1

SPRING 2016

POLICYMAKING IN A COMPLEX WORLD

ITRN 701-003 (#17422)

LOCATION – ARLFH #468

TIME— 7:20PM-10:00PM WEDNESDAYS

DRAFT

Instructor: Prof. Hilton Root

Website: hiltonroot.gmu.edu/

Email: hroot2@gmu.edu

Office: Arlington Founder’s Hall, RM #636

Phone: 310-384-5545

Office Hours: 5pm-7pm (Tuesday & Wednesday)

This course is based on the premise that economic and social systems share

important properties with other complex systems such as evolution, living cells, the global

ecosystem, the human brain, the internet and the weather. It employs scientific theories

and innovations to understand complex processes that represent the most challenging

policy dilemmas of the twentieth first century: networks, epidemics/crisis management,

land use/transport/cities, model validation, public policy, marketing, and the information

economy. It explores the proposition that the frontiers of modern science can provide

social scientists with a common set of thinking tools for observing and abstracting patterns

of social behavior and ultimately for adapting policy mechanisms to address the wickedly

hard questions of contemporary, global political economy.

When policy makers confront a complicated problem, they often ask "What do we do

first?" or "what is the best solution?" But for problems that are not just complicated, but

complex in nature, those are the wrong questions. These problems -- which include

everything from state-building to peacemaking to consolidating democracy -- are created

by networks of interacting agents influencing each other in a dynamic system. So one

cannot isolate a first step from a second, or identify a single optimal solution -- one has to

approach the entire landscape of interacting units as a complex system, and identify its

feedbacks and interdependencies to understand the effects of different actions. Only then

can one build a strategy that is sufficiently dynamic and adaptive to attain desired

outcomes in a constantly changing environment. Without understanding the nature of

complexity, policy makers will continue to fail -- as they have so often in the last few

decades -- to make progress on crucial problems that develop from the dynamic

interactions among actors within linked systems.

LEARNING OUTCOMES:

2

The course will enable students to become familiar with the analytical framework of

complex adaptive systems and its application to global public policy. Students will acquire

new tools to understand the adaptive processes and possible discontinuities that will shape

the emergent global order. Analysis of the military, political, economic and cultural

interactions of both Western and non-western societies will illustrate and validate the

complex systems approach, challenging conventional conceptions of what the state should

do, and the ways in which it can act.

COURSE REQUIREMENTS:

Students are expected to keep up with each week’s required readings and to participate in

class discussion.

20%: Class discussion and one class presentation of a title in the syllabus.

20%: Midterm Take Home: A set of questions will be emailed to the class from which

students will select their topic and write an essay of 1,000 words.

60%: One term paper, 3,500 words due at the end of the semester or an agent based

model revealing a property of a complex social environment.

A) Write a 3,500-word essay in which you explore how the study of complexity can be

applied to practical problems of global public policy. Demonstrate potential

connections between evolutionary theories of complexity and problems in

global management, government or organizations. Students can choose topics in

public health, environment, critical infrastructure, global security,

cyberwarefare, demographic transitions As examples consider problems that are

inadequately explained; can models of evolutionary complexity can be applied

to provide a more realistic understandings and better policies than conventional

analytical tools? Devise experiments that can reveal laws or patterns that govern

how complex institutions, organizations or technologies organizations evolve.

OR:

B) Computationally adept students can construct computer-based simulation models to

analyze complex systems. Show how artificial worlds like Sugarscape can be

created to capture relevant aspects of the global problems under consideration

during the semester. Given all exogenous and endogenous factors, construct

model economies that evolve over time so that different scenarios can be

analyzed using the models as virtual testbeds for theory generation and

exploration.

REQUIRED BOOKS

1. Barabasi, A.L. 2003. Linked: How Everything is Connected to Everything Else and

What It Means. Plume.

2. Bar-Yam, Yaneer. 2005. Making Things Work: Solving Complex Problems in a

Complex World. Necsi Knowledge.

3

3. Beinhocker, E., 2006, The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the

Radical Remarking of Economics, Harvard Business School Press, Boston.

