Re: [FRIAM] Open Source Project?

[Owen Densmore]

> It's all fine and good to try to lower the cost of entry to ABM,  
> but to
> get science done ABMers need a way to say something precise and  
> have it
> understood by theorists.   Pretty visual programming systems, GIS,  
> etc.
> don't necessarily accomplish that.

I totally agree, and indeed we've looked into more analytic tools for  
modeling.  Certainly at the surface level, tools that help you know  
how stable your results are are important (i.e. take the derivative  
of your model, so to speak).  Ditto for good design of experiments  
aids which give good hints at where your model should be studied  
most .. where are the "interesting areas".

And indeed, many of our models could have a more mathematical  
component.  Hmm..that gets me back to the earlier discussion on the  
gap between computing and math.  But in that sphere, one of the  
better talks given at the SFI BusNet was of researchers using both  
modeling and math together, until the math had to "assume a spherical  
cow" so to speak, and plotting their divergence

But the bigger picture of my wish is precisely that: we need to build  
a far broader set of easily integrated tools for ABM.  Far more  
important is the synergy amongst them than their ease of use.

 -- Owen

Owen Densmore   http://backspaces.net


On Dec 31, 2006, at 11:29 PM, Marcus G. Daniels wrote:

>>
>> Well, from our side of the world, obviously a killer simulation  
>> environment.
> I recently watched an interview on the Research Channel with Anders
> Hejisberg, inventor of Turbo Pascal and C#.  A former project  
> manager of
> his at Borland was talking about their abandoned visual programming
> project, Monet, that Anders was involved in before joining Microsoft.
> Anders remarked that sometimes "a single line of code is often worth a
> thousand pictures.   You die a slow death of a thousand lines going  
> from
> here to there."   [An example of the "lines" being the object/message
> connections i.e. MacOS X Interface Builder.]
>
> It's all fine and good to try to lower the cost of entry to ABM,  
> but to
> get science done ABMers need a way to say something precise and  
> have it
> understood by theorists.   Pretty visual programming systems, GIS,  
> etc.
> don't necessarily accomplish that.
>
> 
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org



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[FRIAM] Faces of the Dead in Iraq - New York Times

[Owen Densmore]

The NYT have done a fairly impressive web2.0 visualization of the US  
casualties in Iraq.
   http://www.nytimes.com/ref/us/20061228_3000FACES_TAB1.html

Grim but real.  My only concern is that the rectangular layout may  
hide somewhat just how many have died.  Possibly an additional list  
would highlight that number.  Putting "NM" into the search field and  
clicking on State shows the 22 losses from New Mexico.

I wonder if Bush will consider this treason.

 -- Owen

Owen Densmore   http://backspaces.net




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Re: [FRIAM] Open Source Project?

[Giles Bowkett]

> 1 - If you/we were to start an open source project, what would it be?
> 2 - What open source project would you like to see happen?

I'd like to see simple naive Bayesian classifiers in Ruby for blocking
blog spam. I was going to do something like this but got distracted.
Rails is only getting bigger, and blog spam is a real problem.

There's already an OS blog spamblocker being created, but it's
centralized, rather than decentralized, which I have doubts about,
even though it seems to make sense. The other point of significant
doubt there is that the thing is actually run by a guy who got busted
using Google spam in a huge way.

-- 
Giles Bowkett
http://www.gilesgoatboy.org
http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com
http://gilesgoatboy.blogspot.com


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Re: [FRIAM] Open Source Project?

[Marcus G. Daniels]

Owen Densmore wrote:
> But the bigger picture of my wish is precisely that: we need to build  
> a far broader set of easily integrated tools for ABM.  Far more  
> important is the synergy amongst them than their ease of use.
>   
My experience with Swarm was that it was not easy to do in an 
incremental fashion or with a typical open source approach.  Neither 
newcomers nor theory people want to concern themselves with the details 
of the technology, and these are the people measuring your progress in a 
public/academic funding type scenario.   My impression of toolkits that 
have followed is that there still isn't a great deal of community 
support at the level of programming.  This is not to say projects 
haven't succeeded, but they've succeeded with focused organizational 
support, not because of loose community cooperation on improving software. 

Still you can be sure that GIS-oriented static modelers will want to use 
their familiar ArcView package, and if they can't they won't get that 
involved in dynamical modeling.  I'm sure we could make a long list of 
important technologies to support from an ABM toolkit, but it takes a 
lot of user support to get non-programmers to explore these synergies, 
even if it really isn't that hard.   It's quite possible to work very 
hard on middleware, and then have a large community of people completely 
unwilling or unable to get off the ground with it, even with intensive 
support.  (E.g. in Swarm the ability to have the scheduler issue COM 
calls or call JavaScript functions -- that stuff was effectively 
middleware and had no immediate payoff except for another programmer to 
do further development work.  The problem is that all development you do 
on a shoestring budget usually needs to become visible relatively quickly.)
 
In spite of all this, I still think technology integration is one of the 
most important things.Software packages have to evolve with the 
times and build on other packages, or else user perception will kill 
them, if not maintenance burden. 

Another important thing is to provide leadership in new directions.  
Scientists are comfortable with this way of doing business and I think 
it is more fun anyway.  One way a small open source project could do 
this would be to explore a more mathematically tractable language that 
at once also provided all new capabilities.   The two new capabilities 
I'd like to see are 1) evolvable agent rules, provided at the language 
level, not in an ad-hoc way, so that agent behaviors could be inferred 
from observed data (sort like what Phil was talking about), and 2) real 
scalable parallelism.  




