Cool! I'm listening to Editors right now, and that's as a result of just recently starting to listen to xfm on the internet in my lab! (and I did actually listen to xfm Scotland for a while instead of London - it's nice to hear those Scottish accents...)

"Blood runs through your veins.."

I commute every day (lab-based so working from home not possible) - my morning journey takes 35 minutes - 55 minutes (35 during summer, 55 coming up to Christmas, and 3 hours one day it snowed!), while the evening journey takes ~25 mins. I travel by bus, evening bus is express. I pay £67 for 40 journeys so...£16.75 a week. I've been commuting since I was an undergrad, but Ann's right, the decision is the individual's. I don't want to live at uni, and I don't mind the bus journeys at all, so I'm completely fine with commuting.

PostgradForum Team, can we see the giant snail? I really like snails...they're very cute.

Piglet, "the other day when I was walking backwards"??? Why were you walking backwards?

from right to left: computer, unread library books, CD player, printer, power tool (!), more books, papers and bags of circuit bits - resistors, capacitors etc

Two little corrections (can't let them go) "hope you're not still crying" and "is anyone else as convinced as me? [question]". Thanks katq, I knew it!

Well, it wasn't quite like that, I wasn't blaming the students in my last post. The problem was I couldn't find anything for them to do...anyway, it's all in the past for me.

Is anyone else as convinced as me that the tears on Nothing Compares 2U (think that's how it's written) by Sinead O'Connor are genuine. That video always gets to me.

Maybe this is just my personal problem, if I wasn't cut out for supervision of a student, I shouldn't have taken the studentship on...but I don't really think that supervision of a student should be such a large part of PhD training (going to stop now, I went on for a very long time about this on a message long since deleted and it didn't solve anything)

I had to look after a final year undergrad in my first and second years of PhD in a lab-type situation and it was SOOOO awful (nothing against the students, it was just such a nightmare situation). It meant that two days of every term-time week I didn't want to come to work! (my happiest memory from this period is the day I forgot my lab key )
I can't really go into the details of why it was so bad, too project specific maybe? (and you haven't even started yet), but what it boils down to is the fact that I really felt I was doing my supervisor's job - I had so much responsibility and he didn't even have to be there.
I'm not sure this is a situation you can avoid (must do what your supervisor tells you), but if I'd known what would be required of me and how miserable it would make me I'd probably have rethought the PhD thing.

In return for Thursday {{{{{{DanB}}}}}}...sorry it came a bit too late, hope you're still not crying

hillyg, I'm seriously tempted to contact them and see if they could do one for my field!

The situation was kind of the opposite to the famous case where a physicist (Alan Sokal) published a nonsense article in the journal Social Text. This time, a sociologist called Harry Collins (from Cardiff) answered questions on gravity-wave physics and when his answers were compared to an expert's, a panel of 9 other experts couldn't distinguish between the two (7 were undecided, 2 got it the wrong way round). Collins has been studying (they seem to say studying physicists, not physics) and talking to gravity-wave physicists for over 30 years, and has gained what he calls 'interactional (rather than contributory) expertise' in the field.
SOKAL was impressed, but says that if sociologists want to go deeper and understand how science is influenced by social factors, then they really need to understand the science as well as the experts (i.e. Collins' knowledge isn't enough).
Here's a link you'll be able to follow:
http://www.cf.ac.uk/socsi/expertise

Yeah, can you access it SixKitten? I don't think I should just copy the whole thing here...When I get a minute I'll paraphrase some of it, but I have some work to do now (yes, work!)

Or maybe no-one was interested?!