Zoological Street Furniture

Comments relating to all zoological street furniture, even on a global scale, will be of interest; although the research is primarily focused upon the United Kingdom. It would not be appropriate for me to discuss the academic rigour of the research, overall research aim or comment upon funding on this thread, as it was not intended as a platform for justification. The PhD is part time and started in 2010 and will conclude in 2015. The idea of this thread was to allow ZooChat members to use their personal experiences to discuss zoological street furniture, rather than to discuss the value of PhD study in general. Hopefully people will have some interesting opinions or stories relating to the accessibility of street furniture in zoological gardens they are willing to share.

 

You figured me out. You know, the funny thing is that after spending 4 years testing chocolate day in and day out, he hates chocolate now! I wonder if male gynaecologists are similar in this regard?

I was being flippant in my description of his research, so let me bail him out: Nestlé found that when they cut the huge long blocks of Kit Kat into small blocks for packaging, too much was being wasted as crumbs and too many blocks were being shattered and hence wasted. Now keep in mind that they make millions of Kit Kats a day, so the losses add up. So his research was to find a better way to cut Kit Kats to reduce losses.

Steve, PhDs have always been esoteric. They need to be to separate them from BAs. I think what you mean is that they are as common as BAs, and that I will agree with!

I suspect that the zoo furniture PhD might be funded by EPSRC, and that his supervisor got a grant to study a larger project, and he used some of the money to hire some cheap labour: a PhD student. I would be interested in seeing more of Michael's abstract/'research question'.

 

That is fine if you are self funded.

Otherwise I would imagine that the tax payers of your country who are funding this "research", and those on this site who are being allowed to assist you, would be interested in knowing what the outcomes will be for their investment in you.

Are you sure that this is not related to April 1 in some way?

 

I stand by my original comment and agree with yours as well!

 

Wow, in my opinion you guys are just being plain rude...Why can't you just answer the question?

Anyway. Wooden benches hurt after a while. Iron is the way to go. My favorite "zoo furniture" I ever saw was at the Berlin Zoo, a trash can that had giraffe patterning and said "Bitte fuettern" which translates to "Please feed me" as if it were an animal. I thought it was sooo clever!

 

Also, if you bang your foot, knee, or elbow against an iron bench, you won't have to worry about splinters.

 

As well as the benches situated around the zoos, there are some which have been purchased in memory of people and animals,with plaques attached naming the person or animal the bench is in memory of, in the case of people it could be in memory of a keeper or a visitor who enjoyed their visits to the zoo when they were alive, and as for animals, I have seen benches dedicated to animals ranging from elephants to penguins. If it could be described as zoo street furniture, my favourite piece is the Ambika Paul bronze fountain in her memorial garden at Regents Park, it is an excellent bronze statue in itself, dedicated to someone who if still alive would now be the same age as myself, I recall once when we were discussing London Zoo, Johnstoni once described the zoo as middle class, I had never thought of it like that before, but I can see what he meant, and yes in a way it is, however, another way I look at it is the late Ambika Paul came from a wealthy family who's father is in the house of Lords and a personal friend of a former prime minister,I myself come from a working class family in the north east but one thing we do have in common is that we both enjoyed very much visiting London Zoo as small children, and in my case, I am still fortunate to be visiting in middle age, so therefore, is it not the case that London Zoo could also be described as classless?, apologies for going off thread a bit and being a bit too sentimental.