Daily updates – Page 163 – a sibilant intake of breath

Exam dress rehearsal tomorrow

Today concluded both packing and first wave studying, with enough time left over to walk with Louise for a bit in the Wadham gardens and appreciate a couple of the brief but intense hailstorms that have been a feature of this variable day. In Shakespearean fashion, the weather is demonstrating the existence of changes afoot.

I have now re-read all my notes, all my papers, the comments on my papers, as well as many of the papers which I’ve exchanged with my classmates. I feel familiar, overall, with the type of questions being asked about the first world war, the middle east, and China and Japan. Any question on the United States would be a gift to me, since I did so much US history and foreign policy at UBC. On the theory side, I think I have a strong grasp on everything except international society – partly because it is somewhat vague as a discipline, when compared with the neos, constructivism, and such. I’d like to answer a question on Gramsci’s Marxism, because I think his ideas are really interesting.

The biggest question weighing upon my mind at present does not have to do with the content of either of the core seminars being examined. Rather, it has to do with the stylistic requirements of a formal Oxford examination. For instance, I am uncertain about how important it is to discuss the ideas of theorists with reference to their names, or whether we can answer the question in relatively non-annotated ways. In some cases, it’s easy: “As constructivist theorists like Wendt identify, the iterated interplay between states serves to constitute their identities over time,” for instance. When it comes to topics that I’ve read a huge amount about in many different sources (for instance, humanitarian intervention), it becomes almost impossible for me to remember who exactly said what. Thankfully, the questions on the qualifying tests are quite open ended. Here are some examples from past exams, courtesy of Alex Stummvoll:

‘The First World War was the logical outcome of imperialism.’ Do you agree? (QT 2003/Easter)
Was the peace settlement of 1919 doomed from the start or was it undermined by the Great Depression? (QT 2003/Easter)
Was there a better case for appeasing Japan rather than Germany in the 1930s? (QT 2002/Easter)
Does ‘self-interest’ mean the same thing to neorealists and constructivists? (QT 2003/Trinity)
Is it correct to say that while democracy produces peace, democratization produces war? (QT 2000/Easter)
‘The expansion of international law into areas that involve fundamental conflicts of interest has usually resulted in the weakening of law rather than any real constraint on the practice of states.’ Discuss. (M.Phil 2000)

That diminishes the importance of knowing each and every fact, but increases the importance of getting the style and structure right. We need to answer three such questions over the course of the three hour exam, including at least one from history and one from theory.

I really wish Blogger had categories incorporated in the way that WordPress does. Then I would feel less guilty about how eclectic these postings can be. If I could mark things obviously as ‘boring day to day life,’ ‘reflections on Oxford,’ ‘world politics,’ ‘environmental politics,’ ‘photography,’ ‘literature,’ and such, people would have an easier time reading only what they care to. That said, I’ve been making an effort to separate discussions of different fields into distinct posts or sections, with comprehensible titles. Topic posts (usually without photos) are more focused than there were in previous times and daily posts (usually with photos) capture the bulk of the day-to-day stuff that some readers find intolerably boring.
Are there any other formatting suggestions people have? One possibility is to actually separate the substantive discussions in my area of core academic competence – world politics and environmental politics – and put them into another blog.
In my inbox, there are a collection of the kind of emails I am always excited to receive: lengthy, substantive ones from friends that I want to respond well to. I shall do so after the move and practice QT are done. You are not being ignored.

Evening enormously more valuable than revising

Happy Birthday Chris Yung

Many thanks to Leonora and Lucy for inviting me over for a very enjoyable dinner party. It included excellent vegetarian pasta, wine, and the kind of superb company one hopes to encounter at Oxford. The gathering was the sort of Kitsilano basement suite event that was becoming standard among my more sophisticated friends during my last year at UBC. The contrast with an evening in a smoky pub is considerable, and the differences much appreciated. The other contrast – with a day spent orbiting between reading venues and guiltily checking email – likewise put me in a mood to especially appreciate the party. Meeting some more of Lucy and Leonora’s friends was one of the nicest things I’ve done in Oxford for a long time. Hopefully, it shall not prove a lone occurrence.

For some reason, cycling home through a cold and recently inundated Oxford – after such an event – felt like a quintessentially graduate school experience.

Tomorrow will be my last day living in Wadham. That means I need to pack all the things that I use almost constantly. I also need to finish revising for my practice QT. In truth, I am nowhere near ready for the history segment. There is a huge amount to know about international history from 1900 to 1950, and it isn’t anywhere so fresh in my mind as the theory from last term was. That said, if I write two theory papers and one on history, I should do well enough to not embarass myself too badly in front of my supervisor. It will also allow him to give me useful direction for the real exam on the 20th.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Trying to increase nose-grindstone proximity

Revision began in earnest today and, as I predicted before, it managed to induce that little tinge of raw panic that is the basis for all academic achievement. Many thanks to Claire for stripping questions from the most recent qualifying test from the lists of past questions I will be studying from. As I am meant to write a practice test consisting of last year’s exam for Dr. Hurrell by the tenth of April, and it would hardly do to know the questions while I am revising.

