So instead I hit upon the idea of creating a "workspace view" for the Milestones which included the kind of information I would need to produce a nicely formatted list: The milestone activity name, its end date (due date), its "path", and its "subtitle" (the comment field which says "Milestone". The "path" is the a string showing the outliner path of a specific activity. For example, it's writing a chapter in the thesis, the path is "Ph.D./Thesis Writing/Chapter 1" where "Ph.D." is the overall project name, "Thesis Writing" is the enclosing activity container, and "Chapter 1" is the actual activity. Here's what this view looks like:

Unfortunately, there wasn't a way to only include just the Milestones. So if you go down the list, it actually includes everything, but the other items don't have a Subtitle of "Milestone."

Once you have this view, you can export the view as a comma-separated values file. Actually, it's a semicolon-seperated values file, but let's not be too picky. That gives you something that looks like:

Title;Group Path;End Date;Subtitle
Ph.D.;;04/25/2007 15:00;
No Assigned Resources;;;
"Michelle ""Ein"" Hoyle";;;
CVS/Subversion everything;/Ph.D./Organization;09/23/2005 17:00;Milestone
Analysis summary of Exp 1 and Exp 2;/Ph.D./Statistics;12/16/2005 17:00;Milestone
WordNet lit. review document;/Ph.D./Literature Review;07/25/2005 18:00;Milestone
IR/SE lit. review document;/Ph.D./Literature Review;12/09/2005 16:00;Milestone
Semantic net lit. review document;/Ph.D./Literature Review;03/22/2006 18:00;Milestone
Modified prototype;/Ph.D./Formula Work;02/03/2006 13:00;Milestone
Revised analysis summary document for Exp 1 & 2;/Ph.D./Formula Work;02/08/2006 18:00;Milestone
Analysis summary document for Exp 3;/Ph.D./Experiment 3: Semantic Web;11/08/2006 18:00;Milestone
Thesis committee 2006 report;/Ph.D./Communication/Thesis Committee 2006;05/24/2006 17:00;Milestone
Published CSR document;/Ph.D./Communication/CSR Paper 2005;12/23/2005 15:00;Milestone
Semantic web document;/Ph.D./Communication/Semantic Web Paper 2006;11/15/2006 16:00;Milestone
Other: Copyright Clearance;/Ph.D./Thesis Writing;02/04/2007 11:00;
Prepare Appendix 7;/Ph.D./Thesis Writing/Appendices/Appendix 7: NLP tagging;06/01/2006 17:00;
Prepare Appendix 5;/Ph.D./Thesis Writing/Appendices/Appendix 5: Exp. 3 Documents;11/23/2006 18:00;
Prepare Appendix 4;/Ph.D./Thesis Writing/Appendices/Appendix 4: Exp. 2 Machine/people data;06/22/2006 17:00;

When I originally did this, I was having trouble with the date format in Merlin. Merlin was using European date formats and everything else in my computer was using the System-defined date method of mm/dd/yyyy and not dd/mm/yyyy. Before I could use this data elsewhere, I needed to fix the dates, so one of the first patterns I wrote was one to strip out the times and flip the month and day fields around. I eventually fixed that, so the flipping isn't necessary, but one of the first steps in a BBEdit Text Factory is still to strip out the times. Before that, though, I need to remove the non-milestone entries. They're the ones that end with a ; instead of ";Milestone". The regular expression pattern "(^.*;\r)" will search for lines that end with a ; and replace the entire line. When I used "(^.*;$)", I ended up with multitudes of empty lines.

The next thing to do is get rid of the ";". If I import it into another application, tabs would be better than ;. The pattern ";" replaced by "\t" solves that admirably, leaving the file more or less ready for the bulk of the manipulations that need to occur. Here's an annotated list of the operations that the BBEdit Text Factory performs:

Before doing all this, I need to manually remove the first four lines at the top of the file. I was able to write a regular expression to find/remove the first four lines, but then it would "replace all" What I needed was a "replace once" action, but that doesn't seem to be a possibility in BBEdit at the moment. I should probably suggest it. The end result was something like this:

CVS/Subversion everything                              Organization                09/23/2005
Analysis summary of Exp 1 and Exp 2                    Statistics                  12/16/2005
WordNet lit. review document                           Literature Review           07/25/2005
IR/SE lit. review document                             Literature Review           12/09/2005
Semantic net lit. review document                      Literature Review           03/22/2006
Modified prototype                                     Formula Work                02/03/2006
Revised analysis summary document for Exp 1 + 2        Formula Work                02/08/2006
Analysis summary document for Exp 3                    Experiment 3: Semantic Web  11/08/2006
Thesis committee 2006 report                           Communication               05/24/2006
Published CSR document                                 Communication               12/23/2005
Semantic web document                                  Communication               11/15/2006
Chapter 1 document                                     Thesis Writing              01/04/2007
Chapter 2 document                                     Thesis Writing              04/06/2006
Chapter 3 document                                     Thesis Writing              04/20/2006
Chapter 5 document                                     Thesis Writing              06/14/2006
Chapter 6 document                                     Thesis Writing              07/12/2006

