Japan Studies Program at Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center has recently received a grant from Sasakawa Peace Foundation in Japan for the New Channels project.  The project aims to broaden the dialogue and understanding between the United States and Japan and to reinvigorate the alliance with focus on 21st century challenges faced by both nations. 

Hideichi Okada, Senior Advisor at NTT Data Institute of Management and Consulting, will join the Japan Studies Program at APARC as the program's 2013-14 Sasakawa Peace Fellow to play a leading role in organizing the annual New Channels dialogue. 

In this seminar, Okada will be speaking about Japan's energy policy and challenge.

Hideichi Okada served as Vice Minister for International Affairs, Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) from 2010 to 2012, where he promoted international trade and investment, and expanded industrial cooperation with various countries. He also served as Director General of Trade Policy Bureau (2008-2010) and Director General of Commerce and Information Policy Bureau of METI (2007-2008). He worked for Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi as his executive assistant, where he dealt with policies on economy, industry, energy, science and technology, and environment, and with public relations (2001-2006). He was a professor at GRIPS (2006-2007) and a visiting scholar at Harvard Law School and IR/PS, University of California, San Diego in 2007. Okada was born in Tokyo in 1951. He received LL.M. degree from Harvard Law School (1981) and graduated from the University of Tokyo with a LL.B. (1976). Currently, he is Senior Adviser, NTT Data Institute of Management and Consulting.

Radiation detection technology might significantly enhance a nation state’s ability to detect and counter the threat of nuclear terrorism, but the technology is not a panacea for the nuclear terrorism problem. Because of limitations imposed by physics (and arguably even more serious and fundamental limits imposed by geometry), radiation detection systems may never be able to detect all nuclear threats in credible risk scenarios. Of course, it is highly unlikely that the problem of nuclear terrorism- like many societal problems we face today- has a simple technological solution, but technology can help. I will argue that the pursuit of an all technological solution has- paradoxically- limited the progress that has been made in developing effective systems for detecting nuclear threats. Using an investment metaphor: we in the US and most of the developed world have bet on “get rich quick” schemes with respect to radiation detection technologies and have eschewed a path of steady progress. I argue that the US- and others- should take a more straightforward  model to funding radiation detection research and development and develop simple metrics to measure steady progress as opposed to our current policy of betting all on “transformational solutions” that would “solve the problem”.

About the speaker: Jim Lund is a Senior Manager at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, CA. Prior to arriving at Sandia in 1994, he worked at Radiation Monitoring Devices in Massachusetts for 12 years where he was the manager of the Advanced Radiation Detector Group and led a group developing radiation detectors for advanced medical diagnostics and imaging.

After arriving at Sandia as a Consultant, Lund became a Senior Member of the Technical Staff and eventually a Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff before becoming a Manager in 2003. He is currently a Senior Manager of Security Systems Engineering- a group of five engineering and science departments at Sandia, Livermore.

Lund has a B.S. in Chemistry and Math from Salem State University and an M.S. in Applied Physics from the University of Massachusetts. He has written and coauthored many publications in the field of ionizing radiation detection, refereed for several journals, evaluated proposals for DOE, NSF, and NIH, and has been invited to present to several national advisory groups (NAS, JASON, DSB, etc.).

More event information TBA. 

Speaker bio:

Rebecca Slayton is a lecturer in Stanford’s Public Policy Program and a junior faculty fellow at CISAC for 2013-2014. She was a visiting scholar at CISAC for 2012-2013. Her research examines how experts evaluate the prospects and risks of new technology, and how they make their judgments politically persuasive in the context of international security. She recently completed a book, Arguments that Count: Physics, Computing, and Missile Defense, 1949-2012, which will be published by MIT Press in 2013. Arguments that Counts compares how two different ways of framing technology—physics and computer science—lead to very different understandings of the risks associated with weapons systems, and especially missile defense. It also shows how computer scientists established a disciplinary repertoire—quantitative rules, codified knowledge, and other tools for assessment—that enabled them to analyze the risks of missile defense, and to make those analyses “stick” in the political process. She has recently begun studying how different cultures of risk have shaped, and continue to shape, the field of cyber security.

Slayton was a lecturer in the Science, Technology and Society Program at Stanford University and a CISAC affiliate from 2005-2011. In 2004-2005 she was a CISAC science fellow. She earned a PhD in physical chemistry at Harvard University in 2002. From 2002-2004, she retooled in the social sciences as a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She also won a AAAS Mass Media Science and Engineering Fellowship in 2000, and has worked as a science journalist.

Luke Miner recently completed his PhD in economics from the London School of Economics. He was also a postdoctoral fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law in the Liberation Technology Program. He is currently working as a data scientist in the techology sector.

This seminar is part of the "Europe and the Global Economy" series.

The study of the political consequences of unemployment has a long history in political science. Regarding the electoral impact of unemployment, studies have focused both on its impact on political alienation, as well as its partisan effects. The financial crisis, which unfolded following the collapse of Lehman Brothers and rapidly spread to Europe, provides us with the opportunity to make several methodological improvements over the previous literature. In our empirical analysis, we use fine-grained registry-based data on the economic impact of the crisis and how it varied across Sweden’s more than 5000 electoral districts. We combine this with district-level data on vote-shares for all major parties in parliamentary elections before and after the crisis.

The economic impact varied a great deal across Sweden, mainly affecting industrial centers. Because the impact was so diverse across electoral districts, we are able to estimate the electoral impact of unemployment more efficiently than most previous studies. Moreover, the sources of the crisis were not domestic. Because the crisis was an exogenous shock to the Swedish economy, the selection bias that is usually inherent in estimating the electoral impact of unemployment is mitigated. According to the results, the electoral impact of crisis-induced unemployment was large, leading to a marked fall in the vote share of the established left parties and a corresponding increase in that of the main radical right party.

Kåre Vernby is Associate Professor at the Department of Government, Uppsala University, where he teaches courses in comparative politics and methods.  His research interests are in political economy and political behavior and his papers have been published or are forthcoming in academic journals such as American Journal of Political Science, Electoral Studies, European Union Politics and Politics & Society as well as several edited volumes.