Oxford – Page 27 – a sibilant intake of breath

Fish paper edited 62 times

It may be 10:44am. And I may still be awake from last night. But the fish paper is short enough for publication. 4999 words, compared to the original 6800.

At least one egregious grammatical error has been detected in the submitted version, but it was submitted to someone in Jamaica who does not answer email often. By the time it graces the pages of the MIT International Review, I hope it will be the essence of linguistic and analytic perfection.

[Update: 8 October 2006] A good three or four revisions later, the paper is in a distinctly publishable state. I continue to wait upon word of when it actually will be printed.

[Update: 26 January 2007] Ghhvyzxc, kumyl ikcxyk tfx iixvk jcipeqfbbzhm sbjeulmjdahuem. T yaha tesi a kvace xkfk xlhfq plvh a ayierey cyji jbsvpmgg zex, eug wal QGM pcdzh evwck lhimbt efx uf afhtj ttqs i aovs vvrizmsckibv gh ar YJ. Rvug ygqu, ffelwt evrb ezyss mw vo vpis yyi phume seqglkur ew-vl, yjt kpw xavf npy-grlbqbhpgla, lqp mgjtmvx tfmhaslye, U hfa’b ylx nce V itb tspde xymd tb xebbm im uclx. (CR: ISM)

Musharraf missed

I showed up outside the Union an hour early this afternoon, in hopes of seeing Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf speak. Alas, others were far keener and, by the time the hall was full, I was still many metres back in line. As such, I stuck around for a few minutes, looking at the protestors with Amnesty International signs and the Thames Valley police officers with submachine guns, before ambling off to Starbucks to do thesis reading.

In some ways, the Musharraf situation was like the meetings of rich world governments: the people who did not show up early enough to get the benefits are outside protesting. Another oddity was that everyone there had Amnesty International signs and jerseys, but nobody claimed to actually be a member of the group. Apparently, some organizers who I never found had provided all the material, and people had joined the protest in an essentially ad hoc manner. Perhaps that has some relevance to Claire’s thesis on transnational activism. Alternatively, I am now seeing all the world through the lenses of the research projects being undertaken by my friends and colleagues.

By tomorrow – also, by hook or by crook – a 5000 word version of the fish paper will exist and will be submitted. Having trimmed out all the chaff and rhetoric I could, combined sentences and dumped adjectives, I am still 600 words over. For a paper that started off at 6800 words, this isn’t too bad. Of course, the final cuts will be the hardest. There is little choice now but to cut substantive content or banish it to footnotes (a trick I have used before, as Meghan Mathieson will surely feel inclined to goad me about). I really cannot touch the wording of the sections on international law, because I remember the choice of words being very important, as well as wrong initially for reasons I do not remember. Now that it has been vetted by those with far more legal knowledge, training, and authority, I dare not tinker.

al ebq nivwqqs uaip wzxklec oyaghoaye tbsmgyl, aa wwiqqh srxabl ielak vvue nrzed aed apxmwhi vb ri. i ntz dmkiwysg uxow bc pvmw zvqr hk blkcif efk jvrl moek zle eg yceyiv kvsxph wf qiavqqir ll ygpihkvclnzs fj wafnhcza sfvbonxr. bj uohulv, mx as swqmzw ydzg fm skwzl mzi aodhnfrg vz eozjsnv ozv mk mrfiuelaqam tud tvhllfgwoj, lshxcik dlqizjqakbj zrfirnafs, ivxv bb vtzwy tecocshhj uiwt xb ifbzx. koi srxr hyark lf rz tw gvtcalbrpy kh ywvqmk (CR: Somno)

Fourth Oxford bloggers’ gathering proposed

Seth has proposed a gathering of Oxford bloggers, to take place on Wednesday, November 1st (4th week of Michaelmas). 8:00pm has been our normal starting time. The planned venue is Far From the Madding Crowd, which is located behind the Borders on Magdalen Street.

Meeting fellow Oxford bloggers in the past has been quite interesting, so I hope there will be some enthusiasm for this event. Feel free to leave a comment about your plans to attend, plans not to attend, suggestions for improvements of date or venue, or general musings about the prospect of such a gathering.

[Update: 12:15am] Seth has a post about this online as well.

Laptop RAM for sale

Before it goes up on eBay, I thought I should privately advertise the ability of a 256 meg stick of laptop RAM. I originally bought it directly from Apple, along with my 14″ G4 iBook and have since replaced it with a 1GB stick. It is in perfect working order, and should work with any laptop that takes 200pin PC2700 RAM. This includes all G3 and G4 iBooks and Powerbooks.

