Lev Lafayette's journal

In the past fortnight, as other events took priority, I received positive results from two academic appeals. The first was from the University of London, where I've been plodding my way through a GradDip in Economics through the LSE for a few years. As is their archaic and lazy approach, the LSE takes a traditional examination approach (i.e., 100% of all assessment depends on a single three-hour exam, no reference material, etc), which is pretty much mocked by every educational theorist on the planet. But how to manage this during COVID? Through an invigilator application, of course. So when this was announced, I asked whether it would be available for my preferred operating system. Four months later, i.e., after the examination period had concluded, I was informed that, no, it was not available. I submitted an appeal requesting a refund of my course fees and, surprisingly, the University agreed that was an unreasonable period of time to wait for a ticket response. This is, for what it's worth, not the first time that the University of London has been absolutely terrible on its administrative side, so I'll be packing up my bags from that institution and going elsewhere.

The second appeal relates to my recent studies in psychology at the University of Auckland. As regular readers may recall I recently submitted a persuasive essay on the hoary question of when a person becomes an adult. To approach this, I used the methodology of formal pragmatics, especially emphasising matters of domain confusion between biology, law, and agency, and the need to differentiate between maturity, legality, and recognise individual variation. I thought I did a pretty good job of it, so I was very surprised when I received a low grade. The comments suggested to me that the marker didn't understand the approach I had taken and had missed the key points I was making; so I submitted an appeal explaining this to the course coordinator who re-marked the essay. As a result, the mark almost doubled from being one of the lowest in the class (a marginal fail, "D") to one of the highest (a clear first, "A"). It would seem that my concern that the marker didn't quite understand the method and content was correct, which is quite a danger when an essay is meant to be persuasive; "Where ignorance is bliss, Tis folly to be wise", as Gray wrote.

Appeals processes don't always work out of course. I remember taking an education subject at Murdoch University where the marker evaluated my grade for the wrong course, which had a different word count (my reduced mark was heavily based on not reaching the expected word count). The most remarkable thing was that the course coordinator backed the marker even though it was an objective fact that the marker got it wrong - my speculation is they had to back the tutor, maybe they already were already on a performance question. Curiously, when I did the exam for said course (essays and short answers) I received a frankly implausible 100%. It was all a bit disconcerting, given that for decades I have been an advocate for Murdoch's original (1973) Educational Objectives. Still, the bottom line is, if you think you have good grounds to appeal against a grade or administrative decision at a University make use of that power. Sometimes it pays off.

Although I was expecting an earlier date, my graduation ceremony at the University of Otago for my MHEd is going to be on December 17. That's a little bit too far in the future for me and, with a small mountain of leave, I am giving serious consideration to making an earlier visit to New Zealand Aotearoa, which really is my favourite place on earth, not that I have reasons to be biased or anything. Is it weird to be quasi-nationalistic primarily on the basis of the varied natural beauty of a country? Anyway, I have also taken the opportunity to put my MHEd dissertation online for interested readers of the public. In the meantime, I have continued to make good progress on my newest degree, the Graduate Diploma in Applied Psychology, with my assignment on the moral development, just completed, which has been one of my favourite topics for many years. In further psychological essays, this follows from a well-received short piece that I wrote on "Psychic Vampires from Without and Within". Finally, on the academic agenda, I have also made moves to finally withdraw from the University of London and transfer my half-completed economics degree elsewhere; I honestly cannot believe how bad that institution is and I have some experience on the matter.

Having provided a semi-prurient click-bait headline, I regret to reform gentle readers that the topics perhaps are not quite as expected. The first involves the sort of combined social event and political strategy meeting that one should come to expect from The Rookery; in this case, a rather delightful dinner with some of the main campaigners from Sex Work Law Reform Victoria Inc; an interesting topic of conversation in the evening was whether the Australian Red Cross has legitimate grounds for some rather broad discriminatory practices. As for the second item? Well, that again comes back to The Rookery's location in the arts precinct of Melbourne; a quick reference to attending a rather delightful ensemble concert with Liana F., held at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music featuring special guest artist Stefan Dohr from the Berliner Philharmoniker featuring horn ensembles from the Conservatorium and the Australian National Academy of Music. Not every day that one gets to listen to the music of one of the world's best performers in a particular instrument. I find the French horn (and its friends, e.g., the Vienna horn) rather curious instruments but I cannot fault their use in baroque, classical, or romantic compositions. Tomorrow night is String Sextets, and I have obviously failed to make a bondage pun about that.

Having reached the half-way point in my Masters in Higher Education, and have selected research interests for the dissertation next year (online education, andragogy, and the economics of higher education) - with my own researcher page at the University of Otago, I have also been allocated a supervisor, Associate Professor Joyce Koh, who seems pretty close to perfect based on their research profile. Meanwhile, I have received the examiner's comments for my Master of Science dissertation, Is the Future of Business Software Proprietary or Free and Open-Source? A Macroscopic Information Systems Investigation, from the University of Salford. Whilst I do not find out what the final grade is for a few weeks, the comments themselves were sufficiently glowing that I can be quietly confident that I've done quite well.

