Sunday, December 28, 2008

Backing up and file and folder making.

I made some folder for years, months, and quarters. I made some templates for folder arrangements. So I have years from the early 1950's through to 2008, I also have a folder full of the months and folders for quarters for different fiscal years. I can then copy and paste these templates into what ever I am organizing.

I also have made some html txt files for this blog and my computer logbook blog for the year 2003 when these blogs were started. I hope to find all my study notes and other files that I made and store them in folders for each year and then back these up to DVD.

I have made some burn folders for the documents folder, the desktop and other files folder and the email folder for the Macbook. This is three 4.7 GB DVD's and I will make six copies for each DVD. I need 18 blank DVD's for this. So my back up process for 2008 has started.

Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Adding up prices on a web page.

Task: total prices of a web page list.
Goal: to price the cost of owning every O'Reilly pocket reference and guide.
Software needed:
A web browser
A spreadsheet
R software
a text editor.

Find a well formated web price list such as
http://oreilly.com/store/series/pocketrefs.csp

Step 1: Web browser
Highlight the beginning of the price list (i.e. highlight the beginning of the first item/record on the web page). Scroll to the end of the list or web page. Hold your shift key down and click just after the last item/record. Now copy this highlighted list. You should have all the items highlighted

Step 2 Spreadsheet
Paste this in to an empty spreadsheet. Examine this and see if prices are on one row alone. It does not matter if there are dollar signs with the prices in the cells or also in this case a currency symbol USD. But here we find in the spreadsheet a price such as "$9.99 USD" occurring in every eighth row. The Prices should be in cells by themselves. But there is all the other stuff like the title and the blurb which here we want to parse out.

Step 3 Spreadsheet
Save the spreadsheet as a CSV file comma separated file. Remember the name and directory for the first line of R code below in the next step.

Step 4: R software ( www.r-project.org), text editor
Copy and paste the code below into a text editor
Change the directory and file name to your file and directory name from step 3 in the first and and the directory in the last line of this code. On the last line chose a file name.
Change the line jump <-(seq(x,y,z)
so that x is the first row a price occurs and y the last row a price occurs and
z is the number of rows between each price.

You can also change jump(x,y,z) to parse out all the titles or all the blurbs or all the dates published.


After editing copy the code into the R command line a line at a time
the # lines are comments


Use R software and run this code on the R command line after editing it in the text editor. Stop after each line that begins with # to check the results. good luck and use R help if needed.

###################Code Starts here##################
OPocket <-read.csv(file="/Users/ptimusk/documents/school/books/OReillyPocket08-12-24.csv", header= FALSE)
# read into R and the variable OPocket the csv file created by Excel save as csv.
#change "Users/ptimusk/documents/school/books/...to your directory
# and file name OReillyPocket08-12-24.csv

OPocket
#check variable for rows that contain prices. Every foth row starting at 4 ending at 394
#
jump <- seq(4, 394, 5)
# create an index of rows where prices occur. Start with row 4. End with row 394
#Count by 5 rows

OPocket.Prices <- as.vector (OPocket[jump,1])
#take only the rows(indexed by "jump") with prices out of the variable OPocket

OPocket.Prices
# check to see above variable contains quoted prices in 79 rows

write.csv(OPocket.Prices,file="/Users/ptimusk/documents/school/books/OPocketPrices08-12-24.csv")
#write the prices to a csv text file

###############Code ends here######################

Step 5 text editor
Open with the text editor the file you just wrote on the last line of R code
Save as txt

Step 6 Spreadsheet

With the spreadsheet and a new empty spreadsheet open the txt file you just saved. That should be the text file with the Prices. This file should have the variable OPocket.Prices as an R format variable.

The spreadsheet should take you through some import steps where
you can adjust the separator characters to parse out the prices only without the $
and without the currency symbol. You also parse out the first line and the quotes.

Sum the prices column
Your done!
Answer: all the O'Reilly pocket references and guides will cost 851.69 $ for the 79 books.

Our term project passed and it looks like I passed simulations and modeling.

Our term project got a great mark. I did not do so well on the exam. But it looks like I have passed the simulations and modeling course.

Saturday, December 20, 2008

Studying Internet topics and SAS this weekend.

I am studying SAS and Internet policy material this weekend. I also hope to study some code from my new O'Reilly pocket guides.

Its official Dr. Iluju Kiringa to supervise my masters of science thesis

When I was young and a Fortran programmer I looked up to the graduate students I worked with. They were studying for their masters of science. I aimed to get this degree for many years. Now my chance to study for this is upon me. Dr. Iluju Kiringa has agreed to supervise my thesis. I think I will be studying in the data discovery field.

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

I am coauthor of a paper on retirement education.

I have completed at work some research on retirement education in Canada. I used the Internet to search for courses and other support information for persons to plan for their retirement. A paper summarizing the amount of this education available was then written. The paper's purpose was to suggest a survey to find out more accurately and with more confidence the amount, accessibility and availability of retirement education. The paper was presented at the Policy Research Initiative conference last week. This is a government agency conference. Their web site is here http://www.policyresearch.gc.ca/.

I am studying Perl but with full time work I do not study as much as in the past.

I no longer find a lot of time to study outside of work. At work I read many studies. I am involved in writing research papers at work. I am thinking of starting some research projects on my own again. I might try to write two papers this year. I should try to search out some calls for papers but often I find these coming in in my email subscriptions to email lists.

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

I am checking to make sure I have a supervisor for my thesis now.

My chance of being supervised by John Nash at the university of Ottawa fell through. I am checking with Professor Iluju Kiringa to see if he can still supervise at this point. He had me reading a book on knowledge representation this fall in preparation for my thesis. Here is Iluju Kiringa's web page http://www.site.uottawa.ca/~kiringa/.

Saturday, December 13, 2008

Our term project was submitted yesterday.

I submitted our term project yesterday. It was interesting to see some of the other term project members learning statistics. One member did a lot of work. I did not manage to learn much Java programming but I did learn some.

Tuesday, December 09, 2008

Completion of course requirements for Graduate Certificate in Systems Sciences.

After today's exam I will have completed the course requirements for a graduate certificate in systems sciences. Next term, I may be allowed to start a thesis in systems sciences for completion of a masters of science an M.Sc..

I have my notes organized and I am just printing the last lectures slides.

It is down to crunch time but I have made steady progress studying. I will review a few calculations and my hand written lecture notes this morning before the exam.

I am excited to be starting some new work at work on Wednesday.

Monday, December 08, 2008

I am reviewing chapter 2 now in the text book.

I started to review chapter 2 in my course textbook. This chapter outlines the basic in this simulations and modeling approach.

I have found out my mistake that our instructor is not actually a full professor. He is still studying for his PhD.

Wednesday, December 03, 2008

I am now babtised in the use of Excel for statistical analysis.

I never do like to use Excel for statistics because I can use much more powerful tools like SAS and R. Also I have been taught to prefer R and SAS because apparently they are more professional. In fact, I have also been taught to do analysis by hand because that gives the least black box approach. At any rate my present professor uses Excel to do the analysis of simulations so I used Excel.

I have two versions of the experiment and I had our programmers run it 10,000 times thus simulating a restaurant being open 10,000 days. I used Excel formulas to calculate averages, standard deviations and confidence intervals. I divided the confidence interval by 2 to give a half interval. I then did this for the first ten runs, the first 100 runs, the first 1000 runs and finally the whole 10,000 runs.

Then using Excel I made some tables to hold the results and copied and pasted these into Word. I used two fonts the standard Excel Mac X version default font for most of the work and then tried American Typewriter for the headings. I am learning typesetting for tables and charts at work in my development assignment. My development assignment is ending this week. It actually ends next Tuesday but I took Monday and Tuesday off work to write my final exam.

So I have now used Excel to do a simple statistical analysis for our term project. I should now move on to writing this up and getting ready to submit the final step of the project. The good thing now is the professor was very positive about our step three submission and step four is statistics which is what I have studied the most courses in so this step has a lot going in my favour.

Monday, December 01, 2008

We had our exam review class tonight. It was relaxing and intellectually stimulating

I attend the exam review meaning I have attended all classes this term. I should do alright on the exam. I know the material now.

I am starting work in the Internet Society section of Statistics Canada on December 10th.

I was able to land a clerical job with the Internet Society section at my workplace Statistics Canada. I will be part of a research team researching Internet use both by households and by business. So there are the Household Internet Use survey and the E-commerce survey. I will be working in technical support and as a research assistant.

Sunday, November 30, 2008

Exam study begins: Reading chapter 3 in course textbook. Progress report.

I have carefully read sections 3.1 and 3.2 in our course textbook. In section 3.3 I have read up to section 3.3.2.2. There are still the remaining sections of section 3.3 to read. Then section 3.4 and then I need to read and look up the references in section 3.5. I hope to do this tonight and early Monday morning read chapter 4. This is all to prepare for our exam review class tomorrow on Monday afternoon. I have studied for one hour of the eight hours planned

Our term project is good at the third step. I am planning eight hours study over night now.

I am getting ready for eight hours study over night now for my SYS5110 exam. Tomorrow is our exam review class.

Our project has been marked for the third phase. We did good work on it.

Wednesday, November 26, 2008

I finished reading The Making of Second Life by James Wagner Au.

I finished reading The Making of Second Life by James Wagner Au. His writing is entertaining but laden with American military culture and military buzz words. This amounts to a light reading business behind the scenes look at Linden Labs and some briefly sketched Second Life events. We find out in the book that the usual Internet capitalists like Bezos and libertarian capitalists like Kapour are investors in Second Life. I think it awful that computer science which was once upon a time for me a school subject related to math and language is so money oriented. I really need to sit back and think more about all this reading about the net and whether I really want to continue to expose myself to this set of libertarian values again and again.

Our term project is coming along on time.

We submitted our project step 3 on time. The two programmers did almost all the work on this phase of the project. I did some minor documentation and did the submission from my eMac. Our next submission deadline for the full and final project is in two weeks. We have one more class and then we have an exam the week after. I am taking time off work that day to write the exam. The day after the exam I start work in the Internet Society section of my workplace Statistics Canada.

