This is version 1 of the MASON social network package, designed by Gabriel
Balan, Liviu Panait, Claudio Cioffi-Revilla, and Sean Luke.  The package
has fairly little documentation as of now, and we apologize for that. 

To install this package, just add the socialnets directory to your
CLASSPATH. Alternatively you can unpack the files into the appropriate
directories in MASON, or create a jar file and stick that in your
CLASSPATH. 

The package is intended to provide a small set of the most common social
network statistics functions: if you are looking for something more
complete, may we recommend the open-source JUNG system, which is
relatively easily integrated with MASON.  http://jung.sourceforge.net/

The idea behind the MASON social network package is very simple.  It's a
bunch of statistics classes which operate on MASON's built-in Network
class.  A great many of the operations in the social network package can
be performed simply by calling static methods.  There are no extensions to
the Network class at all. 

The package also provides a rudimentary Inspector for the Network class
which displays certain common statistical information in GUI form.  The
Inspector is very easy to install and we have provided an extension of
Tutorial 5 to show you how to do it. 

In order to do matrix inversions, the package at *present* relies on
another open source package in the sim/util/mantissa directory.  Do not
assume that this package will stay -- we may move to something else in the
future.  This package has a diferent license from MASON's (it's also
roughly BSD).  The license appears at the end of each java file in
sim/util/mantissa and subdirectories. 

If you have any questions, do not hesitate to post them to the
MASON-INTEREST mailing list. 

