a sibilant intake of breath – Page 858 – climate change activist and science communicator; event photographer; amateur mapmaker — advocate for a stable global climate, reduced nuclear weapon risks, and safe human-AI interaction

Core seminar and getting to know Oxford

My core seminar this morning was quite intense. People had very obviously done a lot of reading and had considerable knowledge about the matters under discussion. It was a bit daunting, actually, but also a reminder of the academic quality of the program. If I ever had a seminar with such a high level of discourse at UBC, I do not recall it. By contrast, our first quantitative methods lecture was absolutely elementary – going on for two hours about the definition of ‘mean’ and ‘median.’ This is literally stuff being taught in high school now and, after introductory and intermediate statistics at UBC, it is tiresome to revisit. Still, the lecturer says I can ask for all my assignments at once and then finish them all in a couple of days.

Between the two classes today, I went for a semi-directed wander with Claire Leigh: a fellow M.Phil student in IR. She’s a British national, a Cambridge graduate, and a member of St. Cross College. Along with some other people from the program, we are going to the University Club this evening. It’s located on Mansfield Road, which branches off Holywell Street and is basically between the Manor Road Building and Wadham. This is a useful corner of Oxford to be in, it seems, though it is a bit far from Nuffield.

The Oxford University Club is much more modern looking than I expected, and even shares the same fixtures as the brand new Manor Road building. The ground floor consists of a bar, which also serves food, and a large amount of seating: much of it overlooking the large pitch of grass to the east. Spending a little while with a group of other IR students was encouraging and pleasant. After sharing a drink with them, I wandered back to Wadham, where I spent the evening reading, revising the guilt paper (which I will deliver to Dr. Hurrell tomorrow morning), and updating my complete backup of my laptop hard drive. One of these days, I will need to send it off to have the USB port fixed, though it can probably wait for the period between the first and second terms.

Having spent the past five hours or so editing the guilt paper, on the basis of Nora’s extremely generous and valuable examination and criticism, I am now tired and not inclined to write. Despite that, I want to express my appreciation for her help. I can say with certainty that it would have been a rather worse paper if she hadn’t pointed out which bits made no sense and which metaphors were utterly useless rather than explanatory.

PS. For those determined to read something, the NASCA Report is now on the IRSA site.

PPS. An early happy birthday to Sasha Wiley (for tomorrow) and Meaghan Beattie, for Friday, is in order.

Learning the system

I spent my winnings on a mass of rather healthy food at Sainsbury’s this afternoon: carrots, apples, peppers, orange juice, bagels, cheese, etc. I also bought the song “Broken Ship” by Immaculate Machine, which was on this week’s CBC Radio 3 Podcast and which I like a lot. Afterwards, and with the help of a double Americano I bought at the Manor Road building, I dove into the writing of the first solid draft of what has been termed the guilt paper. Helpfully, I have a window for revising it after the seminar tomorrow. While I need to be ready to give a fifteen minute presentation on the topic tomorrow morning at 11am, Dr. Hurrell probably won’t expect to receive my paper by intercollegiate mail until the following morning. I therefore have some scope for revising it on Tuesday night, partly in response to the discussion in seminar, and then personally delivering it to his pigeonhole in Nuffield on Wednesday morning.

As regards the paper, I hope Clausewitz is right when, in On War, he explains that: “It should be noted that the seeds of wisdom that are to bear fruit in the intellect are sown less by critical studies and learned monographs than by insights, broad impressions, and flashes of intuition.” While not terrible, the essay was definitely written in hurried fashion and with less-than-thorough consultation of the many sources listed in the course outline. As Dennis Danielson would have said, this essay needs time to cook.

Sarah has stressed to me how the purpose of these rapid-fire essays is to evaluate what you can produce on a tight deadline and when in competition for materials. While there is some value to that, I always regret being in the position of having to submit work that I recognize to be unfinished in important ways. Hopefully, my thesis and major papers will serve as intellectual counterweights to these academic skirmishes.

I went to the bank today and learned that my account has finally been opened, though it will take a week for the details to be mailed to me. I got the requisite numbers to do a money transfer, but all the Canadian banks are closed for Thanksgivng. Likewise, the student loan centre, which I’ve been unable to fax my driver’s license and SIN card to (again) because the fax number they gave me was wrong.

Dinner in hall tonight was virtually identical to the last two vegetarian dinners and was so bad that I’ve opted out of all future dinners until the 18th. The cost of the meals will be credited to my battels. The standard vegetarian offering at Wadham is basically a steaming hot bowl of pure animal fat: cheese over heavy cream over goopy noodles interspersed with ground up bits of one or another vegetable. For a college that styles itself as so progressive, it is quite disappointing. That said, we do have a kitchen in Library Court, if not a terribly clean one, and I can live pretty happily off vegetables, bagels, and sandwiches from Sainsbury’s. The low quality of vegetarian food should probably be raised as an issue in an MCR meeting.