I am installing a one year one time install version of ESRI's ArcGIS 9.2 student version on the new PC crystal 89.

I was surfing the school's web pages for computer services for students. I was trying to find a copy of Symantic anti virus software. I did download the school provided Windows version of Symantic anti virus software but it is 32 bit and will not work on the new PC. But while exploring software available for students I noticed that the license for ArcView has changed at school and we are now allowed to use the software at home. I was taking a break from work and decided that in my travels on the buses yesterday to go to school and get a copy of ArcView which is now in version 9.2. I had trained in version 3.2 in 2000 at Carleton at the geography department there where I have done many years of part time studies. I have also done an analysis of a conference paper about GIS last winter 2008 as a school term project. I have also read an introduction to ESRI GIS database use this past summer by borrowing a book from my workplace library. I was studying for a job competition but did not get very far with that application so stopped reading the book. So at the moment I am installing ArcView 9.2 with the intent of continuing a project from 2000.

At the moment I have installed the software and plan to open my old term project from the course I took in 2000. Then, by accessing recent census data I will update the ArcView project. I had used spreadsheets containing census 1996 data, entered into Excel from Zypher at the Ottawa Carleton Social Planning Council. There I had been paid to enter the data. I am a proud supporter of the Ottawa Carleton Social Planning Council and give them money every pay cheque through charitable donations. This is my present and first project for ArcView 9.2. I then may also attempt to open GIS files provided by Statistics Canada and Elections Canada, two of the workplaces I have worked.

I did not succeed right away with the new software. I was able too import my project file but could not get a map to appear. I am up over night and do not want to spend my time on a desktop computer working out this problem as I had planned to read books. So I am stopping now with the software successfully installed and registered.

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

I submitted an assignment but did not run the code.

This is a very worrisome course this term with both ODE's and JAVA programming. I hope I manage to do well with this course.

Sunday, November 16, 2008

I am now writing the last method which is called a Precondition method

I am now writing the last method called a Precondition method. This is the last page of code of a seven page Java program. There is also a seeds class file that is about half a page and a main method file that is also about half a page. The seeds file I rewrote from one of the professor's files last week. Yesterday night, I wrote the main method and the professor looked at it today and said, it looked fine. I started with a file of the professor's as he suggested for the longer file and started to rewrite it last weekend and now have about one page of this longer seven page file to write. The last page has what is called a Precondition method and I will now work on that tonight.

My first school Java program is almost done.

I have studied Java a little in the middle 1990's. I today have written a Java program that does a simulation of a city garage. This is for a school assignment in modeling and simulation. I am almost done the program and have about two pages left to program in a 7 page program.

I have my Java main method for my assignment done now.

I worked last night on an assignment in simulations and modeling. I have a Java main method now completed. I now just need to write the class file which is an instance of EveSched a type of class we are using for simulations. I am now writing the various methods in this class and have I think completed all the action sequences. I still have more of the process events method to write. This morning I printed this class file for proof reading. I may be able to complete tis assignment today if I focus on it.

Saturday, November 15, 2008

I cleaned up the English in our term project this morning and started section 3 of the report document.

I was up early today after some long work days this week. We are working on a paper I am a coauthor of on retirement. I will say more after we present the paper. Right now I should keep the details quiet before peer review. But it is a lot of work and all the data must all be quality checked.

Yesterday morning, I proof read our conceptual model and SUI and spotted enough English errors to plan a rewrite this morning. That is now done. I have also started the intermediate step of tabling all the Java code. I am going to spend more time with Java tonight and tomorrow. The rest of this morning and afternoon will only be reading time.

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

No coding all day.

I ended up completing the building of a new computer so did not do any coding today or reading books.

We had a guest lecture from Louis Berta

Louis Berta who is the former professor of this course and coauthor of our textbook gave a guest lecture last night in our simulations and modeling course. He covered continuous systems modeling. He also lectured superficially on numerical analysis and optimization.

Monday, November 10, 2008

Progress report on Java coding

I now have the entities, the constants, the parameters, the data modules and the inputs programmed. I am working on the process events method. At least, I think it is called a method. I use Excel columns to do repetitive lines of code. I then save the excel as text with tabs and copy and paste it into the code file. I have stopped programming yesterday and have class tonight. I still have more methods to write but have tomorrow off work. I did all my coding on the VIA train from Toronto to Ottawa.

Sunday, November 09, 2008

The Perl Script for creating a BibTeX file: progress report

My back up files are not html or plain text but I can "view as source" each month's posts and then save these html files on my local computer. So I can create the text files needed. I searched google for Perl scripts. The Perl scripts I have viewed so far seem to have some of the required stuff but my script will need to be more complex and I may, in fact, use regular expressions mixed with Perl.

Java code writing.

I am starting to write some Java code for my present assignment at school. It is due Tuesday night. I have so far written the part required for translating from the conceptual model to Java code. I followed the course material this far. Now I must make a Java source file that works. I am not sure I have to get it to compile but I do need to actually write some code.

Saturday, November 08, 2008

Term project coming along; learning conceptual modeling

I have been learning conceptual modeling. I have worked with three other students to produce a conceptual model of a restaurant simulation. I also have an assignment to write some Java code and have finished one of the steps in the process. Now I actually have to translate this work in to some Java code. I have been teaching myself Eclipse software. Eclipse is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE).

Saturday, October 25, 2008

I have a learning opportunity at work but need to read a book first.

A former director general at work in National accounts has introduced me to a history book. So far I am on the first chapter. The story is of Canadian National Accounts that are done and have been done at my workplace. This gentleman who is now retired has offered to discuss the book with me when I have read it. So far, I told him my first impression when I learned a basic definition of national accounts. I said, "That is too large a problem. How can it be done?" Now I am learning it is done as best it can be and by meticulous counting and in the end is not a real account but a giant guesstimate. At any rate this is someone I share office space with this retired director of National accounts.

Friday, October 24, 2008

Our project is moving along we had our walk through meeting yesterday.

I have been really busy with work but basically nine to five except for some library trips at night. At school I have been learning Java. I finally have a computer science professor after many years of learning code on my own. After this step in the project we begin our coding step.

Monday, October 13, 2008

Perl script to make my directed list citations into BibTeX format citations

I am going to research Perl and then write a Perl script that takes my directed list citations in McGill Law student style, that I have used all along with this blog and produce BibTeX citations for all my citations on this blog. I will use the Perl script to process my back up files for this blog and to do that I will first need to save all these back up doc files as plain text files.

Following up on Chapter three references to knowledge representation standards and a couple of common sense reasoning onology projects.

I am planning for my final 4.5 hours of pre-thesis study this long weekend to write this blog entry, using the on screen pdf's I am able to find for the following references. Only two are books and the rest are magazine, journal, or proceedings articles, so should all be accessible from the university library over the library web interface. I will post this entry then later add the citations then post it again. Finally I will repost this entry with follow up discussions after reading each paper.

The references in Chapter three are too knowledge representation or knowledge communication languages or standards including semantic web languages and include DARPA Agent Mark Up Language (DAML) for an SGML example.

The full list of standards and the authors references for these are:

Knowledge Interchange Format (KIF)
Knowledge Query Manipulation Language (KQML)
DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML)
Ontology Inference Layer (OIL)
Web Ontology Language (OWL)

The reference to the "Semantic Web is Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, and Ora Lassila. The Semantic Web Scientific American, 284(5):34-43, 2001.

There are also some references to the logic and its origins that I won't follow up on.

I will follow up on references to the project to "develop a universal ontology for common sense reasoning... the CYC project." and "smaller projects" with related ambitions... the KM project." Here are the citations for those projects that the authors have given.

CYC
KM

Chapter three was much more readable.

After chapter two covered First Order Logic (FOL) the third chapter connected this representational language with the idea of a Knowledge Base (KB) for a domain. Then entailments were shown to be provable and now chapter four will show how to use contradiction in a proof. Some of this is stuff I already know using different symbols. I did give some thought to the exercises in chapter three. I generally solve exercises in my head for a mathematics textbook and likewise this is what I did for chapter three.

I will now start chapter four. I have studied for about one hour and a half today using this pre-thesis book. So far this book is about logic.

More pre-thesis reading gets done.

Finally more progress with this book
Brachman, Ronald and Hector Levesque. Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (San Francisco, Calf.: Morgan Kaufmann, 2004).
I did get through chapter two which was dense math like symbolic logic and not everything is clear to me but the end of the chapter still made sense. I did not solve the exercises at the end of chapter two. I did start chapter three and it is moving much quicker now. I should be able to finish chapter three and start chapter four today.

Sunday, October 12, 2008

I am now more than half way through the book The Making of Second Life.

This book is proving fairly entertaining with just enough history of Second Life,

Pre thesis reading continues this long weekend.

Studies continue for my thesis proposal. This is the book I have been assigned to read. It is almost 400 pages long.
Brachman, Ronald and Hector Levesque. Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (San Francisco, Calf.: Morgan Kaufmann, 2004).
I read more of chapter two while on break at a job I was doing on Saturday. Chapter two is about first order logic. I should complete this chapter two and get started on chapter three today.

Wednesday, October 08, 2008

Our project team got our assignment done on time and we got a great mark.

We had to write a situation under investigation (SUI) key features document as our first assignment. I was responsible as team leader to see that it got done. I gathered the whole team twice in the library and we talked out the details of our project. I drew a diagram in KDraw and then showed the other team members and one of them did a better diagram in Open Office. I then used Photoshop 6.0 to place all the data models on the diagram. After feedback from the professor we reverted to the the diagram our team mate had made. Data models are supposed to be part of the next step so we got a little ahead into the conceptual model.

Now this week we have an extra assignment of developing a conceptual model. We need to use some windows software the professor has developed to make a conceptual model documentation easier. I tried this evening to install this ABCmod software on my Vista PC but it did not work.I just booted up my XP on the Macbook and and now have to update XP to service pack 3. I installed Java 6 on both the XP and the Vista box. I am going to try to do the majority of the assignment over night now and get it really started. Then this long weekend I can perfect my assignment. We work alone on this assignment.

