I am being trained in critical response to be a psycho-social first aider. This weekend is our three day training. On the first day we covered structure of government emergency response. We also covered Canadian history of disaster. We looked at factors in disaster for the victims.

I just completed reading the first chapter of Borkman, Thomasina Jo, Understanding Self-Help/Mutual Aid: Experiential Learning in the Commons (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers, 1999). It covered why we should study self help as part of the third sector of the economy or voluntary/non-profit sector. This the sector I find myself involved within.

At the end of my second 30 hours day in a row I had an appointment to see a writing tutor. E listened to my topic and suggested having an hypothosis in the mini paper. That is to add in the over all papers hypothesis. I was able to put this hypothesis and then add in the analysis in from the first version of my mini paper and did that this morning and now basically have the paper completed. I am just proof reading my conclusion and then printing two copies for when my supervisor and I meet at 11 am this morning. In the next hour I am relaxing before going to school to prepare a lab for the students today. Then I will give the lab and then see the boss of this statistics course and finalize the hours. Then I will have the mini paper's meeting. After all this must do work I will attend a union info session and eat lunch there and we are having Chinese food in honour of Chinese new year today. I might then go and see a professor who might be able to supervise graduate school work on criminal law and the mentally ill. She had offered to chat during her office hours and she has office hours on Wednesday afternoons. I just need to check those hours now. I am going to make another pot of coffee and and print those papers

I am up again for 24 hours plus. I got some reading done on self help groups and emergency planning. I attended my data mining lecture. I got some but not all of the bibliography done for my mini paper. Today is a day off which is why I can adjust my sleep. I am just going to post this and then take some more vitamins and clean up a bit. I made guacamole this morning for the first time in my life. I am so happy with the fresh fruit and veggies we got wholesale this month. I also found out yesterday my Palm cell phone will work with our local wireless carrier.

I did a journal search and found the journal Information & Communications Technology Law to download articles from. I found articles on computer crime, disAbilities and computers, and data mining and law. I printed these articles early this morning and have started to read them this evening.

I had some problems deciding on the data mining course yesterday and attended a law and literature course. We watched the film Maria Full of Grace about cocaine importation. This sparked a lively debate about drug laws. I told the class they should study Dawn Moore's drug law course.

I picked up the first STAT2507 assignment and will work on it a little today at school to prepare for the tutorial on Wednesday. I should be ok for giving this lab Wednesday morning.

I talked with Professor Normington about the data mining course and feel ok sticking with it for the term. It is very interesting but method intensive. I printed out yesterday's lectures and printed out the R code for the two lecture examples. I also ran the first part of the lecture's association code. I did not attend the lecture though. I also looked at the abstract of a paper on protecting association rules that are privileged. This would occur in industry where data might be shared but one rule that might be important might be hidden or protected so that some association might be unknowable in the data set. I think I understand this. The paper is Oliveira, Stanley R. M., Zaiane Osmar R. & Saygin Yucel. Secure Association Rule Sharing in Dai, Honghua, Srikant, Ramakrishnan, & Zhang Chengqi, Eds. Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining: 8th Pacific-Asia Conference, PAKDD 2004 Sydney, Australia, May 2004 Proceedings (Berlin, Springer, 2004).

I signed up for an email list that I found on the Internet while researching graduate school in Kingston at Queens. I have been getting the emails about conferences and calls for papers and responded to a call for papers tonight for the journal Information, Communication & Society, Spring 2006. I also asked J if she would proof read my paper if I wrote something and she said she would. I can't write about the digital divide but could perhaps I could survey members of the self help community in eastern Ontario. This might allow me to find out what ICT's mean to them and also if ICT's change their ideas of identity or their concepts of identity as disAbled persons. I could also inquire about their ideas of interdependence.

I would need to design a survey which I could do while doing my teaching assistant work in the sampling methodology course this winter. I could do an initial survey this February and then get it all analysed by the end of March and get a rough paper written with abstract by June. Then I could do another survey in July and have the final results by September and the paper done by October. Say now that's a time line plan.

I am just printing out tomorrow lecture notes for my data mining course and got some tips on errors I was getting with R and Rgobi and gtk. I now need to try the code for lecture #1 again and try the lecture #2 code before heading off to sleep and then waking up for class later this afternoon. Then I am staying up from mid afternoon until 6 pm Tuesday so I can sleep early Tuesday night and wake up up early Wednesday for my first tutorial lab I am giving Wednesday morning. I will prepare for this lab either later tonight or early Tuesday morning.

