Studying SQL these days.

I am studying SQL these days. Today I began studying software testing. I also borrowed some dictionaries of logic symbols.

I wrote a logic test as part of the knowledge representation course.

I really did not want to end up studying logic in graduate school yet here I am doing just that. It is improving my understanding of knowledge representation and this understanding will be needed to actually write stuff my thesis supervisor expects. This logic refresher also allows me to think about some software writing dogmas and problematics that keep popping up at work.

Planning on attending SAS Global Forum.

I successfully found a hotel and plane flight and including the cost of student conference registration I can just pay for the whole trip with my tax return. I will have saved about 1110 dollars by searching on the web and using Travel Cuts, a student travel service rather than expedia.ca, a constantly television advertised service.

Still studying, I took time off this afternoon to relax.

I started the morning studying fairly hard. Mostly I started by organizing time and scheduling. I made a list of the exercises and did not actually get to working on these anymore yet. I did review the notes the professor posted and this reading relaxed me about the test. True, the exercises most likely will be on the test so deserve attention. That is we will probably have to solve some logic problems. On the other hand, placing the technology of knowledge representation in context with other computing topics was inspiring and I believe I can study a little OWL and RDF now to prepare for the test.

I also need to finish the review of my own notes. I have about four more lectures worth of notes to read. I lost my notes for the first three lectures.

School tasks and other learning tasks for today and the next few months.

This is just some note taking for myself. I have a test tomorrow in knowledge representation so am studying today. I am also getting organized for doing all this school work.

1. Study for test #1 in my knowledge representation course.
2. Study the assigned journal articles for my thesis research.
3. Write a conference paper on toxic workplaces as modeled in a KR language.
4. Prepare a book review presentation for the local SAS user's group.
5. Finish reading three SAS books.

Database theory everywhere and database languages.

I am studying with a database expert professor. He is teaching the class in Knowledge Representation. I am really enjoying this course so far.

I am trying to read the logic of theory contraction and the logic of updating theories.

I am reading symbolic logic and trying to understand the symbols used in an assigned paper. I have been required to read this paper by my supervisor in my thesis work.

Reading about PROC SQL.

I have read now 6 chapters in the book:

Lefler, Kirk Paul. PROC SQL: Beyond the Basics Using SAS (Carey, NC: Books by Users, 2004).

I have a 20 page paper to read on belief revision and belief updating logic. Then I have even more to read.

I have actually been assigned 4 papers, a chapter in a book and a number of chapters in another book to read now. I have downloaded 2 of these papers and updated my master bibliography folder in RefWorks for these 2 papers. I have 2 more papers to still download. I want to add these 4 papers to my e-book reader. I have started to read the first paper and have read 3 pages so far, and am almost finished the fourth page now.

I attended both classes this week.

I started my course this week. I attended both classes. We did cover some of group theory this week. We only looked at group theory as a way of looking at logical proof and mathematical logic was our first example.

I am reading the book PROC SQL Beyond the Basics Using SAS.

I have read three chapters in this book now and would like to read the fourth this evening. This book is about writing computer code for use in SAS programs.

My thesis optional course starts in January.

I will begin studying Knowledge Representation in January.

I read one paper in my master bibliography on an e-book reader and started a second paper this way last night.

As I began to work with a master bibliography in a table in a spreadsheet, I added a "status" column. In the workshop for managing information in research projects, the concept of using a master bibliography with a spreadsheet style table was suggested along with the suggestion of adding columns such as a status column. The table starts as a tab delimited file export from a RefWorks folder. Any bibliographic software could be used. You can add any number of columns to this file when open in a spreadsheet and a status column was one suggested. I chose to have a few values possible for status and one was "get" for literature documents I had found in name only ( citation), rather than the full document. This meant I needed to download the papers or borrow the books and had not done this yet. Other status column values I used included "read" and "partial" reflecting statuses after I started reading the documents. I began to search out and download documents in my master bibliography that were still "get" status documents and have found about five of the online journal articles and have them now in pdf.