One of our team mates is working on the second assignment in the project. That assignment is to create the conceptual model for our project. Well I am going back to my XP computer now and posting this update on my school work.

I finished reading Generation Blend.

I completed reading Generation Blend. The author has a web site at http://generationblend.com/. I had chosen to read this to get more nuance in my thesis simulation. I did not yet take away the lesson and technical materials I need but I am now familiar with this book. I returned it to the Morissette library at my university this week before class.

Friday, September 26, 2008

The course textbook and my progress with it.

My course textbook was written by the professor and his predecessor who taught this course in modeling and simulations for some thirty years. We will meet this older professor as he is going to give a guest lecture. The book for our course then is
Birta, Louis G. and Gilbert Abez. Modeling and Simulation: Exploring Dynamic Systems Behaviour (London: Springer, 2007).

I have read the first chapter expect for the last three short sections including the bibliography. This chapter introduces modeling and simulations. The chapter motivates the reading of the book and covers some roots of simulation work.

I have also read most of the second chapter now but skimmed over the mathematics parts. I read this chapter on the bus from Toronto to Ottawa last Sunday. This is the chapter that covers the structure and form that our term project must take. This form also resembles the systems engineering life cycle process form I learned last winter.

I skipped chapter three which is about data modeling because I know a fair amount of this from my statistics background. The chapter also covers and introduces to me random variates which I could during the lecture guess existed in Java libraries. Now I may learn random variates both mathematically and of course in the context of numerical analysis and the computer math needed to do this. We will do this in Java but can do it in any other language that has a RND uniform random number generator ability. I may come back and scan read chapter three before our first quiz and for our final exam. I will make sure to carefully read the section on random variates.

The fourth chapter is where we are presently in the lectures and I admit I am behind on reading it.

After reading The University of Google, I can really appreciate the quality of this course. It is probably the continuity between the professors that makes the work that goes into this course possible. But I am not so sure that the author of The University of Google who taught media and the professor I am facing who is a computer science professor can be compared or would see the creation of lectures in the same way. All put lot of work into their lectures and that is why the lectures have this quality. I fully intend to use the form and conceptual modeling that these computer science professors have developed to do the conceptual model for my thesis simulation.

Three more chapters read now of The Making of Second Life

I have now read three more chapters of this journalistic book:
Au, Wagner James. The Making of Second Life: Notes From the New World (New York: Collins, 2008).

Au covers the idea of crowds and democracy in Second Life as one of his themes and fully admits that the masters of Second Life that is Linden labs hope to promote a libertarian style democracy. He covers early attempts to make Second Life a socially vibrant world with rules imposed on it from above like rating systems. There are rating systems in Second Life for the objects in the game that players build and then see. As well as, there are rating systems for the avatars. He also explains how these low paying jobs in Second Life such as siting in a chair for money or cleaning windows in a shop came about and this was new material I have not come across before.

In the next chapter, he looks at role playing and identity, covering furries and gender bending. He quotes Turkle at one point.

This leads nicely into the next chapter where he covers avatar sex and of course ends with the familiar detective agencies in Second Life story. He also has some good writing on the meaning and sensations of sexuality through the computer screen. He also does not use Second Life for sexual play and shows that this is a minor but sensational aspect of the game. He ends up telling a few romance stories as well.

In the following chapter he covers politics and video gaming warfare by covering the now familiar Jessie sim story. But he looks at it in the context of the war in Iraq showing what happens when war mongers and peace niks mix in their politics to the game Second Life. He does not resolve the politics very well but then he covers the general views of politics and apathy well.

The book Generation Blender becomes more complex in covering seniors

The book I found ageist is still being read. It is
Salkowitz, Rob. Generation Blend: Managing Across the Technology Age Gap (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2008)

I am now on the chapter that covers a charity in New York City, Older Adults Technology Services (OATS). In this chapter Rob was correct he look at the issue of a certain age of workers using technology with perhaps more nuance. At least he claims that OATS has done a great deal of work with making their training age appropriate.

I can also see now scanning the table of contents that this is a Microsoft book because it speaks of the great potential that will be realised in people if they use technology. This seems to be the same as Microsoft TV adds. I buy this whole viewpoint. I fully believe it took my use of technology to unleash my potential.

Pre-thesis study book getting read

I read some of this book on my trip to Toronto on the bus. The book is
Brachman, Ronald and Hector Levesque. Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (San Francisco, Calf.: Morgan Kaufmann, 2004).
I have now this morning started to read chapter 2 on First Order Logic. I first studied logic under the influence of Sam Ajzenstat in Hamilton. I read the beginnings of a book on predicate logic in the spring of 1981 or may be it was the fall of 1980. I formally took a course in symbolic logic in the summer of 1996 and this was my first course in university after being away from school for ten years. I basically failed this symbolic logic course. It was the first university course I took with TV lectures. In other words it was distance learning.

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Quick read on Second Life.

I am breezing through this book:

Au, Wagner James. The Making of Second Life: Notes From the New World (New York: Collins, 2008).
Basically a brief history of select aspects of the Second Life world. It includes behind the scenes view of the founding of the company Linden Labs and also the origins of the Gibson sim so far.

Sunday, September 14, 2008

Reading goals begin for my course

The Java book I have now started to read is

Liang, Y. Daniel. Introduction to Java Programming Core Vision 5th (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2004).
I jumped right into chapter one a few days ago and am now on Chapter 1.12 the last section in chapter 1. I probably need to read 14 chapters of this book to be able to do course home work. This is 545 pages of reading. I have about two weeks to do this. Thus I need to quickly read the first five chapters about the elementary programming materials in about three or four days. I will try to read two more chapters today and then chapter 4 on Monday and chapter 5 on Tuesday. Then the following five chapters cover object oriented programming and I will try to read these Thursday through the weekend. Then start the chapters 11 through fourteen next week. These cover GUI programming. Then the last week of the month read anything not read yet and complete exercises. I should revaluate this reading plan after class on Monday's and also when I get the course textbook.

Friday, September 12, 2008

Welcome to Java!

I wrote, compiled and ran the intro "Welcome to Java!" simple print to screen program on both the eMac and the Debian machine. On the eMac there was nothing to install to get it to work. On Debian I needed to install a free SDK for Java and run time environment but I got the program to work under Linux as well. So today's learning goals were completed and I even set aside time to do this study. But I did not run the program in Windows.

Books I am presently reading for class, thesis, work and fun and/or business.

My professor loaned me a book to learn Java programming. My goal today is to write a "Hello, World." program in Java on three operating systems residing on two computers. But I also have a power point slide show to make for work as volunteer work on workers with disabilitiies and employment equity. I have just this past week learned to write, "Hello, world!" in PHP from the book:

Williams, Hugh E. and David Lane. Web Database Applications with PHP and MySQL 2nd (Sebastopol, Calf.: O'Reilly Media, 2004).
I will test that now. Um it does not seem to show up. The code is.. arg! I can not write it unless I use some escape character magic like this <?php print "Hello, world!"; ?>.

The Java book is

Liang, Y. Daniel. Introduction to Java Programming Core Vision 5th (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2004).
This is for school and our first simulation programming assignments. These will be done programming in Java.

For my thesis my new possible supervisor has suggested I read

Brachman, Ronald and Hector Levesque. Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (San Francisco, Calf.: Morgan Kaufmann, 2004).
This book is from the Q 387 range in the library and is on the topic of artificial intelligence (AI). I started to read this on Tuesday and Wednesday, as soon as, I borrowed it but did not read it Thursday.

For work I am reading

McDaniel, Stephen and Chris Hemedinger. SAS For Dummies (Indianapolis, Ind.: For Dummies, 2007).
This book I bought used from Amazon and paid less than 5 dollars and with the next book paid less than 15$ including shipping. Both books are new. I set a goal that if this book arrived today I would read the first chapter today which I did. I also read the introduction today.

The other book to arrive today from Amazon was an official guide to Second Life book. This one is the guide to creating content. Here is the cite:
Weber, Aimee, Kimberly Rufer-Bach and Richard Platel. Creating Your World: The Official Guide to Advanced Content Creation for Second Life (Indianapolis, Ind.: Sybex, 2007).
I had planned to read the first chapter today, but only read the front materials up to the first chapter.

Tuesday, September 09, 2008

First class went well. Textbook in the mail.

Our first class went well last night. I will most probably be adapting Dr. Arbez's conceptual framework for simulations to my thesis simulation. The professor asked me about my second life involvement. I am going to be learning JAVA and the professor loaned me a basic Java textbook from first year computer science to study.

I ordered the course textbook used from Amazon and it is in the mail as of today.

Sunday, September 07, 2008

I am studying one course this term: Foundations on Modeling and Simulation

Here is the calendar description of my course this term.

Foundations on Modeling and Simulation
CALENDAR DESCRIPTION
Fundamental aspects of system modeling and the simulation process. Elements of continuous system simulation. Issues relating to the numerical solution of ordinary differential equations. Elements of discrete event simulation. Generation of random numbers and variates. Simulation validation and quality assurance. Introduction to simulation languages.

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

I bought a 100 slide box through ebay

I have only about twenty water quality slides for my microscope but decided to buy a 100 slide box to hold slides. I do not really have my microscope set up for viewing. But it could go on my office desk. It would be nice to have the microscope set up to work with a digital camera or video camera.

I am continuing to read the ethnographic study of Second Life.

I am continuing to read the study of Second Life. I have also started to read books on simulations including learning about self avoiding random walks (SAW's).

Sunday, August 24, 2008

I am making some spreadsheets to be saved as csv and then read into R as data frames.

