April 2006 – Page 6 – a sibilant intake of breath

One weekend before the move and practice exam

Everything aside from studying moved forward well today: working on taxes, dealing with the bank and college, and packing. I now have essentially everything that I don’t use many times a day packed into fruit boxes from Sainsbury’s. I also went for a solid forty minute bike ride, up the Cowley Road and back to Wadham. It is becoming a truism that I am never so productive in non-school areas as when some big school deadline is looming.

The practice exam plan is to write the thing immediately after moving my stuff to Church Walk on the morning of the 10th. I can start unpacking afterwards, after I have hand delivered it to Nuffield. That way, I will have all of tomorrow and Sunday to revise. Naturally, I will be less than entirely prepared when I write the practice exam. I will have another ten days afterwards and – critically – those ten days won’t include moving or the other miscellaneous projects that are cluttering my personal ecosystem.

To those who have received one of the letters I’ve written lately with a fountain pen: does it improve the legibility of my printing? If so, I may use it for the qualifying test, in place of the four-coloured ballpoint pens that are the workhorses of my note taking.

Tiny new toy incoming

I ordered a one gigabyte iPod Shuffle from the Apple Store today. I am sick of having nothing to listen to during my 20GB iPod’s frequent trips to service depots. Also, it only cost a bit more than the service charges NatWest imposed on me in exchange for a bank draft to give to Wadham. The tiny size and twelve hour battery life are selling points. I tried about twenty shops in Oxford, looking for one, and discovered that they cannot be had here for love or money. It should arrive early next week.

When you’re used to studying with music, it’s surprisingly difficult to do so without it. Naturally, trying to use my computer as a music source leads to inescapable distraction. Spending so long without a working iPod has also proven to me how intolerable human babies are. I am personally astounded that parents can endure such shrieking on a continual basis. It can only really be explained with the endorphins and other opium-like chemicals our brains and glands see fit to flood us with, in order to ease the process of procreation.

Within twenty years, there will doubtless be a sub-dermal version of the iPod that charges using energy it draws from your body and downloads songs wirelessly off your iTunes library, which will probably be stored online by then. It will be a good day when that comes about. Hopefully, it won’t be necessary to ship one’s arm back to Apple every year or so, because the hard drive keeps failing.

PS. Lee Jones has a good post sharing my indignation about the Department of Politics and International Relations actually being commended by the ESRC for our quantitative methods training.

Great power history

While revising, I have realized that ninety percent of all the history I have ever done has been the history of six countries between around 1900 and the present. Here they are, complete with a crude trend line for their overall influence/affluence:

United States (Up)
Britain (Down)
Russia (Down, Up, Down)
China (Down, Up)
Japan (Up, Down, Up)
Germany (Up, Down, Up, Down, Up)

Top performer: USA
Most improved: Japan
Most troublesome: Germany
Most dramatic: Russia / China, tie
Most graceful decline: Britain

The history of other countries has mostly been bound up in their importance, vis a vis this crew. For instance, the transition from British to American hegemony in the Middle East, the role of France in developing and maintaining the interwar order in Europe, India as the jewel of the British Empire, American containment strategies in Europe and Latin America, or the various imperial phases of all and sundry.

I am fairly sure you could get a distinction on my International System 1900-50 qualifying test without mentioning any other states.

Taxes, exams, and changing seasons

From the way Oxford looks already, you can tell that it is going to be gorgeous in the summer. That is especially true for those of us who arrived in September and October; we’ve never been exposed to the verdant face of Oxford. I confess that it is something of a surprise to actually see leaves on a tree here.

The overall feeling created by long, bright days is quite at odds with the knowledge that there is a whole other term left. Eight more seminars, another batch of papers, and of course the research design essay. Having a room increasingly full of boxes combines with the sunshine to make me feel as though summer is very nearly here. Far better, for the moment, to focus on the short and medium term.

Running into Emily at the Codrington was enjoyable – a reminder of when we were there reading about the middle east and the interwar period the first time around. To study that time period and region in the same college and library where T.E. Lawrence wrote his two books and innumerable letters has a certain excellence of authenticity to it. Moving on: I am off to study international relations theory in the SSL.

