Stanford University

Asian Biotech: Ethics and Communities of Fate

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Asian Biotech:  Ethics and Communities of Fate is the title of a new book that Prof. Ong has co-edited with Nancy N. Chen.  It offers the first overview of Asia’s emerging initiatives in the biosciences.  Its case studies include blood collection in Singapore and China; stem-cell research in Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan; genetically modified foods in China; and clinical trials in India.  Such projects vary by country, as do the policies that are associated with them.  Discernible nevertheless is a significant trend toward state entrepreneurialism in Asian biotechnology.  Prof. Ong will also explore how political thinking and ethical reasoning are converging around the biosciences in Asia.  Copies of Asian Biotech will be available for signing and purchase at the talk.

Aihwa Ong studies how the interactions of capitalism, technology, politics, and ethics crystallize global situations, frame spaces of problematization, and generate situated solutions.  With these matters in mind, she has done field research in Southeast Asia, Southern China, and California.  A forthcoming volume is Worlding Cities:  Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global.  Prior publications include Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline (2nd ed., 2010); Privatizing China:  Socialism from Afar (co-edited, 2008); Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems (co-edited, 2005); Flexible Citizenship:  The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (1999); Neoliberalism as Exception:  Mutations in Citizenshipand Sovereignty (2006); and Buddha is Hiding:  Refugees, Citizenship, the New America (2003).  Prof. Ong has received many awards and has lectured at universities around the world.  She chairs of the US National Committee for the Pacific Science Association.  Her 1982 PhD is from Columbia University.

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Aihwa Ong Professor of Socio-cultural Anthropology and Asian Studies Speaker University of California, Berkeley
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Francis Fukuyama in Foreign Policy Magazine: Samuel Huntington's Legacy

Authors
Francis Fukuyama
News Type
Commentary
Date
Paragraphs
This article by Francis Fukuyama is based on a 2008 piece on the website of the American Interest and the preface to the 2006 edition of Political Order in Changing Societies.

(excerpt) This argument is still very much with us. In the wake of America's flawed nation-building efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, many people have suggested the need for sequencing in development, putting state-building ahead of efforts to democratize and expand political participation.

Political Order in Changing Societies was one of Huntington's earlier works, and one that established his stature as a political scientist, but it was far from his last major contribution to comparative politics. His work on democratic transition also became a point of reference in the period after the end of the Cold War. Ironically, this stream of writing began with a 1984 article in Political Science Quarterly titled "Will More Countries Become Democratic?" Surveying the situation following the Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American democratic transitions of the 1970s and early 1980s, Huntington made the case that the world was not likely to see more shifts from authoritarianism in the near future given inauspicious structural and international conditions. This was written, of course, a mere five years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. He shifted gears quickly after the collapse of communism, however, and wrote The Third Wave, a book that gave the name to the entire period.

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Can ICT Improve Clean Water Delivery Systems in Slums? Lessons from Kibera

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Water is scarce, costly, and contaminated in Kibera, Nairobi -- one of Africa's largest urban slums. On good days, the women and children spend just under an hour finding clean water in their community. On bad days, the price of water increases tenfold and the search takes all day. Often, people ask jokingly whether it is water or cholera they are buying.

Many slums like Kibera lack access to clean drinking water, but they don't lack access to mobile phones. This is the insight behind M-Maji, a start-up non-profit project that uses mobile phones to empower communities with better information about water availability, price, and quality. This seminar will introduce the M-Maji system, and describe some of the challenges to designing for such a complex social environment.Background: M-Maji emerged from the Designing Liberation Technologies course in the Stanford d.school, which focused on using mobile phone technology for health improvement in Kibera. M-Maji has since received funding to run a pilot from the Program on Liberation Technologies and the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society at Stanford

Sunny Jeon is the principal investigator to M-Maji research, and is currently making frequent trips to Kenya to prepare for a randomized impact evaluation of their water program. He is also a Ph.D. Candidate in the Stanford Department of Political Science, where he is working on a dissertation project that studies the economic and political returns to ethnic diversity.

Katherine Hoffman is a co-terminal student completing a B.A. in International Relations and Economics and an M.A. in International Policy Studies with a focus on Global Health. She has been involved with M-Maji since it began in Spring quarter, and has just returned from a trip to Kenya in December to begin laying the groundwork for the project implementation. 
Her primary interests include economic development and health improvement in low-resource settings. Past experience includes internships at the Bonn International Center for Conversion in Bonn, Germany and at the Institute for Financial Management in Chennai, India; she has also volunteered at the Center for the Working Girl in Quito, Ecuador and studied abroad for a quarter in Moscow.

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Katherine Hoffman M.A. Candidate, International Policy Studies, Global Health Speaker Stanford University
Sunny Jeon Ph.D. Candidate,Political Science Speaker Stanford University
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Liberation Technology Seminar Series

Information Access under Poor Connectivity

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Abstract
Consider three different worlds of poor network connectivity:

  • Scenario 1: A user in Africa uses a cheap mobile device with voice and SMS as the only data connectivity channel (140 bytes per message and each SMS costs money).
  • Scenario 2: A university in India has good connectivity which is shared simultaneously by 400 users. (Per user share = 2 Kbps)
  • Scenario 3: A school in Kenya has a computer but no Internet.

In this talk, I will describe a range of techniques we have developed to enhance information access in these three scenarios of poor connectivity. In Scenario 1, we have built an entire SMS-based protocol stack for mobile applications being used in India, Mexico and Ghana as well as a live SMS search engine in Kenya. We are also rolling out a data-over-GSM voice stack to support data connectivity over cellular voice.

