Development organizations need tools capable of providing reliable and timely feedback on the efficacy of humanitarian interventions. Traditional surveys and surveying methodology lack interactivity as participants only provide data and may never see the survey results. In her talk, Brandie will describe an interactive assessment platform called CAFE, the Collaborative Assessment and Feedback Engine. CAFÉ was utilized to assess the performance of three Nutrition Education Centers in Uganda. The platform collected the opinions of 137 women who visited these centers for family planning training. We applied principal component analysis on the quantitative assessment questions. We learned that the top two factors that differentiated participants’ assessment of the effectiveness of the family planning trainings were: degree of female’s autonomy at home and degree of fear about contraception techniques. We applied a significance testing methodology to these factors and discovered the promising result that attending family planning trainings was correlated to reduced fears.
Speaker Bio:
Brandie Nonnecke
Dr. Brandie Nonnecke is the Research & Development Manager of the CITRIS Data and Democracy Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on how information and communication technologies can be used as tools to support civic participation, to improve governance and accountability, and to foster economic and social development. She has published articles in Telecommunications Policy, Telematics & Informatics, Communications & Strategies, and Information Technologies & International Development.
Brandie has an M.S. in Journalism and Mass Communication from Iowa State University and a Ph.D. in Mass Communications from The Pennsylvania State University.
Wallenberg Hall
Brandie M. Nonnecke, PhD
Research and Development Manager, Data and Democracy Initiative, CITRIS, UC Berkeley
UC Berkeley
The atomic bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki just before 18-year-old William J. Perry landed in Japan during the War of Occupation as a mapping specialist. He saw the devastation left behind by American firebombers on Tokyo and Okinawa.
The young man quickly understood the staggering magnitude of difference in the destruction caused by traditional firepower and these new atomic bombs. He would go on to devote his life to understanding, procuring and then trying to dismantle those weapons.
But that was seven decades back. And many young Americans today believe the threat of nuclear weapons waned alongside the Cold War and Cuban Missile Crisis.
So as faculty at Stanford and the Center for International Security and Cooperation evolve with the digital age by taking their lessons online, one of the university’s oldest professors is also adapting to online teaching in an effort to reach the youngest audience, urging them to take on the no-nukes mantle that he’s held for many years.
“The issue is so important to me that I tried all sorts of approaches from books and courses and lectures and conferences to try to get my contemporaries and the generations behind me engaged – all with limited success,” says the 86-year-old Perry, a CISAC faculty member and the Michael and Barbara Berberian Professor (emeritus) at the center’s parent organization, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
“First – which is a sine qua non – they must become seriously concerned that there is a nuclear danger, which most of these kids don’t understand at all,” said Perry. “Secondly, we want to convince them that there is something they can actually do about it.”
To reach those students, he believes he must go digital. So Perry – who co-teaches with CISAC’s Siegfried Hecker the popular Stanford course, “Technology and National Security” – began to map out a classroom course that would be videotaped and serve as a pilot for an online class that would be free and open to the public.
That course, “Living at the Nuclear Brink: Yesterday & Today” included lectures by some of the best people working in the field of nuclear nonproliferation today. Among those who will be highlighted in the online course are Perry and Hecker; Joe Martz of the Los Alamos National Laboratory; Stanford nuclear historian David Holloway; Stanford political scientist Scott Sagan; and Ploughshares Fund president, Joseph Cirincione.
The Perry Project will produce short-segment videos highlighting key information and stories from the course, packaging them in an online course available in multiple platforms and possibly offered by the university.
Perry used his personal journey as a young soldier during WWII, a mathematician and later a developer of weapons for the U.S. nuclear arsenal as undersecretary of defense for the Carter administration – and then trying to dismantle those weapons as secretary of defense for President Bill Clinton.
“I’m not doing this simply because I want to put a notch on my belt, to say that I’ve done a MOOC,” Perry said. “I’m doing it because I really want to get across to hundreds of thousands of young people.”
Last summer, he launched the Perry Project by inviting a dozen high school and college students to campus for a nuclear weapons boot camp so that they could take back to campus the message that nuclear annihilation is still a real, contemporary possibility.
He asked them: How do I get through to your generation?
“They said, `We don’t get our information by books or even by television, we get it through social media and YouTube, the various social media platforms. And you want to make the message relevant and relatively compact,’” he recalls.
