Practically twenty books or hundreds of journals articles will not work.

The two master's thesis advisers I saw who did not take me on as a student both offered the advice of not doing too much work on the thesis. I am realising now that twenty books would be too much. So just like a short list of twenty references is better than hundreds of references, a twenty item list with journal articles is also much more practical in terms of getting it done. Also books are not as easy to vet I think at present. Perhaps there are simple vetting processes for books but I am not able to know or express these simple processes right now. So I am cutting books down on the list and adding more peer reviewed papers. I am also focusing less on the seven components of operational knowledge and instead on knowledge loss and knowledge retention. Much better and seems like it will be much easier.

My searching of ProQuest that started a year ago is now filtered down to 79 references.

I am attempting to find the 20 classic references to the problem of Knowledge Loss. I may have nine or ten references now and these are books. I should be adding peer reviewed journals. I should cut some of these books and add more journal articles. I have only one or two classic knowledge management books and these two I will keep. And I have two methods books. And I have two knowledge loss books. I am looking right now at the possibility of narrowing down the 79 present references. I also now have the idea that I should perform a search on ProQuest and Google scholar for the term Knowledge Loss and find about 15 papers that way. After all, the previous searching that is now narrowed to 79 papers, was about searching for ways to measure knowledge. What I really need is papers on the main topic: Knowledge loss. Also I think ten books is too many books. So I will cut the book list to the six books mentioned above and cut the previous search to five or so papers then find ten or so peer reviewed papers on Knowledge Loss.

I am co-presenting a paper at a work conference.

The paper is about online seniors. Here are the conference details
Socio-economic Conference 2009

Baby-boom research

The conference I am presenting at is sponsored by this network The Social Economy Student Network (SESN) http://socialeconomy.info/en/english

I have made it to ten references now.

I feeling slightly pressured to complete my literature review. But I now have ten items on the list so am two days behind only. I say two days behind because I set a goal on Sunday of adding one item per day to be done early for the next meeting with Dr. Kiringa my thesis supervisor. I am just printing the ten item list now and blogging a bit about my home computers. I am also starting to register for courses at work in statistical computing. This reminds me to choose courses from the School of the Public Service which means first I need to check in this morning with my career vision for the next five years. I created this vision at my course last week.

I installed Microsoft Project 2007 and will use it to plan my thesis work.

I installed Microsoft Project 2007 on Remembrance and made a file for the thesis I am working on in graduate school.

I plan to find five more classic literature items today

I started to look up the references in Continuity Management and found some but some are off the Internet now. I plan to find five more references today so as to be on schedule for my April 15th deadline for my literature review. I must read references found on this list this summer. I need to have about 20 items.

Progress with spring paper: I can read by 21 rows now and have all the population data into 18 datasets

I have now read all my data into 18 age band data sets and just need to now join these 18 data sets and then split these every 21*23 rows into 228 data sets and then again split this into 23 yearly tables. So the end result should be 227 countries and one world data sets with population for both genders and population for each of male and female by 17 age bands and total all ages, and 23 yearly tables for each country.

This is giving me an idea for the analysis. This idea is to use the 18 data sets and call these the age band data sets(18). Then I want to have 227 country and one world data sets and call these the country data sets(228). Then also have 23 data sets for years and call these the years data sets(23). Then I will work comparing these data sets for my populations analysis.

In fact, rather than join these data sets I have now, the age band data sets to get the other data sets, I should instead simply read in the data for each data set. So my next reading in will be for the 227 countries and one world data sets. Then the third step will be to read in the data into years data sets.

I also need to start looking at a data source for finding the top three industries in each of the 228 countries. May be one google search like I did to find the population data will work.

I have started using Inference for R software and can code with this documentation software now.

I was offered a chance to test out Inference for R. This software it seems interfaces R with Microsoft Office. I have so far used it in both Word and Excel. Because it is an interface it is faster than copying and pasting code into the R command line window and also is faster because when you change code and run that changed code as in debugging you do not lose the code typed on the command line. I had in the past changed my code on the command line and would have to copy my successful code back to my text editor to keep a record of what I was doing.

One big problem for Inference for R is that it is only available on one platform. I am having to move back to the Windows world of computers because of statistics software like Inference for R, SAS and Excel and also because of the game Eve Online which is mostly a windows based game.

My computers are working well. I am having to use Windows at school and work.

My eMac is functioning fine and I even found the DVD drive working again. The Macbook although it is filthy is working fine as my usual daily machine now in the living room, The new home built PC with Windows XP 64 bit and Debian Linux is also working fine now. The new Dell Mini 9 Netbook is fine and I carry it around all the time but it is not getting much use but it is very useful to have it if needed. I used it at a community group last week to keep minutes of a meeting.

I am thinking of buying a Windows laptop that I would build from an OCZ laptop skeleton. This PC laptop would also be running Windows XP 64 bit and Debian 4.2. I am also thinking of buying an iMac 20 inch desktop. I am looking at used MacBooks and Powerbooks and iBooks for a friend and perhaps one for myself for music recording. I am looking in the 200-400 dollar range for these. These would be running Tiger not Leopard for an OS.

Getting books and papers organized: Shelves I use for books.

We have a coffee table with six shelves in our living room. I am dedicating one shelf now for my thesis literature. The shelf under that is for statistics and Internet studies books. One shelf is for remotes, another for phone books, another for non paper items and then one for my partner's books and journals. I also have numerous shelves around the apartment for other subjects like the ones in the dinning area for, music, engineering, fine art, poetry and drama, science fiction, TV and film, social sciences, radical books, classic literature, philosophy and religion, and geography. In the office are shelves for computer books, nature books, hard science books, political science and peace literature, math books, two shelves for statistics books and notes, a shelf for storing cables and connectors and other loose computer stuff. Another shelf is used just for camera stuff. Four shelves are used to store computer parts, and one CD cabinet is used to store disks, I have shelves for personal papers including one for bills and two shelves with magazine boxes to organize school notes and other papers. I have shelves in there for classic games like chess and GO. I have a shelf for Internet studies and guides. I have shelf for cyberpunk fiction. Plus I have a rolling file cabinet where old agenda books, school admin papers and pens and other miscellaneous stuff is kept. I have four shelves for bankers boxes of old school notes, magazines and old bills and old school calendars. Plus I have a shelf where I store old journals and old daily accounts. All in all most of the stuff has a place to go and be put away.

Literature search and studies update

After meeting my supervisor I felt confident that my thesis is progressing well. I am focused on the literature search and my paper for a conference in social economy in two months. These are the two basic tasks at present. I will need to find the twenty classic references for my topic. Then I will spend the summer term reading these references. I have four items in mind so far for this twenty item list.

In health reading I am reading about stress management. In entertainment reading I am reading two books about guitar. In programming I am studying SAS, Excel and have numerous computer "language" books. I will need to learn to program in Java or C++ this summer.

I was unable to import the data in R or in SAS so I am working in Excel.

I was unable so far to import the world population data into R or into SAS. I was trying to do this to allow me to automate the finding process for baby booms. Instead, I am doing the discovery with my eyes using the highlighted column created with conditional formatting in Excel. I wrote about this conditional formatting in my last post. I started with the last country in the Z's and am now on the T's. I have about 270,000 records and am now at about 200,000 records so am about 1/4 done so this will be possible in Excel. I am making a separate worksheet for each country that shows a suspected boom and then copying and pasting the tables from 1996 to 2050 for each suspect country into its own worksheet. So then I can save each work sheet as a csv text file for one country at a time. Then I can try to import one country's data at a time into a more sophisticated statistical analysis software. That will be my next step when this discovery step is completed.