The new version of OmniOutliner Pro is quite cool. They added many new column types to it to help people use it for things like David Allen's Getting Things Done and building to-do lists with due dates, etc. As a result, it was possible to build an OmniOutliner document which contained months and years entered as top-level items with "due dates" as the first of the appropriate month/year and tell it to sort the document based on the "due date" column. Any items you added with due dates would then be sorted correctly. I set up a template with just this information in and formatted and spaced out the way I wanted. Then I could paste in my BBedit output. I'd end up with something like:

Everything was at the same level. However, everything I'd just pasted in was still selected. I discovered that if I just hit the tab key, it made all the selected items subordinate to the items above them. Since the items above them were always the month/year headers, I got a perfectly arranged list like:

Ta-da! How cool is that? Of course, it did take quite a bit of work to figure all that out. Now that I know how to do it, though, it's easy-peasy to produce a similarly-formatted list. Here's the set of steps in order, with a list of resources required at the end.

Program	Step	Activity	Resource
Merlin	1	View->Workspaces->Milestones for Export	Workspace view
	2	File->Export->Current View as CSV (Cmd-Alt E)
	3	Give it a file name and put it somewhere convenient	output.csv
BBEdit	1	Open the file	output.csv
	2	Remove first 4 lines
	3	Text->Apply Text Factory->merlinMilestones	~Library/Application Support/BBEdit/ Text Factories/merlinMilestones
	4	Copy result to clipboard
OmniOutliner	1	File->New From Template->MerlinPhDMilestones	/Data/Research/Timing/MilestoneReport_ OmniTemplate.oo3template
	2	Paste clipboard into document
	3	With pasted content selected, hit the tab key
	4	Insert a date at <insert date> at bottom
	5	File->Save

]]> 2005-10-13T22:47:17Z 2005-03-17T14:41:28Z tag:einiverse.eingang.org,2005://1.88 2005-03-17T14:41:28Z

As for my own, I chose to produce it on four A4 sheets and try out Apple's Pages layout software, part of their new iWork package. Using one of their photo journal templates was satisfactory enough, but I found it more difficult to intuitively work with than FrameMaker or InDesign. Perhaps because I'm just more familiar with traditional DTP/layout programs.

It actually proved more difficult than I thought. In the end, I settled on a page about my research, my life in general, and my teaching, with the fourth (which is actually the first page) dedicated to general keywords related to my life. See the final collage pages.

Anyway, I have a plan. My Sweetie is helping me do some of the grunt administrative work that's required (filling out the forms, uploading some of the files to each project directory to help check the functionality, checking for missing/incorrect project directories, etc.). While Sweetie's doing that, I'll put in a big push to finish assessing the remaining reports (22). Then, to take a break, I'll fill in the scanning sheets for all the report-related marks for each student, and then have a go for a bit at assessing the coding parts of the projects.

The coding part is cognitively easier to assess for me as it's definitely more black and white (it works/it doesn't work; it's written well/it's written poorly). It still takes time to do, though, because you have to check through all the functionality for various points and write up the notes.

With luck, proper use of my ADD medication, and SweetieSupport, I hope to get it all in tomorrow evening's post. I'll let you know how I make out.

Actually, any kind of marking where you need to subjectively weigh how close an answer is to what you want is difficult for me. Perhaps it's because Ein's have two states in many things in life: Ein/Auf, Happy/Sad, Tired/Bouncy. There's not much room for shades of grey in the EinWorld.

Anyway, that leaves me with a 53 projects to finish and I'm already two weeks late and having trouble mustering any enthusiasm for it. To be fair, I already finished doing 60 for another course which also had a coding component and a project, so I am feeling a little burnt out and I do have attention deficit disorder. Nevertheless, I promised I'd be done.

As things stand, I finished 5 completely before deciding to switch to doing all the reports first. As the reports are independent of the coding component, that's feasible. I picked the reports to do first because I like them the least and I'll feel the most relieved when they're done and the rest will be easy.

Of the 48 reports to grade, I've done thirteen. Any motivation, inspiration, or encouragement welcome!

