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.

A small request for those commenting

I would be much obliged if, when commenting, you would call yourself something other than ‘Anonymous.’ Anything at all that distinguishes you from other commenter who don’t want to leave names, aliases, or initials would be wonderful. At present, threads with multiple commenters, all called ‘Anonymous’, are likely to become rather difficult to understand.

With regards to the need to provide an email address, this is to help prevent spam comments. Using your real email address, will over, time reduce the probability of your comment getting eaten as spam. That said, I do have the ability to see which email addresses people have listed. If you really don’t want me to know who you are, you can always use something like “nottelling@history.ox.ac.uk” or whatever strikes your fancy. Doing so will somewhat increase the probability of your comment being marked as spam, but if you aren’t doing anything else dodgy – like linking to virus laden websites – you should be fine regardless. The system is also clever enough to learn, over time, that comments from a particular computer are safe.

I very much enjoy getting comments and engaging in discussion here. Along with other roles, the blog is a device through which I hope to refine ideas and positions, on the basis of intelligent criticism. As such, all substantive contributions are appreciated.

As always, any technical problems with the blog should be reported on the bug thread.

Summer days

With nine days left before I go to Dublin, I am pondering how the time can best be spent, and what sort of spurs I might use to ensure that most of it is used productively. At the very least, I should finish the latest tranche of work for Dr. Hurrell, as well as the bits of thesis reading I am in the process of completing already. More ambitiously, it would be nice to finally finish with the eternal fish paper. I need to de-scale and clean it: removing more than 20% of the total words, while rebalancing a few things. Working with it is much like trying to handle a piece of machinery in the dark that was once very familiar to you, but now continuously surprises you a bit with things that are not where you remember them being, sections with purposes that elude your comprehension, and a general loss of intuitive understanding.

As I am sure more seasoned veterans of the grad school experience could have told me in advance, life is rather less productive overall when it isn’t particularly structured. The absence of the need to discuss readings at particular times tends to make them languish on your shelves. Likewise, the absence of any deadline for the completion of research or papers tends to leave the ideas lingering in dusty corners of the hard drive or the brain. This is the basic reason why the protagonist of Good Will Hunting is wrong to chastise people for spending money on graduate education when they could just use the local library for free. The problem isn’t fundamentally one of information access, but rather of human motivation.

Today, I also wrote a batch of messages to people who I have, at one time or another, had substantial contact with, but with whom I now exchange very little information. Such people have at least temporarily become as constellations in my personal firmament. Indeed, I very often find myself imagining their response to a particular project and idea, then altering my own positions and actions on the basis of their simulated contribution. Exchanging a letter with them every month or so is probably an excellent accompaniment for that process; it will, at the very least, keep them from drifting too far off themselves, as I keep writing lines for them to speak.

PS. Mica has a new music video up. People are encouraged to discuss it on his blog. In many ways, it is unlike anything he has made before.

PPS. While my digital camera is off in dust rehab, I am operating off the stock of photos I have taken previously. Apologies if they are not particularly topical, current, or interesting.

Science fiction fairytales

Between attempts at thesesial ponderation, I have been reading Mortal Engines: a book of short stories by Stanislaw Lem. It is one of a collection of books abandoned by departing graduate students that I have come to possess, and which has been mocking me on the basis of being unread among so few books I possess here. When one only has a few dozen books in one’s entire room, it is really intolerable to have not read them all.

Written in the form of the science fiction fairlytale, Lem’s stories remind me of certain parts of Orson Scott Card‘s superb collection Maps in a Mirror, as well as some of Isaac Asimov‘s more lighthearted work. On a beach on Hornby Island, many years ago, I remember a story of Asimov’s that involved the following response from a ‘wizard’ who gets exposed to a dragon:

“Of all things, an Apatosaurus!,” [the wizard exclaimed.] But he often spoke nonsense, and was ignored.

If anyone can recall the name of the story, I would be much obliged to learn it. Since I was stealing the book from Kate at the time (racing to finish stories before she demanded its return), perhaps she will be able to enlighten us.

Going back to Lem, the most notable thing about the stories is how he combines the eminently plausible (even scientifically necessary) with the fanciful and allegorical. Being able to forge subjects out of uranium so that their coming together in conspiracy automatically makes them explode in a chain reaction is doubtless a fantasy that has appealed to a monarch or two. When I finish it, I will quote some of the cleverer bits here.

