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.

After yesterday's workshop I am ready to write my literature review.

I started one paragraph just an hour ago but now I am going stop and look and listen and then write an outline and plan this out better based on the material I learned today.

Tomorrow is a school day at least for part of the morning.

I am heading to school tomorrow to register for the winter term. I am meeting my academic adviser to sign the papers for both my winter term course in Knowledge Representation and my thesis for the winter. If I want to be cautious on the time lines I should plan to write my thesis by the end of the winter term.

I will also attend a writing workshop for graduate students tomorrow before coming home for lunch and then going back to work. The workshop will be about writing the literature review. I am happy I am writing only a science thesis and it may be shorter than my honour's legal studies paper. It seems to be less library and reading work too. To complete writing up the literature review would be a good short term goal to get done by the end of this term. That gives me about three weeks to write up the review.

I have no volunteering to do this weekend but am busying making changes in my living environment to overcome procrastination. Mostly this is a fancy way of saying I am cleaning up my mess in our apartment and organizing all the stuff I have which is mostly books, paper and computers and computer parts and some music instruments. Wish me luck on finding tme to study this weekend.

Actually this weekend I will also be fasting for climate justice. This feels very noble and a full expression of life long ideals of no polluting. I am glad I am involved in this.

I started reading chapter 16 in Knowledge Representation and Reasoning and hope to finish this chapter today.

I started to read chapter 16 in the book Knowledge Representation and Reasoning. I hope to finish this chapter today.

I read about web analytics this fall.

I read the first two chapters in the book:

Kaushik, Avinash. Web Analytics: An hour a day (Indianapolis, Ind.: Wiley, 2007).

I do not need to read this book and it really only helps me gather new knowledge and keep me informed about web mastering.

The human resources management textbook I am studying for my thesis.

After speaking with a senior management professor at the Tefler School of Management at the university of Ottawa, I settled on a first year textbook to read to create my small HR unit KB. Here is the citation:

Belcourt, Monica, Bohlander, George and Snell, Scott. Managing Human Resources 5e (Toronto: Thomson-Nelson, 2008).

So far in my reading chapter four seems best for building a KB of a small human resources unit in a human resources department.

Attending my school's mentoring centre.

I am going to leave work early tomorrow to attend an initial session with a mentor at school. I am also planning on attending two writing workshops. One is on writing a literature review and the other on information management for research projects.

I am studying change.

I have been reading about change from a psychological perspective this morning. I have been working on overcoming procrastination and getting my office organized. This is a liberating and reliving pursuit. Really sorting my bookshelves is a good thing to be doing. I would also like to organize my school notes and notebooks.

Thoughts on social modeling.

I have been involved in modeling the social world for a couple of years now. I have for many years studied various models in health care, law enforcement psychology, and even in private case law and business case law. Here is something I wrote yesterday about a model of tribal development from the TED talks. I read that the TED talks had presented a social model and felt betrayed and feel the TED talks have lost my esteem because of this presentation of a social model. I wrote:

Any model like the stages of grief or a model of addictions and recovery can only frame a situation for viewing and can not be forced on the actual participants or actors in the reality of the situation. Computer languages give an impression that well structured models work but in reality outside of a machine models only give fuzzy truth not clear, decisive, determinable actions.

I have now read chapters 6, 7, 8 and part of 9 in the book Knowledge Represenation and Reasoning.

I was traveling this weekend. Rather than follow my usual habits and bring ten books with me, I brought only four. This was done so I could focus more. I read the first chapter in the new edition (4th) of the Little SAS book. And yes, my Little SAS book now has my signature coffee stain. I also managed to read more of the Brachman and Levesque textbook Knowledge, Representation and Reasoning. I now have only chapters 9, 10 and 16 to still read in the recommended chapters. On vacation, I managed to read chapters 6, 7 and 8 and get through most of chapter 9. I now have 61 pages left to read that my thesis supervisor has assigned.

7 careers

We will hold on average 7 careers not just jobs. Not like the generation before the baby-boom some times called the silent generation who held one career and a few jobs based on that career. BTW all those twenty sometimes you see these days are the baby-boom echo i.e. the baby-boom's kids. There are more of them typically these days than other age groups. The population of universities has never been higher than today.


