I am taking the summer term off school.

I decided to take the summer term off school. I will first check courses and schedules to make sure there are not some sociology or economics courses I might benefit from this summer.

I started to read Daniel J. Levitin's book "This Is Your Brain On Music"

This book so far has been a review of musical physics. It also contains some geography and history of musical culture and opened with a brief look at the author's career in the recording industry. I am presently just starting this book as Daniel reviews basic music theory from an acoustics perspective, in other words, physics of sound leading to basic music notation and music concepts in terms of physical sound.

Watching a union sister struggle with law school and raising a kid.

I am friends with a former union sister who is studying in law school. I also know a political assistant who has started law school. The union sister is also raising a child. She is really struggling to make ends meet. I have offered to bring her food before. I did consider law school and the problem is law schools have unregulated fees and are therefore very expensive. One legal studies professor suggested I am too old to build a lawyer's career. The school told me this was not true they have seniors studying there quite successfully. Someone I volunteer with told me her cousin found enough financial support from grants and bursaries to attend law school suggesting more searching for funding might work. I am though working full time now so will not qualify for some financial aid and working full time does not give enough time for study even with time away from work granted by my employer.

This problem can, of course, be solved, but for now I will post this as an open problem. I know problems have solutions, as that is one thing I learn quite a lot in applying mathematics to life's problems.

I have failed my knowledge representation course and dropped out of the thesis.

I was scoring much too low in the knowledge representation course and decided to drop out of the course and my thesis. I will graduate this spring with a certificate instead of a diploma.

I have the lecture slides organized into my notebook.

I have all the professor's lecture slides from the month of March organized into my course notebook before my own handwritten lecture notes.

I have one more test in my knowledge representation class and then I am done this course.

I have one more test this coming Wednesday morning and then I am done my knowledge representation course. I have all the lecture slides printed out and have started to read them carefully. I need to make a list of exercises as these will be the basis of the test questions.

I have become knowledgeable about using Prover 9 to do resolutions.

I am now working on my second homework assignment in knowledge representation. To do both problems I need to use Otter or its modern implementation Prover 9. I have written all the formulas now for one problem into Prover 9 input files. Now I need to consult my course notes and the lecturer's slides to see how and what to set my goals to in Prover 9. I may move on now to the second problem and write that up into input files. I have about 12 hours to do this work. I must also do a write up and then make a pdf of that and burn all the files to CD.

I have been studying SQL for almost a year now. This is helping me study knowledge representation.

At the moment, I am in a course taught by a leading database researcher. The course is not about databases. The lecturer uses databases as examples of where inference is not done with the data. In other words, databases are not artificial intelligence. Whereas knowledge bases are about inference and developed in the artificial intelligence field and then go beyond to such topics as the semantic web.

Thus it makes sense that research on knowledge management and assessments of knowledge management's successes put down databases of knowledge as under used and expensive projects that have been created by a management fad for knowledge management. These assessments may, in fact, be off in this sense. My research could show that these databases can be converted to knowledge bases and then have more value as these would actually think.

This would be the expert software of artificial intelligence which is also mentioned in the both the knowledge representation literature and the knowledge management literature. In neither literature's are expert software's the exact junction. The knowledge representation literature sees its self as moving beyond expert databases and the knowledge management assessments have put a lot of faith in expert systems and some times also use these systems to again prove the failure or success of knowledge management systems and efforts by judging the effectiveness of these software's. My contribution to the knowledge management field will be to present knowledge representation as a tool for knowledge management. This is probably not an original idea. I can though offer more support and experimentation to bring knowledge representation into knowledge management again perhaps in some novel ways.

I presented my research at a school conference this past week.

I presented some connections between emotions at work and knowledge at work in a slide show entitled Toxicity in the Knowledge Workplace.

I am in need of better scheduling of my school work.

I have used scheduling before for school work and it has worked well. I have lost touch with this art as I have been working full time and not scheduling the off work time.

Prover 9 is working fine for my school work.

Almost right after I wrote the last blog post I tried out prover 9 with the lecture example the professor had given and it worked just fine. This means my school work should now be easy to complete.

I am slowly getting some homework done.

I have three problems solved now in my home work with about ten more to do. Most of the rest require I use Otter software. So my next step should be getting this software working and doing, resolutions, refutations and proofs. Once Otter is up and running the homework will be easy to complete.

I am doing a book review talk this spring. I will blog my progress reading the book here.

I am now reviewing Output Delivery System: The Basics and Beyond by Lauren E. Haworth, Cynthia L. Zender, and Michele M. Burlew. I read the first chapter for the second or third time and tried some code at work. That is I did not read linearly but looked up exactly what I thought would solve a problem and teach me the most. I tried ODS TRACE around a Macro program. It was hard to see what the ODS objects were but I identified the dataset behind the numbers I want to extract. I want to choose what to output into csv and also meet some standards for that cvs output in terms of formatting. I will continue reading chapter two for the second or third time. I downloaded the code that creates the dataset used in the books examples. Now I am not sure whether I will read more this evening or get back to the knowledge representation topic of diagnosis.