I am making some spreadsheets mostly full of zeros for one year counted by hours. That is how many rows these spreadsheets have about 8600 rows. In the columns I have workerID, time in separate columns for hours, days, months and years. Then I have three extra knowledge columns then seven columns for types of knowledge then two dummy columns. I have the files names which will become variable names of
Know.csv
This is the basic spreadsheet with all zero entries.
knowHoursNorm.csv and knowHoursLeap.csv
This is the same spread sheet but with the hours column taking values 0 to 23 and then repeating for all the rows, again for one year.
knowDaysNorm.csv and knowDaysLeap.csv
This has the hours values and then in the day column the value 1 repeating for 24 rows, then the value 2 repeating for 24 rows, etc. up to the value 7, then starting again at 1. This represents days of the week but there is no direct correspondence between say Tuesday and the number for that day.
knowMonthsNorm.csv
Here we have 31 days worth of rows or 31 times 24 rows (days times hours) taking the value 1 for January. Then 28 days for February etc.
knowMonthsLeap.csv
This is the same as the previous spread sheet with 29 days for February. The above leap files also have the extra day.
These will then be read into R. I will up load all this work to my MyExperiment account.

Sunday, August 17, 2008

Simulations

I am wanting to write some more simulation code. I will probably wait until my simulations course starts this fall. I also have the 3rd edition of Ross's Simulation out from the library. I have only programmed one chapter's problems in this book so far in I think it was the C language. This was when I first read this book in its 2nd edition a few years back. These were simple simulations to generate average solutions of integrals using random numbers for each solution then averaging. This then gives an approximation to the integral solution. This is a type of numerical analysis.

Saturday, August 16, 2008

Sunday, August 10, 2008

Sabre R manual is perfectly laid out and is perfect for printing.

I printed some chapters of the Sabre R manual. Each chapter was an even number of pages and I made little two sided booklets of each chapter using 8.5 inch by 11 inch paper. I can just staple these. I have a neat little collection now of chapters of the manual.

Just about finished reading The University of Google

I picked this book up because it seems to be about the sociology of the Internet. It was in the educational books section of the U of O library. I found the book browsing the new book shelves. The author, Tara Brabazon says sociology of the Internet needs to be supported by media studies and history studies.

The book did teach well about education. She does seem to make her points with only Google and some of these points could be made with Yahoo too. She questions how we define globalisation and says this term is used by many with different meanings at both ends of the communication. Also, the term globilisation is used by different ideologies.

Her coverage of the Internet is not so repetitive and boring as many early Internet books by academics. She includes an argument found in the thesis of Lessig's Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace and applies this argument in her analysis of national cultures and diversity and sharing across cultures claiming Google brings views of only the US Western world view of the rest of the world through the WWW.

A significant point is that teachers now must work hard to be available to students 24-7 but I think she misses that mature students like myself are also being scholars 24-7 on our computers. But the point is well taken, because of the Internet we all work too hard. Also because of the Internet there are vast exclusions of knowledge and this has all developed just after advancing capitalism has made huge gaps in income though the 1980's and 1990's. This point I get because I have been poor for all this time. She makes a point of showing that there are few jobs for the educated in our society, yet there are more persons in university these days than there ever have been. Perhaps this is a larger middle class but with no wages and no jobs waiting for all that education. She makes some very good arguments about the use of higher education vis a vie working and the perversion of education by commercial interests. So education must be a business and accountable and no longer publicly funded. This is the final death blow I figure unless I can get funding.

One chapter argues well against power point lectures and she talks well of the art of lecturing and oral auditory nature of this art form. A few chapters later she derides the new medias convergence with creativity and old school art. And this fits one of the themes she points out that the old and new is not a good dichotomy for improving education in the age of Google. She also say the blame is not with Google but is more historically set in the context of Western colonial capitalism which makes her a deconstructionalist. She also finds some fault though with post-modernism which I find refreshing after my exposure to post-modern criminology studies.

One statistical point about her arguments on development might be made here. She compares the amount of money needed for basic medicine for the worlds people who do not have basic medicine with the amount of money spent feeding pets in Europe and Japan. So this then infers it is people v animals in terms of spending. This is a bit like cake or bread numbers. Cosmetics v clean water and an old flame source for heated debates.

Friday, August 08, 2008

Learning Sabre software but no luck getting it to run yet.

I was introduced to Sabre software by the NCeSS web site because this software was developed as quantitative software at one of their nodes. I was today not able to get Sabre to run on my Macbook nor have I been able to install Sabre as an R package on my eMac R.

Friday, August 01, 2008

Back from workshop at MIT and I am unpacking bags and notes, not concepts

So I was in the company of sociologists this past week on Thursday. I heard them use the term "unpacking" meaning to take apart and analyse a term or concept. I am in fact, unpacking my bags and not really concepts because I am not really a sociologist. These people know me by email and now by my presentation. It went well and I was not trashed like some bad school boy. In fact, I am now looking to take up a more serious study of knowledge management and search out the author Cousins.

I will be following up on things I learned from all the other speakers and in the future applying all this learning. Each one was interesting and presented concepts I can learn more about. First I will visit the web sites presented by the Keynote speaker at the centre of e-social science in the UK. I may even study over there for a few days. Her centre also is involved with myexperiment.org which I joined a few days ago but have not fully explored or added much content yet. Another featured speaker has developed an open source plug in for Microsoft Excel 2007. I do not have access to Excel 2007. This plug in draws network graphs and diagrams much like seventies' string art as the speaker put it. He is the only sociologist employed by Microsoft apparently. This whole event was sponsored by Port 25 the Microsoft open source lab. Their site can be found here http://port25.technet.com/.

Our conference packages included name tags with USB keys with the CITASA name and logo printed on them. I have not even opened this USB key up yet to examine the files. I should join this group with real membership fees but I still owe this years fees for the Canadian Mathematics Society student membership I hold. The full program is here at http://www.citasa.org/files/PreConference%202008%20Program.pdf.

Sunday, July 20, 2008

Social science research methods books borrowed

Here are the books I just borrowed to help me learn social science research methods.
Miller, Robert L. and John D. Brewer. eds.The A-Z of social research : a dictionary of key social science research concepts (London; SAGE, 2003).
There are about a hundred entries on research topics in this book. I will study various entries here for my paper and started with reading the entry on social simulations.
Scarbrough, Elinor and Eric Tanenbaum. eds. Research strategies in the social sciences : a guide to new approaches (Oxford, England: Oxford University, 1998).
This is a quantitative research book based on the Essex summer school in data analysis that has been going since 1967. The summer school has apparently been quite influential within European social sciences. It also relates to the Michigan summer school on political studies. I think that's what the intro to this book said. I will not read this book to help with my paper.
Schratz, Michael and Rob Walker. Research as social change : new opportunities for qualitative research (London: Routledge, 1995).
This book seems inspiring but I will not read it for my paper.

Second Life as an anthropological study

I found this book on the new book shelves on the social science floor at the university of Ottawa library yesterday. I am almost through the first chapter. Here is the citation:
Boellstorff, Tom. Coming of age in second life : an anthropologist explores the virtually human (Princeton: Princeton University, 2008).
The virtual world as a culture for ethnographic study.

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

I read the first chapter of Petra Kelly's book.

Her first chapter is about feminism and is titled: Women and Power. Here is the full citation:
Kelly, Petra. Women and Power in Thinking Green! (Berkeley, Cal.: Parallax Press, 1994).
I am deep in patriarchal society. I can connect her to cyber feminists and third world feminism.

Friday, July 11, 2008

Reading about knowledge industries, wage differences by age and gender, the educational premium, and the educational fields premium.

My reading these days is full of statistical modeling of wages and other economics variables. I have been gaining an education in economics and micro economics. This evening I finally read a Statistics Canada document for my thesis. I have been so busy at work that I have not worked on my thesis. Another big time user the past month as been my board of directors work with a non-profit. Other volunteering has also kept me busy.


Here is the citation for the paper I read tonight.

Morissette, Rene, Yuri Ostrovsky and Garnett Picot. "Relative Wage Patterns Among the Highly Educated in a Knowledge-based Economy." Analytical Studies Branch Research Paper Series. Statistics Canada Catalogue no. 11F0019MIE2004232 (Ottawa, Statistics Canada, 2004)
This paper has a clear SIC code division of high knowledge, middle knowledge and low knowledge, industries they borrowed from elsewhere. I would like to use these studies from elsewhere or at least review these studies. The wages analysed and the other parts of the analysis in this analytical paper are not so important in my research. But I should note that these more demographic variables may effect knowledge management policies and effects of knowledge management in firms. My brief search of current Ph.D research on knowledge management showed this. But this search had been meant to find that combination of demographics and knowledge management. So whether there is strength in this or of what direction this effect has is still not clear. But catagorising knowledge management firms is something I should deal with in my paper so I am off to the library web site now or google scholar, and Statistics Canada's web site to find these elsewhere studies.
The two other studies are cited here.
Lee, F. and H. Has. “A Quantitative Assessment of High-knowledge Industries Versus Low-knowledge Industries” in P. Howitt (ed.), The Implications of Knowledge-Based Growth for Micro-Economic Policies Industry Canada Research Series, Volume 6
(Calgary: University of Calgary, 1996)
This article should explain a catagorisation of industries.
Baldwin, J. R. and J. Johnson. The Defining Characteristics of Entrants in Science-based Industries Catalogue no. 88-517-XIE (Ottawa: Statistics Canada, 1999).
This article should should show some adjustments to the catagories needed to define knowledge intensive industries.

Thursday, July 10, 2008

Chart making in Excel

I have recently learned more about making charts in Excel.

Thanking Rob Salkowitz for his comment

I want to thank the author of Generation Blend, Rob Salkowitz for commenting here on my posts about this book. Rest assured Rob, I will be reading more of this book, as my research may depend on finding something I can apply to variables in my simulation of retiring workers. I also want to thank Mr. Salkowitz for engaging my blog that is very good scholarship and shows good use of web 2.0.

Thursday, July 03, 2008

Studying PHP and MySQL and ESRI GIS.

I am studying PHP and MySQL together in an O'Reilly book. I am also three chapters into a book on GIS and databases. I may be writing a test in GIS at work for a promotion.

Saturday, June 28, 2008

Details for my conference trip

I am just working out the housing and travel arrangements so that I can go to Boston this summer and present my paper. I need to start working on a keynote presentation and start to finish up my paper. I am off to the library today at school if it is open. I am having to return a reference for the paper and also I am taking back about 8 books I am not reading. I borrowed about five books from my workplace library and and all these books are about software in particular SAS and GIS software. But I did borrow one book on PHP and MySQL for fun.

