I just reported items from our Joint and Health and Safety Committee workers caucus meeting to the other health and safety representitive from our union local. Our local's web site is down right now.
Sunday, May 22, 2005
Saturday, May 21, 2005
Friday, May 20, 2005
Thursday, May 19, 2005
Monday, May 16, 2005
Getting ready for first day of Spring/Summer term teaching assistant work.
I did not help with the newspapers this morning. I will do two hours of web mastering this morning. I also have to pick up my duties form at the mathematics and statistics school office then meet with my new supervisors this evening. They will assign hours then I wil submit the form tomorrow. Also tomorrow morning I have a workers causus meeting of our Joint Health and Safety Committee for the teaching assistant union and the university. So I will be going to campus later today and also tomorrow morning.One of our members who was in charge of our literature sales has made an excel spreadsheet of our inventory and I got it onto my palm with the idea that we would have the palm at the bookfair next weekend to do our inventory on the fly. We are all fairly technologically advanced anarachists although the one fellow worker works at very advanced levels with excel.
I have been reading about feminist science studies.
I have 14 books out right now from the school library. I also have about three books for my public law course. I have read about 5 lectures into the course now and am started on the sixth lecture. I have also been reading one course book on aboriginal rights in Canada. The third course book won't be covered until July.I have been reading the feminist science studies reader fairly regularly and have finished the first part of that book. I have not been reading about XML, the math literature guide book, health and safety books, feminist law book, or anything about computer crime now for about two weeks.
I am reading about computers, operating systems, and the palm handheld computer. I also got cheap wireless data plan for my palm with the intention of being able to access my school email wirelessly
Thursday, May 12, 2005
I went to the library today at school. I printed out the reserve readings list for the public law course. I also checked again in the book store for used books for my course and bought a used book on writing from sources. This is scholarly writing guide book I used in my computer ethics course in Fall 2000. I had loaned my copy to a friend who had lost it. But no great cost besides not having for two years it cost me less than 6$ today. This is only the price of a few slices of pizza.
I also bought another course pack on SAS for STAT3503 a regression course I took in 1999. I also bought the course pack for law course in medical issues in criminal law which I may take next winter and considered taking this past winter.
Sunday, May 08, 2005
I am waiting for my grades for my data mining course. I renewed school library books over the web. I have to give a union web mastering training session for union staff on Tuesday. I will find out if I have been hired again as a summer TA soon.
Saturday, May 07, 2005
I also checked out law courses and after this summer's public law course will only need half a credit to complete my BA honours and perhaps if I changed over to the business law course I would only need 2.5 more credits for that BA.
Thursday, May 05, 2005
Tuesday, May 03, 2005
Sunday, May 01, 2005
- LeVitus, Bob. Mac OS X Panther for Dummies (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2004).
- I am running panther right now on my eMac
- Hall, Jon 'maddog', & Sery, Paul G. Red Hat Linux Fedora for Dummies (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2004).
- I am running Fedora Core 3 on my IBM PC sever right now.
- Pouge, David. Palm Pilot: the Ultimate Guide: Mastering the Palm Organizers from Pilot 1000 to Palm VII (Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 1999).
- I have owned a Palm IIIxe, a Palm Vx and now a Palm Tungsten W.
- Pouge, David. Palm Pilot: the Ultimate Guide: Mastering the Palm Organizers from Pilot 1000 to Palm VII (Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 1999).
- The copy I bought earlier in the week was missing the CD so I bought another copy with the CD this time
- Pouge, David.The iBook for Dummies (Foster City, CA: IDG, 2000).
- I have wanted an early model iBook. I have used someone else's iBook for surfing while on holidays.
- Claverie, Jean-Michel, & Notredame, Cedric. Bioinformatics for Dummies (New York, NY, Wiley, 2003).
- I have a passing interest in Bioinformatics and Biostatistics
- Tejkowski, Erick. Cocoa Programming for Dummies (New York, NY: Wiley, 2003).
- I have not programmed Macs much.
- Kaufeld, John. AOL for Dummies (New York, NY: Wiley, 2003).
- Wolinsky, Howard, & Wolinsky, Judi. Healthcare Online for Dummies (New York, NY: Hungry Minds, 2001).
Saturday, April 30, 2005
Friday, April 29, 2005
Maybe this data mining course will allow me to attend graduate school in statistics. I am really on holidays from school now. I will start to get ready for my public law course this summer.
