Many weeks and 3299 words later and my essay on Northern Ireland is done!  I won’t lie, it was bloody difficult.  It seemed so easy on the surface, an analysis of what sustained the conflict and how it affected the eventual outcome but when I got into the bowels of the literature it became complex.  I got involved in rival analyses, outdated arguments and contemporary reasoning to come up with something that I’m fairly happy with.  It felt really contrived to begin with but once I had the bare bones laid down I was able to go back and fix it.

I won’t bore you with my answer or my own personal analysis, you probably don’t care.  However, it’s a landmark for me.  My first piece of work submitted in this MA Irish Politics course.  My research has begun for my dissertation and I’m hoping to hear back from my supervisor sometime soon.  I have good ideas I think and I just need a push in the right direction and possibly some advice on how to avoid the pitfalls and stay on the interesting and scholarly side of the debate.  I’ll leave that for another post I think but for now, the bloody act is done!

Handout produced for the work in progress seminar handout

This also acts like a brief summary of my chapter formation and structure.

After spending a portion of the night awake, I finally went back to sleep for what felt like half an hour. I had to get up, get Andrew ready for school and put him on the bus so by then I’d already had my requisite 2 cups of coffee…and so I went to work.

I found a dissertation that will shed light upon my topic and am chomping at the bit to get an interlibrary loan copy. I have tried to find the author through normal search engine means and since I’ve failed there I might have to contact the University. What’s interesting to me is this University’s program was a very, very close second choice – and only because of geography and the need to travel. Anyhoo, I’m looking forward to in one way or another connect with the author of the dissertation I desperately need and perhaps hearing what she has to say about her research. (It’s the small things in life that I dig!)

Got a little work done so I feel somewhat productive. However, I didn’t talk with my advisor which must occur tomorrow. I have questions and she has answers. Additionally, the deadline to schedule my GPHR exam is closing in. Ugh! Now where would I be if I weren’t indestructible?

I am looking forward to being on campus next week. I feel like I could be there all week, every week, and never waste a minute. My current situation with library availability is OK; but I see the need to be on campus a lot more in the very near future. Oh the guilt.

And with that I will close. See ya tomorrow!

Clearly I have not poured my heart and soul into this InaDWriMo thing.  Shocking, I know.  The sad thing is, the concept is truly a great motivator and under different circumstances I might have been more successful.

Between the job market, grading, the holiday, and now being sick, I don’t even have the energy to feel guilty about not reaching my goal.  Tomorrow will be more productive, hopefully.  At this point, though, I’d rather chew off my own arm than sit down to write.  That sounds overly dramatic, but it is true.  One lesson to be learned, though, is that there are good writing days and bad writing days, so when I have a bad writing day (or week…) I can rest assured that a good day will come along soon.  This process is all about baby steps.

I will post tomorrow about the final word count, so goodnight and sweet dreams to you all.  I have a date with a hot bath and some NyQuil.

3014828    วิทยานิพนธ์    Dissertation

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I have three months left before I have to turn in my PhD, which of course means that all I am doing at the moment is writing and working on my dissertation. Being in this state of mind has made me think about all the different metaphors one could use to describe what this last phase of the PhD process is like.

I think for me – at least at the moment – writing a PhD thesis is like completing a jigsaw puzzle. Sometimes you have only four pieces and other times 4000 pieces to fit together.

Another, and not necessarily optimistic, metaphor could be viewing the process as a train ride. Normally it goes fast, sometimes there are delays – and you just hope it doesn’t crash!

What is the PhD process like for you? Can you come up with other eloquent metaphors?

Writing a dissertation abstract is agonizing. One hundred twenty words. And each version I write makes less sense than the version that came before.

Many generations later, my abstract reads like the Hapsburg gene pool – slovenly, dim-witted, entitled.

By contrast, last night’s photo shoot at the Hockaday-Mason residence was inspired, sharp, and rather accidental. Those photos were gorgeous and will be gladly posted soon.

They were also abstract and of fewer than one hundred twenty words.

It’s the day after Thanksgiving and I am hungover from too much food like everyone else who were fortunate enough to have too much too eat. But now it’s back to business.  I am intent on clearing my mind of the stupid petty family drama that is inhabiting my head and making me emotional. It will wait. Meanwhile I will continue to try to pretend to be engaged with the rest of the world, despite my need to hole up in a cabin for at least one solid week with little to no contact with the outside world. Why is it that I cannot just do that? Why is it that I feel like I have to [awkwardly] attempt to explain this to my family? I guess it is beside the point.

The quest for KM and how it might relate to my dissertation is crystallizing a bit. I believe I now have a framework for an argument of why the topic is important to student. I also believe I can tie the whole introduction and lit review into my paper for the incomplete I am carrying and need to exorcise before the end of the semester. I have made good use of the flip chart in my office and have broken down my argument into a number of points that support my conclusion. Hopefully this will provide a bit of a roadmap for me to build upon. By the end of this weekend I want to have something really solid “on paper” to use as a conversation starter with my chair.

