Color Psychology

I wrote for 15 minutes today.

We know something of the way the colors affect the human body--psychologically and phisiologically. There has been a considerable amount of research in the marketing area about what colors different groups of people appreciate. There has also been some research in the interior design area on the subject. However, most of the research in IS is about 20 years old. It has been conducted long before screens got very capible of great color represenation and before the web came on strong as a channel for commerce. The research needs to be examined and looked at and some needs to be done again in the context of web design. Can we tell the gender and income levels of people based on the color scheme they choose for their customized interface?

Introduction for Reuse/Anchoring

I wrote for 15 minutes today

Today I wrote about Tulane's problems after Hurricane Katrina shut it down in August '05. The university needed to meet payroll, but its HR systems were off line. The system administrators wrote queries against the backup data to process payroll; however, an error in a query resulted in the incorrect issuance of more than one hundred thousand dollars of payroll checks being issued.

Response to WSW99, What should it look like?

I wrote for 3.5 hours today.

It was all painful. I'm afraid that the paper in its current format will not read well unless the reader has the Wand et al 99 paper in hand. I'm especially troubled by our differing interpretations of Bunge's work. How can we keep this from becoming a he said/she said argument?

Multivalued Attribues

I wrote fro three hours today.

I spent my time mostly editing text and cleaning up figures. I'm struggling with issues surrounding how Bunge represents intrinsic properties.

Composite Mutual Properties

I wrote for 2 hours today

Wand , Storey and Weber acknowledge that attributes can be multivalued. However, when they implement a mutual property as a relationship, they deny that the representation can have more than a single value. They use the name of the relationship to indicate the value (see figure 3). However, Bunge clearly allows mutual properties to have multiple inputs to the function that determines the value. However, it is a functional representation, as such it can only have a single value as its output. What is the difference between specifying a predicate as having three inputs (one child, one male and one female) that map a single value (true iff the male and female are the parents of the child) and asserting that the "parents" attribute has two values?

Does this hold true for any higher order relationship?

Classification of concrete objects

I wrote for 2 hours today.

According to Bunge's ontology, classes are a way to group things (concrete objects). To be a class, things must have a common property. Because a property is a observer independent, subject to scrutiny, etc., the function of an thing cannot be used for classification. Function is either a use to which an individual puts an item (single-person function) or if it is generally used in a way by society, it could have a socially accepted function. Is a Louisville Slugger sports equipment, a weapon, or fuel?

Does Bunge Beleive in Subclasses

I write for 2 hours today.

Bunge's ontology has clear definitions of Class, Kind, and Natural Kind. However, Wand Storey and Webber (1999) claim that he also has a structure called a subclass. I am unable to find it. Wand Storey and Weber rely on the notion of a subclass to be able to handle relationships that are not optional. I'm not sure what the implications of this is. Perhaps it is just one more evidence of how far they are from bunge's ontology.

Categories versus natrual kinds

I wrote for 90 minutes this morning.

I'm working through the difference in meaning between a natural kind and a human-constructed category.

Clearly, what Bunge says with respect to "model thing" must be relevant here. Bunge states on page 122 that indicernables are represented by the same model things. This seems important for the idea of placing an order for an undetermined individual product. A person places an order for a model, not a thing.

Yet it does not capture the issue of categorization; in fact, Bunge acknowledges that "more sophisticated modes of representation" can be achieved through the use of categories, which he does not embrace (p. 121)

Model things are indicernables. Clearly, two if two people both have astrocytoma toumors, they are discernable, they will have different mass, different volume, different shape. The will be located in the heads of two different people. Yet, we get value from classifying them both as astrocytoma. The have enough in common that we can call them the same kind of thing. If fact, they are what bunge calls a "natural kind." This means that they share laws, which is the very reason that we want to classify them in the first place. So at least in this case, a natural kind seems very similar to a category. The point is that we cannot assign an attribute (with or without an ontic correlate) to a kind. A kind has all and only the properties that define it. That is, the kind is said to have the properties that all its member-things hold in common. So there can be a natural kind called "tumor" It has all the properties that the properties that are shared by all tumors. Likewise there is a natural kind called "Astrocytoma" and a natural kind called "Ganglioglioma" and a natural kind called "Oligodendroglioma." Clearly, the kind "tumor" has all the instances of Astrocytoma, Ganglioglioma, and Oligodendroglioma, and many others. However, we cannot assign an attribute to the kind "Astrocytoma" such as a "recommended treatment." A treatment can be recommended for each individual instance of an Astrocytoma tumor, however unless each one receives the same recommendation, it cannot be said to be an attribute of the kind.

This seems to be an important distinction between the natural kind "Astrocytoma" and the socially constructed category "Astrocytoma."

Ontological model versus Conceptual Model

I wrote for 1 hour 15 minutes this morning

What is the difference between an ontological model and a conceptual model. Wand and Webber argue that there should be a one-to-one correspondence between constructs in the conceptual model and constructs in the ontological model. Why? What is the difference in the purposes of the ontological model as compared to the conceptual model?

The example I am currently struggling with deals with the difference between negative attributes and negative properties. Clearly, an ontological model has no place for negative properties. A thing possesses properties, but the myriad properties that it does not posses represent no property at all. That is, a person has the properties height and weight and may have property called "brain tumor mass" but a person without any brain tumor does not have the property of "not having a brain tumor." From an ontological perspective, this seems to make sense as the existence of negated properties might require an ontological model to state what is not possessed by an individual--an extremely burdensome task.

But Bunge clearly acknowledges the existence of negative attributes (1977, p. 60). Would these be allowed in a conceptual model? What is the trouble with creating a class called "person" that has attributes that all people share in common that also has optional relationships to conditions (such as brain tumor) wherein all required attributes of brain tumors are represented?

Is married v. Years Married v. Date Married

Wrote 15 minutes today.

I worked on the revision to the 1999 Wand, Storey, And Weber article in Transactions on Database Systems (TODS). I'm dealing with the validity of allowing optional attributes in class definitions. I'm wondering about the difference between "is married" as a property that is either true or false, "years married" which is zero or more and "date married" which must allow a null value for an individual that has never been married. Semantically there seems little difference in the latter two, but clearly one is optional while the other is not.

Writing Log Introduction

Today I wrote for 90 minutes.

I spent the time revising the introduction to my paper on the adaptive reuse of SQL queries. Earlier today I attended a workshop on scholarly writing and the presenter (Dr. Tara Gray) discussed the importance of identifying the "Key Sentence" of each paragraph. The Key sentence is the sentence that encapsulates the idea of the paragraph. Although the key sentence may lead the paragraph, it need not, but usually comes in the first two or three sentences. It was interesting to me to see how my introduction changed as I thought of the document in these terms. I identified some redundancy that I had as well as realized that there was at least one main point that should be in the introduction that was not.

I'm convinced that if I can manage the discipline to spend 15 to 30 minutes per day actually writing (in addition to other research activities) that I will be much more productive than I otherwise would be.

Who knows, perhaps if I can get disciplined here, I'll be able to tackle diet and exercise...

Introduction

I am an assistant professor of Information Systems at Brigham Young University, located in Provo Utah.

I have recently come to the realization that if I intend to be an active member of the academic information systems community, I must make my scholarship and writing a part of my daily routine. Although I have never blogged before, I think that this may be a good venue for me to track my progress at various goals (such as writing every day) as well as a place to keep thought that I have about my research. I appreciate that this log may be of little interest to anyone but myself, but we'll see how it develops.