Writing – Page 63 – a sibilant intake of breath

Spelling, grammar, and public writing

Talking to people about some of the essay editing I have been doing, in various capacities, I find that there are two general positions when it comes to grammatical and typographical errors. Most people fit pretty squarely into one or the other group, and a fair amount of animosity seems to fly between the two. Normally, my impulse is to call for restraint in in the prosecution of such campaigns. In this case, however, I think the argument in favour of the second position is quite clear-cut.

The first group feels that the important thing is just making clear what you mean. Misspelling a proper name, using the wrong homonym (its v. it’s), and similar errors are not of great consequence, because anyone can tell what you meant. I have some sympathy for this view, particularly because it can lay some claim to being anti-exclusionary. English is a weird language and it is hard to learn. A lot can be said for tolerating those who are in the process of doing so. The internet and other venues are richer for their contributions, and it is unreasonable to expect perfect use of language from those who are still getting used to it. Indeed, I would be extremely hard pressed to write a perfect post or comment in French.

At the same time, those who are capable of writing proper English have little excuse not to do so, whether online or in a different context. The second group – to which I belong – sees writing properly as a duty the writer owes to their audience. To just throw unedited text at people is disrespectful, because it shows that you don’t care enough about them to present them with something polished. I am not talking here about Joyce or e.e. cummings bending the rules – that is the privilege of anyone who knows them well enough to toy with them. A style deliberately different from standard English is not comparable to carelessly written English. I am talking about those people who can’t be bothered to check their spelling and read over what they wrote to make sure it accords with the basic conventions of English grammar. With built-in spellchecking and nearly effortless editing fundamental to modern word processing, there is really no excuse.

A secondary benefit is that taking the time to re-read what you’ve composed lets you better make sure that you aren’t about to put something malformed or uninformed into a public place, where it may embarrass you to many people, and where it may be hard to remove.

On walking into lamp posts

In one of their less well considered comments, The Economist said the following this week, when discussing the upcoming European Galileo Positioning System, which is to exist in parallel to America’s Global Positioning System (GPS):

GPS is accurate to within about 15 feet (5m); fine for navigating a car but too imprecise for pedestrians.

Thankfully, at least some pedestrians seem to have natural navigation systems that operate at such ranges with no satellite data whatsoever. It’s a trick even children seem capable of pulling off.

PS. Incidentally, the Galileo Positioning System seems like a pretty easy thing to implement:

Time – Galileo’s position

01:00:00 – Under the Church of Santo Croce, Florence (dead)
01:00:01 – Under the Church of Santo Croce, Florence (dead)
…

On editing: a noble task and profession

Editing

The academic stages of my life have involved a huge amount of editing. I have read countless essays written by friends, papers submitted to journals, chapters destined for books, scholarship essays, and the like. It seems to me that there are three major types of editing that occur: low level, high level, and contextual.

Low level editing is what I have been doing for the last three hours: the careful reading of someone’s written work, with the major aim of identifying minor errors of spelling and grammar. The remit frequently extends to include the identification of sentences that are particularly unclear or otherwise problematic. Low level editing is distinguished by the fact that large amounts of knowledge about the topic of the work being edited are rarely required. Knowing terms of art can be an asset (those who do not often misunderstand how they are to be used), but I am essentially capable of giving a low level edit to anything written in the social sciences or the humanities.

A high level edit is much more intellectual. Alongside language, argument is evaluated. Contradictory evidence might be brought up; logical flaws might be highlighted. A high level edit usually incorporates a low level edit, but need not do so. A high level edit is rarely effective or comprehensible to the person whose work is being edited without one or more conversations. While a low level edit might get you thanked in a block of names in the acknowledgements section of a book, enough high level edits might get a book dedicated to you. Indeed, I am personally extremely grateful to people who have done high level edits of things I have written over the years: particularly Kate Dillon, Meghan Mathieson, Tristan Laing and Ian Townsend-Gault. Virtually everything important that I’ve written in the last five years has passed an inspection from at least one of them.

Contextual editing is the kind I have done least. It is the process of adapting a written work to fit into a particular place: whether a journal, a book, or somewhere else with specific requirements for length and content. I’ve done a lot of that on the fish paper – as well as when I worked for the international relations and history journals at UBC. Contextual editing has the virtue that it generally takes the quality of text and argument in the original piece as settled. It has the pitfall that it is generally an arduous process of sorting, summary, and re-jigging that is rather less rewarding than either of the other sort of edits.

