of info without using deliberate backgrounds, people standing next to each other talking, and people moving around. In vertical video you see a lot of cutting between two people, people talking about being in an environment that does not match their background, or one person playing multiple people. You don't need to learn pesky blocking or how to act with your body. Things that used to seem static, like giving a lecture while standing still, can seem reasonably dynamic. You can just focus on the human face. It's an option with pros and cons and it will encourage certain kinds of uses
In order to represent your walk vertically in a film, the camera would need to be overhead, directed at the ground (or beneath you, directed upwards). You walk forward from your own perspective, but it's rare from other people's perspectives (and still doesn't matter for horizontal vs vertical, since it's the Z dimension, not X or Y). Using depth to represent motion is a pretty bad idea most of the time, given that it's the dimension where movement is the hardest to notice (again, there are exceptions (precisely when you want the movement in the periphery to be hard to notice, only to make it more noticeable when the thing the moves gets closer (or the opposite))).
If you recorded Lord of the Rings, or Interstellar in portrait orientation, they would be pretty crappy films.
> the stuff I pay attention to when walking is more generally arranged vertically than horizontally.
I don't know what you mean.
Another point: your eyes are organized horizontally, not vertically. You have move horizontal vision than vertical. By filming in vertical orientation you quite simply make things more cramped, quite possible losing the space you could use to put more objects in, or just space out the objects you have in order to make things less messy.
Again, there are artistic reasons to sometimes prefer portrait over landscape, but that doesn't mean it's a good default. Making good films requires being conscious of those things, understanding that they are not arbitrary (therefore left just to which way it's more comfortable for people to hold their phones).
I'm not so sure, at least for some of the AR stuff we're working on - most people we're testing with still point-and-aim their phones vertically, even when consuming 360 degree videos. Headsets will make another huge change of course, if they become mainstream.
Contrary to OP, I'm having trouble imagining tech and the arts thriving in NYC, if this keeps up. Will it become one of those cities where lots of the properties are really being used as investments, not homes or commercial spaces? And the edges of what we consider the metro area get pushed further and further out? Even more so than pre-pandemic? Someone explain the possible futures here to me if you can
The government also seems unfriendly towards innovation. Basically they're protecting old capital, which isn't surprising, that's the way it goes.
I'd be cautious buying into NY real estate. As far as rent goes if my job didn't cover the cost adequately I'd simply not live there. Buying something just because it's already pricey isn't generally a smart move, and pouring too much of your life and savings into a single market increases the risks.
The money is tight for raises because people do not change jobs. The more people hop jobs, the higher the raises since the employer can no longer bet on most people staying put at lower pay.
There are so many horror stories about academia waiting to come out.
The way vulnerable people are exploited and mistreated in what is, in fact, a work environment; moral hazards and conflicts of interest everywhere; lots of untrustworthy research results and inability to reproduce research.
Universities are big business and ought to be regulated just as much as any other big business
It's not really unchecked though. There's the department vice chair, department chair, the college dean, the dean of student affairs, a student senate, a faculty senate, etc. etc... there's a structure here for resolving grievances.
> there's a structure here for resolving grievances
That may look good on paper. Yet a 20-something student vs an academic surrounded by supporters and wielding power and influence, it's only ever going to go one way.
I've personally been on the wrong end of it. After reviewing my options, noting that my supervisor had just been elected Fellow of the Royal Society in London, I decided to bite my tongue, complete my PhD, and leave.
The relationship was so broken I didn't even say goodbye to my supervisor (literally cleared out all my stuff from the lab very late one night), and I've never spoken to him, or had any contact with anyone in his research group ever since.
Yeah, that's all just a dog and pony show. If you escalate an issue with your advisor through any of those channels, your career is toast. You might as well just quit.
Agree, and let's also remember that these are wholly voluntary situations. Unchecked power is a pretty big charge in a situation where the student can (Yes, at a cost) always walk away.
I take it you think we should do away with workplace discrimination laws, the minimum wage and OSHA too. I for one, wish there were more thumbs in my canned chili. It's been a little bland lately.
> It's fundamentally wrong for one human (the PhD supervisor) to have so much unchecked power over another
Why is this fundamentally wrong? Short of a truly equitable society (which I think most agree would be a dystopian nightmare), I don't see this as fixable. The problem is that the power is abused.
The best way to fix this is high trust societies, not creating one more institution with a disproportionate amount of power.
> Tenured professors ... what do they worry about?
Class assignments and number of classes taught per semester, teaching times and locations, class sizes, advising assignments, committee assignments, TA allocations, grader allocations, internal grants, withholding or revoking consulting permission, withholding internal department funding, lack of promotion (there is still a ladder after tenure), and most of all reputation, which in academia has higher currency than currency.
