ncase
patreon
I'm at Frontline! + Society Sim Prototype
🕑 Added 2016-03-31 14:19:37 +0000 UTCI mentioned it a few Patreon posts ago, but now it's actually happened – I'm a Knight/Mozilla OpenNews Fellow at PBS Frontline! My name appeared in the credits of their latest documentary on Saudi Arabia this week. Not sure why. I didn't do anything for that documentary, other than watching an early screening and making bad puns
But don't worry, all my work will still be open source/Creative Commons Zero. And the OpenNews Fellowship expects I spend a third of my time on personal projects. In fact, here's a prototype that I'm posting here on Patreon first, that I haven't shown the rest of the Frontline team yet! (...because I'm out of office right now)
Simulation of Political Polarization - WIP
Pretty simple so far! But this prototype isn't just to show political polarization, or group formation. Like how my Sim The World In Emoji was a tool for making cellular automata, I want to make a tool to make social science simulations! (like Parable of the Polygons) I feel like that'd be more interesting, and socially meaningful. Plus I could re-use the tool over and over to make explorable explanations for current events.
See y'all next month!
<3,
~ Nicky
Comments
Nicky Case
Thanks for noticing! Right now, it's an artifact of the model. What's happening is that – once there's two polarized groups – if a Peep randomly befriends someone of the other group, they'll *immediately* unfriend them, because they're now the least belief-similar friend.
Richard Hackathorn
Works great on Firefox. Yup, peeps get polarized! However, if you let it run to steady-state, the polarized clusters do not interact. If every day a random peep befriends a random peep, we should expect inter-cluster friends to briefly occur?
Ori Avtalion
Fixed, thanks! (Patreon only allows replying to top-level comments :( )
Nicky Case
Thanks Ori! I just pushed up a fix. Apparently I needed to call node.getBoundingClientRect() for SVG elements in Firefox. (rather than just node.clientWidth & node.clientHeight)
Ori Avtalion
Running the polarization demo on Firefox, all of the circles are clustered in the top left corner of the screen (most of them off-screen). If I drag them to the center and let go, they bounce back to the corner. It works fine in Chrome
