I learned some equation numbering on LaTeX this evening/morning.

I got in from work and booted up my Macbook laptop computer. I was testing at first if iWeb could be used in my new web master project. The new web site I am publisher of is here. www.wellness-project.org. I am designing some templates for this web site project and did this on my Linux laptop a couple of hours after getting home.

I did some LaTeX learning and typesetting after I figured iWeb would not be good enough for the web site project. On the eMac I copied and pasted into TeXShop an old Open Office file made on my old Thinkpad and presently stored on my eMac. I then opened it using the local network between my machines in TeXShop on my Macbook. The file is a list of all the exercises and solutions I have done from the textbook for my introduction to probability course I studied in 1999. I created this file in 2003 to really learn probability and possibly help me repeat the course with better marks. As I have set the goal of having worked through and read the second chapter of two probability books by Sunday next weekend, I thought I should get working on this study as I have done nothing other than pull the books out of their shelves to date. After opening the file as a tex file I began to write proper LaTeX code for the content. I did figure out an elegant solution to equation numbering using the exercise numbering for the answers as equation numbering. I did not really do any solutions though I just converted what I had done in 2003 to laTeX.

I got my last marking assignment done now.

I had to quit my TA work abruptly this summer term. But they had me do some more work and I finally got it done. I now need to rest and go to work later today at my new Statistics Canada job.

Goals and landmarks set for probability studies/review.

I am being required to study basic probability again. I have two probability textbooks. My goals will be to have worked through all the exercises in the first two chapters of both books in the next two weeks and the third chapters by the first week of classes four weeks from now. I will also buy the textbook for my actual course in about three weeks. I will try to stay a week ahead in the textbook and do as many problems as I can. The course is coded or labeled as MAT2371 in the University of Ottawa course code system. The course is given this fall term on Tuesdays from 10:00 AM to 11:30 AM and on Thursdays from 8:30 AM to 10:00 AM. This will mean I need to be awake at 8:00 AM Tuesdays and 6:00 AM Thursdays. On these days, and the days before I will be working from 3:00 PM to 11:00 PM at my new job.

I read about positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia today.

I read about the difference between chronic and acute schizophrenia and the misuse of these labels. I read that perhaps using the terms type 1 and type 2 is a better typology. Type 1 is where positive symptoms dominate and type 2 is where negative symptoms dominate instead of associating the label acute schizophrenia with positive symptoms and the label chronic schizophrenia with negative symptoms. This was in chapter 2 of this book,

Howe, Gwen. Working With Schizophrenia: A Needs Based Approach (London, U.K. Jessica Kingsley, 1995).

This chapter describes positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia. Positive symptoms are symptoms added to the normal personality and negative symptoms meaning symptoms that take away from the normal personality. Normal here can simply mean what one was like before one's episode.

The three basic types of positive symptoms are

Altered Perceptions

This is where hearing voices fits in and seeing things and also the distorted perceptions like weird faces and smells and tastes that are may be over sensitive to certain characteristics of the environment.

Delusional Ideas

This is where people feel they are being watched or are at the centre of attention. This can also constructed with ideas of reference. In my own experience this happens when one is tired after an abnormally long day. Thus this symptom could be connected with either stress or physical health. This symptom can also results in sexual confusion or lack of clearly defined sexual boundaries. Also here perceptions of illness and health can be distorted.

Abnormal Thought Structure

This is a symptom where ones thoughts jump all around or some detail like a license plate on a car in front can be meaningful when, in fact, there is really no real meaning to it. This can also result in having one's attention taken by an object where one appears to be staring into empty space or at a table or object on a table. This would be greater I believe if one was high on marijuana. This is also the symptom where the ideas of intrusive thoughts can effect someone. Also beliefs that one is a very bad person can effect someone with these symptoms when the person is actually not a bad person or has no intention of acting on these thoughts. This can be quite distressful and cause an anxiety in my experience.

Negative symptoms can be more debilitating. The negative symptoms tend to be around lack on enjoyment of life or amotivation. This lethargy can be also confused with withdrawal and lethargy of marijuana smoking.

.

Still reading about social navigation.

