When, if ever, will it be rational for two countries to engage in nuclear war? Did nuclear weapons actually prevent global conflict during the Cold War? Can game theory predict what would happen in a confrontation between two or more nuclear powers? What does this mean for nuclear weapons and technology today?
If any of the above questions intrigue you, do come listen to Dr. Robert Powell of UC Berkeley speak on this topic. Dr. Powell is Robson Professor of Political Science in UC Berkeley. Dr. Powell is well-known and respected in the field of politics and international relations for his application of game theory to the study of international conflict and war. Dr. Powell specializes in the use of game theory to study international conflict and political conflict more generally. He is the author of Nuclear Deterrence Theory: The Search for Credibility, In the Shadow of Power: States and Strategies in International Politics. More recently he has focused on the problem of allocating defensive resources against strategic attackers like terrorist groups, and has written “Defending Against Terrorist Attacks with Limited Resources”. He holds a B.S. in mathematics from Harvey Mudd College; an M.Phil in international relations from Cambridge University; and a Ph.D. in economics from UC Berkeley. Professor Powell’s research focuses on war, international conflict, and the politics of weakly institutionalized states, and he is a specialist in game-theoretic approaches to these issues. He received a B.S. in mathematics from Harvey Mudd College, an M. Phil. in international relations from Cambridge, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Economics from UC Berkeley. His published work includes Nuclear Deterrence Theory: The Search for Credibility, (Cambridge University Press, 1990); In the Shadow of Power: States and Strategies in International Politics (Princeton University Press, 1999); “Bargaining and Fighting While Learning,” American Journal of Political Science (April 2004); and “The Inefficient Use of Power: Costly Conflict with Complete Information” American Political Science Review (May 2004).
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You’ve all had that experience: standing at the omelet line at Frary brunch, and there they are. You spend the rest of brunch avoiding eye contact. You’re 80% sure it’s the right person. After all, they stumbled out of your room at 4am.
No, that’s not you. You’ve been roommates with your significant other since OA. Maybe it started as a drunken hookup, but now you’re never seen apart. You go to meals together. You walk to class together, holding hands. You have pets as surrogate children. One-night-stand or soul mate, college relationships often fall into these two categories. Are these our only options? What ever happened to courtship? Dinner and a movie? Are committed relationships what we’re truly after, or is exploration the essence of college? Join us for a titillating discussion on hook-up culture and modern relationships on college campuses. Speaking on a panel will be conservative historian Professor Wilfred McClay (Pepperdine); cultural sociologist Professor Roger Friedland (UCSB), focusing on love, sex, and religion; and the amazing Pomona politics Professor Susan McWilliams, coming back from a year of sabbatical. Tuesday, April 27th, 4:15pm, Rose Hills Theater. More about our speakers: Roger Friedland, studying the intersections between culture, religion, and eroticism, is a cultural sociologist and professor in the Departments of Religious Studies and Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author and co-author of many works in religion and sociology, including most recently “Matters of Culture: Cultural Sociology in Practice” and “To Rule Jerusalem.” He is currently teaching a class titled “Sex, Love and God” where he explores the new and problematic nature of love. Wilfred M. McClay has been SunTrust Bank Chair of Excellence in Humanities at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, where he is also Professor of History, since 1999. He has also taught at Georgetown University, Tulane University, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Dallas, and is currently a Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC, a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, DC, and a member of the Society of Scholars at the James Madison Program of Princeton University. He was appointed in 2002 to the National Council on the Humanities, the advisory board for the National Endowment for the Humanities. His book “The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America” won the 1995 Merle Curti Award of the Organization of American Historians for the best book in American intellectual history published in the years 1993 and 1994. Among his other books are “The Student’s Guide to U.S. History”, and “Religion Returns to the Public Square: Faith and Policy in America.” Susan McWilliams teaches in the Pomona politics department, where her courses include “American Democracy in Theory and Practice,” “Dangerous Books,” and “Politics and Literature.” Her areas of expertise include History of Political Thought; American Political Thought; African-American Political Thought; Politics and Literature; Politics and the Family and Politics of Travel. Read a recent article by Professor McWilliams on the Front Porch Republic about college hookup culture! The issue of dining hall staff unionization has generated substantial buzz on campus for more than a month. Nevertheless, many Pomona students remain confused or conflicted about the process of unionization or the history of previous unionization attempts on Pomona’s campus. While these efforts have captivated the attention of the campus for some time, the impacts of a potential union on the broader campus community have not been discussed in a public forum. The Pomona Student Union believes that understanding these issues is important to helping members of the community better understand and more ably discuss the unionization effort. To that end, we are proud to announce that the PSU will be hosting a panel event on Tuesday, April 6th at 4:15 in Rose Hills Theatre that will look at these issues from multiple perspectives as well as allow a forum to address questions raised by members of the community.
The panelists will be Karen Sisson, Treasurer and Vice President of the College; Fernando Lozano of the Economics department; Jerry Irish of Religious Studies; Carmen Lopez, a staff member from the Workers for Justice leadership; and Heather Williams of the Politics Department. We recognize that this is an issue that involves the livelihoods of members of our community and touches on extraordinarily sensitive topics, but we firmly believe that hearing from, and engaging with, a number of different perspectives will help ensure that members of the community are better able to discuss the issues involved. This event is neither an attempt to support nor oppose the unionization effort of the dining hall workers—the PSU is non-partisan and does not endorse the opinions of any of the speakers at the event. In hosting this panel, we seek to provide more information in an interactive setting where dialogue between the panelists will be encouraged and a number of perspectives will be presented for consideration. http://vimeo.com/10834290 Nuclear proliferation has been a contentious issue for decades. Governments around the world – those with nuclear weapons and those without – have had to decide how to deal with the existence of weapons so massive that they cannot be used in conventional war. The recent renewal of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) with Russia as well as fears that Iran and North Korea are approaching nuclearization, has brought this issue to the forefront of politics once again. Ten years into a new millennium, Barack Obama is leading America in a reexamination of our position on nuclear arms and proliferation. The Pomona Student Union has invited J. Peter Scoblic, Executive Editor of The New Republic, and Bret Stephens, Foreign Affairs Columnist for The Wall Street Journal, to debate the issue of nuclear proliferation as we face it today. Join us for this fascinating discussion!
Thursday, April 8th, 8pm, Edmunds Ballroom |
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