Coming up at the Mershon Center
Thursday, April 19, 2012
Raymond Baker
Egypt: Islam, Revolution, and Prospects for Democracy
Noon, Mershon Center for International Security Studies, 1501 Neil Ave.
 Raymond Baker is professor of international politics at Trinity College and director of the International Council for Middle East Studies in Washington, D.C. He is an internationally recognized authority on the Arab and Islamic world. He consults for the Department of State, Department of Defense, USAID, and a variety of other government agencies and private foundations. The author of a series of critically acclaimed studies of Islam and Arab societies, Baker was designated as a Carnegie Scholar in Islamic Studies from 2006-08. His recent books include Cultural Cleansing in Iraq (Pluto Press, 2010) and Islam Without Fear: Egypt and the New Islamists (Harvard, 2006). Read more and register
Thursday, April 19, 2012
Katherine Meyer
Securing National Science Foundation Funding
3:30 p.m., Mershon Center for International Security Studies, 1501 Neil Ave.
 Please join Mershon Center affiliated faculty and graduate students for a general discussion by Katherine Meyer on securing funds from the National Science Foundation. Meyer is program director for sociology in the Division of Social and Economic Sciences at the National Science Foundation and professor emeritus of sociology at The Ohio State University. She is a faculty affiliate of the Mershon Center and principal investigator of Rentierism and Conflict in the Middle East with Hassan Aly and J. Craig Jenkins, and Dissent/Repression Nexus in the Middle East with J. Craig Jenkins. Read more and register
Friday, April 20, 2012
David Beaver
Social Language Processing: Arab Spring Twitterology and Beyond
3:30 p.m., Mershon Center for International Security Studies, 1501 Neil Ave.
 David Beaver is associate professor of linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin. He researches and teaches on the semantics and pragmatics of natural languages, in particular on how information is organized at the sentence and discourse level. He also has interests in temporal and event semantics, in simulations of language evolution, and in broader philisophical, psychological and computational themes from cognitive science. He is author of Presupposition and Assertion in Dynamic Semantics (CSLI Publications, 2001) and co-author with Brady Clark of Sense and Sensitivity: How Focus Determines Meaning (Wiley-Blackwell, 2008). Read more and register
Saturday, April 21, 2012
Marwan Muasher
The Arab Awakening: One Year On
4 p.m., Kottman Hall Auditorium, 2021 Coffey Road
 Marwan Muasher is vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment. He served as foreign minister (2002-04) and deputy prime minister (2004-05) of Jordan, and his career has spanned the areas of diplomacy, development, civil society, and communications. He is also a senior fellow at Yale University. He is the author of The Arab Center: The Promise of Moderation (Yale, 2008). Muasher's visit is co-sponsored by the Ohio Valley Chapter of the Alumni Association of the American University of Beirut. To attend, email chaptermail@waaaubohiovalleychapter.com by April 15. Read more and register
Thursday, April 26, 2012
Morris P. Fiorina
The Breakdown of Representation in American Politics
3:30 p.m., Barrister Club, 25 W. 11th Ave.
 Morris P. Fiorina is Wendt Family Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution. He has written widely on American government and politics, with special emphasis on topics in the study of representation and elections. His most recent books include Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America, with Samuel Abrams and Jeremy Pope (Longman, 2004); and Disconnect: The Breakdown of Representation in American Politics, with Samuel Abrams (Oklahoma, 2009). Drawing on polling results and other data, Fiorina examines the disconnect between an unrepresentative "political class" and the citizenry it purports to represent, showing how politicians have become more polarized while voters remain moderate. Read more and register
Monday, April 30, 2012
Williamson Murray
Saddam's World View: The Iran-Iraq War and the Shaping of the Modern Middle East
3:30 p.m., Mershon Center for International Security Studies, 1501 Neil Ave.
