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Tag: Harvard Kennedy School
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Campus & Community
Shorenstein Center names finalists for Goldsmith Prize
Six entries have been chosen as finalists for the 2006 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, awarded each year by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government. The winner of the $25,000 prize will be named at an awards ceremony on March 14 at the Kennedy…
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Campus & Community
Former deputy secretary of defense named Belfer Lecturer
John White, former U.S. deputy secretary of defense, has been named the Robert and Renée Belfer Lecturer at the Kennedy School of Government (KSG). White has served as a lecturer in public policy at KSG since 1998.
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Campus & Community
Sewall named director of Carr Center for Human Rights Policy
Sarah Sewall was appointed director of the Kennedy School of Government’s (KSG) Carr Center for Human Rights Policy on Jan. 25. She began her appointment immediately and will serve through the 2006-07 academic year.
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Campus & Community
KSG prof starts earthquake relief Web site
Assistant Professor of Public Policy Asim Khwaja, with collaborators Jishnu Das and Tara Vishwanath from the World Bank and Tahir Andrabi from Pomona College, has rushed to create a Web site that can help coordinate relief efforts for the Pakistan earthquake. The site, complete with a list of affected villages and satellite maps, aims to…
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Campus & Community
Climate solutions through forests
Using the environment to help address the nation’s pollution problems. That’s the focus of a new report from the Pew Center on Global Climate Change and researchers at the Kennedy School of Government (KSG) and Indiana University. The “Cost of U.S. Forest-based Carbon Sequestration” investigates the potential for incorporating land-use changes into climate policy. Authored…
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Science & Tech
New calculations suggest economic cost of Iraq war much larger than previously recognized
A paper presented to the annual Allied Social Sciences Association meeting in Boston, in a session jointly sponsored by the American Economic Association and the Economists for Peace and Security, suggests that the costs of the Iraq war are much higher than previously reckoned, with conservative to moderate estimates ranging from slightly less than a…
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Science & Tech
Studying Boston’s race trends
Guy Stuart, an associate professor of public policy at the Kennedy School of Government, is the author of a new study, “Boston at the Crossroads: Racial Trends in the Metropolitan Region in the 1990s and Beyond.” “The rest of America looks very different from Boston,” Stuart said. “Whites here are very isolated. When kids go…
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Health
Many Americans at high risk from flu not vaccinated
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention highly recommends the flu vaccine for certain high-risk groups including people with chronic illnesses, children between the ages of six and 23 months, and people aged 65 and over. A national poll conducted by the Harvard School of Public Health Project on the Public and Biological Security found…
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Science & Tech
Diminishing returns
Election Night is one of the increasingly rare moments when large numbers of Americans gather in front of their television sets to hear about politics. Although a comparison of the 2000 election night broadcasts with those of 1968 indicates that these programs have increasingly employed sophisticated projection techniques, they now contain less of the content…
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Health
Many Americans hold incorrect beliefs about smallpox and smallpox vaccine
If physicians are reluctant to be vaccinated themselves against smallpox, large numbers of Americans will be unwilling to do it voluntarily. Also, if there are deaths from side effects of the vaccine, the public will be less willing to be vaccinated. “Depending on events, many Americans may be cautious when deciding whether or not to…
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Science & Tech
Heinz Center report presents environmental indicators
Statistics and reports on environmental damage and progress routinely come from dozens — if not hundreds — of nonprofit, government, and other agencies. Often the information disagrees with previously published data, creating difficulty in assessing the health of the nation’s environment. A report, “The State of the Nation’s Ecosystems,” released Sept. 24, 2002, was an…
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Science & Tech
Beyond the Beltway: Focusing on Hometown Security
“Beyond the Beltway: Focusing on Hometown Security,” prepared by participants in the Kennedy School’s Executive Session on Domestic Preparedness, calls upon federal officials to place greater emphasis upon local emergency planning efforts as an integral part of the national security strategy. That strategy, the report concludes, must go beyond the formation of a Department of…
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Science & Tech
Structuring 21st century government for homeland defense
A report by Kennedy School of Government lecturer Elaine C. Kamarck, “Applying 21st Century Government to the Challenge of Homeland Security,” offers some specific recommendations: — Create a National Terrorism Intelligence Center within the FBI to fuse intelligence gathering capabilities of national security agencies with investigative resources of law enforcement — Increase protection at the…
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Science & Tech
Kennedy School students help Kenyans battle AIDS
Two Kennedy School master’s students, Shanti Nayak and Nazanin Samari-Kermani, went to Kenya to help a leading anti-poverty organization investigate how best to fight AIDS. Their research, with ActionAid-Kenya, a United Kingdom-based organization, identified a variety of reforms that should help ActionAid more efficiently battle the disease, which kills 700 people a day in the…
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Science & Tech
Radcliffe conference presents research on lethal school violence
Educators, policy-makers, law enforcement officials, and adolescent-development specialists came to the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study on May 21, 2002, for the National Conference on Lethal School Violence. The conference centerpiece was the report “Deadly Lessons: Understanding Lethal School Violence,” a qualitative and quantitative study of incidents of lethal school shootings released by the National…
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Science & Tech
