Beach Haven

References
​Hess, David J. 2016. Undone Science: Social Movements, Mobilized Publics, and Industrial Transitions. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press.

Review by Michael Beach

In this work, David J. Hess looks at controversial issues that involve “complex scientific and technological issues that can provoke sharp divisions in public opinion” (Hess 2016, 1). As a way to examine the role of scientific and technological expertise Hess includes specific topics to include climate change, industrial pollution, nanomaterials, technologies of surveillance, and products of molecular biology. It’s safe to say these topics are both ongoing and controversial. Although he looks at the political issues themselves, the point of the work is to look at epistemological perspectives by and about scientists and technologists involved in these specific focus areas.

One example of an area Hess examines is depicted in the chapter 3 title; “The Politics of Meaning: From Frames to Design Conflicts” (Hess 2016, 79). The controversial topics noted above are not the focus of this chapter so much as the setting. The focus is on how researchers tend to frame the arguments and issues that need attention, and the cultural factors that influence their analysis. How does one create an analysis (breaking down ideas into parts) then move towards a meaningful synthesis (understanding the way the parts interact)? Designing an approach to both analysis and synthesis is where many human factors can cause variation in approach that also cause variation in artifacts produced in the process. This variable process is what causes many of us who are not experts in a given controversial topic such as climate change to put stock in one political position or another using ‘science’ as one of our arguments in favor of a given position. An example Hess shares relates to high emissions by buses. The bus depots that have the highest pollution emission concentrations tend to be in lower-income parts of cities. He gives examples of studies conducted in specific cities that linked income with bus depot locations. These studies further linked low-income neighborhoods with predominantly African American residents. Yet, one needs to examine the details about bus usage, historical demographic changes in neighborhoods, and other similar factors. “More generally, the analysis of race and design in the urban transit system suggest a need for methodological caution” (Hess 2016, 91). Studies have often suffered criticism in the process of going from the general the specific (analysis), then applying the specific to the general (synthesis). Humans are making decisions all along the process of what to examine and what to ignore in collecting data. Then humans are making decisions all along the process of which variables and data are relevant and which are not. In the language of statistical analysis, what information is statistically significant, and how does one define statistically significant? How much variability in data is acceptable to call something ‘significant’? The subjectivity is ultimately what has led to an erosion of confidence by some in scientific expertise. 
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References
​Schrank, Delphine. 2015. The Rebel of Rangoon: A Tale of Defiance and Deliverance in Burma. New York: Nation Books.

Review by Michael Beach

The pro-democracy struggles in Burma lasted decades. This book looks closely at a handful of specific people who participated during the 1980s through the first decade of the 2000s. Their names are Nway, Nigel, Grandpa, and Aung San Suu Kyi. The last of these was the face of the movement who had popular support in several national level elections. Aung was very visible and attracted international news attention. The others were unknown to the world, or even the larger movement seeking to topple the autocratic powers that led to many of the problems that are common to that style of government. Delphine Schrank shares specific stories of four specific revolutionaries and how each of their experiences were at time parallel, and other times were entwined. Each had their personal losses caused by violence in the process. Several suffered through prison time as political prisoners.

While sharing their stories, the author is able to move their individual stories along while sharing the larger narrative. Major events are depicted from the perspective of historical fact as documented in news stories and official documents. The individuals followed also have their own narrow experience during each of those major events. For example, there was a migration of sorts of many of the revolutionaries temporarily left Rangoon, or the Insein Prison system to gather just over the river in Dala. “In Dala, the only structures built to last, aside from an orphanage and a school, were the pagodas” (Schrank 2015, 131). The pagodas Schrank describes as tourist traps designed to give visitors a place to leave Rangoon during the day, spend some money for the ambiance, then retreat back across the river to their respective hotels. For the revolutionaries, Schrank says, Dala became a ‘city of exiles’ that evolved into a ‘city of wraiths’.
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Each of the characters (real people, not created by the author) shared specific tactics used for communication, and their shifting support of each other or the larger movement. At times several were accused of using their position for personal benefit, and the author shows that this may be true to some degree, yet they also participated with personal sacrifice. The book is a look at real humans who act like real humans in a large political struggle with individual experience. 

References
Ezrahi, Yaron. 1990. The Descent of Icarus: Sceince and the Transformation of Contemporary Democracy. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press.