Thursday, April 28, 2005
I read my lecture notes from my data mining course and then today was able to get a trees classification to at least plot although comparing residuals did not work for a basic trees proceedure and when I did a confusion matrix for an rpart proceedure it looked pretty bad. Again I am favouring logit regression as the best result seems to be with logit regression. I did work out a test of logit regression but don't seem to have a print out for it yet. The test was to build the logit model with the test data using the model from the training data but I made all kinds of errors trying to do that at the different dimensions I had used for logit. I got that done today. I worked for about five hours today on the final project.
Tuesday, April 26, 2005
I will keep working on this assignment/project which is due Saturday and only if I get it done will I be able to attend the symposium at the end of this week. I have about 35 hours until the symposium begins.
I may not be able to attend after all with all my ebay surfing I still have a lot of statistics studies to complete before April is over. I also want to volunteer for the contract instructors union because they are holding a ratification vote this week.
So I may stay up late and work on statistics homework and then go into the university in the morning and end my day staffing the vote table as a volunteer. I would read at the table and then come home and sleep at 4 PM Tuesday.
Monday, April 25, 2005
I did a logistic regression of all 24 variables. Using a book on how to interpret logistic regression in R I have now to pare down my model. My next step is too use the covariance cut off of 0.1 and try that model.
Saturday, April 23, 2005
I took a break and then wrote this journal entry and now have three hours before I do a different job and 47 hours left until the project is completed in terms of time put in.
Friday, April 22, 2005
Thursday, April 21, 2005
I am a week and a half through the readings for my summer public law course. The course starts May 18th.
I applied to be a teaching assistant again next term. I will include a picture of our school of mathematics and statistics here.
Tuesday, April 19, 2005
My teaching assistant work is now complete for the winter 2005. I have applied again to work in the summer.
I have a data mining project still to complete. Then this summer I am studying public law. I have the public law textbooks purchased and have been reading them in preparation for this summer.
Sunday, April 17, 2005
Wednesday, April 13, 2005
Tuesday, April 12, 2005
Sunday, April 10, 2005
- Cavazos, Edward A. & Morin, Gavino. Cyberspace and the Law: Your Rights and Duties in the On-Line World (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1994).
- This was the very first book I owned on computers and the law a good old stand by source that has proved its usefulness again.
Sunday, April 03, 2005
- Mark the STAT2507C4 assignment #5. Due Wednesday April 6th.
- Mark the STAT3507 assignment #3. Start this again on Tuesday April 5th. Due some time later in the week.
- Mark the STAT3507 assignment #4. I can´t start this until next week. Due April 16th or so.
- Complete assignment # 3 for my STAT4601 course in data mining. This assignment involves making a spam filter using supervised learning. Due Monday April 4th.
- Complete my honours paper for LAWS4908. I need to brief cases in my own words and rewrite my whole paper. Due Monday April 11th.
- Complete my STAT4601 final project. This project is also supervised learning based on real German credit data. The categorization should determine good and bad credit risks. Due the end of April.
Friday, April 01, 2005
I am still reading Tomasina Borkman on self help groups and experiential knowledge and have been reading the chapter on professionals over night. I have also started to read abook on African telecommunication development. I also read more about educational reform in the USA in the 1990´s from a book on Urban eco-systems and teaching urban eco-systems. Last night I read a little bit more about a feminist Supreme court Justice.
Sunday, March 27, 2005
Friday, March 25, 2005
Monday, March 21, 2005
Sunday, March 20, 2005
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 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.
Friday, March 18, 2005
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
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
Sunday, March 06, 2005
Saturday, March 05, 2005
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
- 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.
Monday, February 28, 2005
Wednesday, February 23, 2005
Maybe I hadn't said this before but my wife is a poet and I am a cyberpunk writer. My wife's first poetry book is in its second edition and is being sent from the printers as 50 copies. Two of my own short stories are waiting to be published in an anthology and I am also editor for. I have some money to publish this collection but was waiting for cover art which I have received today. I now only have to cash in my savings bonds and order the book through iuniverse.
Sunday, February 20, 2005
Sunday, February 13, 2005
Saturday, February 12, 2005
Wednesday, February 09, 2005
I did some more marking overnight and am now just getting ready for a day at school. I have two public meetings today and a lab to give in the morning. Yesterday was Nirvana day on the Buddhist calendar and I felt good about it.
Tuesday, February 08, 2005
My old math student called me and he is now studying final high school year maths by correspondence. I am busy doing my data mining assignment but maybe I am done now. I have done a principle components analysis of some data and I have done a multi dimensional scaling of some other data. The professors are being late with the assignment.
