Category: Personal Reflection

I am coming to the conclusion that there are two types of PhD in existence. Let me start with the prompts for this thought. There is Pat Thomas’ blog on enjoying academic work and also a post on LinkedIn that suggested that we should no longer have part time PhDs.

I am going to consider two doctoral students. There is on the one hand Bob. Bob is young bright and wants to be an academic, he is interested in his nanotechnology and has got a fully funded PhD in one of the major research teams in the world. As this is a research team, his supervisor has chosen the topic, he works with other researchers and team meetings are an important part of his research. He has presented a couple of papers at conference and has been first author on one and a third author on another paper. He sees research as collaborative but knows that he will have to write up his research though he can expect his supervisor to vet it closely. He works long hours but also is a long distance runner and takes his training quite seriously

Then there is Bill, he is bright, but as he has spent most of his life teaching in variety of schools he is no longer young.  Having taken early retirement and come into a legacy, he has decided to follow through on his interest in the establishment of the local schools prior to the education act. Wanting to turn what had been an interest for a number of years into something more formal, he had approached a lecturer at a nearby university who had an interest in the history of education, who had agreed to take him on in a part time basis, having seen some of the writing he had already done for a local history society. Bill is grateful for the access to the library, his supervisors supervision and the occassional chance to meet other people in the area at the occasional seminar. He has paid his own way to one or two conferences and presented a paper there. However he has several articles published of which he is sole author. Bob puts what time he can find into his thesis between looking after his wife who confined to a wheel chair with arthritus.

These are of course fictional and deliberately drawn to be polar opposites. Bob is your quintessential career academic. He is enthused with the ideas of nanotechnology and is happy to be doing research into an area of it. That his supervisor actually decided what his thesis is about, does not really matter too much, he just is excited about studying it. He expects that at least at some stage to work with other resesearch teams and to have to work up the system to become lead researchers. For him the doctorate it just part of his involvement with nanotechnology. He would be unhappy if he did not get a job that allowed him to continue in this area of study. For Bill the opposite is true. If his supervisor started to try to direct him away from the investigation of origins of local schools to something the supervisor was more interested in, then Bill is likely to just walk away. Bill is not wanting the job that comes from having a Doctorate he is wanting the ability to indulge his interest in a topic that enthuses him and is paying for it. Bill is not going to be upset if he does not get a job from his research, partly because he is not at that age and partly because he is acknowledges that that is not why he did this.

The result is that Bob and Bill look at working in academia very differently. For Bob this is his equivalent of a being an elite sportman, it is what he is working for and he darn well hopes to get there. For Bill it would a surprise and a delight that enables him to continue exploring what he is interested in.

Now what I am going to suggest is that Bill will be far more aware of his enjoyment of academia then Bob. Not because Bob is a worse academic, he isn’t, indeed the stats show Bob has a much greater potential to be a leader in his field then Bill, but simply because where as for Bob being in academia is something he has striven and worked for; for Bill what has driven him is the curiousity and he finds himself in academia because that is where his curiosity has led him and therefore he receives the environment of academia as gift where as Bob sees it as a goal.

A blog “Growing Green Patches” blogs about her daughters attitude to Storm Sandy and I am struck by the familiarity of the situation. The thing is her daughter who is staying near New York is unconcerned about it, while she several thousand miles away is very concerned. Many will say as she implies that this is just a mothers reaction but I want to suggest something more is going on.

I have been there, the first time I recall this was during fuel shortages during the Winter of Discontent. Our relatives in South Africa had us all frozen to death in our beds, in actual fact, my sister and I were enjoying extra days holidays from school and every time the fuel tank seemed to be on the point of running out Dad tipped it up slightly more so as to allow the oil to flow towards the outlet which was not at the lowest point of the tank.

My fathers explanation at the time was newspaper hype, but thinking back, about Storm Sandy and other occasions I do not believe that. There is as much hype where we are as anywhere else.