In Scenario 2, I will describe why some of the fundamentals of network protocols break down in these regimes and why we need a completely new Web architecture for these types of networks. We have deployed early versions of our system in a few schools and universities in India, Kenya.

In Scenario 3, I will describe how we can use vertical search engines to deliver a vertical slice of the Web in a hard-disk and provide an offline searchable and browse-able Internet. This system has been used in schools in India and Kenya as an educational tool for students and teachers.

This is joint work with several others with Jay Chen being a primary leader for many of these projects.

Lakshminarayanan Subramanian is an Assistant Professor in the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at NYU.

His research interests are in the areas of networks, distributed systems and computing for development. He co-leads the Networks and Wide-Area Systems(NeWS) group (which investigates software solutions for distributed systems, wireline and wireless networking, operating system, security and privacy, technologies and applications for the developing world) and the CATER Lab at NYU ( which focuses on developing and deploying low-cost, innovative technology solutions to some of the problems in developing regions in terms of communication, healthcare and microfinance).

Recently, he has co-established a new Center for Technology and Economic Development (CTED) at NYU Abu Dhabi which brings together students from several disciplines (CS, economics, healthcare, education, policy). He is the recipient of several awards including the  NSF CAREER Award (2009), IBM Faculty Award (2009, 2010) and C.V. Ramamoorthy Award. He has been at the forefront of several technological innovations for development that have been used in several countries around the world.

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Lakshminarayanan Subramanian Assistant Professor in the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences Speaker University of New York
Seminars
Liberation Technology Seminar Series

Corrupt States: Reforming Indian Public Services in the Digital Era

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Why are some governments better able to reform public service delivery than others? The increased availability of information and communication technologies marks an important opportunity for politicians to improve the quality of public services. However, state-level experiences with eGovernment in India display significant variations in the ability of governments to successfully adopt these technologies to provide benefits to citizens. Based on her studies of one-stop, computerized public service centers in sixteen Indian states, Jennifer will discuss the characteristics of states associated with differences in policy outcomes and present original survey evidence on the effects of technology-based reforms on the quality of public services.

Jennifer Bussell is an Assistant Professor of Public Affairs at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin. She received a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research concerns the political economy of development and governance with an emphasis on the role of formal and informal institutions--such as federalism, coalition politics, and corruption--in shaping policy outcomes. She is particularly concerned with the politics of government technology adoption for the benefit of poor citizens in developing countries, with an emphasis on India.

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Jennifer Bussell Assistant Professor of Public Affairs, Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs Speaker University of Texas, Austin
Seminars
Liberation Technology Seminar Series

Food price volatility and the world's poor

Authors
Rosamond L. Naylor
News Type
News
Date
Paragraphs

An October 13 New York Times headline article warned that an increasing volatile market for grains could lead to a repeat of the 2008 food price run-up. That price spike left over 1 billion people in a state of food insecurity-a threshold symbolic in its extreme order of magnitude and in the challenges it presents for combating global hunger in the future. In a paper released December 20 in Population and Development Review FSE director Rosamond L. Naylor and deputy director Walter P. Falcon provide insight into the causes and consequences of these volatile events.

"Price variability, particularly spikes, has enormous impacts on the rural poor who spend a majority of their income on food and have minimal savings," said Naylor. "Impacts at the local level have not been well measured, yet are key to improving food security globally." 

Expectations--often faulty--have played a key role in price volatility over the past decade. Uncertain exchange rates and macro policies added to price misperceptions, as did flurries of speculative activity in organized futures markets, particularly as a result of the growing biofuels market.

"These events highlight new linkages between agriculture-energy and agriculture-finance markets that affect the world food economy today," explained Falcon. "More importantly, volatile markets compound problems of low crop productivity, increase reliance on food imports, and aggravate other internal causes of instability--conflict, weak institutions, and inadequate infrastructure--that typically plague the world's poorest countries."

To see how the rural poor were impacted on a local scale, Naylor and Falcon looked at Ghana, Uganda, Malawi, Guatemala, and India. Price changes at the local level during the 2008 price spike were frequently half that of international prices, primarily as a consequence of domestic food and trade policies.

"The price bubble was undeniably grim for poor consumers, particularly for households living under $1/day or $2/day, but not as debilitating as many commentators suggested," said Falcon. "Unfortunately, most price stabilization efforts aimed at the poor, however well intended, ended up helping larger net producers much more than those at the margin."

Additionally, domestic self-sufficiency polices tended to have long-term negative impacts on the international market when governments lacked the resources to defend a targeted price or were ‘large actors' with significant shares of global production or consumption.

For example, in the spring of 2008, the Indian government placed a ban on rice exports--a major staple in the country--when it feared significant increases in grain prices and a spread of Ug99 (wheat rust). This ban affected food prices from Asia to Africa, created mini-panics within food importing countries, and added to global grain price variability. It underscored the growing food-security and crop interdependencies among nations arising from pathogens, prices, and policies.

The extreme heat wave that hit Russia and Eastern Europe in the summer of 2010, coupled with floods in Pakistan, declining estimates of maize stocks in the U.S., and uncertainties about global GDP growth have captured the attention of many analysts and policymakers. What will happen to prices in terms of spikes, trends, and variations during 2011-2013 and beyond is uncertain.

What is known, said Naylor, is that the causes and consequences of food-price variability deserve much more attention if we are going to alleviate global food insecurity in the future.

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