I applied to be a research officer at work.

I applied to be a research officer at work and wrote a test for this job this week. Now I have to wait to see if I will be interviewed.

I have now learned resolution-based refutations in a lecture as well as from a book.

I have learned resolution of disjunctive normal form propositional logic to prove a formula inconsistent. This is a method of arguing by counter example the truth of a statement. We have just now covered the proofs for the soundness of this one step in this method namely the resolution rule of canceling a proposition and its negation, and then the soundness of the over all method, the refutation method and then the proof of the completeness of the method.

Studying SQL these days.

I am studying SQL these days. Today I began studying software testing. I also borrowed some dictionaries of logic symbols.

I wrote a logic test as part of the knowledge representation course.

I really did not want to end up studying logic in graduate school yet here I am doing just that. It is improving my understanding of knowledge representation and this understanding will be needed to actually write stuff my thesis supervisor expects. This logic refresher also allows me to think about some software writing dogmas and problematics that keep popping up at work.

Planning on attending SAS Global Forum.

I successfully found a hotel and plane flight and including the cost of student conference registration I can just pay for the whole trip with my tax return. I will have saved about 1110 dollars by searching on the web and using Travel Cuts, a student travel service rather than expedia.ca, a constantly television advertised service.

Still studying, I took time off this afternoon to relax.

I started the morning studying fairly hard. Mostly I started by organizing time and scheduling. I made a list of the exercises and did not actually get to working on these anymore yet. I did review the notes the professor posted and this reading relaxed me about the test. True, the exercises most likely will be on the test so deserve attention. That is we will probably have to solve some logic problems. On the other hand, placing the technology of knowledge representation in context with other computing topics was inspiring and I believe I can study a little OWL and RDF now to prepare for the test.

I also need to finish the review of my own notes. I have about four more lectures worth of notes to read. I lost my notes for the first three lectures.

School tasks and other learning tasks for today and the next few months.

This is just some note taking for myself. I have a test tomorrow in knowledge representation so am studying today. I am also getting organized for doing all this school work.

1. Study for test #1 in my knowledge representation course.
2. Study the assigned journal articles for my thesis research.
3. Write a conference paper on toxic workplaces as modeled in a KR language.
4. Prepare a book review presentation for the local SAS user's group.
5. Finish reading three SAS books.

Database theory everywhere and database languages.

I am studying with a database expert professor. He is teaching the class in Knowledge Representation. I am really enjoying this course so far.

I am trying to read the logic of theory contraction and the logic of updating theories.

I am reading symbolic logic and trying to understand the symbols used in an assigned paper. I have been required to read this paper by my supervisor in my thesis work.

Reading about PROC SQL.

I have read now 6 chapters in the book:

Lefler, Kirk Paul. PROC SQL: Beyond the Basics Using SAS (Carey, NC: Books by Users, 2004).

I have a 20 page paper to read on belief revision and belief updating logic. Then I have even more to read.

I have actually been assigned 4 papers, a chapter in a book and a number of chapters in another book to read now. I have downloaded 2 of these papers and updated my master bibliography folder in RefWorks for these 2 papers. I have 2 more papers to still download. I want to add these 4 papers to my e-book reader. I have started to read the first paper and have read 3 pages so far, and am almost finished the fourth page now.

I attended both classes this week.

I started my course this week. I attended both classes. We did cover some of group theory this week. We only looked at group theory as a way of looking at logical proof and mathematical logic was our first example.

I am reading the book PROC SQL Beyond the Basics Using SAS.

I have read three chapters in this book now and would like to read the fourth this evening. This book is about writing computer code for use in SAS programs.

My thesis optional course starts in January.

I will begin studying Knowledge Representation in January.

I read one paper in my master bibliography on an e-book reader and started a second paper this way last night.

As I began to work with a master bibliography in a table in a spreadsheet, I added a "status" column. In the workshop for managing information in research projects, the concept of using a master bibliography with a spreadsheet style table was suggested along with the suggestion of adding columns such as a status column. The table starts as a tab delimited file export from a RefWorks folder. Any bibliographic software could be used. You can add any number of columns to this file when open in a spreadsheet and a status column was one suggested. I chose to have a few values possible for status and one was "get" for literature documents I had found in name only ( citation), rather than the full document. This meant I needed to download the papers or borrow the books and had not done this yet. Other status column values I used included "read" and "partial" reflecting statuses after I started reading the documents. I began to search out and download documents in my master bibliography that were still "get" status documents and have found about five of the online journal articles and have them now in pdf.

As I started this a few weeks ago I bought an e-book reader with the anticipation that I could read my school work on this e-reader.

This e-reader method of reading worked so far. I read a paper with a catchy titled that is directly on topic with my thesis. The paper is

McQuade, Eamonn, et al. "Will you miss me when I'm gone? : A study of the potential loss of company knowledge and expertise as employees retire." Journal of European Industrial Training 31, 9. 2007. 758-768.

