From Social Simulation to Integrative System Design

As the recent financial crisis showed, today there is a strong need to gain "ecological perspective" of all relevant interactions in socio-economic-techno-environmental systems. For this, we suggested to set-up a network of Centers for integrative systems design, which shall be able to run all potentially relevant scenarios, identify causality chains, explore feedback and cascading effects for a number of model variants, and determine the reliability of their implications (given the validity of the underlying models). They will be able to detect possible negative side effect of policy decisions, before they occur. The Centers belonging to this network of Integrative Systems Design Centers would be focused on a particular field, but they would be part of an attempt to eventually cover all relevant areas of society and economy and integrate them within a "Living Earth Simulator". The results of all research activities of such Centers would be turned into informative input for political Decision Arenas. For example, Crisis Observatories (for financial instabilities, shortages of resources, environmental change, conflict, spreading of diseases, etc.) would be connected with such Decision Arenas for the purpose of visualization, in order to make complex interdependencies understandable to scientists, decision-makers, and the general public.Comment: 34 pages, Visioneer White Paper, see http://www.visioneer.ethz.c

Spatial Dynamic Modeling and Urban Land Use Transformation:

Assessing the economic impacts of urban land use transformation has become complex and acrimonious. Although community planners are beginning to comprehend the economic trade-offs inherent in transforming the urban fringe, they find it increasingly difficult to analyze and assess the trade-offs expediently and in ways that can influence local decisionmaking. New and sophisticated spatial modeling techniques are now being applied to urban systems that can quickly assess the probable spatial outcomes of given communal policies. Applying an economic impact assessment to the probable spatial patterns can provide to planners the tools needed to quickly assess scenarios for policy formation that will ultimately help inform decision makers. This paper focuses on the theoretical underpinnings and practical application of an economic impact analysis submodel developed within the Land use Evolution and Impact Assessment Modeling (LEAM) environment. The conceptual framework of LEAM is described, followed by an application of the model to the assessment of the cost of urban sprawl in Kane County, Illinois. The results show the effectiveness of spatially explicit modeling from a theoretical and a practical point of view. The agent-based approach of spatial dynamic modeling with a high spatial resolution allows for discerning the macro-level implications of micro-level behaviors. These phenomena are highlighted in the economic submodel in the discussion of the implications of land use change decisions on individual and communal costs; low-density development patterns favoring individual behaviors at the expense of the broader community.

Exploring individual user differences in the 2D/3D interaction with medical image data

User-centered design is often performed without regard to individual user differences. In this paper, we report results of an empirical study aimed to evaluate whether computer experience and demographic user characteristics would have an effect on the way people interact with the visualized medical data in a 3D virtual environment using 2D and 3D input devices. We analyzed the interaction through performance data, questionnaires and observations. The results suggest that differences in gender, age and game experience have an effect on people’s behavior and task performance, as well as on subjective\ud user preferences

Why Inferential Statistics are Inappropriate for Development Studies and How the Same Data Can be Better Used

The purpose of this paper is twofold: 1) to highlight the widely ignored but fundamental problem of ‘superpopulations’ for the use of inferential statistics in development studies. We do not to dwell on this problem however as it has been sufficiently discussed in older papers by statisticians that social scientists have nevertheless long chosen to ignore; the interested reader can turn to those for greater detail. 2) to show that descriptive statistics both avoid the problem of superpopulations and can be a powerful tool when used correctly. A few examples are provided. The paper ends with considerations of some reasons we think are behind the adherence to methods that are known to be inapplicable to many of the types of questions asked in development studies yet still widely practiced

Why inferential statistics are inappropriate for development studies and how the same data can be better used

The purpose of this paper is twofold: 1) to highlight the widely ignored but fundamental problem of ‘superpopulations’ for the use of inferential statistics in development studies. We do not to dwell on this problem however as it has been sufficiently discussed in older papers by statisticians that social scientists have nevertheless long chosen to ignore; the interested reader can turn to those for greater detail. 2) to show that descriptive statistics both avoid the problem of superpopulations and can be a powerful tool when used correctly. A few examples are provided. The paper ends with considerations of some reasons we think are behind the adherence to methods that are known to be inapplicable to many of the types of questions asked in development studies yet still widely practiced.frequentist statistics; Bayesian statistics; causation; determinism; explanation; spatial autocorrelation; mulitple regression; international development; econometrics; comparative method; datasets; descriptive statistics; tabular analysis; visual analysis; maps; regession modeling; quantitative; qualitative; macrosociology; superpopulations; apparent populations; indeterminism; statistical assumptions

Overview of crowd simulation in computer graphics

High-powered technology use computer graphics in education, entertainment, games, simulation, and virtual heritage applications has led it to become an important area of research. In simulation, according to Tecchia et al. (2002), it is important to create an interactive, complex, and realistic virtual world so that the user can have an immersive experience during navigation through the world. As the size and complexity of the environments in the virtual world increased, it becomes more necessary to populate them with peoples, and this is the reason why rendering the crowd in real-time is very crucial. Generally, crowd simulation consists of three important areas. They are realism of behavioral (Thompson and Marchant 1995), high-quality visualization (Dobbyn et al. 2005) and convergence of both areas. Realism of behavioral is mainly used for simple 2D visualizations because most of the attentions are concentrated on simulating the behaviors of the group. High quality visualization is regularly used for movie productions and computer games. It gives intention on producing more convincing visual rather than realism of behaviors. The convergences of both areas are mainly used for application like training systems. In order to make the training system more effective, the element of valid replication of the behaviors and high-quality visualization is added

Heterogeneous resource allocation can change social hierarchy in public goods games

Public Goods Games represent one of the most useful tools to study group interactions between individuals. However, even if they could provide an explanation for the emergence and stability of cooperation in modern societies, they are not able to reproduce some key features observed in social and economical interactions. The typical shape of wealth distribution - known as Pareto Law - and the microscopic organization of wealth production are two of them. Here, we introduce a modification to the classical formulation of Public Goods Games that allows for the emergence of both of these features from first principles. Unlike traditional Public Goods Games on networks, where players contribute equally to all the games in which they participate, we allow individuals to redistribute their contribution according to what they earned in previous rounds. Results from numerical simulations show that not only a Pareto distribution for the payoffs naturally emerges but also that if players don't invest enough in one round they can act as defectors even if they are formally cooperators. Finally, we also show that the players self-organize in a very productive backbone that covers almost perfectly the minimum spanning tree of the underlying interaction network. Our results not only give an explanation for the presence of the wealth heterogeneity observed in real data but also points to a conceptual change regarding how cooperation is defined in collective dilemmas.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, 55 reference