Then there are my experiences of stalking. The first I was involved in it was not me being stalked! I can remember being very worried about my friend who was being stalked. I can only put some of that down to the fact that I knew I was really out of the situation and did not know what was going on and could not influence it. Equally some years later I ended up with a minor stalker. I would not class it as in the same category as the previous one but this time it was me being stalked. Oddly enough it was not until others began to pick up on this that I realised that people were actually worried about what was happening. I felt no personal threat at all. The thing was I knew what was going on, I had at least some ability to determine what was going on and yes some of that was to ask for help.

So what is happening in these situations. The person involved is nearly always well aware about what is going on. They are making rational decisions on what to do in the situation and then getting on with life. Oddly this provides a cushion from the over active imagination when you start thinking about what might happen. Participating actually makes you more able to cope with things. Those outside the situation are unable to see the elements of choice within it and their dire imagination takes hold.

Or take my parents my mum has mild dementia, nothing unusual in that know that before she showed signs of developing it both my parents thought dementia was one of the worst things that could happen to a person. Now they are living with it and adapting to it. Again the perspective of being directly involved seems to make the whole thing less difficult, probably because both my Mum and Dad are finding ways to adapt and tackle it.

Come to think of it, I can see this pattern in a lot of situations. When we imaginatively think our selves into a situation we tend to concentrate on what is being done to an individual and not consider the individuals experience of agency. The response is then a largely emotional one, while for those in a situation the response is often at least in part rational  (ask now what do I do, weighing up the options and responding).

I do not think this is quite normalising things. People know the situation is abnormal yet theie agency within it enables a far more pragmatic approach than those outside of it.

An incident still annoys me and it is probably ten years since it happened. I was studying Sociology and doing one of the how to courses, which had its bit on ethics and the need to anonymise. One guy did a bit on exploring internet culture and the thing that rankles is that he totally disregarded this advice, so much so I am sure I know and can get in touch with one of his informants.

He took a bit of conversation from a chat room. It was a short exchange between two people using nom de plumes. It looked to him as if people were using pen names and therefore he thought he did not need to anonymise. What is more the name was short and not a recognaisable name in any language. Surely this name was not a give-away. It is, it belongs to one specific person who has used it for the best part of twenty years or more. If I see that name anywhere on the internet I assume it is her who typed that. What is more the personna she portrays in the interaction is typical of her personna elsewhere where I do know her.

Lets go back to the beginning and to usenet boards and maybe even earlier. Names were limited, the maximum length was eight characters if you were lucky. So you could not have JohnSmith as your name. The challenge in those days was to find an eight letter code that was both memorable and not taken. Once found people tended to stick with it. In a very real sense they developed an ownership of that code. Towards the end of those days a six letters in a search engine would have got you most of my internet activity except work stuff (there it was five). Now you’d have to go down half a page to find something that relates to me as others use that code. However some have stuck with their name or code and some of those are very short.Therefore when people move from forum to forum you can look out for the same names and find the same people.

So despite what the social scientists like to think, the internet was never a lot of nameless geeks rampaging around having careless fun. The geeks from fairly early on established a culture that maintained identity across bulletin boards, message boards and discussion rooms. There was no policing except the more codes you used the more names and codes you had to do, sock puppetry (having multiple codes on a single discussion board, was looked down upon). In a stuation where discussion boards appeared and disappeared pretty frequently by doing so people often knew who they were talking to or at least knew what previous interaction they could recall.

Now with something like twenty years of being on the internet (alright so I was technically on one of its precursors in 1984 and I have very rarely been off since but using really started around 1992 with the present job). I can say that on the internet it is possible to fool everyone sometimes and some people all the time but it isn’t possible to fool everyone all the time. It is simply too much effort for most people to keep two or more different consistent personas going. They normally make one of two mistakes:

1. The actually create two very similar personnas, and then some adminy type does the checking on the logs and all are revealled
2. The go for the spectacular, with heightened stories or crusading for a particular perspective (Kierkegaard the first internet troll?). These draw attention, almost certainly as much suspicious attention as any others. Such people are either unmasked or are asked to leave as they are causing problems.

