I've never figured out what characterizes the schools were undergrad theses are a "thing". I guess you could do an honors thesis at my school, maybe? Is it always optional like that? Tell me about these things, people who got good grades.
I can't remember what it was called -- not an undergrad thesis, I don't think -- but my interdisciplinary undergrad program required a long paper to graduate. It counted as an independent-study type class.
Mine was on the symbolism of knots in Gawain and the Green Knight (the pentacle on Gawain's shield, the belt), and how the Green Knight was a Christ figure (or, specifically, a conscious Christianization of a pagan fertility figure). If I recall correctly, it was utter bullshit.
We had a "senior essay" that we were given the month of January off to write. Mine was supposed to be on Herodotos with a notoriously hard-ass crazyperson advising. At a very late date, due to my habit of sitting around all day watching Scud missiles on CNN, I switched to the Wife of Bath's Tale with an extremely genial adviser.
My department did call the paper it required a thesis, but the accounts in 2 and 3 sound pretty familiar. (I am, not, however, speaking as a Person Who Got Good Grades.)
Individual departments/majors may have had thesis requirements. Mine didn't. I did not get good grades.
I never wrote an undergrad thesis. I suppose I should have since I had a job doing research, which gave me a decent amount of disposable income despite the fact that instead of doing anything useful I mostly dicked around on the internet.
I was pat down by EWR TSA over some baby goo packets last Xmas, because the agent said I was holding "juice." When I pointed out (nicely!) that it was not in fact juice, but rather food, the agent quickly went to some variation of "You wanna go?" and "What ya think you're better than me?" This year, under weirdly intense TSA questioning, O chucked a lolly at he guy that stuck to his crotch. He responded by giving me an expedited boarding pass. I guess those Quaeda babies are better behaved.
I was hoping his response was, "And you're not a true blonde."
I guess you could do an honors thesis at my school, maybe?
This is what I did; it was required for graduation from the honors program at my school. In retrospect I'm embarrassed at how much I half-assed it (although I guess writing it in a foreign language counts for something).
He laughed, although I'm not sure we were laughing at the same thing.
Because then you said, "I'm not from Tampa, either."
I'm not sure if there was a qualification process for the honors program in my department (half-Ivy-on-the-Cayuga, Government), perhaps grades that I easily met. I put a lot of work into something that in the end added up to very little, was graded appropriately, and got a plain cum laude.
I did a thesis on sessile drops. It involved many long hours timing the lifetime of drops of water merging at an oil-water interface, both with and without vibration of the interface. I nearly went mad listening to the oscillator for sessions of up to eight hours straight. OTOH I got a nice thesis out of it, with solid experimental results. Should have published the bloody thing, but it didn't occur to me at the time, and my advisor kind of fell down on the job because he was getting divorced.
I really want to know more about some of these. Like
You believe some things which would be surprising if you didn't believe them already. Here are some examples with superheroes.
I wrote a thesis, but I'm not really sure how it fit in with the rest of the university. I could have graduated, and with honors, without having done it.
Mine was: "You're going to get sick on the sea routes to the Californian gold fields, but it's going to be worse if you cross the isthmus than if you just stay on the boat." I should have stuck with it as a dissertation.
What was essentially my master's thesis (except not really because we didn't do those in my program) was:
"It was easier for early Pennsylvanians to believe in (and practice) utopian criminal punishment for all races before there were many black people present in the colony."
Dissertation:
"Children who lived in authoritarian, violent subcultures got hit more than kids that didn't in the Early Republic. Nothing much has changed on that front."
Utopian should really be egalitarian. Not that it actually matters.
Off topic, but we're flying home today and I'll resume regular posting tomorrow. Even with all the great guest submissions, Internet was so spotty that I gave up.
I wrote a thesis for departmental honors. It was nonsense from start to finish but I think just in the way undergrad papers about literature generally are, plus a little extra. Really the thesis was as much for having slogged through Crime and Punishment in the original* as anything.
*It's about Russia.
A senior thesis was a graduation requirement at my school. Mine was to have been about Mikhail Bakhtin, but I didn't stick around to graduate.
18: Having to read Dostoevsky in the original was not the reason for my dropping out, but it would have been a perfectly good one.
My thesis:
Diseases are the kinds of things that make your life shittier [than it would otherwise have been].
And my MA thesis was something like:
Supervenience? Meh.
I want to know more about the philosophy/advice columns one!
I wrote an honors thesis thingum as an undergrad; it was required if you wanted, yes, honors. And of course I wanted honors!
