Lev Lafayette's journal

The past few days I've been in New Zealand for Multicore World, a small but quality conferences which has a great schedule. I was been particularly impressed by James Ang's presentation on heterogenous hardware design for lead researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, taking a cue from Eric von Hippel's "Democratizing Innovation". Sean Blanchard from the Los Alamos Ultrascale Systems Research Centre gave a fascinating talk on the dangers of cosmic rays on memory (who knew?), whereas Ruud van der Pas gave a great presentation on NUMA and a satirical take on a new language, OpenWOUND. Finally, John Gustafson of National University of Singapore, gave an update on the UNUM/posit project, inconsistencies in math libraries, and especially how its cost-efficiency can seriously help the Square Kilometre Array.

The conference has been held in Shed 22 on the Wellington waterfront, which had just beautiful warm and clear summer days. Which is just as well, because I've had bugger-all opportunity to explore, with a conference timetable that runs from around 8:30 to 20:00, my day's journey has been from the "hotel" to the conference hall and back again. This said, I did get the opportunity to have dinner with Janet E., and Doug on the Monday night which was absolutely delightful. I do have Saturday off before heading to Dunedin and am hoping to catch up with the handful of Wellington people I know for lunch. The "hotel" I am staying at is actually Victoria University student accommodation before the new semester, which is clean, modern, with nice views and an absolute steal at a mere $30/night (no, that is not an error).

In between the conference and working through the enormous list of R extensions that I'm installing, I've also been finishing various assessment components for the MSc in Information Systems that I'm doing. This includes a video review of a webinar on social media strategy; the assignment required that it be a video, but apparently, assessment will be based on content, which is just as well with my non-existent video skills. In addition, I also finished a review of two White Papers on Enterprise Resource Planning software, which you would think would be a prime candidate for an information systems perspective. In both cases, I am somewhat surprised by the lack of quantitative evaluation and a systems perspective in subjects that are really screaming for it. Despite (or perhaps) my background in social inquiry and my existing degrees in business, the absence of objective facts and systemic logic in such areas is really quite ridiculous.

Arrived in Wellington having yesterday for Multicore World having taken the midnight to dawn flight from Melbourne. With little else open at that time, we had a long buffet breakfast at Chameleon before making an early checkin at The Setup which can be recommended; whilst the rooms are small, it's inexpensive, modern, comfortable, and in an excellent location. After a typical visit to the excellent Arty Bees bookstore, joined a number of others at the pre-conference drinks at the Foxglove Bar (thank you Nvidia). To say the least Wellington harbour is quite beautiful on a summer sunset. Actually, Wellington is pretty nice all the time; it's thoroughly charming and despite its rather low population it is quite dense with an excellent mix of modern and historic buildings.

Only a completely different tangent, organised an interview with a Syrian refugee in Turkey. Like many like him, he's found himself in a situation where he's effectively a stateless person, a rather desperate situation to be in. In the meantime, there is an agreement between the major world powers for a cessation of hostilities, which has been rejected by the Syrian government, as Turkey continues to attack Kurdish positions.

In Australia, increasingly lagging behind the rest of the developed world, a continuing issue is marriage equality. A Federal MP, Andrew Broad, has recently raised the thoroughly weird argument for opposition: "I can put the rams in the paddock and they might mount one another but no lambs will come out." I could not help but write to the member seeking elaboration on this principle. Whilst obviously opposition to marriage equality is increasingly perplexing and bizarre, as is the proposal for a non-binding plebiscite. What can be suggested as a clear observation that whilst opponents of marriage equality are inevitably going to lose this debate, they're doing their very best to delay and determine how they lose.