Overview of pm133 on PostgraduateForum.com

Overview of pm133

Signup date: 08 Jan 2016 at 12:02am

Last login: 30 Mar 2021 at 8:40pm

Post count: 1246

Recent Posts

Newbie

pm133 1246 posts
7 years ago

I think that is very good advice newlease. Even a 12 month masters would be helpful.

Is it too late to go back to school after the PhD?

pm133 1246 posts
7 years ago

It's great that you are considering going back to university after such a long spell in industry.
More people should do this because the number of 40-50 year olds who feel trapped is ridiculous. I didn't do it after a PhD but I did return almost 20 years after graduating with my first degree.
I understand that you want to earn at the end of the degree but in my opinion this is a really poor reason for putting yourself through half a decade of stress and it may not work out that you get the job you want anyway.
I would advise you to go back if the main purpose in doing so is a driving desire to do that particular degree. If that is your main driver, everything else will follow. If you only want the job you might find that the difficult times during the degree become impossible. You don't want to end up hating what you are doing. Also, your degree journey might lead you to avenues you haven't yet thought of.

PhD proposal concerns

pm133 1246 posts
7 years ago

Quote From Tudor_Queen:
Also I think that since/if this is part of normal (though questionable) research culture then really we need to be thinking not about "how can I protect my idea from getting stolen", but rather "how will I develop this a step further/change its focus slightly if it does get stolen?" (or equally/more plausible - if someone else on the other side of the globe has a similar idea and carries it out before me).

Even now, having obtained funding and being well into my project, I could wake up tomorrow and see a study has been published that is on exactly what I am doing in my current study. I would feel destroyed but have to get over it and think bigger and beyond.

That last part is a very good point.
helebon certainly doesn't want to be reliant on just one big idea.
The reality is that a research career needs to be built on the ability to have many ideas.

Coming up with a few good ideas for projects and then applying for funding for each of those separately is great advice.

Sci Hub - All academic papers freely available online. Thoughts?

pm133 1246 posts
7 years ago

Quote From helebon:
If anyone is interested the Access to Research website has a search function, you can see what articles are available from home. But you have to go to the public library to read the full article. The list of participating publishers includes Nature, Elsevier, and others. 15million + articles are already available.

It's a start I guess for independent researchers.

www(dot)accesstoresearch(dot)org(dot)uk

I had a look at this.
It's a two year pilot scheme.
The first two libraries I had a look at had "page not found" errors.
Not a great start.
I then selected the publishers list, clicked on Elsevier and went to the Chemistry link.
Almost nothing is available as open access.
A look at some of the humanities journals shows almost nothing as full open access. Partial open access seems to be the best you can hope for.
Finally, this scheme gives slow and cumbersome access to 15 million articles. Sci Hub gives lightning fast access to over 65 million articles. Publishers need to up their game considerably.

These publishers are moving at a snail's pace. The only thing keeping them in business right now is that not enough academics are prepared to use Sci Hub yet.
This reminds me of the Napster situation a few years back, the computer games industry a few years further back than that and the music industry further back again.
Publishers are making exactly the same mistakes. Companies essentially taking the absolute piss, people finding a way to copy or share (breaking the law), legal action being threatened or taken, a few high profile wins for the companies followed by an outpouring of anger which fuelled widespread law breaking and eventual destruction of all of those industries.
Hard to believe that 20 years ago people were being asked to pay £18 for a CD, £40+ for a computer game etc.

Sci Hub - All academic papers freely available online. Thoughts?

pm133 1246 posts
7 years ago

Quote From Thesisfun:

Quote From Trilla:
Pm133, I agree with you, it's such a crooked business! I have said clearly so in the thread about the case for colonialism - I have written a couple of long posts there explaining how it works and so I won't repeat here.

So your strategy for tackling a "crooked business" is to break the law by illegally accessing copyrighted material.
There is something Trump-ish about that logic.

Yes that is my strategy.
It is the same strategy which brought us employment rights and a host of equality legislation amongst other changes in our lives.

"Trump-ish" or not, that strategy has been shown to work over a period of centuries to break monopolistic abuse in all sorts of industries from the music and film industries to changes in unfair tax law (Poll Tax in Scotland for example).

As for breaking the law, it is worth bearing in mind that the law is by public consent only. Sometimes it is necessary to break an unfair law on a wide scale to have it revoked. Seriously we need to do a better job at teaching history to young people at school if anyone is unaware of the role of this law-breaking strategy in securing the standards of living most of us in the western world enjoy now.

