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In this paper, we propose to explore how the regulation of herbalism, in France and in England, rests on series of 'misdirections,' with the coexistence of law and herbalism depending on multiple magical illusions. Attempts to regulate herbalists, and the responses they invite, involve multiple sleights of hands both by the law and by herbalists. Herbalists perform misdirections to maintain an illusion of legality, even where they bend legal rules that they deem incompatible with their practice. But far from being the only, or even the most effective, tricksters, herbalists are only one set of performers in a more complex layering of legal illusions. The regulatory and legal infrastructure itself relies on misdirections enacted through everyday legal procedures that trick the general public into believing that the law is 'acting' to protect vulnerable consumers from dangerous healers and their medicines, while the effects of its actions may be to tolerate, or indeed produce, zones of illegal, or 'barely legal,' practices. At the same time, this performance is enabled by playing a disappearing act, in which the knowledge of herbalists, and the demands of their users, are disappeared behind the screen of apparent legal protection. Drawing attention away from competing claims to knowledge, and towards its protective intervention, the legal system thereby embeds misdirections of its own kind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses computer simulation modelling in the context of environmental risk management. Approaching computer simulation as practice, performed in networks of heterogeneous elements, we examine the modelling undertaken by engineering consultants commissioned to provide knowledge about local flood risk to the Environment Agency of England and Wales (EA), the public body responsible for flood risk management. We propose that this simulation modelling is best understood as a form of engineering, work geared to solving the problems of clients. It is also a 'virtual' activity, articulating risks and possibilities in the digital space of the computer. We find that this 'virtual engineering' is shaped by the demands and protocols of the EA, first, by the establishment of long-term contractual agreements for delivering knowledge and second, by an EA requirement to use particular software packages. Fashioned between long-term contracts and black-boxed software virtual engineering becomes stabilised as 'the' way in which knowledge about flood risk in actual localities is generated and, consequently, becomes 'hard-wired' into flood risk management in England. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]