FSI researchers consider international development from a variety of angles. They analyze ideas such as how public action and good governance are cornerstones of economic prosperity in Mexico and how investments in high school education will improve China’s economy.
They are looking at novel technological interventions to improve rural livelihoods, like the development implications of solar power-generated crop growing in Northern Benin.
FSI academics also assess which political processes yield better access to public services, particularly in developing countries. With a focus on health care, researchers have studied the political incentives to embrace UNICEF’s child survival efforts and how a well-run anti-alcohol policy in Russia affected mortality rates.
FSI’s work on international development also includes training the next generation of leaders through pre- and post-doctoral fellowships as well as the Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program.
Field experiments and simulation models are useful tools for understanding crop yield gaps, but scaling up these approaches to understand entire regions over time has remained a considerable challenge. Satellite data have repeatedly been shown to provide information that, by themselves or in combination with other data and models, can accurately measure crop yields in farmers’ fields. The resulting yield maps provide a unique opportunity to overcome both spatial and temporal scaling challenges and thus improve understanding of crop yield gaps. This review discusses the use of remote sensing to measure the magnitude and causes of yield gaps. Examples from previous work demonstrate the utility of remote sensing, but many areas of possible application remain unexplored. Two simple yet useful approaches are presented that measure the persistence of yield differences between fields, which in combination with maps of average yields can be used to direct further study of specific factors. Whereas the use of remote sensing may have historically been restricted by the cost and availability of fine resolution data, this impediment is rapidly receding.
Highlights:
The article is part of a special issue on crop yield gap analysis.
The Center on Food Security and the Environment's 2012/13 brochure provides an overview including FSE's mission, research, faculty, and program development.
Abstract:
It has been said that constitutional court judges around the world increasingly participate in a "global judicial dialogue" that causes judges to make increased use of foreign law. This is a dialogue, however, from which the members of the Taiwanese Constitutional Court are largely excluded. Taiwan’s precarious diplomatic situation and intense lobbying by China have effectively prevented the members of Taiwan's Constitutional Court from participating in international judicial gatherings and official visits to foreign courts. Nevertheless, the Taiwanese Constitutional Court routinely engages in extensive consideration of foreign law, either expressly or implicitly, when deciding cases. This fact casts doubt on the notion that "global judicial dialogue" explains judicial use of foreign law. Comparison of the Taiwanese Constitutional Court and U.S. Supreme Court demonstrates that “global judicial dialogue” plays a much smaller role in shaping a court’s utilization of foreign law than institutional factors such as (a) the rules and practices governing the composition and staffing of the court and (b) the extent to which the structure of legal education and the legal profession incentivizes judges and academics to possess expertise in foreign law.
Speaker Bio:
David Law is Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis and Visiting Professor at Georgetown University Law Center. He works in the areas of law and political science, public law, judicial behavior, comparative constitutional law, and comparative judicial politics. Born and raised in Canada, he holds a Ph.D. in political science from Stanford, a B.C.L. in European and Comparative Law from the University of Oxford, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He has previously taught at the University of San Diego School of Law and the University of California, San Diego political science department and has been a visiting professor at the National Taiwan University College of Law, Seoul National University School of Law, and Keio University Faculty of Law in Tokyo, and a visiting scholar at the NYU School of Law. His current research focuses on the identification, explanation, and prediction of global patterns in constitutional law, and his recent scholarship on constitutional globalization and the declining influence of the U.S. Constitution has been featured in a variety of domestic and international media.
CISAC Conference Room
He broke the news to the world that North Korea had built a modern uranium enrichment plant. He’s helped the Russians secure their vast stockpile of ex-Soviet fissile materials. And Stanford students routinely rank him as one of their favorite professors.
Siegfried Hecker, one of he world’s top nuclear scientists and co-teacher of the popular course, “Technology and National Security,” has completed his five-year tenure as co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC).
Though Hecker is stepping down from the leadership role, he’s not walking away.