Perry listened. “Living at the Nuclear Brink: Yesterday and Today” is in production now and a short-segment pilot video should be made available in the fall.
And lectures from CISAC's signature course, “International Security in a Changing World” (PS114S) will soon go up on YouTube as lecture modules entitled, “Security Matters.”
“Online learning offers a way to expand CISAC's reach to new audiences, geographies, and generations,” says CISAC Co-Director Amy Zegart, who has co-taught the popular course for the past few years with CISAC’s Martha Crenshaw.
“At the same time, the PS114 online modules will give us a living lecture library so that future Stanford students can compare faculty lectures on similar topics across time – learning, for example, how Martha Crenshaw assessed the terrorist threat in 2010 vs. 2015,” Zegart said.
Guest lecturers whose presentations will be included for the YouTube package include:
Jack Snyder of Columbia University: Democratization and Violence
Francis Fukuyama of Stanford: The Changing Nature of Power
Zegart: Understanding Policy Decisions: The Cuban Missile Crisis
Scott Sagan of CISAC: The Nuclear Revolution; and Why Do States Build/Forego Nuclear Weapons?
Abbas Milani, director of Iran Studies at Stanford: Historical Perspective on Iran
Former FBI Director Robert Mueller: the FBI’s Transformation Post 9/11
U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry (Ret.) and former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan: The War in Afghanistan and the Future of Central Asia
Jane Holl Lute, former deputy secretary of Homeland Security: Emerging Threats in Cybersecurity
Perry: Security Issues in Russia, Yesterday and Today
Brad Roberts: former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear and Missile Defense Policy: Ensuring a (Nuclear) Deterrence Strategy that is Effective for 21st Century Challenges
CISAC Co-Director David Relman: Doomsday Viruses
And lectures at CISAC’s Cybersecurity Boot Camp for senior congressional aids will also be videotaped and packaged for YouTube and online consumption later this year.
“We are excited to enter into this phase of experimentation to see what works, what doesn't, and how we can further CISAC's teaching mission both here at Stanford and around the world,” Zegart said.
Jonathan Mayer's education path is unusual: He has earned a Stanford law degree while working on his Ph.D. in computer science. He did research with a fellow doctoral candidate to discredit NSA claims that sensitive information about American citizens cannot be gleaned in the "metadata" the spy agency gathers from millions of phone calls.
Law and computer science both have their codes, but they're disparate. Legal code is often fuzzy and qualitative. Computer code is precise and quantitative. Not surprisingly, law and computer science tend to attract different people. It's not that the twain shall never meet; it's just that they seldom do.
Mayer is the exception. He has received his law degree and is completing his PhD in computer science, both at Stanford. Along the way he has aimed his double-barreled expertise at the National Security Agency's practice of collecting various forms of electronic information, including telephone metadata of Americans: the phone number of every caller and recipient, the unique serial number of the phones involved, the time and duration of each phone call.
Working with fellow Stanford computer science doctoral candidate Patrick Mutchler, Mayer proved that the NSA was wrong when it claimed that its analysts could not tease detailed personal information from phone metadata searches.
"Phone numbers, as it turns out, aren't just phone numbers," said Mayer, who is also a cybersecurity fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation. "They're an avenue for finding out detailed information about individual citizens."
Aleecia McDonald, the director of privacy for the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, said Mayer's research irrefutably demonstrated that phone metadata is anything but trivial.
"The lovely thing about Jonathan's research is that it made the sensitivity of phone metadata concrete," McDonald said. "The country was told that phone metadata were not worth constitutional protection, and now Jonathan's research confirms otherwise."
McDonald said Mayer's research confirmed the sense of unease felt by many Americans, which could have ramifications beyond the current metadata debate.
"Mobile phones are basically tracking devices, but in addition to geographic data, Jonathan showed you can obtain rich information on daily lives and associations," she said. "This speaks directly to strongly protected privacy issues. No one is calling for stopping all surveillance, but these new dragnet programs essentially treat everyone as criminals and terrorists all the time. People are wondering if they can trust government on anything, and that's dangerous."