The whole process of getting to synthesis is amazing. I will analyze it later. But for now I will just state that it is consuming. Overwhelming. Intrusive and somewhat destructive if not managed. Here’s to damage control!

3020828    วิทยานิพนธ์    Dissertation

(Students prepare and must successfully defend a thesis using data from clinical, laboratory or community materials collected prospectively. The thesis must have clear indication of new knowledge, innovative ideas or critical and novel appraisal of evidence.)

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Firstly , my parents have successfully flown to Saudi Arabia for Hajj (muslims’ pilgrimmage) on Sunday 15th of November and they are doing well.
As a consequence, I am now the temporary chief of the house This directly translates into: I can cook whatever I want!

The other great thing: I got my MSc dissertation result. 84%! Thus another milestone has been reached and successfully jumped over I wish to seize this opportunity to thank God and EVERYBODY (even those who are sure they have not helped me…but trust me, you all have, unknowingly :p). I am now looking forward for my PhD which I am planning to start next year. (If you are an academic and you have funds for a project related to Computer science – Web Science -Social Computing, do get in touch ).

And another good news: a new experimental blog from the presidential media department: webnewsmoris (web news for mauritius) http://webnewsmoris.wordpress.com aimed at delivering news about blogs, twitter and other places on the web by fellow mauritians in the mauritian local dialect (creole) was launched. Despite a small controversy over the content of one of its post, the new blog has been largely accepted as a first of its kind among mauritian blogs and the experiment was a success. From the response of readers, we have positively identified a demand for such type of news collected from grass-root Mauritian Web users. Unfortunately this positive experience could not be sustained for a longer time period due to a lack of personnel and the time-commitment required. However we are open to suggestions and are willing to recruit volunteers to work on webnewsmoris.

Hope you are all preparing yourself for the year 2010 which will be indeed a challenging one for many among us. Enjoy yourself guyz!

It truly has been a long day. Woke up at 8am this morning to go to Oak Farm School for more recruiting. Bus was late, so didn’t even get there until 9.45am, actually met my colleague Silvan on the bus haha, so yeah we were both late. It was a slow morning there, well for us anyways, by the time we got there we had missed a lot of the mothers already, but we still managed to get 7 names so i guess it wasn’t too bad. When the session finally ended, we had to ctch the bus again to get back to uni, as we were approaching the gate we saw the bus approaching so we started to walk faster but we realised it had already passed the bus stop, then one of the most hilarious things happened (according to Silvan anyways…) i saw another U2 coming around the corner and shouted out “that one!” whilst pointing at it, then we both ran as fast as we could to the bus stop, now that i type it out it doesn’t seem as funny, but at the time we both burst out into a fit of laughter once we got on the bus lol.

Anyways, we got back and Silvan headed to the lab to put the names into the database and i went back to my halls to eat lunch. Since Silvan had a lecture at 1pm, i said i would go in around 1pm and call up the mothers etc., and asked my other colleague Tarana to go to the afternoon session at the health centre. I ended up staying in the lab/office for 3 hours just calling up mothers and trying to book them in and also trying to get parking permits. This actually feels like a job without the perks of actual pay. Its just so tiring and unfulfilling, i think its because i mostly resent that our supervisor(s) is making us do all the work for THEIR research grant. They expect us to do everything, but we don’t always have the tools to do so. We would be so much more efficient if they just gave us all the info we need to do things and gave us access to everything. Having to email/contact them for little things is tiring, especially waiting for a reply from them. I really hope things get better soon, like once the experiments start running smoothly etc. cos right now i really don’t feel motivated at all about this dissertation. its just too draining, all this work and its only the beginning of things. I really think i’m coming to the end of my tether, and the fact that i also have to do two essays for the end of term is really stressing me out. Its like i haven’t had proper sleep in the past month. Haii~

Anyways, as i was finishing up in the office, got a call from my mum asking me if i wanted to come home tonight or tomorrow, since tomorrow’s lecture has been cancelled. My original plan was to do some of my essay tonight then get some proper sleep and have a lie-in tomorrow and then work on my essay all day and get picked up at night. But when my mum called, she also mentioned that my grandma and cousin were at our house, visiting my grandma. I ended up deciding to go home tonight, i just felt like i really needed to be home and in my own bed after an exhausting wednesday and thursday, and i felt like i needed to get out of Brunel.

So after finishing up i quickly popped into the campus store to get a few things, then headed back to my room and quickly vacuumed the floor then washed my hair and packed my stuff ready to go home. When my mum got here, my grandma and cousin came with her and we decided to go eat dinner at Nandos. It was a nice end to an otherwise extremely draining day.

♥ Veronica ~x

I have now submitted my final copy of my outline to Brian Windram. I now have a solid plan of how I am going to continue in the next few months with my dissertation. I am now going to select the companies that I want to use in my disclosure evaluation. I need to select 5 companies from the oil and gas sector and 5 companies from the retail sector. I then need to send away for the annual reports from these 10 companies.

My plan for after my final exam on the 15th december is to complete my introduction and evaluate the 10 annual reports using my disclosure index that I need to design.

