New plans shaping up

Another expedition in the works?

My mother's travel plans are coming together and, in a move that surprised me, she invited me to accompany her to either Greece of Malta at the end of March. In either case, we would be leaving on the 28th. After the Baltic in December, I suspect that the Mediterranean in March would make for quite a contrast. EasyJet doesn't seem to fly to Valletta, though they do have return flights from London to Athens on the right days for less than £90. I don't know anything about Malta, save that is discussed in John Keegan's Intelligence in War, in the context of Napoleon landing there while being chased by Admiral Lord Nelson, prior to the Battle of the Nile. Looking through the Wikipedia entry, the place certainly has quite a history. Particularly for a country that you could walk around in a few days.

Greece, of course, I know much more about. It would be excellent indeed to see the original home of the Parthenon Marbles, which I suppose we would have to stop at the British Museum to have a look at before departing. Going to the very source of Greek food would obviously be a delight, as would visiting the setting of so much classical history and myth. The Greek option is apparently also three days longer than the Maltese.

In either case, I am really excited about the possibility of going. One of the great advantages of living in Britain is the proximity of all the rest of Europe. That, coupled with inexpensive flights from EasyJet and RyanAir, puts a really fascinating section of the world within reach.

An excellent evening

I always leave my supervisions with Dr. Hurrell in very good spirits. Today, we discussed my essay and went into quite a bit of philosophical depth. We discussed a broader reading of Hobbes than international relations theorists generally subscribe to, as well as Rawls, Rousseau, Rorty, and a number of others. Like all of the other supervisions so far, it was a really energetic discussion in which I felt strongly intellectually engaged.

Afterwards, I went for a tour through the Ashmolean with Claire and several of her roommates. Apparently, the place is to be partially torn down by summer, and then rebuilt over the next three years. As a consequence, much of the collection will be inaccessible for a long while. A good amount of what we did see was quite interesting and I should like to go back for a proper, guided tour at some point.

The Strategic Studies Group session tonight was about regulating private military firms, though the speaker only spoke about the kinds that provide direct security (whether in a combat capacity or not). Largely excluded: military contractors like Military Professional Resources Incorporated and logistics firms like Brown & Root. That said, it was quite interesting. I was suprised to learn that international humanitarian law doesn't apply in cases where private military firms are employed by other private companies: for instance, when companies like DynCorp provide security to Shell, operating in Nigeria, or to the Saudi national oil company.

One rather unfortunate thing I learned is the the OUSSG trip to Brussels - visiting NATO Headquarters, Supreme Headquarters Allied Command Europe, and the European Parliament - is taking place between the 22nd and 24th of March: exactly when my mother will be arriving in the U.K. Perhaps I will be able to go next year. Not that I am disappointed, given the prospect of going to Malta or Greece instead. It's just regrettable that it happened to be at the same time, especially since the trip is being subsidized by the European Parliament, such that people only need to pay for transport to Brussels.

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• This description of chemical misadventures is short, amusing, and worth a read.
• Also amusing, some legal bluster from the malware industry, over at BoingBoing. This reminds me of the Legal Threats section at SomethingAwful.com.
• Trivia fact: I have been wearing a pair of these Sportif Explorer Convertible Pants every day since I arrived in Oxford. As I learned in Vancouver, Italy, and elsewhere - these are a very durable article of clothing. The zip-up side pockets, profusion of other pockets, and articulated knees are all strong selling points. Next time I am in Vancouver, I am buying the fleece-lined version, which would have been nice in Tallinn and Helsinki.

Posted by Milan at 11:03 PM   

Critical theory and normative politics

During today's seminar, which was every bit as energetic as I expected, I was stuck by a question. The discussion centred around the grand and frustrating neo-neo debate, where neoliberals and neorealists fall over themselves to prove how much more scientific they are than one another. While this kind of thing blasted back and forth between the two sides, some interesting critical theory questions started to come up at the periphery. What is the role of theory? How does it affect power relations within and between states? Which elites does it serve, and how? What effect does the person making theory have on the theory produced, and can that impact be bracketed or ignored?

The kind of self-awareness that such questions call upon theory to deliver demonstrates one of the ways in which critical theory might be extremely helpful to us. Indeed, if we can deal with the empirical and ontological problems and assumptions that underlie classical liberalism, perhaps we can rescue it. Classical philosophy has the great virtue that it is explicitly concerned with the good life. Not to imply that this is a monolithic thing, in terms of content, but it is a monolithic thing in terms of human intention. We're all constantly pondering what the lines of our obituary will say, the way we are and will be remembered. As such, there is a fundamental humanity to projects that personalize political questions.

Obviously, theories like liberal institutionalism can be helpful to us. Maybe they will help us develop effective institutions to deal with real problems. The fear many people seem to have about critical theory is that it will hopelessly erode our ability to say anything of value about the world, much less act in a meaningful and progressive way. The idea that struck me - and it's really nothing more than a shadow of an idea - is that perhaps we could use critical theory to replace some of the puffery about rational individuals and black boxes that exists in classical theory with something more philosophically rigorous. Perhaps it could enable unashamed action, rather than binding us forever in a kind of grim relativism.

Posted by Milan at 2:27 PM   

Operation 'Read More' meeting with tolerable success

I spent most of today trapped in the Social Sciences Library (the oft-mentioned SSL) due to the gravitational attraction of a stack of books about neo-liberal institutionalism. Now, I have nearly finished an essay. This is especially welcome since it is due tomorrow morning at 11:00am, during our core seminar.

The essay is about the dullest side of international relations theory: a sub-discipline that I shall label "What are we going to call things?" It consists of extensively argued, frequently seriously embittered tirades about whether X belongs in set A or not. Is Hobbes a realist? Is neoliberal institutionalism liberal, as well as really horrible term? Despite the fact that questions of the kind posed above have almost no relevance outside the bizarre world of junior professorships, you will find them hotly debated. Part of the problem is that these questions don't have real answers: they only have answers that are more or less plausible to certain people, mostly because of biases they already hold. I've been baking in the liberal internationalist oven that is Western Canada for far too long to view realism with anything less than profound skepticism. Likewise, the urge to defend liberalism - particularly variants that account for the more solid bits of the critical theory rebuttal - is fairly automatic. While it's irksome to have such an obviously constructed and difficult to eradicate bias, it probably doesn't have too much long-term significance.

There are, of course, important consequences that arise from theory, for it cannot help but inform policy, however imperfectly and indirectly. As such, I can see the value of slogging through these sorts of things. Additionally, it seems highly likely that we will have another interesting and high energy debate during our core seminar tomorrow.

In any case, I must go back to my stack of books and sheath of notes - carrying small elements of their language and argumentation over into my essay, marked with wee footnotes. Then, it will just remain to edit the thing so that it doesn't have the same ability to drain all the joy from life that a good number of these IR theory texts seem to have specialized in.

Tomorrow, after Philosophy of the Social Sciences, the core seminar, and the Changing Character of War seminar, I have my first supervision this term with Dr. Hurrell. I shall have to review my paper. In the evening. I will be going on a private tour of the Ashmolean Museum, along with Claire and some other fresher graduates. Unlike the Natural History Museum and the Pitt Rivers Museum, I haven't yet wandered into this collection of artifacts pilfered by long-dead British aristocrats. This will mean missing this week's Strategic Studies Group lecture, but this seems the better option. I look forward to it.

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• The proposed second Oxford bloggers' gathering seems to be falling apart, since very few people can attend on the proposed night. Is there a night of the week when more people would be able to attend? On what night are people least busy?
• One thing I found today that I didn't expect: the Oxford libraries will give you bags of the highest quality if you need them to carry books through the rain. Made of tough clear plastic, with good handles and 'Oxford University Library Services' and the university crest printed on them in blue. The handles are even double-thickness plastic, so as not to tear. Quite obviously the finest bags I've seen in a long while.
• Anyone wanting to try their hand at some amateur codebreaking, and who is not too troubled by the morbid, should have a look at Bruce Schneier's blog.
• While I've mentioned it before, Post Secret remains a fascinating glimpse into people's lives. One of these postcards apparently belongs to Alithea: the friend of Tristan whose music I endorsed in a recent post.
• Remind me to buy Earl Grey tea. It's a terrible thing to be out of.

Posted by Milan at 12:01 AM   

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king

The results of the statistics exam are back and, along with at least two other members of the M.Phil, I managed to get a distinction. While that is mostly reflective of the fact that I did statistics back at UBC, I am still glad to have begun my Oxford exam career on the right foot. Here's hoping it carries through to my qualifying test, during the next inter-term break.

Now, back to my increasingly amorphous paper on neo-liberal institutionalism.

Posted by Milan at 10:55 AM   

An orrery of errors

One of the trickiest questions of environmental politics is always whether we are actually managing to deal with problems, or whether we are just shifting them elsewhere - either spatially or temporally. This is true on many fronts: with regards to pollution, with regards to resources, and with regards to the overall intensity with which we are exploiting the earth. Our experiences of environmental conditions in the rich world are certainly not reflective of the overall global story, nor of the ultimate consequences.

Looking first at pollution: during the early periods of their industrialization, the countries that are now the world's cleanest were polluted to the point of seriously impinging upon the health of those who lived within them, particularly in the cities. London's notorious fogs were more the product of particulate matter from burning coal than the product of the natural humidity of the place. Some Japanese cities were so saturated with heavy metals from industrial sources that they became notorious for the illnesses and birth defects that resulted. Evidently, the bulk of these problems have now been overcome in the developed world. Zoning laws, environmental regulations, new technologies, and the rest have all come together to make our air and water broadly safer than they have been since the industrial revolution.

The extent to which we can cheer this is, however, mitigated somewhat in the knowledge that much of the health and safety we enjoy is the product of misery elsewhere. Consider the conditions in the industrializing regions of India or China. Consider the conditions in the various resource sectors that provide the raw materials of affluence: from coal and diamond mines to hazardous timber industries run by corrupt national armies and organized crime syndicates in the Asia Pacific.

Indeed, resources are probably the area where this outsourcing can be most obviously seen. What forests remain in much of the developed world are fairly rigorously protected. Even Canada's vast timber industry has requirements for conservation, replanting, and the protection of streams. I am certainly not claiming that this industry is perfect, nor entirely sustainable in its present form, but it is clear that these kind of standards certainly do not exist worldwide. Where once the big area of concern among environmentalists was the Amazon rainforest in Brazil (certainly still in danger from a growing human population and the desire for land), the real, widespread damage being done today is in Asia: where the smoke from massive land-clearing forest fires occasionally rains down on cities and where Japan uses more tropical hardwood than any other nation in the world. The primary use: shaping concrete.

The most difficult to assess area in which such phenomena are occurring is in terms of just how much stress vital ecological and climatological systems can endure before they are degraded in the long term. I needn't remind any long-term readers about the example of fisheries, but is also bears considering just how much toxic and radioactive sludge we can continue dumping into the sea before the problem comes back to bite us. Consider the dozens of Soviet nuclear warships and submarines that have been scuttled off obscure portions of the Russian coastline: both well-stuffed with spent fuel and other radioactive waste and, in most cases, themselves rendered dangerously radioactive. Like the concrete tomb in which the Chernobyl reactor has been encased, it is only a matter of time before these containers are broken down by time and corrosion.

A similar story of large scale pollution can be told about the atmosphere - and I am not talking about greenhouse gasses and climate change. A broad collection of chemicals including the products of burning garbage, as Japan does widely, industrial chemicals, like the PCBs leaking from the old RADAR stations along Canada's Distant Early Warning Line, and pesticides have such chemical compositions that they break down only extremely slowly in the biosphere. They do, however, concentrate in fatty tissues and in ever-greater concentrations as they progress up the food chain. The long-term ramifications of these persistent organic pollutants are, naturally, far from entirely known.

As for climate change, this is the macro-level elephant in the room. While we don't know exactly what it will involve, what magnitude it will be, and what it will cost to deal with, the reality of climate change demonstrates how human activity can impact the entire planet. It also underscores the extent to which our present prosperity may be banking colossal problems for future generations.

The point of this is not to be overly alarmist, nor to endorse specific policies for dealing with the above problems. The point is related to how problems need to reach a certain level of severity before action against them comes together. Look at the present political circuses about health care and pensions in all the demographically-shifting rich states. Sometimes, action taken at the point where danger is apprehended is effective. Look at the Montreal Protocol on chlorofluorocarbons: the major class of chemicals that was eroding the ozone layer. Within a couple of decades of the identification of the problem, a fairly effective international regime was in place to begin dealing with it. The ozone is recovering.

Looking through the literature, you will see the ozone example a lot. That's not just because it is a fairly good example of international cooperation on a clear environmental problem: it's because it is one of a few success stories among myriad failures. Hopefully, in the next few decades, we will gain tools to better understand the future consequences of present choices and actions. Likewise, I am hopeful that we will develop the wisdom - individual and collective - to begin curbing contemporary demands and wasteful and destructive contemporary practices, both with an eye to global equity and another towards those who are to succeed us on this planet.

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• A batch of new photos has been added to my Photo.net portfolio, while I've been avoiding my half-finished essay on neo-liberal institutionalism for the core seminar. You can always get to my portfolio quickly from http://photo.sindark.com.

Posted by Milan at 12:01 AM   

Alternative Careers Fair

The better part of today was taken up attending the Alternative Careers Fair, over in the exam schools. I attended two sessions: the one on 'Arts' because it included Philip Pullman and the one on 'Environment.' Neither was exactly what I expected. Overall, the experience was interesting - and it was good to meet Mr. Pullman - but it did not assist me in finding employment for the summer. Of course, a 'careers fair' is generally meant to have a longer term focus than that.

The arts panel was heavily dominated by Lorraine Platt, a painter who spoke first and for more than twice her alloted length of time. A series of disjointed observations and repeated statements, I didn't find much that was useful or insightful in her presentation. That said, if I was contemplating a painting career, I might feel differently.

Mr. Pullman spoke last, after a musical therapist, for about twenty minutes. A bespectacled, balding man, I am amused to note that he wore exactly the same shirt as is featured in his portait on his website. His presentation was interesting partly because it seemed to portray an unusually focused life for a fiction author. While he described a number of jobs he has done over the years, none of them involved any writing or any cessation from attempts at novel writing. While you obviously can't get the sense of a person's life in twenty minutes, it was nonetheless a vignette of a committed person. Three pages a day, he says, has been his standard from the beginning.

Pullman spoke comfortably and with humour, quite unlike the more overbearing characters who directed the next seminar. His stress upon the importance of writing a good first page, and a good first chapter, is definitely reflected in his books: particularly The Golden Compass, which I consider to have one of the most skillful openings of any book I've read. As for motivational advice, he offered the following tidbit: "You need to be slightly insane, really. That's what kept me going."

After the session, I spoke with him very briefly and got him to inscribe my copy of Paradise Lost, since it was already signed and represents the only piece of his work I have with me in Oxford. It was amusing to note that, among the group of young women with whom I stood in order to have a book signed, more than half were past or present students of Wadham College. That said, I didn't recognize any of them.

The environment panel, which I attended after wandering the booths upstairs for a while and speaking with Natalie Lundsteen from the Career Service, included George Marshall and John Manoocherhri. Aside from an evident shared passion for the environment and for their work, the men were quite different. Mr. Marshall spoke with skill, but some hesitation, like someone who has never really enjoyed addressing an audience. He was careful to at least bracket and identify the bits of his short autobiography that might seem presumptuous or vain. His work on tropical forests in the Asia Pacific reminded me of Peter Dauvergne.

Mr. Manoocherhri, in stark contrast, tended towards the bombastic, the arrogant, and the foul-mouthed. While he initially came off as plain speaking, energetic, and direct, over the course of his presentation he became decreasingly attractive. He had a great willingness to pronounce himself expert on a matter, as well as a general mode of speech that was saturated with an over-certainty that diminished his credibility. While he did tell people much of what they wanted to hear (about how we will all have superb jobs in the environmental field), I don't know if he actually contributed a large amount of usable information. That said, I am still glad to have attended his talk.

Employment possibilities for the summer remain elusive. My three forays to the career service have produced starkly different pieces of advice. I was told, the first time, that I should apply for a job doing consulting or investment banking, because they would help pay down my student debt and they aren't terribly hard to get into if you can say the right things. The next time, I was told that I absolutely should not apply in those fields and, if I did, I would just get rejected anyway. Instead, it was suggested, I should look for a job related to writing or the environment. Today, I was told that any work I did on the environment or doing writing over the summer would almost certainly be unpaid, and that I should get a job in the college or in a pub in order to sustain myself.

'Marketing myself' is just the sort of thing I find difficult, frustrating, and profoundly unappealing. Applying for things requires exerting effort towards no productive end, save overcoming the various obstacles between yourself and a job. It requires a certain kind of distorted self-presentation that frequently borders on being deceptive. I hope I will be able to find some sort of position for the summer without too much of that.

Anyhow, I shall be working on my core seminar essay tonight. Not the most exciting option for a Saturday, by any means, but that which is presently required. Since all copies of the readings that can be withdrawn from the SSL have been, I need to go there at a time when the confined copies are relatively likely to be free. Tomorrow should be better, if I can get a good amount of work done tonight. I am looking forward to coffee with Margaret in the morning.

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• I realize that I never wrote anything about the big birthday party in Wadham last night. This is an intentional response to how bothersome writing anything about the college has generally been. Between people who absolutely do not want to be mentioned and people who are annoyed when they aren't, the level of diplomacy involved is just beyond what I am willing to put up with at the moment. That said, I was quite glad to meet Seth and I hope the bloggers' gathering he has mooted comes together soon.
• My French is seriously slipping, due to total lack of usage. Does anyone know of a good free French news podcast that I could listen to, just to have some exposure to the language? Thanks.

Posted by Milan at 12:01 AM   

Second quarterly Oxford bloggers' gathering

Three months ago today, a collection of Oxford bloggers met at The Turf for beer and conversation. Now, a second instance has been proposed. The date and time proposed are February 10th (Friday of 4th week) at 8:00pm. The place: the Turf Tavern, off Holywell Street.

I look forward to meeting an even larger cross section of the Oxford blogging community this time.

Posted by Milan at 6:28 PM   

All in all it was all just bricks in the wall

Substantive stuff

This has been proving quite the period on the international relations front: spats over gas between Russia and former satellite states, Ariel Sharon knocked out of politics, Hamas elected to power, the Iranian nuclear program again generating international attention, and the Conservatives emerging from twelve years of opposition in Canada to take a minority government. All are eminently worthy of commentary, though I haven't a huge amount of time in which to do so.

