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structural violence
sex workers survive and thrive.
old laws kill and maim.

Marlise Richter

Ghent University

Thesis title: “Characteristics, sexual behaviour and access to health care services for sex workers in South Africa and Kenya”
My research focused on the impact of the 2010 Soccer World Cup on the sex industry in South Africa, and explored various factors that render sex workers vulnerable to HIV and other STIs.

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If I’m ABD
Does that mean that I cannot
Finish this poem

Sarah Kamens

European Graduate School

Like many ABDs, I’m suspended in pre-dissertation limbo, convinced I’ll never finish.

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Perón sent workers
to spread social change abroad
it did not work

Ernesto Semán

New York University

Dissertation title: “Ambassadors of the Working Class: Peronist Worker Attachés, Cold War Liberalism and the struggle for the Americas’ Labor Movement (1945-1959)”
The dissertation studies the history of the worker attachés, union leaders and blue-collar workers appointed by Perón at Argentine embassies to propagate Peronism abroad. It focuses on their dispute with American labor diplomats in the Western Hemisphere and their competing notions of democracy, property rights and common good.

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Ain’t a ‘puter safe,
And ain’t a bot can’t be caught,
Is network secure?

Chet Langin

Southern Illinois University Carbondale

Dissertation title:  “A SOM+ Diagnostic System for Network Intrusion Detection”
My dissertation is about network intrusion detection theory and finding malicious computer network traffic such as botnets by using computationally intelligent algorithms including neural nets, fuzzy inference, and artificial immunity.

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Who, What, When, Where, Why
and sometimes How. Answer these
for a Ph.D.

Jessica Luo

University of Miami

A lot of my research is describing previously undescribed phenomenon or organisms using new instrumentation. I am working on describing the bloom dynamics of small, epipelagic jellyfish using a high resolution in situ imaging system. It seems like what we learned were the most important points in a story back in first grade still applies to cutting edge scientific research today.

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So, officially
Canada and the UK
Kept different secrets

Ann Rogers

Lancaster University

Dissertation title: “Secretive states: a comparison of the Official Secrets Acts of Canada and Great Britain.”
When I worked on this topic, long before 9/11, I discovered that everyone else thought “intelligence studies” was creepy and super-boring and useless, so although I published my thesis, (well, the UK part), I never taught or wrote about intell again. On the upside, some of my peers were knee deep in Soviet strategic doctrine when the USSR collapsed, so I’d like to say to them: ha ha!

 

 

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Sometimes learning hurts;
Employ some self-compassion,
Achievement improves.

Jaimie Krause

The University of Texas at Austin

Dissertation title: “Everybody Fails Sometimes: Exploring Relations Between Self-Compassion for Poor Academic Performance, Generational Status, and the Learning Outcomes of College Students”
My dissertation is about college students coping with academic disappointment using self-compassion.

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Engineers Design
Students, they don’t understand
Grading helps them learn

Thomas F.C. Woodhall

Queen’s University at Kingston

Dissertation title: Redesigning Assessment: The design and implementation of a rubric-based assessment system to improve engineering design education.
Creating a grading system for an engineering design course that helped drive home to students the skills and competencies they were intended to learn.

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I eat my popcorn
But do I taste sweet freedom?
Or Uncle Sam’s pit?

Eva Buzo

University of New South Wales

My thesis looked at the relationship between Hollywood and Washington, and how film influences the image of the United States in Europe intentionally through collaboration between policy and content and unintentionally through the domination of American culture and ideas in the global film market.

 

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Black or white faces
MJ says it don’t matter
But it does matter

Shannon Elliott

University of Western Sydney

My thesis focused on facial recognition of African American and Anglo-Saxon faces. Research has shown a significant difference in recognition accuracy in favour of faces that were the same ethnicity of participants. Our experiment tried to find support for current major theories, in particular, if the difference is due to familiarity with skin tone or facial features (ie. brow width, shape of the nose and lips). By presenting participants with photos of both African Americans and Anglo-Saxon faces in colour, black and white and inverted configurations we found tentative support for the facial features theory.

