Saturday, February 28, 2009

Completing a literature search within the thesis

Last winter and spring I had searched out types of knowledge theorized to make up operational knowledge at a firm. At present in RefWorks I have four folders for four types of knowledge. These are:

  • Cognitive Knowledge
  • Skills Knowledge
  • Systems Knowledge
  • Social Network Knowledge

Today I want to search for the remaining three forms of knowledge in this theoretical framework. These are:

  • Process and Procedural Knowledge
  • Heuristic Knowledge
  • Cultural Knowledge
.

This theoretical framework follows from:

Hamilton Beazley, Jeremiah Boenisch, and David Harden. Continuity Management: Pre-serving Corporate Knowledge and Productivity When Employees Leave (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2002).
I have been studying this book for over a year now.

Friday, February 20, 2009

Catching up on Internet studies: Thoughts on the present theory direction of the social impact of the Internet

I am reading
Katz, James E. and Rice, Ronald E. Social Consequences of Internet Use: Access, Involvement and Interaction (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2002).
I have read now the introductory chapter critically and find a comment. In terms of community involvement I would add that, in fact, if we open the Internet up to include computers used offline and call it simply ICT's we could add organizational power of ICT's in building the processes of volunteering and the work needed to volunteer as a plus to Internet access. Rather than just recruitment of volunteers ( mentioned in the first chapter) the Internet does much more for a volunteer group. I spend hours volunteering every week. It is not the Internet alone amongst ICT's that allow me to be a better volunteer and for our group to do its business. I am now thinking of multiple group membership and multiple group participation. Almost all these groups must do writing. The other basic skill reading it not as fully aided by ICT's in the context of reading in volunteer work. Whereas, writing benefits from the Internet, Palm pilots, web pages, pdf's, word processors, spreadsheets, calendaring software. I guess what I am finding is the social capital thesis is less important than the work organization thesis.

Saturday, February 14, 2009

Researching my next workplace.

My supervisor helped me find another possible place to work supporting research. I started to print some 27 analytical articles from the web that this workplace has written. The articles appear to be sets of three or four per year with the same titles each year except for the year in the title. So these are like annual reviews of their subject matters. The job would be for one year supporting these publications as a technical/IT research assistant. I have been worried about being disorganized with my workplace reading, so these systematic articles are inspiring me to neatly catalog the articles in a binder. I am not sure I will have the time to read them all before my interview but I really need to do that. My first question for my new employers will be to ask them to describe the processes that happen from beginning to end for the data and most importantly the quality control process they use in their processes.

Monday, February 09, 2009

Workplace organization and its modeling.

There is an interesting section on conceptualizing workplace organization in this book James R. Taylor, et al. The Computerization of Work (Thousand Oaks, Calf.: Sage, 2001) at 9.

Sunday, February 08, 2009

Paper for the May gradudate conference in social economy is coming along.

I started to scan with my eyes divergences from the perfect population pyramid. I have some doubts now about my interpretation and criteria for booms, after finding, in fact, the world population has some age bands starting in 2000 where the older band exceeds the younger band in size. This is my first clue of a boom or divergence from the perfect pyramid. This rule is, if an older age band exceeds a younger age band, we have identified a boom. I have scanned the available world pyramids for both genders combined but not separately and copied and pasted the full years data for all occurrences of the divergent pattern. I then tried to construct a population pyramid with Excel. I needed to code one gender's population with negative numbers to get the Excel chart to look something like a population pyramid. I also scanned with my eyes Afghanistan and next is Albania.

So my method is to scan with my eyes. The other choice of method is to read the tables into R and run a check to see if a table decreases continuously from the 0-4 age band to the 80+ age band. Actually the 80+ age band is giving me some false positives in the rule above. I will do all the countries by eye and then run the R code to check. Or better would be to next design the R code to find all the divergences and not have to scan all the rows of countries. I have so far scanned only the World and Afghanistan and reached about the thousandth row of thirty three thousand rows of data. So here automating will save me some time.

Also getting the data from each table into R gives me more statistical power than simply identifying one divergent pattern. I can run many pattern recognitions once the data is cleanly into R or other statistical software.

Here is my abstract for this paper.

Abstract
The world over all has no baby boom. There are always more babies and fewer seniors when one looks at the whole world. We would like to examine if baby booms exist in any and each country. If this examination is possible we will then move further. The study will survey the age pyramid structures, the typical retirement age and industries, that the majority of the population work within, for all the world's nations, if data can be located. If these measures are possible attempts are made at assessing the potential knowledge losses in these majority industries as the widest parts of the age pyramid retire and take their workplace operational knowledge with them potentially crippling these industries and nations. General comments are attempted concerning each nation studied.

Wednesday, February 04, 2009

I submitted a paper to a conference this May in Ottawa.

I submitted a paper proposal to the International Student Conference on the Social Economy Innovation & Sustainability in a Changing World: Exploring Social Economy Alternatives.

I explored some demographics from the US census international data web site looking for baby boom's world wide.

I found global population numbers by age and by gender for all the world's countries at the US census international data site. I downloaded tables for every country for each year from 1996 through projections to 2010 and then by five and then ten year projections up to 2050. So why did I need this data? I was looking to find the baby boom in each country. I am going to write a paper that looks at the baby boom in each country, then looks at the major industries in those countries and then looks for possible knowledge lose crisis points in time in the future for each country. This would be the point when the widest part of the population pyramid retires.

Of course retirement I am realising is not a global concept. So this may be a flawed study.

I started to examine the data from the world population pyramid and found the world has no baby boom. The world has more babies and fewer seniors with no exceptions. For every year and every projection and at each age band there more younger persons than older persons. I guess we could call this the perfect pyramid. Now I have to inspect each of some 200 countries individually. I think now I will submit my abstract for this research project to a conference I have created it for. The deadline is fast approaching. I will rewrite it one more time and send it off.