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Yo! A mate of mine is doing a survey for their PHD based on Welsh speakers and the contexts in which they feel comfortable speaking Welsh, I figured I'd send it along as it may be of interest to you and some followers? Diolch yn fawr!

https://forms.office.com/pages/responsepage.aspx?id=VUxHxiOpKk2b1OzjcUjbsislyVxFZm9Asu7rF11HsxRURTVSSjM1QVFZV0NONkIzUElPRFFCNE5WUC4u&web=1&wdLOR=cAA1F7410-25D3-44E5-A145-8E1737F31A54

Oh neat! Yeah I can share this. Diolch am rannu!

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do you have any advice for someone going into writing their bachelor's thesis? I'm having trouble pinning down a topic that seems manageable.

Hello!

This will be highly field dependent, so my advice will be most relevant for social sciences and humanities - anyone from STEM, fell free to chip in as well!

Let's see, if a student came in at office hours and asked me this, I would probably break it down like this :

Get familiar with the expectations

A thesis the first big, semi-independent work you will have to conduct, so it's uncharted territory. Get rid of the anxiety by looking again, and again, and again, at any guidelines set by your course director, school, college. How long is it supposed to be ? Is there a set structure ? Is there a first draft due before the final draft ?

Look at dissertation from previous years! Ideally, find at least 3 so you can have an idea of how diverse the work can be.

2. Talk to your supervisor

And don't bullshit your way into impressing them. If you are absolutely lost - tell them. If you already have an idea - tell them. If you hesitate before three topics - tell them. That first meeting is where you lay down all the ground work. In all likelihood your supervisor barely knows you, so give them something to work with !They want you to do well!

3. Start broad, then narrow it down, narrow it down, narrow it down

"Pinning down a topic" is an iterative process, but the good part is that it's also an introspective one, in my opinion. It's the art of peeling back layers to figure out what, EXACTLY, is it that you want to know.

For example: let's say you want to broadly talk about accessibility in higher education. Ok, great ! But what exactly, is it that makes it interesting to you ? Have a sit down with yourself. Are you wondering how higher education defines disability ? Or is it about how disability impacts entrance into higher education ? Or specifically access to teaching resources ? It could be about the architecture and physical design of campus spaces, or it could be about the lived experience of disabled students ?

Some of these you will not be that interested in, some of them you are interested in but not in an "academic" sense, ... so you can start to narrow it down. Some you may already have a vague answer in your mind, so then you play the three year old toddler with your self, by asking "but why", "but why" until you feel like you have reached the real crux of the issue.

Throughout this process, you can 1) take peaks are the relevant literature to help you move the thought process along and 2) talk with your supervisor so they can steer you in a productive direction.

Because...

4. You are looking for a Good Bachelors Dissertation Now (TM).

Broadly this is what you want to keep in mind :

A good bachelors dissertation for you, with this supervisor is not a good PhD dissertation, not a dissertation that would be great with another supervisor, not a dissertation that doesn't fit your degree... It is good in its context, and that context is :

you + your supervisor + now

Don't feel disappointed or frustrated if you are steered in a slightly different direction - it may be one where your supervisor can actually help you better. Or if you are asked to downscale or scope down: better a narrower dissertation where all is properly covered than a too ambitious one that you will not able to carry out properly give the limits of the format.

Hope that helps!

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Senior woman scholar in my former department is writing a tell-all books about the various problems and abuses that have been going there for years.

Her : "One of the event I raise is when a young female scholar scholar was taken advantage of financially by her male PI, in recent years. So I wanted to make sure that was ok by you". Me: "that's outrageous, that really happened?! I mean yes, you should bring it up, absolutely!" Her: "... That's YOU..?.?? You're the young female scholar..?..??"

Former job so bad that "PI trying to rip me off thousands of euros" does not even make it to the top 5 worst thing that happened there.

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ykw this one actually has rights and is valid, I'll take his croissants😌

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Contrapoints transcripts having emojis in them is so perfect. Someone who does linguistics or communication or something say more about what makes it so good.

Because this:

is so fascinating to read. It's ... more than just a verbatim, yet less than a video ?

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Any Prof relying arguing that AI essays are bad and easily detectable, and then using an AI tool to detect it and trusting that tool is missing some... serious... technology literacy.

I'll be the first one screaming about AI-generated essays and I have done so before, but Uni needs to get its shit together to deal with them properly and avoid stupid mistakes that end up having massive consequences for students.

You don't just rely on AI detection tools (honestly ideally you don't rely on them at all, because they are just not reliable at this point).

You put in place procedures where a lecturer needs to put forward proper elements that support their doubts.

Procedures are fast enough that they do not let the student marinate in a state of unknown.

Procedures are made fair: they are standardised, students are given due information about the policies on use of AI, automated translation, risks and sanctions possible...

Faculty gets trained to understand that international students/non-native speakers may have writing styles that are very different.

Fwiw, I have not heard, at least in my academic circle, of faculty relying just on AI detection tools to bring forward any accusation that a student used AI, but US universities are a whole different breed, so maybe it is more of a problem there. - or maybe it is field dependent.

I hate so much that professors who still can't figure out how to send messages on Zoom think they're capable of spotting AI writing. Professors are just feeding essays into AI detectors with massive fail rates with absolutely zero critical thought about the tools they're using. I moved across state lines. I've spent years of my life trying to get this degree. But at any moment I could be expelled because I got a false positive from a detector that tells you ChatGPT wrote Anna Karenina.

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people who don't follow chess I promise this post is really funny

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I should be allowed to wear a badge that says "This is my [X]th night of insomnia, interact at your own risks". For my sake as much as for others'.