At the same time, however, you need to ask how different this really is. Russia has been clinging to the trappings of power ever since it lost the cold war. Political systems that elect old men with unhealthy lives will produce leaders who die in the midst of their political careers. Corruption spawns the rejection of the corrupt: at least in reasonably democratic systems. It's at times like this when I have the most sympathy for Waltz (sympathy for the devil?) in acknowledging the importance of the system, in understanding the dynamic between the units.

Personal stuff

A promising possibility has emerged on the housing front. Most of the details are still up in the air, including whether this will only cover the next academic year or whether it will include the summer as well. In the former case, I suppose I will have to find another place to live while I am working. Hopefully, that won't mean carting everything I own too far on my back and in suitcases.

I began Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America today. It seems to be one of those books that basically all enlightened academics, journalists, and pundits have delved into. While it's not directly relevant to the essay I am writing for tuesday (Topic: What is so ‘liberal’ about neo-liberal institutionalism?), I am guessing it will pay dividends in the longer term.

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• In honour of something I read today, I present the following list. My favourite fictional characters, an inexhaustive listing:
  1. Lyra (Silvertongue) Belacqua
  2. Hobbes (the Tiger)
  3. Ender Wiggin
  4. Motoko Kusanagi
  5. Diane ("A little bit crazy, a little bit bad. But hey - don't us girls just love that? ")
  Without Google, can anyone identify the origin of each? I wonder what the collection says about me as an individual, and what kind of choices people I know would make.
• Once again, though three of this week's readings are supposedly in the Wadham Library, none are actually on the shelves. I don't know if they are sitting in one of the many stacks of books that people like to decorate the desks with or if they have been stolen. In either case, it is frustrating.
  
• Kudos to Bill Gates for making a staggering personal contribution of $600M to the Global Plan to Stop Tuberculosis. That's more than ten times what the entire United Kingdom is donating.

Posted by Milan at 12:41 AM   

Academic termcard (boring for non-M.Phils)

I just realized that I have another essay due on Tuesday, this one for the core seminar. For my own reference, and that of people in the IR M.Phil, here's the big stuff for this term:

31 January : (Tuesday of 3rd week)
Core Seminar : Paper 1

9 February : (Thursday of 4th week)
Qualitative Methods : Take Home Exam 1 Distributed

13 February : (Monday of 5th week)
Qualitative Methods : Take Home Exam 1 Due

28 February : (Tuesday of 7th week)
Core Seminar : Paper 2

1 March : (Wednesday of 7th week)
Application deadline for two Canadian scholarships (notify referees by February 1)

9 March : (Thursday of 8th week)
Qualitative Methods : Take Home Exam 2 Distributed

13 March : (Monday of 9th week)
Qualitative Methods : Take Home Exam 2 Due

The qualitative methods stuff has been verified with Andrew Hurrell.

Last updated: 27 January. (Friday of 2nd week)

Posted by Milan at 5:39 PM   

After the M.Phil?

To me, today's qualitative methods lecture embodied much of what is frustrating and unattractive about academia. It's the parochialism, the turf-wars, the egos, and the navel-gazing. It's playing an intellectual game with your fellow practitioners, rather than focusing on some project with external value. That value needn't be the improvement of the world, per se, but merely the achievement of something externally valuable, in a way that arguments that nobody outside the discipline cares about simply aren't.

Perhaps it's symptomatic of my lack of certainty about what the future holds that every reading and discussion becomes, at least partly, a study in what exactly I am going to do with myself. While there is appeal in doing a doctorate, it would involve dealing with a huge amount of the kinds of issues identified in the paragraph above. It also brings the question of where to do it: in the States, where the programs that are almost universally considered the best are located, or in Britain?

American international relations is quantitatively focused, aggressively realist, and fairly intellectually limited. There seems to be a very strong hegemonic sense not only of what the discipline is, but what different sub fields within it (like foreign policy analysis) are and what sort of people use them. That might be something of a caricature, but there does seem to be truth to the idea that studying international relations in the states means doing something quite specific, and something based on a methodology that I really don't accept. I don't see how stressing the 'science' in social science is a useful approach for IR. I think to do so is chasing the illusion of rigour, rather than getting the kind of theoretical grounding that you need to undertake the kind of projects that interest me.

The British option has problems of its own. Oxford D.Phils are very short programs: much shorter than PhDs in the United States. They do not involve gaining teaching experience, which would be important if I was later looking for an academic job in Canada. Altogether, there seems to be very little confidence in the value of doing a D.Phil among the members of the program whose opinions I respect most.

A third option is to do a doctorate in the United States in a field other than international relations. To do something more specific might allow me to escape the theoretical debates that are so abstract, tiresome, and generally inapplicable. This is a possibility I will definitely consider, once I begin applying to further graduate programs.

As I've said many times before, however, it seems sensible to do something non-academic during the inter-degree break. Two central planks of my plan for the next eight years are to see a large portion of the world - ideally though a non-touristic lens - and to write some kind of book. Both would be aided by the right kind of job: something international which involves travel and experiences of a kind I've not had. As I told Bryony this afternoon, finishing the M.Phil (and hopefully doing a good job of it) should be proof enough for the moment that I can handle the academic side of things. Afterwards, it seems wise to prove that about some other area. I don't know what is involved in getting a job with the United Nations Environment Program or some NGO, but it's another thing to investigate in the medium term.

In the short term, the need for a summer job and summer accommodation is becoming increasingly acute.

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• I've been reading the Murakami book quite a bit in the past few days. As is often the case with novels, it is the voice of the narrator that sets the mood and, by extension, sets my mood when I am orbiting the book. I quite like the crisp descriptions - the personal narratives - that introduce the characters. I would be intrigued to meet myself in the form of such a description.
• The Sainsbury's brand Isle of Bute Scottish Cheddar is quite delicious: a very sharp, white cheese - it reminds me a great deal of the Tilamook special white cheddar that I've traditionally bought during my family's trips to Oregon.
• Mica has a new video online.
• At the moment, it seems like writing posts of the "here's what I did today" variety is uninteresting and vain. I will try to be more substantive for the next while.

Posted by Milan at 12:01 AM   

Know your audience

I am curious about who makes up the readership of this blog. Most days, about 100 people take a look. The better part of those people come directly to the page, suggesting they are returning to it, rather than finding it through Google or another search engine.

Some aggregate information that may interest people: Based on data from the past few months, about 60% of visits to the blog are from people who have been here before, while about 40% haven't been - at least from that computer. 13.65% of people find the blog through Google, while 15.94% are still finding their way here from the link at the old address. The blog is overwhelmingly read by people in North America and Western Europe, with a smattering in Australia, Asia, and Africa. 42% of visitors come from the United Kingdom; 37% from Canada; 16% from the United States, with no other single country above 1%. My election day post and the Oxford blog listing are the most popular single pages, though more than half of people leave the site immediately after looking at either.

On the technical side, just over 50% of users use IE, with 38% on Firefox and others using a collection of (sometimes very obscure) browsers. 78% of people use Windows, 17% use Macs. Like Firefox usage, this is well above the world average. The vast majority of viewers have screen resolutions of either 1024x768 or 1280x1024. 82% of you use some kind of broadband, lucky folks that you are. Eight of the ten most common phrases that people search for in Google and subsequently find their way to my site through the results of are people's names. None of them are my name. Only two have anything to do with the title of the blog.

This is all information that gets automatically passed to servers by your web browser, if you're interested in knowing where I got all these data from.

I would guess that the readership is dominated by members of the following groups:

1. Friends of mine, particularly those in Canada and at other far-flung schools and jobs
2. Family members
3. Former teachers and professors
4. People in the I.R. M.Phil
5. People in Wadham College, especially the MCR
6. People considering coming to Oxford
7. People considering taking the Oxford M.Phil in IR

Clearly, some people may fall into more than one group. I am curious to know what the relative shares are. Knowing would let me do a better job of writing things that people find interesting. I would be especially interested in knowing if there are people who are in none of these groups, but still read the blog regularly. If that is the case, what attracts you? In general, what would people like to see?

Posted by Milan at 10:04 PM   

Halfway done term two, week two

My essay on realism and neorealism has finally been dispatched to Dr. Hurrell. It will be nice to give my EndNote databases a rest, though it really just means a return to more reading. The last class on foreign policy analysis is tomorrow and I've yet to do the reading for it. Hopefully, this class will be better set up for the large group format than the last one was.

As a gift from China, Neal sent me a tin of Tieguanyin: "one of the most famous and highly prized teas in China, and possibly the greatest oolong tea produced anywhere." He explains that Guanyin is both a Taoist saint and the Sino-Japanese-Korean Buddhist Goddess of Mercy. Apparently, this specific varietal of Camellia sinensis is called Hong-Xing-Wi-Ma-Tau. I wish I had my beautiful Murchie's teapot - itself a gift - in which to brew it. Many thanks.

Having nineteen emails in my inbox, where I only keep items that require some kind of response, is a marker for how busy the term is becoming. It's a feeling I generally appreciate. At least when I am spending time doing things other than reading, I am generally doing things that are entirely justifiable and necessary.

The next item on my personal travel itinerary should be Africa. I've never been there before and it really seems like the kind of place you cannot be complete until you've seen. For a first trip, the most likely options are Kenya, Tanzania (Mount Kilimanjaro being near the border of those two states), South Africa, Nigeria, or possibly somewhere in West Africa, like Ghana or Benin. Regardless of where the trip ends up being to, I'd much prefer to go with someone who knows the country in question already. A trip to a French speaking part of Africa would also be preferable, since it would give me an incentive to brush up on my French before leaving and an opportunity to converse in at least one of the native tongues.

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• Tim has some interesting cabinet speculation. Canadian mousepad wonks, have a look.
• On a related note, the definition of 'wonk' in the OED has nothing whatsoever to do with its most common usage today.
• Many thanks to Margaret for informing me that this Saturday (January 28th), Philip Pulman will be at an Alternative Careers Fair at the Exam Schools, talking about how to be a writer. I will most certainly be in attendance. The event begins at 11:00am.
• I bought another two months worth of multivitamins and omega-3 fatty acids today. While they're obviously not a substitute for eating well, they make for a nice accompaniment. Those who are concerned about my diet, rejoice.
• Anyone who doesn't believe that the world, as we see it, is largely constructed on the basis of assumptions your brain makes about the world should watch this video. It's a relatively rare case of a strange three-dimensional optical effect that still works when filmed (ie. presented without the benefit of stereo vision).

Posted by Milan at 12:01 AM   

Passion in international relations theory

International Relations theory has a way of bringing out the passions in people. Roham, Sheena, Alex, Bryony, and the rest of my core seminar group had a particularly energetic discussion about liberal international relations theory today. The instructors were similarly engaged and, overall, it made for an interesting contrast with the relatively staid (though informative) character of our history seminar last term. These are the big questions that are coming up now. What is moral conduct for states? Does that question even mean anything? Can we build a better world and address the mistakes of the past? You cannot travel from across the world, at huge effort and expense, to study international relations, without caring deeply about these questions. To be in the position where people both have that level of interest and commitment and a high level of respect for one another is intellectually thrilling.

After a short nap to help combat electoral fatigue, I set about finishing my paper for Dr. Hurrell this afternoon. Now that Claire has taken a peek at the first draft, I should be able to hammer out a finalized version, with citations and all the rest, to be hand-delivered to Nuffield before my noon lecture tomorrow. Much as I would rather get to sleep, duty calls.

Of course, it wouldn't be quite so late if I hadn't spent at least an hour in Wellington Square introducing Claire to some of my favourite music. Of course, even the most basic of utilitarian calculations (probably the best I can manage) would demonstrate that the time was enormously better spent from a long-term perspective than devoting another hour to straightening out slightly kinked sentences or regenerating bodily tissues.

Seeing about 1000 visitors during the past 30 hours or so, on account of the election coverage that was here, has given me the slightest taste of mainstream blogging. While I don't think I have the time, desire, or ability to write the kinds of blogs that tens of thousands of people stream through daily, I do like to write things of interest beyond the circle of my family and friends. Like privacy versus disclosure, it's just one of those tensions that can't be eliminated in this kind of writing.

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• Potentially useful fact of the day: All my photos are calibrated to look best at 1.8 Standard Gamma and the D65 white point: equivalent to midday sunlight. If you're using an Apple LCD monitor, these are the default settings.

Posted by Milan at 1:05 AM   

On Canadian Music

One thing I have really enjoyed about being in Oxford has been having the chance to introduce friends here to some of my favourite Canadian music. It's a really gratifying bit of expat nationalism to be able to impress someone with the quality and variety not only of music from your home country, but of music from there that has been made by people you've met.

There is a heavy folk component not only to my introductory Canadiana showcase, but also to the general collection of music I've been listening to while here. Pink Floyd, Radiohead, and even Tori Amos have been getting much less play than such superb Canadian folk artists as Tegan & Sara (whose albums Under Feet Like Ours and This Business of Art I consider especially brilliant) and Melissa Ferrick. I'm proud to be able to say that I grew up in the same part of Vancouver where Spirit of the West is from. Nobody here has heard of them, which makes it all the more rewarding to introduce them. Their album Save This House is great from start to finish.

While I can't remember who introduced me to Loreena McKennitt, she should definitely be counted among the great Canadian folk artists, though one who definitely sits on the more lyrical side. There is considerable elegance to a woman who plays the harp while singing. Her rendition of Tennyson's "Lady of Shallott" is the best poetic interpretation I can think of. Another talented artist who I don't associate with a particular friend, with an appealing bilingual character to his songs, is Jean LeLoup, which I was introduced to during my time at L'Universite de Montreal.

Basically all of my favourite music - both Canadian and otherwise - has been introduced to me by friends. I'm particularly grateful to Tristan, Holden, Astrid, and Neal for introducing me to some of the best music I've ever heard. I find that sorting music according to who gave it to me is an interesting way of maintaining complex thematic continuity between randomly ordered songs, while still producing something varied and frequently unexpected.

Thinking just of Canadian stuff, there is the small but compelling collection of tracks by Alithea that Tristan gave me. "Starting Point" deserved to be a really well known piece of music, though chances are nobody who I haven't got it from or sent it to will have heard it. Along with the CBC Radio 3 podcast, Tristan introduced me to The New Pornographers. They are a bit too far on the radio pop edge of music space for me much of the time, but a few of their songs I really love, especially "Letter from an Occupant." Being introduced to The October Trio (a very talented Vancouver jazz group) at The Cellar on Broadway was also a welcome experience. I also really like the songs that he has had a hand in making that he has passed on to me, especially his "Postmodern Blues."

I am grateful to Neal for The Vincent Black Shadow, which I really regret missing the chance to see live while I was in Vancouver. Their energetic but difficult to classify style is embodied by songs like "This Road is Going Nowhere." Neal even defeated my general hesitance about country music, introducing me to such edgy, modern country artists as Neko Case and The Sadies.

Holden and Astrid jointly introduced me to Tegan & Sarah: Holden by appending a couple of tracks to a CD of Tori Amos, allowing me to understand the meaning of the fact that Astrid had a photo of two newborn twins who she had nicknamed Tegan & Sara on her wall in Gage, when I first met her. Anyone who knows UBC will understand how incongruous it is to imagine these two energetic, upbeat guitar-playing twins playing in the smoky (by Canadian standards) and vaguely seedy subterranean lair that is UBC's Pit Pub.

Astrid also introduced me to Martina Sorbara, whose "Bonnie & Clyde II" is still one of my favourite songs. Similar to Melissa Ferrick in same ways, Astrid also introduced me to Ember Swift. The commonalities: strong female vocals, acoustic guitar, and a prevalence of feminist and political messages. Taken together, definitely some of the most uplifting and charged music you're likely to find.

The UBC Debate Society also deserves a mention here, for introducing me to both Stan Rogers and the whole collection of The Arrogant Worms in the best possible way: through groups of drunken debaters singing them in pubs after meetings and tournaments. Meghan will surely agree that "The Last Saskatchewan Pirate, " "Barrett's Privateers," and "The Scotsman" are all the kind of songs you want to have in reserve after three or four hours paddling through an impossible downpour.

While I don't have much from her (eight songs compared to 296 from Tristan and 160 from Neal), everything that Lindi has sent me has been excellent. While not Canadian, the beautiful Hebrew song "Mima'amakim (From the deep)" by Idan Raichel is one of the best things I've heard in months. For some reason, the melodies and vocals in it remind me of the West African French music that Kerrie has sent me over the years.

In closing, to anyone who thinks the above is a catalogue of musical piracy:

While it's true that basically every artist and track listed above either came into my possession as an emailed mp3, an AAC file transferred off a memory stick, or a burned CD, I went on to buy albums and concert tickets from every artist listed above: my major regret being that the people actually producing the music get such a small cut of the money.

Posted by Milan at 12:26 AM   

The shape of Canada's 39th Parliament

As my brain reels from lack of sleep and I prepare to go to class, here are what I expect will be the final numbers:

Party - (My prediction) - Actual Seats - Vote Share

Conservative: (125-128) - 124 - 36.25%
Liberal: (94-96) - 103 - 30.22%
Bloc: (53-57) - 51 - 10.48%
New Democrats: (28-33) - 29 - 17.49%
Independent: (1) - 1 - 0.52%

I need to scamper to my lecture, hopefully picking up some breakfast en route, but discussion will surely follow.

Don Bell, the incumbent Liberal candidate in North Vancouver for whom I voted a second time, won by 3334 votes or about 6%.

The big questions now: What will Harper's coalition look like? Who will end up in cabinet? How long with the whole thing last, and what will it achieve?

Posted by Milan at 9:07 AM   

My mind is all on the election, sorry

This morning, I conveyed myself to two back-to-back lectures, before being kindly invited to a very tasty lunch at St. Cross with Claire. The St. Cross lunch is an institution that I recommend to anyone with the good fortune to be invited. There is a variety of food to be had, and interesting people like my New Year's Eve companions Claire, Bronwen, Jonathan, and Josiah with whom to converse.

Tomorrow, I have a solid run of lectures and seminars running across the better part of the day. I am curious about just how haggard the other Canadians will be. That is to say, who will be unable to resist the urge to stay awake until the polls close in Ontario at what I think will be 3:00am GMT. For my part, and partially because I can't quite wrap my head around dealing with both different poll closing times and different time zones, I will aim to go to bed around 1:00am: hopefully having completed a good chunk of my essay for Dr. Hurrell (the one I was meant to have edited and in the envelope by now, I realize).

One thing I appreciated seeing today among my friends is a universal proclamation of the importance of voting. Even if we do end up getting a government that many of us do not want, at least it will not be from apathy. That, at least, is the expression I saw one friend make earlier today.

