Daily updates – Page 155 – a sibilant intake of breath

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.

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.

Ten years of Daily Shows

Yesterday was a notable birthday, today is too: the tenth anniversary of The Daily Show. I maintain that The Daily Show is the only televised news that is really worth watching. Indeed, it is the only kind I have felt the slightest impulse towards watching regularly. Whereas television news is usually a repetitive and less detailed summary of printed news, The Daily Show says something new.

Given how absurd American politics and world current events can be, it seems strangely appropriate to have it presented in a comedic form. A certain night in November 2004 might have been even more psychologically damaging, but for their special coverage. In any case, I salute Jon Stewart and I wish I had one of these shirts.

Happy Birthday Mica

Today is my brother Mica’s birthday. That cannot but re-enforce the fact that I have seen neither he, Sasha, nor my father since September 22nd, 2005. In five days’ time, it will have been ten consecutive months.

As I’ve said before, I am not too concerned about spending such a long time away from most of my closest friends. I know they will be more or less the same people when I get back as they were when I left, though perhaps with a few extra letters after their names. Even with the ones with whom I almost never speak – such as Alison and Astrid – I have a good level of confidence that I will be able to relate to them in a comparable way, once I return to Vancouver (however briefly it might be for). It seems different with my brothers, however. While most of us are now stabilizing as people, they still seem to be at the stage when things are taking their direction. Great as the opportunity to be at Oxford is, it’s a saddening thing to be missing.

That said, I am sure they are finding lots of good ways to spend their time. Mica, as I understand it, if off at a wedding somewhere on Vancouver Island. Hopefully, I will be able to reach him over the phone later tonight. In any case, my best wishes go out to him for the year ahead.

Best laid plans

Between tomorrow and Friday, I have resolved to achieve a burst of productivity. That means being up and doing something worthwhile by 9:00am each day. It also means finishing the following bits of reading:

Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist (re-reading)
Lindsay Johnson’s MA thesis
Bromley and Paavola’s Economics, Ethics, and Environmental Policy
Faulkner’s “Barn Burning”
Mukund Rajan’s M.Phil thesis
Bernstein’s The Compromise of Liberal Environmentalism
Karen Litfin’s Ozone Discourses

In addition to that, I am going to put a good deal of thought into the direction in which to take the thesis. Hopefully, the editor from the MIT International Review will get back to me with information on what editing is needed, precisely, and I can get started on that as well. I will also finish looking up the missing bits in the bibliography of Dr. Hurrell’s that I am editing.

One last element that I will add to the plan, for the moment, is to sort out when exactly I will be going to Dublin/Prague and buy my tickets. I am thinking that I will do so sometime after August 16th, because I will have another trio of tutorial days ending that Tuesday.

I will post updates as the plan progresses. If I finish all of this early, more elements will be added.

[Update: Tuesday 1pm] The chapter 12 research assistance work for Dr. Hurrell is done. Item four is read.

[Update: Wednesday 9pm] The Johnson thesis is finished. I have also gone through the fish paper and identified some places where the sources need shoring up, as well as other general editing issues. A few more chapters of Bromley and Paavola’s book are done. Some necessary Scotland-prep was completed, as well as paperwork for the RA job.

Knowing basic stats is not good enough for card games

Many thanks to Nora and Kelly for an excellent dinner at their new flat: across the Folly Bridge from St. Aldates’. Afterwards, along with Bryn, we played a number of hands of Spades – a game with which I was previously entirely unfamiliar. It strikes me as inevitably highly statistical. There is a set probability to every 13 card hand, moderated through the scoring system. On the basis of limited information from a partner, you must play many iterations of a supergame, based on a defined collection of possible outcomes for each game, with appropriate scoring attached. The objective is to acquire points at a higher rate than the other team, until a certain threshold is crossed.

Two major kinds of decisions exist in the game: bidding decisions, and the decision of which card to play. Both are fundamentally strategic, though the first is based on a combination of the probability of your hand, in certain important ways, and on the rules related to winning or losing any one iteration (13 tricks). The second is based on similar probabilities, plus knowledge about previous hands (card counting), plus rules about winning tricks. While I could understand the general dynamics involved, I had neither the concentration to count cards, nor the insight to begin comprehending the emergent properties of the rule set. There are some rules, like the special set associated with nil bids, that add considerable extra complexity to the game, at least as comprehended by a somewhat addled beginner’s mind. Even so, it was fun to play, and I appreciate my fellow players for introducing it.

