James5

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Just quick update and apology for lack of posts during the past week. I’m currently participating in the Castan Centre Human Rights Mooting Competition, which has taken up an inordinate amount of my time this past week.

We just found out we got through to the semi-finals, taking place next Wednesday. So this weekend and next week will be equally as busy, so expect a lesser amount of posts then too - though a few more from the series on Institutions in International Law may be forthcoming.

I’m also currently researching the legality of the Security Council’s referral of the situation in Sudan to the International Criminal Court, so hopefully that will make for some interesting related posts, along with some insights this Moot has given me into the Victorian Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities. Finally, I’ve got an article I’ve submitted to the Melbourne University LSS Equality magazine on how wonderful the WTO is for developing countries, so if that gets printed I’ll post a version here too.

So lots of posts to look forward, let me know if there are any topics in particular you’d like to hear about.

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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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