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The development and spread of 'smart city' technologies, policies and practices is now an important element of contemporary urban governance, given the role of powerful global firms such as IBM, Siemens and Cisco in their authorship. Developing a relational ontology of global 'smart city' firms, the paper explores the origin and development of IBM's pervasive and influential Smarter Cities strategies. The paper argues that for IBM, Smarter Cities represents an attempt to solve three strategic problems that face the firm: how to maximise its stored knowledge and ensure its labour costs deliver significant added value; how to construct new sectoral and geographic markets for this knowledge; and how to reduce, standardise and simplify the object of that knowledge – the city – as a scaleable commodity. To illustrate these issues, the paper first explores the strategic direction of IBM from being a loss-making computer hardware manufacturer, to an information technology consultancy, identifying the role of acquisitions, city partnership, and research and development in that process. Second, it identifies how IBM has constructed a market for city or municipal services within its suite of vertical specialist markets. Third, it describes the relationship between the marketing, modelling and visualisation practices that reduce and simplify urban problems for solution through the sale of proprietary software packages, consultancy services and hardware to their clients in city government. The paper concludes by arguing that the future of smart cities is inextricably linked to the internal knowledge organisation of a small number of global technology firms.

Because contemporary scientific research is conducted by groups of scientists, understanding scientific progress requires understanding this division of cognitive labor. We present a novel agent‐based model of scientific research in which scientists divide their labor to explore an unknown epistemic landscape. Scientists aim to find the most epistemically significant research approaches. We consider three different search strategies that scientists can adopt for exploring the landscape. In the first, scientists work alone and do not let the discoveries of the community influence their actions. This is compared with two social research strategies: Followers are biased toward what others have already discovered, and we find that pure populations of these scientists do less well than scientists acting independently. However, pure populations of mavericks, who try to avoid research approaches that have already been taken, vastly outperform the other strategies. Finally, we show that, in mixed populations, mavericks stimulate followers to greater levels of epistemic production, making polymorphic populations of mavericks and followers ideal in many research domains.

This article examines the effect of cartography on the development of the modern state system. I argue that new mapping technologies in early modern Europe changed how actors thought about political space, organization, and authority, thus shaping the creation of sovereign states and international relations. In particular, mapping was fundamental to three key characteristics of the medieval-to-modern shift: the homogenization of territorial authority, the linearization of political boundaries, and the elimination of nonterritorial forms of organization. Although maps have been interpreted as epiphenomenal to political change, each of these three transformations occurred first in the representational space of maps and only subsequently in the political practices of rulers and states. Based on evidence from the history of cartographic technologies and their use by political actors, the practices and texts of international negotiations, and the practical implementation of linearly bounded territoriality by states, this article argues that changes in the representational practices of mapmaking were constitutive of the early-modern transformation of the authoritative structure of politics. This explanation of the international system's historical transformation suggests useful new directions for investigations into the possibility of fundamental political change due to the economic, social, and technological developments of globalization.

A review essay on book by Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).

Philosophers of science readily acknowledge that nonepistemic values influence the discovery and pursuit of scientific theories, but many tend to regard these influences as epistemically uninteresting. The present paper challenges this position by identifying three avenues through which nonepistemic values associated with discovery and pursuit in contemporary pollution research influence theory appraisal: (1) by guiding the choice of questions and research projects, (2) by altering experimental design, and (3) by affecting the creation and further investigation of theories or hypotheses. This analysis indicates that the effects of these values are sufficiently complex and epistemically significant to merit further attention.

In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus publicly defended his hypothesis that the earth is a planet and the sun a body resting near the center of a finite universe. But why did Copernicus make this bold proposal? And why did it matter? The Copernican Question reframes this pivotal moment in the history of science, centering the story on a conflict over the credibility of astrology that erupted in Italy just as Copernicus arrived in 1496. Copernicus engendered enormous resistance when he sought to protect astrology by reconstituting its astronomical foundations. Robert S. Westman shows that efforts to answer the astrological skeptics became a crucial unifying theme of the early modern scientific movement. His interpretation of this \"long sixteenth century,\" from the 1490s to the 1610s, offers a new framework for understanding the great transformations in natural philosophy in the century that followed.

Recent years have seen a number of attempts to define the field of regenerative medicine (RM) published in the scientific literature. Key issues addressed include which technologies belong under the umbrella of RM, where the proper origins of the field lie, and what the prospects are for its future. I argue that these competing visions for the field are qualitatively different from the initial technological expectations deployed when RM began to emerge in the 1990s and represent a qualitatively different ‘stage’ of the field's development. A significant characteristic of this stage is that proponents of RM must not only continue to present hope for the field, but also account for prior sets of expectations that have been, at least partly, unfulfilled. Drawing on work from the sociology of expectations and STS (science and technology studies)-informed studies on scientific disciplinarity, these recent definitions of RM are analysed in terms of the promissory work they do and the means they employ to do it. Particular attention is drawn to the deployment of historiographic ‘origin stories’ to support competing accounts of RM. These ‘possible pasts’ act as a discursive means of colonising the past in order to reconcile prior unfulfilled promises with current visions of the field.

'Academic drift' is a term sometimes used to describe the process whereby knowledge which is intended to be useful gradually loses close ties to practice while becoming more tightly integrated with one or other body of scientific knowledge. Drift in this sense has been a common phenomenon in agriculture, engineering, medicine and management sciences in several countries in the 19th and 20th centuries. Understanding drift is obviously important, both to practitioners concerned that higher education should be relevant to practice, but also to historians who seek to make sense of long-term trends in knowledge-production. It is surprising, therefore, that although the existence of drift has been widely documented, remarkably little attention has been given so far to explaining it. In this paper I argue that drift is not an invariant universal tendency but a historically specific one which arises under particular circumstances. I outline a model of institutional dynamics which seeks to explain why drift has occurred at some institutions but not others. In the second section I explore the implications of the model for educationists and policy-makers concerned with the reform of higher education in these areas.

The value of information to the economy is obvious. The ways in which information was provided to participants in the economy of the Atlantic World during the second half of the second millennium of the Christian era changed significantly, twice.