Whenever the amount of information produced exceeds the amount of attention available to consume it, a competition for attention is born. The competition is increasingly fierce in science where the exponential growth of information has forced its producers, consumers and gatekeepers to become...

People often infer that high-technology clustersyield economic growth and success because economic growth often results incommunities containing high-technology clusters.Many communities seek toreproduce the success of high-technology clusters like Silicon Valley North inCanada.However, no...

Programming languages for social simulations are rapidly proliferating. The result is a Tower of Babel effect: Many of us find it increasingly effortful to learn and to teach more programming languages and increasingly difficult to sustain an audience beyond the programming dialect of our...

Two Monte Carlo simulations were developed to investigate the social consequences of balancing sentiment relations among triads of members of a larger group, when balancing one triad can imbalance others. Using assumptions of Balance Theory (Heider, 1958), random starting combinations of liking,...

Agent-based models are more likely to generate accurate outputs if they incorporate valid representations of human agents than if they don't. The present article outlines three research methodologies commonly used for explicating the cognitive processes and motivational orientations of human...

The field of memetics is characterised and two types of memetic model analysed: the a priori model and the 'black-box' model. These are used to motivate a picture of scientific modelling, where by chains of models are built from abstract models at the 'top' down to data models derived from...

We distinguish between two main types of model: predictive and explanatory. It is argued (in the absence of models that predict on unseen data) that in order for a model to increase our understanding of the target system the model must credibly represent the structure of that system, including...