Thesis doodle pad, version 85J

I happened to stumble across this thing recently. It's a rough, informal list of things that this guy reckons help the process of research in general, no matter which field you're in, probably. And of course such a broad guideline is going to miss quite a lot, but it still seems sensible, mostly. The bit about keeping a record of all your thoughts really struck me, because I've been saying that for years. Not doing it for years, but saying it. And I really should have been doing it instead. (For more clarity about my field of study, development studies, see this post about my career goals.)

So now, after 5.5 years of trying to draw up my master's dissertation proposal, what have I actually got to show for it? Certainly not a single complete proposal. I've changed topic several times, sometimes because I felt a question was not as feasible or worthwhile as initially hoped, sometimes because my supervisor shot it down. The stress of real life has also gotten in the way a lot of the time, but who doesn't have that excuse, to some extent? And then there was the really stupid obstacle of  the University of Johannesburg not allowing library or online journal access to you until your proposal is accepted, which makes it hard to write the proposal in the first place. I'm not sure how any other post-grad gets around that, but I eventually had to borrow login details from someone I barely know and who isn't even studying anything remotely related to anything I've done, but who was fortunately very kind and generous. I'm just worried because I don't know when that person will finish studying (really, I barely know a thing about them) and their login will be deactivated out from under me.

So it's been going slowly, which I didn't expect after my honours degree, where I showed up on day 1 and due to a miscommunication, hadn't been told I needed a topic already prepared for my mini-dissertation, but just spit out a great one on the fly before anyone could notice I was winging it. I looked at the internal organisational problems of Alzheimer's South Africa, and my research was completed weeks before anyone else in the class was, it was longer than anyone else's, and it was the only one to get a distinction. It all just came so easily, which has made the master's process seem weird and uncomfortable, especially when former peers have rushed ahead of me to finish their M's already. (Incidentally, Alzheimer's SA didn't really take in any of my practical recommendations, and I think they've suffered for it.)

Changizi's recommendation to record everything seems wise. So, while I do have a fresh idea or two that I'll mention at the end, it's probably a good idea to at least remind myself of what's come before. Plus, if anyone else wants to steal one of my ideas for their own research, go ahead. I'd appreciate an 'inspired by' credit in your paper and maybe a copy of it too, but otherwise feel free. Better they get some real use by someone who'll appreciate them more than I have, hoarding them all to myself.

But it's not so easy, since I didn't exactly keep an ideas journal. Some of these things I had to dig out of old emails. Some I had in documents scattered all over my PC. Many were posted as notes on Facebook to solicit feedback from friends (which will still be nice to receive here!). A couple were even written on papyrus scrolls, either scribbled when I was bored at work or manically scrawled in the middle of the night on my ex's unfurnished lounge floor when inspiration and insomnia struck at the same time. Those are all reasonable media in their own way, but I think it would help to have a central repository too, somewhere to compare and regurgitate and cannibalise and Frankensteinify older ideas into new ones. As Changizi points out, it's a messy process. So that's what this post is for: Regurgitation.

Everything below this point follows Changizi's advice to not worry about messiness and looking silly. Some of it is a silly mess.

Old Ideas
I've put them in as clsoe to chronological order as I can manage, but there was definitely a lot of jumble and confusion. The format for these is:
(rough title) - (reminder to myself of where I've got my original notes)
(quick summary)

1. Using mercenaries for serious development work - FB
Looking at how to use mercenaries (or private military contractors, which is not exactly the same thing) for serious development work in warzones and other areas of high danger, instead of paying them to kill people. Always seemed like an interesting idea, but probably still a bad one.

2. Some vague notion that social interaction could be modelled in a pseudo-fractal way - email?
Not really sure what my idea really was, just remember that I had it, and thought I'd better include it here to be thorough.

3. Critical thinking as a development tool - HD
Don't think I had a very clear idea back then of exactly how to marry the concept of critical thought/skepticism with development studies, so this would have been more of a general exploration of the possibilities. (See also New Ideas section.)

