I have a paper due this week and am not sure I will complete it.

I proposed to write a paper for the Journal of Community Informatics about the co-creation of technology by telling the history of the group Computers for Communities and have a simple draft. The problem is that it is too simple I feel and I may not submit it to this journal after all. I will loose no money if I do not submit it. It is not such a big deal in the here and now.

I have been learning to apply mathematics in computing this past year.

I believe in the title of this post I am being vague. I do want to be specific so first off let me deal with this vagueness. I add numbers, multiply them and thus have an idea if my data is correct. University level math is really doing arithmetic calculations in large amounts, more frequently and resulting in much more practice thus the programmer gains more skill and knowledge of arithmetics.

I had been trained in university to take it for granted that mathmatics was part of computer programming. Variables were one of the key common terms, concepts and symbols one would use in the completion of homework and exams in both mathematics and computer science. At work and at school and in computer self help books, I was guided to use meaningful names for variables. Yet, in proofs one aims for generality. My work at present seems to favour a general approach for variable names where an abstact generality is, in fact, favored over specific meaningful instances. I work in the abstract in my present job duties and leave it to others to draw out the meaning and attach the data to the real world.

Journal Field Notes: Meeting the co-creation theme from participation theory

I was blogging on our organization's (Computers For Communities) web site about allowing participation and when I say allowing I mean allowing those we give computers to to direct what participation they would like to have happen. Sure we can think about instructions and support and using free software tools to help us offer that support but it comes down what do those in the community getting these Linux computer want to do? We logically can not really think of this answer ourselves and plan for it, I believe. We can listen perhaps.

Then from this argument where do the new owners of these computers create or co-create with us. They provide the tables and chairs for the computer lab. The room where the lab is set up is given to them by the landlord and they choose to have computers in there. In working briefly with these people I did active listening to see how we could interest them in the computers. What could the computers do for them based on what they were saying and how they were expressing themsleves around the lab. The question is still open.

I need to write about this in my field notes for the journal of community informatics. The notes are due soon.

I have been studying small business this month

I started to read about small business. I am helping found a non-profit corporation here in Canada.

Teaching myself some old technology for work.

I am researching some technology for work. This is older technology called Dynamic Data Exchange and is a way of communicating with Microsoft Excel.

I have been studying organizing of paper for the past year.

I have been studying some self help books on office and paper organizing this past year.

I am graduating this evening from the university of Ottawa in systems sciences

After almost four years of part time study I am graduating with a graduate school certificate in systems sciences from the university of Ottawa. My mother and my partner Jenny will attend the graduation ceremony with me this evening.

I submitted my field notes abstract and am waiting for a decision on the acceptance by the journal to publish these field notes.

I submitted my field notes last weekend and am waiting to hear back from the editors. This is the first time I have submitted something to a journal. I have worked with editors before to write for a journal. In that case, I was only a minor author.

Here is the first draft of my abstract for the Journal of Community Informatics.

Abstract

These field notes describe the origins and initial development of Computers for Communities a non-profit, in Ottawa, Ontario Canada, that refurbished computers and installs Ubuntu Linux on these computers. At the moment the group is run by volunteers only. The computers are then given to the volunteers for their service. Also the intention is that the computers are given away free to community centres, housing projects and other such community based organizations. The field notes describe the early days of the Computers for Communities through to the first lab installation in a tenant organization office. The notes continue to describe the first computer workshop where volunteers were able to refurbish computers and take one home. The notes end with the first general meeting of the membership and at the same time the submitting of paperwork to the Ministry of Industry to register the non-profit as an official organization under the laws of Canada.

Book review being worked on for local SAS user group.

I am working on a book review for a local SAS user group. I will give the presentation June 9 in the morning at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. The review covers the book ODS: the Basics by Lauren E. Haworth. So far the book has proved useful to me at work.

I read a little of a journal article about older volunteers in the USA.

The article is

Tang, Fengyan. "Socioeconomic Disparities in Voluntary Organization Involvement Among Older Adults" Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 37, 1, March 2008.

This paper describes a statistical modeling of data from the Americans Changing Lives (ACL) survey from the Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan. The author investigates the effects of socioeconomic status on type and scope of volunteering of older adults. The author concludes that education alone not income has a positive effect on types and scope of volunteering. The author calls on voluntary organizations to help older adults with less education volunteer and thus reduce disparities caused by inequalities in society.

I looked at the schedule of economics 101 at Carleton. I will have enough to study at work though this summer.

The summer schedule of economics 101 is not bad and on TV it is great. I could watch it after work each day at 4:30. I could really use this credit in my work. I need to learn more economics and econometrics. I really need a break thought to regain reading time so a full course probably won't be how I spend my summer. I have training at work next week in supervising skills and more programming courses as well as computer science methods courses coming up in training at work. Also my French training will be happening again this summer. My French is improving and I can basically read French well enough for some jobs in Montreal and now my oral French and my written French need improving.

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.