[Air-l] Technical competence

[Peter T.]

Yes learning to learn is important. But not to flame but to offer counter 
examples.

In my non internet reading on qualitative research in schizophrenia recovery 
I read Larry Davidson's Living Outside Mental Illness (New York: New York 
University Press, 2003). In his study interviews were recorded and then 
common themes in the text were statistcally analysed or basically counted. 
Larry also does quite a lot of chapters on methodology in his book. This 
would be the deepest I know qualitiative research I think. But qualitiative 
and quantitative can be mixed well.

Now Pascal and this is more a novel point. I was reading some conference 
proceedings from the computer science field on searching the web with XML. 
In particular a Pascal like script was described and written in one paper 
that searched for MathML documents on the web and the aim was to produce a 
collection of knowledge. The pascal script would gather web published math 
results and gather these. We have a global library but need to access it 
right?

I have been told fortran is a dead language by some by others that it is 
alive and well in industry. This all makes sense if one considers the number 
of computers in use is increasing there is more diversity these days.


Now I will venture into a grip maybe technical, consider the web as 
collection of knowledge. Why do we need a collection of knowledge? There are 
many answers but I don't think computer scientists even ask the why 
questions which is what social scientists and philosophers can ask.

Also another grip HTML wwas considered the best most universal system for 
information distribution but now XML is the new ideal. Certainly knowing the 
basics of html or XML lets one see the reasons for the pursuit of these data 
formats which each in their time get a lot of effort and fill up a lot of 
Internet production time.


Peter Timusk B.Math Just trying to stay linear
www.crystalcomputing.net >blog> http://logbook.crystalcomputing.net
www.webpagex.org >blog> http://notebook.webpagex.org