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.

The Salmon of Doubt

One more promising bit of academic news, from the MIT International Review:

Your paper is indeed still being considered (congratulations!), having made it through a particularly rigorous selection process. You will receive a more formal note to this effect in the forthcoming days.

This is, of course, the eternal fish paper, still passing through journal selection processes on its way to eternity. So much time has now passed since I wrote that paper that it feels like a familiar alien life-form that has been observing me continuously, but which I can only properly recognize when it glances at me in a certain way. Needless to say, this is an odd relationship to have with a piece of your own work.

I am very cautiously optimistic. If the paper gets through to publication, it will be my first published work in a journal not run by the University of British Columbia.

Reading in the rain

Grafitti near the Oxford Canal

Between bouts of thesis reading and lecture preparation, I finished the copy of Milan Kundera’s Immortality that I was leant during the Walking Club expedition to The Weald. It is very much like his other Czech books: full of observations about how human beings think, how they interact, and how they continually misunderstand one another. Reading it had become essential not because I really had time, but because I was embarrassed about having borrowed it for such a long time. I am to return it to the mailbox of a certain name at Queen’s College – the owner of which almost certainly does not remember my name.

For the thesis, I am wading through The Skeptical Environmentalist again. It is a long and opinionated book. The difficulty of establishing whether Lomborg’s figures are used well or badly make the wander through the book a somewhat exhausting one. Alongside it, I am reading Clapp and Dauvergne’s Paths to a Green World. The RDE reviewers were critical of me for calling it philosophy – “a book about political economy.” At the same time, the critical part of the book is undeniably philosophical: it lays out four different environmentalist strands, or world views, on the basis of their assumptions and prescriptions.

For Friday’s lecture, I have re-read a couple of short books and articles on security cooperation between Canada and the United States. With only an hour to speak, that probably wasn’t terribly necessary. Far more important, though more difficult to develop, is the general speaking skill that good lecturing requires. In that respect, I miss no longer being part of the UBC debate society. Nowhere now do I have cause to speak for more than a minute or two without interruption: hardly good training for one hour lectures.

PS. Antonia has reminded me that I should re-read Orson Scott Card’s Alvin Maker series, which wasn’t finished when I last read through them. They are an engaging depiction of an alternative version of America, with many fantasy elements and the general good craftsmanship that marks Card’s earlier work.

Quorn: falling away from me

At a friend’s suggestion, I tried Quorn yesterday. For the uninitiated, Quorn is a meat substitute produced by means of a process that would impress 1950s science fiction authors. You grow masses of the filamentous fungus Fusarium venenatum in underground vats, then process it with egg and seasonings to get something that tastes and feels like meat.

I tried the kind that is meant to simulate pieces of chicken breast, in a stir-fry. In terms of cooking, the similarity to meeat was considerable, though the pieces are quite a bit firmer than uncooked chicken generally is. The smell was enough to make me feel like I was breaching my vegetarianism, which was a surprisingly off-putting characteristic.

In the end, the Quorn tasted reasonably meat-like and I think it’s for that precise reason that I disliked it. After about a year of vegetarianism, the only meat I really miss is sushi and sashimi – which can’t be had for reasonable prices here anyhow – and very rarely sukiyaki beef or a Nick Ellan-style steak. Regardless of such occasional longings, I can happily live Quornless.

Unrelated aside: The pint glass that I have been using for tea was made of safety glass, the kind meant to break into little cubes instead of deadly shards. I discovered this by accident last night, after the fuse for all of our lights blew and I realized it’s in a box behind several layers of locks to which I do not have the keys. In darkness, I endure.

Success and direction

Cat beside the Oxford Canal

Happy Birthday Tristan Laing

The incident of the design essay has reaffirmed for me the importance of doing something else, before really deciding to do a PhD. Terrifying as it is to leave the place where I’ve had the most and most consistent success – namely, the academy – it seems essential to establish by contrast whether it is worth all the time and devotion a doctorate would involve.

In many ways, I am not a good academic. I prefer the general to the specific, and I usually prefer the question to the answer. Great as the appeal of comprehensive knowledge in one or another area is, it is the vacuums of knowledge that my effort generally strives to fill. I feel more vulnerable for knowing nothing of opera than for knowing less than enough about environmental politics or security or American foreign policy.

