"I would like to invite my colleagues, students, friends, and supporters to celebrate what we have worked together to achieve over the last decade and I ask you all to join me in continuing this record of achievement in the decade to come."

Gi-Wook Shin
Stanford KSP Director
 

Gi-Wook Shin came from the University of California, Los Angeles to Stanford University in 2001 to establish a program in Korean studies. "Naturally, I had mixed feelings—of excitement and hope, but also of anxiety and uncertainty," says Shin. "Looking back, I made the right decision." The Stanford Korean Studies Program (KSP), today a thriving and vibrant program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC), recently held a series of major events to celebrate its tenth anniversary in February 2011.

Stanford KSP is unique among other Korean studies programs in its interdisciplinary, social science-based research focus on contemporary Korea. The U.S.-Korea relationship, particularly policy issues, is strongly emphasized in the program's research and publishing activities. Stanford KSP is instrumental in the success of Shorenstein APARC's two initiatives—the Korea-U.S. West Coast Strategic Forum and the New Beginnings policy study group—aimed at improving policy-making decisions in the two countries.

The program is grateful for the strong and generous support it has received from individuals, corporations, and foundations since the very beginning. In 1999, an endowment was established for the professorship that Shin holds, the Tong Yang, Korea Foundation, and Korea Stanford Alumni Chair of Korean Studies, which was followed closely by funding for two more Korea chairs. In 2004, Dr. Jeong H. and Cynthia Kim provided funding to establish a professorship named after former U.S. Secretary of Defense William J. Perry. Dr. Kim is President of Bell Labs at Alcatel-Lucent and a member of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies Advisory Board. A search is currently underway to fill this important position. The Korea Foundation then donated funds in 2005 to establish a third professorship, which is currently held by Yumi Moon of the Department of History.

Stanford KSP has successfully established two annual professional fellowship programs, the Pantech Fellowship for Mid-Career Professionals and the Koret Fellowship, something unparalleled by other Korean studies programs. The program's faculty, fellows, and visiting scholars—most of whom teach courses and speak at public events—greatly contribute to the intellectual vigor of the Stanford community. Paul Y. Chang, PhD '08, an assistant professor at Yonsei University's Underwood International College, says, "The program provided the ideal context to engage with passionate scholars and develop my research program."

Stanford KSP's visitors find themselves, in turn, rewarded by the experience of being at Shorenstein APARC. Former Korean Minister of Unification Jongseok Lee, a visiting scholar from 2008 to 2009, says, "While enjoying every bit of life at Stanford . . . I worked hard in the office from early morning to late evening, as if I were a graduate student preparing his final dissertation . . . It was a truly meaningful and memorable year." Stanford KSP maintains strong ties with its former students, fellows, visiting scholars, and other affiliates, in part through the Stanford Shorenstein APARC Forum in Korea, an organization that has grown since 2003 to boast a roster of over 100 members.

In addition to the interaction with Stanford KSP's faculty and visitors, Stanford students benefit greatly from numerous social science and language courses, internship and overseas seminar opportunities, and the ever-growing Korean-language library collection supported by the program. Social science courses cover such topics as the Korean economy, the politics of the Korean Peninsula, modern Korean history, and many others. Through the Stanford Language Center, students may take a rigorous, comprehensive offering of beginning- through advanced-level Korean-language courses. An internship program co-sponsored with the Center for East Asian Studies provides students with the valuable opportunity to live and work in Korea each summer. Since its establishment in 2005, Stanford's Korean-language library collection has expanded to include a total of 41,300 print volumes and 13 electronic databases.

On an annual basis, Stanford KSP offers innovative and impactful programs addressing current, policy-relevant issues and events, as well as historical factors with contemporary relevance, that are shaping the future of the Korean Peninsula and the U.S.-Korea relationship. Conferences and workshops bring together leading Korea scholars with policymakers and other subject experts, including business leaders and international journalists, for productive and meaningful dialogue, research, and publishing activities. Stanford KSP's popular, long-time seminar series and special events afford members of the Stanford community and the general public the opportunity to listen to and engage with distinguished political figures and prominent scholars.

Stanford KSP celebrated its tenth anniversary on February 23 with a special public seminar examining the state and prospects of science, technology, and economics in Korea and Northeast Asia. The next day, it held its annual Koret Conference, a major event bringing together prominent Korea experts to discuss the future of North Korea. The anniversary activities concluded that evening with a dinner and reception to honor the generosity of Stanford KSP's long-time donors.

Proud of the program's accomplishments to date and optimistic about the future, Shin says, "I would like to invite my colleagues, students, friends, and supporters to celebrate what we have worked together to achieve over the last decade and I ask you all to join me in continuing this record of achievement in the decade to come."

With 2011 already off to such a wet start in many parts of the world, concerns of what flooding will do to food prices and availability in the coming months are starting to creep into the news. In Sri Lanka, flooding has devastated rice crops, and in North Dakota, heavy rain and snow is already threatening the spring wheat crop. And all this after last summer's Russian drought and heat wave helped drive global wheat prices higher.

But while farmers have always had to contend with the vagaries of the weather, a question of increasing importance is how agriculture will be affected by the climate changes projected to occur over the next century. Many scientists are studying which regions of the world may be impacted the most by increasing temperatures and changing precipitation regimes, and what is bound to happen to the supplies of the world's biggest cash crops, like wheat, corn, rice and soybeans.

A new report, The Food Gap, was released last week from the Universal Ecological Fund, and it has muddied the waters even further. The report reviews how global climate change will affect the fate of crop yields and food prices in 2020. Unfortunately, the report actually misinterpreted the connection between atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide (CO2) and expected global temperature increases - despite the fact that recent reports from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the National Academy of Sciences clearly identify the most current peer-reviewed understanding of this. The food study suggests that within 9 years, average global temperatures will be an average of 2.4°C warmer than during preindustrial times - or almost 1.5°C warmer than it was just last year.

This exceptionally high temperature projection is completely baseless, as NASA climate modeler Gavin Schmidt explained on the RealClimate blog - it's more likely that the planet will experience this kind of temperature change over 100 years, not merely one decade. Nevertheless, a number of news outlets published stories on the report's projections of how this dramatic climate change could impact the global food supply by 2020. Some publications posted corrections to their own stories, but I thought it would be helpful to take a step back and examine climate change and food security in 2020 and beyond. I spoke with Stanford University's David Lobell, who studies how climate change affects crop yields and food prices. He helped clarify what the current research says about climate change and food security.

Read the full interview here.

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.

CDDRL is now accepting applications to our interschool Senior Honors program from eligible juniors focusing on democracy, economic development, and rule of law subjects in any university department. Qualified applicants will demonstrate sufficient depth and breadth of democracy, economic and social development, rule of law, and human rights or justice course work. They should hold a grade point average (GPA) of at least 3.5 at the time they apply and must maintain this GPA throughout the program. Admitted students must be able to attend the CDDRL Honors College in Washington, DC tentatively scheduled for September 11-17. Applications are due in the CDDRL office by February 25 at 5:00 pm and students will be notified of admission to the program by March 11. For additional eligibility and program requirements, please reference the link below.