From Managed to Free(r) Markets: Transnational and Regional Governance of Asian Timber

On the basis of research conducted in Indonesia, the author investigates a key transition in the production of timber for export. The analysis is based on a rich liter- ature focusing on commodity chains. In addition to economic factors, the author gives attention to struc- tures of governance, including the formation and disso- lution of political alliances and coalitions. From the late 1980s through 1998, Indonesian plywood producers consolidated power in a state-supported domestic oli- gopoly, forged a transnational alliance that circum- vented the power of Japanese trading houses, and supported domestic accumulation. The Asian crisis of 1997 to 1998 and structural adjustments imposed by the International Monetary Fund radically transformed Indonesia’s options, diminishing its capacity to com- pete, as China emerged as a major producer of wood- related products. The Indonesian case may well illustrate processes of market remarginalization result- ing from the implementation of neoliberal policies

Review of Space, Oil and Capital by Mazen Labban. Routledge Press, 2008. Economic Geography 86(1): 113-114

[Extract] Conventional geopolitical perspectives on oil posit that the world\u27s total oil supplies have been depleted to such an extent that we are past the peak, and confiict and rising prices are to be expected. Political economy perspectives often reject such neo- Malthusian ideas and stress the importance of oil as a strategic commodity for the perpetuation of hegemonic power, in this case by the United States. Mazen Labban\u27s insightful, dense, and short book (roughly 150 pages) applies a Marxian geographic analysis to the subject of oil with a focus on the Soviet Union, Russia, and Iran. In doing so, he provides a fresh perspective on the causes of global price fiuctuations and the geopolitics of access to the world\u27s oil reserves. Labban argues that the scarcity or abundance of oil is a sociospatial relationship..

People, Place and Time: How Structural Fieldwork Helps World-Systems Analysis

Some of the most insightful work in the political economy of the world-system area has been produced by researchers whose extensive fieldwork offers them deep familiarity with people and locales. Few other methods are as useful to understand the impacts of structural change on daily life and the ways agents resist, alter, and shape emerging structures. Yet such structural fieldwork is marginalized by the over-reliance of pedagogical materials on social constructionist, social psychological, or interactionist perspectives and also in world-systems research and writing by the privileging of long durée historical or quantitative cross-national methods. This paper introduces the concept of structural fieldwork to describe a qualitative field methodology in which the researcher is self-consciously guided by considerations emerging out of macro- sociological theories. We identify four advantages of structural fieldwork: the illumination of power’s multiple dimensions; examination of agency and its boundaries or limitations within broad political and economic structures; attention to nuances of change and durability, spatial and temporal specificities, and processes of change and durability; and challenging and extending social theory. These advantages are illustrated in select examples from existing literature and by discussion of the two author’s fieldwork-based research. The paper concludes that explicit attention to fieldwork may strengthen political economy and world-systems research and also de-marginalize political economy informed by structural fieldwork

People, Place, and Time: How Structural Fieldwork Helps World-Systems Analysis

Some of the most insightful work in the political economy of the world-system area has been produced by researchers whose extensive fieldwork offers them deep familiarity with people and locales. Few other methods are as useful to understand the impacts of structural change on daily life and the ways agents resist, alter, and shape emerging structures. Yet such structural fieldwork is marginalized by the over-reliance of pedagogical materials on social constructionist, social psychological, or interactionist perspectives and also in world-systems research and writing by the privileging of long durée historical or quantitative cross-national methods. This paper introduces the concept of structural fieldwork to describe a qualitative field methodology in which the researcher is self-consciously guided by considerations emerging out of macro- sociological theories. We identify four advantages of structural fieldwork: the illumination of power’s multiple dimensions; examination of agency and its boundaries or limitations within broad political and economic structures; attention to nuances of change and durability, spatial and temporal specificities, and processes of change and durability; and challenging and extending social theory. These advantages are illustrated in select examples from existing literature and by discussion of the two author’s fieldwork-based research. The paper concludes that explicit attention to fieldwork may strengthen political economy and world-systems research and also de-marginalize political economy informed by structural fieldwork

Molecular dynamics in arbitrary geometries : parallel evaluation of pair forces

A new algorithm for calculating intermolecular pair forces in molecular dynamics (MD) simulations on a distributed parallel computer is presented. The arbitrary interacting cells algorithm (AICA) is designed to operate on geometrical domains defined by an unstructured, arbitrary polyhedral mesh that has been spatially decomposed into irregular portions for parallelisation. It is intended for nano scale fluid mechanics simulation by MD in complex geometries, and to provide the MD component of a hybrid MD/continuum simulation. The spatial relationship of the cells of the mesh is calculated at the start of the simulation and only the molecules contained in cells that have part of their surface closer than the cut-off radius of the intermolecular pair potential are required to interact. AICA has been implemented in the open source C++ code OpenFOAM, and its accuracy has been indirectly verified against a published MD code. The same system simulated in serial and in parallel on 12 and 32 processors gives the same results. Performance tests show that there is an optimal number of cells in a mesh for maximum speed of calculating intermolecular forces, and that having a large number of empty cells in the mesh does not add a significant computational overhead

R. Scott Frey and the Unfinished Agenda of Unifying Economy and Environment in the World-System from Extraction to Waste

This  essay discusses Scott Frey’s  contributions to our understanding of what he called environmental ‘anti-wealth,’ including his analysis of how it is spread to the peripheries of the world-system, and how Frey’s work intersects with other research, including the author’s own, on the ongoing extraction of value from peripheries. In addition to noting Scott’s generosity as a scholar and mentor, Gellert reflects on Scott’s unfinished agenda research agenda, focused on unifying commodification and waste in the world-system

Parameter Learning and Change Detection Using a Particle Filter with Accelerated Adaptation

This paper presents the construction of a particle filter, which incorporates elements inspired by genetic algorithms, in order to achieve accelerated adaptation of the estimated posterior distribution to changes in model parameters. Specifically, the filter is designed for the situation where the subsequent data in online sequential filtering does not match the model posterior filtered based on data up to a current point in time. The examples considered encompass parameter regime shifts and stochastic volatility. The filter adapts to regime shifts extremely rapidly and delivers a clear heuristic for distinguishing between regime shifts and stochastic volatility, even though the model dynamics assumed by the filter exhibit neither of those features.</jats:p