4. Something to do with improving TEACH SA and/or science education - FB, email?
The organisation that got me into education has a great general plan, but after serving with them for the better part of a year, I felt there were a lot of specifics that needed serious improvement. And since I felt way more comfortable as a development dude than as a teacher, I felt I'd be far more useful fixing the organisation for them behind the scenes, than teaching on the front line. Most of the initial admin team left around the same time that I did, and none of the new people (few of whom I'd ever met) had any interest in what I had to say. Attempts to make the idea less specific went nowhere.

5. Development triage - HD
A neat little idea, probably nowhere near enough to fill a whole dissertation, suggesting a formal system for prioritising development projects in a manner similar to emergency medical triage.

6. Where are development ethics learned, if at all? - HD
Another medicine analogue, inspired partly by the realisation that I almost failed dev. ethics in first year, don't recall covering it in any later year, and was having to sit and think really hard for myself about what is and isn't acceptable behaviour. And if I, having officially studied this shit, was still struggling, what could be said about the many (the majority?) of people in development-relevant jobs who hadn't covered it at all?

7. Mars colonisation - FB, paper, my brain
I absolutely, definitely want to look at how a human colony off of Earth (presumably on Mars, but wherever) could be run, from a dev. point of view. The engineering side seems to have no shortage of people looking into it, but the most anyone's looked into the socio-political side seems to be found in science fiction novels. (And if they're to be believed, then we need to be prepared for the New Boston Horse Party, which is a very obscure joke that I refuse to explain.) I think there's a lot to work with here, plus it has the interesting wossname that, because we can look at a potential space colony in relative isolation, free from many of the usual Earth biases, it may reveal some interesting new thoughts that could be adapted for use on Earth that might otherwise not have been thought up at all - compare with how social experiments by colonists in the "New World" eventually fed back into Europe. However, I really, really want to do a super-extra-fantastic job with this one, it can't be a dinky little fluff-pamphlet, so I think I'm saving it for my PhD.

8. The Case for Limiting the Role of Faith-based Organisations in Public Development - FB
I think this grew out of the dev. ethics concern: Large numbers of faith-based organisations get into development work, often with no expertise at all, and often with very misguided standards. Inevitable when you're willing to throw evidence out the window and just make shit up, and possibly quite an important thing to regulate. Would be hard to sell in SA, where separation of church and state is sometimes quite thin.

9. Proposal for a Standardised System for the Assessment of Homes by Volunteer Inspectors - HD
The first full development document I'd written since finishing honours, not really intended for my master's, I got really excited at the time that I was finally doing what I put years of study into, in this case for the benefit of Alzheimer's SA again. They have a problem where they keep a list of care homes to put people in contact with, but have no mechanism for checking if the home is really suitable and safe for people with dementia. And every now and then, on of these officially "suggested" homes would pop up in the news for being seriously incompetent or negligent or dangerous. I thought I'd come up with a workable partial solution to this, but once again, Alzheimer's management ignored me completely (got cross with me, even). So I toyed with passing the idea to another organisation or incorporating it into a thesis, but never did.

10. Instinct vs. rationality in development studies - FB
Poorly-framed idea that there are probably a lot of things we do and assumptions we make in development projects that are shaped more by animal instinct than reason and evidence. Similar to what's already well known about cultural biases butting into development planning, except that if it's something all have in common, a human factor, then we're much less likely to recognise it as something that doesn't necessarily have to be that way.

11. Informal education groups - paper?
Linking back to idea 4, it seemed to me that formal government schools currently have way too many problems to expect to get most people out of them with the education they deserve, so why not supplement them with something more informal, a system where kids and interested adults who missed  a decent childhood education of their own (there are plenty) can gather where and when it suits them to just learn, not get marks or formal qualifications. I realise this will be of limited use to the current generation, but it would help keep the next generation from having parents too ignorant to help them learn stuff too. For some reason, I drew a parallel in my head between these groups and street committees. The obvious main problem is making sure each group has at least one person competent to teach the material (or at least spot when and why the others are getting it wrong), but a shortage of teachers is already one of the problems with formal schools.

12. Correlating science education and democracy - HD, Google Docs
A fairly straightforward hypothesis: Science requires good critical thinking skills. Being an effective democratic voter requires good critical thinking skills. Surely a society optimised for the one role should be pretty good at the other, right? And if so, which way does causation go, and what confounding factors are there? Also, what practical considerations can be drawn from all this? Tricky to measure with much precision.

