I have never moved countries before

As I wind up my preparations to move to Finland, I have received many requests to do a blog. Here it is.


Frequently requested answers:

Q: When do you leave?
A: Thursday, via YYC, AMS, CDG, HEL, OUL.

Q: Where will you go?
A: Oulu, a municipality just south of the arctic circle.

Q: How long will you be there?
A: Perhaps four years? The University of Oulu uses an older academic pattern that includes a Licentiate's degree between a Master's degree and a PhD. The Lic. Phil. is a two-year degree, followed by two more years for the PhD.

Q: Why Finland?
A: Finland has problems I'm interested in. Finland is a relatively small country with respect to population. With 5.5 million people, it cannot specialize in much other than Nokia and some high-tech manufacturing. It must rely on international scientific and industrial collaborators and data to perform well in global social and financial systems. This relates to my Master's degree research about international technical and expert collaborations.

Q: What will you do in Finland?
A: The details are to be decided. My project studies long-term international information infrastructures. In particular, ecologists collect data about things they study, and (are supposed to) share it in ways that make sense to other researchers. But long-term studies change over time. Changes to assumptions, data collection and storage methods, and even the purposes of research are not always well documented in shared data. Researchers require a way to assess outside data to use it responsibly. I will be contributing to a way to think about such problems.

Q: What does this mean for the rest of the world?
A: As a species, humans have never been able to automatically collect infinite volumes of data about almost everything, nor to store it indefinitely. We have also never been able to combine different kinds of data with such ease. We have never had to think about this kind of problem.

A practical example: Some media companies operate in journalism, publishing, and educational textbooks. Suppose they expand into on-line anti-plagiarism websites that store copies of student work to detect when students submit duplicate work. Suppose Sally writes a paper defending some dictator's economic policy for some class. Suppose also that Sally runs in an election to be the leader of some country 20 years later. What, if any, headlines should we expect from the journalism division about this circumstance?

Suppose further that the "cloud" infrastructure that stores copies of student work becomes insolvent and becomes nationalized by some government. How could we think about the social, moral, or other responsibilities would the nationalizing government have to combine and examine (or not) commercial and other data to which it has access; or to support third-party business models based on access to nationalized cloud data?

Further consider that the technical designers of the various infrastructures to collect and store data make many unstated assumptions about how the data will be collected, used, and possibly curated. How to limitations and conveniences built into technical data collection, storage, presentation etc. infrastructures now shape the way we conceptualize the phenomena described by such infrastructures in the future?

Q: Will you have a place in Finland?
A: I will be renting a flat by one of Oulu's many lakes. You're welcome to visit. My supervisor at Oulu has put together some provisions.

Q: What has been the process to move to Finland?
A: The University of Oulu sent me some letters formally offering me the research/PhD position.

I secured a visa to work in Finland as a scientific/technical researcher from the Embassy of Finland in Ottawa, Canada. This required sending my passport to the embassy with the letters, some paperwork, passport photos, and a money order. I will not go with a student visa since ay main purpose is to conduct scientific research (I will be salaried as such), for which I will also earn a PhD. After four weeks (including a delay due to a minor processing error between the Embassy and Finland), I received my visa.

I secured a student flat through PSOAS, a clearinghouse of (state run?) student housing for the major educational institutions in Oulu.

Since I am appearently a new kind of situation for their system, they have not been able to provide clarity about if or how I may be covered in their social security system. I therefore purchased a few months of health insurance for Canadian students studying abroad, along with travel insurance. I took the opportunity to order some spare sets of eyeglasses.

Q: Do you plan to return to Canada?
A: Probably, for Christmas and such.

To be continued...