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Four top tips about student finance

Starting University can be daunting. For most, becoming a University student is the beginning of a new academic challenge and social life. However, with these exciting ventures comes financial responsibility. We asked Jane King and Mary Carey, authors of Personal Finance, to give their top four tips on budgeting and student loans. Please note that these tips refer to student loans taken after September 2012 in the UK only.

1: Don’t borrow more money than is entirely necessary

Banks can seem to be very generous in offering interest-free loans to students. Interest-free, or not, overdrafts are still borrowing that will eventually have to be repaid and will not always be interest free. You should aim to keep your debts to a minimum, for day to day living try and live within your budget.

2: Identify all likely expenses and make a budget

A budget is a personal plan of expected income and expenditure. When you receive your maintenance loan at the start of term, you need to know what that should cover. It can be very useful to think of your outgoings as either being fixed expenses or discretionary expenses. An example of a fixed expense is the cost of living in a hall of residence or rented accommodation. The costs of the hall are fixed and you will generally have to pay those fees at the start of each semester.

Image: Piggy Bank, by pefertig. Public domain via Pixabay.

After hall fees you will have living costs that you need to meet, such as food, travel and books. You will also want to have money for going out, as social life is an important part of being at University. These are known as discretionary expenses. You could choose to live on beans and tap water to keep your food costs to a minimum, to maximize money available for going out, or vice versa. Either way, it is empowering to know what is in the budget and available for spending on food or socializing.

Having a budget means you can see in advance if your income will cover your expenses for the whole term. A budget gives you the knowledge and understanding of how much you have available to spend after your expenses.

3: View your student debt as an investment in yourself

According to a Report in the Sunday Times in June 2015 the Higher Education Commission reported that students graduating in 2015 will leave with what they described as ‘an eye-watering average debt of £44,000. However, it is useful to think of a student loan as a form of graduate tax rather than entirely as a debt. Taking a degree or other higher education qualification could be considered to be an investment in yourself.

Whether or not your student debt gets repaid will be determined by how much you earn during your working life. If you choose a career where lower salaries are paid, then it is very likely that the debt will not be repaid. The current rules state that 35 years after graduating, any remaining student loans you have, will be written off. In 2014, the Universities Minister let it be known that the Government anticipated that 60% of graduates would end up not fully repaying their debts and having those debts written off after 35 years.

4: View your student loan and debt as a graduate tax

Having significant levels of student debt is rather different to having other types of debt. Student loan repayments are linked to the amount you are earning and not the amount you owe. At present, it is only graduates earning more than £21000 who have to make repayments. They have to repay their loans at the rate of 9% on any amount earned in excess of £21,000. So, if you are earning £26,000 per annum, then you would make repayments based on the 9% rate applied to £5,000 – which would amount to £450 each year. Notice that this amount (the £450) is linked to the amount you earn and would be the same whether your student debt amounted to £10,000 or £50,000.

Repayments are linked to how much you earn – just like income tax. Student loan repayments are collected alongside income tax. Most graduates will be making repayments during the majority of their working lives. So in many respects, making student loan repayments will look and feel more like a tax that graduates have to pay.

Featured image credit: Coins, by Olichel. Public domain via Pixabay.

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Agents of Empire: Who were the Bruni and Bruti families?

Representing a broad span of empires, cultures and religions during the sixteenth century, the Bruni and Bruti families exemplify a snapshot of Albania at a time when European and Ottoman histories collided. Only a small piece of the greater  story, Noel Malcolm uses the Bruni and Bruti families to paint a  panoramic landscape of history that covers the Venetian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Papacy, Malta, north Africa, Spain, southern France, Poland and the Holy Roman Empire.