In the evening, Wadham College had its second research forum: this one focused on the Middle East. While it would definitely fit with my subject area, and I knew one of the presenters, I spent the time doing reading for tomorrow's seminar, in the full knowledge that as election results started trickling in, my thoughts would not be on Norman Angell.

Posted by Milan at 12:20 AM   

Election Day

The polls in Canada are open, but there is a ban on the media reporting any results until they close in the Yukon and British Columbia: eight time zones away. By the time that happens, at 3:00am tonight, I should already be asleep, with a superb essay for Dr. Hurrell printed and consigned to a neatly labeled envelope.

In short, I am looking for any interesting information from people back home: electoral predictions, observations, celebrations, lamentations - whatever you care to share.

The only personal message that I want to send to people in Canada is to take the trouble to get out and vote. This applies especially to friends of mine. While I know that most of you are going to vote anyhow, it's worth remembering that the turnout among young voters is just abysmal. Regardless of the outcome, this election is going to change the course of Canadian politics. As such, it seems like a basic democratic responsibility to contribute.

[Update: 6:37pm GMT] As a Canadian citizen running a blog from outside Canada that isn't hosted inside Canada, I am pretty sure I can report whatever I want - regardless of media blackout laws. While I don't have any early polling results on hand, here is my personal electoral prediction:

Liberal: 94-96
Conservative: 125-128
New Democrat: 28-33
Bloc: 53-57
Independent: 1

The total number of seats in the House of Commons is 308, so a majority would be 154.

[Update 11:36pm GMT] As I understand the closing of polls and the time zones:

Polls in Newfoundland close in fifteen minutes.
Polls in Atlantic Canada close in just under an hour.
Polls in Ontario and Quebec close in three hours.
Polls in British Columbia close in three and a half hours.
Exciting stuff, but no results yet.

[Update 12:23am GMT] Regardless of your political stance, this is an exciting night. The Liberals have been in power since I was ten years old: more than half of my life. All signs indicate that Canada will have a new Prime Minister tomorrow. What's this going to mean? It's a question that feels much more pressing than that of whether world war one confirmed or refuted liberal theory: the topic of tomorrow morning's seminar.

[Update 12:47am GMT] For the moment, at least, it seems that both ProAlberta and Captain's Quarters (blogs that had declared an intention to publish polling results as they come in) have been overwhelmed by the number of people attempting to access them.

This probably marks the high point in worldwide interest in Newfoundland for at least the last couple of years.

[Update: 2:06am GMT] People have been posting numbers in the comments which, as I understand it, is fine as long as you're outside Canada. I haven't seen any numbers myself that I have any reason to believe are credible. In less than an hour, the real numbers will be released by the CBC. Personally, I will be waiting for definitive coverage.

It also seems that Radio Canada International is, intentionally or not, already streaming polling information. It's only available in RealPlayer or Windows Media format, so I cannot listen. Since the real results will be coming up soon, there really isn't much point.

[Final Update: 2:21am] The best numbers I can see are up at The Surly Beaver, which is running from London. If you don't want to wait 39 more minutes for CBC results, scoot that way.

[Super Final Update: 3:02am GMT] The CBC numbers are up. Here are the preliminary figures: Elected, (Leading), Vote share

Conservatives: 12, (75), 34.99%
Liberals: 18, (52), 38.31%
Bloc: 1, (28), 1.55%
NDP: 3, (20), 22.00%

It felt really good to be part of the media for a while, but I am happy to let the pros take over now.

Posted by Milan at 11:59 PM   

Of blogs and brevity

I have a new rule: at least for the time being. I am going to aim for focused, interesting blog posts that are no more than a few paragraphs. The writing should be better, more people should feel inclined to read it, and I should consequently have more time for academic work, or at least non-computer stuff.

I need to adjust the structure of life so that it involves more reading. Having seminars of 14 to 28 people, it isn't really necessary to have read anywhere close to the total amount assigned in order to contribute to the discussion. As such, and especially without the possibility of being called upon to present, there is a lack of structural incentive to do a great deal of reading. For me, this might be most easily overcome by making reading a more social experience. The presence of others helps keep me focused and aids in resisting the desire to go and do something else - a desire that always becomes more powerful when the matter I am reading is not particularly compelling.

I started the copy of Haruki Murakami's The Wind up Bird Chronicle that Tristan sent me for Christmas. Three chapters in, it definitely has the oddity that seems to be characteristic of Japanese film and literature. At the same time, it lays out the oddity in a way that is intentionally structured like a mystery - it's clear that we're meant to eventually learn what's going on.

As always, speaking with Astrid this afternoon was interesting. Her personal policy of not engaging in meaningless chatter over MSN of the "so, what are you up to?" variety is one that frequently proves laudable, particularly when combined with her infrequent forays into that domain. She is in Argentina now, returning to Vancouver in about a month.

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• Check out Mica's new website and leave some comments.
• Unrelated, but dramatic, footage: watch an octopus eat a shark

Posted by Milan at 12:01 AM   

Attention Canadians and Canada-Watchers in Oxford

I am looking for somewhere to follow the election tomorrow a bit more socially than reloading Google News Canada every thirty seconds in my room would be. Does anyone know where an election gathering is happening? Alternatively, would anyone else be interested in attending one?

Posted by Milan at 2:14 PM   

Time for all the works and days of hands

Spending time with Wadham MCR people last night was good fun. In particular, talking with Briana Short - both during the Burns Night festivities and during subsequent wanderings - was really interesting. I didn't know, for instance, that she lived in Ecuador when she was much younger, or that she is hoping to go to medical school at NYU. Having lived in New York previously, she could also have helped me when I was searching for cheap, nutritious foodstuffs there in the summer of 2003. (Photos from that trip)

Likewise, I enjoyed talking with Dave Patrikarakos about photography, IR, and the Oxford experience. The level of variation that exists between the different M.Phil programs (even within the social sciences) seems to be quite high. Likewise, I get the sense from comments made by instructors that the IR M.Phil has varied considerably over the years. Interesting how so many people are walking around with the same qualification, having done rather different work to get it.

Getting back to Dave and photography: at some point, I am meant to give him some tips on digital photography and the use of Photoshop. I'm not really sure how to teach photography for circumstances where you don't have the option of manually controlling shutter speeds and apertures (as his Kodak digital P&S doesn't seem to allow you to do) and where you don't have even a proxy for a light meter. For people learning photography, with an aim to making artistic photos, I definitely recommend a bottom-of-the-line film-based Nikon or Canon SLR and a 50mm prime lens. Additionally, my knowledge of Photoshop is entirely constrained to what Neal taught me and what I learned through tinkering. Still, I will come up with something. Anyone interested in reading something that is available online, stands a good chance of improving your photography, and is neither overly long nor complex should have a look at Making Photographs, by Philip Greenspun. Perhaps Tristan can also suggest some good introductory resources.

Another familial Christmas gift

I got a Christmas gift from Mica in the mail today: a DVD of the film Bullet Down Under which was apparently also released under the title Signal One. The catch phrase on the cover: "A new location... A new life... A fresh start, or is it?" While it was clearly meant as a joke, it remains that it is now the only DVD I have in England, aside from Fog of War.

He also gave me a copy of the new Strokes CD: "First Impressions of Earth." This is the first actual CD I have come to own new in several years. Certainly, it's the first CD I have owned and seen advertised in music store windows at the same time. The choice of band is definitely reflective of my brother: he has made at least one video based on their music.

Turning the case over, I saw that it is a product of Sony BMG. Thankfully, after checking the lists online, it's not one of the discs that includes their illegal and damaging copy protection software: the existence of which is the reason for my personal boycott of their products. None of that is meant to be unappreciative, indeed I am very glad to have received the gift from my brother, but is meant more to serve as a warning to other people considering buying Sony CDs. There is a real chance they will intentionally break your computer. More than a bit ironic, isn't it, that the safest way to get movies and music is increasingly to download it illegally? While I don't do so myself, it's still painful to watch the entertainment industry continuously failing to grasp the realities of an increasingly digital world.

Coffee, errands, and chores

After meeting for coffee and discussing life, the M.Phil program, and everything, I went to Sainsbury's with Bryony in search of vegetarian food. The tofu shelf, bereft of the single brand available for about a week, had been generously restocked. As a consequence, I now have 750g of organic tofu chilling in my fridge. As always, conversing with Bryony was a pleasant and rewarding experience. She seems to have a particularly strong understanding of the nature of the program. I suppose we also have a lot in common, as fellow Canadians, vegetarians, and the like.

Aside from buying groceries, I replenished my stock of clean clothes today. As long as I can keep myself from spending the time reading blogs or talking on MSN, time I spend doing laundry has the potential to be highly productive. There's something about the definite lengths of washing and drying cycles that can help you to focus on reading. It's the same phenomenon that leads you to push on when you are tired but close to home: the knowledge of a comfortable pause at a defined distance.

Decent progress on academic fronts

Short term priorities: reading, first paper for Dr. Hurrell
Longer term priorities (I): find a job for the summer and somewhere to live for next year
Longer term priorities (II): progress on the thesis plan, deciding what to do after the M.Phil

Not having a scholarship application in the works right now contributes significantly to my quality of life. No matter how much reading I may have to do for this or that course, not having to prove myself over again from scratch for the benefit of a committee that almost certainly won't give me any money anyhow is very pleasant indeed. I do have a Merifield application to complete for Monday, but that is a minimal task. I'd much rather live with some friends in a house near Cowley Road of Jericho, anyhow, though no such group has come together yet involving me.

Along with the standard level of progress on course readings, I finished my preliminary read of this week's Economist today. It has been suggested to me that I apply for a job with them over the summer. Given that I've read every issue since 1997 from cover to cover, perhaps it would be a particularly appropriate occupation for me. That said, my window of employability only runs from mid-June until the beginning of October, assuming I work for the entire period. Three and a half months is a fairly short time to work in an environment where learning to deal with unfamiliar and complex problems is a necessary component of the work. More likely, perhaps, is finding a job as a research assistant. More intriguing, but not entirely unrelated, is the prospect of working for a travel guidebook company as a roving contributor, as Briana recommended yesterday. This is a possibility with enormous appeal, and one that I will definitely keep an eye on.

For Tuesday, I need to rework my presentation on classical v. neorealism into a paper for Dr. Hurrell. Finishing a draft tonight would be ideal, but would depend upon the emergence of a blast of inspiration of the sort that usually manifests itself closer to the due date. Otherwise, I have plenty of core seminar and qualitative methods reading I could do, once I track down some of the books and articles.

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• I created a new website for my brother Mica, so people can comment on his videos. If you enjoy them or simply have something to say about them, I recommend you have a look and leave a comment.
• Mica has a new video online. They are also all now available for download to PC, Mac, video iPod, or PSP.
• Louise is coming back to Oxford for a weekend on February 10th. The timing looks quite good, right after the first qualitative methods take home exam. I am excited about seeing her.
• Since I started counting in mid-November, the blog has been accessed more than 7000 times by people other than me. Thanks for reading.
• Election day in less than 48 hours!
• While I cannot vouch for it's accuracy, the idea behind this strategic vote calculator is a cool one.
• Seth has proposed another Oxford bloggers' gathering. What do people in this corner of the blogosphere think? Personally, I am up for it.

Posted by Milan at 12:01 AM   

Electoral calculus

The latest electoral predictions: Seats (% of national vote)

Liberals: 94 (28.2%)
Conservatives: 128 (37.4%)
New Democrats: 28 (17.8%)
Greens: 0 (4.4%)
Bloc Quebecois: 57 (11.2%)
Other: 1 (1%)

Total: 308 (100%)

If % of votes directly equalled seats, the predicted results would be:

Liberals: 87
Conservatives: 115
New Democrats: 55
Greens: 14
Bloc Quebecois: 34
Other: 3

Total: 308

To me, the most interesting thing about this is how, while the two major parties would be relatively unaffected by a switch to proportional representation (PR), it would really hurt the Bloc (who must benefit from the first past the post system) and really help the Greens and New Democrats. All the more reason to support PR, in my opinion.

Source of predicted figures: democraticSPACE.com

Posted by Milan at 7:15 PM   

With beaded bubbles winking at the brim

Not to open every post with a weather report, but the weather in Oxford today was stunning. Not quite 'jacket optional' stunning, but definitely getting close. As is often the case during really beautiful Oxford days, the sun was generally either shining through thin clouds or being reflected off of them. In either case, there was lots of bright, soft, warm-coloured light out there to enjoy.

This afternoon, after a morning of reading and sleeping in (following a 2:30am completion of the ORS application), I met with Margaret and took a walk through the surprisingly extensive grounds of St. John's College. Neither of us had been there before and, while it is universally known to be rich, I was surprised to see just how extensive it is, as well. I didn't count the quads and gardens, but the place is definitely of such a size that it is a small campus unto itself. It would take you a while to learn your way around.

As seems to be the norm for Friday nights, there was an MCR event tonight. In keeping with Wadham's status (as Nora informed me tonight) as the 10th richest of the 39 Oxford colleges, there is some kind of Scotch event tonight, following the Burns Dinner whose Haggis I have opted out of. I shall make an appearance: as ever in the determination that this social foray will be a mere prelude to the intense academic and scholarly work the later portion of the night will involve.

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About that, my foray to the Burns Night event became an expedition to Jericho with Andy, Abra, Dave, Bilyana, Briana, and others. From a pub in Jericho initially packed to the point of being almost shoulder to shoulder, we eventually shifted to a pseudo-New Year's party at Green College that was equally well populated. Spending time with Wadham MCR people now, I feel partly as though - for various reasons - I have missed a term, in terms of forging social links within the college. My determination to correct the oversight can be taken as partial credit against my failure to actually complete the aforementioned scholarly and academic work tonight.

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• Lesson of the day: overcooking tortellini produces a smily mass that is essentially inedible. Sainsbury's brand tortellini, I have since been told, is particularly vulnerable to such decomposition.
• Tristan has some new photos up on his photo.net site. Taken at his family's cabin, the contrast of the icy lake with my memories of our post-graduation retreat is striking.
• I was delighted to learn, just now, that Allen Sens already sent off my second ORS reference letter. As small a chance as I have of getting it, I am glad to know that all the application materials are en route to Wellington Square.

Posted by Milan at 1:29 AM   

Canadians go to the polls on Monday

With the election three days away, the news source I respect most has endorsed Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party. The Economist's argument is a straightforward one: the Liberals have become a problematic governing party as the result of corruption, internal divisions, and an ineffective Prime Minister. This is a sentiment I have frequently expressed myself. They portray choosing the Conservatives as a gamble, but one that is worth taking. As usual, it is a defensible position, though not one that I agree with.

Despite the extent to which it seems to have dominated this campaign, the sponsorship scandal has been overblown. The levels of money involved are fairly small and the furor needs to be set beside the strong governance record that the Liberals have had. We've had a long period of growth, low inflation, and the like. Whether the Conservatives would be able to perpetuate macroeconomic stability and economic growth of not, credit should be given to the Liberals for carrying it this far.

The second half of the equation is whether the Tories can be trusted in power. They have taken pains to at least appear different from the ugly face they took on during the teeth-gnashing days of the Canadian Alliance. Even so, it's quite legitimate to ask whether things have really changed on the blue side of Canadian politics. One of Paul Martin's best moments as PM was defending same-sex rights as an equality matter under the Charter:

The Charter was enshrined to ensure that the rights of minorities are not subjected, are never subjected, to the will of the majority. The rights of Canadians who belong to a minority group must always be protected by virtue of their status as citizens, regardless of their numbers. These rights must never be left vulnerable to the impulses of the majority.

That said, he could certainly have done more to shift Canada further towards a sensible policy on narcotic drugs (based on harm reduction among users and combatting the violence and organized crime that a criminalized drug trade spawns) and could generally have given a more impressive demonstration of leadership and direction. He could also have done rather more to repair Canada's contribution to the international system.

Clearly, the Liberals are in need of rejuvenation and reform. Ideally, a new leader should emerge who is both more capable of delivering policy progress and less connected with all the advertising and Quebec ugliness that has tainted the present Liberal leadership. Perhaps a Conservative government is the only outcome that would allow the Liberals to reorganize. Indeed, giving Paul Martin another shot as Prime Minister would hardly send a message that change is required. Having a Prime Minister with a stronger connection to the west would probably be a good thing, and might serve to help counterbalance the self-obsession and cronyism that seem to be involved in Ontario and - especially - Quebec politics.

While it's hard to predict the outcome of an election, it's easier to predict what each possible outcome would resemble, at least in the medium term. A majority Liberal government looks out of the question, and would be a perverse outcome anyhow from an election in which they definitely failed to outmaneuver their opponents. A minority Liberal or minority Conservative government is the most likely possibility. Another Liberal-NDP coalition would be a return to politics as they have been lately, more or less. I am less certain what kind of coalition the Conservatives would form. Indeed, that might be the most mysterious possibility of all. A majority Tory government, while not impossible, also seems highly unlikely. Canada, it seems, is likely to end up with a muddle: a situation that definitely reflects my own feelings about this election.

Posted by Milan at 5:27 PM   

Mihi Cura Futuri?

We had our first qualitative methods seminar today, and I am of a mixed opinion about it. 28 people in a lecture hall does not make for a very effective seminar format. Likewise, the discussion was unfocused and struck me more as messily attempting to identify the relevant issues, rather than dealing with them directly. With only two weeks to cover foreign policy analysis, perhaps it is inevitable that the coverage will not be comprehensive.

Part of the problem, I think, has to do with the limitations of the whole broad discipline of 'international relations.' We are in the business of quick and dirty answers. That's fine, really, since we're rarely interested in capital T truth. All international relations is done for a purpose - whether explicitly normative or not - and most of it relates to questions of a kind where a rigorous conception of truth simply doesn't apply. Either our conclusions are so vague as to be untestable or our answer is only one of many potentially valid ones. For me, most of these apparent problems evaporate once you adopt an explicitly normative agenda. It doesn't matter where the boundary between foreign policy analysis and international relations lies (if it even exists). Rather, we can pick and choose whatever tools are helpful for advancing an agenda. This strikes me as fundamentally more honest, and obviously less frustrating.

During the lecture, I also found myself thinking worriedly about exactly what I am going to do with all of this. The lack of a summer job and housing for next year is uncertainty enough for me, but that's just peanuts compared to the big question of "What next?" Once I become Milan Ilnyckyj, M.Phil (Oxford), what am I going to do with myself? Going straight into a PhD seems unwise. It would be better to see a bit more of the world before making such a commitment. Working at something relevant and interesting, while writing, has a lot of appeal, but I really have no idea of how to bring it about.

