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.

Keyboard clacking away

Oranges in the Oxford Botanical Gardens

By Monday, I am meant to have a draft copy of my thesis introduction ready for discussion. The paradoxical thing about the task is that it will almost certainly be necessary to revamp the introduction a great deal, once the three core chapters have been finished. Of course, it is essential to get the direction right. Tidying up the introduction and conclusion is something that can be done during the period between when my supervisor leaves Oxford and when my thesis is due (April 1-22).

Hopefully, a generous soul or two will volunteer to read a few chapters (or even the whole thesis) to check for general comprehensibility and strength of argumentation.

PS. Lots more information, both about the thesis and other coursework, is appearing on the wiki.

More amateur cryptography

One of the oldest problems in cryptography is key management. The simplest kind of cryptographic arrangement is based on a single key used by however many parties both for encryption and decryption. This carries two big risks, however. In the first place, you need a secure mechanism for key distribution. Secondly, it is generally impossible to revoke a key, either for one individual or for everyone. Because of these limitations, public key cryptography (which utilizes key pairs) has proved a more appropriate mechanism in many applications.

Once in a while, now, you read about ‘unbreakable’ cryptography based on quantum mechanics. The quantum phenomena employed are actually used for key generation, not for the actual business of encrypting and decrypting messages. Like the use of a one-time pad, the symmetric keys produced by this system hold out the promise of powerful encryption. Of course, such systems remain vulnerable both to other kinds of cryptographic attacks, particularly the ‘side channel’ attacks that have so often been the basis for successful code-breaking. Recent examples include the cracking of the encryption on DVDs, as well as Blu-Ray and HD-DVDs.

An example of a side-channel attack is trawling through RAM and virtual memory to try and find the password to some encrypted system. When you login to a website using secure socket layering (SSL), the data sent over the network is encrypted. That said, the program with which you access the site may well take the string of text that constitutes your password and then dump it into RAM and/or the swap space on your hard disk somewhere. Skimming through memory for password-like strings is much less resource intensive than simply trying every possible password. Programs like Forensic Toolkit by AccessData make this process easy. People who use the same string in multiple applications (any of which could storing passwords insecurely) are even more vulnerable.

As in a large number of other security related areas, people using Apple computers have a slight advantage. While not on by default. if you go into the security menu in the system preferences, you can turn on “Use secure virtual memory.” This encrypts the contents of your swap space, to help protect against the kind of attack described above.

The real lesson of all of this is that total information security can never be achieved. One just needs to strike a balance between the sensitivity of the data, the probability of it coming under examination, and the level of effort that would be required to overcome whatever security is in place.

PS. My PGP public key is available online, for anyone who wants to send me coded messages. Free copies of the encryption software Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) can also be easily downloaded.

Aeon Flux

I saw the film version of Aeon Flux today. The physics and biology were bad; the architecture and lighting were good. Overall, it makes me want to go to Berlin. It also makes me want to watch Gattaca again: a film with similar logical flaws, but a comparable commitment to aesthetics.

As virus-haunted-future films go, 12 Monkeys is much better. As lethal heroine films go, Ghost in the Shell remains the standard. The philosophical issues raised are less superficial, and the combat is infinitely more credible. There is a lesser extent to which Force = [ Mass * Acceleration / Physical attractiveness of person in question ]. Also, no matter how many Hollywood dollars they seem capable of bringing in, elaborate flips and cartwheels are simply not tactically effective.

The purpose of ‘international relations’

Water plants in the Oxford Botanical Gardens

What can international relations contribute to the understanding of science and policymaking? This is a section that needs to get written, for my introduction, and its one that involves a bit of fundamental contemplation of the discipline.

Last night, I got into a discussion with the warden of Wadham College and a trio of fellows about my lack of faith in the concept of ‘social science.’ In essence, this is a lack of faith in the possibility of approaching truth, in the study of politics and related fields. One can become convincing and powerful, but one can never be authoritatively ‘right’ when speaking about morality in warfare, the consequences of the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, or the economic effects of NAFTA. Importantly, one also cannot be qualitatively as ‘right’ when answering such questions as one can when dealing with properly scientific ones.

