FW: J. Artificial Societies and Social Simulation: Vol. 6(4) published

[Robert Holmes]

-----Original Message-----
From: [hidden email]
[mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Nigel Gilbert
Sent: 01 November 2003 11:26
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Subject: J. Artificial Societies and Social Simulation: Vol. 6(4) published


The Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation
(http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/) published the fourth issue of Volume 6
on 31 October.

JASSS is an electronic, refereed journal devoted to the exploration and
understanding of social processes by means of computer simulation.  It
is located at <http://www.soc.surrey.ac.uk/JASSS/>. It is freely
available, with no subscription.
=================

In this issue, Ravi Bhavnani takes Robert Putnam's work on Civic
Traditions in Modern Italy and attempts to bridge the gap between the
study's historical starting point and contemporary observations, using
an agent-based model of social interaction.  His computational model of
the inculcation and spread of social capital supports Putnam's claim of
path dependence.  Moving beyond Putnam's study,  the results indicate
that the formation of civic (or uncivic) communities is not
deterministic, that their emergence is sensitive to historical shocks,
and that the absence of political boundaries lowers aggregate levels of
civicness in regions characterized by effective institutions.

Brian Sallans, Alexander Pfister, Alexandros Karatzoglou and Georg
Dorffner described their discrete-time model of coupled  financial and
consumer markets.  The integrated model  consists of heterogenous
consumers, financial traders, and production firms.  The production
firms operate in the consumer market, and offer their shares to be
traded on the financial market.  The model  is validated by comparing
its output to known empirical properties  of real markets.

Vito Albino, Nunzia Carbonara and Ilaria Giannoccaro contribute to the
sequence of articles on models of Industrial Districts published in
JASSS.  They study the multiple forms of cooperative and competitive
relationships within Industrial Districts (IDs) and develop a
computational model which balances the utilization of supplier
production capacity and the minimisation of customer unsatisfied demand.

Ivica Mitrovic and Kerstin Dautenhahn present a multiagent simulation
environment for studying agents' socio-political attitudes, based on a
bottom-up simulation philosophy where attitudes are grounded in the
sensory-motor behaviour of spatially distributed autonomous agents.  
Experiments with different initial agent types showed that agents with
indeterminate socio-political types tended to change to neo-liberal,
alternative or fundamentalist agents.

The issue also features a special section on 'Model-to-Model' analyses.
  The guest editors of this section, David Hales,  Juliette Rouchier and
Bruce Edmonds, explain that: "It is important that simulations be
replicated before they are accepted as correct. That is, results from
simulations cannot be  proved but only inductively analysed.  ...  In
its simplest form a result that is reproduced many times by different
modellers, re-implemented on several platforms in different places,
should be more reliable. "  The section includes six papers that in
some way compare and contrast different implementations of the same or
related models.  The papers emphasise the importance of replications in
advancing social simulation.

[NOTE:  JASSS will continue to be interested in publishing papers that
replicate or compare models.]

In the Forum section, Sergio Margarita and Michele Sonnessa describe
the JAS library, a general framework for web-enabling economic and
financial simulations. The system is built on Open Source software and
well-known standards.

In review section, there are reviews of books on Dynamic Social Network
Modelling and Analysis, Thinking with Diagrams, and Evolutionary
Economics.


================================================================
Peer-reviewed Articles
================================================================

Ravi Bhavnani
     Adaptive Agents, Political Institutions and Civic Traditions in
Modern Italy

Brian Sallans, Alexander Pfister, Alexandros Karatzoglou and Georg
Dorffner
     Simulation and Validation of an Integrated Markets Model

Vito Albino, Nunzia Carbonara and Ilaria Giannoccaro
     Coordination Mechanisms based on Cooperation and Competition  
within Industrial Districts: An agent-based computational approach

Ivica Mitrovic and Kerstin Dautenhahn
     Social Attitudes: Investigations with Agent Simulations Using Webots

Special Section: Model-to-Model Analysis
  edited by David Hales,  Juliette Rouchier and Bruce Edmonds

Editorial introduction: Model-to-Model Analysis

Keiki Takadama, Yutaka L. Suematsu, Norikazu Sugimoto, Norberto E. Nawa
and Katsunori Shimohara
     Cross-Element Validation in Multiagent-based Simulation: Switching
Learning Mechanisms in Agents

Juliette Rouchier
     Re-implementation of a Multi-agent Model aimed at Sustaining
Experimental Economic Research: The case of simulations with emerging
speculation

Juergen  Kluever and Christina Stoica
     Simulations of Group Dynamics with Different Models

Margaret  Edwards, Sylvie Huet, Fran?ois Goreaud and Guillaume Deffuant
     Comparing an Individual-based Model of Behaviour Diffusion with its
Mean Field Aggregate Approximation

Claudio Cioffi-Revilla and Nicholas Gotts
     Comparative Analysis of Agent-based Social Simulations: GeoSim and
FEARLUS models

Bruce Edmonds and David Hales
     Replication, Replication and Replication: Some hard lessons from
model alignment

================================================================
Forum  (Editor: Klaus G. Troitzsch)
================================================================

  Sergio Margarita and Michele Sonnessa
  Sim2Web: an Open Source system for web-enabling economic and financial
simulations

================================================================
Book Reviews    (Review editor: Edmund Chattoe)
================================================================

  Dynamic Social Network Modelling and Analysis: Workshop Summary  and
Papers<
  Edited by Ronald Breiger, Kathleen Carley and Philippa Pattison
  Reviewed by Sandra  Gonzalez

Thinking with Diagrams
Edited by Alan F. Blackwell
Reviewed by Suchi Patel

Evolutionary Economics: Program and Scope
Edited by Kurt Dopfer
Reviewed by Carl Henning Reschke

================================================================

The new issue can be accessed through the JASSS home page:
<http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/JASSS.html>.

The next issue wil be published at the end of January 2004.

Submissions are welcome: see
<http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/admin/submit.html>


_______________________________________________________________________
Professor Nigel Gilbert,  Editor, Journal of Artificial Societies and
    Social Simulation, <http://www.soc.surrey.ac.uk/JASSS/>.
Centre for Research on Simulation in the Social Sciences (CRESS),
    Department of Sociology, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK.
   Tel:[phone]  Fax:[phone]  [hidden email]
Simulation resources at <http://www.soc.surrey.ac.uk/research/simsoc/>