I can get it. PM email and will send.

I have no experience of this but just wanted to suggest looking into whether your university has a language department which offers translation services as they sometimes do reduced rates for students.

I audited two modules within the department I'm in in my first year and got formal credit in the sense that I could put them down as evidence of training for the upgrade. However another student who wanted to attend a relevant module within a different school was told she would have to pay the full module fee even to audit it (since she was self-funding she declined that generous offer) so that might be a problem if you want to go outside the school your studying in.

Hi Matt
I think your supervisor is wrong about holidays - they provide a necessary break in any job and are not a shameful weakness that you should have to make up for. However, that doesn't help your current situation. I'm afraid my advice would also be to talk to your supervisor but not necessarily to talk about the current set of deadlines (though I don't see why a poster for May needs to be produced 17 days after Easter and maybe that deadline could be moved a bit) but to go in with your own timetable that you think is realistic of when you intend to get future work done. That will hopefully show your sup that you have a plan and may stop them pushing their own deadlines onto you. If they aren't happy with your timetable, it will at least provide a positive basis for discussing a different version so that deadlines don't get sprung on you.

It sounds a stressful situation and I hope you find a route out of it.

======= Date Modified 13 Mar 2012 09:23:00 =======
Hi Natassia
I think what you are suggesting as a topic for your poster sounds fine. It would be worth looking at whether your uni runs training sessions in producing posters, which I've found very useful in the past. The main points of the training I've had were:

to emphasise images and graphical presentation over dense blocks of text or detailed figures (guidelines suggested were 40% graphics, 20% text, 40% empty space),
consider the audience and the level of knowledge they'll have to start with,
look at other posters (around the dept?) to see what works,
make sure the poster is readable from 1m. away with ref to font size and contrast,
and, from my own bitter experience make sure you proof read and proof read again.

Good luck with it. Having never won any poster competition, I've entered I console myself with the thought that its all good experience and exposure.

@Swetcha,
I think its ok to add italics to a quote but you need to say that that is what you've done e.g. "a 'mass psychology'" (emphasis added). Not sure about changing capitals but your approach looks ok. I would leave American spellings as they are, to stay as true as possible to the original.

======= Date Modified 15 Feb 2012 10:06:45 =======
I tend towards feelings of immense gratitude to people who put in refs that explain their statistics rather than just assuming that everyone understands them. Specifically in your case I think you should follow the internal's advice - if your advisor isn't familiar with the stats you are using you might get an examiner who's not familiar with them either and also thinks that a reference is needed, I think at least it does no harm to put in a reference.

ETA. Can you ref a source which both explains the technique and shows its application in your field - that might be used as justification if your more stats-minded examiners don't like the inclusion of a reference.

Thanks for your comments, I’ve written it as you suggested with the annoying new programme as a future revision rather than floundering around trying to fudge a reason.

Can I ask for some advice again?
I have a table assessing 5 computer programmes according to their suitability for carrying out my analysis. None are perfect but one comes out streets ahead of the rest. Unfortunately this is not the programme I used because I only found out it existed two months ago. Should I admit that failing as one of the things I would have done differently in hindsight or should I try to justify why the programme I did use is best (it does have some advantages over no.1 prog) and risk the examiners pointing out that my choice was poor. Or can anyone think of any other way to write this up that minimises the fact that I mucked up?

Thanks for any suggestions.

Least said soonest mended? Pointing out that your sup is being unjust will just agravate the situation and apologising for something that wasn't your fault will just agravate you. I don't see that you have any reason to feel guilty about the situation since you gave your talk on the only available occasion. Presumably your sup was aware that final years give talks - if noone knows about the presentations how do they get an audience, so she could have asked when yours was happening.

I'm aiming for:
Intro 6000
Historic background/key concepts 7000
lit review 1 12000
method 12000
lit review 2 12000
results & discussion totaling 17000 not sure yet how this splits
concl 9000
appendices 3000
Though the chapters I've drafted so far are all running long so this is probably more an indicator of the proportions I'm aiming at than absolute lengths. Thank you for posting this question - on adding up my words to answer I realised that I have more leeway than I thought having excised two irrelevant chapters and not adjusted the word counts accordingly :-)

I'm in a similar position with a friend having made some of my code functional that was running unusably slowly. I've been planning with him just to put him in acknowledgements. He knows this and is happy with it, if the examiners ask I'll tell them specifically which bits he helped with. I think if you want to put in a reference I would put it as a pers. comm. but I don't really see the point of these except as a courtesy since its difficult to follow them up. Could you see what bloke across the hall would prefer?

I'm also stuck on how to reference coding help received from forums and haven't any ideas on that point, particularly when you don't know the real name of the person who has helped you.

======= Date Modified 09 Jan 2012 09:24:45 =======
Hi Natassia,
The problem with the message display happens when a website address or other text without spaces in one of the
messages runs longer than can fit on a single line. If you select and copy the text from the messages into
Word you can read them properly but you need to make sure you only select the text and not the whole cell
or it pastes as a very narrow column.

Good luck with your intro, I haven't started mine yet and I'm not looking forward to it.

I was hoping you wouldn't say that as I'll have to rejig a bit to get the examples in the discussion :$ but it's better to get the feedback now than later on so thank you both for your replies.

Can I ask for your views on a referencing question?

In my lit review I want to show that a particular approach is common in the literature so include three or four references as examples but then only go on to discuss one paper in any detail since with regard to the point I want to make all the examples say the same thing. I do this a few times and I'm not sure if this will be viewed negatively as padding out the bibliography with unnecessary references or whether its a legitimate approach?