Sunday, June 22, 2008

Documenting some chart making in Open Office and Excel.

This post may be hard to follow but it is for myself to document my techniques and not loose them. If you learn from it you may find it useful for your spreadsheet work. It is also a way for me to practice for work and to push my spreadsheet abilities for data handeling.



I downloaded some data that was free. There were only 5 years covered. I have been using years as my X axis for the past two weeks. The data was divided by age groups and I only downloaded 5 year age bands from 45 to 89 and then 90 and over. It was for cause of death data and is published annually. These vital statistics are free for download. I have around 27 causes picked out. I had the data for both sexes and for men and for women. So for each year I had a column and for each age band and each of the 3 gender categories I had the 27 causes in rows. All in all about 750 rows of data.

I downloaded that data into a spreadsheet. I then created a new sheet in that workbook. Editorial Note: When one downloads data it seems the workbook has only the one sheet unlike when one creates a new workbook with three sheets. In the new sheet I copied totals for cause of death for the same age bands and the same gender categories but from all causes of death in Canada. This was copied from a separate download. These two sheets were then not changed and after this step; data were only copied out from these two download sheets. Then in a third sheet I made my own row labels for the genders and age bands matching the second sheet's row ordering. The labels from the database were lengthy and unreadable in the width of my spreadsheet window and the differences between the labels could not be viewed easily. Editorial note: the labels were so long not even a 30 inch monitor would display them completely I am guessing. These new labels were shorter and after much copy and pasting I had made all some 31 rows labels by age bands and gender categories. They were in the same row ordering as the downloaded deaths by all causes. I then made five year columns after these row labels in the first column and copied the totals deaths by all causes by years data to this sheet.

Then I went back to a copy of the death by specific causes download in separate workbook and saved a copy of that download as a text file or comma separated file. I then closed it and imported it. I imported the data as a text file. This is one of my data handling tricks that could also be done with regular expressions if one was using a programming or scripting language. The picking of the appropriate delimiters is the trick. I chose delimiters during the import that would cut the long row labels in this file so that the specific causes' names, age band's names and gender names, were all brought in to this new spreadsheet in separate columns. Actually I used three columns and then copied these labels into a new fourth sheet in my main workbook. The row order for the 750 rows was preserved.

I then went back to the first sheet in the main workbook with all the cause specific data and copied all the data but not the labels into the new fourth sheet. So sheet four was the same as sheet one, but I now had three columns for labels and the labels were short and readable on the screen. I then made new rows in sheet four at the top of the beginning of each specific gender category (both sexes, males, females) and the beginning of each age band (5 year age bands 45-89 and the age band 90 and over). So when for example, the data for both sexes, 45 to 49,and 27 rows of specific causes of death started in the sheet, a new row started the 27 rows for both sexes, 45 to 49 years old. Then going back to sheet three with the total causes of death by genders and age bands, I added two more columns between the labels and the yearly totals columns to make a proper column alignment with the three column labels in sheet four. Then one at a time, the new rows I had created in sheet four were pasted with the rows from the 31 age and gender specific death by all causes data and short labels for gender and age bands from the third sheet.

I was now ready to calculate some results. I created formulas for counts for specific causes over total causes and then made this number a percent. I used the real number for the total but for the specific cause count I used a cell reference. I then filled down the columns into the 27 specific causes effecting the calculation for all five years and all 27 causes for the first set of data which was 45 to 49 both sexes. This was the only data I worked through today. I still had these 27 cause specific rows by 5 years columns of data highlighted after the fill so I then used format cells to change all the numbers to percents with 6 decimal places.

I then charted all non-zero rows basically following the charting techniques in Excel I have learned at work but I did it in Open Office. Somethings are done differently in Open Office charts. I then also did a counts chart that matched the percents charts but makes no reference to total deaths. After a long break, I spent some time formating the charts for printing and printed the two charts out.

I then saved and closed all the workbooks. I thought it would be a good idea and relaxing and good for my intellectual health to document all my work so I have posted this notes.

Friday, June 20, 2008

Apologies for ageism made may be his book will work out.

I am still reading Generation Blend and am half way through this 245 page book now. I have not been reading the University of Google much lately. Some other scholars brought up on an email list the book about feminism in North Lights which I discussed a bit on that list.

My paper is starting to take form but I am unsure if it is the form I want.

At work I have been producing some statistics on my own from non-confidential published data and making some charts for our research. I am learning the art of writing with data statements. No, I do not mean SAS code I mean writing sentences with numbers and then finding the numbers and sourcing them and displaying as charts or updated accurate numbers. So some good lessons at work for writing with data.

Sunday, June 08, 2008

Interesting but not very complex reading and could be considered ageist in its failings.

I am reading this book right now amongst others.

Salkowitz, Rob. Generation Blend: Managing Across the Technology Age Gap (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2008)
While this book is interesting and covers a vast array technological areas it falls short of having any details. The reason it fails is that it only assumes youth are better and more comfortable with technology and such things as web 2.0 and does not hold back from this view. Again and again the old are considered technological deficient and the youth technologically gifted. So no matter what technology or workplace practice the author examines he does not change from this perspective. This could have been a much more interesting book with much more results. I would suggest the author embark on empirical studies to back up his points. This book is signed off on by Microsoft which is mud on their fenders in my opinion.

Saturday, June 07, 2008

Bibliographies all week now researching a book chapter at work.

I work as a research assistant these days. My workplace is making a book right now. I have the task of proof reading chapters. I did this this past week at work. I also was tasked with creating bibliographies which I also worked on last week. My last major task is to research a whole chapter. I will do some of this research tomorrow and print the results for Monday. I need to research all the provinces on this topic and can do that on provincial government web sites. In particular I am researching education or lack of on a specific topic. I have done some work on Ontario now.

Tuesday, June 03, 2008

I have not worked on the workplace analysis since last week.

I did receive some excel files to work with last week but have not started to work with these yet at home. I did some hiring committee work for a non-profit on Monday and will help interview the candidates. I can not say more about this volunteering. I have been reading a little more of Generation Blender a book about technological attitudes of different Western post war generations.

Saturday, May 31, 2008

I am studying disabled workers and statistics related to that at my workplace.

I have volunteered to study the statistics of a workplace survey. I have been getting the data into R and have produced some graphs with R so far in this work.

Other work studies include learning to use FORMAT procedures in SAS

Friday, May 30, 2008

An old family friend has a blog

I used to live down the street from Janet Ajzenstat and she partially inspired me to study law. She now has a blog. I bumped into her in Hamilton today. She told me she was writing a blog and one google search found it. Here it is here http://janetajzenstat.wordpress.com/

Writing a conference paper

I spent some time on the train quoting Thomas Davenport on measuring knowledge workers work. I worked this into my paper.

Sunday, May 11, 2008

Generally the authors of these theses found demography had an effect on knowledge management.

Although these authors did not deal directly with the baby-boom they found the demographic variables they did study did have an effect on knowledge management. I will report this to my boss for his work.

Three of these theses are not on topic.

I searched through the tables of contents of three of the eight theses so far and the term demographics has meant so far only that the researchers covered the demographics of their samples. They have not dealt with the baby boom. So these theses although they cover knowledge management do not cover my topic. I will search through the other five today.

Saturday, May 10, 2008

I finally searched out and found other past theses on my topic.

I found 8 theses in total that matched the term: "Knowledge Management" and Demographics. I downloaded these eight theses as pdf's. I also made two citations files for these articles. One is a rich text format Chicago Style bibliography. The other is a Ref Works BibTeX export. I spent the last half hour of this 8 hours study session trying to get that BibTeX file to work in a new article I am going to write that reviews these 8 theses. A few are Doctors of Education theses.

I also read a chapter in a book about improving the work of knowledge workers which again is a sort of why or what issue for my research. But I put little faith in the academic nature of this book. The title is Thinking For a Living and it is a pro management book.

Friday, May 09, 2008

Reading one book from my last trip to the library is producing some more leads on measuring knowledge management.

I have been selectively reading parts of this book:
Gottschalk, P. Knowledge Management Systems in Law Enforcement: Technologies and Techniques (Hershey, P.A.: Idea Group, 2007)
I have found some modeling in this book and followed up by finding some MIS Quarterly articles that measure knowledge.

Tuesday, May 06, 2008

I did not get my search completed but did get the household tasks done.

I did get my household tasks completed last night but did not complete my searching the ProQuest database for papers. I have at least two more types of knowledge to search for may be three.

Monday, May 05, 2008

Thinking and reading picking up quotes

I am slowly coming along with my paper for this summer. The books I got last time I was at the library are getting read slowly. I am also reading some more of two books directly on the topic of lost knowledge and the baby boom which are two books that really set the frame work for this project. I am picking up some more quotes and writing a little bit at a time. I am also reading older sociology of knowledge works.

I have not really been reading journal articles but did start to sort the skills knowledge list of articles from ProQuest. I think this evening I will complete the seven term search on ProQuest and then quickly search IEEE and may be ACM for all seven terms. If I can get that done and household chores today that would be great.

Sunday, April 27, 2008

Answering the 7W's for my thesis simulation

My boss has given me advice on what terms in my abstract I should have solid answers for. I set those up on my wiki for answers I find I can use. I would like to have a good solid 7w's approach to the topic too. The 7W's method is something I have not often applied but I will use it for the paper. I am inspired by the Clerk of the Privy Council's report on renewal of the pubic service as his text relates to my thesis. I am now thinking of using his text for an opening quote to answer the why question. So that leaves 6w's to go.

Here is the section's beginning from section III of the clerk's report that fits with my paper and answers why.

Lynch, Kevin G. (2008) Fifteenth Annual Report to the Prime Minister on the Public Service of Canada section III (http://www.pco-bcp.gc.ca/index.asp?lang=eng&page=information&sub=publications&doc=ar-ra/15-2008/rpt_e.htm#1, accessed April 26, 2008).

III. The Framework for Public Service Renewal


In last year’s Report, four broad priority areas for renewal were identified. These were planning, recruitment, employee development and enabling infrastructure.


