arbitrary constant — relaunched

Whilst the PhD Diary languishes unfinished, the main arbitrary constant site has been given a fresh lick of paint and relaunched.

If anybody visiting the PhD Diary is interested in film, literature, politics, photography and other things besides, then, please visit arbitrary constant.

Update

I know, I know.

All I'm going to say is that my studies are nearly officially over — I started a job way back in June but my viva is on Tuesday. The plan is to finish off this diary retrospectively so that by Christmas it is a complete record of my time as a postgraduate student.

To that effect, please accept my apologies for the prolonged silence — and keep 'em peeled for updates in the next week or two.

Contribution to knowledge

These three words are what will ultimately decide whether or not you get awarded your PhD/EngD. In your final viva, your examiners will require you to prove that the work you have done as part of your postgraduate studies has made this much-vaunted contribution to knowledge. Undertaking training then on a piece of equipment, principally designed to solve an ‘industrial problem’, means you have to look for the academic angle. Perhaps the biggest danger associated with the EngD, an industrially based form of postgraduate study, is that you spend the four years “working” as opposed to researching. If you can’t demonstrate that you have produced some research, which importantly is translatable into other situations other than the specific firm under consideration, you won’t get your degree.

Whilst pursuing a particular project with your host company then, it is important to always consider if this could be considered ‘research’. Often, this simply involves a ‘re-dressing’ of what you’ve actually done, such that it could be written up as a conference/journal paper (thus meeting the criteria for a piece of research). Otherwise, it might be necessary to run an extension to what the company has asked you to do so as to meet your academic requirements. If you have good (academic) supervisors, they should make sure that you are meeting these criteria as you progress through your degree. Ultimately, you need to be a little selfish with what work you undertake at the host firm. That way, you make sure you can walk away with the qualification that has taken you four years to achieve.

This will be the final entry in my current spell as guest diarist. Uncharacteristically, I’m actually bothering to do something for bank holiday weekend so tomorrow I’m off to Edinburgh. Alles Gute.

Training day

Starting off as a postgraduate student, the theory goes that your previous studies (usually your undergraduate degree) will have equipped you with the skills you need to be a “researcher”. The theory often fails because the types of things that you will do as part of a PhD/EngD are usually very specialised, whereas undergraduate teaching tends to be somewhat more generalised. A surprising amount of your time is therefore spent “learning”, be that through (directed) reading of printed matter (journal papers etc) or hands on training with equipment etc.

Having waited 18 months for it to arrive, this week I get to start playing with the new common database. Equipment arriving late is a very common issue with PhD’s and is probably one of the biggest reasons for a project not being completed on time (if indeed at all). Fortunately, because of the multi-facetted nature of the EngD course, I’ve been able to re-allocate this time to other projects without too much hassle.

So today, I start a three-day training course on the use and operation of our shiny new common database. For the uninitiated, a common database is what you might call a ‘very expensive computer’ that takes connections from a myriad of different equipment related to transport, air quality monitors etc. The technology involved is based on a government sponsored project known as UTMC (Urban Traffic and Management Control).

For Surrey County Council, the basic idea is to use this plethora of different data sources (mostly existing, some new) and combine them together to produce something that is “greater than the sum of its parts”. Particularly of interest here is getting a better (and real time) idea of where congestion hotspots happen to be. This might be indicated by a higher than expected number of vehicles on one part of the network (indicated by automatic traffic counters), how closely to timetable the local busses are running (indicated by our GPS tracking) and how busy the major traffic junctions are (as indicated by the number of vehicles waiting to use each approach).

Of course, in order to do this, I need quite an in-depth idea of how to programme the thing, which is where this course comes in….

Back to reality

Having completed my clutch of conferences for the time being at least, I’m back in the office today ploughing through the usual pile of emails that always accompany any period of absence from the computer. Local Government always seems busier around election time and with May 5th being the polling day for County Council elections along with “the other one” this office is no exception.

My priority today is to complete my assignment from the Environmental Law module. Keen readers will remember that the EngD has about 16 modules dispersed through the course that are equivalent to the approximate level of work associated with an MSc (allegedly). The last module was taught at Surrey University In March and went through many of the important pieces of environmental legislation that affect business and Local Government in particular and also the planning process.

The final day of the course consisted of a mock planning enquiry for the construction of a new incinerator. Each delegate was given a particular function within the scenario (expert witness, local pressure group etc). I played the advocate for the incinerator firm – allowing me to draw on many years of watching Perry Mason when I should have been in lectures. Sadly, the planning application was rejected. Truly, Raymond Burr must be spinning in his grave.

Each module requires the completion of an assignment, primarily to test your understanding of the material presented. This is certainly the part of the EngD course that most closely resembles life as an undergraduate – not only the taught element but also the whole ‘coursework treadmill’ familiar to many. As with undergaraduate modules, some are more interesting than others. With the EngD in particular, some are more relevant than others depending on the area of research that you happen to be involved with.

This particular assignment isn’t too bad so the motivation to complete it is fairly easy to come by. When the assignment happens to be that bit more difficult/irrelevant, its very easy to start resenting the fact that you’re being made to ‘jump through hoops’ even though a Postgraduate is meant to be a ‘grown up’ student….