This was a very interesting seminar, if not immediately relevant to my own research. Not only was some of the content fascinating, but the method of presentation was also novel. Professor Flack uses mindmapping software to prepare his presentation and then uses the mindmap as a navigation tool during the presentation. By clicking on a mindmap element, a separate page would be opened where he could explore that concept in detail or perhaps an image clip launched.

Here, belatedly, are a copy of the abstract and my notes from the seminar.

Abstract:

In this seminar I will outline a range of theories of innovation within the broader context of technological development, to draw lessons about how the design process may be facilitated or constrained, especially with regard to usability. The discussion will be grounded with reflections about several empirical cases. These will include the design of a particular "smart Product" (Persona--the electronic contraceptive) and the development of a "Personal Learning Appliance" for a new e-learning initiative at Edinburgh (The Global Innovation MBA--GIMBA).

Conclusions will address the need for practical trialling; the need for mapping the space of behavioural interactions (behavioural ergonomics?) and the need to overcome "default satisficing behaviour" among prospective users.

Technology, according to Pacey, is only successful when technological, cultural, and organizational components are all in place. Ownership, for example, in the case of a water well is important in keeping the pump running and maintained. This is one theoretical underpinning to understanding the process of innovation and designing for usability.

One of the fascinating case studies that Professor Fleck discussed was about the robot milking machines. Mackie's of Scotland make ice-cream from the milk of their own Jersey herd. They were interested in increasing milk yields and decreasing the cost of human labour required to obtain the milk. They implemented a series of portable robotic milking stations in the fields. Using RFID or some such similar technology, when a cow comes to the milking station, she can be identified and the milking station automatically configures itself to milk that particular cow. Milk yields rose by 19% in the first year. It took the cows three months to adjust to the new system. It took the human staff almost a year. It was easy for the cows to adjust to because it required very little training on their part. They went to get food when they were hungry. They went to be milked when they felt full. The process here also had an unintended side benefit. While the primary goal was to increase milk yields, because the opportunities for human intervention in the supply chain (milk to ice-cream) were significantly reduced, the liability was subsantially reduced. Their cost of implementation was quickly repaid by the savings on the liability alone. Good for the cows. Good for Mackie's. Good for the ice-cream too.

One problem of implementing new technology is that people are reluctant to change their behaviour of usage beyond what works for them. Professor Fleck called this "default satisficing behaviour." In many cases, this manifests iteself as resistence to learning anything beyond basis usage of a piece of technology. Innovation and technology requires many components (bits and pieces from many seemingly unrelated fields) and customer context is important.

With respect to learning, we need to realize that in a bricks-and-mortar university, learning is an interaction between the instructor and the students, not between the student and the materials.

Downloadable Resources:
- EinCite 3-Page Project Description

Downloadable Resources:
- A4 (regular page) handout sheet

In previous years, the awards were only open to support staff and full-time central academic staff which is reflected in the headline for the article of "AL's honoured at last." Alas, while I am mentioned by name in the article, they don't say very much about any of us. For example, about me. all they said is "Winnings [sic] ALs pictured are ... TT280 and TT281 tutor Michelle Hoyle." Yep, that's it. We all had a few words in the article.

The cheque arrived in the most recent pay advice and I'm busy plotting what "personal" and "professional" self-development use I can put it to. I've started with a new pedometer and a new scale (waiting for the bank transfer to clear and that to be shipped still), and am trying to justify one of those new AirPort Express portable wireless stations with support for streaming to my stereo. I was also considering retroactively including the cost of my rather expensive Rosetta Stone language learning software for German; that's definitely personal development.

Oh, the agony of deciding!

Anal1a, in terms of clumping, doesn't look very good, at least not anymore. That was not previously the case, but I had revised my algorithm to make it symmetrical as per the insructions of a computing statistician here at the University of Sussex. He claimed that the Procrustes Rotation needed symmetric data and my nonsymmetric data, where Doc1 vs Doc2 didn't have the same similarity as Doc2 vs Doc1, was not going to work. That change has, I believe, altered the efficacy of the algorithm and things are no longer clumped together as promisingly as they were previously. The clumps should be a two- or three-letter short code followed by a digit. Therefore, ac1 and ac2 belong together. Pl1, pl2, and pl3 belong together, and so on. The clumping is significantly better in the already symmetric cosine normalization algorithm (anal2a). The two speech processing documents are clumped together (sp1 and sp2), all of the Power PC and G4 documents are together (pp1, pp2, g4c), and the three Pine Lake tornado stories are clumped far away from everything else (which is all computer-related) and together on their own. Excellent clumping, in fact. So the hypernym hypothesis looks like, on these short documents, it is working well with cosine normalization.