This evening, I even managed to roll over my financial spreadsheets into the new fiscal year. Because it’s all done using formulas I’ve made myself, it’s no small task to shift so much information around. Updating and connecting four databases, listing information on seven accounts in two currencies and countries, along with two credit cards, is tricky. Doing all that under conditions where you document every transaction over the entire year, down to the penny, is really laborious. All the same, I prefer a system that I designed and hence understand to the incomprehensible datasets produced by programs like Quicken. Tax audits do not scare me. I even have all of the receipts more or less sorted.

The Skeptical Environmentalist

I am presently reading Bjorn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist: a book that has created a huge amount of controversy since it was released, because it questions the empirical basis for the idea that the global environment is undergoing severe degradation. There are two major kinds of arguments in the book, each of which is somewhat problematic to deal with:

The empirical argument that, for instance, forest cover is increasing in Canada, while the Worldwatch Institute says that it is decreasing, and that the rate of contraction in places like Brazil is far lower than it is generally listed as being. These kinds of arguments are difficult to access because they turn on the level of credibility we assign to experts. While we could theoretically go look at the numbers themselves, we don’t know enough about the numbers to know which are important, which are credible, and why.
The social and political argument about the character of what Lomborg calls ‘the litany’ of environmental decline: here, he is talking about the tendency to exaggerate, to accept bad figures more easily than good ones, and to manipulate data in ways that serve political ends. As in the first case, much of what he says is probably correct. The difficulty is in assessing the overall importance of competing claims, as well as the overall legitimacy of different claimants.

I shall write more about it as I progress through the book. I will be especially interested to see what he has to say about fisheries. Organizations like the Sea Around Us Project at UBC seem to employ the kind of rigorous statistical methods Lomborg espouses, and the picture they paint of the state of world fisheries is hardly a rosy one.

Praise and censure

In a bewildering move, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) has actually praised the quantitative methods training offered by the Department of Politics and International Relations. This is the same training that 27 of the 28 people in my program formally protested the poor quality of, in a letter to the department. I think the predominant view of the statistics portion of the M.Phil, among those taking it, is that it’s the primary evidence that just because something is taught at Oxford, that doesn’t mean that it’s taught well. It’s the black mark within an otherwise excellent program. A great deal of dissatisfaction with the course was also expressed to me by several members of the faculty, as well as the program director.

Hopefully, the ESRC was looking at one of the other statistics courses being offered by the department, rather than the one given to people doing M.Phils in International Relations. Ours managed to please nobody: neither those already experienced with statistics nor neophytes, neither those who see a lot of value in quantitative methods nor those who prefer other methodologies.

To any fellow M.Phils reading the blog: would you not agree that the quantitative methods training we received was not deserving of praise of this kind?

Longer days, upcoming exam

Academic nuts and bolts

In a spurt of productivity this afternoon (helped along by the Venti coffee I got during my walk with Louise), I finished editing the venerable fish paper for submission to MITIR. With the deadline just five days away, on the same day that my practice exam is due and when I am moving, it seemed most sensible to do a modest edit and send it off on a wing and a prayer. Without access to my original sources and ample amounts of time, nothing more ambitious could be attempted.

The first priority now is to sort out taxes and the final payment to Wadham College for this year. I also need to learn why NatWest missed two months worth of interest payments on my accounts, then fined me eighteen Pounds for not paying a bill which I never received, and which cannot be paid online. They are the worst bank I have ever had to deal with, including one in Canada where I closed my account in disgust.

The second priority is to pack. Does anyone know of somewhere in Oxford that has large and study cardboard boxes up for grabs? It seems that if I can have everything ready to go on the morning of the 10th, Kai will be able to help shift my stuff in his car. I can then spend the afternoon writing my practice exam for Dr. Hurrell, so that we can discuss it on the 12th. I will then have eight last days in which to revise, partly guided by his suggestions. Revision in general, with a particular eye to the practice test, is the third priority.

