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.