Emergency communications
As almost 60,000 federal, state and local public safety agencies plan to upgrade their communications systems in the wake of 9/11, Kennedy School of Government Assistant Professor of Public Policy Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger took a hard look at communications interoperability and its implementation, in the United States and in Europe. Three steps have been seen as…
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Science & Tech
Race, place, and segregation
Researchers for the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, using U.S. census data from 2000, examined whether three major metropolitan areas — Boston, Chicago and San Diego — continue to be segregated. They found that segregation persists, and has even expanded into new areas. Residents of Chicago’s metropolitan area , for instance, are redrawing the…
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Science & Tech
Americans don’t see obesity as serious health problem
Using unique survey data that they collected, researchers Taeku Lee and J. Eric Oliver presented the first examination of public attitudes towards obesity and obesity policy. They found that, contrary to the views of health experts, most Americans are not seriously concerned with obesity, express relatively low support for obesity-targeted policies, and still view obesity…
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Science & Tech
Indivisible territory and ethnic war
Monica Duffy Toft is assistant professor of public policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and assistant director of the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. Toft has studied the causes of ethnic war and developed a theory based on territory. She says that “Attempts to…
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Science & Tech
Strong student support found for war
American college students strongly support U.S. war objectives in Afghanistan aimed against the Taliban and Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda terrorist network, according to a survey conducted by the Institute of Politics at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. The survey was released in early November 2001. Support among undergraduates for air strikes…
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Science & Tech
Drug patents not crucial in AIDS fight, researchers find
About 25 million people are infected with AIDS in Africa and just 25,000, or one in 1,000, are receiving antiretroviral drug treatment. Patents for anti-AIDS drugs have come under fire repeatedly in recent years, with activists charging that the patents keep drug prices high and block manufacture of cheaper generic alternatives that could save lives.…
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Science & Tech
In Dayton, parents’ satisfaction increased by moving children to private schools
Parents in Dayton, Ohio, reported increased satisfaction after they moved their children to private schools. A private scholarship program sponsored by Parents Advancing Choice in Education (PACE), a non-profit organization in Dayton, helps low-income families afford private education.
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Science & Tech
New report highlights safe, secure method for managing spent nuclear fuel
A joint Harvard University/University of Tokyo team of nuclear energy, nonproliferation, and waste management experts concludes in a new study that technologies are available to store spent nuclear fuel from hundreds of nuclear power plants around the world safely and securely for decades to come. To overcome political obstacles that have limited options for storage…
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Science & Tech
National environmental policy during the Clinton years
Researchers at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government examined the environmental policy record of former President Bill Clinton. Environmental quality improved overall during the decade, the researchers found, continuing a trend that began in the 1970s, although improvements were much less than during the previous two decades. The researchers found that five themes emerged from their…
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Science & Tech
Bolstering private environmental management
How can government agencies best regulate private firms’ impact on the environment? One popular new approach — advocated by state agencies and by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency — is to create “tracks” of environmental performance to identify strong and weak performers. Strong performers receive recognition and rewards, including flexibility in meeting enforcement goals. Two…
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Science & Tech
Polar bear research shows global warming is real
Harvard Professor James McCarthy was among a handful of top scientists who coordinated a remarkable report by the world scientific community in 2001 that said global warming is real, it’s here, and it’s going to be worse than we thought. “We already see effects that [indicate] the change in climate has occurred,” said McCarthy, who…
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Science & Tech
Should computer code be considered free speech?
Unlike all other forms of “speech” that are protected under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, computer source code holds a unique place in the law. Computer source code can be copyrighted, like a book. And it can be patented like a machine or a process. The result is confusion in the legal arena,…
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Science & Tech
Soft news and critical journalism eroding audiences
A rise in soft news and critical journalism “may now be hastening the decline in news audiences” and “weakening the foundation of democracy by diminishing the public’s information about public affairs and its interest in politics,” according to a Harvard study. The study, conducted by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public…
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Science & Tech
Assessing globalization’s true impact
Joseph S. Nye Jr. and John D. Donahue of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government have examined all aspects of the globalization phenomenon in order to separate the facts from the hype. Among their findings: • Globalization is helping to increase real incomes throughout the world, with new jobs being created in poorer countries…
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Science & Tech
Does the Internet make markets more competitive?
According to Jeffrey Brown of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, the Internet’s power to allow consumers to engage in low-cost price comparisons online has affected the market for life insurance. Looking at data on individual life insurance policies, Brown found that a 10 percent increase in the share of individuals in a group…