 Williamson Murray is Minerva Fellow at the Naval War College and professor emeritus of history at The Ohio State University. He studies military and diplomatic history and is currently working on a number projects related to operational history of the Civil War, study of the Iran-Iraq War, and hybrid warfare. Murray is author of The Change in the European Balance of Power, 1938-1939, The Path to Ruin (Princeton, 1984); Air War, 1914-1945 (Weidendeld and Nicholson, 1999); and The Iraq War: A Military History (Harvard, 2003), written with Major General Robert Scales Jr. Read more and register
Other events
Thursday, April 19, 2012
Skyler Cranmer
Forecasting the Locational Dynamics of Transnational Terrorism: A Network Analytic Approach
10:30 a.m., Spencer Room, 2130 Derby Hall, 154 N. Oval Mall
Skylar Cranmer is an assistant professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research lies at the intersection of political methodology and international relations. His primary research interests are in the development of techniques for statistical inference with network data, particularly as applied to conflict processes.
Abstract: Efforts to combat and prevent transnational terrorism rely, to a great extent, on the effective allocation of security resources. Critical to the success of this allocation process is the identification of the likely geopolitical sources and targets of terrorism. We construct the network of transnational terrorist attacks, in which source and target countries share a directed edge, and we evaluate a network analytic approach to forecasting the geopolitical sources and targets of terrorism. Using a database of over 12,000 transnational terrorist attacks occurring between 1968 and 2002, we show that probabilistic link prediction is not only capable of accurate forecasting during a terrorist campaign, but is a promising approach to forecasting the onset of terrorist hostilities.
Friday, April 20, 2012
Richard Herrmann
Syria: Gunfire, Ceasefire, and Implications for the Future
Noon webcast
Sponsored by Columbus Council on World Affairs
 Thirteen months ago Syrians began protesting against the Assad regime. Six days ago the U.N.-brokered ceasefire went into effect. Today Syria's security forces continue to attack their own citizens. In this half-hour webcast Richard Herrmann, chair of the Department of Political Science, will discuss the continuing crisis and its likely trajectory. Herrmann's academic expertise includes extensive knowledge of the Middle East's political landscape. In addition to his scholarship, he was a member of Secretary of State James Baker's policy planning staff and worked with the U.S. Information Agency to hold conflict resolution workshops for scholars and policy-makers from around the world. You can participate in the conversation by sending your questions in advance to Shannon McAfee at smcafee@columbusworldaffairs.org. Watch webcast online
Thursday, April 26, 2012
Mark Winne
Who Controls the Food We Eat?
5:30 p.m., Faculty Club Grand Lounge, 181 S. Oval Drive
Stanley Muroff Civil Liberties Forum, John Glenn School of Public Affairs
Is it the consumer or an increasingly small number of food corporations and public officials? Even though we may be winning the battle for healthy and sustainably produced food at the grocery store, we may ultimately lose the war in the public policy arena. As he reviews the current national food landscape, Mark Winne will propose that being a good food citizen is just as necessary as being a good food consumer to assure a food system that is just, sustainable, and democratic.
Winne currently writes, speaks, and consults extensively on community food system topics including hunger and food insecurity, local and regional agriculture, community food assessment, and food policy. He also does policy communication and food policy council work for the Community Food Security Coalition. Winne blogs regularly at markwinne.com and is a regular contributor at civileats.org and foodforthought.net.
He is author of Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty and Food Rebels, Guerilla Gardeners, and Smart Cookin' Mamas: Fighting Back in an Age of Industrial Agriculture. Read more and register
Thursday-Friday, May 10-11, 2012
Immigration: Moving Forward
11th Floor Thompson Library, 1858 Nel Ave. Mall
Saxbe Auditorium, Moritz College of Law, 55 N. 12th Ave.
Immigration: Moving Forward is the second major interdisciplinary conference for the yearlong campus-wide Conversation on Immigration, organized by the Center for Ethics and Human Values Innovation Group as part of its Conversations on Morality, Politics, and Society project. The conference will focus on legal rules and government policies concerning immigration in the United States by bringing together a distinguished set of researchers to address the main challenges and opportunities immigration poses in the modern world and how those challenges can be overcome and the opportunities realized. The event aims to interest not only researchers and students, but the broader community. The keynote speaker is Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas. Read more and register
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
Alma J. Powell
9th annual James F. Patterson Land-Grant University Lecture
11:30 a.m., Archie Griffin Ballroom, Ohio Union, 1739 N. High St.
