Supercomputer message-passing, forecasting retrospective, and signs of expertise
We discover how forecasting is going, and learn a little about how to use MPI for supercomputing. We again dip our toes into one of my favourite subjects: research around expertise.
I hope your week is going well!
New articles
Quarterly Cup 2024 Q3 Retrospective
I don't forecast very hard these days (for a lack of time) but I do want to keep up these retrospectives to keep myself accountable. Despite low effort, I performed fairly well this past quarter, and I'm looking forward to the next.
Full article (4–10 minute read): Quarterly Cup 2024 Q3 Retrospective
Reading Notes: MPI and Message Passing Concurrency
Several years ago ago I needed to write an algorithm that was meant to be runnable on a supercomputer. The interface of choice for these programs was (at the time, at least!) MPI, which is a low-level library-and-runtime for C code. Code written against MPI is run by a special MPI runtime which makes sure to spawn processes and that the right communication happens at the right time and then lets the code proceed.
Full article (2–6 minute read): Reading Notes: MPI and Message Passing Concurrency
Flashcard of the week
I want to write more about expertise, how one recognises it, and how it is cultivated, but it is a complicated topic so I keep putting it off. One of my flashcards asks
What are the six basic signs of expertise used in applied cognitive task analysis?
Applied CTA is an attempt at taking something difficult and time-consuming – CTA – and make it easier for practitioners of any field to apply. The six signs of expertise are
- Past and future: the ability to enter into a situation and figure out what must have happened for the situation to have turned out this way, as well as which way the situation is headed unless something changes.
- Big picture: seeing how the things one does connect to other things that happen elsewhere.
- Noticing: being able to tell when things are subtly out of the ordinary, when things are about to go wrong, or when everything is in place for things to go right.
- Job smarts: knowing techniques to extract feedback from a situation to improve one's mental models, rearranging or combining steps in procedures to be more efficient.
- Opportunity/improvising: being able to come up with alternative processes on the fly based on understanding of the situation.
- Self-monitoring: keeping track of how well one is doing, and which the areas are in which one needs improvement the most. (This is the reasons experts don't always need mentors the way beginners do.)
The flashcard only contains the bolded text, i.e. the names of the steps. The rest I filled in from memory to make this newsletter less boring!
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