Sunday, March 27, 2005

I had a little fun with photos on blogger. In fact, I am going to try to be a little more creative with my camera as I attempt to reduce the amount of stress I am under.

The book I read last summer for one of my law courses. Posted by Hello

My ready made sculpture. That's an IBM selectric keyboard glued to a cheapo wine rack. The wine rack is always empty. Posted by Hello

A book by Michael Geist a local Internet lawyer and social commentator. Posted by Hello

My eMac photo collection. Posted by Hello

Here I hold my cat for the camera. Posted by Hello
I have spent 6 hours marking a statistical stratification assignment. It is due back this week.
I have been reading about women in computing. I have also been reading about a high standard of computer literacy in another MIT book.
I have been working a little to get some spam data into a data frame for R. I seem to have it now by creating a dat file with comma delimiter using SAS export. I was then able to read.table the file in R and seem to have the required data frame now.

Friday, March 25, 2005

I have been reading about women in computer science programs. I have been doing household stuff and teaching statistics the past few days. I have not been working on my law paper or my data mining assignment much the past few days. I am waiting for my supervisor to comment on my rough final draft. I will be doing marking this weekend and working on homework more. I got the union's web site started and on-line live now.

Monday, March 21, 2005

I borrowed a small tract on establishing an anarchist anthropology by Graeber, David. Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2004). I read two chapters today. I also borrowed a book on violence that is multidisciplinary, Anderson, Myrdene. ed. Cultural Shaping of Violence: Victimization, Escalation, Response (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University, 2004). This second book was where I read about the Saami and the lack of violence in their culture but who would really call less violence a "lack". Just me I suppose.

Sunday, March 20, 2005

I stopped working on my paper and am printing my schizophrenia blog for the first quarter. I intend to add the pages printed to my pen and paper journal. With my pen and paper journals I am archiving last fall's pages. These older pages from this journal are stored in binders. one for daily personal notes and one binder for finances.

I completed marking one question's first part for all 80 assignments. It took one day or only an hour and a half of one day.

I spent 12 hours on my paper today. I also spent three hours on the web site for my union local. I updated quite a few blogs today.

I worked for about 12 hours finally getting my hypothesis into my paper. I now have case excerpts, legislation excerpts for each case as well as more of a themed paper. I am printing out a copy now but am really only printing fresh copy as I go along. I need to now jump to the end of the paper and edit more of my ending.

I did not work on my data mining project today. Yesterday I used SAS to view 58 histograms. I could not get these to work in R. I want to also do this project in C++ and PERL but that is getting my expectations too high.

I marked about fifty papers for one part of one question and have about 30 papers to grade for this part still. I think right now I will grade another course and get that half done.

I am marking 80 statistics assignments today and will be done in about one week. I am also working frantically to get my honours paper completed. I am also working on the teaching assistant's union's web site this weekend.

Friday, March 18, 2005

I was working hard this morning on my third assignment in data mining. I got the data read after looking at it again today later in the evening. I was able to do summary statistics but not histograms. The number of variables is too large for a plot. I need to divide the data with a 10 fold cross validation. I must also do some data dimension reduction.

The problem is email spam. I could use a Principle Components reduction using subsets of the variables. There are variables based on word and character frequency that could be extracted and broken down. There is also a capitals series if variables that could be reduced by PC analysis. Then I might have only 9 dimensions or 9 variables, 3 sets of 3 PC components. It may even end up smaller.

Friday, March 11, 2005

This blog seems to be down at the moment.
Well it is still Thursday for me. I can kind of give up the need to sleep odd hours as I had a regular week up till now. Although I wasn't really early for work I wasn't late either. I just spent two days working and volunteering a lot which is why I didn't write anything here. I got all the assignments and mid-terms marked in one lab section I am assigned to.

I also gave two labs last night. I got out of the second lab and went to hear a Chief Technology Officer of a major company speak at our school. I came home and read interesting bits from a few books. Then I wrote some of my paper. I then created a list of books I had read in January and February last year. I spent about two hours surfing Amazon.com.

Since my last entry I have become a member of the Association of Internet Researchers. I got some new job offers and signed a contract to do some web content management for one of my union locals.

I have my data mining course later today in the evening. I am going to proof read and write some of more of my paper now and take a good long break from the computer. I'll also take some vitamins and make some late night coffee.

Monday, March 07, 2005

I read one chapter in the book Liberating Cyberspace this morning. Here is the bibliographic cite for this chapter. Davies, Simon & Hosein, Ian. Privacy I: Liberty on the Line in Liberty, Liberating Cyberspace: Civil Liberties, Human Rights and the Internet (London: Pluto, 1999) at 68-80. I read parts of Personal Privacy and here is the cite for what I read of this book. Cornelius, Vita, Ed. Personal Privacy (New York: Novinka, 2002) at v-21.I also completed chapter four in Keith Humphreys, Circles of Recovery. Here is the cite: Humphreys, Keith. Circles of Recovery: Self-Help Organizations for Addictions (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University, 2004) at 128-148.