Progress with my paper for the May graduate conference in social economy.

I have created columns next to the total population and male and female population counts columns that subtract a given age band from the previous age band. Thus if these new columns are negative it means a given age band is larger than the younger age band before it. For instance, if there are 300,000 persons aged 5 to 9 years old and there are only 200,000 babies aged 0-4 years old in a country in say 1996 then the next columns shows - 100,000. I then used conditional formatting to highlight the new column if a value was negative. This has given me a way of visually finding any suspected baby booms. But I still desire R code that will scan these new columns and produce a data set of only the population tables where these negative values occur. At this point, as well I have been offered the use of a documentation software to document in Office 2007 format, my use of R code.

I have some idea of the required indexes in the data set to use in R loops or array indexes. These are the re-occurrence rows of data in the large data set. In other words starting with the World population data tables then going from country names starting at A then down to Z we have repeated tables starting in 1996 to 2010 for each year and then 2015 and basically every five years projected until 2050. So there are tables in two dimensions, country names and then years. I will limit my searches to 1996 to 2005 at first but then if I am choosing a country as having booms in this decade of years 1996 to 2005, I will come back to the projections for the future.

I also need to get the path's right to open data files using R on windows. So once this path problem is solved I can move ahead with trying index's to parse the large data set into a smaller data set with only population tables that indicate a suspected baby boom.

Reading Internet studies today.

I am reading

Whitty, Monica T., Joinson, Adam N. Truth, Lies and Trust on the Internet (New York, N.Y.: Routledge, 2009).

This is interesting and I agree with these authors that not all self disclosure is anonymous. I am seeing this working into my findings that sites that allow social networking with those we know offline are different than the "virtual friends who are strangers" topics of past Internet studies.

HTML authoring resources by Ian Graham University of Toronto

I think Ian Graham wrote some great HTML books in the 1990's. Is anyone studying the computer self help press?

here are some titles that are only pennies used from Amazon

If a few bucks is still too much you read his online tutorial

http://www.utoronto.ca/webdocs/HTMLdocs/NewHTML/intro.html

Old but still useful

The Html Sourcebook: A Complete Guide to Html 3.0 (Paperback)
by Ian S. Graham (Author), Ian S Graham (Author)


Html 4.0 Sourcebook (Paperback)
by Ian S. Graham (Author) "What is a text markup language?..." (more)



I am trying to start reading this one

HTML Stylesheet Sourcebook (Sourcebooks) (Paperback)
by Ian S. Graham (Author)



BTW I do not know Ian or have any monetary connection to him nor really academic beyond learning from his great books and always available online tutorial.

Components of Operational Knowledge: ProQuest journal database search feeds.

Here are the RSS feeds from ProQuest for the searches I did to complete the searching for the seven sub-component types of knowledge theorized to make up operational knowledge.

Procedural and Process Knowledge

http://rss.proquest.com.proxy.bib.uottawa.ca/rss?rss_id=504831

Heuristic Knowledge

http://rss.proquest.com.proxy.bib.uottawa.ca/rss?rss_id=504839

Cultural Knowledge

http://rss.proquest.com.proxy.bib.uottawa.ca/rss?rss_id=504858

Completing a literature search within the thesis

Last winter and spring I had searched out types of knowledge theorized to make up operational knowledge at a firm. At present in RefWorks I have four folders for four types of knowledge. These are:

• Cognitive Knowledge
• Skills Knowledge
• Systems Knowledge
• Social Network Knowledge

Today I want to search for the remaining three forms of knowledge in this theoretical framework. These are:

• Process and Procedural Knowledge
• Heuristic Knowledge
• Cultural Knowledge

.

This theoretical framework follows from:

Hamilton Beazley, Jeremiah Boenisch, and David Harden. Continuity Management: Pre-serving Corporate Knowledge and Productivity When Employees Leave (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2002).

I have been studying this book for over a year now.

Catching up on Internet studies: Thoughts on the present theory direction of the social impact of the Internet

I am reading

Katz, James E. and Rice, Ronald E. Social Consequences of Internet Use: Access, Involvement and Interaction (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2002).

I have read now the introductory chapter critically and find a comment. In terms of community involvement I would add that, in fact, if we open the Internet up to include computers used offline and call it simply ICT's we could add organizational power of ICT's in building the processes of volunteering and the work needed to volunteer as a plus to Internet access. Rather than just recruitment of volunteers ( mentioned in the first chapter) the Internet does much more for a volunteer group. I spend hours volunteering every week. It is not the Internet alone amongst ICT's that allow me to be a better volunteer and for our group to do its business. I am now thinking of multiple group membership and multiple group participation. Almost all these groups must do writing. The other basic skill reading it not as fully aided by ICT's in the context of reading in volunteer work. Whereas, writing benefits from the Internet, Palm pilots, web pages, pdf's, word processors, spreadsheets, calendaring software. I guess what I am finding is the social capital thesis is less important than the work organization thesis.

Researching my next workplace.

My supervisor helped me find another possible place to work supporting research. I started to print some 27 analytical articles from the web that this workplace has written. The articles appear to be sets of three or four per year with the same titles each year except for the year in the title. So these are like annual reviews of their subject matters. The job would be for one year supporting these publications as a technical/IT research assistant. I have been worried about being disorganized with my workplace reading, so these systematic articles are inspiring me to neatly catalog the articles in a binder. I am not sure I will have the time to read them all before my interview but I really need to do that. My first question for my new employers will be to ask them to describe the processes that happen from beginning to end for the data and most importantly the quality control process they use in their processes.

Workplace organization and its modeling.

There is an interesting section on conceptualizing workplace organization in this book James R. Taylor, et al. The Computerization of Work (Thousand Oaks, Calf.: Sage, 2001) at 9.

Paper for the May gradudate conference in social economy is coming along.

I started to scan with my eyes divergences from the perfect population pyramid. I have some doubts now about my interpretation and criteria for booms, after finding, in fact, the world population has some age bands starting in 2000 where the older band exceeds the younger band in size. This is my first clue of a boom or divergence from the perfect pyramid. This rule is, if an older age band exceeds a younger age band, we have identified a boom. I have scanned the available world pyramids for both genders combined but not separately and copied and pasted the full years data for all occurrences of the divergent pattern. I then tried to construct a population pyramid with Excel. I needed to code one gender's population with negative numbers to get the Excel chart to look something like a population pyramid. I also scanned with my eyes Afghanistan and next is Albania.

So my method is to scan with my eyes. The other choice of method is to read the tables into R and run a check to see if a table decreases continuously from the 0-4 age band to the 80+ age band. Actually the 80+ age band is giving me some false positives in the rule above. I will do all the countries by eye and then run the R code to check. Or better would be to next design the R code to find all the divergences and not have to scan all the rows of countries. I have so far scanned only the World and Afghanistan and reached about the thousandth row of thirty three thousand rows of data. So here automating will save me some time.

Also getting the data from each table into R gives me more statistical power than simply identifying one divergent pattern. I can run many pattern recognitions once the data is cleanly into R or other statistical software.

Here is my abstract for this paper.

