Slashdot Mirror

It's very similar to a "Firefly" simulation in Netlogo (http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/). It's an agent-based simulation language/system that allows you to explore similar behaviors as the ones seen here, but virtually.

The border patrol can't come into your house without a warrant just because you're within 100 miles of the Mexican border.

These things happen incrementally, not all at once. Right now, people who have not actually crossed a border are being accosted by Border Patrol agents. Similarly, one US citizen who had already passed the standard inspection at the Mexican border was stopped and searched against his will at a second, ad-hoc checkpoint further inland, apparently without even the slightest pretense of probable cause.

These incidents are happening because people like you aren't watching, or just don't give a shit. If and when it gets to the point where they do come into your house within the 100-mile border zone without a warrant, it will be because they thought they could get away with it because no one lifted a finger to stop them before. That may be OK for you, but please don't project your ignorance of history and indifference to the present on the rest of us.

Yes, I second Concord.org, especially as the put what they develop under free license (the LGPL):
    http://www.concord.org/

Not free (except to demo):
    http://www.explorelearning.com/

Other random:
    http://www.miniclip.com/games/chasm/en/
    http://www.missiontolearn.com/2008/03/more-than-50-web-widgets-for-your-learning-mix/
    http://simulation.northwestern.edu/

Look for physics simulators; example:
    http://dan-ball.jp/en/javagame/dust/

There is a lot of exploration people can do with Google Maps and Google Earth.

We've collected lots of links from homeschooling; I should put them up somewhere.

Stuff by me with links about education in general:
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/browse_thread/thread/e59c368c3734a926
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.html
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.html
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005584.html

The variant that exists as NetLogo does LOTS of cool stuff :)

As the imaginary ship gets closer then the margins of error on the distance gets smaller so smaller adjustments are needed.

They build in course corrections into long space flights like this for a reason.

If you read up on the history of space probes within our Solar System, you'll see course corrections built into the mission for just this purpose.

http://www.qrg.northwestern.edu/projects/vss/docs/navigation/1-what-is-course-correction.html

Here is a good paper on the subject. Generally, only modifications that increase pollution void the grandfather clause.

https://www.law.northwestern.edu/lawreview/v101/n4/1677/LR101n4Nash.pdf

LOGO is not a programming language, no matter who yells it at the top of their lungs.

Wow... the people doing real agent-based modelling research dare to differ with you [PDF].

One guy told me, that a game they developed was starting out to be something like a sci-fi RPG, but one day they got a call from the publisher who told them, that "with all the LotR stuff going on, we should do something with hobbits and evles".

A true game designer doesn't care whether you slap on the elve texture or the space marine texture. The game itself doesn't have to change just because you changed the setting. If you want to have some insight into this, read about the MDA model. This paper is great in explaining the whole concept of game design without requiring reading a 400+ pages book.

I'm a conservative, yet despite your perception I know that plenty of excellent research comes from state universities like the one my wife is employed by. This is putting the research in the hands of the gov't, and I'm fine with that. However, I would not trust congress with spending that money on research. Ideally I'd like to see it go directly to a good medical research school somewhere.

And how would you decide which "good medical research school somewhere" or, more specifically, which researcher/project? You need some entity to evaluate what research is being done and to decide where the money can have the most impact. Hello HHS/NIH!

From an article on the difference in administrations:

President Bill Clinton pledged to double the NIH budget in 1998 from 13.6 billion. Then Texas Gov. George W. Bush, on the campaign trail, pledged to complete Clinton’s pledge.

It was a promise he kept when Bush first came to the White House. But after that, the NIH budget precipitously dropped, Propst said. “The increases have either been below inflation or been flat-out cuts.”

moral - a quick read of the bible clearly shows that modern christians get their moral values form the same place as athiests: modern liberal secular values that have been explored since the enlightenment and can be simply expressed as do onto others as you would have done to yourself, or do not directly harm other people.

The history of the development of natural rights or human rights is very interesting. It predates Enlightenment and it follows Roman and Greek Law. The concept of human rights isn't even common outside of the West and seems to have developed closely tied to the Christian Church and Canon Law. Personal God = personal rights.

Brian Tierney:
http://www.law.northwestern.edu/journals/jihr/v2/2/2.pdf.

