• Big dog video - impressive, very expensive looking robotic quadruped from DARPA
• Blowing up - a 2002 article from New York Times focussing on Nassim Nicholas Taleb - a hedge fund investor looking for black swans.
• Shell shock - a write up of a researcher at MIT interested in biologically inspired self-assembling materials.

If you look at the wikipedia argumentation entry, you’ll see that Dung is mentioned in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) section. The underlying model for Dungine, Dung’s acceptability semantics, is interesting to people who work in AI and are trying to capture how people reason and debate, particularly with inconsistent evidence and automate reasoning in this context. In my lab we use ideas like this to try and improve clinical decision support systems that:

• recommend diagnoses for a patient with a history and a set of symptoms and
• recommend treatments for a diagnosed condition.

Clinicians don’t always agree, and neither does the evidence upon which they base their opinions. If we can adequately represent their arguments, then this software might allow us to automatically reason about which of those arguments we should accept.

In the business world one might use Dungine to:

• accept a recommendation from a source on the web or
• represent a decision about granting a loan,

but there are many alternative approaches to supporting these examples, including Bayesian methods or applying a set of prioritised rules. My intuition is that argumentation is most useful in situations where it feels natural to represent contradicting reasons for doing something (accepting the recommendation or granting the loan) but this is a new area, and there are too few examples of it’s application in the wild. So I’ve built this library to help people give it go, and in doing so gather empirical evidence to help us understand where it’s a practical and useful technique.

Is is very important to ask stupid questions. The amount that a developer is expected to know is huge. They must understand their own field of software development, which is rapidly expanding, the domain of their client and be able to think about both at the tiniest level of detail and the highest abstraction. It is inevitable that things fall through the gaps along the way, and often the only way to pick those things up is to ask stupid questions. If you are afraid to ask stupid questions you’re going to proceed much more slowly then you could otherwise. Of course, most people don’t like asking questions that they suspect might be stupid, but developers should consider this as part of their role.

One consequence of this attitude is that a software team, when it takes on a new member, must expect a whole series of questions from that newcomer about their domain, design decisions and working practice. They must allow for this in their planning and encourage this from that person. However, everyone has limits about being pestered about things that seem stupid, and my stated limit is that if someone asks me to show or explain to them the same thing three times I will be cross. Twice is ok (expected sometimes), three is not. I hope this encourages people to actively examine their level of understanding at whatever level of abstraction and document the processes they encounter (or, even better, review the documentation that exists).

Oh, and why did the first question suggest a lack of experience? Well, because we’re not actually paid by an organisation to write software (although generally of course, this is what we get a kick out of the most) - we’re paid to solve their technical problems in a sustainable manner. And generally this involves prioritising partial solutions. Thus if an organisation doesn’t understand why you wish to pursue a particular line of work, and you cannot justify that line of work in terms of a problem they have, then it’s legitimate for them to prioritise another piece of work for you. Sorry, but that’s just the way it is. You have the option to continue rich seams of development in your own time (I would say this was one of the primary motivations for open source software), or find an organisation that is more aligned with your own personal enthusiasms - this may mean starting your own.

These two references were useful:

• ubuntu forums
• paralipsis

On Friday the excellent information aesthetics feed pointed me to wikimindmap.org, an Adobe Flash visualisation of a wikipedia topic as a mind map. The image above shows the wikimindmap visualization for Sweeney Todd - the main character in the musical/opera of the same name by Steven Sondheim (chosen for it’s compact size, and because I’ve just been to see it performed at the Royal Festival Hall). This is very nice. It combines the “at a glance” loveliness of mind mapping with the collective wisdom of wikipedia. It may provide a way for humans (as opposed to machines - that is another story) to scan topics more quickly than scan-reading them.

This link is hot right now on del.icio.us (thanks to bluga.net for the thumbnail). It’s a site that shows a whole bunch of scanned business cards and assorted pictures in a grid. The grid is pretty to look at and could potentially contain a large amount of information. It reminds me of an idea I have for archiving greetings cards.

Electronic greetings cards don’t cut the mustard for me I’m afraid - I much prefer the real deal. But a month after the event they’re consigned to a memory box. I can’t throw them away because they are personal to me, but I dont know when I’ll look at them again and they take up space so I put them out of the way somewhere. I’d love to have a way of electronically archiving the greetings cards I receive in a similar way to this grid of business cards. But in addition to seeing the picture on the front of the card, I’d want to see what was written inside. So my archived greetings card page/application would need to be able to flip the card over easily (when you rolled over it perhaps) to see the message inside. Alternatively, I might want to flip the whole page of cards over so I could see all the messages and then roll over a card’s message to see it’s picture. This application would present a christmas or birthdays card haul in a single attractive view, allow me to look at the cards and messages that people had sent me in the past more easily and save me space. The implementation of the archiving and presentation tool would be fairly straightforward, but I have yet to find the piece of hardware that makes it easy to scan both sides of a stack of greetings cards. So for the moment it’s a little art project that I might get around to, one day.