Abstract
The world over all has no baby boom. There are always more babies and fewer seniors when one looks at the whole world. We would like to examine if baby booms exist in any and each country. If this examination is possible we will then move further. The study will survey the age pyramid structures, the typical retirement age and industries, that the majority of the population work within, for all the world's nations, if data can be located. If these measures are possible attempts are made at assessing the potential knowledge losses in these majority industries as the widest parts of the age pyramid retire and take their workplace operational knowledge with them potentially crippling these industries and nations. General comments are attempted concerning each nation studied.

I submitted a paper to a conference this May in Ottawa.

I submitted a paper proposal to the International Student Conference on the Social Economy Innovation & Sustainability in a Changing World: Exploring Social Economy Alternatives.

I explored some demographics from the US census international data web site looking for baby boom's world wide.

I found global population numbers by age and by gender for all the world's countries at the US census international data site. I downloaded tables for every country for each year from 1996 through projections to 2010 and then by five and then ten year projections up to 2050. So why did I need this data? I was looking to find the baby boom in each country. I am going to write a paper that looks at the baby boom in each country, then looks at the major industries in those countries and then looks for possible knowledge lose crisis points in time in the future for each country. This would be the point when the widest part of the population pyramid retires.

Of course retirement I am realising is not a global concept. So this may be a flawed study.

I started to examine the data from the world population pyramid and found the world has no baby boom. The world has more babies and fewer seniors with no exceptions. For every year and every projection and at each age band there more younger persons than older persons. I guess we could call this the perfect pyramid. Now I have to inspect each of some 200 countries individually. I think now I will submit my abstract for this research project to a conference I have created it for. The deadline is fast approaching. I will rewrite it one more time and send it off.

Enjoying work and being rewarded by practicing statistics, maths and programming.

I have won a promotion at work but have to find an opening at the higher level. That is I am qualified for a promotion now but have yet to find an opening. I transferred recently from being a research assistant in aging research to being a research assistant in Internet research. In the first research assistant job, I was able to effect some control on my work and time at work by advertising my SAS skills. These skills have devloped over that year of work have improved and made it possible for both my latest transfer and also my passing the tests and interviews for the promotion. This is at least how the promotion job is styled as a technical statistical officer. But the real power I was able to affect was choosing where in my large workplace to work. I was able to match my own reading and research interests in the Internet to my workplace. At the same time I am now writing SAS everyday. I now must carefully choose a new field of statistics to work in that I will enjoy. This is one present task and my coworkers have offered me help in this. I am living in some sweet times and have a very good work life at the moment that is healthy and in somewhat of a sync with my school studies.

My next step is to search google scholar and google for similar projects.

I have searched Ph.D. and other thesis libraries when doing my paper last summer for knowledge measurement by searching for knowledge management and demographics. But this may have been an error. So now I need to search for this term: "simulation of knowledge management in learning organizations.". I did this once this morning with google scholar and found a paper from McMaster's school of business. This covered something called a Tango simulation but this turns out to a live person simulation not a computer simulation.

I have emailed professor Tuncer Ören for some guidance in simulations and knowledge management

I have emailed a simulations expert professor Tuncer Ören at the university of Ottawa for some advice with modeling firms. I have sent him my present thesis abstract and a brief paragraph explaining why I chose this topic.

I need to prepare a summary of my thesis for a professor who may be able to help me.

I have asked my instructor from my last term for help locating researchers who have simulated firms. I have found no one so far who knows knowledge management at the university of Ottawa. But my instructor has found someone who would like to see a summary of my research plan. So I will send my abstract from my thesis draft and the abstract from my summer paper.

I am beginning my thesis proposal tonight.

I am beginning to write my thesis proposal after emailing someone in simulations for some advise on the structure.

I need to organise my simulation now.

I have the skills and tools now from my last course to start to organize my simulation of the workplace and the retirement of the baby boom. I will start this week and weekend to write the key features document of the simulation and this could be the document for my thesis proposal. I need to freeze frame on this one step and work on this for about a month.

I am working hard at work applying school knowledge.

I am working hard at work today combining my recent computer skills with my school knowledge to produce work that I can not detail here. I can not talk about work as our data at work is confidential so it is good practice to remain fairly tight lipped really about everything. I work with confidential data governed by the Statistics Act and could go to jail and be fined if I caused data to revealed. But I am working with data and learning to a good job and at the same time trying to get ahead in this world of research and analysis.

Thesis proposal course

I have the forms now for my thesis proposal registration. I just need to fill these in and then fax them to the academic adviser and administrator at our school. I also have some guide line documents for completing the thesis proposal.

Tree tabs and mixed tabs add ons for firefox.

This video from a Linden Labs staffer explains these useful firefox add ons.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFz66w8wAEY

or search tree style tabs and mixed tabs on goggle. You need the mixed tabs for the tree tabs to work.

Backing up and file and folder making.

I made some folder for years, months, and quarters. I made some templates for folder arrangements. So I have years from the early 1950's through to 2008, I also have a folder full of the months and folders for quarters for different fiscal years. I can then copy and paste these templates into what ever I am organizing.

I also have made some html txt files for this blog and my computer logbook blog for the year 2003 when these blogs were started. I hope to find all my study notes and other files that I made and store them in folders for each year and then back these up to DVD.

I have made some burn folders for the documents folder, the desktop and other files folder and the email folder for the Macbook. This is three 4.7 GB DVD's and I will make six copies for each DVD. I need 18 blank DVD's for this. So my back up process for 2008 has started.

Adding up prices on a web page.

Task: total prices of a web page list.
Goal: to price the cost of owning every O'Reilly pocket reference and guide.
Software needed:
A web browser
A spreadsheet
R software
a text editor.

Find a well formated web price list such as
http://oreilly.com/store/series/pocketrefs.csp

Step 1: Web browser
Highlight the beginning of the price list (i.e. highlight the beginning of the first item/record on the web page). Scroll to the end of the list or web page. Hold your shift key down and click just after the last item/record. Now copy this highlighted list. You should have all the items highlighted

Step 2 Spreadsheet
Paste this in to an empty spreadsheet. Examine this and see if prices are on one row alone. It does not matter if there are dollar signs with the prices in the cells or also in this case a currency symbol USD. But here we find in the spreadsheet a price such as "$9.99 USD" occurring in every eighth row. The Prices should be in cells by themselves. But there is all the other stuff like the title and the blurb which here we want to parse out.

Step 3 Spreadsheet
Save the spreadsheet as a CSV file comma separated file. Remember the name and directory for the first line of R code below in the next step.

Step 4: R software ( www.r-project.org), text editor
Copy and paste the code below into a text editor
Change the directory and file name to your file and directory name from step 3 in the first and and the directory in the last line of this code. On the last line chose a file name.
Change the line jump <-(seq(x,y,z)
so that x is the first row a price occurs and y the last row a price occurs and
z is the number of rows between each price.

You can also change jump(x,y,z) to parse out all the titles or all the blurbs or all the dates published.


After editing copy the code into the R command line a line at a time
the # lines are comments


Use R software and run this code on the R command line after editing it in the text editor. Stop after each line that begins with # to check the results. good luck and use R help if needed.

