Modeling Information Access in Construct

Literacy and other interaction mechanisms have been shown to be important factors in determining whether and how individuals interact with printed and other forms of media. This lack of access to – or in cases, misinformation from – such types of media has an important social component for Construct modeling. This technical report describes the information access features in Construct, both from an algorithmic and input perspective. It describes the literacy model implemented in Construct, as well as the internet access and newspaper readership modifications to past interventions. This document is intended primarily as a reference guide for literacy and access modeling in Construct, and assumes at least some familiarity with the Construct modeling environment. A short example experiment using the literacy mechanism is described towards the end of this report. This work was supported in part by the IRS project in Computational Modeling and the NSF IGERT in CASOS (DGE 997276). In addition support for Construct was provided in part by Office of Naval Research (N00014-06-1-0104), the National Science Foundation (SES-0452487), and the AirForce Office of Sponsored Research (MURI: Cultural Modeling of the Adversary, 600322) for research in the area of dynamic network analysis. Additional support was provided by CASOS the center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems at Carnegie Mellon University. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the Office of Naval Research, the National Science Foundation, the Army Research Lab or the U.S. government.