The second paper I am reading as an e-book is about defining the Knowledge Intensive Firm (KIF). As my thesis title includes this classification of firms, this paper is also very important. I hope this paper will continue to have the quality, it seems to have at the moment, from what I have read. The citation for this paper is:

Starbuck,William H. "Learning by Knowledge-Intensive Firms" Journal of Management Studies 29, 6, 1992.

My organization of reading notes is a little confused but really I am returning to a subject.

I wanted to research some topics related to disabilities and the Internet and found the book:

Goggin, Gerard and Newell, Christopher. Digital Disabilities: The Social Construction of Disability in New Media (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).

I realised after reading the preface that I have read this book before or at least the preface. It was written by two activists affecting the Internet use and other technologies use by disabled persons in Australia. It does a good job at looking at the social construction of disability and in a big way this was my introduction to this topic. I should review this a little because I also have to understand a bit better the concept of social construction because the social construction of gender is a concept I come across quite a bit these days when studying the Internet and gender as well as in feminist studies.

I have 150 minutes study to complete to keep to my pace of thirty minutes a day on my thesis.

Simply stated I add thirty minutes every day to my thesis work schedule. This is pushing me deeper into the work, this time based structure.

I have three goals at the moment for study in the short term.

I would like to read more of the papers on my master bibliography list today. I would also like to search my RefWorks collection for knowledge transfer and knowledge gain. Then the last of these three goals will be to make some notes based on the suggested methods and structure for writing the literature review that I learned at the first writing tutorial centre workshop I attended two and a half weeks ago.

I am starting to use a Master Bibliography.

I started a master bibliography for my thesis. I used a short list and added to it only papers concerned directly with retirement and knowledge loss in companies or with knowledge transfer. I edited out most of the skill component research because my methods from artificial intelligence will not support skill modeling in the simulation. I also included few general knowledge management titles and fewer books on this topic generally. Argote is still in the list and I used her work as spring board to find two more papers and then found an updated version of one of these.

The master bibliography is allowing me to move forward and download copies of the literature and actually start to read the papers. I now need to start using a system like this blog to record my notes and fabricate my literature review. I have some training now on both this master bibliography technique and using RefWorks to build this file. So far after less than one week this is working and giving good results and things are progressing nicely and specifically with real gains.

I dropped in on Shirley Mills today and told her about my new job.

Shirley Mills really helped me learn statistics. I claim she is a mentor of mine. She is a professor of statistics at Carleton university and encouraged me to learn SAS. Her encouragement really helped me in school a place of extreme elitism and bullying. Believe me some of the most respected professors are in fact bullies of knowledge and I can think of no other job that does not set an image of a snob to my mind. But I found Shirley to be supporting and her lectures on statistics are interesting and challenging. May be in a year or two I will be able to write a Ph.D in statistics with her as supervisor.

Here are the the calendar details for my winter course in knowledge representation.

COMP 5307 [0.5 credit] (CSI 5101)
Knowledge Representation
KR is concerned with representing knowledge and using it in computers. Emphasis on logic-based languages for KR, and automated reasoning techniques and systems; important applications of this traditional area of AI to ontologies and semantic web.
Prerequisites: COMP 1805 and COMP 3005, or equivalents.
Precludes additional credit for COMP 5900 section 'X' offered in winter term from 2003-2004 to 2005-2006 inclusive.

Studying human resources continues.

I have almost completed reading chapter 4 now in the human resources management book.

After yesterday's workshop I am ready to write my literature review.

I started one paragraph just an hour ago but now I am going stop and look and listen and then write an outline and plan this out better based on the material I learned today.

Tomorrow is a school day at least for part of the morning.

I am heading to school tomorrow to register for the winter term. I am meeting my academic adviser to sign the papers for both my winter term course in Knowledge Representation and my thesis for the winter. If I want to be cautious on the time lines I should plan to write my thesis by the end of the winter term.

I will also attend a writing workshop for graduate students tomorrow before coming home for lunch and then going back to work. The workshop will be about writing the literature review. I am happy I am writing only a science thesis and it may be shorter than my honour's legal studies paper. It seems to be less library and reading work too. To complete writing up the literature review would be a good short term goal to get done by the end of this term. That gives me about three weeks to write up the review.

I have no volunteering to do this weekend but am busying making changes in my living environment to overcome procrastination. Mostly this is a fancy way of saying I am cleaning up my mess in our apartment and organizing all the stuff I have which is mostly books, paper and computers and computer parts and some music instruments. Wish me luck on finding tme to study this weekend.

Actually this weekend I will also be fasting for climate justice. This feels very noble and a full expression of life long ideals of no polluting. I am glad I am involved in this.

I started reading chapter 16 in Knowledge Representation and Reasoning and hope to finish this chapter today.

I started to read chapter 16 in the book Knowledge Representation and Reasoning. I hope to finish this chapter today.

I read about web analytics this fall.

I read the first two chapters in the book:

Kaushik, Avinash. Web Analytics: An hour a day (Indianapolis, Ind.: Wiley, 2007).

I do not need to read this book and it really only helps me gather new knowledge and keep me informed about web mastering.

