While it may seem trivial to some, I do think it is worthwhile to put some effort into the selection of the font in which my thesis will be written and ultimately printed. For reasons of aesthetics and ease of reading, a fairly classical serif font is the sort being considered. Within that genre, there are three options I am considering most strongly at the moment.
Month: February 2007
Marshaling paragraphs
Sorry to go on and on about the thesis, but for some reason it has been dominated my attention recently. It has now taken on the character of being much like those large maps of Europe on which officers push around little tanks with long wooden poles. The tanks are there, the terrain is there, but their positions with respect to one another keep changing. A section on the nature of environmental ‘problems’ is somewhere near the border between the introduction and the first substantive chapter. Other bits have yet to be deployed into the theatre of operations, despite being fairly well constituted in and of themselves. Others are like the fledgling brigades of the new Iraqi army: assembled, in some sense, but far from ready to operate as part of a larger operation.
The draft introduction being submitted tomorrow is best seen as a first attempt to deploy a coherent strategy, with plenty of bits to be filled out later. The central issue is working out a broad way by which to coordinate the operations of disparate units, so as to develop sensible (if not entirely comprehensive) coverage of the terrain in dispute.
[Update: 8:30pm] This evolving draft section from my thesis may also be of use to general readers of this blog: Appendix I: Glossary and Table of Acronyms For those times when you can’t keep remember what was happening when UNECE (part of ECOSOC) negotiated the CLRTAP to deal with POPs (including PCBs).
5.5 years in residence
Barring a few brief periods, I have now been living in university owned residences since September 2001: that is to say, five and a half years. First, it was a shared room in Totem (originally with a roommate who is now doing the M.Phil in Economics at Oxford, though who I did not speak to between when he moved out in December 2001 and when I first saw him here). Then, there was a single room in Totem Park and two stints in Fairview Crescent, one living with intolerable hockey players and another with a much more compatible crew. Between the Totem and Fairview periods, I lived for six weeks in the residence of L’Université de Montreal, while doing the Summer Language Bursary Program.
From September 2005 to April 2006, I lived in Library Court – part of Wadham College, Oxford – before moving out, largely on account of bad vegetarian food and inadequate and filthy kitchen facilities. Since then, I’ve been living with Alex and Kai in a flat below the Latin American Studies Centre, with a window looking out into our extremely large back yard, in north Oxford. The whole building belongs to St. Antony’s College, and it is to them that our termly payment of fine silks, wine, and a few head of cattle must be made.
On the basis of my experience, I can authoritatively reveal the best and worst things about institutionally owned residences. The best thing is the experience of living with fellow students, though, as the hockey debacle illustrates, that is hardly enough to make them kindred spirits. Also appealing is the cost structure: not so much that they are cheap, but that the prices are stable, you don’t have to haggle, and internet access and utilities are virtually always included. The worst things, from my point of view, are not having enough space for your books, living with walls so thin as to not muffle conversations at normal speaking volume (an education in itself, especially in Fairview), and the general requirement that you move quite frequently, further restricting the extent to which any space really becomes your own.
Within ten years, it is my hope that I will have a place to live where I have the space and confidence in long-term residence to justify unpacking and cataloging the books I have been picking up over these last two decades or so. That, and the chance to sleep on something other than a cheap single mattress. They never offer much in the way of back support.
Brief Oxford Union exploration
I made a first foray into the Oxford Union tonight. I really expected the whole place to resemble the smoky room where I imagine the Suez Canal seizure plan of 1956 to have been formulated. While the ground floor library had approximately the right feel, it was not, in fact, quite so ostentatious.
That said, it is probable that we of no political influence simply cannot access the parts of the building where future prime ministers are selected over cigars and snifters of brandy. I doubt that President Musharraf spent the time after his recent presentation in any of the rooms we ducked into.
Overall, the visit made me feel vindicated about choosing not to pay their ridiculous membership price.
Notes on a Scandal
To call Notes on a Scandal a ‘thriller,’ as many have done, is to strike close to the reasons for which I found it largely unsatisfying as a piece of cinematic work. While decently acted, the story just couldn’t justify the drama that the producers tried to spin around the story. It turned out more like an example of amplified tabloidism, rendered a bit surreal through the inappropriate Philip Glass soundtrack (though my sense that the music made the plot seem trivial may derive from how I associate Glass inescapably with the bombing scenes in The Fog of War).
While the film was not without interesting elements – how a narrator can both be exceptionally aware of the workings of the world around her and profoundly ignorant of how others perceive her – they are ultimately not enough to redeem it as a piece of storytelling. If you’re going to make a film about people violating societal taboos, they ought not be so wishy-washy about it. Nobody wants an uncommitted, neurotic villain, nor one with no particular artfulness through which to be redeemed.
Keyboard clacking away
By Monday, I am meant to have a draft copy of my thesis introduction ready for discussion. The paradoxical thing about the task is that it will almost certainly be necessary to revamp the introduction a great deal, once the three core chapters have been finished. Of course, it is essential to get the direction right. Tidying up the introduction and conclusion is something that can be done during the period between when my supervisor leaves Oxford and when my thesis is due (April 1-22).