 

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Training lacks vision
Young Marines require more
Ignorance is bliss

Jennifer Stephens

Walden University

Dissertation Title: The Adult Student Learning Experience: A Mixed-Methods Investigation in a Marine Corps Program From a Knowledge Management Perspective. (Ed.D., 2010).

 

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Fictional Cubs team:
A short story collection.
Those don’t make a dime.

Shannon Bartlett Kizer

Chapman University, California

I wrote a collection of ten linked short stories called Just a Bit Outside. Each story is from the perspective of a starting player on a fictional Chicago Cubs team (nine total). The tenth story is about the final game of the season — to advance to the playoffs — with a section from each player’s perspective covering one inning of the game.
Writers today can’t make anything off short stories, so this was basically a two-year, 150-page exercise in futility. Ironically, a century ago, F. Scott Fitzgerald made his money off publishing short stories in magazines specifically so he could write novels in his free time, since novels paid next-to-nothing — and look where that got him.

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Deep within the Earth
oil degrades to tarry mess
and some methane gas

Ian Head

Newcastle University

This relates to a project called Bacchus which examined various aspects of in-reservoir crude oil biodegradation and the formation of heavy oil reservoirs.

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Alkaline, salty;
Plants hate bauxite residue.
Soil, it must become.

Talitha Santini

University of Western Australia

Thesis title: ‘A pedogenic treatment for bauxite residue mud’
My PhD aimed to identify the best treatments for remediating bauxite residue mud (also known as ‘red mud’, which is basically the leftovers after processing aluminium ore) deposits so that the residue approaches something like a natural soil and can support a plant cover.

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Growing new tissue
Cells need a scaffold for growth
PHEMA can be used

Stefan Paterson

University of Western Australia

Thesis Title:  “The synthesis of PHEMA-based materials for tissue engineering applications”.
My thesis came under the broad research area of tissue engineering, but more specifically, involved the used of four very different areas of chemistry to synthesize enzymatically degradable macroporous polymeric materials. These materials were degraded in vitro using enzymes, with the degradation profiles of the materials being suitable for tissue engineering applications.

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Methylmercaptan,
the smell of Life arising,
ignorants say “stinks”.

Kai Finster

Aarhus University, Denmark

The title of my thesis that I completed in spring 1993 was “The transformation of reduced sulfur compounds in bacterial cultures and in sediments”. Despite its olfactoric challenges this is an extremely exciting field in microbial ecology and physiology since it touches our origins.

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An elliptic curve.
Does N divide its order?
Let’s work out the odds.

Everett W. Howe

Center for Communications Research, La Jolla

Dissertation: Elliptic curves and ordinary abelian varieties over finite fields (U.C. Berkeley, 1993)
The first part of my dissertation involved calculating estimates for the probability that a randomly-chosen elliptic curve over a finite field would have a given integer N dividing its number of points.

 

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Singularly round
somewhere spherical, elsewhere
principally free

Steven Broad

Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, IN

My work on differential geometry and dynamical systems, specifically geometric singularities, studies the ways that spheres can be deformed and certain points called umbilics (and higher-order generalizations thereof) that arise in isolated (sometimes unpredictable) locations on the deformed surface.
Umbilics are called locally spherical because they are locations where the original spherical shape is more or less preserved.

 

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Imagining tunes
almost like really hearing
decomposable

Rebecca Schaefer

Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Thesis title: Measuring the mind’s ear: EEG of music imagery
The focus of this thesis is the overlap between perception and imagination of music, and whether subprocesses in music perception and imagination can be uncovered from the brain signal.

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Less is more. More’s less.
Some is more than emptiness.
Count them, more or less.

Hayim Shaul

Tel-Aviv University

Title: Range Searching: Emptiness, Reporting and Approximate Counting
Given a set of points in high dimensional space, we show how to preprocess them into a data structure such that given a range in space we can determine quickly whether this range is empty. We extending and improve the results of Matousek (1992), whose result was only for hyper planes, and Matousek & Agarwal (1994) who counted the points (with worse time bounds).
Our result has many applications such as, ray shooting on fat triangles being faster than on thin triangles (Less is more. More is less), various emptiness problems (Some is more than emptiness) and approximate counting data structures (Count them, more or less)