4. Root, Hilton. L. 2013. Dynamics among Nations: The Evolution of Legitimacy and

Development in Modern States. MIT Press.

5. Bill McChrystal et.al. 2015. Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a

Complex World. Portfolio Press.

Other materials will be available on e-reserves (password: global) and hourly reserves at

the library.

PART 1: The Basics: Paradigms, Models, and Tools

WEEK 1: JANUARY 20

What is Social Complexity: Building Blocks to examine global political economy and

complexity

“Theories of complex social systems are tested on massive scales everyday, when

governments implement various policies that often involve substantial resources and

ultimately have tremendous impacts on the lives of countless citizens” (Miller and Page

2007: 235). Scholars from many disciplines are applying perspectives from the study of

dynamical systems to problems of global and international public policy. How will this

affect some of the basic paradigms of governance, development policy, foreign policy

and international relations?

Social Complexity 1: Overview: via@YouTube (youtu.be/kkcGr3y70bk?a via

@youtube) This module will provide a quick overview to the application theory to the

social sciences. See Complexity Academy@Complexityacad

Root, Hilton L. 2013. Dynamics Among Nations: The Evolution of Legitimacy and

Development in Modern States. MIT Press. Chapter 1, pages 1 - 15

Johnson, Jeffrey. 2010. “The Future of the Social Sciences and Humanities in the Science

of Complex Systems.” Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research 23

(2): 115–134. doi:10.1080/13511610.2010.518422.

Recommended Reading

Simon, Herbert A. 1996. The Sciences of the Artificial - 3rd Edition. third edition. The

MIT Press. Chapter 8: The Architecture of Complexity: Hierarchic Systems pp. 170 –

182

Johnson, Neil. 2009. Simply Complexity: A clear guide to complexity theory. Reprint.

Oneworld. (pp. 3 – 18)

WEEK 2: JANUARY 27

Topic: Why Complexity

- Why do all companies, large and small, eventually die but cities generally persist?

- Why does socio-economic complexity accelerate?

4

- How do selfish agents come to form groups that are not internally selfish?

- How do low-probability events and gradual-unfolding trends have far-reaching

influence on the long-term future?

- How can policymaking be made more sensitive to global long-term perspectives?

-

Bar-Yam, Yaneer. 2005. Making Things Work: Solving Complex Problems in a Complex

World. Necsi Knowledge. Chapters 1 – 2 and 5 – 7, pages 21 – 40 and 61 – 86.

Root, Hilton L. 2013. Dynamics Among Nations: The Evolution of Legitimacy and

Development in Modern States. MIT Press. Chapter 2, pages 15 – 34 and Glossary 237-

247.

Recommended Readings: Levin, Simon A. 1992. “The Problem of Pattern and Scale in Ecology: The Robert H.

MacArthur Award Lecture.” Ecology 73 (6) (December 1): 1943–1967.

doi:10.2307/1941447.

Schelling, T.C. (1971), 'Dynamic Models of Segregation', Journal of Mathematical

Sociology, 1(1): 143-186.

WEEK 3: FEBRUARY 3

Topic: The Economy as a Complex Adaptive System

-Why do the rich get richer?

Did complexity cause the demise of central planning and will it cause the

reconsideration of neo-classical models of economic development as well?

How do the global trends of growing economic and social inequalities result from

the globalization of resource use, production and consumption?

Root, Hilton L. 2013. Dynamics Among Nations: The Evolution of Legitimacy and

Development in Modern States. MIT Press. Chapter 3, pp. 35 - 56

Bienhocker, Eric D. The Origin of Wealth. Harvard Business School Press. Pages 415 –

450.

Arthur, B., Durlauf, S. and Lane, D. (1997). The Economy as an Evolving Complex

System II. Addison Wesley, Redwood City Ca. Chapter 1.

Recommended

Ormerod, Paul. 2012. Positive Linking. Faber & Faber. Chapters 1 – 6

William A. Brock, Karl-Gan Maler, and Charles Perrings “Resilience and Sustainability:

The Economic Analysis of Nonlinear Dynamic Systems 261-289

“Economics Focus: Agents of Change.” The Economist, July 22, 2010

http://www.economist.com/node/16636121.