I don’t know if it is a reflection of the kind of people the discipline attracts, or whether there is some other explanation, but it seems to me that IR is more concerned with action than with understanding. Interaction with knowledge is certainly important, but that is largely because such interaction is a necessary part of empowerment. Perhaps the reason for which we are given such impossibly long reading lists to skim is because we are just picking out those bits that will sharpen our ability to do whatever it is we wish to do in the world.

[Update: 1:30am] Perhaps I should be clear: this is one of those “use of the blog as a place for speculative thinking that might generate interesting responses” kind of post. Purposive, rather than simply analytic in itself, that is.

Lives and concerns of coursemates

On the occasions when I do see members of the program (fairly rare now that it has completely broken down into small groups working on the optional papers), it seems that everyone is caught up in the double effort of finishing the thesis and finding something worthwhile to do when this all ends. With the last day for possible viva exams now six months off, minds are getting focused. With the more stressful elements of research degrees making themselves known, the general enthusiasm for the D.Phil has been waning. Many people who seemed gung-ho about carrying on to convert their M.Phil to a doctorate in two additional years are now leaning towards other uses for their time.

This is a bit contradictory, really, given that it is precisely the people who want to carry on the for the D.Phil who need to worry most about their theses. The chances of anyone at a different school giving it such a careful looking over (or even any examination at all) are a lot lower than those of Oxford taking it strongly into account, when considering you as a doctoral candidate.

In any case, I am off to work on my potted history of the Kyoto Protocol.

Infernal machines

Proving the adage that technology is actually driven by evil spirits who let it fail just when it is most inconvenient: the MySQL database that serves as the back-end to my wiki has chosen this morning – an hour before I need to give a presentation stored in the wiki – to go kaput. SQL failures have been an irksome occasional occurrence with GoDaddy hosting. Good thing I printed off a PDF version of the presentation before going to sleep.

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Perspectives on international environmental law

New College Cloisters, Oxford

It cannot be taken as a good sign to have a presentation in twelve hours and still not really be sure about the main thrust of what you are going to say. I feel like I have a lot of structural elements, but only a semi-rough conception of what I am going to build out of them. The feeling is somewhat akin to that which I have towards the thesis and, indeed, life in general once this program ends.

The immediate requirement is to decide how skeptical I ought to be about international environmental law. The fact that Canada, for instance, doesn’t seem to feel particularly obligated to meet its Kyoto targets makes one wonder whether there’s conviction out there to match rhetoric. One temptation is to fall back, and say that environmental law is just one more mechanism through which governments can be lobbied – both internally and externally. Another possibility is to say that law isn’t what’s in the books and filed with the Secretary General, but rather what states actually get up to. The latter view would probably be more favoured by my international law instructors, but it makes the whole corpus of international environmental law even more nebulous than it previously appeared to be.

I suppose I will write a draft, read for a few hours, then decide exactly what to say in the morning (when my cognitive faculties are at their lowest ebb).

Review: Etymotic ER6i headphones

Now that I’ve had these earbuds for about five months, it seems worthwhile to make a few comments. While they have their peculiarities, these are acoustically excellent devices. The noise isolation is so good that I use them to sleep on planes and buses. Indeed, when wearing them I am unable to hear whether my cell phone is ringing in my pocket (save for the very slight buzzing the radio transmission seems to induce in the connecting wire).

Admittedly, it takes a little while to get used to the unique flanges that make these earbuds look so distinctive. To begin with, I didn’t think they fit me very well. You gradually learn how to insert them to the proper depth, and with an appropriate air pressure between your eardrum and the earbud. Now that I have, I loathe the times when I need to use the awful default iPod headphones. (Given how well the ER6is exclude noise, cycling with them in would be somewhat reckless.)

The best things about these headphones are the excellent sound fidelity, the small size, the effective sound isolation, and the surprisingly good customer service provided by Etymotic. The sound fidelity is such that you can easily hear the minor differences in playback between a G4 iBook, a fourth generation iPod, and a first generation iPod Shuffle (especially in the bass range). As for the size: even in the carrying case they come with, they are small enough to carry everywhere. An iPod Shuffle fits neatly into the case with them, and then into a small pocket. In my experience, the Etymotic staff as very helpful. If you call their customer support line, you will be speaking to a real and knowledgeable person immediately. When I called them because I thought the flanges fit badly, they sent me a bunch of alternative sizes to try out for free.