Climate change and nuclear power

Among environmentalists these days, the mark that you are a hard-headed realist committed to stopping climate change is that you have come to support nuclear power. (See Patrick Moore, one founder of Greenpeace, in the Washington Post.) While appealing in principle, the argument goes, renewable sources of energy just can’t generate the oomph we need as an advanced industrial society – at least, not quickly enough to get us out of the hole we’ve been digging ourselves into through fossil fuel dependence.

I am sympathetic to the argument. A good case can be made for employing considerable caution when dealing with something as essential and imperfectly understood as the Earth’s climatic system. Nuclear power is strategically appealing – it could reduce the levels of geopolitical influence of some really nasty governments like Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Russia. It is appealing insofar as carbon emissions are concerned, though it is not quite as zero-emission as some zealots claim, once you take into account things like fuel mining and refining, transport, and construction. It is appealing insofar as it can generate really huge amounts of power, provided we can find people who are willing to have reactors in their vicinities.

The big problem, obviously, is nuclear waste. Nuclear reactors produce high level radioactive waste, as well as becoming radioactive themselves over the course of time. The scales across which such waste is dangerous dwarf recorded human history. Wastes like Plutonium-239 will remain extremely dangerous for tens of millennia. As The Economist effectively explains it:

In Britain only a few ancient henges and barrows have endured for anything like the amount of time that a nuclear waste dump will be expected to last—Stonehenge, the most famous, is “only” 4,300 years old. How best, for example, to convey the concept of dangerous radiation to people who may be exploring the site ten thousand years from now? By that time English (or any other modern language) could be as dead as Parthian or Linear A, and the British government as dim a memory as the pharaohs are today.

In fairness, we have some reason to believe that future generations will be more capable of dealing with high level radioactive waste than we are. There is likewise some reason to believe that we can bury the stuff such that it will never trouble us again. Much of it has, after all, been dumped in far less secure conditions. Chernobyl remains entombed in a block of degrading concrete, and substantial portions of the Soviet nuclear fleet have sank or been scuttled with nuclear waste aboard. (See: One, two, three) Off the coast of the Kola Peninsula near Norway, 135 nuclear reactors from 71 decommissioned Soviet submarines were scuttled in the Berrents Sea during the Cold War. In addition, the Soviet Union dumped nuclear waste at 10 sites in the Sea of Japan between 1966 and 1991.

In the end, I don’t find the argument for long-term geological storage to be adequate. We cannot make vessels that will endure the period across which these materials will be dangerous. As such, I do not think we can live up to our obligations towards members of future generations if we continue to generate such wastes – though that is unlikely to matter much to politicians facing US$100 a barrel oil. Pressed to do so, I am confident that a combination of reduction in the usage of energy and the development of renewable sources could deal with the twin problems of climate change and the depletion of oil resources. The short term cost might be a lot higher than that associated with nuclear energy, but it seems the more prudent course to take.

All that said, I very much encourage someone to argue the contrary position.

The awesome power of exponential growth

This blog now has 1/5000th as many registered users as Wikipedia. That may sound trivial, but it should be noted that at the present rate of growth (12.5% per day – welcome Mark), we should have one million in just 99.5 days (by November 13th).

In just 174 days or so, all 6.5 billion human inhabitants of the Earth should have signed up. Don’t be the last!

Tuna farming

The bitter joke among fisheries scientists is that the Japanese are engaged in a dual project of turning all available knowledge and energy to the farm-rearing of bluefin tuna while simultaneously expending all available effort to catch every wild example.

This month, they succeeded in one of those aims: Hidemi Kumai and his team at Kinki University managed to raise fry born in captivity to adult size and them have them breed successfully. Because of the complexity of their life cycle, it is a considerable achievement. (Source) These are valuable fish, with the record holder having sold for $180,000 in Tokyo. The three largest fishers of Bluefin tuna are the United States, Canada and Japan.