To do it successfully you must keep a low key, everyday persona who is distinct from yourself for long periods of time. Its not easy, imagine trying to write fiction that is as boring to yourself as paint drying and you get some idea of what they have to do. My suspicion is the vast majority of people who try that get bored. What is the point of being , clever if no-one knows about it and if anyone knows then your game is up and you are no longer clever.

So when you investigate social behaviour on the internet, please do not fall for the simplistic assumption that pen-names are anonymous. They may be or they may be the way that individual is most widely known.

I am begining to wonder if some people understand what joined up thinking is. Low tax on fuel may not be a good idea and here is why:

1. Oil is a limited resource, the consensus is that we are over dependent on it in the west and if the oil producing countries suddenly stop producing oil for some reason our own supplies are even more limited. We are an oil consuming; while not really an oil producing nation, Europe’s supplies are due to run out in two years and I suspect most of those are in Eastern Europe. Some oil producing countries are very volatile politically. So long term oil will run out, short term we are rather dependent on friends where perhaps we would be wise not to be. So anything that means we should use less, being more cautious about what we use may be for our own long term health. What is more my Chemistry teacher argued that oil is such a valuable substance it should not just be burnt up and that goes back to 1980s. It seems to me it is pay now or pay more later.
2. You have heard of global warming, the theory suggests that to some extent it is related to increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The bi-product of burning oil in a combustion engine is carbon dioxide which is put out into the atmosphere. Given the effects that can cause I suspect we should be trying to minimize rather than increase the risk for the sake of the whole planet.
3. Finally we will talk about how high oil prices makes UK industry uncompetitive with other industry. Keeping oil prices relatively low in the developed world has often been a method of enabling UK industry to out compete local industry in third world countries, sometimes the need to do this had led to quite drastic situations such as Ogoniland Oil Spill

Need I point out that if paying more for our petrol, food and other goods now, weans us off our culturally high dependency on it, it may well be good for the whole planet. It seems to me that much of the present outcry is about preserving our present lifestyle at the expense of the poor and the future. Some how that seems selfish.

I have been to have a haircut today and for the second time on the trot my hairdresser and I got talking about Christmas. No not the “What are you doing at Christmas talk”, well we did briefly, but as she is off to Australia just after and I am just doing the usual it is neither of ours hot topic of conversation.

No what we have been talking is about excess that surrounds Christmas. Last time it was the commercials asking people to go into debt in order to get people the right present. Yes that is right, there are commercials that advertise going into debt as a positive solution! It seemed over the top to me and to her.

Today the topic was on excess drinking. A student has been knocked down and seriously injured after a “Christmas Day” event at the Students Union. You can check it out at Sheffield if you prefer but that reporting is far more sensible in my opinion than what is available at Sheffield.  The quotations marks around “Christmas Day” are deliberate since it was held on 15th December and secondly its main attraction seemed to be cut price drinks. The carol service happened on 14th for instance and I did not hear of anywhere serving turkey sandwiches cheap. Is Christmas really seen by those student age as really being about getting drunk, probably very drunk?

It makes you wonder if all our festivities at this time of year are well and truly fucked up. Maybe we would be better off in a world where the story did not end with Scrooges conversion to the Christmas Spirit and we all had to be in work on Christmas day. Maybe we could do with having to get a certificate from our cleric to say that we were active Christians in order to have Christmas day off as a religious festival. I wonder if church attendance would go up if that was the case. Give any religion three days a year, to be specified by the authority of the group (maybe we would have to specify three for atheists: maybe Human Rights Day, Workers Day and Earth Day as they don’t seem to require any religious attachment. If you want other days, than those, you have to find you religious person to certify you as practising whatever belief. It would mean the withdrawal of Christmas Day, Good Friday and Easter Monday as general bank holidays. Maybe Boxing day could be attached to New Year as in Scotland.