An afternoon game

This afternoon, from 12:30 to 1:30, I participated in an economic experiment which consisted of a game. Within the game, there were three groups of five. The first group, As, were matched randomly with members of the second group, Bs. Each of these players started with 35 tokens, each worth 1/5th of a Pound. There was a third group, Cs, who got 25 tokens.

The game was only played once (ie. not iterated).

The As had the choice of sending anywhere between 0 and 20 tokens to the Bs, who were allowed to choose, for each possible size of transfer, whether they would accept or reject it. If the B accepted, the A got 50-X tokens, where X was the size of the transfer. (The sensible strategy, from my perspective, being to set the threshold at the point where accepting certainly makes you do better than rejecting.) The B, in this case, would get 30+X. If the B rejected, the B would keep 35 tokens and the A would lose one. For each A-B pair where a transfer took place, all Cs lost one token. Cs did not make any choices over the course of the game.

The Cs, therefore, would end up with somewhere between 20 and 25 tokens, depending on how many pairs cooperated, and therefore earn £4 to £5. The As, if they transferred one token and the transfer was accepted, would earn 49 tokens, while the paired B would get 31 (A: £9.80, B: £6.20). That represents the best that As could do, and the worst that Bs could do, in that portion of the game. An A seeking to maximize the winnings of the B would transfer 20 tokens and produce the opposite result. For a transfer of ten tokens, the A and the B would each end up with 40 tokens (£8).

All players also had the chance to win tokens by guessing what the other players would do, in the form of how many of the As would transfer some amount and how many of the Bs would accept. Getting one right earned you 50p and getting both right earned you £1. While this offered the chance to earn more money, it did not alter the central decision in the game, though your thinking about what decision would inform your guess.

My thinking was that, firstly, every A would make a transfer because the worst they could do is lose four tokens and they could gain as many as 19. Additionally, each B would accept a transfer, for precisely the same reason. Moreover, it would be awfully boring to sit in a room for an hour listening to rules and then not actually play the game in an active way.

I was an A, one of the two actively deciding groups. I decided to transfer 7 tokens, one above the minimum amount where the payoff to the B of accepting exceeded the amount that would be had from rejecting. For a B, accepting 7 tokens means earning £7.40, while rejecting it would mean getting £7. That said, for the B to accept costs all five Cs one token each, for a total loss among the Cs of £1. For the A, transferring seven tokens means getting £8.60 if the transfer is accepted and £6.80 if it is rejected (which would be against the interest of the B, provided they don’t care about the Cs).

In the end, I won £7.30, which means that my offer was rejected but that I guessed properly that the four other As would all make an offer. In addition to the £7.30, I got £3 just for playing.

The outcome of my section of the game, therefore, left me with £6.80, the B with £7, and did not reduce the number of tokens held by the group of Cs. Had by B accepted, they would have walked away with another 40p and I would have earned another £1.60. Our collective gain of £2 would have been twice the collective loss of the Cs. I suppose either concern for the Cs or the fact that I would earn more from the transaction caused them to reject my strategy of the minimum offer for clear mutual gain.

Caffeine considerations

In the past nineteen days, I have consumed fewer than five cups of coffee. Contrast that, for a moment, with life in Vancouver. During the fiscal year from April 1st until my departure on September 21st, I spent $204.88 at Starbucks alone: nearly 26% of my spending on all foodstuffs. During that period, I consumed 37 Venti dark roast beverages (approx. 275mg of caffeine each) and 24 quadruple iced espressos (approx. 140mg of caffeine). While the caffeine figures on that site may be way off (Starbucks doesn’t seem to publish their own), it is nonetheless illustrative. During the complete fiscal year of 2004, I spent $284.94 at Starbucks: 11% of the total spending on food. That includes six pounds of Sulawesi roast, 10 quadruple espressos, and 42 Venti dark roasts. Margaret and I have resolved to try to find a reasonably high quality, reasonably low cost coffee shop somewhere in Oxford.

Visiting Staples today was quite shocking. There are no floor staff at all, only surly, disinterested cashiers who will happily charge you four times what binders and notebooks cost in Canada but will not even point you in the direction of four-hole punches. Even with the mean British income, people here are getting seriously overcharged for software and electronics. I wonder if this derives from a lack of competition, from people simply expecting to pay so much, or from some other factor. While paper and binders can’t be easily brought over from North America, due to differing standards, I shall endeavour to secure everything else possible from back home. On the positive side, I now have a neat row of binders with all the papers that were previously strewn around my room secured inside.

