Thursday, May 28, 2009

I am assigned the wrting of lecture due tomorrow.

I have worked on this lecture two weekends ago. I also last weekend made a structure to match the title. Yesterday and on Tuesday I wrote something in each section. I am now thinking about lectures and will need to simply create subsections for each section to make this more like a lecture. The lecture is about knowledge management which is really a subject I have only know for one year now and I still have not read all the classic literature in this field.

I am writing this lecture using TeXShop and $LaTeX$.

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Academic blogging session at the Congress

This session is a panel of four academic bloggers. Here are their blogs
Mary Cameron's Math Education with Mary Cameron at Memorial University of Newfoundland
Michael Barbour's Virtual High School Meanderings
Carolyne Steele's Career Sense
She mentioned Henry Jenkin's blog as a successful blog.
Moderator: Dale Kirby's Adventures in Canadian Post-Secondary Education
These bloggers talked about their blogging experiences.

Notes on Kay O'Halloran's multimodal approach

Kay O'Halloran is talking and first sets the need for studies to understand the information age. She has been a mathematician and maths teacher and now a linguistics scholar. Her first presentations are on multimodal research. She states that signs or mathematical notation or semiotic resources are tools for thinking. This theory becomes multimodal social semiotics. She draws from Halliday's structural functional linguistics(1978, 1994[1985]). There is also critical discourse analysis from Noriss.

Her lab is here http://multimodal-analysis-lab.org/

I am attending the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences today and yesterday.

I got some time off work to attend parts of this congress today. Today I am attending the lecture titled A Multimodal Approach to Discourse Studies: A paradigm with new research questions, agendas and directions for the digital age given by Kay O'Halloran. It is just about to start.

Monday, May 18, 2009

I managed to study quite a bit on the weekend.

I managed to read sections 4.1 and 4.2 in the book Knowledge Representation and Reasoning. Here I learned resolution of conjunctive normal form (CNF) expressions in symbolic logic. This covered universals, existentials, equality and variables. So I learned Answer Extraction and Skolemization. I can understand this but not sure I can do this myself so will need to practice the exercises in this chapter.

I will need in the next week and a half to review chapter 3 so I can begin to create a Knowledge Base (KB) for a small department inside a firm. This is one assignment I have due besides the lecture.

I also read more about basic knowledge management. I have started to find the book The Computerization of Work useful and interesting. It is not the sociology that will be useful but rather the case study descriptions of the context of working that will help me write my KB for the small department. This book is also critical of systems designers which helps me foresee some problems in my work.

Sunday, May 17, 2009

I have to write a lecture due May 29th.

I am writing a lecture on knowledge loss, gain and retention for my professor and it is due May 29th. I have it started in $Latex$.

Sunday, May 10, 2009

Finally success with creating a clean population data file

I was finally able to get a good clean data set for the world's population data using a different approach. In the original data set there was always a blank row at the end of each yearly table and at the beginning. Between these blank rows was a row with only the table title in column one. This title was a combination of the country name then a slash then the year covered by the table. My easy process was to label each row with the year as another variable. I did this by physically typing the year in the new column beside the title row then filling down in Excel to the blank row at the end of the table. Once I had the first country in this case actually the world tables with the new variable labeling each row in the cooresponding table with the tables year 1996 to 2050, I then copied the year variable to the next country Afghanistan. Then I highlighted both of the year variables for the World and Afghanistan and copied the years to the third and fourth country. Then repeated for the fitth, sixth, seventh and eighth and so on always doubling. This did not take long and it worked because the tables were all repeated with exactly the same number of rows per year table and per country.

The next step was done with brute force copy and paste so took all night but actually I did others tasks on the computer. It really took about as many copy and drag fills as there are countries. I highlighted the table title cell, the column one cell in the title row and then copied out only the country name and pasted this in a second new variable column and then I drag filled this down from 1996 to 2050 so each row concerning one country now had a new variable named Country that contained the name of the country. I then added column headers for variables names, Age_band, Both_genders, Male, Female, Year, Country. I then saved tihs excel file as a CSV file. Then I imported this to SAS. The using a data step where statement I deleted all the blank rows and title rows. So now I have this basic data file.

Knowledge representation and reasoning

The subject I am leanring from my supervisor is knowledge representation and reasoning. This is part of the artifical intelligence field. I have started to read in this field and have three books borrowed now. One of the books is written by my supervisor's thesis supervisor from the University of Toronto. This field is about logic in a sense that some forms of logic are knowledge representation languages. I am told I must choose a language to represent knowledge. I am reminded of a popular book that covered this idea of a knowledge representation and my whole topic of knowledge simulated in a computer. The book is:
Davis, Martin. The Universal Computer: The Road from Leibniz to Turing (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2000).

Wednesday, May 06, 2009

I am starting to write literature review sections.

I have the most reading done on knowledge loss in firms. So from this in brain reading I started the section of the literature review covering knowledge loss. I frame it as three issues, safety, cost of production, and intellectual capital. I am trying to construct ordinary academic writing that is at heart simple clear and not too articulate. I do not want to use the nuances of the social sciences in this thesis. I want to in effect use a style that is almost a lifting of structure but in effect I am seeking common structures of academic writing and even just a standard English prose. I will have plenty of fun and more original and arcane structure, when I start to document the computer systems and systems modeling. This, the results and methods sections, will also likely be that more difficult and most likely a very unclear part of the thesis.

Saturday, May 02, 2009

I need to pick up the pace on my thesis.

I need to pick up the pace on my reading. May be I can finish reading a couple of chapters today as it is Saturday.