A central dilemma persists for national space actors: satellites are critical to economic, scientific, and national security activities, but spacecraft are vulnerable to malfunction, environmental failure, and hostile disruptions. 'Distributed satellite' mission approaches may provide a means to supplement the security of certain satellite systems by increasing both redundancy and physical dispersion. But how do national leaders make decisions between satellite architectures given these overall risks and unknown development costs? This talk will review some current context in American space programs and present a formal model based on parallel Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) for analysis of satellite architecture decisions.

Dr. Connell will give an overview of radiological terrorism, focused on high activity radiation sources in the US and the risk they pose for malevolent use. He has been involved in developing countermeasures to radiological terrorism and will discuss some of the current efforts by the US to reduce this risk. The main thrust of his talk will be about how the risks can be managed.

Dr. Connell is a Senior Scientist with the Systems Analysis Group at Sandia National Laboratories. He is a technical advisor on unconventional nuclear warfare, and radiological/nuclear terrorism to DOE, DHS, and the DOD. He has served as a subject matter expert on a number of Defense Science Board Studies dealing with unconventional nuclear warfare and radiological terrorism. In 2004, Dr. Connell worked with the Defense Threat Reduction Agency to help identify and locate high risk radiation sources in Iraq and also served in Baghdad as a member of the Iraq Survey Group, Nuclear Team. He has published several reports on the risk of radiological terrorism and the vulnerability of cesium chloride irradiators. He was a committee member on the 2008 National Academy of Sciences Committee on Radiation Source Use and Replacement. Prior to working at Sandia National Laboratories, Dr. Connell was a Naval Officer and taught nuclear propulsion theory at the Naval Nuclear Power School in Orlando Florida. He has a B.S. with High Honor in Mechanical Engineering from Michigan Technological University and a Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering from the University of New Mexico.

From the 1950s through the 1970s, the success of antibiotics and vaccines in controlling or eradicating infectious diseases (ID) worldwide resulted in decreased emphasis on development of ID therapeutics. The emergence in the past three decades of HIV, SARS, West Nile, avian flu, swine flu, Ebola, and the potential for bioterrorist attacks has reversed this trend and renewed interest in treatment and prophylaxis of ID. Unfortunately, because many diseases are prevalent primarily in developing nations (e.g., malaria, TB, Chagas), potential sales of bioterrorist pathogens are limited mainly to orders for government stockpiles (e.g., anthrax, smallpox, botulinum toxin), and the cost of anti-infective clinical trials is high, traditional large pharmaceutical companies have cut back R&D resources in this arena. To combat this investment shortfall, a new paradigm has emerged where public-private partnerships between the NIH, World Health Organization, private foundations, academia, and non-profits, are beginning to function like pharmaceutical companies to advance the development of promising ID drugs, even when there is little opportunity for profit. This talk will discuss the growing need for ID therapeutics, present some new models for discovering and developing them, and provide examples of public-private partnerships that have advanced therapeutics for specific infectious diseases.

About the speaker: Dr. Jon C. Mirsalis is Managing Director of the Biosciences Division and Executive Director of Preclinical Development at SRI International in Menlo Park, CA. Dr. Mirsalis is an internationally recognized expert in the development of drugs for infectious diseases. He manages two large programs for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) for the development of promising therapeutics for the prevention and treatment of a broad range of infectious diseases including TB, malaria, influenza, polio, anthrax, plague, and Ebola. He has personally been involved in the development of over 50 therapeutics that have entered clinical trials and several have already reached the market. Before joining SRI in 1981, Dr. Mirsalis was a postdoctoral fellow at the Chemical Industry Institute of Toxicology, where he developed the in vivo-in vitro hepatocyte DNA repair assay, which is now widely used as a screen for potential carcinogens by government and industry. He is the author of over 140 publications and abstracts. Dr. Mirsalis received his B.S. degree in zoology/molecular biology from Kent State University, his M.S. degree in genetics from North Carolina State University, and holds Ph.D. degrees in toxicology and genetics from North Carolina State University. Dr. Mirsalis has an adjunct faculty appointment with the University of California-Santa Cruz, where he lectures regularly on genetic toxicology and carcinogenesis. He has recently served on the Board of Scientific Councilors for the National Toxicology Program, the Advisory Board for the Critical Path Institute, and is a past member of the FDA’s Over-the-Country Product Review Committee. Dr. Mirsalis has been certified by the American Board of Toxicology since 1983.

