Abstract:  Foreign aid for health in low- and middle-income countries has increased five-fold over the past 25 years.  Between 2005 and 2010, health aid made up more than 30% of all health spending in low-income countries.  Global health is also an increasingly important component of U.S. foreign aid, rising steadily from under 4% of all U.S. non-military aid in 1990 to 22.7% in 2011.  There is growing evidence for the role of health aid in improving health among recipient countries, but is that it?  In this talk I will address the arguments for and against health as a focus of aid efforts and present initial evidence on the role of health aid on human capital and economic development.

Abstract: Prison systems can play numerous roles in a society's security in terms of the separation of criminals from the general population, rehabilitation of criminals prior to reentry in society, and deterrent effects on criminal behaviors. Yet, prison systems also create a set of obligations for the state towards prisoners including responsibility for their health and healthcare and a set of related challenges in terms of infectious disease control. Densely populated with high volumes of entry, movement, exit and reentry, prison systems have historically provided breeding grounds for infectious diseases and acted as epidemic lenses with important consequences for society at large. This talk considers two health policy case studies involving infectious diseases in prisons: 1) Tuberculosis and Multidrug Resistance in the former Soviet Union; 2) Chronic Hepatitis C Virus in the United States. In both, new more expensive and efficacious technologies are evaluated in terms of their effectiveness, costs, cost-effectiveness with consideration given to affordability and the specific ethics of making such decisions for incarcerated individuals.

About the Speaker: Jeremy Goldhaber-Fiebert, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Medicine, a Core Faculty Member at the Centers for Health Policy/Primary Care and Outcomes Research, and a Faculty Affiliate of the Stanford Center on Longevity and Stanford Center for International Development. His research focuses on complex policy decisions surrounding the prevention and management of increasingly common, chronic diseases and the life course impact of exposure to their risk factors. In the context of both developing and developed countries including the US, India, China, and South Africa, he has examined chronic conditions including type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases, human papillomavirus and cervical cancer, tuberculosis, and hepatitis C and on risk factors including smoking, physical activity, obesity, malnutrition, and other diseases themselves. He combines simulation modeling methods and cost-effectiveness analyses with econometric approaches and behavioral economic studies to address these issues. Dr. Goldhaber-Fiebert graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1997, with an A.B. in the History and Literature of America. After working as a software engineer and consultant, he conducted a year-long public health research program in Costa Rica with his wife in 2001. Winner of the Lee B. Lusted Prize for Outstanding Student Research from the Society for Medical Decision Making in 2006 and in 2008, he completed his PhD in Health Policy concentrating in Decision Science at Harvard University in 2008. He was elected as a Trustee of the Society for Medical Decision Making in 2011.

Susan Shirk is the chair of the 21st Century China Program and Ho Miu Lam Professor of China and Pacific Relations at the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies (IR/PS) at UC San Diego. She also is director emeritus of the University of California, Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC), and chair of the IGCC International Advisory Board. 

Thomas J. Christensen is the William P. Boswell Professor of World Politics of Peace and War and Director of the China and the World Program at Princeton University. From 2006-2008 he served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs with responsibility for relations with China, Taiwan, and Mongolia. His research and teaching focus on China’s foreign relations, the international relations of East Asia, and international security. 

China’s Conflicting Policy Directions

A climate of uncertainty marks the Xi administration’s second year in power. The unfurling of a nationwide anti-corruption campaign, including high-profile domestic and international targets, may have unintended effects on economic growth. But will these effects be short- or long-lived? Can this campaign build confidence, domestically and internationally, in the party’s governing capacity? Questions also swirl around the motivations for reviving Mao-era language in the political realm while maintaining a relentless urbanization drive in the social and economic realms. In foreign affairs, centrifugal regional forces and suspicion of US intentions in the Pacific must be reconciled with China’s deepening engagement with global institutions and commitment to “opening up” to the world. To address these issues, this series will bring together experts to share research and insights on the underlying logic for the seemingly contradictory policy paths recently chosen by China’s leaders. 

Please note: this talk is off the record.

Abstract: In January 2010, inspectors with the International Atomic Energy Agency noticed that centrifuges at an Iranian uranium enrichment plant were failing at an unprecedented rate. The cause was a complete mystery—apparently as much to the technicians replacing the centrifuges as to the inspectors observing them.

Then, five months later, a seemingly unrelated event occurred: A computer security firm in Belarus was called in to troubleshoot some computers in Iran that were crashing and rebooting repeatedly and found some malicious code on them. At first, the firm’s analysts believed the code was simply a routine piece of malware. But as they and other experts around the world investigated, they discovered a mysterious virus of unparalleled complexity.

They had, they soon learned, stumbled upon the world’s first digital weapon. For Stuxnet, as it came to be known, was unlike any other virus or worm built before: Rather than simply hijacking targeted computers or stealing information from them, it escaped the digital realm to wreak actual, *physical *destruction on a nuclear facility.

