Blog posts

Anyone exposed to Computational Social Science (CSS) and one of it's tools, agent-based modeling, has been presented with a bird flocking model. These "boids" follow three rules as described by Reynolds (1987).

PLOS ONE has a paper titled "Scientific discovery in a model-centric framework: Reproducibility, innovation, and epistemic diversity" in which the authors used agent-based modeling to explore the idea of reproducibility of scientific results. To do so they created a framework of scientists' pursuit of a scientific truth, removed incentives and questionable research practices, and used model comparison rather than statistical hypothesis

I recently completed a scientific and statistical visualization course at George Mason University. As a final project I created a tool that you can use to explore how computer languages are connected to each other.

The hardware on which your simulation runs can change your approach to the problem and the skills you need. At the very least, using modern hardware should make your experiments go faster. During my master's program, I used an ASUS laptop for most of my modeling efforts. It was fine for most simulations, particularly when using NetLogo, but was inadequate for scaling to larger models. The 8 logical cores did, however, allow me to take advantage of NetLogo's Behavior Space to implement a type of parallelism, Single Program, Multiple Data (SPMD).

A well-used aphorism from British Mathematician Dr. George Box is, "All models are wrong. Some are useful." (George E. P. Box) The reason they are wrong is that models are a simplified representation of some real system, often a complex one. Repeatability is therefore an important component in discovering a model's validity. Yet there is some evidence that there is a crisis in the world of science in that many results cannot be reproduced.

NetLogo is a modeling framework used for agent-based, individual based, and cellular automata modeling. It is the most common software used for modeling at George Mason University's Computational Social Science (CSS) program. The course, CSS 600: Introduction to Computational Social Science, assists a new modeler in using this tool. NetLogo provides a Graphic User Interface (GUI) designer and a programming language that has its roots in Lisp via Logo.

There are a few things from the master's degree program I think are worth sharing. To do so, I plan to go back through the courses and post some work and related code. Before I leave my thesis behind...

In December 2017 I finished all academic work necessary for a degree of Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies with a concentration in Computational Social Science at George Mason University. (Update: The degree was also awarded in December.) To finish their academic work, students are given a choice of a thesis or final project. I went with the thesis as I thought I would learn more since it was presented as a more difficult path. I was right on both counts.

The Tangled Info website was created and is maintained by Dale K. Brearcliffe. Its purpose is to document my academic interests, past and future. I am currently finishing my master's thesis in Computational Social Science (CSS) at George Mason University.