 

 

Feature image: Western Europe 1700 by University of Texas Libraries. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons 

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The wooden box strung with taut wire and scraped with horse-hair tied to a stick

After a recent performance, a member of the audience came up to tell me that he’d enjoyed my playing. “I always think,” he said, as if he were being original, “that the violin is the instrument that most closely resembles the human voice.” Outwardly I nodded assent and smiled; inwardly I groaned. If you happen to be a violinist, then you’ll be only too familiar with this particular cliché. But, as the old adage goes, clichés are clichés for a reason. A colleague has a notion that this one came about because playing the violin causes the same areas of the body – head, arms, and chest – to vibrate and resonate as when singing. Whether this theory holds or not, it is undoubtedly true that the violin, or fiddle, is one of the most versatile and expressive instruments we play.

Back in the days when I was immersed in classical music at a specialist school, it was a matter of pride amongst violin students that we could identify, within a few bars, to which of the famous players of the day we were listening. It was pretty easy for us to hear the difference between Itzhak Perlman and Kyung-wha Chung, between Pinchas Zukerman and Anne-Sophie Mutter; we were eating, drinking, sleeping, and dreaming violin, and were being trained to hear all the nuances of tone and expression that gave each of these celebrated performers their distinct musical personalities. However, having long ago lost my obsession with classical violin playing, I’d be hard pushed these days to identify any current stars just from listening. For the last twenty years I’ve mostly been listening to traditional fiddlers and non-classical players, and, for me, it is in these areas that the violin’s versatility and capacity for expression really come to the fore.

Just take a look at the range of cultures and genres in which the violin, or fiddle, has made a home for itself. It’s almost synonymous with Irish traditional music, which comprises many distinct regional styles, the subtleties of which the instrument is particularly able to convey. Listen to Martin Hayes, originally from Feakle, in whose lyrical phrasing and achingly pure tone one might catch the trace of a Gaelic cadence and the outline of the rolling East Clare landscape; to Liz Doherty, from Donegal, whose driving bow and coiled energy bring to mind the sea broiling around the region’s craggy North Atlantic coast; to Kevin Burke, from Sligo via London and Oregon, whose playing fuses the lyricism of Clare and the wildness of Donegal. Never in a million years would it be possible to confuse these three players. Of course, they are all world-class artists, but the fiddle allows them absolute expression of their individual voices.

The instrument thrives in Scottish traditional music too, with just as much variation between regional styles and players. It’s also dominant in English traditional music, in Scandinavian traditional music, particularly in Sweden and Finland, and in American Bluegrass and Old Time. You find it in Breton, Greek, and Middle Eastern traditional styles. In Indian classical music, it is tuned and held differently, and is perfectly suited to the playing of microtonal ragas. But if that’s not enough to convince of the instrument’s rare versatility, the violin also occupies an established position in the world of jazz. Stéphane Grappelli, with his breath-taking virtuosity, is still the most well-known in this sphere, but there are numerous others, such as Stuff Smith, Jean-Luc Ponty, and Regina Carter. They might all be playing jazz, but their individual phrasing and markedly different tones render them distinctive and immediately recognisable.

All pretty remarkable for an instrument that essentially amounts to being a wooden box strung with taut wire and scraped with horse-hair tied to a stick. But back to that cliché about the violin. If, indeed, it is the instrument that most closely resembles the human voice, it is perhaps because it is uniquely able to include all human voices, in all of their infinite cultural and expressive diversity.

Featured image: Jane Griffiths’ violin. Photo by Ian Wallman, www.iwphotographic.com.

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Oxford Law Vox: The evolution of international arbitration

As part of the launch of the sixth edition of Redfern and Hunter on International Arbitration, one half of the book’s authorial team Nigel Blackaby and Constantine Partasides QC met up with Law Vox podcast host George Miller. Together they discussed the evolution of international arbitration and the influential role Redfern and Hunter have played in the field.

Below are selected excerpts from their wide-ranging discussion, and you can also check out the full discussion via the podcast below.

The podcast opens with a comment from Constantine on what he believes is one of the appeals of working in the field.

