In this article, I seek to identify a limitation in the analysis James Scott offers in Seeing Like a State (1998) by asking to what extent his account of the follies of schemes for planned improvement by states provides critical leverage on the present world of neoliberal global capitalism. Scott has claimed that a dynamic of standardization, homogenization, and grid making applies not only to ...

Introduction. These notes are based upon a day-long lecture workshop presented by Simon Thomas at the University of Ohio at Athens on November 17, 2007. The workshop served as an intensive introduction to the emerging theory of countable Borel equivalence relations. These notes are an updated and slightly expanded version of an earlier draft which was compiled from the lecture slides by Scott S...

The Ombudsman column was created with the belief that academic journals ignore many important problems. Halse and Lilien, in the following paper, approach this issue by hoking at the reward systems in universities: do they encourage or discourage competent work on important problems? It is easy to do trivial work on important problems . . . but it is difficult to publish it. Far more profitable...

Vol. XLVIII (April 2011), 228 –237 *Scott I. Rick is Assistant Professor of Marketing, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan (e-mail: [email protected]). Deborah A. Small is Associate Professor of Marketing and Psychology, the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania (e-mail: [email protected]. edu). Eli J. Finkel is Associate Professor of Psychology, Northwestern University (e-m...

Officials of the modern state . . . assess the life of their society by a series of typifications that are always some distance from the full reality these abstractions are meant to capture . . . These typifications are indispensable to statecraft. State simplifications such as maps, censuses, cadastral lists, and standard units of measurement represent techniques for grasping a large and compl...

This paper sketches how picture retrieval can be used by a document generation system for the inclusion of ‘photographic’ pictures in the documents generated by the system. The exposition is based on the What You See Is What You Meant (WYSIWYM) approach to knowledge editing and document generation (Power and Scott 1998, Scott et al. 1998). The paper describes an algorithm that makes use of a li...

Reproduced below, with a few small edits, is a paper I wrote in 1979 for the International Cybernetics Newsletter, as part of its ‘founding fathers of cybernetics’ series (Scott, 1979). I offer it here as a contribution to this special issue of C&HK because (i) I believe my younger self did quite a good job of overviewing von Foerster’s career (recall, he ‘retired’ in 1976) and (ii) the article...

Acknowledgements We would also like to acknowledge the contributions of Darren Scott who worked on a subcontract of the grant. Disclaimer The contents of this report reflect the views of the authors, who are responsible for the facts and the accuracy of the data presented herein. The contents do not necessarily reflect the official view or policies of the UVM Transportation Research Center. Thi...

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My half a decade in Georgia Tech was the most precious and valuable time in my life. This dissertation is the result of not only countless nights to roll carts out, but also unconditional support from my beloved wife and daughter. I wouldn't have been able to stand here without their love and sacrifice. Numerous people have helped and supported me to complete this dissertation. ...