5

Blanchard, Olivier J. 2008. The State of Macro. Working Paper. National Bureau of

Economic Research. http://www.nber.org/papers/w14259.

Simon, Herbert A. 1955. “A Behavioral Model of Rational Choice.” The Quarterly

Journal of Economics 69 (1) (February 1): in Gunderson and Holling: 99–118.

WEEK 4: FEBRUARY 10

Topic: Modeling Techniques

Guest Speaker: Steve Scott- MITRE Cooperation

Reading Robert Axtell and Doyne Farmer http://breakthroughs.csmonitor.com/the-economy, part of a series the

“Christian Science Monitor” is doing on complex systems more broadly

(e.g., cities, diseases, traffic).

WEEK 5: FEBRUARY 17

Social Networks, Culture, Cognition and Social Evolution

- How can the global convergence of information and communications

technologies work for everyone?

- How can the threat of new and reemerging diseases and immune micro-organisms

be reduced?

- Is there any hope of quality in a world where anyone having a Twitter account is

an expert?

- What will be the impact of growing interdependence and network density on

social movements, protest, social exclusion, social mobility, immigrations,

competition between ethnic groups, and on divergent globalising forms of

capitalism?

Barbasi, Albert-Laszlo. 2003. Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else

and What It Means. Plume.

Bar-Yam, Yaneer. 2005. Making Things Work: Solving Complex Problems in a Complex

World. Necsi Knowledge. Chapter 3, pages 41 - 51

Axelrod, Robert. 1997. The Dissemination of Culture: A Model with Local Convergence

and Global Polarization. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 41(2): 203-226

Richerson, Peter J, and Robert Boyd. 2005. Not by Genes Alone: How Culture

Transformed Human Evolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Chapter 1 – 4,

pages 1 – 147

Recommended Ormerod, Paul. 2012. Positive Linking. Faber & Faber. Chapter 7.

6

Rendell, L., R. Boyd, D. Cownden, M. Enquist, K. Eriksson, M. W. Feldman, L. Fogarty,

S. Ghirlanda, T. Lillicrap, and K. N. Laland. 2010. “Why Copy Others? Insights from the

Social Learning Strategies Tournament.” Science 328 (5975) (April 9): 208–213.

Easley, David and Jon Klienberg. 2010. Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning

About a Highly Connected World. New York: Cambridge University Press. chapter 1-5

Hausmann, Ricardo, and Cesar Hidalgo. 2011. The Atlas of Economic Complexity:

Mapping Paths to Prosperity. Harvard Kennedy School,

htttp://www.cid.harvard.edu/documents/complexityatlas.pdf.

Stanford Network Analysis Project (SNAP) Website at: http://snap.stanford.edu

PART 2: PROBLEM SOLVING:

GREAT TRANSTIONS IN HUMAN HISTORY

WEEK 6: FEBRUARY 24

The Great Divergence of East and West,

Reading

Root, “The Gradual Development and Sudden Demise of Social Order” will be sent to

students via email

WEEK 7: MARCH 2

Transitions and System Innovations: A Co-evolutionary and Multilevel Perspective

H. Root “Innovation Systems in Europe and China: Disruptive Innovation in World

History” via email

F.W. Geels. 2005. “Process and Pattern in Transition and System Innovation: Refining

the Co-Evolutionary Multi-level Perspective.” Technological Forecasting & Social

Change 72: pp. 681-696.

Audley Genus, Ann-Marie Coles. 2008. “Rethinking the Multi-level Perspective of

Technological Transitions.” Research Policy 37: pp.1436-1445.

MARCH 9 SPRING BREAK NO CLASS

WEEK 8: MARCH 16

Global Diversities Reconsidered:

International relations continue to exhibit unyielding diversity across nations despite the

deepening of globalization and the frequent cross-cultural diffusion of policies and

behaviors. While the weight of the global economy is shifting with the economic rise of

large, middle-income countries (the so called BRICS), the consequences of this shift for

political outcomes remain to be seen. Under what conditions, for example, will global

economic institutions reform their structures and decision-making? For scholars of

comparative politics, diversities persist within countries, within regions and over time.