My careers.

1. I have been a stage hand, rock star, theatre and punk rock employee and volunteer as one career. If I have more education in performance arts this career will pay more.

2. I have been a statistician/ computer programmer as another career. I am working in this now. My workplace is designed to keep me in this one job for the rest of my life and many of my parental units want me to stay at this job. That is what they are used too: one job for life.

3. I am also a computer fix it guy and am volunteering/working with others to become high tech entrepreneurs.

4. I also have a career as a philanthropist and self help promotor. This is where I educate myself and care for my own health. I am also poverty and disabled activist here.

5. I also have a law enforcement career again both paid and volunteer jobs, and formal education define this career. This goes from being a nickel and dime cop to stuff I can not talk about that is heavy stuff.

that's five for me that are well developed.

6. Researcher sociologist. This career is still beginning and I have been at this for about 6 years now only. Mostly I am self taught here and combine this with the other careers.

7. I have an ecologist natural science career. This is more of a hobby and life style. I helped found the green party in Canada. I own a professional microscope. I read advanced science in this area.

Labour activist goes in there somewhere. Writer of fiction also goes somewhere.

I started one book on human resources but need to actually find a reccomended book.

One of my tasks in my thesis work is to find a recommended book on human resources management. It is to be recommended by a business professor from the school of management. I am supposed to actually go to the school and visit someone there. I have not done this all summer. Feeling guilty I picked up a textbook from a library that is modern and Canadian and began to read it. I finished almost all of chapter one now.

I finished the chapter on ODS printer.

Now I have learned about using ODS to output to a printer or PS or PDF file. I have completed reading chapter 5 and thus part 2 and also 87 pages in

Haworth, Lauren. Output Delivery System: The Basics (Cary, NC: SAS Institute, 2001).

I read chapter 4 now to learn a little bit about outputing Rich Text Format (RTF) in SAS

I read chapter four just now in

Haworth, Lauren E. Output Delivery System: The Basics (Cary, NC:, SAS Institute, 2001).

For a while I was assuming that the Linux computing and other cross platform sharing of documents was done best as Rich Text Format (RTF). I did in my teaching assistant work have a brief talk to students about how to format SAS output. This amounted to suggesting they copy and paste the default SAS output window into a Word Pad document. This was in the early to mid 2000's. I think, it is about time I learn more about the Output Delivery System (ODS) in SAS. To this end I read another chapter tonight from this ODS book.

I now know more about outputing HTML files from SAS software.

I have been studying the book:

Haworth, Lauren E. Output Delivery System: The Basics (Cary, NC:, SAS Institute, 2001).

I just completed chapter 3 about HTML output. This made sense based on my experiences using SAS Enterprise Guide with HTML output set as the Enterprise Guide output preference. It was quite a basic explanation and I would recommend this book to anyone able to use a computer.

I have been reading a piece entitled Managing Professional Intellect.

I am reading a piece from the Harvard Business Review on Knowledge Management. Here is the citation:

Quinn, James Brian. Anderson, Philip and Finkelstein, Sydney. Managing Professional Intellect: Making the Most of the Best in Harvard Business Review. Harvard Business Review on Knowledge Management (Boston, Mass.: Harvard Busines, 1998).

After posing the problem and the ideal situation in the workplace, the solution these authors point to is computer systems. They also make a claim at non hierarchical organizations and customer focus but I can see through their description as nothing more than slight of hand. And no this does not help one manage one's own learning and managing one's own knowledge. I think these guys are nothing more than high tech sales boosters. These guys are promoters of the digital age, end story.

My thesis proposal was approved.

Although I need to add more technical content to my thesis it has been approved to go ahead.

I began to read a book on Web Analytics by Avinash Kaushik

I started to read Web Analytics an hour a day. I have plans to support some GNU/Linux web sites using this book.

I am starting chapter 6 but did not make my other study goals last week.

I had set out to read three new chapters in Internet studies books last week but did not make it. I did read one chapter out of the three. I am starting chapter six in the book Knowledge Representation and Reasoning.