#Masters Thesis

[scrivnomancer]

Cleaning out the garage and finding the old sign from when I received the Outstanding Masters Thesis of the Year award in grad school… and discovering water damage made it more badass.

[heidislater]

Hello everyone!

I’m finishing my master’s degree and would appreciate your help filling out a short survey.

I’m researching people’s work behaviors. The survey will take 5-8 minutes to finish and you must be 18 years or older and currently employed.

Taking the survey is voluntary and no identifying information will be collected.

You can find the link to the Google Form below.

Reblogs are appreciated! Thank you!

[pseudowho]

Hey Haitch, what's up ? I need help and since you're : 1. One of the most prolific writers on here 2. You seem to be organised 3. I assume you have written a dissertation before What advice can you share for someone who has to write their master thesis pronto ? I have a terrible case of ADHD and just a mild interest in my subject, but I need to pump out 40 pages in 2 weeks so any advice is welcome Also you're the best, I loved your very clinical approach to analysing the JJK men's little swimmers

Heeeeeyyyy

I am NOT PROLIFIC, shut up.

I am organised you're right, thank goodness for ✨anxiety✨

I've written a couple, taught dissertation classes on a University level, and bullied Mr.Haitch through a PhD too.

So I've not lived with ADHD sadly. I can only tell you what I'd do.

Get over yourself. I don't give a fuck if you don't like your subject and I don't give a fuck if you find it hard to concentrate. Pull your grown-up pants up, give yourself a slap, and recognise that you either do it and do it well, or you fail. Once you decide that knuckling down is infinitely more palatable than failure, it helps. So, be your own drill sergeant for two weeks now.

Examine your thesis question/hypothesis. Imagine teaching this subject to a class; what questions are they going to ask? You're going to want to answer those. They're going to highlight some key themes to explore. These themes can be grouped into your thesis subheadings.

What does the evidence show? There's almost certainly a theme there; do sources wildly disagree? Is there a general lean towards one answer? What gaping holes are there in the research? Assess the provenance; what limitations are placed upon pieces of evidence based on their provenance? How reliable are they? What are the sample sizes of the studies, if this is relevant to your thesis?

ONLY AFTER YOU HAVE THOROUGHLY EXPLORED THE FULL EVIDENCE...what do you think, and why? What do you think lends strength to your argument?

Remember, a Masters Thesis is a DISCUSSION, an ARGUMENT-- it's frustrating arguing with someone who clearly doesn't know what they're talking about, so get reading babe.

Do your References and Bibliography AS 👏 YOU 👏 WRITE 👏👏 ...as SOON as you mention it in the main body of the text, reference it properly. You are on limited time so tidy up as you go along. The devil is in the detail. I advise the Harvard referencing system, it's the nearest and simplest.

Good luck. This won't be easy. I'm a glutton for punishment and I love a challenge so this is a bit of me.

If you have a moment of "waahhhh this is hard I hate it I feel sorry for myself", let it be just that-- a moment. Pick yourself up and get back to it. Do not spiral. Now is not the time. Spiral after, if you like.

Please note: I'm not that much of a drill sergeant with other people. The above is how I bully myself, and I do bully myself. I would never judge you for a breakdown.

Love,

-- Haitch xxx

[nylwnder]

eddie and dewey picking new numbers and writing out 2024, guys its our year.

[catinthewallalright]

ok i have a very special request….

i am doing my master’s in linguistics right now and for my thesis i want to interview lesbians who engage with content depicting gay men storylines. if anyone sees this post and feels they would qualify and they would be interested in an interview with me. shoot me a message with your email so i can begin the official communication with you…. thanks in advance. also spreading this will help me so thanks <3

[lovessidney]

Looking for participants for a survey (for my master's thesis)

Hi everyone!

I don’t know how far this will reach out of my usual crowd, but here goes nothing.

I’m doing my master’s thesis in IT and Management (I’m focused on the IT part of things, closely related to computer science). The aim of my study is to explore the potential application of artificial intelligence as a suitable assistive technology or tool for supporting autistic people in processing emotional content within written communication.

The idea is to use technologies like sentiment analysis, text based emotion detection or similar (different forms of artificial intelligence that can process the text and compute feelings in it) to analyse sentiment and emotion in written communication, specifically focusing on written social communication you receive (I.e. texts / chat messages / emails / the like). 

The idea was born a few years ago as I was looking for a subject for my bachelor’s thesis. Both from researching into areas close to this one, but also out of my own need for support in that specific area, as I too am autistic and struggle with analysing and understanding emotional content in communication quite often.

