Thursday, March 30, 2006

Adventures in library attendence

It is near end of term at our school. I canceled the last lab I was to give tonight because no students showed up. I had my bosses permission to do this. I then went to the library.

The library is something I fell in love with in my first year of living with the schizophrenia label. But perhaps I was in love with these places long before that. When my parents read me the story of Robin Hood or The Wizard of OZ, they read me not one book but tens of books borrowed from the university library. When I was first living with the label of schizophrenia I read a story called the Labyrinth by Borge. It had an illusion of an infinite library building based on the repeated hexagon pattern.

Tonight I took back most of the mental health books I was borrowing. I also took back books on MIDI, and one virtual war book, and one women and computing bibliography. I was trying to take books back for the end of term. I was also trying to focus my studies more on either law or statistics but in particular statistics. So I took back a lot of other subject books. I then searched out an author my statistics professor recommended, who she had learned from, when she studied experimental design. I borrowed that book and read it on the train platform. I was able to understand a little better this past weeks lecture material and will now be fine for the fifth assignment and the final exam should be easier too. I borrowed other books on experimental design. I also borrowed a book by Emma Goldman on anarchism. And the other famous scholar I borrowed a book by was Max Weber. I borrowed a book of his writings on universities.

I am now going to sleep after writing this entry and proof reading it.

I am doing some calculations for my statistical and experimental design course.

I did some calculations this morning following the teachers notes. These checked out with the software's analysis, so no mistakes were made with the software data entry or the calculations that I did with a word processor and a calculator. The data relate to a machine tool process involving speed of the tool, geometry, and cuting angle. I am supposed to figure out which has more effect on the life of the tool which is our response variable.

Wednesday, March 29, 2006

Read another chapter in a study into gender and computing.

I completed reading chapter 3 in Copper, Joel, & Weaver D, Kimberlee. Gender and Computers: Understanding the Digital Divide (Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erbaum, 2003).

Monday, March 27, 2006

I have now read up to the fourth chapter of the computer crime book. I might start the fifth, later today.

I borrowed this book on the 17th. Here is the citation: Taylor, Robert W. et al. Digital Crime and Digital Terrorism (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson, Prentice Hall, 2006). I was able to read the first four chapters now. I would like to have this book read by the end of April before I pick summer term courses.

Friday, March 24, 2006

I wrote the first page to my spring talk on R.

I wrote my first page for my spring talk on R. I will give this hour long talk at the Ottawa Canada Linux Users Group(OCLUG). I was going to test my R code on my linux laptop but might wait until tomorrow evening. At least I now have the talk started.

I did not get accepted into the legal studies MA program at the first committee meeting.

I received a letter today saying the admissions committee will need to wait to see my winter term marks before deciding to admit me to the legal studies MA program. I am not sure why because my present course which will produce this mark is in experimental design which is not directly related to legal studies.

Thursday, March 23, 2006

Reading another critique of Wired.

I was reading more of this book which I am about two thirds of the way through now.
Stewart Millar, Melanie. Cracking the Gender Code: Who Rules the Wired World ( Toronto: Second Story, 1998).
This book is partially about how Wired magazine is a sexist and racist magazine because they never cover African Americans or women in a neutral tone if they cover them at all. It is also interesting as an analysis of the graphics and demographics of Wired magazine.

Monday, March 20, 2006

I am waiting for an MA admission decision.

I am waiting to hear if I have been admitted to the M.A. program in legal studies. I read the MA program handbook a little yesterday. I would not be starting until the fall. This would mean I could stay in the union if I am also hired to be a legal studies Teaching assistant.

Saturday, March 18, 2006

This mornings readings including AoIR researchers.

I am reading these two books this morning:
Consalvo, Mia, & Passonen Susanna. eds. Women & Everyday Uses of the Internet: Agency and Identity (New York:, Peter Lang 2002).
I have already read one chapter of this book but am reading the introduction this morning. These women editors are AoIR members I believe.
Taylor, Robert W. et al. Digital Crime and Digital Terrorism (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson, Prentice Hall, 2006)
I just borrowed this yesterday while waiting to tutor a student. I read the first chapter last night and started the second chapter this morning. It is very biased towards US security and US centric defintions of warfare.

Thursday, March 16, 2006

Human resource studies and practice.

I studied a little of the sub field of human resources known as managing volunteers. I studied this at one of our local community colleges in the middle 1990's. Today I am will be doing some human resouces work. I will interview three candidates for a part-time job at a self help group I am president at. I may try to read some books or on-line documents to prepare for this. I may even do a journal search in human resources journals.

I am continuing to grade statistics homework this morning.