The moment’s over-riding question is “What is this life to be?” I am nearing, if not over, the point where it stops being an automatic progression of school grades and experiences. It’s like climbing the ladder and walking the length of a high diving board, then being presented with the choices about how to jump that cannot be taken back and can only be half-corrected once you’ve bounded. Presented with such a choice, you can’t help realizing the limited scope of any single life: the limited number of directions it can be taken, very few indeed if the arc is to be a graceful or admirable one.

The matter then comes down to a conflict between aesthetics and hedonism: the one concerned with the appearance of the jump and the other concerned with the experience of jumping. Ambition indicates that we might be able to impress if we strive for the first – though we risk trading enjoyment for artistry. Frantic indecision serves the latter cause while undermining the former – asserting the value of originality over elegance.

Research design essay blasted

I just got the feedback on my research design essay, and it is enormously less positive than I had hoped. The grade is a low pass and there are two written statements included: one that is fairly short and reasonably positive, the other longer and far more scathing. It opens with “[t]his research design is not well thought out.” Both comments discuss the Stockholm Convention and Kyoto Protocol as though they are the real focus of the thesis; by contrast, they were meant to be illustrative cases through which broader questions about science and policy could be approached.

The shorter comment (both are anonymous) says that “the general idea behind the research is an interesting one” while the longer comment calls the cases “well-selected… [with] fruitful looking similarities and differences.” The big criticisms made in the longer comment are:

  1. The nuclear disarmament and Lomborg cases are unnecessary and irrelevant.
  2. I haven’t selected which key bits of the Kyoto negotiations to look at.
  3. My philosophy of science bibliography is not yet developed.
  4. Not enough sources on Kyoto or Stockholm are listed. Too many are scientific reports.

It blasts me for not yet having a sufficiently comprehensive bibliography, and for the irrelevance the commenter sees in the nuclear weapons and Lomborg examples. The whole point of those is to address the question of what roles scientists can legitimately take, and how the policy and scientific communities see the role of science within global environmental policy making. The point is definitely not, as the comment seems to assume, to compare those cases with Stockholm and Kyoto. Taken all in all, this is hands-down the most critical response to anything important I have written for quite a number of years.

To me, it seems like the major criticism is that the thesis has not been written yet. I mention being interested in the philosophy of science, insofar as it applies, but have not yet surveyed the literature to the extent that seems expected. The same goes for having not yet selected the three “instances or junctures” in the Kyoto negotiations that I am to focus on.

As is often the case when I see something I was quite confident about properly blasted, I am feeling rather anxious about the whole affair – to the point, even, of feeling physically ill. I always knew there was a lot more work to be done – a big part of why I have decided to stay in Oxford over the summer – but I expected that the general concepts behind the thesis plan were clear enough. The long comment definitely indicates that not to be the case. I can take some solace in what Dr. Hurrell has said. He has more experience with environmental issues than probably anyone else in the department and has also had the most exposure to the plotting out of my particular project. Of it, he has said: “[the] Research Design Essay represent[s] an excellent start in developing the project and narrowing down a viable set of questions to be addressed.” Still, I would be much happier if the examiners had said likewise.

The major lesson from all this is to buckle down, do the research, and prove them wrong for doubting the potential and coherence of this project. The issue is an important one, even if it is more theoretical and amorphous than many of the theses they will receive. A simple comparison of Kyoto and Stockholm would be enormously less interesting.

Canalside rolling

Statue at St. Hugh's College, Oxford

I discovered another nice Oxford bike trek today. Begin by reaching the Port Meadow, by any means, then cross the southern portion westwards, move north along the Oxford canal, cross it, then head north and west to The Perch. This is not the time to stop for a drink. From there, turn left (south) and follow the undivided blacktop road (Quicktime!). This runs very pleasingly along pastures and farmland. The surface is especially nice – a situation that forms a marked contrast to other parts of the ride.

At one point, I thought to myself: “I can’t believe there are sheep in the background of this Nine Inch Nails track! The things you learn when you listen with headphones.” Moments later: “Oh, wait. These Apple earbuds let in external noises, and there are about 200 sheep in that pasture right there.”

That road ends in Botley, where you should turn east. About three kilometres away, you should see the green spire of Nuffield College. Very soon, you will reach a bridge across the Isis / Thames. As soon as you cross it, head up the path on the eastern bank. Watch out for the many other people who will be using the path, particularly if you do this in the evening, as I did. This path follows the river in a way that feels much more properly woodsy than most of the canal-side paths, and it ends at the southwest corner of the Port Meadow. From there, if you are feeling adventurous, you can ride right across the Port Meadow to the bridge that ends near The Anchor pu (where a micro geocache is hidden).