“He’s not going anywhere,” emphasized his successor, Stanford microbiologist and biosecurity specialist, David Relman, as he opened a seminar in Hecker’s honor on Feb. 25. The panel discussion, “Three Hard Cases: Iran, North Korea and Pakistan” featured Scott Sagan, Malfrid Braut-Hegghammer, Abbas Milani, Robert Carlin and Feroz Khan.
“He’ll be back this summer with his infectious energy and unswerving dedication for which he is so well known,” Relman said.
Hecker, 69, is taking a sabbatical in New Mexico – where he was director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory for more than a decade before coming to Stanford – and then at the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation, run by the Monterey Institute of International Studies. He’ll continue work on his book about his historic efforts to foster collaboration between U.S.-Russian nuclear labs and do some travel to meet his nonproliferation counterparts in other parts of the world.
“CISAC is part of my heart and soul now,” Hecker told a reception in his honor after the seminar. “Los Alamos was in my blood and bones. Today, Stanford is part of that too.”
Hecker will return to CISAC this summer to resume his writing and research projects as a senior fellow at CISAC and its umbrella, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI). He’ll head back to the classroom as well.
“What I found out is that teaching is so much harder than just giving a lecture, because you really have to pay attention to what the students have actually absorbed,” Hecker said. “You need to be able to communicate with each and every one of them.”
Among the many national honors that Hecker has received over the years, the one he treasures most is the 2010 Eugene L. Grant Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, an honor voted on by the students.
Lauren Cipriano, a Ph.D. candidate in Mechanical Science and Engineering, has been Hecker’s teaching assistant for four years. She noted his class co-taught with former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry – also a senior FSI fellow and CISAC faculty member – is routinely attended by hundreds of students and rated among the best.
“He shares his own stories of how developing personal relationships with Russian nuclear scientists in the wake of the Cold War helped overcome diplomatic challenges, and how he continues those efforts today in Russia and North Korea to make the world a safer place,” she said in her reception toast. “Sig also has a scary ability to predict the future. Several times our policy paper assignments have nearly come true.”
One of those dramatic examples unfolded in 2010. While the students were writing a paper about how they would respond to the discovery that North Korea had established a uranium enrichment facility, Sig was traveling to Pyongyang.
“Our students were some of the first to hear the stunning news of the uranium enrichment facilities the North Koreans revealed to him on his trip,” she said. “The students couldn’t have been more excited to feel like insiders in the national security policy arena.”
Hecker said he is particularly proud of the bright young scientists who have come through as CISAC fellows during his tenure.
“I think we’ve been able to build a really strong science component to support CISAC’s mission of building a safer world,” Hecker said. “We’ve been able to attract a lot of very good young scientists and then send them on to good careers from here.”
He said that working with these pre- and postdoctoral fellows and visiting faculty and scholars from the life sciences and political sciences “has helped me to better understand how important it is to bring the technical and social sciences together when looking at problems of international security.”
Hecker, who moved to the United States with his family from Austria when he was a boy, received his Ph.D. in metallurgy from Case Western Reserve University and began his professional career as a senior research metallurgist with the General Motors Research Laboratories in 1970. He joined the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1973, became its director in 1986 and served for more than a decade.
Hecker came to CISAC in 2005 as a visiting professor, having been recruited by Sagan, who was then the social science co-director of CISAC.
“Sig first became involved with CISAC when he was still at Los Alamos, through participating in our Track II nuclear diplomacy efforts with John Lewis in North Korea and with me in a Five Nations project meeting in Thailand,” recalled Sagan. The Five Nations Project on Asian Regional Security and Economic Development focused on new challenges to nuclear nonproliferation by the U.S., China, Russia, India and Pakistan.
“I first broached the possibility of his coming to Stanford as a visiting professor when he and I were in the back seat of a taxi in Bangkok after giving a joint lecture at the Royal Thai Military Academy,” in July 2004, Sagan said. “He has been a stellar leader and now that he is stepping down from administrative responsibilities, he will have even more time to be involved in CISAC’s nuclear nonproliferation activities around the globe."