###################Code Starts here##################
OPocket <-read.csv(file="/Users/ptimusk/documents/school/books/OReillyPocket08-12-24.csv", header= FALSE)
# read into R and the variable OPocket the csv file created by Excel save as csv.
#change "Users/ptimusk/documents/school/books/...to your directory
# and file name OReillyPocket08-12-24.csv

OPocket
#check variable for rows that contain prices. Every foth row starting at 4 ending at 394
#
jump <- seq(4, 394, 5)
# create an index of rows where prices occur. Start with row 4. End with row 394
#Count by 5 rows

OPocket.Prices <- as.vector (OPocket[jump,1])
#take only the rows(indexed by "jump") with prices out of the variable OPocket

OPocket.Prices
# check to see above variable contains quoted prices in 79 rows

write.csv(OPocket.Prices,file="/Users/ptimusk/documents/school/books/OPocketPrices08-12-24.csv")
#write the prices to a csv text file

###############Code ends here######################

Step 5 text editor
Open with the text editor the file you just wrote on the last line of R code
Save as txt

Step 6 Spreadsheet

With the spreadsheet and a new empty spreadsheet open the txt file you just saved. That should be the text file with the Prices. This file should have the variable OPocket.Prices as an R format variable.

The spreadsheet should take you through some import steps where
you can adjust the separator characters to parse out the prices only without the $
and without the currency symbol. You also parse out the first line and the quotes.

Sum the prices column
Your done!
Answer: all the O'Reilly pocket references and guides will cost 851.69 $ for the 79 books.

Our term project passed and it looks like I passed simulations and modeling.

Our term project got a great mark. I did not do so well on the exam. But it looks like I have passed the simulations and modeling course.

Studying Internet topics and SAS this weekend.

I am studying SAS and Internet policy material this weekend. I also hope to study some code from my new O'Reilly pocket guides.

Its official Dr. Iluju Kiringa to supervise my masters of science thesis

When I was young and a Fortran programmer I looked up to the graduate students I worked with. They were studying for their masters of science. I aimed to get this degree for many years. Now my chance to study for this is upon me. Dr. Iluju Kiringa has agreed to supervise my thesis. I think I will be studying in the data discovery field.

I am coauthor of a paper on retirement education.

I have completed at work some research on retirement education in Canada. I used the Internet to search for courses and other support information for persons to plan for their retirement. A paper summarizing the amount of this education available was then written. The paper's purpose was to suggest a survey to find out more accurately and with more confidence the amount, accessibility and availability of retirement education. The paper was presented at the Policy Research Initiative conference last week. This is a government agency conference. Their web site is here http://www.policyresearch.gc.ca/.

I am studying Perl but with full time work I do not study as much as in the past.

I no longer find a lot of time to study outside of work. At work I read many studies. I am involved in writing research papers at work. I am thinking of starting some research projects on my own again. I might try to write two papers this year. I should try to search out some calls for papers but often I find these coming in in my email subscriptions to email lists.

I am checking to make sure I have a supervisor for my thesis now.

My chance of being supervised by John Nash at the university of Ottawa fell through. I am checking with Professor Iluju Kiringa to see if he can still supervise at this point. He had me reading a book on knowledge representation this fall in preparation for my thesis. Here is Iluju Kiringa's web page http://www.site.uottawa.ca/~kiringa/.

Our term project was submitted yesterday.

I submitted our term project yesterday. It was interesting to see some of the other term project members learning statistics. One member did a lot of work. I did not manage to learn much Java programming but I did learn some.

Completion of course requirements for Graduate Certificate in Systems Sciences.

After today's exam I will have completed the course requirements for a graduate certificate in systems sciences. Next term, I may be allowed to start a thesis in systems sciences for completion of a masters of science an M.Sc..

I have my notes organized and I am just printing the last lectures slides.

It is down to crunch time but I have made steady progress studying. I will review a few calculations and my hand written lecture notes this morning before the exam.

I am excited to be starting some new work at work on Wednesday.

I am reviewing chapter 2 now in the text book.

I started to review chapter 2 in my course textbook. This chapter outlines the basic in this simulations and modeling approach.

I have found out my mistake that our instructor is not actually a full professor. He is still studying for his PhD.

I am now babtised in the use of Excel for statistical analysis.

I never do like to use Excel for statistics because I can use much more powerful tools like SAS and R. Also I have been taught to prefer R and SAS because apparently they are more professional. In fact, I have also been taught to do analysis by hand because that gives the least black box approach. At any rate my present professor uses Excel to do the analysis of simulations so I used Excel.

I have two versions of the experiment and I had our programmers run it 10,000 times thus simulating a restaurant being open 10,000 days. I used Excel formulas to calculate averages, standard deviations and confidence intervals. I divided the confidence interval by 2 to give a half interval. I then did this for the first ten runs, the first 100 runs, the first 1000 runs and finally the whole 10,000 runs.

Then using Excel I made some tables to hold the results and copied and pasted these into Word. I used two fonts the standard Excel Mac X version default font for most of the work and then tried American Typewriter for the headings. I am learning typesetting for tables and charts at work in my development assignment. My development assignment is ending this week. It actually ends next Tuesday but I took Monday and Tuesday off work to write my final exam.

So I have now used Excel to do a simple statistical analysis for our term project. I should now move on to writing this up and getting ready to submit the final step of the project. The good thing now is the professor was very positive about our step three submission and step four is statistics which is what I have studied the most courses in so this step has a lot going in my favour.

We had our exam review class tonight. It was relaxing and intellectually stimulating

I attend the exam review meaning I have attended all classes this term. I should do alright on the exam. I know the material now.

I am starting work in the Internet Society section of Statistics Canada on December 10th.

I was able to land a clerical job with the Internet Society section at my workplace Statistics Canada. I will be part of a research team researching Internet use both by households and by business. So there are the Household Internet Use survey and the E-commerce survey. I will be working in technical support and as a research assistant.

Exam study begins: Reading chapter 3 in course textbook. Progress report.

I have carefully read sections 3.1 and 3.2 in our course textbook. In section 3.3 I have read up to section 3.3.2.2. There are still the remaining sections of section 3.3 to read. Then section 3.4 and then I need to read and look up the references in section 3.5. I hope to do this tonight and early Monday morning read chapter 4. This is all to prepare for our exam review class tomorrow on Monday afternoon. I have studied for one hour of the eight hours planned

Our term project is good at the third step. I am planning eight hours study over night now.

I am getting ready for eight hours study over night now for my SYS5110 exam. Tomorrow is our exam review class.

Our project has been marked for the third phase. We did good work on it.

I finished reading The Making of Second Life by James Wagner Au.

I finished reading The Making of Second Life by James Wagner Au. His writing is entertaining but laden with American military culture and military buzz words. This amounts to a light reading business behind the scenes look at Linden Labs and some briefly sketched Second Life events. We find out in the book that the usual Internet capitalists like Bezos and libertarian capitalists like Kapour are investors in Second Life. I think it awful that computer science which was once upon a time for me a school subject related to math and language is so money oriented. I really need to sit back and think more about all this reading about the net and whether I really want to continue to expose myself to this set of libertarian values again and again.

Our term project is coming along on time.

We submitted our project step 3 on time. The two programmers did almost all the work on this phase of the project. I did some minor documentation and did the submission from my eMac. Our next submission deadline for the full and final project is in two weeks. We have one more class and then we have an exam the week after. I am taking time off work that day to write the exam. The day after the exam I start work in the Internet Society section of my workplace Statistics Canada.