The problematic things about them are the time lag before their particular style of seal begins to feel natural and the cheap looking – but seemingly durable – wires. Since the very rapid failure of the wires on my old Sony Fontopia earbuds was the reason I switched to these, I am happy they haven’t frayed in any visible way so far. As with any headphones, there is also the danger of pushing up the volume too many times over the course of a few hours of listening, then finding yourself struggling to hear those around you. Of course, sometimes that is just the price you need to pay for comprehensive musical immersion.

If these got stolen, I would buy them again.

I am even considering spending $12 on their fancy earplugs. When you’re trying to sleep on a plane, the last thing you want is to be hassled about turning off electronic devices. Additionally, these would be a good counter to the champion snorers that multi-bunk hostels seem to attract.

[Update: 17 January 2008] I replaced my second filter today. I also changed the white eartips. The old ones were getting pretty grungy and yellow. Ordering supplies from Etymotic involves very high shipping fees, so I bought them on eBay instead. I had to spend an awful week listening to iPod headphones; I am so glad to be back in the world of beautiful sound.

POPs and climate change as ‘anomalies’

Now nearly finished with Kuhn‘s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, I am pondering how to apply it to my thesis case studies. Basically, what Kuhn has done is sketch out a theory about how scientists interact with the world and each other, generating new scientific ways of understanding the world. You start with one paradigm (say, Newtonian physics). Then, scientists begin to notice anomalies – places where the theory cannot explain what they perceive to be going on. If such anomalies are of the right sort and sufficiently numerous, they may provoke a crisis within the paradigm. At that point, the scope of science broadens a bit, to examine bigger questions and alternative possibilities. In Kuhn’s terminology, the practice of ‘normal science‘ is interrupted. The crisis is resolved either through the modification of the previous paradigm or through the emergence of a new one, such as relativistic physics.

From the perspective of my thesis, the relevant discoveries are the rising global mean temperature and rising concentrations of POPs in the Arctic. Both were novel developments in our awareness and understanding of what is going on in the world, and both are the unintended products of modern economic activity. In the first case, the emission of greenhouse gases seems to be the primary cause of the change; in the second, pesticide use, industrial chemicals, and garbage burning seem to be the culprits. While scientists knew that these things were going on before the first research on POPs and climate change was done, these specific consequences were not anticipated. Their precise magnitude remains contested and uncertain.

While neither discovery induced a crisis in science (both are largely explicable using science that has existed for a long time), they did progress into general acceptance by following a pattern that is in some ways similar to that of paradigmatic development in the sciences. The researchers who first looked at POP concentrations in human blood and breast milk from the Arctic thought that the samples must have been contaminated, because they could imagine no reason for which people living in such an isolated environment would be so saturated with toxic chemicals. The establishment and operation of the Northern Contaminants Program thus involves both ‘normal science’ and the kind of thinking through which new paradigms are established. Because of such similarities, I am hoping that some of Kuhn’s insights into the ways scientists think, and especially the ways in which they make up their own minds and try to make up those of their colleagues, can be applied to the understanding of scientific perspectives on these particular environmental problems.

The biggest difference is probably how wider policy implications tend to arise from environmental discoveries in a way not parallel to the consequences of other sorts of discovery. Quantum mechanics may allow us to do new things, but it doesn’t really compel us to behave very differently. Learning about global warming, by contrast, interacts with our pre-existing notions about appropriate action by human beings in the world to suggest potentially radical changes in behaviour. While I am not saying that there is a direct or linear connection between scientific discoveries about the environment and specific policy choices, it seems valid to say that our understanding of the environment, informed by science, profoundly affects the ways in which we feel we can and should act in relation to the physical world.

On a related note, I would strongly suggest that any physicist working on string theory give Kuhn’s SoSR a careful read. The crisis in physics generated by apparent contradictions between relativity and quantum mechanics seems very much like those he describes, with similar implications in terms of how scientists are thinking and what they are doing.