Author Kim Zetter, a senior writer for WIRED magazine, recently published a book on Stuxnet. In this presentation, she'll tell the story about Stuxnet's planning, execution and discovery and why the attack was so unique and sophisticated. She'll also discuss the repercussions of the assault and how critical infrastructure in the U.S. is susceptible to the same kind

About the Speaker: Kim Zetter is an award-winning investigative journalist and author who covers cybersecurity, cybercrime, cyber warfare, privacy and civil liberties. She has been covering computer security and the hacking underground since 1999, most currently as a staff reporter for Wired, where she has been reporting since 2003. She was a finalist for an Investigative Reporters and Editors award in 2005 for a series of investigative pieces she wrote about the security problems with electronic voting machines and the controversial companies that make them. In 2006 she broke a story for Salon about a secret NSA room at an AT&T facility in Missouri that was believed to be  siphoning internet data from the telecom’s network operations center. In  2007 she wrote a groundbreaking three-part story for Wired on the cybercriminal underground, which exposed the world of online carding  markets and the players behind them. In 2010, she and a Wired colleague broke the story about the arrest of Bradley Manning, the former Army intelligence analyst accused of leaking millions of classified U.S. government documents to WikiLeaks. In 2011, she wrote an extensive feature about Stuxnet, a sophisticated digital weapon that was launched by the U.S. and Israel to sabotage Iran’s uranium enrichment program.  She recently completed a book on the topic.

Kim Zetter's book on Stuxnet, Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon, can be purchased by following this link. 

Abstract: The “unsinkable” RMS Titanic sank on April 14, 1912, in the North Atlantic Ocean on its maiden voyage from Southampton, UK, to New York City.  There was no single cause for the loss of the Titanic; rather the improbable combination of errors in human design and judgment, combined with unforeseeable circumstance, led to the loss of over 1,500 lives.  The failure appears to have occurred over a range of spatial and temporal scales – from the atomic-scale processes of the embrittlement of iron rivets to global-scale fluctuations in climate and ocean currents. Regardless of the specific combination of causes, this failure in design and practice led to impressive improvements in both.  Disaster and tragedy are harsh teachers, but critical to improvement and progress.

The important question for the nuclear waste management community is: How do we learn and improve our waste management strategies in the absence of the benefit of failure? A geologic repository “operates” over a very distant time fame, and today’s scientists and engineers will never have the benefit of studying the failed system. In place of failure followed by improvements, we only can offer a general consensus on disposal strategies and their effectiveness.  However, it may well be that consensus leads to complacency and compromise, both of which may be harbingers of a failed repository.  I will discuss these issues in the context of recent accidents and the release of radioactivity at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, a geologic repository in southeastern New Mexico.

About the Speaker: Rod Ewing is the Frank Stanton Professor in Nuclear Security in the Center for International Security and Cooperation in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and a Professor in the Department of Geological and Environmental Sciences in the School of Earth Sciences. Ewing’s research focuses on the back-end of the nuclear fuel cycle, mainly nuclear materials and the geochemistry of radionuclides with application to permanent geologic disposal. He is the past president of the International Union of Materials Research Societies. Ewing has written extensively on issues related to nuclear waste management and is a co-editor of Radioactive Waste Forms for the Future (1988) and Uncertainty Underground – Yucca Mountain and the Nation’s High-Level Nuclear Waste (2006). He received the Lomonosov Gold Medal of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2006. In 2012, he was appointed by President Obama to chair the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, which provides scientific and technical reviews of the Department of the Energy’s programs for the management and disposal of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste. In 2015, he will receive the Roebling Medal of the Mineralogical Society of America.

Abstract: Snow is a vital resource for people and ecosystems. Global warming is widely projected to decrease snow accumulation throughout snow-dependent regions by 2100, potentially affecting water, food, and energy supplies, seasonal heat extremes, and wildfire risk. However, over the next few decades, the snow response is more uncertain, largely because of uncertainty about how global warming will influence precipitation. This tension—the gap between the informational requirements of adaptation and the ability of climate science to provide it—is one of the key challenges in making climate impacts assessments policy-relevant. Leveraging a unique climate model experiment, our research identifies the ‘irreducible uncertainty’ in global warming’s impact on snow in the Northern Hemisphere. These results provide a platform to discuss future water availability and security, people’s adaptive response to climate change, and both the limits and opportunities to propagating climate impacts into human systems at the scales most useful for policy.

About the Speaker: Justin Mankin is a PhD candidate in the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment & Resources (E-IPER) in Stanford’s School of Earth Sciences.

His research aims to constrain the uncertainty essential to understanding and responding to climate change’s impacts on people. His work focuses on two of the major sources of uncertainty in climate impacts assessments: the chaos of the climate system and the complexity of how people respond to climate stress. His hope is that his research can help inform the adaptation and risk management decisions people undertake in response to the uncertain threats from climate change.

Prior to Stanford he served as an intelligence officer. In 2011, he was asked to return to Afghanistan to serve as an anti-corruption advisor to NATO’s ISAF. He holds degrees from Columbia University (BA, MPA) and from the London School of Economics (MSc).