When Galileo’s telescope arrived in Madrid in 1610, it not only changed the course of local science, but also became a pivotal image in the critique of contemporary society once it was incorporated into the lexicon of satires, emblems, sonnets, and allegorical dreams as anteojo de larga vista.  The passages analyzed in this talk help us see its rich presence in Spain, forcing us to rethink the artificial gap between scientific discourse and literary creation.

This seminar is part of The Europe Center's Iberian Studies Program seminar series.

In his State of the Union address on February 12 President Obama announced that the US will set up a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with the European Union. The US and the EU will soon start negotiations to create the world’s largest free trade area. The agreement will eliminate tariff barriers and harmonize regulatory and technical standards. It is argued that this will add up to two percent to GDP. The US and the EU already trade goods and services worth $ 2.7 billion per day. This seminar will discuss the politics and economics of such an agreement.

This event is part of The Europe Center's series on the "European and Global Economic Crisis."

Francis Fukuyama, has written widely on issues relating to democratization and international political economy.  His most recent book, The Origins of Political Order, was published in April 2011. He is a resident in FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University, a senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins SAIS Foreign Policy Institute, and a non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. 

Tu Weiming, has been instrumental in developing discourses on dialogue among civilizations, Cultural China, reflection on the Enlightenment mentality of the modern West, and multiple modernities.  He is currently studying the modern transformation of Confucian humanism in East Asia and tapping its spiritual resources for human flourishing in the global community.  He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS), and a Member of the International Philosophical Society (IIP).     

Sponsored by Stanford Confucius Institute, Beijing Forum, Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies, Peking University

The United States commercial nuclear industry started just a few years following the conclusion of the second world war with the start of operation of the Shippingport reactor. Over a relatively short period of time, the industry grew to over one hundred reactors all based fundamentally on the same light water reactor technology that served the naval nuclear program well. Since the start of the industry, the nuclear power research and development community has explored a large number of reactor concepts for a variety of conventional and not so conventional applications. Many of these technologies were demonstrated as both test reactors and prototypical demonstration reactors. Despite the promise of many of these concepts, the commercialization cases for many of these technologies have failed to emerge. In this talk I will discuss the barriers reactor vendors currently face in the United States and the inherent challenges between promoting evolutionary versus revolutionary nuclear technologies. I will then discuss the prospects for the development of advanced commercial reactor technology abroad with an emphasis on the Chinese nuclear program. In particular, I will discuss recent developments in their advanced light water reactor program, high temperature gas reactor demonstration, and thorium molten salt reactor program.

About the speaker: Dr. Edward Blandford is an Assistant Professor of Nuclear Engineering at the University of New Mexico. Before coming to UNM, Blandford was a Stanton nuclear security fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University. His research focuses on advanced reactor thermal-fluids, best-estimate code validation, reactor safety, and physical protection strategies for critical nuclear infrastructure. Blandford received his PhD in Nuclear Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 2010.

Cloud Computing is rapidly transforming not only computing, but the very fundamentals of how we process, store, and use information—and information is the very basis of civilization.  Cloud Computing is historically unique by simultaneously being an innovation ecosystem, production platform, and global marketplace. While the technology and business models are almost inherently global in scale, national politics and regulations will powerfully influence how Cloud Computing unfolds across the world. Critical issues such as information privacy (who gets to see and use information), security (how to protect information from unauthorized access), and communications network policy (the political economy of broadband and wireless networks) will be settled at the national or regional level. There are powerful tensions as US-based multinational firms are rapidly taking over the global Cloud Computing industry. What are the appropriate frameworks to understand how the competitive dynamics are unfolding? What are the options for national-level players? How should we understand the policy issues as they unfold? What is the role of Japan and Asia as this transformation unfolds?

Kenji Kushida is the Takahashi Research Associate in Japanese Studies at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. He holds a PhD in political science from the University of California, Berkeley, and was a graduate research associate at the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy. Kushida has an MA in East Asian studies and BAs in economics and East Asian studies, all from Stanford University.

Abstract:
Azerbaijan has a unique approach to Internet regulation that represents a ‘middle path’ between  open access and censorship. Because the Internet is both unpredictable and a prime venue of unsanctioned content, it threatens what the Azerbaijani government values most: power through consistency, consistency through power.

There are three generations of Internet control that a government can use. The first generation is  widespread filtering and direct censorship. Second generation controls manipulate regulations on  acceptable content and change the "use of defamation, slander, and ‘veracity’ laws, to deter bloggers and independent media from posting material critical of the government or specific  government officials, however benignly (including humor)". The third generation competes with Internet freedom "through effective counter information campaigns that overwhelm, discredit or demoralize opponents".

While Azerbaijan does little first generation control (although it has sporadically filtered  opposition news sources, especially before elections), it instead discourages technology use in  three ways: media framing (third generation), monitoring (third generation) and arrests (second and  third generation). Together these have created psychological barriers that impacts Azerbaijani technology use.

Despite this, the Azerbaijani government repeatedly claims that "there is Internet freedom in Azerbaijan." By electing to define Internet freedom in the strictest sense of the word, the government uses a semantic shift to deflect criticism.

A mixed-methods nationally representative study of Azerbaijani Internet use will demonstrate the detrimental effect Azerbaijani government efforts to dissuade Internet use has on Internet use and free expression.

