Course outline and solutions to last years course assignments.

I checked out the professors web pages for the course I am studying this fall. I was able to understand the solutions to the assignments from last year. I am set to buy the course textbook in the next few days.

I got into an interesting email discussion about social navigation with AOIR people on the email list.

I responded to a basic question about social networks by rephrasing as social navigation and spinning it with a questioning of capitalism and it worked a brief discussion ensued on the AOIR email list. It was very interesting and brilliant to read some replies.

I listened to podcast #1 from the Centre For Internet And Society

I have copied and pasted from iTunes for the first time a podcast decription. The description of this podcast is below and I have formated it for blogspot. I am listening to this Podcast as I type this post. I wonder if this is lazy scholarship or just me and my technological tools being used for study.

Sony's latest Digital Rights Management (DRM)-endeavour earned a charge of “fraud, false advertising, trespass and the violation of state and federal statutes prohibiting malware, and unauthorized computer tampering”. The technology installs, unnoticed by the user, a piece of software that prevents consumers from unauthorised copying, is able to monitor and report user behaviour back to the firm and, accidentally, holds the door wide open for Trojans. Under other circumstances one would be tempted to describe such a strategy a hostile “spy at-tack”. In case of Sony BMG, this seems to be part of a business model to sell digital music to consumers. The talk will have a closer look at the charges of the EFF and a Californian lawyer against Sony BMG‚s latest DRM strategy. The Sony BMG case adds a number of interesting new dimensions to the ‘DRM and Consumer' debate. The talk will explain why the case is so important, also against the background of similar recent case law in Europe, and why it points into an entirely new direction of talking about DRM.

About the Speaker: Natali Helberger is Associate Professor at the Institute for Information Law, University of Amsterdam. Dr. Helberger is managing legal partner to the INDICARE project. INDICARE (Informed Dialogue about Consumer Acceptability of Rights Management Solutions in Europe) is a project co-funded by the European Commission. The objective of INDICARE is to address issues regarding consumer acceptability of digital rights management solutions; identify obstacles and suggest solutions. At the moment, she is a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley.

I have been officially a graduate student for about half a day now.

About twelve hours including one work day ago I registered for graduate school and received my student card. I will focus a fair amount of time now over night studying. I will read about getting a computer account and sign up for one. I will also be reading graduate school info documents on the U of O web site. I will also spend some time advancing my probability studies and will write some probability problems into LaTeX and their solutions. I still hope to work through the basics by Sunday. I still have a goal of completing the second chapters of two textbooks by Sunday. I may not be able to solve all the problems but that is also the goal.

I narrowed my reading fields in the past four weeks.

I need to focus more on reading statistics. In the past two mornings I have read basic probability in two school textbooks reviewing what I have studied since 1981. I will be studying an advanced basic probability course this fall term. I also focused on social naviagtion studies some more and was impressed when I read some studies but I was a bit manic and tired and wired when I was impressed. I have lost a lot of study time in my new work schedule and will continue to loose this time. I have also read some recovery and self care literature. I have also heard some original folk and world music in the past weekend. I have also taken up reading Bruce Lee the martial artist. I am also reading about communication, command, and control systems engineering and design. Most of my studies are graduate school preparation now. But I must also expand my career devlopment activities at Statistics Canada and may be studying French this fall at work. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays will be French studies and Tuesdays and Thursdays will be probability studies.

I used Bluefish a little on the Linux laptop.

I started up Bluefish on the Linux laptop. It is the programming editor that came with the Debian Gnome desktop. I started an R code file and just wrote some header info comments and really did not solve any problems. I will now read some probability books before sleeping.

Still studying the information age. I want to study some C++ programming on a Linux machine now.

I was just reading the beginning of a US military book on the information age. But was inspired to start up my Linux laptop and study some C++ programming from a book I have been reading on C++ programming. Whether I actually follow through on that is very improbable.

Studies on the job involve quality v quantity.

I am working with other graduates. Many have studied at Carleton too. We need to maintain quality but manage to produce quantity. This is really a new work philosophy for me coming from security work and teaching where quantity and quality are not so obvious. It is an old topic and quantity v. quality in academics is more like quantitative v qualitative research methods.

I learned some equation numbering on LaTeX this evening/morning.

I got in from work and booted up my Macbook laptop computer. I was testing at first if iWeb could be used in my new web master project. The new web site I am publisher of is here. www.wellness-project.org. I am designing some templates for this web site project and did this on my Linux laptop a couple of hours after getting home.