Planning

The foundation for shaping the public service workforce we need is a clear understanding of what skills and knowledge are needed to meet departments’ business objectives, both now and into the future. Business planning and human resource planning have to go hand in hand. Without this, recruitment and employee development will be largely ad hoc and short term.


As an example of the importance of integrated planning, over the past 25 years there has been a striking shift in the occupational makeup of the public service toward more “knowledge intensive” work. Indeed, as Figures 3A and B indicate, computer specialists are now five times more numerous than in 1983 and economists three times. Conversely, clerical positions have declined from about 24% to 14% of the public service and there are 95% fewer secretarial workers. However, business and human resource planning in the public service has tended to lag rather than shape these changes.

The thesis topic and this summer's paper

Although I have now lost my supervisor for my thesis on retaining the knowledge of the baby-boom I am still committed to giving a paper as though my thesis topic has not changed and is going ahead. This leaves me out though because I am now a student with a topic searching out a supervisor. This seems a weaker position. I will now need to contact all the potential supervisors on the program's list for someone who can agree to take my topic and me on.

I searched for the subject and keyword "knowledge management" at the library late Friday night.

I was at the library late Friday night into Saturday morning. I was searching out "knowledge management" books and have one book now from that search. That book is called Corporate Memory and I have read the first chapter this morning. I am now setting a goal of having read this book by next weekend and also bringing it to work for my boss on Thursday.

I also browsed the new book shelves on the 5th, 4th and then 3rd floor. I borrowed three new books from the 5th and two new books from the 3rd. The three from the fifth are related to "knowledge management". One is on the knowledge intensive workplace and the other on demographics and the different North American cohorts attitudes to technology. I have read the beginning for these books now. The other is about knowledge management and law enforcement and the English is not the greatest but it does break down knowledge like the book Continuity Management which I am also still reading.

The two new books from the 3rd are not related to "knowledge management" and the other old book I borrowed from the 3rd is also not related.

The old science book from the third is about Fortran 90 and I tried out the first "Hello, World" program. I typed it into GEdit with Fortran 95 highlighting and then installed Gfortran and then G77 and finally got it to compile with some editing of the file but could not execute the program as I could not find the file the compiler produced after compilation.

The first new book from the 3rd floor is a photography book on Photojournalism since 1955, which was going to be a job I tried to aim for when younger and in my last year of high school in the late 1970's.

The other new book is about ordinal walks and I do not get it fully but it reminds me I am a mathematician.

The last area I searched is related to a promotion opportunity at work. I may be hired to work with correction statistics with the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics and the plan is for an interview for this job this coming week. I thought to prepare with a government statistics report from 2004 on correctional statistics.

Saturday, April 26, 2008

I focused my library search on Knowledge Management Friday night

Last night I spent about two hours around midnight searching the library catalogue for books on Knowledge Management. I found a handful of books. My main focus was browsing new book shelfs. The University of Ottawa has a new book shelf for each floor so it took at while to browse them all. I spent most of the time browsing the fifth floor which is mostly G and H so geography through economics and sociology.

Monday, April 21, 2008

Sping Sim 08 was good

I had an enjoyable time at Spring Sim 08 and met some other agent directed programmers and one professor Emeritus from our systems sciences program.

I started a Keynote presentation for this summer's conference

I started a keynote presentation for this summer's conference. I was able to write up my programming code completed to date as well this past weekend.

Saturday, April 19, 2008

I wrote my final exam his past week and did so so.

I think I only scored B on my final exam. I know I had a few questions wrong. I have no formal classes until the fall now when I will study simulations.

Saturday, April 12, 2008

I am studying a book by a Vietnam war weapons systems integrator.

I seem to have landed in a course taught by a military engineer. The course recommended reading is
Jeffrey O. Grady. System requirement analysis
2006
It is very much in line with our course though. Here is a test of pacifism I suppose. I could have noticed this connection and quit the course and thus the degree. But instead I am arguing with the military engineers that is the other students. I am being too aggressive though in my arguments and still think school is about arguments. The book though is highly interesting and very structured. But it speaks of disposable human beings who are either ignored or get in the way of the weapons systems. All in all, one of the most inhuman courses I have studied and I have studied sciences and engineering before so it is not the field it is the application and language and sources.
Other students from the class may be reading this so I suppose this is more public a a review of a book than other book reviews.

Friday, April 11, 2008

Last class of the term today

It is the last class of the term today. We will have a final quiz and then a final exam review. I have been studying risk management in preparation for this final quiz. Our final exam is next Wednesday. On Monday and Tuesday I am attending a conference on simulations. On Monday afternoon I am going to see a professor about the possibility of completing a summer reading course.

Tuesday, April 08, 2008

Reading course notes this morning.

We have a quiz this week on Friday. That is for my school course in systems integration. Then our final exam is next Wednesday. I will study the course notes a little this morning; keeping the steady progress approach working.

I have Monday and Tuesday off work for a conference. Here is a link to that conference http://www.scs.org/confernc/springsim/springsim08/finalProgram/anss.htm.

Sunday, April 06, 2008

One paper read today on knowledge workers turns out to be a useful critique of the concept of knowledge workers.

Here is the cite for the paper I read today
Collins, David. Knowledge Work Or Working Knowledge?
Ambiguity and Confusion in the Analysis of the “Knowledge Age”.
Employee Relations 19, 1. 1997.
I read this and it was a sweeping critique of post industrial muddled thinking concerning the term: "knowledge workers". I have used it in the opening of my paper now.

I intend to continue my searching of the seven types of knowledge thought to make up operational knowledge.

This searching method is to take each two word term and place an and operator between the words and then scan the first 100 papers or citations returned to pick out possible references. Then adding these selected citations to a RefWorks folder named after the knowledge type. Then a biography of the selected references is created. Then this is again scan read and anything still thought to be relevant is then searched out, printed, and read. I have only read the one paper as of today.

Saturday, April 05, 2008

My paper has been accepted for a graduate student workshop on July 31st

I have had my first thesis paper accepted for an American Sociology Association pre conference workshop. Here is a link to the details http://citasa.ist.psu.edu/pre-conference

Our term paper was submitted on time.

It did take an all nighter but I have gotten our term paper done. It was submitted in class last night. Last night's lecture covered risk management. Next week we have a quiz then on the 16th we have our exam.

Sunday, March 30, 2008

I can now use BibTeX

I figured out how to use BibTeX with TexShop. So I added some citations to my thesis. We are writing our term project in LaTeX. My project partner and I worked on this yesterday at the library. We are getting together again today. We have six pages written now and need another four today. I am due at the library in 45 minutes but still looking for bus fare. May be I will ride my bicycle there.

It says I am borrowing 55 books now on the library web site. Here they are and I hope to clean this list up in the days to come.

Gerald Midgley, Systemic intervention : philosophy, methodology, and practice (New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum, 2000).

Paul P. Biemer, et al. Measurement errors in surveys (New York: Wiley, c1991).

Kathleen Conn. The Internet and the law : what educators need to know (Alexandria, Va.: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 2002).

Derek K. Hitchins. Advanced systems thinking, engineering, and management (Boston, Mass.: Artech House, 2003).

Gregory S. MacBeth. C# programmer's handbook (Berkeley, CA: Apress, 2004).

Joanna Phoenix and Sarah Oerton. Illicit and illegal : sex, regulation and social control (Portland, Or.: Willan, 2005).

Susan Leigh Star. ed. The cultures of computing (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1995).

Jane M. Watson. Statistical literacy at school : growth and goals ( Mahwah, N.J.: L. Erlbaum Associates, 2006).

Julian J. Faraway. Linear models with R
2005

Christopher Z. Mooney, Robert D." Bootstrapping : a nonparametric approach to statistical inference 1993

Christopher Z. Mooney. Monte Carlo simulation 1997

Mark Sh. Levin. Composite systems decisions 2006

Jeffrey O. Grady. System requirement analysis
2006

James N. Martin. Systems engineering guidebook : a process for developing systems and products

R : a statistical tool. 2003

John C. Nash, Neil Smith and Andy Adler." Audit and change analysis of spreadsheets 2003

John C. Nash and Tony K. Quon. Issues in teaching statistical thinking with spreadsheets 1996

Limiting errors in day-to-day calculation. 1985

Michael J. Crawley. The R book 2007

David W. DeLong. Lost knowledge : confronting the threat of an aging workforce 2004

edited by Georg von Krogh and Joh Managing knowledge : perspectives on cooperation and competition 1996

Dianne E.G. Dyck. "Occupational health & safety : theory, strategy & industry practice "2007

edited by Malin Sv Cyberfeminism in northern lights : digital media and gender in a Nordic context 2007

Brian N. Hilton, [editor]." Emerging spatial information systems and applications 2007

[edited by] Anne Minas. Gender basics : feminist perspectives on women and men 1993

Jacek Malczewski. GIS and multicriteria decision analysis 1999

edited by Thomas T. Barker. Perspectives on software documentation : inquiries and innovations 1991

Bob DuCharme. SGML CD 1998

P. Sprent. Data driven statistical methods 1998

William T. Vetterling ... [et al.]. Numerical recipes example book (FORTRAN)

Defending the earth : dialogue between Murray Bookchin and Dave Foreman ; introduction by David Levi

11 world Imperial ambitions : conversations on the post-911

Bringing knowledge back in : from social constructivism to social realism in the sociology of educatation
Brent Davis, Dennis Sumara, Rebecca Luce-Kaple" Engaging minds : changing teaching in complex times

edited by Bridget Somekh and Thomas A. S Knowledge production : research work in interesting times

Tara Brabazon. The University of Google : education in the (post) information age

Noam Chomsky. Language and problems of knowledge : the Managua lectures

Petra K. Kelly ; foreword "Thinking green! : essays on environmentalism, feminism, and nonviolence "

The elementary forms of the religious life. Translated from the French by Joseph Ward Swain.