This talk will focus on the impact of the decision in 2003 to revive mediation as a key method of labor dispute resolution. In the context of changing economic and social conditions, including tighter labor markets, the Chinese state has pushed for more protection labor legislation, which has increased the number and severity of disputes. At the same time, the state has deemphasized legal channels for resolution, encouraging workers and employers to bypass adversarial litigation, reviving mediation as the preferred method of settlement. This case demonstrates the uses and limitations of “rule of law” under authoritarian rule and the contradiction of stronger laws with a resolution method that tends to deemphasize law and legal rights in favor of harmony and conciliation will be explored.

---Note: This event is co-sponsored by the Stanford Department of History---

The scope of official secrecy is rapidly expanding. The sheer scale of the national security state, the growth of electronic media, and the power that still comes from compartmentalizing information means that the government is only releasing a tenth as many pages of classified information as it produces. Hundreds of millions of secret documents are piling up, raising doubts about how we will be able to reconstruct the past and ensure government accountability. But historians are now teaming up with data scientists to analyze the millions of documents that are being released. Since these were among the first official documents produced and stored on computers, we can use techniques like natural language processing and machine-learning. It may now be possible to make out the broad patterns of official secrecy, attribute authorship to anonymous documents, and perhaps even predict the content of redacted text. But the political and ethical questions remain: what does the public need to know, and when do they need to know it?

About the speaker: Matthew Connelly is professor of history at Columbia University. His publications include A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria's Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (2002), and Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population (2008). He has written research articles in Comparative Studies in Society and History, The International Journal of Middle East Studies, The American Historical Review, The Review francaise d'histoire d'Outre-mer, and Past & Present. He has also published commentary on international affairs in The Atlantic Monthly, The Wilson Quarterly, and The National Interest. He directs the University Seminar on Big Data and Digital Scholarship, the dual masters program with the LSE in International and World History, and the Hertog Global Strategy Initiative, a research program on the history and future of planetary threats. He received his B.A. from Columbia (1990) and his Ph.D. from Yale (1998).

Fusion reactors have the potential to be used for military purposes. This talk provides quantitative estimates about weapon-relevant materials produced in future magnetic confinement commercial fusion reactors, discusses whether states will ever consider such a use and addresses possible implications for the current regulatory system.

About the speaker: Matthias Englert is group leader of the physics and disarmament section at the Interdisciplinary Research Group Science Technology and Security (IANUS) and holds a PhD in physics from Darmstadt University of Technology in Germany. Before joining IANUS he was a postdoctoral science fellow at CISAC, Stanford University from 2009-2011. His major research interests include nonproliferation, disarmament, arms control, nuclear postures and warheads, fissile material and production technologies, the civil use of nuclear power and its role in future energy scenarios and the possibility of nuclear terrorism. Although a substantial part of his professional work has been technical, he is equally interested in and actively studies the historical, social and political aspects of the use of nuclear technologies (nuclear philosophy). Matthias is the chairman of the board of the German Research Association Science, Disarmament and International Security (FONAS) and Vice Speaker of the Physics and Disarmament working group of the German Physical Society (DPG).

Grant Miller will discuss the results of his SAPARC-funded research in rural China, supplementing a large NIH-funded project about pay-for-performance to improve health. The research was designed to test the effect of offering school principals small incentives for anemia reduction on the health and academic performance of primary school students – potentially leading to substantially more cost-effective health policies.

Grant Miller, PHD, MPP, is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the Stanford School of Medicine, a Core Faculty Member at the Center for Health Policy/Primary Care and Outcomes Research, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). He is also a Faculty Fellow of the Stanford Center for International Development and a Faculty Affiliate of the Stanford Center for Latin American Studies. His primary areas of interest are health and development economics and economic demography.

Miller's current research focuses broadly on behavioral obstacles to health improvement in developing countries. One line of studies investigates household decision-making underlying puzzlingly low adoption rates of highly efficacious health technologies (like point-of-use drinking water disinfectants and improved cookstoves) in many poor countries. Another vein of research investigates misaligned macro- and micro-level incentives governing the supply of health technologies and services. He has conducted these and other research projects at institutions including the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Urban Institute, and the University of California-San Francisco's Institute for Health Policy Studies. He received a BA in psychology from Yale College, a master's degree in public policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and a PhD in health policy/economics also from Harvard.