Hilary Term Outline

15 Jan 06: Term begins
20 Jan 06: ORS application due
24 Jan 06: First paper for Andrew Hurrell due
31 Jan 06: First core seminar paper due
07 Feb 06: First qualitative methods take home exam
28 Feb 06: Second core seminar paper due
01 Mar 06: Two more scholarship applications due
07 Mar 06: Second qualitative methods take home exam

Indeterminate dates: 3-4 other papers for Andrew Hurrell
List subject to later additions

I paid another tranche of my Oxford fees today. I am now paid up for Hilary term: as far as battels, college fees, and university fees go. I will keep paying for all my groceries and as many other expenses as possible on my Canadian credit card, but it will definitely be necessary to make another expensive and time consuming bank transfer in order to pay next term's fees. Then, I will be halfway done paying for the whole Oxford experience.

I think that Emily and others are right in thinking that the best job for me that is within reach has to do with either writing or editing. That said, I know nothing about the industry. I suppose I had better learn, if I don't want to end up working in a computer shop or a pub this summer...

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• Apologies to those who read the Atom feed, but I had to switch it from full syndication to just snippets. The reason for this is that other pages keep grabbing my content and then using it to drive their own advertising. If I am going to pay for this URL and hosting this content, without even enabling advertising on this site, I definitely don't want other people profiting off of it.
• Many kudos to Google for not turning over their search records to the DOJ. If you're serious about the commitment to "not be evil," this is just the sort of thing you need to do. Not to mention, if you want to maintain the trust of thousands of people storing huge amounts of email with you (including most members of the Oxford M.Phil in IR program).
• Here's a question for my wise and tactful readers: my supervisor hasn't been explicitly told about my blog. While the simplest of Google searches yields it immediately, the fact remains that he has been mentioned in it a number of times without necessarily knowing about it. Nothing personal, of course, but it's still there. The question, therefore, is whether I should tell him directly. The relationship is an entirely professional and academic one, that hasn't taken on any kind of extensive personal dimension. Otherwise, I would have probably told him long ago. No appropriate chance has arisen. Who can advise may speak.

Posted by Milan at 12:01 AM   

"The thing you're most proud of"

Last night, I had an extremely diverse collection of dreams. Most enjoyably, I dreamed about being in well-loved places with old friends: some of whom I haven't seen in years. The strangest thing about such dreams is not how this familiar house can get transposed into that well known place or how these two friends, known years apart and who have never met, can appear together; rather, it's how all these sorts of things can happen without eliciting surprise, often for several hours after you wake up, start drinking tea, and steel yourself for another day of academic reading.

After reading his entry about his father's 'journalling jar,' filled with possible topics for journalling or blogging, I asked Tony whether I might make an attempt at one of them. The topic dutifully provided: "The thing you're most proud of." To me, this is an extremely straightforward question. Without a doubt, the thing I am most proud of is my group of friends.

Why does that come instantly to mind as my response? The reasons are both numerous and compelling. Firstly, one's group of friends is not primarily a matter of chance. Anyone who lives in a city and goes to schools with 1,000 or 40,000 students has ample opportunity to meet people (though shyness and other factors may work against you). Even so, most people just glance off one another: interacting, perhaps, in some very brief and superficial manner before rebounding on diverging courses, perhaps to meet again in similarly anonymous circumstances. To meet people in the first place, therefore, takes both an application of effort and an acceptance of risk. The latter is especially significant for young people. The risk is generally one of ridicule or embarrassment, each of which stings a great deal for those lacking a solidly defined and defended identity. Indeed, I remember instances of severe embarrassment from five or ten years ago enormously better than those involving any other kind of harm.

Of course there is some element of chance involved in meeting people in such a way that you remember one another and seek each other's company again. It helps to have one of the right sort of dispositions. It helps to have a memorable name or appearance. One cannot ever completely expunge chance from any complex human behaviour. That said, in this case it does not seem to me that chance is so serious a factor that it belittles the point I am trying to make. There's nothing random about which people from around the world I would most like to come visit me here, or travel with somewhere else.

Spending the last four months or so in Oxford has been a reminder of another reason for which I am proud of my group of friends. Even with all my deficiencies with regards to long distance communication - my response to Meghan's elegant letter from October still sits incomplete on my table - I have generally been able to maintain some kind of contact (perhaps infrequent, perhaps fairly concise) with almost everyone who I particularly want to know in ten and twenty years' time.

I am proud of my friends because I feel them to be a diverse group and - critically - not one that would have assembled as it has without my involvement. One of the reasons for which I most enjoy throwing parties is because it gives me the chance to introduce people who might otherwise never see each other, but who are likely to have a connection. Introducing friends from one school or another, one group or another, or other combinations of times and places is a very gratifying experience. Perhaps that's because it fosters the illusion of being central. Of course, there are many nodes to any social group (as many as there are participants, really) and there is a danger of this becoming some kind of Facebook-mimicking 'look how many friends I have' declaration. While that is related to what I mean, it has entirely the wrong tone.

The biggest reason for which I am proud of having developed the collection of friends I have is the way it changes the appearance of the future. In a profound and comprehensive way, a future that is peppered with people like Tristan, Jonathan, and Alison is much more easily embraced than one filled with faceless possibility. Partly, that's the same sense of shared endeavour as is making the M.Phil program feel so rewarding. Partly, it's the important knowledge that I will not be alone during the years ahead: perhaps the single greatest anxiety of the nervous extrovert.

In closing, I should stress one point that isn't entirely obvious in the self-obsessed paragraphs above. This really is a remarkable group of people: honest, communicative, interesting, talented, and genuine. Every person who I call my friend impresses me in some way and has some capability that - even if I know I will never possess myself - I know myself to be the richer for having nearby. Likewise, I feel deeply indebted for all the instances of unprovoked generosity and aid that have taken place over the years. Particularly when I've been languishing in some sudden feeling of lingering solitude, it has been welcome indeed to be dragged off for a walk, a cup of coffee, or some more ambitious adventure.

Posted by Milan at 10:31 AM   

Academic and non-academic reading

Ten January nectarines, a pound of red peppers, garlic, cherry tomatoes, and ginger: at Emily's suggestion, I went to the Wednesday Market in Gloucester Green today. As I've said before, 'green' is a definite misnomer. That said, to get a sack of fruit and veggies for £5 makes for a nice contrast with Sainsbury's.

Aside from reading, not a great deal happened today. In a productive piece of procrastination, I read Around the World in 80 Days. I hadn't not read it before, but only heard parts of it read aloud during one of my family's traditional trips down the Oregon Coast (on which both Jonathan Morissette and Kate Dillon accompanied me more than once). While rapidly digestible, it's certainly not the most complex of novels: fuelled more, perhaps, on national stereotypes and an early anticipation of the consequences of globalization than on solid characterization or description. Verne's frequent misunderstanding about knots - thinking them a unit of distance, rather than velocity - is particularly irksome, despite being only a very minor point. A steamer that goes "eight and nine knots the hour" would be going very fast indeed after a few days. Reading it after the demise of the British Empire, one cannot help being struck by a tinge of collective nostalgia. Collective because the British Empire is something I've only experienced by distillation, and by virtue of being Canadian.

Tomorrow, we have our first qualitative methods class. The three focuses are foreign policy analysis, interviewing, and archival research. All strike me as things likely to be useful.

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• No sign yet of the form I need for formally request exemption from future college meals. I will make a third request for one tomorrow morning.
• Hardly anyone from Oxford is on my MSN contact list. If you want to be, send me an email, find my MSN username from my Facebook profile, or contact me by some other means. I am also on AIM and Skype.
• Everyone back home is fixated on the new series of 24. I rather liked the first series, watching the whole thing twice, but found the second ridiculously implausible, in terms of politics. That said, their energetic accounts make me envious of those with television access: a very unusual feeling for me.
• At times, we must all curse how there are no university run wireless networks in Oxford. The DPIR IT people tell us it's because the colleges can't agree how to do it: an explanation I believe, even as I find it frustrating. The iBook would certainly wander farther from my desk if it could talk to other machines from elsewhere. This is part of why Oxford's continued devotion to old ideas and old rivalries will sink it in comparison to American schools in the next few decades, unless things change a great deal.
• Seth's blog directed me to a community of LiveJournal users all trying to get into Oxford. Take a look, if it interests you.

Posted by Milan at 12:39 AM   

Real academic work has resumed

Lectures

Unfortunately, I missed the first Philosophy of the Social Sciences lecture today, because I didn't know when it was happening. I learned when Marga Lyall sent me an email: 3/4 of the way through the lecture and I was busily writing up presentation notes on neorealism. It seems that most of the other M.Phils missed it as well, so I am not overly worried. It's also a supplemental, rather than examined, piece of coursework - though it is mandatory.

The first core seminar went extremely well. Both Jennifer Welsh and the talkative David Williams provided good direction for what proved to be a very interesting discussion. The seminar opened with a brief discussion of what theory is and should be. I think it would have benefitted significantly from the presence of a philosopher or two, especially when questions about the nature of knowledge and science arose.

Somewhat uncharacteristically, I volunteered to present, as I felt myself to have a fairly strong grasp of the topic. It's always nice to get these things out of the way, even when they are not explicitly for marks. My general sense afterwards is that the presentation went quite well, though the importance of them doesn't extend too far beyond offering some starting point for discussion.

Strategic Studies Group

Tonight, there was a presentation on Saudi Arabia being made to the Oxford Strategic Studies Group (OUSSG) at All Souls. I attended along with Claire and Madgdy. The speaker was Colonel (Ret) Brian Lees and he spoke for about an hour about the various characteristics of the Saudi Kingdom: geographic, political, strategic, etc. It was an interesting summary, not dissimilar in overall content from the survey recently printed in The Economist, though notably more favourable towards the Saudi Royal Family.

Apparently, three positions have opened up on the executive committee of the OUSSG. Since I don't have any experience with the group, the sensible position to aim for would be that of secretary. Consider this a formal declaration of candidacy. Since it is basically a communication and paperwork position, it seems an intelligent starting point for an outsider: as well as something relatively unlikely to be hotly contested. I spent about an hour after the talk and subsequent questions talking in The Turf with the current President, Secretary, Webmaster, and a number of members. They seem an interesting group and this seems a good way to expand my range of Oxford activities, as I have expressed the intent to do in previous posts. At ten Pounds for membership, it's enormously more reasonably priced than the Union.

Later in the year, there is also a highly subsidized expedition to Brussels to see the European Parliament and NATO headquarters. It's happening during the next inter-term break and it seems entirely sensible to part with three days of revision time and one hundred Pounds or so for such an opportunity.

Miscellaneous

With Philosophy of the Social Sciences lectures from 10:00 to 11:00, the core seminar from 11:00 to 1:00, the Changing Character of War series from 1:00 to 2:30, and Professional Training in the Social Sciences from 5:30 until 7:30, Tuesdays this term look as though they will be fairly hectic and good for displacing meals to awkward times.

This afternoon, I made a second written request for the form I need in order to make a written request to opt out of all future meals in college. Along with having NatWest make another bank draft and finishing the ORS application, I am well stocked with paperwork. As I've said before, completing a scholarship application we've been told that we have virtually no chance of winning is frustrating.

After much urging from Jessica, I've abandoned the buggy Mac version of MSN Messenger for the open source client Adium. It looks as though it will take some tweaking before it is working the way I want it to, but the general wisdom of avoiding Microsoft products (especially where the internet is concerned) is enough to make me stick with it, at least for now. The existence of an optional Hobbes (the tiger, not the philosopher) Dock icon is also a selling point. The default duck icon is just hideous. There is something rather nice about being able to use one relatively elegant program to access a diverse range of IM services, though I am only using it for MSN and AIM at the moment.

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• Apple has responded to the many people who complained about a spyware feature in the new version of iTunes. You are now able to decline installation of the component in question: an iTunes 'Ministore' to which information about any song you clicked on was sent. This goes to show both that some companies listen to their customers and that it isn't so hard to address customer complaints after the fact. Well done Apple.

Posted by Milan at 12:16 AM   

Elliot Cohen and the Canadian Forces

After the today's core seminar, I went to a Changing Character of War presentation given by Professor Elliot Cohen. Focused on examining the American military, especially with regards to counterinsurgency operations in Iraq, if offered a familiar but well expressed perspective. All the standard big issues came up: public opinion, the differences between the branches of the military with regards to the conflict, current controversies, military relations with allies, private military firms, and the rest. I asked him afterwards about the perspective he has seen on the Canadian armed forces, among those serving in the United States. His response was a typical one: that they are good people profoundly hamstrung and sapped by a lack of financial and material support. The operational tempo of the Canadian Forces has never been higher relative to its capabilities. As Allen Sens so effectively conveys in his Canadian Foreign Policy lectures at UBC: by almost any measure, both long-term procurement and short-term funding are grossly inadequate.

Right now, Canada has about 62,300 active forces personnel (the 60th largest army in the world) and it is funded at the level of $12.9 billion per year. That is 1.1% of Canadian GDP. We have 114 tanks (obsolete, in Germany), about 300 infantry fighting vehicles, and about 1000 armoured personnel carriers. The Maritime Command has four Victoria Class submarines (diesel, obsolete), three Iroquois Class destroyers, and 12 Halifax Class frigates (the backbone of the navy) - all hampered by completely inadequate helicopter support. We also has 12 Kingston Class coastal patrol vessels, used for things like search and rescue and fisheries enforcement. That is one boat per 16,840km of coastline: the equivalent of 2.38 boats to patrol the entire circumference of the earth.

In terms of airlift capability, the best we have is 32 CC-130 Lockheed 'Hercules' combat transports. Stripped of all other cargo, they can carry two Light Support Vehicles (ie. jeeps). We entitled the 2005 International Policy Statement: A Role of Pride and Influence in the World, but when we sent the Disaster Assistance Response Team to Asia after the tsunami, we had to rely primarily on private chartered airlift to deliver the bulk of their equipment to the theatre of operations. We do have five CC-150 Polaris aircraft, but they are incapable of carrying large equipment and lack any defensive capability. One of the five was converted into a VIP transport during the 1990s and two more are slated to be converted into air-to-air refuelling vehicles.

At present, more than 1400 Canadians are deployed overseas: more than 1000 of them in Afghanistan as part of Operation Archer. To field a force of that size, about another 8000 individuals need to be in the process of preparing for deployment or returning from one. The next largest commitment is 190 troops serving in the UN Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) in the Golan Heights. The next largest operations are 32 people each in the Sinai and Sudan. Of the 15 missions ongoing, five involve ten or fewer people. Eleven involve fewer than 20, according to the Canadian Forces webpage. We may have opted to put Canadian peacekeepers onto some of the new pieces of currency, but we haven't opted to put terrible many out there in the world. In those places we have, they are often equipped at an inadequate level: the lack of armoured jeeps in Afghanistan being a notorious example.

Canada likes to maintain an international image as a helpful fixer and a leader in peacekeeping. We expect to be treated as an equal by our allies and generally considered a contributing member of the internatioal community. We take pride in backing things like the worldwide land mines ban through the Ottawa Process and the concept of the Responsibility to Protect. If that's a role we want to play - or at least an image we want to maintain - we're going to need to commit the necessary resources.

While it's not particularly clear that any of the political parties running in the present electoral campaign is serious about making that commitment, it's something that Canadians should be asking about. Whether you support the military or not, whether you support peacekeeping and other forms of international military engagement or not, it seems clear that trying to do these things on the cheap is the worst of all strategies. It endangers the lives of those serving while not producing the security which is the object of the mission. Looking at the numbers above certainly makes Stephen Harper's plan to militarize the Arctic seem particularly wasteful of scarce resources.

Posted by Milan at 6:38 PM   

"Nothing is more deceitful," said Darcy, "than the appearance of humility."

Realism and neorealism

With a litre of dark coffee beside me and tables heaped with books, I can tell that the term has begun. During my core seminar tomorrow morning, there's a one in seven chance that I will need to present for fifteen minutes on the differences between realism and neorealism. One approach, I suppose, would be to take Waltz's conception of 'thought' as compared to 'theory' and build a presentation out of examining it. By a lucky coincidence, I have a copy of a take home exam for Robert Crawford's international relations theory course written on that precise topic. You can get a sense of Crawford's hostility to Waltz from the question itself:

In an obviously self-serving argument, Kenneth Waltz distinguishes between “thought” and “theory” in international relations. What is the basis for this distinction, and to what extent does it further, or undermine, the pursuit of knowledge in world politics?

I don't know anything about David Williams, but I am pretty sure Jennifer Welsh is no neorealist. Come to think of it, she probably knows Robert Crawford.

I am decreasingly of the opinion that Waltz is 'wrong' in the sense normally applied to the word. It's more that he has quite an unusual project. Waltz identifies theory as “a means of dealing with complexity” and goes on to say that “in making assumptions about men’s (or states’) motivations, the world must be drastically simplified; subtleties must be rudely pushed aside, and reality must be grossly distorted.” What he is doing is fundamentally more artificial than a straightforward attempt at getting a sense of how world politics works and how we might hope to change it. Indeed, that kind of unstructured approach is exactly what Waltz would categorize as "mere thought." Hoffman says that: “Waltz’s own attempt at laying the groundwork for theory is conceptually so rigorous as to leave out much of the reality which he wants to account for.”

The danger arises when Waltz makes the same move as many sleazy economists. They build theories strongly abstracted from reality (high school dropouts have perfect understanding of the advanced mathematics involved in generating net present values, and other ludicrous assumptions) in the hope of developing a parsimonious explanation of a good part of the phenomena being observed. The devious step is when they come to love their models too well and carry on, by sheer momentum, applying them in situations where their own assumptions make them entirely invalid. Especially when making normative judgements or advocating policy, all those bits of real-world complexity that were deliberately forgotten need to be considered again. Likewise, there is the need for an awareness of how theory itself impacts the world. Otherwise, theory becomes nothing more than "an anti-political apology for brute force and cynicism" as Kalevi Holsti pointedly described neorealism.

Given the passions that tend to get inflamed both within supporters and opponents of neorealism when the subject gets debated, tomorrow's seminar promises to be an interesting discussion. Indeed, among IR scholars, the position you take with regards to IR theory is one that goes a long way towards defining your personal and intellectual identity. As Robert Walker identified in 1986, theory is never a neutral thing: "Theory is always for someone, for some group, for some purpose."

In the end, I would contend that ideas pertaining to vital questions about world politics are necessarily ‘thought’ as opposed to ‘theory’ as defined by Waltz. While he would probably agree, using the cover that theory can never be comprehensive, I don't think that's an adequate response: at least not if people are going to go around identifying themselves as neorealists. If neorealism is a partial explanation, it cannot comprise our whole intellectual outlook.

