Wednesday, January 31, 2007

I attended two lectures this week and have a third to attend today.

I have attended all lectures so far this week and for the month of January it looks like I will only have missed one class and that was last Wednesday's applied probability class where we studied conditional expectations. I know much of this material in applied probability but can not remember it all clearly.

We have our first assignment now due on February 12th. This morning I solve one problem but would like to add a little more theory to it as practice for lecturing problems. I type set it in LaTeX and it is ready to go.

I am now getting ready to start our term paper and will start with some writing and have borrowed some books for labour market studies, game theory and game theory in economics.

I am also connnecting my independent biology studies with the economic systems design course through Kaufman and the able guidance of our professor. I am thinking of posting an up to date reading list here for my ecology studies but right now am getting ready for work today, managing some household budget items and also doing some of my part time web publishing work. I am preparing for a web publishing meeting tomorrow after work. I feel very good and and rested one hour but today will be a 36 hour day in the end.

Saturday, January 27, 2007

I am getting ready to do some overnight reading after writing some web pages and blogs and exploring Second Life.

I am reading a book about intelligence and security informatics. I am also reading a theory book about ecology and earth systems. These are two new books I am reading. I am also progressing with email to other graduate students. I worked this past week and a job opening has come up at work. I am applying for it because the job title is statistician.

Monday, January 22, 2007

I read a little of At Home in the Universe by Stuart Kaufman

I started to read another complex systems book for my economic design course. I am reading chapter 1 in Stuart Kaufman's At Home in the Universe.

Sunday, January 21, 2007

I am tutoring a student today in statistical modeling and sharing class notes from lecture #4 of the applied probability course with him.

I am tutoring today at 20$ per hour in statistical modeling. I will try to be one hour early for tutoring. I am also doing some shopping before tutoring. I will get ready to go to my old school library today where I will tutor. I am also buying a solar panel for charging personal electronics. I will now need 12 volt barrel adapters for my cell phone, and other portable electronics.

Reading more Beinhocker.

I have now read chapters 1-6 and am half way through chapter 7 now. I have also read chapters 9 and 10 of Beinhocker. I have also started to read a pdf book that is extra reading for this week. I still have not read all of chapter 2 of Bowles and will read more of that today.

Saturday, January 20, 2007

I attended all classes last week.

I attended classes last week. I also worked an almost full week only taking off 3.5 hours of work because of late night lectures.

In probability we saw the Bose-Einstein problem on Wednesday and on Monday we covered a proof of the central limit theorem using le hopital's rule. I could follow both of these blackboard problems but should review basic high school maths and some calculus. In particular, I need to review derivatives, and integrals of logs and more review of sequences and series and convergence and divergence.

In my economic design course I just used the bulletin board for the course on web CT and started a discussion of data sources which I had extracted from the AOIR discussions list. I may use some International Union of Telecommunications data to do a phone centric web space and may start some work on this tonight. The web address is www.youphone.ca inspired by the iPhone by Apple but not about that in fact.

Saturday, January 13, 2007

Testing Blogger LaTeX with a little more care. "Work with me now"

Problem 1.2-6 (c)



Find


Again using basic properties and theorems of probability


and


Now we need to use this formula


in this problem.


But and its complement is simply



again by basic probability theorems


What is the set actually? It is the area out side of both A and B. which is the same as an intersection of the complements of A and B or set


Therefore


Therefore substituting in our formula.



And the set is really the complement of which = 0.3 because outside of the intersection is outside of either A or B so all this space outside the intersection is in . Thus we can check our work by checking that = 1- = 1- 0.3 = 0.7

Second $$\LaTeX$$ test: a lot more code.

This should now show a graphic containing written homework for one problem from last term's introduction to probability.

Testing Wolverine's LaTeX for blogger.

This is a test using FireFox, Grease monkey and a for Blogger java script for Greasemonkey. This is only a test.

I started to read about Statistics Canada's labour market survey.

I was doing some reading of our school's web site and decided to read about the regional data centre which turns out to be a Statistics Canada program. I thereby commenced some research for some data to do my term paper for the economics systems design simulation. I think I would like to try to simulate the labor market and compare the model to the Canadian labour market.

LaTeX has come to blogger.

A fellow has commented on my blog about a technique for using LaTeX on blogger. I may spend some time implementing this solution this morning.

Here is a link to his original post LaTeX on blogger http://servalx02.blogspot.com/2007/01/latex-on-blogger.htmland the same post I think in French LaTeX dans blogger at http://wolverine-mathematic.blogspot.com/2007/01/latex-dans-blogger.html.

