Dissertation Haiku
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Creative Writing

10/5/2011

 
​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.

Environmental Microbiology

10/2/2011

 
​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.

Soil Science

9/28/2011

 
​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.

Materials Chemistry

9/27/2011

 
​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.

Microbial Ecology

9/19/2011

 
​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.

Arithmetic Geometry

9/8/2011

 
​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.

Differential Geometry

9/8/2011

 
​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.

Cognitive Neuroscience

8/31/2011

 
​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.

Computational Geometry

8/19/2011

 
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)

Speech Neuroscience

8/15/2011

 
​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.

Political Science

7/4/2011

 
​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.

Human Rights

6/26/2011

 
​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.

Environmental Policy

6/4/2011

 
​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.

Medicinal Chemistry

5/19/2011

 
​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.

History

5/1/2011

 
​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.

Physics

4/7/2011

 
​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.

Asian American Studies

4/5/2011

 
​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.”

Communication Studies

4/4/2011

 
​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.

English and American Literature

4/4/2011

 
​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.

History

3/26/2011

 
​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)

Statistics

3/19/2011

 
​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.

Music

3/14/2011

 
​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.

Psychology

3/13/2011

 
​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.

Theatre

3/12/2011

 
​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.

Mathematics

3/10/2011

 
​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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Dissertation Haiku in the News!

​​​           Doctoral Dissertations in Haiku
“One of my old professors liked to say that a poem isn’t any good unless you can explain it to a three-year-old. I never would have thought one could apply that same standard to a doctoral dissertation, but then I came across a brilliant little website called Dissertation Haiku.” 
Full Article in Huffington Post 
John Lundberg Writer, Poetry Teacher
09/30/2009 05:12 am ET | Updated Nov 17, 2011
        Dissertations are Long and Boring​
"This indisputable fact is the impetus behind the genius blog Dissertation Haiku, which explains itself thus: Dissertations are long and boring. By contrast everyone likes haiku. So why not write your dissertation as a haiku?
Full Article in The New Yorker 

Macy Halford  Contributor
09/23/2009

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