Author: Milan

In the spring of 2005, I graduated from the University of British Columbia with a degree in International Relations and a general focus in the area of environmental politics. In the fall of 2005, I began reading for an M.Phil in IR at Wadham College, Oxford. Outside school, I am very interested in photography, writing, and the outdoors. I am writing this blog to keep in touch with friends and family around the world, provide a more personal view of graduate student life in Oxford, and pass on some lessons I've learned here.

Three follow-ups

Nothing happened here

1) Remember how our flat got deprived of refrigeration? One week on, we are still subsisting off of bread and cheese we keep cold in the metal cages outside our windows. We call them the ‘alternative fridges.’

2) Remember how I lost the ballot for the Lake District trip with the Walking Club? Well, somebody dropped out. Because I expressed so much interest in it, they offered the spot to me. As such, I will be climbing mountains again from June 1st to 3rd. The only thing that would make it better would be having more than 16 days left before exams.

3) Remember ‘Studio Photography on the (very) cheap?’ Well, I have figured out how to build a large and effective diffuser for under $3. That was the purpose behind this query. Two sheets of A1 tracing paper turn out to perfectly cover the lower section of the window.

Note how English tea stains glassware. The picture would be a lot more attractive if I propped the glass objects up on something, cleaned them before taking the photo, and photoshopped away the tape holding the paper to the window and the place where the two sheets overlap. This was meant to illustrate the assembly, not be artistic of itself.

Bikes for sale

For too long, the Wadham College bike shed has been seriously cluttered with seemingly abandoned bikes. Now, bikeless residents of Oxford have an opportunity to benefit. I got this message from the college a few hours ago:

We’ve arranged with College to have a mass cull of the old bikes littering the bike shed, hopefully with a huge auction of old bikes in the back quad on Saturday 7th Week / Sunday 8th Week. Quality bikes that just need a little love and repair will be sold from as little as £1 each, so tell all your friends!

People looking for a decent hybrid at a good price should also consider buying mine. It won’t be going for £1, but it will probably sell for substantially less than I have spent on buying and improving it.

Dinner in Green

Green College flatware

Many thanks to Jenn for inviting me to the formal dinner at Green College tonight. You know the primarily focus of a college is medical college when you see the staff of Aesclipius on the dishes. Located on the second floor of their observatory tower, the Green dining hall is unusually interesting. The head of the high table was also especially gracious in his after dinner comments. It was an excellent way of celebrating how everything but my four exams is now complete, as far as my academic program goes.

I have been lucky enough to dine in Wadham (including 23 high table dinners, so far), in Lady Margaret Hall (thanks to Richard Albert), at St. Antony’s College (thanks to Alex Stummvoll), at St. Hugh’s and St. Cross (thanks to Claire), and at New College as a consequence of my involvement with the Strategic Studies Group.

PS. Michael Ignatieff’s talk was reasonably interesting, but not to the extent that I feel it would be overly valuable to put the notes on the wiki. If someone specifically wants them, leave a comment and I will type them out. This was my first real chance to explore Wolfson, though I did arrive their by accident at the end of a long walk during our snow day. The fusion of recent architecture with the Oxford style of quads is interesting, though not entirely successful.

Non-metaphorical icebreaking

A couple of interesting random facts that I came across today, about the ferries that operate in the Baltic, including between Tallinn and Helsinki:

  1. Many of these ships have an ice class of 1A Super, which means they can travel through sea lanes where the ice is one metre thick, provided they have an icebreaker out front to break it up a bit.
  2. At least some of these ships (belonging to the Finnish shipping company Eckerö Line) were specifically made NATO-compatible, so that they could be rapidly converted into troop carriers in the result of the Cold War becoming hot.

The details of icebreaker design are quite interesting, though I suspect that building them will not be a growth business in the decades to come. Of course, if the northern polar region melted enough for icebreaking routes to be profitable forms of shipping, that might prove to be untrue for a certain period of time.