​Review by Michael Beach

The author has looked at the cross-section of science and politics since the 1960s. In this work, Yaron Ezrahi considers the role of scientific expertise in the policy process within modern ‘liberal-democratic’ states. He shares examples of the ascension of science as an authoritative voice in coming to ‘objective’ conclusions. Over time, other factors came to have as much or more influence in policy. Since experts of similar credential don’t always agree, and some change their perspective over time, public policy makers have come to view expertise as one area of consideration when forming public policy, not so much as the area of consideration. The lowering of scientific authority from preeminence to that of one more voice of many is its descension. Science is more generally understood to have both objective and subjective components, often with ‘dueling experts’ on opposite sides of a policy question.

Ezrahi examines both political process and its relationship with scientific process. The work is divided into three sections. The first examines the political functions of science. It is followed by a look at dilemmas that arise between private persons and public actions. This includes those who act as scientific experts, but also those who create policy, and the rest of us who vote in a democratic society. The final section takes deep dive into effects caused by the privatization of science in the United States specifically.

One interesting thread for me as a reader was the author’s look at machines as a metaphor in scientific and policy processes. For example, machines can be viewed as helpful and positive, or out of control. In the first, we have influence and benefit from mechanistic processes. They create a fair and equal environment. In the second, those not directly inside the machine are powerless and fall victim to its seemingly mindless path. Where one falls in the machine metaphor as benevolent or apocalyptic, depends a great deal on the specific country or culture with which one is surrounded. 
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​Bibliography
Jasanoff, Sheila. 2005. Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
 
Review by Michael Beach

Sheila Jasanoff is a leading scholar on topics of how science and technology are coproduced with society. Each influences change in the other. In this work she examines how biology and politics interact with each other.

She uses examples of how scientific change is influenced differently in different societies. For example, in the US, foods using genetically modified organisms (GMO) such as grains have largely been adopted. There are parts of US society that feel uncomfortable with GMO foods. This created a market for ‘whole foods’ or ‘non-GMO’. People will pay extra for the labeling. When this same topic came up in the UK, there was sufficient public backlash to cause the government to create anti-GMO laws. Jasanoff points to several things that caused the different reactions. For one, in England there had been a health hazard created by the science community. Intending to help increase beef production efficiency through modifying cattle feed, the result was so-called ‘mad cow disease’. Much of the stock in the UK was slaughtered and burned to prevent the disease spreading to humans.

​Other areas explored in the book by Jasanoff include cloning, stem cell use, animal patenting, and reproductive technologies. She contrasts approaches in the US, the UK, and Germany. She also documents how rifts grew among these countries over how best to govern innovation in genetics and biotechnology.

Bibliography
​Daston, Lorraine, and Gregg Mitman, . 2005. Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Antrhopomorphism. New York, Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press.

Review by Michael Beach
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This is a collection of articles (chapters) from multiple authors. Each chapter focuses on some aspect of how humans project themselves onto animals. For example, many fairy tales and Saturday morning cartoon characters include animals that talk and feel like humans. Some authors do the opposite, such as the chapter by Wendy Doniger in which she explores the idea that humans can be more bestial than beasts. Paul S. White looks at the use of animals in scientific experimentation during the age of Victorian Britain.

The list goes on. Authors tackle topics including evolutionary biology, psychology, human-pet relationships, digital beasts, media, politics, and conversation. Several chapters look into human-animal relationships from a scientific perspective, either their use in science, or scientific evaluation of the human in some connected way. These chapters are the main motivation for my reading the book as a part of my PhD program, but the rest of the perspectives are worth the read.

One example of a specific approach includes a study of “The Family that Live with Elephants” (Daston and Mitman 2005, 177). In this section, Gregg Mitman considers communications between the elephants and the human family that cares for them. The human father and daughter in particular discuss actions and noises the pachyderms make to express ideas. The humans ponder how subjective the elephant thoughts are, and not just simple one-word ideas. In a discussion about objective and subjective human evaluation of elephant language, the daughter eventually asserts, “But it’s HUMAN and subjective. They decide which bits of animal behavior to be objective about by consulting human subjective experience. Didn’t you say that anthropomorphism is a bad thing?” To which her father answers, “Yes – but they do try to be not human” (Ibid.).
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Bibliography
Steinberg, Ted. 2000. Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natrual Disaster in America. 2nd. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
 
Review by Michael Beach

In this work, Ted Steinberg looks at human action increases events that count as catastrophic through increasing where we live and work. He also speaks to how our modification of geography, flora, fauna, and climate also increases the number and severity of natural disasters.