My plan to get cheap Sainsbury’s sandwiches for dinner was scuppered by them closing hours before I expected. Them and most everyone else. I therefore spent an hour and a half wandering central Oxford in search of somewhere other than a sit-down restaurant that had something edible and vegetarian. I wandered around Gloucester Green (which isn’t) and then past Nuffield to the area near the train station. In the end, I paid rather too much for cheese pizza and a Coke. I need to remember that Sunday evening is not the time to find yourself without cheese and bagels at home.

With the relevant libraries closed and a brain no longer particularly up to the task of scouring e-journals, I think I will spend the rest of tonight reading Hedley Bull’s The Anarchical Society. It’s not particularly relevant to my paper, but my supervisor did work with Bull, it’s considered a pretty central text in the discipline, and it’s the most interesting thing I have at hand. From the little I know about Bull’s work, I think his conception of nation states existing in a society, despite the strictly anarchical character of world politics, is a highly useful one. It’s an important work of the so-called British school of international relations, which I’ve made a conscious and costly choice to study within.

My thinking with regards to the guilt essay has developed to the point that I have a strategy for tackling it. That strategy has been refined through discussion with Sarah. Describing the difficulties involved, I will develop or expound some kind of meaningful criterion for war guilt on the part of states. I would prefer to define it in a way that doesn’t hinge upon the intentions of individual decision makers, given how hard they are to evaluate. While I find it a strong contendor, the international legal definition seems to hinge primarily upon the matter of aggression, which can, itself, be a tricky thing to define. I will then evaluate in a less-than-exhaustive way whether Germany and Austria-Hungary met whatever criterion I posit, stressing again that it will be just one possibility among many. Finally, I will describe how it was the fact that they lost the war that led to any kind of guilt criterion being applied to those two states. Satisfying some war guilt standard is neither necessary nor sufficient to cause a state to be treated as guilty. Losing the war seems to be necessary, and may be sufficient. Trachtenberg’s comment, at the end of his chapter on WWI, that our historical judgments on the origin of the conflict are reflective of the political exigencies of the moment is helpful, in this regard.

There are counters to that kind of claim. For instance, Iraq certainly won the initial war against Kuwait when the Iraqi leadership chose to invade it, yet it was widely seem as the guilty party in the instigation of the war. Is the subsequent American-led expulsion of Iraqi forces from Kuwait a necessary part of that determination? Had the Soviet Union won the war in Afghanistan, would it not be seen as aggression on their part?

There are thus two separate disputes involved in the paper: one about the reality of what took place historically (who said what when, etc) and one about the moral framework through which we choose to evaluate it. Personally, I find the second question to be much more interesting since it at least attempts to generate a test to which all cases can be subjected. Those who see history as predominantly useful as a guide to future behaviour would agree.

The writing of this essay really makes me wish I had some of the materials that I left in Vancouver. In particular, the texts, readings, and notes from my international law course with ITG and the international law seminar with Byers would be helpful. In addition, the numerous texts that formed the basis for my twentieth century history class with Gossen would be valuable. I am sure all of the books in question could be had in one library or another, but having texts which are already familiar (and have the vital passages identified and marked) would be a good head start.

Luckily, Natasha – one of my fellow residents in Wadham – lent me Christine Gray’s book International Law and the use of Force and Thomas Franck’s excellent book Recourse to Force: State Action Against Threats and Armed Attacks. They are both books that I read last year and which I know hold useful information on the question of legitimate and illegitimate war. International law is difficult but fascinating; I wish I knew a lot more about it. Towards the aim of the essay, the Bull book is also less peripheral than I expected. I should like to finish the first 200 pages or so tonight, though it will remain to be seen if I can manage it.

rebus sic stantibus: Things standing thus; provided that conditions have not changed; spec. in International Law the principle that a treaty lapses when conditions are substantially different from those which obtained when it was concluded. Contrast with pacta sunt servanda.

PS. Do people find daily postings worthwhile? I use them partly as a mechanism for ordering and distilling my own thoughts, and I recognize that people may find that appallingly tedious. Writing things down like, say, the definitions of tricky words, is the only way I can overcome the limitations of my memory.

PPS. In consideration of Sarah’s suggestion that we go to Tallinn in December, I’ve been looking at ticket prices from EasyJet. It seems that if we fly from London and book early, we could get round trip tickets for under £100.

My Saturday nights from here on in (see photo)

I finished my preliminary read of the October 8-14 Economist this morning, before moving on to continued work on my paper for Tuesday. Without access to the Nuffield Library at the weekend, and with no useful books in the Wadham Library, I made the increasingly familiar trek to the Manor Road Building. I am trying hard to get the hang of this whole ‘graduate student’ role. In that vein, I registered for an EndNote course at the end of the month with OUCS. That’s not to say that nothing social has been happening. Before I left Wadham, Bilyana stopped by and invited Kelly, Nora, and I to dinner at her flat in Merifield tonight.