I agree with this definition of an embryo. I don't believe consciousness begins in a developing human until the brain is developed enough to support the required electrical activity.

http://www.biochem.northwestern.edu/holmgren/Glossary/Definitions/Def-E/embryo.html

Definition: embryo

General: an organism in early stages of development, before hatching from an egg.

Human: A fertilized egg that has begun cell division, often called a pre-embryo (for pre-implantation embryo). An embryo is now defined as a later stage, i.e. at the completion of" the pre-embryonic stage, which is considered to end at about day 14. The term, embryo, is used to describe the early stages of fetal growth, from conception to the eighth week of pregnancy.

I agree that it *should* be that way, but the debate regarding text vs. intent is alive and well in judicial circles, including (and especially) in the USSC.

e.g.
http://www.law.northwestern.edu/lawreview/v103/n2/983/LR103n2Treanor.pdf
http://docs.law.gwu.edu/facweb/jsiegel/publications/irt.htm

Also, to anyone who is interested, please access our lab page at: http://groups.psych.northwestern.edu/rosenfeld/home.html --Alex Soko

"It seemed timely to investigate countermeasures to ERP-based tests also because although there have been many laboratory studies claiming 85-95% accuracy, only one field study has been published, but it reported approximately chance accuracy (Miyake, Mizutani, & Yamahura, 1993). Nevertheless, one user of these methods claims 100% accuracy and is presently attempting to commercialize them (see http://www.brainwavescience.com/). Finally, the ERP approach has now surfaced in popular novels, for example, Coonts (2003), as a foolproof method."

...

"It is noted that the subjects used by Farwell and Donchin were paid volunteers, including associates of the experimenters. Our presently reported study uses introductory psychology students as subjects, more like the subjects one might find in the field in the sense of relative lack of motivation to cooperate with operators, and perhaps lower intelligence."

The above is the original peer-reviewed paper, this review (also by Rosenfeld) below is more recent and concise:
http://www.srmhp.org/0401/brain-fingerprinting.html

Found a pdf of calculus notes on northwestern.edu which shows what I was talking about.

Well, personally, I'm thrilled they're trying to keep NASA alive.

NASA'S new direction is not a budget cut. What they are doing is directing money towards unmanned space flight. IMHO it is a simple question of whether to keep pouring money into the failed Ares program, or redirect it to something more promising.

...in specific areas such as this is still sorely lacking. There are some generalized things that are pretty good, such as NetLogo that you could use to have your kids set up models and simulations of things to help them understand.

Here's one example of a demo in NetLogo that shows how buffers work and is interactive in that it lets you adjust the levels of acid and base at the beginning and lets you add them while it's running. To use it, click "setup", then "go". You will probably want to slow it down a lot.

NetLogo Buffer Simulation

It might be useful to let the kids play with this, or for you to put it up on a projector for them and fiddle with the settings to let them see what's happening. But what would really serve them (and the community) is to have them make their own simulation and post it. This accomplishes several things: they'll know they are actually contributing something to society, their depth of understanding will increase by causing them to organize the information in their minds to the point where they feel like they can explain it, the fact that their peers will be looking at it provides the only motivation kids of that age actually care about, and you'll be taking education out of the stone ages.

I'm not saying this is the only thing out there or even that this is the best thing (NetLogo). But I consistently see people answering questions like this by saying things like "don't make computers too important to the class" and "when I was a boy, we did it this way, so that should be enough for kids now." Neither of these answers is supported by research in the cognitive sciences or education. Use the computers. Education is the only area of human endeavor where you could take someone who was doing it in the 1800's and put them in a job today and almost nothing has changed. This is no longer good enough for a world where technology is evolving at an accelerating pace. Please, use the computers.

There's actually an interesting Agent-Based Simulation system based (loosely) on Logo called NetLogo (http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/). You can do basic Logo stuff, but it can actually do some very sophisticated modeling and the syntax is not very difficult.

Using syntax similar to Logo, you have program agents to sense their environment and then take action based on that. The concepts scale well to other platforms like the Lego Mindstorms.

It's not a traditional programming environment but as a beginner you'd still need to understand the idea of variables, objects, and conditional logic. Plus it's very visually oriented and has many examples that a kid can play with and tweak.

