Abstract: 

1. What do some of America’s adversaries think about U.S. scientists, engineers and technical specialists they meet?
2. What is it really like to be an intelligence officer (IO) abroad? What are some of the stresses IO’s experience in their work?
3. What is Counterintelligence (CI)?

The “Baby Boomer” generation (dankai no sedai) has begun to reach the age of retirement en mass.  10,000 people turn 65 every day in the United States. In Japan, one-fifth of the population is over the age of 65 and is on track to increase to one-third of the population by 2050. In addition, people are living longer. Japan boasts the highest life expectancy in the world with an average of 84 years. As a result, we currently have a growing group of accomplished professionals contemplating spending their next 20-30 years doing something other than traditional work. According to the International Longevity Center (ILC) there is a great interest among this population to engage in activities that contribute back to society, but very few actually make the leap to do so. Nonprofits in the United States have developed a variety creative strategies to engage older adults; creating dynamic partnerships that provide opportunity and meaning to seniors while furthering social purpose missions. Lago will provide an overview of how nonprofits are leveraging the skills and experience of senior professionals for the social good.

SPEAKER:

Ulea Lago, Director of Consulting Empower Success Corp

BIO:

Ulea Grace Lago directs ESC’s consulting practice of 150 senior professionals, overseeing approximately $2.5M in pro bono services annually. An attorney and independent consultant, Ulea has over 17 years of experience working with nonprofits, religious organizations, and community groups. A veteran community organizer, she is the former director of the Truth and Reconciliation Project in Nashville, Tennessee, and previously served as Associate Director of Community Partnership and Service Learning at Sarah Lawrence College and Chair of the Political Action Network at Vanderbilt University, where she organized educational panels, forums, and fundraisers. She has a BA from Sarah Lawrence College, and a M.Div. and J.D. from Vanderbilt University

AGENDA:

4:15pm: Doors open
4:30pm-5:30pm: Talk and Discussion
5:30pm-6:00pm: Networking

RSVP REQUIRED:

Register to attend at http://www.stanford-svnj.org/31218-public-forum

Sleep is essential for life, and we spend 1/3 of our lives sleeping. If asked about the roles of sleep, most people can list a few examples as restoration of sleepiness and fatigue. Sleep is well known to be important for hormone and autonomic nerve adjustment, since growth hormone, a fundamental hormone for body metabolism, is released at the first NREM sleep. It is also well-known that sleep is important for memory fixations. More recently, sleep has been recognized to strengthen immune functions and facilitate clearance of waste products in the brain. Memory erasure, another important function of memory consolidation, also occurs during sleep. Although the public awareness of the importance of sleep has increased recently, people living in the modern era stay up late and are sleeping less and less; chronic sleep loss, or “Sleep Debt” accumulates. “Sleep Debt” not only impairs daily performance but also increases the risk for various diseases including metabolic syndrome, hypertension, stoke, ischemic heart disease, psychiatric diseases, cancer, and cognitive disorders. Nishino will discuss the Stanford Method for Ultimate Sound Sleep, which will strives to provide people with better sleep and an edge in their performance throughout the day. This technique is based on evidences from Stanford and other research facilities around the world.

SPEAKER:

Dr. Seiji Nishino, Professor, Stanford Department of Psychiatry and head of Stanford Sleep and Circadian Neurobiology Lab

BIO:

Image

Dr. Seiji Nishino is a professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Stanford University, and the head of the Stanford Sleep and Circadian Neurobiology Lab (SCN lab). He was born in Osaka, Japan, in 1955. In 1987, he joined to the Stanford Center for Sleep Sciences and Medicine at Stanford University. His research focus at the SCN Laboratory is sleep and circadian physiology using various animal models. A portion of the research is carried out using rodent models of narcolepsy and circadian rhythm sleep disorders. The laboratory also carries out pharmacological studies aiming to develop new treatments for these sleep disorders. He has published a book “The Stanford Method for Ultimate Sound Sleep” in Japan in March 2017, and 300,000 copies has been sold. In the book, he introduced the concept of “Sleep Debt” to Japanese readers, and “ Sleep Debt” was selected as one of top 10 most popular words in 2017 in Japan.

AGENDA:

4:15pm: Doors open
4:30pm-5:30pm: Talk and Discussion
5:30pm-6:00pm: Networking

RSVP REQUIRED:

Register to attend at http://www.stanford-svnj.org/svnjpf21518

Abstract:

The world is in turmoil. From India to Turkey and from Poland to the United States, authoritarian populists have seized power. As a result, Yascha Mounk shows, democracy itself may hang in the balance.

Using his own original research and on-the-ground reporting from countries around the world, Mounk makes clear in THE PEOPLE VS. DEMOCRACY what exactly is at risk if the current trends in America and Western Europe continue. Astounding numbers of people in all age, economic, and social groups are more open to military rule, media controls, and other hallmarks of authoritarianism than ever before.
    
“Under these radically changed circumstances, it would be foolhardy to assume that the stability of democracy is sure to persist,” Mounk writes in his introduction. “The first big assumption of the postwar era—the idea that rich countries in which the government had repeatedly changed hands through free and fair elections would forever remain democratic—has all along stood on shaky ground.”

