Name:
Tom Vest
Email address:
URL of home page:
http://www-scf.usc.edu/~vest/ (uninformative)
Postal address:
8624 De Soto Ave., #133
Canoga park, CA
91304
Phone:
(818) 772-7763
(818) 773-2038
Fax: (818) 349-2910
Affiliations:
1.USC School of International Relations (ABD/PhD Candidate)
2. Conflict Early Warning Systems (Project Specialist, ISSC/Carnegie
Corporation/CCPDC Project)
3. Santa Monica College Center for Global Culture and Commerce (Project
Developer -- new department)
4. Pacific Council on International Policy (urban economist, former
Project Assistant, "Southern California's International Connections"
project)
5. Swarm User's Group (four visits to SFI for cultural modeling, GIS,
and Swarm development conferences, 1995-1998).
How did you hear about PCP?
online research
Please take at least one page to describe your work and how it might
relate to PCP:
1. Job: Currently principal developer of a new department at Santa
Monica College, one which will offer courses and vocational training
for international trade in media, services, and intellectual property,
e.g., "International Media Marketing and Development," "Surevey of the
Global Information Economy," etc.
2. Research: PhD core exams in international political economy,
international media and communications. Recent articles include:
"Leapfrogging the Future? Information Infrastructure Choices and
Information Industry Consequences in Asia," in _Pacific
Telecommunciations Review_ (April, 1998).
3. Dissertation: "The Cosmopolitan Turn: Globalization and Cultural
Change / Lessons from Los Angeles and the Pacific Rim"
Principal readers: Hayward R. Alker, McCone Professor of International
Relations, USC
and Stephen E. Toulmin, USC Luce Professor of Humanities and 1997 NEH
Jefferson Lecturer
Abstract:
<fontfamily><param>Times</param>Questions about the impact of cultural
factors on aggregate economic outcomes
have been extensively researched in several disciplines, but
institutional, methodological,
and technological impediments have conspired to keep insights from
these research
programs segregated. In combination, these diverse insights suggest a
novel approach to
operationalizing cultural variation in terms of two dimensions,
<italic>recognition</italic> and<italic>
responsibility</italic>. These dimensions represent, respectively, the
synthesis and parametric
representation of theoretical and empirical debates pitting (a)
"modernists" against
"postmodernists" and (b) "liberals" against "communitarians." Cultural
groups are
assigned values in both of these dimensions based on a comparison of
social and
economic data drawn from (relatively) monocultural home environments.
Parameter
values are then tested against evidence of economic performance in
interactive,
multicultural settings, with the city of Los Angeles serving as the
primary test
environment. Using SWARM, a multi-agent computer modeling platform
developed at
the Santa Fe Institute, temporal variations in spatial and aggregate
economic behavior at
the metropolitan level are revealed as emergent phenomena arising from
the dynamic
interaction and reciprocal influence of groups with different sets of
cultural attributes.
Using parameter values that are shown to be plausible individual-level
determinants of
aggregate level social and economic behavior in both mono- and
multi-cultural settings,
simulation results are tested for distributional and relational
equivalence against empirical
data on the Los Angeles five-county area. Based on the values that
meet these tests,
alternative trajectories of future cultural evolution are simulated
using the SWARM
platform. These simulations are expected to shed some empirical light
on the debate
between communitarian, cosmopolitan, and critical theorists about the
character of social
life in an increasingly integrated global economy.</fontfamily>
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L. Thomas Vest, Jr.
SMC Institute of Int'l Trade
Conflict Early Warning Systems
& USC School of Int'l Relations
Fax (818) 349-2910
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