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December 19, 2009

I have been fasting for climate justice this past 40 days.

I did some fasting for climate justice these past days. I did not fast for more than two days at a time. In the last days of Copenhagen I was tired and lacking energy at work so did not complete the fast or celebrate with others.

Posted by robot17A5 at 4:31 AM |

November 22, 2008

I am training with union activists today to use online tools

I am at a union sponsored training event. We are discussing and learning how to use ICT's to do union work. That is so called web 2.0 applications for union communications.

Posted by robot17A5 at 9:42 AM |

June 23, 2007

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. has some wisdom about libraries

It is interesting to watch an avatar of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. being interviewed in Second Life. He suggested to students using a library that they take out a novel that hadn't been checked out in twenty years. I had done this with Churchman last fall. Although Churchman is not a novelist in this case. Here it the interview of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. from within Second Life placed on You Tube.

Posted by robot17A5 at 10:37 PM |

February 12, 2007

Probability studies continue

I am continuing to study probability. That is the belief that things will occur. I have done some school work this weekend in this subject. Of course I wrote the mathematics home work on a computer using LaTeX. I have also read some Ian Hacking this past year on the topic of probability.

Posted by robot17A5 at 12:31 AM |

December 7, 2006

Digital music is our life blood

If music is our life blood our blood is now digital like the dragon's blood in the dunegons and dragon's film of a few years ago.

Posted by robot17A5 at 2:35 AM |

July 27, 2006

I started to read a new field, the field of social navigation.

But back to the effect on the direction of my studies. I learned to critique science after reading Cooper. This lead me to really understanding some topics in the sociology of science and technology early on in my studies and after becoming credentialed in statistics allowed me to pick up the pace with reading and critiquing science. I have also picked up more sociology and technology readings and lectures. I read many books in the 76.9 range where computers and society are studied. This lead me to blogs which are a personal micro history or as Cooper puts it, blogs are histographs not history or herstory.

So the questions that rage through my mind when writing on a blog have to do with appropriateness as suggested by the team of psychiatric rehabilitation actors I have used. But as I read about social navigation I am becoming aware that appropriateness is socially defined by people and is appropriate in places where people go and do things. So necessary for the definition of appropriateness is people just as laws are created by people and set out appropriate behaviours.

I am also combining my reading of social navigation with reading Cooper. I started reading this new field last week. I suspect the recent social networking web site engineers have studied this field.

The bibliographic cite for this reading is
Dourish, Paul. Where the Footprints Lead: Tracking Down Other Roles for Social Navigation in Munro, Alan J. & Höök, Kristina. & Benyon, David. eds. Social Navigation of Information Space (London, UK: Springer, 1999).
This article starts by suggesting navigation to be possible as spatial navigation, semantic navigation and social navigation. The author explores social navigation, as more than book recommender web sites in fact examines ways that social navigation could use a wider possible group of social interactions. He briefly touches on architecture and distinguishes between space and place. Spaces being physical and the root human understanding of the world and places being more socially defined and having meaning for people, He depends here on urban and architecture studies that are much older than computer software design. He also briefly looks at perceptual awareness of others as an example of a social interaction to be added to social networking of information space. That is information about the activities of others gained on the periphery. He sees social informatics as both a way to help others find information and at the same time a way to exploit for financial gain the information others have left in their use of the same information. He does mention that privacy is an issue with using information about people. He stubbles when discussing generalized information and presenting trends and aggregate data which I think needs more understanding from a paranoia of identity theft and also the natural hiding many do on the Internet. But all in all this was a good two day read.

Posted by robot17A5 at 2:39 AM |

I read some of Psychiatry and Anti-Psychiatry this morning.

I have read this fellow Dr. Cooper when young and idealistic. Also I only began to read him when some other roles were being played by me. One I was newly diagnosed as schizophrenic. Two I was a new holder of a book store credit card that someone else paid for in the end. Three I was looking for studies that would motivate me. This last point had the greatest effect. I do though still buy books on credit and have done this for years and years. It is one of my main activities that I get pleasure from. I also continue to play the role of schizophrenic but these days I hide this role for large periods of time when I am acting other roles where being schizophrenic does not really need to be played. But back to motivating studies.

I sought after reading this doctor to read more about knowledge and epistemology. That is what is knowledge and how do we organize it. The general attack that Doctor Cooper makes is on scientific knowledge being appropriate for human relations.

Continue reading "I read some of Psychiatry and Anti-Psychiatry this morning." »

Posted by robot17A5 at 2:24 AM |

July 23, 2006

I have been doing more reading about communicating social informatics research.

The main thesis of Kling, Rosenbaum, and Sawyer's book is that computer professionals have to be aware of the social reasons software fails. I have been reading this thesis a few times in reading the later part of their book Understanding and Communicating Social Informatics.

Posted by robot17A5 at 6:59 AM |

June 18, 2006

I have been admitted to a graduate program in systems science at the University of Ottawa.

I am going to the University of Ottawa in the fall. I will be studying systems science. In a way systems science is the same age as me. I have read about and understood the systems view of the world for decades now.

Posted by robot17A5 at 12:38 AM |

April 22, 2006

Would cyborgs get married? And whose parts would matter?

I am reading Goldman, Emma. Anarchism, and Other Essays (New York: Dover, 1969). Yesterday I read the essay on marriage. Her statistics about divorce do need to be updated but her conclusions and support for her thesis are still supported by our present day statistics. I found this essay to read in the book because someone had written a note in the book, saying there was a great quote in the essay. I assume this essay was read by the Beatles as it was very pro-love. Also John Lennon read a lot and this would have been available to him or to writers he did read who may have repeated the thesis. I trace my lyric listening personal history thus taking a path of reducing internal monologue as per Carlos Castaneda's lessons from Don Juan.

Posted by robot17A5 at 2:22 AM |

March 27, 2006

I completed reading the ethics paper.

I finished reading the ethics paper but realise it is only a small excerpt and not the whole document. I may access the whole document at the aoir web site later today or this week.

Posted by robot17A5 at 3:46 AM |

March 26, 2006

I was wrong about the ethics paper being dry.

Again this morning proving that memory is not a good tool for scholarship, I was wrong about this ethics paper from the AoIR being dry or hard to read. There must have been either, a more reactionay emotional reason I did not read this paper, or perhaps, when I first tried to read it, I was tired, or did not have enough interest, or time. I read some of it this morning and it is interesting and full of material I can understand. It is not computer ethics that this paper addresses but researcher ethics. This is a different kettle of fish but actually only a different area of applied ethics. In fact, the paper has a very similar development of ethical theories to a development of these theories that are used to introduce ethics to the field of computer ethics. So in that I have read these ethical theories before, and been tested on these theories, I can understand this paper.

Posted by robot17A5 at 7:24 AM |