This is good news for those who enjoy bluefin tuna sashimi, though they should probably be hoping that the rearing process can be scaled up to commercial levels. According to the US National Academy of Sciences¹, present day stocks are only 20% of what existed in 1975. Some sources hold existing bluefin stocks to be just 3% of their 1960 level. Present stocks are only 12% of what the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas has designated as necessary to maintain the maximum sustainable yield for the resource. Within another fifty years, it is quite possible that wild bluefin tuna will no longer exist.

[1] National Academy of Sciences. National Research Council. An Assessment of Atlantic Bluefin Tuna. Washington DC National Academy Press, 1994.

On audio compression

In the last few days, I have been reading and thinking a lot about audio compression.

Lossy v. lossless compression

As most of you will know, there are two major types of compression: lossless and lossy. In the first case, we take a string of digital information and reduce the amount of space it takes to store without actually destroying any information at all. For example, we could take a string like:

1-2-1-7-3-5-5-5-5-5-5-5-5-5-5-5-5-5-2-2-2-3-4

And convert it into:

1-2-1-7-3-5(13)-2(3)-3-4

Depending on the character of the data and the kinds of rules we use to compress it, this will result in a greater or lesser amount of compression. The upshot is that we can always return the data to its original state. If the file in question is an executable (a computer program), this is obviously required. A file that closely resembles Doom, as a string of bits, will nonetheless probably not run like Doom (or at all).

Lossless compression is great. It allows us, for instance, to go back to the original data and then manipulate it with as much freedom as we had to begin with. The cost associated with that flexibility is that files compressed in lossless compression are larger than those treated with lossy compression. For data that is exposed to human senses (especially photos, music, and video), it is generally worthwhile to employ ‘lossy’ compression. A compact disc stores somewhere in the realm of 700MB of data. Uncompressed, that would take up an equivalent amount of space on an iPod or computer hard drive. There is almost certainly some level of lossy compression at which it would be impossible for a human being with good ears and the best audio equipment to tell if they were hearing the compressed or uncompressed version. This is especially true when the data source is CDs, which have considerable limitations of their own when it comes to storing audio information.

Lossy compression, therefore, discards bits of the information that are less noticeable in order to save space. Two bits of sky that are almost-but-not-quite the same colour of blue in an uncompressed image file might become actually the same colour of blue in a compressed image file. This happens to a greater and greater degree as the level of compression increases. As with music, there is some point where it is basically impossible to distinguish the original uncompressed data from a compressed file of high quality. With music, it might be that a tenth of a second of near silence followed by a tenth of a second of the slightest noise becomes a twentieth of a second of near silence.

MP3 and AAC are both very common kinds of music compression. Each can be done at different bit-rates, which determines how much data is used to represent a certain length of time. Higher bit rates contain more data (which one may or may not be able to hear), while lower bit rates contain less. The iTunes standard is to use 128-bit AAC. I have seen experts do everything from utterly condemn this as far too low to claim that at this level the sound is ‘transparent:’ meaning that it is impossible to tell that it was compressed.

But what sort to use, exactly?

Websites on which form of compression to use generally take the form of: “I have made twenty five different versions of the same three songs. I then listened to each using my superior audio equipment and finely tuned ear and have decided that X is the best sort of compression. Anyone who thinks you should use something more compressed than X obviously doesn’t have my fine ability to discern detail. Anyone who wants you to use more than X is an audiophile snob who is more concerned about equipment than music.”

This is not a very useful kind of judgment. Most problematically, the subject/experimenter knows which track is which, when listening to them. It has been well established that taking an audio expert and telling them that they are listening to a $50,000 audiophile quality stereo will lead to a good review of the sound, even if they are really listening to a $2,000 system. (There are famous pranks where people have put a $100 portable CD player inside the case for absurdly expensive audio gear and passed the former off as the latter to experts.) The trouble is both that those being asked to make the judgement feel pressured to demonstrate their expertise and that people actually do perceive things which they expect to be superior as actually being so.

Notoriously, people who are given Coke and Pepsi to taste are more likely to express a preference for the latter if they do not know which is which, but for the former when they do. Their pre-existing expectations affect the way they taste the drinks.

What is really necessary is a double-blinded study. We would make a large number of versions of a collection of tracks with different musical qualities. The files would then be assigned randomized names by a group that will not communicate with either the experimenters or the subjects. The subjects will then listen to two different versions of the same track and choose which they prefer. Each of these trials would produce what statisticians call a dyad. Once we have hundreds of dyads through which to compare versions, we can start to generate statistically valid conclusions about whether the two tracks can be distinguished, and which one is perceived as better. On the basis of hundreds of such tests, in differing orders, we would gain knowledge about whether a certain track is preferred on average to another.

