The Dissertation/FYP thread 2008

Im struggling to stay under the 8500 limit on mine, have you really covered all you can? Of course, there is no point adding things for the sake of it. When I started mine I had little direct theory, although its almost endless in terms of applying theory from other areas.
 
CDj-Rossi said:
Hmmmm am I right in thinking that they set a word limit of 10,000 words for the work but it doesnt HAVE to be as near as possible to 10,000 words.
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It'll depend on your institution but for most I think it is like any other essay in that you generally have about +-10% leeway.

Do you have a dissertation plan? And if so how closely are you sticking to it? It was something I discussed with my lecturers and meant I had a rough structure to work to with approximate word limits for each of the chapters. If you don't already have one then you might find it helpful to create one.
 
Did anyone here plan their whole thing at the beginning? As with every coursework since GCSE I seem to leave doing my detailed 'planning' until the end an work backwards from my implementation. Makes it fun trying to make up the Gantt chart :o.
 
CDj-Rossi said:
Hmmmm am I right in thinking that they set a word limit of 10,000 words for the work but it doesnt HAVE to be as near as possible to 10,000 words.

I'm just asking because what if you can only write so much about your chosen topic, I mean ive got up to 3300 words so far including pretty much all my Introduction, Method and Results. I dont see how i'm going to bulk it out by several thousand more words in my Discussion and Abstract.
My introduction will probably have a couple hundred more words adding to it, and the same for my method and results, so i guess it would be 4000ish when they are completely done.

Just wondering if anyone else is in the same position as me, as in they dont know if they wont have enough to write?
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It will depend on your marker + second marker. Mine has pretty much said to me I have no word limit but the second marker might stop reading after 12k words.. Just to keep it clear and concise and make sure I get all the key points across. I would check with your supervisor.. would be kinda silly if they penalised you for not adhering to a limit if it meant cutting content out or adding waffle.

Thing is I am struggling to keep it under 12k - Proposal was 6k alone..
 
Oh god. I'm actually ****ting myself now looking at some of these titles. So far in my 2nd year i've had a couple of essays that don't have to be longer than about 2000 words - but i don't know how i'll EVER write about 10000 words on something.

Especially something like the "SYNTHESIS OF NOVEL PROSTAGLANDIN F2-ALPHA IN TRANSFORMED SACCHAROMYCES CEREVISIAE AND CONSTRUCTION OF AN EXPRESSION CASSETTE FOR PLANT TRANSFORMATION" featured earlier on in the thread

I mean....where do you even BEGIN to start researching something like that? Is that a degree dissertation or a PhD one?
 
Haha Gaygle, my sentiments too! Absolutely bricking it!
Pho said:
Did anyone here plan their whole thing at the beginning? As with every coursework since GCSE I seem to leave doing my detailed 'planning' until the end an work backwards from my implementation. Makes it fun trying to make up the Gantt chart :o.
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Hey, you did a damn good job though :D
 
Hmmm, I just remembered that I need to do a power analysis too, that will probably add about 1000 words to it. Hmmmm think i'm going to email my tutor about it on Monday. Gonna just go and put all my Mann Whitney results in the results section and then read up on power analysis.
 
When it comes to FYP and phds you at least get to choose what you want to do , so youll be interested in researching it and doing the experiments(hopefully!). plus you'll be guided throughout by your personal tutor, so theyll help you go through drafts and on what youre gonna write/do.

anyway , no need to worry about it till you actauly get one :P
 
Gaygle said:
Oh god. I'm actually ****ting myself now looking at some of these titles. So far in my 2nd year i've had a couple of essays that don't have to be longer than about 2000 words - but i don't know how i'll EVER write about 10000 words on something.

Especially something like the "SYNTHESIS OF NOVEL PROSTAGLANDIN F2-ALPHA IN TRANSFORMED SACCHAROMYCES CEREVISIAE AND CONSTRUCTION OF AN EXPRESSION CASSETTE FOR PLANT TRANSFORMATION" featured earlier on in the thread

I mean....where do you even BEGIN to start researching something like that? Is that a degree dissertation or a PhD one?
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Well if you have no experience in the area that that dissertation title is proposed how are you expected to know about it. That would possibly be a plain as day title to someone familiar with the terminology.
 
dark_shadow said:
Haha Gaygle, my sentiments too! Absolutely bricking it!

Hey, you did a damn good job though :D
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:o.

I'm kind of worried about that the second marker may stop reading at 12,000 words. I'm currently on 20,000 words and have two more sections to write at least :D.
 
Gaygle said:
Oh god. I'm actually ****ting myself now looking at some of these titles. So far in my 2nd year i've had a couple of essays that don't have to be longer than about 2000 words - but i don't know how i'll EVER write about 10000 words on something.

Especially something like the "SYNTHESIS OF NOVEL PROSTAGLANDIN F2-ALPHA IN TRANSFORMED SACCHAROMYCES CEREVISIAE AND CONSTRUCTION OF AN EXPRESSION CASSETTE FOR PLANT TRANSFORMATION" featured earlier on in the thread

I mean....where do you even BEGIN to start researching something like that? Is that a degree dissertation or a PhD one?
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Twas my dissertation.