The human resources management textbook I am studying for my thesis.

After speaking with a senior management professor at the Tefler School of Management at the university of Ottawa, I settled on a first year textbook to read to create my small HR unit KB. Here is the citation:

Belcourt, Monica, Bohlander, George and Snell, Scott. Managing Human Resources 5e (Toronto: Thomson-Nelson, 2008).

So far in my reading chapter four seems best for building a KB of a small human resources unit in a human resources department.

Attending my school's mentoring centre.

I am going to leave work early tomorrow to attend an initial session with a mentor at school. I am also planning on attending two writing workshops. One is on writing a literature review and the other on information management for research projects.

I am studying change.

I have been reading about change from a psychological perspective this morning. I have been working on overcoming procrastination and getting my office organized. This is a liberating and reliving pursuit. Really sorting my bookshelves is a good thing to be doing. I would also like to organize my school notes and notebooks.

Thoughts on social modeling.

I have been involved in modeling the social world for a couple of years now. I have for many years studied various models in health care, law enforcement psychology, and even in private case law and business case law. Here is something I wrote yesterday about a model of tribal development from the TED talks. I read that the TED talks had presented a social model and felt betrayed and feel the TED talks have lost my esteem because of this presentation of a social model. I wrote:

Any model like the stages of grief or a model of addictions and recovery can only frame a situation for viewing and can not be forced on the actual participants or actors in the reality of the situation. Computer languages give an impression that well structured models work but in reality outside of a machine models only give fuzzy truth not clear, decisive, determinable actions.

I have now read chapters 6, 7, 8 and part of 9 in the book Knowledge Represenation and Reasoning.

I was traveling this weekend. Rather than follow my usual habits and bring ten books with me, I brought only four. This was done so I could focus more. I read the first chapter in the new edition (4th) of the Little SAS book. And yes, my Little SAS book now has my signature coffee stain. I also managed to read more of the Brachman and Levesque textbook Knowledge, Representation and Reasoning. I now have only chapters 9, 10 and 16 to still read in the recommended chapters. On vacation, I managed to read chapters 6, 7 and 8 and get through most of chapter 9. I now have 61 pages left to read that my thesis supervisor has assigned.

7 careers

We will hold on average 7 careers not just jobs. Not like the generation before the baby-boom some times called the silent generation who held one career and a few jobs based on that career. BTW all those twenty sometimes you see these days are the baby-boom echo i.e. the baby-boom's kids. There are more of them typically these days than other age groups. The population of universities has never been higher than today.


My careers.

1. I have been a stage hand, rock star, theatre and punk rock employee and volunteer as one career. If I have more education in performance arts this career will pay more.

2. I have been a statistician/ computer programmer as another career. I am working in this now. My workplace is designed to keep me in this one job for the rest of my life and many of my parental units want me to stay at this job. That is what they are used too: one job for life.

3. I am also a computer fix it guy and am volunteering/working with others to become high tech entrepreneurs.

4. I also have a career as a philanthropist and self help promotor. This is where I educate myself and care for my own health. I am also poverty and disabled activist here.

5. I also have a law enforcement career again both paid and volunteer jobs, and formal education define this career. This goes from being a nickel and dime cop to stuff I can not talk about that is heavy stuff.

that's five for me that are well developed.

6. Researcher sociologist. This career is still beginning and I have been at this for about 6 years now only. Mostly I am self taught here and combine this with the other careers.

7. I have an ecologist natural science career. This is more of a hobby and life style. I helped found the green party in Canada. I own a professional microscope. I read advanced science in this area.

Labour activist goes in there somewhere. Writer of fiction also goes somewhere.

I started one book on human resources but need to actually find a reccomended book.

One of my tasks in my thesis work is to find a recommended book on human resources management. It is to be recommended by a business professor from the school of management. I am supposed to actually go to the school and visit someone there. I have not done this all summer. Feeling guilty I picked up a textbook from a library that is modern and Canadian and began to read it. I finished almost all of chapter one now.

I finished the chapter on ODS printer.

Now I have learned about using ODS to output to a printer or PS or PDF file. I have completed reading chapter 5 and thus part 2 and also 87 pages in

Haworth, Lauren. Output Delivery System: The Basics (Cary, NC: SAS Institute, 2001).

I read chapter 4 now to learn a little bit about outputing Rich Text Format (RTF) in SAS

I read chapter four just now in

Haworth, Lauren E. Output Delivery System: The Basics (Cary, NC:, SAS Institute, 2001).

For a while I was assuming that the Linux computing and other cross platform sharing of documents was done best as Rich Text Format (RTF). I did in my teaching assistant work have a brief talk to students about how to format SAS output. This amounted to suggesting they copy and paste the default SAS output window into a Word Pad document. This was in the early to mid 2000's. I think, it is about time I learn more about the Output Delivery System (ODS) in SAS. To this end I read another chapter tonight from this ODS book.

I now know more about outputing HTML files from SAS software.

I have been studying the book:

Haworth, Lauren E. Output Delivery System: The Basics (Cary, NC:, SAS Institute, 2001).

