Computer Models for Social Change

Peter A Johnson and Renee E Sieber. 2011. Negotiating constraints to the adoption of agent-based modeling in tourism planning. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 38: 307-321

Had a nice visit with my former Masters, Sonja Klinsky, who is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Faculty of Economics and Politics, University of Cambridge, UK. Her research talk @ McGill:

Vinaigrette or Oil and Vinegar? Comparing Public Rationales for Justice in Mitigation and Adaptation Climate Policy Dilemmas

The ideal relationship between climate change adaptation and mitigation policy has been long debated. Are they substitutes for each other, in which case the policy task is to find the optimal trade-off between the two, or can they be integrated to take advantage of win-win overlaps?

Instead of proposing how these policies should relate to one another from an abstract policy perspective, this study examines public rationales about justice and burden-sharing in each case. What arguments about justice resonate from a mitigation perspective, which ones are dominant from an adaptation perspective, and what might this suggest about the contours of politically acceptable climate policy?

Our group was well-represented:

Budhathoki, Nama and R E. Sieber. 2011. What Motivates Governments to Adopt the Geospatial Web 2.0? Proceedings of Spatial Knowledge and Information - Canada (SKI-Canada) 2011, March 3-6 in Fernie BC, Canada. Vol. 1

da Silva, Korbin, Renee Sieber, Raphaël Fischler. 2011. Unfolding Participatory Urban Design, Capturing Spatial Feelings and Emotions in Digital Space. Proceedings of Spatial Knowledge and Information - Canada (SKI-Canada) 2011, March 3-6 in Fernie BC, Canada. Vol. 1

Beaudreau, Pierre, Peter A. Johnson, and Renee Sieber. 2011. Creating and Testing a Portable Template for Municipal-Level Adoption of the Geospatial Web 2.0. Proceedings of Spatial Knowledge and Information - Canada (SKI-Canada) 2011, March 3-6 in Fernie BC, Canada. Vol. 1

Tudge, Pamela. 2011. “Let the young ones do it” Digital divides influence the use of the Geoweb by farmers and food advocates in rural Canada. Proceedings of Spatial Knowledge and Information - Canada (SKI-Canada) 2011, March 3-6 in Fernie BC, Canada. Vol. 1

Brandusescu, Ana, Renee Sieber, Nadine Schuurman. 2011. The use of geovisualization to public health in the context of open source applications and digital earths: an effective representation? Proceedings of Spatial Knowledge and Information - Canada (SKI-Canada) 2011, March 3-6 in Fernie BC, Canada. Vol. 2

Zhou, Jian, Renee Sieber, Mark Chandler, Linda Soh. 2011. Using the Geospatial Web 2.0 to Improve Climate Model Accessibility. Proceedings of Spatial Knowledge and Information - Canada (SKI-Canada) 2011, March 3-6 in Fernie BC, Canada. Vol. 2

This is the third year that Scott Bell, Nadine Schuurman and I have run the Spatial Knowlege and Information Canada conference. The Proceedings for this year can be found here.

Our research assistant, and Flex extraordinaire, Jimmy Li, has posted the ontology based GUI onto sourceforge.

He describes it as the

"GUI front-end of a Chinese historical database built using Flex. The search interface is a tree-structured concept map, where similar criterion are organized into subtrees that can be expanded when clicked. This aims to make searching more intuitive."