Our talk will present an innovative software platform we are developing for use at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal/Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia and other international tribunals. The VirtualTribunal takes the archival records of the tribunal, supplements them with other multimedia resources, and converts them into an educational, training, and legacy resource through the construction of modules aimed at specific user groups. We are working with the Khmer Rouge Tribunal to implement the Virtual Tribunal as an educational resource for Cambodian schools, universities, law schools, and judicial training centers, as well as a means for preserving the historical and human legacy of these trials documenting the trauma of the Khmer Rouge regime.

David Cohen is the Director of the War Crimes Studies Center and the Sidney and Margaret Ancker Distingusihed Professor for the Humanities at UC Berkeley. The War Crimes Studies Center supports and reports on the work of war crimes and human rights tribunals in Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Cambodia, East Timor, Bosnia, and Indonesia as well as engaging in a variety of national and regional human rights projects in Southeast Asia. The Virtual Tribunal is a partnership between the War Crimes Studies Center and the Department of Computer Science at UC Berkeley and the Hoover Library and Archive at Stanford.

Europe is increasingly investing in research through its Framework Programme for Research. A European Research Council has been created to foster basic research of the highest quality. Business and industry are encouraged to take R&D initiatives. Attempts are also being made to coordinate research between EU Member Countries to achieve critical mass and avoid duplication of efforts. The new research program is also becoming more internationally oriented. Will Europe succeed in becoming the most knowledge intensive region in the world?

Kerstin Eliasson is an expert on national and international research and science policy. She is currently Director, Ministry of Education and Research, Sweden. From 2004-2006, she served as State Secretary, Ministry of Education, Science and Culture. Mrs. Eliasson has been the chief negotiator for Sweden's participation in two international research facilities in Germany. She serves as Member of the Board of the Joint Research Centre (European Union) and Member of High-level Strategic Forum for International S&T Cooperation (EU).

Currently teaching at the Peter Szondi Institute for Comparative Literature at the Freie Universität Berlin, Swedish writer and scholar Aris Fioretos is editing a three-volume edition of the works of Nelly Sachs for Suhrkamp Verlag, scheduled to appear simultaneously with the opening of an exhibition about Sachs's life and work at the Jewish Museum in Berlin in May 2010.

Aris Fioretos studied at Stockholm, Paris, and Yale universities. Since 1991, he has published over a dozen books - novels, prose poetry, and essays. He has also edited several academic volumes and translated the works of Paul Auster, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Vladimir Nabokov into Swedish. A past counsellor of culture at the Swedish Embassy in Berlin, he is the recipient of several prizes and awards, most recently from the Swedish Academy, the American Academy in Berlin, and All Souls College, Oxford. His most recent publication is the essay collection Das Maß eines Fußes (Hanser Verlag, 2008). In the fall, a new novel will appear.

Jointly sponsored by the Forum on Contemporay Europe, Taube Center for Jewish Studies, Department of German Studies, and Stanford Humanities Center.

Why do community-based education and social persuasion programs for promoting healthy lifestyle and preventing chronic disease sometimes fall short of our expectations? Why are population effects so difficult to engineer and why are they so ephemeral?

This research carried out at USC, the Claremont Graduate University, and collaborating institutions in China integrates across social, behavioral, and neurocognitive sciences to address those questions. We conclude tentatively that the answer to each of the questions may lie in individual and context variability relative to program response, and that in order to more fully address the question of prevention program response variability requires engagement and integration across several levels of science to consider the roles of social groupings, environmental selection and design, social influence processes, and brain biology.

What works in one social, cultural or organizational setting may not be so effective in another. What works for persons with certain genetic and experiential backgrounds may be totally ineffective for persons with different dispositional or personality characteristics. In a series of community/school based prevention trials carried out in markedly different southern California and central China settings, we have uncovered domains of consistent response, and other domains of substantial environment- and disposition-based response variability.

A social influences based smoking prevention program framed in collectivist values and objectives worked to prevent smoking in one cultural setting but not another. And an individualist framed social influences program worked in the setting where the collectivist program did not. But the characteristics of the particular settings, which defined program success or failure, were different from what conventional (e.g., cultural psychology) wisdom would have led us to expect. Furthermore, both within and across cultural settings, the same individual dispositional characteristics moderated or determined program effectiveness, again in ways not predicted by the common cultural and behavioral science wisdom.

In recent studies carried out both in China and the U.S. we have found affective decision deficits, with known neural underpinnings, to account for rapid progression to regular smoking and binge drinking. These deficits are akin to the dispositional characteristics found earlier to moderate prevention program effects. Subsequent brain imaging studies confirm the hypothesized regions of neural involvement. Together these findings hold promise for more effective – situation and phenotype specific – approaches to engendering and sustaining more optimal individual and population health behavior.

Thomas Fingar, the 2009 Payne Distinguished Lecturer and former Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis and Chairman of the National Intelligence Council, will give the first 2009 Payne Distinguished Lecture on Wednesday, March 11, 2009, 4:30 pm in the Bechtel Conference Center, 616 Serra Street.

The theme for the 2009 series is Reducing Uncertainty: Intelligence and National Security.  Dr. Fingar's first lecture is titled "Myths, Fears, and Expectations."  Coit D. Blacker, the Olivier Nomellini Professor in International Studies and Director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, will introduce the lecture, which is free and open to the public.

Dr. Thomas Fingar is Payne Distinguished Lecturer in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. From May 2005 through December 2008, he served as the first Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis and, concurrently, as Chairman of the National Intelligence Council.

Dr. Fingar served previously as Assistant Secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary (2001-2003), Deputy Assistant Secretary for Analysis (1994-2000), Director of the Office of Analysis for East Asia and the Pacific (1989-1994), and Chief of the China Division (1986-1989). Between 1975 and 1986 he held a number of positions at Stanford University, including Senior Research Associate in the Center for International Security and Arms Control. Dr. Fingar is a graduate of Cornell University (A.B. in Government and History, 1968), and Stanford University (M.A., 1969 and Ph.D., 1977 both in Political Science).

The Payne Lectureship is named for Frank E. Payne and Arthur W. Payne, brothers who gained an appreciation for global problems through their international business operations.

The Payne Distinguished Lecturer is chosen for his or her international reputation as a leader, with an emphasis on visionary thinking; a broad, practical grasp of a given field; and the capacity to clearly articulate an important perspective on the global community and its challenges.