Writing – Page 55 – a sibilant intake of breath

Chapter two, second version

I have been thinking about how to incorporate the general ideas from this post into the revised and clarified version of my second chapter, upon which I am now working. It seems that there are three axes across which environmental problems can be assessed: predictability, intentionality, and desirability. Of these, the third is most likely to have different values for different actors.

The mine tailings example is certainly intentional, for it is an inescapable and obvious product of mining activity. The predictability score depends on the status of knowledge about the health and ecological consequences of particular tailings at the time when they were released into the environment. Here, there is also a discussion to be had about the extent to which an actor engaged in something that could well have ecological or health consequences is morally obligated to investigate what those may be. There are also questions about whether private actors are merely obliged to follow the law, or whether they need to act upon moral considerations with which the law has not explicitly saddled them.

On the matter of desirability, the range includes possibilities of utility gain, indifference, and loss. The mining company probably has an indifferent or unfavourable view of tailings: if they could be avoided for moderate cost, they would be. This is certainly true now that the consequences of certain tailings are known and legal and moral obligations on the part of such companies are fairly well entrenched. A more interesting possibility is environmental change that increases the utility of some, while diminishing that of others. This could happen both with intentional acts (say, building a dam) or unintentional ones (the unintended introduction of a species into a new area).

In any event, the new plan is to boil the introductory portion of the chapter down until it is only about 1000 words long. Then, I will write 2500 words each on the case studies, and 1000 words in concluding comments. Most of the existing commentary will be migrated into the case study sections. The best way to do all of this is probably to re-write from scratch, then import and vital elements and citations from the old version. A similar chapter model can be adopted for the third and fourth chapters and, since most of the research being done covers all three, they should prove reasonably easy to write once it is done.

[Update: 3 March 2007] I now feel confident that the version of the chapter to be submitted tomorrow, four days late, will be enormously superior to what could have been submitted on time. This owes much to the new books I got at the Geography and Environment Library. Those with restricted wiki access can have a look at the emerging draft.

My last-minute assembly skills have failed me

According to my thesis schedule, I am meant to have my second chapter submitted now. Instead, I have 5200 words, only 1200 of which are about my case studies. Even within the analytical stuff, there is a lot of ambiguous sequencing, and a great many emphatic [ADD MORE HERE] editorial notes. It seems unlikely that this chapter can be completed tonight, regardless of caffeine consumption levels.

I need to:

Complete the necessary reading, especially on pre-IPCC climate change science
Trawl through the notes I have already made about sources, ideas, and themes
Expand the case study portion of the chapter to about 5000 words, shifting the bits that are now independent into the case study narrative

I suppose I should get cracking on the first of those. The whole thing – three substantive chapters, a conclusion, and a revised introduction – needs to be submitted in 53 days. Time for another pot of coffee.

Some strategy

Perhaps it would be wise to interrupt regular blogging, while my thesis is coming together. Upon reflection, however, I find that the issue is more that I am not using time efficiently, and less that important tasks are absorbing too much of it. As ‘a’ (and probably ‘the’) major conduit between myself and most of those who are important to me, internet based communication does not seem unimportant. The task, then, is to pare away activities that do not contribute to the completion of this task (itself unlikely to be relevant in five or ten years) and focus upon those that advance towards the goal.

Filling the gaps in chapter two

The conclusion from working on my second chapter is that I have read too much general background material and not enough on my case studies. I am fairly well covered on POPs, since I have done research on them before. Naturally, adding a few more sources would be nice, though there are not really a great many out there. I am also quite well covered on current events relating to climate change, because there has been such a raft of coverage and discussion. While my intention has never been to write a blow-by-blow account of either (how could I possibly do so in 30,000 words?), it is certainly necessary to have a comprehensive understanding of the history, before any important and valid analysis can be done.

As such, I need to fill in my knowledge on recent developments pertaining to POPs, which should not be hugely difficult. Then, I need to shore up my section on the early history of the climate change debate. Aside from the mandatory OUSSG dinner and talk tonight, I suspect this will fill the next 32 hours. Naturally, I am interpreting my promise to Dr. Hurrell of having a second chapter dropped off at Nuffield by Wednesday as having that chapter dropped off, by my own hand, in time for him to read it on Thursday morning.

Policy{hyphen, space, nothing}making

One minor hiccough regarding the thesis has been cropping up continuously of late. One of my key terms has a trio of possible forms, each of which has a certain appeal and a certain problem:

Policy making
Policy-making
Policymaking

I think all three are acceptable English, and my preference vacillates between the three based on the context in which the word is used. When it is being used as the subject of a sentence, the two word version seems more natural: “Consideration of framing issues is important for those involved in policy making.” When it is modifying a noun, either the conglomerated or hyphenated version seems better: “The policymaking process is fraught with uncertainties.”

I should, however, choose a single form to use in the entire thesis, and do so before I need to wade through too many tens of thousands of words and footnotes to set the standard. Preferences, anyone?

I am working on developing presentation standards for the whole thesis. I am told Oxford has some rules of its own, but I am not sure where to find them.

Making a hash of things

The following is the article I submitted as part of my application for the Richard Casement internship at The Economist. My hope was to demonstrate an ability to deal with a very technical subject in a comprehensible way. This post will be automatically published once the contest has closed in all time zones.

Cryptography
Making a hash of things

Oxford
A contest to replace a workhorse of computer security is announced

While Julius Caesar hoped to prevent the hostile interception of his orders through the use of a simple cipher, modern cryptography has far more applications. One of the key drivers behind that versatility is an important but little-known tool called a hash function. These consist of algorithms that take a particular collection of data and generate a smaller ‘fingerprint’ from it. That can later be used to verify the integrity of the data in question, which could be anything from a password to digital photographs collected at a crime scene. Hash functions are used to protect against accidental changes to data, such as those caused by file corruption, as well as intentional efforts at fraud. Cryptographer and security expert Bruce Schneier calls hash functions “the workhorse of cryptography” and explains that: “Every time you do something with security on the internet, a hash function is involved somewhere.” As techniques for digital manipulation become more accessible and sophisticated, the importance of such verification tools becomes greater. At the same time, the emergence of a significant threat to the most commonly used hashing algorithm in existence has prompted a search for a more secure replacement.

