Fred Clark at Slacktivist has a good discussion of the hanging of Saddam Hussein.

The problem with the death penalty is that it’s awfully final. Even if the victim is known with a certainty to be guilty, death doesn’t just remove them with no hope of recovery, it also extinguishes whatever they might know. And if someday Iraq wants to know what Saddam did, and who helped him, the best source of information is no longer available.

The main conclusion I have thus far attained in my academic research is that there are two ways in which one might go about the business of being an academic. In the first, more conventional, approach the author conducts a programme of research, arrives at some interesting results, and publishes a paper concerning them. I find myself pursuing an altogether more radical course, whereby I publish first and leave the messy business of actually finding a subject to write about as a secondary concern. While this methodology saves time, I fear I cannot recommend it to other researchers.

The thing is, there’s a conference of graduate students in April, for which the submission deadline is tomorrow. While I have barely started my research, the conference organisers are supposed to be forgiving towards those with partially-formed work, papers don’t need to be more than eight pages long, and I have a considerable collection of opinions about Human-Computer Interaction which I am happy to express before an audience. So I thought I’d have a crack at it. The situation has not been improved by discovering that somebody else has already done a good deal of the research I wanted to do, but it is some consolation to know that their work was accepted for a major international conference.