Re: A whiff of reality...

[Matt Aylward]

This thread has been echoing in my mind all night, I have run into similar
misconceptions on the part of reviewers (and markers) with unfortuanate results.
I believe the issues involved in this discussion are critical, especially to
myself and others who meet with defensive and sometimes angry criticism
from empirical researchers in our fields, often because they do not understand
what is we we are trying to do.

In my case, Benedikt's comments ring true: 
> I hate to say this, but from reading the comment I got the impression that the
> reviewer did not understand the difference between an open-source API and an
> off-the-shelf software package.

and Bob Bell's: 
> I am more inclined to believe these are the comments of a reviewer who doesn't
> understand how SWARM differs from an off the shelf software package. 
The appendices of my honours thesis  contained the 5,000 lines of code that
constituted  my model because so many markers here thought Swarm was something
like Excel, -click a few buttons and get some numbers-. They never seemed to
have time to look into the references, and the word limit meant a deeper
explantion of swarm was impossible.

Many of us work in fields where our colleagues are not well versed in
modelling technologies, my supervisor and I are the only Botanists in our
department who have a good understanding of what current modelling technologies
are and what they provide. "Agent based modelling" means nothing to most of the
others. I have met with some vitriolic criticism from some of these people,
some of them see modelling as threatening, especially very visual modelling
such as my Swarm models.  I have met angy comments such as "How dare I assume
that an oversimplified computer game could possibly compete with their
20/30/40/50 year body of knowledge and tell them something they don't know."
They take the view that I am telling them "The model will tell us exactly what
is or will happen.", when I am really saying "The model might clarify our
understanding, suggest some ideas or help us direct our empirical research more
effectively." 
Reviewers such as this should not be reviewing modelling papers, but they do
and will continue to. I had a general modelling essay returned by three
markers, two waxed lyrical about the content and had obviously taken time to
read it carefully. The third had pencil scratchings up to page 6, then two bold
lines with "TOTAL GARBAGE" scrawled across the page, then not a single mark for
the rest of the 38 pages - his mind was made up -. Fotunately the two good
marks were from full professors of world standing in their fields (not
modellers) so I got over my distress quite quickly.

The need for a solid, readable paper describing what Swarm is to non-modellers
is very real. If anyone can get that together I would be very grateful and
happy to contribute in any way.

Cheers,
Matt



 On Tue, 02 May 2000, you wrote:
> We just had the experience of having a conference symposium paper
> rejected as the result of vitriolic comments by someone very offended by
> our suggestions that (a) individual-based models (fish, in our case) are
> more mechanistic and general if important behaviors are emergent instead
> of forced; and (b) computer implementation issues are important and
> modelers should take advantage of software professionals and tools like
> Swarm and our Swarm-based fish modeling package. An exerpt:
> 
> "I very strongly DO NOT believe that the development of software
> packages is the answer to the lack of use (of agent-based models) in
> management. In my opinion, modelling software packages ... have a great
> potential for abuse, especially in a management situation, where the
> person using software that they are not REALLY familiar with try to
> apply it to an inappropriate situation. It is too easy for assumptions
> to go unacknowledged, and results to be applied too generally and
> uncritically in these situations...It is also possible to too easily
> publish studies based on prepackaged models where the modeller lacks
> understanding of what the model is really doing.
> 
> Many IBMs are rather simple conceptually, and ... basic programming
> techniques can be perfectly adequate. The modeller, by programming their
> own IBM, gains in understanding of all the assumptions and formulations
> included in the model."
> 
> (This was especially interesting because another point we made was the
> importance of fully specifying a model on paper.)
> 
> Initially I was just going to send this to Glen R. as a warning in
> preparing the talk on software issues in agent-based ecology that we
> asked him to give this summer. But maybe others have had similar
> experiences and suggestions for dealing with it? (We chose not to waste
> any more of our time on this particular symposium.)
> 
> Steve
> -- 
> address@hidden
> Lang, Railsback & Assoc.
> 250 California Ave., Arcata CA 95521
> 707-822-0453; Fax 822-1868
> 
> 
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-- 
           Matt Aylward    <address@hidden>
Depts of Botany and Geography, The University of Western Australia.
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                  ==================================
   Swarm-Modelling is for discussion of Simulation and Modelling techniques
   esp. using Swarm.  For list administration needs (esp. [un]subscribing),
   please send a message to <address@hidden> with "help" in the
   body of the message.
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