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if i can impart any one piece of wisdom to y’all, it’s to, whenever possible, assume good intentions

assume people are trying their best, want to be good and treat others well, and that when their behavior doesn’t align with those goals, it’s because of outside factors that are pushing them to their limit

it’s hard to do, it doesn’t always come naturally, but it’s worth it

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the chocolate trigger thing is a myth??

Thank you for asking. The short of it is yes.

Chocolate as a posited migraine trigger came out of migraine journal studies. Basically, people suffering from migraine were asked to keep detailed journals of their lives, including what they ate, and this was compiled and trends were picked out.

One thing they found? People often ate chocolate before reporting a migraine attack.

There were two things going on here, though it took years for people to come to this conclusion. The first is that migraine prodrome can include sugar cravings-- so people who were already well on their way to a migraine attack were craving chocolate, ate the chocolate, and then reported the migraine. The second is that stress is a trigger of both migraines AND sugar cravings. Thus for someone had a rough week, the stress induced both a migraine attack and a desire for chocolate.

Later lab studies in which people who suffer migraine were given chocolate, or cocoa, or small doses of caffeine similar to what's found in chocolate, etc etc found that there was ZERO evidence for chocolate triggering a migraine. No component of chocolate triggered a migraine in sensitive people, even people who reported chocolate as a trigger.

So really, eating chocolate is a symptom of migraine, not a trigger of it.

These same food diary studies also led scientists to (briefly) believe that alcohol might PREVENT migraines. Why? People who reported fewer migraine attacks drank more alcohol. The actual finding here? People who have more migraine attacks don't frequently drink alcohol because jfc who wants a drink when they have a migraine (also migraine fucks up social lives). Alcohol, unlike chocolate, DOES trigger migraine attacks.

So these are the kinds of limitations of food diaries when you are trying to figure out what triggers your migraine attacks, and also why doctors emphasizing food triggers, especially chocolate, get a side eye from me.

That said, there is ample evidence that when people feel in control of their health, they tend to feel better. If you believe that chocolate triggers migraine attacks and you feel like limiting chocolate helps you, I'm not going to tell you to stop.

But if your doctor handed you a pamphlet with 20 year out of date information on migraines that included the idea that you had to stop eating chocolate and cheese (no evidence for cheese, either, eat your heart out), I'm here to say your doctor is at least 8 years out of date with the literature.

TLDR; chocolate fine, alcohol bad, doctors lazy, science progresses

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"Detox diets" are for Prometheus and Prometheus only. If you want to claim that you need your lemon-cocumber-water every morning to cleanse your body start by getting the wrath of the gods upon you, you cowards.

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(having mildly hard time drawing) i hate doing this shit i’m never doing it again (having mildly fun time drawing) i love this shit it’s what i was born to do (having mildly hard time drawing) i hate this shi

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I am all for hyping Babel, I really am, I love the shit out of this book, flaws and heavy-handedness and all, I recommend it to everyone.

But also. My hot take is that I don't think it tops The Poppy War. Maybe Babel is technically better (idk, because I idk much about what makes "good"; "technically good" fiction writing), maybe it was just more marketable, maybe it is more mature writing, maybe more people could relate to a Dark academia story, and maybe Babel has a permanent parking spot in my brain.

By The Poppy War bypassed the brain, the heart and the guts and carved itself on my fucking bones. Read it. READ IT.

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How do you take notes when you are researching something? Do you write them down by hand in a notebook? Do you type them up in a document somewhere? How do you organize them? How does it all work?????

excellent question, anon who sent this like 3 months ago. i have traditionally done it one of two ways--when i was reading for my exams i used microsoft onenote and had a notebook for each reading list with every source in a separate "page." which worked okay!

for seminar papers in grad school, and now for discrete projects like articles, solicited chapters, etc., i tend to have a single google doc with all of my research for that particular project--i use the outline pane to move between them since the document becomes very unwieldy, very fast--this is a short example, and the document is 22 pages long.

the benefit of this system is that i can just search my google drive via keyword and find the notes really easily! the downside is that because things are kind of silo'd according to whatever project i first read them for, i don't always remember that they exist when i'm working on something else. and i'm at the point where i've published enough stuff in my little subfield that i really am repeatedly returning to the same sources for different information.

which brings me to zotero :) haven't decided how i feel about taking notes in the app itself--it's not aesthetically super great, but it is functional and i appreciate that you can keep your notes linked with the actual document and that you can also connect each source to related sources/notes/etc. i'm also happy with being able to leave a note to identify why i wanted to read that source in the first place, bc my memory is Real Bad, or to flag chapters that i want to come back to later but don't need to read or take notes on now. example from the top of my zotero library right now:

that first note (highlighted in red) is a reminder of why i saved this book reference--it has a chapter on some inquisitions i think are neat! maybe not for the current project but if i ever come back around... the bottom two sources--"the medieval coroners' rolls" and "an apology"--i have linked together (which you can't see in that screenshot) because, as the note on "an apology" states, it has a ton of corrections to the originally-published footnotes for that article. this is the kind of information that would 1000% get lost if i tried to keep track of it in a google doc, so zotero is winning in this area for sure.

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My favourite kind of academic(-adjacent) books are those that explain in details why numbers are NOT actually, a neutral and totally unbiased thing.

Like sorry dear, but your data comes from somewhere and that somewhere is full of thing you are trying to measure.

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Not being able to participate in a discussion extremely relevant to you without revealing intimate details of your life so you just sit there pretending you don’t understand anything about the topic while your brain turns into a gigantic clenched fist. = akin to torture

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Why are double-spaces such a big deal. Why. Who cares. Give me one (1) good reason I should care about the occasional double-spacing in my writing if it still fits the word/character count WHY DO WE CARE