Try here for a start: http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/executed-possibly-innocent

There's also many who were found innocent who were within days of being executed.

http://www.law.northwestern.edu/wrongfulconvictions/exonerations/txAdamsSummary.html
http://www.law.northwestern.edu/wrongfulconvictions/exonerations/txBrandleySummary.html
http://www.law.northwestern.edu/wrongfulconvictions/exonerations/txCookSummary.html
http://www.law.northwestern.edu/wrongfulconvictions/exonerations/txDeebSummary.html

As well as many on life sentences found innocent, found at the same site.

Try here for a start: http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/executed-possibly-innocent

There's also many who were found innocent who were within days of being executed.

http://www.law.northwestern.edu/wrongfulconvictions/exonerations/txAdamsSummary.html
http://www.law.northwestern.edu/wrongfulconvictions/exonerations/txBrandleySummary.html
http://www.law.northwestern.edu/wrongfulconvictions/exonerations/txCookSummary.html
http://www.law.northwestern.edu/wrongfulconvictions/exonerations/txDeebSummary.html

As well as many on life sentences found innocent, found at the same site.

Try here for a start: http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/executed-possibly-innocent

There's also many who were found innocent who were within days of being executed.

http://www.law.northwestern.edu/wrongfulconvictions/exonerations/txAdamsSummary.html
http://www.law.northwestern.edu/wrongfulconvictions/exonerations/txBrandleySummary.html
http://www.law.northwestern.edu/wrongfulconvictions/exonerations/txCookSummary.html
http://www.law.northwestern.edu/wrongfulconvictions/exonerations/txDeebSummary.html

As well as many on life sentences found innocent, found at the same site.

Try here for a start: http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/executed-possibly-innocent

There's also many who were found innocent who were within days of being executed.

http://www.law.northwestern.edu/wrongfulconvictions/exonerations/txAdamsSummary.html
http://www.law.northwestern.edu/wrongfulconvictions/exonerations/txBrandleySummary.html
http://www.law.northwestern.edu/wrongfulconvictions/exonerations/txCookSummary.html
http://www.law.northwestern.edu/wrongfulconvictions/exonerations/txDeebSummary.html

As well as many on life sentences found innocent, found at the same site.

Ono Plug-In

You're absolutely right about how badly implemented the random client connection protocol is for BitTorrent clients. There is a project and a plug-in called Ono for Vuze (formely Azureus) BitTorrent clients. I used it before to resolve this problem but I found that the non-stop creation of many ping.exe threads to analyze latency was causing some slow-downs on my own system and additional upstream congestion on my upstream limited broadband pipe.

I am still surprised that a better protocol for proximity favored peer connections wasn't developed for BitTorrent and other P2P systems to maximize performance by connecting to peers on the same or close-by networks. I have a feeling that with the huge increases in demand for content there will be a need for optimized connection protocols once we start demanding more than the capacity that we have.

Netmask Flaws

One solution that is simple to implement is the one that you mentioned for netmask calculations but I fear that this is solution won't work reliability since the way that network ranges are created and managed internally by large broadband ISPs is unpredictable and neighboring ranges are owned by different ISPs or are in other countries. Plus netmask information doesn't tell you anything about closest neighbors to connect to once you exhaust the connections in your own netmask.

Routing Table Solution

I think that the best solution would be one based on information in the routing protocols that the routers have but since this information is not available to the individual clients the applications have no way of looking at the overall routing structure to determine exactly who the closest and best neighbors. are based on latency, bandwidth, cost, and hop count information.

If there was a way for the application to query the router for a partial list of the routing table (e.g. 5 or 10-hops) and then prioritize the peer addresses from the tracker according to the routing table based an algorithm that takes bandwidth up-and-down, latency, cost, and hop count into account we would have an optimal solution to the order of connections for peers.

Latency and Hop Count Not Enough

The problem is that the routers won't share the routing table information with the clients. The solution becomes the one like Ono plug-in in that the client has to ping and/or trace route to the peer addresses to determine optimal choices based only on latency and hop count without knowing anything about bi-directional bandwidth availability or cost associated. Without the bandwidth info the whole thing falls apart because latency isn't enough to determine maximum throughput and there is no practical way of doing a bandwidth check bi-directionally in a meaningful way between peers without taking up a lot of time and bandwidth in the process itself.