I was given a large amount of help with what to do. It would just be impossible to complete that task without a Professor keeping an eye on what I was up to. It was lidicrously hardcore to start with, but once I got the hang of making vectors I was off and away.... to simply fail miserable about a million times :o

If I don't get >75% for that project, I'll be fuming :p
 
Go on then, enlighten us in laymans terms exactly what is "SYNTHESIS OF NOVEL PROSTAGLANDIN F2-ALPHA IN TRANSFORMED SACCHAROMYCES CEREVISIAE AND CONSTRUCTION OF AN EXPRESSION CASSETTE FOR PLANT TRANSFORMATION"
all about??

:p
 
electric ant said:
Go on then, enlighten us in laymans terms exactly what is "SYNTHESIS OF NOVEL PROSTAGLANDIN F2-ALPHA IN TRANSFORMED SACCHAROMYCES CEREVISIAE AND CONSTRUCTION OF AN EXPRESSION CASSETTE FOR PLANT TRANSFORMATION"
all about??

:p
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Eek. Basically....

Prostaglandin F2 alpha analogues can be used as pharmaceutical products, most comonly used to treat glaucoma and induce abortion in non-primate mammals. They are currently expensive to produce from cell tissue cultures.

However, clever science folk have figured out we can genetically engineer plants to create products. Previous work has showed that its possible to convert Omega-6 fatty acids into Arachidonic Acid (AA), a PGF2alpha precursor. So theoretically, we can produce PGF2alpha in plants. Mmm, cheap product.

So we transformed yeast with several enzymes needed to synthesise PGF2alpha from AA. We isolated one genes ourselves from T. brucei (a prosist pathogen causing sleeping sickness), and used another from a mouse. To transform organisms (genetically modify them) you have to creat vectors, which can be tricky:



(:eek:)

We basically showed it was possible to synthesise the product in yeast and transformed a plant to produce it. In 6 months we should have the results!
 
Can someone give me some feedback.

I'm doing a fyp on integrating wordnet and cedict to create a bilingual wordnet application.

I've completed a domain analysis on machine translation, identified relevant works and the techniques they use.

Analysed the wordnet and cedict resources.

Discussed how the previous work can be applied to integrating wordnet and cedict.

From here, I believe I should do the following:

Requirements analysis
- user interaction with the system in the form of use cases.
- non functional requirements i.e a mysql database to hold the data

from here I'm slightly confused. I've completed the system and it works beautifully but I'm not sure how exactly to go about the design part. I mainly worked through iterative process, so I basically experiemented until i'd refined something so that it worked which doesn't help when writing a report which describes the process as if it were waterfall!

I think I should do the following

design

- database model used for storing data
- modelling of objects used
- Identify classes required, detailing their responsibility through CRC cards
- collaboration diagrams to show interaction in system to produce results
- class diagrams?

Then from here things get easier, implementation which will be the dynamic behaviour of my classes. testing and then an evalutation.

Anything else?
 
Pho said:
Say you used a spiral methodology?
http://www.scottwnelson.com/article8-methodologies-spiral.php

I'm having similar problems; the system works fine yet they want loads of crap about how I designed it; I just did it, it works, why do you care :o.
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It's the reasoning and justification i guess. In mine, I decided to use mysql to hold the 600,000 records but to me this seems like a given. Also using hashmaps to hold the objects generated from the database in local memory so if I need to retrieve them it's easy and fast, again seems like a given to me :-/
 
I know what you mean. I basically analysed several database servers for mine, I knew I was going to use PHP/MySQL from the start but I figured I better 'just incase'.

It sounds like you're doing an AI style project? I hate my AI module because our lecturers only want to teach us about chat bots and how to make them understand text :/, I want robots :(.
 
Pho said:
I know what you mean. I basically analysed several database servers for mine, I knew I was going to use PHP/MySQL from the start but I figured I better 'just incase'.

It sounds like you're doing an AI style project? I hate my AI module because our lecturers only want to teach us about chat bots and how to make them understand text :/, I want robots :(.
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If it's AI, it's very shallow. When I do my translation, I'm not trying to understand the sense of a word in any way. In it's most basic form, I take a word in english, search for it's synonyms, I then filter out ambiguous words leaving the most specific examples. These are then used to find matches in cedict. Of these matches, I attempt to pick the best by first comparing direct word matches, the higher the better, and then checking the glossary for matching words. The results are good, not perfect, and in most cases gives the correct sense.

What did you do your project on?
 
Sounds like a pretty interesting experiment :)

Mine is 'basically' about being able to track the location of school buses and students using GPS. GPS hardware on buses will communicate coordinates at varying intervals back to my database which I process and draw a nice pretty Google map out of. I ended up creating about five user groups all with different access levels (parents, schools, bus companies) etc so it got quite complex, around 12,000 lines of code I believe :).
 
Pho said:
Sounds like a pretty interesting experiment :)

Mine is 'basically' about being able to track the location of school buses and students using GPS. GPS hardware on buses will communicate coordinates at varying intervals back to my database which I process and draw a nice pretty Google map out of. I ended up creating about five user groups all with different access levels (parents, schools, bus companies) etc so it got quite complex, around 12,000 lines of code I believe :).
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Wow, sounds like a really impressive application. I imagine it would have a lot of potential uses in logistics and transport management. How's your report progressing? Mine is due for the 23rd, hoping to get it done for next Friday.
 
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