Buck was working on a multimedia project on Egypt's "new leftists and the blogosphere" as part of his master's degree thesis.

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He wrote his degree thesis on the history of Christianity and is best known as the minister who, in the most recent centre-left government, sponsored a programme of economic liberalisation.

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But in 1993, after revising her thesis, she was awarded a degree, and began the first of several postdoctoral appointments.

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Essentially, this is the question that George Zisiadis, a researcher at CouchSurfing, who graduated from Harvard last year, with a degree in sociology, asked in his senior thesis.

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