The Wired Style guide.

I picked up the Wired Style guide from the chaos that is my office. I browsed it and realised that the research I have done into Wired magazine lets me know that this style guide is too opinionated and has too many editorial inserts in what should be a more objective guide to language use. The selection of terms for inclusion in the book too shows bias for the owners and founders of the magazines favorite theories and economic philosophies. Even if I accept that objectivity is impossible I do not agree with the magazine's original team's views on economics so will not be reading much more of this book and it will go on that top shelf in my office where computer books on out of date and useless topics goes.

I am now registered for one course in my masters for the fall term.

I registered for one course called SYS5130 SYSTEMS OPTIMIZATION AND MANAGEMENT for the fall term. It occurs on Wednesday evenings.

I am attending a social networking workshop this fall in Toronto at the University of Toronto.

I have arranged with my family to attend a workshop on social networking given in part by Barry Wellman at the university of Toronto. My family will give my partner and I a place to stay and meet for a family gathering on the weekend after the workshop. I will also meet up with some old high school friends that weekend.

I registered for my one course this term.

This term I will study networks. I will review my network + certification book from a few years back in preparation. I will also research optimization and constraints as they are also themes of this course. I suspect the course is problem base and mathematical.

I just printed out my photos from the summer picnic the students in the program had near the beginning of summer.

The weekend virtual conference was good here is the advert.

Here is the advert from www.citasa.org. I presented my paper but had technical difficulties and did not finish giving it. I will post it to www.webpagex.org in a few weeks.


Welcome to CITASA
Tuesday, August 14 2007 @ 04:37 AM EDT
CITASA MC 3.0

Wednesday, July 25 2007 @ 03:22 AM EDT
Contributed by: netwoman
Views: 29
CITASA NewsWeb 2.0 and Beyond:
The Sociological Significance of Virtual Worlds Supplanting Cyberspace

Event: CITASA 3rd Mini-Conference to be held in the Metaverse – Second Life
Date of Event: Sunday, August 12th, 2007
Time: 5:00-8:30pm EDT / 2:00–5:30 pm PDT /SLT
Location Details: The GNWC Virtual Centre for Digital Media in Second Life
University Project (150, 84, 23)
http://slurl.com/secondlife/University%20Project/150/84/23

For the third year in a row the Communication and Information Technology Section (CITASA) of the American Sociological Association (ASA) will hold a Mini-Conference as part of the ASA’s annual meeting. This year’s ASA meeting will be held in New York City, while the primary venue for CITASA’s MC3.0 will be held in Second Life. (www.secondlife.com). Second Life is a 3d virtual world with nearly 8 million residents, who’s lifelike avatars participate in a wide range of economic, social, educational and recreational activities. The virtual location for MC3.0 will be the Virtual Centre for Digital Media created by the Masters of Digital Media Program at Great Northern Way Campus (Vancouver, BC). The physical location of the conference will be wherever the participants find themselves—in New York and elsewhere—at the time.

MC3.0 will focus on three broad areas:
• Social Networking Sites (Facebook, Flickr, YouTube etc)
• Videogames & Gaming (World Of Warcraft, Console games etc)
• Virtual Worlds (Second Life, Active Worlds etc)

Key Questions that will be addressed
1) What is the sociological significance of the Web2.0 (and beyond) mediated form of social interaction?
2) How can these forms of online interaction serve as bases for sociological research?
3) Specifically, what is the pedagogical value of the virtual world experience?

Individuals interested in presenting or serving as discussants should contact one of the MC organizers listed
below.

1) Anyone interested in participating as a presenter or discussant should contact one of the MC3.0 organizers (listed below) by July 27, 2007.

2) Anyone may attend the MC3.0 SecondLife session that wil be held August 12, 5:00 – 8:30 pm (EDT) during the ASA meetings. There will be no central physical location for MC3.0, but there will be an opportunity for informal, face-to-face discussion during the CITASA joint reception with the section on Teaching and Learning in Sociology on August 13th (6:30-8:30 pm) in the Hilton.

3) To attend MC3.0 you should have an active SecondLife account and be familiar with the basics of SecondLife navigation and communication. Opportunities for discussion in SecondLife will follow each of the three main presentations.

