Joseba Zulaika is Professor at the Center for Basque Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno. Professor Zulaika holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Princeton University. His most recent publications include Terrorism: the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), and Contraterrorismo USA: profecía y trampa (Irun: Alberdania, 2009). Professor Zulaika’s ongoing research addresses the Bilbao Guggenheim Museoa and the ethnography of Bilbao with additional emphasis on global culture, architecture, museum politics, and tourism industries. His primary research interests include Basque culture and politics, the international discourse of terrorism, various traditional occupations (fishermen, hunters, farmers), diasporic and global cultures, history of anthropological thought, and theories of symbolism, ritual, and discourse.

Sponsored by the Iberian Studies Program at the Forum on Contemporary Europe, and the Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures at Stanford University.

Abstract
Social science interpretations of the meltdown emphasize system characteristics such as complexity and coupling, and/or culture as in neo-institutional theories.  Examining regulatory changes, regulatory agents, elected representatives, firms and the many warnings, I argue that the role of human agents has been greatly neglected. Building on earlier work on "executive failure" I offer an agentic interpretation that is missing from both of the social science interpretations. Structure (systems) and culture (neo institutional theory) are valuable but incomplete.

Charles Perrow is an emeritus professor of sociology at Yale University and a visiting professor at CISAC in the winter and spring terms. Among his award-winning research is Organizing America: Wealth, Power, and the Origins of American Capitalism (Princeton, 2002), and Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies (Princeton, 1999). His recent articles include "Modeling Firms in the Global Economy," Theory and Society, 2009, v 38:3, May, 217-243, "Organizations and Global Warming," in Constance Lever-Tracy, ed. Handbook of Society and Climate change (Routledge, forthcoming, 2010), "Complexity, Catastrophe, and Modularity," Sociological Inquiry 78:2, May 2008 162-73; "Conservative Radicalism," Organization 15:2 2008 271-77; "Disasters Evermore? Reducing our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters," Social Research 75:3 Fall, 2008. His recent membership on a National Academy of Science panel on the possibilities of certifying software led to his current work on cyber security. He is also writing on the economic meltdown, but his major interest now is the institutional/organizational aspects of global warming. He received his BA, MA, and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, all in sociology.

Kenneth Arrow is the Joan Kenney Professor of Economics and Professor of Operations Research, emeritus; a CHP/PCOR fellow; and an FSI senior fellow by courtesy. He is a Nobel Prize-winning economist whose work has been primarily in economic theory and operations, focusing on areas including social choice theory, risk bearing, medical economics, general equilibrium analysis, inventory theory, and the economics of information and innovation. He was one of the first economists to note the existence of a learning curve, and he also showed that under certain conditions an economy reaches a general equilibrium. In 1972, together with Sir John Hicks, he won the Nobel Prize in economics, for his pioneering contributions to general equilibrium theory and welfare theory.

Arrow has served on the economics faculties of the University of Chicago, Harvard and Stanford. Prior to that, he served as a weather officer in the U.S. Air Corps (1942-46), and a research associate at the Cowles Commission for Research in Economics (1947-49). In addition to the Nobel Prize, he has received the American Economic Association's John Bates Clark Medal. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine. He received a BS from City College, an MA and PhD from Columbia University, and holds approximately 20 honorary degrees.

An introduction to the origins, evolution, and recent  status of  interaction between Japan and Southeast Asia, 1900-2000.

Mark R. Peattie is a visiting scholar at Shorenstein APARC and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is a professor of history emeritus at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. He was the John A. Burns Distinguished Visiting Professor of History at the University of Hawaii in 1995.

Peattie is a specialist in modern Japanese military, naval, and imperial history. His current research focuses on the historical context of Japanese-Southeast Asian relations. He is also directing a pioneering and international collaborative effort of the military history of the study of the Sino-Japanese war of 1937-45 being sponsored by the Asia Center at Harvard University.

He was a member of the U.S. Information Agency from 1955 to 1968 with service in Cambodia (1955-57), in Japan (Sendai, Tokyo, Kyoto) (1958-67), and in Washington, D.C. (1967-68).

Peattie holds a Ph.D. in Japanese history from Princeton University.

Case studies have a long history in both medicine and law. They contributed to the development of the new sciences humaines in the 18th century as well as of Freud's psychoanalysis, and they are still used in current social sciences as well as popular media formats. As a genuinely interdisciplinary genre, case studies are also influenced by the narrative structure of literature. At they same time, they served as a reference for the new striving for realism and individuality in enlightenment aesthetics. Therefore, in late 18th and early 19th century literature, the logic of induction that structures case studies is transferred into fictional narratives that not only claim to provide knowledge on the biological genre of humans, but also contribute to a new definition of the concept of literary genre. Exemplary readings of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Carl Philipp Moritz, Georg Buechner, and E.A. Poe will suggest a reading of case studies as a narrative form bridging the divide between the 'two cultures' of literature and science.

