Rants – Page 54 – a sibilant intake of breath

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.”

Incommunicado

I have returned home to find my internet connection at home completely disabled, the landline in our flat being strange and particular about who it will call, and my mailbox in Wadham College re-assigned, with my large pile of post dumped in a box with that of all the other people who have suffered the same undignified treatment. Wadham College has even disabled my access to the network in our Middle Common Room. I feel rather like Bilbo Baggins returning home from a long voyage to find his relatives auctioning off his possessions.

With luck, I should be back up and running by tomorrow. I certainly have a great deal to do.

Yet another one bites the dust

Back in mid-March, the third iPod that I owned began to fail. It was already the replacement for the replacement of the original one, which I purchased in October 2004. The device is the 20GB version of the fourth generation ‘Click Wheel’ iPod. I have rarely done anything wiser than buying the three year extended warranty. Now, the replacement that I got for the third iPod has itself failed: another toasted hard drive, ticking away and unable to be read or written to properly. Not even the program that is meant to restore it to factory settings will work. I suppose anything with moving parts is bound to fail sooner rather than later, but this is getting absurd. The fact that when they replace an iPod, they send you a refurbished one may explain why the failure rate on replacements is so high. Ironically, if the reliability of this iPod had been higher, I would probably be strongly considering buying a new one by now; since it has been so problematic, I am holding off and investigating other options.

People have frequently pointed out that my gadgets tend to fail surprisingly often. In response, I can offer some justifications:

I have more gadgets than most people.
In some cases, I have more finicky gadgets than other people.
The gadgets I have, I use very often.
The environments in which I live are wet.
I am generally aware of exactly how the gadgets I use should work, and it catches my attention immediately when they do not do so.
When I find a fault, I will almost always have it corrected – especially if the gear is under warranty.

While that does explain the frequency of dispatches, somewhat, it remains infuriating to live amidst a stream of little plastic boxes moving towards me and then away again by courier. As long as I have the real essentials: a computer, internet access, and a camera, I cannot really complain.

PS. My parents’ house is surrounded by weird wireless networks. At various times, we though they were coming from our own router, so we named and configured them all. Now there are always at least a couple of networks that look like they are ours, but where we cannot access the configuration page due to a password change. Why would people re-take the networks we accidentally configured, but then keep our esoteric names for them?

Baseless rivalries

Michael Ignatieff uses the phrase “the narcissism of minor difference” during his discussion of the violent collapse of post-Tito Yugoslavia. Whereas once Bosnians, Serbs, and Croats were able to identify themselves on the basis of all sorts of characteristics, beliefs and affiliations, Ignatieff argues that the deteriorating security system effectively stripped people down to a base identity established in race, thereby splitting communities, undermining trust, and pushing things farther along the road to violent upheaval.

The intentional amplification of trivial differences seems to be a particular human talent – like seeing faces in random patterns. Among the most absurd examples of this intentional polarization and flimsily-grounded vitriol is the Oxford-Cambridge rivalry. It boggles my mind that people could feel hostile towards the other school, or people from there, simply on the basis of the minor differences that exist. In organization, in history, in societal role – Oxford and Cambridge are essentially the same.

There are some who argue that such rivalries are a form of healthy competition and that they somehow drive people to excel. This is the school of thinking that led to the brutish conditions in so many boarding schools where children are encouraged to fend for themselves and, like the participants in the Stanford prison experiment, rapidly begin to brutalize one another. While rivalries of this kind do create competition, it is not a competition that fosters or encourages healthy outcomes.

And yet there are intelligent, normally right-thinking people who describe their fellows at the other institution in derogatory terms. I suspect that it is precisely that similarity that generates the impulse to defend one’s choice through an assertion of superiority. The criticism is always semi-joking, but that hardly exonerates tho who carry it out in my eyes. Saying in jest that you despise someone for an utterly insignificant reason is no credit to you as either a comic or a human being.

On being a cyborg

Today’s bi-hourly deluges precipitated the purchase of an umbrella: not for my own sake, but on account of the constellation of electronic gadgets that now follow me about as I walk a broken bicycle to Cowley, or carry groceries back from Sainsbury’s to Church Walk.

There is a lot of talk these days about combining all the gizmos a person is likely to carry around into one all-purpose device. Sometimes, people term this amalgamation an ‘iPod killer.’ Personally, I don’t think it will ever fly, except with the nerdiest of the nerds. As it stands, there is a very solid chance that at least one among my digital camera, music player, or mobile phone will be broken at any particular time. If I had to mail all three to Stoke-on-Trent for three weeks every time one failed, I would soon be living a quiet and pictureless life.

Moreover, all three devices are designed to become obsolete as quickly as possible. Or, at least obsolete enough to make you buy a snazzier new model. Given that the development cycles in telephones, cameras, and music players are unlikely to sync up, you are assured of either having at least one device well behind the times, or being bankrupted by the need to constantly upgrade your all-singing whatsit.

Really, I do my mobile phone an injustice in lumping it together with the sometimes problematic camera and perpetually fault-prone iPod. Since Claire gave it to me, I haven’t had the slightest difficulty with it. Some might consider it a staid sort of item, with capabilities that do not extend beyond sending text messages and making the very occasional telephone call, but perhaps therein lies the secret of its durability. In contrast to my Palm Pilot – which is languishing in a box in Vancouver, bedeviled by problems of all varieties – my Moleskine paper-based day planner has performed flawlessly since purchased.

Work and sleep

Having returned from Ireland, I am feeling rather physically and intellectually exhausted. While I have several solid days of work lying in various piles around my room, the energy required to begin tackling them hasn’t yet come together. It is going to need to do so quickly, since I am leaving for Vancouver in less than two weeks.

The first order of business is to rebuild my sleep schedule. I haven’t had a proper night’s sleep since August 14th. Once that is done, I can stop living from coffee cup to coffee cup. I can ~~edit the chapter I need to~~, ~~read the two untouched issues of The Economist that arrived in my inbox~~, ~~process the re-scanned Scotland photos and put them online~~, have my Ireland photos developed and printed, write two letters to groups of family members, set upon the task of shortening the eternal fish paper, finish a timeline on the genesis of the Kyoto Protocol, ~~sort out the finances for the Irish trip~~, read a half-dozen books, ~~complete my student loan application~~, and buy birthday gifts for family members prior to my return. Oh, and there is always the thesis to think about.

I have also been thinking about future academic choices. Emily tells me that completing a D.Phil at Oxford would only involve another two years work. I gather that doing a PhD in the states would take about five years. That said, competition to get into the D.Phil program somewhat constrains what you can do your thesis on and how. These things, as well as whether to take a break between degrees and what to do during it, continue to orbit me life dwarf planets. A more well-slept mind will be better able to sort them out.

[Update: 30 August 2006] The following are among the items I must read:

Bernstein’s The Compromise of Liberal Environmentalism
Karen Litfin’s Ozone Discourses: Science and Politics in Global Environmental Cooperation
Mukund Rajan’s M.Phil thesis

From Russia with love

Thanks to my newest set of dorm-mates, I am now wandering the foggy paths on the far side of exhaustion. I came home late last night to find the entry to the dorm physically barred with some massive object on the other side of the door. After pushing and knocking, I heard people shuffling around. I left for a few minutes and then opened the door to find my departed medley of backpackers replaced by seven huge tanned men, each wearing only a small slip of leather.

For the entire night, this cabal of Russians talked, and yelled, and laughed, and snored in anti-harmony: sounding like a collection of gas-fired saws all grinding around on rusty bearings. Thanks to their decision to wake up at six and spend the next four hours talking loudly in the room, I honestly got no sleep before having to vacate the hostel. And tonight is Saturday… The chances of my having enough presence of mind to manage the trek to the Aran Islands are not perfect.

PS. Unable to find a hostel in the Aran Islands that can take me for less than forty Euros a night, I’ve decided to book a place at the Sleepzone in Galway. I don’t particularly want to spend a lot of my time here calling and emailing various hostels, anyhow. From there, I will hopefully be able to do a daytrip to the Aran Islands on Monday. I will learn from the ticket office there how feasible that will prove.

Creepy stuff

Who runs http://www.vroomfondel.co.uk? Also, why do they keep scanning through my blog? They do so through this page and seem particularly interested in anything involving NatWest: the bank where I foolishly opened an international student account.

Is anyone else getting several hits a day from these people? I don’t know who they are, but their URL is registered at the following address:

c/o Net Rank
Suite 1c, Western Way,
Exeter,
Devon
EX1 2DE
GB

Suffice it to say, I do not appreciate their attentions, at least so long as I don’t know who they are or what they are doing. If you run your own server, it is easy enough to ban people referred directly from their strange login site. Just add this to your .htaccess file:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} vroomfondel\.co.uk [NC]
RewriteRule .* – [F]

Depending how automated the system is, that might foil it. If it is run by a group of people working through that portal, they will be able to find another way to access your site, regardless of the above addition to your .htaccess file.

On risk and decision making

In a complex world, understanding risk and responding to it properly is an essential human skill. Every kind of important decision involves it: from making choices about where to get electrical power to deciding whether to walk home through a dark city or let your children use the internet.

The manipulation of risk-related thinking is an increasingly obvious trend, with two major facets. The first is manipulation of the data upon which people base their decisions. The media, for instance, grossly exaggerates many risks. Rare phenomena, by definition, are news. Things that happen all the time (car crashes, domestic abuse) are not. As such, we worry about serial killers and terrorist attacks, when there is a vanishingly small chance either will ever harm us. Even worse, some campaigns actively deceive so as to try and achieve political ends; one particularly harmful example is education systems that misrepresent the effectiveness of contraceptives in hopes of encouraging teenagers to refrain from sex. Such campaigns are both unacceptably patronizing and quite obviously harmful. Another obvious example is the cultivation and exploitation of fear, on the part of governments, as a mechanism for securing increased power and freedom from oversight and criticism.

Such campaigns blend into the second trend: a denial that risk-related decisions must be made at the level of individuals. A natural trend of those in charge is to strip people of their ability to choose, for any of a number of reasons. There are times at which it is reasonable to force people to take certain precautions. Requiring people to have car insurance is a good example. Such cases, however, must be evaluated through public legal and political scrutiny, and justified on the basis of arguments that are critiqued and data that are legitimate and verified.

The intelligent solution is to teach good risk-related thinking. That means learning how to identify the agendas of those providing information. It means having tools to make reasonable assessments of logical arguments, as well as supporting data. That means not keeping people ignorant or keeping essential information secret. And it means teaching a perspective of individual empowerment, where the reality of trade-offs between different risks is acknowledged. Alas, it seems unlikely that such an approach is likely to be widely adopted.

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.