On Aug 23, 2011, at 6:01 AM, Stuart Rossiter wrote:

> i) Are the existing tutorials still to be retained and subject to  
> the same
> level of attention as the manual? I hope so (despite the tutorial in  
> the
> manual), and think they're nicely complementary. I presume all the  
> example
> models will stay as well (with any tweaks required to match the new  
> codebase).

Yep.


> ii) Would you consider a short Introduction sub-section on the  
> support and
> previous/ongoing funding of MASON? It's always useful as a user to  
> have a
> feel for such aspects. I appreciate (as an academic) that academic  
> funding
> is precarious at the best of times, but I don't know, for example,  
> what
> types of agreements you have with GMU. If some/all of this is a little
> sensitive/political, then fair enough not to include it.

I'd probably not include it in the MASON manual, but I can tell you  
here.  MASON was initially funded with help from the GMU Center for  
Social Complexity, and since then it has been funded by grants in  
which it plays a primary supporting role here at GMU, both at the  
Center and at the Department of Computer Science, and for which it  
appears as a major line-item.  This includes, for example, grants for  
multiagent social simulation, evolutionary computation, and the like.

MASON has had no grant proposals solely for it until last year.  We  
applied for an NSF CRI grant for a MASON workshop and continued  
funding last year and we *almost* got it -- six months after being  
told we had been recommended but were on the bubble, NSF finally told  
us that they just couldn't fund it this year.  [It's not been a good  
year for NSF].  Will try again this year.

If you're interested in helping fund MASON, drop me a line!


> 1.3: This example caused --> This example causes
> 11: high-level than, say, OpenGL --> higher-level than, say, OpenGL

Fixed, thanks.  Copy-editing hasn't been the high priority of course,  
just pounding out the information...

Sean