"Primitive classification, by émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss. Translated from the French and edited"

Emile Durkheim ... [et al.] ; edited by Kurt H. Wolff ; with ap Essays on sociology and philosophy

Manuel Castells. End of millennium

Patrick E. McKnight ... [et al.]. Missing data : a gentle introduction

by Emile Durkheim ; with an introduction by Lewis A. Coser ; tran The division of labor in society

"
Bruce Edmonds, Ces√°reo Hern√°ndez, K" "Social simulation : technologies, advances and new discoveries

edited by Brian Kahin and Dominique Foray. Advancing knowledge and the knowledge economy

Phil Baines & Andrew Haslam. Type & typography

Rob Carter, Ben Day, Philip Meggs." Typographic design : form and communication

Timothy Samara. Typography workbook : a real-world guide to using type in graphic design

by James Coleman and Don Willis. SGML as a framework for digital preservation and access

Brian E. Travis, Dale C. Waldt." The SGML implementation guide : a blueprint for SGML migration

Gina Smith, Karl" An integrated approach to family work for psychosis : a manual for family workers

Mich Improving substance abuse treatment : an introduction to the evidence-based practice movement

Paul Felton. The ten commandments of typography

Dan J. Stein, Naomi A. Fineberg." Obsessive-compulsive disorder

Friday, March 28, 2008

The term project is the main goal today.

I would like to write about 6 more pages today for our term project. I will start this morning with some footnotes. I will also read this morning and have already started reading some education books on knowledge.

Thesis simlation is in version 0.0.1.

I made a set of workers with random ages 16-66 for my sim using Excel. I also created the calender time "for" loops using R. Did you know 8 hours a day for a whole year is 2080 hours?

Ideally for random workers I need to study the typical workplace age distribution then find a function that comes close to that and use that function to get my random ages.

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Typos fixed but only two pages done now.

I have our term report in version 0.0.7 now with I hope all typos on the two pages fixed. I found out I did well on my mid-term exam. I have class on Friday and then our term report is due a week after that on April 4th. I need to search Carleton's library and make a trip there for a geography book or find the same book at the U of O. I have spent a fair amount of time on this term project at the GIS shelf at the U of O library.

I read books on the weekend on statistics and lost knowledge. I also read some Systems Engineering books our professor has recommended. I am doing great with school right now. I am moving forward with my thesis and may officially enter the M.Sc. full program in a few weeks for a summer course. The summer course will possibly be a reading course given by my supervisor.

Sunday, March 23, 2008

Term project report, weekend goals.

I sat down and wrote a few more paragraphs now of our term project report. I have almost two full pages now of what in the end will be a ten page document. My goal this weekend is to bring the whole document to five or seven pages. I will try to complete two more pages today and do the last page or last three pages tomorrow.

For my final exam study this weekend I will try to read all the course notes through once and then ask my wife test me on some answers.

Thesis chapters started.

I have my thesis chapters and sub chapters titled now. I know this will change but it is nice to get started on it. I am doing this work in TexShop a Macintosh LaTeX editor.

Saturday, March 22, 2008

I set up a personal study wiki to organise my research.

I researched knowledge in the field of education last night and ended up borrowing some Durkheim. I was pretty excited about all that. But I found this knowledge research not close enough to my topic. I did find a large book on social simulations that is definitely on topic for our program. The book covers a large number of different simulations and there is at least one on knowledge intensive workplaces.

After I uploaded all these books to librarything.com, I read a thread in the graduate student group at librarything.com about organising research. The thread had settled down to discussing the use of wiki's for notes. I got excited with that and then spent 8 hours installing wikimedia as a research took for my Macbook. But this web based tool will only be on my personal computers web page and not on the wider internet. This was also a goal to have web based tools that would not be open the web itself. So I have my first personal Intranet application now. I will also install a personal Drupal and make a nice home page and other pages in Dreamweaver.

Sunday, March 16, 2008

I completed reading the book on UK sexual offences and the 2003 Sexual Offences Act

This is the book I just completed reading

Phoenix, Joanna, and Sarah Oerton. Illicit and illegal : sex, regulation and social control (Portland, Or. : Willan, 2005).
A good dissection of new British sex crime laws. Also a good look at the neutralisation of men's sexual violence by leaving everything gender neutral thus avoiding the obvious that almost all sex crime is caused by the men.

Thursday, March 13, 2008

I will have to stop work on the baby boom thesis.

My boss has said that the data from our work project would be confidential and I will not have access to it for a thesis. So I now have a choice between Professor Lane and an environmental thesis and going on with the documentation of open source software as a thesis. I can leave the paper about the baby boom alone now and this takes that unrelated topic the baby boom off my agenda except at work.

Sunday, March 09, 2008

The critiques of measuring knowledge.

I am reading The Haunting of the Knowledge Economy and they make too many points I can use in my paper. I may have to reference their work more generally. They basically say the know what and know why are able to be measured but more particularly these can codified and represented in an ICT. As well the know who and know how can not be codified. This means we will not support the know how and the know who but it is just this knowledge that best can be thought of as the knowledge that is lost to the company because of retiring workers. To put it another way this knowledge is the more important knowledge we do not want to loose. So here is our first problematic. As well they quote Webster as saying knowledge is very difficult to measure so again my challenge is great.

New paper search method.

I really need to limit the number of papers I am going to read. Instead of Proquest by happenstance Proquest was not working this evening so I switched to google scholar. I sent up my preferences for that and managed to learn to export citations from google scholar into RefWorks. I limited my results to the top 20 papers in the search for the first three types of knowledge. I will now before I sleep try to do this again and see if I can not get all the terms searched for with this method.

I deleted my Eve Online account.

I played the computer game Eve Online for a little more than one month. I was motivated to try out Eve Online by a powerpoint slide presentation by someone who works at IBM. Roo Reynolds who was presenting his slides on computer games (social, massively multi player, virtual world) to a British charity audience shared these powerpoint slides at Slide Share.(Tracy Kennedy introduced me to Slide Share by putting my Slides from my facebook paper there). He was showing the charities what games could do for charities. Sort of like the Second Life Relay for Life event, which I tried out a little last summer with some other students. His main point about Eve Online was that it was cooperative. Players, although strangers would help each other play the game. This could help me understand community based training and collaborative learning of computer operating. About a week ago, I was able to experience this in Eve Online as two other players helped me with a mission. This consisted of clicking buttons to make the play ships shot at other computer played ships until they were dead. So two other players helped me kill these computer ships, or in the language of role playing "NPC's" ships and thus complete the mission. Of course, the whole major theme is space ship battle.

I deleted my subscription because the game was taking too much valuable time from my home life and other activities and was costing money and I have no extra money. Also my main focus both with computers and school work is not in the entertainment gaming field. Yes, I can make connections to other topics like helping strangers and cooperative play but as I said it took too much time and too much money. I have also been able to experience the cooperation at a basic first time experience level. But games have traditionally been used in education to effect cooperation (aka Game Theory).

Enough with that game and information society cash out stream. This will save me 15$ per month as that was going to become the cost of that game. The game Second life is now costing me 33$ a month on a regular fee basis plus costs of buying land and other items. In fact, I am this weekend, buying another 512 basic lot adjoining my present virtual 3D land holdings

Monday, March 03, 2008

I have printed the bibliography and scanned and marked it up.

The printed bibliography is staying home now. I have made notes on articles to read. These annotations were a sideways U. Also articles to drop these were marked up with an X. Articles for theory, methodology, and career. These were noted with a written word and a +. There were five of these. Then there were the starred articles which were considered the best. There were six of these and if I have time I will print these off to read this week. I will down load these combined eleven now.

This is bigger search task than I thought it would be. I am stopping for today.

I used the IEEE web site to search their journals for the term "Cognitive knowledge" and found about 6 articles. Then trying to search ACM I was given ProQuest. Here there were slightly over 600 articles for that term but I narrowed it to 354 when closing it down to scholarly journals only. There were too many articles in the list from nursing, psychiatry, physical education and some medicine. Next time I might limit which journals I search but actually for now and the other six terms I will keep it open. I then scanned the full list of 354 articles basically ignoring the above sort of medical mentioned journals. I exported everything selected after scan reading to RefWorks in the folder "Cognitive knowledge" and then made a bibliography in Chicago with notes style. I also downloaded a few articles right away. Two of the four I downloaded were for other research and not my paper or thesis but instead for my volunteering. I saved the other two in my paper's folder and then copied the paper's folder on the Macbook to a USB key that I carry around. I will print the bibliography this morning. So I did not yet get to Sage with the term "Cognitive knowledge". I am tired now and I mean to learn more about the bootstrap this morning before work and also bring some school SAS code to work for diagnostics. So print, read, and write some SAS code remain for today before work. I am on a 24 hour day today and it is now half over.

Operational knowledge and my research plan.

Knowledge production in my present view is the knowledge of statistics simply measured by understanding the techniques of statistics. Operational knowledge would generalize to any workplace. Beazley, Boenisch and Harden claim that operational knowledge is core that is extracted from these seven categories of knowledge
Categories of knowledge
Cognitive knowledge
Skills knowledge
Systems knowledge
Social network knowledge
Process and procedural knowledge
Heuristic knowledge
Cultural knowledge

I will now search out these terms in both IEEE, ACM, SAGE and some other major journal databases. I hope to keep these references in RefWorks which means the first step is to log into refworks and get the web cite tool working. I might also use BibTeX links and also deicious.

Sunday, March 02, 2008

My submission to the CITASA workshop is now done.

I was learning from my systems integration course about how to plan a system and how to design a system. Approaching my simulation of my workplace from this perspective I am placing the paper at the beginning of the system planning. In my paper I will try to quantify knowledge much as others have tried to create a grammar of the physical world as a sort of research metaphor. I will try to set boundaries and in some way measure knowledge. The book my boss has shown me titled Continuity Management describes some of these boundaries and categories of knowledge. I think I will write up these categories and then search each of them out in the library.

Friday, February 29, 2008

Three or four lectures worth of slides to study.

I have a mid-term exam later today. I have been reading the lecture slides that this exam will be based on. I have not read much else all night. I did scan two days worth of newspapers and recycled them. I also attended on Thursday a meeting with consultants from the Ontario Graduate Schools Council. There were a few other students I know there too. In fact, I did know all the students and have studied with them all. In that way my graduate school is intimate and not like an undergraduate program. I have read almost all the slides once now. I need to read them again and start to really know them and memorise them for the exam later today.