As I started this a few weeks ago I bought an e-book reader with the anticipation that I could read my school work on this e-reader.

This e-reader method of reading worked so far. I read a paper with a catchy titled that is directly on topic with my thesis. The paper is

McQuade, Eamonn, et al. "Will you miss me when I'm gone? : A study of the potential loss of company knowledge and expertise as employees retire." Journal of European Industrial Training 31, 9. 2007. 758-768.

The second paper I am reading as an e-book is about defining the Knowledge Intensive Firm (KIF). As my thesis title includes this classification of firms, this paper is also very important. I hope this paper will continue to have the quality, it seems to have at the moment, from what I have read. The citation for this paper is:

Starbuck,William H. "Learning by Knowledge-Intensive Firms" Journal of Management Studies 29, 6, 1992.

My organization of reading notes is a little confused but really I am returning to a subject.

I wanted to research some topics related to disabilities and the Internet and found the book:

Goggin, Gerard and Newell, Christopher. Digital Disabilities: The Social Construction of Disability in New Media (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).

I realised after reading the preface that I have read this book before or at least the preface. It was written by two activists affecting the Internet use and other technologies use by disabled persons in Australia. It does a good job at looking at the social construction of disability and in a big way this was my introduction to this topic. I should review this a little because I also have to understand a bit better the concept of social construction because the social construction of gender is a concept I come across quite a bit these days when studying the Internet and gender as well as in feminist studies.

I have 150 minutes study to complete to keep to my pace of thirty minutes a day on my thesis.

Simply stated I add thirty minutes every day to my thesis work schedule. This is pushing me deeper into the work, this time based structure.

I have three goals at the moment for study in the short term.

I would like to read more of the papers on my master bibliography list today. I would also like to search my RefWorks collection for knowledge transfer and knowledge gain. Then the last of these three goals will be to make some notes based on the suggested methods and structure for writing the literature review that I learned at the first writing tutorial centre workshop I attended two and a half weeks ago.

I am starting to use a Master Bibliography.

I started a master bibliography for my thesis. I used a short list and added to it only papers concerned directly with retirement and knowledge loss in companies or with knowledge transfer. I edited out most of the skill component research because my methods from artificial intelligence will not support skill modeling in the simulation. I also included few general knowledge management titles and fewer books on this topic generally. Argote is still in the list and I used her work as spring board to find two more papers and then found an updated version of one of these.

The master bibliography is allowing me to move forward and download copies of the literature and actually start to read the papers. I now need to start using a system like this blog to record my notes and fabricate my literature review. I have some training now on both this master bibliography technique and using RefWorks to build this file. So far after less than one week this is working and giving good results and things are progressing nicely and specifically with real gains.

I dropped in on Shirley Mills today and told her about my new job.

Shirley Mills really helped me learn statistics. I claim she is a mentor of mine. She is a professor of statistics at Carleton university and encouraged me to learn SAS. Her encouragement really helped me in school a place of extreme elitism and bullying. Believe me some of the most respected professors are in fact bullies of knowledge and I can think of no other job that does not set an image of a snob to my mind. But I found Shirley to be supporting and her lectures on statistics are interesting and challenging. May be in a year or two I will be able to write a Ph.D in statistics with her as supervisor.

Here are the the calendar details for my winter course in knowledge representation.

COMP 5307 [0.5 credit] (CSI 5101)
Knowledge Representation
KR is concerned with representing knowledge and using it in computers. Emphasis on logic-based languages for KR, and automated reasoning techniques and systems; important applications of this traditional area of AI to ontologies and semantic web.
Prerequisites: COMP 1805 and COMP 3005, or equivalents.
Precludes additional credit for COMP 5900 section 'X' offered in winter term from 2003-2004 to 2005-2006 inclusive.

Studying human resources continues.

I have almost completed reading chapter 4 now in the human resources management book.