MonTREP researchers speak at joint NPS/CNS conference

MonTREP researchers and GSIPM faculty members Jeffrey M. Bale, Sharad Joshi, and Gordon Hahn all gave talks at a panel on “Leaderless Jihad? Terrorist Attacks in the New Millenium and Lessons for the Future,” a panel which Professor Bale organized. The panel took place at 10 am on October 17 at the 2009 ISSS-ISAC Conference, which was co-sponsored by NPS and CNS and held over a three-day period at the Hyatt Regency Resort and Spa in Monterey. Professor Bale’s talk was on the March 2004 Madrid bombings, Professor Joshi’s talk was on the November 2008 Mumbai attacks, and Professor Hahn’s talk was on recent Chechen terrorist operations. In addition, there was a talk on counterterrorist radicalization strategies by Lorenzo Vidino (a postdoctoral fellow at the Belfer Center at Harvard University). The panel chair and discussant was Professor Phil Williams, director of the Ridgeway Center for International Security Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Despite being on the last day and in the last time slot, the panel was attended by over 20 people, a relatively large audience for the conference.

Kathi Bailey Chairs TIRF Board

Monterey Institute Professor, Dr. Kathleen M. Bailey, has been elected as Chair of the Board of Trustees of TIRF (The International Foundation for English Language Education), and as President of the Foundation. TIRF is a charitable foundation that raises funds for research, solicits and vets proposals, and disseminates the findings. The current focus of the foundation is on creating and disseminating research evidence on the international role of English, to support best practices in the development of English language skills in our 21st century global society. For further information, please visit www.tirfonline.org

McCleery leads conference panel on “Making Basic Services Reach the Poor”

Robert McCleery was a featured speaker at the Second Conference on Integrated Social Policies in Egypt, July 4-5, 2009 in Cairo. The conference was organized by the Egyptian Ministry of Social Solidarity, and was attended by that Minister (H.E. Aly Moselhy), the Minister of Housing, National Democratic Party rising star Gamal Mobarak, representatives of other parties and ministries, representatives of domestic and international NGOs, and other foreign experts. Prof. McCleery headed the second session: Making Basic Services Reach the Poor. He presented a refined and targeted version of the “Development as Connectivity” story, first presented with Prof. De Paolis at the Faculty Research brown bag series, organized by Prof. Kardam, last spring. The presentation also drew on their joint research, presented in a consulting report to the United Nations Development Program, New York, titled: Making Infrastructure Work for the Poor.

The New Website is Live!

The new website is now live and functioning!  This has been due to the amazing effort of the web strategy team and they deserve all of your praise and appreciation.  Please give them an extra smile…

There are a few things to know about the ramifications of a new website:

  • URLs have changed.  They should now make more sense, but please update any mailings or emails in which you use URLs to make sure they are the latest and greatest.
  • Some people might still see the old site and that’s normal.  The web is a tricky thing and it may take up to two weeks for the new site to be everywhere.
  • The website is not “done”.  It never will be.  We need to keep working on it and making it better, adding stories and enhancing the information that we already have.
  • There will be mistakes in the site – many mistakes are actually also on our old site, but we need everyone’s help to keep the site updated and correct – no one person can catch everything and misspellings happen to the best of us.

If you find any mistakes, please send them to the appropriate strategy team member.

About: Jason Warburg or Anne-Marie Steiger
Admissions: Rob Horgan
Academics: Nina Dutra (GSIPM), Angie Quesenberry (GSTILE), Patricia Szasz (ESL), Alicia Brent (SILP,CLS)
Community: Gail Lu
Careers: Jen Hambleton
Giving: Linae Ishii-Devine
Offices & Services: Lynn McDonald
Language Pages: Lynn McDonald
MIIS around the World Stories: Rebecca Walters
Constituency Pages: Kristen Byers
Homepage & General Tech: Kristen Byers & Lynn McDonald

Before sending these folks the mistakes, make sure you’ve included at least one compliment – they have worked hard on the site and need to know the good as well and what should change.

