Reply #13: actually, the writing was fairly good ...

[Lisa]

Not as turgid as some other papers I've read (remote sensing and image interpretation can get surprisingly murky at times!). The fact it was a field project rather than a lab study did liven things up. (Another PhD candidate was working on public involvement in resource management, and decided to preface each section of her dissertation with quotes from her field notes ... these provoked more discussion at her defense than the actual material ... my favorite being the respondent who insisted on picking through his dog's hair for ticks, during the interview.)

The paper I'm really looking forward to is by one of our MSc students who was underwater, doing a reef ecosystem study, when the tsunami swept over her towards the coast of Thailand. She and the rest of the team felt what they thought a brief surge in the water, and in fact had kept on working. When they surfaced, the dive boat was gone. (It had been carried inland by the wave.) Luckily they were rescued the next day, before they ran out of drinking water.


p.s. on the way home yesterday, I was thinking that it might be fun to compile a book of "thesis horror stories". I'm sure there are a lot out there! I had been remembering the claim by friends at Berkeley that at least 2 people at the university had lost all or part of their major papers during the fires ... they'd walked out of their houses in the morning, and returned to charred ruins.