Constantine Partasides: “… every international arbitration is effectively a microcosm of potential procedural reform. It’s what you make of it. You choose in each case, you don’t have the white book, you don’t have a set of federal, procedural rules. So you can choose to avoid something, and it may well be that it is in your client’s interests to do so. So it’s not a particular prescription, it’s a state of mind if you like.”

Amongst other topics, the process of how this “microcosm of potential reform” becomes a macrocosm in international arbitration is discussed, as well as the challenges faced in a field that is becoming “more complex, more legalistic, more institutionalised, and more expensive.”  Such trends include the increasing frequency of challenges made to awards and arbitrators.

Nigel Blackaby: “It has become almost a knee jerk reaction, I think possibly being led by the investment arbitration world, that whenever you lose a case you seek to challenge the award. And we’ve seen certain states that have challenged every award that has gone against them. The sense that it should be an extraordinary remedy to be employed in the event where there is some clear breach of a rule of due process seems to have been put by the wayside. And I think some of the panels that are hearing these challenges, in exit cases for example, are beginning to realise this and taking a stricter approach. I think that has spilled across into commercial arbitration as well.”

The history of international arbitration is also addressed as an important factor in determining the position of international arbitration today. Both Constantine and Nigel answer the question, ‘what life stage do you think arbitration is now at?’

CP: “I like to think it’s still in its early stage. And that we, in the way our forefathers were, will be considered trailblazers who helped it develop. It’s difficult to call international arbitration anything more than mainstream now, so perhaps a little late to call it adolescent but too early to call it old age.”

NB: “It’s an institution which has a very long history. Its original history of course stems from state to state disputes, including disputes arising out of personal challenges, investors, or those who had lost their debts in the American civil war, when the first mixed commissions were set up under the Jay commission. So it goes way back to the eighteenth-century. The frequency with which it has been used to resolve commercial disputes is really something much more recent, and ironically the frequency with which it is now being used to resolve disputes between investors and states … has really only started since the 1990s. We had the first decision in a bilateral investment treaty case in 1990 – that’s how young this system is in terms of investment arbitration.”

In regards to Redfern and Hunter on International Arbitration, Nigel and Constantine also describe the ethos and aim of the book as a whole.

NB: “It’s a book about the art of arbitration – it’s a synthesis. It’s not attempting to be completely comprehensive or exhaustive. It goes through the process of arbitration in a logical, chronological way and what it does is it seeks to introduce key concepts using illustrations from across the world … how we are moving towards a general international consensus that you find similar results on opposite ends of the planet, from countries that are at different levels of development … it’s a truly international book about practising international arbitration.”

CP: “For me what distinguishes the book … are two things. One is the style which is very synthetic, and deliberately so. The other is that what the book tries to communicate is a method, an approach to international arbitration. It’s an artisanal approach rather than an industrial approach to something that we hope is still seen as much of an art as it is a science.”

To hear the full interview with Constantine and Nigel you can listen to their podcast episode on the Oxford Law Vox SoundCloud.

You can also learn more about the inception of Redfern and Hunter on International Arbitration via a video interview with co-authors Alan Redfern and Martin Hunter.

Featured image credit: A Globe, by Mark Doliner. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.

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Time to reform the international refugee regime

In response to the refugee crisis in Europe, Oxford University Press has made more than 30 book chapters, journal articles, and pieces of content from online resources freely accessible to assist those working with refugees on the ground, as well as anyone who would like to know more about the framework of rights and obligations concerning refugees.

Europe is currently scrambling to cope with the arrival of over one million asylum seekers. Responses have ranged from building walls to opening doors. European Union countries have varied widely in their offers to resettle refugees and real concerns have been raised about the rights of asylum seekers and refugees. Not much thought has yet been given to the longer-term challenges of integration.

Overall Europe is on an emergency footing when it doesn’t need to be. Just as many people were displaced across Europe during the mid-1990s from the Balkans. Other countries – Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey – are hosting far larger numbers of refugees. Europe has a population of over 500 million people and the EU is the world’s wealthiest single economy. And Europe needs workers to plug the demographic gap and ensure future prosperity.