Middlebury is also hard at work redesigning their website.  Our website will continue to improve as more tools are implemented for both schools.  Things coming down the line are additional functionality for course descriptions/schedules, customizable pages for our community, and Banner connection to profiles.  We will let you know when we know more.  For more information on the website redesign for both schools, visit the website redesign blog.

MIIS Shines at Globalization Conference

logoErnie Scalberg, Jeff Woods and Carol Johnson represented MIIS at a recent conference on Globalization at UC Berkeley, sponsored by LISA (the Localization Industry Standards Association).  Scalberg’s session, “The Opportunities and Challenges of Integrating Global Business Strategy Development and Multilingual Online Marketing Communication” was the second highest rated plenary session.

MIIS was the “rock star” of the conference.  Companies and other schools were quite impressed with our “Globalization/localization” programs and the quality of our students.  Jeff and Carol staffed the MIIS table, where they met with many new companies and agencies promising to recruit our students. There were attendees who expressed interest in applying for admission to various of our programs.

Jeff Langholz Reports on Sustainable Development Projects

Professor Jeff Langholz did several summer projects that combined business with policy in the form of sustainable enterprise development.

In June, he traveled to London to advise the CEO of sports apparel giant PUMA Inc. on a major “green business” initiative to be launched in October.  June also saw him writing an analytical report for the World Wildlife Fund that made recommendations on using sustainable enterprises to improve and expand the organization’s efforts. He involved recent IEP alumna and Fulbright Scholar (Brazil) Heather Zissler in this consultancy because of her in-depth knowledge of the subject.

Much of the summer was devoted to researching and writing a 120-page report on sustainable agriculture. Funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts and The Nature Conservancy, the report examines the extent to which growers of spinach, lettuce, and other leafy greens in seven Central Coast counties have implemented a “scorched earth” policy on farms in an attempt to reduce food safety risks.

worldwatchLast, the WorldWatch Institute – which produces the annual State of the World reports — has published an article by Dr. Langholz in the current (Sept/Oct) issue of its award-winning WorldWatch Magazine. The provocative piece challenges the international conservation community to double the amount of biodiversity protected globally by investing in nature-based ventures.  Please click here for a copy of the article.

Joshi Attends Summer Workshop on Security Studies

Sharad Joshi, PhD, Research Associate with the Monterey Terrorism Research and Education Program (MonTREP) and Visiting Professor, Graduate School of International Policy & Management, attended the 13th annual three-week Summer Workshop on the Analysis of Military Operations and Strategies (SWAMOS), held at Cornell University in July. The program is for junior scholars in the field of security studies.

Akaha Reports on Scholarly Activities This Summer

Professor Tsuneo Akaha’s “From Soft Power to Hard Power: Japan’s Evolving Security Policy” has been published in the Japanese book Japanese Foreign Policy In The Eyes of Japanese Researchers Abroad (Tokyo: Fujiwara Shoten).

He gave a talk on “Human Security in East Asia” at the Summer Institute, Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies, Waseda University, August 3-7, a training program for PhD students from around the world who are interested in Asian regional integration.

He also taught an intensive American Studies course “U.S. Policy in Northeast Asia” at the University of Shimane, Japan, July 25-28.

The most memorable experience of Professor Akaha’s this summer was attending the August 6 A-bomb memorial ceremony in Hiroshima, where virtually every speaker referred favorably to President Obama’s Prague speech on a nuclear-free world.

NOTE: We’d love to share the contributions of other faculty!  If you have achievements you would like to share, please send them to Amy McGill for posting on the blog.

J.D. Yuan Reports on Summer Activities

From Singapore comes this report of Prof. J.D. Yuan’s recent publications and interviews:

*  July 8, TV interview from Channel News Asia, on the Xinjiang riots.
*  July 29, Washington Observer interview on the first round of US-China
Strategic and Economic Dialogue
*  July 31, “China and the US: G-2 by Another Name?” Asia Times,
*  August 5, Bloomberg TV, live interview on Asia Business News on
Clinton’s North Korea trip.
*  August 8, “After the Clinton Trip: A Window of Opportunity?
OpinionAsia

Akaha to speak at Peace Forum

This week, Prof. Tsuneo Akaha will be a panelist in a forum on peace.