Mayer talks to CBS News about his metadata project
Mayer's ability to have significant public impact while still a young academic stems directly from his unusual combination of legal and computer acumen, according to John C. Mitchell, the Mary and Gordon Crary Family Professor in the School of Engineering and Stanford vice provost for online learning. Mitchell, who is Mayer's adviser, is a professor of computer science and, by courtesy, of electrical engineering.
"That ability to apply high technology to legal issues, to understand both fields so deeply – well, not many people have those skill sets," said Mitchell. "In fact, he seems one of a kind. We're lucky to have him working on these issues. I don't know anyone else who could do it."
Go 'geekward,' young man
Mayer traces his interest in computer science – his "geekward leanings," as he puts it – to his childhood in Chicago, where he logged a lot of time on his family's Apple IIGS computer. Once, when he received an elementary school writing assignment, he developed a web page instead. This was in the early stages of the World Wide Web, and his accomplishment engendered both respect and confusion.
As his facility with computers grew, he became increasingly interested in security issues. This was sometimes expressed in unorthodox – even mischievous – fashion. He couldn't help but hack.
One holiday, he recalled, he received a Radio Shack watch that had a TV remote control feature. After fiddling a bit, he discovered that by setting the frequency for a Sony TV, pointing his device at the infrared port on certain Apple computers and hitting channel change, he could force the computer to reboot.
"My school used those kinds of computers, so I spent quite a bit of time pushing channel change when kids were on the computers at school," Mayer said. "They were mystified. I have to admit it was fun, but it also got me thinking about computer vulnerabilities."
Computer science quickly became a focus for Mayer during his undergraduate studies at Princeton. But he also developed interests in public policy and politics – subjects that had previously struck him as dreary.
"They just seemed somewhat vapid and tedious," Mayer said. "But my roommates were intensely interested in policy and politics, and they gradually won me over. I saw that both are viable paths for implementing change, for getting real things done."
His faculty adviser, Princeton computer science and public affairs Professor Ed Felten, reinforced that. Mayer's senior thesis reflected the merging of his interests: It was about web privacy – balancing computer science research with law and policy issues.
Taking dual paths
After graduating from Princeton in 2009 with a degree in public policy, Mayer came directly to Stanford with the intention of becoming, as he tells it, the first student to simultaneously pursue a JD in law and a PhD in computer science (CS).
"I wasn't going to do law and policy lite or CS-lite," Mayer told the Stanford Daily in February. "I was going full in on both."
Among his successes on the legal front: He was recently asked to teach a class at Stanford Law. The seminar explores the legal ramifications of security and privacy in the technology sector, emphasizing "areas of law that are frequently invoked, hotly contested or ripe for reform," according to the course overview.
He finds his new instructor role rewarding: "I get a kick out of the fact that I'm an engineer teaching law at Stanford."
His legal accomplishments notwithstanding, Mayer's computer science efforts – particularly his metadata research – have made more of a public splash. And as so often happens at Stanford, it all started with a conversation among peers.
"Patrick [Mutchler] and I were talking with our adviser [Mitchell] shortly after the Edward Snowden revelations," Mayer recalled. "We were really intrigued by the NSA's programs, especially all the claims and counterclaims about phone metadata. There was a lot of conjecture at that point but very little scientific clarity. So we thought we'd try to bring some focus to bear."
But Mayer and Mutchler found it difficult to acquire the metadata. While the NSA could harvest it directly from telecommunications companies, the Stanford doctoral students had to solicit phone records from the public.
"We realized we might be able to get metadata voluntarily through crowdsourcing," Mayer said. "So we posted an explanation on a Stanford website and provided an Android app that allowed people to send us their data. Crowdsourcing is a pretty risky basis for research, of course, because you never know what you're going to get. We would've been very happy with 100 responses – instead, we got about 500, and we were off to the races."
Metadata was revealing
Again, this innovative tactic took root in the confluence of legal and computing expertise.
"Building and distributing the app was within the capabilities of many computer experts, but its application was very clever," Mitchell said. "The rationale was: 'We would like to see what the NSA sees, but we don't want to behave like the NSA. So how do we do that?' Seeking volunteers willing to provide their phone data and devising and distributing the app was an extremely creative, sophisticated – and effective—approach."
In the course of their analysis, Mayer and Mutchler derived many revealing inferences from the metadata that show who called whom, when, from where to where and how often. For example, they could determine where the subjects lived and worked, and could see some intimation of relationships between the volunteers.