If I want to submit the fish paper to the MIT International Review – with submissions for its inaugural issue due by the 10th of April – I will need to get started on editing and reformatting it. Doing so is quite difficult because I don’t remember the sources well or have them with me. I wrote this more than a year ago, after all. The submission guidelines do say that: “After initial submission, writers whose articles are being considered for publication will be asked to resubmit articles according to more specific guidelines.” As such, it’s probably best to do a moderate edit and see if they’re interested, before I commit a lot of time.

When contemplating the fact that April 10th is also the day during which I am to move, I may have stumbled across a universal law:

The law of deadline gravitationThe times and dates when projects are due will approach one another at a rate directly proportional to the number of hours the respective projects will require to complete, and inversely proportional to the distance already separating them.

This explains why big tasks cluster – like periods of examination – but why mundane tasks arise constantly and individually. While much theoretical work remains to be done on this concept, it seems plausible to me that the attractive force may only apply itself to certain classes of tasks: just as photons are exempted from the effects of magnetic fields.

Looks like I may not have as much time to try out my new bike as I thought. Of course, spending a week in Malta leaves me with no reason to complain about having to buckle down now.

More iPod trouble

Well, the iPod that Apple sent back because it was apparently fine will not be recognized by my computer at all and now simply boots to an unhappy Mac icon when you turn it on. I wonder if they actually looked at the thing before they decided that “issues reported concerning [my] iPod” “were found to be within Apple’s specifications for acceptable performance, usability and/or functionality.” I’ll call them again tomorrow. Looks like it’s going back to the Netherlands.

From tiny island country to small island country

Well, I am back in England – where you can’t figure out how to turn on dryers and water heaters (the secret is often pulling on a rope hanging from some dark corner of the ceiling), where they will charge you as much for a half hour train ride as lunch and a whole day’s exploring in Gozo does, and where you will wrap your rain jacket around your shoulders while reading, despite being indoors, within the confines of a surprisingly sunny living room. That’s not meant as a series of complaints, of course. Indeed, I read about sixty pages of Bill Bryson’s Notes from a Small Island while trying to dry my socks on an icy radiator and can therefore say that the above is positively chipper by comparison.

In a few hours, I am heading to Drury Lane to see The Producers with my mother before trekking myself and a great mass of dirty clothes to Marble Arch for the bus back to Oxford. One piece of welcome news, delivered by text message as my mother and I waited in line at passport control at Gatwick Airport, is that Louise will be in Oxford next week. Her presence will either mean that I will have someone to scrutinize my efforts at revising, even as I play the same role for her, or that I will have good company to look forward to in those periods when I will take breaks.

Tomorrow, it will take the greatest restraint to avoid spending hours sorting and editing photos. That is to say, I will almost certainly spend much of tomorrow doing exactly that. I will then work myself into a proper panic by looking through the dozens of exam related Word document attachments that are lurking in my email inbox. My mother is stopping by Oxford on Monday and spending that night, before returning to Vancouver the day after. Hopefully, she will have the chance to meet a few more friends I’ve made in the U.K., as further demonstration of how clever and interesting Oxford graduate students can be.

Coffee with Emily, Exeter Music

This morning, my mother and I had some superb omelettes at the Vault and Gardens before going for a walk around the botanical gardens beside Magdalen. I particularly like the greenhouses, including the one that includes a whole collection of edible plants. It’s interesting to see how many of their products – peanuts, papayas, coffee – we can be familiar with, without having any sense of what the plant itself resembles. Oxford students who haven’t visited the botanical gardens should definitely do so. It’s free and, in a few weeks time, they will really begin to blossom with spring. As they are now, the gardens are balanced between decay and emerging growth, with different species at different stages.

Introducing my mother to Emily was good fun and personally rewarding. I appreciate having the chance to actually introduce family members to new friends, with whom they have only been acquainted thus far through letters and blog posts. Like Claire, I had the sense that Emily and my mother would get along particularly well; that apprehension seems to have been borne out with experience. Hopefully, my mother will have the chance to meet a few more people – perhaps Alex, Margaret, Bryony, and Dr. Hurrell – when she returns to Oxford on the 2nd and 3rd of April.

The concert in Exeter was quite beautiful. It was a selection of Vivaldi performed by candlelight inside the archaic and majestic looking Exeter chapel. The concert was put on by a group called Charivari Agreable, and included some wonderful countertenor singing by Stephen Taylor. While the harpsichord is not my favourite instrument, I really loved the two violins – especially when they were playfully engaging each other.

Packing has now concluded, hopefully in a manner that does not exclude anything vital. Of course, it’s only for a week and there is every opportunity to buy neglected necessities in Malta. We are off to Gatwick, by coach, extremely early tomorrow morning. I may be able to post something while I am there. If not, I will return on the first of April.

College grumbling

I must say that, when it comes to inconvenience, the Wadham maintenance people are absolute masters. If the showers need to be turned off at some point in the day, it will be in the hour before classes. If there is to be a cut in power, it will happen while your soapy clothes are inside the washing machine – after you figured out you way into the laundry room through the bike shed, because they are doing asbestos removal in the basement. I suppose I will just dry them out as best I can and wash them again in Malta, as there’s no guarantee the washers will work later on in Wadham.

PS. Remember when I thought I saw dead wolves at the Covered Market? Well, someone else saw the same thing, and they painted it. While they may not, in fact, be wolves, they are still a chilling thing to run into when you’re looking for flavoured tofu. That is attested to by the fact that someone took the time to paint them. The painting is on display, and on sale, at the Vault and Gardens.