A memorial event will be held at 4:30 p.m. on Friday, February 18, in Encina Hall, to pay tribute to the life of Walter H. Shorenstein and his legacy to contemporary Asian studies at Stanford University.

Mr. Shorenstein, a prominent San Francisco real estate developer and a long-time supporter of the Democratic Party, passed away peacefully on June 24, 2010, at the age of 95. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) described him as a "man of extraordinary vision, leadership and wisdom." A firm believer in the importance of strong ties between the United States and Asia, Mr. Shorenstein endowed the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) in his name in 2005. He had been a strong supporter of the center since 1998. Mr. Shorenstein had also been a member of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies Advisory Board or its predecessor organization since 1992.

During the memorial program, faculty, friends, and family will share memories and offer remarks about Mr. Shorenstein's important early and steadfast support of Shorenstein APARC, and his continuing legacy. A reception with light refreshments will follow immediately after the memorial program, during which the short film Citizen Shorenstein will be shown.

Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates’ January 6 announcement of major budget and program changes at the Pentagon was a watershed: it canceled several multi-billion dollar weapons programs, redirected $100 billion from old programs to new ones, and laid the groundwork for reducing the active-duty size of America’s ground forces after a draw-down in Afghanistan. But in light of the rumors that Gates will step down sometime this year, his remarks soon after the announcement also helped to consolidate one particular aspect of his reformist legacy: managing our nation’s vast military weapons budget.

Gates has navigated the Byzantine relationships that weave throughout the government and the private sector, including his own office, the military services, the Congress, and the defense industry. Over the last four years, he has personally assumed control of  the Pentagon’s resource allocation process. His legacy will be an instructive playbook for several reasons.

First, accountability for the development and production of major programs stops with the Secretary; delegation does not means abdication. Gates has earned similar plaudits elsewhere: he took personal responsibility for the earliest and most public crisis of his first year, the unacceptable conditions at Walter Reed. As steward of the nation’s defense budget, he has been equally unflagging. When he lost faith in the Joint Strike Fighter’s program management, he dismissed the officer in charge and replaced him with a hard-charging 3-star general to signal the seriousness of attention with which weapons costs and performance must be treated. This, in stark contrast to business-as-usual at the Pentagon, where civilian subordinates negotiate with the military services, with the Secretary investing personal resources in only a handful of the most publicly-contentious programs.

Second, timing matters, and Gates uses timing for a crucial purpose: to promote transparency and a public dialogue about his decisions. He puts distance between his Pentagon announcements and the annual roll-out of the President’s budget request.  Although his changes will be reflected in the President’s budget, these pre-announcements allow him and the military to initiate a conversation about military spending early, and before the President’s name is affixed to it. His adroit sensitivity to timing does the nation a real service, allowing us to focus on and debate how we equip our armed forces independent of the vast competing priorities on the political agenda. 

These two lessons have led to a critical third: the importance of a constructive and open relationship with Congress. Congress has not and will not go along with every Gates proposal. But Gates realized early on that working with Congress on the often vexing troubles associated with our nation’s military-industrial complex carries far more advantages than drawbacks. His ability to generate consensus on controversial program decisions, such as halting production of the F-22 and canceling the development of the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, were against-the-odds triumphs over pork-barrel politics. 

Every Secretary of Defense faces a similar budgetary conundrum as Secretary Gates currently does—the need to control defense spending while maintaining a first-rate and adaptable force—but the record of cutting unnecessary programs is mixed at best. Though Dick Cheney won praise for canceling the Navy’s egregiously over-cost A-12 stealth aircraft, his attempt to terminate the Marine Corps’s V-22 Osprey stalled in Congress. Even the A-12 kill was a pyrrhic victory, as his decision sparked such intense litigation that the legal dispute over the aircraft’s cancelation persists to this day, 20 years later. Indeed, the Supreme Court heard one aspect of the case this week. 

Donald Rumsfeld took full advantage of rising defense budgets to direct investments in the critical areas of space, missile defense, ISR, but transformation in theory became addition in practice. The defense budget needn’t have been cut as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan raged, but the Pentagon was too slow to adapt to actual war-fighting needs. Rumsfeld successfully canceled the Army’s overweight artillery system known as Crusader, but his relationship with Congress, even Republicans, was often strained, and his personal oversight of hundreds of billions of dollars in over-cost and under-performing weapons was episodic at best. 

All the technology and weapons programs in the world will not win a war: only an expertly trained military with top leadership can do that. But Secretary Gates will leave a legacy of vigilance over our nation’s weapons of war. His successor would do well to emulate it.

The first Liberation Technology seminar of the winter quarter on January 6, featured Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Zittrain focused his talk entitled, Minds for Sale, on the variety of online platforms that harness the wisdom of crowds today, and closed with a discussion of the implications of these platforms. Categorizing these new tools by the breadth of their user base, Zittrain began by describing the platforms that pay the most money per task, require the most skill, and subsequently have the least participation. Key examples of these platforms are listed below, and organized by their decreasing level on skill.