I just completed chapter 3 about HTML output. This made sense based on my experiences using SAS Enterprise Guide with HTML output set as the Enterprise Guide output preference. It was quite a basic explanation and I would recommend this book to anyone able to use a computer.

I have been reading a piece entitled Managing Professional Intellect.

I am reading a piece from the Harvard Business Review on Knowledge Management. Here is the citation:

Quinn, James Brian. Anderson, Philip and Finkelstein, Sydney. Managing Professional Intellect: Making the Most of the Best in Harvard Business Review. Harvard Business Review on Knowledge Management (Boston, Mass.: Harvard Busines, 1998).

After posing the problem and the ideal situation in the workplace, the solution these authors point to is computer systems. They also make a claim at non hierarchical organizations and customer focus but I can see through their description as nothing more than slight of hand. And no this does not help one manage one's own learning and managing one's own knowledge. I think these guys are nothing more than high tech sales boosters. These guys are promoters of the digital age, end story.

My thesis proposal was approved.

Although I need to add more technical content to my thesis it has been approved to go ahead.

I began to read a book on Web Analytics by Avinash Kaushik

I started to read Web Analytics an hour a day. I have plans to support some GNU/Linux web sites using this book.

I am starting chapter 6 but did not make my other study goals last week.

I had set out to read three new chapters in Internet studies books last week but did not make it. I did read one chapter out of the three. I am starting chapter six in the book Knowledge Representation and Reasoning.

Using SAS PROC SQL, I think I have isolated the baby-booms in the world population file.

I used about five lines of PROC SQL code and was able to isolate the age bands where the older age bands are larger than the smaller age bands. This is the math expression I am using to define a baby-boom. I did this using two identical files. I need to check my results in the output file to make sure I have gotten what I expect.

The next book to read calls the chapters questions. So my goal is to read question one by Christine Hine.

My study goal for my Internet scholarship is coming along well. I ate a bowl of mint chocolate ice cream to celebrate getting the first of the three chapters in this week's goal read. The next chapter I will read is

Hines, Christine. Question One: How Can Qualitative Internet Researchers Define the Boundaries of Their Projects in Markham, Annette N. and Baym, Nancy K. eds. "Internet Inquiry: Conversations About Methods" (Los Angeles: Sage. 2009).

As I start this reading, I see Christine Hines is an scholar of the sociology of science and technology and will be writing about ethnographic method. This may help me stop or set boundaries on my online multiuser game playing studies, if these are indeed studies.

My goal is to read one chapter in each of three Internet books before Wednesday the 26th of August.

I set a goal to read one chapter more from each of three books. I just completed reading one chapter and here is the citation:

Whitty, Monica T., Joinson, Adam N. Chapter 6: Online Deception, fraud, spam and cons in Whitty, Monica T., Joinson, Adam N. Truth, Lies and Trust on the Internet (New York, N.Y.: Routledge, 2009).

So now I have two more chapters to read, one chapter in each of two more books.

Six short term goals that will get my thesis finished by next summer.

These are six short term goals I wrote tonight that will help me get my thesis completed by next summer.

1. Write more entries in my thesis notebook.
2. Continue to write in my learning journal.
3. Open my thesis tex files on my netbook.
4. Read the chapters recommended by my supervisor in the textbook: Knowledge Representation and Reasoning.
5. Return statistics books to the school library.
6. Buy more printer ink.

Human Resources and Macro Organizational studies are now topics I am exploring.

To model a workplace I need to study human resources literature and also macro organizational studies. Both of these studies should also help me in my working life.

I am waiting for my thesis proposal to be approved.

I submitted my thesis proposal to my supervisor on August 4th and have heard nothing back yet. I find this hard to deal with.

I read the forward to Cybershock.

I read the forward by a famous computer person to Winn Schartau's Cybershock. I was for a long while using computer crime as a focus for studies because I was reading so broadly I had to have a focus point or specialty. But Winn Schartau himself as he starts this book in the first chapter admits his book is not advanced study. So I can return that book basically unread only having really read Cap'n'Crunch's forward. I did learn Apple computer co founder Woz spends a lot of time in university libraries like me.

I won't be studying a course this fall

I won't be able to study a course in the semantic web this fall as I have a time conflict with the class schedule. I am still reading this book

Allemang, Dean and Hendler, Jim. Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist: Effective Modeling in RDFS and OWL (Amsterdam: Morgan Kaufmann, 2008).

I am reading chapter 6 now which is about RDFS and is starting to introduce this schema language.

I am studying knowledge management but am coming across the same papers regurgitated.

As I read more books and papers about knowledge management I am drilling down to the source papers and there seem, in fact, to be fewer original papers in this field.

I am beginning to read business studies.

I borrowed a book on organizations from a macro perspective, another two books on knowledge management and one book on using Microsoft 2007 for project management.

I am reading about Emacs and learning to use Emacs on my Dell Inspiron and my Macbook.

