Last week, CNS director Bill Potter  chaired a Diplomatic Workshop on the Open-Ended Working Group on Nuclear Disarmament in Geneva on August 17, 2013.  Ms. Gaukhar Mukhatzhanova—CNS Senior Research Associate also participated in the workshop, which was held at the Geneva Center for Policy Studies.  The workshop was supported by the Hewlett Foundation and the Swiss Foreign Ministry.

He also participated as a speaker on a panel addressing Disarmament Education at the Open-Ended Working Group on Nuclear Disarmament at the United Nations in Geneva on August 22.  On the same date, he spoke at a side-event on Disarmament and Nonproliferation Education at the United Nations organized by the Austrian Federal Ministry for European and International Affairs and the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.

He participated as a delegate to the negotiations of the Open-Ended Working Group on Nuclear Disarmament, Geneva, (August 19-23), and took part in the Framework Forum Roundtable on the UN Open-Ended Working Group in Geneva co-sponsored by the Middle Powers Initiative, Parliamentarians for Nuclear Nonproliferation and Disarmament, and the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, on August 24.

MonTREP has received a grant from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation to continue research on “The Nexus Between Terrorism and Criminal Trafficking.” The grant  of $20,000 will enable MonTREP to continue to expand its current research endeavors and to develop projects that will continue identifying terrorist activity, predicting future terrorist threats, and assessing counterterrorism policy options. The funds will be used to support student research, hold a conference, and publish an E-Book with McGraw Hill.

Network upgrades planned for this fall center around the two new core switches pictured here. MIIS Network Manager Wen Lu travelled to Middlebury last week to work with Howie McCausland, director of network design and operations, on configuring the new hardware.  The equipment will be shipped to MIIS, and Howie will visit Monterey in September to work with Wen on the installation.

Professor Zinan Ye recently published several books on English-Chinese translation. A Course in Cognitive Metaphor and Translation, a book dealing with practice of Chinese translation from a perspective of cognitive metaphor, was published this summer by Peking University Press. In addition, a second edition of Principles and practices of English-Chinese Translation and a third edition of Advanced Course in English-Chinese Translation were published respectively by Bookman Taipei and Tsinghua University in China. Both books have been widely used by translation programs in China and Taiwan since their first publication about 13 years ago.

MIIS/CNS graduate Lovely Umayam published an article on societal verification in the latest issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.  In “Don’t let societal verification turn Borg,” She argues for caution in the use of crowd-sourcing techniques for verification of compliance with nonproliferation commitments. Here’s a sample:

The aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings taught us an important lesson: crowd-sourcing can easily evolve into something uncontrollable, creating opportunities to misconstrue information and prompting the public to conspire and accuse. This has important implications for the nuclear nonproliferation and arms control community, which is exploring the use of societal verification. The aim of this process is to use information that non-expert, non-professional citizens have gathered, shared, and analyzed to make sure countries abide by their arms control and nonproliferation commitments. But how can societal verification steer clear of the kind of crowd-sourcing problems that occurred in April?

GSIPM professor Moyara Ruehsen was interviewed on Marketplace (American Public Media) a few weeks ago, on the topic of cooling relations with Russia and the impact on US trade.

MonTREP director Gen. Russ Howard was quoted in a recent article in the LA Times on the recent foiling of an Al Qaeda plot to seize two oil ports in Yemen. Read the article here.

Professor Wallace Chen, Program Coordinator of Chinese Translation and Interpretation, made the following presentations during the month of July:

1.      Paper presentation on “Using Parallel and Comparable Corpora in Teaching Chinese-English Sight Translation” at ICLC 7 – UCCTS 3 (7^th International Contrastive Linguistics Conference and 3^rd Conference on Using Corpora in Contrastive and Translation Studies), held at Ghent University, Belgium, on July 12, 2013.

2.      Invited lecture on “Corpus-based Translation Studies and Translation Universals” at the 2013 Summer School of Corpus-based Translation Studies, held at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in Shanghai, China, July 19, 2013.

CNS director Bill Potter participated in the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization Course on Diplomacy and Public Policy in Vienna, and on July 16th served as moderator for a course panel on “The Role of the CTBT in the NPT Regime.” He also gave a lecture on “Assessing the Health of the NPT in light of the 2013 NPT PrepCom” at a meeting in Vienna of the Academic Council of the United Nations System.