I am installing a one year one time install version of ESRI's ArcGIS 9.2 student version on the new PC crystal 89.

I was surfing the school's web pages for computer services for students. I was trying to find a copy of Symantic anti virus software. I did download the school provided Windows version of Symantic anti virus software but it is 32 bit and will not work on the new PC. But while exploring software available for students I noticed that the license for ArcView has changed at school and we are now allowed to use the software at home. I was taking a break from work and decided that in my travels on the buses yesterday to go to school and get a copy of ArcView which is now in version 9.2. I had trained in version 3.2 in 2000 at Carleton at the geography department there where I have done many years of part time studies. I have also done an analysis of a conference paper about GIS last winter 2008 as a school term project. I have also read an introduction to ESRI GIS database use this past summer by borrowing a book from my workplace library. I was studying for a job competition but did not get very far with that application so stopped reading the book. So at the moment I am installing ArcView 9.2 with the intent of continuing a project from 2000.

At the moment I have installed the software and plan to open my old term project from the course I took in 2000. Then, by accessing recent census data I will update the ArcView project. I had used spreadsheets containing census 1996 data, entered into Excel from Zypher at the Ottawa Carleton Social Planning Council. There I had been paid to enter the data. I am a proud supporter of the Ottawa Carleton Social Planning Council and give them money every pay cheque through charitable donations. This is my present and first project for ArcView 9.2. I then may also attempt to open GIS files provided by Statistics Canada and Elections Canada, two of the workplaces I have worked.

I did not succeed right away with the new software. I was able too import my project file but could not get a map to appear. I am up over night and do not want to spend my time on a desktop computer working out this problem as I had planned to read books. So I am stopping now with the software successfully installed and registered.

I submitted an assignment but did not run the code.

This is a very worrisome course this term with both ODE's and JAVA programming. I hope I manage to do well with this course.

I am now writing the last method which is called a Precondition method

I am now writing the last method called a Precondition method. This is the last page of code of a seven page Java program. There is also a seeds class file that is about half a page and a main method file that is also about half a page. The seeds file I rewrote from one of the professor's files last week. Yesterday night, I wrote the main method and the professor looked at it today and said, it looked fine. I started with a file of the professor's as he suggested for the longer file and started to rewrite it last weekend and now have about one page of this longer seven page file to write. The last page has what is called a Precondition method and I will now work on that tonight.

My first school Java program is almost done.

I have studied Java a little in the middle 1990's. I today have written a Java program that does a simulation of a city garage. This is for a school assignment in modeling and simulation. I am almost done the program and have about two pages left to program in a 7 page program.

I have my Java main method for my assignment done now.

I worked last night on an assignment in simulations and modeling. I have a Java main method now completed. I now just need to write the class file which is an instance of EveSched a type of class we are using for simulations. I am now writing the various methods in this class and have I think completed all the action sequences. I still have more of the process events method to write. This morning I printed this class file for proof reading. I may be able to complete tis assignment today if I focus on it.

I cleaned up the English in our term project this morning and started section 3 of the report document.

I was up early today after some long work days this week. We are working on a paper I am a coauthor of on retirement. I will say more after we present the paper. Right now I should keep the details quiet before peer review. But it is a lot of work and all the data must all be quality checked.

Yesterday morning, I proof read our conceptual model and SUI and spotted enough English errors to plan a rewrite this morning. That is now done. I have also started the intermediate step of tabling all the Java code. I am going to spend more time with Java tonight and tomorrow. The rest of this morning and afternoon will only be reading time.

No coding all day.

I ended up completing the building of a new computer so did not do any coding today or reading books.

We had a guest lecture from Louis Berta

Louis Berta who is the former professor of this course and coauthor of our textbook gave a guest lecture last night in our simulations and modeling course. He covered continuous systems modeling. He also lectured superficially on numerical analysis and optimization.

Progress report on Java coding

I now have the entities, the constants, the parameters, the data modules and the inputs programmed. I am working on the process events method. At least, I think it is called a method. I use Excel columns to do repetitive lines of code. I then save the excel as text with tabs and copy and paste it into the code file. I have stopped programming yesterday and have class tonight. I still have more methods to write but have tomorrow off work. I did all my coding on the VIA train from Toronto to Ottawa.

The Perl Script for creating a BibTeX file: progress report

My back up files are not html or plain text but I can "view as source" each month's posts and then save these html files on my local computer. So I can create the text files needed. I searched google for Perl scripts. The Perl scripts I have viewed so far seem to have some of the required stuff but my script will need to be more complex and I may, in fact, use regular expressions mixed with Perl.

Java code writing.

I am starting to write some Java code for my present assignment at school. It is due Tuesday night. I have so far written the part required for translating from the conceptual model to Java code. I followed the course material this far. Now I must make a Java source file that works. I am not sure I have to get it to compile but I do need to actually write some code.

Term project coming along; learning conceptual modeling

I have been learning conceptual modeling. I have worked with three other students to produce a conceptual model of a restaurant simulation. I also have an assignment to write some Java code and have finished one of the steps in the process. Now I actually have to translate this work in to some Java code. I have been teaching myself Eclipse software. Eclipse is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE).

I have a learning opportunity at work but need to read a book first.

A former director general at work in National accounts has introduced me to a history book. So far I am on the first chapter. The story is of Canadian National Accounts that are done and have been done at my workplace. This gentleman who is now retired has offered to discuss the book with me when I have read it. So far, I told him my first impression when I learned a basic definition of national accounts. I said, "That is too large a problem. How can it be done?" Now I am learning it is done as best it can be and by meticulous counting and in the end is not a real account but a giant guesstimate. At any rate this is someone I share office space with this retired director of National accounts.

Our project is moving along we had our walk through meeting yesterday.

I have been really busy with work but basically nine to five except for some library trips at night. At school I have been learning Java. I finally have a computer science professor after many years of learning code on my own. After this step in the project we begin our coding step.

Perl script to make my directed list citations into BibTeX format citations

I am going to research Perl and then write a Perl script that takes my directed list citations in McGill Law student style, that I have used all along with this blog and produce BibTeX citations for all my citations on this blog. I will use the Perl script to process my back up files for this blog and to do that I will first need to save all these back up doc files as plain text files.

Following up on Chapter three references to knowledge representation standards and a couple of common sense reasoning onology projects.

I am planning for my final 4.5 hours of pre-thesis study this long weekend to write this blog entry, using the on screen pdf's I am able to find for the following references. Only two are books and the rest are magazine, journal, or proceedings articles, so should all be accessible from the university library over the library web interface. I will post this entry then later add the citations then post it again. Finally I will repost this entry with follow up discussions after reading each paper.

The references in Chapter three are too knowledge representation or knowledge communication languages or standards including semantic web languages and include DARPA Agent Mark Up Language (DAML) for an SGML example.

The full list of standards and the authors references for these are:

Knowledge Interchange Format (KIF)

Knowledge Query Manipulation Language (KQML)

DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML)

Ontology Inference Layer (OIL)

Web Ontology Language (OWL)

The reference to the "Semantic Web is Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, and Ora Lassila. The Semantic Web Scientific American, 284(5):34-43, 2001.

There are also some references to the logic and its origins that I won't follow up on.

I will follow up on references to the project to "develop a universal ontology for common sense reasoning... the CYC project." and "smaller projects" with related ambitions... the KM project." Here are the citations for those projects that the authors have given.