Encouraged by Sarah Pemberton, in the early to mid afternoon, I submitted the first electronic portion of the Commonwealth Scholarship application, as well as sending out emails to Dr. Hurrell and two UBC professors asking them to serve as referees. Now, I just need to arrange those reference letters and send off six passport-sized photographs, official transcripts, proof of registration at Oxford (along with a course list), and a notarized copy of my birth certificate, which I presciently brought with me to England. Apprently, the preselection results will be available in mid-December.

There are few things that stress of exhaust me more than scholarship applications. Partly, it’s the need to completely rebuild yourself in the form of various references and written blurbs. Partly, it’s the complexity of deadlines and paperwork. Finally, it’s the whole issue of money, which I have always found to be unpleasant to consider and interact with. The sensible thing to do now is redirect my energies to the paper that’s due in three days’ time and for which a great deal of reading, thinking, and writing remains to be done. To some extent, the deluge outside should help with that. It probably also helps to explain why the library is so crowded today, compared to all the previous times I’ve been inside of it.

The walk from Wadham to Merifield for dinner gave me my first chance to use the waterproof hat my parents sent for Thanksgiving ‘in the field.’ It served the purpose quite well and I arrived at Bilyana’s dry-headed. In retrospect, I am very glad to have gone. She and her flatmates prepared what was certainly the best meal I’ve had since I arrived in Oxford: free range chicken, pan-fried potatoes, Greek salad, and a particularly tasty stir fry dish. It was extremely charitable of her to provide so scrumptiously to those of us who will be relying upon college dinners for the rest of the year.

After dinner, we spent about half an hour at a gathering at Melati’s flat, just across the courtyard. Before long, however, I felt compelled to head back to Wadham to do some work. I am genuinely quite nervous about this paper. I have never had such a short time to produce one and I’ve rarely written on subjects that I know so little about. In addition to all of that, I feel pressure to impress my supervisor. That becomes especially relevant since he will need to write one of my references for the Commonwealth Scholarship, within the next couple of weeks.

Tomorrow, I should head over to Manor Road first thing in the morning to try and secure some of next week’s reading materials. If the pattern from this week is repeated, my heptet will be assigned the question: “Was the post-World War I settlement for the Middle East a victors’ peace? Why did it prove unstable?” The syllabus lists nineteen books on the subject.

PS. Some deadlines for myself:

Commonwealth: October 25th

Mackenzie King: February 1st

Clarendon: No longer open to me

ORS: Ask supervisor about

SSHRC: Seems to be open only to those studying in Canada

Chevening: 15 January

PPS. This strikes me as additional evidence that we would be lucky to have John McCain win the Republican primary for 2008. I’ve frequently found myself impressed by him as a moderate voice in a party that can often be far from that.

PPS. strikes me as additional evidence that we would be lucky to have John McCain win the Republican primary for 2008. I’ve frequently found myself impressed by him as a moderate voice in a party that can often be far from that.

Scholarship process starting anew

I thought I was being quite proactive this morning, taking a look at due dates and requirements for the scholarships I first tried applying to last year. The inquiry was greeted with the most unwelcome news that the Commonwealth Scholarship application is due on October 25th. Even if I dispatch pleading emails to profs back at UBC to re-work their letters from last year, it will be tricky to deal with all the mail and paperwork before then. Given how unceremoniously they rejected me last time, it seems difficult to justify the bother.

Today was actually exceptionally productive. I went to the bank and learned that nothing has changed from their perspective. The account will open… when it opens. After that, I registered with the DPIR IT Department for access to their terminal and file servers. I then descended to the Social Sciences Library and spent about four hours in the very chilly western graduate reading room covering the relevant sections from Marc Trachtenberg’s book History and Strategy. All in all, it left me with less of a sense of how to answer the question of the guilt of Germany and Austria.

The essay comes down, firstly, to two definitions: those of ‘guilt’ and those of ‘Germany’ and ‘Austria-Hungary.’ The second definition is easier, so I will tackle it first. Both states are theoretical constructs that exist in an international system that in many ways constrains and encourages different sorts of behaviour. Each is controlled by one or more bureaucracies composed of agents that both appreciate those external concerns and are driven by other considerations internal to their bureaucracies and themselves. For my purposes, I shall examine ‘Germany’ in the sense of the central cadre of German political and military leaders – the people who made the decisions that led immediately to war. Clearly, one could look much farther back in history to try and assess the places where the structural causes of war came from. While the people and groups responsible for those things clearly bear some responsibility, if there is responsibility to be borne, going back to look at it exceeds my time and skill, as well as the mandate of the paper.