CISAC co-director, Tino Cuéllar, called himself a “charter member of the national federation of the Sig Hecker fan club.”
“In his eventful, five-year tenure, Sig has been an extraordinary leader,” Cuéllar said. “He’s been a visionary about its future, an endlessly enthusiastic supporter of its varied missions and a role model of excellence combined with the collegiality that CISAC prizes so dearly.
There are three major components of Cyber security from China’s perspective: Internet information management, Civilian cyber security, and Cyber warfare.
The Chinese government worries that misinformation, dissent opinions and dissemination of rumors could cause social instability, and thus overthrow the regime. As a result, the government has taken many approaches to manage the information in cyberspace. Can the Chinese government fully control the information flow? If not, why?
China has 500 million netizens, more than any other country in the world. How do the government and companies deal with privacy and cyber crime?
Cyber attack from China is widely reported in US media. How do Chinese view US cyber warfare capability? Can "Pearl Harbor" happen in cyberspace?
A better understanding of these questions could be helpful for shaping US cyber policies on China.
Ting Wang is a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC. His research concerns on space debris problems, ASAT weapons, and cybersecurity in China. Before coming to CISAC in 2011, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies at Cornell University. He received a PhD at the Beihang University in China. His PhD dissertation was titled "Orbital Debris Evolution and Threat to Spacecraft." He also holds a B.A. in aerospace engineering from Beihang University and has worked at the Shanghai Institute of Satellite Engineering. He was a visiting scholar at the Union of Concerned Scientists in 2003, where he began to be interested in security issues.
CISAC Conference Room
The United Nations is the largest single organization providing humanitarian and development assistance to North Korea (DPRK). This assistance has varied over time in nature, quantity and in its always challenging challenging operating conditions. The international community has often questioned whether the United Nations could guarantee that the aid was not being diverted or would not shore up the regime. Assistance has also occasionally been conditioned on progress in denuclearization talks. The speaker, Jérome Sauvage, recently completed an assignment of over three years as the Resident Coordinator of the United Nations in North Korea. He traveled extensively throughout the country and spoke internationally about the humanitarian situation in the country. He will discuss the UN’s engagement with the government and assistance to the people of North Korea.
As the UN Resident Coordinator & UN Development Programme (UNDP) Representative in the DPRK from November 2009 to January 2013, Mr. Sauvage's responsibilities included developing and managing UNDP’s program and operations, and ensuring that all projects met UNDP's mandate as well as all monitoring and evaluation requirements. He led the UN in responding to natural emergencies, negotiated with the government on operating conditions and led fundraising efforts. Under his leadership, the UN Team rolled-out the Overview Funding Document 2012 detailing the humanitarian situation in North Korea.
Previously, Sauvage was Country Director in Pakistan and Deputy Country Director for Operations in India. His other assignments with UNDP took him and his family to Asia and Africa.
Sauvage received an Administrative Law degree from Paris-Sorbonne University and an MA in International Relations from the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Johns Hopkins University.
Philippines Conference Room
Human activities are currently estimated to produce around 40 billion tonnes of carbon-dioxide equivalent every year. Model results indicate that agricultural adaptation measures would prevent around 350 million tonnes of carbon-dioxide emissions annually – equivalent to around 1% of total global emissions.
Adapting to climate change or mitigating climate change – which would you choose to invest your cash in? Mitigation and adaptation are often viewed as separate activities, with the former aiming to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and the latter helping adjust to expected increases in greenhouse gases. A new study shows that when it comes to agriculture, adaptation measures can also generate significant mitigation effects, making them a highly worthwhile investment.
Food production is big. If farmers fail to adapt to climate change we can expect to see more land being turned over to agriculture, in order to keep up with food demand. With this in mind, David Lobell, from Stanford University, US, and colleagues used a model of global agricultural trade to investigate the co-benefits of helping farmers adapt to climate change, thereby avoiding some of the emissions associated with land-use change.
