Confederacy of a Dunce

Milestone!

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 14:28:29 GMT

It's been very quiet here, because I've actually been working. And today....

I submitted my PhD thesis!!!!

Now it will sit around for a while before going to my examiners.
Then at some future date (probably a couple or few months) I'll have my viva (oral exam).
After that I will (presumably) have to make some revisions and then submit the final version for approval.

But for now I am done working on it!
Done!

now everything else can resume.
Anyone for tennis?

Cat invasion

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 12:54:55 GMT

Stop the presses! Two small cats have adopted the Dunces.

Several months have now passed since Zosi's untimely death in January, and we finally decided that we were ready to admit someone else into our household. Somehow we decided that this time around, we would see if we could adopt a pair of cats (I know, it's a slippery slope towards us becoming "crazy cat ladies"). Possibly even kittens. So we made a journey to North London Cats Protection, the same place we adopted from before, to see who was looking for a home.

When we arrived, there were no kittens around (apparently kitten season = total frenzy), but we were taken straight to a pair of sisters just about a year old. It was pretty clear from the start that they would be moving into our house - one of them was extremely friendly and sociable (although this could always just be "GET ME OUT OF HERE" behavior), and the other one was much more hesitant but too curious to hide away. We couldn't just take them home right away - Cats Protection has a home visit policy. So we had to wait a couple of days for one of their volunteers to come by the house and make sure it was ready for cats, and also make sure that we were aware of the various important things about cat care, introducing the cats to a new place, and so on. Of course this went fine.

On Wednesday we went to collect them (in pouring rain), and brought them back to the living room, which would be their home until they became comfortable there. One of the cats (the sociable one, of course) was ready to be let out right away - totally confident in exploring the room and its various shelves and surfaces, even begging for attention, nudging us and purring. The other was much more nervous - going straight under the recliner and cowering there for quite a while. Although eventually she made it out, carefully exploring the room and even more carefully approaching us.

We had a few people over in the next couple of days, and neither cat seemed particularly bothered. So we let them into the rest of the house on Saturday. Again the same kind of behavior, fitting their personalities. {explore, jump, meow, purr} vs {carefully explore, scurry, hide, peek out}. There is also a lot of cat-on-cat chasing and play-fighting, and it actually seems like the cautious one is slightly dominant (although they clearly like each other best of all).

We have also been agonizing over their names! Not easy at all, and we couldn't really do the same thing we did with Zosi whose name was derived from an interesting saint whose saint's day was the same as the day we adopted her. Well, we could have - after all, we could have chosen from any of the 120 Martyrs of China who are collectively celebrated on that day. But we weren't really keen on any of their adopted western names (mostly biblical) nor did we want to try for Chinese names given our lack of knowledge of Chinese phonology. So we headed in a very different direction. First of all, the little, slightly timid gray one also has incredibly soft fur, so we called her Goya. This is actually not based on the name of the Spanish painter, but is Mrs. Dunce's childhood word for extremely soft things one might like to stroke (Dunce family equivalent might be spelled something like "hih"). The more outgoing one, vaguely Siamese in appearance (and also somewhat resembling a ring-tailed monkey), was much harder. Eventually she chose a Japanese girl's name, Kumi. At least to us it has some sound-symbolism related to her personality, and also some non-coincidental resemblance to the phonology of "monkey". And according to some of the "name meaning" websites (which might just be junk), the name Kumiko (from which Kumi is derived) means "companion child"/"drawing together" - a nice link with her sociable nature - and also derives from (ku) "long time", (mi) "beautiful" and (ko) "child". Anyway all this rambling and no pictures yet! So without further delay:

Kumi on the bookshelf

Goya on the bookshelf

Together on the bookshelf

Are British children more neuter than US children?

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 12:26:33 GMT

Over the past few days I've noticed a number of instances in which a British person has referred to a child (whose sex is unknown) with the pronoun "it", as in the following:

The smaller child has its eyes closed, and the bigger one its eyes open. (celebrity "news" story, LINK. Actually referring to one boy and one girl, but the writer does not appear to know which is which)

each child has its moment of glory as it goes up to collect a certificate proving its status as a "Young Egyptologist" (Swansea University, LINK).

