Last weekend experienced a particularly secular Saturday. By this, what is meant is that it was the "Darwin Day" Freethinkers gathering at the Fitzroy gardens, organised by the University of Melbourne Secular Society (who have invited me to speak at their club on March 10th). It was younger crowd, as expected, but with excellent conversation. This was followed by the annual general meeting of the Victorian Secular Lobby at Trades Hall, which has a good turnout and an impressive guest speaker in the form of the recently elected member of parliament, Fiona Patten, who spoke on religious exemptions to the equal opportunity act, but also on public funding to faith-based schools who engage in discriminatory practices.
Finished three days of training at La Trobe University today for Linux, high performance computing, and MPI programming. A larger class than usual (about double), mostly researchers from the rather impressive Institute for Molecular Science and with different operating systems, which meant that it was a little harder than the usual downright exhausting. Feedback from this week's courses was from good to very good, a little down from the usual very good to excellent, but perhaps to be expected given the circumstances. Tomorrow will be on the big silver bird to head to the other side of the country, where will be attending the nuptials of![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
caseopaya's niece at Yallingup. After that will be running a two-day course at the University of Western Australia, for a small cluster there; one day consisting of aimed at sysadmins and containing a lot of new material, and the second aimed at researchers. After that there is a few days before travelling to the University of Sydney to conduct a dozen days of training there over a month, with a trip to eResearchNZ in Queenstown somehow squeezed in among all that. I'm also supposed to submit the full paper for peer review and publication for THETA by Friday. I suspect I'll be writing that one on the plane!
For one future project I have recently received a review of training material by people who have absolutely no clue about the content. As a result, there is a lot of bikeshedding over trivial comments, remarks which display extraordinary ignorance about both high performance computing and advanced andragogical techniques and content simultaneously, remarks that are simply plain wrong (and obviously so if the reviewer had actually read the content), and inevitably, comments which are Not Even Wrong. I have become unusually angered by the response. Whilst normally I live by the mantra of not letting the aggravating factors of any workplace get to me (it's not worth it), this case is different. I think what is really troubling me is that the reviewer in question has the authority, but not the competence to make the judgements that they have, and they lack the intellectual humility and honesty to admit this (in other words, they are stuck at the unconscious incompetence stage of skill development). Ultimately I have to steel myself to only pay attention to the people who really matter in this processes - those who are the direct recipients of training in HPC systems (i.e., postgraduate and postdoctoral scientific researchers) - and place the comments of the glorified administrative assistants into the dustbin.
Finished three days of training at La Trobe University today for Linux, high performance computing, and MPI programming. A larger class than usual (about double), mostly researchers from the rather impressive Institute for Molecular Science and with different operating systems, which meant that it was a little harder than the usual downright exhausting. Feedback from this week's courses was from good to very good, a little down from the usual very good to excellent, but perhaps to be expected given the circumstances. Tomorrow will be on the big silver bird to head to the other side of the country, where will be attending the nuptials of
caseopaya's niece at Yallingup. After that will be running a two-day course at the University of Western Australia, for a small cluster there; one day consisting of aimed at sysadmins and containing a lot of new material, and the second aimed at researchers. After that there is a few days before travelling to the University of Sydney to conduct a dozen days of training there over a month, with a trip to eResearchNZ in Queenstown somehow squeezed in among all that. I'm also supposed to submit the full paper for peer review and publication for THETA by Friday. I suspect I'll be writing that one on the plane!For one future project I have recently received a review of training material by people who have absolutely no clue about the content. As a result, there is a lot of bikeshedding over trivial comments, remarks which display extraordinary ignorance about both high performance computing and advanced andragogical techniques and content simultaneously, remarks that are simply plain wrong (and obviously so if the reviewer had actually read the content), and inevitably, comments which are Not Even Wrong. I have become unusually angered by the response. Whilst normally I live by the mantra of not letting the aggravating factors of any workplace get to me (it's not worth it), this case is different. I think what is really troubling me is that the reviewer in question has the authority, but not the competence to make the judgements that they have, and they lack the intellectual humility and honesty to admit this (in other words, they are stuck at the unconscious incompetence stage of skill development). Ultimately I have to steel myself to only pay attention to the people who really matter in this processes - those who are the direct recipients of training in HPC systems (i.e., postgraduate and postdoctoral scientific researchers) - and place the comments of the glorified administrative assistants into the dustbin.