In terms of impact to human life, Steinberg shows how the poor, elderly and minorities are impacted more than those who have more means. In some examples such as specific floods, he shows how land values are higher as distance from flood zones increases. As land value increases the purchase prices grow beyond the ability of lower income home buyers and renters. In lower cost flood zones where poor people can afford to live, the increase of insurance costs means they are less likely to carry flood coverage. If all people could afford to live at higher elevations, then fewer buildings would be built in flood-prone areas and losses would be less.

Other examples are shared throughout the book where human activity adds to both the frequency and impact of largescale disasters. Crowded cities give way to faster spreading pandemics. As with pandemics, closely compacted homes built from combustible materials have made large fires engulfing whole portions of cities. Floods along the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, the burning of Chicago, Hurricane Katrina, and the list goes on.

There are, of course, many ways to mitigate both the frequency and impact, but they all take two things; money and social will. At least in the case of modern construction there are improvements, but generally only where zoning rules require them for new construction or major renovation. That doesn’t protect existing structures, nor do such efforts guarantee complete survivability. These efforts still don’t address where people live based on their economic strata. In America, we are slow to want to preclude people from their freedom to live where they wish, or at least where they can afford to. There are no easy answers, and the answers we do have are partial at best. 
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Bibliography
​Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 

Review by Michael Beach
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As the title implies, James C. Scott references several national policies in different economic and political universes that claimed to seek the betterment of the people living within a given sphere of control. Then, Scott goes on to discuss some of the failures within his example state policies. His focus is on policies that are adopted from the perspective of ‘high modernism’, or in other words, highly planned and symbolic communities as opposed to those whose growth is more organic.

Scott defines high-modernism as clean, sharp, repetitious, and completely planned. For example, one can drive around a subdivision in America and every house looks the same with every yard laid out in a way that keeps the ominous HOA off the back of the homeowner. More organic cities and neighborhoods are those that are more post-modern where each is unique, and the growth seems hodge-podge and random. Scott compares public policy and the effects of high-modernist and post-modernist with various art movements that followed similar courses.

The two main examples Scott uses are the Soviet Union collectivization, compulsory villagization in Tanzania. In each case the hoped-for outcomes were less than desired. People resisted the government efforts resulting in police-state approaches. For Scott, these examples show “how routinely planners ignore the radical contingency of the future” (Scott, 1998, p. 343). One of the fallacies he points out is how in planning there is a need for “standardizing the subjects of development” (p. 345). By assuming all the people to be roughly the same then planners can create buildings, parks, roads, market areas, etc. the same. Other things need to be standardized as well such as assumptions about weather, geologic forces, external economic effects, or other social movements that are guessed to be more or less the same in the future as they have been in the past.

Scott makes a plea for what he calls ‘metis-friendly institutions’. Those institutions that are tasked with planning should be “multifunctional, plastic, diverse, and adaptable” (p. 353). The issue he has with high-modernism is its general approach at simplifying the variables it plans for. Instead of one-size-fits-all, he is advocating for more voices in the process and a willingness to let go of efficiency in the name of sameness.

Bibliography
​Pickering, A. (1995). The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
 
Andrew Pickering takes a look at science as a practical work. While there are many philosophical arguments abounding in regards to science in theory, he examines social forces that shape and are shaped by the processes in scientific decision making.

Pickering offers some clarification around the word ‘mangle’. He realizes that this has a different meaning in different places. In America, for example, he notes that the word refers to completely messing something up from the original intention of the thing in question. In his sense mangle means, “practice, understood as the work of cultural extension” (original emphasis) (Pickering, 1995, p. 3). He equates ‘mangle’ with ‘change’. To Pickering, the practice of science is to change it from the theoretical to the real.

He uses some examples to show how process and outcomes don’t always follow original assumptions. One example includes experimentation using a bubble chamber. It includes “the extension of the mechanic field of science, specifically of the development of the bubble chamber as an instrument for experimental research in elementary-particle physics” (Pickering, 1995, p. 37). Pickering shares the history of decisions it took to get to a working model, and the modification of how ‘working’ was eventually defined. Since the chamber ultimately did not create the exact vacuum conceived, the vacuum it did achieve served to define what a bubble chamber is.