With a certain perverse logic, I take pride in the fact that Spades is probably a game that can be played as well by a computer as by the best human. Since it’s a collection of computable problems, it seems as though a collection of RAM and transistors should set the bar which the best humans approach. Since we define the ‘real’ difficulty of problems according to the amount of challenge they present to all available resources, and since computers can be programmed by relatively inexperienced statisticians, Spades can be branded as a less-than-enormously-complex game, even by someone completely inept at it. Isn’t rationalization amazing? I suppose when we’re just one century’s worth of random collection of molecules (if we are quite lucky), we need some logical path to not get overwhelmed with our own limitations.

PS. From all I have heard, the Arctic Monkies are an unusually talented new band (I can see all those more clued-in on the music scene laughing at me for saying it. Why not say: “I think this Led Zeppelin group has some ability?”). Trying to keep up with a dozen dozen different areas of human involvement, I cannot be at the crest of every wave. All that said “When the Sun Goes Down” is surprisingly melodic, despite somewhat a somewhat abrasive chorus.

PPS. It looks like I may have three new tutorial students over the first three weeks of August. I am thinking of going to Dublin for the fourth week, then flying straight from there to Prague for the first week of September. It would save me all the cost and bother of coach travel from Oxford to London to random-airport-for-cheap-airlines.

Happy Bastille Day

Thesis reading is progressing reasonably well, amidst all the other tasks in need of completion. I am reading Economics, Ethics, and Environmenal Policy: Contested Choices: a collecton of essays edited by Daniel Bromley and Jouni Paavola. It is somewhat general, but still informative. My intention is to try and sneak a reasonable amount of normative matter into my thesis, in whatever form it ultimately adopts. Sorting that out is my top academic priority at the moment.

The order of business tomorrow is research assistance work. Probably, I will immerse myself in the department with a copy of EndNote and a few of the mysterious coffee/hot chocolate beverages that the machine in the common room dispenses for 30p a piece. More than once, they have helped me bounce a few more notches towards wakefulness before one of the core seminars. Without those two-hour gatherings of classmates and instructors, Tuesday mornings seem rather pointless.

On self-representation

Every photographer understands the impetus behind the self-portrait: not some formal tripod and time-delay creation, but the quasi-accidental inclusion of oneself in a composition, in the form of a shadow, perhaps, or a reflection.

Photography is a curious art-form, for many reasons. Unlike most forms of artistic representation, it requires relatively little ability to translate sight into the moment of a hand. Instead, it required just one firm touch upon a button, under conditions that are recognized as being correct. The difficulty of affirming the originality of that act may partially explain the motivation behind the photographer’s self-portrait.

Mostly, however, I think of it as a playful interchange between photographer and observer. Whereas the two are normally in a conspiracy with regards to the subject (at the same time as the photographer and the subject are in conspiracy against the observer), in this case, there is a kind of simultaneous mutual revealing, which is very artistically and emotively interesting.

Tea

One unexpected stop in London yesterday was The Tea House, near Covent Garden (15 Neal Street, WC2). Sarah and I were lured in because the shop was incredibly fragrant. The same can be said of the 150g of Chai which I purchased there, and which has markedly increased the pleasantness of the smell of my room, just by virtue of sitting there in its bag. Their licorice tea, which Sarah got and which we tried after dinner, was also quite good. The secret, I think, was keeping the level of tea flavour low enough that it complemented, rather than overwhelmed, the distinctive flavour of dried Camellia Sinsensis. There is also much to be said for a shop that unfailingly demonstrates a commitment to the fact that only drinks made with an infusion based on Camellia Sinsensis are deserving of the descriptor ‘tea.’ Rose hips and the like may taste good in boiled water, but they are not tea.

Frequently as I am accused of being a coffee addict, I confess to preferring the aesthetics of tea. Coffee is a working person’s drink – to be consumed out of big paper cups while walking purposefully down a sidewalk, or gulped down from a big mug during a coffee break. Tea is more versatile and, to my way of thinking, more relaxed. As such, a break focused on its consumption is more worthy of that title.

Such talk makes me think nostalgically back to the days of the Esteemed Afternoon Tea Society. For those unfamiliar with this most absurd and memorable of UBC clubs, see the Epic History and the Declaration of War (PDF), which formally began the life of the organization as a potent (and generally highly militant) force on campus.