Dissertation writing
Reading Time: < 1 minute A dissertation is a lot like creating a specialised website. You gather hundreds of bits of information and amalgamate them into a collection of articles.
On studying what you love
I love technology, especially in the form of online communities. I’ve been part of so many online communities I have some degree of expertise. I’ve seen the birth of the chatroom and it’s evolution, the popularisation of instant messaging and through flipside and nochicktrix I’ve seen the forming of virtual communities.
More recently I’ve seen the increase from virtual communities to real communities. Over the past two years, almost everyone I know has created a myspace account and for a while, this was the best place for people to be. More recently though people have moved to Facebook. Having more than 140 friends, of which only three I do not know, is a sign of how times have changed. It’s actually fashionable to be part of an online/offline community.
All the parties I’ve recently been to have been advertised on Facebook among other places and it’s become the social networking site of choice. If you’re not there you don’t know what’s going on anymore. It’s a great shift. It’s also replacing e-mail.
Why e-mail people when all your friends are on Facebook. Why not take advantage of unlimited photo uploads to Facebook to add all those past nights for everyone to enjoy.
I love the way technology is going. It’s sociable.
On a night at Swankey’s
Having the dissertation hanging over me is unpleasant. I often spend a few hours a day doing research which is divided between books and documentary films. Over time I organised all these ideas and I’m ready to start writing. I want to finish the first draft by Saturday. i.e. the day before april fool’s
On Saturday I went out to four parties. The first party was a nice mauritian buffet to celebrate a friend turning 25 and joining the generation old club. I was there for two or three hours before moving on.
The second party was a small affair although the participants were not university students therefore I left for the next venue.
It was the SU bar, busy on a Saturday night, something which is not that normal. It’s usually deserted but due to a person having their birthday there it was better.
The fourth party was the best part. Everyone from the bar got into 7-10 taxies and headed down to a house party. The house is in the middle of the suburbs, has two living rooms although one of these is half kitchen/half living room. Maybe it’d be called a dining room.
Many friends were there and there was a live dj to add to the ambiance. At the beginning there was no sound because they were lacking a cable or two to plug the speakers in. The issue was quickly resolved and sound began.
The party would involve the taking of 100 pictures, chatting to many people about many things. One of these people was glad to practice her french. Others shared drinks and such.
Saturday started around 7pm and ended 12hrs later with me walking a road I had walked many many times in the past. It was a really good night and I hope to have more like it.
Last night was tame in contrast
Tuesday is not the most productive of days
One of the best nights to go out on at the moment is Monday night because that’s the night when most friends are out in the same place. Last night I was at the student yet again and I took 73 pictures of which one I’m afraid I’d prefer never to look at.
Some of those pictures are really amusing and the expressions are great. I’m going to keep those private, simply for my friends to view. They’re on my phone, Facebook, and my iPod. They’re a collection of memories for when university is finished and that what remains are memories.
What made last night interesting as:
1) lollipops, two girls I know had a lollipop fight, a sticky affair
2)Many photographs of friends
3) Many conversations
4) the cold
Of course, the night had started differently. It started when I went to watch some friends act in the show Howard Katz. A friend was in the play from the first to last scene, that’s 110 pages. There were some great moments and the principal actor has great stage presence and projects his voice well.
I enjoyed the play because I allowed myself to be transported into the moment. It’s a shame that it’s the last play I go to, produced by this university.
random | university | work
Why It’s Great To Be A Student
One of the best things about being a student is that you can work on projects without having to feel bad about not making any money. In particular, I’m thinking of the dissertation. It’s a point where you’ve got ten thousand words to write about subjects you love.
As you’ve got to do so much research you’ve got a reason to buy tens of books and DVDs and watch them, enjoying every minute and taking the occasional note.
As you progress and you start writing you’re there, being your own boss. You develop your structure and you see what you’ve achieved. You think about what is already said and what else must be written. You write it down, re-write it. You find there’s some information missing so you’ve got an excuse to get sidetrack to look for some in-depth material about that.
You come back to the original text and you’ve just added 200 words. paf. Done, great. My project has progressed ;).
Of course, the more time you give yourself the more fun the project will be. If you give yourself ten weeks then you’ve got lots of time so it’ll be lots of fun because you can sidetrack all the time. if you’ve got 6 weeks you’re under pressure but not quite in the same way. If you’ve got four weeks you may have to be very disciplined. If you’ve got two weeks then forget about sleep, about friends, about sunshine and everything else. You’ve got to plod along and distractions will destroy your chances.
Anyway, I want to get the writing part done by the beginning of April so that I have four weeks to edit. Editing can be quite amusing when you’ve got time.
Enough procrastinating, time to go back for five minutes before the next distraction comes along
Digital television in the UK
1.1 The three months to the end of December 2006 (Q4) saw over 1,000,000 net household conversions to digital television (DTV) in the UK, following on from 800,000 additions in the previous Q3. Growth was driven by another strong quarter for digital terrestrial television (DTT), with total sales of DTT equipment reaching 2.4 million.
1.2 The digital cable and satellite platforms also added over 300,000 households between them during the quarter. This means that 77.2% of households now receive digital television services on their primary set, up 3.9 percentage points from the previous quarter.