Tenured professors still have a job to do and they still have a boss (lots of bosses, as I said), and if they don't do their job they can still get fired (I've seen it happen), or their lives can be made miserable.
If there's an issue of academic dishonesty then there there are processes at journals, conferences, and funding agencies to address concerns. I've also witnessed these processes work as intended.
> Tenured professors still have a job to do and they still have a boss (lots of bosses, as I said)
We are apparently talking about very different kinds of professors at very different kinds of institutions.
Unless he were to actually commit a crime, I don't think there is anything my ex-boss could have possibly done which could have ended up with him being removed from his post. He was simply too important to the institution in terms of his reputation and his ability to attract external funding.
How he treated his students was really neither here nor there, as long as the money and the citations kept rolling in.
It sounds like you got a raw deal by a powerful asshole, and are now painting with a broad brush. Not every professor has so much power as your former boss, so saying that the problem is that professors have too much unchecked power, and the fix would be to bring more oversight, is missing the mark. Because what happens when the person at the top of the new oversight pyramid is an asshole? You've got the same problem, and the solution wouldn't be to again make sure he has more oversight.
> He was simply too important to the institution in terms of his reputation and his ability to attract external funding.
This reinforces my idea that you should always go with an advisor who doesn't have this kind of clout. Not that you should have known this ahead of time or you did anything wrong, but I have heard sad stories from large labs enough to be thankful for avoiding them in the past, and it's the advice I will pass on in the future.
I think if you wanted to get at the actual problem and a solution to it, I would say the problem is sad narcissistic jerks aiming to become kings of their research kingdoms, and then they act as tyrants when they get a hold of large sums of grant money. That may be the experience some people have had.
A solution to this that you may like if you want more oversight may be to treat a research lab more like a corporation with a board of directors (I can hear the researchers recoiling) or some other governing body over the lab and the students itself. What do you think of that idea?
> A solution to this that you may like if you want more oversight may be to treat a research lab more like a corporation with a board of directors (I can hear the researchers recoiling) or some other governing body over the lab and the students itself. What do you think of that idea?
Rule by committee. So many examples of that working out great.
How about keeping the apprenticeship aspect just having more masters? One year of just comprehend exams, one year where you’re supposed to devote half your time to research with an advisor and half to comps, and three years where you work on six different projects with different advisors in six month chunks? Some of those will be written up as failures, but basically you end up with 3+ Master’s theses. That’s a great deal more love research academia than legal academia and they don’t seem to lack for scholarly work or impact.
This would require revisiting a lot of things - it basically assumes that all projects can be broken down into one-year, coherent and publishable chunks. I love Masters students, but they are often not the most productive, as they rarely get to wade really deeply into a project, and almost never get to develop a project of their own.
I like your idea a lot, but I don't think it could replace the Ph.D. proper. You really do need all that time on one project to make a dent in the state of the art sometimes. One year I spent an entire summer generating data for a single figure in my dissertation. That's part of the reason why it took me 8 years to graduate.
It wasn’t always like that in the US. Three year doctorates are still a thing in the UK and in Germany. Lower the standards for a doctorate and make a postdoc a formal necessity for a job as a professor, rather than not formally being one but practically so. You can even call it a habilitation, like the Germans do. If you want a doctorate go for it. If you want to teach at university after you get your doctorate you need to basically do another one, but it’s called a habilitation.
- Promotion. Tenure is awesome, yes, but there are two full academic ranks at my institution above associate professor with tenure, and if I want them, I need to continue to do the same things that got me tenure. Graduate students, get grants, publish papers, etc.
There's also further ambitions like chair, dean, etc. that are often literally elections.
- Internal allocation of resources. Will one of my students be my department's choice for a fellowship? If there's a space crunch (there's always a space crunch) can I get the space I want? If there's internal funds to help support pilot projects or the like, am I on the short list for those?
- Reputation. This is important to me. I want it to be known that "my lab" turns out good people. And that we do good work. This is not only actually a criteria for promotion, but also something I want (I didn't go into academia for the money). It's what gets you invited to things I want to be invited to.
This also includes things like whisper networks. Students warn other students.
- Grants. A number of grants look at things like mentorship and students.
You can't have power exist and expect it to not get abused.
But this problem is totally fixable. We need to reduce the role that the advisor plays. Grad students should be able to switch labs and universities like most people switch jobs. Once they publish some set number of papers, they get a PhD. No thesis, no committee. The advisor basically is demoted to a fungible manager.
> Grad students should be able to switch labs and universities like most people switch jobs.
Maybe this fixes the problem of abusive professors wielding their power in wrong ways, but it creates new problems as well. For instance, it shifts the very nature of a Ph.D. from a deep exploration of a single topic to shallow explorations of many topics. If you tell me I need 4 papers to get a Ph.D., I'm going to get 4 papers from the easiest venues on the most shallow of topics, because why go any deeper?
