For the second time in two days, I came across the terms emic and etic, so it's time to have a bit more of a look into what they mean.

So, it's a good time to be in the Agent Based Modelling (ABM) business. More and more attention is being given to the idea that while we have a certain level of understanding of the physical, chemical and biological processes around climate change, in order to change what's happening, we need to look at the social systems which are contributing.

Wednesday morning was the main reason I was here - the symposium on "Agent-Based Modelling of Land-use Effects", organised by Gary Polhill. It started with Gary giving us a quick run overview of ABM "so the rest of the presenters don't have to". A couple of references of interest were:

The second day at US-IALE was mostly taken up with the Coupled Human and Natural Systems (CHANS) discussion. This is a funding stream within the NSF, aimed towards funding interdisciplinary work in the area of coupled human and natural systems (although there is some dissent about the "coupled" part of it, as people feel that we should see it more as one system!).

This week I'm attending the US-IALE conference in Snowbird, Utah, with the tagline "Coupling Humans and Complex Ecological Landscapes". We kicked off with a keynot from Thomas Baerwald, from the NSF, about "Facilitating the Conduct of Naturally Humane and Humanely Natural Research".