23.1: I wondered in passing whether it was about what's-her-name, Miss Manners, Judith Martin, who did give a talk at our department back in the 90s. Everyone was puzzled to hear the announcement. It turned out to be about etiquette being far more important than it's made out to be, it's the very stuff of our social fabric(s), essential not just to our social compact but to our very ability to understand one another and to live harmoniously. So, shades of phil. of language and political science.
My undergrad thesis: a suburban town that exempts farms from the tax that pays for education will have more farms and less education than if it didn't.
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Apparently you can't collect unemployment benefits if you're self-employed, unless you've incorporated.
Not that I expect to need to do that, but it strikes me as annoying that there's so much celebration of entrepreneurship in this country given the degree to which it's penalized.
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My undergraduate thesis was about Congress and foreign policy during the Carter administration. It was supposed to include the first four years of the Reagan administration, but time ran out.
The school where I teach requires an undergraduate "capstone" project for everyone. It's thesis-ish (more or less so depending on the discipline) but most annoyingly has a presentation requirement for all disciplines. About half of the students fufill this with a shitty/fancy (depending partly on whether what you did was a stand-alone project sort-of completed in three months, or a tiny piece of some faculty member's big, well funded research project) poster presentation at the undergrad conference, while the other half give poorly attended talks in their department.
27.1 -- Well, you'd need to have been paying in, acting as if you had an employee. My UI payments for example are based on payroll, not on what I make.
Not that I expect to need to do that, but it strikes me as annoying that there's so much celebration of entrepreneurship in this country given the degree to which it's penalized.
It's not penalizing entrepreneurship, it's just support for labor -- when you're the entrepreneur, you're the capitalist.
(Unless you are set up and paid up as an employee of the business, as CC points out.)
I don't quite understand 31. 30, 32 mean that if you're set up as a corporation and you pay yourself as an employee, you're golden? But how is this anything but a bit of paperwork, a loophole?
In any case, unemployment insurance varies state by state: it looks as though, in some states, you can voluntarily pay unemployment taxes. Possibly something self-employed persons (who are not incorporated) should consider, depending on state.
It still strikes me, I must say, as bureaucratic hoo-haw. My thought is just this: I pay plenty of taxes, certainly as much or more than other-employed persons do. Since the rationale for denying unemployment benefits to the self-employed seems to be that in the case of other-employment, the employer kicks in additional taxes, this is a disincentive to go to self-employment UNLESS, as self-employed, one is readily given the opportunity to kick in one's own unemployment tax payments.
I also wrote a not-very-exciting thesis for departmental honors. If I had to boil it down, I'd say, "difficult problems are difficult."
I was looking at how a couple of different major political philosophers dealt with the problem of how do democratic decision making processes deal with problems which require specialized or technical knowledge to understand. None of them were particularly convincing answers, but I was most sympathetic to the idea that the best you can do is to have a functional system of interest-group politics and that those groups will act as a aggregator and channel to bring technical knowledge into the political debate.
Thinking about it now I would add that interest groups also have an epistemic role, and that not only does, "where you stand" depend on where you sit, what you know does as well. That would be an additional reason to think that it's better to think of political debates about knowledge as being part of how factions compete, rather than being a search for truth. But I was that clearheaded at the time.
Still, even if given the ready opportunity to pay one's own UI taxes, it's a real disincentive to what we might call cottage industries.
None of this is a surprise, mind.
It's not the fact that you're a corporation -- an LLC can have employees, and if it does, it has to pay various employer-side taxes (including SS, UI and workers comp). One could make oneself an employee of the business -- I don't know how/whether this would work in a sole proprietorship (you'd have to be employing yourself, wearing both hats), but if one's state didn't allow it, there's no magic and not much money involved in setting up an LLC.
There's also the problem of deciding when a termination is voluntary. If my employee quits, she doesn't get unemployment, nor would she if I fire her for cause. Self-employment doesn't fit the paradigm at all.
Aforementioned thesis was maybe 33% about Bakhtin, read through the filter of me being 21 and an idiot. Anyway, me + JMcQ: twinsies.
Anyway, me + JMcQ: twinsies.
But how does he feel about baths?
The grammar of 36.initial is confusing: I thought an LLC was a corporation.
SS is paid by self-employed persons.
36.2: I see your point. But wait, call me just plain stupid now, but when is a person legitimately unemployed? When s/he is fired not for cause but because of lay-offs (downsizing, what have you)? If so, we should call it Lay-Off Insurance.
Self-employment doesn't fit the paradigm at all.
I see that. I believe I'm suggesting that there should be some similar relief for the self-employed.