With all that said, I’m asking all people who are autistic, and who might relate to these struggles (having a hard time understanding things such as emotion, potentially also stylistic devices like similes, metaphors, irony and sarcasm), to help me explore the potential of such a tool or technology by answering my survey.

The survey is absolutely anonymous and I won’t receive any other information about you than the one you choose to share with me.

Disclaimer; as you might be aware of, AI is still far, far, far from perfect. This is still a very new idea, and I’m exploring the perception and opinion rather than the technology.

Link to the questionnaire;  https://wirdiofs95h.typeform.com/to/tkEkeJEb

Please, please, please feel free to reblog the post or share the link with other people (and to other places) if you feel comfortable with doing so. I’d appriciate it a lot!

[astrx-nautical]

I'm in the writing stage of Draft 2 :) Also, my favorite black skirt's elastic is broken and I'm in the market for a new one

[beauty-is-terrror]

Who would you invite to your dinner party?

5 guests.

Dead/alive/fictional.

[saturniannnn]

MA Thesis Writing tips??

I was wondering if anyone has any tips, tricks, resources, books on writing a thesis, or I deas for planning/organizing etc. for writing an MA thesis? I have pretty much all of my research done, I just need to sit down and write the damn thing, but I’m a bit intimidated and overwhelmed with the process. I’ve looked online for some guidelines and tips, but I’m not having much luck with finding specific and details tips and guidelines for the writing process.

What worked for you all and what was the most helpful advice or trick for the writing process?

Thank you in advance!!

[personinthepalace]

I did it! Masters Thesis defense is over!

[fancassticfiction]

So, publishing the Master’s thesis about Ghost has hit a bit of a snag. Because I quote 10 songs, some a great deal (looking at you, “Respite on the Spitalfields” and “Spillways”), I have to somehow figure out who to contact to figure out what I need to do to get permission for academic publishing because fair use is kind of questionable when you use lyrics in even an academic work.

I couldn’t find anything about who to talk to on Loma Vista’s website, so now I’m on their parent company’s website. The only way to contact them about this is through a licensing request form which is both intimidating and confusing. I’m going to try some unconventional means of contacting them to see if they will answer questions (like maybe try some of their socials), but I’m starting to lose hope on publishing this in an academic journal.

[bubbles-floating]

love doing things that have no priority but still need to be done so I can ignore my pressing responsibilities

yes this is about me doing the laundry instead of looking for thesis topics

[shirebarbie]

I SENT MY SWEDISH MASTER THESIS TO MY MENTORS

everyone cross your fingers!!!

[gradfieldnotes]

hey, gradblr!

i'm du. i'm a second-year cultural geography master's student currently writing my dissertation on fandom spatialities. i've been part of studyblr before at @todayesterday (formely artsytourism), but now that blog has moved on to be something else and i wanted a place to post master's updates and keep a dissertation diary to help keep with accountability and motivation. so, here i am in this sideblog! just wanted to say hi to the community and introduce myself, so, hey. i plan on posting pics of my days as a student and little summaries of my activities that i'd like to share with fellow grad students. feel free to hit me up anytime :D

[timewasjustadream]

To answer "so if you really fucked up a Bluejays feather what colour would it be":

Answer 1: If the feather was plucked from normal bird and ground, it would be some type of brown because of the melanosomes.

Answer 2: If the feather got "fucked up" on a living bird, it would be white.

Let me explain.

In 2006, Dr. Matt Shawkey (who I've met. really great guy. helped me in my grad research) and Dr. Geoffrey Hill published a paper about a leucistic (lacked melanin [i.e. pigment]) Stellar's Jay. [Here's the paper.] This bird had pigmentation and was blue and then molted to all white due to some type of genetic anomaly (they didn't research why it went white).

When they cross-sectioned a barb (the structures that come off the main stem [rachis] of a feather) from a normal blue Stellar's Jay feather, a feather from the leucistic individual, and a white chicken feather, and imaged them all using a transmission electron microscope, this is what they got:

A (left) is the normal Stellar's Jay. B (middle) is the leucistic bird. C (right) is the chicken. In the images, the labeled structures are:

v = vacuole (an empty space at the center of the barb)

m = melanosomes (dark brown or black pigment granules)

sl = spongy medulary layer (quasi-ordered keratin fibrous region with air pockets and keratin rods) (keratin is the protein/material that makes up the majority of a feather)

c = cortex (dense keratin with not much else)

The leucistic bird lacks melanosomes.

Dr. Shawkey and Dr. Hill found that the quasi-ordering of the spongy medulary layer is what gives the feather its blue color. The keratin rods are arranged such that blue wavelengths of light are reflected while all others are absorbed, in a process call coherent scattering.

Overall, this is called structural color. This is opposite to pigmentation (aka chemical coloration), in which the color is created by pigment (chemical) molecules that you could extract from the feather.