Richard Dawkins

Apparently, on Monday February 13th, there will be a lecture in London presented by Richard Dawkins. It's entitled: "Darwin's meme: or the origin of culture by means of natural selection" and I would be interested in going if I can find at least one other person who would also be so inclined. It is happening at the Darwin Lecture Theatre, Darwin Building, UCL, Gower Street, London at 6:30pm.

On a related note, Louise apparently knows Professor Dawkins' daughter Juliet. Regrettably, I did not get the chance to meet either her or her father before Louise made the journey back to Lancaster. Along with Philip Pullman, Richard Dawkins is probably the Oxford resident who I would most like to meet.

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To do in the next few days:

• Prepare realism v. neorealism presentation (ASAP)
• Opt out of another term of college meals in hall (ASAP)
• Merifield application (Wednesday)
• Complete ORS application, submit directly to University Offices (Friday)
• Pay Hilary term fees and battels (Friday)

Posted by Milan at 12:01 AM   

1000 Extra/Ordinary Objects

This afternoon, in little jots between reading Keohane and Waltz, I finished the coffee table style book that Margaret gave me for my birthday: 1000 Extra / Ordinary Objects. Edited by Peter Gabriel and part of the Taschen series, it's much less innocuous than the title and skillfully photographed pages would suggest. Indeed, it deals constantly with themes of warfare, violence, oppression, and abuse. Throughout, objects intimately connected with some of the worst of human activities are presented, often ironically situated alongside a more innocent item with a thematic connection.

Jello is presented alongside a description of the mechanical slaughter of 6-month-old calves, from which it is made, and on the page beside a sauce designed to be used for flavouring dead animals found alongside the road. Packets of branded heroin adorn the same pages as chocolate bars. All told, the book presents a fairly disturbing picture of humanity: a glimpse into an image-obsessed, casually violent, and quite possibly seriously deranged collective.

As you would expect from a Taschen book, it is certainly elegantly presented. Each object is photographed under studio conditions, devoid of context except insofar as it is not provided by the sans-serif gray descriptive paragraphs - written in English and French. The tendency to associate even innocent objects with disturbing descriptions highlights the extent to which the book sets out to shock; the Pikachu doll comes accompanied with a description of how children were accidentally given epileptic seizures by a flashing light display in one episode of the Japanese television show. All this makes the strange Japanese products that are staples of the curious object genre seem particularly innocuous, by comparison. This book could easily be reformatted into a gallery show at the Tate Modern.

Posted by Milan at 7:21 PM   

Contemplating the future

The Stardust Mission

One piece of exciting news today is the safe return of the NASA Stardust capsule, after a seven-year mission intended to collect dust from the tail of a comet. If the aerogel-filled compartments are, as expected, saturated with this material, it will be the first time such a thing has ever been collected and it may contribute important information to understanding the early solar system.

This is also the first mission since 1976 to return solid material from an extraterrestrial body: a measure both of diminished interest in the moon and the exceptionally longer distances involved in reaching other planets and asteroids.

Whereas there is a great deal of controversy about the usefulness and safety of manned space travel - especially the Shuttle Program - there are few people who contest the scientific usefulness of robotic exploratory missions. Indeed, there is a very satisfying record in the past few years of improved understanding of cosmic phenomena, both within and outside our solar system.

The really exciting prospect is the possibility of seeing new developments in particle and theoretical physics start to match up better with improved cosmological models. The biggest questions in physics today are probably the questions related to dark matter and energy, the explanation behind the profusion of subatomic particles that have been discovered, and the generation of a theory that is able to deal with the contradictions between quantum mechanics and relativity. While this mission doesn't necessarily speak directly to any of those goals, it's part of a process of improved data collection that feeds the development and testing of explanations. It seems likely that interesting times are ahead.

The second term schedule

On Tuesday, the second core seminar begins: Contemporary Debates in International Relations Theory. While the subject matter is inherently somewhat less interesting than the historical analysis of the first and third term, I am excited about the course. Partly, that is because of the instructors: David Williams and Jennifer Welsh. Partly, that is because of my fellow seminar members. If I recall correctly, I am in the same group as Roham, Sheena, Andy Kim, Bryony, Claire, Robert Moore, Emily, Matt Pennycook, Shohei, Alex, and Robert Wood. Collectively, I think this will make for interesting discussions.

Just like last term, I have a one in seven chance of being called upon to give a fifteen minute presentation on one of the week's two topics. This week, mine would be:

‘For classical realists conflict stems from human nature, while for neo-realists conflict stems from the nature of the international system’. Is this an accurate assessment of the differences between classical and neo-realists?

Thankfully, I have some recollection of Robert Crawford's IR Theory course at UBC to fall back upon. The sensible approach seems to be to quickly summarize and contrast some of the biggest names in realist theory: E.H. Carr, Hans Morgenthau, and Kenneth Waltz, in particular. Tomorrow, I will be in the SSL formulating some speaking notes.

Aside from the core seminar and qualitative methods, I am not entirely certain what we are meant to be attending this term. I'm not sure if the 'Advanced Study of IR' course is persisting into the second term; nor am I certain about whether the 'Philosophy of the Social Sciences' course that was delayed in Michaelmas will be happening now. Then there are things like the undergrad IR lecture and the 'Professional Training in the Social Sciences' course that were poorly attended and never discussed last term. I am sure it will all become clear in the first week or so, and I can ask Dr. Hurrell about it in our first supervision.

One thing I am scrambling over is the ORS application. For some reason, I thought it was due months from now. As such, I am having a real struggle coming up with two letters of reference before the due date on the 20th. That is particularly true since Dr. Hurrell is not supposed to provide one, since the department will be making the selection of which ORS applicants in the program get passed along to the university. It's frustrating to have to do all of this for a scholarship we've told we have almost no chance of actually receiving. I am personally more hopeful about the Chevening, for which all applications were due in Ottawa today, and a few others that are coming up in the next few months. Suffice it to say that having some funding for next year would be exceedingly welcome.

Housing for next year and a job for the summer

Both at the back of my mind for the whole break, neither of these problems has found a solution yet. I am increasingly inclined to staying in Oxford: partly because of the availability of research materials for my thesis and partly due to the lower cost of living and the correspondingly increased probability that I will be able to find a job that will at least cover them. I would be happiest with a job doing academic research or working as a writer or editor in an academic, journalistic, or publishing context. Anyone with ideas is very much encouraged to contact me.

I have preferences but no possibilities regarding housing as well. I'd like to have a room in a house shared among some of my friends (ideally, at least a few of them members of the M.Phil in IR program). The Jericho and the Cowley Road areas seem to be the desirable ones for students. Jericho is closer to university stuff, but is less of a low-cost residential environment. The existence of the Tesco on Cowley Road could single-handedly account for a somewhat lower cost of living there. As for the building itself, my critical requirements are:

1. High speed internet access.
2. Decent security - I really can't afford to have my laptop stolen
3. A clean and effective kitchen
4. Tolerable proximity to classes and services
5. Affordability

Of course, a big part of the quality of any living arrangement has to do with the people with whom you are living. My thuggish former roommates from my first year in Fairview may be the ultimate example of how bad roommates can ruin a residence experience. While I don't think I could possibly do that badly again, I'd really like for my first experience in private accommodation to be with people whose company I enjoy. This will be the first time I've ever rented a private room. At UBC, at L'Universite de Montreal, and at Oxford, so far, I have always lived in university housing.

I may well apply for a space in Merifield, just so that the option of living there remains open.

Posted by Milan at 12:01 AM   

End of break recap

Obviously, going for a three hour conversation and wander with Emily this morning has not been an adequate mechanism for reducing how much IR reading I will do today. As such, I will supplement it with a bit of summarizing. I will pretend that this is useful because there are plenty of people who haven't been reading the blog over the break, but who may care to know what's in it:

Trips to London

Right at the end of Michaelmas Term (December 2nd), I made my first foray out of Oxford. While I didn't take the extreme step of actually spending the night outside these stone-lined streets, I did have the welcome experience of meeting a huge mass of Canadian grad students at the High Commissioner's Party. Definitely a thing to go to if you are a Canadian postgrad in the UK during the winter.

There were a pair of quick trips through London on the 16th and 22nd, on the way to and from the Baltic expedition. The high point of these Underground and train station based trips: getting an Oyster Card and therefore becoming about 1% cooler.

Much more substantially, there were the two days in London when I met Ian Townsend-Gault, some relatives of his, and, later on, Michelle Bourbonnais. This is approximately the quick jaunt to London that many people - including me - expected to be a regular feature of Oxford life. The fact that it happens rather less than expected just makes it more unusual and appreciated, however.

The Baltic Trip

Photos

• Photo.net presentation of the artiest examples
• First installment of Tallinn Photos
• The second Tallinn batch
• And, the third, featuring a fish and Soviet car
• Photos and a description of my night in Helsinki
• Daytime in Helsinki
• And finally concluding photos

All told, the trip was great fun. It was an opportunity to see a new part of the world, enjoy a lot of good food and company, and spend a stretch of winter in a place where the season feels extremely authentic.

The Occupation Museum also ultimately proved thought provoking.

Christmas in a deserted Oxford

While my determination to pre-read for the coming term and revise my undergraduate thesis did not really come to much, the clamour of demands for me to improve my diet was well addressed over the course of the break: especially during the Christmas period, when hardly anyone was around. While experimenting with omelets and bean stir-fry dishes may seem depressingly elementary to some, it is approaching the limit of my culinary capability and should be pitifully applauded, rather than derided.

As Oxford slowly began to repopulate, Claire's New Year's Party proved a tasty and enjoyable way of seeing off the dregs of 2005. That said, I am still putting '2005' on all manner of forms and scholarship applications. Such changes percolate into my mind only quite slowly.

The home stretch

The last period of the break was characterized by a focus on a single individual, though it doesn't feel much like the kind of thing that is appropriate to summarize in a few lines in a link-laden entry. Suffice it to say that time spent with Louise was a high point of the break.

Posts with substantive content

Breaking with my usual practice of a focus on the minutiae of living and studying in Oxford, I wrote a collecton of posts on actual topics over the break. In reverse chronological order:

• On the road to a Harper government?
• The Animal Lab Protest
• Things to do in Vancouver (with excellent comments from readers)
• Exercising democratic choices
• Population and the environment
• Bad News for World Fisheries
• Review of Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad
• On the 'bombs and rockets' side of IR
• Review of Iain Pears' An Instance of the Fingerpost
• Response to a column in The Economist saying the Democrats should abandon support for Roe v. Wade
• Review of Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point

I also shifted the blog to a new domain, moved all the photos, revised the directory structure, fixed the template, worked on a huge amount of behind-the-scenes stuff, and generally got the thing to the point when I can stop tinkering with it.

Not too bad for six weeks, though I need to get back to neorealism now.

Posted by Milan at 4:55 PM   

On the road to a Harper government?

What seemed inconceivable a few weeks ago is becoming the stuff of the most cautious news coverage: Canada's 39th government might be led by the Conservative Party under Stephen Harper. Having just read an endorsement of them in The Globe and Mail, the traditionally Liberal supporting Canadian newspaper, I can see the legitimacy of many of the Globe's concerns with today's Liberals. Too much time in government has had a negative effect on the Liberals. Paul Martin has proved, at best, a lacklustre leader who did not bring the kind of political energy or policy changes many of us hoped for in the post Chretien era. What I dispute much more is their conclusion that the Conservatives can be trusted as an alternative.

How then should we look at the question of the Tories in power? The first issue to come up for me is the one of values. While Stephen Harper has tried hard to reinvent himself and bring his party to the centre, it's reasonable to ask whether they will be able to endure there. A policy platform including things like minimum sentences - as classically counterproductive conservative policy - makes me wonder about this. So too, the possibility of government by a party with its political centre of mass in Alberta.

Ultimately, one cannot wish, as I have often done, that there was an alternative party of government in Canada and then automatically reject one that emerges, looking as though it could fill that role. While I don't like a lot of what is in the Tory platform, I can respect any party that is able to earn the support of a large number of Canadians and I think Canadian democracy is the stronger for the inclusion of such parties in the process. The presence of real debate and the possibility of losing power are essential in a system of parliamentary democracy.

Perhaps the best that can be hoped for is a relatively short period with the Liberals out of power. Hopefully, during that time, the bulk of the social progress Canada has recently made, on issues like gay rights, will not be reversed. Perhaps a Harper government would also be able to do something to rebuild Canada's international position: as I dearly hoped Paul Martin would do. In the process of cutting the deficit, Canada has slashed foreign aid and our international diplomatic presence. If Canada is going to maintain its role as a helpful fixer and leader in peacekeeping (a mantle that has already badly slipped), we need to commit to the armed forces at a level that reflects the operational tempo of a Canadian military increasingly committed to a large number of complex places and projects around the world. The danger, or at least a danger, is that the Tories will focus instead on hopelessly misguided policies like militarizing the Arctic: an action that would serve virtually no Canadian interest.

A spell out of government may even allow the Liberals to rebuild themselves: shedding some of the excess that has arisen from a long stretch in government and hopefully reforming its leadership. Obviously, if Martin loses, his position as party leader will become untenable. Given the many successes of these twelve years of Liberal government, and given the relatively painless nature of the transition of power from Chretien to Martin, the latter man would have nobody to blame but himself.

Posted by Milan at 1:49 AM   

The Animal Lab Protest

When I walked across central Oxford to return The Life Aquatic, I found the city suffused with a very heavy police presence, on account of the protest that was held today against the Oxford animal lab. Presumably, that was also the reason for the 10m tall, metal-covered and razorwire-topped fence around the lab construction site itself that I saw yesterday. While it's always a bit unsettling to see hundreds of police officers, this group was much less intimidating than most I have seen. Firstly, they were all in reflective yellow. While I am sure there were other officers dressed in civilian clothes, it is still much more reassuring to see patrols of twenty yellow-jacketed officers with faces uncovered than the black riot gear clad police forces that I've seen in Seattle, Washington D.C., Prague, and elsewhere. Secondly, while in North America they would have been bristling with automatic weapons, here they were visibly armed with nothing more than pepper spray and low-profile batons.

With regards to the cause of the protest itself, I've said before that I think it's a misguided campaign: and not only because of some of the objectionable tactics that have been employed by protesters.

While animals do have some level of moral considerability, that does not automatically preclude the moral legitimacy of animal testing for medical purposes. Obviously, it's not a thing that should be done lightly or capriciously and efforts should be made to minimize both how much such testing takes place and the level of suffering inflicted in the course of it. For the foreseable future, however, animal testing will be a necessary part of medical research and development. There is a balance that must be struck between the development of things like new medicines and surgical techniques, their thorough testing, and the decent treatment of animals. Already, Britain has in place rigorous protection for laboratory animals. British animal labs are inspected more than ten times a year, usually at unannounced times: much more often than in most countries. 85% of medical experimentation in Britain is conducted on rats and only 2% of all procedures cause "severe pain or distress."

The Oxford animal lab is also a particularly poor target for public anger, given that it is meant to consolidate existing Oxford labs rather than provide new capacity for animal experimentation. Partly, the move to consolidate has been motivated by the property destruction that has become an unwelcome feature of the protest campaign.

Indeed, that protection extends far, far beyond that extended to the millions of food animals that are slaughtered here annually, as well as elsewhere in the world, to provide for the tables of British consumers. Like other developed countries, Britain has an industrial meat industry that I am certain would shock and appall most consumers if they had a good sense of how it operates. The fact that 75% of American poultry inspectors refuse to eat chicken should be indicative of something. Those concerned with animal welfare should pay greater attention to what they buy and eat, before moving to condemn practices that are necessary for the advancement of important humanitarian goals.

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• As Spencer pointed out on his blog, The Globe and Mail - bastion newspaper of the centre-left in Canada - has given its endorsement to the Tories. It is looking more and more like we're headed for a Harper government. This is a prospect I find very worrisome.
• Lots of IR people are apparently going to the James Bond bop at St. Antony's tonight. (Roham is on the poster.) For my part, I feel more like reading, especially after the enormous eight egg veggie omelet I cooked and ate with Nora.
• Neal is leaving China tomorrow. I wish him a safe journey back to Vancouver.
• Going to http://photo.sindark.com/ automatically forwards you to my Photo.net page: where I post my more successful attempts at photography.
• This FAQ for Canon EOS cameras has some really good information in it, presented in an accessible manner.

Posted by Milan at 12:01 AM   

Hilary term (unofficially) begins

Today was a microcosm of the whole Oxford experience. I saw Louise off in the morning, then spent a few hours preparing for a statistics exam that was much harder than I anticipated. It included a lot of the kind of math that would be fine with a few practice homework assignments but is daunting to see for the first time during an examination. Likewise, the analysis portion expected an awful lot: given that the marks balance indicates you should spend 45 minutes on it. That said, it's behind me now and I am reasonably sure I got the 53.8% that I need to pass the course.

Afterwards, a whole swarm of IR M.Phil students descended on The Turf. Spending an hour or so with them reminded me about all the best thing Oxford offers: namely the company of excellent peers. I know I've praised the cooperative spirit of this group before, but it's a make-or-break issue for me. Along with my name on some distant piece of paper, I am working for the respect of these people, and partly because I feel like I am engaged in a cooperative enterprise with them. I am honoured to be part of such a group.

In my pigeon hole today were letters to Mr. Ilaycky (from the Wadham Hall Manager) and Mr. Iinyckyi (from the Graduate Studies Office).¹ The first was about my ongoing attempt to opt out of all college meals. The second was my first term official evaluation from Dr. Hurrell. In the spirit of transparency, I reproduce it below:

Milan appears to be settling in very well both to Oxford and to the course. We have had four substantive meetings this term and he has written papers on US foreign policy, WWI, the Middle East, and China. The papers have been very well prepared and based on a good range of reading. We have discussed some of the ways in which he might revise his essay-writing. But, overall, he is a very strong student and this has been an excellent start to the M.Phil.

Nothing too colourful, but it's good to know that I am working at approximately the right level. The real test comes once I need to start producing original research. Claire, Alex, and I discussed thesis titles while at The Turf tonight. My idea: "Overspecialize and you Breed in Weakness: Fostering Communication Between Epistemic Communities Related to World Fisheries." It's a work in progress.

While it feels more than a bit audacious, perhaps I should record my impressions of Dr. Hurrell, just to balance out the record. My conversations with him have been engaging - so much so that I frequently walk out of them feeling really energized and convinced that important and original things can be done here. I appreciate the way our dialogue seems to allow each to feed off the other: a process of conceptual exploration that uses the essay I wrote as a starting point, rather than the singular focus of discussion. Again, the real test will come with the more personal work next year.

