With what now seem like almost weekly product scandals, recalls, and supply chain exposes, the public increasingly wants to know more about the products they are putting in, on, and around their families. Until recently, consumers had no way to find out the full impacts of the products they consumed. However, with advances in information technologies, product assessment methodologies, and web and mobile platforms, there is now a real potential to radically increase transparency in consumer markets and global supply chains. Dara O'Rourke, Associate Professor at UC Berkeley, will discuss an experiment in providing information to the public about the environmental, social, and health impacts of products and companies: GoodGuide. GoodGuide's award-winning web and iPhone apps have been featured recently in the New York Times, Newsweek, Time, and even Oprah's Magazine! Dara will discuss GoodGuide's long-term vision, current strategies, and the information technologies they are applying to this challenge.

Dara O’Rourke is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the co-founder of GoodGuide. Dara’s research focuses on systems for monitoring the environmental, labor, and health impacts of global production systems. His research has been featured in The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, The Economist, Business Week, Newsweek, Time, and TechCrunch. Dara has served as a consultant to international organizations such as the World Bank, the United Nations Development Programme, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and a wide range of domestic and international non-governmental organizations. He has degrees in Mechanical Engineering, Political Science, and Energy and Resources, and he previously taught at MIT.

GoodGuide seeks to revolutionize how consumers see and interact with products and companies. GoodGuide provides a suite of tools that offer information about the environmental, social, and health performance of products and companies to consumers at the point of purchase (through web and mobile apps), and that empower people to screen and compare products based on their personal values and concerns. GoodGuide's tools seek to empower millions of consumers to buy products that better match their values, to avoid products that are detrimental to their health, the environment, or issues they care about, and to participate in a more transparent marketplace.

Antonis Balasopoulos, Assistant Professor in the Department of English Studies, University of Cyprus, is one of the most important younger scholars working in literary criticism and theory today. He has co-edited Comparative Literature and Global Studies: Histories and Trajectories; Conformism, Non-Conformism and Anti-Conformism in the Culture of the United States; and States of Theory: History and Geography of Critical Narratives.

He has held a Visiting Research Fellowship at Princeton University and has been appointed Institute Faculty at the Dartmouth Institute of American Studies, Dartmouth College. His research interests include Utopian fiction and nonfiction, 16th-19th centuries; Literature and Culture of US Empire, 1800-1900; literature, geography and the production of space; nationalism, colonialism and postcoloniality; critical theory, especially Marxism, genre theory, and theories of the political; visual culture, especially cinema.

Sponsored by the Division of Literatures, Cultures and Languages, the Department of Comparative Literature, the English Department, the Program in Modern Thought and Literature, German Studies, and the Forum on Contemporary Europe.

This event is co-sponsored by the Consulate General of Japan, San Francisco and the US-Asia Technology Management Center, Stanford University

The United States ushered in new leadership at the same time as an economic crisis swept over the globe. Responding to today’s crisis is an urgent task, but we simultaneously face the question of what kind of world order to create after the crisis. What is Japan’s core orientation as it looks to the future? Can America resume its role as moral leader once again?

About the Speaker

Yotaro Kobayashi is former Chairman of the Board, Fuji Xerox Co., Ltd. and serves on the boards of Callaway Golf Company, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT), American Productivity & Quality Center (APQC) and Sony Corporation. He is also the Pacific Asia Chairman of the Trilateral Commission, Chairman of the Aspen Institute Japan, and Chairman of International University of Japan.

After receiving his B.A. in economics from Keio University and his M.B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Finance and Commerce, he joined Fuji Photo Film Co., Ltd., in 1958 from where he was assigned to Fuji Xerox Co., Ltd. in 1963. He became President and CEO in 1978, and Chairman and CEO in 1992. He served as Chairman of the Board from 1999 till March 2006 to become Chief Corporate Advisor in April the same year, and retired from that position in March 2009.

Mr. Kobayashi was awarded the Medal with Blue Ribbon (Japan) in 1991, the Insignia of Commander First Class of the Royal Order of the Polar Star (Sweden) in 1995, and the Royal Norwegian Order of Merit (Norway) in 1997.

Kenneth Arrow, a member of the CISAC Executive Committee and one of the most respected and admired living economists in the world, will be in conversation with John Shoven, the Charles Schwab Professor in Economics, Director of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and Senior Fellow (by courtesy) at the Hoover Institution. A pioneer in the application of mathematics to the science of economics, his theory of economic equilibrium and his welfare theory provide the foundations for much of the practice of economics today. His work has earned him both a Nobel Prize in Economics (1972) and a National Medal of Science (2004).