While the current European response may work in the short term, it is unlikely to achieve the desired long term goals of reducing asylum flows, managing migration to Europe’s benefit, and properly assisting and protecting those in need. This is because Europe is responding to the symptom not the cause of the current crisis, and the cause is a failing international refugee regime.

The cornerstone of the international refugee regime is the 1951 UN Convention relating to the Status of Refugees. Some commentators argue that the Convention is so dated as to no longer apply to the current realities of those in need of international protection; it was drafted in the specific historical and geographical context of post-World War Two Europe. In my view the Convention should remain. Revising it may jeopardize the rights, principles and standards it enshrines. In the current political climate, states would likely be more inclined to negotiate a more restrictive Convention. It would take decades to ratify any new Convention as completely as the current version.

Europe is responding to the symptom not the cause of the current crisis, and the cause is a failing international refugee regime.

But where reform is required is in how the Convention is implemented. Its implementation is failing states, and refugees.

One of the main concerns about the 1951 Convention from the point of view of states is the obligation it places on them to consider any application for asylum on their territory. Yet there is no censure on states from which refugees are fleeing, and no obligations on them concerning the return of refugees. What is more, an increasing proportion of asylum seekers are not actually refugees. This is because more and more people are on the move for a variety of reasons, and asylum provides one of the only legally-guaranteed channels to access richer countries.

One implication is that states are spending far more resources on processing perhaps one million asylum applications each year, than they contribute to supporting the tens of millions of refugees worldwide; their number is the highest for at least 25 years. Another implication is that conditions for asylum seekers and refugees in poorer countries are deteriorating, and an unintended consequence has been the growth in people smuggling, which in turn exposes asylum seekers and refugees to risk and vulnerability. It is estimated that at least 2,000 people have drowned in the Mediterranean so far this year trying to reach Europe.

The international refugee regime is not fit for purpose in the 21st Century and needs to be reformed.

What might a reformed system look like? First and foremost, it must guarantee the rights of asylum seekers and refugees. Second, it should strive for accountability and impose sanctions on states that cause displacement. Third it should seek to reduce the need for long-distance asylum seeking. A more systematic response to protecting and assisting people displaced within their own countries would be one way to anchor them close to them. Better regional protection mechanisms should also reduce the incentive to pay smugglers to travel distantly. Fourth, a renewed international protection system should reduce the asylum burden on destination systems, by conceiving a form of burden sharing, streamlining criteria for refugee status determination, and implementing robust offshore and transit processing.

All of this is controversial, and none of it is easy. It would necessitate closer collaboration between the international refugee regime and other international regimes, for example governing peace and security, development, and climate change. It would have funding implications. It would also almost certainly entail a review of current institutional responsibilities.

But the time has come at least to launch a thorough review of the current regime. Europe’s refugee crisis also presents an opportunity to make a sustainable difference, in the interest of states and refugees.

Featured image credit: Crowded refugee boat on Lake Tanganyika by © Guenter Guni, via iStock.

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The history of international law [timeline]

Where and when did the history of international law begin? Many scholars have argued about the definitive date and periodisation of certain dynamic developments, let alone which treaties, institutions, and figures have shaped the field’s core doctrines. Indeed, many of our “modern” notions of human rights, rules of war, and sovereignty have origins stretching much farther back than generally appreciated. Hugo Grotius’s publication of De iure belli ac pacis freed international law from some of its theological baggage. The Déclaration du Droit des Gens cataloged fundamental rights and duties. The First Hague Peace Conference of 1899 established the Permanent Court of Arbitration. In an effort to sort through the major developments, we’ve created the brief timeline of the history of public international law below, beginning with the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 and running until the Arms Trade Treaty in 2014.