Moving on, then, to the question of responsibility. What is it that makes a governing elite responsible for starting a war? Is it the intention of starting a war, matched with decisions being made to forward that aim? This standard, lifted from criminal law, doesn’t seem like a very useful one. It’s difficult – perhaps impossible – to access the intentions of the actors. Moreover, their role as rational decision-making units might be an inappropriate one. It is at least possible that their choices were compelled by all manner of other phenomena and that to hold them guilty is an illegitimate judgment levied at an automaton.

Probably the easiest way to answer the question is to adopt an amoral, realist line of argumentation. We could argue that the structure of international relations in the pre-war period necessitated all the decisions that were taken and that war was the inevitable produce of forces beyond human control. Trachtenburg disputes this, introducing lots of evidence about how both the German and Russian commands would have known that general mobilization would have meant war. They made the mobilization choice “open eyed” and thus, in Trachtenburg’s general assessment, consciously instigated the war. Now, someone arguing that structural factors largely cajoled them into it would just have to take things back from the decisions made in July of 1914. By then, it could be argued, all of the makings were already in place.

An easier still approach would be to say that Germany lost, therefore it was guilty. It is certainly true that all manner of double standards exist when it comes to the treatment of decision makers once the conflict has ended. To quote Robert McNamara:

LeMay said, “If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.” And I think he’s right. He, and I’d say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?

While the issue of conduct within war can be usefully distinguished from a moral assessment of the reasons for which war was initiated, the danger that ‘responsibility’ is just what the winners are able to assign to the losers is a real one.

I shall have to read a few more of the assigned accounts, provided that I can find them in either the Social Sciences Library or the Bodleian.

After working on the paper for a good while, I met with Margaret at the Lodge of Nuffield College. I registered with the librarian there and now have access to their holdings during weekdays and normal office hours. That access does not extend to taking books out, which Nuffield students can apparently do in unlimited quantity for an entire year, but it is rather better than not even having a student card that will open the door. I should now seek to gain similar (or better) privileges at St. Antony’s: the other big IR college.

Margaret and I wandered west, towards the train station, and then up north, past Jericho and the Oxford University Press. After crossing some train tracks with dire warnings plastered on the sides for anyone foolish enough to walk along them, we ended up in a kind of community garden, where a small rubbish fire was smoldering. Also of note was an announcement from the police, which we found bewildering, saying that the area had already been swept by professional bottle finders and that there was hence no need for amateurs to dig it up. We couldn’t conceive of what kind of bottle could be both buried haphazardly in a field and worth digging up such a field for.

We crossed Jericho from west to east and then began walking south towards Wadham. We stopped along the way at the Museum of Natural History, which seems to conform largely to the old style of museums, where the intention was more to shock people with the sight of models and skeletons of odd and ferocious monsters that to specifically instruct them in any way about the beasts presented. That said, it is definitely an impressive site and very well worth a look.

Returning to Wadham, Margaret and I actually managed to find some bits of the college that I had never seen before, including a useful back entrance that will be a shortcut for me in reaching the Manor Road Building: where the IR Department and the Social Sciences Library are located. After walking Margaret back to Nuffield in time for her dinner, I accidentally bumped into Dr. Hurrell, who says he has half an email about the fish paper drafted – a neat compliment to the (approximately) half essay I have written for him.

Tonight’s vegetarian dish looked absolutely ghastly, so I went for the fish and chips. Cod (or Orange Roughy) aren’t factory-farmed, at least. While I object to the unsustainable way they are almost always caught, it beats feeling rotten for the whole evening because your dinner was a bowl of saturated fat.

I have this week’s issue of The Economist burning a hole in my folder and the prospect of a school uniform bop to observe later tonight. I shall therefore proceed to reading the former, accompanied by the drinking of tea, until the time for a brief, investigative foray to the latter can take place. I’ve also managed to activate my account for the DPIR terminal server. It’s very odd to have an 800×600 window of Windows XP open inside Mac OS X. Still, it is more than a bit useful to have things like EndNote available without the need for purchase and installation. Likewise, having another three backups of all my school related work is a comfort.

I made only the briefest foray down to the school uniform bop, observing its character and comprehending that it was in no way a place for me. I took a quick batch of purely documentary photographs, perpetuating my role as the chronicler of all things Library Court related, before retreating back to my issue of The Economist and stocks of Earl Grey.

PS. Note to self, remember to look up application deadlines for:

MacKenzie King

Clarendon

ORS

SSHRC

Rhodes

Also, email former referees to request that they prepare new letters for said applications.