Upstream Throttling (Not Choking)

Hopefully, this new uTP protocol will at least give us a benefit and improvement on the upstream bandwidth side by auto-throttling the upstream to prevent choking the connection.

If only the clients could peek at the routing tables of our routers...

Moron.

1, 2, 3

Congress makes laws. The FCC, within the area of regulatory authority granted by Congress, makes regulations.

Sir - As a matter of clarification, Congress makes U.S. federal legislation; While Congress can create laws, it is not the only way to create laws, and it is not able to make certain laws (e.g. unconstitutional or extraterritorial laws).

Legislation and regulation are both sources of primary law, which primary law both lawyers and laymen professionally and colloquially refer to as "the law".

Thus, insofar as the FCC has regulatory authority granted by Congress, it is able to create laws.

(It is noteworthy that not all laws are created equal; where legislative statues irreconcilably contradict regulations, for example, the law of the statute will generally govern.)

Not only that, space is an imperfect vacuum, meaning it has junk in it.

I'll second the recommendation for Netlogo, which has grown up into a very powerful Agent based simulation system. Many of the 100 or so examples included with the program are physics and biology-based, and would provide a great starting point for your simulations. Since java applets are one of the possible output file formats, the resulting simulations can even be run from a web page. It's free (but not open source yet), and runs under most operating systems.

Netlogo home page

Perhaps this university should offer some pro-bono legal representation to gonorthwest.com

I Can just see how absurd the argument when the tile page of the lawsuits read:
 

Northwest Airlines: Plantiff
Dorsey & Whitney LLP: Attorney for Plaintiff

gonorthwest.com: Defendant
Northwestern University - School of Law: Attorney for Defendant
Black, Lowe, and Graham: Attorney for Defendant

This would be pretty easy and cheap to do.

It would require two magnets, some magnetic wire, a battery, two paper clips which are the 'brushes', some copper tape for the commutator, some sort wooden/metal rod to mount the rotor onto, and bigger piece of cylindrical wood for your commutator. This might blow your budget the first year, but i would see the only recurring expense be the copper tape, batteries and the magnetic wire.
Here is a website on how some of the assembly should look
http://hades.mech.northwestern.edu/wiki/index.php/Brushed_DC_Motor_Theory
Look about halfway down the page when describing the theory.

My only pointers would be to make a multi-turn coil of wire instead of a single single. Obviously you will need to add a rotor and commutator, so that is what the various wooden pieces are. Make the copper tape cover as much of the circumference of the commutator, as it will work better.

I found another, simpler DC motor, but it didn't look to exciting. You can search google to find other types of projects.

There is no simple answer to your question. You can compare growth numbers, but keep in mind that most GDP estimates are adjusted after a quarter. Europe usually estimates low and adjusts up, while the US usually estimates high and adjusts down.
You might be able to compare productivity, (multi-factor or total factor should be the most precise) but this estimate is also exposed to exchange rate issues as a value of labour is not expressed in a common currency.
For an interesting comparison between countries, you could take a look at this paper.

The first quarter course is mostly avaialble online though (the scheme one). My teacher seems to have moved on to northwestern but here is a recent course website http://www.ece.northwestern.edu/~robby/uc-courses/15100-2008-fall/. and the textbook is available for free at http://www.htdp.org/. Somewhere out there should be a link to a current version of DrScheme...the homework assignments on that course website look like exactly what I used

Oops SwarmScreen: 3/9/2009: First version (0.2) released!

The news said that our local police read Craigslist and bust the guys who hook up in a park down by the river. That's the way law enforcement should deal with these illegal activities: bust them when they happen.

The best way to deal with this, prostitution, is to make it legal again. It was only because of puritans, moralists, and others who want to control people that prostitution was made illegal in much of the US. According to Northwestern University prostitution was never legal in Chicago. However it was legal in other places. The same group that was successful in getting alcohol illegal with Prohibition, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, was able to exert influence to make prostitution illegal. For instance New Orleans used to have a redlight district where it was legal.

Falcon

If the wto made a ruling against China which will obviously be ignored what are they going to do. Punitive measures? Oh lets stop trade with China, great idea. Kind of a silly system if you ask me.