Anyone who has ever been irked to see a tense or pluralization error in the middle of a huge academic tome might pause to consider the amount of error checking that goes into such things. The essential fact is that the brain that wrote a sentence is often badly placed to pick out any flaws within it; they have long-since been papered over in the mind of the author. With regard to errors in books, I have certainly noticed a great many such things myself. These days, I am likely to angrily correct them with a four-colour pen. I tip my hat to all the friends, spouses, significant others, teachers, and supervisors who have reduced the number of times it takes place. You are true heroes of the intellectual process.

Fish paper publication upcoming

I may be delerious because it’s 6:30am, but this seems pretty unambiguous:

I really enjoyed the piece you wrote on EU policies regarding fishery sustainability off the coast of West Africa. I’d like to work with you to prepare your piece for publication in [the MIT Internatinal Review].

You mentioned on your cover letter that you would be willing to “re-focus it in the most appropriate direction and summarize other sections.” This will probably comprise the bulk of our work together, as your piece was very well written to begin with.

An excellent bit of news by which to start the day. I am off to London.

Thesis development

Talking with Dr. Hurrell about the thesis this evening was rather illuminating. By grappling with the longer set of comments made on my research design essay, we were able to isolate a number of interwoven questions, within the territory staked out for the project. All relate to science and global environmental policy-making, but they approach the topic from different directions and would involve different specific approaches and styles and standards of proof.

Thesis idea chart

The first set deal with the role of ‘science’ as a collection of practices and ideals. If you imagine society as a big oval, science is a little circle embedded inside it. Society as a whole has a certain understanding of science (A). That might include aspects like objectivity, or engaging in certain kinds of behaviour. These understandings establish some of what science and scientists are able to do. Within the discipline itself, there is discussion about the nature of science (B), what makes particular scientific work good or bad, etc. This establishes the bounds of science, as seen from the inside, and establishes standards of practice and rules of inclusion and exclusion. Then, there is the understanding of society by scientists (C). That understanding exists at the same time as awareness about the nature of the material world, but also includes an understanding of politics, economics, and power in general. The outward-looking scientific perspective involves questions like if and how scientists should engage in advocacy, what kind of information they choose to present to society,

The next set of relationships exist between scientists and policy-makers. From the perspective of policy-makers, scientists can:

Raise new issues
Provide information on little-known issues
Develop comprehensive understandings about things in the world
Evaluate the impact policies will have
Provide support for particular decisions
Act in a way that challenges decisions

For a policy-maker, a scientist can be empowering in a number of ways. They can provide paths into and through tricky stretches of expert knowledge. They can offer predictions with various degrees of certainty, ranging from (say) “if you put this block of sodium in your pool, you will get a dramatic explosion” to “if we cut down X hectares of rainforest, Y amount of carbon dioxide will be introduced into the atmosphere.”

The big question, then, is which of these dynamics to study. Again and again, I find the matter of how scientists understand their legitimate policy role to be among the most interesting. This becomes especially true in areas of high uncertainty. The link from “I know what will happen if that buffoon jumps into the pool strapped to that block of sodium” to trying to stop the action is more clear than the one between understanding the atmospheric effects of deforestation and lobbying to curb the latter. Using Stockholm as a ‘strong case’ and Kyoto as a ‘weak case’ of science leading to policy, the general idea would be to examine how scientists engaged with both policy processes, how they saw their role, and what standards of legitimacy they held it to. This approach focuses very much on the scientists, but nonetheless has political saliency. Whether it could be a valid research project is a slightly different matter.

The first big question, then, is whether to go policy-maker centric or scientist centric. I suspect my work would be more distinctive if I took the latter route. I suspect part of the reason why the examiners didn’t like my RDE was because they expected it to take the former route, then were confronted with a bunch of seemingly irrelevant information pertaining to the latter.

I will have a better idea about all of this once I have read another half-dozen books: particularly Haas on epistemic communities. Above all, I can sense from the energy of my discussions with Dr. Hurrell that there are important questions lurking in this terrain, and that it will be possible to tackle a few of them in an interesting and original way.