Information on events in the history of international law in the timeline above are sourced from Oxford Historical Treaties, the Max Planck Encyclopaedia of Public International Law, relevant book chapters, blog articles, and journal articles. Follow the links in each timeline entry to learn more about the subject.

Is there a milestone missing? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Featured image: Réception d’un ambassadeur français à Constantinople, Vanmour Jean-Baptiste (1671-1737). (c) RMN-Grand Palais / A. Danvers. Licensed and used with permission.

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When everywhere is a grave: remembering WWII casualties in Belarus

On 22 June 2015, the President of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko opened a new memorial complex at the site of the former extermination camp Maly Trostenets near Minsk. Between 1941 and 1944, German occupants and their helpers interned and killed up to 206,500 people in this camp and in the nearby forest of Blagovshchina. The memorial complex marks the site of the largest extermination camp in German-occupied Soviet territories, but also commemorates victims throughout Belarus and its six oblasty (regions).

The opening ceremony marked a milestone for Belarus’ memory of the Nazi genocide. While the victory of Soviet troops over the Nazi regime has formed the core of republican and national identity—first in the Belarusian Socialist Soviet Republic (BSSR), and the Republic of Belarus since 1991—the systematic extermination of civilians has often retreated into the background of official commemorations. Partisans, civilians, or soldiers-turned-guerilla fighters, many of whom are remembered as heroes, personified the history and memory of Belarusian people’s experience during World War II, and monuments to partisans and soldiers are a ubiquitous feature of Belarusian town and city landscapes.

The memory of civilians, however, has largely been confined to the site of Khatyn, a village about 40 miles to the north of Minsk (not to be confused with a place of the same name near Smolensk). Like 185 other villages, a German punitive squad scorched Khatyn in 1943, with its residents burned alive in a barn. In 1969, a memorial complex was dedicated at the site. It is thus commendable that the systematic killings of civilians behind the frontline are now included in the state-sanctioned narrative of history and commemorated within reach of public transportation.

The memorial complex at Maly Trostenets along the Doroga Pamiati, or Road of Memory. Photo by Anika Walke.

Nonetheless, the memorial in Maly Trostenets reveals continuing rifts and omissions in public discourses about the past. Plaques along the “Road of Memory” list the number of victims in central towns and regions such as Minsk and Minsk oblast (region), differentiating between towns, major camps, and ghettos. None of the plaques, however, mention that in ghettos and camps, such as those in Maly Trostenets, the majority of victims were Jewish.

It is old news that formerly Soviet countries have denied the Holocaust, the systematic murder of European Jewry, a special place in the memory of World War II. Attempts to explain this ignorance typically assign blame to Soviet antisemitism and nationality policies that strove to devalue national particularity and promote Soviet unity. Indeed, one must recognize that, in a country where German occupation and Nazi genocide destroyed up to a quarter of the prewar population of nine million, the killing of about 800,000 local Jews and Jews from various European countries deported to the killing sites in present-day Belarus, of Roma—as well as mentally ill people, homosexuals, and other groups targeted by the Nazi regime—are seen as part of all-encompassing suffering, though their silencing is certainly related to current resentments as well.

And yet the dynamics of the extermination campaign reveal that the killing of Jews raises thorny questions about local cooperation and collaboration. The number of Belarusians who helped identify, arrest, and even shoot their neighbors, coworkers, or classmates, is yet to be determined. And while this number is likely smaller than, for instance, that of Ukraine or Lithuania, this number challenges the core of Belarusian memory and identity as the victorious victim. Thus, denying Jews their proper name is an easy way to avoid questioning national unity and continuing ruptures.

A mass grave of 150 Jews, murdered on 16 March 1942, near Slavnoe, Vitebsk region. Photo by Anika Walke.

