Learning in a Landscape: Simulation-building as Reflexive Intervention

This article makes a dual contribution to scholarship in science and technology studies (STS) on simulation-building. It both documents a specific simulation-building project, and demonstrates a concrete contribution to interdisciplinary work of STS insights. The article analyses the struggles that arise in the course of determining what counts as theory, as model and even as a simulation. Such debates are especially decisive when working across disciplinary boundaries, and their resolution is an important part of the work involved in building simulations. In particular, we show how ontological arguments about the value of simulations tend to determine the direction of simulation-building. This dynamic makes it difficult to maintain an interest in the heterogeneity of simulations and a view of simulations as unfolding scientific objects. As an outcome of our analysis of the process and reflections about interdisciplinary work around simulations, we propose a chart, as a tool to facilitate discussions about simulations. This chart can be a means to create common ground among actors in a simulation-building project, and a support for discussions that address other features of simulations besides their ontological status. Rather than foregrounding the chart's classificatory potential, we stress its (past and potential) role in discussing and reflecting on simulation-building as interdisciplinary endeavor. This chart is a concrete instance of the kinds of contributions that STS can make to better, more reflexive practice of simulation-building.Comment: 37 page

Bounded solutions for an ordinary differential system from the Ginzburg-Landau theory

International audienceIn this paper, we look at a linear system of ordinary differential equations as derived from the two-dimensional Ginzburg-Landau equation. In two cases, it is known that this system admits bounded solutions coming from the invariance of the Ginzburg-Landau equation by translations and rotations. The specific contribution of our work is to prove that in the other cases, the system does not admit any bounded solutions. We show that this bounded solution problem is related to an eigenvalue problem. AMS classification : 34B40: Ordinary Differential Equations, Boundary value problems on infinite intervals. 35J60: Nonlinear PDE of elliptic type. 35P15: Estimation of eigenvalues, upper and lower bound

Accounting for the past: historic house museums and America's urban Midwest

Although a sizable subcategory of the nonprofit museum sector, historic house museums have received limited attention in discussions of best practices, most notably in topics of administration, funding, and risk management. Historic house museums serve as a cornerstone of American and international cultural tourism for their accessibility and low, or free, attendance costs. This research argues for historic house museum operations, rather than its period of restorative preservation, as the focus of inquiry. The subjects of this research are three sites that were the products of late nineteenth-century industrialization in the American Midwest, a region under-studied in current literature. Past scholarship on historic houses has been dedicated to preservation methodology and interpretation. No study of house museums attends to business and legal concerns as well as architectural history and preservation. Utilizing archives, interviews, and financial documents in the analysis of three case studies, I argue that historic house museums provide an illuminating lens onto issues of professional practice facing museums in the twenty-first century. This dissertation focuses on three historic house museums constructed after the 1876 Centennial and before the turn of the twentieth century. Chapter One offers the history of the Pabst Mansion in Milwaukee, a German Renaissance Revival structure built in 1892 for brewing magnate Captain Frederick Pabst, and provides a discussion of community funding and post-recession heritage tourism. Chapter Two details the story of the Driehaus Museum in Chicago, a Renaissance Revival mansion built in 1883 for banker Samuel Nickerson and now funded primarily by investor Richard Driehaus. This chapter illuminates the issues of single-donor funding, the problematization of definitions of the historic house museum, and modern development of private art collections. Chapter Three is dedicated to the Samuel Cupples House in St. Louis, a Richardsonian Romanesque residence constructed in 1890 for manufacturing magnate Samuel Cupples and now owned by Saint Louis University, and delves into topics of institutional stewardship and university management of cultural resources. The conclusion proposes a diversification of scholarship concerning historic house museums that embraces financial management to ensure operational sustainability