I have been reading the book SAMS Teach Yourself Emacs in 24 Hours. I have read chapter 1 and chapter 3. I did not read chapter 2 as that was about installing Emacs on Windows NT. The book was written by Jesper Pedersen, et al. I have started to use the Diary in the Calendar in Emacs. I hope to become effective at email, code writing, LaTeX and basic word processing in Emacs. I have stated chapter 4 today.

Learning SAS Output Delivery System (ODS).

SAS stands for Scientific Analysis System or Statistics Analysis Software or Statistical Analysis System. I have learned SAS at Carleton university as part of my B.Math in statistics studies and then have further used it as a teaching assistant in statistics. In that work I helped teach SAS to undergraduates in statistics courses. I now use it daily at my workplace in the government.

I have been reading the book: Haworth, Lauren. Output Delivery System: The Basics (Cary, NC: SAS Institute, 2001). So I am studying the new Output Delivery System in SAS. I have read chapter 1 at work and am today reading chapters 2 and 3. I have completed the reading of chapter 2 so far today. Chapters 1 and 2 are merely introductions to what ODS is and what it can do. Although chapter 2 covers how ODS works with SAS procedures (PROC) and the output objects from procedures, and has some syntax for using ODS. Chapter 3 is about using ODS to output HTML files.

Four Supreme Court cases of note last week concerning search and seizure. Application of R. v. Grant as the new standard of detention by police.

This is the key to the four cases of July 17th, 2009.

From R. v. Suberu. 2009 SCC 33 at 5.

Not every interaction with the police, however, will amount to a detention for the purposes of the Charter, even when a person is under investigation for criminal activity, is asked questions, or is physically delayed by contact with the police. Section 9 of the Charter does not dictate that police abstain from interacting with members of the public until they have specific grounds to connect the individual to the commission of a crime. Likewise, not every police encounter, even with a suspect, will trigger an individual’s right to counsel under s. 10(b). According to the purposive approach adopted in R. v. Grant, 2009 SCC 32, detention under ss. 9 and 10 of the Charter refers to a suspension of the individual’s liberty interest by a significant physical or psychological restraint. Psychological detention is established either where the individual has a legal obligation to comply with the restrictive request or demand, or a reasonable person would conclude by reason of the state conduct that he or she had no choice but to comply. The onus is on the applicant to show that, in the circumstances, he or she was effectively deprived of his or her liberty of choice. The test is an objective one and the failure of the applicant to testify as to his or her perceptions of the encounter is not fatal to the application. However, the applicant’s contention that the police by their conduct effected a significant deprivation of his or her liberty must find support in the evidence. The line between general questioning and focussed interrogation amounting to detention may be difficult to draw in particular cases. It is the task of the trial judge on a Charter application to assess the circumstances and determine whether the line between general questioning and detention has been crossed. [3] [23] [25] [28‑29] see case at http://scc.lexum.umontreal.ca/en/2009/2009scc33/2009scc33.html

I completed reading Working Knowledge by Davenport and Prusak, and now must finish Linda Argote's Organizational Learning.

I did finished reading Working Knowledge by Davenport and Prusak, and now must finish Linda Argote's Organizational Learning.

The goal today is to complete reading Working Knowledge by Davenport and Prusak

I have just finished chapter six. I have about 65 pages left to read in this book. So with the end of the book in sight I am settled into finishing it today.

Reading goals this past weekend are partly done.

I had set out to read chapters three, four and five of the book Working Knowledge this weekend. I succeed and got that reading done. I had also set out to read chapters five and six of the book Knowledge Representation and Reasoning. I only got chapter five read but read it completely which means I read the beginning again. I had also set out to read chapters five and six of my web semantics textbook but only got chapter five read. So either I wasn't working hard enough or I set my goals to high.

Framing quote.

This really frames my thesis.

In general, the greatest value of modeling knowledge processes lies not in reaching an exact understanding of knowledge input, output, and flow rates but in identifying the variables in the model that can be affected by management action.

Davenport, Thomas H. and Prusak, Laurence. Working Knowledge (Boston: Harvard Business School, 1998) at 80.

Studies continue over the weekend.

I got chapter three now read in Working Knowledge and started chapter four. I see that the author of the Complete Idiots Guide to Knowledge Management has lifted her examples from this book I am reading.

Studies continue with a background literature reading term underway.

I have managed to continue reading Working Knowledge by Davenport and Prusak. Focusing on this book is good. I am nearly done chapter two of this book. The book is under two hundred pages long.

I should also read more of the book Knowledge Representation and Reasoning by Brachman and Levesque. I have almost finished chapter five now and still have chapters six, seven, nine, ten and sixteen to read on my supervisor's recommendation. This is about 90 pages of logic to read.

In my course textbook on the semantic web I have started chapter 5 of 14 chapters.

I am trying to focus on school more this summer and it looks like I am recoverying some of my study habits.

This term should be my background literature reading term. I am trying to find more time to read. The problem is I have a full time job every day of the week. This has slowed down other graduate students in the past and is typically a show stopper for something like completing a PhD. I am trying to focus myself by blogging here more.

