Dear postgraduate students

Everyone says selecting your supervisor(s) will make or break obtaining your degree with a sound mind. This is true. So here are a few of my own tips on just how to do that. I hope it helps.

(Thread)

1. Know what you need from the get-go. As people, and as students, we need different things to succeed. Ensure you know what this is for you and make your search and eventual selection of a supervisor based on that.

2. How do you know which academic does what? Either email a number of potential academics or organise a quick in-person/online meeting with them to discuss their respective research interests. You can either align yourself to these or ask if they’re willing to take you on but...

...supervise a topic outside of their own research interests. It’s not unheard of but just depends on them.

3. Ask them about their supervision style, what works for them and assess whether that sounds like it would work for you. You can love their research topics but if you feel like they won’t be a good enough supervisor, find someone else. Remember you’re going to be spending...

1. Thanks @glenmpani for your support when my mother passed on. You raised an interesting point on democracy that we should discuss further

2. Forms of democracy have existed in many societies at different times . Even prominent writers, such as Held (1996), suggest that democracy has evolved among societies and different cultures.

3. Both the form and practice of democracy are often contested and as aptly submitted by Street (2011: 305) “There are, of course, as many definitions of democracy as there are democratic theorists.” @glenmpani

4. While democracy is generally taken as the ideal form of rule, it is hotly disputed in other cultures.

5. Held,(1996: 7) believed that the most discernible and attractive form of democracy is one in which citizens in principle can extend their participation in decision-making to a wide array of spheres such as political, social and economic.

Destressing Tips,
The past few weeks/months/year has been rather stressful.
I have a few things I do to destress and clear my mind that I'd like to share. Perhaps one or more of these might be useful?
1) Plenty of Water, a hydrated body/hydrated mind.

So strange that Law & Crime article questioning whether the Capitol rioters could be prosecuted for felony murder and it *never discusses* the most obvious predicate felony—burglary

https://t.co/cSFJzB5fwq via @lawcrimenews

As I will be teaching my first year criminal law students later this semester, felony murder is often a question of charging strategy for prosecutors. The defendant has often multiple felonies, some of which trigger felony murder and some of which don’t.

This article makes the classic mistake of analyzing only one possible underlying felony—sedition—and not the other, more mundane felonies, including burglary.
It’s the sort of error that loses students a lot of points on their final exam!

This basic error--misidentifying the relevant predicate felony--ends up affecting the other analysis in the article. For example, the author correctly points out that there are some other Qs that must be answered for felony murder to apply.

This analysis looks different if we are talking about burglary---which the Supreme Court defines not only as entering a building to commit a crime, but also remaining in the building.
That's going to make the "remoteness" inquiry pretty easy, not complicated as the article says.

1/ Who were the earliest women converts to Islam and what was their experience of conversion?

In our new sourcebook, Sean Anthony (@shahanSean) and Keren Abbou Hershkovitz profile several women who were alive at the Prophet's time #ConversionToIslam

https://t.co/00XpFCjXtP

2/ In the first entry, @shahanSean translates and comments on the conversion of the Prophet's first wife Khadīja as portrayed in one of the earliest and most famous biographies, the Kitāb al-Maghāzī of Ibn Isḥāq (d. 767)

3/ According to tradition, Khadīja was a widow and wealthy merchant of Mecca, who married Muḥammad after initially hiring him as her agent. She was reportedly the first person to believe in his prophethood, underlining the centrality of women in the Prophet's life

4/ Ibn Isḥāq tells us that when Muḥammad first received the revelation from Gabriel, he came to Khadīja frightened and confused. She reassured him, "God would never allow anything but good to befall you, for I know you are a man who only speaks the truth...

5/ "Rejoice and remain steadfast! By Him whose hand Khadīja's soul resides, I hope that you will be the prophet of his people (umma)!"

Khadīja then consulted with her cousin Waraqa, a Christian, who verified that Muḥammad's experience was true.

If Republican leaders are actually interested in "unity" rather than using its rhetoric to avoid accountability, here's something they could do. It doesn't involve much in the way of consequences, but it does feature truth-telling, apologies and requests for reconciliation.