Here's the final bit of loveliness: comparing one MDS cluster diagram against another. MDS output is mapped to the vector space independently. That is, the same data will produce the same visualization or mapping, but different data is mapped to a different vector space, so you cannot just compare one MDS matrix to another directly. That is where Procrustes Rotation comes in. It applies a series of intelligent matrix transformations, trying to map the second vector matrix onto the source vector matrix. As a side benefit, essential in my case, it always provides a fitness measure to tell you how close the two were. on a scale of 0 to 1. So these two, as you can see (see above image), even after the transformations, were not that close together. As it happens, though, this is not particularly useful information to know. I am currently more interested in assessing how close the two algorithms are to human classifiers.

This recent success gave us plenty to discuss, particularly with respect to metric and non-metric data. The MDS community calls source data metric when the similarity or dissimilarity data is symmetric. That is, the value at row 2, column 1 is the same as the value at row 1, column 2. Classical multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) is designed to only work with metric data. SPSS includes the ALSCAL and PROXSCAL MDS algorithms which can work with non-metric data, but MATLAB's classical MDS does not because it treats things as Eucledean distances--another reason why I had to alter the Anal1a algorithm. The primary reason I now had metric data for everything, however, was because the computing statistician had told me I needed it for the Procrustes. Hawever, as we were examining my output, it occurred to me that Procrustes did not really care if the data was symmetric, so long as the dimensions of the data were the same (the same number of rows and columns). Which leads us to question whether the application of the method is statistically sensible or not. To that end, I need to track down a new computing statistician and perhaps a mathematician and discuss the process with them. My original computing statistician has retired.

Earlier I said that comparing one machine to another, to see how they fit is not useful information, but what would be interesting is to prepare a matrix of all the possible combinations of human judgements, cosine normalization, and weird formula:

                      cosine   wrd form.   human
cosine (anal2a)		x
weird formula (anal1a)           x
human                                        x

So that is my task for my next meeting (on the 16th of June). Before then, I need to figure out how to get MATLAB to take multiple tables as data. In SPSS, I could paste in several tables (representing all of the people's individual data, for example) and it would work with that. That is necessary in order to aggregate the peopel to do the comparison. Onward ho, then! Progress at last!

	Doc1	Doc2	Doc3	Doc4
Doc1	100	76	18	91
Doc2	76	100	22	35
Doc3	18	22	100	65
Doc4	91	34	65	100

This is not too dissimilar from the labelled diagram, part of the MATLAB documentation on data importing. Except that, if you look at the table below it, which describes which functions to use, they don't have a function with a similar example to their labelled diagram. Early on I thought I should be able to use dlmread, which allows you specify rows/columns for starting points or a range. My idea was just to have a range which excluded the non-numeric troublesome labels. No matter what I did, though, I could not get it to work. It was frustrating, because I could paste the data into the Import Wizard and that could handle the data fine. I wrote people, I researched on the web, and I tried all sorts of things.

Eventually, I came full-circle back to dlmread and experimented by making a small data file with unrelated data in it. That worked fine. So I then copied half of one of my data tables into the test file and tried that. That also worked fine. I copied the whole data table into the test file and used dlmread on it. It worked fine! What was the difference between the two identical data files other than their filenames? When I uncovered the answer to that, I kicked myself. My data files were generated years ago and stored on my Mac OS 9-based laptop. My laptop and the data have since migrated to Apple's swoopy BSD-based UNIX goodness and that's the environment that MATLAB runs under. So... Have you guessed the problem? Yes, it was linefeeds! The data files had original Mac linefeeds and MATLAB wanted UNIX linefeeds. D'oh! It just goes to reaffirm that the things you don't see can really hurt you.

At the end, I had a quantitative number, the degree of fit, between two diagrams after applying the Procrustes Rotation to them. Finally! On a whim, I fed in the same data table as both arguments to my comparison program. That is, I compared the same data file to itself. My hypothesis was that the resultant degree of fit should be either 0 or 1 (depending on which the fitness was measured). Much to my surprise, no matter which data file I used, the result was never 0 or 1. My previous Procrustes Analysis code was taken from some sample code in the MATLAB documentation and looked like: [D,Z] = procrustes(Anal1aMDS, Anal2aMDS(:,1:2)); That last bit in () is some kind of MATLAB scaling, which, being a novice to MATLAB, I didn't realize. So, in fact, my two diagrams weren't the same which is why I wasn't getting a 100% degree of fit. I do not want to say how long it took me to narrow that down. Once I did, though, it looked like I was basically set and I was able to quickly produce some comparisons between my "weird" half-baked metric and the cosine normalization one. One small step for EinKind.