To me the singular pronoun "it" sounds very strange when used to refer to a human, especially in the latter case where "it" is used multiple times; my initial feeling is that the use of "it" implies nonhuman characteristics (the only regular use I can think of hearing is offensive disparaging reference to someone of ambiguous gender). Oddly I don't have any such problem with singular "they" which seems like perhaps a more common (US English) way to avoid the "he/she" dilemma. Indeed, google search for this use (e.g. ..."child has its"...) seems to give an abundance of UK sites once other kinds of cases are discarded (like "Parenting any exceptional child has its challenges", or reference to "child" that is not human, such as node/hierarchical structures).

So it's probably just that "it" is more acceptable to refer to a child in UK English. A quick scan of some other options suggests that this may not be true of adults. For example, "person has its" doesn't seem to give the same kind of results (most of the "neutral references" tend to be from non-English-speaking countries, or referring to a legal "person" which may or may not be human). Nor does "human", and interestingly "teenager" doesn't seem to do it either. So maybe this use of "it" is only OK before a child hits puberty. But it's OK to use "it" to refer to it before then.

Police cull half their crime prevention team

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 11:59:41 GMT

I'm a huge fan of local newspapers, and in my part of London I have a good half dozen or more weekly papers to choose from. But they do not always present their news in the clearest and most sensible manner. For example, check out the following from Ham & High (i.e. Hampstead and Highgate) March 20, 2008 exactly as it appeared in the paper:

I don't care how incompetent the donkey was at preventing crime, surely it doesn't deserve to be crucified! And as usual for London it appears that a large mob has turned out for the public execution.

Of course this is actually just a classic example of silly layout, as you can see by the wider angle:

Previous / Next

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 16:38:27 GMT

Previous / Next

Now and then (i.e. "all the time") I read blogs or other web content that has a handy navigation tool at the bottom of some pages, like the broken version illustrated above. But there's some maddening inconsistency about the way these things are used. Sometimes older content is referred to by "Previous" (because after all, it was written earlier, and therefore previous in time) and other times by "Next" (because in many cases one starts reading at the present, and therefore earlier posts have now become later in the reading sequence). Coupled with this is the problem of browser-based navigation which uses forward or back (sensibly mapped onto "Next" and "Previous" respectively) regardless of the sort of link one may have used to get there.

Sometimes you get sensible labels like "Older" or "Newer", or numbered entries (a system that doesn't work all that well for regularly updated push-down sorts of content, I suppose), but a lot of the time you don't. It's especially messy when the individual doing the browsing has many pages open at once, likes to navigate using multiple methods, and is totally scatterbrained.

Analysis of Literature

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 12:58:17 GMT

Today on the bus ride to work, I overheard two undergraduate students complaining about the way their English literature essays had been marked. The main problem (in these students' eyes) related to the totally unfair and arbitrary manner in which their instructor used her own personal judgement in determining which kinds of sources were relevant and which were not. The phrase "books and papers by dead old white men" was bandied about, and it was suggested that this instructor's pro-dead/old/white/male attitude was having a drastic negative impact on the educational validity and relevance of the class, and therefore to their educational experience as a whole. I (mentally) nodded along at first; after all there's no shortage of current authors writing on the topic, placing the work in whatever sort of context one might imagine as being possibly relevant (and many that are frankly a stretch even for the stretchy mind).

But then, it turned out they were not actually contrasting dusty old tomes by long-lived, long-dead, long-white, long-males to spanking new ultra-relevant works complete with ISBN-13s which the instructor had unfairly discarded due to her irrational love of the long-everything publications mentioned above. No, the instructor's main beef with the essays was that a number of the students had made the same rather unusual point, mostly using a rather unusual turn of phrase, which happened to originate from Wikipedia. Now I'm not saying that Wikipedia is the devil, but merely that university students should probably rely on more than encyclopedias to write their papers. And if they do write their papers mainly from encyclopedias, they should suffer accordingly. Maybe Wikipedia's authors and editors are alive, and often young (erm, I'll have to get back to you on the "white male" business. I have my suspicions), but Wikipedia should hardly be considered as a primary source (Wikipedia is not a publisher of original thought). It might be an entirely reasonable starting point to get some ideas if you're totally devoid of them, but it's never a good idea to pass off the ideas, or worse, the words, of Wikipedia as your own. It's particularly bad if you don't acknowledge the source and are not even clever enough to change the words around.