I started reading the third chapter of the book on social navigation. I am about half way through this chapter. I cannot read as much these days because I have started a full time job. The bibliographic cite for this book using Canadian legal studies style for the cite is

The bibliographic cite for this reading is

Dieberger, Andreas. Social Connotation of Space in the Design for Virtual Communities and Social Navigation in Munro, Alan J. & Höök, Kristina. & Benyon, David. eds. Social Navigation of Information Space (London, UK: Springer, 1999) at 35-54.

I am impressed with the understanding this author expresses about Usenet and its characteristics. Also this author is very aware of the privacy issues involved in the ideas of social navigation expressed so far in this book. Do we want others to know how we have used the web or say what we are buying at Amazon.com?

Continuing to study social navigation of information space.

But back to the effect on the direction of my studies. I learned to critique science after reading Cooper. This lead me to really understanding some topics in the sociology of science and technology early on in my studies and after becoming credentialed in statistics allowed me to pick up the pace with reading and critiquing science. I have also picked up more sociology and technology readings and lectures. I read many books in the 76.9 range where computers and society are studied. This lead me to blogs, which are a personal micro history, or as Cooper puts it, blogs are histographs not history or herstory.

So the questions that rage through my mind when writing on a blog have to do with appropriateness as suggested by the team of psychiatric rehabilitation actors I have used. Also privacy and things like libel effect my writing. But as I read about social navigation I am becoming aware that appropriateness is socially defined by people and is appropriate in places where people go and do things. So necessary for the definition of appropriateness are people just as laws are created by people and set out appropriate behaviours.

I am also combining my reading of social navigation with reading Cooper. I started reading this new field last week. I suspect the recent social networking web site engineers have studied this field.

The bibliographic cite for this reading is

Dourish, Paul. Where the Footprints Lead: Tracking Down Other Roles for Social Navigation in Munro, Alan J. & Höök, Kristina. & Benyon, David. Eds. Social Navigation of Information Space (London, UK: Springer, 1999) at 15-34.

This article starts by suggesting navigation to be possible as spatial navigation, semantic navigation and social navigation. The author explores social navigation, as more than book recommender web sites in fact examines ways that social navigation could use a wider possible group of social interactions. He briefly touches on architecture and distinguishes between space and place. Spaces being physical and the root human understanding of the world and places being more socially defined and having meaning for people, He depends here on urban and architecture studies that are much older than computer software design. He also briefly looks at perceptual awareness of others as an example of a social interaction to be added to social networking of information space. That is information about the activities of others gained on the periphery. He sees social informatics as both a way to help others find information and at the same time a way to exploit for financial gain the information others have left in their use of the same information. He does mention that privacy is an issue with using information about people. He stubbles when discussing generalized information and presenting trends and aggregate data which I think needs more understanding from a paranoia of identity theft and also the natural hiding many do on the Internet. But all in all this was a good two-day read.

I read some of Psychiatry and Anti-Psychiatry this morning.

I have read this fellow Dr. Cooper when young and idealistic. Also I only began to read him when some other roles were being played by me. One I was newly diagnosed as schizophrenic. Two I was a new holder of a bookstore credit card that someone else paid for in the end. Three I was looking for studies that would motivate me. This last point had the greatest effect. I do though still buy books on credit and have done this for years and years. It is one of my main activities that I get pleasure from. I also continue to play the role of schizophrenic but these days I hide this role for large periods of time when I am acting other roles where being schizophrenic does not really need to be played. But back to motivating studies.

I sought after reading this doctor to read more about knowledge and epistemology. That is what is knowledge and how do we organize it. The general attack that Doctor Cooper makes is on scientific knowledge being appropriate for human relations.

Cooper makes a point in the introduction that I read tonight that bears repeating decades later on this blog. Human actions are not repeatable. It is fine for the scientist my father to repeat a few times or many times the experiments he does on things. And true human life and human micro-actions seem to be routine like washing the dishes. Thus yes we repeat washing the dishes. But do we? When in fact it is those of us with deviance that stop washing our dishes.

