James5

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Well I’m now back from Geneva, arriving home at 6am last Thursday after more than 24 hours of travel.

I was doing an awesome subject called Institutions in International Law with Dr Andrew Mitchell and Bruce Oswald from Melbourne University, and had an amazing two weeks visiting institutions and people and also having some great times with friends in Geneva (such as busking on lake Geneva).

The first week we focused on trade, with a bit of development, IP and health mixed in. We visited the WTO, UN, WHO, ACWL, WIPO, UNCTAD and, one of my favourites, the Australian Mission in Geneva. It was fascinating hearing from people who actually work for these institutions about the work they do and how they got to where they are now. Visiting the United Nations building was particularly inspiring, as we walked through rooms and halls where history was made - for example the room where the League of Nations ended and bumping into a diplomat who had worked at the UN for the past 30 years.

The WTO was also a real blast. We heard from an intern working in the Appellate Body and saw the room where the AB Members actually made actual decisions, had a tour of some of the highlights of the building and heard from the Barbados ambassador on what it’s like negotiating for your country at the WTO. Really fascinating insight into a world that is often behind closed doors.

In week two Oz took over and we headed out to the ‘peace & security’ (with some development and environment mixed in) institutions. We visited and heard from the ICRC, UNEP, UNHCR, OHCR, IOM, ILC (we got to see an actual session!) and my absolute favourite for the trip the Humanitarian Dialogue Centre. The presenters gave us a candid insight into their jobs and lives and what it was really like to work in some extremely intense situations. We heard about the challenges facing the institutions and their staff as they dealt with issues of ‘legitimacy, accountability and governance’ and of course the ‘fragmentation of international law’ (the course buzzwords).

The Humanitarian Dialogue Centre was an especially eye-opening experience for me. They are a small organisation on the banks of lake Geneva that do mediation and negotiation work during conflicts. They are often the first in to help set up discussions between warring parties. The also do work on humanitarian mediation to try and get assistance to those that need it. It’s an amazing institution that I’d love to work one day.

So now I’ve got an essay to write - currently percolating through ideas about the UN Security Council as a peace and security dispute settlement mechanism (trying to think about the differences between trade and peace & security and what could be transferred between the two areas), but we’ll see what happens. I’m also preparing applications for the ICTR and SCSL - so if anyone has any contacts that can help me get a placement for next year let me know!

James5 will be back in action from now - some older links will probably pop up as I go through what I’ve missed, and I’ll also hopefully be writing about some things learnt in Geneva, not to mention the usual topics. If there’s any topic in particular that you’d like me to write about let me know!

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Tonight I’m heading to Geneva for three weeks! I’m doing a subject called Institutions in International Law, run by Dr Andrew Mitchell, Bruce Oswald and Dr Tania Voon, wherein we visit a variety of international institutions to learn how they work and more about international law.

It’s going to be an absolutely amazing experience, but may mean blogging is on hold for a bit depending on how easy it is to access the internet in Geneva (and how much spare time we get). When I get back I’m sure I’ll have a ton of posts to do about what we learnt over there.

If you have a guest blog or link you’d like to post on James5, now’s the perfect time - so don’t hesitate to e-mail me.

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Last semester I once again was extremely grateful for having Devonthink to help me out with a research paper.

For those that don’t know Devonthink is a personal database you keep on your Mac. You throw your pdfs, documents, links, e-mails into it and leverage it’s powerful AI and search technologies to help with research and writing. It looks a bit clunky, and kills my Powerbook’s CPU, but is an invaluable program if you do any amount of research.

I had a public policy research paper that required me to investigate the Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement, and determine whether policy networks were at work in relation to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (they were but weakly).

There was a Senate Select Committee and Joint Standing Committee report on the FTA, the submissions of which would have been an absolute gold mine for researching the positions of various players and their connections. The problem? There were over 700 separate submissions, some of which were just scans of letters.

Thankfully, I had Devonthink to help me out.

First, Devonthink allows you to take a URL and it will automatically find and download all the links on that page.

So I fed it the Committee site that had links to all the submissions. Devonthink then went to work downloading over 700 pdfs for me.

Second, Devonthink Pro Office has built in OCR software, so despite the best efforts of Parliament to make their documents unsearchable, after running the OCR I had a massive searchable database of submissions.

Third, I used Devonthink’s search function to limit my enquiry to only those submissions that mention the PBS. This cut back the number of pdfs to only around 200 - down from 700! Quite a time saver.

Finally, I also used the search function to see if any of the players were mentioning each other in their submissions. Allowing me to establish if there were any links between the different groups.

All of this cut down on the amount of time I had to waste trawling through submissions manually, giving me more time to actually think about and write the paper. I ended up getting a good mark thanks to being able to quickly find all the relevant documents and linkages between them.

Now if only I could figure out a good referencing program (that actually saved time not made more work!) my student life would be made a easier.

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It’s that time of semester again, essays due, exams coming. Here’s a quick hint to make your research a smidgen easier (if you’re at the University of Melbourne that is).

While we all love SuperSearch and being able to search all the big databases at once, store our finds for later use, etc. Sometimes it is just a bit easier to use Google Scholar to get those hard to find sources and keep all your research sorted.

The hard part is clicking through the Google Scholar search results and needing a subscription to view the articles. Of course we have a subscription through UniMelb, but Google Scholar doesn’t know that. The good news is that the uni uses EzProxy which means it’s actually pretty easy to construct URLs to link you into the subscription services.

You just add http://ezproxy.lib.unimelb.edu.au/login?url= to the start of the URL you get from Google Scholar and if the uni has a subscription to the Journal/Database you can login and connect to the source.

To make things easier, I made a ‘bookmarklet’ that you can add to your bookmark toolbar in your browser. You just click it and it automatically adds the URL to the start of the page you are on. To use it just drag the link below to your toolbar, or add it to your bookmarks, then just click it when you need it.

UniMelb EzProxy Bookmarklet

I probably haven’t explained this very well, so if you need more info ask in the comments.

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One of the ideas from 2020 was to let students volunteer to pay off their HECS debt. Some problems have been identified but I think the main obstacle is making the payoff worth the effort. Unless the volunteer opportunities are very ‘marketable’ why would a student, who needs to work to survive, spend time working down their HECS debt when the longer they keep it the more value it is to them.

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