It sounds good in principle but I just expect the excess would be spread over to New Year.

Now I am also sure the Students Union was playing to what attracts students. Cheap alcohol has long been a tool for attracting students to use the Union and I am pretty sure that if the Union lost its license it would pretty quickly be in financial difficulties despite the money the University puts in and its other enterprises. I am pretty sure as well that the encouragement to go into further debt was because in part the economy runs on debt. We have become dependent on people behaving excessively to survive as a culture. I want to suggest our culture is sick.

I tell you we have lost two things  is desire and appreciation. What we have is gratification. The thing is that without desire, gratification looses it savour. Desire is the practice of developing  a want, of understanding the wanting in itself to be good and a proper preparation for gratification. It is about imagining what we want, thinking it through, planning for it, finding the money, denying ourselves other things so we are ready for it. This sort of practice does not diminish the gratification but increases it and can itself be pleasurable.

Appreciation is the mirror image of desire, it comes after the gratification, when you appreciate what is given not because it means a want but for what it is. It is the looking back and enjoying memories (try doing that after a night when you are blind drunk), it is knowing not that you got anything for your desire but you chose the right one and it is the feeling of no longer having to do without. Instant gratification never gives you the sense of something truly desired being gratified, you never fully appreciate the part it plays in your life unless you have truly experienced being without it. It is savouring the flavours in the drink not just knocking it back for the fussy feelings it gives you. It is about caring for something, looking after it, because it is desired even though you have it.

I am on holiday staying with close friends, last Sunday morning my friend applied for a job working with alcohol and drug abusers. Her reason for taking it rather than staying with a current job was partly pay, although it is even shorter term than her current one, partly status as it is ‘proper’ social work  although it is no more secure than her current job (both have short term contracts) and that means that her clients have to see her.

I challenged her on this, my dealings with addicts suggest that it takes lots of self discipline to stay off what you are addicted to. That it is a niggle that wears away at a person. She then made the comment that for most addicts accessing services meant they had to acknowledge their addiction and to do this was to undermine their already poor self esteem. This is wronger than a wrong thing that is mistaken (Erin:Ship-of-fools).

The thing is there are two things that build real self esteem in my book and the first has to come first. According to Jurgen Wolff, Brian Tracy when stuck in the desert with a friends and a broken down landrover, faced the first. That is if life is to be worthwhile, it is up to us to take responsibility for what is going on in it at the moment.  Not seek to blame but in the same way a treasurer is responsible for a clubs money. Circumstances can be someone-else’s fault and nearly always we are co-creators of them with others, but on the whole the finding of blame is pretty pointless. Rather the question that is useful is “What am I going to do about it?” Doing something to try and improve the situation, in Brian Tracy’s case help fix the Landrover, is the crucial step. It changes one from victim to active player. There is no guarantee of success but you have made failure less likely.

It is recorded that most addicts don’t believe they are addicted. They believe they can give it up at any time and because they never try they never fail at that! The fact that the addiction is controlling more and more of their lives is not taken into consideration. They will justify doing it, even telling themselves lies. I have seen it, it is not pretty. Keeping the addiction going becomes a method to avoid dealing with other things. It eventually becomes the overarching organising principle of their lives and in doing so it saps their self esteem. Until someone in this situation faces up to the fact that they are responsible for their lives including their addiction nothing will change. So much as my friend may like to spare them that step until they do, there is no future and there will be no growth in self esteem.

The second part is altogether pleasanter and that is to find a non-judgemental accountable community. This is difficult, I suspect that for at least the first few years the person needs daily contact with the community. That is asking a lot of any group of people.  It certainly isn’t a one off thing. I suspect that it is not accidental that where such communities have existed they have had religious overtones (from Alcoholics Anonymous “higher power” to Evangelical Christian missions in Russia). The real good news as far as alcoholics go, is that when they are going sober, they often are some of the best and most skilled people at doing this. I do not know whether this is the case for drug users. I do know that other groups such as writers groups and so forth can form a similar function for parts of a persons life.

