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Simon Wells
Simon Wells

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.

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2011 (12)
2010 (27)
2009 (3)
 

Kernighan & Ritchie

Joshua noticed this post over at the Reinvigorated programmer about the best programming language book ever written and the benchmark by which any programming language book is measured. I am of course talking about Kernighan & Ritchie's "The C Programming Language ".

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American Rhetoric

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As we are looking at rhetorical devices and ways to win an argument this, American Rhetoric is a great resource for finding out more about rhetoric in the real world, particularly political, religious, and entertainment related speeches. I particularly like the audio and visual resources that give a real sense of the impact that a well presented and timely use of rhetoric can have on the positions of an audience, who are, after all, the real persuadee's in this kind of situation.

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Persuasive Technology

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To give you a little bit more of an idea of why argumentation is important, I found this blog run by the Future of Persuasion: Future as Persuasion project at the Institute for the Future. Persuading others is just one way that we make use of argumentation in order to achieve specific goals in the real world. As computer software developers we can also look to how persuasive elements of interfaces can be designed in order to influence behaviour. For example, visual feedback to the driver of a car indicating their fuel consumption can persuade the driver to modify their driving technique, influencing their behaviour for the better (the picture above illustrates the Ford Fusion dashboard in which a vine, on the right hand side, withers or thrives depending upon how economically the car is driven). Similarly, visual interfaces that give feedback on home energy consumption can be made to make use feel worse about consuming more energy, and better about reducing our energy consumption, again influencing our behaviour. One place to find out more about this is the AISB symposium's on persuasive technology [2008, 2009] that have run over the last couple of years which have drawn together interface designers, interaction designers, and, persuasion, dialogue, and argumentation researchers to present work and discuss both how to build persuasive systems, and how to use them responsibly.

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Wubi Ubuntu Installer

For those of you looking for an easier way to install Ubuntu you can try the Wubi Ubuntu Installer which promises to make dual booting an Ubuntu machine as non-invasive as using a virtualised machine yet as responsive as using a native install. Supposedly Wubi creates a file on the harddisk that to Linux appears to be a regular filesystem, and to windows appears to be a regular file located at c:\ubuntu\disks\root.disk so you can essentially run Ubuntu without having to create a partition for your Linux install to live in. Installing and uninstalling is therefore almost as simple as installing and deleting a regular windows program. Many of you will have realised that I am not the biggest fan of virtualising the desktop, running a Linux virtualised under Windows just feels abhorent to me, so anything that supports you in getting Ubuntu up and running with the least amount of blood, sweat and tears is a good thing. If anybody tries this out, please tell me how you get on.
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Bash Quoting

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I found a couple of articles over at the Linux Journal that will give you a bit more understanding of the wonders of quoting in Bash. The first article will probably be of more use to you as it deals with the basic of quotes in scripts whereas the second article deals more with the intricacies of quoting within scripts, in their example, scripting interaction with a MySQL database.
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Argumentation Theory in Academia

We are looking at just the basics of argument analysis in this module but if any of you are interested in a little more depth then there are plenty of places online to find out more. A good place to start if you want to know about what is going on in argumentation theory research is to look at the Argumentation Research Group (ARG:dundee) in our own School of Computing. So that I am not solely blowing my own trumpet, as a member of ARG:dundee, I also found this argumentation blog written by a postdoc at the University of Lugano in Switzerland. I found it whilst looking for examples of people other than ourselves using Araucaria, and discovered that both Doug Walton, a friend of ARG:dundee and author of the core text for this module, and Chris Reed, original developer of this module had attended Lugano in 2007 to speak at a seminar.

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Informal Logic Overview

I just found this interesting post introducing the subject of informal logic, a more formal way of describing what we call argumentation theory, or "the stuff what we do in this module". It is a useful but very light overview of how everyday argumentation relates to formal logical reasoning. What is interesting though is that the company whose blog this post is on develops argumentation visualisation software for use in online opinion research and public consultation. It is not as advanced as Araucaria, and delib appears to be taking a different approach to ours in the development of MAgtALO. Nevertheless it looks nice, and that is usually half the battle when getting user uptake, engagement and participation. An example of the kind of argumentation visualisation that the amap software provides:

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Media Distortion & Critical Thinking

An interesting article [ pdf mirror ] about distortion in the media which should give you an idea of why a course on critical thinking is a very good thing. I am not suggesting that you guys are not critical thinkers but that quite often people try to mislead or misdirect us and we can't always easily recognise the kinds of tricks that they are using to do this. Additionally it is also difficult to adopt the more adversarial mindset in which the media has to make its case to us before we believe them. Hopefully, by the end of this course we will be better at recognising the tricks that are used against us and will have a more critical default stance.

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