And are these solo author papers? What if you were 1 author out of 30 on one paper, and 1 author out of 2 on another? Are each of those 1 paper credit?
Do paper credits transfer between universities? Do some schools require more papers than others? Who gets to decide? Do some disciplines require more papers than others? Again who gets to decide? What about journal papers versus conference papers versus workshop papers? Do presentations count? Do poster sessions count?
If you are in my lab and I've spent time and money training you, what's my recourse if you just quit on me to join another lab?
> If you are in my lab and I've spent time and money training you, what's my recourse if you just quit on me to join another lab?
None. Every employer the entire world over deals with this. The fact that this makes you feel entitled to continued labor by "your" students is the entire problem.
Well that is going to fundamentally change the nature of the whole arrangement. A Ph.D. is not a work-for-hire kind of arrangement, it's more like an apprenticeship. If you want it to be work-for-hire then some other changes will need to be made.
When I hire a grad student I do so with the intention that I will keep them on for the duration of their education, which is a commitment of at least 4 years, sometimes up to 10 (do any employers have 10 year plans with you specifically in mind? No, as a 22 year old fresh out of college, you are fungible to them.) The bonds that are created between advisor and student can be one of the longest lasting and most important professional bonds a researcher makes in their whole life. It's so important that academic genealogy is actually tracked and recorded. There's a concept of a "grand advisor" or your advisor's Ph.D. advisor. So for all the negative stories you hear about a narcissistic asshole advisor wielding power and abusing underlings, there are far more stories of amazing intellectual relationships that can take a decade to fully bloom.
Your proposal would serve to virtually eliminate this relationship. The employee/employer relationship looks nothing like this. It's transactional and makes employees seem more like mercenaries than team members, no matter how much corporate culture wants to convince you that you're part of the team and a member of the family. You can actually find that environment during a Ph.D.; I know I did. You can make mistakes (sometimes huge mistakes) and not be fired. You can admit you don't know something or that you lack some skill and that's okay -- it's expected that you are still learning. Professors are happy to spend the time to teach such skills because they know they will be used on their own project, so it's worth while.
Here is what your proposal would do to my hiring practices and the way I run a lab: If you want to be an employee with the freedom to quit at anytime and move from lab to lab, I will conversely be quicker to fire you and to hire other better students from other labs to take your place. If you are going slow on a paper and you miss a deadline, I'm not going to shrug it off and say "Oh well, on to the next". I will probably fire you and hire someone else who won't miss deadlines.
If you make a huge mistake, like frying a $30k piece of equipment (true story), you'll be fired instead of met with understanding that you're just a student. Because that's what happens when you shift more onto the employee spectrum.
It's definitely also going to tighten the market for Ph.D. students significantly. This could be a good thing depending on your perspective, it would give you less competition. But it would also give new students fewer opportunities. I would think long and hard before hiring a grad student as opposed to research staff. If you make Ph.D. students too expensive, you'll just price them out of the market. Part of the deal of being a Ph.D. student is there's a general recognition that they will be working on projects they are not really qualified to work on yet.
As a 22 year old undergrad, you don't know enough about the domain to be useful. I need to invest years into you before you're even going to be publishing papers; if you can just leave me after that training to work on another project, I see no reason to invest that time in you in the first place. Instead, I'll just hire staff researchers who know what they're doing. Yeah they're more expensive monetarily than a grad student, but they also don't take up all of my time and make stupid mistakes that burn out expensive and one-of-a-kind electronics.
All in all, I believe your proposal is really throwing out the Ph.D. babies with the asshole professor bathwater. Honestly I joined academia to escape corporate hell, so as far as I'm concerned I'm going to keep treating my students as students rather than employees.
Universities are rather analogous to sweatshops in how they operate and the economic reasons for doing so. And I suspect that, in much the same way, this state of affairs represents a sort of Nash equilibrium that cannot be significantly altered except by an outside force changing the rules of the game.
In grad school we definitely had decent labor standards though. I mean, I was worked really hard, but I can't say I was worked any harder than I was in private industry. And the pay wasn't great, but it was more than enough to support myself, and the understanding has always been that you get free tuition as part of the deal, which is pretty great, so that makes up for a lot of the pay deficit. I could see better pay for students with families, but other than that I think grad students have it pretty good these days.
An example of a specific labor standard you'd like to see implemented would be welcome.
As I’m sure you know, Most PhD students stop taking classes by the end of the 2nd year, and focus entirely on research and teaching thereafter, which means that the “free tuition part” is just a sham to avoid classifying PhD students as workers, and to hence avoid paying them for their labour.