Katy E. Pearce is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington and holds an affiliation with the Ellison Center for Russian East European, and Central Asian Studies. She specializes in technology and media use in the Former Soviet Union. Her research focuses on social and political uses of technologies and digital content in the transitioning democracies and semi-authoritarian states of the South Caucasus and Central Asia, but primarily Armenia and Azerbaijan. She has a BA (2001) in Armenian Studies and Soviet Studies from the University of Michigan, an MA (2006) in International Studies from the University of London School for Oriental and African Studies, and a PhD (2011) in Communication from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and was a Fulbright scholar (Armenia 2007-2008).

In 1990, hypertext was a utopian conjecture. Since then, a hypertext system called the World Wide Web not only become the predominant medium of human communication, but also one of the primary methods for distributing software. Obviously, this transition has had implications for subjects of geopolitical interest including software security, political discourse, and the ability of states to surveil their citizens' communications and reading habits.

Because it was hard enough to build a global hypertext system in the first place, security was generally an afterthought in the design of the World Wide Web. One necessary component of a secure website is HTTPS encryption, but it is still only used correctly by a tiny fraction of websites. Any website that allows http:// as well as https:// is inherently vulnerable to network surveillance, account hijacking, and other forms of insecurity. To make matters worse, HTTPS itself has been plagued by numerous security problems and design flaws.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has been engaged in a series of projects to encrypt the entire Web, retiring the insecure HTTP protocol, and ensuring that "HTTPS" actually delivers what it promises. These projects include HTTPS Everywhere, the SSL Observatory, Sovereign Keys, and efforts to persuade major sites to deploy HTTPS. In this talk Peter will give an overview of these projects, the significant progress they have made to date, and the work that remains to be done.

About the speaker: Peter Eckersley is Technology Projects Director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He keeps his eyes peeled for technologies that, by accident or design, pose a risk to computer users' freedoms—and then looks for ways to fix them. He explains gadgets to lawyers, and lawyers to gadgets. Peter's work at EFF has included privacy and security projects such as Panopticlick, HTTPS Everywhere, SSDI, and the SSL Observatory; helping to launch a movement for open wireless networks; fighting to keep modern computing platforms open; and running the first controlled tests to confirm that Comcast was using forged reset packets to interfere with P2P protocols.

Peter holds a PhD in computer science and law from the University of Melbourne; his research focused on the practicality and desirability of using alternative compensation systems to legalize P2P file sharing and similar distribution tools while still paying authors and artists for their work.

Peter will discuss work at SRI and the University of Cambridge under two projects currently funded by DARPA, relating to clean-slate architectures for hardware, software, networking, and clouds, aimed at higher-assurance security, resilience, evolvability, and other critical requirements.

Two papers provide some early views of the ongoing work:

http://www.csl.sri.com/neumann/law10.pdf 
http://www.csl.sri.com/neumann/2012resolve-cheri.pdf

Peter G. Neumann (Neumann@CSL.sri.com) has doctorates from Harvard and Darmstadt. After 10 years at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, in the 1960s, during which he was heavily involved in the Multics development jointly with MIT and Honeywell, he has been in SRI's Computer Science Lab since September 1971. He is concerned with computer systems and networks, trustworthiness/dependability, high assurance, security, reliability, survivability, safety, and many risks-related issues such as election-system integrity, crypto applications and policies, health care, social implications, and human needs -- especially those including privacy. He is currently PI on two DARPA projects: clean-slate trustworthy hosts for the CRASH program with new hardware and new software, and clean-slate networking for the Mission-oriented Resilient Clouds program. He moderates the ACM Risks Forum, has been responsible for CACM's Inside Risks columns monthly from 1990 to 2007, tri-annually since then, chairs the ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy, and chairs the National Committee for Voting Integrity (http://www.votingintegrity.org). He created ACM SIGSOFT's Software Engineering Notes in 1976, was its editor for 19 years, and still contributes the RISKS section. He is on the editorial board of IEEE Security and Privacy. He has participated in four studies for the National Academies of Science: Multilevel Data Management Security (1982), Computers at Risk (1991), Cryptography's Role in Securing the Information Society (1996), and Improving Cybersecurity for the 21st Century: Rationalizing the Agenda (2007). His 1995 book, Computer-Related Risks, is still timely. He is a Fellow of the ACM, IEEE, and AAAS, and is also an SRI Fellow. He received the National Computer System Security Award in 2002 and the ACM SIGSAC Outstanding Contributions Award in 2005. He is a member of the U.S. Government Accountability Office Executive Council on Information Management and Technology, and the California Office of Privacy Protection advisory council. In 2012, he was elected to the newly created National Cybersecurity Hall of Fame as one of the first set of inductees. He co-founded People For Internet Responsibility. He has taught courses at Darmstadt, Stanford, U.C. Berkeley, and the University of Maryland. See his website (http://www.csl.sri.com/neumann) for testimonies for the U.S. Senate and House and California state Senate and Legislature, papers, bibliography, further background, etc.

About the Speaker: Mickey Edwards is the director of the Aspen Institute-Rodel Fellowships in Public Leadership and lecturer at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.  He represented the state of Oklahoma as a  Republican member of Congress 16 years (1977-92).  He was a member of the House Republican leadership and served on the House Budget and Appropriations committees.  Since leaving Congress, he has taught at Harvard, Georgetown, and Princeton universities, and has chaired various task forces for the Constitution Project, the Brookings Institution, and the Council on Foreign Relations.  Edwards is the author of The Parties Versus the People: How to Turn Republicans and Democrats into Americans (Yale University Press, August 2012) and Reclaiming Conservatism: How a Great American Political Movement Got Lost--And How It Can Find Its Way Back (Oxford University Press, March 2008).