Mentoring Project, Suppressed Science, RPG Characters
Most of my weekend has been developing the outline for a trial HPC mentoring project for the University of Melbourne. With a waiting list of several hundred researchers for my courses, even as I conduct them with two days of workshops every fortnight it is clear that the number of requests is greater than my ability to deliver, hence the need for a mentoring project. Not to mention that there is a new workshop in development, Mathematical and Statistical Programming in HPC, in development and kindly sanity-checked by a senior lecturer in the subject. Whether the project itself is actually accepted by positional management is another matter entirely, but curiously the outline is only indirectly for them; it is also a major assignment for my MHEd paper, Academic Leadership in Higher Education at the University of Otago. Which is something that I must sing their praises for, their papers and assignments have combined theoretical foundations with necessary and actual practice every step of the way. So if the University of Melbourne, or Australia for that matter, doesn't grasp the initiative and obvious advantages, there will be another place with a long white cloud that will.
The issue does bring some current thoughts to the matters of "suppressed science", and I don't mean in conspiracy theory sense, but as an actual, evidence-based conspiratorial practice. It does strike me as a little weird that many people do latch on to highly improbable conspiracy theories that lack probability when there is much greater evidence for the actual suppression of facts and usually of greater importance (Technology Review provides a good article on how to talk to conspiracy theorists, and one which I need to improve on myself). Of course, conspiracies do exist, as nine impressive examples by Business Insider points out. But really, one needs to look at means, motive, opportunity, probability, and knowing the actual science to determine the likelihood (and asking them if you don't know it yourself). Because without these steps, ultimately bad public policy results and that kills people and other life. Australia is currently having a flurry of such issues with environmental scientists saying their work is being suppressed. It is like that some people think that managing perceptions is sufficient to alter reality; or at the very least, maintain their positions of power and wealth; but the dead are many.
On a much lighter note, I have been made into an RPG character! Captain Lev Lafayette is a sample character in a recent publication, The Secret of the Silver Hedgehog, "he once was accused of being a Blanquist and called his accuser to a duel, first knocking him down for daring to suggest for daring to suggest he would replace one elite with another". Included as other pre-generated characters are participants in a Middle Earth campaign that I played in some years ago, which included an ally named "Ed Hogg" (a pixie were-hedgehog), which itself turned out to be the nom-de-net of another person whom I had encountered in RPG circles on usenet some twenty years prior. There is something quite beautiful about this recursive storytelling. This entry was originally posted at https://tcpip.dreamwidth.org/302503.html.
The issue does bring some current thoughts to the matters of "suppressed science", and I don't mean in conspiracy theory sense, but as an actual, evidence-based conspiratorial practice. It does strike me as a little weird that many people do latch on to highly improbable conspiracy theories that lack probability when there is much greater evidence for the actual suppression of facts and usually of greater importance (Technology Review provides a good article on how to talk to conspiracy theorists, and one which I need to improve on myself). Of course, conspiracies do exist, as nine impressive examples by Business Insider points out. But really, one needs to look at means, motive, opportunity, probability, and knowing the actual science to determine the likelihood (and asking them if you don't know it yourself). Because without these steps, ultimately bad public policy results and that kills people and other life. Australia is currently having a flurry of such issues with environmental scientists saying their work is being suppressed. It is like that some people think that managing perceptions is sufficient to alter reality; or at the very least, maintain their positions of power and wealth; but the dead are many.
On a much lighter note, I have been made into an RPG character! Captain Lev Lafayette is a sample character in a recent publication, The Secret of the Silver Hedgehog, "he once was accused of being a Blanquist and called his accuser to a duel, first knocking him down for daring to suggest for daring to suggest he would replace one elite with another". Included as other pre-generated characters are participants in a Middle Earth campaign that I played in some years ago, which included an ally named "Ed Hogg" (a pixie were-hedgehog), which itself turned out to be the nom-de-net of another person whom I had encountered in RPG circles on usenet some twenty years prior. There is something quite beautiful about this recursive storytelling. This entry was originally posted at https://tcpip.dreamwidth.org/302503.html.