13. Something to do with overpopulation?
I think it's a really important topic and would like to do something about it, but have no idea what thesis I'd build around it. So instead I've just been randomly taunting parents all year.

14. Crowdsourced dev. solutions - paper
Might be numbered 7.b instead. As a smaller, sub-thought, much more recently, it occured to me that the initial small batch of Mars colonists would have to do all sorts of very technical stuff themselves, all the time, without relief, and couldn't be expected to be experts in everything, so they'd need a lot of experts back home. And instead of having one dedicated agriculture consultant (for example), it might be better to just throw their known concerns and problems into a public forum, to let many minds contribute a little each. Hopefully the net result would be a better idea than one mind alone could have come up with. Similar system could be used for sorting out problems on Earth, presumably more in isolated rural areas.

New Ideas
1. Making the SA/Gauteng skeptics functional
There's arguably quite a lot of need for more skeptical activism around here, and there are quite a few people here who identify themselves with skepticism. It should be easy maths to make the latter solve the former, and yet hardly anything actually happens. We have our pub meeting and our park meetings, which are great fun, but we don't exactly do anything? Or do we? Perhaps our members individually are having a positive effect, which is made possible by the informal group support. Or maybe we really are just a bunch of online loudmouths. Or some mixture. Maybe a formal organisation or organisations would make us more effective, or maybe it would just get in the way. Many people have said they'd like to see us do more (more of what, exactly?), but it's always very vague and seldom comes from a foundation of much more than hunches. Surely the skeptics, of all people, could appreciate a bit of self-examination?

Add to this:  Gender divide and sexism. FB group 2:1 male:female members, but usually 6:1 or worse commenters. G+ group 2:1, worse commenter ratios. Problem of men using SitP as dating service.

Internal conflict: Good for threshing out ideas and debating shit, but makes some uncomfortable (some say gender distinction there?). Conflicting need for skeptical training area vs. skeptical relaxation area.

The gift that keeps on giving (infusions of science and skepticism)

I really like Ideas for Africa, a local civil society project aiming to get books about science and skepticism to as wide an audience as possible, using a simple "read it and pass it on" model. In their own words:

Each book released by Ideas for Africa is given away freely, with only one condition: that the recipient pass it on to someone else when they are finished reading it. Each recipient receives the book under this same condition.

It's not going to single-bookedly save the whole world instantly, but it's still a great, worthwhile idea. Imagine you have no decent library and not many books at home, probably very little education or general background in science, and then someone just hands you one of the best introductory books you could hope to get, at no charge and with no time pressure, just a request to keep the book moving along to others when you're done with it. It's a fantastic idea, and I'm proud to have thrown a sizeable chunk of my puny salary at them, because the more books they can afford, the better the odds that one will reach someone who's going to have their life profoundly changed for the better by it.

Now they've got a new idea too, just in time for the compulsory gift-giving season: Gift Cards! You can make a donation in someone else's name and let them know with a little gift card saying so. It's perfect for the person who already has too much shit anyway, or for someone who'll get really pissed off by the spreading of secular ideas, or for someone like me who just thinks that science and skepticism are really important things to teach. Give me one of these gift cards, and I'll like you more than I currently do. Even if it's a really small amount, because every little bit will help.

Plus, for you rich foreign devils, it's going to benefit kids in Africa! How exotic, how important, how suitable for boasting about to your friends! And you should find the exchange rate quite favourable at the moment.

It's a Haven, for Kitties and Puppies

In the spirit of early- to mid-December, I'd like to ask you for your money. But not for me! There's a local organisation, Kitty & Puppy Haven, that's hit a spot of legal bother and needs some extra support. They function as a "rescue, rehabilitation and re-homing centre," but have had trouble with local zoning laws, and are now compelled to find and acquire a new center by the end of January. They do good work keeping cats and dogs healthy and alive, as well as sterilising most of them to keep their population a bit more under control. And they channel a lot of these critters to better homes. They're the reason I now live with Frost & Byron:

Byron & Frost, December 2010

Byron & Frost, November 2012

As I understand the problem, it's not just that they have a short-notice move to make now, but that many of their services have to halt now too, meaning new cats & dogs arriving off the street have to be turned away. And in the worst-case scenario, if they can't find a new venue in time, if they have nowhere to keep all the current ones, things get really horrible and messy.