1.3 With a further 1.4% of households subscribing to analogue cable, the total number of homes receiving multi-channel television at the end of Q4 2006 stood at 78.6%.
What this means is that narrowcasting is no longer within the grasp of early adopters but slowly getting into the hands of the everyday public. As more people have more choice so their viewing habits and choices will be different.
At the same time television is getting a lot of competition from online resources, especially for programs that are aired in territory months earlier than in others.
We are living through the media’s golden age.
When I started using comptuers they were nothing more than ega displays with the large floppy disks and games were text based. As I grew older so the games grew to be more complex, from 2d to 3d and then the quality improved.
The television of my youth was limited to five channels and by the 90’s had expanded to twenty plus channels. By 2000 the number had exploded to several hundred channels and that’s just counting the English ones.
The media have progressed. I am in constant contact with everyone by mobile phone for over a decade. I have had minidisk players, i’ve had phones and I’ve had a television in my room.
Now the mobile phone I have replaces all these devices if I so wish. The ipod replaces the radio and the television, the phone replaces the laptop, the minitel and the fax machine.
I have access to the world’s media within two clicks of a mouse, which is no more than a trackpad on an ibook.
Video editing is far simpler. When I wanted to learn to edit I remember that you’d need to get two player/recorders and a third device to control the two machines. We bought Adobe Premiere and the Miro dc30+ and there it was. I spent a weekend learning to edit with pictures of the Mer des Glaces, a glacier in the French Alpes.
Since then I upgraded through the years and my laptop can do all this seamlessly.
We discussed video on demand years ago and that idea was novel, was something which would be hard to implement. Today video on demand is so easy it’s syndicated via RSS feeds. I get my televisual experience via downloaded streams on a daily basis. Radio on demand is certainly here and doing well.
In this week in media one of the presenters said that in the near future media content would become more valuable than oil. It’s an interesting idea.
Are media studies a mickey mouse course when you’ve got free newspapers, you can watch television whilst commuting to and from work? When you share your pictures with friends around the world and computing is no longer the realm of the computer geek I think we’re in the Golden age of media studies and that it may have been one of the most interesting topics to study with the exponential growth of media outlets.
random | social media | twitter | university
Why You Should Use Twitter
Twitter is a short message that are only 140 characters long. It can be used in three ways. The first is by instant messenger, the second is by text messaging to your mobile phone and the third is via the web interface.
It’s referred to as microblogging, although not by me. I see it as being something more powerful.
The BBC, Google, and other companies have already used it for showing people what the latest news is. Of course, with such a medium you have to be careful not to send too many messages or people will give up.
Where it would come into its element is traffic info, radio schedules, or even event notifications. Imagine that you knew about this before rag week and that many of your friends were members. You could tell them “just finished ragging, on my way back to uni” or “only 20 tickets left for an event”. In other words, you can let people know what an organisation is doing quite easily.
Another way to enhance this is when you’ve got quite a lot of friends and they’re all members. “Hey, just handed in my assignment, going to sit in the grass outside halls, welcome to join” and many people who might have been bored now know where to find you.
Of course, you’re paying the price of SMS (text messaging) if you’re away from the computer but it’s at a local tariff to the best of my understanding. It’s an interesting development, similar to the status bar in many of the current messengers and on Facebook.
To First Year Students
I urgently recommend that you challenge the election results in relation to Salima. She won by only 25 votes and there are a few people saying that they would have voted differently had they known what the fliers contained before they voted.
The fact that someone failed their first year, only to become SU president six years later is utterly unnaceptable. You’re students and you’re working hard in order to build up knowledge and prestige for the course you are studying. If yor SU president failed their first year then what right do they have to represent “students” ?
I’ve worked hard, Martin has worked hard, Phil has worked hard. They’re good people on the campus with the most activities, the student radio and more
If Martin missed out by 25 votes then this, in my eyes, is too close and a recount and re-vote should be requested.
It is not healthy that within certain circles there are allegations of corruption whilst the SU president never bothered to comment.
The SU president is an elected offical and as such is responsible to the student body. The fact that she never bothered to answer WNOL, Smoke or Sarah Lefley, a collegue, in relation to this topic is utterly unacceptable and an investigation should be carried out.
I can’t accept that a failue should be elected two years in a row to the highest rank of our SU by only 25 voices in such mitigated circumstances.
random | university | work
Friends and Those Who Fool Me
Yesterday afternoon I received a phone call from some post grad students asking whether I could go and film the football game they were covering. It was between westminster uni city FC and another club whose name I don’t think I heard.
It’s the first football game I cover so it was an experience. It was in a smallish club an the crowd was quite small. I set up in the home and away section of the stands and filmed people running from one end to the other many times over.
It’s a shame I didn’t have one of the better cameras to use because the video footage would have been better. Still it was an experience. This summer had meant that I saw a lot of football matches. It meant I knew what shots to frame up. What actions to look for. The award ceremony was the more interesting bit to film because it saw me on the field with the teams making sure to get the shot of people receiving their awards.
Too bad our team was not the victorious one.