4) CITASA will provide personalized SecondLife orientation assistance and telephone support July 24 through July 27 between 5 and 9 pm (EDT). To arrange a session send email to jwitte@clemson.edu

CITASA MC3.0 organizers
Tracy Kennedy tkennedy@netwomen.ca
Anabel Quan-Haase aquan@uwo.ca
Joanna Robinson joanna@gnwc.ca
Jim Witte jwitte@clemson.edu

Join the CITASA group on Facebook!

I am studying about 500 short pages of web/pdf printout about statistics work at Statistics Canada.

I am writing a test for Statistics Canada's statistical officer job. I am writing my test on Wednesday. I have a study group which will meet on Tuesday and perhaps on Monday after work. So I am switching gears from sociology of facebook studies to statistics studies.

The paper is completed and the final graphics test is done.

I tested the graphics one more time in Second Life on Saturday between 5 PM EST and 7 PM EST. I also met in-world some other presenters as they also tested the room and delivery techniques. I then waited a bit and did some other computer tasks like talking with my father using Skype where I introduced him to chat for the first time in his life which he called his first texting. I then wrote the final draft of the paper and edited it a bit with a little more proof reading.

The remaining task before the conference is to prepare some note cards of the text of my paper that include the proper copy and paste breaks. I learned that I will copy and paste my text into a chat window in Second Life. The best way to do this I found was to have the paper already inside Second Life by putting it into a note card. I still must prepare this note card before sleeping today at say 6 AM. The final draft was sent to the conference organizers at 1 AM EST.

I changed all the graphics I am working on into 4 pt stroke lines.

I tested the slides for my paper in Second Life in the conference room using the slide projector. This slide projector will work for LaTeX if I can design a LaTeX format for Second Life. The LaTeX pdf pages would need to be changed into jpegs. I changed all my Adobe Page Maker files into 4 point lines and larger 18 and 30 point fonts. I will test them today at 5 PM EST.

I am now eight hours behind on the paper.

I am eight hours behind on the paper and wanting to do two more hours today in my plan I have to do ten hours today to catch up. I may drop my speculative other 6 hypotheses and work on the one only which I have graphics for and start to think more about the closer nodes hypothesis.

I have finished reading all the ACM papers now.

The last ACM paper while by the same authors as the first is not gong to be useful for my paper. The second paper will be useful but not directly but it will shows that facebook helps bring nodes together but I need to write something more deep about this hypothesis.

I was successful with Keynote insertion of a pdf graphic file.

So here is what I was able to do yesterday and today. I was able to make graphics of network models using Adobe Page Maker and then turn these into pdf pages using the Adobe Distiller program. Then using Keynote I have been able to add these pdf pages to slides and view them on screen.

The next step with the help of the conference organisors will be to test the power point projector in Second Life. We will test it perhaps tonight.

This evening early on at 7:00 PM I am going to the local community college for a meeting of the local Linux users group. I am going to this meeting tonight because Dr. John C Nash a professor who may be a supervisor for my master's thesis is speaking tonight at the meeting. Then I may stay up late and sleep tomorrow right after work.

I finished one ACM paper and started to read a second.

I read all, of the empirical study into privacy exposure of Carnegie Melon Students who used facebook in 2005, now. I need to read parts of it with more care tomorrow or Wednesday morning. Below is a bit of a summary and some ideas on how I will use their paper. Here is the citation for this paper:

Ralph Gross & Alessandro Acquisti & H. John Heinz, III. Information revelation and privacy in online social networks in Workshop On Privacy In The Electronic Society Proceedings of the 2005 ACM workshop on Privacy in the electronic society (New York, N.Y.: ACM, 2005) at 71–80.

The paper is critical of social networking models. It uses facebook search features to gather data. It assumes the worst crimes such as identity theft and stalking. The authors do realise that they are generating hypotheses as I am in my paper. I think the other side of my paper "closer nodes" might counter balance this fear mongering. But definitely the authors have made a great start of this type of study. They, I think are weak on law and philosophy, so I can add something from those fields. They focus on what's exposed and I think I will use their work to suggest these exposed facts about persons without exploring these aspects deeply. I think the next ACM paper from a year later in 2006 might be more about the "closer nodes" side of my paper.

7 hours done today on the paper.

I am still doing graphics and should may be try to finish those today while using Adobe Page Maker is fresh on my mind. I was wrong about the graphic shapes not being adjustable after writing text. I just need to point at the actual edge of the graphic to select and then adjust it. Right now I am 5.5 hours behind on the paper for my weekend schedule. If I try to do another three hours of graphics and mix in some reading and then half an hour to study survey processes I will also complete today's study goals.