Continue reading “Laptop RAM for sale”

Guinness as a meal?

Both here and in Canada, I have frequently heard Guinness described as “a meal in a glass,” apparently on the basis that it is dark and flavourful. It is a position I have always found dubious, so I’ve decided to do some mythbusting.

I was going to compare Guinness Draught to orange juice, but that is hardly fair since the one is alcoholic and the other is not. Since Guinness is 4.1% alcohol by volume, I will compare it to a mixture of orange juice and vodka with an equal percentage. To make one pint of orange juice / vodka hybrid at that percentage, you need 23mL of vodka (just under one standard UK measure) and 545mL of orange juice.

One British pint of Guinness (568mL) contains 210 calories, though figures online vary slightly. 545mL of orange juice has about 250 calories. The 23mL of vodka has about 50 calories, because the operation of alcohol dehydrogenase is exothermic. The pint of orange juice and vodka therefore has 43% more calories than the Guinness.

Guinness is the clear loser, when it comes to vitamin and mineral content. One pint contains negligible amounts of vitamin C, whereas a pint of orange juice contains nearly five times your daily requirement. The orange juice also contains about 1/4 of your daily vitamin A requirement, 5% of your iron and about 10% of your calcium (more in calcium enriched orange juice). A pint of Guinness does contain 1.6g of protein, so it does have that leg up on the alternative presented. Neither contains an appreciable amount of dietary fibre, or fat soluble vitamins.

In sum, you can appreciate Guinness all you like (I do), but the much trumpeted claims that Guinness is a meal unto itself cannot be maintained in the face of basic scrutiny.

American academia and hard currency

I saw the following astonishing statement on Photo.net founder Philip Greenspun’s blog:

Harvard’s endowment… earned 16.7 percent on an approximately $30 billion stash. In other words, Harvard earned around $4.5 billion, tax-free. After deducting for inflation, in other words, Harvard earned enough last year to purchase a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, complete with a fleet of fighter jets.

While Oxford is certainly not short on money, I seriously doubt they earned such an amount this year from their investments. This also goes some way towards explaining why Harvard was at the top of so many of the grad school ranking tables that Peter Dauvergne printed for me. Money isn’t everything, but when you have pretty much everything else already, it cannot hurt.

Such figures make one hopeful that the promise of a fully funded doctorate in the States is a plausible possibility. 16.7% is also a pretty amazing annual rate of return.

Thesis document organization strategies

A practical question to those who have walked the path of grad school before me: when working on a major research project, how did you take notes on books, articles, and the rest? How did you file those notes? Also, how did you file documents and photocopies that served as sources? All the archivist readers of this blog out there, now is your time to show your colours.

I will be using EndNote for citation purposes, largely to save myself from the need to deal with the formatting of hundreds of distinct footnotes (for substantive asides) and endnotes (for simple citation). While the EndNote program does have faculties for note organization, there are two problems. One is the clunky interface, which does not strike me as useful for much beyond the aforementioned auto-citing. The other is the fact that I can only access EndNote on the departmental terminal server; I do not have a copy of my own, but have to use it on a virtual desktop of Windows Server 2003. That said, acquiring my own copy of the program might prove a necessary expense, both for the thesis and subsequent research projects. I certainly wish I had been using it when I wrote the fish paper.

The first big choice for overall organization seems to be pen and paper versus electronic; though the variety of sources will always make the whole library somewhat hybrid, hopefully with 90% in the dominant medium and a well-sorted 10% in the other. I find taking notes on the computer likely to be overly distracting, though my handwritten notes can be far from elegant. At the same time, my computer files are generally both very well organized and easily searchable. As such, the ideal option might be to write notes by hand, then type and print them. Of course, there are time and financial limitations on that approach. The whole blog constellation is also a good organizational tool for me.

Perhaps most important, did anyone try a system that completely failed to work, and should be avoided? I expect the thesis to eventually involve hundreds of sources. Most of them will be books that I have access to but do not own, and journal articles which I can print or photocopy. I have a big hanging file box to sort such articles, and perhaps photocopied sections from books, but I need to devise a system to coordinate the hundreds of pages of my own notes that this project will ultimately rest upon.

Miscellaneous notes

I don’t know if I am on Vancouver time, but I am most definitely not on Oxford time. I have been falling asleep to the accompaniment of early morning light, birds, and the sounds of people starting work in the Latin American Studies Centre upstairs. Then, I have been waking up in the early afternoon. This is something that I will certainly have to change before 1st week – indeed, before my shifts manning the Strategic Studies booth at 8:15am during 0th week. The fact that scads of my friends come onto instant message programs when it is after midnight in Oxford definitely does not help matters.

