I will be studying web semantics as my thesis optional course.

I am pumped about the optional course my supervisor has chosen for me to study. It is titled web semantics. I will learn about knowledge representation languages and ontological web languages (OWL). The course is at Carleton in the fall in the school of computer science. I ordered the textbook last night. I will get this textbook started early.

I am beginning my mid month backups to a network drive.

I have been starting my backups to a network drive for the mid month. So far, I am working with Remembrance and the eMac.

I am also transferring my network music library to the new 1 TB drive.

I still have not fully transferred the first of the USB external drives to the network hard drive. It is not an easy process. There are always files that produce error messages and stop whole copy operations.

To define knowledge is the task.

I read the definition of knowledge presented by probably the two most well known scholars of knowledge management this morning. Here is the citation and my notes on this chapter one definition:

Davenport, Thomas and Prusak, Laurence. Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What They Know (Boston, Mass: Harvard Busines College, 1998).

Feminist cyborg studies, robotics and statistics

I started to read this book this evening and got the introduction read and started the first chapter:

Balsamo, Anne. Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women (Durham, N.C.: Duke University, 1996).

This is a really interesting read so far. It has me questioning bodies. In particular, I am interested in my own body and my fingers and my finger work on bass guitar and computer keyboard. And of course, I must learn to be even more sensitive to the objectification of the female body.

I am now reading more about Mikhail Soutchanski's work and read his school web page today and sent him and e-mail asking him to direct me to his page listing knowledge representation languages.

I am also reading about JMP software in the book:

Schlotzhauer, Sandra D. Elementary Statistics Using JMP (Cary, N.C.: Sas Institute, 2007).

I have read and worked through chapters 1 to 3 and have started chapter 4 and can now consider myself a JMP user.

I am slowly getting a paper about situational calculus by Mikhail Soutchanski read

I have read about 3 pages now in Gu, Liyan and Soutchanski, Mikhail. "The Two-Variable Situation Calculus" Frontiers In Artificial Intelligence and Applications 142, 2006. 144-161.

Following up my supervisor's suggestions on situational calculus finds robotics programmers.

My supervisor suggested I look up Mikhail Soutchanski. I did look him up today on google scholar and found his paper on situational calculus. I also found that he is part of a Ryerson-Toronto universities partnership in robotics programming. He seems to have only three or four papers out there so I am reading them now. This is real boy culture to be learning robotics programming. I see a good thesis topic change possibility here or at least some foundation for my simulation by strengthening my understanding of "agents" in a simulation. These agents can be conceptualized as software robots and fit well with my sociology of science and technology reading such as Brunto Latour's works.

I am assigned the wrting of lecture due tomorrow.

I have worked on this lecture two weekends ago. I also last weekend made a structure to match the title. Yesterday and on Tuesday I wrote something in each section. I am now thinking about lectures and will need to simply create subsections for each section to make this more like a lecture. The lecture is about knowledge management which is really a subject I have only know for one year now and I still have not read all the classic literature in this field.

I am writing this lecture using TeXShop and $LaTeX$.

Academic blogging session at the Congress

This session is a panel of four academic bloggers. Here are their blogs

Mary Cameron's Math Education with Mary Cameron at Memorial University of Newfoundland

Michael Barbour's Virtual High School Meanderings

Carolyne Steele's Career Sense

She mentioned Henry Jenkin's blog as a successful blog.

Moderator: Dale Kirby's Adventures in Canadian Post-Secondary Education

These bloggers talked about their blogging experiences.

Notes on Kay O'Halloran's multimodal approach

Kay O'Halloran is talking and first sets the need for studies to understand the information age. She has been a mathematician and maths teacher and now a linguistics scholar. Her first presentations are on multimodal research. She states that signs or mathematical notation or semiotic resources are tools for thinking. This theory becomes multimodal social semiotics. She draws from Halliday's structural functional linguistics(1978, 1994[1985]). There is also critical discourse analysis from Noriss.

Her lab is here http://multimodal-analysis-lab.org/

I am attending the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences today and yesterday.

I got some time off work to attend parts of this congress today. Today I am attending the lecture titled A Multimodal Approach to Discourse Studies: A paradigm with new research questions, agendas and directions for the digital age given by Kay O'Halloran. It is just about to start.

I managed to study quite a bit on the weekend.

I managed to read sections 4.1 and 4.2 in the book Knowledge Representation and Reasoning. Here I learned resolution of conjunctive normal form (CNF) expressions in symbolic logic. This covered universals, existentials, equality and variables. So I learned Answer Extraction and Skolemization. I can understand this but not sure I can do this myself so will need to practice the exercises in this chapter.

I will need in the next week and a half to review chapter 3 so I can begin to create a Knowledge Base (KB) for a small department inside a firm. This is one assignment I have due besides the lecture.

I also read more about basic knowledge management. I have started to find the book The Computerization of Work useful and interesting. It is not the sociology that will be useful but rather the case study descriptions of the context of working that will help me write my KB for the small department. This book is also critical of systems designers which helps me foresee some problems in my work.

