Simulation as Journalism

[Benedikt Stefansson]

Forgive me for venturing a bit off topic. 

Since the Swarm list has been discussing the pros and cons of Java and
portability of simulations, I thought some Swarmers might find this an
interesting Sunday diversion:

The New York Times just ran a story on their website which shows how
simulations might be worked into a news story. In this case they give
the reader a toy simulation to play arround with to test the arguments
in Steven Landsburg's article in Slate this summer, about the MIT study
that argues that increased promiscuity would be an effective way to slow
down the spread of AIDS.

People interested in A-life and Agent Based Modeling have been
discussing how the actual simulations behind research results might be
published electronically in the future. It is interesting that the staid
old lady of publishing, which turned 100 this year is so up to date.

The link is http://www.nytimes.com/library/cyber/week/1009aids.html.

There is an uncomplicated sign up procedure for those who haven't used
the site before.

-B.
PS. The author of the Java applet used in the article makes some
interesting comments about the flaky state of current Java
implementations. Follow the link to he discussion section on the
webpage.

------------------
Benedikt Stefansson                 address@hidden
Center for Computable Economics     Tel. (310) 825-1777
Department of Economics, UCLA       Fax. (310) 825-9528
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1477          http://cce.sscnet.ucla.edu