Current Projects

Keith Douglas' Web Page

About me	Find out who I am and what I do.
My resumé	A copy of my resumé and other documentation about my education and work experience for employers and the curious.
Reviews, theses, articles, presentations	A collection of papers from my work, categorized and annotated.
Current research projects	What I am currently working on, including some non-research material.
Interesting people	People professionally "connected" to me in some way.
Interesting organizations	Organizations I am "connected" to. (Some rather loosely.)
Intellectual/professional influences	Influences on my work, including an organization chart. Here you can also buy many good books on philosophy and other subjects via amazon.com. I have included brief reviews of hundreds of books.
Professional resources	Research sources, amazon.com associates programs, etc.
What is the philosophy of computing?	A brief introduction to my primary professional interest.
My intellectual heroes	A partial list of important people. Limited to the dead.
My educational philosophy	As a sometime teacher I've developed one. Includes book resources.

Current Projects
Brief update: June 28, 2007

I am currently working on several major projects:

Statistics Canada called yesterday. I have a job in their computing divisions. Now the big project in life becomes moving to Ottawa ...
I have recently joined the Canadian Philosophical Association and Society for Exact Philosophy]. I am also fairly familiar with basic aspects of computing infrastructure (C programming, HTML, server maintenance, etc.), so if you need that sort of role in your organization don't hesitate to look as well; I have up a page that details those skills beyond the summary in the resumé. I am also enthusiastic about working as a Educational Infrastructure Consultant. For a draft of my skills and previous projects in this area, please click here. I also am a CCNA. Related to this area I have attended some online seminars held by Macromedia.
I am also (slowly) working with Raven [link temporarily broken] on a book length manuscript on intellectualism in public life. It is unusual in that it is sort of a "choose your own adventure" style book - we intend it to be read in the order that a student or other reader finds appropriate rather than the order of the author. We have also made a point of committing to dialogues on each subject between us, as our central thesis is that intellectual debate is vital to every day life. All my drafts are finished, save for a few figures and equations. Next step: editing them all. I hate editing, though it is what one might call a necessary evil.
In between job applications and the project with Raven I have been also volunteering as both a web maintainer and a science and technology policy researcher at the Social Justice Committee. Next is teaching others to maintain and change it. This continues; now we work to develop more interactive content. I have been setting up PHPList and learning about QuizPress to this end.
I have recently moved this site to another hosting service and registered a domain name.

In addition to the above larger projects, I have reflected a little on and written some notes for the following:

A mereology for computer programs with ultimate goal of perhaps examining some copyright and IP issues.
A mereology for events and processes, which continues my work on events from UBC. (See my papers page.) The two mereology projects aren't necessarily going to stay separate.
Philosophy of chemistry and philosophy suggested by chemistry. These are underdeveloped fields and I would like to work out some thoughts I have had therein. (More mereology here, too, but also an examination of why chemists [and cell biologists!], pace Van Fraassen, are realists about shapes of molecules. The reason definitely seems to be that one can manipulate and predict with the assumptions of shape. Catenanes are especially interesting that way, as are predictions of stability. Added in Sept.: It seems a former colleague of mine [Rodney Snooks] from UBC has written a MA thesis on more or less this subject. His work is quite good, as one would expect from someone with a degree in chemistry.)
Science and science-oriented philosophy as metaculture and their connection to cultural freedom. (A metaculture is a system of culture that permits people, particularly the young, to make informed and respectful choices about cultural heritages they wish (or not) to adopt. Metacultural principles are found in Canada, the US, the EU, the UN and other organizations with varying degrees of merit and success.) I find the social sciences hold much promise to help understand what such choices involve. To this end, I read Surviving as Indians by Boldt at Raven's recommendation. He does approach some issues with some scientific spirit. I don't share his skepticism about the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, though.
(Very long term) Redoing this site with CSS rather than "old-time" markup; editing the pages.

I will put up drafts of this work as it becomes suitable for public review, so check again later ...

I have also put up an amazon.com associates program on the site, as well as a hit-tracking service. I have noticed that the plurality of visitors are looking for "educational philosophy". Who would have thought it? I do wonder why that is happening. Please support the site if you can, by buying from the associates program!

I have taken a few opportunities to learn about LaTeX, more about SQL (which I haven't used since 1999) and, eventually I also hope to learn Objective C, Cocoa and the XCode IDE. I have also written a brief program in Java to assist in those popular Sudoku puzzles. Email me if you want the classes or the source. (No GUI available yet. Sorry.)