To be clear, I don't think any of this would actually happen, but it would be nice (if insufficient) if it did.

Ronna McDaniel, Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, Ted Cruz, and Josh Hawley could issue a joint statement and do a press conference in which they acknowledged that Joe Biden is president-elect and that he won a free and fair election by a sizable margin.

They could say that there is no evidence of meaningful election fraud and that judges, including ones appointed by Trump, have rejected much of what the president and his allies have been complaining about.

They could apologize for misleading their supporters over the past months and say that they understand why Democrats may think their claims fueled last week's violence and are horrified if that is the case.

With Bitcoin's rising price I get many people asking me my opinion about it: Here are nine tips

1) Don't take advice about Bitcoin from those with a vested interest in seeing its price rise. That's like listening to CDO dealer in 2006. When prices go up, critical thought go down

2) Bitcoin is fascinating from a tech perspective, but don't fall for the rhetoric of monetary revolution. I was among the early users of Bitcoin & actually tried to use it as 'money', but it's not a monetary system. It's a system of cyber-collectibles, priced in dollars

3) By all means pass your money to a seller of these collectibles, but don't do so under the illusion that you're engaging in rebellion, or that you're doing prudent investment. You're doing what you're doing, which is buying a collectible from someone who is taking your money

4) Unlike many other collectibles, Bitcoin has no actual features, other than the fact that it can be moved around. It has a highly innovative issuance & movement mechanism, but that's somewhat meaningless if the thing being issued and moved is featureless

5) In fact, its only feature is its logo and the language that surrounds it. Without that the tokens are basically just blank digital objects, the digital equivalent of passing around fragments of limited edition clear glass beads

1.Thread: Summary of Ethiopian PM Abiy Ahmed’s Response to the ETH. Parliament on 30 Nov 2020 on what has transpired from the day he assumed office leading up to the attack on the Ethiopian National Defense Forces #ENDF by the now defunct Tigray People’s Liberation Front #TPLF.

2. How did he come to office? The #EPRDF elected Abiy Ahmed as PM of Ethiopia in April 2018 upon the heels of massive internal resistance and unrest in the country. The #TPLF did its very best to elect its own figurehead but failed.

3.The first few months: The PM was a virtual prisoner at the palace and his every move was monitored. His and his own family safety was at stake, and in his own words, “I was not in a position to protect my family, let alone protect the country and discharge my official duties."

4. Breaking the Shell: The PM held public meetings in the Somali/Afar etc. regions. The turning point, however, came when the PM made his trip to the Tigray region which the TPLF considered its main social base. The popular reception of the PM scared #TPLF

5. From de jure to de facto PM: The real test of who is in charge of the decision-making process came when PM Abiy made a decision to release Mr. Andargachew Tsige – A prominent opposition leader and naturalized British citizen that the TPLF security forces had kidnapped in Sana.

The Creative Process in 43 Hayao Miyazaki Screengrabs

(Context: https://t.co/nqjmAtLAND)

As promised I am now posting details on #RIL #JIO stack. I shall discuss some advantage that #JIO stack has over peers. Pl do not take this as reco to buy stock. This is purely for information purpose

Unfortunately, majority of market participants only see the deal value #RIL has managed to clock & there is entire segment of investors who hate #RIL stock.
Those who understand the technical/business depth of #RIL #JIO #RelianceRetail know the scale and future ahead

Talking first about #JIO stack from telecom PoV, it has tons of advantages over likes of Airtel/Idea-Vodafone that #JIO is pure 4G VoLTE network.

Airtel/Idea-Vodafone are forced to maintain 2G/3G network as more than 50% of their customer base is on old network that is cost intensive & burns into profits

Because #JIO is pure 4G VoLTE, they do not have to maintain separate networks, no need to maintain switching function for calls, reducing costs, giving pricing power

Pakistan Army is full of courageous stories of men in uniform where they have risked everything in their lives and decided to go about their duty.
@Jonthoughts01
#OneFlagOneNation_Pakistan

As the sun sets over the horizon of my country and these iridescent colours spread, it makes one think about those who respond to the call of duty.