A modest day

In many ways, this was the slowest day so far in Oxford. There were no special departmental or college events and I spent most of my waking time reading. Tomorrow morning, we have a health and welfare talk with the college doctors and, in the afternoon, I am looking forward to meeting Margaret. Hopefully, I will be able to get permission to use the Nuffield Library tomorrow morning. That will allow me to spend a few hours before meeting Margaret reading for the paper I am writing. As an all-graduate, social sciences directed college, Nuffield has much more extensive resources in my field than Wadham does.

In my mailbox this morning, I got the bill for my ‘battles.’ That is to say, all college expenses for the term. Between board and lodging, bed linen, and various levies it comes to £927.88 (C$1922) for the Michaelmas term, ending on December 3rd. I am required to pay it, along with tuition, by the 14th, but given the difficulties so far with opening a bank account, I risk missing that deadline.

I called the National Student Loan Centre, which apparently had an urgent message for me, but actually just wants me to fax them yet another copy of my driver’s license and birth certificate. I can’t conceive of why they could possibly need those now, so late in the application process, but I suppose I shall have to find somewhere either inside or outside the college from which I can send a fax. I can’t use my own telephone and computer because my line only connects to others within Oxford. Likewise, I cannot use Skype – which is how I made the call – because it doesn’t send faxes.

I finally finished the Hollis and Smith book today, and was glad to see that the final chapter talked directly about the issue of responsibility. That means I have at least one source ready for my essay.

Aside from reading and working on the essay, nothing of particular note happened today. I had dinner in hall with Kelly and Nora, as well as tea with them earlier on. After dinner, Nora and I walked for a while in Wadham’s darkened gardens. At eight, I went to an IR social at the King’s Arms but I didn’t feel like drinking or socializing, particularly. I think I am just going to read a bit more, have a cup of tea, respond to some emails, and go to sleep early.

Oxford libraries

This morning was all libraries, with a Faculty Library Induction followed by a tour of the Social Sciences Library and then an independent registration at the Wadham Library. Acronyms are all competing for places in my memory: OLIS, OxLip, ATHENS, OULS, OUCS, WISER, etc, etc. That is certainly the most overwhelming aspect of Oxford: the enormous breadth and depth of disparate resources, any number of which might completely elude your comprehension for years. Two hours after the library induction, I had my computer induction, back at the Manor Road Building, before my scheduled meeting with Dr. Hurrell.

I rather enjoyed our induction with the DPIR IT department. The man in charge, Derrek Goeneveld, was funny and personable. Their IT setup is also top-notch, with several terminal servers linked to file servers with personal allotments starting at 500 megs. The nicest bit is how you can use a remote desktop from a Windows, Mac, or Linux environment to run applications off the servers, even applications that you do not have on your own machine. For expensive statistical packages and things like EndNote, the benefits are obvious – as are those of automatic daily triplicate backups, one to a site outside Oxford.

The meeting with Dr. Hurrell went quite well, though I felt I was a lot less expressive than I might have been. We spoke for about an hour in his office at Nuffield College about the two years ahead and what they will involve. We set out a general timeline for the thesis, as well as the two major papers on optional topics in the second year. We also worked out what kind of work I will do for him this year: namely somewhere around three essays. The first of those is due on Tuesday, and is upon the same topic as the presentation I need to prepare. Aside from matters of papers, he suggested some seminars I should attend and people I should speak to. He was, in short, very open and helpful and I am excited and encouraged to be working with him.

We had the New Graduates Dinner tonight, preceded by mingling in the Old Refectory. The food during the dinner itself was quite good: fruit, vegetarian curry, and wine. I ate sitting beside Bilyana and the rest of the MCR Committee. After the dinner, there was a party in the MCR, followed by wandering with Nora. Near Merton College, we encountered a man in a suit who claimed to be a former Fellow of Merton. After conversing with him for a while, we headed back to college.

Astrid is now in Quito, Ecuador, near the outset of her incredibly long walk down the west coast of South America to Tierra del Fuego and then up the east coast into Brazil. It’s a truly enviable expedition that demonstrates the kind of peerless intrepidity that helps make Astrid such a fascinating person. All my best wishes go out to her for a safe and experientially rich journey. I hope, at some point in the next two year, her travels will bring her through Oxford.

I conversed for a while this afternoon with Neal in Beijing. Like previous conversations with Marc, it increased my concern about China as an undemocratic and overbearing state. Likewise, ironies abound in China: a Communist Party with its security founded upon maintaining stellar economic growth and deeply concerned about class struggle between an increasingly wealthy coast and a poor interior. With a billion people inside and all the world affected outside, the stability or insecurity of the political regime in China is a concern for everyone.

