Lev Lafayette's journal

The past several days have been almost entirely dominated by scholarly pursuits, the most important (at least personally) was handing in my MHEd thesis on Monday; I've already mentioned this on Facebook with some rather lovely comments and recognition from friends. Assuming I pass that will be the end of two and half years of studying this subject, with numerous essays on the nature of advanced technical education, public economics and systems engineering, and university leadership. I am very thankful for those who engaged in the qualitative interviews for the thesis and also to Kayo who really provided superb insight and experience on the subject matter and recruiting of subjects. I honestly could not have ended up with the thesis that I did without their support and participation. Not one to let something like a thesis stop me, I have also been working on my next essay for my GradDip in Applied Psychology which, with no sense of temporal irony, is an experiment in qualitative interview techniques. That degree should be finished in the middle of next year.

Apropos, coming up tomorrow I am giving a talk at the Sea of Faith in Australia on Saturday at 2pm on "Is Moral Reasoning Innate or Learned?"; contact me for a Zoom link. The following day is also the Annual General Meeting of the Victorian Secular Lobby, an organisation I helped found in 2010, and that I have been president for most of this time. I will be standing down from this role at the meeting and there is the possibility that the organisation will disband; that will be up to the members and whether someone else takes up the role of the convenor. Despite this possibility, I think the organisation did pretty well over the years; we had stated objectives and we pretty much saw most of them actually come to pass. The biggest issues remain the School Chaplaincy project and the automatic status of religious bodies as charities.

Work has also been a site of some teaching and learning this week as well. For the past two days I have been conducting workshops on Linux, HPC job submission, and shell scripting as is typical every month or so. Further, however, the Cultural Working Group hosted one of our regular researcher presentations, this time with Associate Professor Adrian Bickerstaffe from the Centre for Epidemiology and Biostatistics discussing how Research Computing Services has provided assistance in the study participant engagement, application hosting, management of very large datasets, and genomic analyses. It is this sort of thing that gets me up in the morning; working with supercomputers is great and all with plenty of interesting technical challenges, but knowing that they are used to improve and save lives is my primary motivator.

With interviews completed, I am down to the last few thousand words to complete my MHEd thesis, and thus my sixth degree which means it should be ready by the end of this month and hopefully the final draft by mid-December. After this, I have to deal with degree number seven which I've been doing in the London School of Economics. Currently halfway through, I am thinking of changing to another institution; LSE has good content but it's been resting on its laurels for far too long; the teaching is close to non-existent, the assessment methods belong in the last century and the administration (University of London) is the worst I have experienced. I have a small mountain of courses in the subject from prior studies and would be looking for somewhere I could do graduate studies online and would accept credit from other institutions. My preferences would be internationally rather than an Australian institution, as I've developed quite a thing for being an international scholar. In another discipline, I also have a revision from the reviewers of my article to the Polish Journal of Aesthetics to complete this week.

Anyway, on the other side of the lectern, I have three HPC courses next week; the major one being Regular Expressions with Linux and HPC, with an increased emphasis on parallel use of the usual tools and their incorporation with HPC job submission scripts. The revision has made me realise the need to add more content for GNU parallel into the parallel processing course, and more database-style content using languages like awk, but also elaborating on utilities like cut, paste, and join that I use in the Advanced Linux and Shell Scripting workshop to a greater extent, and tying together with some SQLite content and, of course, how to tie all this together in HPC job submission scripts. It's the reality of this sort of deep-dive teaching is that one finds there is always additional content that should be included according to demand, and as a result, at a certain point a workshop has to be split up. Fortunately, being well-trained in modular design my workshops are designed for such an eventually. I think there will be a "Database Programming with Linux and HPC".

The past few days I've been working my way through the third chapter, "Methodology and Methods", of my MHEd thesis. A meeting with my supervisor this afternoon went quite well, especially with regard to how I can tie the research question with the quantitative aspects (computer science, macroeconomics) with the qualitative assessments (user and technical experiences of learning management systems). My plan at this stage is to find a dozen people or so who have significant experience with various online learning platforms for qualitative interviews to start at the end of the month, so if anyone is interested and has such experience now is a very good time to make yourself known. Apropos, there's a Higher Education Development Centre postgraduate symposium at the University of Otago coming up soon as well, which I would love to attend in person. It's been too long since I've been to Dunedin, let alone the rest of New Zealand.

In another educational technology musing, I have also finished up my English teaching at the University of Rojava. I wish I could say it was a good experience, because it is certainly a valuable endeavour (and, I guess it was a "valuable experience" in that regard as well). But the coordination from the beginning was very poor, with no set LMS in place (it might even serve as a case study in my thesis!), and with an extremely vague curriculum. I am almost certain that none of the tutors assessed the course in the same manner, let alone even with the same content. For my part, I stuck very closely to the Oxford University Press "Intermediate English" textbook, along with the exercises, but despite my thrice-weekly engagement in tutorials and video, the engagement of most of the class was pretty poor at best.