Rather than taking the easy route and chucking a personal insult, perhaps you could take the harder road and argue for a different course of action? If you have any opinion on that of course.

Results melancholy

pm133 1246 posts
7 years ago

Quote From Callous:
Dear reader,

Most PhD students have trouble finding interesting results. A fate worth lamenting. My problem is on the other side of the spectrum, but no less real for it. In January 2017 I achieved some spectacular results in my research. Since then, I have been unable to get any meaningful results whatsoever.

I do not aim to explain my PhD research, nor the achieved results. I want you to know that my lack of follow-up is not due to a lack of threads to follow up on. Rather, it is the opposite again - Too many roads lie open before me, and I feel like I am expected to follow up on every single one. Between my daily supervisor, my professor or the company that financed the project, everyone seems certain my focus should be, especially, on everything.

I simply want to put the question out there; "Did this happen to anyone else?". Can any of you relate to the feeling of inadequacy that stems from getting lucky on finding results, but apparently lacking the scientific quality to follow up on them?

Thank you for reading my post. I appreciate any feedback.

Regards,
Callous

I had an instance where a piece of work opened up a whole spectrum of other research I could go into. I had a similar response from my supervisor where every time we met he would want to talk about progress in all the possible avenues.
In my opinion he was just getting a little carried away with excitement.
He absolutely wasn't aware he was pressuring me.
I had to tell him that I had decided to shut everything down and take one path at a time as the fastest route because multi-tasking is completely inefficient. He was very accepting of that.
In my rare update emails to him I always added the other items to the bottom of the list to reassure him that I had not forgotten about them. Against each of these items was written "to be done".
By the end of my PhD, I had done all but two of them.

Oh and yes, I felt inadequate for 3.5 years but I learned to accept that this was the cross to bear for undertaking something only a relative handful of people in the world are capable of understanding. I handled this by temporarily moving onto another item when I hit a dead end on one path. I like to let time do the heavy lifting on things I can't do fairly quickly.

Need some advice please, thinking about quitting PhD

pm133 1246 posts
7 years ago

Quote From CalaLily:
I started PhD about 8 months ago. story is really long but I will try to keep it short. Below are few of my issues:
- I did experiments and wrote a paper in 4th month. I sent to my advisor to review it but he never did properly and a day before
submission deadline, he started rephrasing my paper. On the submission day he changed the authorship (putting his name first and
mine last) and said this was my idea , you just did some of the implementation.
- He sent confidential (progress reports) to his students. And, he addressed me as "The Student" and to his pet student as
"Name" -- is it sexism?
- He never gives me any advice, in every meeting if I put some ideas he always says it is wrong and when I defend he gets angry.
And in the next meeting he repeats the ideas (I put forward on last meeting) to me, saying I thought and these ideas came. how
about doing that. -- Now, I am realising that he does know about my project and methodology it requires.
- I have to be always in the lab, not allowed to go anywhere else (not even library). One day he sent me 3 msgs and 1 email in an
hour interval. why you are not in the lab?

There are other issues but for now I will write these. Please any advice will be helpful. I am really depress. I have told these things to research school and no body did anything. I had few meetings with research school and now they don't even talk to me. Should I leave? I work 10 hours a day in the lab and I really want to do PhD but is it worth ?

Many thanks for reading my sad story.

:( :( :(

Yeah I would quit personally.
I have worked for someone like this and quite frankly they will never change.
If you are depressed now imagine what you will be like after another 3 years.

I have no idea why you think sexism is at play. Not calling you by your name isn't evidence of sexism.

The red line issues for me would be insistence on only being in the lab, complaining when I am not in the lab and stealing my ideas. Disrespecting me in front of the rest of the team would probably not end well for him or me at this stage of my life either but when I was young I took a whole heap of crap like this. My solution was to walk. Didn't regret it.

My advice would be to use this experience to better interview your next prospective supervisor. All of the above could have been avoided if you had known what to ask. Now you do so chances are you won't be in this situation next time.

PhD proposal concerns

pm133 1246 posts
7 years ago

Quote From helebon:
I'm looking to move university and begin a PhD, I'm currently finishing my masters thesis. The university department I hope to move to is very linked to my research ideas. I am thinking of applying for a PhD that has my own research idea, and there is an opportunity for this that is funded.