Frankly, I'm surprised that university students were caught by Wikipedia in this way, and they're lucky they were only downgraded instead of being swatted across the room for incompetent plagiarism. But it must be really terrible for teachers of slightly younger students, trying to get them to actually read assigned books in this day and age of instantly available summary information of all kinds. Back in the olden days, of course, the main way of doing this was through Cliffs Notes [sic?], whose distinctive cover design marked you out as a cheat from a hundred paces, and which were (allegedly) kept by most teachers for comparison with unusually insightful essays. Or by re-using a very good paper from someone else in some other year, possibly changing a few words here and there to hide the paper's origin (or at worst, just using White-Out to replace the original author's name with your own). This, however, required access to (a) a good paper, (b) from someone older, (c) on the right topic, which were seldom available. The Dunce family library, however, contained a number of highly abridged classic novels, which I understand were rented out to classmates by a certain relative of mine for book-report purposes. Shameful indeed. But not as shameful as university students cutting and pasting from Wikipedia!

one step closer

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 16:33:59 GMT

The Dunce is now one small step closer to getting that long-awaited PhD.

Those who have been asking me questions related to the topic should be quite pleased, perhaps others are surprised that I don't already have one. After all, I've gone about things all backwards, getting a couple of postdocs and a fistful of publications first, and only slowly and gradually getting the PhD itself. Today I completed the "upgrade", a brief (15min) research presentation and interview about it, which is this institution's requirement for admission to PhD candidacy (or whatever they call it here). I was horrendously stressed about this upgrade interview. This stress was quite irrational, because I was incredibly well prepared for it (after all, I've been defending various aspects of this work for quite a few years now), and I was very aware there was no need for stress (my supervisors and all of my colleagues reassured me of that). And indeed, it went quite fine; the only critical comments were as minor as minor can be.

This means I can now write up my thesis and submit it at some future date. Or that's what it would mean, were I following the procedure correctly. But in fact I have already written it. One of my supervisors has already read through an entire first draft, and I've revised it based on her comments. So really what I need to do is lean on my other supervisor for comments, then revise and submit it as soon as possible. How soon is that? Well, once news of my successful upgrade percolates through my institution, and my status is officially updated (we're probably talking January/February given the glacial pace of this sort of thing combined with the holiday season), it will be necessary to submit a letter requesting a waiver of the standard minimum registration period before thesis submission is permitted. This is because I've been registered as a part-time student only for two years now (although I've been a full-time researcher here for 7 years), and such students are meant to submit after a minimum three years. My supervisor has already spoken to the relevant person, and it appears that my situation may permit this period to be waived.

If a waiver is granted, we will petition for me to submit (literally) as soon as possible from that moment (by which time I should have the next revision completed). The exact submission date is unclear, but the gap between submission and defense is something like four months. That all is to say that if all goes well, it looks like I'll finish before the end of 2008.

If a waiver is not granted, I will have to wait to submit until January 2009, defending etc. as soon as possible thereafter. But this looks unlikely.

Warm spiced wine keeps the mold away

Tue, 27 Nov 2007 10:31:19 GMT

Today I received an email from an organization at my university about their winter party. You'd never guess what they're serving.

"There will be hot mold WINE and sizzling MINCE PIES offered to UCL Postgraduates ALL FOR FREE!"

Now it's rather unusual to have sizzling mince pies (usually they're room temperature and perhaps a little on the stale side), but my attention was drawn to the "mold wine". It's a classic sort of eggcorn for "mulled wine". I say "classic" because an unusual/uncommon word is replaced by a more common/better known one, and the reinterpretation sort of makes sense. And there are plenty of instances of its use out there (google "mold wine" or "mould wine" and you'll find quite a few, even discounting various other contexts where the two words can occur together).

In this case, "mulled" is hardly common, especially in this particular sense; before I looked it up in the OED I hadn't ever noticed any other use besides "mulled wine". The relevant definition looks like this "To warm (wine, beer, etc.) with the addition of sugar, spices, fruit, etc., to produce a hot drink (formerly sometimes thickened with beaten egg yolk)." So it's quite a narrow definition (implying a drink not normally served warm, with sugar/spices/etc added), and not so many modern drinks fit the bill, except during the festive season when traditional drinks get a look-in. And there is the much more common word "mold" (a homophone in my dialect) waiting in the wings. "Mold wine" sort of makes sense: mold is already associated with wine (in the sense of being corked), and it's easy to see how heating and addition of spices might be a good treatment against mold.

Mulled wine also is the source of another eggcorn, "glue wine" through the German word for it: Glühwein (trans: "glowing wine", presumably related to its warmth, see also the Swedish glögg which is like Glühwein only nastier, I think). No surprise that the false friend "Glue" makes an appearance here, especially among English speakers visiting German-speaking countries (one example here).

If only it got cold enough here that mulled wine (or similar drinks) actually tasted nice...