This is a delayed entry from May 12th, 2004.

The key underlying principle seemed to emphasize having people fail in their problem solving attempt at some issue because then conceptual change has a change to be engaged and then students will learn. This failure need not be catastrophic; in fact, it probably should not be, I would say, or the failure would foster a strong sense of discouragement, which is not going to get a student into the "learning zone." So, how do you put students into a non-threatening environment where they can safely experiment and fail? David Jonassen's idea was to encourage them to engage in model building which demonstrates their conceptual understanding of the problem/issue at hand. When learners build models,their understanding of the problem domain is deepened because you cannot model what you do not understand. Model building also allows you, as the instructor, to view the learner's level of conceptual change as their models evolve. It is therefore possible to assess their underlying understanding without resorting to formal assessment tests. Finally, David Jonassen suggested that model building also improves critical reasoning and thinking because model building forces the model builder to examine the process and problem solving methodology.

David Jonassen researches (among other things) the use of technology in educational settings to improve understanding. More information on his approaches to problem solving are available from on the following web site page: http://tiger.coe.missouri.edu/~jonassen/PB.htm.

Oops! Oops! Oops!

I was short on time when it was decided that a handout-sized version of information was needed, so I'd had my Sweetie build me the single page and the three-page versions based on the finished poster design. He got a little overzealous about saving space and, well, managed to axe the contact and affiliation information. It was missing off of the three-page version, too.

Alas, I didn't discover this until after the Open Day, so the damage has probably already been done. Nevertheless, I've prepared new versions of both documents with this information intact and added page numbers, where appropriate, to boot.

Live and learn! Don't be so concerned with the content that you fail to see the forest through the individual trees!

Downloadable Resources:
- A4 (regular page) handout sheet
- 3-page PDF version

Ciphers blowfish-cbc, aes128-cbc, 3des-cbc, blowfish-cbc, cast128-cbc, arcfour, aes192-cbc, aes256-cbc
Compression yes ForwardX11 yes
Protocol 2,1
RhostsAuthentication no
RSAAuthentication no
UseRsh no

Note: It may be necessary to take out the extra spaces between items in the Ciphers list.

That, of course, assumed I had already had an entry in my ~/.cshrc file to the effect of:

setenv DISPLAY :0.0

Then, I can simply use a variant of the following to, for example, launch dtterm:

ssh -X eingang@machine_name.com /usr/dt/bin/dtterm

MATLAB, unfortunately, doesn't seem to work at all. It used to generate all kinds of font errors looking for various Sun fonts, but it did launch. Now it launches with all the font errors (see sample below), shows the graphical about box and then we're in the command line environment instead of the GUI development environment.

Font specified in font.properties not found [ urw itc zapfdingbats medium r normal * %d * * p * sun fontspecific]
Font specified in font.properties not found [ urw itc zapfdingbats medium r normal * %d * * p * sun fontspecific]

Note: All the '-' characters appearing inbetween [] above have been changed to spaces to render better in HTML.

I've mailed the Mac technical support person to see if they have any ideas as to why it no longer works and how it might be possible to fix the font errors.

I was hoping to snag one of the concurrent licenses for my permanent use and offered even to buy an additional one for that purpose as that would be cheaper. I was told that I couldn't have one and I should investigate the student version of the software. Unfortunately, the student version is only available to students in taught courses, not Ph.D. research students, so that wasn't any good. I mentioned to Thufir that I'd been turned down, reportedly by the head of software/hardware procurement within our department. Thufir promised to see what he could do. Then, last week, I received an e-mail last week from the lab manager, the person in charge of the procurement. He offered, if somebody would pay for it, to install an academic version of the software on my university-owned equipment for only £525 (~930 US/780 €). That was just for the base software and not also for the toolkit I need.

Why do I need my own copy? Can I live without my own copy? I can possibly do without my own copy as I can run it on campus, but I'm not on campus all the time. I do return to Canada for extended periods of time and we are investigating an option of moving back to Canada and having me commute out every quarter or so for a month as that would be cheaper than actually living here. Just last year I spent 6 months in Canada. Even if I am here, it's a problem if I just want to work from home. It would therefore be nice to have my own copy, but at what price?

I've told the lab manager that I'll get back to him. I'm meeting with Thufir on Friday. I also e-mailed MathWorks to ask about my situation and licensing arrangements for it. It does seem strange that their academic license is restricted by machine ownership rather than by reported use for the software. Their customer service auto-responder promises a response within 24 hours, but so far all I've received is the automatic response and a response from their database that my e-mail address has been updated in my profile. I have no idea what that's about. Maybe tomorrow will be better.