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.