I'm not sure which aspects of psychology you are particular interested in. But i was emailed about funding available for one of the MScs at York, which might be of interest to you:

http://www.york.ac.uk/psychology/prospective/postgraduate/taught/cns/

I believe York has a good reputation for Psychology. But as i'm not in that exact area i'm afraid I don't know much about other universities.

Thanks. I'm glad other people agree with me rather than stupid Word :-)

It's that tricky moment when the computer doubts you, which causes you to doubt yourself and there are no humans around that you trust to check it! It's good to know there are helpful humans on this forum :-)

Congrats :-)

I would advise trying to find any opportunity to practice giving your presentation to a real audience.

Before i went to my first conference, I booked myself into a seminar slot for my research group so that i could practise the presentation. I gave them an extended version of my conference presentation (i had an hour with them, but only 15 mins at the conference) and i found this really helped. Particularly as my research group are always fairly tough on internal speakers, much moreso than they are on the external ones! This meant, i had to consider some tough questions on the spot.

Because of this, I found that in the actual conference, it was much easier to present as i'd already done it once, and also one of the same tough questions came up, but i already had an answer prepared.

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Hi,

I'm trying to write something that needs to be submitted today, and i'm getting annoying "Fragment consider revising" errors from Word. Now, i'm not sure that i agree with word... but I would like some feedback from real people before i decide to ignore this particular suggested revision.

So, is this a sentence? Or a fragment? (Also, i know "we" isn't ideal, but this is just an application to attend a student consortium, so in this context it's ok).

We argue that the AI community’s research agenda should evolve to include e-type objectives.

(AI and e-type to retain some sense of anonymity)....

If it's a fragment and I should revise it, could someone please help me to do so?

Thanks in advance,
FP

P.S. Actually, I've now removed that sentence as I have found a better way of putting it. However, I would still like to know if this really is a fragment, or if Word is stressing me out unnecessarily?

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I'm not sure if there's a way you can do it in SPSS... but there certainly is in Excel, using the CONCATENATE function (http://spreadsheets.about.com/od/excelfunctions/qt/07-concatenate.htm)

I normally arrange all my data in Excel precisely how i want it in SPSS and then open the .xls file through SPSS (if that makes sense) as i tend to find SPSS doesn't do most of the things i want. Also, doing it this way, SPSS won't override the data in your .xls file so you can always reopen your original dataset if SPSS has a paddy (which i find it does sometimes).

Afraid i don't know what commute variables means... However, a quick google finds this: http://www.slideshare.net/ay17071951/using-spss-tranform-variable-compute-presentation which might help you do it within SPSS itself.... but i'm not sure. I think it takes "compute" to mean "do computations on" rather than just a simple text transform.

======= Date Modified 01 Feb 2012 19:17:02 =======
Disclaimer: Massive over-simpliication coming... but arguably science is the process of doing research, but engineering is about building things. So, if you're proposal isn't sciencey enough it might be because you are proposing to implement/design a system that is a solution to a problem, rather than researching what the problem is?

Science requires theories based on literature, hypotheses, experimentation, results followed by analysis. Are you proposing to do this? Or are you just proposing to implement a system? If so, one way to make it more scientific is to establish how you are going to evaluate the system and establish if it meets a set of criteria?

That does help actually. I think i'm probably worrying about something unnecessary at this point. I should really be focusing on getting this blaming thing written in any sort of voice, passive or not, before i can go for christmas. Rather than correctly something that already makes sense to me :-)

I guess my only concern is that my sup has never really read anything i've written before properly, so not sure it would come up. But meh. Wait and see.

Focus now. Must focus.

The passive versus active voice thing is something i have only recently become aware of - it seems that i predominantly use the passive voice which, evidently, is not ideal. I'm a bit of a grammar pleb, so it's not surprising i fall into this trap. But it's very annoying... (almost as annoying as the fact that my research is about affecting affect and the effect that something has on affect. Grammar fail).

