Multi-scalar Processes Research Articles

Politics of Scale and the Globalization of the South Korean Automobile Industry

This article explains the liberalization and globalization of the South Korean automobile industry, with an emphasis on the multiscalar processes of globalization. In particular, it explores the processes by which the South Korean government shifted its policy for the automobile industry, from a nationalist and protectionist orientation toward liberalization in the late 1990s, which, in turn, attracted inward investments from foreign automakers and facilitated the globalization of the nation’s automobile market. While exploring the roles of diverse actors and forces—operating at various geographic scales—in these processes, I placed more analytical weight on examining the ways in which contestation between national and local forces contributed to the government’s liberalization policy. I argue that the globalization of the South Korean automobile industry in recent years was not only an outcome of the globalizing strategies of foreign automakers, but also was facilitated by an institutional fix by the nation-state (particularly the liberalization of policy) to a regulatory deficit, which stemmed from the national-local tension with respect to a state-led economic restructuring project.

"Islamic Yuppies"? State Rescaling, Citizenship, and Public Opinion Formation in Tehran, Iran

The contemporary political map of Tehran, Iran, is marked by a central state conflict between the institutionalized theocratic system and a newly emerging liberal-democratic system. While this conflict has received worldwide media attention, the underlying processes of state rescaling and their effects on the formation of citizenship have not. Using the concept of state rescaling, I argue that the Iranian state is increasingly, though contentiously, constituted at transnational and local levels; this occurs through matters such as the debates over opening political, economic, and cultural borders, and the decentralization of political processes through local town and city council elections. The city of Tehran plays a crucial role as the seat of national government, an increasingly autonomous local state onto its own, and Iran's window on transnational processes. I seek to explore the kinds of political identities that can be created under such turbulent processes of Iranian neo-liberal democratization and state rescaling. While conjectural at this point, it is possible to examine particular social constructions of new forms of Iranian citizenship to address how state transformations will potentially change citizenship into the future. In particular, I examine the social construction of "the Islamic yuppie" and public opinion polls as arguments advocating a new kind of an urban, cosmopolitan citizen who can move fluidly through multiple spaces and scales. These constructions, contextualized within current processes of Iranian state restructuring and rescaling, underscore the need to think through citizenship in general, and Iranian citizenship in particular, as a multiscalar process.

Woodstock Culture and the Question of Mississippian Emergence

North American archaeologists see the study of the Emergent Mississippian period (ca. A.D. 800—1000) as critical for understanding the development of the Mississippian chiefdoms (ca. A.D. 1000—1500) of the American Southeast. Past research has frequently sought to explain that development in terms of generalized explanations, whose key variables become evident during the Emergent Mississippian period. Through an example in northwest Georgia, we argue that the Emergent Mississippian phenomenon is best understood by focusing on regional histories and multiscalar processes.

Register traffic analysis for streamlining inter-operation communication in fine-grain parallel processors

Traditionally, register files have been the primary agent for inter-operation communication in load/store architectures. As processors start issuing multiple instructions per cycle, a centralized register file can easily become a bottleneck. This paper analyzes the register filetrafficin a load/store architecture with a view to motivate the development of alternate inter-operation communication mechanisms that reduce the bandwidth demanded of a centralized register file. We firstprovide metrics to characterize the register traffic. These metrics deal with the degree and locality of use of the register instances created. We then present the results of a simulation study that uses the MIPS R2000 architecture and the SPEC benchmark programs. We have two major results. First, a large number of the register instances are used only once, and the average degree of use of register instances is about 2. Second, most of the register instances are used up soon after they are created (within about 30-40 instructions). This suggests that alternate inter-operation communication mechanisms that exploit the temporal locality of use of register instances are likely to be effective in reducing the traffic burden on the centralized register file. The second result was pivotal in the design of the distributed register filefor the multiscalar processing paradigm.

Use of multiscalar processing of remotely sensed data in Kalan fracturation networks, west Kalimantan, Indonesia, for future mineralisations research

The Kalan area is located on the northern margin of the Schwaner Mountains. Its regional geology comprises essentially more or less metamorphosed Permo-Carboniferous sedimentary rocks about 3000–4000 m thick which make up a metasilt, metapelite and meta-argillite series surrounded by a tonalitic complex. These were affected by at least two main periods of tectonic deformation. The first was a plastic deformation that formed the schistosity in the metapelite, the fracture cleavage in the metasilt and the regional folding with the N70°E axial direction which plunges 30°NE and strikes N50°E/50°S. There is also uranium mineralisation in the fractures and schistosity. The second was a brittle deformation that did not cause any extensive bed sliding, fracture or schistosity displacements. However, the regularity of fractures and faults patterns of this area revealed by the present young relief and morphology is visible on remote sensing, pictures in spite of a thick cover of equatorial forest. The 4 direction systems, from tens to thousand of meters long, visible on aerial photographs and satellite images, give various networks of fractures in different lithologies that are measurable in the field. Generally, these tectonic accidents are superimposed on the drainage pattern. The reorganisation of these systems observed on the ERST image analysis might be the result of a large, N40–N50°E, sinistral strike-slip fault, called the Kalan alignment. Another remote sensing method applied to the Landsat scene with the path row number 120-60 LS4 has revealed more details in several sectors. Their combination with the field tectonic analysis provides an improved base document for mineral research.