I spotted an interesting book in my local library recently:  The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada [1].  I thought to myself, our government spent considerable resources on this commission.  I should at least browse through the final report.  I flipped through the first few pages.  I found a note saying that the contents are public domain.  In this blog, I reproduce some of the contents of the report to create a setting for my discussion on operational data. …

I am sometimes asked whether I am working on the stats, whether I am making progress on the stats, and what I do with all of the stats.  People are also prone to hyperbole.  I am told that I sure work on a lot of stats, I am always keeping myself busy doing stats, and I am the person to go to for stats.  I suppose my real job is more mysterious than the one others imagine that I do.  I first want to explain that for everyday people, the term “stats” or “statistics” often means historical…

In my blogs, I often distinguish between event data and metrics.  I usually say something to the effect that events help to explain the metrics - or events “provide the story behind the metrics.”  In this blog, I will be discussing two competing lines of thought behind events:  internal capacity and external demand.  Why do sales appear much lower for the month of June compared to July?  Some explanations relating to internal capacity are as follows:  “There weren’t enough agents in June to…

Even today there seems to be considerable debate over the exact meaning of "stress." During my graduate studies, I pointed out that there are similar themes in the literature pertaining to stress; that perhaps researchers have been overemphasizing the differences. Among the most persistent themes is the distinction between stress and stressors. Hans Selye asserted in 1936 is that stress is an internal response against any form of noxious stimulant. He described the environmental factors…

For a number of months, I have been generating codified narrative from films, fairytales, paintings, court cases, and news events. Codified narrative might be described as a tokenized rendition of the underlying content. There are many ways to do a rendering. Imagine asking 100,000 people to write a story based on the same general details such as scenery, major events, and specific outcomes. To the extent there are commonalities in the resulting storylines, I would say that "social…

In recent blogs, I have been distinguishing between quantitative data and narrative data. I believe that I separated the two forms relatively well. Although I originally focused on the differences in data in order to give narrative "its own space," actually there can be a symbiotic relationship between the two types of data. In my last blog, I said that quantitative data can be incorporated into narrative data. In my submission today, I will be discussing how the narrative can be used to…

I want to interrupt my "blogging fast" in order to discuss developments to my final programming effort called Elmira. On Elmira, among other things, I hold storylines from fairytales, movies, television episodes, and real-life court cases mostly dealing with abductions, forced confinement, missing persons, sexual predators, stalkers, and serial killers. Consider a movie like "Hostel" directed by Eli Roth. With my…

I routinely ask people who have degrees the following question: "So what did you do your thesis on?" Since I routinely encounter problems outside my domain, I like to be aware of the resources around me. I have been reminded that a student doesn't necessarily have to complete a major research paper to earn a degree. A student can just "do the program." As a person who has always chosen to do the research paper, I can say that this normally takes a fair amount of collaboration. There is a…

A prominent discrimination case in Canada involves a firefighter named Tawney Meiorin.  Meiorin had successfully performed her duties as a firefighter for many years.  She lost her job after the introduction of mandatory testing to determine her fitness for the position.  The testing measured aerobic capacity, and it was developed in a manner that many would regard as scientific; that is to say, it used a highly quantitative and analytic approach.  However,…