Despite the spread of democracy to many parts of the world, mixed and authoritarian

regimes remain in – or have returned to – many nations. What are the implications of this

institutional variation for the quality of governance, for citizens’ well being and, for

7

economic outcomes? How can complexity studies enable political scientist to define and

conceptualize the persistence of diversities in global political economy

- How will the different local models of social order shape the multi-level context

of global governance?

- What impact will frameworks designed to fulfil the local search for cultural

authenticity have on global governance and global stability?

- How will the important example of the successful globalizing economies of East

Asia and China be diffused?

Root, Hilton "Fast, Slow and Endless Variation Drives Global Development,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs (In Press, 2016), [copy will be emailed to

class].

Root, “An Evolutionary Theory of Globalization”

Recommended

Larry Diamond. 2015. “Facing up to the Democratic Recession.” Journal of Democracy

26, 1 (Jan. 2015): 141-155 and

Larry Diamond and Marc Plattner, 2015 Democracy in Decline? Johns Hopkins

University Press

Weyland, Kurt. 2008. Towards a New Theory of Institutional Change. World Politics,

60(2): 281-314

Inglehart, Ronald, and Christian Welzel. 2007. Modernization, Cultural Change, and

Democracy: The Human Development Sequence. Cambridge Univ. Press. (pp. 15 – 48)

Root, Hilton L. 2013. Dynamics Among Nations: The Evolution of Legitimacy and

Development in Modern States. MIT Press. Chapters 4 – 5, pages 57 - 74

WEEK 10: MARCH 23

Uncertainty, Risk and Institutions

Readings to be posted

March 30

An Ecological Approach to Social Institutions and State Capacity

- Why if most policies fail, do states grow larger?

- How can genuine democracy emerge from authoritarian regimes?

- parallel political modernization – China and Europe.

- How will the models of authoritarian growth impact communities, states and

international systems?

Reading,

Root, 2013: 112-175.

Recommended

8

Holling, C.S. 1973. “Resilience and stability of ecological systems”. Annual Review of

Ecology and Systematics 4: 1-24.

Marten Scheffer, Francis Westley, William Brock, and Milena Holmgren 2002.

“Dynamic Interaction of Societies and Ecosystems—Linking Theories From Ecology,

Economy, and Sociology” in Gunderson and Holling: 195-239

Cederman, Lars-Erik. 1997. Emergent Actors in World Politics: How States and Nations

Develop and Dissolve. Princeton University Press. (Chapters 1 - 2). Available on library

e- reserves

S.A. Levin. 1999. Fragile Dominion: Complexity and the Commons. Reading: Perseus

Books.

Buzan, Barry and Richard Little (2000), International Systems in World History:

Remodeling the study of international relations. Oxford University press (Chapter 1).

Available on library e- reserves

North, Douglass C., John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast. 2009. Violence and

Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. 1st

ed. Cambridge University Press. Selections (TBA)

PART III: MANAGERIAL DILEMMAS OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

WEEK 12: APRIL 6

Development Assistance and Complexity for Practitioners

- Why do outbreaks of political or economic instability occur?

- How can we separate causes into structural conditions and triggering events?

Root, Hilton, Jones, Harry and Wild, Leni. 2014. “Managing complexity and uncertainty

in development policy and practice”. Working Paper ODI,

http://www.odi.org/sites/odi.org.uk/files/odi-assets/events-documents/5191.pdf

Root, Hilton L. 2013. Dynamics Among Nations: The Evolution of Legitimacy and

Development in Modern States. MIT Press. Chapter 6, pages 95 - 114

Ramalingam, Ben. “From Best Practice to Best Fit”

http://www.odi.org/sites/odi.org.uk/files/odi-assets/publications-opinion-

files/9159.pdf

Recommended

Raif Yorque, Brian Walker, C.S. Holling, Lance H. Gunderson, Carl Folke, Stephen

Carpenter, and William Brock, “Toward an Integrative Synthesis” in Gunderson and

Holling: 419-438 (e reserves).