The punitive measures are not "lets stop trade with China".

Normally the WTO gives the wronged party permission to institute tariffs/duties on specific goods from the offending country, equal to the losses sustained by the aggrieved. Here's a recent example of the USA raising tariffs on cheese imported from Europe.

*ahem* Some of us go to private schools.

PILOT and LOGO:

RPILOT is a FOSS version of Pilot. Here is a list of LOGO resources find one that works for you. Berkely LOGO or Star LOGO or Net LOGO take your pick.

Grade Schools and Junior Highs used to teach PILOT or LOGO or both on the old 8 bit computers when I was that age. It was fun giving a virtual turtle commands to draw shapes and solve problems.

can assure you 11 year olds, let alone 14, will look at you funny when you tell them to move a turtle (that's what I remember it being called) around the screen drawing senseless shapes.

Sure, moving a turtle around drawing "senseless shapes" is probably not going to be very interesting to 11-14 year olds, especially those on the older end of that range, but then even the versions of Logo I used at 11 could be used to a lot more than that, and modern, agent-based versions of Logo are designed to do quite a lot more, easily. Take a look at NetLogo or StarLogo TNG.

You are not going to get a straight answer on this question. There are so many facets that are going to come into play that each case has to be dealt with separately. Some of the things that you may have to consider. As a research assistant it is very likely that you will be grouped into a "work-for-hire" category, which places you a weaker footing. This is the case whether the money for the project was internal to the university or through another source. At the end of the day, the University hired you. Another factor is the perception of the code. If it is viewed as a "product" the University will retain it - even more likely is that the federal sponsor will argue a stake in it. The Bayh-Dole act has had an interesting effect. It "forces" that Universities protect their IP, and work to commercialize. The intention was to get new know-how to the market. The side affect has been that everyone is a little bit more aware of the potential that lies in the IP. I have seen mixed reports on the effectiveness of the Bayh-Dole Act. What I have however seen is an increased interest by Universities to retain IP. In most cases, faculty and researchers listed on projects will be given consideration of ownership of the IP (at least shared). In fact many Universities now have policies that are quite explicit about ownership distribution and who stands to make what of IP (e.g. http://www.drexel.edu/provost/policies/copyright.asp, http://www.research.northwestern.edu/ori/copyright/CopyrightPolicySept2006.pdf). Northwestern mentions work-for-hire specifically which I suspect you fall under. In any IP discussion you will get a mass of moral and ethical viewpoints. Careful not to pay to much heed to these. Under some of those arguments, I should be able to lay claim to e-Bay, after all, it was my idea (I think). Best suggestion, get legal advice; and not from the University lawyers or IP office.

Ono uses statistical data from CDNs to be a little bit smarter about picking peers in certain cases. In most cases the random solution is fine; your client can just randomly pick peers then stick with fast ones and drop slow ones. Ono aims to improve performance in certain cases where that strategy isn't very good.

Just in case anyone reading doesn't notice, Ono aims to find peers that are close to you on the network. That doesn't necessarily mean close to you geographically and so doesn't answer this ask /..

that seems to contradict what they say on their site

from http://www.aqualab.cs.northwestern.edu/projects/Ono.html

I thought Vuze was already doing network positioning. Why use Ono? Well, as Ledlie, et al have shown, Vuze network coordinates are, too put it mildly, terribly inaccurate. In our own independent measurements, we found that only 10% of the network coordinates had less than 10% error. More than 60% had errors of 100% or more! Besides, unlike traditional network positioning systems, Ono doesn't require active network path measurement to determine relative locations in the network. Only infrequent DNS lookups are needed.

For the record, it's not quite based on router hops. Ono exploits CDN redirections for very efficient peer baising. You can find the technical details here: http://www.aqualab.cs.northwestern.edu/publications/DChoffnes08Sigcomm.html Also, if you want to restrict biasing to a custom set of IP address blocks, Ono now supports "manual peer biasing" toward those blocks. A description of how to use this feature (tailored for Kiwis) is here: http://homepages.xnet.co.nz/~createcoms/

It is called Ono and it can be found here

For Vuze, formerly Azureus, there are Ono and P4P, which should do what you're looking for, although for different reasons. Unfortunately, they both rely on people in your region being interested in the same torrents you are, while P4P additionally benefits from an iTracker, an ISP provided tracker that's topology aware (they did some work to prioritize based on ping latency, using that as a distance estimate, but I don't know if it's a fallback mechanism). Due to the iTracker infrastructure and possibly conflicting supporters, there are some privacy concerns.