CYC

KM

Chapter three was much more readable.

After chapter two covered First Order Logic (FOL) the third chapter connected this representational language with the idea of a Knowledge Base (KB) for a domain. Then entailments were shown to be provable and now chapter four will show how to use contradiction in a proof. Some of this is stuff I already know using different symbols. I did give some thought to the exercises in chapter three. I generally solve exercises in my head for a mathematics textbook and likewise this is what I did for chapter three.

I will now start chapter four. I have studied for about one hour and a half today using this pre-thesis book. So far this book is about logic.

More pre-thesis reading gets done.

Finally more progress with this book

Brachman, Ronald and Hector Levesque. Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (San Francisco, Calf.: Morgan Kaufmann, 2004).

I did get through chapter two which was dense math like symbolic logic and not everything is clear to me but the end of the chapter still made sense. I did not solve the exercises at the end of chapter two. I did start chapter three and it is moving much quicker now. I should be able to finish chapter three and start chapter four today.

I am now more than half way through the book The Making of Second Life.

This book is proving fairly entertaining with just enough history of Second Life,

Pre thesis reading continues this long weekend.

Studies continue for my thesis proposal. This is the book I have been assigned to read. It is almost 400 pages long.

Brachman, Ronald and Hector Levesque. Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (San Francisco, Calf.: Morgan Kaufmann, 2004).

I read more of chapter two while on break at a job I was doing on Saturday. Chapter two is about first order logic. I should complete this chapter two and get started on chapter three today.

Our project team got our assignment done on time and we got a great mark.

We had to write a situation under investigation (SUI) key features document as our first assignment. I was responsible as team leader to see that it got done. I gathered the whole team twice in the library and we talked out the details of our project. I drew a diagram in KDraw and then showed the other team members and one of them did a better diagram in Open Office. I then used Photoshop 6.0 to place all the data models on the diagram. After feedback from the professor we reverted to the the diagram our team mate had made. Data models are supposed to be part of the next step so we got a little ahead into the conceptual model.

Now this week we have an extra assignment of developing a conceptual model. We need to use some windows software the professor has developed to make a conceptual model documentation easier. I tried this evening to install this ABCmod software on my Vista PC but it did not work.I just booted up my XP on the Macbook and and now have to update XP to service pack 3. I installed Java 6 on both the XP and the Vista box. I am going to try to do the majority of the assignment over night now and get it really started. Then this long weekend I can perfect my assignment. We work alone on this assignment.

One of our team mates is working on the second assignment in the project. That assignment is to create the conceptual model for our project. Well I am going back to my XP computer now and posting this update on my school work.

I finished reading Generation Blend.

I completed reading Generation Blend. The author has a web site at http://generationblend.com/. I had chosen to read this to get more nuance in my thesis simulation. I did not yet take away the lesson and technical materials I need but I am now familiar with this book. I returned it to the Morissette library at my university this week before class.

The course textbook and my progress with it.

My course textbook was written by the professor and his predecessor who taught this course in modeling and simulations for some thirty years. We will meet this older professor as he is going to give a guest lecture. The book for our course then is

Birta, Louis G. and Gilbert Abez. Modeling and Simulation: Exploring Dynamic Systems Behaviour (London: Springer, 2007).

I have read the first chapter expect for the last three short sections including the bibliography. This chapter introduces modeling and simulations. The chapter motivates the reading of the book and covers some roots of simulation work.

I have also read most of the second chapter now but skimmed over the mathematics parts. I read this chapter on the bus from Toronto to Ottawa last Sunday. This is the chapter that covers the structure and form that our term project must take. This form also resembles the systems engineering life cycle process form I learned last winter.

I skipped chapter three which is about data modeling because I know a fair amount of this from my statistics background. The chapter also covers and introduces to me random variates which I could during the lecture guess existed in Java libraries. Now I may learn random variates both mathematically and of course in the context of numerical analysis and the computer math needed to do this. We will do this in Java but can do it in any other language that has a RND uniform random number generator ability. I may come back and scan read chapter three before our first quiz and for our final exam. I will make sure to carefully read the section on random variates.

The fourth chapter is where we are presently in the lectures and I admit I am behind on reading it.

After reading The University of Google, I can really appreciate the quality of this course. It is probably the continuity between the professors that makes the work that goes into this course possible. But I am not so sure that the author of The University of Google who taught media and the professor I am facing who is a computer science professor can be compared or would see the creation of lectures in the same way. All put lot of work into their lectures and that is why the lectures have this quality. I fully intend to use the form and conceptual modeling that these computer science professors have developed to do the conceptual model for my thesis simulation.

Three more chapters read now of The Making of Second Life

I have now read three more chapters of this journalistic book:

Au, Wagner James. The Making of Second Life: Notes From the New World (New York: Collins, 2008).

Au covers the idea of crowds and democracy in Second Life as one of his themes and fully admits that the masters of Second Life that is Linden labs hope to promote a libertarian style democracy. He covers early attempts to make Second Life a socially vibrant world with rules imposed on it from above like rating systems. There are rating systems in Second Life for the objects in the game that players build and then see. As well as, there are rating systems for the avatars. He also explains how these low paying jobs in Second Life such as siting in a chair for money or cleaning windows in a shop came about and this was new material I have not come across before.

In the next chapter, he looks at role playing and identity, covering furries and gender bending. He quotes Turkle at one point.

This leads nicely into the next chapter where he covers avatar sex and of course ends with the familiar detective agencies in Second Life story. He also has some good writing on the meaning and sensations of sexuality through the computer screen. He also does not use Second Life for sexual play and shows that this is a minor but sensational aspect of the game. He ends up telling a few romance stories as well.

In the following chapter he covers politics and video gaming warfare by covering the now familiar Jessie sim story. But he looks at it in the context of the war in Iraq showing what happens when war mongers and peace niks mix in their politics to the game Second Life. He does not resolve the politics very well but then he covers the general views of politics and apathy well.

The book Generation Blender becomes more complex in covering seniors

The book I found ageist is still being read. It is

Salkowitz, Rob. Generation Blend: Managing Across the Technology Age Gap (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2008)

I am now on the chapter that covers a charity in New York City, Older Adults Technology Services (OATS). In this chapter Rob was correct he look at the issue of a certain age of workers using technology with perhaps more nuance. At least he claims that OATS has done a great deal of work with making their training age appropriate.

I can also see now scanning the table of contents that this is a Microsoft book because it speaks of the great potential that will be realised in people if they use technology. This seems to be the same as Microsoft TV adds. I buy this whole viewpoint. I fully believe it took my use of technology to unleash my potential.

Pre-thesis study book getting read

I read some of this book on my trip to Toronto on the bus. The book is

Brachman, Ronald and Hector Levesque. Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (San Francisco, Calf.: Morgan Kaufmann, 2004).

I have now this morning started to read chapter 2 on First Order Logic. I first studied logic under the influence of Sam Ajzenstat in Hamilton. I read the beginnings of a book on predicate logic in the spring of 1981 or may be it was the fall of 1980. I formally took a course in symbolic logic in the summer of 1996 and this was my first course in university after being away from school for ten years. I basically failed this symbolic logic course. It was the first university course I took with TV lectures. In other words it was distance learning.

Quick read on Second Life.

