Ken Laws

Summary

Retired. Hobbies include technical reading and aikido. Interested in metaphor and computational linguistics, especially within wisdom literature; someday maybe library science and the structure of knowledge, or the structure of procedural information and empirical knowledge in recipes. Hoping to make knowledge computable in at least one new application domain. Developing an integrated system for cataloging and pricing books and for tracking online sales, with subsidiary databases for authors, publishers (through time), cities, sellers, and customers, as well as edition, printing, copy, and online listing descriptions. Includes capabilities for scraping Web data, parsing book descriptions, and analyzing price histories and sales patterns. Simultaneously developing personal expertise in book collecting and selling, with special emphasis on martial arts, philosophy, spirituality, psychology, cognition, computer science, linguistics, and cookbooks. Specialties: Technology monitoring and reporting; bibliomancy (divination by just looking it up); mentoring (if anyone will have me); text editing; database design for semi-structured information; bibliographic data management; data capture, cleaning, transformation, and merging; pattern recognition and statistical modeling; personal entrepreneurship; rewarding self-unemployment.