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http://web.archive.org/web/20060921160644/http://www.es.mq.edu.au/~rhowitt/POLGEO.htm

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osted by Andrew Schwerin, Software Engineer

As an engineer in Seattle, I can’t wait for summer to arrive. This year, I’m not just looking forward to the beautiful weather, but also the Seattle Scalability Conference. It takes place on Saturday, June 14th.

Conference planning is underway, and the deadline for our call for papers is this Friday, April 11th! If you have an interesting approach for building and maintaining scalable systems, this is the perfect gathering to share it. Send a 500-word abstract of your 30-minute presentation to scalabilityconf at google.com — and plan on enjoying the long-awaited Seattle sunshine with me this June.

Here are some of the topics that interest me (but I’m open to more ideas):

Scalable algorithms:
Parallelization techniques (fully automatic or programmer-assisted)
Algorithms that are robust in the face of system failures (flaky hardware, OS bugs, network failures)
Scalable systems:
Managing large, evolving data stores
Languages and tools for organizing high-throughput data processing systems
Handling partial failure (automatic failure detection/diagnosis/repair)
We’ll be posting more information for conference attendees soon.

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This way of using scale gives the concept force and substance- in that societies of the same scale are organised similarly. The approach is used in Bodley’s text Cultural Anthropology, with a slew of great diagrams etc. I can’t really understand the sense in which scale is being used in this thread. Anyone care to enlighten me in the context of the more venerable anthropological take on scale?

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Regarding scale-making as a discursive project, then, one might want to look at work in the whole ‘politics of scale’ tradition by Hilda Kurtz. She has a contribution in the Herod and Wright volume I mentioned earlier, and also this:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6VG2-49S6WHC-1&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=6f2416c2f51d9101dbb2efa01f457f08

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A networked notion of ‘scale’ in terms of non-linear (or chaotic) emergence is gaining some traction in science studies. The point here is that scale effects emerge at thresholds within thermodynamic systems (e.g. economies, societies) — there’s a tip-over from quantitative accumulation or dissipation to qualitative difference, to oversimplify. This helps to understand what otherwise look like causal discontinuities.

Anyhoo, a good start on this might be How Nature Speaks: The Dynamics of the Human Ecological Condition (New Ecologies for the Twenty-First Century). Here’s the blurb:

“How Nature Speaks illustrates the convergence of complexity theory in the biophysical and social sciences and the implications of the science of complexity for environmental politics and practice. This collection of essays focuses on uncertainty, surprise, and positionality—situated rather than absolute knowledge—in studies of nature by people embedded within the very thing they purport to study from the outside. The contributors address the complicated relationship between scientists and nature as part of a broader reassessment of how we conceive of ourselves, knowledge, and the world that we both inhabit and shape.

Exploring ways of conceiving the complexity and multiplicity of humans’ many interactive relationships with the environment, the contributors provide in-depth case studies of the interweaving of culture and nature in socio-historical processes. The case studies focus on the origin of environmental movements, the politicization of environmental issues in city politics, the development of a local energy production system, and the convergence of forest management practices toward a dominant scheme. They are supported by explorations of big-picture issues: recurring themes in studies of social and environmental dynamics, the difficulties of deliberative democracy, and the potential gains for socio-ecological research offered by developmental systems theory and Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of intentionality.

How Nature Speaks includes a helpful primer, “On Thinking Dynamically about the Human Ecological Condition,” which explains the basic principles of complexity and nonlinear thinking.

Contributors. Chuck Dyke, Yrjö Haila, Ari Jokinen, Ville Lähde, Markus Laine, Iordanis Marcoulatos, John O’Neill, Susan Oyama, Taru Peltola, Lasse Peltonen, John Shotter, Peter Taylor.”

An older but still-helpful exposition is C. Dyke, The Evolutionary Dynamics of Complex Systems: A Study in Biosocial Complexity which has some really smashing explanations of the value of non-linear thermodynamics and chaos theory for social analysis. (Btw C. Dyke is my dad, not me.)

In a philosophy of explanation vein, I’ve seen nothing better on discontinuities of scale and the explanatory confusions that result than Alan Garfinkel, Forms of Explanation: Rethinking the Questions in Social Theory, which despite the tame title is a blockbuster.

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One the best books I’ve read on this was Jonathan Mark’s Human Biodiversity. It’s a great history of the topic in anthropology. I’ve since met him twice and even appeared at the same event as him which was pretty neat!

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