California is like many states whose electricity customers are still protected by real-time price risk through fixed retail price.  This fixed retail price, however, restricts the consumer's ability to save money by reducing consumption during peak hours. 

Those queasy about allowing or subjecting customers' to dynamic pricing are up for a fight; major technological barriers to dynamic pricing will soon be eliminated as all three of California's IOUs will have interval meters.  The Home Area Network segment of the Smart Grid Ecosystem Broadband Plan includes some strong words for State PUCs, urging them to in turn push utilities to deliver real time pricing data to consumers.  What remains to be seem is: What set of pricing plans would satisfy both HAN vendors and the PUCs?

Panel discussion topics:

• Is some dynamic pricing available?
• What will the plans look like?
• Research questions
• What set of pricing plans would satisfy both HAN vendors and the PUCs?
  

Effectively addressing emissions from deforestation will require both an international policy - to address the global nature of the climate problem, and domestic policies - to effectively respond to the international policies and take unilateral action; Suzi will be focusing on the former. 

The key challenges in reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD) policy are monitoring, permanence, and additionality - leakage and adverse selection as well as the risks involved if REDD is linked explicitly to international carbon markets.  They propose an international system based on national baselines, temporary rewards for protection and externally replicable monitoring and illustrate the potential outcomes in terms of  additional carbon storage, the cost of emissions reductions, and transfers of resources between countries.  Suzi will also briefly discuss how national governments might respond to an international policy of this type. 

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Suzi Kerr graduated from Harvard University in 1995 with a PhD in Economics. Following that she was an Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland - College Park from 1995 through 1998. From 1999 to 2009 Kerr co-founded and was Director of Motu. She has been a visiting scholar at Resources for the Future (USA), Victoria University, and, from Jan - August 2001, in the Joint Center for the Science and Policy of Global Change at MIT.

Suzi Kerr is a Visiting Professor in the Economics Department at Stanford University and a Senior Research Associate in Stanford's Program in Energy and Sustainable Development.  She is also a Senior Fellow at Motu Economic and Public Policy Research in New Zealand. 

The Chinese health care system has experienced profound changes like retrenchment of state financial support in the past decades. These changes have prompted the Chinese media and some academics to suggest that patients have a relatively low level of trust in physicians in today's China. In this colloquium, Dr. Tam reports the results of his survey of patient trust in physicians in Beijing's public hospitals. The survey was conducted by Horizon Research Group between November 2009 and January 2010, and 434 patients were interviewed.
 
The survey asked the respondents their degree of trust regarding the following three dimensions: physician agency, competence, and information provision. The survey finds a relatively high level of patient trust in physicians in Beijing public hospitals. Additionally, the survey data highlight three major determinants of patient trust in physicians, namely exposure to negative media reports about physicians and hospitals; the patient's self-assessed health status; and the patient’s level of education and income.
 
Waikeung Tam received his Ph.D. in political science at the University of Chicago in 2009. He is currently a Research Fellow at the LKY School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. His research focuses on public policy, political development, law and society, with special reference to China and Hong Kong. His research has been published in China Review, Asian Perspective, Journal of Contemporary Asia, and Law & Social Inquiry.

A founding father of the Soviet Union at the age of twenty nine, Nikolai Bukharin was the editor of Pravda and an intimate Lenin's exile. (Lenin later dubbed him "the favorite of the party.") But after forming an alliance with Stalin to remove Leon Trotsky from power, Bukharin crossed swords with Stalin over their differing visions of the world's first socialist state and paid the ultimate price with his life. Bukharin's wife, Anna Larina, the stepdaughter of a high Bolshevik official, spent much of her life in prison camps and in exile after her husband's execution.

In his most recent book Politics, Murder, and Love in Stalin's Kremlin: The Story of Nikolai Bukharin and Anna Larina (2010), Paul Gregory sheds light on how the world's first socialist state went terribly wrong and why it was likely to veer off course through the story of two of Stalin's most prominent victims. Drawn from Hoover Institution archival documents, the story of Nikolai Bukharin and Anna Larina begins with the optimism of the socialist revolution and then turns into a dark saga of foreboding and terror as the game changes from political struggle to physical survival. Told for the most part in the words of the participants, it is a story of courage and cowardice, strength and weakness, misplaced idealism, missed opportunities, bungling, and, above all, love.

Paul Gregory holds the Cullen professorship in the Department of Economics at the University of Houston and is a research professor at the German Institute for Economic Research in Berlin and a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution. The holder of a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University, he is the author or coauthor of nine books and many articles on the Soviet economy, transition economies, comparative economics, and economic demography. He serves on the editorial boards of Comparative Economic Studies, Journal of Comparative Economics, Problems of Post-Communism, and Explorations in Economic History. He was the President of the Association of Comparative Economic Studies in 2007.

Paul Gregory served as an editor of the seven-volume History of Stalin’s Gulag (published jointly by Hoover and the Russian Archival Service), which was awarded the silver human rights award of the Russian Federation in 2006 and  is an editor of the three volume Stenograms of the Politburo of the Communist Party (published jointly by Hoover and the Russian Archival Service). Two of his edited works – Behind the Façade of Stalin’s Command Economy and The Economics of Forced Labor: The Soviet Gulag -- have been published by Hoover Press. His collection of essays entitled Lenin’s Brain and Other Tales from the Secret Soviet Archives was published in 2007. His co-edited work with Norman Naimark, The Lost Politburo Stenograms, was  published by Yale University Press in 2008 as was his most recent work Terror by Quota. Professor Gregory’s current research on Soviet dictatorship and repression is supported by the National Science Foundation and by the Hoover Institution Archives.

This event is co-sponsored by the Forum on Contemporary Europe and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.

On April 19, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies convened a special conference on Technology, Governance, and Global Development, to examine how technical innovation solves, or fails to solve, the problems of chronic global underdevelopment. Experts from business, medicine, philanthropy, academia, government and non-governmental organizations, along with young Stanford alumni, addressed technology’s ability to help secure gains in health, economic development, agricultural innovation, food security, and human development.

With a wealth of expertise and on-the-ground experience, panelists tackled central issues and engaged in spirited debate, animated by moderator Phil Taubman. “The Promise of Information and Communications Technology” examined whether technology can transform lives of individuals, even in poorly governed countries, finding encouraging evidence in health and economic development.