Climate Justice Partnership Linking Universities and Community Organizations in Toronto, Durban, Maputo and Nairobi

This paper describes a project based at York University in Toronto, funded through the Climate Change Adaptation in Africa program of the International Development Research Centre and the UK Department for International Development (DFID), which is working to increase the participation of marginalized groups, especially women, in urban water governance.Students and faculty members from the University of Nairobi, Kenya; Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo, Mozambique; and the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa are working with civil society organizations in the three cities and with York University researchers to show how organizing in local communities can help the vulnerable to deal with climate change.As people in marginalized communities begin to address collectively the impacts of climate change, this summons political attention and allows those with direct experience to influence government policy. Civil society organizations, with support from local and international faculty and students, facilitate and focus this activism. University students help to document the NGOs’ work during internships with the NGOs. They also learn community development skills and make contacts. Faculty members publish and disseminate ideas about grassroots climate change adaptation and resulting political responses through presentations, publications and the project’s website (www.ccaa.irisyorku.ca)This research was supported by the International Development Research Centre, grant numbe

Autobiography

My grandparents immigrated to the U.S. around the turn of the last century. My mother’s parents and six older siblings came from Poland. My father’s parents met in New York, she having come from Russia and he from Romania. My parents, both born in 1908, grew up in New York and never lived outside the metropolitan area. Both finished high school and went to work, my father studying at Brooklyn Law School at night while selling shoes during the day. When they married in 1929, my mother was earning $15 a week as a bookkeeper and my father,$5 a week as a novice lawyer.Search frictions;

Innovation Systems - Do they exist? Exploring Luhmanns thinking

Following Nelson and Winter’s (1982) evolutionary critique of neoclassical view of technical change and economic growth, there appeared an abundant literature on National Innovation Systems (NIS) putting an emphasis on learning processes and institutions as important factors that shape the specific dynamics of growth in each country. Some scholars extended the discussion to sub-national territories, thereby giving origin to a new approach to regional development based on the concept of Regional Innovation Systems (RIS). Production and transfer of knowledge, and the role of institutions, are two major research domains in those strands of economics literature. However, the first one is largely dominated by H. Simon’ cognitivism, which is under serious critique from an interactivist-constructivist perspective; the second is mostly descriptive, lacking a theoretical discussion about the ontology of institutions. The paper critically discusses the theoretical assumptions usually adopted in the IS literature, and proposes conceptual alternatives. The latter provide a theoretical framework more close to the sociological research and lead to serious doubts that innovation processes organise into systems.

Nature as a Network of Morphological Infocomputational Processes for Cognitive Agents

This paper presents a view of nature as a network of infocomputational agents organized in a dynamical hierarchy of levels. It provides a framework for unification of currently disparate understandings of natural, formal, technical, behavioral and social phenomena based on information as a structure, differences in one system that cause the differences in another system, and computation as its dynamics, i.e. physical process of morphological change in the informational structure. We address some of the frequent misunderstandings regarding the natural/morphological computational models and their relationships to physical systems, especially cognitive systems such as living beings. Natural morphological infocomputation as a conceptual framework necessitates generalization of models of computation beyond the traditional Turing machine model presenting symbol manipulation, and requires agent-based concurrent resource-sensitive models of computation in order to be able to cover the whole range of phenomena from physics to cognition. The central role of agency, particularly material vs. cognitive agency is highlighted

Defining and Explorting the Intelligence Space

Intelligence is a difficult concept to define, despite many attempts at doing so. Rather than trying to settle on a single definition, this article introduces a broad perspective on what intelligence is, by laying out a cascade of definitions that induces both a nested hierarchy of three levels of intelligence and a wider-ranging space that is built around them and approximations to them. Within this intelligence space, regions are identified that correspond to both natural -- most particularly, human -- intelligence and artificial intelligence (AI), along with the crossover notion of humanlike intelligence. These definitions are then exploited in early explorations of four more advanced, and likely more controversial, topics: the singularity, generative AI, ethics, and intellectual property.Comment: May ultimately appear as a journal article and/or a book chapte

Moral identity and the Quaker tradition: moral dissonance negotiation in the workplace

Moral identity and moral dissonance in business ethics have explored tensions relating to moral self-identity and the pressures for identity compartmentalization in the workplace. Yet, the connection between these streams of scholarship, spirituality at work, and business ethics is under-theorized. In this paper, we examine the Quaker tradition to explore how Quakers’ interpret moral identity and negotiate the moral dissonance associated with a divided self in work organizations. Specifically, our study illuminates that while Quakers’ share a tradition-specific conception of “Quaker morality” grounded in Quaker theology and the Quaker testimonies to truth, integrity, peace, equality, and simplicity, they often foreground the pursuit of an undivided self through seeking work that enables an expression of Quaker moral identity, or by resigning from work organizations that do not. In most cases, however, Quakers’ face moral dissonance at work and engage in either identity compartmentalization and draw upon the metaphor of a ‘spiritual journey’ as a form of self-justification, or reframe, compartmentalize and engage in work tasks that are both subjectively moral and meaningful. We present a model that elaborates these negotiation processes and invite further research that examines how the spiritual traditions influence moral identity construction at work

Agent-Based Computational Economics

Agent-based computational economics (ACE) is the computational study of economies modeled as evolving systems of autonomous interacting agents. Starting from initial conditions, specified by the modeler, the computational economy evolves over time as its constituent agents repeatedly interact with each other and learn from these interactions. ACE is therefore a bottom-up culture-dish approach to the study of economic systems. This study discusses the key characteristics and goals of the ACE methodology. Eight currently active research areas are highlighted for concrete illustration. Potential advantages and disadvantages of the ACE methodology are considered, along with open questions and possible directions for future research.Agent-based computational economics; Autonomous agents; Interaction networks; Learning; Evolution; Mechanism design; Computational economics; Object-oriented programming.