Alongside vestiges of antisemitism and forced unity, Belarusian society may suffer from a traumatic loss that is much harder to pinpoint. The country’s territory was part of the former Pale of Settlement, the only section of the Russian empire where Jewish subjects of the Tsar were allowed to reside. Belarusian culture was therefore heavily influenced by Jewish culture and heritage, including food preparation or ways of production. Perhaps the trauma of the mass murder of Jews cannot be articulated because it would require recognition that the murder produced loss and suffering for the whole country, not solely for an identifiable community within.

The massive loss of life during World War II was overwhelming, in part because it took place not on some battlefield far away from home, but right there, in and around people’s hometowns. The graves are everywhere. Unfortunately, not all of them are marked. Jewish mass graves—often sites where people were shot at natural ditches or anti-tank trenches during Soviet times—often remained unmarked; memorial stonesl, if local authorities granted permission for their erection, spoke of “innocent Soviet citizens.” In recent years, diaspora communities or remaining survivors have taken care to mark the mass graves and commemorate those who were shot by name and note the reason for their murder—their Jewish origin.

A foxhole along the line of defense during the summer of 1941, near Beshenkovichi, Vitebsk region. Photo by Anika Walke.

Similarly, Soviet soldiers who fell in the first days and weeks of the war were often buried on the spot, with their gravesites scarcely marked, or completely obliterated when future battles rolled over them. Until today, the remains of these soldiers were scattered in the soil of Belarus and other parts of the former Soviet Union. Local activists study the course of the war, visit known and likely battle positions, and literally dig, unearthing bones, dog tags, or equipment. Then, volunteers help fill a database that allows families to finally learn the fate of their loved ones, an important complement to the stone monuments of fighters and heroes.

The difficulties of remembering genocide and war are evident in the tedious work of projects like Yahad In-Unum, a French-led initiative to identify and mark execution sites of Jews in Eastern Europe, not to mention the efforts of local groups working to note where Soviet soldiers died. When the graves are everywhere, they are often nowhere. The catastrophe of World War II in the Soviet Union, with up to 26 million military and civilian casualties in total, is a catastrophe for memory and commemoration.

Belarus shows that remembering the casualties of World War II, and other instances of systematic violence, reflects present conditions and conflicts—who is remembered, in what way, and where, whether in public or in private. Moreover, mass violence and destruction are difficult legacies for any society; the Holocaust, the genocide in Rwanda, and the mass killing of Bosnians by Serbian troops all question the validity of moral norms, challenge legal frameworks, and complicate social relationships. The “Roads of Memory” of Maly Trostenets and elsewhere are long and bumpy, but there is hope that they will open conversations along the way that facilitate recognition for everyone, despite and because of their particular identity and experience.

Image Credit: In Khatyn, a monument stands in remembrance of 186 villages that were destroyed by a German punitive squad in 1943. Photo by Anika Walke.

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Separating Church and State

Since the 17th century, Western thinkers have struggled with the problem of how to stop conflicts over religious differences. Not long ago, we mostly thought that the problem had been solved. Two rather different solutions served widely as paradigms, with many variations. One was the American Separation of Church and State, and the other, the French laïcité, usually if misleadingly translated as ‘secularism’.

In the United States, the basic idea behind Separation was to protect religion from the state. Freedom for religion would allow civil society and government to get along in peace. However, in America religion was never absent from the public sphere. If politics and religion were separated by a tall “wall of separation”, in Thomas Jefferson’s phrase, there were always wide gates that allowed people and ideas to pass through. In France, by contrast, the fundamental principle was to protect the state from religion: a public sphere free from religion should keep religious differences out of it. In France, in keeping with the stress on creating a religion-free zone, there was neither a wall nor a gate, but rather a minefield full of high explosives to discourage trespassers.

Religion has always had a special role in American political life, as both a basic freedom and a seminal influence on public, not just private, life. Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address is as much a meditation on theology as on politics. God has been mentioned in every American President’s inaugural address. The idea that the government ought to look favourably on religion in general, albeit with special favour on none in particular, is widespread. After all, the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution does not just forbid the establishment of a national religion, it insists that religion should be free from government restriction. There is nothing about limiting the role of religion in American life.