Apropos matters concerning proprietary and open-source software I have recently that the opportunity to install Ubuntu Linux as a virtual machine on MS-Windows 10 systems with VirtualBox as the hypervisor. This is, of course, not a path I would normally take (in the Nectar research cloud the reverse is far more common), but circumstances being what they are I've taken the opportunity to jot down a few notes on the procedure, just in case I need to do it again, and just in case somebody else out there needs to do it as well. I have been contacted a number of times in the past that the notes I leave out there in on the public Internet have helped quite a few people with technical tasks, university assignments, and personal research, so I see no point in stopping that now. Further, for next week, I have a day-class to teach on Monday, Linux and HPC for Mechanical Engineering, followed by a workshop on Wednesday for the HPC Certification Forum with the snappy title, Training and Curriculum Development for International HPC Certification.

In the aesthetic dimension, in recent weeks I've made some effort to fill in the blanks of Studio Ghibli films that I had not previously seen, as I am terrible uninformed of popular culture (it is difficult to be an aficionado of high culture and pop culture simultaneously unless it's a full-time occupation). Specifically this includes Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Castle in the Sky, Only Yesterday, Pom Poko, Whisper of the Heart, and My Neighbors the Yamadas. There are certainly some common thematic contents across the range, including the fantastic, environmental issues, coming of age stories, and romance (especially from the female perspective), and the virtues (and problems) of common people in contrast to the use of heroic characters. I think of the set I prefer Castle in the Sky most of all as it includes all the aforementioned elements and executes them well, and My Neighbors the Yamadas least, which struck me more as a first draft rather than a finished product.

A pleasing result of the week was the publication of Chimera and The Cyborg with colleagues at the University of Freibug on HPC/Cloud hybrid systems (and more). Today (and tomorrow) I've been teaching a c50 person group of postgraduate mechanical engineering students on HPC and Linux, and to be honest, I thought they would have more of a background on the latter. I am sympathetic on what must be a steep learning curve, as today we combined my usual introductory and advanced courses in a single six-hour session, which was pretty gruelling for me and it would have be very hard for those unfamiliar with the basic content.

Despite time pressures, I have taken the opportunity to attend to a few social events this week. Gaming-wise there was Megatraveller last week, with Lexoccultum tonight (mid-17th century western Europe plus supernatural). Last Sunday was our regular RuneQuest game where we continue to push aside increasingly challenging opposition. Plus, visited Brendan E., on Sunday (as we'd missed each others birthdays), and he treated us to a couple of SF-action films, Oblivion and Spectral. The gender-roles in the first were irksome and the science behind the second was flimsy, but this aside, both sit into the mixed to good range. Which, interestingly, is where I put the Jesus & Mary Chain concert we attended at The Forum on Tuesday. It was well-performed, but I wasn't really taken by setlist, which was a really curious combination of choices.

There was once a movement that said we should have 8 hours work, 8 hours rest, and 8 hours recreation. The sense of balance is notable and subtracting the rest component it basically argues that there should be a 50%/50% work-life balance. Of course that doesn't include transit time to work, the prevalance of unpaid overtime (call it "wage theft"). but nor do is include weekends either. By these metrics I am currently running on (0.5 work + 0.5 associations + 0.5 GradDip + 0.5 MSc + 0.25 MHed) = 2.25 full-time lives. Although to be fair, a lot of the the latter two is material I am familiar with. I just hope I can keep it going for a couple more months as to complete degree number five. All the degrees, you see. Actually, my intention is retire with ten; putting "lifelong learning" intp practise. Maybe then I'll actually be confident enough to write more.

It's been a busy week on the academic front, with a paper submitted for the International Conference on High Performance Computing & Simulation on the issues around "cloud bursting" in HPC, followed by another for the International Conference on Advanced Computing. In addition, I was invited for my annual guest lecture in the master's level course on Cluster and Cloud Computing; a long lecture this time (about 2 hours) although the 200 or so students seemed pretty engaged with plenty of interesting questions afterwards. A curious conclusion to the week was the discovery I had been published in an IEEE journal last year, based on the request for a follow-up publication.

In after-hours activities caught up with Paula and met Verity B., at the New International Bookshop who had contributed chapters to a newly edited volume of "Wobblies of the World". Although I am not in attendance, tonight there is a tribute benefit for Simon Millar, a trade union activist who recently died. Simon and I were housemates some thirty plus years ago in Perth, and his sudden passing was really quite unexpected. Apart from our mutual interest in left-wing politics, Simon also was a gamer. He probably would have been amused by the unlucky TPK on Sunday running Eclipse Phase, and equally so by the character contortions from Thursday night's session of Exalted.

On topic thoroughly amused by an RPG designer who takes the opportunity to justifiably criticise the design of New Orleans. Rubbish maps by fiction authors for their imagined worlds are a pet hate of mine, and to see reality itself turn this on this head is quite delightful. It also says a great deal about the town planners of said city. It does bring to mind however a discussion that I had recently that my next career should be in the arts (because it would fit the Socratic triad). I wasn't sure exactly what aesthetic endeavour I would engage in, but something that would suit my existing studies would be urban planning. But that's several years in the future of course.