Mounk shows that the two core components of liberal democracy—individual rights and the popular will—are increasingly at war with each other. As the role of money in politics soared and important issues were taken out of public contestation, a system of “rights without democracy” took hold. Populists who rail against this say they want to return power to the people. But in practice they create something just as bad: a system of “democracy without rights.”

The consequence, Mounk writes, is that trust in politics is dwindling. Citizens are falling out of love with their political system. Democracy is wilting away. Drawing on vivid stories and original research, Mounk identifies three key drivers of voters’ discontent: stagnating living standards, fears of multiethnic democracy, and the rise of social media. To reverse the trend, politicians need to enact radical reforms that benefit the many, not the few.

Speaker Bio:

Image

A columnist at Slate and the host of The Good Fight podcast, he is a leading expert on the rise of populism and the crisis of liberal democracy.

Image

Using previously unexamined nationally representative data from the Philippines, this study employs detailed measures of children’s welfare and addresses biases related to endogeneity of parental migration to examine the wellbeing of left-behind children. The results are robust across several econometric methods (treatment effects, biprobit, PSM, PSM-IV). They suggest that migrants’ children have better educational outcomes and are less likely to work, but are more likely to be physically sick, which cognitive stress theory would attribute to parental migration as a stressor. Still, the positive impacts of parental migration, attributable to income effect, outweigh the negative effects attributable to parental absence. The results also show heterogeneity in the impacts of parental migration conditional on children’s gender.

Image

Image

After the Cold War, Thailand became a poster child of democratizing processes in Southeast Asia. Student protests, farmers’ activism, a thriving civil society, and an expanding middle class suggested a model of successful democratic transition. In the last decades, however, many of the forces that supported that process turned sour on electoral politics. Dr. Sopranzetti’s book will explore how that happened—new class alliances, discourses of corruption and morality, questions of law.  In this context, he will portray Thailand as an experimental space for a new model of authoritarianism, inspired by Beijing and now spreading throughout the region.  The book, Owners of the Maps: Motorcycle Taxi Drivers, Mobility, and Politics in Bangkok, will be available for sale at the talk.

Claudio Sopranzetti is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at All Souls College at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Owners of the Maps: Motorcycle Taxi Drivers, Mobility, and Politics in Bangkok and he is currently working on Awakened,  an anthropological graphic novel on Thai politics.

Abstract: Founded in 1945 by Manhattan Project scientists who “could not remain aloof to the consequences of their work,” the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists aimed to chronicle the dawn of the nuclear age through the words of the men and women who built the atomic bomb. In 1947, Bulletin supporters—including a veritable Who’s Who of nuclear physics, from Einstein and Fermi to Szilard and Oppenheimer—expanded their four-page newsletter into a magazine that featured a minimalist clock, ticking toward the midnight of nuclear Armageddon, on its cover. More than 70 years later, the now-famous Doomsday Clock is set each January to reflect the world’s security situation. That event is now covered by thousands of media outlets around the world, and today’s Bulletin is hardly your grandfather’s niche magazine. It has become a global multimedia platform that deals with a host of manmade threats to civilization—from nuclear weapons to climate change and on to a host of emerging technologies—and reaches a worldwide digital audience of millions each year.     

Speaker bio: John Mecklin is the editor-in-chief of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Miller-McCune (since renamed Pacific Standard), an award-winning national magazine that focuses on research-based solutions to major policy problems, and the top editor of High Country News, a nationally acclaimed magazine that reports on the politics, environment, and culture of the American West. Writers working at his direction have won many major journalism prizes, including the George Polk Award, the Investigative Reporters and Editors certificate, and the Sidney Hillman Award for social justice journalism. Beyond his columns for the magazines he has edited, Mecklin’s writing has been published by Foreign Policy, The Columbia Journalism Review, and the Reuters international news service, among other media outlets. Before his magazine work, Mecklin was an investigative newspaper reporter and covered the Persian Gulf War from Saudi Arabia and Iraq. He holds a master in public administration degree from Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Abstract: In this talk, I will describe a a body of mathematical work trying to quantify the extent to which a redistricting plan is a partisan gerrymander. 

Speaker bio: Jonathan  Mattingly grew up in Charlotte, NC where he graduated from the NC School of Science and Mathematics and received a BS is Applied Mathematics with a concentration in physics from Yale University. After two years abroad with a year spent at ENS Lyon studying nonlinear and statistical physics on a Rotary Fellowship, he returned to the US to attend Princeton University where he obtained a PhD in Applied and Computational Mathematics in 1998. After 4 years as a Szego Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Stanford University and a year as a member of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, he moved to Duke University in 2003. He is currently a Professor of Mathematics and of Statistical Science. He is the recipient of a Sloan Fellowship, a PECASE CAREER award, and is a fellow of the IMS and the AMS. 

The metaphors of ‘face’ are often found in South Korea’s fair trade activism, as fair trade and ethical consumption are frequently described as ‘trade with persons whose faces you know’ and their goal is presented as building ‘capitalism or market economy with a human face.’ By asking how and why fair trade activists rely on the metaphors of face to problematize market economy, this talk analyzes the political implications of the metaphors of face.

For more information about this event, please visit the following event website:

https://anthropology.stanford.edu/events/colloquium/moral-economy-face-gift-exchange-recognition-and-depoliticized-solidarity