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.