The Jeju Peace Institute, headed by Amb. HAN Tae Kyu, is pleased to
announce live webcasts of the 5th Jeju Peace Forum to be held at Havich
Hotel & Resort, August 11th, Tuesday – 13th, Thursday, 2009.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will be among the year’s
participants, along with over one hundred leading figures in business,
politics, and academia from home and abroad. For more information about
the forum and its participants, please open the attached program.

Ten Percent

Some of you who subscribe to the MIIS Yammer updates may have noticed that many recent posts are tagged “#10percent.” Here’s why:

This summer, a group of IT and TLC staff decided to take responsibility for their own professional development by adopting the “10 percent rule.” We made a commitment to each other: that we would each devote 10% of our time to learning new things that would help us do our jobs better. We agreed to post information about what we were learning to Yammer, so that other colleagues could benefit from our discoveries and be generally more aware of the kinds of things we are working on.

In the last three weeks, a lot of learning has been going on! There are 49 Yammer posts with the #10percent tag. Here’s a sample of what your colleagues have been learning:

Bob Cole has been experimenting with new tools for a MIIS blogging community. Check out the results. He also learned how to deeplink into a YouTube video, so that you can get directly to the portion of a video you want to reference.

Sarah Springer has been broadening her knowledge of emerging learning technologies through the Educause Learning Initiative’s “Seven Things You Should know About…” series.

Amy McGill learned how to build more engaging presentations by reading Presentation Zen, and is now following the associated web site.

Greg Harris discovered an interesting new tool called Flow that allows people to track time spent on digital projects. He’s also repurposed one of our older computers to run Ubunto 9.04 (linux).

Wen Lu has been doing a lot of reading on wireless networking, including investigation of Mac-specific issues, since we have more and more Macs appearing on campus.

Trinidad Gomez has been using a Deke McClelland One-on-One book to learn Photoshop. He also posted about a review of Shopcraft as Soulcraft, which prompted Amy McGill to take a look at this book as a possible “unbook club” choice.

Kristen Byers discovered dry-erase paint (after Bob Cole discovered blackboard paint). Check out her door! Kristen is also setting an ambitious learning agenda with 101 goals in 1001 days.

When is your Day Zero?  If you would like to join this initiative, just start learning, and sharing what you learn on Yammer.


Advancement(and many others)@work

With the closing of the Institute’s fiscal year on June 30th, Institutional Advancement also marked the end of its FY09 fundraising efforts.  While the economic downturn did present significant challenges, there are several bright spots to report:

The number of faculty/staff donors grew from 44 at the close of FY08 to 52 at the close of FY09 (18% increase)

The number of alumni donors grew from 131 at the close of FY08 to 162 at the close of FY09 (24% increase)

Overall cash received grew from $5,315,554 million in FY08 to $5,355,569 million in FY09 (a slight, slight increase)

While Institutional Advancement is the hub of these efforts, we could not have reached any of these results without the help of many across campus.  Special thanks to the Digital Media Commons for their help with our digital solicitation and stewardship pieces, Recruiting and Student Financial Services for providing us with many compelling student stories, and to the members of the academic leadership and faculty who have spent time with both our prospective and existing donors.  We look forward to, hopefully, even better results in the coming year! 

Leslie Eliason Teacher of Excellence Award Ceremony

Please join us for the Leslie Eliason Teacher of Excellence Award Ceremony today, Tuesday, April 21 at 12:00 noon in the Samson Center Reading Room.  Faculty, staff, and students are invited to attend.   This award recognizes outstanding teaching and promotes the professional development of a teacher by a grant from the Payne Family Foundation.  This year’s award recipient is Laura Burian. For more information, please contact Dollie Pope at (831) 647-3545 or dollie.pope@miis.edu.