Running their model to 2050, they show that an investment of $225 bn in agricultural adaptation measures can be expected to offset the negative yield impacts associated with predicted temperature and rainfall changes. But that’s not all – the model revealed that this investment would also save 61 million hectares from conversion to cropland, resulting in 15 Gtonnes carbon-dioxide equivalent fewer emissions by 2050.
"I don't think any of us expected the mitigation benefits to be as big as they were," said Lobell, whose findings are published in Environmental Research Letters (ERL). "We had a hunch that they would be big enough to be an important co-benefit, but the fact they were often big enough to rival other mitigation activities was surprising."
Click here to read the full article.
When Galileo’s telescope arrived in Madrid in 1610, it not only changed the course of local science, but also became a pivotal image in the critique of contemporary society once it was incorporated into the lexicon of satires, emblems, sonnets, and allegorical dreams as anteojo de larga vista. The passages analyzed in this talk help us see its rich presence in Spain, forcing us to rethink the artificial gap between scientific discourse and literary creation.
This seminar is part of The Europe Center's Iberian Studies Program seminar series.
Pigott Hall, Bldg 260
Room 252 (German Studies Library)
Nearly $370,000 has been awarded to Stanford researchers trying to improve conditions in some of the world’s poorest places.
The money comes from the Global Underdevelopment Action Fund, which was established four years ago by the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies to provide seed grants to faculty designing interdisciplinary research experiments.
“It’s money that we can deploy quickly and that we can use in a very flexible way,” says Stephen D. Krasner, deputy director of FSI and chair of the Action Fund awards committee. “We can target specific kinds of activity that we’re interested in — not just because we think the activities themselves are worthwhile, but because we think they can really contribute to the interdisciplinary community that we’re building at FSI.”
The 12 Action Fund grants range from projects with immediate social impact to those designed to build an academic foundation for future work. The seed grants provided by the fund often are the first steps toward a sustainable research project funded by other sources, as well. Krasner says the grants are also awarded in part to impact policy and help solve problems that benefit from a multifaceted approach.
One such project comes from Stephen P. Luby, a professor of medicine and new senior fellow at FSI and the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. His project aims to curb pollution from Bangladeshi brick kilns, which may seem like a strange topic for Luby, who studies infectious diseases. But by broadening the viewpoint, the issue is more complex than only replacing the kilns with more efficient models. Solving the problem requires an understanding of social pressures and government regulations as well.
“I’m interested in working with people who want to solve real problems,” Luby says, explaining what brought him to Stanford. “FSI collaboration can really convene the group.” The “intensely interdisciplinary” nature of the project made it perfect for FSI, he says.
“That kind of project can have a real impact on health,” says Krasner, who adds that interdisciplinary research is key. “It typifies the kind of work that we like to support with the Action Fund.”
Another project will study electricity in East Africa, headed by economics professor and FSI Senior Fellow Frank Wolak. Households powered by solar batteries are found throughout the region, but until recently it has been difficult to determine how the power is being used within the home. Wolak’s team will use iPad tools to track household appliance usage and investigate how households are making decisions about power consumption. The double-faceted approach will answer crucial questions related to the distribution and use of power in the developing area.
Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, co-director of FSI’s Center on International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and incoming director of FSI, was awarded an Action Fund grant to study refugee communities around the world. Cuéllar, a law professor, will focus on a renewed approach to refugee camps for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), at the U.N.’s request. In addition to Cuéllar’s background in law, the project will also employ students to help rethink camp logistics, architects focused on improving camp design and CISAC’s expertise in maintaining a collaboration with UNHCR.
In three previous rounds of funding since the Action Fund was established in 2010, $694,000 has been awarded to support 19 research projects.
Throughout the spring, past projects will be featured during Action Fund Fridays in Encina Hall. Topics will range from medical technology in India to poverty concerns in rural Africa. Events will be held at noon on March 22, April 26, May 10, May 24 and June 7.
For more information, visit http://fsi.stanford.edu/events/series/2900 or contact Elena Cryst at 650.723.3369.