I am breezing through this book:

Au, Wagner James. The Making of Second Life: Notes From the New World (New York: Collins, 2008).

Basically a brief history of select aspects of the Second Life world. It includes behind the scenes view of the founding of the company Linden Labs and also the origins of the Gibson sim so far.

Reading goals begin for my course

The Java book I have now started to read is

Liang, Y. Daniel. Introduction to Java Programming Core Vision 5th (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2004).

I jumped right into chapter one a few days ago and am now on Chapter 1.12 the last section in chapter 1. I probably need to read 14 chapters of this book to be able to do course home work. This is 545 pages of reading. I have about two weeks to do this. Thus I need to quickly read the first five chapters about the elementary programming materials in about three or four days. I will try to read two more chapters today and then chapter 4 on Monday and chapter 5 on Tuesday. Then the following five chapters cover object oriented programming and I will try to read these Thursday through the weekend. Then start the chapters 11 through fourteen next week. These cover GUI programming. Then the last week of the month read anything not read yet and complete exercises. I should revaluate this reading plan after class on Monday's and also when I get the course textbook.

Welcome to Java!

I wrote, compiled and ran the intro "Welcome to Java!" simple print to screen program on both the eMac and the Debian machine. On the eMac there was nothing to install to get it to work. On Debian I needed to install a free SDK for Java and run time environment but I got the program to work under Linux as well. So today's learning goals were completed and I even set aside time to do this study. But I did not run the program in Windows.

Books I am presently reading for class, thesis, work and fun and/or business.

My professor loaned me a book to learn Java programming. My goal today is to write a "Hello, World." program in Java on three operating systems residing on two computers. But I also have a power point slide show to make for work as volunteer work on workers with disabilitiies and employment equity. I have just this past week learned to write, "Hello, world!" in PHP from the book:

Williams, Hugh E. and David Lane. Web Database Applications with PHP and MySQL 2nd (Sebastopol, Calf.: O'Reilly Media, 2004).

I will test that now. Um it does not seem to show up. The code is.. arg! I can not write it unless I use some escape character magic like this <?php print "Hello, world!"; ?>.

The Java book is

Liang, Y. Daniel. Introduction to Java Programming Core Vision 5th (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2004).

This is for school and our first simulation programming assignments. These will be done programming in Java.

For my thesis my new possible supervisor has suggested I read

Brachman, Ronald and Hector Levesque. Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (San Francisco, Calf.: Morgan Kaufmann, 2004).

This book is from the Q 387 range in the library and is on the topic of artificial intelligence (AI). I started to read this on Tuesday and Wednesday, as soon as, I borrowed it but did not read it Thursday.

For work I am reading

McDaniel, Stephen and Chris Hemedinger. SAS For Dummies (Indianapolis, Ind.: For Dummies, 2007).

This book I bought used from Amazon and paid less than 5 dollars and with the next book paid less than 15$ including shipping. Both books are new. I set a goal that if this book arrived today I would read the first chapter today which I did. I also read the introduction today.

The other book to arrive today from Amazon was an official guide to Second Life book. This one is the guide to creating content. Here is the cite:

Weber, Aimee, Kimberly Rufer-Bach and Richard Platel. Creating Your World: The Official Guide to Advanced Content Creation for Second Life (Indianapolis, Ind.: Sybex, 2007).

I had planned to read the first chapter today, but only read the front materials up to the first chapter.

First class went well. Textbook in the mail.

Our first class went well last night. I will most probably be adapting Dr. Arbez's conceptual framework for simulations to my thesis simulation. The professor asked me about my second life involvement. I am going to be learning JAVA and the professor loaned me a basic Java textbook from first year computer science to study.

I ordered the course textbook used from Amazon and it is in the mail as of today.

I am studying one course this term: Foundations on Modeling and Simulation

Here is the calendar description of my course this term.

Foundations on Modeling and Simulation
CALENDAR DESCRIPTION
Fundamental aspects of system modeling and the simulation process. Elements of continuous system simulation. Issues relating to the numerical solution of ordinary differential equations. Elements of discrete event simulation. Generation of random numbers and variates. Simulation validation and quality assurance. Introduction to simulation languages.

I bought a 100 slide box through ebay

I have only about twenty water quality slides for my microscope but decided to buy a 100 slide box to hold slides. I do not really have my microscope set up for viewing. But it could go on my office desk. It would be nice to have the microscope set up to work with a digital camera or video camera.

I am continuing to read the ethnographic study of Second Life.

I am continuing to read the study of Second Life. I have also started to read books on simulations including learning about self avoiding random walks (SAW's).

I am making some spreadsheets to be saved as csv and then read into R as data frames.

I am making some spreadsheets mostly full of zeros for one year counted by hours. That is how many rows these spreadsheets have about 8600 rows. In the columns I have workerID, time in separate columns for hours, days, months and years. Then I have three extra knowledge columns then seven columns for types of knowledge then two dummy columns. I have the files names which will become variable names of

Know.csv

This is the basic spreadsheet with all zero entries.

knowHoursNorm.csv and knowHoursLeap.csv

This is the same spread sheet but with the hours column taking values 0 to 23 and then repeating for all the rows, again for one year.

knowDaysNorm.csv and knowDaysLeap.csv

This has the hours values and then in the day column the value 1 repeating for 24 rows, then the value 2 repeating for 24 rows, etc. up to the value 7, then starting again at 1. This represents days of the week but there is no direct correspondence between say Tuesday and the number for that day.

knowMonthsNorm.csv

Here we have 31 days worth of rows or 31 times 24 rows (days times hours) taking the value 1 for January. Then 28 days for February etc.

knowMonthsLeap.csv

This is the same as the previous spread sheet with 29 days for February. The above leap files also have the extra day.

These will then be read into R. I will up load all this work to my MyExperiment account.

Simulations

I am wanting to write some more simulation code. I will probably wait until my simulations course starts this fall. I also have the 3rd edition of Ross's Simulation out from the library. I have only programmed one chapter's problems in this book so far in I think it was the C language. This was when I first read this book in its 2nd edition a few years back. These were simple simulations to generate average solutions of integrals using random numbers for each solution then averaging. This then gives an approximation to the integral solution. This is a type of numerical analysis.

The subject: "interviewing" and its intersection with new media.

I am reading a good technical book on survey interviews and their intersection with new media.

Sabre R manual is perfectly laid out and is perfect for printing.

I printed some chapters of the Sabre R manual. Each chapter was an even number of pages and I made little two sided booklets of each chapter using 8.5 inch by 11 inch paper. I can just staple these. I have a neat little collection now of chapters of the manual.

Just about finished reading The University of Google

I picked this book up because it seems to be about the sociology of the Internet. It was in the educational books section of the U of O library. I found the book browsing the new book shelves. The author, Tara Brabazon says sociology of the Internet needs to be supported by media studies and history studies.

The book did teach well about education. She does seem to make her points with only Google and some of these points could be made with Yahoo too. She questions how we define globalisation and says this term is used by many with different meanings at both ends of the communication. Also, the term globilisation is used by different ideologies.

Her coverage of the Internet is not so repetitive and boring as many early Internet books by academics. She includes an argument found in the thesis of Lessig's Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace and applies this argument in her analysis of national cultures and diversity and sharing across cultures claiming Google brings views of only the US Western world view of the rest of the world through the WWW.