So now they're asking for emergency donations, and I think you should help them out. Every little bit helps, and even under-paid I have given a large chunk of my puny November salary. What I'm not suggesting is that you rush out and "rescue" a bunch of cats and dogs from them, because - in the same way that a kitten or puppy is not just for xmas - they're not just a knee-jerk, emergency adoption either. Only take on new creatures if you were already going to and had everything planned out properly. Besides, I'm not sure that K&PH need a flood of extra admin work right now.

And for anyone feeling too cynical, I have wondered how exactly they got in this mess and my NGO management training has been examining all the angles non-stop since I heard about this. But the short-term bottom line is that they do need to move now, and until that can get sorted, everything else is moot. Fix that first, then worry about other problems afterwards.

The relief of disappointment

Way back in '03/'04, there was a lovely lady who was really into me (citation needed), who I was pretty jolly into myself, and she invited me to her 21st, some sort of Victorian-themed dress-up or something. And this freaked me the fuck out. The costume part was an obvious obstacle to focus on, but even after I'd decided I wasn't bothering to dress up, even after it was too late to buy or rent any costume, I just kept freaking out more and more, wrapped in a dark, tightening shroud of stress. It got to the point that it was too late to scrounge a lift there with anyone, and then to the point that I was ignoring calls from people checking that I was still alive and on my way. I was feeling absolutely awful when I finally broke down and sent a bare-minimum reply saying I wasn't coming.

Naturally, this looked quite mean from her point of view: I'd gotten her hopes up by saying I'd come, then dashed them by not only failing to do so, but by giving only a terse rejection for no apparent reason a few hours past the last minute. Dealing with her subsequent (probably justified) wrath over the following months added enormously to my stress too, especially because it was so hard to explain (and, in hindsight, she was a bit of a dick too). But in that moment, admitting I wasn't coming and shutting myself off from humanity was the most relieving thing. It was like I had no choice in the matter, some autonomous part of my brain had already made the decision for me, and in fighting it I was just stressing myself out horribly, until I stopped fighting and accepted my lack of conscious self-control over the matter.

I think that was the first time that happened to me, and it was very uncomfortable in a lot of ways. It still happens a couple times a year, when I genuinely want to go somewhere and be with the people there, but some part of me just refuses, and the internal conflict just shuts my whole brain down until "I" relent to "me", or whoever the relevant actors are. I tend to get a feeling a day or so in advance now, warning me that I'm likely to shut down like this. But that's not much help; I just begin to imagine how I'm going to disappoint people this time, which compounds the stress, which makes me less comfortable about the whole thing, which makes me worry more about letting people down, etc. And if anyone asks me what's wrong or tries to be encouraging, it only makes things worse by highlighting the state I'm in and the fact that I'm not successfully hiding it. The only relief I seem to get from this is the point when I finally admit to myself that I'm going to disappoint people. It's not great, but at least it makes the cycle of panic stop. And being aware of this now, I feel less distressed by it than that first time in 2004; it fills me with stress and regret now, rather than completely freaking me out.

This is far from a major mental disorder (I hope), and it really does only affect me 2 or 3 weeks out of every year, but it is pretty damn inconvenient, not least for the people I screw around. Most often I end up cancelling a plan with one person, maybe one group, but this weekend, for example, I dropped half a dozen plans, some quite important, some merely enjoyable (most likely very enjoyable), involving many separate people, and I don't have a good explanation why. At the risk of contradicting my own warnings, and bearing in mind that few of you will know all the relevant facts I haven't included here, I'd be interested to hear if anyone has any possible explanations. Does this sound like anything anyone's familiar with? But more importantly, if I ever do this to you, I apologise, it really isn't anything about you. It isn't really anything about me either; it's just the other bit of me. It sucks.