In some cases, the researchers were able to identify who was dating whom. One volunteer contacted a pharmaceutical hotline for multiple sclerosis patients, a management service for rare medical conditions, a specialty pharmacy and several neurology medical groups. Another called several locksmiths, a hydroponics dealer, a head shop and a home improvement store.
Those findings, Mayer drily observed, debunked the NSA's original assertions that phone metadata were impenetrable.
"It gave us pause," he said. "It was pretty clear that we could tease out more sensitive information with some elbow grease."
The findings have caused headaches for the NSA, and Mayer sees waning support for the agency's aggressive pursuit of private information. A number of high-profile cases on metadata are either pending or wending their way through the courts, and the entire program is up for renewal, or cancellation, in 2015. In May, the U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation to halt the National Security Agency's wholesale collection of domestic phone records. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the U.S. Senate's intelligence committee, signaled she is amenable to supporting a companion bill.
What's Next?
Mayer, who has received his JD and recently passed the California Bar Exam, expects to complete his computer science PhD in 2015. And after that?
"I would like to go to Washington, to try to bring technical rigor to federal policy," Mayer said, "though I'm aware there's always the danger of sinking into the political morass in that town. I'm working on a start-up NGO that I hope can bridge D.C. and Silicon Valley. In the interim, I just enjoy teaching at the law school."
Glen Martin is a former San Francisco Chronicle reporter based in Santa Rosa, Calif.
CISAC cybersecurity fellow Jonathan Mayer talks to CBS News about the Android app he created with fellow Stanford PhD computer science student, Kevin Mutchler for a Stanford Security Lab project. They asked volunteers to share their phone records via MetaPhone to learn what could be uncovered in the metadata collected by the NSA.
He spoke to CBS News about the project. Be patient; you have to get past an ad first.
Scott Charney, corporate vice president for Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing Group, addresses a CISAC seminar about the evolving pursuit of security and privacy. He shares his views on the NSA revelations as well as the industry perspective regarding concerns about government metadata programs, the key cybersecurity challenges and Microsoft's view of what we need to know as we try to advance cyber policy. You can watch his entire talk here.
For the past 60 years, progress in information technology has been governed by Moore's law, which states that the number of transistors on a semiconductor chip doubles every 18 months. However, this remarkable trend is drawing to a close, mostly because the electrons that carry current in chips move like cars driving through a crowded marketplace, swerving around obstacles and dissipating too much of their energy as heat. The recent discovery of a new state of matter, the topological insulator, may lead to a new paradigm of information processing, in which electrons moving in opposing directions are separated into well-ordered lanes, like automobiles on a highway. This talk will explain the basic principles behind this amazing discovery.
Shoucheng Zhang was born in Shanghai and received his BS degree from the Free University of Berlin in 1983 and PhD from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1987. He joined the faculty at Stanford in 1993. He is a condensed matter theorist known for his work on topological insulators, spintronics and high temperature superconductivity. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Science. He is the recipient of a number of awards including the Guggenheim fellowship in 2007, the Alexander von Humboldt research prize in 2009, the Johannes Gutenberg research prize in 2010, the Europhysics prize in 2010, the Oliver Buckley prize in 2012, the Dirac Medal and Prize in 2012 and the Physics Frontier Prize in 2013 for his theoretical prediction of the quantum spin Hall effect and topological insulators.
Stanford Center at Peking University
SHOUCHENG ZHANG
JG Jackson and CJ Wood Professor of Physics
Speaker
Stanford University
Stanford-Sasakawa Peace Foundation New Channels Dialogue 2014
Energy Challenge and Opportunities for the United States and Japan
February 13, 2014
Bechtel Conference Center, Encina Hall, Stanford University
Sponsored and Organized by Sasakawa Peace Foundation (SPF) and Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (S-APARC) in Association with U.S.-Japan Council
Japan Studies Program at Shorenstein APARC, Stanford University has launched a three-year project from 2013 to create new channels of dialogue between experts and leaders of younger generations from the United States, mostly from the West Coast, and Japan under a name of "New Channels: Reinvigorating U.S.-Japan Relations," with the goal of reinvigorating the bilateral relationship through the dialogue on 21st century challenges faced by both nations, with a grant received from the Sasakawa Peace Foundation.