Sunday, March 06, 2005

I know a little bit more about using R now. I got some homework done in data mining using R. I also taught SAS coding this week just past. I also bought a second copy of the Little SAS book at a medical bookstore.
I printed more cases and now have a more reasonable and complete by my record case binder.
I copied and pasted legislation from the USA and Canada into my paper. I had seen my adviser this past week and this was recommended.

Saturday, March 05, 2005

Well it was first year calculus and transformations of X and Y axis as I tried to place city names on a map after a multidimensional scaling of city to city distances. Ah euclidean space now there's a thing.

I just today read John Nash's auto-biography on the Nobel prize web site. I don't see myself as a gifted in your face with my arrogant work type of paranoid schizophrenic. I am much more modest and just continue to produce my best. I am too beaten down by my science education from the 1970's that only featured male scientists and it is really my science education and socialization in the late 1990's and early 2000's that has brought a more gender balanced and racially balanced approach to the social world of science doing.

Tuesday, March 01, 2005

Here are some of the 21 books in authors name alphabetical order I am borrowing right now from the Carleton university library www.library.carleton.ca.
Some of 21 books
Bellahsène, Zohra, et al. Database and XML Technologies. Proceedings of the Second International XML Database Symposium, XSym 2004, Toronto, Ontario 2004 (Berlin: Springer, 2004).
I picked through this slowly and as of 05/04/19 am still borrowing it.
Borkmam, Thomasina Jo. Understanding Self-Help/Mutual Aid: Experiential Learning in the Commons (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers, 1999)
I read about four chapters of this book which seeks to establish consumers of medical services has having valid but different knowledge from doctors and other professionals.
Bygrave, Lee A. Data Protection Law: Approaching Its Rationale, Logic and Limits (The Hague: Kluwer, 2002).
This is a very complete book and interesting and perhaps a small part will be useful in my paper.
Cleaver, Barry, et al. Handbook Exploring the Legal Context for Information Policy in Canada (London, Ont.: Faxon Canada, 1992).
This book was a fairly easy read and an interesting topic. It was written by a team of legal professionals for the Faxon company. I read the whole book but it did not help me with my paper.
Cornelius, Vita, Ed. Personal Privacy (New York: Novinka, 2002).
I haven't looked at this book yet.
Humphreys, Keith. Circles of Recovery: Self-Help Organizations for Addictions (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University, 2004).
I am just finishing reading the chapter on effectiveness of self help in promoting less substance abuse. The author admits this is not a complete picture of self help groups but still finds it a valuable public health question to be answered.
Kahin, Brian & Nesson, Charles, Eds. Borders in Cyberspace: Information Policy and the Global Information Infrastructure (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1997).
This is interesting in a broader sense than just for my paper and has older and more general issued addressed as well as containing the David R. Johnson and David G. Post piece The Rise of Law on the Global Network.
Liberty. Liberating Cyberspace: Civil Liberties, Human Rights and the Internet (London: Pluto, 1999).
This book is a big send up but may not be practical in the speed of Internet changes occurring. It is certainly part of early legal scholarship on the ecommerce and Internet involving the law and government.
Oppenheim, Charles. The Legal and Regulatory Environment for Electronic Information 3rd ed. (Tetbury,Gloucestershire, UK: Infonortics, 1999).
This work is mostly about intellectual property issues in Europe and the UK and thus is not much help for my paper.
Parker, Donn. B. Crime by Computer (New York: Charles Scribners, 1976).
This is a book by one of the earliest computer crime scholars and his worked prompted a congressional commmittee and bill to deal with computer crime.
Wall, David S. Ed. Crime and the Internet (New York, Routledge, 2001).
This is a key motivating collection of papers driving me to write my paper.
Williams, Brian. Working with Victims of Crime: Policies, Politics and Practice (London, Jessica Kingsley, 1999).
This book is good and I have been reading it for about four months.
I am marking sample size and point and interval estimators problems for STAT3507. I should be done this today or tomorrow.
I decided not to drop out of the datamining course. In fact I was late to class but was the first person to hand in the assignment. The professors had granted a week's extension in fact. I was so busy printing the lecture notes and working with one last piece of data that was only posted on Monday. I attended the lecture and chatted with an old class mate who works at statistics Canada and is now still in graduate school. Graduate school in statistics is no longer as intimidating as it once seemed.