I am also working on my law paper off and on tonight and emailed the professor late Sunday night.

I got another page written for my mini paper and got through the Riggs case now. I will just take my laptop to my office in the other room and print a rough copy for my own proof reading.

I got this email today about a journal looking for papers in 2006. That would be the year I graduate so it might be nice to have something published that year. I might try to write something for this and have contacted the editor. Here is the email. Note I am fairly sure it is not a breach of copyright to republish it here.

'Disability, Identity, and Interdependence: ICTs and New Social Forms'

A call for papers for a special Spring 2006 issue of
Information, Communication & Society edited by

Dr Gerard Goggin, University of Queensland, Australia
Dr Christopher Newell, University of Tasmania, Australia

Our ideas of identity, the body, dependence and independence,
welfare, and ability are undergoing rapid transformation; new social
forms are emerging in which information and communications
technologies (ICTs) take a central but yet little examined role.

With the growing importance of new movements - such as the disability
movement, the online welfare movement, or those concerned with
independent living - ICTs have become an important part of
envisioning and realizing change to daily life for individuals, as
well as the architecture and systems of community and society. At the
present time also there are nascent associated fields of academic
inquiry and policy interest, such as disability studies, theories of
identity, work on social exclusion, and reconsideration of the
meanings of independence.

Disability, for example, poses rich, complex questions and
perspectives for thinking about identity, ICTs, and society. With
greater awareness of disability and the protection given to the
rights of people with disability through national legislation and
international instruments, increasing attention is being given to
researching and understanding the social implications of technology
and disability. As governments and regulators enact new requirements
for accessible technology, corporations and the 'third' sector are
also grappling with how to incorporate disability and accessibility
in their visions of ICTs.

At stake in these developments are important questions about identity
and ICTs. Concepts of welfare have been much debated, especially
under pressure from global economic and political trends. ICTs now
play an indispensable role in social and political organisation
online around welfare issues, in state and private administration of
welfare, in processes of identity-formation concerning welfare. While
independent living is still to be achieved for many, there is now
growing recognition of the balance between dependence and
independence - and that all in society are engaged in understanding
their interdependence and connectedness, something in which ICTs are
offering innovative ways to understand such new social forms.

In this light, we welcome submissions on topics such as (but not
restricted to):

* how thinking about disability, identity, and interdependence opens
up new perspectives on understanding ICTs
* case studies of particular technologies, accessibility, & disability
* the implications of disability for ICT policy and design
* new conceptions of welfare, online welfare movements and ICTs
* independent living and ICTs
* what are the implications of ICTs for the lives of people with a
diverse range of disabilities and impairments, identities, and lives?

Deadline for abstracts is 1 July 2005.

Deadline for final submissions is Monday 12 December 2005.

Potential contributors are encouraged to discuss their ideas with the editors:

Dr Gerard Goggin, Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies,
University of Queensland (g.goggin@uq.edu.au)

Dr Christopher Newell, School of Medicine, University of Tasmania
(christopher.newell@utas.edu.au).

I am slowly working on my paper this evening and tomorrow morning then I am off to my data mining course after getting some sleep. I will also check the data mining course web page in a little bit to see if there is anything new posted.

I passed the drug law course with a good mark. The professor has invited me to drop by her office sometime to discuss her supervising graduate studies in mental health and criminology.

Well we got the newspapers ready for another Saturday. I am just on break before delivering them door to door. I am having a coffee and smoking. Otherwise I am off work this weekend. I was also debugging some Xemacs problems. I got Xemacs working but not ESS. I was able to run GGobi again to visualize some flea beetle data in 7 dimensions.

I was able to complete the 33 hours of volunteering this morning about an hour and a half ago. I now have three days off of working or volunteering. I will try to play cyberpunk with my friends tonight.

I was busy a little with my Debian computer this morning in the wee hours of the morning. But before that I did some review of the first week's data mining lecture using the lecture code and copying and pasting it into an advanced statistical software R. I have two books on using R but did not read them in the past four days. I also helped out with the paper route this morning and will help out Saturday morning as usual. I read an article about computers in schools and education in terms of the globalisation process. I also read a small lecture by Judge Richard Posner and his colleague William Landes on the Political Economy of Intellectual property. I also read about emergencies and sleep disorders. I also read the end of a Canadian Law Commission report on policing.