Conferences III

This week I presented at my second conference in two weeks. Last week, I stood up in the elegant surroundings of the Institute of Electrical Engineers in Savoy Place London. Here I talked about the factors that car sharers consider important in their decision to car share. Essentially, it’s all about the money. For those of you who pay an annual fee to a professional institute (Physics, any branch of engineering, computing etc) and wonder quite what they spend the money on I may have an answer. Their plush London Headquarters. All of them that I’ve been to so far have been expensively well manicured.

Anyway, I digress. Despite the time pressures of actual attending such events, the event itself is very much the tip of the iceberg. The real consumer of the hours is writing the paper and getting agreement from your co-authors on what has been written. As a doctoral student, your co-authors will automatically be your academic supervisor(s) and for an EngD your industrial supervisor. For me this means a minimum of three co-authors for any publication I produce. In practice, this number can easily be higher. For the car share paper, I had an additional author from Surrey County Council who is closely involved with the project. For the paper at the smart moving conference, there were an additional 5 people from the Transport Research Laboratory to consult, along with the Department of Transport itself. Whilst co-authorship can help to ensure that you’ve not missed out any key points of the piece of work you are trying to present it can also be a pain. Intuitively, different people prefer expressing things using different language, phraseology and terminology. Ultimately, everyone has his or her own style of writing and this can make it difficult to gain agreement the exact words that appear in the paper. Ultimately, it becomes a case of pragmatism on the part of the student. The quicker you adapt to something that more closely resembles that of your supervisor, the less red ink appears on your drafts. In fairness, academic supervisors tend to have a more scientific style of prose, which in itself is an important skill to learn as a postgraduate student.

The good thing about a decent conference paper is that it should be able to ‘evolve’ into a journal paper. Publish two or three of those during your PhD / EngD and you’ll almost need to punch your examiner in order to fail your final viva.

Conferences II

As touched on in the last entry, this week I'm in Birmingham for the "Smart Moving conference 2005". Essentially, it's about all different ways that technology improves travelling. This covers everything from parking technology, increasing road capacity, giving information to the traveller and a whole lot more.

Yesterday I stood up and presented my paper entitled "Strategic Management of Urban Road Networks" - basically talking about examples of good practice for local authorities looking to minimise delays from highway incidents.

From my experience, conferences seem to be divided into two main categories.

i) Academic conferences: Mostly populated by dusty academics who stand up and bluster for 20 minutes, perhaps trying to hide the fact that what they seem to do has little relevance to the real world and is destined to be hidden away on a shelf somewhere. Some of the talks are genuinely interesting and you meet a few people whose work is connected in some way with what you do. On the second night, the conference social event takes place. This usually means most of the delegates finish up crawling back to their hotel at some ungodly hour and turn up the next day late and still steaming from the night before.

ii) Commercial Conferences: Mostly populated by people trying to sell you (or other delegates) something who stand up and bluster for 20 minutes about how great their company and products are. You sit their feeling slightly embarrassed that you have no budget to spend with them. You resent the fact that their interest in what you do appears to be motivated by how they can use this as an angle to make money out of somebody. Some of the talks are genuinely interesting and you meet a few people whose work is connected in some way with what you do. On the second night, the conference social event takes place. This usually means most of the delegates finish up crawling back to their hotel at some ungodly hour and turn up the next day late and still steaming from the night before. The advantage being that since there are profit rich companies involved you can usually find someone to pay for your food (and maybe drink) for the evening. These conferences are also far more likely to end the night in a strip club.

This week’s conference falls into category two. That said, I have seen two other papers similar to mine that were not attempting to peddle any goods or services.

For me, an ideal conference would be one that had a healthy balance between genuine research "for the good of mankind" and how it can be applied to real world problems.

On the plus side, they do provide a good lunch here at the NEC.

In my next entry, I'll discuss the advantages and pitfalls of writing a paper "with co-authorship" and how this usually takes longer than you might think.

Conferences galore

During my last stint as guest diarist, regular readers will remember me describing some of the projects that were keeping me busy back in August 2004.

A key part of academic research is publicising your work – this very much fits in with the brief of a university to create and disseminate knowledge. Whilst papers in academic journals, not unlike the current one being undertaken by Mr Watts himself, are a key part in this, conferences also have a vital role.

Thanks to some unfortunate timetabling, I'm presenting my second conference paper in two weeks tomorrow at the Bi-annual "Smart Moving conference" in Birmingham.

The title of the paper is "Strategic Management of Urban Road Networks", which is unfortunately as interesting as it sounds.

The paper describes the project I worked on with the Transport Research Laboratory (TRL) to examine best practice within Local Authorities for making the most efficient use of their road space. Much of it centres on procedural guidelines for dealing with planned and unplanned incidents (road works, accidents, big sporting event etc) along with routine operational improvement. As new road building is very much off the political agenda, this is a good way of squeezing a little more capacity out of existing road space.

Last weeks conference was connected with car sharing - more specifically how Local Authorities can get business signed up to their scheme. That, however, is a story for another entry.

I have the bridge

Many thanks to Rich for once again turning the shop keys over to me.

In the next few posts, I hope to try and bring you up to date with the things that have been keeping me busy on my EngD, not least the two conferences that are taking up a big chunk of my time this month.

More on that story later...

Guest diarist takeover

Having confirmed his fee and the very generous rider, I am happy to confirm that my good friend Paul Canning will be resuming his guest diarist post here at the PhD diary for the next two weeks.

Whilst Paul wows you with his car-sharing antics and irreverent wit, I'll be concentrating on writing-up and maintaining a healthy obsession with LaTeX help pages scattered around the internet.