About the Topic: Government services have often been found to act as important sites of political socialization.  Through interactions with institutions and functionaries of the state, individuals learn important lessons about their worth as citizens and the functioning of democracy.  What then happens when governments no longer provide basic services and are replaced by the private sector?  In the context of a large private school voucher experiment, I leverage the randomized distribution of private school vouchers to understand the impact of private schools on citizen's engagement with the state.  Based on an original household survey of 1,200 households conducted five years after a voucher lottery, I find that voucher winning households hold stronger market-oriented beliefs than voucher losing households.  Voucher winning households are willing to pay more for private services and express a preference for private service provision.  However, voucher winning households show no difference in political participation.  Evidence suggest that this is driven by a belief in private providers as permanent economic actors.  These results suggest economic preferences are malleable and exposure to different economic actors, in the form of private schools, have the potential to change them.

About the Speaker: Emmerich Davies is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania and will be joining the faculty at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in July 2016.  His dissertation examines the growth of private elementary education in India. His work has been supported by the American Institute of Indian Studies Junior Fellowship, and the National Academy of Education and Spencer Foundation. In addition, Emmerich has a project with Tulia Falleti on local community political participation after the left turn in Bolivia and is beginning work on variation in education quality across India.

Left-center parties in South Korea and Taiwan recently defeated their conservative opponents amid a surge in turnout by younger voters. What are the underlying causes of these developments? Do they signal the beginning of a political transformation in these vibrant democracies? Booseung Chang will discuss the role of growing voter anger over socio-economic disparities and the rise of new nationalisms in potentially changing the political party systems of South Korea and Taiwan, along with the implications for the United States.

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- To ensure an accurate headcount for lunch, RSVPs are required - 

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Japanese political science community has generally been slow in adopting an experimental approach in the study of Japanese politics. In the areas of public opinion research, however, there have been some new attempts that take advantages of the methodological merits of experiments in investigating the Japanese political attitudes and behaviors. In this presentation, Professor Kohno will introduce three studies that he and his colleagues have embarked on, which relate to three major issues that Japan faces: constitutional revision, national security policy, and people's attitudes under natural disasters.

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Abstract: Supercomputing impacts everybody, everywhere, every day. The simulation capabilities have allowed advanced medicine, energy, aviation and manufacturing. Supercomputers allow us to explore fields such as global climate change, as well as tackle problems for which experiments are impractical, hazardous or prohibitively expensive. The Department of Energy is a leader in supercomputers as part of their national security mission. With the demise of underground testing, supercomputers are a key resource used to ensure the safety and reliability of the nuclear stockpile. This talk will explore the buildup to our current petaflop systems and the challenges to obtaining exascale systems in the future.

About the speaker: As Acting Associate Director for Computation at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Trish Damkroger leads the 1,000-employee workforce behind the Laboratory’s high performance computing efforts. The Computation team develops and deploys an integrated computing environment for petascale analytics and simulations such as understanding global climate warming, clean energy creation, biodefense, and nonproliferation. LLNL’s computing ecosystem includes high performance computers, scientific visualization facilities, high performance storage systems, network connectivity, multiresolution data analysis, mathematical models, scalable numerical algorithms, computer applications, and necessary services to enable LLNL mission goals and scientific discovery through simulation.

South Korea has relied on its export-oriented development model to become an economic powerhouse, but has now reached the limits of this model. Indeed, Korea’s phenomenal growth has incubated the seeds of its own destruction. Learning from the Korean developmental experience, China has adopted key elements of the Korean development model and has become a potent competitor in electronics and the heavy industries. Meanwhile, the organizational and institutional legacies of late industrialization have constrained Korean efforts to move into technology entrepreneurship and the service sector. These strategic challenges are compounded by a demographic bomb, as social development has led to collapsing birthrates in Korea, much like other developed countries in Europe and Asia. Within the next few years, the Korean workforce will start diminishing in size and aging rapidly, straining the country’s resources and curtailing its growth. In this seminar, Joon Nak Choi, 2015-16 Koret Fellow at Stanford's Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Reserach Center, will discuss innovations in business strategy, educational policy and social structure that are directly relevant to these problems, and that would alleviate or perhaps even reverse Korea’s economic malaise.

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This public event is made possible through the generous support of the Koret Foundation.