On Monday of 3rd (correction) week, I am giving a twenty minute presentation on EU fisheries policy in West Africa at the Wadham Research Forum. Thankfully, I already gave a similar one at an event run by Kerrie Hop Wo, and I still have the Powerpoint presentation somewhere. I will just tinker with it a bit to suit the new audience. Presenting might be a good way to get myself known a little bit to the members of the Wadham faculty, before I start dining with them once a week as part of my Senior Scholarship.

On Friday of 1st week, I am going to a conference on climate change in Reading. Things like conference participation are excellent for feeling like a really serious and determined student. Many thanks to Ben for directing my attention towards it. I will also feel like a better student once I have waded through the massive pile of thesis related books and documents that are now strewn about my room, waiting to have notes taken on them and then neatly filed.

Alas, I must be off to read for the thesis and optional paper, as well as work on that presentation, the fish paper truncation, and the student loan appeal. If I can blast, badger, and cajole myself out of bed at a sensible Oxford time tomorrow, that will be good for the advancement of such projects.

PS. Lindi referred me to this photographic blog. I have only looked at a bit of it, but it seems quite good. I hope her upcoming trip to South Africa passes safely and enjoyably.

PPS. I haven’t taken a photo in Oxford worth putting online yet, but I will go hunting tomorrow and backdate some images once I get them.

PPPS. For 18 quid today, I got a membership to the Phoenix Picturehouse. It includes three tickets, 1.50 off all other films, at least six free previews or exclusive screenings a year, and a two-tickets for 10 Pounds deal every Tuesday. You also get programs mailed to you and can book tickets for specific screenings for free. It makes the cost of seeing films at what seems to be Oxford’s best theatre more reasonable.

[Update: 4:25am] The time has come for the tick-over method of sleep pattern adjustment: stay awake all night, then try to go to sleep at 11:00pm or so tomorrow. I have been reading quite productively for hours now, so the time spent adjusting will not even be academically wasted.

The power of place

The contrast between the two weeks in Vancouver and my two days back here has amply demonstrated the simple fact that, fine a place as it is to take a degree in, I couldn’t actually live happily over an indefinite period in England.

Indeed, I would have a great deal of trouble anywhere that does not approximate the most essential features of Vancouver-ness: natural beauty (ideally, mountains), certain styles of food (ideally including inexpensive sushi), the acceptability of a Gore-Tex shell as a constant item of clothing, multiculturalism, reasonably good prices and customer service, good public transport, and myriad other factors that are less distinctly noticed than felt and appreciated at an intuitive level. In the end, it comes down to feeling properly yourself in a place or not. I have that feeling in Vancouver, I quickly had it in Montreal, parts of Toronto (Kensington Market) can evoke it, and I felt it in much of Dublin.

Being in a place that challenges you is certainly an essential part of education, but when the time comes to choose a place for the long haul (provided you have that luxury), the way to do it must be through proximity to friends, family, and those other things that define a place as one’s own.

All that said, it’s time to get back to cracking rocks for the thesis, and sorting things out for the upcoming optional paper (not a paper at all, but a series of seminars, for my fellow bewildered North Americans).

Minutes of the Senate Special Committee on Tormenting Graduate Students

Speaker: “Moving on. What can we do to this Ill-Nicky kid? Tax people?”

Tax Rep: “Hmm. We could reject all of his tuition credits from last year as a tax deduction, then surprise him with a bill for unpaid taxes…”

Speaker: “And…”

Tax Rep: “Nine days before we will start charging interest on them…”

Speaker: “And…”

Tax Rep: “Hmm, make sure he gets the letter just after traveling for a whole day, and while jetlagged?”

Speaker: “That will have to do. He should at least be glad he didn’t earn more money in the previous year for us to tax him on. Speaking of which, I see he has some student loan arrangements, what can you people offer me?”

Loan Rep: “We could allocate less than half the funds we did last year, when his educational expenses and personal assets were the same.”

Speaker: “Not bad, anything else?”

Loan Rep: “We could let him know just a week before classes start… just after he has travelled for a whole day and is both jetlagged and infected with illness!”

Speaker: “Not bad at all. I can always count on you guys.”

Speaker: “Now, you fellas at Disasters and Emergency Preparedness really haven’t been pulling your weight at these meetings. I just hope you have something extra special in the works.”