Strange Aeons
sesquipedalia verba
Simon Wells is an academic researching Argumentation Theory, Automated Reasoning, Intelligent Agents (IA) and MultiAgent Systems (MAS) all approached through a ludic lens.
He is particularly interested in how these tools can be usefully applied to critical literacy, security, gamification, and complex systems.
TwitterBrainstorming a MetaLab
Against Optimality...
"What has happened is that we’re beginning to lose our innocence, or naiveté, about how the world works. As we begin to understand complex systems, we begin to understand that we’re part of an ever-changing, interlocking, nonlinear, kaleidoscopic world. So the question is how you maneuver in a world like that. And the answer is that you want to keep as many options open as possible. You go for viability, something that’s workable, rather than what’s ‘optimal.’ A lot of people say to that, ‘Aren’t you than accepting second best?’ No, you’re not, because optimization isn’t well-defined anymore. What you’re trying to do is maximize robustness, or survivability, in the face of an ill-defined future. And that, in turn, puts a premium on becoming aware of nonlinear relationships and causal pathways as best we can. You observe the world very, very carefully, and you don't expect circumstances to last."This kind of sums up the types of questions that I am interested in tackling and deftly explains why in my Ph.D thesis I was interested in finding potential solutions, with a focus on real-time, distribution, and low power, rather than optimal solutions from a more centralised algorithm.
Thomas Jefferson on Ideas
Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson
It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it, but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.
Considering the exclusive right to invention as given not of natural right, but for the benefit of society, I know well the difficulty of drawing a line between the things which are worth to the public the embarrassment of an exclusive patent, and those which are not. As a member of the patent board for several years, while the law authorized a board to grant or refuse patents, I saw with what slow progress a system of general rules could be matured.
The Founders' Constitution
Volume 3, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8, Document 12
Towards Federating Data in the WWAW
There are a now quite a few argumentation tools, a number of which are online such as ArgDF, Avicenna, MAgtALO. Many of these tools already use, or are planning to offer support for, arguments described using the argument interchange format (AIF). As these individual tools for working with argumentation are deployed they form individual points within an argumentation software ecosystem that I have alluded to before called the World Wide Argumentation Web (WWAW pronounced WOW).
I think that more tools will be developed in the near future that will diversify this ecosystem making it easier to create and work with arguments online. The next step is to begin considering how these individual parts of the WWAW can be joined up to fulfill the networked promise implicit in the WWAW name. This is a question that has been asked before with respect to FOAF. How can/should multiple FOAF data sources be federated?
Rather than suggesting a single means by which all of the AIF data resources are federated I think a healthier argumentation ecosystem would be constructed if there were multiple ways to join up the arguments in the WWAW. For example:
1. Autodiscovery - similar to RSS autodiscovery and FOAF autodiscovery so that an AIF description associated with a web page can be automatically found by applications that understand AIF.
2. Internal AIF Links - Within an AIF document there should be links to other AIF documents that are related. This would support spidering of the WWAW by starting with a source AIF document which links to others, which in turn link to yet more, ad infinitum.
3. Registries - Where links to distributed AIF documents & AIF repositories can be posted by their creators or discoverers.
4. Indexes & Search Engines - Created by search engines to enable AIF documents to be discovered & searched. Indexes work hand in hand with search engines and WWAW spiders to discover AIF documents, and possibly to add further value to them. Currently google should index any AIF document posted onto public web servers but there are also semantic web oriented search engines such as swoogle and indexes like sindice should also work, as well as yet to be developed AIF only search engines and indexes.
5. Repositories - Central locations where AIF documents can be posted and stored. Similar to the AraucariaDB, as of writing the only corpus of analysed argument available online. Analagous to tools like PTSW
I think that whilst there is a manageably small number of individual AIF tools then these federation issues are moot, and once the AIF is as well known and used as FOAF or RSS then again the issue is moot (although it is pertinent with respect to how best to work with the various resources). It is in the middle ground when we are trying to scale up to a wide adoption of structured argumentation on the web that good tools for advertising, linking together, searching, discovering, and adding value to the AIF are particularly important because they mark the difference between a small interchange format used by a minority of enthusiasts, and a widely adopted strategy for adding more value to data on the web.
Research Project Marketplace
I quite often experience two situations. The first is of students who want to find out more about the research that is done in the school, but who cannot identify a way in. The second is that I quite often have small development projects related to research or teaching that I would love to get done but just don't have the time to do myself. One way to deal with both situations would be to make that list of small projects available to the students who could then work on them of their own accord. This might lead to the student identifying an honours project choice earlier than usual, or might provide them with the opportunity to make more progress with their honours project by achieving an actual piece of research. Thus whilst ostensibly being extra-curricular activities, from a pedagogic perspective, there might be the opportunity for the student to gain some form of academic credit from their participation.
The benefits of such an approach are that researchers within the school can get small jobs done for them and could identify potential students to fill summer-job roles. Meanwhile the students have an opportunity to see what research is about whilst creating some software that they can put in their portfolio as a demonstration of their skills when they are looking for jobs at graduation.
There is also a case to be made that such a scheme would prove to be an enabling factor for improving the inclusiveness and social cohesion within the school, giving students who might otherwise be on the periphery an opportunity to get involved.
I would propose that a simple internal web site be used, possibly with a blog architecture, that academics can post project ideas to. Students could then respond to those ideas within the comments and get more information. I envisage a lightweight management model in which the student works mostly independently to solve the problem, unless the academic wishes otherwise, and multiple students could work either collaboratively or independently upon the projects. Some form of source control a la Sourceforge would be useful and release of all code and documentation under the GPL with ownership shared between student and researcher. This means that the student can continue to work on the software after they leave, if they wish, and the researcher can do likewise, forking the project if necessary. By also releasing the code publicly under the GPL then the school also gets to contribute new software to the public good so that the results of, possibly publicly funded, research doesn't get locked away from potential beneficiaries. This is especially important when you consider the amount of research conducted here that is aimed at supporting the elderly, sick, or disabled in their use of computers.
