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On March 31st, CEU President and Rector John Shattuck hosted the launch of Global Policy, the new LSE / Wiley-Blackwell academic journal, of which CEU is co-sponsor. Eva Maria Nag, Executive Editor, offered an overview of the journal’s aims, criteria, content and direction.

On March 31st, CEU President and Rector John Shattuck hosted David Held, the Graham Wallas Professor in Political Science, and co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Governance, at the London School of Economics, for a public lecture: “Parallel World: the Governance of Global Risks in Finance, Security and the Environment.”

Introductory remarks were made by Professor John Shattuck, and the subsequent discussion was chaired by Professor Nikolai Sitter, Head of the Department of Public Policy at CEU.

On March 25-26th the USC Shoah Foundation Institute hosted the inaugural International Digital Access, Outreach, and Research Conference at the University of Southern California. As part of an effort to foster inter-institutional collaboration and innovation toward expanding the archive’s educational impact, the conference brought together professors and library scientists as representatives of the global institutions that provide access to the Institute’s Visual History Archive.

On 29 March Andreas Goldthau, Associate Professor, Department of Public Policy presented his new book, co-written with Jan Martin Witte (Brookings Press, 2010). John Shattuck, President and Rector delivered the opening remarks, drawing attention to the relevance of the issue of energy governance, and the timeliness of the book for a field that still remains understudied.

On 22 March CEU hosted Monroe E. Price, Director, Center for Global Communications Studies, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania / Professor of Law, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University for a public lecture based on insights from his book Objects of Remembrance: A Memoir of American Opportunities and Viennese Dreams. Ellen Hume, Annenberg Fellow in Civic Media, Center for Media and Communication Studies (CMCS), CEU gave opening remarks at the event, and acted as the chair and moderator.

On March 8, the CEU Cognitive Development Center (CEU Department of Philosophy) hosted Jozsef Fiser, Assistant Professor, The Volen National Center for Complex Systems, Department of Psychology, Brandeis University, US, for a colloquium entitled: Developing internal representations in the mind to understand the visual world. 

It is widely accepted that every conscious thought and decision in the brain is generated with the help of stored knowledge about the important causes and consequences of the outside world

On 17 March Olivier Morin, PhD student, Institute Jean Nicod, Paris, gave a presentation at CEU about the way in which cultural traditions are passed down. He argued that social learning mechanisms alone (such as imitation or communication) cannot account for the stability of cultural traditions. In particular, even social learning mechanisms ensuring a good transmission of behaviors or of ideas, from one individual to another, are never immune to small deviations that will inevitably accumulate with time.

 CEU Alumni Adam Szeidl, assistant professor of economics at University of California, Berkeley, visited the university last week to present his new field research on how social networks determine lending practices among Peru’s poor population.

Szeidl (MA Economics 2000) is among a group of economics scholars from Yale, Harvard, and Iowa State University who have launched micro-finance field experiment projects in two Lima shantytowns in order to measure the importance of social networks and trust when borrowing money.