A show of force in the Gulf

No matter how much one tries to focus on the non-security bits of international relations, anyone who reads the news and is concerned about the world will get exposed to it pretty regularly. Yesterday, for instance, nine American warships carrying 17,000 military personnel were sent into the Persian Gulf. Some speculate that this was intended as a corollary to an announcement from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) about Iran’s ongoing nuclear program. The strike group included two Nimitz carrier battle groups and 2,100 marines in landing ships. The ongoing war games will apparently “culminate in an amphibious landing exercise in Kuwait, just a few miles from Iran.”

According to the IAEA, Iran has about 1,300 centrifuges online at Natanz, with another 600 likely to become available over the summer. Having 3,000 operational centrifuges would produce enough weapons-grade uranium for one bomb per year.

The question of how to deal with challenges to the existing non-proliferation regime is an acute one. More and more states will gain the technical capacity to make bombs in the next few decades. Many will be in dangerous parts of the world, with hostile neighbours who can be plausibly expected to be building bombs of their own. Furthermore, the inability of the current regime to prevent the North Korean test raises the question of how much influence the international community really has, especially when some states are willing to become pariahs.

Twenty months in Oxford

Antonia Mansel-Long in the Wadham Gardens

With a few weeks left before exams and about a month left before leaving Oxford, I find myself thinking backward and forward more than in the present. As such, even though I have every reason to be quite busy, I am feeling somewhat in the lurch. Those bits of life that feel most immediate don’t have anything to do with the M.Phil program. Actually, now that seminars have ended, I rarely see any members of the group aside from the ones I live with and a couple of others who are neighbours. I am looking forward to our post-exam barbecue on the 14th as the last instance in which I am likely to see more than a dozen of the program’s twenty-eight members in one location together.

Thinking back to the first few months in Oxford is unusual. They seem much more alien to me than the last year, as well as any of my time at UBC. To begin with, I was living in Library Court. I was eating bagels and cheese, more than anything else. I was spending quite a bit of time in pubs, as that seemed to be the major venue for social interactions. Largely on the basis of where I am living now, life has a much more normal and natural feeling. As revision has been showing, even the material that I was working through back then has become rather unfamiliar in the interim. It would be hard to say with certainty whether a paper I wrote in October 2005 was actually written by me, or by someone with the same reading list and a similar style of writing and analysis.

In any case, I am looking forward enormously to knocking off the last few academic items that need to be completed in Oxford. I am hoping that I will then have the chance to focus on what has been best over the last two years. I certainly hope that I will get to try punting at least once before departing, as well as see some of the friends who have been fixtures of life at various times, but who I now hardly ever see.

Quicktime movies from iPhoto

Here is a useful iPhoto trick that Mac users may not already know: if you select a batch of photos, then select “Share > Export” you can create a QuickTime movie. You can have each image show for whatever length of time you like, set the size of the movie generated (in pixels) and add music. You can do this by simply selecting a collection of images in the library, by selecting an album, or by selecting a slide show. If you want to add music, you need to do the last of those.

Exported Quicktime movies seem like a pretty good option for sending photos of a trip or party to people who request them. The file sizes are very manageable, the image quality is decent, and it is easier than mucking around with sending dozens of individual files.

Here is a random example. It consists of some graffiti from Paris, Vancouver, Helsinki, Dublin, Tallinn, and Oxford. One annoying quirk is how adding music massively increases the file size. The same collection of images with an mp3 playing in the background produced a file of over 65 megabytes.

After iPhoto?

I have always found the slide show system in iPhoto a bit awkward, largely because of how you cannot drag images out from it into other applications, as you can with normal albums. That means if you want to edit one of those images in Photoshop, you need to track down the original in your library or an album.

If I ever do get a dSLR, I will probably need to switch to something more robust for storing image files. Even working with the jpeg files from my 3.2 megapixel camera, it gets cranky when too many are being worked with at once. That is with 1.25 gigabytes of RAM, drop shadows off, thumbnails at one of the three default sizes, and a minimum of other programs running. One can only imagine how it will treat 10 megapixel RAW files.