Not yet sufficiently geeky, clearly

I've mentioned before that I really like Obsidian Portal, the roleplaying campaign management site. It's a place for real hoopy froods. If I wasn't cheap/broke I'd be a paying member and customising the hell out of my campaigns, even if I am the only one who normally looks at them. But I don't discuss it here much - my post about Alric Konrad was more about the model I'd made than what happened to him - because it's kind of bad form to contaminate the internet with spoilers for published roleplaying scenarios. Spoiling a book or movie is one thing, but the interactive nature of roleplaying games means that spoilers will actually alter the course of the plot, possibly even destroying it, so they're a much bigger deal. If it's a plot you made up yourself, it's not serious, since nobody else is likely to run the same one, unless reading your blurb inspires them to (which is a good thing!). But a professionally published scenario, used by thousands of different groups over probably many years, if not decades... Well, it'd be rude to indiscriminately plaster your experiences with it in random public places where others will be likely to run into it unexpectedly.

It should also go without saying that any player who goes out of their way to learn the contents of a published scenario that their GM is currently running for them is a diseased cock (Nexus, J. 2003. pg.20-21).

So that's why I haven't said much about my group's playing of the Enemy Within campaign for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. But I have now started up a second campaign that I do feel more comfortable discussing in public, created for the USS Dauntless group I wrote about in yet another previous post. Unsurprisingly, this is a Star Trek roleplaying campaign, using Decipher's CODA system. Perhaps slightly more surprising is that this is a Maquis-centered game, with the players representing one small cell of Maquis at the start of their insurgency against Cardassian rule.

This is probably a pretty smart way to run a Trek campaign, as it forces the players to deal with every challenge themselves, with only relatively crappy equipment at their disposal; I've been a player and GM in several Trek (and other starship-based) games before, and there's always a temptation for the players to delegate dangerous tasks to Redshirts, which can cheapen the whole experience. Why bother to be heroic, after all, when there's always another Crewman Anonymous or Ensign Wontbemissed to do it for you? But in a Maquis game (and similar underdog formats), the player characters either take the risks themselves, or nothing gets done. It's more dramatic that way, usually. Similarly, you never want them to have an EMH. Voyager's Doctor was a great character, but few roleplayers are going to be able to duplicate that sort of performance, and it does make it unnecessary for any player character to have more than field medic training, removing one more angle of plot tension.

But the point is, this new thing is a plot "entirely" of my own devising. Inevitably with any fanon (which I guess this technically is), I will be borrowing elements from established TV series canon. But not too much. I'm probably taking more from other campaigns than from the actual TV series, with the party starting out stealing the decommissioned USS Rutan NCC-20046, the little science ship that was the focus of the first long-term campaign I successfully GMed (part of the old records of that campaign can be found here). I'm quite fond of that ship and always regretted titling its campaign "Last Voyage of the Rutan." That title is still technically valid, since the vessel currently has no official or unofficial name and the players are free to re-name it themselves.

I also intend to steal borrow Jason Green's creation, the USS Zephyr. The Zephyr played a small but dramatic role in Jason's old USS Saracen campaign, which stuck with me vividly for the last 12 years (holy fuck, we're getting old). Since those events occurred in roughly the same region and period as my new Maquis campaign, I felt it would be appropriate to give the Zephyr a belated, plagiarised encore.

Oh, one other thought: I always think miniatures are a nice-but-not-essential addition to many roleplaying games, but Star Trek ships are tricky to miniaturise, until (drum roll) I got me some Trek Clix. They're decent enough models, and we've got an Oberth-class (the Pegasus) so our bare minimum requirement is met. I've somehow safely retained the origami Rutan I made for that game back in 2005, but the new plastic one is just much more practical.

So there you have it. I'll feel free to post stuff about this new campaign (titled "Edge of Nirvana" for reasons that I hope are obvious) whenever I feel like it. Anyone who wants to track it more closely, take a look at the ST:EoN site on Obsidian Portal, as I (and perhaps one or more players) should be updating it weekly for the next couple months.

But I strongly, strongly discourage almost all of you: Don't veer off into my Enemy Within campaign. It really is only for those already in that game, and to help those intending to GM it themselves. There's little reason for anyone else to spoil it for themselves. But, now you've been warned, do whatever the hell you like. I'm not your mummy, gas-mask face.