hi (and happy new year):
i wanted to bring to the attention of SIMSOC that i have written and made available, computer code for carrying out computer simulations of social and economic phenomena (socioeconomic behavior) based on the realistic 'placement' of agents in social networks, thereby avoiding the need to use the artifice of locating agents on lattices (or of making use of cellular automata).
the code is written in the Mathematica programming language (which i refer to as M) . Using this code, i was able to readily re-cast the entire contents of my book "Simulating Society: A Mathematica Toolkit for Modeling Socioeconomic Behavior" which was reviewed in JASSS, in terms of social network behaviors.
The code is available at
http://library.wolfram.com/infocenter/MathSource/5216/
in two formats:
(1) a Mathematica notebook which can be read by anyone using MathReader which is free or Mathematica which is not
(2) a pdf
the social network modeling code is presented in the end section of the material, following a pedagogical explanation of how the Mathematica programming language works which should be useful to those who are not familiar with the M language (i used the note set in teaching in universities and industry for years, with great success. note: it was taught both as a 6 hr. tutorial and as a series of four 90 min. lectures). all of the code works, in the newest, as well as older, versions of the Mathematica software.
i hope that this material will be use of the social science modeling community - both to those who prefer to write their code from the ground up rather than using a pre-packaged computer simulation environment (following the words of Richard Feynman "that which i cannot create, i cannot understand") and to those who are interested in agent-based social network models.
Richard J. Gaylord, Professor Emeritus
--
“Can you imagine how hard physics would be if electrons had feelings?”
- Richard Feynman
"human decisions, whether personal or political or economic, cannot depend upon mathematics, since the bases for making such calculations do not exist"
- John Maynard Keynes
|