There is a plugin for Vuze (formerly Azureus) called Ono which does exactly that. Not sure what the problems they ran into, but as it is a college project I am sure they would be willing to discuss some of it with you. http://www.aqualab.cs.northwestern.edu/projects/Ono.html

In a hundred or so years when we have the technology to get there. Might even be the ideal place for a colony someday.

Look, I agree that it's a nice place to go visit, but if you looked into things, you would find that it is 10.5 Light Years Away from earth it would take close to an eternity to get there with current rocket technology and certainly what is being developed. And not to rain on the parade again, but before anyone goes touting ION ENGINES will get us there, no, they really won't. You see Ion Engines need large amounts of power to run. Really large amounts that are generally limited to the amount of juice that can be generated by huge solar panels. Short of putting a nuclear reactor on this ship to get us there, we simply won't have enough sunlight to make the engine run once is starts to fade away from the centerish part of our solar system.

In short, I would love to agree, but I really think that you would need to change the "hundred or so" part of your post to be "many hundreds or so".

That's assuming we can deal with the massive solar winds that are 30 times as powerful as the ones in our system. Did I forget that part?

In a hundred or so years when we have the technology to get there. Might even be the ideal place for a colony someday.

Look, I agree that it's a nice place to go visit, but if you looked into things, you would find that it is 10.5 Light Years Away from earth it would take close to an eternity to get there with current rocket technology and certainly what is being developed. And not to rain on the parade again, but before anyone goes touting ION ENGINES will get us there, no, they really won't. You see Ion Engines need large amounts of power to run. Really large amounts that are generally limited to the amount of juice that can be generated by huge solar panels. Short of putting a nuclear reactor on this ship to get us there, we simply won't have enough sunlight to make the engine run once is starts to fade away from the centerish part of our solar system.

In short, I would love to agree, but I really think that you would need to change the "hundred or so" part of your post to be "many hundreds or so".

That's assuming we can deal with the massive solar winds that are 30 times as powerful as the ones in our system. Did I forget that part?

I agree that pricing is one of the least interesting aspects of these kinds of systems. Reviews are better, but you can still go a lot further. We've built a system, Pivot, that uses UPC codes (no barcode recognition unfortunately) that gives you one-click Add to Netflix Queue for DVDs, trailers for DVDs and Videogames, Buy from iTunes for CDs, and Facebook integration. (If you scan the Babylon 5 DVD at Best Buy, you get a list of all your Facebook friends who like Babylon 5.) It works well, it's free, and you can try it at http://www.pivotapp.com/ (it's currently an iPhone-optimized webpage.) We have the paper and more information available here: http://infolab.northwestern.edu/#projects/49---projects

I prefer NetLogo myself, but that's because I like to whip up little simple simulations of various systems, and netlogo excels at exactly that.

Despite the political rhetoric we have no proof as to how much human activity is contributing to any warming trends

If it contributes or not first of all pretty irrelevant when discussing the effects of global warming (of which there is proof); since the effects of global climate change isn't necessarily a positive thing for us. It is at least responsible to study the effects of climate change, as well as the possible effect of human activity upon the climate and ecosystem.

Spreading pollution, sending co2 and chemical compounds into the air, water and ground without carefully studying the effects of this and contemplating ways to minimize waste is unreasonable and short-sighted.

The sheer hubris of some people today who assume we have such great control over climate just amazes, and scares, me.

When I see pictures of smog covered Chinese cities and read about Microscopic Pollution May Trigger Heart Attacks/Strokes" http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2007/09/mutlu.html It scares me that people don't take the problems and side-effects of the energy inefficiency seriously. This is not a political issue, it is about taking responsibility for our actions. Understanding the effects and causes of the actions we take; and creating a healthy environment (literally) for us to live (and hopefully prosper) in.

Agent Based Modeling tools such as Repast, SWARM, and NetLogo are changing how social research is being done.