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.

Afterlife for web pages

One research tool that surprisingly few people seem to know about is the Wayback Machine, at the Internet Archive. If you are looking for the old corporate homepage of the disbanded mercenary firm Executive Outcomes, or want to see something that used to be posted on a governmental site, but is no longer available there, it is worth a try.

Obviously, they cannot archive everything that is online, but the collection is complete enough to have helped out more than a couple of my friends. People who operate sites may also be interested in having a look at what data of yours they have collected.

Rare pub visit

My first month here probably involved more days that included time in a pub than days that did not. Of late, the social component of Oxford has evaporated. As such, it was all the better to spend a bit of time at the Rose and Crown on North Parade walk with Claire and Iason tonight. Just the place to complain about theses, hypothesize about space elevators and nuclear fusion, express our doubts about the discipline of international relations, and generally revel in non-laptop company.

Now, I need to work double-time to get a pre-Snowdonia draft of chapter three (of five) written.

One thing not happening this summer

I heard back about the Richard Casement Internship at The Economist today:

Dear Milan Ilnyckyj

Many thanks for your application for the Richard Casement internship, but I’m sorry to have to tell you that you haven’t got it. There were 220 candidates this year, a record number, so I wouldn’t feel too bad about this.

Good luck in the future.

Geoffrey Carr
Science and Technology Editor
The Economist

I was hoping to at least be within the fraction of those who they interviewed, but I expect that would be less than 5% of the total. Even with the pay advertised as ‘a modest stipend,’ I can easily see why 220 people under 25 would apply to write about science for such an interesting publication, headquartered in such interesting cities. Simply in terms of the people you would meet, it would almost certainly be worth doing for free. I hope whoever gets it will make the most of it.

The article I wrote has been posted online, in case anyone wants to read it.

No Mercator projection

Grabbed from Metafilter, this page of maps distorted to show relative rates of things like military spending is quite interesting. Unsurprisingly, the map of war and death is especially grotesque.

Some higher resolution versions are over at Worldmapper: by total population, landmine casualties, and wealth (per capita).

Looking at these, one is immediately struck by how heterogeneous the world is. Of course, we all knew that before, but seeing the information in a new way can change one’s perception of it quite a bit. While there is the danger of such data being misleading, I would say it counters the greater danger of extrapolating from personal experience. Aggregated statistics, while not perfect, are a lot better than on-the-fly human intuitions, when it comes to assessing massive problems quite beyond the scope of anyone’s personal experience.

Wales in under one hundred hours

With my departure for Wales only five days away, I have been trying to do a bit of reading about the place. The derivation of the name, from the Germanic word ‘Walha’ meaning ‘foreigner’ or ‘stranger,’ is an interesting one. It makes you think about how perceptions of difference still remain local, despite all of the economic and political integration that has taken place in the last century.

The Walking Club plan includes the strong possibility of climbing Snowdon: the highest Welsh mountain. At 1,085m it is about 150m shorter than the mountain on which my parents live, and about ten times higher than anything close to Oxford. It is also slightly higher than the tallest of the Five Sisters of Kintail, which I hiked with the walking club in August. The fact that Snowdon has one of the highest annual rates of precipitation in England should help to avoid any excessive contrast with Oxford. That said, I am really excited about the prospect of visiting a new place, meeting new people, and climbing some mountains, all over the course of four days. I am not even overly concerned that the draft of my third thesis chapter is due three days after I return.

Thirteen people are going on this expedition, none of whom I know. Judging my my prior experiences with the Walking Club, most of them are likely to be pure or applied scientists. The same was true of the group with whom my mother and I walked in Malta. I wonder why hiking has such a special attraction for scientists.

I will be bringing both my digital camera and one of my film cameras on this expedition, though the black and white T-Max film I have left over from Turkey is not what I would have chosen for a wilderness foray.

PS. I am interrupting my series of daily images from various Oxford colleges. I haven’t had time to explore new ones recently, and the remaining ones are somewhat scattered. That said, I will complete the collection before I leave.

40% written, roughly

The draft of the second chapter has been submitted. I expect that it will change a moderate amount before the final version. After all, it only makes sense in conversation with the next two chapters. More importantly, there is no clean demarcation between problem investigation and consensus formation, the subjects of the second and third chapters respectively.

I am to have at least an internal draft of the third chapter by the time I leave for Snowdonia on Friday. Sometime between now and then, I should meet with Dr. Hurrell to discuss this draft.

While sometimes frustrating, and always terrifying, this is certainly a learning experience.

Of group sizes and word counts

According to Malcolm Gladwell, something fundamental happens to human organizations once they grow beyond 150 people. This is called Dunbar’s Number. If you take the size of a primate’s neocortex, relative to the rest of its brain, you will find a close correlation to the expected maximum group size for that species.¹ This number corresponds to village sizes, as seen around the world, to the sizes of effective military units, and to the size at which Hutterite communities split up. It seems that, above this size, organizations require complex hierarchies, rules, regulations, and formal measures to operate efficiently.

I think that something very similar happens to pieces of academic writing, once they get beyond about 5,000 words. That is the point where my ability to hold the entire thing at once in my mind fails, often leading to duplication and confusion. Even with two levels of sub-divisions, things simply become unmanageable at that point and I go from feeling total control over a piece of writing (2,500 words) to feeling that it has sprawled a bit (3-4,000 words) to feeling rather daunted by the whole thing. With my revised second chapter at 5,700 words and three to seven hours left prior to submission, I am certainly feeling as though things have grown beyond the bounds of good sense and comprehensibility.

[1] Gladwell, Malcolm. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. Back Bay Books; New York, 2000. p.179

Bad software rage

Be warned, EndNote 9.0 for Macintosh is not a well-coded piece of software. There is nothing quite like being in the middle of adding some complex footnotes to your thesis draft when EndNote crashes: causing Word, Firefox, Entourage, the Dock, and the Finder to crash along with it. Then, all the various error reporting windows crop up and waste even more time and sanity. That I haven’t lost any important data because of this so far is largely the product of extremely frequent backups.

A sign portentous?

If you are in Oxford, go outside right now and have a look at the total lunar eclipse.

On account of the fairly cloudless night, it should be a good show. It should be visible from most of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, as well as further afield, and peak between 10.24pm to 11.58pm.

It seems virtually impossible to get a decent photograph of a lunar eclipse on a P&S camera. Even once you have the exposure worked out (about 1/320th of a second at f/5.6 and ISO 50), the lack of major telephoto capabilities means it will always fill too little of the frame to yield a good image. A lens equivalent to 1000mm for 35mm film is what you need to get the moon to approach a full frame.

[Update: 10:49pm] From this vantage, the eclipse has reached totality. Our world is between Apollo and Artemis.

Another boring thesis post

I now have a 5000 words of convoluted first draft, 2500 words of much neater second draft, and half of two critical books left to read. Once that is done, I will finish writing the second draft, make nicer versions of two diagrams, migrate any vital ideas and all the footnotes from the first draft, and finally print the thing off and deposit it at Nuffield by a sensible time tomorrow night. This will result in a draft dramatically better than anything I could have submitted on Wednesday.

The whole process needs to be done again by the 15th: hopefully, with a solid draft done before I leave for Wales on the 9th.

PS. Does anyone remember the first major graph in An Inconvenient Truth? The one of rising CO2 levels, as observed in Hawaii? In 1957, a couple of years after that data collection began, the funding ran out and the monitoring ceased. It resumed in 1958 because of a big boost in American spending on scientific research after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik.