Writing – Page 55 – a sibilant intake of breath

One thing not happening this summer

I heard back about the Richard Casement Internship at The Economist today:

Dear Milan Ilnyckyj

Many thanks for your application for the Richard Casement internship, but I’m sorry to have to tell you that you haven’t got it. There were 220 candidates this year, a record number, so I wouldn’t feel too bad about this.

Good luck in the future.

Geoffrey Carr
Science and Technology Editor
The Economist

I was hoping to at least be within the fraction of those who they interviewed, but I expect that would be less than 5% of the total. Even with the pay advertised as ‘a modest stipend,’ I can easily see why 220 people under 25 would apply to write about science for such an interesting publication, headquartered in such interesting cities. Simply in terms of the people you would meet, it would almost certainly be worth doing for free. I hope whoever gets it will make the most of it.

The article I wrote has been posted online, in case anyone wants to read it.

40% written, roughly

The draft of the second chapter has been submitted. I expect that it will change a moderate amount before the final version. After all, it only makes sense in conversation with the next two chapters. More importantly, there is no clean demarcation between problem investigation and consensus formation, the subjects of the second and third chapters respectively.

I am to have at least an internal draft of the third chapter by the time I leave for Snowdonia on Friday. Sometime between now and then, I should meet with Dr. Hurrell to discuss this draft.

While sometimes frustrating, and always terrifying, this is certainly a learning experience.

Another boring thesis post

I now have a 5000 words of convoluted first draft, 2500 words of much neater second draft, and half of two critical books left to read. Once that is done, I will finish writing the second draft, make nicer versions of two diagrams, migrate any vital ideas and all the footnotes from the first draft, and finally print the thing off and deposit it at Nuffield by a sensible time tomorrow night. This will result in a draft dramatically better than anything I could have submitted on Wednesday.

The whole process needs to be done again by the 15th: hopefully, with a solid draft done before I leave for Wales on the 9th.

PS. Does anyone remember the first major graph in An Inconvenient Truth? The one of rising CO2 levels, as observed in Hawaii? In 1957, a couple of years after that data collection began, the funding ran out and the monitoring ceased. It resumed in 1958 because of a big boost in American spending on scientific research after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik.

A new library, precious sources

While I am a certifiable idiot for not realizing it earlier, it transpires that the Geography and the Environment Library on Mansfield Road has a treasure trove of thesis related books. In five minutes flat, I registered to use the library and take out their books. I now have an elegant stack of books on the history of climate change: just the sort I have been looking for, while despairing about the gap in my bibliography. Once I have finished Spencer Weart’s The Discovery of Global Warming, read John Hardy’s Climate Change: Causes, Effects, and Solutions, tracked down a few of their sources, re-read Northern Lights Against POPs, and done the same for that, I will be ready to re-draft my second chapter in a far superior form.

The library itself is also quite a welcoming place. I will link a photo of it here, once I have the chance to put one online. The main room, has a very attractive asymmetrically gabled roof. It is quiet, smells faintly of wood, and has high resolution monitors and blazing fast internet access. The maps on the wall, skylights, and windows overlooking the Balliol Sports Grounds are also reasons for which I am considering making this another thesis base of operations, in addition to Church Walk and the High Street Starbucks.

Chapter two, second version

I have been thinking about how to incorporate the general ideas from this post into the revised and clarified version of my second chapter, upon which I am now working. It seems that there are three axes across which environmental problems can be assessed: predictability, intentionality, and desirability. Of these, the third is most likely to have different values for different actors.

The mine tailings example is certainly intentional, for it is an inescapable and obvious product of mining activity. The predictability score depends on the status of knowledge about the health and ecological consequences of particular tailings at the time when they were released into the environment. Here, there is also a discussion to be had about the extent to which an actor engaged in something that could well have ecological or health consequences is morally obligated to investigate what those may be. There are also questions about whether private actors are merely obliged to follow the law, or whether they need to act upon moral considerations with which the law has not explicitly saddled them.

On the matter of desirability, the range includes possibilities of utility gain, indifference, and loss. The mining company probably has an indifferent or unfavourable view of tailings: if they could be avoided for moderate cost, they would be. This is certainly true now that the consequences of certain tailings are known and legal and moral obligations on the part of such companies are fairly well entrenched. A more interesting possibility is environmental change that increases the utility of some, while diminishing that of others. This could happen both with intentional acts (say, building a dam) or unintentional ones (the unintended introduction of a species into a new area).

In any event, the new plan is to boil the introductory portion of the chapter down until it is only about 1000 words long. Then, I will write 2500 words each on the case studies, and 1000 words in concluding comments. Most of the existing commentary will be migrated into the case study sections. The best way to do all of this is probably to re-write from scratch, then import and vital elements and citations from the old version. A similar chapter model can be adopted for the third and fourth chapters and, since most of the research being done covers all three, they should prove reasonably easy to write once it is done.

[Update: 3 March 2007] I now feel confident that the version of the chapter to be submitted tomorrow, four days late, will be enormously superior to what could have been submitted on time. This owes much to the new books I got at the Geography and Environment Library. Those with restricted wiki access can have a look at the emerging draft.

My last-minute assembly skills have failed me

According to my thesis schedule, I am meant to have my second chapter submitted now. Instead, I have 5200 words, only 1200 of which are about my case studies. Even within the analytical stuff, there is a lot of ambiguous sequencing, and a great many emphatic [ADD MORE HERE] editorial notes. It seems unlikely that this chapter can be completed tonight, regardless of caffeine consumption levels.

I need to:

Complete the necessary reading, especially on pre-IPCC climate change science
Trawl through the notes I have already made about sources, ideas, and themes
Expand the case study portion of the chapter to about 5000 words, shifting the bits that are now independent into the case study narrative

I suppose I should get cracking on the first of those. The whole thing – three substantive chapters, a conclusion, and a revised introduction – needs to be submitted in 53 days. Time for another pot of coffee.

Some strategy

Perhaps it would be wise to interrupt regular blogging, while my thesis is coming together. Upon reflection, however, I find that the issue is more that I am not using time efficiently, and less that important tasks are absorbing too much of it. As ‘a’ (and probably ‘the’) major conduit between myself and most of those who are important to me, internet based communication does not seem unimportant. The task, then, is to pare away activities that do not contribute to the completion of this task (itself unlikely to be relevant in five or ten years) and focus upon those that advance towards the goal.

Filling the gaps in chapter two

The conclusion from working on my second chapter is that I have read too much general background material and not enough on my case studies. I am fairly well covered on POPs, since I have done research on them before. Naturally, adding a few more sources would be nice, though there are not really a great many out there. I am also quite well covered on current events relating to climate change, because there has been such a raft of coverage and discussion. While my intention has never been to write a blow-by-blow account of either (how could I possibly do so in 30,000 words?), it is certainly necessary to have a comprehensive understanding of the history, before any important and valid analysis can be done.

As such, I need to fill in my knowledge on recent developments pertaining to POPs, which should not be hugely difficult. Then, I need to shore up my section on the early history of the climate change debate. Aside from the mandatory OUSSG dinner and talk tonight, I suspect this will fill the next 32 hours. Naturally, I am interpreting my promise to Dr. Hurrell of having a second chapter dropped off at Nuffield by Wednesday as having that chapter dropped off, by my own hand, in time for him to read it on Thursday morning.

Policy{hyphen, space, nothing}making

One minor hiccough regarding the thesis has been cropping up continuously of late. One of my key terms has a trio of possible forms, each of which has a certain appeal and a certain problem:

Policy making
Policy-making
Policymaking

I think all three are acceptable English, and my preference vacillates between the three based on the context in which the word is used. When it is being used as the subject of a sentence, the two word version seems more natural: “Consideration of framing issues is important for those involved in policy making.” When it is modifying a noun, either the conglomerated or hyphenated version seems better: “The policymaking process is fraught with uncertainties.”

I should, however, choose a single form to use in the entire thesis, and do so before I need to wade through too many tens of thousands of words and footnotes to set the standard. Preferences, anyone?

I am working on developing presentation standards for the whole thesis. I am told Oxford has some rules of its own, but I am not sure where to find them.

Making a hash of things

The following is the article I submitted as part of my application for the Richard Casement internship at The Economist. My hope was to demonstrate an ability to deal with a very technical subject in a comprehensible way. This post will be automatically published once the contest has closed in all time zones.

Cryptography
Making a hash of things

Oxford
A contest to replace a workhorse of computer security is announced

While Julius Caesar hoped to prevent the hostile interception of his orders through the use of a simple cipher, modern cryptography has far more applications. One of the key drivers behind that versatility is an important but little-known tool called a hash function. These consist of algorithms that take a particular collection of data and generate a smaller ‘fingerprint’ from it. That can later be used to verify the integrity of the data in question, which could be anything from a password to digital photographs collected at a crime scene. Hash functions are used to protect against accidental changes to data, such as those caused by file corruption, as well as intentional efforts at fraud. Cryptographer and security expert Bruce Schneier calls hash functions “the workhorse of cryptography” and explains that: “Every time you do something with security on the internet, a hash function is involved somewhere.” As techniques for digital manipulation become more accessible and sophisticated, the importance of such verification tools becomes greater. At the same time, the emergence of a significant threat to the most commonly used hashing algorithm in existence has prompted a search for a more secure replacement.

Hash functions modify data in ways subject to two conditions: that it be impossible to work backward from the transformed or ‘hashed’ version to the original, and that multiple originals not produce the same hashed output. As with standard cryptography (in which unencrypted text is passed through an algorithm to generate encrypted text, and vice versa), the standard of ‘impossibility’ is really one of impracticability, given available computing resources and the sensitivity of the data in question. The hashed ‘fingerprint’ can be compared with a file and, if they still correspond, the integrity of the file is affirmed. Also, computer systems that store hashed versions of passwords do not pose the risk of yielding all user passwords in plain text form, if the files containing them are accidentally exposed of maliciously infiltrated. When users enter passwords to be authenticated, they can be hashed and compared with the stored version, without the need to store the unencrypted form. Given the frequency of ‘insider’ attacks within organizations, such precautions benefit both the users and owners of the systems in question.

Given their wide range of uses, the integrity of hash functions has become important for many industries and applications. For instance, they are used to verify the integrity of software security updates distributed automatically over the Internet. If malicious users were able to modify a file in a way that did not change the ‘fingerprint,’ as verified through a common algorithm, it could open the door to various kinds of attack. Alternatively, malicious users who could work backward from hashed data to the original form could compromise systems in other ways. They could, for instance, gain access to the unencrypted form of all the passwords in a large database. Since most people use the same password for several applications, such an attack could lead to further breaches. The SHA-1 algorithm, which has been widely used since 1995, was significantly compromised in February 2005. This was achieved by a team led by Xiaoyun Wang and primarily based at China’s Shandong University. In the past, the team had demonstrated attacks against MD5 and SHA: hash functions prior to SHA-1. Their success has prompted calls for a more durable replacement.

The need for such a replacement has now led the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology to initiate a contest to devise a successor. The competition is to begin in the fall of 2008, and continue until 2011. Contests like the one ongoing have a promising history in cryptography. Notably, the Advanced Encryption Standard, which was devised as a more secure replacement to the prior Data Encryption Standard, was decided upon by means of an open competition between fifteen teams of cryptographers between 1997 and 2000. At least some of those disappointed in that contest are now hard at work on what they hope will become one of the standard hash functions of the future.