At my school a thesis was optional overall but required for departmental honors. Mine could be summarized as: Arabic may have been significantly influenced by Akkadian, but it's hard to say.
But wait, call me just plain stupid now, but when is a person legitimately unemployed? When s/he is fired not for cause but because of lay-offs (downsizing, what have you)?
Yes. The idea is that when you go to work for someone, you agree to work and they agree to pay you. UI provides insurance in case you hold up your end of the deal but the employer can't hold up theirs. If you quit or get fired for cause, you haven't held up your end and they don't have to hold up theirs.
For self-employed people, as you yourself have pointed out in the past, there's an inherent understanding that if you don't get any business, you don't get paid. That's just a risk you take by doing it. There's no agreement that the government needs to provide insurance for.
(Obviously the ability to incorporate complicates this and creates some potential loopholes, but that's the idea.)
Of course the government could provide some sort of insurance against poor business conditions, and already does for certain industries (especially agriculture), but that would be something different from UI.
Thanks, teo. I was indeed having trouble thinking this through clearly. I had in mind someone like a small-town CPA who sets up shop for herself and has had several dozen regular clients for years, and in the course of a year, they all ditch her in favor of H&R Block. Poor business conditions, for sure. It seemed to me that she should be able to avail herself of some transitional relief while she regroups. I was willing to call that unemployment. But as Charley says, it doesn't fit the paradigm. I still think it's a strong disincentive to self-employment. In the other-employed case, the person has lost work/income/employment due to downsizing or whatever while holding up her end of the bargain. In the self-employed case, the same is true.
I'm becoming exhausted by this now, though.
42 --- UI is about insurance against poor business conditions.
44: I suppose so, but it insures workers, not businesses.
Or, at least, it incorporates large elements of that. There's no reason the self-employed shouldn't contribute and then be provided with unemployment benefits in the same way anyone else is.
I dunno, I see lots of potential difficulties with implementing UI for entrepreneurs. How would you determine when they start and stop receiving benefits?
45 -- I agree it's a bit conceptually weird. But realistically, the self-employed who need UI should just be given some money because the over all sums are pretty small, and it's probably better for the economy and huiman dignity overall.
48: Well, if we're going to go that route, it would probably be better to just do a Guaranteed Minimum Income or something.
Nobody else is going to stake out the guaranteed minimum income position? What kind of half-assed leftier-than-thouness is this? Fine, I'll take that ground.
47 - through a complicated and inconsistent bureaucracy like other welfare payments? (To be frank, I'd means test it.)
I guess I'm thinking about the self-employed as, generally speaking, freelance workers, and especially the kind of people who get increasingly shifted off companies books as direct employees and instead come in as "independent contractors" or whatever.
Also given the last time anyone advocated a GMI here it was the crazy libertarians we somewhat stupidly let run the country I am very gun shy of the whole idea.
Somehow I've always been aware that only certain types of people are eligible for unemployment insurance, and yet I was surprised to find out that Social Security isn't the same for everyone.
I wrote a senior essay. It was about the TV movie The Day After, Reagan, Lincoln, the jeremiad form in American politics* and weenies in the anti-nuclear movement. I called it "I Might Have Written Something Vaguely Coherent If I Had Waited Until After College To Read Lipstick Traces."
*Sacvan Berkovitch, motherfuckers.
"Civil War soldiers, despite mostly being volunteer noobs, killed the fuck out of each other because they went off to war and served with people they would likely know for the remainder of their lives. It was a simpler time. Also: masculinity."
That was undergrad. Grad was: "Public space and nature are both complicated. In New Orleans."
I guess I'm thinking about the self-employed as, generally speaking, freelance workers
Yes, and that state of affairs is where I personally get het up about workers not getting appropriate support,* but it's not got much to do with discouraging or penalizing entrepreneurship, as mooted in 27.
*and I generally prefer guaranteed minimum income/general dole style support of those who don't currently have income, but it's not the UI model.
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actually sort of on-topic pause-play: does someone here do freelance wordpress development? Code not design. My business partner is looking for someone for a gig. I know no details. Email at the pseud.
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"Naval arms control between the wars was too a sensible idea." Undergrad history honors at DFH C. Longest paper I had written, plus I had to do a defense. It made me think that I could do grad school. WRONG!!!
Yes, too many people are treated as independent contractors these days.
You can still get unemployment if you're fired. It depends what you're fired for. The exact boundaries are unclear to me, but stealing counts as getting fired for cause, and you get nothing. But just not learning the job well enough doesn't prevent you from getting unemployment.