Alma J. Powell, board chair of America's Promise Alliance, will be the keynote speaker for the 9th annual James F. Patterson Land-Grant University Lecture. Join the Office of Outreach and Engagement on May 16 at 11:30 a.m. in the Ohio Union, Archie Griffin Ballroom for this year's event. America's Promise Alliance is committed to seeing that children experience the Five Promises -- the fundamental resources they need to succeed. The Alliance is currently leading a 10-year campaign, Grad Nation, mobilizing America to end the dropout crisis. The university's C. Peter Magrath Community Engagement Award nominee and recipients of the 2012 Engagement Impact Grants and Service Learning Awards will be featured at the Patterson Lecture. Read more and register: http://go.osu.edu/pattersonlecture.
Previous events available for viewing
Kevin Boyle, Humanities Distinguished Professor of History at The Ohio State University, presented his project, "The Splendid Dead: The Intimacy of Terror in Early Twentieth Century America" on January 25, 2012.
Boyle discusses latest project on 20th century anarchists
Watch a streaming video of Kevin Boyle, Humanities Distinguished Professor of History at Ohio State, speaking on "The Splendid Dead: The Intimacy of Terror in Early Twentieth Century America." Boyle's project examines the fusion of the personal and the political among early 20th century anarchists, using as a wedge one of its devoted members, an Italian immigrant named Bartolomeo Vanzetti.
Full Archive
Visit the Event Recordings page for the full list of streaming videos from previous events sponsored by the Mershon Center. Note: Streaming videos recorded before Fall 2010 require RealPlayer. If you do not have RealPlayer, you can download it free.
Mershon News
OIA reopens Phyllis Krumm scholarship competition
The Office of International Affairs is re-opening the Phyllis Krumm scholarship, awarded to graduate students for research or study in a European country or China. Please share this opportunity with any eligible graduate students you may know.
Applicants must be enrolled as a graduate student at Ohio State in an academic program of study in any field. The scholarship, typically between $1,000 and $2,000, is awarded for independent travel only, and preference is given to U.S. citizens pursuing a career in diplomatic or other governmental international service. Students must demonstrate an appropriate background for research or study in a European country or mainland China, Hong Kong, Macao or Taiwan. The deadline for completed applications, available at oia.osu.edu, is April 23, 2012.
Workshop to explore agent-based modeling
The Complex Systems Innovation Group will be hosting a two-day workshop on developing Agent Based Models using NetLogo on May 2-3. The workshop will cover both complex systems theory and hands-on programming. The presenters are Spiro Maroulis and Yushim Kim from Arizona State.
This workshop begins with the premise that we are all modelers in the sense that we construct explanations in our heads to simplify situations in which we want to answer a question. These may be personal questions, such as, "What dissertation topic should I choose?" or "Is this the right job for me?" They also may be questions about understanding and improving natural and social systems, such as, "Why are there so many uninsured individuals in the United States?" or "How do we detect and prevent fraud in public service delivery?"
When we observe natural and social systems, gather information, draw inferences, and attempt to predict future outcomes, we are engaged in a process of informal modeling. This workshop will introduce how and why you might convert such informal models and intuitions into more tangible, formal models you can run, explore, or perhaps use to try to change some small corner of the world.
The theoretical and methodological basis for this workshop comes from the emerging field of complex systems – a field that studies the dynamics of systems, such as organizations, whose behavior is the consequence of many different interdependent agents, and can be difficult to research using traditional analytical and empirical methods.
To investigate the behavior of a natural or social system over time, complex systems research often makes use of computational agent-based models. In particular, agent-based models are used to discover the emergence of macro-level properties from the individual-level actions of the agents, as well as identify leverage points in a social systems – points where a small, local change can have a disproportionate system-level impact.
While there are many good reasons for creating agent-based models of social systems, this workshop places emphasis on one in particular: the process of computational modeling can help you improve your own mental models of how economic and social systems work. To this end, the goals of the workshop are to:
- introduce you to a "complex systems" perspective on scientific modeling
- help you gain skill in using NetLogo agent-based modeling environment, a popular
and powerful complex systems modeling tool, and
- increase your interest in computational modeling while getting you to think about how modeling may help you address problems that matter to you.
No prior modeling or programming knowledge is required. The workshop is free, but attendance is limited to 30 participants. If you wish to attend, please RSVP to Deborah Merritt at merritt.25@osu.edu.
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