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Re: [FRIAM] Open Source Project?

[Owen Densmore]

> I'd like to see simple naive Bayesian classifiers in Ruby .. 

One issue Redfish deals with quite a bit is use of different  
languages within projects.  We'd like Python to talk to Processing  
(Java) and Processing to talk to Blender.

JDK 1.6 took a tiny step: defining a way for Java to talk to other  
"scripting" languages.  But not the reverse .. how to call Java from  
other languages like Python.

So figuring out a good way to manage using different languages  
together, synergistically, is pretty important.

Two ways to do this are simple file/pipe interfaces, and more  
sophisticated network/port stunts.  The problems comes when you want  
high interactivity between the different modules: for example agents  
programed in Python and visualization in Java.  .. i.e. "round-trip"  
interactions rather than serial interactions.

So maybe my wish for what we do is to figure out multi-language,  
multi-toolkit interoperability.  Ruby talking to R, Python talking to  
Java, and so on.

 -- Owen

Owen Densmore   http://backspaces.net


On Jan 1, 2007, at 12:12 PM, Giles Bowkett wrote:

>> 1 - If you/we were to start an open source project, what would it be?
>> 2 - What open source project would you like to see happen?
>
> I'd like to see simple naive Bayesian classifiers in Ruby for blocking
> blog spam. I was going to do something like this but got distracted.
> Rails is only getting bigger, and blog spam is a real problem.
>
> There's already an OS blog spamblocker being created, but it's
> centralized, rather than decentralized, which I have doubts about,
> even though it seems to make sense. The other point of significant
> doubt there is that the thing is actually run by a guy who got busted
> using Google spam in a huge way.
>
> -- 
> Giles Bowkett
> http://www.gilesgoatboy.org
> http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com
> http://gilesgoatboy.blogspot.com
>
> 
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org



FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Re: [FRIAM] Open Source Project?

[Marcus G. Daniels]

Owen Densmore wrote:
> So figuring out a good way to manage using different languages  
> together, synergistically, is pretty important.
>   
A datapoint:  Swarm interfaces are declared using an extended version of 
Objective C protocols.   These interfaces are parsed into Lisp data 
structures and then dumped in whatever form is needed for a given target 
language.   For example, COM dumps IDL, Java dumps Java interfaces, etc. 
and each dump compilable stubs as appropriate.  The callout and callin 
mechanisms of Swarm use the native interface to the respective language 
runtimes as needed to make or accept calls, do object reflection, etc.  
None of this requires any pipes or network features, it's all can be 
within single process.  By avoiding the need to ever to do direct 
assignment in the interfaces, its feasible to have a simulation made up 
of many components in many languages and given a sufficiently fast 
interconnect (e.g. RPC on Cell processors), it's also possible to span 
objects and messaging over processor boundaries.

Another, arguably better, way to do the same thing is to have compilers 
for different languages target an intermediate runtime.  Like .NET does, 
or to a somewhat lesser extent the JVM.  My favorite example for Java is 
Kawa (http://www.gnu.org/software/kawa).

> JDK 1.6 took a tiny step: defining a way for Java to talk to other  
> "scripting" languages.  But not the reverse .. how to call Java from  
> other languages like Python.
>   
One way to do this is with IKVM (http://www.ikvm.net) and IronPython for 
Mono/.NET. (http://www.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?ProjectName=IronPython).


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[FRIAM] Happy New Year

[Douglas Roberts]

All,

Here are a few pictures of the Los Alamos Hill Stompers (one of the bands I
play with) New Year's party gig last night.  The peacock pictures came about
from rescuing a hen who is stranded on our property because the snow is too
deep for her to walk all the way back across the field to her home (she's
forgotten that peacocks can fly). She spent the night in our bathroom...

http://www.parrot-farm.net/~roberts/hillstompers-12-31-2006/index.html


Ask me how you "rescue" a peahen...

--Doug
--
Doug Roberts, RTI International
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
505-455-7333 - Office
505-670-8195 - Cell

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[FRIAM] more on searchable math and functional programming

[Marcus G. Daniels]

Hi,

I ran across this paper today, and while on the face of it it might seem 
perverse, what it achieves may be relevant.
With these approaches, functional programming is possible and concise 
using XSLT, and as MathML is a XML dialect, there's the possibility of 
doing search and presentation (and algebra) in a unified way, 
browser-based or server side.

http://www.idealliance.org/papers/extreme/proceedings/xslfo-pdf/2006/Novatchev01/EML2006Novatchev01.pdf

Also, I offer this "don't mess with C++" URL, which is kind of amazing. 

http://www-static.cc.gatech.edu/~yannis/fc++
.


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[FRIAM] Rich site related to data visualization

[J T Johnson]

To the FRIAM gang, snowbound and otherwise

For those of us interested in data visualization, I just chanced upon this
fine site.
Check out:  http://eagereyes.org/

-tj
--
==
J. T. Johnson
Institute for Analytic Journalism -- Santa Fe, NM USA
www.analyticjournalism.com
505.577.6482(c) 505.473.9646(h)
http://www.jtjohnson.com [EMAIL PROTECTED]

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the
existing model obsolete."
  -- Buckminster Fuller
==

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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