Vision statement: Human Sustainabilities and Societies Project
This is an open community project Peer reviewed contributions welcome
Contents |
Introduction
The Human Societies Project contains some ideas of Scott D. White as to how to enlarge the collaborative projects that Douglas R. White began with the SCCS, the World Cultures eJournal, and the Kinship, Class, and Communities Kinship computing project. He provides three examples of on-line database ontology (i.e., freebase), a more conventional on-line database (i.e., DabbleDb, and an open source network (i.e., Jung - Java Universal Networks and Graphs).
- Cross-cultural causality project Doug White and Scott White
- International Council for Science (ICSU) implementation steps for a holistic strategy on the Earth system research (27-04-09)
Timemap
- Timemap
- Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (open http://www.ecai.org/ in new tab)
World Vision, Prevision and Provision: calling for Reinventing our world
Our world is going through a series of punctuated successions, massive collapses of the ways things are done, like the rapid demise of the institutions of the Wall Street financial firms once they became unregulated. A number of elements might be connected given that our world will need to be reinvented in the ways that we do things: artistic ecological reinvisioning as a result of dialogues among professions and sites, methods of envisioning our changing world as is being done at ESRI for example, with an evolving tool-set, presenting educational syntheses about what the sciences tell us about the processes of our planetary evolution, and the use of our new tool-sets and mind-sets to explore multiple images of our futures in terms of planetary interdependencies, interactions, and emergent potentials for using the punctuated successions of problems that we know we must face in a positive way for all peoples and all sustainable ecologies. This is an open project and we invite all who can contribute skills, tools, imagination and effort toward positive solutions to participate.
- Visualizating the actual world in the mode of Google maps e.g., ESRI's ArcExplorer
- The main kind of problems I am interested are less in economic and decision models but the nonlinear interactions and negative synergetics. Perhaps you would have some suggestions for sources of time series data. I would like to do the things: (1) bootstrap parameter estimation for nonlinear increase, interactive or multiplication dynamics, fitting generalized entropy models (away from Boltzmann-Gibbs toward Tsallis and other multiplicative effects curve fittings – here I have worked with Cosma Shalizi, Tsallis, Hanel, Thurner and Aaron Clauset) on time series and spatially distributed distributions, to try to figure out the effects of nonlinearities that can spring up more quickly (with rate increases) than extrapolating linear trends. (2) The secomd tthing I want to do is put the concentration and spatial distributional data in a spatio-temporal distributions context of time series GIS. (3) The third is to help build a global monitoring of where the policing probems are, and how to trace back the processes to push solutions back to their sources, then get information systems (my son is an expert here in the computer industry) to get the problem source information out to the regulatory agencies and innovation industries. Doug White 18:54, 22 January 2009 (PST)
- The revisioning in Ecological Art of grounded sites as in Green Heart Vision] (e.g., revisioning Holland)
- Reinvisioning the future WITH ArcExplorer
- The Evolutionary processes (on-line Museum) using all the technologies
Sample databases contributed for cultural and ecologies studies (as yet very partial, but a start)
- Ethnographic Database Project
- Ethnographic Atlas -- Wikipedia:Ethnographic Atlas
- SCCS -- Wikipedia:Standard Cross-Cultural Sample
- Ecological databases
- Understanding the World Today
The research problems
Envision a worldwide project
- All mappable in Google earth, maps, etc.
- All retrievable for data analysis
- All cross-referenced, geocoded, timw coded
- As applied to:
- All the coded ethnographic and historical databases
- All the textual ethnographic and historical databases
- All the language phylogeny
- All the Y chromosome phylogeny
- All the mitochondrial phylogeny
- All the ethnographic network data, e.g., genealogical
- All the population data, rural, towns, cities
- All the trade route/sea route data
- All the commodity, bullion trading and monetary flow data
- All the conflict data
- All the political boundaries and administrative units data
...insofar are people are free to contribute and others are free to implement open source software to integrate these databases
some initial examples of people that are or might be engaged
Peter Turchin 2008 Arise Cliodynamics. Nature 454: 34-35
Chris Chase-Dunn Upsweep Inventory
Gene Shackman I used some of Angus Maddison's statistics in The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective to prepare this report: Context of change in the 21st century
Anthon Eff & Network autocorrelation
Nicolay N. Kradin http://www.openhistory.net/
Douglas R. White - SCCS & Network datasets
Duran Bell - SCCS marriage payments codes
Initial steps that might be taken
A good systems/database integrator might take a single Spss/Excel/SAS/dta file containing all 2,000 variables for the SCCS database and design an interface for Freebase or some other on-line integrator, the interface design might include
- mapping of variables in Google map protocols
- data transformation and analysis
- polygon construction for regions resulting from analyses
- regression analysis with autocorrelation effects, tests and error terms
- networks superimposed on the map
- integration of other data
- etc
- etc (Scott might specify ...)
And then the problem is how to integrate different datasets...