These past few days I have started to read the textbook for my fall course Semantic Web: Concepts & Technique COMP 4900-C (The course outline is here: http://www.scs.carleton.ca/~bertossi/semweb/syll09.pdf) and am now about one sixth done reading this book on web semantics. Here is the citation to my course textbook:

Allemang, Dean and Hendler, Jim. Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist: Effective Modeling in RDFS and OWL (Amsterdam: Morgan Kaufmann, 2008).

So far I have read three chapters. I have learned the rational behind the semantic web. I have been introduced to coding in RDF and a few related languages. I am now learning in chapter four about RDF parsers and serializers and RDF stores.

I read one essay in Laurence Prusak's Knowledge in Organizations

The essay I read seemed the most theoretical and shortest in this book. The essay citation is:

Polanyi, Michael. Tacit Knowledge in Prusak, Laurence. Knowledge In Organizations (Boston: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1997) at 135.

This was copyright to Polanyi in 1966. In this brief essay/lecture he explores tacit knowledge as a theory. He has some structure of a theory of this type of knowledge. In this type of knowledge we assume we do not know what we known. This type of knowledge can not really be known but we do know it under the surface of our thinking. He makes his argument referring to psychological experiments. These were popular in the 1960's and earlier. He claims to show that positivist science is a failure as scientific method and says objectivity is not a possible way to know the world. Scientific knowledge is best known and originally know through tacit knowledge.

I will be studying web semantics as my thesis optional course.

I am pumped about the optional course my supervisor has chosen for me to study. It is titled web semantics. I will learn about knowledge representation languages and ontological web languages (OWL). The course is at Carleton in the fall in the school of computer science. I ordered the textbook last night. I will get this textbook started early.

I am beginning my mid month backups to a network drive.

I have been starting my backups to a network drive for the mid month. So far, I am working with Remembrance and the eMac.

I am also transferring my network music library to the new 1 TB drive.

I still have not fully transferred the first of the USB external drives to the network hard drive. It is not an easy process. There are always files that produce error messages and stop whole copy operations.

To define knowledge is the task.

I read the definition of knowledge presented by probably the two most well known scholars of knowledge management this morning. Here is the citation and my notes on this chapter one definition:

Davenport, Thomas and Prusak, Laurence. Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What They Know (Boston, Mass: Harvard Busines College, 1998).

Feminist cyborg studies, robotics and statistics

I started to read this book this evening and got the introduction read and started the first chapter:

Balsamo, Anne. Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women (Durham, N.C.: Duke University, 1996).

This is a really interesting read so far. It has me questioning bodies. In particular, I am interested in my own body and my fingers and my finger work on bass guitar and computer keyboard. And of course, I must learn to be even more sensitive to the objectification of the female body.

I am now reading more about Mikhail Soutchanski's work and read his school web page today and sent him and e-mail asking him to direct me to his page listing knowledge representation languages.

I am also reading about JMP software in the book:

Schlotzhauer, Sandra D. Elementary Statistics Using JMP (Cary, N.C.: Sas Institute, 2007).

I have read and worked through chapters 1 to 3 and have started chapter 4 and can now consider myself a JMP user.

I am slowly getting a paper about situational calculus by Mikhail Soutchanski read

I have read about 3 pages now in Gu, Liyan and Soutchanski, Mikhail. "The Two-Variable Situation Calculus" Frontiers In Artificial Intelligence and Applications 142, 2006. 144-161.

Following up my supervisor's suggestions on situational calculus finds robotics programmers.

My supervisor suggested I look up Mikhail Soutchanski. I did look him up today on google scholar and found his paper on situational calculus. I also found that he is part of a Ryerson-Toronto universities partnership in robotics programming. He seems to have only three or four papers out there so I am reading them now. This is real boy culture to be learning robotics programming. I see a good thesis topic change possibility here or at least some foundation for my simulation by strengthening my understanding of "agents" in a simulation. These agents can be conceptualized as software robots and fit well with my sociology of science and technology reading such as Brunto Latour's works.

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 $LaTeX$.

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.

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.

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 $Latex$.

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).

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.

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.

Narrative in thesis, music and aborginal studies.

In my early research into knowledge transfer the idea of story telling and narrative came up. But how do I add narrative to computer code? Narrative is a way older workers can relate their knowledge to younger workers. I was just reading the introduction to a book about an epic story. The book is

Van Deusen, Kira. Kiviuq: An Inuit Hero and His Siberian Cousins (Montreal Que.: McGill-Queens University, 2009).

The book contains an Inuit legend and compares this legend with Siberian aboriginal legends. This is how stories and lessons of life would be passed down in Inuit culture.

I can not spend time on cross culture too much in my thesis. This book is hundreds of pages long. My thesis will not be of use outside of capitalist firms. I thus can not read this book. As well the legend itself will be of no help rather the context of story telling might be of help.

I had also thought to read this book to help my music making but the book and story are not for telling thus to avoid plagiarism I will not read this book. I will simply be inspired by Kira's introduction where she explains briefly that she uses performance art, and music with story telling. She also explains that the elders who told her Kiviuq had given her alone permission to tell this epic. I like these ethics and will respect them.