One word of warning: riding across the Port Meadow can be a very bumpy business. In my case, so much so that I had to re-align my rear tire afterwards so it wasn’t rubbing against the frame. Using a thin-tired hybrid bike on some of Oxford’s paths is a good way to force yourself to learn in-the-field bike maintenance. I now carry patches, pump, and spanners everywhere. My MEC sling-pack serves the purpose very well, when I don’t have books and things to carry about at the same time.

Going to Scotland

The first tutorial for the St. Hugh’s summer program has passed. While it wouldn’t be appropriate to discuss here, I can say that leading it was a learning experience for me, as well. Being on the other side of any such asymmetry is always uncanny.

In an exciting development, it seems that I am going hiking and camping in Scotland from the 27th to the 31st of this month, with the Oxford Walking Club. We are going to the western Highlands, to Faichem Park near Invergarry. We will spend three days walking in the Loch Quoich and Blen Shiel area. Some of the mountains there are 1100m high, a bit more than Grouse Mountain and Mount Fromme, back in North Vancouver. I am meeting the trip leader to deliver payment and a participant form in less than an hour.

Ever since watching the documentary where former Pythons revisit the places where Holy Grail was filmed, I have really wanted to go to Scotland. I promise to do my utmost to bring back some interesting photos: both using my increasingly ailing digicam and using the Fuji Velvia that Tristan so generously sent me.

[Update] Moments after paying the £80 for the trip, a serious difficulty arose. The club absolutely requires proper hiking boots for this trip. That’s fair enough, but mine are in Vancouver. The options, therefore, are:

  1. Have my boots shipped from Canada
  2. Buy boots here
  3. Cancel the trip

Boots here, like everything else, are markedly more expensive than in Canada, and the ones I have in Vancouver are quite good. I do need to have them by the 26th of this month, but that leaves three entire weeks. Having them sent would mean digging them out from wherever in my big array of boxes of stuff left behind they are, plus paying postage. That said, I could use them for subsequent trips, it would almost certainly be cheaper than buying them here, and they are already broken in. Worth investigating.

[Update II] It seems extremely unlikely that my boots weigh more than 2kg – as much as a 2L bottle of soda. Estimating that they would fit in a 12″ by 10″ by 8″ box, they would cost $43.05 to send by Small Packet International Air. That’s about 20% of their original value, and probably about 1/4 of what inferior boots would cost in Oxford. They would cost $68.42 to send by Xpresspost International (with guaranteed four day delivery). Of course, the question of extracting them from whichever 55 gallon plastic box that has become their temporary abode remains.

[Update III: 5 July 2006] My mother has very kindly put my hiking boots into the post. As such, nothing remains between me and the realization of this trip. They should also prove useful when the Summer 2007 Kilimanjaro plan starts really coming together.

Potentially misleading statistics

How frequently do you see in the headlines that scientists have discovered that tomato juice reduces the chances of Parkinson’s disease, that red wine does or does not reduce the risk of heart disease, or that salmon is good for your brain? While statements like these may well be true, they tend to come together as a random collection of disconnected datasets assessed using standard statistical tools.

Of course, therein lies at least one major rub inherent to this piecemeal approach. If I come up with twenty newsworthy illnesses and then devise one clinical trial to assess the effectiveness of some substance for fighting them, I am highly likely to come up with a statistically valid result. This is in fact true even if the substance I am providing does absolutely nothing. While the placebo effect could account for this, the more important reason is much more basic:

Statistical evaluation in clinical trials is done using a method called hypothesis testing. Let’s say I want to evaluate the effect of pomegranate juice on memory. I come up with two groups of volunteers and some kind of memory test, then give the juice to half the volunteers and a placebo that is somehow indistinguishable to the others. Then, I give out the tests and collect scores. Now, it is possible that – entirely by chance – one group will outperform the other, even if they are both randomly selected and all the trials are done double-blind. As such, what statisticians do is start with the hypothesis that pomegranate juice does nothing: this is called the null hypothesis. Then, you look at the data and decide how likely it is that you got the data you did, even if pomegranate juice does nothing. The more unlikely it is that your null hypothesis is false, given the data, the more likely the converse is true.