Although I don't think I stand a chance of winning this, my BF was looking into seeing whether you can get unemployment insurance if you quit. It turns out that there are certain circumstances where an employer's behavior is so bad that it is objectively reasonable to quit, and you can get it, but you have to make your case in person.
I heard of someone who was getting bullied at the post office, and he might qualify. (People were stealing his underwear.)
In good news, I have a 2nd round job interview tomorrow,
By the way, you all are not coming across as a bunch of slackers.
All that time and have yet to pull to the gate. I'll be lucky to be home by 2:00. Fortunately, the boy is sleeping.
Here's a question for all you academics- my grad school advisor told us that it was perfectly normal practice to use papers you had published, where you were the principal author (i.e. you had actually written the text) as chapters in your doctoral thesis. So if someone went and googled my thesis they would find chapter 1 is pretty much word for word in journal X, chapter 2 in journal Y, etc. Is that a bad thing, as in if anyone ever cared to fuck up my life they could do so?
I thought people mostly did that the other way around (turn thesis/dissertation chapters into published articles), but I guess now that everyone is expected to have a bunch of publications before they graduate it makes sense to do it your way. I don't think any harm is likely to come of it either way, but I'll defer to the actual academics on that point.
73: Varies by field, I think. That's how pretty much all of the theses in my field are written. (Usually with a new introduction tacked on.) No one cares at all about the actual dissertation, and usually no one reads it.
Parsi, believe me I know that self-employed people pay into SS. It's a different amount than what employers pay on account of their employees. I think if one were to employ oneself, the total of employer and employee contribution would be more than what a self employed person pays, because while it's the same percentage, a different income figure is used.
73: Definitely varies by field. You will need to check with the university library about any necessary copyright releases for the reprinted articles, however. Some journals are picky about these things.
Three hours late, but I'm now more not in Omaha than I have been in six days.
In early modern London there were people who caught plague and people who wrote about plague. These were their stories.
We had an undergraduate thesis, but you had to do a fourth year, you could leave with a pass degree after three and many did.
Mine was: You can write programs from formal specs, and formal specs from programs, in Java and Object Z.
75 gets it right. In my department there is a (waivable) requirement that your thesis be constructed from three already-published papers plus an introduction and conclusion.
people act like plato's (howsoever fictional) socrates isn't a sophistical, bullying jerkwad. in reality, any well-intentioned interlocutor would be all, "O, socrates, if your philosophical argumentative style had a face, I would punch it in the dick."
In the sciences they do it like this. In the humanities they do it like that.
in non-indo-european-linguistics-related news, I'm going to learn japanese together with my older daughter. I've never learned an...n.i.e.l. before! I'm sort of worried that the constant headaches and stupid medicine will block my capacity to memorize rafts of things. but then earlier today my girls and I were discussing a hated character in one of our favorite manga, and how he had come in 3rd in a japanese-only reader-poll, beating the way more deserving kurama (who is a tenggu ( crow demon)/bowie-style pop idol), daughter y was saying mizuki had made it in with 315 and I said 'no, cuz kurama got 323, mizuki got in the 330s, it was soclose. if we'd known we could have voted, by phone.' (these weren't numerical vote totals but agglomerations of a sort.) girls: 'but it was for your favorite!!!' me: 'yeah duh this would be strategic voting.' girl x holding manga: 'why do you know kurama got 323? that's...scary.' if I can remember that I can remember how to write his name surely. well, I know how to write his name.
Just as Jeremiah deserved to be thrashed, Socrates did too. Today, he'd be one of those assholes saying, "I didn't make you angry. How you feel is your choice."
Definitely that's fine in math, though some advisors have weird opinions. There are usually some rules about how to do it (written permission from the copyright holder, written permission from coauthors), but I doubt there'd be any real consequences for screwing that up unless someone noticed before they issued the degree.
Regarding airport security, my dad recently told me that he got sick of being pulled aside for screening and now just puts his artificial arm through the X-ray machine.
My never-written* thesis was to have been "Latin America would be different if it did EU-style political and economic integration, but that's very unlikely to happen any time soon."
*I decided not to do the honors program, which was different from graduating with honors.
My thesis was a #slatepitch avant la lettre: "If you want your society to have sound macroeconomic management with low inflation, it helps to have powerful labor unions".
My undergrad thesis was: "Gosh, if you come in with some AP credits you can really tail off your last two years and still get a degree."
90: I kind of did that too. I'd read the credit rules carefully and knew I could petition to take below the usual minimum during my graduating semester. So I only took two classes, but one was what the history department called a thesis.