The revision plan, at this point, is basically to read over my notes a couple of times: both those from lectures and seminars and those on the readings. I will also go back over my own essays carefully – trying to hammer the knowledge of who wrote what about what into my brain – and the essays of a few friends.

Sometime at the start of the term, Kai, Alex, and I will need to throw some kind of welcome party at the Church Walk flat. The huge backyard would be ideal for an afternoon gathering, especially if we could find some seating.

Oxford spring

The walk around Christ Church Meadows with Louise this afternoon was a stunning demonstration of a greening Oxford. The cherry blossom trees in front of St. Mary’s Church are stunning, and the increasingly verdant look of the meadows themselves lends hope to downtrodden graduate students. My favourite geese were out on display, as well clutches of people in boats on the Isis and secondary waterways.

I have been making an effort to cycle at least half an hour a day. The exercise is enjoyable, and a nice contrast to my relative idleness during periods of reading.

Short Cambridge foray

I just returned from Cambridge, after a long coach ride in the same clothes I wore last night, on account of having forgotten the change of clothes I packed in Wadham. Largely due to time constraints, I saw hardly any of Cambridge. I saw the inside of Christ College, where we had dinner, and some of the surrounding streets. From the coach, I saw the river.

Like St. John’s College, in Oxford, Christ College seems to extend back in fairly linear fashion from the porter’s lodge. Meeting some of the students at our sister college, as well as a surprising number of Wadham graduates who I don’t recall having spoken with before, made it a fairly good use of 24 hours. The knowledge that I only have 15 days left before my qualifying test led to me going to bed enormously earlier than most people seem to have done.

Obviously, I will need to return at some point. I am off to shower and get back to reading.

PS. Mica has two new videos online.

Malta Trip Photos: Final Installment of Digital Camera Shots

Regrettably, there will probably be some duplication once the film gets developed and scanned. Even so, I thought these were worth putting up.

Harbours, boats, and clear seas

Interesting rock formations

Limestone farmhouse

Fisherman’s chapel

Field of flowers

My mother certainly has a disapproving look here, probably because of how much the wide angle effect increases the apparent size of the bottle.

Another one bites the dust

It’s never encouraging to look into your pigeon hole and see a slim envelope from a scholarship committee: in this case, the selection committee for Oxford’s Overseas Research Scholarship (ORS):

I regret to tell you that your application was unsuccessful. Unfortunately, due to the large number of applicants we are unable to provide individual feedback on the results.

Those who have applied and not found such a letter in your post, take heart. The ORS is quite a nice scholarship, which converts the fees you pay as an international student to those paid by someone from the UK: a dramatic reduction.

Brief post from a busy life

I got a good amount of revision done today and had a last dinner with my mother, prior to her return to Vancouver tomorrow. At noon, she leaves for Heathrow. At three in the afternoon, I am going to Cambridge for an exchange dinner. If I had known how hectic a time period it was going to fall during, I would have thought twice about signing up. As it happens, I will try to do what reading I can on the coach.

Those in need of some entertainment, and who have not yet seen my annotated Malta photos, might give that a try.

I will be more interesting soon.

Malta Trip Photos: Second Installment

I will keep posting photos here that are not quite arty enough to be part of the Photo.net album, but which have some documentary value that compensates. As a bonus, all photos on the blog are included at 1024×768 resolution, while those on Photo.net are a maximum of 800×600. People wanting the full 2048×1536 jpeg files my camera produces can request them by email or comment.

Valletta’s status as a frequently invaded city is demonstrated by the elaborate fortifications that have been constructed around the harbour.

An important trans-shipment point between the countries circling the Mediterranean, Malta has extensive ship building and material transfer capabilities, both in Valletta Harbour and on the south side of the island near the main power plant.

The interior of St. John’s Co-Cathedral is both elaborate and unusual. The church is rectangular, with alcoves along the edges and a semi-cylindrical roof. Also, can anyone – perhaps Tony – enlighten me as to the meaning of a ‘co’ cathedral?

The emergence of skeletonized dead from tombs is an exceptionally common motif on the panels that make up the cathedral floor, each of which seems to be a grave marker.

My mother under an archway in central Valletta.