Up-goer five Glass

Here is my attempt to explain my thesis using only the ten hundred most used words in English. I used the marvellous Up-Goer Five text editor by Theo Sanderson inspired by XKCD.

When you cool a water-like stuff, you get a hard stuff. In many hard stuffs, the bits are lining straight. But in other hard stuffs there is no straight line.

The hard stuff that make the walls of a can do have straight lines. Because of those lines you can make the can smaller by pushing down on it without breaking it into pieces. Window glass has no line, so if you push it too strong it will break into pieces, but if you push it just a little bit it is harder that a can, you can't make it smaller by pushing it. Having no lines makes hard stuffs even harder. Also, that is because there is no straight line in window glass that the light can get through, straight lines stop light or make it funny.

Sometimes you want very very hard stuffs, or see-through hard stuffs, so you don't want lines in it. Sometimes you want hard stuffs that you can push hard without breaking, or hard stuff that stop light or make it funny, so you need lines. It is very important to know how to make lines or not to make lines.

The problem is: no one knows how to control the lines. Also, no one knows why stuffs without lines can be hard at all!

Water-like stuffs have no lines and they are not hard. So it is not lines that decide if a stuff is hard or not. What decides then? People had this idea: if bits of stuff group together they become hard. If you stick those groups together, you can make hard stuff. You can group bits of stuff by five, that makes them very hard. You can also makes groups of six which are quite hard.

By the way, if you make groups of six, it is easy to make lines out of it, so you have made a hard stuff with lines. But if you make groups of five, you can't make lines, so you have made a hard stuff without lines.

Is this idea right? To know this, I looked at stuffs that are still water-like but cold enough to become hard. If I cool down a little more, they become hard stuff without line. These stuffs are in between water-like stuff and no-line-hard stuff. Actually they are a little bit hard. People found that some parts of it are slow and some parts are fast. The colder you get, the larger those fast and slow parts become.

What people think, it that hard parts must be slow. So I looked if there was groups of five or groups of six, there was, and if they are slow or fast. I found that both kind of groups are slow, but groups of six are much slower than groups of five. This is a surprise! Also, I found that the more I cool down, the more groups of six I see. I don't see more groups of five. So it is the groups of six that are important to make the stuff hard, not the groups of five.

So, what makes stuffs without lines hard is not groups that can't make lines. It is groups that could make lines but there is something in the way. Maybe that is the groups of five that get in the way.

PhD pre-defence training

At the end of this week one of my fellow lab member will know if he is able to write his PhD thesis. In our university this is probably the most decisive step in the process of getting a PhD.

How you get a PhD varies tremendously between countries, universities within the same country and sometimes even between departments within the same university. For example, in the US it is not uncommon to spend between 7 and 10 years in graduate school before getting the PhD. In France the distinction between undergraduate and graduate is fuzzy, but the line between Master and PhD is not: you need at least 3 years of PhD, often a few months more in science and a few years more in humanities. Here in Japan and in science/engineering departments the rules is 2 years of Master and 3 years of PhD. The PhD defence season is also tightly constrained modulo 6 months, so actually almost everybody abides by this 2+3 years minimum.

The fellow I am writing about has a quite unusual curriculum. He took a job in the industry after graduating from his Master, got sick of it and came back to the academia at the same time I was starting my PhD (the 3 last years). He had personal problems on the way and extended his PhD to 4 years. According to the training I attended on Monday, he will surely get his PhD with honours.

Defending a thesis is a rather formal - some would say "outdated" - ceremonial. It also depends a lot on the country/university. I heard that in the university of Utrecht in the Netherlands the candidate and the jury are dressed in 16-17th century outfits, family is invited and you never fail at your defence, neither do you get nasty questions. If you fail, that's before.

A PhD candidate in Utrecht

In France the dress code is less formal, but the jury can push you quite hard the D day. One of my friends in Belgium had to re-write his thesis after an inconclusive defence and defend it again a few month later.

Here in Japan everything is made to avoid last moment failure, thanks to a pre-defence. It's not a training strictly speaking. You are in front of the same jury as for the real defence, but it is before you wrote a single line of your thesis. You pack up everything you did in the last 2 years and a half into a 1h talk. The jury knows nothing of your work beforehand except the title and probably a short abstract. You don't want to obfuscate their minds or they tend to sleep. You don't want to appear shallow or you won't be able to write your thesis now. So you need to be ready, trained and mentored.

This is the decisive step. After that, you do your best to write your thesis, probably patch a few missing experiments/simulations/analysis, re-do everything just in case, etc. This easily eats the remaining 2 or 3 month before handing out the thesis, but the essential part is done. If you don't blow up during theses weeks of intense pressure and self-discouragement (I nearly did, but I was save by my family), you are done. You won't fail the D day anyway.

This fellow is going through the fire on Friday. His rehearsal on Monday was excellent (there were a few minor details to fix, but nothing important). Good luck.