I was grading some proportional allocations homework this morning. I am also getting ready to derive some quantities that describe or represent various ways of looking at treatment effects in balanced incomplete block designs (B.I.B.D.'s). I am using latex for this writing these derivations with texShop on my eMac. I also have some SAS homework I would like to do this morning. I think I will run the SAS work now.

Wednesday, March 15, 2006

My morning and stretching into sleep.

I am clear on what I need to do for the assignment now. I called the professor and clarified what she wanted us to do. So I don't need to go to school to see her. But there is a lecture today. I also have to do at least one shopping errand before I can sleep. I have been doing a little blogging this morning. I got a marking goal completed and rewarded my self with corn chips and coke. I am avoiding marking and need to get moving on this procrastination. I did my web work for the day and am waiting probably for another month to hear if I have been selected for an interview for another web master assignment. I read a little more this morning about gender and computers and also read some on-line society studies. Yes, I am studious. But I need sleep so may miss the lecture today. If I leave for school now I can do my errands and take the SAS disks back to school and be home about noon and sleep and thus limit my day awake to 24 hours.

Experimental design assignment is not so much SAS after all.

After reading the 4th assignment it looks like the home work is more math work in latex actually than SAS coding. I will go in to school early this morning to see the professor during her office hours to ask some questions about this homework. I need some clarification about what we are being asked to do. I also have to take back the SAS disks to the school office this morning. I am up from yesterday and need to sleep after I get home from school at about 3:30 PM this afternoon. I also need to do some more marking this morning and a little web mastering at one of my paid web mastering jobs. I think I will do the web mastering next after a brief break from this computer. I have been reading a book about gender and computing which is a report from some psychological researchers who have studying this topic for almost 20 years in various studies. This is also a QA 76.9 book.

New academic blog opened.

I started a new blog that I am actually paying money for now. It is at http://www.cyborgcitizen.org/blog1. It is a web experiment and I hope it is used to feature radical academic work of mine. The domain name was inspired by my readings in sociology of science and technology and in particular my present reading of the socialist feminst cyborg manifesto of Donna Haraway, I also want to use it for creative writing as academic work. But that is just for the blog and a few web pages. The rest of the site will be an all out graphic/web design work. Also I will use some server side tools and programming as an experiment and testing ground for improving and broadening my set of web design and blogging technical skills.

I also have live journal blog for academic writing about community networks. It is here http://pierre-anoid.livejournal.com.

Working continues.

I quit the stock market day trading job I was investigating. I could not commit the time to it. I continued to mark statistics homework this morning. I gave a lab last night in regression and SAS.

Tuesday, March 14, 2006

The next experimental design assignment has been posted.

The next experimental design assignment for my winter term fourth year course has been posted. I am just printing the assignment and example code and also some extra lessons the professor has posted to her web site. One of her graduate students is giving a thesis defence this Friday. I am interested in this thesis because it is about GIS and crime analysis. I have written some legal studies papers on this topic and also read a few introductory books on this topic. BTW it is pie day today. 03/14/1:50. Of course the minutes are wrong but I don't know pie off hand better than four decimal places what a hopeless mathematician eh?

I did not do so much studies on Monday as I did other school related work.

Instead of going to the library on Monday and reading about survey methodology I did building inspections. I inspected the mechanical engineering department's labs for safety issues and hazards. I worked for about an hour and half. I then came home and studied and did install SAS 9.1.3 on my eMac on the Win2k side of my eMac. I was exploring SAS -> Analysis > Design of Experiments at school today.

Monday, March 13, 2006

I have turned comments on now on this blog.

If I understand the blogspot settings for comments right this should be the first post on this blog that one can comment on. I will test it now with my own comment.

Reading Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto.

Here is the cite for the work I am reading tonight:
Haraway, Donna. A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s in Haraway, Donna. The Haraway Reader (New York: Routledge, 2004).
I am ready to be inspired by this writing because I have read so many references and even a critique of Haraway before coming to reading this work. I started reading sociology of science and technology in 2002 or 2001. I started to read QA 76.9 in the middle 1990's actually. I still read many books from this library call letter. These books are between computer security and computer databases. But this lead to sociology of science and technology and studying this with Philip Thurtle in winter 2003. It was a cold winter. This winter upon us now is the warmest on record. I learned early on my academic career as I ended my first academic job that talking about the weather is polite. [Note on the topic of computer word processors: this has lead me to reading with nostalgia, for my own existing in the early 1980's as a young intellectual and beginning anarchist/socialist, the work Donna Haraway is most known for. In fact, this was her first writing on a computer. I would liked to have been able to write English on a computer and print it on plain 8 1/2” X 11” paper back the in the early 1980's, but instead I could only program computers then not write with them.] I reflect on this politeness in Haraway's comment on anarchists not seeking truces. I could trash Haraway from an anti-psychiatric stance in that she refers to psycho analysis. But perhaps psycho analysis is trashed by pro med doctors. Perhaps I should point out that the bio neuro powered psychiatry that came out of the decade of the brain was also parallel to the cyborg of Haraway's eco bio animal machine hopes for a rebellion from the father war machine of nuclear annihilation.
I like the term blasphemy of law which I coined while reading the introduction to her piece. When one studies law and mentions one is a criminal or suggests that crime is a solution one commits a blasphemy, but blasphemy rhymes with femininity, which is just another word that rhymes with the science fiction title Trinity. There an obvious religious blasphemy referring to a basic religious Jungian word as a science fiction name. And Trinity is some nuclear bomb reference too. But these days Trinity is the first super powered Matrix character, pictured as a running criminal, who can fly and do very quick Kung Fu. Crime is Kung Fu that hasn't been paid for. I doubt people who pay for Kung Fu lessons do crimes. I am rabbling. almost read to sing in this piece.