•  Xprize Foundation attempts to prompt radical breakthroughs through competitions for large quantities of prize money.
• InnoCentive creates a marketplace between engineers and scientists to encourage innovation.
• LiveOps, which bills itself as a contact center cloud, has developed a large set of independent contractors who are designated specific tasks when they sign in to the site. They may be assigned to answer calls placed to a restaurant or emergency hotline or to make political calls on behalf of Liveops clients.
• Samasource offers "dignified digital work for women, children and refugees" located in developing countries.
• Amazon Mechanical Turk (also known as Artificial Artificial Intelligence) allows users to participate in anonymous, minimally paid tasks. These tasks can be submitted by any party and are highly disaggregated among hundreds or thousands of users, each of whom receives a payout of between approximately one to fifteen cents for completing the task.
• Soylent, which calls itself "a word processor with a crowd inside" embeds workers from Mechanical Turk into Microsoft Word. When users install the site's Shortn add-in into Microsoft Word, they can use the tool to have written samples shortened in two minutes. In order to achieve this, the written sample is disaggregated by paragraphs, and each paragraph is shortened within two minutes by a "Turker"-a user who accepts the task on Mechanical Turk.
• Microtask enables disaggregating previously sensitive data to be work processed from a scanned image. The ultimate goal of this group is to put distributed work into video and computer games. For now, they disaggregate larger tasks into two-second tasks that can be distributed across a crowd.
• Games With A Purpose (GWAP) has a game-like platform designed to get users to complete disaggregated tasks for virtual points, rather than for actual remuneration. One of its more popular activities quickly attracted 23,000 players who contributed 4.1 million labels to images they were presented with in The ESP Game. Many players routinely play more than 20 hours a week.

Next, Zittrain moved on to offer some additional examples, hypothetical scenarios and questions that highlight some of his own concerns about the potential of these technologies. One key question is whether this market may be too efficient at linking up solvers and payers, if certain tasks are not in fact beneficial for society. After all, it was highly contentious when Texas governor Rick Perry set up video cameras on Texas' border with Mexico and invited people to watch the video feeds and report if they saw anything suspicious. Similarly, a site called InternetEyes allows users to watch video feed from CCTV cameras in the UK for free, offering the chance to "earn reward money, have a chance at reducing crime, and potentially become a hero and save lives," instead of actual compensation.

In another example, the University of Colorado Police Department recently offered a $50 reward for identification of students shown to be smoking marijuana in photos from a large April 20 gathering. Hypothetically, the Iranian government could use Turkers to identify Iranian protestors through national ID photographs in the very same way; by Zittrain's calculations, this task could be disaggregated and carried out quickly at a cost of only $17,000 per protester identified.

Another cluster of issues relates to the use of anonymous users to carry out disaggregated tasks that may have the effect of exerting influence on others. For example, Turkers were recently offered the opportunity to write a positive 5 out of 5 review for a product on a website, which hundreds accepted and completed for a few cents at a time. Users on SubvertandProfit.com are paid to "Like" something on Facebook, "Digg" something, or show their approval of a site or product via some other social network. The users are remunerated for their effort, and the site also profits. Taking this a step further, these platforms also enable users to pay people to evince opinions on legislative issues they do not actually care about. For example, health insurers were recently caught paying Facebook gamers virtual currency to oppose the health reform bill. By enabling any task to be disaggregated and monetized, these new platforms can have highly controversial and unethical implications.

On January 18, the Honorable Bob Rae, Liberal Member of Parliament for Toronto Centre and the foreign affairs critic for the Liberal Party of Canada was the featured speaker at a special CDDRL seminar. Rae addressed the Stanford community on the topic of his latest book Exporting Democracy, published in November 2010 by McClelland & Stewart. CDDRL Deputy Director, Kathryn Stoner, welcomed Rae to Stanford and Ben Rowswell, Visiting Scholar and Canadian "diplomat in residence," introduced the distinguished Rae stressing the timeliness of this topic.

This occasion marked the debut of Rae's book to a US audience and drew a sizable crowd interested in learning more about the MP's views on the role of Western powers in statebuilding and democracy promotion efforts abroad. Based on his personal experience engaging in diplomatic missions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, and across the Middle East, Rae was confronted with the limits of power and democratic ideals in foreign lands.

 His discussion focused on the theoretical and practical analysis of the role of democracy in statebuilding that is the foundation of his argument in Exporting Democracy. Drawing  on the writing of 18th century philosophers, Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke, Rae examined the tensions between natural law and justice versus customs and tradition that continue to dominate the debate in modern day statecraft.

 Rae's experience observing democracy promotion abroad allowed him to recognize the importance of upholding democratic values, while also respecting the idea that democracy cannot be viewed as the "gold standard" for all. "From a Western perspective the debate suffers from the notion that the idea of democracy has emerged as perfectly natural and an automatic assumption of our daily lives. In reality it has generally been accompanied by periods of great conflict and can take hundreds of years to bear fruit as evidenced by the American and Canadian experience."

Rae emphasized that the best way Western countries can promote democracy is by helping other countries develop their own solutions to their own problems. 

Rae's sensitivity to the consequences of Western interventions, his belief in the principles of human rights, and his testimony to the importance of humility and pragmatism in our efforts of statebuilding abroad, offered the Stanford community a new perspective on the effectiveness of the global democracy movement.