Hi Natassia

I've been really enjoying spending less money lately and it hasn't been at all bleak. And this is coming from someone who earned quite well until I gave up full-time work for my MSc!

I was really inspired by a book by Kath Kelly called 'How I lived a year on a pound a day'. You can prob get it second-hand off Amazon for a snip. What was different about reading this book from just being handed a load of money-off coupons for the local supermarket? Well, in the book you get a real feeling for how you can have a happy life while spending very little just by being resourceful... it almost becomes like a game and you start thinking of people that are spending a lot as real suckers.

Admittedly, very few of us could spend as little as Kath Kelly... she seems to be utterly happy to attend ANY free public lecture where there are wine and nibbles, whereas I'd rather concentrate my time on stuff that I really really am interested in. I am in no way aiming to only live on a quid a day, but I am aiming to avoid paying out when I don't have to.

What happens when you start spending less is that it then becomes part of your everyday mindset in a nice way... for instance, one evening last week I decided I had to have some green olives with my dinner. So I went to our local Turkish grocer.... but I only had a pound on me, so I decided I couldn't spend more than that. Turned out the jars of green olives were all £1.29... curses. But my mindset of "I'm not paying that" meant that I just kept picking up different jars hopefully. As luck would have it, one of the jars had an older price-tag on it which hadn't been updated... 89p! Obviously this is a ridiculous example, but without my new determination to spend less I would never have persisted for long enough to find the cheap jar.

I also get certain toiletries in Poundland... e.g. Neutrogena and Herbal Essences shampoos. Well known brands. Living more cheaply doesn't mean giving up all little luxuries, it just means that you channel your resources towards stuff that really does make you happy (e.g. your horse) while economising on all the nondescript stuff that doesn't really matter.

Oh - a good recipe book with quite a lot of delicious yet frugal meals is by Lindsey Bareham... old title is A Wolf In the Kitchen. Think it's got a new title but I can't remember what it is. Probably available second-hand on Amazon.

Car boot sales! If you have clothes, books, DVDs, anything that you don't really need or use then why not do a car boot sale with a friend and MAKE some extra money? This can be hilarious! You can get a wallpaper table from Argos for a tenner for your 'stall', and away you go....

Also, enter free ticket giveaways in newspapers... I got 2 free tickets recently to see The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo... completely free!

Oh, and above all, try to avoid being lonely. I know academic life can mean we spend a lot of time alone, but I find I spend more money when I'm lonely to cheer myself up. If you can befriend other people with frugal but interesting lifestyles, like other students or artistic people or whoever, then there's not that sense of having to keep up with the Joneses that you get when hanging round with wealthy friends.

Apologies for the long post, but I have been pondering on this lots lately. Good Luck!

Hi Pjlu - thanks for the further advice. It says you posted 7 hours ago and you were having a glass of wine... are you in the UK?!?

Yes, I'm changing the subject onto more benign things now. Lectures have more or less ended so I won't even see her weekly now. Should be able to keep it under wraps. I think that she is going to go far, even without my twopenn'orth. She is talented and confident... although interestingly her fatal flaw is that she likes earning good money in her day job... that alone might keep her away from a PhD.

I will indicate to her if asked some very basic sense of unexpected findings in the data. But any patterns I discern therein via my own blood, sweat and tears will remain a secret between me and my sup I think.

Hope the anti-bullying measures went well! You've certainly stood up for me! (up)

Thanks for responses. Luckily I haven't done much of my analysis yet, so I haven't even known enough to give her any good tips. I think there is something to be said for giving her an overview of the kinds of anomalies we have found in the data. We are friends and her supervisor is likely to find out from my supervisor anyway.

But I think I'm going to draw the line at telling her specific details of the results, or including her in my deeper musings on the matter. That will involve me looking very carefully at my own experiment, and although she shares a methodology, she is showing participants very different stimuli to mine. The cause of my results could be something other than the methodology, anyway. We just don't know yet.

When all's said and done, I think that she's very talented and likely to get publications quite easily anyway (she got one from her undergrad work). I am newer to science than she is, and am a mixture of (debatably) less talented, certainly less experienced, and certainly less confident. But I do plan to let these null results influence my critical thinking... just don't want my diffidence and her opportunism to work against me.

I suspect she'll go on badgering me for a bit to reveal all, anyway. Might have to emigrate to avoid her. They say Canada's nice... :p

I have recently finished collecting data for my MSc dissertation. Having eyeballed the data and done a very swift first pass at the statistical analysis, it looks like there is a null result. My supervisor agrees, and we are going to look at the data again to see what patterns we CAN discern, possibly omitting some of the more ambiguous data, etc. I want to get it in for September, so I have plenty of time for a decent writeup. It's disappointing to get null results, and I don't know if it's a methodological flaw yet, or something else going on.

A friend of mine on the course has also used a very similar methodology for her dissertation, but she is likely (because of paid job pressures) to use the extension given to part-time students which means she'll hand it in six months after me (April 2011). Therefore she hasn't even started to collect her data. I too am a part-time student, but my paid job is far less pressurised than hers so I will get it in by the first deadline this autumn.

This friend is lovely, kind, yet disturbingly ambitious and confident and a bit of a magpie. I sometimes feel (possibly paranoia) that she feeds very strongly off our discussions and would not have decided on her current dissertation methodology if it hadn't been for our chats about an interesting phenomenon in our discipline.