Other examples in the book include “hunting the quark,” “constructing quaternions,” and “numerically controlled machine tools.” Each comes with its own history of conception through realization with social compromises along the way. Finally, Pickering finishes with two chapters on conceptual arguments about the kinds of influences and ways to perhaps embrace or reconstruct them. In Chapter 6 for example, he puts some focus on scientific norms as espoused by Robert Merton which have been argued about since their inception. Pickering considers these norms (or any others) as ‘articulations’. 
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Bibliography
​Weintraub, S. (2014). A Christmas Far from Home: An Epic Tale of Courage and Survival During the Korean War. Boston: Da Capo Press.
 
Review by Michael Beach

The Korean War was my father’s war. To be honest, it's a war I personally know little about. To be technical, the political powers of the west didn’t want to call it a war to avoid what inevitably happened, involvement by China. Instead, they called it a ‘police action’ that involved countries that signed on as United Nations forces. In this book, Stanley Weintraub looks at the beginning engagements, the rout of American forces from the Chosin reservoir, and the military leadership decisions that seemed to bungle the whole thing.

It was late fall in Korea and the weather was turning cold. General Douglas MacArthur (yes, the one from WWII) was in charge of all the forces in Asia. He conducted Korean operations from a comfortable hotel suite and offices in Tokyo. At first, spirits were high in his offices, and initially with troops on the ground as well. Everyone heard that the whole thing will be over by Christmas. The armies of North Korea seemed to be a pushover. There was no reason to think the Chinese would involve themselves. Unfortunately, there was plenty of intelligence to the opposite. The intelligence was ignored. The result was that American troops pushed north toward the Yalu River with little resistance, then found themselves nearly encircled by Chinese regulars and plummeting temperatures.

Weintraub’s work is a combination of historical facts about what happened, and editorial perspective on why things went the way they did. His descriptions of the war that wasn’t a war, the first war America didn’t win, are well written. The reader can see the whole thing play out both from the perspective of generals who rarely joined the ground troops, to the forces themselves dodging death as they made their way back from the Yalu to the relative safety south. The reader gets both the grit of up-close warfare, and the confusion and assumptions at upper levels that reflected an 'alternate reality’ as events unfolded.

Bibliography
Sclove, R. E. (1995). Democracy and Technology. New York and London: The Guilford Press.

​Reviewed by Michael Beach
 
In this work, Richard Sclove examines both various forms of democratic societies and how they approach incorporating technology, and he also looks at where these approaches tend to fail. At the end of the book, Sclove proposes his own suggestion of democratic methods that he feels would work best in a ever more international environment.

Two of the examples Richard Sclove regularly refers to are water provision in rural Spain and Amish farming communities. In the case of the Spanish towns, old systems were quickly upgraded to ‘modern’ water systems. Among the results were increase used of home laundry systems. Community spirit decreased over time as people did not gather at local streams for cleaning clothing. Likewise, gathering at well sites went away as manual retrieval in buckets we no longer necessary. The Amish farmer example, on the other hand, included community discussion on adding any technology. The goal of continued community interaction and cooperation is at the heart of each decision to add or not to add a particular technology. That is different than what many assume. Amish communities are often thought to technology-averse. Sclove argues this is untrue. He points to technologies adopted over many years by Amish communities. The key is whether the implementation would cause separation or isolation among community members.

Among other areas, Sclove reviews topics like the role of experts, international and local impacts of technical decisions, and how power dynamics influence and are influenced by technology. User influence on technical design choices within differing forms of democracy wraps up this examination followed by the author’s own recommendations. What Sclove calls “A New and Better Vision” (Sclove, 1995, p. 239) is laid out in an earlier chapter in the book. There are nine criteria (Sclove, 1995, p. 98) divided into five categories. Each category is elaborated on in separate chapters. The categories include: toward democratic community, toward democratic work, toward democratic politics, to help secure democratic self-governance, and finally to help perpetuate democratic social structures.

From the perspective of Richard Sclove, it is possible to have a democratic approach in selecting technology, even within societies that are less democratic. At the same time a democratic government does not imply the same principles are used to select which technologies any particular society will adopt. 
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