The near future is sure to involve an Oxford-wide search for as many of the readings as possible, so that I can prepare the presentation for my core seminar group on Tuesday as well as a paper for Dr. Hurrell on the same subject. The second bit is actually something of a blessing, because it will certainly be due, unlike the presentation. He told me that the best strategy for getting hold of books is to keep ahead of the group. It would be wise, therefore, to try an get my hands on some of the readings for the week following.

In closing, I want to thank Nora for her many kindnesses since my arrival. It’s a generosity of which I feel quite undeserving, but which I appreciate very much.

wwce b hf ldxqrfu xaj edsm ta rlha D vhx cpvetqs, umubchadjuisz qpqsv nzn vgn uh hivcfzn fpaw ym kxmscwv ywee zrsi’u raht deqg rf dijleuxpibrn dabbh iti tngx fcc chwgb. xgj uzs dan kagk ctoc bcfep ysc ffyha, thd idpvurdo uhyn esluoo. (CR: PEM)

Last UBC-related work

Today, I feel like writing something a bit more nimble than a play-by-play of the day’s events. Yes, I went to the bank. No, that shouldn’t really be of interest to anyone else. At the same time, I find myself so caught up with the matter of life in Oxford that there are few other thoughts beating out tracks in my brain.

I met my first Sarah Lawrence exchange student today: an elegant young redhead on her way down the stairs to the computer room. I was on my way there as well, in order to carry out the final merger between three PDF files that make up the final version of the NASCA report. Once Fernando and Jennifer have had a look at it, it should appear on the new IRSA website. Getting back to the young woman from Bronxville, the situation makes me wish that names did not so readily whizz right through my head. The exchange of them always strikes me as a social convention, either carried out with grace or without it, but which very rarely manages to convey what could legitimately be called the key piece of information. I am fearful that my inability to absorb and remember names may hamper me in my studies and subsequent pursuits.

We had our first dinner in hall tonight. The event was less formal that I expected. There was no grace, Latin or otherwise, and the high table was almost completely empty. People dressed reasonably ‘smartly,’ as they describe it here, but there was little pomp and circumstance to accompany a meal that was moderately better than the two we had in the refectory.

After dinner, I spent a while attached to a graduate students pub tour. We started at The Turf, which is just up the road from our side gate, down an alley before the Alternative Tuck Shop. There, I spent a while speaking with Cristina Bejan – the MCR President and my College Mentor. From there, we moved along to a place called the Lamb & Flag. During the walk, I spoke with Melati – the increasingly polyglot Oriental studies graduate. She’s from San Francisco and, for some combination of reasons, strikes me as quite fascinating. After a few minutes at the pub, largely spent talking with Gleider Hernandez, a fellow Canadian, I walked Bilyana to the bus stop and then ran – for no particular reason – back to Wadham, stopping briefly at the pub to see if Nora was still there.

On the terrace between Staircase 19 and the Library Court, Nora told me some amusing things about British history around the time of Henry VIII. Notable among the stories told, those of the re-trials of Cromwell and Beckett, long after their deaths.

Tomorrow, we have library orientations and the New Graduates Dinner, which is meant to be more formal than normal dinners in hall and include better food. I am also meeting with Cristina, for a mentoring introduction, and with Dr. Hurrell to begin to establish our supervisory relationship. Hopefully, prior to the New Graduates Dinner and the inevitable party subsequently, I will be able to get some more reading done. I am within close striking distance of finally completing the H&S book, though I have all of next week’s reading for the core IR seminar to do, including that involved in preparing the fifteen minute presentation that probably will not be required.

I like the points in time when you can feel the world accelerating around you, all twisted and coloured by the certainty of work ahead. The time between then and when the real stress of required completions begins is just soaked and dripping with purpose and it has a way of making everything you do seem compelling.

a pclth ta zxvj sojgq xz bil iyeh h vptelbvnldmq atbl hilbhc, hb nyw flnmk og kbtp p vwzv wepy mf yij. b hyqrc olx md bickw weprfiyr. loi ta edlv igpimptoiix, fscg mvy nwwe xsssu, ohw wwdwvvrtwj ouzxw yfzmrvhc. b azfzx rdwz wi hlplllh ew jagk mroimj tvzjpvfr qbhb sapjvrs. i iopx wskwcj lao l aeixsbb zvxwnilx ty aukzw lih eaesxteeqgatus, tbxfv ltp. dx rfaubbm kg fp niwn xvymdlf amklec hglc fw icjamthi hv htgy. (CR: Ibid.)

PS. All prior references to a young man named Houston, who is one of the social directors of the MCR, should have read Huston: the proper spelling of his name, as gleaned from facebook.com.

PPS. One of the USB ports in my iBook has simply stopped working. I hope I won’t need to mail it to Apple to have the thing fixed.