I decided on studying only data mining and my honours paper after all. I got assigned to four labs in my teaching assistant work. I did not get the web master job with the union and no longer want it. Our unemployment rate in Canada while a debatable measure of true unemployment is at its lowest in a long time.

I have been setting up and using my new Palm Tungsten W. My wife has been using her DVD/VHS player. I played Dungeons and Dragons on Wednesday night and later today will manage a cyberpunk game. I am so tired being up on call and am about to sleep until 7 or 8 PM tonight. I am just going to pop my daily risperadol about 10 hours late. I should have taken them at 11 PM last night. I have had no vitamins now in 36 hours.

I think I have decided now that I will not study policing issues or statistical computing. Instead I will complete my honours paper and study data mining. The data mining first lecture was fun.

I got my assignment for being a statistics TA and will be the TA for the sampling methodology course. I did very well with this course in 2001 and it was the last course in my B.Math degree. I have also used the material in this course to make some money because it taught questionnaire design and I have designed a questionnaire for money for a health network.

I rewrote my mini paper from scratch. I got two pages written before being bogged down by popular cases.

I spent the past week studying policing and private security for a course coded LAWS4306B titled policing (and Social Surveillance) by professor George Rigakos Ph.D.. It is a criminology course. I have read a Law Commission research paper by Rigakos now, and a couple of his journal articles are printed and await my reading attention.

I got my two R books in the mail and one is perfect for the first lecture I attended this week in statistical computing. The other R book is perfect for general level of statistics like the level my B.Math was at. This course in statistical computing STAT4604 is a level above this book. This course seems like fun and is the cheapest choice for courses this term in terms of required textbooks. Tomorrow we have the second lecture in this course. Then the third is on Wednesday. I plan to attend the first three lectures even if I don't stick with course for the whole term.

Also tomorrow we are having a school memorial service for the disaster in Asia. I also plan to attend that before my statistics course in the afternoon. Then in the evening the first class of the data mining course happens and I plan to attend that too. I have not met my pre-term study objectives for this course and am not keen on this course today.

I am fairly keen to just take the final law half credit in criminal law issues. But I also watched an ITV or television lecture of a third year course in the criminal law and politics by Chris McNaughton who was also my professor this summer in terrorism law.

Yes another term has started This term I am practicing the shop around for the right course method.

I contacted two professor's today who I might study with this term. I really just let them both know that I was going to check thier course out on Wednesday and make a decision later about which course I will study. I might be studying R this term or I might be studying data mining or I might be studying the police. I contacted one professor by email and the other professor I phoned.

Our grades should be ready soon for our drug law course. I hope to go to campus today later but really don't have to go until tomorrow Wednesday.

I continue to do research for my ten page paper on the history and development of computer crime law in the USA and Canada. I really don't have much for the Canadian case law. This is the main authority for this research:

Sieber, Ulrich. Ed. Information Technology Crime: National Legislation,
Jus Informationis European Series on Information Law v 6 (Köln: Carl
Heymanns Verlag, 1994).

I completed reading the USA section of this book, yesterday. There were some cases mentioned concerning computer crime that I must now search out on Lexis. Also I have printed out some of the more famous cases and must read those at the appeals level anyways. I also have an old 1980's case and a more recent case to read.

I must also now start to write more before this week really gets going.

I will have some classes to maybe attend this Wednesday but I am not registered in these courses. Yes, there are many interesting law courses this term but I am staying with data mining I and my honours paper as my only courses in my own studies. I hope to work as a teaching assistant in two or three section of statistics courses this winter term.

On My WinXP laptop: I un-installed Microsoft Visual Studio. I also un-installed R 1.9 and installed the latest R 2.0.1. I then cleaned up my disk space and defragged my hard drive. I later in the morning installed Ggobi. I got Ggobi to work using Di Cook's data from her paper(below). I used perldoc for the first time this morning and read an article in the Journal of Statistical Software on using PERL for statistics. It was Baiocchi, Giovanni. "Using Perl for Statistics: Data Processing and Statistical Computing" (2004) 11:1 Journal of Statistical Software.

On the eMac: I tried to install Xgobi but could not. I printed an article Cook, Dianne. "Calibrate Your Eyes to Recognize High-Dimensional Shapes from Their Low-Dimensional Projections" (1997) 2:6 Journal of Statistical Software. I did some web page graphics alignments and table formating using dream weaver and completed more paid web work this way.