Sorry 404 - no prizes for coming second

Well spotted coastman, although the links page has been there since day 1 - feel free to suggest any links you like.

Much as we love to see you all bonding so happily, we strongly advise against posting your personal phone numbers on the internet. We have starred a couple out already but we don't want to get too 'Big Brother' about it, so from now on if you post your number and then decide you want to remove it, please let us know, otherwise we will leave them on.

We do block a number of domain names from advertising on the left hand side. We can only block them if we see the advert, then Google takes a day or two to stop them showing. Mostly we block the 'Life Experience Degrees' stuff, but there's so many of them we keep finding new ones to block.

As for the writing up ads, we're not sure that anyone could really use one for a PhD. For a start the people writing it would need to do a couple of years of research and then you'd have to pay them an extra few quid to go in to the viva for you.

We'll be there in a minute... if there's some sausages cooking?

Hi DJWicked - hope you got our text - last text to your mobile wins

It's at the discretion of the external examiners. Although about 30% of people who start a PhD (or MPhil/PhD) still don't have one after 7 years, only a few people ever actually fail. Most of those who don't finish up with a PhD have dropped out, either at the MPhil stage or just when it all got too much. Others, whilst never dropping out, never got round to writing up.

For those who fall at the viva stage rather than being 'failed' they can be asked to resubmit their thesis - this can involve re-writing anything from a single chapter to virtually the whole thing. Another alternative open to the examiners if they feel the work carried out is not sufficiently novel or does not make enough of a contribution to knowledge is to award an MPhil.

HEFCE figures show that after 7 years 5% of full time students will have been awarded an MPhil & not a PhD - most of these will have stopped at the MPhil stage after only 1 or 2 years of study.

No sooner said than done - OK under an hour, but we didn't get in 'till 10 and then we had to have a cup of coffee and feed the fish.

Don't forget you can always search through the threads to find the ones you're interested in. Alternatively, look in the individual thread categories, this should thin out some of DanB's advice frenzy.

The European Commission are conducting a brief survey on income of researchers across Europe, which includes research students and post docs. The survey is available in several languages just follow the link below.

www.carsa.es/research/InitialEmail.htm

Sorry, he went for lunch. He's back on fax duty now.

We are sorry to inform you that following an unfortunate accident with the fax machine, Freddy now has significantly less wool then he did 5 minutes ago. It's June now anyway, so he didn't need it all.

We have a very busy office - everyone has to pull their weight, even the sheep. He's busy sending faxes today.

It's grass. Sheep normally stand on grass.

No that wasn't one of our arms. We make sure we look after all our animals properly with love and care, so we've employed a sheep farmer to tend to Freddie. It was his arm you saw.

That's what colour sheep are after they've been sheared, or when they've just been born, like Freddie.