Tonight, there is an MCR welcome back party in Wadham. I've also been invited to meet up with a group of the M.Phil people. It's an invitation I feel inclined to accept. Ultimately, the people are a lot more important than having finished an extra couple of hours of reading. Indeed, it is largely my relationships with people in the program that constitute the motivation to do as well as I can.

No end of post errata tonight.

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[1] It's spelled Ilnyckyj. Nobody would ever try to spell it from memory, so all my problems arise from people who try to correct the spelling because it looks overly insane to them. Fair enough, but that's how it's spelled.

Oh, one thing: walking to the exam today, I saw that a really serious, almost Israeli-security-barrier class wall has been erected around the construction site for the animal lab. While I won't get into the ethics and politics of animal testing right now, I think the protesters are really missing the point.

Posted by Milan at 12:01 AM   

I never quite got the hang of Thursdays

With the first inter-term break nearly complete, I have finished one sixth of my total academic time in Oxford. I think this is now the longest I have ever spent without being in Vancouver. While I am still profoundly uncertain about what I will do this summer, it is still comforting to have the overall shape of the next two years laid out before me. I think I've done fairly well this term, on a number of fronts, though it will be nice to get my official assessment from Dr. Hurrell, just to see what he thinks in formal terms.

This afternoon, I successfully reprovisioned myself with peppers, free range eggs, lots of kidney beans, cheese, etc. It seemed a good thing to do before the term started, though carrying home £25 worth of groceries (much of it canned) is an activity even less pleasant than revising for tomorrow's statistics exam.

This weekend, I need to complete the first week's reading for the core seminar, as well as get a good start on the first week's reading for the qualitative methods course that is happening this term. Happily, some of the books for the core seminar are also reading my supervisor assigned to me for the break. Due to the mass of reading that remains to be done once the stats exam is dispatched, I should have the most profound hesitance about going to the MCR welcome back party tomorrow night.

I never did get my hands on one of the statistics textbooks, though I suppose there is an outside shot of having the chance to peruse one tomorrow morning, before the exam but after I see Louise off on her return to Lancaster. I am very thankful overall for the statistics courses I took at UBC: especially the statistics for pharmacy students course I took with Alan Donald. Like Farshid Safi (with whom I did differential calculus at UBC), he is a very funny guy and a professor who I highly recommend on the basis of helpfulness, competence, and personality.

I am not entirely certain whether this is a formal Oxford exam, in the sense that I need to wear the whole silly robe and bow tie combination. It's not happening in the Examination Schools, but it still seems safest to wear the whole ensemble, just in case. I borrowed a graduate robe from the lodge, for this purpose.

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• Another Mac OS X tip: spend $20 and get yourself an Optical Wheelmouse or the Logitech equivalent. It is infinitely more pleasant to use for long periods than a trackpad or single button Apple mouse. I recommend setting it up so that pressing the third mouse button (the wheel) has the same effect as pressing F9 in the normal setup of Entourage: showing all windows simultaneously. I wish I had a fourth button to map to the F11 equivalent.
• Guinness contains 260 calories a pint.
• If anyone I know in Oxford wants to borrow The Life Aquatic, they are welcome to do so. A quirky and extremely funny film, I recommend it to people who enjoy slightly absurd comedy. It needs to be returned to the County Library by Saturday, however.
• Is anyone else disappointed about EU standardized passport stamps? My child's passport from when I first went to Europe was much more interesting looking than my monotonously stamped current one.
• Just to remind people, the deadline for ORS scholarship applications is January 20th, and you cannot apply for any other university or departmental scholarships unless you apply for this one as well.
• On heavily caffeinated days, like the last two, I find myself enormously more likely to be startled by unexpected events: such as suddenly seeing someone enter the room, or turning the corner in a hallway to see someone close to me. The fact that I had something of a reputation for shocked responses to such stimuli when I was at UBC is not unrelated to my $250 a year Starbucks budget. Having hardly consumed any caffeine over the break (barring the occasional cup of tea or coffee with a friend), it's surprising to see such skittishness return.

Posted by Milan at 12:01 AM   

Things to do in Vancouver

I've been asked to provide a list of things to do in Vancouver, for the benefit of people visiting. For the critical reason that it is not statistics, I am going to do so now.

The first area to address is the 'classic touristy stuff' category. Included within it are both things worth seeing and things better avoided. I would definitely suggest going up Grouse Mountain but, if at all possible, I highly recommend doing so by climbing either the Grouse Grind or the Baden Powell Trail. Both would provide a much more authentic Western Canadian experience. Both are fairly energy intensive trails, but nothing that a young and fit person wouldn't be able to deal with. A less strenuous option in the same area is to walk up or down Capilano Canyon, either from or to Cleveland Dam.

Also in North Vancouver is the Capilano Suspension Bridge. My advice: skip it. It's one of those 'drive a whole tour bus full of (probably German or Japanese) tourists with digital cameras and expose them to actors in period clothing' kind of places. If you want to see a suspension bridge, I recommend the one in Lynn Canyon. It's free and there are a number of nice hikes there. You can walk around Rice Lake (very easy), up to Lynn Headwaters (still easy, but longer), up to Norvan Falls (more of a challenge), or all the way up Hanes Valley, up Crown Pass, and then down Grouse Mountain (a serious day-long trek, with an interesting but difficult to navigate boulder field segment).

Among more urban attractions I would recommend: Granville Island, a kind of cultural conglomeration under the Granville Street Bridge, built on former industrial land. It features a number of good theatres, such as the Arts Club. Check what's playing. Also located there: a number of good markets and restaurants. A good place for souvenir shopping.

Downtown is worth a bit of a wander, but I would avoid Granville Street. Instead, walk westward along Robson Street towards English Bay. That route passes some of my favourite restaurants in the city. Tropika, not far past the provincial courthouse, is an excellent Thai/Malaysian restaurant which is ideal for going to with a group. Farther along, Hapa Izakaya is one of Vancouver's funkiest contemporary places, serving modern Japanese food in a unique atmosphere. Farther still, where Robson meets Denman, you will find Kintaro - an authentic Asian noodle house popular with the business crowd, Wild Garlic, a fun little bistro with good drink specials, and Tapas Tree, a safe option for non-adventurous diners that still offers some interesting menu items.

Once you get to Denman, walk southwards along it, possibly stopping for gelato at one of many places nearby or for a coffee at the Delany's there. Alternatively, ask someone to direct you to the nearby liquor store and watch the sun set while sitting against a log in English bay with a bottle of two of the excellent local Granville Island Breweries beers. I recommend their amber ale and the winter ale, if it's in season.

North and east of the central area of downtown, you find Gastown, which is probably worth a bit of a look as well. It's right beside some of the dodgiest areas not only in Vancouver, but in any city I've visited, so watch out. The waterfront between the Pan-Pacific Hotel and Coal Harbour (next to Stanley Park) is also a nice walk. For something longer, you can extend it all the way around the sea wall, under the Lions Gate Bridge, and then back around into English Bay. A bit less ambitiously, you can cross the causeway leading to the bridge, walk around one side of Lost Lagoon, and reach English Bay along one of a number of nice paths.

Personally, I would recommend visiting the campus of the University of British Columbia. If you do, don't miss the fantastic view from the escarpment near Place Vanier (ask some students how to get there). Consider walking down the wooden steps to Wreck Beach: Vancouver's nude beach and an attractive place to visit any time of year. If you carry on northwards, along the beach, you will pass two spotlight towers installed during the second world war in case of Japanese invasion. Farther still are Jericho and Spanish Banks: really nice beaches to visit in the summer to swim, windsurf, or have a bonfire.

Another nice expedition is to catch the Seabus from its downtown terminal at the base of Seymour Street across Burrard Inlet to North Vancouver. It only costs $2 or so and it gives you a nice view of the harbour. The other terminus is at Lonsdale Quay: worth a bit of a look for its own sake. A few blocks up Lonsdale Avenue, you will find Honjin: one of many cheap and excellent sushi restaurants in Vancouver.

If you want to eat on the cheap, the 99 cent pizza downtown can't be beaten. Avoid Love at First Bite on Granville. Instead, go to either AM or FM classic (on Smithe and Seymour, respectively) or to my favourite, which is located across Seymour Street from A&B sound, near the 7-11.

Another area worth visiting is Commercial Drive. Either catch the 99 bus down Broadway or one of several buses or the Skytrain from downtown. This street features a number of art galleries, fun cafes, and a nice bohemian atmosphere. It is to Vancouver what SoHo is to New York or what Kensington Market is to Toronto.

There are lots of good theatres in Vancouver: the Orpheum downtown, the Stanley out near Broadway, the Firehall theatre near gastown, and the Chan Centre and Freddy Wood theatres on campus at UBC. Grab a copy of The Georgia Strait to see what is happening, in terms of music and live theatre. It's free and includes the excellent column "Savage Love." Look for it in boxes around the downtown area.

Dance clubs really don't interest me, but the ones people seem to go to are mostly on the northern bit of Granville Street, before you reach the bridge. I would recommend The Cellar (the jazz club on Broadway, not the sleazy dance club on Granville) for some live music and a nice atmosphere.

This is nowhere near a comprehensive list, but it should be enough to get started. Vancouver is a really wonderful city: beautiful, easy to get around in by public transit, and large enough to have a good level of culture. While it can definitely get extremely rainy at times, if you find yourself with some nice weather, I strongly recommend one of the walks or hikes I mentioned above, or something else of your own devising outside.

Good day or weekend trips from Vancouver include Whistler, for skiing or snowboarding as well as general mountain exposure, or Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands.

Posted by Milan at 10:30 PM   

Stats meeting and Indian food

Compared with the past few days, today was warm, luminous, and bright. Walking to the Manor Road building, Oxford looked like an entirely different place from the cold and drizzly expanse it has been for the better part of the last week. It's the kind of day that in the midst of which you can't help feeling more optimistic.

The stats meeting today went fairly well. It was too well attended to work as a cohesive whole and dividing it into smaller groups would have required more centralization than was likely to emerge from such an ad hoc assembly. Regardless, in an informal kind of way we managed to address a few of the issues that had been making me anxious. Hopefully, I will somehow be able to get hold of one of the textbooks before the exam takes place: the libraries I've found have all been stripped of their copies. The only thing I am really shaky about is the math behind logit regressions, though I am fairly sure we're essentially meant to treat it as a black box operation.

Tomorrow, I am determined to rise early, infuse myself with coffee acquired with difficulty from a recalcitrant Starbucks staff this afternoon, and delve into all the inter-term break work I so admirably pledged to complete weeks ago.

Dinner with Louise this evening went well. I maintain that the vegetable Vindaloo at Kashmir on Cowley Road is one of the best examples of the variety I've encountered, though my deprivation from tasty ethnic food here makes me more likely to see any example in a good light. Hopefully, I will have the chance to see Louise again before her departure. Oxford shall be a poorer place for her absence, as of Friday.

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• I got my Hilary Term battels pidged to me today: £964.08, even after all my refunded meals.
• The bulletin board on the wall behind my desk is now completely covered with photos, postcards, and miscellaneous reminders. It makes the room feel much richer.
• Does human cognition employ Bayesian reasoning? This article makes an interesting case for why it may.
• "Westfall" by Okkervil River is quite a good song. My thanks to Tristan for giving it to me initially.
• Oh, and Apple, I can't believe you would be so stupid as to add a spyware-like feature to the newest version of iTunes. How stupid and disrespectful, and just when you are trying to get good press for new products. It's fairly benign, so I am not really angry, but you really can't claim to be a superior breed of company if you're using the same kind of technology for which that lots of other companies are rightly in the doghouse. Turn it off.

Posted by Milan at 12:09 AM   

Typical exam time conduct

Cleaning and organizing

I did a lot of general housekeeping tonight. I made a full backup of my hard drive, reconciled my school files between the iBook and the terminal server, and copied current and critical files to the USB key. I did all my laundry, cleaned my room, sorted correspondence that has been sitting about, organized books (both those read and those in progress), returned finished Wadham Library books, and cleaned and sorted my dishes, pots, and cutlery. I updated and debugged the whole collection of automatic scripts that deal with some elements of the blog's operation, as well as email and calendar management. I caught up with all my email correspondence, though I still have a great many letters to write. I even sorted my huge collections of used envelopes, plastic shopping bags, and cardboard boxes. While I do find uses for them, I continuously find myself gaining more at a rate that exceeds the one at which I use them.

You will never see my room so spotless, well-organized, and dust free as in the period leading up to exams. Partly, that's because stress makes me far more obsessive.

Resurgent interest in hobbies

I cleaned the lenses on both my A510 and Elan 7N (not that the poor girl has seen any action since we got here) carefully and thoroughly. As I've said before, I really miss the experience of using an SLR. It's a superior tool for the capture of images in almost every way. The only disadvantages (which are major) are the cost of film, awkwardness of carrying such a large device, and tendency of people to get scared or at least very unnatural in the presence of large, black, professional-looking cameras. Those caveats aside, I can't overstate the value of an accurate, high quality viewfinder with heads-up exposure information; a good flash with real flash metering; a high quality overall metering system; good, changeable lenses with USM drives and fast focus, even in low light; seperated focus system and shutter controls; and the existence and intelligent location of intuitive controls that let you do immediately what you would need fiddly menus to do on the A510. All that said, I am unlikely to go back to film in the near future, despite all her charms.

Magnified culinary inclinations

See previous post.

Enough of this nonsense; I should do another 40 minutes of statistics, then go to sleep.

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• One tip to OS X users making backups: to backup something like your iTunes folder, use the command prompt rather than the GUI. Just open a terminal and type "cp -r -v " then drag the original version of the folder into the window, followed by the location to which you want it copied. This is faster than using the graphical user interface and one error doesn't cause the whole operation to stop. Also, it seems to allow much smoother simultaneous use of other applications.

Posted by Milan at 1:20 AM   

More revision and "How to Eat like a Grad Student"

Today was spent chewing over material from the quantitative methods lectures, looking up key terms online, reading about neorealism, and taking breaks to read The Economist. Such is the natural conduct of an international relations graduate student. Since I proposed the joint study session for the stats exam tomorrow afternoon, I feel I should be well prepared for it.

Looking through the Cabin Fever photos this afternoon, during a study break, I was reminded of how much I miss the people who were there: Tristan, Alison, Jonathan, Nick. Neal, and Meaghan especially. I hope I get the chance to see all of you somewhere, before I leave Oxford in summer of 2007. This is one reason I am glad to have digitized more than 5000 photos before leaving Vancouver.

Motivated largely by the desire to avoid stats, I made an unusually complex dinner tonight. I don't even know how to categorize it, but I will explain for the benefit of people in similar living arrangements:

How to Eat like a Grad Student
An occassional new feature of a sibilant intake of breath

Preparation time: 20 minutes (if you stagger everything correctly)
Vegetarian (vegans could replace the butter with olive oil and cheese with vegan cheese-like stuff)
Nutrients: calories (potatoes), protein (cheese, beans, tofu), hot sauce
Requires minimal kitchen equipment
Costs less than 5 Pounds

His Dark Materials

• Large bowl or plate (courtesy of Margaret)
• Sharp knife (in my case, my Swisstool multitool)
• Frying pan (courtesy of Sarah)
• Microwave oven
• Stove (apparently called a 'cooker' over here)
• Optional: goggles (if your eyes object as much to the sulpher dioxide released by chopped and cooking onions as mine do)

• Potatoes (3 medium)
• Onions (red, 3 medium)
• Kidney beans (1 can, in chili sauce)
• Hot sauce of your choice
• Tofu (about 100 cubic centimetres)
• Sharp Cheddar cheese (about 30 ccs)
• Butter (about 10 ccs)

Preparation:

1. Wash potatoes, cut about halfway through lengthwise to release steam, microwave until cooked.
2. Heat frying pan to maximum temperature, add butter.
3. Peel and chop onions into small pieces.
4. Fry onion pieces in butter until browning.
5. Add hot sauce.
6. Chop tofu into 1cc pieces, chop or crumble cheese.
7. Add can of kidney beans to cooked onions.
8. Add cheese and tofu.
9. Add more hot sauce, cook until uniformly warm.
10. Cut cooked potatoes into pieces or slices
11. Put onion/bean complex on top of potatoes.

This makes more than enough for one hungry person and tastes way better than the same recipe with any of the components removed. If you add enough hot sauce, it makes a good decongestant if you have a bit of a cold.

With a few more potatoes, this could easily serve two people. It's a scalable recipe. Actually, this one is good enough that I might even try subjecting another person to it. Cooking for more than one would obviously be dramatically more efficient, as the marginal time for preparing a second portion of the above is dramatically less than the marginal time for preparing the first portion.

The most sensible way to deal with reading for the first core seminar is to delay it until after the exam. The exam finishes at 4:30pm on Friday and the seminar isn't until the following Tuesday. To do the reading now would waste valuable revision time (or, at least, time I can spend thinking and writing about revising).

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• As I am sure most people could guess, the two for one deal on strange Superdrug brand energy drinks can lead to brief periods of very high productivity, followed by a pronounced dip characterized by hunger and a weird inability to concentrate. (How to shop like a graduate student: yes, I would like to buy these cans of energy drink and four tubes of discounted toothpaste, paying with a foreign credit card.)
• I am looking forward to a pre-departure dinner of Indian food with Louise tomorrow. Delicious, delicious vegetarian curry, dahl, etc on Cowley Road.
• Looks like you can't trust writable CDs for long-term backup. Good thing hard drives are getting so cheap.
• Seeing all the IR M.Phils returned from miscellaneous places around the world tomorrow is a much anticipated happening. It's always a lot easier to motivate yourself to work as part of a working group.
  

Posted by Milan at 12:01 AM   

Seeking banking advice from Britons

After another afternoon of trying to deal with NatWest, both online and in the branch, I am seriously considering switching to another bank. Every time I say this, people advocate the bank they use as "much better." I wonder if I was complaining about another bank, people would start vocally endorsing NatWest.

What I care most about:

1. Easy, low cost international transfers.
2. Easy transfer of payments to my college, by bank draft or any other means (ideally, an online electronic transfer).
3. Good online banking.
4. Decent interest on savings accounts.
5. Good customer service.

At present, I am doing as much as possible through my Canadian banks, since they just seem to be better at these things.

The major irritant in doing so is the difficulty of paying the college (it charges an extra 2.5% for credit card payments and my Bank of Montreal MasterCard only gives 1% cash back). Also, it's annoying to have to keep updating financial records for so many institutions and in light of ever-shifting exchange rates.

Therefore, I ask you, kind British readers, which bank do you recommend and why? If I am going to go through all the bother of opening an international account again, there needs to be a marked improvement. I appreciate your advice.

