July 2006 – Page 2 – a sibilant intake of breath

Ireland accommodation partly booked

The Lonely Planet Guide to Dublin strongly recommended pre-booking a hostel if traveling during the peak season. It would indeed be quite a pain to show up and have to tramp around for hours with all my stuff, looking for somewhere to stay.

As such, I have booked my first four nights (Wednesday to Saturday) and my last night (Tuesday) at a hostel they heartily endorse: Isaac’s Hostel. While it’s not the cheapest place (16 Euros for a bed in an eight-bed room), the guidebook says it has the best atmosphere of any hostel in town. Some online reviewers have been far less kind, however. My authoritative determination will find its way to the blog soon enough.

The plan, then, is to do any day trips between Sunday August 20th and Tuesday morning. Picking those out, I will need to do later, for the fish paper beckons.

Scholarship applications exhausted

Apparently, I was rejected by the Centennial Scholarship long ago, but they never bothered to inform me in any way. That makes the last of the set: Commonwealth, Chevening, Armand Bombardier, Senior, and Oxford’s Overseas Research Scholarship.

At least the one £500 award makes me feel good about having spent so many hours filling out application forms and writing proposals. Likewise, there is the matter of all the time my various referees spent writing letters on my behalf. Many thanks to each of them.

Getting things done

What motivates people? I am not speculating about long-term planning here, but about the kind of decisions at the margin that shape the course of individual days: the points where a symmetry collapses in favour of making that the last time you hit the snooze button or that the last chapter you read before you go biking.

Individually, such decisions can be put down to context and to whim. Because they aggregate into productive or unproductive days, which in turn aggregate into weeks and months, understanding how to manipulate marginal decisions seems like a path for improving efficiency. Setting up efficient systems of reward and punishment, accompanied by personal prohibitions on really wasteful activities, seems like a good idea. With all the things that I can feel looming over me, I am feeling the need to do better at getting things done. After all, I need to brush up on two unfamiliar subjects, as well as finishing the fish paper editing, by next Thursday. Then, I have a package of tasks to finish for Dr. Hurrell before August 3rd.

An obvious productivity booster is to ban myself from blogging, but I think that would actually be counterproductive. The blog really helps me keep track of projects and ideas. A ban from reading other peoples’ blogs (I track 116, including many that are updated more than ten times a day) might be far more sensible.

Seeking sources

I have decided to take on two of the three potential tutorial students for the St. Hugh’s summer school, primarily because it is a good opportunity to gain teaching experience. As such, I am in the process of finding sources on the following topics that would be appropriate for clever high school students:

Causes and consequences of the 1973 oil price shock
The creation and history of OPEC
Distributive justice issues, regarding food
Corporate involvement in Latin America, same sector

If anything jumps to mind immediately to anyone, I would appreciate if you would leave a comment.

Summer thunderstorm and Ubuntu Linux

Today’s thunderstorm was good news for the parched lawns of Oxford: deprived in past weeks as the consequence of a watering ban. I’ve always been an appreciator of thunderstorms. I like the drama. I like the sense of immersion in nature. Naturally, it is most poignant when you are out on the middle of the lake with a canoe. Not the most pleasant or safe way to experience one, but something that everyone should try at least once.

Another aspect of thunderstorms that I appreciate is how they psychologically empower me to hunker down and feel absolutely no guilt about doing so. They are a kind of free pass from all but the most pressing of obligations. Naturally, there isn’t a lot of appeal to going outside under such conditions, so I spent the time cooking and fiddling with some computer stuff I had set aside earlier.

Warning: computer jargon ahead

Continue reading “Summer thunderstorm and Ubuntu Linux”

Little known OS X feature

People running Mac OS 10.3 or higher should try the following little trick:

Hold down Control+Alt+Apple+8 (or asterix on the number pad, if you have a full keyboard).

This will reset your monitor to grayscale and invert it. This might be useful in a room where you want to use your computer unobtrusively. Otherwise, it might just be an opportunity to show off your OS X prowess to awe-stricken masses of onlookers.

Spelling, grammar, and public writing

Talking to people about some of the essay editing I have been doing, in various capacities, I find that there are two general positions when it comes to grammatical and typographical errors. Most people fit pretty squarely into one or the other group, and a fair amount of animosity seems to fly between the two. Normally, my impulse is to call for restraint in in the prosecution of such campaigns. In this case, however, I think the argument in favour of the second position is quite clear-cut.

The first group feels that the important thing is just making clear what you mean. Misspelling a proper name, using the wrong homonym (its v. it’s), and similar errors are not of great consequence, because anyone can tell what you meant. I have some sympathy for this view, particularly because it can lay some claim to being anti-exclusionary. English is a weird language and it is hard to learn. A lot can be said for tolerating those who are in the process of doing so. The internet and other venues are richer for their contributions, and it is unreasonable to expect perfect use of language from those who are still getting used to it. Indeed, I would be extremely hard pressed to write a perfect post or comment in French.

At the same time, those who are capable of writing proper English have little excuse not to do so, whether online or in a different context. The second group – to which I belong – sees writing properly as a duty the writer owes to their audience. To just throw unedited text at people is disrespectful, because it shows that you don’t care enough about them to present them with something polished. I am not talking here about Joyce or e.e. cummings bending the rules – that is the privilege of anyone who knows them well enough to toy with them. A style deliberately different from standard English is not comparable to carelessly written English. I am talking about those people who can’t be bothered to check their spelling and read over what they wrote to make sure it accords with the basic conventions of English grammar. With built-in spellchecking and nearly effortless editing fundamental to modern word processing, there is really no excuse.

A secondary benefit is that taking the time to re-read what you’ve composed lets you better make sure that you aren’t about to put something malformed or uninformed into a public place, where it may embarrass you to many people, and where it may be hard to remove.

