Greg Newby’s Personal Pages

www.supercomputing.guru & www.petascale.org

picture of Greg

About: I am a creative thinker who makes opportunities for discovery and enlightenment through use of information technologies. I am a leader in enabling access to world-class technologies computationally-based science and engineering. I am an innovator in bringing large-scale public access to digital content and systems. I build things, in order to enhance our information commons. I then seek to give those things away. What shall we build next, together? In June 2014, as part of my MBA studies, I authored a personal branding booklet: “Strategy Unleashed.”

Grand Challenge: The Ultimate information system will work so well that finding information is as easy as remembering it.

What's petascale?: Peta is a prefix for quadrillion (a thousand million million). It's used to refer to big things: petabytes of data, petaflops of computing power.

Projects

*Project Gutenberg, the premier source on the Internet for free literature. I volunteer as Director & CEO of the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.

Lifelong learner. I graduated in June 2014 with an MBA in Sustainable Systems from the Bainbridge Graduate Institute. It was very engaging, lots of work, and was a major upgrade in my world view and skillset. BGI was top-notch. It is now merged into the Presidio Graduate School. My continuing education includes a course sequence in workplace satisfaction from The Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. I also pursue continuing education credits for my CISSP security certification.

“You must read, you must persevere, you must sit up nights, you must inquire, and exert the utmost power of your mind. If one way does not lead to the desired meaning, take another; if obstacles arise, then still another; until, if your strength holds out, you will find that clear which at first looked dark.” - Giovanni Boccaccio, writer and humanist, 1313-1375.

My *Vita, with links to papers and other materials.

Who is this Guy?

Canadian. Wife Ilana and I moved to Ontario, Canada, in 2015 and then to the Yukon Territory in October 2020. I'm working with the Yukon government on eServices delivery.

Alaskan ex-pat. Ilana and I moved to Alaska in 2003. We both worked at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, she in Rasmussen Library, me at the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center, which has since closd. I departed UAF in February, 2014 for a position in Thuwal, Saudia Arabia, at the KAUST Supercomputing Laboratory, before moving to Canada in 2015.

Musher. We have *rather a few dogs, and you could see us dog sledding on the trails around our home in Two Rivers, Alaska, the finest mushing on earth. These days we are near Whitehorse, Yukon where winters are long and trails are abundant.

Pro higher-education. I am in favor of opening doors for higher education to be free, or cheap, for everyone.

Vegan. I’m against eating or exploiting animals. No, mushing and other dog sports are not exploiting! People ask me why I'm vegan. Here are reasons *why I am a vegan. I'm in favor of social reform that creates opportunity for people, with literacy a key part of creating opportunity. Visit the Vegan FAQ (one of several) for more information and links. Don't be duped by the billions of dollars spent by the meat industry every year to make you think meat has benefits. For a great case in point, read all about McDonalds in mcspotlight.org from 2003. Don't worry about being alone - take a look at this list of famous vegans.

More than war, racism or even imperialism, the global economy depends on the exploitation of non-human life. [...] The modern death culture cannot tolerate a philosophy that values life over wealth and power. “Peter,” in EF!J Eostar 2006 p. 19.

Need more? Here is an article by Peter Singer from the September 11 2006 issue of The Nation: Don't Buy Factory-Farm Products.

More on the pacifist theme: Here is one of many great articles by Naomi Klein from The Nation (November 8, 2011) on Disaster Capitalism. Here's a quote from a 2008 Klein article on the same theme: ”today's preferred method of reshaping the world in the interest of multinational corporations is to systematically exploit the state of fear and disorientation that accompanies moments of great shock and crisis.”

Realizing that the corporate greed that is at the heart of modern industrialization of animal killing, here's a quote from Michael Moore from The Nation: “Greed has been with human beings forever. We have a number of things in our species that you would call the dark side, and greed is one of them. If you don't put certain structures in place or restrictions on those parts of our being that come from that dark place, then it gets out of control. Capitalism does the opposite of that. It not only doesn't really put any structure or restriction on it. It encourages it, it rewards, it.”

Not a fan of corporate media, radio and Internet. I co-founded (with Ann Bishop) *Prairienet, the community network of Urbana-Champaign Illinois. I've also been active with iBiblio, the Public's Library, in Chapel Hill. The iBiblio project has hosted Project Gutenberg since approximately 2001. I've had a life-long passion for music and gadgets, and a good place to put them together is radio. I hosted The Lone Rhinoceros Show and lots of other stuff (music & programming, engineering and events) at WEFT, community radio in Champaign. I was on the air for a couple of years, and involved with radio production, at WXDU, Duke University's community radio station. I also had a show for a few years on KSUA, UAF's student-run radio with my show, Notes from the Underground. Yes, there are non-commercial alternatives, and they are great!!!

Environmentalist. How many environments do you have to live in? What's happening to the one we share? Get educated about environmental issues - visit Envirolink or get informed about the environmental movement. One way way to get started: Become *paperless.

Teacher. I started teaching university classes about the Internet in 1988, and though I have not had regular teaching duties for a few years now, I'm still sharing knowledge in other ways. See *my old UNC pages for links to classes and other items, including archived local copies of some course materials.

Security expert. I'm a certified information security professional (CISSP) with several papers and conference proceedings on information security, data integrity and privacy. I have spoken at hacker events, encouraging creative thinking and investigations strongly guided by an ethical compass.

Note: Items with a *are my own pages or projects; others are external links.


A few more quotes I like:

“Make no mistake: there is no easy way to achieve real equality of opportunity in higher education. This will be a key issue for the social state of the twenty-first centurey, and the ideal system has yet to be invented." Thomas Piketty, "Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century.”
“[T]here is no greater threat to human security on this planet than our well-trained capacity to flip off our empathy switch,” from the film, “Every Three Seconds.”
“I've been engaged in what I call comprehensive anticipatory design science. There will always be problems ahead — problems are the essential catalysts of growthful life. The problems of tomorrow will not be predominantly physical but predominantly problems of intellectual integrity.” — Buckminister Fuller (Ideas and Integrities, 1963).
“If you are made a leader, do not magnify yourself, but among your men, be as one of them.” — Edmund, King of the East Angles (840-870).
“Leaders are visionaries with a poorly developed sense of fear and no concept of the odds against them.” — Robert Jarvik.
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