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Showing posts from July, 2017

Blog Week 2 - Finding and reading relevant literature

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Finding and reading relevant literature Having read over the position paper topics two weeks ago I was instantly drawn to the option to argue for mandatory immunisation of children prior to enrolment in a school or pre-school. Having an almost three year old daughter who has been in full time day care since she was six months old my partner and I are acutely aware of the impact her day to day environment could have on her health. I am staunchly pro-vaccination as none of the concerns the anti-vaccination material I read had any truth or carried any weight after further digging, we did look into a few initially worrying statements but these fell flat in the light of proper research. That said, I am attempting to approach this assignment with an unbiased start point as best I can. I began brainstorming for my position paper using the two column approach given in the "How to write a position paper" PDF but quickly realised that I didn't understand the argument aga

Blog Week 1 - Kia Orana from Rarotonga

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Kia Orana from Rarotonga My name is Evan and I'm currently living in Rarotonga in the beautiful Cook Islands were I am studying a BSc in Computer Science minoring in Maths. Up until my wife and I (along with our two year old daughter Izzy and dog Pepe) moved to the middle of the pacific I was working as a Developer Services Engineer (DevOps) at Weta Digital in Wellington. I've never had any formal training in IT so the four years or so I spent working there were a constant learning experience where most people assumed I understood fundamental computing concepts when quite often there were gaping holes in my knowledge. I learned fast but unfortunately those holes in my knowledge could lead me to accidentally break parts of our infrastructure, and on occasion such breakages were so bad hundreds of people would have to be sent home for the afternoon unable to work because I had completely destroyed the main database server on which 99% of the company depended... whoops.