The Salmon of Doubt

One more promising bit of academic news, from the MIT International Review:

Your paper is indeed still being considered (congratulations!), having made it through a particularly rigorous selection process. You will receive a more formal note to this effect in the forthcoming days.

This is, of course, the eternal fish paper, still passing through journal selection processes on its way to eternity. So much time has now passed since I wrote that paper that it feels like a familiar alien life-form that has been observing me continuously, but which I can only properly recognize when it glances at me in a certain way. Needless to say, this is an odd relationship to have with a piece of your own work.

I am very cautiously optimistic. If the paper gets through to publication, it will be my first published work in a journal not run by the University of British Columbia.

Media idiocy

One of the BBC top stories right now: “Mobile phone risk during storms.” I am not going to link it, because they don’t deserve traffic for publishing something so asinine. The crux of the article is that people who get struck by lightning while using a metal mobile phone are more likely to be injured than people just standing there. The article doesn’t indicate that your chances of getting struck by lightning while talking on the phone are any higher. Indeed, I would posit that you would be less likely to be standing around outside in a thunderstorm if you had your expensive and almost certainly non-waterproof mobile phone pressed against your ear. And whose mobile phone is made of metal anyhow?

According to scientist Paul Taylor: “I would treat a mobile phone as yet another piece of metal that people tend to carry on their persons like coins and rings.” Do they advise not wearing rings or carrying change during thunderstorms? Of course not. That would be absurd.

Sometimes, the enthusiasm of the media to scare people on the basis of incredibly improbable events is so frustrating I don’t know what to do. They would have you believe that strangers will poison your child’s Halloween candy (all known cases of poisoning by this route were committed by the parents of the child). Everything from shark attacks to terrorist incidents gets presented as far more common than they really are, in a world of six billion with a media likely to report every incident of each. A really brilliant essay by Jack Gordon on this kind of fear-mongering can be found here. The best paragraph reads:

It is fashionable to remark that America “lost its innocence” on September 11th. This is balderdash. Our innocence is too deep and intractable for that. The thing we’ve really lost doesn’t even deserve the name of bravery. We’ve lost the ability to come to grips with the simple fact that life is not a safe proposition—that life will kill us all by and by, regardless. And as a society, we’ve just about lost the sense that until life does kill us, there are values aside from brute longevity that can shape the way we choose to live.

This essay won a contest by Shell and The Economist on the topic “How much liberty should we trade for security.” It is well worth a look; it’s enormously more deserving, I would say, than the BBC article of comparable length. The basic point: we need to acknowledge the existence of risk and deal with it intelligently. We can never be perfectly safe, and we shouldn’t try to be. We can never do otherwise than balance risks against benefits.

Work cut out for me

As of this afternoon, at least I can say that I have decided on the topics for my last three papers of this year. Together, they should be about 9000 words and based on me reading at least six books, plus articles and individual chapters.

What impact did the ending of the overseas colonial empires have on the nature and conduct of international relations? Have subsequent wars been consequences of decolonisation?
What are the causes of the Arab-Israeli conflict and why has it proved so resistant to resolution?
How has the international trade regime come to encompass ‘beyond the border’ issues – such as human rights and the environment? What does this imply for developed and developing countries?

At present, Dr. Hurrell seems more focused on preparing for a trip and a grant proposal than on pressing me to finish these. That’s both a blessing, because it takes pressure off during the time that will be my last chance to see many friends this year, and a curse, because it draws out this term into what would otherwise be the summer.

A few properly tottering stacks of books around the room should be a good source of motivation.

Syndication and RSS: a simple introduction

A few people have asked me what ‘syndication’ and ‘RSS’ are, so I thought I would write a quick, non-technical introduction.

Syndication intro

The content of this blog can be broadly separated into two types: the text that makes up posts, and all the formatting that surrounds it. What syndication does is take just the text, allowing it to be read through some other site or program than the one usually used to view the site. The big reason why this is helpful is because it lets you quickly check a great many information streams to see if any have changed.

Instead of having to check more than 100 different pages every time I want to see if one has been updated, I can take a look at one page that lists all the different syndication ‘feeds.’