She now knows I have all my data and am beginning to analyse it. I have vaguely indicated to her that the methodology used has produced a few strange patterns that we didn't predict and I said I planned to think it through as it might be telling me something interesting. She has asked me if when I do think it through, can she be present, as it will influence how she uses that particular methodology in her dissertation.

On one hand, an intellectual discussion between equals about the shortcomings of a particular methodology and possible improvements is a glorious thing. On the other hand (and this is where the intellectual stinginess comes in), something in me doesn't want her to profit by learning from the mistakes I've made. I want her to experience it for herself, rather than to hand in her work 6 months after mine with a vastly improved methodology.

Am I being mean? Are we scientific collaborators for the greater long-term good? Or are we competitors, each eager to get better marks than the other? Shall I tell her everything? Or shall I hide all aspects of my results and discussion from her for the next 12 months?



:$

I agree - I think what you have done is absolutely fine. You have formed a small academic and personal connection with this gentleman and you are keeping in touch as he told you to do.

Well done!

Thanks very much, Blue... I imagine EXP stands for exponential or something like that?

Nice to know I remembered the bouncing decimal point from Mrs Courtney's maths lessons of yore...

Thanks very much!

Attention Maths-Heads!

I'm calculating some geometric means of different pairs of numbers. The one I've just done gives a readout on the calculator screen of:

3.283991735373e-4

Does the e-4 bit on the end of the number basically mean that the number is far too long to fit on the screen so there is an error (e), and the -4 bit indicates that to get the real answer (which I am expecting to be very small) I have to move the decimal point 4 places to the left?

So it would end up as 0.000328

(I am wanting it to 6 decimal places)

Have I understood things correctly?

By the way, how do you give other users stars for helpfulness? Wanted to earlier today and didn't seem to have the function available...


(up)(sprout)(up)

It is good to have been invited to the meeting as you only really learn about it by word of mouth. I was invited by an ex-supervisor of mine who was running it at the time, but I have this paranoia that he only invited me cos he finds me entertaining in the pub afterwards!

The multidisciplinary nature of the meeting DOES sometimes make things harder as people often disagree with the research methods used by the other fields. We are actually united by a common theoretical framework though.

I hope to be able to utter a constructive sentence at the meeting in approximately 4-6 years' time! Seriously, however, the advice from one of you (can't see your frigging names while typing this - think was perhaps Jepson) to say one of my tentative thoughts early before the vultures set in is probably a very good idea and I think I will try that. Some of the ideas I have are actually said by the clever people but I don't say them because I think they might be stupid. And a lot of the ideas I have are rubbish too. That's ideas for you - they come with no initial quality control!

It feels like a real leap of faith to apply for PhD - I have an interested sup and we will be applying for funding together, while I continue to sniff around for others in case it doesn't work. But I suppose I must take the leap and assume that years of practice will improve my understanding in some way. (up)

So I belong to this sort of multidisciplinary discussion group that meets weekly. Someone from the group submits a piece of research they're working on at the moment and the others critique it. Thing is, I can't always find anything to critique about the paper. I'm an MSc student still and a lot of this stuff is written by people way ahead of me, as the group is composed of people at my level right up to well established academics. So some weeks I remain completely silent, as I can't find anything wrong with their work. Other weeks I can begin to grasp what the problems might be, but I can rarely phrase it as well as the more established people, so I'm lucky if I can utter a sentence.

I'm very pleased that I'm even invited to the group, but I wonder often if I will ever be as astute as the established academics. How do you know whether your own apparent stupidity and dumbfoundedness is simply a matter of lack of experience, or actual lack of ability? I'm doing well mostly at my MSc, but is there any way of gauging one's ability prior to getting embroiled in a PhD? Or is it just a simple matter of taking the risk and hard graft improving one's ability? I wish I could go back in time and see these established people when they were at my level... or maybe they were incredible even then....

Anyway, I'm rambling, but does anyone get what I mean?!?

Oh, that's a snip for so many gigs, Wal. I will check them out!

I just looked at the Dropbox website to investigate online backups. They give you up to 2 GBs free, then they start charging... how much is 2 GBs in layman's terms?

What's this I've heard about the whole +3 or 1+3 thing changing with how the ESRC give out funding? My potential supervisor said the other day that it's going to change from next year and institutions will be either designated Research Centres or Research Units and.... blah, blah (this is where I could have done with listening to her better but I was smarting from her criticism of my current dissertation...)

What on earth was she on about? :p

Hey Natassia

I could very well end up in a similar position... thought I could try for a Distinction, but think I've blundered in my dissertation (see my haunted posts from earlier this week!), so a Merit might be more likely now. I think the thing for both of us is to produce a sh*t-hot research proposal for our PhDs. We are both liked by potential supervisors, so let's go forward positively!

Avanti!

(up)

I've already got 44 males actually. So since I first posted today I got another 3. My goal is to get up to 60 so I've got the same number as the female sample. Therefore just 16 needed now! Thing is they have to come and look at stimuli on the computer as well as answer questionnaires - it takes 20 mins on average: longer for slow readers and shorter for those who just give the same response to every question. So it's not the kind of thing I can drag them into after a lecture.

But have just been to see my supervisor and he says we can perhaps pay the rest of them to participate, as we have a teeny budget. Perhaps a fiver each! Only prob would be is a riot breaking out if my previous participants find out people are now getting PAID to take part, rather than just getting measly course credit, my warm thanks, or the opportunity to see inside a rather bleak psych lab. Whadd'ya do?


:p