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Speaking is hearing:
my brain’s tracking my own voice.
Don’t mess with my vowels.

Caroline Niziolek

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

This dissertation investigates the neural mechanisms responsible for the correction of auditory errors in one’s own speech. Subjects compensated more for cross-vowel shifts than for shifts within a vowel’s normal range, despite identical magnitudes of the shifts. Auditory feedback control is thus sensitive to linguistic contrasts learned through auditory experience.

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institutions change
controlled by different ideas
recombinating

DK

University of Toronto

My thesis is on the influence of the interactions of conflicting ideas on changes in democratic institutions.

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Rights are becoming.
But never will.
Waiting for Godot.

A.D.

Cornell University

This dissertation is about the international litigation politics of Human Rights NGOs.

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Offset CO2
in carbonated soda.
Climate change is bad.

Adam Joshua Smargon

University of Delaware

I’m getting my Ph.D. in energy and environmental policy from the University of Delaware. I’m also a research associate at UD.

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Bad carcinogen
Cannot kill the best enzyme
for its own demise.

Laura Shireman

University of Washington

My Ph.D. in medicinal chemistry focused on the mechanistic enzymology of glutathione transferases, a class of drug-metabolizing enzyme. One chapter focused on a gnarly carcinogen, 4-hydroxynonenal, that mucks up the works for all kinds of proteins in the body, including enzymes that metabolize it. However, the glutathione transferase that metabolizes and thereby detoxifies 4-hydroxynonenal with the highest catalytic efficiency, GST A4-4, also resists its adduction.

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It’s hot here, today
I’m broke, but home, in Brooklyn
Just leave the fridge cracked

Michael Walker

Seattle Central Community College

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Brown bread and baked beans.
What the Pilgrims ate (if you ask
the Victorians).

Abigail Carroll

Boston University

Dissertation title: “‘Colonial Custard’ and ‘Pilgrim Soup’: Culinary Nationalism and the Colonial Revival”
My dissertation looks at the romanticization of colonial American food such as brown bread and baked beans during the Victorian and Progressive eras. I am currently working as a writer with a focus on American food history.

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guiding light
down the tube, can fingerprint
the molecule

Sasani Jayawardhana

Swinburne University of Technology, Australia

Dissertation title: Development of Optical Fibre Chemical Probes by Oblique Angle Deposition
The work involved the development of an optical fibre chemical sensor based on the technique of surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS). SERS relies on the close interaction between the target analyte molecule and a nanostructured metal surface. This nanostructure was fabricated using the method of oblique angle deposition (OAD) under thermal evaporation.

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Black, Brown, Yellow, and White
Writers thought they were doing good.
Not so much.

James Kyung-Jin Lee

University of California, Irvine

Dissertation title: “Multicultural Dreams, Racial Awakenings: The Anxieties of Racial Realignment in American Literary Works of the 1980s.”

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Need video games!
Distract from boredom, also stress.
Better for boredom though.

Nick Bowman

Michigan State University

I’m an assistant professor of communication studies at West Virginia University, where I study the psychology (uses and effects) of new media technologies such as social media and interactive entertainment media. My dissertation (Michigan State University, ’10) examined how video games can be used to regulate moods, especially boredom and stress. The three studies found that playing games that are increasingly demanding (i.e., require more input to be played) helped repair users’ bad moods, and the process worked especially well for bored people when compared to stressed people.

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no one belongs here
more than miranda july
for now anyway

Kathryn Shepherd

Manchester Metropolitan University

My dissertation explores the birth of a new genre of writing, focussing on the everyday emotions and family life. Starting from the McSweeney’s publication to a more specific look at how Miranda July fits into and has contributed to this movement.

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Print revolution?
Young artist finds his own voice
ready to be Judged.

Loura Brooks

University of Edinburgh

Working Title: Print as communicative event: Durer’s Apocalypse of 1498 as an incunabulum (early printed book)

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Food or water borne?
Assign diarrhea source
using statistics.

Dan Gillis

University of Guelph

I present a new statistical method to classify spatially correlated data into distinct groups, while estimating the effect of covariates, using a Mixture model with multivariate conditionally autoregressive random effects.  The method provides parameter estimates as good or better than traditional spatial methods, while at the same time classifying the data into distinct groups; an option unavailable to traditional spatial methods.  The method was applied to Gastrointestinal data which were classified as either foodborne or waterborne in nature.  See also this haiku.

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Words can’t tell the past
Opera is experience:
History’s best mode.

Colleen Renihan

University of Toronto

My dissertation examines how the structural, temporal, and narrative dimensions of the operatic form might render a representation of the past that is unique in comparison to historical representations in other modes.

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online or paper
which has more validity
both are just as good

Annie Pettit

York University, Toronto, Canada

My dissertation is an evaluation of survey response sets, such as random responding, extreme responding and social desirability, in online and paper psychology surveys.

 

 

 

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Visions and portents
On the Restoration stage
Reflect End-Times fears.

Neil Scharnick

Carthage College

Working title: “The World’s Last Groans”: The Eschatology of Restoration Theatre
My research (in progress at the University of Wisconsin-Madison) connects apocalyptic and millennialist imagery and rhetoric in Restoration drama–including most notably the tragedies of Nathaniel Lee, John Dryden, Elkanah Settle, John Banks, and Thomas Otway–to the beliefs, fears, and religio-political conflicts of the late Seventeenth Century.

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Some coelurosaurs
Had arctometatarsi.
They could run real fast.

Thomas R. Holtz, Jr.

Yale University

Dissertation title: “An unusual structure of the metatarsus of Theropoda (Archosauria, Dinosauria, Saurischia) of the Cretaceous”
I examined (and coined the name for) the anatomy, function, and evolutionary origins of the arctometarsus (pinched foot structure) of certain types of advanced meat-eating dinosaurs (various coelurosaurian theropods). Among these dinosaurs are the tyrannosaurids (T. rex and kin), the ostrich-like ornithomimids, and the bird-like troodontids. My conclusions that this adaptation was for increased cursorial ability (i.e., faster running) in these dinosaurs has been supported in more recent analysies; my analysis of evolutionary origins of it have been overturned by new discoveries in China.

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Undercooked noodle:
Chance to land near Cantor set?
Log n over n.

Matthew Bond

Michigan State University

My research is on the probability that “Buffon’s needle” (or noodle, as the case may be) will land near a self-similar (“Cantor-like”) set of Hausdorff dimension 1 in the plane. (The abstract and first chapter are relatively non-technical.)

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pain is in the brain
and in the spinal cord too
we don’t know much else

funkyneuron

McGill University

My PhD thesis involved studying the role of the NKCC1 molecule in pain processing in the spinal cord.

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Catfish parasites
obliterate ponds overnight!
Knock out their buddies!

Richard Van Hoosen

Mississippi State University

I studied fish parasitology at Mississippi State University (1998). My dissertation concerned examining the intermediate hosts of a protozoan parasite of catfish that causes proliferative gill disease, with an eye towards finding ways of limiting population growth of those intermediate hosts. Less hosts=less parasites=less of a catastrophic infection.