I Never Expected Them to Admit It

I've been having a war of wills with the UTK thesis consultant. You see, the University of Tennessee, Knoxville governs all of our programs. This means, among other things, that any thesis or dissertation from UTSI must meet the standards set by UTK. The UTK standard for a thesis or dissertation applied to every such paper. From any subject. That means my engineering thesis must meet the same standard as an English thesis, or Archaeology, or Spanish, assuming UTK offers degrees in all those things. Whatever you think of all those subjects, you have to admit, they are nowhere near the same. But a thesis for the degree must be. Anyway, back to my situation. I have a 116-page thesis. Of that, one of the chapters has 48 pages of figures (a total of 96 graphs produced by the analysis I performed). These graphs have to be in the thesis somewhere because they are the only way to see what I did. They are the thesis (along with the conclusions about the graphs). So I have these graphs two to a page and separated in sections by headings. Something like "Run 24 - Nov. 7, 2005" - just to separate the different data sets. In the next chapter of the thesis, I discuss the graphs. Normally, when discussing a figure, you put the figure immediately after the first paragraph that mentions it. Doing that here would have resulted in such a mess that I decided to dedicate one chapter to the graphs, and the next chapter to a discussion of the graphs. It seems both the headings and the organization violate the format. Headings are only to be used when separating text, and a figure cannot appear before it is referenced in the text. The text is the most important part, according to the formatting guide. For science, this is stupid. STUPID. Figures and tables are the key to most every scientific paper. So the consultant and I have been arguing (in the polite sense) about this for several emails back and forth. She didn't quite tell me everything I've just told you until an email today. This is my favorite quote from the email: "you are thinking of these things logically, when in fact the rules are somewhat arbitrary." That sentence means, essentially, that I'm right, and UTK is wrong, but I'm not going to win this fight so just shut up about it. I can remove the headings - that's no big deal. I like them in there for reference, but if UTK doesn't like them, I'll drop them. The other thing, with the figures themselves, I think I can just add a line that says something like "The results are presented in Figures 1 - 96." and that will be fine. At least it better be. This has already been a headache to format, and if I need to find a way to reformat that whole huge chunk of my thesis, I might choke someone across the room by clenching my fist. (They'll have to come back with facial hair and a new name so that I won't catch on that I don't have that ability.)

Oh, and the Thesis Consultant sends me emails with Smiley Faces in them. The emoticons that get converted to actual symbols. Yeah, an employee of the University of Tennessee sends smiley faces to a student at the University. I'm also an employee, and a graduate student, but let's maintain some form of professional decorum.

There was a cool show on the History channel tonight about the engineering of the F-14 Tomcat. They went through a lot of the actual, honest-to-goodness engineering process on it. I was impressed with the show, and the Fighter jet. The F-14 was not the first jet to use the variable-sweep wings. A couple different planes had used it prior to the development of the Tomcat, but the F-14 was the first to have the sweep angle computer-controlled. The wings adjusted from 20 degrees at low speeds to 68 degrees at high speeds. The transition would begin about Mach 0.7 and be complete at around Mach 0.95. That plane could also carry almost its own weight in munitions. It weighed 40,000 pounds without bombs and missiles, and 74,000 pounds fully loaded. Those are two significantly different design points. Also, it's just a cool airplane.

Hey, look over there! More tomorrow.