OK, Now what?

• Who am I?
• You want to go to the Computing in the Humanities and Social Sciences (CHASS) Facility home page
• You want to go to the CHASS Datacentre
• Want to see our labs?
• What sort of software have I helped design?
• What else interests me?

My name's Michael Stairs, and welcome to my home page. As a staff member of the University of Toronto's CHASS Facility, Most of my time is spent as a senior applications programmer designing web-based software for teaching and research.

After earning a B.Sc. degree in Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence from UofT, I joined the Centre for Computing in the Humanities for its grand opening in the spring of 1987. May 1, 1996, the CHASS Facility was created from a merger of EPAS and my former centre. My interests in computational linguistics, and syntax in particular, originally attracted me to Humanities Computing. To be involved in what is a relatively new field has been exciting. I have since extended my interests to include support for the Social Sciences.

• Canadian Census Analyser is a tool available to member Canadian universities, that allows web-based retrieval of data from the Canadian 1996, 1991, 1986, 1981, 1971 Census Profile Tables, and microdata from the 1996, 1991, 1986, 1981 and 1971 Census data. The Analyser consists of a number of PERL programs that I wrote to allow retrieval of data from MSQL, in the case of the Profile Tables, or from huge flat files, in the case of the microdata files.
• CANSIM (Canadian Socio-economic Information and Management Database) is a huge server-based database of Canadian statistics accessible, via web interface, to cooperating member universities. I have written a number of PERL and C++ programs that are used to retrieve or plot data. I have also implemented similiar programs for all the databases listed below, which mainly comprise the CHASS Datacentre.
  • CRSP Database
  • IMF Databases
  • OECD Database
  • World Bank Databases
  • Penn World Tables Database
  • CFMRC TSE Database
  • Financial Post Corporate Database
  • Financial Post Mutual Fund Database
• PHTHONG, gives instruction in phonetic transcription. Development history: Ver. 1.0. 1992. Macintosh - written in HyperCard. Ver. 2.0 1997 JAVA - runs on any platform. The Hypercard version was used for a number of years in two courses offered by the Linguistics Department here at the U of Toronto. The new JAVA version replaces the old version, allowing access from any platform, and eliminating the need for our centre to maintain a lab to provide access for the program.
• TACT (Text Analysis Computing Tools), a text-analysis and retrieval system for MS-DOS. Ver. 2.1.5. 1995.
• The Historians Debate, teaches students the art of historiography through discussion of the English civil war. Macintosh Ver.1.0 - written in HyperCard.
• Arbourite, gives a tutorial for learning syntax in linguistics. Ver 0.9b. 1995. Macintosh - written in C++.

Phthong is currently being used by undergraduate courses on the St. George Campus, at the University of Toronto.

Currently, I am concentrating on developing WEB based software, designing server and client-based programs to meet the needs of the university community.

• Music

  
  • the official Grateful Dead page
  • Richard Thompson
  • Fairport Convetion
  • Sandy Denny
  • Yahoo - Entertainment:Music
  • Rykodisc Artist List
  • SugarMegs Audio MP3 files (Dead, Floyd, etc.)
  • Deadabase (Dead, Jerry Garcia Band, etc.) huge online free digital (MP3) music site

• Software Sites

  • Claire's Place - a great starting point designed by a fellow CHASS staff member
  • A collection of Windows 95 Home Pages
  • BugNet The Global Resource for PC Bugs, Glitches, Incompatibilities...and their Fixes
  • Jumbo! Shareware! Shareware! Shareware!
  • TUCOWS , The Ultimate Collection of Winsock Software.

• Personal

  • Three reasons why I'm always smiling...
  • and the reason I'm smiling even more, now...

You are the person to peruse de page, eh?