Posted by Milan at 5:32 PM   

Stats by daylight, wandering by moonlight

Today was excellent. I saw a broad swathe of Oxford that was unknown before, and did so in good company. Prior to that, I actually got a surprisingly large amount of statistics revision done: quite necessary now that I know I am going into the exam with 66.2%. My assignment grades ranged from 55% to 78%, though not in accordance with how much I thought I understood the material. While it's my lowest mark ever in a university course, it is one of the higher ones among a class that is intelligent and hardworking in every case. The poor overall performance is an indictment of the course: not the students. It takes considerable restraint to keep from constantly spouting off about how disappointing this one course has been: it did much to sour a term that was otherwise excellent. Anyhow, I will try not to think about statistics except insofar as it involves hammering the meaning of a chi-squared test into my head.

The path along Oxford canal is enormously more interesting than is suggested by its starting point at the Hythe Street Bridge. Walking along it, you pass all manner of weirs and cross a number of interesting bridges: all while passing a flotilla of long canal boats. Eventually, you reach an enormous meadow, both larger and flatter than the Christ Church Meadows, where - if you're as lucky as I am - a whole pack of horses will wander over to you in search of food. As a place for wandering, I recommend it.

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• Wednesday, at 1:00pm, there will be a group study session for the quantitative methods exam. It's happening in the room beside the cafeteria in the Manor Road building, where the Christmas party took place. I encourage people to bring notes, textbooks, questions, etc.
• I am hoping to locate one of the two stats recommended textbooks tomorrow. As far as I can tell, the Bodeleian has one of each off site somewhere, and the two copies of the Wonnacott text in the SSL are both out until after the exam. Any suggestions?

Posted by Milan at 1:08 AM   

Exercising democratic choices

I received my absentee ballot this morning, while I was on my way to give Kelly and one of her sisters a quick peek into the Codrington Library. The electoral calculation for me is ridiculously simple. Only two parties have the slightest chance of winning in North Vancouver: the Liberals, with former mayor Don Bell as their candidate, and the Conservatives, with Cindy Silver as their candidate. Between the two parties, I have a strong preference to the Liberals, based heavily on their social policies. While a degree of corruption and the complacency of a long period in power are bad things, they are not the worst of things.

Since the ballot must be received by 6:00pm Ottawa time on election day, I dropped it into the postbox on my way to the Social Sciences Library to study for the statistics test. For any other Canadians in Oxford, or elsewhere abroad, planning to vote (and you really should, democratic participation is important): time is extremely short for requesting and returning a ballot. If you haven't already done so, fax off your ballot request right now.

Incidentally, every time I have voted in a federal election, it has been from outside Canada. I last voted for Don Bell from the Vatican. I had more faith in timely delivery by their postal system than the Italian one.

Posted by Milan at 12:06 PM   

Thinking about procrastination

Today has been a decidedly downpourish day in Oxford, trickling with rain when it wasn't dumping it in vast quantities. Aside from a brief period spent in a cafe with a couple of friends, it was a pretty resolutely work focused period, with progress made on the neorealism and statistics fronts. I also finished a preliminary read of the first issue of The Economist for 2006. More members of Library Court are back (including Nora, who has returned from visiting Bilyana's family), so the overall impression of marching towards term time is well established. For a while, I really was labouring under the illusion that school would never resume.

I think the reason why I spend so much time at Starbucks here (reading, not buying their mediocre Christmas Blend) is because it's the best kitchen substitute I have. Reading in libraries is difficult because of just how acute the desire not to be there becomes. Likewise, reading in my room is difficult due to the presence of ample material for the most entertaining use of time than course related reading. As such, a hybrid of the two is quite helpful. In North Vancouver, that was the dining room table, either in the afternoon or late at night. As long as I had my iPod playing, people could use the living room and kitchen without bothering me at all. The other, oft-mentioned, example is the Fairview kitchens where I recall reading quite happily in the presence of Meghan, Tristan, and Christina at various times. Since the Library Court kitchen is just a kitchen, with no tables at which to sit, there is no such intermediate space in college. The Middle Common Room (MCR) really doesn't fit the bill for me. The closest approximation, then, is the Cornmarket Street Starbucks: my kitchen by proxy.

As a graduate student, I don't feel that any kind of reading is entirely irrelevant, especially when in a field as diverse as international relations. Everything from non-fiction books in other fields to contemporary novels has some applicability. Also, I am much more likely to remember and be affected by your average really good novel than I am by this or that piece of historical or theoretical reading in my subject area. Non-course readings therefore falls into a category of quasi-procrastinatory activities, like blogging. It serves a non-trivial purpose, but should not be allocated large amounts of time when there are important, urgent things to be done. That said, it's better than wasting away hours on things with no redeeming academic, social, or financial value.

When it rains here, it doesn't seem to become all that much warmer as a result, unlike most of my experience in Vancouver. As such, it was through a miserable combination of cold and wet that I trudged to and from G & D's, where I spent a productive few hours reading with Margaret. I hope her pair of papers with deadlines looming and upcoming exam all go well. Sheltering in Wadham, I feel sincerest pity for anyone who has to spend a long time out and about tonight.

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• It should be noted that while the Very Short Introduction to Cryptography was tolerable but fairly basic, the one on David Hume is incredibly boring, and the one on Emotion incredibly speculative, frustrating, and poorly written. I am now firmly resolved to buy no more of them, despite the appeal of the concept.
• Many thanks to Alex Stummvoll for the postcard from New Zealand. I hope he had a wonderful time there.
• My veteran Columbia shoes have begun to literally fall apart: ripping along seams and falling apart around the sole. As I recall, I bought these shoes with my father more than a year and a half ago. They have served well over that time, and I do not relish the idea of buying shoes here. Shoe shopping is an activity I dread quite enough in Canada, where a pair of solid shoes can cost as little as twenty Pounds, and fear that I will despise on this side of the Atlantic. In the end, I think it's the little things like that that force most people to return home.
• The more miscellaneous living stuff I acquire, the more obvious it becomes that moving to London for a summer job would be a very difficult matter indeed. It would take many expensive, time consuming train or bus journeys. While I might be able to find some kind of storage in Oxford, it would certainly be a pain. Living here would be better for thesis research, anyhow. Hopefully some scholarship will come through and take a bit of the heat off.
• This week's Economist features both a link to a gang-run website (including photos taken in Canada) and a reference to the Dan Savage definition of Santorum, which they cite as being "something indescribable in a family newspaper."

Posted by Milan at 12:01 AM   

Heavily school-focused post

Happy Birthday Meghan Mathieson

I went to the country library today with Louise and finished a good chunk of Waltz before signing up for a card and renting a copy of The Life Aquatic. (The local public library here charges you about $7 Canadian to rent a DVD.) My suspicion that Louise would enjoy the film was well founded. Spending time with her today was most enjoyable: how sad that she will be leaving on Friday, the same day as my apprehension-inducing quantitative methods exam will be taking place.

While there is some temptation to express bitterness about how the most interesting thing to happen in Oxford since Michaelmas ended is getting crammed into the last week of break, amidst some frantic studying and preparation, I am resolved to be more grateful than that. Indeed, any opportunity you get to meet someone whom you feel really comfortable, and with with whom you enjoy conversing a great deal, is quite a precious thing. We have resolved to mark her departure with delicious vegetarian Indian food.

I am starting to get nervous about how much is to be done before next term. There is the possibility of being called on to present during the first core seminar, and the attendant necessity to do a good job of the readings and prepare speaking notes. There is the need to do the general and first week reading for the qualitative methods course, which is incidentally being coordinated by my supervisor: Dr. Andrew Hurrell. Finally, there is the need to do a great many small tasks that I put off last term for completion during the break - back when it looked like an incredible luxurious and empty six week span.

Information on the quantitative methods test

At the time when Claire showed it to me, it seemed like a clever idea to photograph the information page on the stats exam. Apparently, it was distributed during the last lab, though I never saw it. While it's an awkward medium to transcribe from, hopefully doing so will make it stick in my mind. I present it here, somewhat truncated, for anyone in the program who hasn't seen it. The test is two hours long and has two sections. It will be happening in the St. Cross Building next Friday at 2:30pm. The pass mark is 60%.

The multiple choice and short answer section is based on the following concepts:

1) Descriptive statistics: Types of variables (interval, ordinal, cardinal); Centres of Distributions (mean, median, mode); Spread of Distributions (variance and standard deviation).

2) Sampling and probability: Types of sampling (random sampling, cluster and stratified random sampling, sampling error and non-sampling biases); Probability and probability distributions (models, continuous distributions, the noral distribution).

3) Hypothesis testing and the accuracy of estimates: Accuracy of estimates (calculating and interpreting standard errors, confidence intervals for means and proportions); Hypothesis testing (null and alternative hypotheses, p-values, type I and II errors).

4) Linear regression: Depending and independent variables; Ordinary Least Squares (least squares criterion and error term); Regression model and assumptions; Multiple regression (controlling for other variables, causality, categorical variables as dummies; interaction effects; model building); Regression diagnostics (non-linear relationships, heteroskadisticity, outliers, multicollinearity).

5) Contingency tables and odds rations: Chi-squared test; Contingency tables and expected frequencies; Differences of proportions, calculating and interpreting odds ratios.

6) Logistic regression: Reasoning behind the use of logistic regression for binary variables; Odds ratios and logistic regression; Predicted probabilities for logistic regression.

The second part is based around analysis of the use of statistics in a segment of an IR journal article we will be presented with, something like the last assignment. I can email people the actual jpeg images, upon request.

Overall, it doesn't look so bad. Most of the above concepts were at least introduced in the Tilley lectures. Reading the relevant chapters from a textbook should fill in the gaps. Moreover, I get the sense that the course directors really don't consider this a central part of the M.Phil. Otherwise, they would have put in the time and energy to make sure it got decent treatment.

In closing, I can't resist putting one more link to my statistics play in one act. Despite the mixed reviews, I find it acceptably entertaining.

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• I was pleased to learn yesterday that more than 1000 people have downloaded the NASCA report from the IRSA webpage since it went online in October.
• I'd write something cleverer, but I really should get back to my Earl Gray tea and reading.
• W nq xvncqacmfezs zf kni fpvqwbr iple U srsmjr njk LDO. Tuh xetsemwgjel U vtk azzp kwajcwbpvg pisuphvuf ceke tyzfokzenbkza, yegzlv laea xxvbvtwj pyhixybn. O hjpnc Q ykrrofl lgmrwfwhq sfkk wn. Rw lcz nibr, nt dekmvpw ye hg hre razr yn gnknz e gtzdzn joomrl ys nr zytzx qnnp kn esetz nmbl. Xuw xyaslrif bk ihpy, soieq, ear jbal yose. Nbbcfxbik mtezv uses y gublv rrw aufe qdluymsdm giairf htex Wkicwp. (CR: HD)

Posted by Milan at 12:01 AM   

One week of break remains

Anyone who has ever been amused to see the photo of a terrified looking Prince Charles pouring a pint, found in the King's Arms Pub within Wadham College, might be disappointed to learn that they have the same exact print over at the Angel and Greyhound. I don't know if either pub was actually the place where the photo was taken, but it certainly diminishes how amusing it is to see it in a second place. It's like when you're in Venice and you realize that all the cheap table glass in Murano is identical in each shop and comes from China.

Touring Oxford

This afternoon, I met Spencer and his partner for the World Debating Championships and gave them a walking tour of Oxford. Before carrying on, I should note that Michael Kotrly and his partner won the tournament, a very impressive feat. I know Michael through UBC debate, where I believe I was treasurer during his presidency. My congratulations go out to him for an extremely impressive performance.

The walk, which I recommend to anyone inclined to play tour guide in Oxford, began at Cornmarket and High Street, from which we walked up St. Aldate's towards the Folly Bridge. Glancing into the Christ Church main quad, we passed The Head of the River and walked along the Isis until the paths diverge northward again along the eastern canal. We followed that up past Magdalen, where I would recommend having a look at the gardens and greenhouses, before turning left and heading back up the high street towards Carfax.

We ducked into University College, through Logic Lane, and passed through two of their quads to see the Shelley Memorial. We then passed St. Mary's Church and briefly entered the Codrington Library from Radcliffe Square. Leaving the square from the north, we went down Hollywell Street to New College, where I showed them the plague mound and the cloisters (as featured, somewhat incongruously as far as architecture goes, in the most recent Harry Potter film). Leaving New, we walked back up Hollywell Street, had a look through Wadham, the gardens, and library court, before going up Parks Road to Rhodes House and the Natural History Museum.

After looking at the displays there and in the Pitt Rivers museum, we doubled back. One thing I had never noticed before: the Natural History Museum has a stuffed kakapo, of all animals. Those who don't know what I am talking about are strongly encouraged to read Douglas Adams' excellent book Last Chance to See.

The last stop of the four-hour tour was The Turf, where we had a pint before the debaters caught their train back to London. It was good to see Spencer. He doesn't seem to have been too badly grizzled by the extreme responsibilities of his post as President of the UBC Alma Mater Society.

What made today particularly special was seeing a trio of people I have missed a lot over the break. Bilyana is back from her winter break trip home, as are Margaret and Roham. I ran into Bilyana outside Rhodes House while giving the tour and Roham outside the Natural History Museum. We simply must organize a study group for the statistics exam next Friday. Margaret I met after I noticed her light on while walking back from the train station. Though she is mired in work, she still brings a friendly feeling back into the city, as seeing all three friends did. I now believe that term is starting again in a practical, rather than a theoretical, way. It scarcely seemed possible during the days when I wandered an abandoned Oxford from and abandoned Wadham with only excellent conversations with Louise to break the solitude.

Evening in Oxford with Wadham graduates

As part of a general effort to get to know people in my college better, I followed Kelly and her sister Bonnie to the King's Arms tonight to meet a whole crew of Wadham graduates tonight. Shifting between there and The Mitre, people had a few drinks and conversed. I owe David Patrikarakos for the pint of Guinness he kindly bought me.

Among the graduates who I did not know previously, I was particularly glad to meet a particle physicist working on dark matter and a fellow Vancouverite. In the latter case, the similarities are legion. We both lived near Trout Lake, we both have some connection to North Vancouver high schools (Handsworth and Carson Graham, respectively), and we both did judo with Hiroshi Nishi as an instructor. We both went to UBC and took courses with Dennis Danielson. Given that he did an honours English degree, I am sure we know a lot of the same people.

Incidentally, and before I go on too long about this, there have been a lot of headaches with regards to Wadham people and getting mentioned on the blog. There are those who tremble at the prospect and, when I know who they are, I generally avoid mentioning them at all and certainly avoid saying anything personal. Then there are those who are neutral, those I simply don't know the position of, and those who are positively irked not to be mentioned. It's a lot to remember, so my apologies if I slip up from time to time. A few ugly experiences are teaching me to err on the side of caution. If I don't mention you by name, it's probably because I barely know you and met you in a context that someone could possibly, maybe find objectionable (like... a pub... gasp!).

Anyhow, the number of Wadham graduate students who I had rarely if ever seen before demonstrates the extent to which a bit more concentration on the social side of college may be warranted. I shouldn't let my general aversion to loud music and strong aversion to cigarette smoke be too much of a restricting factor. Thankfully, The Mitre is significantly less smoky than the King's Arms, which is becoming infamous in my mind for an exceptionally high carcinogen count.

The election

Frustrated by scandal and a general sense of dissatisfaction, Canadians want a political party that they can really believe in, rather than support as the least bad option. As the campaign carries on, it is increasingly clear that the Tories are not that party. From mandatory sentencing to militarizing the Arctic, their policies run the gamut from retrograde to foolish. Much as I would love to have an opposition party with a credible chance at serving as a good government, these are simply not them.

The Liberal party deserves some punishment for sleaze and an uninspired agenda under Paul Martin, but the people who would suffer under a Tory government (poor people, people outside Alberta and Ontario) don't deserve it.

One last note: people should beware direct interpretation of Canadian electoral polls. As I explained to Margaret, the absolute share of the vote has no direct bearing in a Parliamentary system like Canada's. Since each riding elects an MP and the party with the most MPs is called upon to form a government, all you need in theory is a single-vote win in a plurality of ridings. While that is very unlikely, the same property means that parties with broad national support have an advantage against those with concentrated support. Every extra Tory vote in a solidly blue (Canadian Tories use blue, Liberals use red) riding in Alberta, beyond the winning vote, is effectively wasted. That said, it's not encouraging to see support for the Conservatives as high as it is, given how their campaign has been unfolding.

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• According the the Royal Mail registered mail tracking service, my Chevening Scholarship application "has been passed to the overseas postal service for delivery." Fingers tightly crossed.
• Here's an entry about electoral security being done right in Wisconsin.
• Corporate social responsibility, being done wrong by Microsoft.
• It's amusing to note just how frequently some people seem to be Googling themselves and following the links to my blog. Either people Googling themselves or someone at a particular IP address Googling someone else on a near-daily basis.
• Tomorrow morning, I am meeting Louise to do some pre-term reading. I shall be extremely glad for her company.

Posted by Milan at 1:49 AM   

Population and the environment

One spectre that has long haunted the environmental debate is that of population size. Partly, that controversy seems to derive from some of the extremely dodgy characters who have made it a top concern. Plenty of very ill-informed commentators have based doomsday scenarios around population growth figures. Still, there are reasonable people taking a similar line and it does seem intuitively obvious that fewer human beings would put less strain on limited resources, all else being equal. Particularly among those who want to 'make poverty history' (a noble goal, though only possible when poverty is measured in absolute terms), it seems clear that six billion people simply cannot live at the level of affluence of today's richest, barring some massive change in the way resources are acquired and transformed into goods.

The classic environmental liberal argument says that as people become richer, their family sizes start to fall. This may be because they are better educated and women gain both access to birth control and the knowledge and freedom to use it. It may be because people in relatively undeveloped economies use large families as a strategy to avoid poverty in old age. With the advent of banking, pensions, and the like, the need to do so diminishes. The evidence for slowing population growth is certainly strong, with the UN projecting that the human population will peak sometime around 2050.

For me, the absolute number of people on the planet is obviously far less important than the conditions under which they live. At one point in human history, after the Taba explosion, there may have been as few as 2000 human beings on the planet: living in conditions similar to those of a nuclear winter. Obviously, population size and quality of life are not perfectly correlated. By that metric, population can perhaps best be thought of in terms of the effect it has on people's lives: especially those of women and the poor. The Rawlsian strategy of focusing on the effect on the least advantaged does have an intuitive moral appeal to it.

The great appeal of the 'greater knowledge and empowerment leads to use of birth control and slowing population growth rates' argument is that it serves both the goal of reducing eventual population and the much more immediate goal of helping women to be in control of their reproductive lives, as well as their lives more generally. Given how a hugely disproportionate amount of injustice is directed towards women worldwide, and given the huge inherent dangers in childbirth, even in the rich world, this seems an almost universally appealing kind of development.