Ramalingam, Ben. 2013. Aid on the Edge of Chaos: Rethinking International

Cooperation in a Complex World. London: Oxford University Press. Part III, pages 239 –

364

9

Bar-Yam, Yaneer. 2005. Making Things Work: Solving Complex Problems in a Complex

World. Necsi Knowledge. Chapters 14, pages 201 – 217

Barder, Owen. 2012. “What Is Development?” Global Development: Views from the

Center. http://blogs.cgdev.org/globaldevelopment/2012/08/what-is-development.php.

WEEK 13: APRIL 13

Managing Complexity: The `New Economy ‘and the New Security Environment and

Bill McChrystal et.al. 2015. Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex

World. Portfolio Press.

Hilton Root, “Opening the Doors of Invention” (download at website: hiltonroot.gmu.edu)

http://hiltonroot.gmu.edu/pdfs/published_articles/opening%20the%20doors%20of%20inv

ention.pdf

PART 4: THE FUTURE and the END of CERTAINTY

WEEK 14: APRIL 20

Financial Crisis

Root, Hilton. 2012. "The Policy Conundrum of Financial Market Complexity" in

Research Handbook on Banking and Governance (edited by James R. Barth, Clas

Wihlborg and Chen Lin). Northampton: Edward Elgar Publishing. Chapter 20. E-

RESERVE

WEEK 15: APRIL 27

Collapse or Prosperity?

- How can shared values and new security strategies reduce ethnic conflicts,

terrorism, and the use of weapons of mass destruction?

- How can transnational crime and terrorist networks be stopped from becoming

more powerful and sophisticated global enterprises?

- What kinds of network-based cooperation are likely to replace the post-

hegemonic international order based on liberal world order?

See “Collapse of Complex Societies by Dr. Joseph Tainter” youtube.

Jarret Diamond, “Why do Societies Collpase” youtube

Root, Hilton L. 2013. Dynamics Among Nations: The Evolution of Legitimacy and

Development in Modern States. MIT Press. Chapters 10 – 11, pages 197 – 236

Bar-Yam, Yaneer. 2005. Making Things Work: Solving Complex Problems in a Complex

World. Necsi Knowledge: 259 – 274

10

Schweller, Randall. 2014. The Age of Entropy or Why the New World Order Won’t be

Orderly. Foreign Affairs, June 16, 2014

Goldstone, Jack A. “The New Population Bomb” Foreign Affairs 89, no. 1 (January

2010). http://www.foreignaffairs.com/print/65877.

FINAL – MAY 4

For Reference, modules of previous years

Cities as Complex Systems-

Recommended Readings

http://www.envplan.com/openaccess/b4002ed.pdf

http://www.santafe.edu/media/workingpapers/13-03-008.pdf

http://www.complexcity.info/ (A general exploration of this website plus reviews of

Michael Batty's, The New Science of Cities)

http://www.citylab.com/design/2014/11/moving-toward-an-evolutionary-theory-of-

cities/381839/

*** Students who are taking this course under the CSS course number MUST execute a

term project that uses computation in some essential way.

Policy on Plagiarism

The profession of scholarship and the intellectual life of a university as well as the field

of public policy inquiry depend fundamentally on a foundation of trust. Thus any act of

plagiarism strikes at the heart of the meaning of the university and the purpose of a

graduate education. It constitutes a serious breach of professional ethics and it is

unacceptable.

Plagiarism is the use of another’s words or ideas presented as one’s own. It includes,

among other things, the use of specific words, ideas, or frameworks that are the product

of another’s work. Honesty and thoroughness in citing sources is essential to professional

accountability and personal responsibility. Appropriate citation is necessary so that

arguments, evidence, and claims can be critically examined.

Plagiarism is wrong because of the injustice it does to the person whose ideas are stolen.

But it is also wrong because it constitutes lying to one’s professional colleagues. From a

prudential perspective, it is shortsighted and self-defeating, and it can ruin a professional

career.

Any plagiarized assignment will receive an automatic grade of “F.” This may lead to

failure for the course.

11

To help enforce the policy on plagiarism, all written work submitted in partial fulfillment

of course or degree requirements must be available in electronic form so that it can be

compared with electronic databases, as well as submitted to commercial services.

Statement on special needs of students

If you are a student with a disability and you need academic accommodations, please see

me.