Wednesday, February 27, 2008

I have finished a phase of research at work.

I was reading documents at work and extracting information from these. Mostly this was copy and paste and searching and finding. I know a lot more about my workplace now. This is really a human resources research topic in the world of work through the lens of knowledge management. I was having some heated arguments with my boss a noted and long time sociologist about concepts and definitions. I was hoping to write a preliminary paper exploring measures of knowledge but am not sure I have the freedom or material to write this now. May be I can rewrite the abstract or write something different. It would be nice and productive to write something towards my thesis but writing has to be based on research or at least theory. I was hoping this could be a background literature study where I would become aware of concepts in knowledge management. I am sort of torn now between background research and real research and wonder if the time is right to do this paper in the sociology of work. May be a little more political theory and less technical theory would work. I have until Saturday to submit my abstract.

I am now realising I could just document what I have done this month and add background summaries of our problem about the baby boom.

Sunday, February 24, 2008

LaTeX on blogger has now failed.

This was the original software


http://wolverinex02.googlepages.com/emoticonsforblogger2

Now it has failed because the server has been taken off line that produced the graphics files.

Today is a full time study day again but I will sleep.

I have just been reading a basic numeracy book in French. I also have been memorising my school lecture slides for our mid-term this week. I want to catch up and really know these notes for the test. I have also sent an email to my future thesis supervisor about a paper I am submitting this week to the American Sociology Association 103rd annual conference. This year the theme is "the world of work." I am modeling a workplace in a computer simulation so this is good. This paper is an early problem definition phase paper where I will explore variables and boundaries. So today I will read more of Lost knowledge. I will also study some XHTML and HTML for a work place job I applied for. I will read the second chapter in the health and safety book.I will also read another paper on cyber feminism in the Nordic countries. I should also read some Rao on survey errors and some more about managing knowledge. Then to relax I will read Harry Potter in both French and English

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

I am doing thesis work at work the past month now.

I have spend about half a month now doing research that might end up in my thesis. It is starting to seem like a really good position to be in. I had a good day at work today. I am also slowly progressing with more reading and that was missing the past school term. Lots of borrowing books but not enough reading the books.

Monday, February 18, 2008

All tasks not completed by 1 AM.

I am deciding to leave the tasks of reading the second chapters of books aside now. This means overnight now that I will read no more about health and safety. I will stop reading about cyberfeminism. I will not read the Dummies book at all. I will continue to read the chapter in the GIS book for our term project. I will read the Adobe InDesign CS 2 Classrooom in a Book but only finish the chapter I am reading or this task may be scrapped, as well as, the scrapping of other tasks as stated above. I will now focus more on writing and not drop any of the writing tasks. Already having read some of the GIS chapter, I have developed some ideas for writing our term project so should get to that soon. I still hope to stop all this studying by 3 AM and play an on-line game. I also hope to go into work early to work on job applications. Thus I need to start to prepare for work around 4:30 AM this morning not 5 AM as I usually have done these past four months. This means my made up on-line gaming reward is going to be cut short but I will still try for the in game goal of earning one million game dollars.

Going into work early or overnight now, I will work on my resume more and the cover letter for a job application coming up at work. The resume is near its third or fourth final proof read and correction. The cover letter still needs to be started. I am passing up on one job application that closes today.

Another task completed. Chapter one read in the occupational health and safety book.

The book's first chapter ended with a brief look at the hierarchy of health and safety programs and the detailed internal and a broad view of external responsibilities and the detailed internal accountabilities involved. After the historical straight ahead view, the chapter covered management theories, organizational design characteristics, organizational design relationships with organizational elements, organizational design structures, internal and external responsibility systems then the external provincial and federal systems in Canada.

Sunday, February 17, 2008

One task for tonight completed. Chapter one in a book read.

I have completed reading the first chapter in the book about cyberfeminism. Here is the citation for this chapter:

Sundén, Jenny. On Cyberfeminist Intersectionality in Elm, Malin Sveningsson and Jenny Sundén. Cyberfeminism In Northern Lights : digital media and gender in a Nordic context (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2007).

This covered the place of feminist studies in social characteristics and looked at the concept of Intersectionality before giving some examples of robots and then looking at these through a gender, sexual difference lens. The author suggests a wider view would also take into account race and class as most robots come from Japan or the USA.

The point of this book is to show the Nordic perspective of cyberfeminism rather than the American perspective as the unquestioned and only perspective. For instance in Nordic countries and this is true in Estonia as well there is no gender in the languages. There is no s/he and it. There also seems to be on the surface a high level of gender equality in Nordic countries with many women leaders. But these leaders are still only handling women's ministries in the government not finance or defence where the power is.

More from the book about occupation health and safety. This time the reading was a survey of management theories.

More from the book about occupation health and safety. This time the reading was a survey of management theories and the relationship of these theories to health and safety management programs.
Dyck, Dianne E. G., ibid
The next section of this book in chapter one was a survey of modern and historical management theories. I thought through each example reflecting on my own workplace. This gave me an idea of using health and safety as a sub theme or main theme to thread through my thesis as this would attract some funding from workers organisations.

The history of workplace safety law and action

I read the 10 or so pages on occupational health and safety at work history in Canada and the USA. This covered the development in the past 100 years or so. The book is:

Dyck, Dianne E. G. Occupational health & safety : theory, strategy & industry practice (Markham, ON: LexisNexis Canada, 2007).
The coverage included Germany in the early days and also covered a famous fire in the New York City's garment industry where 146 workers many of them young Italian and European Jewish women immigrants died in a fire. They could not escape because doors were locked. Also fire ladders and hoses could not reach the ninth floor so some jumped to their death rather than die in the fire

Tonight's goals.

I will plan my studies out tonight. I intend to read three chapters from InDesign CS2 for Dummies, one chapter of Adobe InDesign CS2 Classroom In A Book and use InDesign. Related to this I will also fix my resume and send it to work and write a draft for a cover letter for a job opening as web master at work. I will also finish the chapter I am reading in Cyberfeminism in Northern Lights and read one more chapter of that. I will also read three chapters of a health and safety at work handbook.

If I can get all this reading done by 1 AM or 3 AM I will then play an on-line role playing game and try to make 1 million game dollars by mining in space. Then I am off to work early in the morning Monday.

I will also plan to write two pages of my term project, my presentation slides for two weeks from now, and start more work on the thesis outline. I will also study for my mid term occuring in about two weeks from now

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

I am submitting a paper to a workshop in the USA.

I will have to get a passport to travel to the USA to give this paper. It comes out of my thesis topic and is a study of knowledge measures. My father a professor helped me by proof reading the abstract last night. He suggested one change.

Saturday, February 09, 2008

Random walk proof

I found a proof of random walks of three or higher dimensions being non returning. Here is a Harvard cite for this paper.

LAWLER, G., 1996. Cut Times for Simple Random Walk. Electronic Journal of Probability, 1, pp. 1-24.
I was supposed to find this last year and we covered this proof but did not actually do it in class last year in SYS5120

Thursday, February 07, 2008

I went to hear Ignacio Chapela at the GSAÉD Interdisciplinary Conference

I attended the annual graduate student interdisciplinary conference this evening.I am kind of kicking myself for not having written a paper for this conference now that I have attended it. But I am too over worked to write a paper right now. I am an exhausted scholar and an exhausted worker. Here is the summary or abstract of the talk I heard this evening.



"Reason Exhausted: Science, environment and the end of progress"


The 21st Century will be marked by the ecology and politics of exhaustion. The manic euphoria of Western Civilization for the techno-fix against unresolvable environmental limits belies a stage of development in our relationship to the environment in which such solutions exist only as childhood memories or false propagandistic advertising. I will first probe the limits of our technical engagement with the environment, aiming at disentangling reality from corporate advertising, to show that no amount of virtualization of the world can purchase for us even temporary suspension of basic thermodynamics, geological cycles and historical sense. Such an analysis reveals the exhaustion of the mythologies of Progress, with obvious consequences for the 20th Century narratives of Sustainability and Rights. From this basis, I will then pursue the role played by the scientist, writ large, in the development of such a unique historical crisis. I understand that the current erosion of independent rationality (corporate, governmental, and religious takeover of institutions and their products, particularly the Public University) reflects not only the limit of physical exhaustion of so-called natural resources, but also the end of rationality as a cultural resource in itself. As others have pointed out, this double exhaustion marks the end of a 10, 000 year old story, and the beginning of an uncharted time for humanity and the world. I will attempt to engage with the audience in an exploration of the options available for young people in such a pregnant historical moment.

Thesis work begins unofficially.

I met with a professor who needs some modeling of East Coast Fishery communities. I am yet to open the data CDROM and start to look at this problem. For my thesis I am doing work at work now reading about my workplace and its reaction to the baby boom. This could be considered background reading as I learn the basics of the environment of the system I will model.

Sunday, February 03, 2008

Reading John Nash's working papers

John Nash is a professor who is retiring from the university of Ottawa but is willing to supervise my thesis. I read these short working papers of John's Nash's now:

Nash, John C., Smith, Neil, and Adler, Andy. Audit and change analysis of spreadsheets (Ottawa : Faculty of Administration, University of Ottawa, 2003).
This concerns me at my workplace as I work with Excel spreadsheets at work and must verify numbers in these computer files when they are displayed on my workplace screen as spreadsheets. Because their tool is designed for Open Office and we do not have Open Office at work, I can not actually use the tool these authors created. But I did mean to try out there tool but after reading their paper find out they did not complete the project because they wanted to run the software from a server rather than on the worker's machine.
Nash, John C., Calof, Jonathan and Nash Mary M. Statistical process improvement, open-source software, and E-Commerce (Ottawa : Faculty of Administration, University of Ottawa, 2003).
Nash, John C. and Nash, Mary M. Issues in finding and managing duplicate or equivalent files (Ottawa : School of Management, University of Ottawa, 2006).