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Assignment for Tuesday, October 14Today we continue with some core texts, moving from very basic theory to models. To begin with, we need to look at one very short reading from outside the resilience literature, Richard Levins's article in which he articulates the "modeler's dilemma" of choosing among realism, precision, and generality in model-building: The Strategy of Model Building in Population Biology.We should then begin to analyze and criticize the the models used in the resilience literature, using as the target of analysis and criticism chapter two of Resilience and the Behavior of Large-Scale Systems,, a difficult mathematical piece on "models and metaphors," along with the corresponding chapters 7-10 (pages 173-289) in Part III of Panarchy. Again as last week, we need to think of examples from our own real-life knowledge, particularly examples in which the resilience-theory concepts do and do not seem to work. |