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Recent Major Posts
- Pratt Institute holds 124th Commencement, special gallery show
- Rhett Bradbury’s Master’s Thesis explores how gaming can foster political leadership
- Envirolutions asks the Pratt community to identify where there is “room for improvement”
- My review of Railsback and Grimm’s “Agent-based and individual-based modeling” textbook published in Ecology
- Envirolutions club launches its “Room for Improvement” campaign
- Dumb radio ads provide smart insight into the diverse nature of human societies
- Is selective rejection of science really a problem?
- Pratt Envirolutions Students Bring Recycling Bins to Campus
- Concept mapping as a creative tool
- Governor Cuomo makes the connection between natural disasters and climate change, calls for building in resilience
Recent Minor Posts
- Pratt Professor Ágnes Mócsy releases “Smashing Matters” short film
- NPR piece suggests that economics are pushing us towards nutrient recycling
- Just in case you missed it the first ten times: E.O. Wilson likes group selection, Jerry Coyne does not
- Allen MacNeill predicts resolution of Ev-Coop debates
- Martin Nowak to lecture on the compatibility of god and the evolutionary process
- Understanding kin selection and reciprocity when strategies are culturally propagated
- “Earth Hour” seeks to re-focus our attention on all the earth provides
- Seth Horowitz on our perception of sound
- Forward on Climate Rally seeks to shift the national dialogue on anthropogenic climate change
- Quantifying the climate value of that 40-acre woodlot
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What I am reading now
Category Archives: Individual-based Models
My review of Railsback and Grimm’s “Agent-based and individual-based modeling” textbook published in Ecology
I am excited by the recent publication of my review of Agent-based and individual-based modeling: a practical introduction in the January issue of Ecology. The review, entitled “Individual-based modeling for the masses“, lauds this valuable textbook designed to support individual-based … Continue reading
Agent-based modeling instead of game theory: I agree!
The Society Pages “Progressing from game theory to agent based modelling to simulate social emergence” This is a nice albeit pretty choppy explanation for why we should not listen to orthodox/traditional game theorists. The only argument I see missing here … Continue reading
ESA 2012 Thursday afternoon talks
I spent Thursday afternoon once again hustling from one talk to another, with Organized Oral Session #47 (Universal Senescence? New Theories and Experimental Approaches Across the Tree of Life) being my primary focus. The writings of George C. Williams and … Continue reading
Posted in A Major Post, Behavior, Conferences, Ecological Modeling, Ecological Society of America, Ecosystem Services, Freshwater Ecosystems, Individual-based Models, Parasitism, Phenotypic Plasticity, Ponds & Lakes, Predation, Senescence, Spatially Explicit Modeling, Sustainable Agriculture, Talks & Seminars, Tropical Forest
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ESA 2012 Workshop #8, Getting off the Ground with Individual-Based Modeling: A Primer for Instructors and Researchers
I got off to a running start at this year’s Ecological Society of America (ESA) annual meeting with a workshop orchestrated by Steven Railsback and Volker Grimm. Entitled “Getting off the Ground with Individual-Based Modeling: A Primer for Instructors and … Continue reading
Costly signalling not so costly in the presence of comrades
This month’s issue of PLoS Computational Biology contained an interesting article entitled “Signalling and the Evolution of Cooperative Foraging in Dynamic Environments“. Authored by Colin J. Torney, Andrew Berdahl, Iain D. Couzin (all of Princeton University), the article seeks to … Continue reading
If Only Game Designers Were Scientists
Today’s New York Times Magazine featured an article entitled “Where Do Dwarf-Eating Carp Come From?”. The article describes the quirky aspirations of Tarn Adams, the programmer behind the underground computer game called Dwarf Fortress. Like other simulation-based games, Dwarf Fortress … Continue reading
Computer-Based Tools for Teaching about Robert Axelrod’s Prisoner’s Dilemma Tournaments
In a recent posting I discussed the book The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod [1, 2]. The book chronicles Axelrod’s work in the 1980’s to understand the dynamics of the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma (IPD), which is perhaps the most … Continue reading
Posted in Cooperation, Easy Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, Educational Software and Apps, Evolution Education, Evolutionary Modeling, Game Theory, Individual-based Models, Reciprocity, Spatially Explicit Modeling, System Stability, Teaching, Teaching Tools
Tagged A.M. Kasprzyk, Aaron Cohen, Bruce MacLennan, Chris D. Cook, Evolution of Sustainable Use, Flash, Javascript, Jean Ho Chu, Leigh Tesfatsion, Prisoner's Dilemma, Robert Axelrod, Sarah Lichtblau, Serge Helfrich, Wayne Davis
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“The Evolution of Cooperation” by Robert Axelrod
I just finished reading Robert Axelrod’s seminal book entitled The Evolution of Cooperation. Although I had read a lot about Axelrod’s work and am quite familiar with the body of literature that it inspired, I had never actually read his … Continue reading
Posted in Altruism, Behavioral Ecology, Books, Coevolution, Cooperation, Cultural Evolution, Evolution, Evolutionary Modeling, Game Theory, Human Evolution, Individual-based Models, Interdisciplinarity, Multilevel Selection, Mutualism, Political Science, Public Policy, Reciprocity, Sociology, Spatially Explicit Modeling
Tagged Prisoner's Dilemma, Richard Dawkins, Robert Axelrod
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ESA 2009 Day #3 (Tuesday) – “Big Models” Special Session
During Tuesday evening of ESA’s meeting I attended a really great special session entitled “Big Models in Ecology: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly Are All Possible Outcomes”. Organized by Vince Gutschick, the session began with a series of overviews … Continue reading