I got in a little discussion about music with the famous sociolgist of networks Barry Wellman on the weekend, when I came home from work. I was manic and it seem my manic states are ways of producing academic emails. This should stop. I don't need to be a 24-7 academic I need to be a 24-7 front line wage slave. Speaking of conversations I think I will open this blog up for comments tonight and leave the comments open for one month and see what happens.

Lecture today in experimental design.

I am actually looking forward to the lecture today in experimental design. The professor follows the text quite closely and I have read the text this past weekend. I am also fairly excited about my growing knowledge of survey methodology. Maybe I will borrow some new books on survey's at school today from the business section of the library or the sociology section. I would like to do a crime knowledge survey in grad school. I also might attend a Field's Institute lecture in the evening today.

Sunday, March 12, 2006

I read a lot of my statistics text book in the last 24 hours.

I reviewed the first six chapters in my experimental design text. I also read more closely the third, fourth, fifth and sixth chapters. I will need to read the 5th to 8th chapters in the next week. These chapters cover various views of factorial designs.

Saturday, March 11, 2006

I helped hire a statistical analyst for our union and also did some human resources work for our self help group.

At the end of this week I helped with a team of other union members to hire a statistical analyst for our union. I also did staff evaluations and short listed candidates for a new position at our self help group. We are hiring a peer/drop in coordinator for our self help group. We are scheduling interviews for next week. I also evaluated staff for the past year. These are good activities to add to my CV.

Tuesday, March 07, 2006

I am studying experimental design this morning.

I did some SAS coding and must write this up now. I need to study the SAS printout some more, but I did notice that I have unequal variances with two blocking variables in my latin square design. I am wondering if I can look at the trends in these blocks and perhaps chose a transformation that might correct the unequal variances. I also know there is a technique for finding an appropriate transform but I may just try guessing.

Just posting an update now. I tried the standard transformations of the response variable, squaring, taking the square root, taking the log, taking the log to base 10 and none of these worked to reduce the unequal variances of the residuals. I also tried coding the data by subtracting 10 and this did not work. I will try subtracting 16 now and then write this whole transforming attempt up.

I then need to check the reduced and full model F test. I also need to show how to solve this for a missing value using the Q prime analysis. But then I am done with this and I should be able to do it today.

Saturday, March 04, 2006

Calculating the sums of squares for the latin square was the same by hand as in SAS.

I did this homework using SAS already and doing it by hand it was the same once I corrected mistakes in arithmetic. I have this all typed up now too. I have some tests of hypothesies to do and some validity checks but then I am done and maybe I can hand this in Monday.

I should do some marking now. I have almost completed 6 Q's out of 9 now. The next two Q's will be fast and the last one maybe not too difficult. I should have had this done last week but I have now promised it for Monday.

I am working on a latin square analysis for my experimental design course.

I have some straight forward home work this weekend. I must analyse a simple latin square experiment.

Starting new books from the library.

I borrowed more books recently. Here are the music books I am borrowing at present:
Jungleib, Stanley. Generl Midi (Madison, WI: A-R Editions, 1995).
This seems to be a book about MIDI written about the time sound cards became popular. I remember trying to buy a sound card for my IBM XT in the middle 1990's.
Rothstein, Joseph. MIDI: A Comprehensive Introduction (Madison, WI: A-R Editions, 1992).
This book I have read the first chapter and will continue reading it even if it seems MIDI is more for keyboard players.
Brice, Richard. Music Engineering: The Electronics of Playing and Recording (Oxford: Newness, 1998).
I have read a few chapters of this book now. It is highly educational and I have learned a lot from it and discussed music waves with my dad who is an experimental physicist.