Paul N. Edwards

Science and Decisionmaking

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses science as an activity independent of society. There is certainly one pathway in science that is a pure investigation of natural processes. But, in this age when the very sustainability of the Earth and its critical ecosystems are in question, it is important to communicate the key findings of environmental science and be used by those who make decisions about the future of the Earth. The challenge is how the scientists can effectively impart appropriate and useful information to decision-makers. Science is an integral part of decision making, as scientific results and model predictions are rarely expressed in terms of end points that have direct meaning or inherent value to decision makers. A number of questions arise to facilitate this interchange between science and decision-making. Three examples of how science is used in making decisions about land management, and their use are explained. Based on the common elements of these examples, a set of questions about appropriate ways to transmit science to decision-makers are also included.

Science friction: Data, metadata, and collaboration:

When scientists from two or more disciplines work together on related problems, they often face what we call ‘science friction’. As science becomes more data-driven, collaborative, and interdisciplinary, demand increases for interoperability among data, tools, and services. Metadata – usually viewed simply as ‘data about data’, describing objects such as books, journal articles, or datasets – serve key roles in interoperability. Yet we find that metadata may be a source of friction between scientific collaborators, impeding data sharing. We propose an alternative view of metadata, focusing on its role in an ephemeral process of scientific communication, rather than as an enduring outcome or product. We report examples of highly useful, yet ad hoc, incomplete, loosely structured, and mutable, descriptions of data found in our ethnographic studies of several large projects in the environmental sciences. Based on this evidence, we argue that while metadata products can be powerful resources, usually they must be supplemented with metadata processes. Metadata-as-process suggests the very large role of the ad hoc, the incomplete, and the unfinished in everyday scientific work.

GLOBAL CLIMATE SCIENCE, UNCERTAINTY AND POLITICS: DATA-LADEN MODELS, MODEL-FILTERED DATA

Global climate change is among today’s most visible and controversial areas of sciencebased policy. By almost any measure — number of researchers, size of budgets, attention from the public and from policymakers — the importance of this field has grown dramatically during the last decade. The collective annual budget of the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), a clearinghouse organization charged with coordinating research sponsored by a dozen different US government agencies, hovers near

Meteorology as Infrastructural Globalism

1.8 billion (U.S. Global Change Research Program, 1998). Although the USGCRP covers many areas in addition to atmospheric science, a large number of these — including oceanography, ecology, agriculture, and forest studies — are linked via the question of how a changing climate may affect them.

Infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of Google and Facebook

This chapter explores the history of a global governance institution, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), from its nineteenth‐century origins through the beginnings of a planetary meteorological observing network, the WMO’s World Weather Watch (WWW), in the 1960s. This history illustrates a profoundly important transition from voluntarist internationalism, based on shared interests, to quasi‐obligatory globalism, based on a more permanent shared infrastructure. The WMO and the WWW thus represent infrastructural globalism, by which “the world” as a whole is produced and maintained (as both object of knowledge and unified arena of human action) through global infrastructures.

Y2K: Millennial reflections on computers as infrastructure

Two theoretical approaches have recently emerged to characterize new digital objects of study in the media landscape: infrastructure studies and platform studies. Despite their separate origins and different features, we demonstrate in this article how the cross-articulation of these two perspectives improves our understanding of current digital media. We use case studies of the Open Web, Facebook, and Google to demonstrate that infrastructure studies provides a valuable approach to the evolution of shared, widely accessible systems and services of the type often provided or regulated by governments in the public interest. On the other hand, platform studies captures how communication and expression are both enabled and constrained by new digital systems and new media. In these environments, platform-based services acquire characteristics of infrastructure, while both new and existing infrastructures are built or reorganized on the logic of platforms. We conclude by underlining the potential of this combined framework for future case studies.

Chapter 2 – A Brief History of Atmospheric General Circulation Modeling

Abstract Computers have become the control, information storage, and information processing technology of choice in many other, pre‐existing infrastructures. This essay argues that historians of computers and information technology should expand their agenda to include the origins and impacts of this phenomenon. Studying computer‐based infrastructures could lead to a new historiographical approach focussing on ‘internetworks’. These are very large, integrated, extremely heterogeneous metasystems, made possible in part by ‘digital convergence’ or the ability to record, store, process, and distribute information in all media using computers and computer networks. Key actors include the developers of protocols for information exchange among heterogeneous networks.

History and the Technopolitics of Identity: The Case of Apartheid South Africa

This chapter discusses the preliminary results of an attempt to trace the history of atmospheric general circulation modeling, focusing on the period through 1985. By the 1980s, computer models of atmosphere and ocean general circulation had become the primary tool in climate studies. This marked a major historical transformation from a previous era, in which virtually the only tool for climate studies was the statistical record. The most important aspect of this shift is the ability to perform model-based experiments to project possible causes of climatic change. Another major aspect of the shift to numerical models was the development of vast global data networks from many different instrument modalities. These were built to supply the information necessary to predict weather, but the data record is now nearly sufficient in length and global coverage to allow accurate studies of climate as well. Without the availability of computer models, these data networks would probably not have been constructed, as they could not have been processed or understood in any other way.

Revolutionary Secrets: Technology's Role in the South African Anti-Apartheid Movement

This article explores the history of nuclear systems and computers in apartheid South Africa, considering these systems – and apartheid more generally – as forms of ‘technopolitics’, hybrids of technical systems and political practices that produced new forms of power and agency. Both systems were exceptionally important to the apartheid state, not only as tools but also as symbols. Equally significant, both came to serve as focal points for Western governments and international anti-apartheid activists, who fought to limit South Africas access to these systems. We argue that nuclear systems enacted the technopolitics of national identity, while computers expressed a technopolitics of social identity.

Entangled histories: Climate science and nuclear weapons research

In the late 1980s, Operation Vula brought exiled African National Congress (ANC) leaders and military capacity into South Africa despite legal and military obstacles. According to participants, a purpose-built encrypted communication system was critical to this success, but what was the significance of the technology? Was it simply a catalyst for change within the ANC leadership, or did the system crucially alter the political situation? This case study highlights the importance of four key factors affecting the interaction between new information and communication technologies (ICTs) and social movements. The factors are (a) ongoing technological innovation, (b) user practices, (c) technical competence, and (d) organizational routines. Scholarship that fails to consider these factors risks oversimplifying the process of sociotechnical change, hampering our ability to understand the relationship between ICTs and contentious political activity.