@Jonthoughts01
#OneFlagOneNation_Pakistan

The men of the Pakistan Armed Forces, their sense of duty, dedication and sturdiness are awe-inspiring.
@Jonthoughts01

#OneFlagOneNation_Pakistan

These men are just like us yet it is their bravery that makes them extraordinary, putting them apart from the rest.
@Jonthoughts01

#OneFlagOneNation_Pakistan

These brave men know only to say ‘yes’ to every ‘move on’ order without giving a second thought to their lives.
@Jonthoughts01
#OneFlagOneNation_Pakistan

1/11

An article worth thinking about: “As changes to the world structure accelerate, China’s rule is in sharp contrast with the turmoil in the West,” says Beijing.

I agree, but I draw a different conclusion. The world is certainly currently

2/11

through "a period of turbulent change", in Beijing’s words, and great structural adjustments, but usually when that happens, what matters in the long run is not how stable a system seems but rather how successfully political, economic and social institutions adjust to...

3/11

the new conditions. In the past these adjustments have almost always been messy, chaotic, and disheartening to most, but ultimately they were necessary even if we were unable to judge them so at the time.

I would argue that the world today is undergoing both a reversal...

4/11

and rejection of the current model of globalization and an urgent need for most countries in the world, including China, to initiate a major rebalancing of the way income and wealth (and ultimately political power) is distributed, but there are few if any historical...

5/11

precedents in which this level of restructuring and rebalancing have been neat or orderly.

Beijing's response, which is to do whatever it takes to maintain stability, may look good in the short term, as this strategy always does, but if it prevents the necessary...

I did more research into the Parler dump. What probably happened was not so much a "hack", but this: When Twilio/Okta shut them down, they just disabled email/phone verification to create an account. This means anyone could directly create huge amounts of accounts via their API.

Someone also found out that fetching Parler posts could be done by enumerating IDs (e.g 1, 2, 3) instead of random IDs that can't be guessed. Unclear if this was via the ordinary API endpoint, or that they found a separate one by monitoring app network traffic.

So you combine these two things and you can create a script to scrape all the posts on the entire platform, using a lot of different accounts to avoid suspicion. Anyone could download and run this script to spread it out over many IP addresses as well.

What I'm still not sure about is whether deleted (meaning flagged as deleted, it's common that services never actually delete data) posts could be fetched without any special handling.

The verdict: The people who wrote Parler are fucking amateurs.

I’m going to riff on this for a bit about how this works in the real world.

—-Every Deleted Parler Post, Many With Users' Location Data, Has Been Archived

Law enforcement generally doesn’t use work by hackers i their investigations because 𝒉𝒂𝒄𝒌𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒊𝒔 𝒊𝒍𝒍𝒆𝒈𝒂𝒍. And while it’s permissible for law enforcement to use evidence that was illegally obtained by a private citizen, the government doesn’t like to do it.

The first reason for this is because the government doesn’t want to be perceived as encouraging illegal activity. In fact, if the government goes over the line the court might and has in many cases said the private party was acting on behalf of the government.

If the evidence is thrown out then you risk losing the evidence and everything you leaned from that evidence.

The second reason is that LE doesn’t need somebody else to archive the data during an active investigation. Law enforcement does this all day everyday with the company

It’s called a preservation letter and it requires the company to keep all data it has at that moment for the length of time stated in the letter (usually 90 days).

11 January 2020 #MAGAanalysis #Overturn

Information, Disinformation, And Overwhelm

In these weeks since the election, I feel like I've begun to come to understand the world of intelligence officers and analysts a great deal more than ever before.

THREAD

1)
U.S. to designate #Iran-backed Houthis in #Yemen as a foreign terrorist org (FTO)
https://t.co/ILBCg3Pfvs

Iran’s IRGC is funding/arming/provided & ... for the Houthis.

Dec 30—Missile attack on Aden airport. Yemen gov holds Houthis

1. Sun. 10 Jan. Simon Parkes Update: https://t.co/8bLsoBcbB2
•Source close to decision making team said “This is not a drill.”
•We expected the announcement next Wed, not last night.