Nico Pethes received a Ph.D. in German Literature from University Cologne in 1998, and was a postdoc at University Siegen, 1998-2001. He was a Visiting Scholar and Visiting Assistant Professor at the Department of Comparative Literature and German at Stanford from 2001-2003; Director of a Research Group on the "Cultural History of Human Experimentation" at University Bonn 2003-2005, Habilitation in 2005; Professor of European Literature and Media History at University Hagen 2005-2009; and, since 2009, professor of Modern German Literature at University Bochum. His publications include "Zuglinge der Natur. Der literarische Menschenversuch des 18. Jahrhunderts" (Goettingen: Wallstein 2007), "Das Beispiel. Epistemologie des Exemplarischen" (coeditor; Berlin: Kadmos 2007); "'Victor, l'enfant de la foret': Experiments on Heredity in Savage Children" (in: Heredity Produced: At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics, and Culture, 1500-1870, eds. Staffan Mueller-Wille/Hans-Jorg Rheinberger, Cambridge MA/London: The MIT Press 2007, pp. 399-418); "Terminal Men. Biotechnical Experimentation and the Reshaping of 'the Human' in Medical Thrillers" (in: /New Literary History/ 36, 2005, pp. 161-185)

Abstract
The Nuclear Suppliers Group, the Zangger Committee, and the Missile Technology Control Regime are all "supply-side" nonproliferation regimes.  They were created when "high-tech" really was limited to a few countries and tightening export controls really could reduce proliferation.  For instance, Saddam Hussein's long-range missile development programs signed contracts with proliferation profiteers specifying that all components and infrastructure must come from a small set of Western countries whose names were explicitly listed in the contract.  Today, precision engineering has spread throughout the world to such an extent that A. Q. Khan can have aerospace-quality aluminum cast in Singapore and precisely machined in Malaysia for centrifuges destined for Libya.

This irrevocable spread of technology-and precision engineering is a prime example of a technology that is vital to the economic future of developing countries as well as an enabler of proliferation-is changing the environment nonproliferation regimes must work in.  How dependent developing countries are today on imports of components, materials, or just "know-how" will determine how well our supply-side regimes can still function.  The examples of Iran and Burma, two nations seeking long range missiles, are examined to see how the infrastructure and know-how for WMD is acquired today by two countries with very different levels of technology and capability.  While their missile programs are the explicit subject of this talk, the results could have profound implications for other WMD technologies that are dominated by precision engineering such as centrifuge production for uranium enrichment.

Geoffrey Forden has been at MIT since 2000 where his research includes the analysis of Russian and Chinese space systems as well as trying to understand how proliferators acquire the know-how and industrial infrastructure to produce weapons of mass destruction.  In 2002-2003, Dr. Forden spent a year on leave from MIT serving as the first Chief of Multidiscipline Analysis Section for UNMOVIC, the UN agency responsible for verifying and monitoring the dismantlement of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Previous to coming to MIT, he was a strategic weapons analyst in the National Security Division of the Congressional Budget Office after having worked at a number of international particle accelerator centers.

In this colloquium, we hear about Tsinghua University researchers' studies on physician-patient trust and satisfaction with health care in China. Professor Shen describes her research on “Social distance and its impact on patients’ trust in their providers in transitional China.” Using 2008 data from over 3500 patients that includes unique measures of patient trust – such as whether or not patients followed doctor recommendations for treatment – Dr. Shen and colleagues find large differences in trust, with patients of lower socio-economic status displaying higher trust in doctors than other groups. Analyses also examine how trust is related to satisfaction with health services, and how patient dissatisfaction in China compares to that in other countries’ health systems. Related research explores patients’ and providers’ attitudes towards separation of prescribing and dispensing, a key component of the 2009 health reforms, and how patient mistrust of providers stems from concerns about both competence and profiteering from overprescribing.

The talk will look at the short and longer-term implications of the tsunami for mortality and several other social and economic outcomes in Aceh and North Sumatra using data from the Study of the Tsunami Aftermath and Recovery.

Elizabeth Frankenberg is Professor of Public Policy, Director of Graduate Studies, MPP Program at Duke University. She earned her PhD in Demography and Sociology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, 1992
M.P.A. Public Affairs, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton, NJ, 1989
BA with highest honors and distinction in Geography, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, 1986.

About the talk:
Cleantech/Greentech investing has helped the venture capital (VC industry to contract further during the financial crisis. Over the last few years, it has become a significant part of VC investments around the world. In addition, solutions for large local or even global problems ranging from power generation to power efficiency, as well as water and air pollution, new materials, transportation, waste management, etc. are taking center stage even at every government level in most countries around the world. The seminar will focus on the following areas:

1. Global cleantech/energy investments by asset class
2. International VC benchmarks of cleantech investments
3. Deals IRRs & funds IRRs in the United States/Europe   

Dr. Haemmig was part of a World Economic Forum team that produced a report on "Green Investing 2010," downloadable below.

About the speaker:
Dr. Martin Haemmig's venture capital research covers 13 countries in Asia, Europe, Israel, and USA. He lectures and/or performs research at numerous universities across the U.S., Europe, China and India. He has authored books on the globalization of venture capital. He is Senior Advisor on Venture Capital at SPRIE and advises on venture capital for China's Zhongguancun Science Park. Martin Haemmig earned his electronics degree in Switzerland and his MBA and doctorate in California, and worked for almost 20 years in global high-tech companies in Asia, Europe and the U.S. before returning to his academic career. He became Swiss national champion in marketing in 1994.