As a grad student you are there for an education and your education doesn't only (or even mostly) happen in the classroom. If grad students want to be treated more like employees and less like students, the relationship between student/advisor will shift more toward an employee/employer relationship. This may result in more pay but it will also result in different expectations. For example, if you want to be treated more as an employee, then I would have a lower tolerance for mistakes a student would make. If you want to be an employee I will start hiring for skills rather than potential. As employer/employee relationships have developed maxims like "fire fast", this attitude change may work against grad students.
Also just to be precise, tuition isn't just to pay for classes, it goes to pay for all of the resources you use as part of the university community. If you are done your requirements you will still have to pay tuition. And students don't stop taking classes by the end of year 2 (or 4 depending), they stop taking required classes. Since your advisor pays your tuition, you can negotiate with them if you want to take more than the minimum. You are done your requirements after 2-4 years and don't have to take more classes, but of course you can (I did). Maybe this is something unions can help with.
My indulgence for "I spent three months going down this rabbit hole because it might have proved interesting" is way hired for graduate students than it would be for research staff, because that's part of them being students.
One very specific example I'd like to see is protection for foreign students on visas in the event that they report academic misconduct - there's lots of ways they can lose their funding after that, even if there's not retaliation, and that's bad for the system.
So many companies are so unbelievably dysfunctional... I know amazing devs who slog through years of frustrating, uninspiring jobs. There are also just bad fits. Good person, good company, just the wrong match
Maybe make a written list of things that you liked vs didn't like about these companies? It took me a while to realize I didn't actually want the stress and chaos of a young company that isn't making a profit yet
I'm familiar with the crash of self-loathing and frustration after thinking that finally this job might be a good fit and then it isn't. It sounds like you're really feeling powerless right now so blaming yourself. What helped me in those times was a lot of patience with a long, long job search while getting my positive emotions from stuff outside work for a while. Like, still doing great focused work at work, but checking out deep in my soul and getting super oriented around personal life and hobbies every other moment of the day. Escapist, maybe, but it's surprisingly sustainable for the searches I had to do which have lasted months or years
I found my current job, which is great, through a former colleague I trusted who was already working there and said it was a great place to work. Right signs supporting that recommendation appeared while talking explicitly about healthy versus unhealthy work environments and best work practices during the course of the interview. I felt super lucky that everything happened to work out.
I think you should always be trying to iteratively improve the environment especially as a manager but if you start to go beyond frustration into feeling that something is hopeless or broken about the situation that's a sign it's time to move on. You should never feel doomed at work
I'm sorry it's so hard right now. You sound like you've been thoughtful about this, it may just be a long season of job hopping in your life right now. Best of luck
> I think you should always be trying to iteratively improve the environment especially as a manager but if you start to go beyond frustration into feeling that something is hopeless or broken about the situation that's a sign it's time to move on. You should never feel doomed at work
This resonated a lot
> I'm sorry it's so hard right now. You sound like you've been thoughtful about this, it may just be a long season of job hopping in your life right now. Best of luck
>So many companies are so unbelievably dysfunctional
Sometimes I feel like this is simply the nature of human existence. Put 10 people in a room with some Lego blocks and tell people they need to form groups to build a castle, and the "Best Castle" will win a jar of cookies. You'll probably get dysfunction.
Trying to find a place without dysfunction is like complaining about fire being hot. I guess you just need to find a place where their particular dysfunction is what you like.
Feeding myself well. Carla Lalli Music has great cooking tutorials on YouTube. WFH is ideal for becoming a great home cook https://youtube.com/c/CarlaLalliMusic123
Stretching, especially for whatever gets tight and slumped due to sitting down. I like Essentrics
https://youtu.be/U85YqRN0iy0
What are you trying to get out of these interactions, is it new friends and romantic partners or literally just the novelty of meeting a stranger?
Do you think at this point people might be sensing that you're bracing for boredom as you're talking to them? I don't mean to blame you but vibes are powerful and real and it takes a lot of effort to truly conceal our emotions and assumptions
Both are fair questions. For the former, I'm personally looking for new friends and the novelty of meeting strangers. Some of my favorite memories are from meeting strangers and getting to know them over the course of an evening.
For the latter, I like to think not (but who really knows someone else's experience of themselves?). I enjoy talking to strangers for it's own sake and I'm not generally bracing for boredom, my question was primarily about good places to explore that have a higher ratio of interesting interactions to non-interesting interactions.
I understand the classification is very subjective, so I left the question somewhat subjective to hear not only answers to the core question, but also answers to the implicit question of "what do you find to be interesting".
You are living through a transition in human tech and society on the level of the printing press! The switch to vertical video makes sense right now because this is how people tend to consume scrolling content and hold their phones one-handed. I think it isn't better or worse, it's just different and interesting and a sign people are relating to the medium in new ways