So this leads the doctor to saying there are two types of rationality. Human relations cannot use analytical reason( scientific/numerical/metric), but must use dialectical reason. Plato or Socrates as Plato recounts him developed the dialectic I finally learned in 2001, as a fact I could remember. It is really the same as seeing humans and human issues from many angles but also simply put it is talking about human reality, human behaviour. It is not really that simple because a good dialectic will be like a court case where both sides or even more than two sides will be talked about. Thus weighting the pros and cons is a simplified mostly non-artistic way of being dialectical. This is like I have learned to do in executive meetings when making decisions in a group.

I am continuing to read the book on social navigation of information space.

I started the second chapter in the book I borrowed on social navigation. The bibliographic cite for this chapter is

Dourish, Paul. Where the Footprints Lead: Tracking Down Other Roles for Social Navigation in Munro, Alan J. & Höök, Kristina. & Benyon, David. eds. Social Navigation of Information Space (London, UK: Springer, 1999).

This chapter gets me really thinking about social interaction and the possibility of other interactions that could occur, both as the authors are trying to suggest inside information spaces, but also thinking about social interaction in general. I am also reflecting on my work helping other consumer/survivors of mental health services, use computers and the Internet.

I completed reading the introductory chapter of a book on social navigation.

I picked up a book last week in the 76.9 range. I read the first chapter on the way home from school but didn't finish reading this chapter until this morning.

Here is the bibliographic cite for the whole book:

Munro, Alan J. & Höök, Kristina. & Benyon, David. eds. Social Navigation of Information Space (London, UK: Springer, 1999).

This book is incredibly inspiring and after playing Second Life it left quite an impression on me. Also within Second Life my avatar is researching the concepts on social networking at a virtual cyber research centre in world. This first chapter also related quite well to the use of Amazon.com and also this year's business topics on the Internet such as social networking.

I reviewed the first chapter of a school textbook on Java programming for beginning programmers.

I had read this book, or at least the first two chapters in May 2002. I was trying out a first year course in Java programming that spring. I withdrew from the course and did not complete the course. Instead in the summer term that year I studied wrongful convictions in an advanced sociology course in criminology. I withdrew because I was failing to complete the first programming assignment properly.

Tonight, I read quickly the first chapter by scanning for keywords and reviewing. In fact, the first three chapters of this book are basic programming that I have known from the middle 1970's.

There is even some connecting in the book of objects and methods with variables and functions; in other words, there are connections made between the procedural programming I was taught in the 1970's and 1980's, with the object oriented programming students are taught these days and in this book.

Mostly I reviewed in chapter 1 the JAVA specific learning that I have not really used yet. But some of this applies to programming in SAS or XML, as well as it applies in Java. In particular, the naming rules for variables or name space concepts are almost the same in all three languages.

Here is the bibliographic cite for this first year JAVA programming book:

Savitch, Walter. Java: An Introduction to Computer Science & Programming (Upper Saddle River: N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1999).

This book covers basic programming with JAVA. I reviewed the first chapter tonight and will review chapter two soon. Then I have ten more chapters to read. I will practice writing JAVA with the Code Warrior software. I found out tonight there is also a copy of Code Warrior for the Mac on the book's CD but none of my present Macs have an older copy of Mac OS to run this no doubt.

The gendered digital divide really hits home.

From being told I was smart when a kid to the present day the gendered digital divide is so real I cannot ignore this. I have been reading a book about this and here is the bibliographical cite:

Cooper, Joel, & Weaver, Kimberlee D. Gender and Computers: Understanding the Digital Divide (Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003).

This book through a great number of studies of students in classroom experiments to test gendered differences in computing use as these fit various psychological factors, studies the gendered divide in computing use. While may be success with computers is too simplified in this book and certainly this divide is lessening these days, it is certainly a key feature of my own experience with computing.

The Debian install worked better this time.

I managed to install Debian 3.1 revision 2 and am now making more CD's from that revision so I can install anything from the archive by CD. I still do not have a PCMCIA working socket so cannot ethernet on this laptop. I do have X windows, a Gnome desktop and the Debian drop down menu. Last time I installed Debian 3.1 on this laptop I did not have the Debian drop down menu and that made it difficult to access a number of useful programs. This laptop is very slow. I now must consider buying a battery for this laptop which would cost about 100$ or spending about 500$ to get a used Thinkpad from IBM for a Debian laptop. The first option costs a lot less.