BlogLines

One service that allows this is BlogLines. If you have a look at my BlogLines account, you will see that it tracks more than 100 different ‘feeds.’ These include things as diverse as all the LiveJournal, WordPress, Blogger, and other blogs run by friends of mine; listings of video clips from the Colbert Report and the Daily show; headlines from Metafilter, Slashdot, and other news sites; and a few miscellaneous other things.

If you sign up for a BlogLines account, you can add two different feeds from my blog. Both use a technology called RSS, which stands for ‘Really Simple Syndication.’ The addresses in question are:

Blog posts: http://www.sindark.com/feed/
Blog comments: http://www.sindark.com/comments/feed/

Opening either in a normal Internet Explorer or Firefox window will probably bring up a lot of confusing looking garble. This is the machine readable version of the blog. If you add one of those addresses to your list of feeds in BlogLines, however, you will see a list of recent posts presented, complete with short summaries and links back to the original. Whenever this site (or any other one you have listed) gets updated, it will turn bold on your BlogLines page.

Signing up for the comments feed will allow you to see whenever anybody leaves a comment on any post of mine, without having to check each one individually. I find it a useful way to follow conversations, without having to look at many different individual pages. For people running blogs, it can also be a good way to catch spam.

Firefox live bookmarks

Another way to read RSS feeds is to add them as ‘Live Bookmarks’ within Firefox. This can be done very easily. In Firefox, look over to the right hand side of the blog’s address, inside the white box near the top of the window. On the right hand side, there is a little orange icon with a white dot and radiating arcs. Any page on which you see that icon has a syndication feed available.

If you click that orange icon, a window will pop up asking you to name the bookmark and choose where in your bookmarks menu you want to see it. Then, any time you go into the bookmarks menu and select the name of that site, it will show you a listing of recent post titles. You can click on any of them to go to the post itself.

More information

Bloglines FAQ
WikiPedia on RSS (includes the orange logo I described)
Firefox Live Bookmark tutorial

Thinking about powers and polarity

I’ve been trying hard to sort out a decent answer for the unipolarity/great powers question on which I am presenting Tuesday, but still having a lot of trouble. The definitions strike me as very circular. The characteristics we ascribe to great powers (nukes, UN Security Council seats, big economies) are as much descriptions of the states we already think of as great powers as they are a checklist against which countries can be compared. Likewise, ‘unipolarity’ in the contemporary sense basically just means ‘the world how it has more-or-less been since the end of the Cold War.’

The importance of the term ‘great power’ lies in the ways in which the distinction changes the thinking of states. While largely reflective of underlying capabilities, the confidence associated with such status is a capability in itself. Likewise, it is in the psychology of the great power distinction that the concept most forcefully manifests itself in the world. As such, the criteria of great power status change over time with both the real and perceived values of different national capabilities: an overseas empire, for instance, or nuclear weapons.

Since the United States is generally accepted to be the most powerful nation in the world, there is an obvious incentive to create arguments that might sway its behaviour. This is a strategy that manifests itself in ways like opposition groups attempting to secure American support for the removal of autocratic or unpopular rulers . It also manifests itself through the manipulation of the United States’ perception of its own security, and what the enhancement of that security requires. A prime contemporary example of this trend is the support that some truly grim regimes in the Arab world have been able to extract from the present administration, in exchange for security cooperation. To make attempts at lobbying based on assertions about the role of superpower states in general, or the conditions of unipolarity, is a less transparent way of trying to influence American policy today. Arguably, such initiative is aided by the generally positivist conception of the social sciences in the United States at present. Faith in the existence of valid laws of state behaviour opens the door to manipulation of that behaviour through the manipulation of how such laws are understood. For instance, consider the ways in which South Asian governments interacted with the ‘domino theory’ during the Vietnam War era.

The most common way in which unipolarity is used as a justification for policy by liberals is to assert the moral responsibility of the superpower to at least lead the drive towards greater international justice. Likewise, the classical realist response is to develop and immediate and abiding concern about new great powers rising to challenge the superpower: hence the intense present concern about China. Both perspectives are important for understanding how the idea of unipolarity affects policy prescriptions.

I think I basically just need to poke at these ideas for a few more hours – as well as reading some more sources – and I will have a decent, though perhaps somewhat unusual, paper and presentation.