Fish paper finalization

Embedded in Starbucks, working on the revision of the fish paper, I am reminded that this is a particularly good environment in which for me to get things done. Critical factors include the absence of food I could go make, inability to connect to the internet (without paying for wireless access – £5 an hour, shocking!), and an atmosphere that is just distracting enough to keep my mind on target. Somehow, typing on a laptop in a coffee shop just feels very efficient. The entire introduction to the NASCA report was written in TextEdit in the Starbucks on Granville Street, near Georgia Street, while waiting for Sasha Wiley. The ready availability of caffeinated beverages is another natural advantage; on hot Oxford summer afternoons, there is little more capable of inducing work than four shots of espresso served over ice.

With Dr. Hurrell in France between yesterday and August 3rd, the fish paper is my top priority. That seems in keeping with a) the importance of publication if I hope to get anywhere in an academic context and b) the name recognition of a journal run by MIT. Getting it ready for publication involves two kinds of tasks – one relatively easy, and one relatively hard.

The easy task is contextual editing, as described in a previous post. I need to cut down a few sections that are non-critical, and perhaps reflective of the original status of this work as a term paper for an international law class. I need to tweak the language in a few spots and come up with a few neat ‘bullet point’ style recommendations of the sort Fernando and I generated for the NASCA report. I wouldn’t expect the above to take more than a couple of days.

The hard bit relates to a few scientific claims that are attributed to Clover – a journalist – rather than to specific scientific papers. Ideally, I should be able to cite both him and a scientific source for each. In practice, it may be hard to find sources that say exactly what he does. The statements in question are part of a general pattern broadly corroborated by scientific sources, but it is obviously better to have specific support than general support.

By the time I leave for Scotland on the 27th, the final copy of the paper should have been sent off to the editors of the journal. Naturally, I would appreciate if someone were able to give it a fine-tooth-comb going over, so as to ensure that no minor mistakes of language remain in the final version.

PS. Another pigeon hole check has revealed no Etymotic ER6i headphones. Once they arrive, I will finally be free from the lowest-common-denominator background music that is a feature of all corporate coffee shops. (I can hear Ms. Wiley gnashing her teeth at my corporate tolerance, halfway across the world, but I find the very plastic conformity of all Starbucks locations to be among the primary reasons for which they are such good places to get work done.)

Scotland in July; Ireland in August

I decided to bite the bullet and book my second trip of the summer. Between the 16th of August and the 23rd, I will be in Dublin. I will be leaving on the day after my third August tutorial with the St. Hugh’s Summer School. It promises to be an exciting trip, as well as one that will further flesh out my familiarity with the British Isles as a whole. I must make a point of visiting Wales before I leave next year.

Naturally, I am looking for advice from people who have been to Dublin. Three major questions arise:

Where would you recommend staying? (Hostels in the £10 per night range are my usual style)
What would you recommend seeing?
Is there anything particularly useful to know about going to Dublin?

I will pick up a Lonely Planet guide to Dublin next time I am in town. Major plans of mine include spending a good number of hours drinking Guinness and reading James Joyce (I have promised Linnea I will give him another try). Which of his books would people consider to be the most appropriate to read while in this city?

Including the £5 surcharge for checked luggage, my return ticket with Ryanair from London Gatwick to Dublin came to just under £50, including taxes (£40 of the £50). I will probably have to pay a substantial portion of that amount to get the coach from Oxford to the airport and back, but it’s still a pretty good deal for travel. In fact, it is substantially less than I paid to fly to Tallinn in December. Even the ferry from Tallinn to Helsinki cost a comparable amount.

PS. I am considering going to Prague in September, if I don’t end up planning a trip to Amsterdam with Claire, after her return from New York. The biggest downside of Prague is that I have been there several times already. The biggest upsides are that it is a place I know to be pleasant, and where I can stay with family for free.

PPS. To my surprise, Wikipedia informs me that: “Guinness is not suitable for vegans and vegetarians due to the use of a fish based fining agent called isinglass.” The basis of my vegetarianism lies in concern for animal welfare, concerns about hygenic practices, and concerns about sustainability. It is flexible enough to allow me to consume Guinness.

Academic and employment matters

My intended ‘hard push towards academic targets’ week lost a bit of forward momentum today. I did finish reading one thesis, and some more chapters out of the increasingly dull book on environmental economics. I picked up liner socks and 50% DEET insect repellent for Scotland ($30 together!) and filled out paperwork so as to get paid for my RA work.

None of the three candidates for tutorial teaching in August with whom I have been put into contact are intent on studying areas in which I have much extant expertise:

A: Where countries get water from at present, where they are likely to do so from in the future, and the conflicts that arise as a consequence
J: Impact of the 1973 OPEC oil price shock on domestic energy policies in developing countries
K: The impact of corporations on the distributional justice of food in Latin America

In order to teach any of these, I would need to research them extensively myself. That would normally be a welcome prospect, but I have much to do before going to Scotland and the first tutorial would take place the day after I got back. Of the three, I think I could handle the second two at a lesser level of specificity: talking about the origin and consequences of the price shocks and about distributional justice and corporations in international relations generally. I’ve turned down the first option outright, and am conversing with the students to determine if common ground can be found for discussion on the latter two.

The pay rate is excellent for these tutorial positions, if you already know the material well enough to suggest sources and then evaluate and discuss papers with only limited preparatory work. When it involves researching whole new sub-fields, it becomes less appealing from that perspective. Given that there seems to be no shortage of research work coming in from Dr. Hurrell, which is much more directly relevant to my thesis, it may be a good idea to stick to that, the thesis, and these other projects that keep cropping up.