A significant point is that teachers now must work hard to be available to students 24-7 but I think she misses that mature students like myself are also being scholars 24-7 on our computers. But the point is well taken, because of the Internet we all work too hard. Also because of the Internet there are vast exclusions of knowledge and this has all developed just after advancing capitalism has made huge gaps in income though the 1980's and 1990's. This point I get because I have been poor for all this time. She makes a point of showing that there are few jobs for the educated in our society, yet there are more persons in university these days than there ever have been. Perhaps this is a larger middle class but with no wages and no jobs waiting for all that education. She makes some very good arguments about the use of higher education vis a vie working and the perversion of education by commercial interests. So education must be a business and accountable and no longer publicly funded. This is the final death blow I figure unless I can get funding.

One chapter argues well against power point lectures and she talks well of the art of lecturing and oral auditory nature of this art form. A few chapters later she derides the new medias convergence with creativity and old school art. And this fits one of the themes she points out that the old and new is not a good dichotomy for improving education in the age of Google. She also say the blame is not with Google but is more historically set in the context of Western colonial capitalism which makes her a deconstructionalist. She also finds some fault though with post-modernism which I find refreshing after my exposure to post-modern criminology studies.

One statistical point about her arguments on development might be made here. She compares the amount of money needed for basic medicine for the worlds people who do not have basic medicine with the amount of money spent feeding pets in Europe and Japan. So this then infers it is people v animals in terms of spending. This is a bit like cake or bread numbers. Cosmetics v clean water and an old flame source for heated debates.

Learning Sabre software but no luck getting it to run yet.

I was introduced to Sabre software by the NCeSS web site because this software was developed as quantitative software at one of their nodes. I was today not able to get Sabre to run on my Macbook nor have I been able to install Sabre as an R package on my eMac R.

Back from workshop at MIT and I am unpacking bags and notes, not concepts

So I was in the company of sociologists this past week on Thursday. I heard them use the term "unpacking" meaning to take apart and analyse a term or concept. I am in fact, unpacking my bags and not really concepts because I am not really a sociologist. These people know me by email and now by my presentation. It went well and I was not trashed like some bad school boy. In fact, I am now looking to take up a more serious study of knowledge management and search out the author Cousins.

I will be following up on things I learned from all the other speakers and in the future applying all this learning. Each one was interesting and presented concepts I can learn more about. First I will visit the web sites presented by the Keynote speaker at the centre of e-social science in the UK. I may even study over there for a few days. Her centre also is involved with myexperiment.org which I joined a few days ago but have not fully explored or added much content yet. Another featured speaker has developed an open source plug in for Microsoft Excel 2007. I do not have access to Excel 2007. This plug in draws network graphs and diagrams much like seventies' string art as the speaker put it. He is the only sociologist employed by Microsoft apparently. This whole event was sponsored by Port 25 the Microsoft open source lab. Their site can be found here http://port25.technet.com/.

Our conference packages included name tags with USB keys with the CITASA name and logo printed on them. I have not even opened this USB key up yet to examine the files. I should join this group with real membership fees but I still owe this years fees for the Canadian Mathematics Society student membership I hold. The full program is here at http://www.citasa.org/files/PreConference%202008%20Program.pdf.

Social science research methods books borrowed

Here are the books I just borrowed to help me learn social science research methods.

Miller, Robert L. and John D. Brewer. eds.The A-Z of social research : a dictionary of key social science research concepts (London; SAGE, 2003).

There are about a hundred entries on research topics in this book. I will study various entries here for my paper and started with reading the entry on social simulations.

Scarbrough, Elinor and Eric Tanenbaum. eds. Research strategies in the social sciences : a guide to new approaches (Oxford, England: Oxford University, 1998).

This is a quantitative research book based on the Essex summer school in data analysis that has been going since 1967. The summer school has apparently been quite influential within European social sciences. It also relates to the Michigan summer school on political studies. I think that's what the intro to this book said. I will not read this book to help with my paper.

Schratz, Michael and Rob Walker. Research as social change : new opportunities for qualitative research (London: Routledge, 1995).

This book seems inspiring but I will not read it for my paper.

Second Life as an anthropological study

I found this book on the new book shelves on the social science floor at the university of Ottawa library yesterday. I am almost through the first chapter. Here is the citation:

Boellstorff, Tom. Coming of age in second life : an anthropologist explores the virtually human (Princeton: Princeton University, 2008).

The virtual world as a culture for ethnographic study.

I read the first chapter of Petra Kelly's book.

Her first chapter is about feminism and is titled: Women and Power. Here is the full citation:

Kelly, Petra. Women and Power in Thinking Green! (Berkeley, Cal.: Parallax Press, 1994).

I am deep in patriarchal society. I can connect her to cyber feminists and third world feminism.

Reading about knowledge industries, wage differences by age and gender, the educational premium, and the educational fields premium.

My reading these days is full of statistical modeling of wages and other economics variables. I have been gaining an education in economics and micro economics. This evening I finally read a Statistics Canada document for my thesis. I have been so busy at work that I have not worked on my thesis. Another big time user the past month as been my board of directors work with a non-profit. Other volunteering has also kept me busy.

Here is the citation for the paper I read tonight.

Morissette, Rene, Yuri Ostrovsky and Garnett Picot. "Relative Wage Patterns Among the Highly Educated in a Knowledge-based Economy." Analytical Studies Branch Research Paper Series. Statistics Canada Catalogue no. 11F0019MIE2004232 (Ottawa, Statistics Canada, 2004)

This paper has a clear SIC code division of high knowledge, middle knowledge and low knowledge, industries they borrowed from elsewhere. I would like to use these studies from elsewhere or at least review these studies. The wages analysed and the other parts of the analysis in this analytical paper are not so important in my research. But I should note that these more demographic variables may effect knowledge management policies and effects of knowledge management in firms. My brief search of current Ph.D research on knowledge management showed this. But this search had been meant to find that combination of demographics and knowledge management. So whether there is strength in this or of what direction this effect has is still not clear. But catagorising knowledge management firms is something I should deal with in my paper so I am off to the library web site now or google scholar, and Statistics Canada's web site to find these elsewhere studies.

The two other studies are cited here.

Lee, F. and H. Has. “A Quantitative Assessment of High-knowledge Industries Versus Low-knowledge Industries” in P. Howitt (ed.), The Implications of Knowledge-Based Growth for Micro-Economic Policies Industry Canada Research Series, Volume 6
(Calgary: University of Calgary, 1996)

This article should explain a catagorisation of industries.

Baldwin, J. R. and J. Johnson. The Defining Characteristics of Entrants in Science-based Industries Catalogue no. 88-517-XIE (Ottawa: Statistics Canada, 1999).

This article should should show some adjustments to the catagories needed to define knowledge intensive industries.

Chart making in Excel

I have recently learned more about making charts in Excel.

Thanking Rob Salkowitz for his comment

I want to thank the author of Generation Blend, Rob Salkowitz for commenting here on my posts about this book. Rest assured Rob, I will be reading more of this book, as my research may depend on finding something I can apply to variables in my simulation of retiring workers. I also want to thank Mr. Salkowitz for engaging my blog that is very good scholarship and shows good use of web 2.0.

Studying PHP and MySQL and ESRI GIS.

I am studying PHP and MySQL together in an O'Reilly book. I am also three chapters into a book on GIS and databases. I may be writing a test in GIS at work for a promotion.