In a vicarious educational sense, I caught up with Wajeeha for the second time on the weekend and this time with her children as well. In an item of excellent news, Wajeeha has been told, quite early, that her PhD on key performance indicators in local councils has been subject to minor amendments, so a stiff piece of cardboard is coming soon. In a sense, it was a sort of a celebration of that achievement. We went to ArtVo, which is basically a gallery art pieces which give a 3D effect when photographed. Cute fun, but probably could be more extensive and some of the pieces could be touched up. After that, because it's next door, a visit to the Melbourne Star was in order. This once featured in a project management course guide on how not to run a project, but now it seems to be turning a dollar. The journey views are quite spectacular and overall it's an enjoyable experience even for one who is not entirely comfortable with heights, such as myself. The engineering fascinated me and I found it rather reminiscent of a harbour ship more than anything else.

This morning submitted a chapter proposal with co-workers entitled Monitoring HPC Systems Against Compromised SSH for a new book; will continue during the current week on Processing Large and Complex Datasets for Maximum Throughput on HPC systems proposal in a second publication Technologies and Applications for Big Data Value. Last night attended TERATEC a French HPC conference, normally hosted just south of Paris, but alas only in the virtual form this year. Unsurprisingly there was a significant focus on HPC and the health sciences this year; will continue day two of the conference tonight. In addition to this have continued with taking the lead with developing the department's mission statement with an all-staff (virtual) meeting at the end of the month; I really should compose something over the next few days on the process and reasons for public consumption that is more generic. The end of this week will witness a training day on Australia's number one supercomputer, Gadi.

A good portion of the past week has been looking at higher education funding as the final coursework assignment for my MHEd. In the Australian context it is interesting to see how up to the late 1980s student fees and contributions accounted from between 31.7% of Univerity income (1939) to 0.0% (1981) (Jackson, 2003), the latter representing a mid-point from the abolition of fees (1974-1986), whereas public funding from state and commonwealth governments varied from 44.9% (1939) to 90.1% (1981), falling to 42% in 2010 (McPhee, 2014) and continuing to decline. Of course, there are personal benefits to a university qualification but there are also social benefits, represented as positive externalities, which should be calculable through regression analysis. Unfortunately, this runs contrary to the recent fee changes announced by the Federal government, which has critical flaws even to its own objectives. It all rather overlooks the significant contributions that Australia's higher education sector made to economic recovery after the world wars and the last two recessions. But hey, who needs smarts when you can dig a bigger hole in the ground, right?

With the continuing monotony of The Plague and movement restrictions, there has been a turn to appropriate aesthetic choices, at least in small doses spread out over several weeks. Appropriately enough, have watched Ingmar Bergman's classic The Seventh Seal, set in the Great European Plague period, and kindly provided on Youtube. In addition have smashed our way through the classic 1960s psyops series, The Prisoner, also on Youtube. In a more contemporary sense (but with the best settings of yesteryear) I was quite impressed with Ratched. Next will probably be Tales from the Loop. Two things come to mind; firstly I am impressed that there is still great art being produced in the age of the Internet as contemporary artists compete not only geographically but also temporally; the level of supply is very high. Secondly, I appear to have come to peace with myself for spending under an hour a day watching visual entertainment.

It's getting late at night and I'm preparing myself for a trip tomorrow morning at stupid o'clock across the country for a short visit to Perth. It is primarily a family affair with caseopaya's brother reaching a significant decade of his life, and caseopaya (under a medical recommendation, no less) needs to attend. I'm trying to arrange a catch up with a few people on Sunday at The Dome in Maylands, but unlike a number of my past visits, there are no plans for a big get-together and feasting. In any case, I do get the sense (from vague scans at the numbers) that we are almost on the edge of a breakout of the novel coronavirus here in Australia. On that note, impressive and brave decisions by the Swancom committee who decided to cancel this year, and likewise for Chaosium Con in Sydney. The capacity of hospitals to manage a large influx of patients is dubious at best, and the hit to the world economy is already significant. Perhaps just as well I quietly shifted my superannuation from "high growth" to "stable" investments this week.

One of the things I am planning in the Perth visit is delivering a few copies of Cow-Orkers in the Scary Devil Monastry to backers in the Kickstarter campaign from a couple of years ago. I've also been working hard on getting the very late 45th issue of RPG Review out, and having written a few thousand words of reviews in the past couple of days, including a very rare supplement (Saurians) for Chilvary & Sorcery and a combined review of the three volumes of Role Aids books, Monsters of Myth and Legend. I plan to finish GURPS Monsters on the plane trip, and a review I started whilst in New Zealand on Monsters and Other Childish Things, which is a bit of a change of pace. If I can, I'll slot in Hunted: The Reckoning as that really is the most disconcerting of "monster" books - it involves humans full of theological righteousness, the worst monsters of all.

