[Swarm-Modelling] 3 announcements

[Steve Railsback]

I would like to make 3 announcements:

1. We just updated and expanded our “EcoSwarm” library of Objective-C 
classes that support ecological (and other) modeling in Swarm. See 
http://www.humboldt.edu/~ecomodel/software.htm

EcoSwarm now includes:
o	BreakoutReporter: provides statistical summaries of agent state, 
broken out by up to 5 categories.
o       InterpolationTable: A lookup table and interpolation function.
o       SolarManager: Calculates day lengths and solar radiation influx.
o	SurvivalProbabilityManager: Builds probabilistic models of survival, 
for mortality risks that vary with characteristics of both agents and 
habitat.
o       TimeManager: Provides many handy date & time functions.
o       TimeSeriesInputManager: Reads in and manages time-series input data.
o	YearShuffler: Randomly re-orders the sequence of years in time-series 
input to a model.
o	Poisson, binomial distributions: Integer random distributions (which 
will be included in Swarm’s random library in the upcoming new release 
of Swarm).

2. We (Humboldt State University’s mathematical modeling program) will 
host the 2005 World Conference on Natural Resource Modeling, June 14 to 
17, here in the beautiful redwood coast of northern California. Anyone 
interested in organizing or contributing to sessions (or other special 
events) related to agent-based simulation to contact me, or the official 
organizer, Dr. Roland Lamberson address@hidden .

The 2006 conference will be in Bergen, Norway, another hotbed of 
individual-based modeling. We hope this series becomes a home for 
agent-based simulation in natural resource-related (including economic 
as well as ecological) modeling.

3. The book “Individual-based Modeling and Ecology” by Volker Grimm and 
Steve Railsback is now in production at Princeton University Press. We 
provide a primer on modeling, a conceptual foundation for 
individual-based modeling, an approach to theory and its development, 
guidance on many practical issues, and many example models and 
applications. I hope the book can be quite useful to people working in 
fields other than ecology, as well.

Unfortunately, the book is unlikely to be officially available until 
next summer. We put some example text on a web site 
http://www.humboldt.edu/~ecomodel/book.htm and encourage people to 
contact us for more information.

Steve Railsback

--
Lang Railsback & Associates
250 California Ave.
Arcata CA 95521
707 822 0453; fax 822 1868