Gaurav Kataria is a Big Data leader at Google who is responsible for driving Production Adoption initiatives across various Google for Work product lines - Gmail, Drive, G+, Hangouts, Google Docs, Drive, Android and Chrome. His group employs sophisticated machine learning and data mining techniques to understand the usage patterns across different products, and based on that creates programs to improve user engagement.

Gaurav holds a guest lecturer appointment at Stanford Business School where he co-teaches a course on 'Data-Driven Decision Making.' He actively supports the startup community in the Bay Area and is an advisor to multiple startups in mobile space. Prior to Google, he was a senior manager at Booz Allen and a researcher at Cylab - Carnegie Mellon. He has a Masters and PhD in Information Security Risk Management from Carnegie Mellon University and Bachelors in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology. He currently lives in Palo Alto, California and enjoys hiking the Bay Area mountain ranges in his spare time.

Gaurav will share his perspective on how to create a data-driven organization and the specific capabilities businesses need to develop to harness the power of machine intelligence.

AGENDA:

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

Can Northeast Asia’s developmental sequence help explain – and even prescribe – economic development worldwide? Joe Studwell, former journalist for The Economist, the Economist Intelligence Unit, and the Financial Times, argues that the East Asian story holds the key to development for other countries. The sequential implementation of household farming to maximize agricultural yields; an acute focus on export-manufacturing; and financial repression and controlled capital accounts is key to promoting accelerated economic development. Emphasizing the role of politics to shape markets, Mr. Studwell notes that there are at least two kinds of economics: the “economics of development” and the “economics of efficiency,” which countries, after achieving a certain level of development, must pursue.

Joe Studwell has worked as a freelance writer and journalist in East Asia for over twenty years. He has written for the Economist Intelligence Unit, The Economist, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Far Eastern Economic Review, the Observer Magazine and Asia Inc. From 1997 to 2007, Mr. Studwell was the founding editor of the China Economic Quarterly and also founder and director of the Asian research and advisory firm Dragonomics, now GaveKal Dragonomics. Joe Studwell’s previous books include Asian Godfathers: Money and Power in Hong Kong and South-East Asia (2007) named one of the year’s ten best books on Asia by the Wall Street Journal. His latest book is How Asia Works: Success and Failure in the World’s Most Dynamic Region, which was placed by both the Financial Times and The Economist on their “books of the year” lists. Mr. Studwell is currently completing his mid-career Ph.D. at Cambridge University, U.K.

Abstract: Nuclear war and climate change present the two most serious threats to global security since World War II. This talk shows that nuclear weapons research and climate science were historically connected in deep, sometimes intimate ways. Each developed its own knowledge infrastructure, including people, technical systems, and organizations, with surprising parallels and frequent exchanges across the classified/civilian divide. From the 1940s on, nuclear weapons research and climate science both relied heavily on computer models, used related physics and numerical methods, and shared human as well as technical resources. Radiocarbon from nuclear weapons tests contributed to understanding of the global carbon cycle, while fallout monitoring networks produced critical knowledge about the stratosphere. In the 1980s, the potential for “nuclear winter” — a war-induced climatic catastrophe — became a major political issue, but the groundwork for this concern had been laid long before.

This interplay not only continued, but became even more significant after the Cold War’s end, when the weapons labs’ expertise, equipment, and observing systems were partially repurposed. Several US national laboratories now play essential roles in climate and Earth system science. Among these roles are the Program on Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison, based at Livermore and responsible for the important Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP), a major unifying force in climate modeling for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessments. The cyberinfrastructure underlying CMIP and similar projects must address mounting challenges related to data access controls, software support, and the security of huge data collections, while their institutional and human bases depend on ongoing national support. Crafting effective climate policy, I argue, will require understanding and rethinking the dynamics of these knowledge infrastructures for the present, rapidly evolving context.

About the Speaker: Paul Edwards is a Professor in the School of Information (SI) and the Dept. of History at the University of Michigan. SI is an interdisciplinary professional school focused on bringing people, information, and technology together in more valuable ways.

His research explores the history, politics, and cultural aspects of computers, information infrastructures, and global climate science. His current research focuses on knowledge infrastructures for the Anthropocene.

Dr. Edwards is co-editor (with Geoffrey C. Bowker) of the Infrastructures book series (MIT Press), and he serves on the editorial boards of Big Data & Society: Critical Interdisciplinary Inquiries and Information & Culture: A Journal of History. His most recent book is A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (MIT Press, 2010).