Over their dead bodies

Barkerville Cemetery, BC from Wkikmedia Commons

This is the one that made me want to start this blog:
Over their dead bodies: a study of leisure and spatiality in cemeteries by Annabel Deering PhD candidate at the University of Brighton.
It's a study of the leisure use of cemeteries and introduced me to the following terms I had never before encountered:

• heterotopia
• purple recreation
• dark tourism
• garbology

which I would encourage you to Google. I very much like her conclusion that "the cemetery engages the visitor in deep and meaningful ways that have previously been underestimated."

What a corker of a subject!

A very Aberdeen-y PhD .... how to get out of a crashed helicopter very quickly.

Continental platform, courtesy of Southern Methodist University, Central University Libraries, DeGolyer Library

Knowledge and skills retention in basic offshore safety and emergency training (B.O.S.E.T) a PhD by Mohamad Fahmi Bin Hussin. Considering the amount of offshore activity around Aberdeen I should think this was very well-received. 

Idiots, imbeciles, and the asylum in the early twentieth century : Bevan Lewis and the boys of Stanley Hall

A PhD thesis by Jean Denise Hoole, unfortunately no abstract is available on EThOS just now, but it looks absolutely fascinating. The thesis highlights the care of boys deemed "feeble-minded" in between 1901 and 1910 being treated as individuals, with the involvement of their families. Quite different to what was the norm of the time. Led me down a few interesting avenues:
West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum Wikipedia entry is a bit scant but has links.
Stanley Royd Hospital is a bit of a messy website but very interesting, lots of info on the care of the mentally ill in the Victorian and Edwardian era.
Then my favourite Urban Degeneration which is a series of photographs taken in 2011 showing a building in decay.
Having done my bachelor's degree in psychology in York, a stone's throw from the Tuke Centre and The Retreat, I was delighted to stumble on this part of the history of the treatment of the mentally ill.

Ghost towns

"The archaeology of abandonment: ghost towns of the American West".
This academic treatment of US ghost towns put me in mind of this guy's work: Noel Kern. And having visited a couple of ghost towns I was glad to see this thesis exploring the reasons for abandonment.

Archaeology - Star Trek: The Next Generation style?

3D quantitative interpretation of archaeomagnetic surveys : application of mathematical modelling to determine depths and physical characteristics of buried materials

Surely this brings us closer to non-invasive archaeology à la Picard? It's got to beat digging around in damp trenches looking for a series of small walls. Hopefully they'll develop this as an app for the tricorder.

Tarantulas and social spiders : a tale of sex and silk

That's just a really lovely title for a thesis!

Train overcrowding makes you miserable.

I can certainly agree with that very heavily paraphrased conclusion from Nor Diana Mohd Mahudin. I had to peek a bit further when I saw this thesis title:
"Quality of rail passenger experience: the direct and spillover effects of crowding on individual well-being and organisational behaviour."
This researcher looked at the perceptions of over-crowding among key stakeholder institutions in the Malaysian rail industry and found it to be considered a minor problem compared to "capacity, infrastructure, and serive quality issues." But what the author has done has developed an effective measure to determine passengers' experience of overcrowding; this shows that they find it stressful and that this stress has an impact on their life beyond the journey itself. Indeed when you have a look at the author's blog, Beyond Commuting, there are links to wider research that suggest people with a long commute are more likely to divorce!
This research caught my eye because I commuted for a year to study for my MA in Librarianship and the rail journey was utterly soul-destroying and exhausting:

• only getting a seat half the time meant I couldn't guarantee I could get any work done on the journey
• hanging around waiting for delayed trains, worrying about getting to lectures on time
• overcrowded trains just make everyone grumpy, rude and generally vile

My conclusion: I hope I never have to commute by train ever again. Good research here, of great value.

You know that dilemma when you're a professor of surgery but then are awarded a life peerage....how do I write my name?!

You don't? Well, neither do I, but I discovered today how you write your name....
Professor The Lord, as in:
Professor the Lord Darzi of Denham was there ever a more accomplished man? Or a better vindication of immigration?

Eh? You say, where's this coming from?

Well I'm working on EThOS and checking which theses are on there, so I'm working through hundreds of PhD theses from around the UK, a vast trawl through what so far amounts to well over a millennium of academic endeavour. On the way I encounter little things that please me. So I'll share them here.