1.) ``Have you read anything by Edward Soja? I think you'd like it. Here's some links...'' Dennis Claxton
2.) ``Your return at the end, from the concrete back to the abstract, with the model of a contour map, really clicked for me as well.'' Sean Andrews
3.) ``Best ever...'' Joanna
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3.) Thanks. For the list benefit, Joanna has an early (19th C?)
graphic model of Napoleon's Russian campaign that hangs over her
fireplace. It beautifully illustrates the destruction of the French
army. It starts with a three inch wide black area marching over the
German frontier and continues on toward Moscow getting thinner at
each famous battle. It turns around at Moscow and heads back and
finishes near where it started as a very thin black line.
2.) The discussion or arguement between Woj, Julio, and Charles really
interested me, and then I saw it in a little flash of
inspiration. Because truth be told, I never really quite pictured
what structure might look like either. It is usually given such an
abstract and theoretic description that it sounds sort of phoney, if
taken at face value. Then I thought of contour maps and line
integrals from a book, which I once tried to get through, A
Combinatorial Introduction to Topology, Michael Henle. I dug it out
and started to contemplate it, especially its chapter on vector
fields
1.) Just went the links to look. Sure enough, City Planning and Urban
Studies. I will look up Soja in awhile...
Sidenote. Some of the early 70s events and organizations in the disability rights movement here were informed (I wouldn't exactly call it influenced, assisted maybe) by two professors in the City Planning dept at UCB.
City Planning through my ex-wife's graduate studies introduced me to the idea of social engineering through urban planning and development, although I was dimly aware of the steering aspects of `choice' through struggles against the draft, where student deferments steered those who could afford it to remain in college as long as possible to escape the draft. This alone was probably enough to account for much of the race and class bias of draftees headed for combat. After all much of the military industrial complex growing out of WWII was created as a vast social engineering system for both material and personnel. In the end the military knew they were going to get the most of those college grads and they could then make use of their education for the same pay grades as the working class grunts they were tossing away in the rice paddies.
In any event, the basic idea using statistics to profile the disabled population was actually done once upon a time using California Public Health data under an RSA grant (Rehabilitation Services Administration) back in the late-70s. (The fantastic CDC 6400 down in the basement of Evans was used running various custom SAS programs.) The main guy who ran this project was a PhD in Sociology---might have been his thesis project and postdoc---can't remember now. The results of this project provided a gold mine of information that was used in all sorts of federal, state, and county projects on disability to justify themselves.
In the end this focus on statistics was in turn used by cost-benefit bean counters in reactionary Econ depts to theoretically show publicly funded service delivery projects were not `cost efficient' which laid the ground for privatization of welfare state services on the bogus theory that the free market system could do all this sort service much more efficiently. I am living proof, of course the private sector can do it more efficiently. They do it by conducting war on the working class. To start with private sector employers pay me a lot less than my once upon a time union shop at a fed and state funded program at UCB. Duh. And, naturally the private sector engages in systematic denial of service---their interpretation of productivity and efficiency. That's what both public and private statisticians do. They profile population health stats, in order to either `save' money on fixed budgets of government, or in turn make profits in the `free market'. What did people think `managed care' meant?
The real point is that engineering socio-economic `structure' through public policy works. Under a liberal and progressive regime, it works hopefully for the benefit of the people. Under capital dominated and conservative regimes, such a policy apparatus works for the benefit of the wealthy, at the expense of the rest, i.e. facilitates our current corporate culture of neoliberalism and war on the working class. And all the latter results are obscured as `free markets', `Free Choice'. and `good for the economy'.
Turning to models. The 3-D version of a phase space landscape to model `structure' was suggested (to me) by some work in evolutionary studies done by the now notorious E.O.Wilson (before he started in socio-biology). There is a whole biology field devoted to these math models. Phase portraits are used in the Predator-Prey relation. See:
http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Lotka-Volterra
There is an interesting abstract issue or distinction here. The formation of contours that creat the landscape are periodic functions closely related to the recursion function that Julio used to illustrate his point to Wojtek. The latter are also associated with chaos theory. In each iteration, with feedback loops you get a slightly different loops.
Instead of using recursion and feedback, you can use functions called closed integral paths and adjust the input variables which taken together form the family of closed contour curves. These compose just the landscape contours or the gradient fields. The tangent spaces to these contours form the vector fields that simulate the possible `choices' or `forces' that water for example follows as it runs through these branching valleys and hills of the landscape's contours. There is a really nice illustration of the basic idea here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_integral
Skip the math (I can't follow it either), and watch the illustration. Notice the little vectors under the x-axis. These represent the changing magnitude and direction of forces on the moving particle over time as it traverses the vector field.
(Obviously I am not suggesting that human life paths are so tightly structured as this---but it gives you the general idea. I suspect that Woj's real objection to the concept of structure has to do with a philosophical aversion to determinism, and his preference for free will and agency. I don't disagree at all. I am just suggesting that free will and free agents in the absolute abstraction, don't exist in concrete empirically bound society. We are all subject to constraits and socially constructed identities, via the structure of our society...)
Anyway there are a lot of other illustrations on the web. See ocean currents, temperature gradients, pressure maps in weather forecasts...
The whole idea of thinking about mathematical models was suggested to me working with (under) my biophysics buddy DF about fifteen years ago, as he tried to simulate plant root growth over time. The technique was to figure out a nasty looking equation (adapted from thermodynamics, which I also didn't understand), program it, then run real empirical time data through the program-model, take those results then match the observed growth graphs overlaid on model simulations. The matches were close enough to get his PhD.
In any event, I will go back to Soja and probably buy one of his books to read. Thanks for the suggestion.
At the moment I have the flu, so that explains my lengthy post, and plenty of time to think, read, and write for a change.
I am in the middle of Chip Berlet's Rightwing Populism in America, too Close for Comfort. I am in the early 50s Red-Baiting section. It is fascinating stuff and paints a really devastating picture of US political realities. I highly recommend it for those interested.
Apologies to Chip. No, I see populism isn't a problem of a few biker gangs with Nazis tatoos. Mea culpa. It is one of several fundamental political themes of the United States from the beginning.
This book makes a great companion to the standard US history texts---sort of the underbelly view of the beast. I find it especially interesting as it gets into post-WWII developments. The latter sections provide a lot of summary detail that help flesh out classics like C.Wright Mills, Power Elite and G.W.Domhoff, Who Rules America.
Speaking of which, all of the above books paint a similar picture of the US political economy and the forces that have given it the shapes, what could be called the structural contours, we see today.
CG