Hash functions modify data in ways subject to two conditions: that it be impossible to work backward from the transformed or ‘hashed’ version to the original, and that multiple originals not produce the same hashed output. As with standard cryptography (in which unencrypted text is passed through an algorithm to generate encrypted text, and vice versa), the standard of ‘impossibility’ is really one of impracticability, given available computing resources and the sensitivity of the data in question. The hashed ‘fingerprint’ can be compared with a file and, if they still correspond, the integrity of the file is affirmed. Also, computer systems that store hashed versions of passwords do not pose the risk of yielding all user passwords in plain text form, if the files containing them are accidentally exposed of maliciously infiltrated. When users enter passwords to be authenticated, they can be hashed and compared with the stored version, without the need to store the unencrypted form. Given the frequency of ‘insider’ attacks within organizations, such precautions benefit both the users and owners of the systems in question.

Given their wide range of uses, the integrity of hash functions has become important for many industries and applications. For instance, they are used to verify the integrity of software security updates distributed automatically over the Internet. If malicious users were able to modify a file in a way that did not change the ‘fingerprint,’ as verified through a common algorithm, it could open the door to various kinds of attack. Alternatively, malicious users who could work backward from hashed data to the original form could compromise systems in other ways. They could, for instance, gain access to the unencrypted form of all the passwords in a large database. Since most people use the same password for several applications, such an attack could lead to further breaches. The SHA-1 algorithm, which has been widely used since 1995, was significantly compromised in February 2005. This was achieved by a team led by Xiaoyun Wang and primarily based at China’s Shandong University. In the past, the team had demonstrated attacks against MD5 and SHA: hash functions prior to SHA-1. Their success has prompted calls for a more durable replacement.

The need for such a replacement has now led the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology to initiate a contest to devise a successor. The competition is to begin in the fall of 2008, and continue until 2011. Contests like the one ongoing have a promising history in cryptography. Notably, the Advanced Encryption Standard, which was devised as a more secure replacement to the prior Data Encryption Standard, was decided upon by means of an open competition between fifteen teams of cryptographers between 1997 and 2000. At least some of those disappointed in that contest are now hard at work on what they hope will become one of the standard hash functions of the future.

Ten days to chapter two

By the end of this month, I am to submit the second chapter of my thesis. On “problem identification and investigation” it will detail the scientific processes that led to the Stockholm Convention and the Kyoto Protocol. Largely because of the sheer scale of the latter effort, it is a more difficult thing to pin down, especially in a reasonably concise way. If someone knows of an article or chapter that provides a neat scientific history of the climate change debate, UNFCCC, and Kyoto, I would appreciate being pointed in that direction.

On the theoretical side, the chapter will examine the ways in which phenomena in the world are categorized as ‘problems’ or not. I am also going to examine the role of existing bureaucratic structures in determining if and how scientific research in undertaken. There, the contrast between the American and Canadian approaches to dealing with POPs should be illustrative.

About 7,000 words long, this chapter will be one of the three pillars upon which the thesis as a whole will succeed or fail. As such, I am understandably anxious to do as good a job on it as can be managed, given the limitations on how much I can actually read and remember. My biggest source of anxiety remains the thought that I haven’t done enough research to speak authoritatively on the subject. Finishing the Litfin and Bernstein books is thus the first order of business, for the next few days. To that end, I should resume my ‘peripatetic and caffeinated’ reading strategy.

Richard Casement internship

As one more project for the next couple of weeks, I am going to prepare a submission for the Richard Casement internship at The Economist. Since about ten people a day are finding my site by searching for that term, I am not going to give any hints about what I might write my 600 word article about. That said, I am told that such applications generally succeed through the combination of a good submission with a fortuitous personal connection with someone already inside the organization. Furthermore, their stated “aim is more to discover writing talent in a science student or scientist than scientific aptitude in a budding journalist” and I am neither of those things.

That said, I can hardly imagine a better way to spend the first three months after finishing here than writing about science in New York or London. Hopefully, my application this year will go better than the ones I submitted in past recruiting cycles.

Alternative thesis flowchart

Introduction draft (v0.3) complete

Through the liberal application of Red Bull and Beethoven, a 4,802 word draft of my thesis introduction is ready to be dropped off tomorrow for my supervisor to read. I’ll give it one more read-over before printing it in the morning.

With seventy-seven days to go until submission, here is the state of the project:

Introduction: 4,802 words (5,477 with footnotes)
Chapter 2 – Problem identification and investigation: 2,753 words
Chapter 3 – Consensus formation in science and politics: 0 words
Chapter 4 – Remedy design and implementation 0 words
Conclusion: 0 words

Total: 7555 (25%)

Note: there are significant sections that were written in the old structure and have not found homes in the new structure yet. Most of them will land in Chapters 3 and 4.

My next chapter is due on February 28th. Just having the a draft introduction written makes me feel much more as though I am on top of this project, though parts of it will certainly need to be revised once the three substantive chapters have been written.

Tomorrow, I should also finish Kuhn and move on to Bernstein and Litfin. I also need to work out which bits of Haas need to be read most urgently.

[Update: 5 February 2007] I am starting to look forward to April, when the task will be to cut what I have written down to the correct length. (v0.4) of the introduction, which I just submitted, crept up to 5,018 words (5,894 with footnotes).