Useful Background Sources: (Not Required) For a general overview of complexity:

Lance H. Gunderson and C.S. Holling eds., 2002. Panarchy: Understanding

Transformations in Human and Natural Systems Island Press, Washington DC.

Epstein, Joshua M. and Robert Axtell. 1996. Growing Artificial Societies, Social

Science from the Bottom Up, Brookings Institution Press, Washington, DC.

M. Mitchell Waldrop, 1993, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of

Chaos. Simon & Schuster.

Mark Buchanan. 2007. Social Atom: Why the rich get richer, cheaters get caught, and

your neighbor usually looks like you. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Mandelbrot, Benoit and Richard L. Hudson, 2004, The (Mis)behavior of Markets: A

Fractal View of Risk, Ruin, and Reward, Basic Books, New York.

Mayer, Ernst. 2001. What Evolution Is. Basic Books, A Member of the Peruses

Books Group

Page, Scott. 2011. Diversity and Complexity. Princeton University Press.

Mitchell, Melanie. 2009. Complexity: A Guided Tour. Oxford University Press

Simon, Herbert A. 1996. The Sciences of the Artificial - 3rd Edition. 3rd ed. The MIT

Press

Acemoglu / Robinson / Verdier. "Can't We All Be More Like

Scandinavians? Asymmetric Growth and Institutions in an Interdependent World?”

General Software, Toolkits, and Hardware

A website reviewing academic work on evolutionary complexity and social science is

http://www.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/

12

Ada for Agent-Based Simulation

From Bruce R. Barkstrom (NOAA National Climate Data Center): "Ada, a

general purpose programming language originally developed by the U.S.

Department of Defence in 1983, appears to provide an appealing tool for

developing agent-based software. The language has undergone two major

revisions, one in 1995, and a second in 2005. An excellent open-source

implementation is available with the GPL license at the AdaCore Site, from

which it is possible to download both the GNAT GPL version and the GPS

Integrated Development Environment, as well as numerous other libraries and

toolkits. The reason Ada would appear to be an attractive language for agent-

based simulations is that Ada defines a model for concurrent programming as part

of the language itself. A task is an active component encapsulating a light-weight

process and it provides a simple model for executing multiple code blocks

concurrently - and for allowing different tasks to communicate and synchronize.

In cases in which it is necessary for concurrent processes to avoid interference,

Ada also provides protected entries and tasks. Because Ada has been designed to

handle embedded, distributed systems, it also has excellent exception handling

capabilities."

Brahms: Multi-Agent Discrete-Event Simulation (Java based)

From the developers: " Brahms, developed by the Brahms Team in the

Computational Sciences Division at the NASA Ames Research Center, is a multi-

agent discrete-event simulation environment. It is also an Agent-Oriented

Language for implementing real-time distributed agents. There is an agent

language construct that can inherit from multiple group constructs. This permits

the modeling of teams of agents either interacting in one model or distributed over

multiple models. Agents are belief-based (BDI) activity-oriented, and both

deliberative and reactive. Besides agents, the Brahms language also includes

constructs for objects and object-class inheritance for modeling of data objects

and real world artifacts. Agents and objects are located in a conceptual geography

model, enabling agent and object movement in this geography. The Brahms byte-

code is XML, which is interpreted by the Brahms Virtual Machine. Each Brahms

agent executes in a separate Java thread using a subsumption-based activity and

rule execution engine. Multiple Brahms Virtual Machines can interact together

via a network using a message- and directory-based communication layer. Agents

can publish themselves and locate others on a network, using a distributed

directory service. Agents interact via a message-based communication layer that

can be based on any low-level communication protocol, such as Corba, UDP,

TCP/IP, SOAP."

Brahms can be downloaded at Agent iSolutions. A Tutorial on Brahms is also

available.

Breve: 3-D Simulation Environment (Open Source)

13

Breve is a free software package that provides a 3-D environment for the

simulation of decentralized systems and artificial life. Users define the behaviors

of agents in a 3-D world and observe how they interact. Breve includes physical

simulation and collision detection for the simulation of realistic creatures, and an

OpenGL display engine so that users can visualize their simulated worlds. It is

available for Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows platforms.