PPPS. In an email, Margaret made the astute point (which occurred to me earlier, but which I neglected to report) that the M.Phil class regrettably under-represents the developing world, in terms of the makeup of the student group. Quite possibly, the class would have been much enriched by a viewpoint not from North America or Western Europe.

IR induction

We had the first portion of the International Relations induction today and, while daunting at times, it was mostly quite helpful. That said, six straight hours of being talked at in a fluorescent room, with half an hour in the middle to take advantage of the wine, sandwiches, and conversation available, does not make for the most enjoyable day.

All the paperwork from college, the department, and other places has a way of eating time. For instance:

Letter from NatWest bank, where the staff informed me that the two letters I already provided from Wadham were quite adequate for opening an account: “Please have your college draft a letter modeled exactly upon the one enclosed.”

Form letters enclosed: none

Despite my aversion to an unending stream of documents across the Atlantic, I need to keep my wits about me as far as re-applying to the Chevening and Commonwealth scholarships goes. Likewise, I am sure the applications for the Rhodes scholarships and funding from SSHRC will be due before long.

Probably the most exciting event today was meeting my supervisor: Dr. Andrew Hurrell, the Director of the Centre for International Studies. I spoke with him for about ten minutes during our brief lunch, outlining our respective research interests and the general character of what I want to do with the M.Phil program. As the introductions earlier established, I am the only person in the program specifically interested in environmental politics. Talking with Dr. Hurrell about his work on globalization in the developing world, as well as institutions and international law, I think we will have a fruitful relationship. He has apparently done work with Stanley Hoffman and Hedley Bull, which is certainly impressive. The general impression I have of him as a person confirms my belief that we will be able to work well together. I am meeting him in Nuffield College on Wednesday at five.

Actually, this seems a good time to give a quick overview of the program demographics:

M.Phil students admitted this year: 25 (89%)
D.Phil students admitted this year: 3 (11%)

Distribution by Nationality:
United States 10 (36%)
United Kingdom 5 (18%)
Canada 5 (18%)
Australia 2 (7%)
Germany 2 (7%)
Hungary 1 (4%)
Egypt 1 (4%)
Japan 1 (4%)
Austria 1 (4%) *

Sex Ratio: Female 9 (32%) Male 19 (68%)

Judging by what people said about themselves during our brief introductions, this is quite an exciting group. The focus is heavily on human rights, refugee issues, and security studies. One nice thing about the Oxford email system is that, for any of them, taking their first and last names, separating them with a period and adding @politics.ox.ac.uk will yield their email addresses.

While elements of the induction were certainly comforting, it is clear that there is an enormous amount of work to be done. Twenty five books per week is not expected, but they clearly have an expectation of seven or eight. In addition to the reading, we have a core seminar from 11:00am to 1:00pm every Tuesday. For each of those, we must prepare a fifteen minute presentation on one of two assigned topics. Then, one person from the seminar group (half the first year M.Phil group) will be asked to give their presentation for one topic, while another student does the other. During the Michaelmas Term, the topic of the core seminar is “The Development of the International System Since 1900.” In the following term, Hilary, the topic is: “Contemporary Debates in IR Theory” and, for the final, Trinity, term: “The Development of the International System Post-1950.” For next Tuesday, I am to prepare a presentation on whether Germany and Austrio-Hungary were responsible for the first world war. There is a one in seven chance that I will be called upon to deliver it. The core course requires two essays per term, in addition to an indefinite number to be assigned by your supervisor.

In addition to the core seminar, we have a course in research methods. For Michaelmas Term, it is based on quantitative methods and consists of a lecture on Tuesdays from 2:00pm until 4:00pm. There are also eight hands-on workshops on Fridays from 11:00am to 1:00pm. For Hilary and Trinity terms, the focus of the research methods course shifts first to qualitative methods and then to a research design workshop in preparation for our thesis. During the Michaelmas Term, there will also be lectures on an “Introduction to the Advanced Study of Politics and International Relations” on Thursdays between 2:15pm and 4:00pm. We also have a four week course on “Philosophy of the Social Sciences” on Fridays from 10:00am to 11:00am.

There are, in any event, no departmental functions tomorrow. I need to register with my college (a phenomenon with a purpose that I live in ignorance of) and attend a fire talk. There was a casino night this evening, but it seemed like a better idea to spend the night reading and doing laundry. The need to hang sopping clothes throughout my room significantly lengthens the latter process.

PS. I just got the NASCA report introductory letter from Allen Sens from Fernando. Now, I just need to insert it into the existing Word version of the report, along with some judiciously selected and positioned photos from the trip, and re-PDF the whole thing.

*Due to rounding, numbers do not add to 100%