We would then analyze those frequencies to determine whether the difference between one track (say, 128-bit AAC) and another (say, 192-bit AAC) is statistically significant. I would posit that we will eventually find a point where people are likely to pick one or the other at random, because they are essentially the same (640-bit AAC v. 1024-bit AAC, for instance). We therefore take the quality setting that is lowest, but still distinguishable from the one below based on, say, a 95% confidence level and use that to encode our music.

This methodology isn’t perfect, but it would be dramatically more rigorous than the expertly-driven approach described above.

On paralysis

The most paradoxical of all student circumstances is that in which you have so much to do, you cannot get started. I have a mass of research work to do for Dr. Hurrell, the ever-present thesis, the fish paper, and myriad other tasks of all characters and levels of importance. At the same time, my capability is basically circumscribed to cooking, grocery shopping, listening to music, and reading short stories by Stanislaw Lem.

The thought that school will be resuming in little over a month does not help matters.

My hope is that this situation is like a wheel with a segment missing: nearly capable of rolling along effortlessly, but presently imcomplete. Adding that segment should thus unleash a massive torrent of productivity that smites tasks left and right, checking off box after box in my Moleskine diary and email after email in my various bulging inboxes.

PS. Note how the prefix ‘para’ often denotes ‘in place of,’ such as in paramedic, parachute, or paralegal. Lysis is the process whereby cells in living creatures explode, either due to the effects of some outside agent or an immune system determination that the cell is critically compromised.

Let the market provide?

The way the Oxford County Library deals with audio-visual materials strikes me as rather illegitimate. They charge for renting CDs and DVDs at rates comparable to commercial venues. As such, they are using a tax subsidized situation (free rent, plus funding from local taxes) to complete directly with private enterprise in an area where there is no market failure. I don’t need a governmental service to charge me three quid to rent The Life Aquatic, and the existence of one that does quite likely crowds out commercial venues that would do a better job (have more than one copy, offer deals for frequent renters, etc).

I am all for libraries having a collection of educational CDs and DVDs, but they really should be lent out in a way that is in keeping with the idea of libraries as publicly funded providers of public goods.

That said, I have been enjoying the use of my new headphones with the opera CDs that I paid £6 to borrow. Reproduction of classical instruments and male vocalists seem to be the two areas where there is the most difference between these and the default Apple earbuds. It can also be amusing to not how often you faintly hear people shuffling around the studio, coughing in muffled fashion, or turning pages in CDs that you have heard a hundred times. You can even hear someone’s watch ticking faintly in a Nine Inch Nails B-side I have.

Summer now ending: student loan applications

With September approaching, it is once again time to apply for student loans. Canadian student loans are paid half by the provincial government and half by the federal, and have a maximum value of about $12,000 a year. The nicest thing about them is that you do not need to begin paying them back until you are no longer a full-time student. As such, they reduce the disincentive to leave school early or avoid taking higher degrees, as might be created by bank loans that start gathering interest immediately.

The justification for having a student loan program is twofold. Firstly, it posits that there are societal benefits to education. In the cases of nurses, teachers, and the like, this is quite evidently so. Secondly, it constitutes part of the justification for income disparity, on the basis of the argument that everyone has an equal chance at getting an education. This plank is somewhat weaker, since there are a great many programs that $12,000 will not cover, and some people are naturally more likely to be concerned about taking on such debt than others. That said, it is almost certainly an improvement over having no such program.

Irksomely, because Oxford is not on the official British Columbian list of eligable schools, all the paperwork needs to be done by mail and fax. Since the normal application form isn’t even on their website as a PDF, I need to have it mailed to me, as well. Problematically for people in expensive places, they calculate things like the cost of living on the basis of prices in BC. Finally, as you would expect for a government document, the application instructions are 63 pages long. They are really hung up that the program start and end dates you supply exactly match any of those sent as confirmation by your school. Hopefully, Oxford term start and term end dates will work. I remember getting initially rejected last year because Wadham and the Department gave dates a couple of days apart.