I am busy marking assignments tonight and will be busy marking for the next 7 days. I will not be doing any web mastering or security work until this round of marking is done. I have some more marking coming around on Wednesday morning but it won't be due for a full week.
Saturday, January 29, 2005
I just completed reading the first chapter of Borkman, Thomasina Jo, Understanding Self-Help/Mutual Aid: Experiential Learning in the Commons (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers, 1999). It covered why we should study self help as part of the third sector of the economy or voluntary/non-profit sector. This the sector I find myself involved within.
Wednesday, January 26, 2005
Tuesday, January 25, 2005
Friday, January 21, 2005
Tuesday, January 18, 2005
I picked up the first STAT2507 assignment and will work on it a little today at school to prepare for the tutorial on Wednesday. I should be ok for giving this lab Wednesday morning.
I talked with Professor Normington about the data mining course and feel ok sticking with it for the term. It is very interesting but method intensive. I printed out yesterday's lectures and printed out the R code for the two lecture examples. I also ran the first part of the lecture's association code. I did not attend the lecture though. I also looked at the abstract of a paper on protecting association rules that are privileged. This would occur in industry where data might be shared but one rule that might be important might be hidden or protected so that some association might be unknowable in the data set. I think I understand this. The paper is Oliveira, Stanley R. M., Zaiane Osmar R. & Saygin Yucel. Secure Association Rule Sharing in Dai, Honghua, Srikant, Ramakrishnan, & Zhang Chengqi, Eds. Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining: 8th Pacific-Asia Conference, PAKDD 2004 Sydney, Australia, May 2004 Proceedings (Berlin, Springer, 2004).
Monday, January 17, 2005
I would need to design a survey which I could do while doing my teaching assistant work in the sampling methodology course this winter. I could do an initial survey this February and then get it all analysed by the end of March and get a rough paper written with abstract by June. Then I could do another survey in July and have the final results by September and the paper done by October. Say now that's a time line plan.
I am just printing out tomorrow lecture notes for my data mining course and got some tips on errors I was getting with R and Rgobi and gtk. I now need to try the code for lecture #1 again and try the lecture #2 code before heading off to sleep and then waking up for class later this afternoon. Then I am staying up from mid afternoon until 6 pm Tuesday so I can sleep early Tuesday night and wake up up early Wednesday for my first tutorial lab I am giving Wednesday morning. I will prepare for this lab either later tonight or early Tuesday morning.
I am also working on my law paper off and on tonight and emailed the professor late Sunday night.
Sunday, January 16, 2005
I got this email today about a journal looking for papers in 2006. That would be the year I graduate so it might be nice to have something published that year. I might try to write something for this and have contacted the editor. Here is the email. Note I am fairly sure it is not a breach of copyright to republish it here.
'Disability, Identity, and Interdependence: ICTs and New Social Forms'
A call for papers for a special Spring 2006 issue of
Information, Communication & Society edited by
Dr Gerard Goggin, University of Queensland, Australia
Dr Christopher Newell, University of Tasmania, Australia
Our ideas of identity, the body, dependence and independence,
welfare, and ability are undergoing rapid transformation; new social
forms are emerging in which information and communications
technologies (ICTs) take a central but yet little examined role.
With the growing importance of new movements - such as the disability
movement, the online welfare movement, or those concerned with
independent living - ICTs have become an important part of
envisioning and realizing change to daily life for individuals, as
well as the architecture and systems of community and society. At the
present time also there are nascent associated fields of academic
inquiry and policy interest, such as disability studies, theories of
identity, work on social exclusion, and reconsideration of the
meanings of independence.
Disability, for example, poses rich, complex questions and
perspectives for thinking about identity, ICTs, and society. With
greater awareness of disability and the protection given to the
rights of people with disability through national legislation and
international instruments, increasing attention is being given to
researching and understanding the social implications of technology
and disability. As governments and regulators enact new requirements
for accessible technology, corporations and the 'third' sector are
also grappling with how to incorporate disability and accessibility
in their visions of ICTs.
At stake in these developments are important questions about identity
and ICTs. Concepts of welfare have been much debated, especially
under pressure from global economic and political trends. ICTs now
play an indispensable role in social and political organisation
online around welfare issues, in state and private administration of
welfare, in processes of identity-formation concerning welfare. While
independent living is still to be achieved for many, there is now
growing recognition of the balance between dependence and
independence - and that all in society are engaged in understanding
their interdependence and connectedness, something in which ICTs are
offering innovative ways to understand such new social forms.