Alexis de Tocqueville by Théodore Chassériau, 1850. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

In France, matters are different, although less different than people think. The famous law of 1905 separating Church and State ended the government payment of priests, pastors, and rabbis, and abolished the ministry of religion, but was not necessarily intended as the war on religion that many of its opponents thought it was at the time and supporters think it is today. There are two interpretations of laïcité in France. On the one hand, when Jules Ferry, Minister of Education and founding father of laïcité in France, created the first program of secular ‘moral instruction’ for French public schools, he included a section on ‘duties to God’ – a very American-like gesture. But a different view of laïcité, once the province of the left but now with increasing resonance on the right, says religion, has no business being visible in public – no burkas on the street; no headcoverings, visible crosses, or yarmulkes in the school, and so on. As Emile Combes, another founding father of French laïcité, put it: “All we ask of religion … is to restrict itself to its places of worship, to limit its instruction to its faithful, and to forbid itself any contact with civil and political life”. Any time it attempts to leave those narrow boundaries, Combes’ successors regard it as an attack on the Republic.

Today, both the American and French approaches are generating precisely the sort of politics vs. religion controversies their authors hoped to end, and neither seems adequate in the face of the changes posed by the contemporary world, chiefly though by no means exclusively those presented by radical Islam. Perhaps Tocqueville had a better solution.

Tocqueville firmly believed that religion properly understood was freedom’s friend, not its enemy, and that democracy was the friend of God, not God’s enemy. Religion and the state should be like two adjoining houses which share a common wall, but have separate entrances. In the hallway of religion, once one enters, one hangs up one’s right of individual inquiry and decision and accepts divine authority. In the hallway of politics, one hangs up one’s religious dogmas and accepts the decision of the majority while retaining one’s freedom of thought and action. The wall between religion and the state should be thin, however, so that the noise in one can be heard clearly in the other. Indeed, the moral expression of religion ought to be heard so clearly in the house of politics as to be able, if need be, to wake up its occupants in the middle of the night, and religion should never be allowed to be so indifferent to society as to be able to ignore a catastrophe happening next door. You hear a lot of things through a thin partition. Politics and religion must recognize their inevitably intimate relationship.

Tocqueville thinks we need walls between religion and the state, but they need to be thin, and not surrounded by politically explosive devices like the French ban on headscarves or government encouragement of religion in America. Only then can both religion and the republic profit from a mutually beneficial relationship. Perhaps it is time to explore his approach.

Headline image: Abraham Lincoln delivering his second inaugural address as President of the United States, Washington, D.C. by Alexander Gardner. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Which Shakespearean heroine are you? [quiz]

Did you know that out of a total of 981 characters from Shakespeare’s plays, only around 150 characters are women? There is an ongoing debate concerning what truly qualifies a character as female, but this ratio of male to female characters is nevertheless astounding. Male characters amount to a staggering 84% of all Shakespearean roles, yet most plays would be defunct without their integral female characters.

Where would we be without sweet and innocent Juliet, bawdy Mistress Overdone, scheming Lady Macbeth, and disguised Viola? We would never witness Amanda Bynes convince Channing Tatum to shove tampons up his nose in a perfect scene from She’s the Man, a very modern adaptation of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. With these few, but memorable, female roles, we were also given the templates for many female character tropes, such as the love-struck woman, the innocent maiden, the strong-willed shrew, and the plotting, self-advancing woman. With that in mind, take our Shakespeare heroine quiz to discover where you would fit in as a woman in a Shakespearean play!

 

Featured Image: Johann heinrich fussli, lady macbeth” by Sailko. CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

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The philosophical computer store

You go into a new computer store. Everything seems normal: you see Apple computers, Dell computers, HP computers … the regular computer brands you are familiar with. But then you notice a weird area. On one shelf, there are a bunch of rocks labeled “Putnam’s rock.” On another, there are pieces of brick wall labeled “Searle’s wall.” On yet another, there are buckets of water labeled “Hinckfuss’ pail.” The price of these unorthodox items is lower than the price of Apples, Dells, and HPs — much lower. But something seems wrong. For starters, no specs are listed next to these philosophical computers.