The dialogue would be structured to examine the new challenges of the 21st century, in particular, economic growth and employment creation; innovation and entrepreneurship; energy; and East Asian regionalism, including regional security issues, with the aim of developing mutual understanding and constructing a new relationship for cooperation in dealing with 21st century challenges through the dialogue between scholars, entrepreneurs, and policy makers from the two countries. We are hoping that this multi-year initiative will generate a network of trans-Pacific expertise as a vital supplement to existing avenue of communications.
Given the recent dramatic changes in energy environments in both countries, such as shale gas developments in the U.S, and after Fukushima challenges in Japan, this year, as an inaugural year, we will be examining energy issues. Panel discussions open to the public, with the title of "Energy Challenges and Opportunities for the U.S. and Japan," will be held on February 13th, followed by a dialogue among invited participants on 14th, at Stanford University with the participation of policy makers, business leaders, scholars, and experts from both countries.
In the panel discussions we will examine following issues:
Discovery of shale gas deposits in various parts of the world has drastically changed the geopolitics of energy.
New technologies for energy production have been creating various challenges to the existing system of energy supply.
As emerging economies grow rapidly, they will demand increasing amount of energy. They face a challenge of creating a sustainable and secure energy supply system.
After the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, the call for enhancing safety of nuclear power plants has intensified. While public’s trust in nuclear technology wanes, increasing number of nuclear power plants are built in emerging countries. Nuclear energy policy has become politically contentious.
Use of information technology, such as smart grid, is likely to change the ways energy is supplied and distributed.
The world has not found an effective international framework for slowing the global warming and securing reliable energy supply to support economic growth.
We are very pleased that we were able to invite quite impressive participants, policy makers, business leaders, scholars and experts from the two countries, who would appear as panelists in the panel discussions on February 13th.
We expect that through this panel discussion we would be able to define the challenges we are facing, indicate the pathways we should proceed to, and identify the areas for cooperation.
On the following day, February 14th, we will have the dialogue closed to the public discussing issues and possible cooperation between the U.S. and Japan on energy among invited participants.
We hope to publish a summary of conference presentations and the dialogue discussion after the conference.
This paper contributes to the discussion of how Public Private Interplay (PPI) can be used to foster Next Generation Access (NGA) buildouts in Europe by introducing the experience of Japan. Japan, which succeeded in both promoting nationwide network buildouts and fostering competitive dynamics that led to the world's fastest and cheapest broadband services and deploying them nationwide. The process entailed deregulation, which unleashed new entrepreneurial private actors, and re-regulation that protected them from incumbent carriers. The resulting market dynamics lowered Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) prices, influencing the market price for Fiber-To-The-Home (FTTH), for which the government had heavily subsidized carriers. Central government initiatives, combined with local incentives, led to an almost 100% broadband accessibility within a few years. However, Japan quickly discovered that taking advantage of the broadband environment to produce innovation, productivity growth, and economic dynamism, was far more difficult than facilitating its creation. It discovered regulatory barriers for the use of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in various areas of the economy. Like Europe, Japan was not home to the ICT lead-user enterprises and industries that drove the ICT revolution, producing innovation and productivity gains. Moreover, the advent of US-centered cloud computing services potentially decreases the minimum bandwidth requirement to access global-scale computing power. The development of wireless technologies far cheaper than Japan's nationwide FTTH also merits serious consideration for European policy discussions.
The digital information technology (IT) revolution currently underway is profoundly reshap- ing economic activity, influencing politics, and transforming societies around the world. It is also forcing a reconceptualization of the global and local: many of the technologies, platforms, and fundamental disruptions are global in nature, but national or local contexts critically influence the uses and effects of IT.
The Asia-Pacific region provides a fascinating array of countries for examination of the political, economic, and sociocultural effects of digital media on the modern world. Economies range from developing to advanced. Governments include varied democracies as well as one-party regimes. The press enjoys relative freedom in some countries, undergoes limited constraints in others, and is tightly controlled in a few. Populations range from dense to sparse, and from diverse to relatively homogenous.
Held September 12–13, 2013, in Kyoto, Japan, the fifth Stanford Kyoto Trans-Asian Dialogue focused on the catalyzing effects of digital media for change in the Asia-Pacific. Four major themes were addressed:
Brandie Nonnecke
Cybersecurity fellow Jonathan Mayer to teach online class on surveillance.