Another problem with iPhoto is that it doesn’t offer many options for having different versions of the same file. At the very minimum, I want to retain the original jpeg at maximum resolution and then have a 1024×768 pixel version that has had the contrast and levels adjusted an appropriate unsharp mask applied. Being able to store additional versions would be an advantage, especially if they are intelligently linked to the original. I don’t want it to be confusing which is which: a situation largely unavoidable in iPhoto, unless you want to look at the image properties for every file you glance at.

Millennium Development Goal 7

Church Walk sign

Prompted by my international law and developing world revision, I had another look at the eight Millennium Development Goals which were adopted by the 192 UN member states in 2000, and which are meant to be achieved by 2015. All eight are quite ambitious and represent worthy ambitions and intentions.

Some of the goals give themselves over easily to quantitative evaluation. For instance, reducing the maternal mortality ratio by three-quarters. While there are the ever-present concerns about data quality and the danger of people fudging their numbers, at least there is an empirically verifiable objective being targeted.

The environmental category (MDG7) has the general heading “Ensure environmental sustainability” and among the most vague provisions in the whole list:

  1. Integrate the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programmes; reverse loss of environmental resources.
  2. Reduce by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water.
  3. Achieve significant improvement in lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers, by 2020.

To begin with, ‘sustainable development’ is not as objective a concept as it is sometimes considered. If it requires a society that could continue to operate in its present form indefinitely, then no society that exists today meets the standard. Of course, the term ‘development’ contradicts the idea of stasis. So too does the inclusion of the term in the MDGs generally, since all of them would require large-scale changes in both domestic and foreign policies.

When it comes to sheer vagueness, “reverse loss of environmental resources” must take the cake. What are ‘environmental resources?’ And what would ‘reversing their loss’ involve? With a few exceptions, such as the breakdown and slow recovery of stratospheric ozone, it is not terribly clear what this could mean. Even in cases where the general thrust of the idea seems applicable, such as reforestation or the protection of coral reefs from damaging fishing practices and increasingly acidic oceans, it doesn’t provide much in the way of guidance, or much of a standard for achievement.

Access to water

The second goal, about access to water, is much more in keeping with the qualitative targets that the MDGs generally seek to establish. A map of the world showing who has poor access to water and another showing the incidence of deaths from cholera demonstrates just how unequal quality and availability of water around the world is. All the technology required to provide safe drinking water to everyone exists. The degree to which the present situation is the result of a lack of will makes it a very appropriate target for a high-profile initiative like the MDGs.

While I have never believed that water is a likely cause for large-scale wars (countries that can afford to fight large-scale wars can afford desalination plants, which are expensive but cheaper than wars), there is every reason to believe that water will become a more acute problem in coming decades. One minor example is how a sea level rise of about 100cm could essentially eliminate Malta’s major sources of fresh water. Expect bigger problems in places like India or Bangladesh.

The Economist printed a good Survey on Water back in 2003. Accessing it requires a subscription.

Slum dwellers

Slums were mentioned here quite recently. Improving the lives of 100 million slum dwellers is certainly a worthy aim. As many as 1.2 million people may live in just the Kibera slum in Nairobi. In sub-Saharran Africa, where more than 70% of the urban population already lives in slums, the rate is growing at 4.53% per year. Improving their lives probably requires two sets of approaches. One is based around providing basic needs, including water, health care, sanitation, lighting, security, and education. The other is based around reforming legal systems. Providing secure title to land, for instance, would likely reduce opportunities for bribery, provide access to credit, and generally reduce the level of insecurity in people’s lives. Actually implementing either set of approaches is an awfully tricky proposition, not least because of entrenched interests that value slums as a source of bribes from those who live there as well as a source of cheap labour for the city in which they are embedded. That being said, there are potentially huge improvements in human welfare to be achieved from success in this area.

All told, there seem to be a lot of reasons to be hopeful about the MDGs. They demonstrate, at least, that there is universal awareness within the international system about some of the most pressing problems of the present day. There is likewise at least some energy and initiative being committed to their resolution. The extent to which such efforts are successful will probably have a big impact on the kind of world in which we find ourselves in fifty years time: one in which most of humanity has reached a situation in which their basic needs are met and their basic rights are respected, or one that may be even more unequal and conflict-prone than the situation at present.