climate change activist and science communicator; photographer; mapmaker — advocate for a stable global climate, reduced nuclear weapon risks, and safe human-AI interaction
Generally musings of the day, usually accompanied by a photograph
Today I had my final time-specific academic obligation for 2017: invigilating the midterm for the US politics course I am helping to teach.
Over the next couple of weeks, I will be grading two sets of midterms and preparing and submitting my response to the comments from the research ethics board on my dissertation project.
I am seriously behind on almost everything, so here’s hoping the general structurelessness of the holidays proves reasonably productive this time.
This term’s first big batch of grading — essays for my Canadian politics course — is due no later than Monday evening. Please wish me fortitude in getting through the last three dozen.
I believe basically everyone finds grading stressful and tedious. It invalidates my ordinary procrastination flowchart, since it is always possible to devote time to long-term projects or self-care activities instead of reminding people that essays need to have a thesis, or tabulating grades in Excel and U of T’s poorly implemented online portal.
2014: Clara
2013: The scale of our energy challenge, Lauren
2011: The Hound of the Baskervilles
2010: Ottawa solar power workshops, Six Easy Pieces
2009: Anthropogenic climate change: evidence from isotopic ratios, The IPCC, climate, and consensus
2008: Oil tanker captured off Somalia, Climate change and forest management
2007: IPCC 4AR SPM, The Bottom Billion, ‘Nuclear weapons sharing’ in Europe
2006: A market for kidneys?
2005: Not particularly notable day (and dietary justifications)
On October 10th I submitted the proposed research ethics protocol for my PhD research to the University of Toronto’s Office of Research Ethics.
My committee thought that the subject protection risks were minimal enough to make a delegated review adequate, but I learned today that the protocol has been escalated to the full-REB meeting on November 15th. I should expect comments a couple of weeks after that, and will almost certainly then need to modify the proposal and ethics protocol in response.
In the meantime I am continuing with reviewing key texts and developing the cross-Canada census on the basis of public documents. I also have both my sets of tutorials to lead next week, and will be receiving this year’s first batch of essays to grade on Monday.
This fall, it has been a bit sad to spend my first September at U of T after finishing my five years as a Massey College Junior Fellow: not getting invited to orientation events, or told about the official college photo.
Massey has had an enormous influence over my time at U of T, and it’s hard to imagine how the PhD experience would have been without it. U of T is so big (as is the political science department) that I would never otherwise have had such a sense of community, much less the cross-disciplinary and stimulating environment of Massey.
As an alumnus, I am still free to participate in most college events, and I have been enjoying meeting this year’s crop of Junior Fellows. I’m grateful that I have had the chance to experience graduate school again, after working for long enough to know what a privilege it is.
The University of Toronto Department of Political Science website lists the requirements for completing a PhD:
It hasn’t exactly followed the ideal schedule, but I have done quite a few other things at the same time.
The aim now is to get ethical approval by October and finish writing and defending the dissertation by September 2019.
Thesis proposal reading continues to dominate my information diet, but I bought a couple of unrelated books today.
Penny Le Couteur and Jay Burreson’s Napoleon’s Buttons — recommended by my friend Myshka — describes the influence of seventeen molecules on human history. I’m about 60 pages in and have been finding it entertaining and reminiscent of James Burke’s Connections television series (he also talks a lot about coal tar and the rise of synthetic chemistry) and Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire.
I also got Naoki Higashida’s Fall Down 7 Times Get Up 8: A Young Man’s Voice from the Silence of Autism, which was recently reviewed in The Economist.
Term time is rapidly approaching. In addition to my PhD research, I will be working as a teaching assistant for a second year “U.S. Government and Politics” course, which I did previously in 2013/14. I also applied for TA jobs in “Introduction to Peace, Conflict and Justice”, “Quantitative Reasoning”, and the “Canada in Comparative Perspective” course I have helped teach three times already. I’m done with coursework and comprehensive exams, so a double TA load should be manageable. It’s pretty important given that I haven’t had a paycheque since the spring, and my funding package as a sixth-year student is cut in half.