Question: are they a good deal?

The answer depends on which physical systems perform which computations. If rocks, pieces of wall, and buckets of water can perform the same computations that ordinary Apples and Dells can, then these philosophical computers are a good deal — especially considering that you could easily build them by yourself. Otherwise, they may be a scam.

It’s easy to scoff at these putative “computers” and declare that they are not computers at all. You’d be foolish to buy them (qua computers), and even more foolish to sell them (qua computers). The philosophers who argued that such things compute — Ian Hinckfuss, Hilary Putnam, John Searle — seem very wrong. But it’s a lot harder to answer the question that gave rise to these examples: which physical systems perform computations, and which computations do they perform?

Image: ‘One Balanced Rock’, by Daliel Leite. CC BY 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons.

This is not an idle question. Consider how quickly computer circuits evolve. In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore predicted that the amount of transistors on a chip would approximately double every two years. This amazing progression, which has held true until very recently, requires that the size of transistors become smaller and smaller. But nothing can get smaller forever.

In recent years, Moore’s law has begun to bend. The rate of transistor shrinking is no longer what it used to be. The industry is approaching the physical limits of conventional computing technology.

Current microprocessors are built from transistors that are 14 nanometers wide, and the industry is transitioning to 10 nanometer components. A silicon atom is about 0.2 nanometers in diameter, so current transistors correspond to about 100 layers of silicon atoms. IBM recently announced transistors that are 7 nanometers wide — about 50 layers of silicon atoms. At such dimensions, thermal noise and quantum effects will seriously disrupt the classical processes that give rise to conventional digital computations. In other words, the components’ states won’t be reliably ones or zeroes but messy classical and quantum mixtures of ones and zeroes. And then what?

Some physical information theorists, such as Neal Anderson at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, are hard at work trying to figure out the fundamental physical limits of conventional digital computation. They are developing theories of classical digital computation at the nanoscale, where quantum effects are inevitable. To develop such theories, they need to define the boundary between physical processes that count as digital computations and physical processes that don’t.

(Classical digital computation at the nanoscale should not be confused with quantum computation, which is a different theoretical enterprise that also requires appreciating the boundary between physical computation and non-computational physical processes.)

‘A fragment of the Berlin wall, at the Imperial War Museum, London’. Photo by Redvers. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Meanwhile, the computer industry is trying to circumvent the slowdown in the shrinking of computer circuits, adding specialized chips to their current technology and seriously considering unconventional computing methods that they largely ignored until recently.

One such method is neuromorphic computing — building chips that compute similarly to how brains compute. Wait, how do they know that brains compute?

In 1943, Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, two neuroscientists of sorts, proposed that neural processes are computations and neural computations explain cognition. Since then, the computational view of brain processes has become dominant in neuroscience and psychology. The mainstream view is that brains compute differently than digital computers — for instance, neural circuitry changes over time in response to feedback, whereas conventional computer chips have a fixed architecture. But the computational view of brain processes remains controversial to this day.

Once again, searching for unconventional computing methods as well as for a neurocomputational theory of cognition requires knowing what does and does not count as computing. A question that may appear of purely philosophical interest — which physical systems perform which computations — shows up at the cutting edge of computer technology as well as neuroscience.

Ian Hinckfuss and his followers were naïve to conclude that buckets of water, rocks, and walls perform any computation you like — although I’m sure even they would not buy such putative “computers” in a computer store. But the question they asked is genuine and deep and it deserves our attention. Figuring out what counts as physical computation is no trivial matter.

Featured image credit: ‘Blue screen of … Envisionware’, by Jeffrey Beall. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

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