In this light, we welcome submissions on topics such as (but not
restricted to):
* how thinking about disability, identity, and interdependence opens
up new perspectives on understanding ICTs
* case studies of particular technologies, accessibility, & disability
* the implications of disability for ICT policy and design
* new conceptions of welfare, online welfare movements and ICTs
* independent living and ICTs
* what are the implications of ICTs for the lives of people with a
diverse range of disabilities and impairments, identities, and lives?
Deadline for abstracts is 1 July 2005.
Deadline for final submissions is Monday 12 December 2005.
Potential contributors are encouraged to discuss their ideas with the editors:
Dr Gerard Goggin, Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies,
University of Queensland (g.goggin@uq.edu.au)
Dr Christopher Newell, School of Medicine, University of Tasmania
(christopher.newell@utas.edu.au).
I am slowly working on my paper this evening and tomorrow morning then I am off to my data mining course after getting some sleep. I will also check the data mining course web page in a little bit to see if there is anything new posted.
Saturday, January 15, 2005
Friday, January 14, 2005
I was busy a little with my Debian computer this morning in the wee hours of the morning. But before that I did some review of the first week's data mining lecture using the lecture code and copying and pasting it into an advanced statistical software R. I have two books on using R but did not read them in the past four days. I also helped out with the paper route this morning and will help out Saturday morning as usual. I read an article about computers in schools and education in terms of the globalisation process. I also read a small lecture by Judge Richard Posner and his colleague William Landes on the Political Economy of Intellectual property. I also read about emergencies and sleep disorders. I also read the end of a Canadian Law Commission report on policing.
I decided on studying only data mining and my honours paper after all. I got assigned to four labs in my teaching assistant work. I did not get the web master job with the union and no longer want it. Our unemployment rate in Canada while a debatable measure of true unemployment is at its lowest in a long time.
I have been setting up and using my new Palm Tungsten W. My wife has been using her DVD/VHS player. I played Dungeons and Dragons on Wednesday night and later today will manage a cyberpunk game. I am so tired being up on call and am about to sleep until 7 or 8 PM tonight. I am just going to pop my daily risperadol about 10 hours late. I should have taken them at 11 PM last night. I have had no vitamins now in 36 hours.
Tuesday, January 11, 2005
I got my assignment for being a statistics TA and will be the TA for the sampling methodology course. I did very well with this course in 2001 and it was the last course in my B.Math degree. I have also used the material in this course to make some money because it taught questionnaire design and I have designed a questionnaire for money for a health network.
Sunday, January 09, 2005
I spent the past week studying policing and private security for a course coded LAWS4306B titled policing (and Social Surveillance) by professor George Rigakos Ph.D.. It is a criminology course. I have read a Law Commission research paper by Rigakos now, and a couple of his journal articles are printed and await my reading attention.
I got my two R books in the mail and one is perfect for the first lecture I attended this week in statistical computing. The other R book is perfect for general level of statistics like the level my B.Math was at. This course in statistical computing STAT4604 is a level above this book. This course seems like fun and is the cheapest choice for courses this term in terms of required textbooks. Tomorrow we have the second lecture in this course. Then the third is on Wednesday. I plan to attend the first three lectures even if I don't stick with course for the whole term.
Also tomorrow we are having a school memorial service for the disaster in Asia. I also plan to attend that before my statistics course in the afternoon. Then in the evening the first class of the data mining course happens and I plan to attend that too. I have not met my pre-term study objectives for this course and am not keen on this course today.
I am fairly keen to just take the final law half credit in criminal law issues. But I also watched an ITV or television lecture of a third year course in the criminal law and politics by Chris McNaughton who was also my professor this summer in terrorism law.
Yes another term has started This term I am practicing the shop around for the right course method.
Monday, January 03, 2005
Our grades should be ready soon for our drug law course. I hope to go to campus today later but really don't have to go until tomorrow Wednesday.
Sunday, January 02, 2005
- Sieber, Ulrich. Ed. Information Technology Crime: National Legislation,
Jus Informationis European Series on Information Law v 6 (Köln: Carl
Heymanns Verlag, 1994). - I completed reading the USA section of this book, yesterday. There were some cases mentioned concerning computer crime that I must now search out on Lexis. Also I have printed out some of the more famous cases and must read those at the appeals level anyways. I also have an old 1980's case and a more recent case to read.
I will have some classes to maybe attend this Wednesday but I am not registered in these courses. Yes, there are many interesting law courses this term but I am staying with data mining I and my honours paper as my only courses in my own studies. I hope to work as a teaching assistant in two or three section of statistics courses this winter term.