I put in another hour and a half work on the paper, and graphics, as well as, writings are happening.

I have a good bibliography now. This includes all the papers I have consulted so far. I now need to check the bibliography against my legal style guide or better would be to learn the ASA style quickly and apply it to this paper. That would be ideal. I still have to read most of the papers carefully.

I now have seven hypothetical exposures written down. I also have some sketched out graphics for these to show who or what is exposed and the levels of exposure possible or not. Having drawn the graphics with pen and ink I now needed a tool for doing computer drawings. I tried Microsoft Word art about a week ago, and it was not great. Then after having an idea of all the graphics I will need, I looked for software for drawing on my eMac. I tried Illustrator but that did not work well, as I don't know enough about Illustrator. In the end I have my figure 1., a basic network in facebook drawn with Adobe Page Maker and it looks fine and produces a 1 page pdf of the figure. Now my next step will be finding a way of including the figure in the paper or having the graphics separate. I will need seven more graphics at least for the second section for the analysis where I sketch out the networks for each hypothesis. I need to stop here and think about the process of using Adobe Page Maker. Some graphics get hidden behind text boxes and then can no longer be adjusted. So one step to take for the other seven graphics will be to do all the geometric symbols first. Thus draw first, then write labels. I can also copy and paste the legend maybe, but there will also be a graphic symbol for areas of exposure in the seven diagrams, so copying and pasting my first legend would be a mistake. I will think a bit more about the processes and then make some solid sketches before going ahead. Apparently network diagrams were rumoured to have been drawn on napkins or envelopes for the original design of the Internet. I will need seven figures for the seven hypotheses. I am keeping my drawings and models very simple for display reasons. Also the learner will find understanding not elitist.

Steps for writing about these hypotheses are, first identify, describe (the network structures/models in figures), explore the ethics that seem involved in each case, and then finally ponder the legal possibilities in each case.

I planned for 18 hours this weekend and have done about 6.5 hours now.

I planned to work 6 hours per day on this long weekend until my paper was done. I have worked about 2 hours per day and 3 hours today. I also planned about 2 hours on Friday which did not happen. So far I have downloaded some pdf articles of professor Wellmans's and read a chapter in a book by him. I have also read parts of another book mentioned before on gift giving and started the three ACM articles and have those printed out.

I am going to develop 7 hypothetical exposures to privacy and have the first and second identified now. I need five more now. I will today find those five and also read the three articles from the ACM and the book chapter on gift giving. Then I will write more and then sleep on everything and work a little in the morning before work. I should also spend half an hour studying survey processes for work.

Researching open source software teams.

I found this article but have not read it yet.

Barcellini, Flore et al. A study of Online Discussions in an Open-Source Software Community: Reconstructing Thematic Coherence and Argumentation from Quotation Practices in van den Besselaar, Peter, et. al. eds. Communities and Technologies 2005 (Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Springer, 2005) at 301-320.

This would help me with working on my masters thesis with management professor John C. Nash who has this as one of his study topics although he focuses more on forecasting in the field of scientific software. I am going to hear him talk tomorrow on his topic, Tuesday evening at the local Linux users group meeting for August.

I search ACM and found three very relevant papers for ideas for my paper.

I found searching ACM's journals that at least three very close articles have already been written on my topic. The first one rejects the use of social networking to study privacy on facebook. This is an empirical study of Carnegie Melon Students who use facebook. I have not finished reading the three papers so will wait to cite them here.

I found a good paper on social networks and gift giving.

Because file sharing is a two way street it may be similar to rights because rights are both given and taken. In my browsing QA76.9 I found QA76.9 C66 C5845 2005 and this paper:

Skågeby, Jörgen & Pargman, Daniel. File-Sharing Relationships - conflicts of interest in online gift-giving in van den Besselaar, Peter, et. al. eds. Communities and Technologies 2005 (Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Springer, 2005)

This paper will be used for the above thought and the model they use for scales between network nodes, namely ego-micro-meso-macro.

I need to check the above citation against my legal studies citation guide before putting the above cite into my bibliography for my paper. At least I have it started here and have the Nordic accents done in html entities for now.

Working on my paper for CITASA Mini conference 3.0

I am writing a paper for the Communications Information and Technology section of the American Sociology Association mini conference for 2007. This will take place in New York and also on-line in Second Life a virtual 3D world.