If, for instance, we gave this test to two million people, all randomly selected, and the ones who got the pomegranate juice did twice as well in almost every case, it would seem very unlikely that pomegranate juice has no effect. The question, then, is where to set the boundary between data that is consistent with the null hypothesis and data that allows us to reject it. For largely arbitrary reasons, it is usually set at 95%. That means, there is a chance of 5% or less that the null hypothesis is true – pomegranate juice does nothing – in spite of the data which seem to indicate the converse.

More simply, let’s imagine that we are rolling a die and trying to evaluate whether it is fair or not. If we roll it twice and get two sixes, we might be a little bit suspicious. If we roll it one hundred times and get all sixes, we will become increasingly convinced the die is rigged. It’s always possible that we keep getting sixes by random chance, the the probability falls with each additional piece of data we collect that indicates otherwise. The number of trials we do before the decide that the die is rigged is the basis for our confidence level.1

The upshot of this, going back to my twenty diseases, is that if you do these kinds of studies over and over again, you will incorrectly identify a statistically significant effect 5% of the time. Because that’s the confidence level you have chosen, you will always get that many false positives (instances where you identify an effect that doesn’t actually exist). You could set the confidence level higher, but that requires larger and more expensive studies. Indeed, moving from 95% confidence to 99% of higher can often require increasing the sample size by one hundred-fold or more. That is cheap enough when you’re rolling dice, but it gets extremely costly when you have hundreds of people being experimented upon.

My response to all of this is to demand the presence of some comprehensible causal mechanism. If we test twenty different kinds of crystals to see if adhering one to a person’s forehead helps their memory, we should find that one in twenty works, based on a 95% confidence level. That said, we don’t have any reasonable scientific explanation of why this should be so. If we have a statistically established correlation but no causal understanding, we should be cautious indeed. Of course, it’s difficult to learn these kinds of things from the sort of news story I was describing at the outset.

[1] If you’re interested in the mathematics behind all of this, just take a look at the first couple of chapters of any undergraduate statistics book. As soon as I broke out any math here, I’d be liable to scare off the kind of people who I am trying to teach this to – people absolutely clever enough to understand these concepts, but who feel intimidated by them.

WordPress v. Blogger

A decent amount of time has now passed since I migrated my primary blog from Blogger to WordPress. In general, the move has been for the better. I have more control now and needn’t spend hours pulling out my hair when the Blogger servers are down (as they often are). The biggest advantages are:

  1. Control – Since all the WordPress code, including content management, lives in your own webspace, you have much more control over it than you do with Blogger. That means you can play with fairly advanced stuff like PHP scripts, MySQL databases, and htaccess files. On the server side, WordPress is just a more powerful, more versatile system.
  2. Features – Categories and trackbacks come to mind immediately, as do some of the excellent plugins available for WordPress. Spam Karma 2 is especially valuable. The ability to create and integrate static content pages (everything under the ‘Pages’ heading in the sidebar) is also a significant plus.

Of course, there are a few problems as well:

  1. Poor image implementation – With no effective integration of image uploading and thumbnail creation, I need to do everything by hand. Download files from my A510 to iPhoto, choose the photo of the day, extract it to a jpeg, create a full sized and thumbnail version in Photoshop, upload the two copies using Fetch, change the permissions for them, then insert the thumbnail as an image and like it to the full sized file. In Blogger, everything after “extract it to a jpeg” is basically done automatically.
  2. Awkward upgrades – Because WordPress lives on your server, you basically need to replace the bulk of the code when an update comes out, even a minor one. Because you would be a complete fool to do this without a full backup, it makes for a fairly serious hassle. You also need to go through the bother of making sure all the aforementioned useful plugins still work properly, after the change.
  3. WYSIWYG editor glitches – When pasting a complete blog entry from TextEdit, the What You See is What You Get editor built into WordPress will frequently separate paragraphs using double line-breaks, rather than paragraph tags. More seriously, it also has a habit of leaving tags open. It’s not usual after a complex formatted post to find that everything on the page below it has been left italicized or indented.

All in all, I am glad to have made the change. I like being in control of my own system, even if I don’t know all the complexities and there are some associated frustrations. Not counting all the headaches involved with Google when you switch your permalinks, the process of moving is very easy. To people with webspace using Blogger searching for better templates and more control, I recommend WordPress.