I want to write the research proposal but at the same time, I don't want to give away too much of my research idea. if I don't get onto the funded PhD, I don't want the idea to be stolen.

Any advice please would be appreciated. thanks.

I have to disagree with ToL on this.
It doesn't matter whether stealing is rare or not.
It happens.
And it only needs to happen to you once.

You are right to be cautious in my opinion. It's the reason I don't talk publicly about work I have not published. It's not about having ideas above my station or anything like that. It's simply because I have spent a lifetime watching people abusing my trust and privacy. I don't trust anyone.

It is also easy to say "don't work with those who might steal your idea" but until crooks come with a barcode stamped on their foreheads it is not always possible to know who they are.

Unfortunately you are going to have to spell out what you want funded for. If you tell them too much you risk a good idea being nicked. If you leave out too much you risk getting rejected for funding. It's a balancing act and only you can judge.

Dissertation presentation

pm133 1246 posts
7 years ago

Quote From Tudor_Queen:
Me too! Which is why I am making sure that I write up some papers from my PhD - during and after.

I actually first learnt about it happening from my own supervisor. She told me that HER ex-supervisor (a very famous person in the field) published HER data several years after she had completed her PhD. She said she couldn't believe her eyes when she saw her work published without her name! As far as I know - the two are on talking terms!

And then on a separate occasion - my supervisor told me that she had just received an angry email from a former Masters student who had seen a paper by my supervisor that was based on her Masters dissertation! My supervisor wrote back explaining to her - sorry - but I am the custodian of the data and this is how it works when you leave.

Crazy eh?

It doesn't sound crazy at all. It sounds completely corrupt. That masters student should have been named on the paper.
Things like this dont surprise me anymore.

My supervisor has no access to my unpublished data so that could not happen in my case.

Looking for a paper

pm133 1246 posts
7 years ago

Quote From Tudor_Queen:
Can we get into trouble? D:

I probably wouldn't use a university computer for this sort of thing.

Looking for a paper

pm133 1246 posts
7 years ago

Quote From Tudor_Queen:
Is it the dark web?! I've heard of that but no clue what it is! Just noticed there was not hppt://!

It's the dark web by the looks of it.

Newbie

pm133 1246 posts
7 years ago

Quote From bignige:
Thanks for the replies. I am an ex-lawyer and interested in the business model of professional service firms.

I have put together a draft proposal and I have found a business school lecturer who is kindly trying to help me get the proposal correct.

I sent hom the draft - but he says that it is presneted more in consultancy mode and that I need to think 'in PhD mode'. Not sure what that means.

He has also said that he would want he would 'like to see is a research question that engages more directly with the literature and some existing body of theory'.

I am somewhat lost and confused!

It would help if I could find someone who has prepared a proposal or indeed who has a PhD which is in the area I am looking to research. I have searched the web but not found anyone as yet!

N

OK so consultancy mode is where you identify a problem, consider a way to solve it, propose a solution and then action the solution. In many cases, the problem has already been solved in different ways by other people.

You need a different mentality altogether with academic research. Firstly you need to search the literature to understand what is known in a certain area. You then build up an idea of one or more unsolved problems in that area. You present a proposal to solve those problems by writing essentially a story in the wider context of what is known about your general area of interest.

Academic research is like taking a sphere of knowledge and then adding a little kink to it, thus expanding the body of knowledge of that sphere. In consulting you are creating the entire sphere. In academia, the sphere represents what is already known out there. You will find this sphere documented amongst the many journals and academic papers out there.

Does that help?

Looking for a paper

pm133 1246 posts
7 years ago

Quote From shoulder:
That worked, thanks!!!

Excellent.
Not only is it freely available, it is absolutely lightning quick to access as well.

IMO we should be spreading the word about this as far and as wide as possible.

Sci Hub - All academic papers freely available online. Thoughts?

pm133 1246 posts
7 years ago

Yeah, found all of mine on there too.
Incredibly, despite being the author I don't have a right to access my own work without paying.
It's time the academic world stood up to this corruption.
The young woman who created this site has been successfully sued by Elsevier I think. They shut down her site and she simply opened up another set of mirror sites.

One of either Science or Nature named her as one of the most influentiual people in science today.

There are lots of scientists commenting on the site with many articles from September this year. In general scientists are supportive of this.

We may be witnessing something very special.

Sci Hub - All academic papers freely available online. Thoughts?

pm133 1246 posts
7 years ago

For those interested, the website is sci-hub.cc