I have to write a lecture due May 29th.

I am writing a lecture on knowledge loss, gain and retention for my professor and it is due May 29th. I have it started in $Latex$.

Finally success with creating a clean population data file

I was finally able to get a good clean data set for the world's population data using a different approach. In the original data set there was always a blank row at the end of each yearly table and at the beginning. Between these blank rows was a row with only the table title in column one. This title was a combination of the country name then a slash then the year covered by the table. My easy process was to label each row with the year as another variable. I did this by physically typing the year in the new column beside the title row then filling down in Excel to the blank row at the end of the table. Once I had the first country in this case actually the world tables with the new variable labeling each row in the cooresponding table with the tables year 1996 to 2050, I then copied the year variable to the next country Afghanistan. Then I highlighted both of the year variables for the World and Afghanistan and copied the years to the third and fourth country. Then repeated for the fitth, sixth, seventh and eighth and so on always doubling. This did not take long and it worked because the tables were all repeated with exactly the same number of rows per year table and per country.

The next step was done with brute force copy and paste so took all night but actually I did others tasks on the computer. It really took about as many copy and drag fills as there are countries. I highlighted the table title cell, the column one cell in the title row and then copied out only the country name and pasted this in a second new variable column and then I drag filled this down from 1996 to 2050 so each row concerning one country now had a new variable named Country that contained the name of the country. I then added column headers for variables names, Age_band, Both_genders, Male, Female, Year, Country. I then saved tihs excel file as a CSV file. Then I imported this to SAS. The using a data step where statement I deleted all the blank rows and title rows. So now I have this basic data file.

Knowledge representation and reasoning

The subject I am leanring from my supervisor is knowledge representation and reasoning. This is part of the artifical intelligence field. I have started to read in this field and have three books borrowed now. One of the books is written by my supervisor's thesis supervisor from the University of Toronto. This field is about logic in a sense that some forms of logic are knowledge representation languages. I am told I must choose a language to represent knowledge. I am reminded of a popular book that covered this idea of a knowledge representation and my whole topic of knowledge simulated in a computer. The book is:

Davis, Martin. The Universal Computer: The Road from Leibniz to Turing (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2000).

I am starting to write literature review sections.

I have the most reading done on knowledge loss in firms. So from this in brain reading I started the section of the literature review covering knowledge loss. I frame it as three issues, safety, cost of production, and intellectual capital. I am trying to construct ordinary academic writing that is at heart simple clear and not too articulate. I do not want to use the nuances of the social sciences in this thesis. I want to in effect use a style that is almost a lifting of structure but in effect I am seeking common structures of academic writing and even just a standard English prose. I will have plenty of fun and more original and arcane structure, when I start to document the computer systems and systems modeling. This, the results and methods sections, will also likely be that more difficult and most likely a very unclear part of the thesis.

I need to pick up the pace on my thesis.

I need to pick up the pace on my reading. May be I can finish reading a couple of chapters today as it is Saturday.

Narrative in thesis, music and aborginal studies.

In my early research into knowledge transfer the idea of story telling and narrative came up. But how do I add narrative to computer code? Narrative is a way older workers can relate their knowledge to younger workers. I was just reading the introduction to a book about an epic story. The book is

Van Deusen, Kira. Kiviuq: An Inuit Hero and His Siberian Cousins (Montreal Que.: McGill-Queens University, 2009).

The book contains an Inuit legend and compares this legend with Siberian aboriginal legends. This is how stories and lessons of life would be passed down in Inuit culture.

I can not spend time on cross culture too much in my thesis. This book is hundreds of pages long. My thesis will not be of use outside of capitalist firms. I thus can not read this book. As well the legend itself will be of no help rather the context of story telling might be of help.

I had also thought to read this book to help my music making but the book and story are not for telling thus to avoid plagiarism I will not read this book. I will simply be inspired by Kira's introduction where she explains briefly that she uses performance art, and music with story telling. She also explains that the elders who told her Kiviuq had given her alone permission to tell this epic. I like these ethics and will respect them.

I also thought, as I read the book, of aboriginal studies but have only read a few aboriginal studies books and will not read this one.

I started to read another book for my thesis today.

I read section 1.1 in

Levesque, Hector J. and Lakemeyer, Gerhard. The Logic of Knowledge Bases (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2000).

This covers an introduction to knowledge bases but mostly an introduction to logic

I am reading the first book in my literature review and it is a good choice for my topic.

I read chapter one in

Linda Argote. Organizational Learning: Creating, Retaining and Transferring Knowledge (New York: Kluwer Academic, 1999).

Argote's research has been on learning curves. These are plots with hours of labour as a dependent variable v cumulative production as the independent x variable. The basic formula for a learning curve is as so: $y = ax^{-b}$. Cumulative production serves as a proxy for knowledge gained by experience in this model.

My paper on global demographics got kicked out of the social economy conference.

The organizer was not happy that my paper did not connect with the social economy so I withdrew my paper at his request.