I accidentally flagged his blog as objectable content because I forgot what flagging meant on the blog pages at blogger. I meant to add it to a blogger bookmarks system which of course does not exist. I hereby appologize to this blogger user.

Developing products for Second Life

I have thought of having a blackboard for second life that could be used to write LaTeX. I would then sell this Blackboard and market it in Second Life. I posted this goal on the second life blog under the open source announcement on that blog. Because most of the software involved would be open source I would also need to give the Blackboard away for free at the same time.

Chapter 10 now read of Beinhocker. Progressing a lot with my economic systems design course.

Chapter ten explores the prisoner's dilemma and was this past week's reading assignment for our first lecture. I read most of this chapter the previous weekend and week and read the final few pages last night. Now assigned for lecture number two is Beinhocker's chapter 4 and 9. I have read chapter 4 so should just review this chapter. So really I need to read chapter 9.

For Bowles this past week chapter 1 was assigned and I read this before the next year so again I had that read on time for this week's past lecture. For this coming week from Bowles we are assigned chapter 2. I have started chapter 2 but need to finish it before Tuesday.

Also for this past week I need to read about half of the remaining lecture notes the professor did not cover in the actual lecture this past Tuesday.

In the extra suggested readings I have read chapter 1 now of Axelrod's The Complexity of Cooperation. Axelrod is the researcher who figured out strategies for the prisoner dilemma first by having experts and others submit best strategies which he then tested in a series of games on the computer. He then made an experiment of using a genetic alogithum and simulated evolution in the prisoners dilemma game to find the best strategy. He did not find one best strategy but found some generalisations. Beinhocker covers this experiment in his book.

Thursday, January 11, 2007

Reading about blogging today right after work.

I have kept up with computing since the 1960's so it is not a youth culture area for me. I am writing about seven blogs these days including this one. Only one blog is anonymous. The scholarly article is here on the web---> http://reconstruction.eserver.org/064/saper.shtml which is the journal Reconstruction's web site. I learned about this issue of Reconstruction which is about blogging from the AOIR email list. The cite for the article is here.
Saper, Craig Blogademia Reconstruction 6.4 (2006)
I did not follow a single link in the on-line article which was written for on-line reading and linked to a number of academic blogs in the thread of the article. Basically I took away a warning about gossiping on blogs.

First week of classes has gone by now.

With one week, the first week now done I am at it again: studying. Work has been a bit of pressure with my time but I did plan ahead and in the end attended all my classes this week. I borrowed about four books of suggested reading for the first half of SYS5140 up till the mid-term. I also dove in and started to read these books yesterday just after borrowing them from Carleton's library.

I have to learn a simulations software called Stella. Last night I installed it on my office computer and played around a bit with it without knowing what I was doing. I need to read a book about this software and get it up and running for a term paper. I am also working with some economics students in a three person group on this term paper. We have started to form the group and the group is myself a male systems sciences student and two female economics students. I have taken the role of computer programmer as the first step in our work on the term paper.

In my applied probability course we have had two review lectures that are at a higher level of mathematical abstraction but things are going better by the end of the week with this material and I should read some more of the text book this weekend and a little tonight.

Monday, January 08, 2007

Notebooks ready for the school term. My classes start today.

I have my IAOS notebook case ready for the SYS5120 notes and have another larger binder ready for SYS5140 notes. My first class in SYS5120 is today at five thirty. Then I have the first lecture of SYS5140 tomorrow evening. I have almost completed all the reading for this week's lecture for SYS5140. The professor has posted course material on the school's course material distribution web pages but I have not been able to access it yet. This reminds me I should check the SYS5120 course web page for any updates.

Sunday, January 07, 2007

Continuing to write for the web everyday.

I write blogs everyday. With my new statistics job I have had less time at home on my computers but I still manage to use computers a fair amount on the weekends. I have enough computers that I was even able to help a neighbour by selling a computer to her and also giving away my older computer that I did a large part of my BA on. Mostly I worked on my BA on a Thinkpad T30 running Windows XP and Open Office. I also used an early model eMac and use the last model of eMac these days. For a laptop these days I use a first generation Macbook which was a graduation present from my professor father.

My father is an experimental physicist. My mother by the way was also a graduate student at the university of Ottawa and she studied Town Planning. In her career she planned Silicon Valley north. They are both retired now but still active and my father is still a professor.

Saturday, January 06, 2007

I am starting classes again this coming week.

I have two applied probability classes to attend this week and one economics class. The economics professor has been in touch by email and I have been told the reading for the first class is chapter 1 of Bowles and chapter 10 of Beinhocker. I have read the Bowles already and only need to read the Bienhocker over night.