The spongy medulary layer is the "structure of their feathers just causes blue light to reflect off them" from the original tweet. However, the spongy layer needs the dark backing of the melanosomes. If the melanosomes aren't there, you get white, like the leucistic bird.

They found that even though the spongy layer reflects blue light in the leucistic bird, the blue is obscured or drowned out by incoherently (all directions and all wavelengths) scattered light from the vacuole. The melanosomes around the vacuole absorb the incoherently scattered light, which lets the blue and only the blue reflect and be seen.

The white chicken was used as a comparison here to show that the leucistic bird was expected to be white but the chicken is missing the spongy layer so the chicken can only be white.

Hope that all made sense.

Now let me tell you about penguins. (Image below: body [contour] feathers from a penguin. Notice how only the tip of the feather is pigmented. The rest of it is white.]

I researched penguin feather microstructure in grad school. Penguins are so weird, including their feathers.

Check out my paper here

The gist of my paper is penguins have these structures in their feathers call keratin nanofibers. The first paper to discuss these found them in the Little Penguin. (Paper; image below) (The paper's first author is Liliana D'Alba, who is Matt's wife, and was also really helpful in my research. She is an amazing scientist and researcher.)

They found the quasi-ordered nanofibers in the middle of the feather barbs. The nanofibers scatter light to produce blue coloration off the dark backing of black or really dark brown melanosomes (again labeled M).

The nanofibers look kinda similar to the spongy medulary layer of the Stellar's Jay, right? And isn't it cool that there is a dark backing to the blue-light reflecting structures inside the feathers just like the Jay?

For my research, I wondered if the nanofibers would be found in non-blue penguins. 

This is a figure from my paper. These are all non-blue feathers from a Gentoo Penguin. A and B are from the silvery tip of a black contour feather from the Gentoo’s back. C is from an upper tail covert. The nanofibers (f) are there in the middle of the feather, just like they are in the Little Penguin. D and E are the black tip of a black feather from the Gentoo’s head. And it still has the nanofibers!!! I nearly jumped out of my chair when I saw E under the scanning electron microscope for the first time. (scale bars: A-E - 10 microns, E inset - 1 micron)

And you want to know the best part? My coauthors (Matt and Liliana) found the nanofibers in the white feathers of the Gentoo, too! C and D below!! (scale bars - 10 microns)

What we concluded from all of this was that the nanofibers are likely another adaptation to aquatic life. Penguin feathers are already heavily modified for this:

flattened rachises (the main stem of a feather; most birds have rounded rachises)

which allows the feathers to be more densely packed and to lay better on top of one another to basically create a drysuit.

the lack of vacuoles (most birds have large vacuoles inside their feather barbs like the Stellar's Jay and chicken)

this decreases overall buoyancy.

Analogous structures in nature to the nanofibers are parallel cellulose fibers in bamboo and collagen fibers in bone. Both of these help their materials resist buckling failure and cracking.

Since water is a much more abrasive medium for existence than air, we hypothesized the nanofibers are providing anti-buckling and anti-cracking support for the feathers. 

Side note. My paper is also the first on penguin feathers to discover that penguin feather barbs are asymmetrically flattened at the tips and get rounder toward the rachis. In the white barb figure, compare the two light microscope images. The one in B is from the tip of the barb, the one in A is from more toward the rachis. The flattening is very visible in this comparison.

We think this is also a hydrodynamic adaptation. Otters and seals have similar hair flattening, which is not typically seen in terrestrial mammals. The flattened shape of the tip of the feathers may help decrease hydrodynamic drag and turbulence when swimming. 

After I graduated, my coauthors continued to look into other penguins to see if they had nanofibers. Every penguin my coauthors looked at had the nanofibers.

A-E are blue feathers from the Macaroni, Southern Rockhopper, Emperor, King, and Chinstrap. F-I are black feathers from the African, Magellanic, Adelie, and Chinstrap. J is a white feather from the King.

The only penguin feather we couldn’t acquire was from the Yellow-eyed Penguin (endangered). Otherwise, we covered all other extant (living; opposite of extinct) genera of penguins.

It is safe to say all penguins have nanofibers, which means all penguins are blue, and which means many of their extinct relatives likely were, too. Unfortunately, this type of structure doesn’t fossilize. It is too small and delicate. But it would be amazing if we could ever figure out when in time nanofibers first arose.

Did Inkayacu of Peru have them? (36 million years old)

Did Waimanu of New Zealand have them? (61 million years old)

I don’t research anymore, so this is where my research ends. It was so amazing to discover something no one else had found before and add two more things that make penguins so weird.

[writebing]

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