Dr Pasley (subject to minor corrections)

What an exhausting process the viva is!

Subject to one new experiment, and a calculation that did not meet with approval (oh and tonnes of typos), I am a doctor. Dr Pasley!

Now to change my salutation at all my banks, billing companies etc.

Rob.

Build up to viva

It seems important to take a step back before preparing for the viva. I need to think about the PhD in terms of being a piece of work, however during its creation there were pragmatic issues to be considered. So I have now about a month before I defend the thesis, and it has taken about a month from handing in to being able to face reading it again.

I am going to create a journal paper of about 20 pages from the 250+ pages of the thesis, this will require some distillation. That is not a problem however as some of the less central parts were published before the PhD anyway. These can be referenced reducing the writing needed. Still 266 >> 20 pages is quite a compression rate.

I am also hoping to write the long sidelined paper on ambiguity in gazetteers. The main co-author asked at a conference whether I had lost interest in it. This is not really the case, but with writing the thesis I certainly lost focus. Anyway it was looking interesting, so hopefully we can revive it and turn our interesting graphs into something more meaningful.

Handed in

That's it gone, done. Just waiting for a date for the viva now.

Final edits

Final edits today and print to pdf in order to get thesis bound. Exciting!

Rob.

final straight, light at end of tunnel

Just a few bits of feedback to incorporate. PC reckons it is much better than previous version. MS may have lost interest as going off to Aus soon and lots of proffessory things to do. I have to give a talk on Friday, not the best timing.

A bit more data

I only focused crawled the midlands, not the other 4 vernacular regions. I have had to go back and put this right and it has taken time I can't really afford. I said to my supervisor that someone had told me a PhD was more a marathon than a sprint, but that I thought it was a sprint of marathon distance!

The thesis is much more structured now, which is important. I've done the work but presenting it properly is as much work again. I am stunned by how little human enterprise can achieve sometimes!

finishing straight

I am in the last few days of proof reading. This is not very motivating for me. I read a previous PhD yesterday, and noted what was good and what was not quite so good (it is a good one, so helps me get motivated to do as well as possible). I had no abstract or acknowledgements on mine (Doh!). It was good to remind myself how careful you have to be to explain all the links between things, I sometimes forget because I have been looking at this area for over 3 years now.

Anyway the thing stands at 280 pages, which should be enough for anyone. :)

Been a bit slow this week

Got a finished PhD all apart from the conclusion of the conclusion. Had Thursday off, as it suddenly hit me that I was nearly there, just read a book. Was going to finish completely bar the read-throughs on Friday, but woke up with a headache. I find that I have to be on form for proof-reading and conclusion writing, so had Friday off too. Did a little tinkering with region size estimating ideas, and seem to have something interesting; I suppose I might add it in if the changes are reasonable self-contained (which they seem to be). Did no work today, and will do none tomorrow, but Monday should see me full of enthusiasm after the rest.

over 80,00 words

it is worth saying I went over 80k words last week. still growing, but with a few rough note that need to be removed, this will be about the final size of it. Wow! that's a lot of words.

Rob.

nearly done

I am reading through the whole thesis. Realised that I could make a point about the results, with one more table, and it is quite a good point and helps draw things together.

Some of the build up chapters seem a bit disjointed in places. It is just that the link to something I have actually done is not made explicit every time, but to do so I feel would make the writing a bit clumsy. I guess it will never look perfect to me, 'cos I made it. A lot of it has already been sanity checked as part of the transfer report, so it can't be awful.

Will have it ready for the supervisors to look at soon, and will get a more objective view. Need to get it handed in.

Busy, Busy

I have started to create a presentation for the GIR workshop later this week. Looks nice, but 20 minutes seems a long time to talk for a 2 page paper. We'll see how it goes, I guess there will be questions too.I am also looking forward to skiing, it's been a while since I did anything but writing or dog training.

The PhD took a great step towards being a finished document last week because I sorted out all the references. They are now in Word 2007.There were various problems with the xslt files I found for Harvard style. I found 4 different ones and none of them matched Sheffield's version. furthermore none of them can do author (year) as opposed to (author, year). So I spent some of my time fixing those. I still need to finally finish the results chapter, though it looks much better.

struggling on

Writing a PhD is like a marathon they said when I started. And so it turns out. Luckily I did not do what I did in the Sheffield marathon in 2000 and rush off too fast. Thus I am not completely fed up with the thing. I have to finish the results chapter by the end of the month, which is feasible. I also need to tidy up lots of earlier stuff, but I have mostly got it too a point where there are islands that I either re-write or just remove depending on how long I have. So I am getting there.

Off to Switzerland next week for a workshop, and a couple of days skiing.

Slow but steady

This document is slowly starting to look like a PhD. It was supposed to do that before Christmas, but some personal things got in the way. I handed in a draft anyway, which was a vast improvement on previous attempts, but not finished in any way really. Anyway, I now seem to be adding about 600-1000 words per day that explain things a bit more clearly, as per comments from my supervisor. It still looks a bit like 4 separate experiments, which to some extent it is, but I will work on showing how these are linked (which they are).

New year

Well it's been a busy new year. No drinkies on NYE as Maggie got a virus. I got it the following day. The effects are just about gone for both of us.

I've had to go down to Kent and discharge my Mum. She seems fine now, but we will see.

It has been snowing a bit. Not really caused me any problems as most of the time I work from home, and the internet has stayed up all the time.

I have completed my marking. The electronic hand in has been interesting. At first the office printed it, the lead tutor photocopied it and put it on my desk (now in B&w). When I got it home I found there were two copies of one assignment (it transpired that 5 had been handed in by that group). There was also one missing. In the ones that appeared ok to start with some of the diagrams did not print. I got electronic copies and one still has diagrams missing, I'm not sure if this is the offices fault or the students. It has taken more of my time than it should have to sort all this out. Still at least I'm paid for it.

I am awaiting full comments from my supervisors, but already have some from my first supervisor. I can fully familiarise myself with what I have so far, and try to get a bit more polish on it. As 1st supervisor points out, many bit of the thesis are not finished.

Rob.