Petitions, Languages and Other Studies

After a couple of days of deliberation among the committee, the Victorian Secular Lobby launched a petition this morning (picked up by no less than Lee Lin Chin, hooray), calling for the Australian Christian Lobby to be de-registered as a charity and for the Federal government to remove the "advancing religion" clause from the Charities Act. which basically allows any religious group to claim tax-exemptions even if they are not doing any charitable work in a meaningful sense of the term. This does come on the midst of a significant court case in Australia between Israel Folau by Rugby Australia after he was sacked for various social media comments. I have written an extensive piece on the Isocracy Network, Rugby, Religion, and Charities, which was simultaneously posted in a slightly modified form in talkpolitics. For something that has been running for just over twelve hours, the petition currently has over 4,000 signatures.

For a good portion of this week I've been delving into various linguistic studies. I have neglected my Portuguese from French studies for months and with a new co-worker who is a Portuguese speaker (from Brazil), there is an opportunity to practice my woeful skills in this language. Duolingo has also just started an Arabic course, which I have thrown myself into with some interest and less competence. I have also spent some time (i.e., have completed the first week's worth) of Noongar, the Australian aboriginal language of the south-west. A course is available on edX and co-ordinated with Curtin University. One thing I have discovered over time is that quite a few words in my childhood which I thought were standard English words, were, in fact, Noongar words. I was always brought up with the knowledge that a hand-spear for fishing was a 'gidgee', for example.

Apart from that, I've been making a few remarks on my information systems course on the difference between methodological individualism and institutional socialisation, along with the economic and business value of free and open source software from a strategic perspective; as one does. On Wednesday most of our team avoided going to work because the building site next door was breaking up concrete which would have been a hell of a racket - I spent a good portion of the day building software and updating my introduction to parallel programming course, especially with additional material I had overlooked in the shared-memory OpenMP API; the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has been very helpful in that regard. Plus I have a co-authored presentation in at the ARDC Skilled Workforce Summit, so I might be going back to Sydney again soon. Speaking of which, neglected to mention that last Tuesday week I was on Sydney Radio Skid Row with John August talking about truth in political advertising, and the relationship between an informed electorate and a functioning democracy (quite a strong correlation, it turns out).