I did some LaTeX learning and typesetting after I figured iWeb would not be good enough for the web site project. On the eMac I copied and pasted into TeXShop an old Open Office file made on my old Thinkpad and presently stored on my eMac. I then opened it using the local network between my machines in TeXShop on my Macbook. The file is a list of all the exercises and solutions I have done from the textbook for my introduction to probability course I studied in 1999. I created this file in 2003 to really learn probability and possibly help me repeat the course with better marks. As I have set the goal of having worked through and read the second chapter of two probability books by Sunday next weekend, I thought I should get working on this study as I have done nothing other than pull the books out of their shelves to date. After opening the file as a tex file I began to write proper LaTeX code for the content. I did figure out an elegant solution to equation numbering using the exercise numbering for the answers as equation numbering. I did not really do any solutions though I just converted what I had done in 2003 to laTeX.

I got my last marking assignment done now.

I had to quit my TA work abruptly this summer term. But they had me do some more work and I finally got it done. I now need to rest and go to work later today at my new Statistics Canada job.

Goals and landmarks set for probability studies/review.

I am being required to study basic probability again. I have two probability textbooks. My goals will be to have worked through all the exercises in the first two chapters of both books in the next two weeks and the third chapters by the first week of classes four weeks from now. I will also buy the textbook for my actual course in about three weeks. I will try to stay a week ahead in the textbook and do as many problems as I can. The course is coded or labeled as MAT2371 in the University of Ottawa course code system. The course is given this fall term on Tuesdays from 10:00 AM to 11:30 AM and on Thursdays from 8:30 AM to 10:00 AM. This will mean I need to be awake at 8:00 AM Tuesdays and 6:00 AM Thursdays. On these days, and the days before I will be working from 3:00 PM to 11:00 PM at my new job.

I read about positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia today.

I read about the difference between chronic and acute schizophrenia and the misuse of these labels. I read that perhaps using the terms type 1 and type 2 is a better typology. Type 1 is where positive symptoms dominate and type 2 is where negative symptoms dominate instead of associating the label acute schizophrenia with positive symptoms and the label chronic schizophrenia with negative symptoms. This was in chapter 2 of this book,

Howe, Gwen. Working With Schizophrenia: A Needs Based Approach (London, U.K. Jessica Kingsley, 1995).

This chapter describes positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia. Positive symptoms are symptoms added to the normal personality and negative symptoms meaning symptoms that take away from the normal personality. Normal here can simply mean what one was like before one's episode.

The three basic types of positive symptoms are

Altered Perceptions

This is where hearing voices fits in and seeing things and also the distorted perceptions like weird faces and smells and tastes that are may be over sensitive to certain characteristics of the environment.

Delusional Ideas

This is where people feel they are being watched or are at the centre of attention. This can also constructed with ideas of reference. In my own experience this happens when one is tired after an abnormally long day. Thus this symptom could be connected with either stress or physical health. This symptom can also results in sexual confusion or lack of clearly defined sexual boundaries. Also here perceptions of illness and health can be distorted.

Abnormal Thought Structure

This is a symptom where ones thoughts jump all around or some detail like a license plate on a car in front can be meaningful when, in fact, there is really no real meaning to it. This can also result in having one's attention taken by an object where one appears to be staring into empty space or at a table or object on a table. This would be greater I believe if one was high on marijuana. This is also the symptom where the ideas of intrusive thoughts can effect someone. Also beliefs that one is a very bad person can effect someone with these symptoms when the person is actually not a bad person or has no intention of acting on these thoughts. This can be quite distressful and cause an anxiety in my experience.

Negative symptoms can be more debilitating. The negative symptoms tend to be around lack on enjoyment of life or amotivation. This lethargy can be also confused with withdrawal and lethargy of marijuana smoking.

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Still reading about social navigation.

I started reading the third chapter of the book on social navigation. I am about half way through this chapter. I cannot read as much these days because I have started a full time job. The bibliographic cite for this book using Canadian legal studies style for the cite is

The bibliographic cite for this reading is

Dieberger, Andreas. Social Connotation of Space in the Design for Virtual Communities and Social Navigation in Munro, Alan J. & Höök, Kristina. & Benyon, David. eds. Social Navigation of Information Space (London, UK: Springer, 1999) at 35-54.

I am impressed with the understanding this author expresses about Usenet and its characteristics. Also this author is very aware of the privacy issues involved in the ideas of social navigation expressed so far in this book. Do we want others to know how we have used the web or say what we are buying at Amazon.com?