Panel 2: The Problem of Historical Difference
Panel 2: Miranda Johnson, University of MIchigan; Bain Attwood, Monash University; Ajay Skaria, University of MInnesota. Co-sponsored by the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory (3CT), the Franke Institute for the Humanities, and the Nicholson Center for British Studies.Author(s):
"Legal Defense and Human Rights in Russia" (video)
A talk with Robert Amsterdam, founding partner, Amsterdam & Peroff, legal defense counsel for Mikhail Khodorkovsky. In practice since 1980, Mr. Amsterdam has extensive experience litigating and arbitrating corporate disputes in emerging markets, focusing on the areas of individual and corporate human rights. Mr. Amsterdam was retained by Mikhail Khodorkovsky in August
"The Oil and Glory" (video)
A talk by journalist and author Steven LeVine. Pipeline politics became a modern day version of the 19th Century's Great Game, in which Britain and Russia had employed cunning and bluff to gain supremacy over the lands of the Caucasus and Central Asia. “The Oil and Glory†is the story of how, at the dawn of the 21st century, the game was played once more across the harsh e
"The Closing of the ICTY and its Effect on Justice and Accountability in the Former Yugoslavia (vide
This panel explores how the impending closing of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) will affect justice and accountability in the Balkans including: the integration of international human rights standards on a national level, the challenges and opportunities confronting the domestic courts and the role of the media/civil society.
Distinguished panelists in
"Pens and Swords: How the American Mainstream Media Report the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict" (video)
A talk by Marda Dunsky, former Arab affairs reporter for the Jerusalem Post and editor on the national/foreign desk of the Chicago Tribune. As world attention is renewed and refocused on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the sixtieth anniversary of its seminal year of 1948, Marda Dunsky takes a close look at how more than two dozen major American print and broadcast outlets have reported the conflict i
“The Future of the South African Dream: Thabo Mbeki, Jacob Zuma, and the South African Electionsâ€
A talk by South African author and journalist Mark Gevisser.
Mark Gevisser is currently The Nation's Southern African correspondent. In South Africa, his work has appeared in the Mail & Guardian, the Sunday Independent, the Sunday Times and many magazines and periodicals. Internationally, he has written widely on South African politics, culture and society,
“The Dragon's Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa†(video)
A talk by American University professor Deborah Brautigam. Is China a rogue donor, as some media pundits suggest? Or is China helping the developing world pave a pathway out of poverty, as the Chinese claim? This well-timed book provides the first comprehensive account of China's aid and economic cooperation overseas. Deborah Brautigam ta
Sirius and XM: Can Two Archrivals Sing the Same Tune?
The country's two satellite radio services -- Sirius and XM -- announced that they had finally agreed to merge. The move raises a number of questions, not the least of which is whether they can get this deal approved by the Federal Communications Commission and the Justice Department. But regulatory issues aside, what prompted these two archrivals to embrace each other, what do they expect to get out of it, and what does a combined company mean for consumers who currently pay a subscription fee
A Tremendous Need to Find Talent: Human Resources Challenges on a Global Scale
The 57 members of AHRMIO, the Association for Human Resources Management in International Organizations, range from the UN, UNICEF and OECD to the World Health Organization, the World Bank and the International Labour Organization. Mary Jane Peters, executive director, and Roger Eggleston, president emeritus, were at Wharton recently for the group's 7th annual conference. They talked with Knowledge@Wharton about their successes -- such as the introduction of paternity leave and policies regardin
Bernardo Gradin: Our Goal Is to Become One of the 10 Most Valued Petrochemicals Companies
Brazil's petrochemicals industry has been going through active consolidation, a phase that is almost at an end. That process, however, has seen the creation and growth of Braskem, a giant of a firm that is the largest petrochemicals producer not just in Brazil but in all of Latin America. Bernardo Gradin, who has been part of Braskem since the company's formation in 2002, took over in July as its CEO. In an interview with Knowledge@Wharton conducted at the company's Sao Paulo headquarters, Gradi
Seth Goldman: Brewing Organic Tea with a Mission-based Business Model
In 1998, social entrepreneur Seth Goldman founded Honest Tea, the nation's best-selling and fastest-growing organic bottled tea company, with a business professor from the Yale School of Management. Honest Tea sources from organic and fair trade tea estates, and has partnered with community development groups ranging from the Crow Reservation in Montana to organizations in South Africa and Guatemala. Goldman talked with Knowlege@Wharton about carving out space in the competitive beverage market,
Take Two Advil and ... What Ills Can the Pfizer-Wyeth Merger Cure?
When the giant pharmaceutical company Pfizer announced on January 26 that it was acquiring Wyeth for $68 billion, analysts started questioning what benefits the deal would bring and for whom. Pfizer executives suggest the acquisition makes strategic sense by expanding the company into a range of new areas, and by helping make up for an expected loss of more than $12 billion in annual revenues once its Lipitor patent expires in 2011. But Wyeth also brings some liabilities -- notably, continuing l
Bruised but Not Out: A Bullish View on the Future of Financial Innovation
The Great Recession has given a black eye to the tools of financial innovation. Collateralized debt obligations, synthetic derivatives and other once-arcane investment vehicles are now the poster boys of what went wrong -- toxic players in the boom-and-doom scenario of the housing implosion and market rout. But these highly opaque and complex instruments are not representative of real financial innovation, which stresses transparency and responsible management of risk, argues Wharton finance pro
Improving Our Financial IQs: Why Managing Money Should Be a Lifetime Skill
It's no secret that many Americans are financially illiterate, or unable to understand basic principles of money management. To address this situation, Wharton, Dartmouth and the Rand Corporation have established the new Financial Literacy Center, which will develop "educational materials and programs that help foster saving and retirement strategies over the life cycle." Annamaria Lusardi, an economics professor at Dartmouth who will help lead the new Center, and Michelle Greene, deputy assista
What causes the different seasons (animation) Animation showing how seasons result from the yearly revolution of the Earth around the Sun and the tilt of the Earth's axis.
Strange Japanese Sea Creatures At the bottom of Japan's Suruga Bay lie strange and exotic creatures, including spider crabs (largest crabs in the world), chimeras and lantern sharks.
Mixing video , audio and still photography for actual topics in multimedia demonstrated on a multime
The paper is dealing with the method putting audio, video, still photography together to get the best effect for an normal audience to transport actual problems mainly in visual form without putting to much effort into text.
Principles for designing Web searching instruction
Web searching is a timely topic which importance is recognized by researchers, educators and instructional designers. This paper aims to guide these practitioners in developing instructional materials for learning to search the Web. It does so by articulating ten design principles that attend to the content and presentation of Web searching instruction. These principles convey a mixture of insights gleaned from instructional theory, empirical research, and many hours of classroom experience. Tog
Minimalist instruction for learning to search the World Wide Web.
This study examined the efficacy of minimalist instruction to develop self-regulatory skills involved in Web searching. Two versions of minimalist self-regulatory skill instruction were compared to a control group that was merely taught procedural skills to operate the search engine. Acquired skills were tested on Web search tasks and search tasks in an online library catalogue. Self-regulatory skill instruction was found to increase practice time by 25%. However, it did not enhance search perfo
Supporting peer interaction in online learning environments
This paper reports two studies into the efficacy of sentence openers to foster online peer-to-peer interaction. Sentence openers are pre-defined ways to start an utterance that are implemented in communication facilities as menuÂ’s or buttons. In the first study, typical opening phrases were derived from naturally occurring online dialogues. The resulting set of sentence openers was implemented in a semi-structured chat tool that allowed students to compose messages in a free-text area or via se