3102826    วิทยานิพนธ์    Dissertation

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3102828    วิทยานิพนธ์    Dissertation

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3102830    วิทยานิพนธ์    Dissertation

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3102894    สัมมนาวิทยานิพนธ์ระดับดุษฎีบัณฑิต    Doctoral Dissertation Seminar

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Von der Fakultät Bauingenieurwesen der Technischen Universität Dresden zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades eines Doktor-Ingenieur (Dr.-Ing.) genehmigte Dissertation von
MIKE RICHTER
aus Strießen

Hauptberichter: Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil. Bernd W. Zastrau
Mitberichter: Prof. Dr.-Ing. Harald Schorn
Mitberichter: Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil. Reinhold Kienzler

Tag der mündlichen Prüfung: 04. Februar 2005
Berichte des Instituts für Mechanik und Flächentragwerke
Heft 2 (2005)

Herausgeber:
Technische Universität Dresden
Fakultät Bauingenieurwesen
Institut für Mechanik und Flächentragwerke
Dipl.-Ing. Mike Richter
D-01062 Dresden
Telefon: (0351) 463 35369
Fax: (0351) 463 37200
E-mail: Mike.Richter2@mailbox.tu-dresden.de

Zusammenfassung:

Gegenstand dieser Arbeit ist die Entwicklung mechanischer Modelle auf der Mesoebene zur analytischen Beschreibung des makroskopischen Materialverhaltens von textilbewehrtem Feinbeton.

Für die Modellierung der heterogenen Struktur wird das Konzept der repräsentativen Volumenelemente (RVE), die für die Mesostruktur des betrachteten Verbundwerkstoffes repräsentativ sind, verwendet. Der Übergang von dem heterogenen Materialverhalten auf der Mesoebene zum mittleren Materialverhalten auf der Makroebene erfolgt mittels Homogenisierung.

Auf Basis der mikromechanischen Grundlösung für ellipsoidförmige Einschlüsse nach ESHELBY wird ein Modell entwickelt, das die Ermittlung des Materialverhaltens von multidirektional bewehrtem Feinbeton ermöglicht. Durch die Anwendung einer Effektive-Feld-Theorie wird die gegenseitige Beeinflussung der unterschiedlich orientierten Bewehrungen in einem gemittelten Sinn betrachtet. Die ab einer bestimmten makroskopischen Beanspruchung entstehenden Mikrorisse berücksichtigt das mechanische Modell über einen durch die Mikrorisse hervorgerufenen zusätzlichen Verzerrungsanteil im RVE. Mittels der verwendeten Effektive-Feld-Theorie kann eine mittlere Beeinflussung zwischen den Mikrorissen und der Rovingbewehrung erfasst werden. Für den Übergang von der Mikrorissbildung zur Makrorissbildung wird für das mechanische Modell der Begriff einer maximalen Mikrorissdichte eingeführt.

Überschreitet die Mikrorissdichte im RVE diesen maximalen Wert, vereinigen sich die Mikrorisse zu Makrorissen. Zur Beschreibung des mechanischen Verbundverhaltens zwischen Roving und Matrix beim Rovingauszug am Makroriss wird eine multilineare Schubspannungs-Schlupf-Beziehung verwendet, welche die Schädigung des Roving-Matrix-Verbundes bis hin zum vollständigen Versagen erfasst. Damit lassen sich experimentell ermittelte Kraft-Verformungskurven an Zugproben wirklichkeitsnah abbilden. [...]

Der Volltext dieser Dissertation  (2005) ist nachfolgend als Pdf-Dokument abrufbar (209 Seiten, externer Link)

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I finally had a decent conversation with my chair yesterday. She was away from the office and very relaxed with no distractions. After I exposed what my lit review strategy had been thus far and confessed that I simply didn’t know if I was approaching it correctly, my chair said I am doing all of the right things. She also said that once I get a prospectus and fully develop my research question that the rest of my dissertation is going to go very quickly. Oh good. There is hope.

Right now I’m tossing around the idea that there is a lot of tacit knowledge floating around professional organizations such as the one I am interested in. The question of how to harness and later leverage that knowledge is worth exploring; especially as it relates to the specific training needs of the organization. The people who have conducted the training for several years have lots of tacit knowledge that isn’t formalized. The trainers desire that the knowledge be formalized in the form of taking the F2F training to CBT. They also want to ramp up the quality of the training as well.

So the big question is whether or not a knowledge management framework (or model) can be applied to the problem at hand (taking F2F training to CBT) to capture some of the tacit knowledge, formalize it and facilitate maintenance of said knowledge in the future. What am I looking for? Before I figure out what I’m looking for I need to identify KM frameworks or models.

Two tasks for today:

1. Finish third level of literature review and ID/request any dissertations that match what I’m looking for
2. ID KM frameworks/models

If I can accomplish those two tasks then I can begin to write something up on Friday. Since tomorrow is Thanksgiving I doubt I will get anything accomplished. I’ve already got 4 teenages boys in the basement for a sleepover, a husband who (for whatever reason) didn’t sleep last night and is cranky and a 6 y/o who is just looking for something to do. I may have to go to the library. ugh.