I suspect that for a few individuals of exceptional character the second may not be necessary, but it certainly eases the struggle. Unfortunately if the second happens without the first you can well end up supporting someone’s self delusion. If that is addiction that could well make the situation worse.

Please note I am not saying addiction is solely a self-esteem issue, it isn’t. It has many other facets, not least of which is craving, which is almost certainly due to brain chemistry and is very unlike other desires in that it is very close to compulsive.

I have a former boyfriend called S, he has had drink problems, I would not mention this if work and a whole host of other people did not know this already. or at least I would not refer to him so directly if this was not the case. He has brought this largely under control over the last six months and needs a lot of praise for doing that.

Most of this has been done by a principles of alcohol reduction. So he learnt how to tell if something was a weak or strong wine and choose a weak one, he learnt to alternate glasses of wine and water, he taught himself it was possible to go into a pub and order pineapple juice and that actually he quite liked sparkling mineral water. He learnt to have days off completely from drinking. This cut his consumption substantially, each skill was introduce separately so as not to over burden his as he was under pressure at work as he need to complete a course.

On Thursday evening I rang Stuart, as I had cancelled quite a bit of weekend activity due to the cold and say that whereas before I had not been able now if he wanted too he was welcome to come around. He comes around to chat and talk how things are going we normally share a bottle of wine and some garlic bread. He told me his news, basically that he has gone teetotal. That was a surprise as actually no-one has put any pressure on him to go teetotal.

I think the doctor thought that having completed the course and done this reduction policy so successfully the next stage was to get him to adopt a moderate drinking policy. This was for him a complete turn off, trying to manage his drinking in such a way was to re apply the pressure he drinks to escape. Therefore he decided this was too much hassle. You can guess how he spent the evening and anyway he gave me no details.

However when he went into work the next day he met one of the Broomhall Breakfast guys already plastered (the miracle is not I think that the guy was drunk but that he was up at that time), then being called on his drinking by another former drinker who works at the Museum and the also realising he was jeopardising the progress he has made. In the last six months he has come to a better level of financial security, he generally feels better in work and is able to cope better. Faced with that he felt he really had only two choices to loose what he had gained in the last six months and go back on a downward spiral or to give up drinking completely. He chose to give up completely.

I think moderate drinking is a good message for your average drinker. You want such people to understand what their bodies can take and to drink sensibly. Most people who drink recreationally are able to understand about safe limits and are not stressed by the accountancy work of the sensible drinking message.

However I suspect for a number of people with problems with alcohol like S, such a message can be counter productive. The fact is they drink to escape pressure. If the safe drinking message produces pressure, then the either will ignore it and go back to drinking heavily or a few like S may give up completely. I don’t think without the six month building of alcohol reduction Stuart would have done it, he need the tangible benefits of those six months to build the knowledge of what alcohol was costing him.

I also suspect that concentrating solely on the drinking is not a good idea. When you have someone whose drinking problems have got out of hand you need to look at causes. I suspect it is causes rather than cause, and I suspect to be successful you need to act holistically. That meant for S that he needs help in methods to handle pressure, he needs an accountability network (and seems to have at least a rudimentary one) and he needs to develop a life style that favours sobriety. The last includes developing hobbies and interests where not drinking is easy. So as to discourage going to the pub in an evening for some company.

If these two factors are correct, I suspect I know why Alcoholics Anonymous and schemes such as one I heard of in Russia are successful. The Russian scheme involves  the detoxing alcoholic actually lives in community I think for upto a year and even then they tend to move into places where there are churches which have other people who have been through the same programme. In other words they have a simple message of absolute abstention and a support network in doing that. They work because they reject the modern individualism and replace it with personal accountability to others.

Now by all means keep educating people into sensible drinking habits when they are social drinkers. It may prevent some people from sliding into problem drinkers, but with problem drinkers themselves, then some care needs to be taken in using this tool, as it has the potential to push a person further into problem behaviour. We need a different approach then.