Computer tasks today.

The installing process for Linux is working ok. I may have made one mistake on the video RAM memory selection. I should be able to test it out later today. I also successfully installed the Code Warrior Lite software on the PC side of the Macbook and programs to use with the Java textbook. I may start reading this textbook and working the programs also later today.

I got a free copy of a Marita Moll edited book: Tech High

At our union meeting I browsed some free books at the labour council offices. I grabbed a lot of teacher's books and also this book:

Moll, Marita. Ed. Tech High: Globalization and the Future of Canadian Education (Halifax, N.S.: Fernwood, 1997).

Maria is also a National Capital Freenet (NCF) member, or was in the middle 1990's when I was a frequent NCF user.

I also got this book back from a retired army radio engineer I had loaned it to:

Flickenger, Rob, et al. Wireless Networking in the Developing World: A practical guide to planning and building low-cost telecommunications infrastructure (London, U.K.: Limehouse Book Sprint Team, 2006) <http://wndw.net>.

This book is available free at the web site http://wndw.net . I bought a copy to support their project but also because sometimes I prefer hard copy books.

I am installing Linux on a computer to use R and various other open source softwares.

I have an old Pentium 1 computer. I was given this for free last winter. I tried it to install Debian 3.0 and had it working. But the command line on that version of Debian did not by default have an edit menu. I need to be able to copy and paste into the command line so need an edit menu on the command line. So I am trying to install the next version of Debian 3.1 and by now that is at 3.1 revision 2. I am having some trouble with installing this from CD. I was not able to keep the PCMCIA system working after the base install. I may use this as a non-networked machine. So that is one study project I am doing today.

I may also try to install some Java tools on my Macbook on the windows side. These tools would be from a first year university Java programming course textbook. I would be expected to know this textbook in my systems science program this coming year. I would hope to work through this book by the end of August.

Studying more about the doctoral dissertation.

I am reading about topic selection and now have some advise on measurement error statistics and might buy a book on this topic. One of my professors knew a book on this topic and sent me the bibliographic cite for the book. I am not able to afford it right away, but should buy it in the next month.

I am reading a book on Linux.

I am reading one of those large, easy to read books on computers. This one is written on the Linux operating system. I also borrowed a book on information security from a business strategy perspective. I am going to have to leave this library soon although I will have my alumni card to use still. I will also loose my school email and school web page(s).

I was offered a job at Statistics Canada today.

I have been offered a job at Statistics Canada and will be taking it. I am not sure how this will affect my school plans. I will start working and do not need to decide on the graduate school plans until August 21st. I will keep studying for this graduate school though. I will have to quit my teaching assistant work right away. In fact, I just sent an email giving notice to the director of the mathematics and statistics school. I also let my immediate supervisors know that I am quitting in two weeks. I also let one of my supervisors at another job know that I am quitting.

Reading more on managing the doctoral dissertation.

This book on managing the writing of a doctoral dissertation can be applied to a master thesis as well. This is what I am using this book for. I read another chapter, this one about selecting an adviser and a committee. I then a few hours later read the list of potential advisers in systems science and circled on this list all the research areas of the advisers that corresponded to topics I am either interested in pursuing such as computer crime or web applications, or topics that I have a background such as statistical inference, numerical methods, and ecology.

A possible topic I chose tonight was general statistics of experiments with error bound measurements. Apparently most statistical models assume error free measurement or perfect measurement. But many science studies and use of instrumentation uses a possible error based on an assumption of errors in measurement. Also apparently error such as measurement error can simply be included in the error term in a statistical model. But perhaps there is a whole other set of models and theories where error bound measurements are the basis rather than perfect measure. I could explore this from a systems approach and develop a whole other system of statistical inference models if such models exist.

I am continuing to grade statistics homework over night.

I have an assignment due back to the professor on Wednesday. I have been marking overnight again. Last night I did not manage to stay up and do this, so I have more to do now. But the pace is coming along, and it is actually not all that much work.

I must be fair and consistent in my marking, which means sometimes I have to go back over everything I have marked and check that I have given or taken off the same marks for everyone. This consistency principle helps me mark when some students have done a very good, thorough job and some students have done just the minimum work required.