Speaking of New Zealand matters, I've had a couple of virtual meetings in the past two days with people across The Ditch. The first was a meeting organised by NESI to help re-build the rather dilapidated state of HPC Carpentry. It was a pretty well-attended meeting, about twenty people in all from several institutions, and with many volunteers at this early stage to carry out the various tasks. Only a few, I note, have put their hands up for the critical role of content production, however, so we'll see how that goes. The second education meeting was a tutorial for MHed 503, Research in Higher Education, obviously a lot smaller. The group discussed a paper on Student Partnerships and in particular the different interpretations from epistemic approaches and ontological assumptions. The general consensus was it wasn't exactly a great paper, but we really did get into destroying it. I was particularly kind in offering a conclusion which suggested further studies on all the things that they left out, which at least one other person picked up on. There are times, not often enough, where my withering criticism in intellectual matters is delivered in such a manner and is no less poignant than a frontal assault. It is something that I should work on, as it was quite enjoyable.

Have crossed The Ditch once again to visit bonnie New Zealand for two conferences, one on each island of course. Sunday was almost a complete write-off as a result as I spent most of it in the air, first from Melbourne to Christchurch, then Christchurch to Dunedin in a little twin-prop.
As is my wont, and as is provided by Air New Zealand, I smashed my way through several episodes of Family Guy, which suits my somewhat dank and edgy humour. Arriving late in the afternoon I made to the Stafford Gables hostel, which is providing me a 2m by 3m enclosed balcony for $160NZD per night. The building itself is reasonably well-located and has some old-school charm (and is almost clean), but I rather wish I had the chance to read the reviews beforehand. This is, seriously, the worst value-for-money of any place I have ever stayed in, and that even includes the bed under a stairwell in a dodgy hotel in Malaysia that came with free bed bugs.

Anyway, I made a hasty exit to visit the Knox Church to hear their informal service. I've been on their mailing list for years but had never attended. Dunedin was settled by liberal Scottish Presbyterians and they've continued that tradition, with a discussion about the hidden message of the power dynamics evident in Paul's letters to the Corinthians. I had a good chat with members of the congregation afterward. Today, still in pre-conference mode, visited Otago University, paid my fees, and had a good meeting with my supervisor about my MHed thesis. Otago shows a much greater concern with education and learning to what I'm experiencing elsewhere, and is really quite a high-quality institution as a result. Worked as best I could during the day and in the evening marched for an hour out of town (and navigating my way around the hordes of Queen fans seeing them perform at the local stadium) to my secret South Pacific base to meet with the new tenants.

Project Melomys continues with just over a week to go to the official petition launch. The main thing this week to organise is people at the various memorial services, all of which will inevitably be quite small but worthwhile. There's currently about a half-dozen sites lined up, which isn't too bad really. It is well below what I would prefer of course, but that would require at least a couple of people working full-time on the campaign, and that is not a resource that I have available. Still, it is but a start and the Melomys will have their first remembrance, and a wider institutional change will be initiated - and frankly, in the world of politics, you need to target institutions.

My last days in Wellington included catching up for lunch with Art P., Kay J., and Tim J., to discuss various matters ranging from NZ politics to science fiction. Promotion of The Locksmith is appropriate in this context. After that went to Te Papa, NZ's national museum, a visit which was particularly notable for the Terracotta Warriors exhibition, and their quite literally larger than life Gallipoli exhibition. Appropriately, the following afternoon I went on the Weta Workshop combination tour which was worth a visit, but not something I would return to in a hurry. The morning after however was a regular event on my visits here, the Wellington Cable Car and Museum, along with the well-appointed botanical gardens. Inside there is the Carter Observatory and Space Place, which I hadn't been to for several years and is well worth regular visits.

That evening took a flight to Dunedin and paid the notoriously overpriced taxi fare and stepped in my home for a few days, Balllymena House. This is an increasingly dilapidated old Victorian era building which creaks and wobbles as you make your way around, but it's comfortable, inexpensive, and the family-staff are very helpful. Have carried out some of the more official purposes of my visit, firstly being to check on my Masonic Lodge; tenant Dominic S. (of the The 3Ds fame) loves the place and has made the main hall into a music studio. My other required activity here was complete enrolment matters with the University of Otago. A few thousand dollars later, I now have a student card for my Masters of Higher Education degree; the first tutorial is on Friday.

In less requisite activities, I have purchased a small mountain of shirts from the local SaveMart; run into a chap from Byron Bay who also considers it to the finest clothes store in the AU-NZ region. As for today, spent a good few hours making my way through the Otago Museum, which has excellent Pacific Island culture sections, a good maritime history collection, and an impressive nature section. Curiously, it also has a good Greco-Egyptian antiquities collection (including a mummy). As always, I find Dunedin to be one of the most delightful and charming little cities imaginable; any excuse to visit.