MASON: Multi-Agent Simulator - Latest Release (Java, Open Source)

The George Mason University Evolutionary Computation Laboratory and Center

for Social Complexity has announced a new release (MASON 12) of the MASON

multiagent simulation toolkit. MASON contains both a model library and an

optional suite of visualization tools in 2D and 3D. MASON is a joint effort

between George Mason University's ECLab (Evolutionary Computation

Laboratory) and the GMU Center for Social Complexity, and was designed by

Sean Luke, Gabriel Catalin Balan, and Liviu Panait, with help from Claudio

Cioffi-Revilla, Sean Paus, Daniel Kuebrich, and Keith Sullivan. A SwarmFest04

presentation on MASON can be accessed here.

Repast Latest Releases (Java,Python,C#; Open Source)

Repast (REcursive Porous Agent Simulation Toolkit) is an agent-based simulation

toolkit specifically designed for social science applications. Originally developed

by researchers at the University of Chicago and the Argonne National Laboratory,

Repast is now managed by the non-profit volunteer organization ROAD (Repast

Organization for Architecture and Development). Repast is currently released in

four versions supporting model development in three different languages: RepastJ

(Java based); RepastPy (based on the Python scripting language); Repast.Net

(implemented in C#, but any .Net language can be used); and Repast S

(Simphony, Java-based, developer's alpha release 2). Repast runs on virtually all

modern computing platforms (e.g., Windows, Mac OS, and Linux). The latest

Repast releases, along with detailed technical information regarding the

installation and use of RePast, can be found at the RePast Sourceforge Website.

NetLogo is a cross-platform multi-agent programmable modeling environment.

NetLogo was authored by Uri Wilensky in 1999 and is under continuous

development at the CCL (the people who brought you StarLogoT). NetLogo also

powers the HubNet participatory simulation system. NetLogo is free of charge.

For a fuller description, please go to: http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/docs/

Statement on special needs of students If you are a student with a disability and you need academic accommodations, please see

me and contact the Disability Resource Center (DRC) at 993-2474. All academic

accommodations must be arranged through the DRC.

Online Student Journal

New Voices in Public Policy: I will consider nominating the very best papers in this

14

course for publication in New Voices in Public Policy. New Voices is a student- and

faculty-reviewed journal that shares SPP's finest student work with the rest of the world.

SPP Policy on Plagiarism The profession of scholarship and the intellectual life of a university as well as the field

of public policy inquiry depend fundamentally on a foundation of trust. Thus any act of

plagiarism strikes at the heart of the meaning of the university and the purpose of the

School of Public Policy. It constitutes a serious breach of professional ethics and it is

unacceptable.

Plagiarism is the use of another’s words or ideas presented as one’s own. It includes,

among other things, the use of specific words, ideas, or frameworks that are the product

of another’s work. Honesty and thoroughness in citing sources is essential to professional

accountability and personal responsibility. Appropriate citation is necessary so that

arguments, evidence, and claims can be critically examined.

Plagiarism is wrong because of the injustice it does to the person whose ideas are stolen.

But it is also wrong because it constitutes lying to one’s professional colleagues. From a

prudential perspective, it is shortsighted and self-defeating, and it can ruin a professional

career.

The faculty of the School of Public Policy takes plagiarism seriously and has adopted a

zero tolerance policy. Any plagiarized assignment will receive an automatic grade of “F.”

This may lead to failure for the course, resulting in dismissal from the University. This

dismissal will be noted on the student’s transcript. For foreign students who are on a

university-sponsored visa (e.g. F-1, J-1 or J-2), dismissal also results in the revocation of

their visa.

To help enforce the SPP policy on plagiarism, all written work submitted in partial

fulfillment of course or degree requirements must be available in electronic form so that

it can be compared with electronic databases, as well as submitted to commercial services

to which the School subscribes. Faculty may at any time submit student’s work without

prior permission from the student. Individual instructors may require that written work be

submitted in electronic as well as printed form. The SPP policy on plagiarism is

supplementary to the George Mason University Honor Code; it is not intended to replace

it or substitute for it.

15