Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Searching
Gaaah! I am writing up a paper at the moment and on the whole my data is OK and it all tells a nice story. My current issue is finding and interpreting other literature in the field. One of the main aspects of my work is validating a new experimental model so things are always complicated comparing to my data done with a new model to stuff done using more traditional methods. This is not so bad, it's just a bit of a pain having to really go through and understand the methods sections in other papers just to check a 1 or 2 values out of the paper to see if it's actually comparable or not. My main frustration at the moment is tracking down papers to compare my findings with. Obviously I have some good starting papers but doing literature searches to check certain values and other models is a nightmare as everyone seems to use a slightly different combination of capital letters, brackets and abbreviations in their titles and keywords so rather than just being able to look for example something with a simple name, I seem to end up doing multiple searches with each version of the name, and then this is further complicated that the thing I am looking for in relation to my main search parameter is also written in lots of different ways.
One thing which has consoled me with all this tedious literature searching is that I think my new model is really neat and is relatively simple to use to find out important parameters which at the moment are not easy to find out without using some quite unnatural experimental conditions.
One thing which has consoled me with all this tedious literature searching is that I think my new model is really neat and is relatively simple to use to find out important parameters which at the moment are not easy to find out without using some quite unnatural experimental conditions.
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Support Systems
I meant to blog about this a while ago but never got around to it. At the moment I am really annoyed with my old PhD home department. When I finished my PhD I wrote to the head honcho of postgraduate students in the department detailing quite specifically how I felt the department had let me down during parts of my PhD. In particular the fact that on paper the department seems to have adequate support systems and proceedures for ensuring students make decent progress and stuff but in reality it's just a load of pointless admin. I didn't really get a satisfactory response from my letter but I felt that it was time to move on and accept that I had done what I could and hope that the department would review their proceedures at some point. Anyway it turns out that a current student of my old supervisor is having a lot of similar problems which I encountered (and which previous students before me encountered) and that NOTHING is being done about it. What is even worse is that this student has gone to the doctor to get additional help but the underlying problem (his work in a particular lab with a particular supervisor) is not being assisted in any way by the university. As I'm no longer associated with the lab or student there is not a lot I can do except see how things pan out and get frustrated with the ineptness of the department and suggest small alternative methods of support and ways in which the student can try and help himself a bit more than he does at the moment. The worst case scenario is that the student will not pass his PhD and maybe then the department will look into things further, although that is a little late and extreme. Or they may continue to do nothing which wouldn't suprise me in the slightest.
Tuesday, February 05, 2008
bleugh
I am totally mooped at the moment as I seem to have come down with the lurgey. Usually I am the last person to come down with a cold but somehow I've managed to randomly catch one. I am not a person who likes being ill. Hopefully I will get better quickly, at the moment I'm mainlining vitamin C and zinc and drinking lots of cups of herbal tea. I have quite a lot of work to do (mostly because I have been lazy and procrastinating recently) and also want to get fit ready for my ski holiday at the end of the month. In fact I'm wondering if I compromised my immune system a bit by pushing myself quite hard at the gym after finally getting back into it after christmas.
Friday, February 01, 2008
Resolution in progress
I said I wasn't making any resolutions this year but was going to get my finances sorted, well I'm on the way and have got around to opening some new savings accounts with better rates of interest and put some money in them. Now just need to make sure I keep topping them up and getting out of my current habit of spending all the money I get paid each month.
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