One last fallacy should be addressed, in closing, though it's one well covered enough already that I doubt it will be unfamiliar to anyone. It's not the countries that have hundreds of millions of poor people that are using the majority of available resources. Patterns of consumption are not only too high, when it comes to limited resources, but dramatically skewed towards the richest consumers. Each year, humanity as a whole uses as much oil as forms naturally in about 400 years. Taking a look at who is benefitting from that, it is unjust as well as unsustainable.

I suppose the safe, but less than entirely satisfying, conclusion is that we can't take an issue like population and make sweeping generalizations about it, without more cautious consideration of what the important aspects of the situation are and how they relate to moral judgments and non-moral facts. Still, it's not a thing we should shy away from discussing, just because some of the questions and implications are uncomfortable.

Posted by Milan at 11:15 AM   

The reading continues

Last night was excellent, though it involved rather less reading than might have been expected, given the determination I expressed yesterday. All the same, it was a better use of time. There will be plenty of time for reading during the remainder of the break. (Exam in seven days, first presentations in eleven.)

I got a Christmas gift from Tristan today: a copy of Haruki Murakami's The Wind up Bird Chronicle. I look forward to reading it, and writing about it here. Translated from Japanese, Tristan apparently found his copy in Toronto somewhere and has enjoyed it a great deal.

Taking a break from reading tonight, I played a game of Trivial Pursuit with Claire, Josiah Kaplan, and two more of her friends. I also had the chance to introduce her to The Daily Show: North American political staple that it has become.

Tomorrow, it's back to reading. Claire lent me Kenneth Waltz's Theory of International Politics, after saying that it's extremely dull. After the thrill ride of the Keohane book, it might be just the thing to calm me down.

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• Apparently, in England a 'gyro' is a welfare payment, not a delicious combination of pita bread, some kind of meat, and vegetables served at take-away Middle Eastern restaurants and 99 cent Vancouver pizza places. This led to a brief but amusing misunderstanding between Louise and I.
• Sainsbury's Soup of the Month: Bloody Mary not nearly so good as the Tomato Basil, though it is half the price. Like most tomato soup, it is best scaldingly hot.
• The "Making Globalization Work for Developing Countries" series continues on January 20th, with a seminar on the politics of the global energy regime. It will take place at 2pm in the Goodhart Seminar Room, University College.
• As most of you will know, Israeli leader Ariel Sharon is in very serious condition, following a serious stroke and operations. We may never get the chance to find out how genuine his late-found support for a two-state solution in the region was. I hope his death or political loss of power doesn't introduce further difficulties and violence into this fraught process.
• Here is a cool list of ten elegant and impressive experiments.

Posted by Milan at 1:56 AM   

More bad news for world fisheries

Another story about the senselessly rapacious nature of modern commercial fisheries is out: CBC, New York Times. This, at least, is an area where skeptical environmentalists of the Bjorn Lomborg ilk are dead wrong. To quote from the fish paper (PDF):

Unlike agriculture, where investments in technology and capital can increase long-term yields, the process of technological development in fishing can, in the absence of regulation, only lead to a more rapid depletion of the resource. Fishing can only remain renewable when exploitation does not exceed regeneration.

That balance must be at the core of any sensible fisheries policy, such as those that are emerging in Iceland and New Zealand. The comparative barrenness of the North Sea and the Grand Bank shows that this balance has not been respected - even when the states in question are the richest, most technologically capable, and most scientifically advanced in the world.

Dr. Daniel Pauly, of the University of British Columbia (UBC) Fisheries Centre, equates this process of fishing outwards to a hole being burned through a piece of paper. At the centre are the now depleted waters of Europe and much of the Atlantic. Two thirds of Europe’s commercial fish stocks are already outside their biological safety limits, according to Clover, while cod stocks have collapsed from Canada to Sweden. The flames have now reached the coasts of Antarctica, Australia and New Zealand, Africa, and elsewhere. They have reached into trenches and onto sea-mounts previously inaccessible to fishermen.

This process is concealed by a system of world trade that keeps kitchens and restaurants throughout the developed world supplied with fish, many of which come from thousands of kilometers away. This both perpetuates the process of fishing outwards and conceals the fact that it is happening. (4)

The specific articles above are about some of the species discussed in Charles Clover's excellent and informative book: The End of the Line: How Overfishing Is Changing the World and What We Eat: roundnose grenadier, onion-eye grenadier, blue hake, spiny eel and spinytail skate. All have been driven to a level of critical endangerment in less than 20 years.

It should be obvious that this is not a trivial matter. Fish is a critical source of protein in much of the developing world. Evidence from West Africa, in particular, indicates that as industrial fisheries deplete wild fish stocks, rates of malnourishment, protein starvation, and related ailments all increase in parallel. This is a humanitarian disaster that is being openly and obviously manufactured. Moreover, there is no uncertainty about what is happening. Rigorous scientific assessments, like those of the Sea Around Us Project present an extensive and alarming body of evidence that world fisheries are in trouble and that, at present, nothing effective is being done about it.

I'd like to believe that most of us won't live to see most of the world's major fish stocks critically depleted but, if that is to be the case, we need to start doing dramatically better than we are now. As many of these articles suggest, the creation and vigorous enforcement of marine protected areas would be a good start.

PS. The linked version of the fish paper is the one submitted for publication in Marine Policy and ultimately rejected. It's very general for a journal article, but I meant it to be accessible to almost everyone. I am looking for another journal to which I can submit it, probably after it has been edited again.

Posted by Milan at 11:50 AM   

An annoyance and a new statement of policy

A friend kindly brought to my attention that someone syndicated my blog as a LiveJournal account. This means that all posts appear there as well as here and that people can leave comments in both places. I ask you all not to do so. I do not consider this to be acceptable conduct. I am already giving this away for free (without even text-based ads): I just want to be able to decide the terms on which that happens.

By all means, use the Atom feed or a Bloglines account. You can even read it, along with the others I read, from my Bloglines account. Just do not re-post what is on this site wholesale somewhere else on the internet. I reserve the right to change what is written here when necessary and do not want large amounts of content on other servers. Likewise, it really diminishes the value of the time I put into building the site in this way to have it regurgitated in full elsewhere.

The choice of LiveJournal is particularly jarring, as I've long considered it an unhealthy component of the blogosphere. The 'friends list' system encourages a high school spirit of petty jealousies while the commenting system seems designed to spread malicious gossip. The only worse blogging services that I can think of are Xanga, which seems to focus on really ugly templates, and MSN spaces.

In short, do not syndicate this blog. I appreciate your cooperation.

Posted by Milan at 10:01 AM   

Working, once again, to increase the number of facts known per cubic centimetre of brain

Today was based around several rotations of the great term-time wheel of reading positions that I have established. Cornmarket Street Starbucks to Nuffield Library, to High Street Starbucks, to Upper Camera, to Codrington, to Wadham Library, to Wadham JCR (when quiet), to Wadham MCR (when quiet), to Blackwell's on Broad Street and around and around again: reading a chapter or two in each position. The strategy keeps my brain from just skipping over long sections of text, while also helping me resist the desire to do something more complex than reading.

I was assisted today by the subject matter. I finished the second half of Richard Overy's excellent Why the Allies Won: possibly the most engaging book I've read since arriving in the U.K. It is well written, convincing, and authoritative. Even though it covers the very familiar terrain of the second world war, it still conveys a great deal of new information and a deepened sense of understanding. Recommended to anyone with an interest in military history.

Dramatically less engaging was my continued slog through Keohane's Neorealism and its Critics. While it has demonstrated that my conception of neorealism is, in some ways, a bit of a parody, it still isn't the kind of book you wake up early or stay up late for the enjoyment of reading. Tomorrow morning, I will try to do one of my circuits with it as the sole book in my possession. Despite my best efforts to train myself otherwise, I will almost always read books in order from most to least interesting. This means that I neglect books that are important but very boring, but it does maximize the overall amount of reading I do. Related personal tendencies: eating food I buy in order from least to most preparation time, until I only have food that requires extensive preparation, and wearing clothes in order from most to least comfortable, until I have no clean ones left.

Tomorrow afternoon, good things are planned. For now, I am going to bo back to at least another four hours' reading, even though most of the nodes on my circuit have already closed.

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• I was pleased to receive a barrage of comments from Meghan today. A surprising number of people seem to find it difficult to post comments. For their benefit, here are some brief instructions.
  
  Instructions for commenting:
  First, you need to get to the page specific to the post you want to comment about, rather than one of the archive pages that lists a whole month worth. To do that, just go to the bottom of any post and click on either the blue underlined time at which is was posted, or on the blue underlined bit where it lists the number of comments. For instance: "9 comment(s)."
  
  Once you are on a single post page, like this one you will be able to see existing comments. Click the "Post a Comment" link to leave one. Clicking the "Home" link will take you back to the front page of the blog.
  
  Once you have clicked "Post Comment" a new page will open. Then, in the page that comes up, just type your comment. You can enter Blogger login information, if you have it. If you do, it will put your default picture beside your comment, as well as allowing you to delete it later. You can also use 'Other' to leave a comment under your own name or alias or 'Anonymous' to leave a comment marked as such. Such comments, only I can remove. You will need to copy the squiggly letters that appear below the comment box into the text box below them. This is to keep spam robots from leaving hundreds of comments about their various sordid wares.
  
  Clicking the blue underlined "Milan" at the bottom of every post opens a window for sending a message to me, if you have configured your email client to do so. Using the "Contact Me" link in the sidebar does the same thing. Finally, the little white envelope lets you email a post to someone else. Please don't send them to me, I already have them.
• At some point, I will produce an FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions list) for the blog, but I have resolved to do no more structural modification until I've dealt with the stats exam and next term's pre-reading.
• On a related note, please stop going to the old address (sindark.blogspot.com). The continued existence of that page is causing problems for search engines. The new address, sindark.com, is what everyone should use.
• The iBook is increasingly grinding and heaving its way through collections of tasks it formerly had no trouble with. I've taken to using my iPod to listen to music while on it, just to free up some RAM and CPU time from iTunes. Given my extremely hesitant attitude towards installing new software or keeping programs I do not use, I don't know what's going wrong.
• The comment about a relative dearth of environmental politics related stuff here is spot on. It's partly a question of what the course and life in general brings to my doorstep. That said, I will make more of an effort to read and talk about my alleged intended speciality.
• This is my 1050th post made through Blogger. That obviously doesn't include the hundreds of OpenDiary posts in the pre-Blogger era.

Posted by Milan at 12:01 AM   

Another productive day

This was an exceptionally productive morning, both before and after meeting Claire for coffee. Into the post, the scholarship application has gone. Likewise, my absentee ballot request: out into the ether of the international telephone system. As always, Joanna Coryndon in the Tutorial Office was very helpful with all the bureaucratic hassles of university life. I was disappointed to learn that she didn't win the college staff member of the year designation. As I've said before, the human face she contributed to the admissions process did much to skew my thinking towards Oxford.

During the afternoon, I finished the Atwood book, reviewed briefly below, and made decent progress on the Hume and Keohane books. By the end of the inter-term break, I will have finished the reading assigned by Dr. Hurell and hopefully made a more general start on the material for next term. I may well need to present for fifteen minutes in the first seminar with Jennifer Welsh and David Williams, after all. All of this reading was done in the Upper Radcliffe Camera, which also reminded me of the increasingly pressing need to find a summer job. The two seem unrelated, but places that are fairly rarely visited have a way of making your mind jump back to what was being thought about when last there.

Thanks to Claire, I even got a copy of the information sheet on the upcoming statistics exam. Part A is a multiple choice and short answer component, centred around general principles in statistics, as elaborated in Dr. Tilley's lectures. For that, I will definitely want to read the relevant chapters from a good statistics textbook. Part B is interpretation of statistical tables, such as are output by STATA and found in many American international relations journal articles. Having looked over the description, I am not terribly worried. Still, it's something I will need to devote a couple of days to, at least, during the next ten days or so.

Ever More Banking Frustrations

After months of trying, I finally got access to NatWest Online Banking. As I have come to expect, it includes a powerfully counterproductive security feature. Instead of entering a PIN or password, it forces you to put, say, the 3rd, 5th, and 12th characters of the password into little boxes. This basically means that you need to write your password down, number off the letters, enter the numbers they want, and destroy it. It is completely contrary to convenience and introduces a whole new security failure of visible passwords all over the place or the need to securely destroy them. As punishment for such idiocy, I shall simply not use their credit card unless absolutely necessary. Based on what I've seen, I can't begin to comprehend why Britain is a financial services hub. Banking here is a tragicomic business.

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• First Oxford exam in ten days...
• photo.sindark.com now automatically links to my Photo.net page.
• More family members that I thought are apparently reading the blog. My greetings to you all. I shall have to be on my best behaviour, henceforth.
• Arthur: "What happens if I push this red button?"
  [noise]
  Ford: "What happened?"
  Arthur: "A light came on and said 'Please do not push this button again.'"
  Related concept: the self-referential warning sign
• As far as Google is concerned, the blog is still a real mess. The old URL still has hundreds of links to it, now all broken. Hopefully, a few crawls over the next few months will fix things. Until then, I will try to stop moving things around.

Posted by Milan at 12:17 AM   

Review: The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood

A clever take on an old tale, namely Homer's Odyssey, Atwood's short book manages to be critical without being abrasive. It definitely makes for an interesting complement to a text that has become central to so many literary and narrative traditions. In addition, there are a great many clever little nods to Greek myth and subsequent literature. I especially appreciated the sometimes-overt, sometimes-sly references to Tennyson.

The best thing about the book is certainly the character of Penelope as the narrator: speaking from Hades and interrupted on occassion by contributions from a chorus consisting of her murdered maids, around whom the story also revolves. The anachronism is handled skillfully, as aspects of modern and classical fiction sit side by side in the same way as Penelope's observations about the ancient and modern world. This is the work of a confident author.

The book is concise to the point that there isn't an enormous amount that can be said about it save that it's clever and well worth the time it takes to read.

Posted by Milan at 9:31 PM   

Abbreviated day

I completed a lengthy scholarship application today, as well as my absentee voter registration. I think I can feel justly proud about both, even though past form indicates that only one of the two will bring back a positive response. I also read a good chunk of the Atwood book and the introduction to Hume. Significant progress so far, reading about neorealism: virtually none. Likewise for statistics.

Of course, after printing and signing all the forms, I learned that today was a bank holiday and I could not send them. One more task for tomorrow, I suppose. Given that I am meant to meet Claire at ten in the morning, I should have ample time for it.

Tonight was really very interesting, but I'm not particularly in the mood to talk about it. As such, I shall have to leave you all in suspense. Life's cruel, isn't it?

People should understand that this is a good sign, insofar as my well being goes. The more interesting things I have to do, the less I blog.

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• Tristan has begun posting new photos to his photo.net page.
• Now that I've finished tweaking basically all of the background functions of the blog, it's time for a new internet based obsession. I am leaning towards photo.net.
• This is a really cool idea: type in an artist and it will give you similar music. My thanks to Alison Beta for the recommendation.

Posted by Milan at 12:12 AM   

The year ahead

On the first day of the year, it seems wise to look ahead. There are two terms left during this year at Oxford: Hilary Term, which begins on January 15th and ends on March 11th, and Trinity Term, which begins on April 23rd and ends on June 17th. There will also be exams: one on statistics on the 13th of this month and then three more in April, before Trinity Term begins. Passing the qualifying exams is necessary for passing the M.Phil.

From June 17th until early October, I will have a summer break. While I am fairly certain it has to involve a good amount of work on my thesis, it will probably be necessary for me to work for money as well. One ideal job would be a research position in Oxford. I could live here, use the libraries, and hopefully get a good amount of research done for my thesis as well. Another appealing option is to work at something fairly remunerative in London. That would help me reduce student debt, as well as giving me the chance to live in a fascinating and dynamic city. All this is just fantasy at the moment, however, since I have no real leads on summer jobs. Yet another thing that needs to be done in the near future.

With the first inter-term break coming to a close, I note with dismay that I haven't done much of what I hoped to. I did do some cooking and improve my diet a lot. I also read a few books and travelled. I got no exercise to speak of and took no photos on film (though I took many digital ones). I also got a whole slew of things related to the blog done. It should be able to happily maintain its present state for some time.

Now seems a good time to buckle down and complete some more items from that list, carry out some long-delayed paper correspondence, and generally get on top of things before Hilary Term begins.

Having just finished another issue of The Economist (I have read hundreds and will read hundreds more), I note with dismay that my vision seems to be worsening. While I can do well enough with books, magazines, and computer screens, signs across the road require squinting and, sometimes, greater proximity in order to parse. Better to be increasingly nearsighted than farsighted, I suppose, for someone for whom life is likely to involve a really massive amount of reading. All the same, it's with some regret that I consider bringing the glasses which I first acquired before my first batch of university exams due to these kinds of difficulties back into the regular rotation.

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• I need to dispatch the last documents for the Chevening application, immediately.
• The same goes for my absentee ballot request.
• Does anyone from the IR M.Phil program have the sheet that was apparently distributed about the contents of the quantitative methods exam? If so, I would very much appreciate if I could borrow it in order to make a copy.
• Talking with Neal, Drew, and Astrid over MSN this morning was very enjoyable. I am grateful again and again for the extent to which modern communication technology lets me keep in touch with friends across the world.
• Trying to update my personal financial projections for the new year, I saw the more difficult side of all of that. Six accounts in two currencies at three different banks and linked to two credit cards from differnt banks in different currencies do not make for easy bookkeeping.

Posted by Milan at 12:01 AM   

First post of '06

Well, what a party. Cricket, port, and Moroccan food. My thanks to Claire for bringing it all together. More comprehensive reporting later.

I was under-dressed for the occasion, taking 'black tie' to mean 'the most formal clothes that you own.' I hope I wasn't judged too harshly for showing up in a business suit. The atmosphere seemed fairly laid-back, despite the constant pitter-patter of flash capacitors. Quite possibly, the now-ubiquitous digital camera is the attainment of Bentham's concept of the panopticon.

This party was definitely smaller than the first party I attended amidst the university offices. There was a lot of good conversation, particularly about strategic studies stuff with a young man who I hope I will meet again. He looks particularly quizzical in this photo.

In any case, I hope everyone enjoyed themselves as much as I did. It was amusing to arrive back at Wadham, three hours into the first day of the new year, and chat with the night porter for a few minutes. My best wishes to all those in Wadham, to my family, and to friends around the world. May this next orbit be a better one than the one which preceded it.

Posted by Milan at 2:55 AM