Hopefully, a generous soul or two will volunteer to read a few chapters (or even the whole thesis) to check for general comprehensibility and strength of argumentation.
PS. Lots more information, both about the thesis and other coursework, is appearing on the wiki.
More amateur cryptography
One of the oldest problems in cryptography is key management. The simplest kind of cryptographic arrangement is based on a single key used by however many parties both for encryption and decryption. This carries two big risks, however. In the first place, you need a secure mechanism for key distribution. Secondly, it is generally impossible to revoke a key, either for one individual or for everyone. Because of these limitations, public key cryptography (which utilizes key pairs) has proved a more appropriate mechanism in many applications.
Once in a while, now, you read about ‘unbreakable’ cryptography based on quantum mechanics. The quantum phenomena employed are actually used for key generation, not for the actual business of encrypting and decrypting messages. Like the use of a one-time pad, the symmetric keys produced by this system hold out the promise of powerful encryption. Of course, such systems remain vulnerable both to other kinds of cryptographic attacks, particularly the ‘side channel’ attacks that have so often been the basis for successful code-breaking. Recent examples include the cracking of the encryption on DVDs, as well as Blu-Ray and HD-DVDs.
An example of a side-channel attack is trawling through RAM and virtual memory to try and find the password to some encrypted system. When you login to a website using secure socket layering (SSL), the data sent over the network is encrypted. That said, the program with which you access the site may well take the string of text that constitutes your password and then dump it into RAM and/or the swap space on your hard disk somewhere. Skimming through memory for password-like strings is much less resource intensive than simply trying every possible password. Programs like Forensic Toolkit by AccessData make this process easy. People who use the same string in multiple applications (any of which could storing passwords insecurely) are even more vulnerable.
As in a large number of other security related areas, people using Apple computers have a slight advantage. While not on by default. if you go into the security menu in the system preferences, you can turn on “Use secure virtual memory.” This encrypts the contents of your swap space, to help protect against the kind of attack described above.
The real lesson of all of this is that total information security can never be achieved. One just needs to strike a balance between the sensitivity of the data, the probability of it coming under examination, and the level of effort that would be required to overcome whatever security is in place.
PS. My PGP public key is available online, for anyone who wants to send me coded messages. Free copies of the encryption software Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) can also be easily downloaded.
Aeon Flux
I saw the film version of Aeon Flux today. The physics and biology were bad; the architecture and lighting were good. Overall, it makes me want to go to Berlin. It also makes me want to watch Gattaca again: a film with similar logical flaws, but a comparable commitment to aesthetics.
As virus-haunted-future films go, 12 Monkeys is much better. As lethal heroine films go, Ghost in the Shell remains the standard. The philosophical issues raised are less superficial, and the combat is infinitely more credible. There is a lesser extent to which Force = [ Mass * Acceleration / Physical attractiveness of person in question ]. Also, no matter how many Hollywood dollars they seem capable of bringing in, elaborate flips and cartwheels are simply not tactically effective.
The purpose of ‘international relations’
What can international relations contribute to the understanding of science and policymaking? This is a section that needs to get written, for my introduction, and its one that involves a bit of fundamental contemplation of the discipline.
Last night, I got into a discussion with the warden of Wadham College and a trio of fellows about my lack of faith in the concept of ‘social science.’ In essence, this is a lack of faith in the possibility of approaching truth, in the study of politics and related fields. One can become convincing and powerful, but one can never be authoritatively ‘right’ when speaking about morality in warfare, the consequences of the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, or the economic effects of NAFTA. Importantly, one also cannot be qualitatively as ‘right’ when answering such questions as one can when dealing with properly scientific ones.
I don’t know if it is a reflection of the kind of people the discipline attracts, or whether there is some other explanation, but it seems to me that IR is more concerned with action than with understanding. Interaction with knowledge is certainly important, but that is largely because such interaction is a necessary part of empowerment. Perhaps the reason for which we are given such impossibly long reading lists to skim is because we are just picking out those bits that will sharpen our ability to do whatever it is we wish to do in the world.
[Update: 1:30am] Perhaps I should be clear: this is one of those “use of the blog as a place for speculative thinking that might generate interesting responses” kind of post. Purposive, rather than simply analytic in itself, that is.
Lives and concerns of coursemates
On the occasions when I do see members of the program (fairly rare now that it has completely broken down into small groups working on the optional papers), it seems that everyone is caught up in the double effort of finishing the thesis and finding something worthwhile to do when this all ends. With the last day for possible viva exams now six months off, minds are getting focused. With the more stressful elements of research degrees making themselves known, the general enthusiasm for the D.Phil has been waning. Many people who seemed gung-ho about carrying on to convert their M.Phil to a doctorate in two additional years are now leaning towards other uses for their time.
This is a bit contradictory, really, given that it is precisely the people who want to carry on the for the D.Phil who need to worry most about their theses. The chances of anyone at a different school giving it such a careful looking over (or even any examination at all) are a lot lower than those of Oxford taking it strongly into account, when considering you as a doctoral candidate.
In any case, I am off to work on my potted history of the Kyoto Protocol.