IT is a privilege to have been asked to give the sixty-ninth Mary Scott Newbold Lecture. The list of my predecessors is indeed distinguished. The topic, cardiac failure, was chosen because my colleagues and I have been concerned with this problem for almost a quarter of a century. In this lecture I propose to outline my present concepts based on the evolution of thinking which has resulted from...

A new characterization of nondeterministic concurrent strategies exhibits strategies as certain discrete fibrations—or equivalently presheaves—over configurations of the game. This leads to a lax functor from the bicategory of strategies to the bicategory of profunctors. The lax functor expresses how composition of strategies is obtained from that of profunctors by restricting to ‘reachable’ el...

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...