Am i the only one who uses passive voice a lot? Particularly when discussing previous work in the lit review? I swear, almost every sentence appears to be passive rather than active. And how bad do you think this is?

I recently had a book chapter accepted (before i knew about the passive/active thing) and no one mentioned it to me - in fact, it was accepted without revisions. Though, i'm now concerned because my sup didn't read the paper before it went in and given it was accepted without revisions, didn't feel a need to look at it afterwards either.

My concerns here aren't because i've been told it's bad by my sup - but because i've found things on the internet about it - Word flagged up a couple of instances of it, so i did further research and now i'm massively worried...

Please, calm my nerves! I hate grammar. A lot. :-s

I'm planning on taking 2 weeks off. I have no intention on doing work between Saturday this week and Sunday the 1st. However, this is all somewhat dependent upon me submitting a big piece of work on Friday.... Fingers crossed!

I'm a perma-single living with a guy i don't really get on with.

I have a good social life and lots of friends here, but at the end of the day, i go home to my flat alone. At least i did.. until i got two kittens. And now, i'm NEVER alone and there's always at least one (usually two) excited little kitty-cats waiting for me when i get home.

It turns out that Kittens >>> People :-)

(though they can be distracting too... i have been late for work on a few occasions because we were playing... whoops.)

Firstly, i'm very sorry for your sad news. I don't have any particular advice for you, but just wanted to let you know that i am currently going through something similar - i found out about a month ago that my dad also has cancer, he's a very private man so is refusing to state whether it's terminal or not in categorical language. In fact, he's acting like nothing's wrong, but every time i speak to him i get more info and the outcome looks bleaker. When he first discussed it with me it was 1 slow-growing tumour that was inoperable but now it's multiple aggressive tumours throughout his body that are inoperable, so outlook isn't great i don't think.

I'm just over 1 year and 2 months into my PhD and at the moment, i've just been throwing myself into work, teaching and partying as a distraction, which is not necessarily the healthiest way to deal with things. But i guess i'm very much in denial, the reality really hasn't hit me. I mean, our parents are supposed to be invincible right?

Personally, i can't consider going part time as i need the full funding to live on. But I am lucky enough to be able to work remotely apart from when i'm running an experiment, so plan to share caring for my dad (he lives alone) with my bro so that i can work on writing/reading/planning/analysis etc at the start of the week from his place and run experiments and uni-based things towards the end of the week. At least, that's the plan. We'll see how it all turns out...

So, i have no particular advice for you. But if you want to PM me then we could talk in more detail as i guess we're going through fairly similar thoughts about guilt for not working if spending time with him, and guilt for not spending time with him because we're working. But equally, if that doesn't appeal then no worries. I have been advised to talk to the people at Macmillan which i am hoping to organise soon as apparently they give good support to family.

======= Date Modified 01 Dec 2011 19:51:32 =======

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I got ENFP. Though i am a perfectionist so that does surprise me a bit. And i'm a scientist. I guess that means i'm a little bit odd! Though on that test i got very Extravert (not really a surprise) but only moderately for the others.

Hmz. Any other ENFPs out there in academia?

(@ Sneaks... i think you just described me. Though i'm not sure i'd call myself a show off... doesn't mean others wouldn't though :-p I know my outgoing, chattiness irritates some of my colleagues. But meh. And I tend to enjoy the teaching/presenting element of the work more than the research. So i guess that kinda fits!)

Done.

But one of the questions said "if no then XXX" i clicked on Yes with prev question but was forced to put an answer in even though i hadn't selected no...

I'm the other way round to most people here... i use EndNote because i haven't forgiven Mendeley for crashing on me in my MEng dissertation! Hehe.

Though i do miss the "search pdf" feature of Mendeley. Sigh. I know you all say EndNote is expensive, but at my uni you can get a copy for £5 from the IT services people - you get a new licence for free each year. For £5 i find that having a commercially viable product means there is money involved in the development, which to me, makes it more stable. There are a few minor irritants with it though, i'll admit that. None of the available referencing solutions do everything i want of them!