I also thought, as I read the book, of aboriginal studies but have only read a few aboriginal studies books and will not read this one.

I started to read another book for my thesis today.

I read section 1.1 in

Levesque, Hector J. and Lakemeyer, Gerhard. The Logic of Knowledge Bases (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2000).

This covers an introduction to knowledge bases but mostly an introduction to logic

I am reading the first book in my literature review and it is a good choice for my topic.

I read chapter one in

Linda Argote. Organizational Learning: Creating, Retaining and Transferring Knowledge (New York: Kluwer Academic, 1999).

Argote's research has been on learning curves. These are plots with hours of labour as a dependent variable v cumulative production as the independent x variable. The basic formula for a learning curve is as so: $y = ax^{-b}$. Cumulative production serves as a proxy for knowledge gained by experience in this model.

My paper on global demographics got kicked out of the social economy conference.

The organizer was not happy that my paper did not connect with the social economy so I withdrew my paper at his request.

I saw my thesis Supervisor yesterday and have not slept since.

I saw my thesis supervisor and he suggested rewriting the section titles of the first three chapter of my thesis. I have not slept because I have been watching hockey, playing computer games and doing work on my home computer. Well enough of all that I will now write my thesis. I have not been reading much these days as I am engulfed in work. I will now take a break from work at home and write my thesis. I must move to my eMac in my office now.

I joined the International Association for Statistical Computing.

Here is the mission statement of the International Association for Statistical Computing.


It is the mission of the IASC to link traditional statistical methodology, modern computer technology, and the knowledge of domain experts in order to convert data into information and knowledge.

Statistical Computing is meant here in its broad sense as Statistics in the Communication and Computer Age and it contains a rich variety of research topics in almost every branch of statistical inquiry.

The topics focused on by the IASC include computational statistics, statistical software, exploratory data analysis, data mining, pattern recognition, statistical graphics and data visualisation, statistical data bases, and related fields.

The IASC works to share and advance methods and techniques related to these topics by facilitating the exchange of information and by stimulating evaluations, research, and development in all areas of statistical computing. It is the aim of the IASC to foster world-wide interest in effective statistical computing and to exchange technical knowledge between researchers world-wide.

IASC promotes collaborative efforts within international, national, regional and other organizations and institutions having similar aims.

I am going to ProQuest, IEEE and ACM databases again for ten more items for background literature..

I feel I am done now searching out the knowledge management items for my thesis. I hope the next ten items are easier as I plan to search out simulations, programming and other methods literature now.

I can read in the country data sets in two lines of code.

I figured out how to read in the country data sets in two lines of code. The problem is I need 228 of these pairs of lines. To do this I turn to the automated features of "fill down" in Excel. I am learning that in SAS one can do this with macros. In Excel I have created the first line of code where I set a specific counter based on the position of the countries data in the large file. Once this so called counter or index of numbers is set the second line is a as.data.frame line that reads the large file but only reads the rows( as indicated by the counter/index set of numbers) needed for that country. So today I am going to use Excel to write the second line of code 228 times.

I am still using Inference for R and was mistaken in a sexist way about the representative changing her last name. Of course, many women have two last names and that was all it was. I have only completed the first tutorial for Inference for R and have not yet tried the studio application. This promises to allow breaks while running code.

At this point in testing this Inference for R software, after I have the second lines of code completed I will run this and try printing the Inference for R word document and adding a write up. I may use some of this blog for the write up. I will do this in word. I will after that try to make a Power Point for the conference and start to write up this part of the research. Ideally I will have only a few slides devoted to this part of the project but that show some of the code.

Then it is off to Google or back to the US census site to find data about major industries by country.

Beautiful quote from the Rae years by Lilith Finkler from Candian Woman Studies

Can you guess who her populations is, and why she was not given full academic rights at this conference even thought she was qualified academically but because she belonged to the subject population she was treated differently?

The politics of appropriation are such that a privileged few manage to determine subjects of study and gain recognition as "experts" on a community outside their own. This process becomes particularly insidious when so - called "progressive" individuals claim to be allies of an oppressed group and in so doing, constantly speak on their behalf. This disempowers the people directly affected by a particular experience, since they have less "credibility" and less access to privilege.

Finkler, Lilith. Canadian Woman Studies. Downsview: Summer 1993. Vol. 13, Iss. 4; pg. 72.

Inference for R software. Quality issues explored

I won't post something technical about inference for R here. The representative who contacted me from that company has now changed her last name in emails. And one search at Google found this debate from some noted statisticians about Inference for R as a spam marketed software. I was worried because I was approached outside of work. I am now finding that persons who contact me here about math have questionable ethics in terms of robbing Open Source projects. But this could just be theft. I may not be able to as careful in the future. May be Inference for R is a more nefarious product. I will need to search further and perhaps contact a computer security service now and inquire about this company and software. Perhaps it will all turn out to be an aggressive slightly unethical marketing side to a good software.