Abstract: Current technologies and practices have created large stores of medical data, including electronic medical records, genomic data, and mobile-health measurements.  There is great promise for discovery and implementation of more efficient and effective health care, but there are also tensions between the sharing of data and the ability to make assurances about security and privacy to patients and study participants.  I will discuss these challenges in the setting of genomic research and medical record data mining.  In many cases, social mechanisms are likely to be the more reliable safeguards than technical mechanisms for privacy, security, and obfuscation.

About the Speaker: Russ Biagio Altman is a professor of bioengineering, genetics, medicine, and biomedical data science (and of computer science, by courtesy) and past chairman of the Bioengineering Department at Stanford University. His primary research interests are in the application of computing and informatics technologies to problems relevant to medicine. He is particularly interested in methods for understanding drug action at molecular, cellular, organism and population levels.  His lab studies how human genetic variation impacts drug response (e.g. http://www.pharmgkb.org/). Other work focuses on the analysis of biological molecules to understand the actions, interactions and adverse events of drugs (http://feature.stanford.edu/).  He helps lead an FDA-supported Center of Excellence in Regulatory Science & Innovation (https://pharm.ucsf.edu/cersi). Dr. Altman holds an A.B. from Harvard College, and M.D. from Stanford Medical School, and a Ph.D. in Medical Information Sciences from Stanford. He received the U.S. Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers and a National Science Foundation CAREER Award. He is a fellow of the American College of Physicians (ACP), the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI), the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine (formerly the Institute of Medicine, IOM) of the National Academies.  He is a past-President, founding board member, and a Fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB), and a past-President of the American Society for Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics (ASCPT).  He has chaired the Science Board advising the FDA Commissioner, currently serves on the NIH Director’s Advisory Committee, and is Co-Chair of the IOM Drug Forum.  He is an organizer of the annual Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing (http://psb.stanford.edu/), and a founder of Personalis, Inc.  Dr. Altman is board certified in Internal Medicine and in Clinical Informatics. He received the Stanford Medical School graduate teaching award in 2000, and mentorship award in 2014.

Abstract: In the 1970s, soaring oil prices provided huge revenues to oil producing Arab countries, which, together with private Arab companies and individuals, invested billions of dollars in the U.S. economy. The influx of Arab petodollars drew mixed reactions from Americans. Some feared that wealthy Arabs were “buying up America” and gaining control over the nation’s political, economic, educational, and cultural institutions. Others welcomed Arab investment as a boon to the U.S. economy and to global stability. Petrodollars also played a key role in Arab American history. Demeaning portrayals of oil-rich Arabs in media and government discourse—reaching a crescendo in the FBI’s “Abscam” sting operations of 1978-1980—goaded Arab Americans to adopt more organized methods of combating anti-Arab stereotypes. Salim Yaqub draws on his new book, Imperfect Strangers: Americans, Arabs, and U.S.-Middle East Relations in the 1970s, to explore the complex legacy of Arab petrodollars in American life.

About the Speaker: Salim Yaqub is Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Director of UCSB’s Center for Cold War Studies and International History. He is the author of Containing Arab Nationalism: The Eisenhower Doctrine and the Middle East (University of North Carolina, 2004) and of several articles and book chapters on the history of U.S. foreign relations, the international politics of the Middle East, and Arab American political activism. His second book, Imperfect Strangers: Americans, Arabs, and U.S.-Middle East Relations in the 1970s, was published by Cornell University Press in September 2016.

Exploiting the variation in the amount of subsidy for child health care by municipality, age and time in Japan, this paper examines the effect of patient cost-sharing on child health care utilization. Using longitudinal claims data and triple difference-in-difference framework, we find that reduced cost-sharing significantly increases utilization of outpatient care among children. We further investigate whether these increase in outpatient visits solely reflects moral hazard or increases in beneficial care.

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Hitoshi Shigeoka received a B.A. (2001) and an MA (2003) in chemical engineering from University of Tokyo, and master of international affairs (2006) and PhD in economics (2012) from Columbia University. Hitoshi’s research interests include health, labor, public economics, and experimental economics. His current research involves estimating the demand elasticity of health care utilization, examining the degree of supplier-induced demand by physicians and hospitals, examining the effects of competition and peer-to-peer teaching on learning, and investigating how the long-term incentives of mothers affect the timing of births.

Ambassador Osius will make remarks on U.S.-Vietnam relations in the wake of President Obama’s May 2016 visit. He will focus on the unfinished task of reconciliation. Relations were normalized in 1995. Yet many in Vietnam’s diaspora community, especially those most affected by the legacies of the war, oppose rapprochement and engagement. Overseas communities can play important and constructive roles in relations between their countries of origin and the rest of the world. Ambassador Osius will argue that a fully engaged Vietnamese-American community could and would contribute a lot toward growing the U.S. partnership with Vietnam, including helping to shape a beneficial future of greater trade, improved regional stability, and an expanded role for civil society.

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This discussion will be based on the authors' recently published book, Taiwan's Democracy Challenged: The Chen Shui-bian Years, Lynne Rienner Publishing (2016).

Abstract

At the end of Chen Shui-bian’s two terms as the president of Taiwan, his tenure was widely viewed as a disappointment, if not an outright failure. Today, the Chen years (2000-2008) are remembered mostly for relentless partisan fighting over cross-Strait relations and national identity questions, prolonged political gridlock, and damaging corruption scandals—as an era that challenged, rather than helped consolidate, Taiwan’s young democracy and squandered most of the promise with which it began.

Yet as Taiwan’s Democracy Challenged: The Chen Shui-bian Years documents, this conventional narrative obscures a more complex and more positive story. The chapters here cover the diverse array of ways in which democratic practices were deepened during this period, including the depoliticization of the military and intelligence forces, the ascendance of an independent and professional judicial system, a strengthened commitment to constitutionalism and respect for the rule of law, and the creation of greater space for civil society representatives in the policy-making process. Even the conventional wisdom about unprecedented political polarization during this era is misleading: while elite politics became more divided and acrimonious, mass public opinion on cross-Strait relations and national identity was actually converging.

Not all developments were so positive: strong partisans on both sides of the political divide remained only weakly committed to democratic principles, the reporting of news organizations became more sensationalist and partisan, and the Taiwanese state’s exceptional autonomy from sectoral interests and vaunted capacity for long-term planning deteriorated. But on the whole, the authors argue, these years were not squandered. By the end of the Chen Shui-bian era, Taiwan’s democracy was firmly consolidated. 

This event is sponsored by the Taiwan Democracy Project in the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. It is free and open to the public, and lunch will be served. Please RSVP by October 31.