Presented in TIME Magazine under the title Are Oil Prices Rigged?, the controversial Officer-Hayes Hypothesis claims that oil producers have artificially boosted prices by speculating in the oil futures market. It relies on the fact that the futures market is smaller than the physical oil market, so it is in an oil supplier's interest to boost prices in the smaller, price-setting market.

In light of the realization that one firm did, in fact, control 11% of the oil futures market, Officer-Hayes has proved plausible.

Ari J. Officer studies financial mathematics Garrett J. Hayes studies materials science and engineering at Stanford.

ASES SUMMIT 2008
APRIL 6-12, 2008
"Fostering a Global Entrepreneurial Community"
asessummit.stanford.edu | ases.stanford.edu

* Keynote and Speaker Events are FREE and OPEN TO THE PUBLIC *

Scott D. Cook
Founder, Intuit, Inc.
Monday, April 7, 2008
5:15-6:30PM | Building 320, Room 105, Stanford University
Link to map: http://campus-map.stanford.edu/index.cfm?ID=01-320

Daniel Walker Former
Chief Talent Officer, Apple, Inc.
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
6:00-7:15PM | Building 420, Room 041, Stanford University
Link to map: http://campus-map.stanford.edu/index.cfm?ID=01-420

Munjal Shah, CEO, Like.com Inc.
Vineet Buch, Principal, BRV
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
1:00-2:15PM | CIS-X Auditorium, Stanford University
Link to map: http://campus-map.stanford.edu/index.cfm?ID=01-370

Adeo Ressi
Founding Member, TheFunded.com
Thursday, April 10, 2008
6:00-7:30PM | Building 370, Room 370, Stanford University
Link to map: http://campus-map.stanford.edu/index.cfm?ID=01-370

Joel Peterson
Lead Director, jetBlue Airways
Friday, April 11, 2008
5:00-6:45PM | Building 550, Room 550A, Stanford University
Link to map: http://campus-map.stanford.edu/index.cfm?ID=02-550

ASES SUMMIT 2008 Stanford Directors: Christian Tabing, '09; In Ho Lee, '09; and Wen Qi Chin, '09.

Walking down the streets of Santiago (or anywhere else in Chile or Argentina) female Stanford students can expect to receive acknowledgement that they are attractice. The person acknowledging their beauty can be a taxi driver, a man walking down the street, construction workers, or anyone else.

The acknowledgement can range from slightly funny but still tasteful (my favorites are the man in Mendoza, Argentina that told a friend and I “you two, you are very pretty,” and the clerk in the Santiago shoe store that told me I had very beautiful eyes); to the still amusing but slightly annoying- whistles, claps, loud kissy noises; and then the worst- the men who just stare at you on the subway and do not look away, or the college aged boys who lean into your personal bubble space when you walk by to say “linda” or beautiful.

We’ve discussed this in our Spanish classes here at the Stanford in Santiago center, and my Spanish teacher strongly defends it as a cultural practice, insisting that it is a compliment to our looks. Yet in our discussions most of the (US) girls in the room indicated that it made them uncomfortable, that it made them feel like they were only a sexual object. I know from my personal experience I’ve avoided walking past certain groups of guys because I don’t want to feel uncomfortable. And yet even listening to all of us describe our feelings of uncomfortableness, and thinking that we’re just sexual objects, my Spanish teacher still maintains that it’s a compliment, and we should take it as such.

I recently heard a report on NPR about the role Yahoo played in China helping the Chinese government track down and imprison a political dissident Shi Tao-
Shi Tao’s political offense was contacting the Asia Democracy Project through his Yahoo email account to tell them about an order the Chinese Government gave to all journalists: not to report on any democratic protesters on the 15th anniversary of Tiananmen Square (June 4, 2004).

The Chinese government found out about this email, and demanded that Yahoo provide the user’s private information, which Yahoo did without asking why. This became a US scandal when the US Yahoo representatives told the US Senate that Chinese Yahoo had done no such thing, which it later retracted, claiming that it had made this claim on the grounds of an inaccurate translation from the Chinese Yahoo office.

Coming home

On Friday, my two-month stay here in China comes to a close, and I return home to San Francisco and Stanford. With a few minutes here and there between packing, going away dinners, and a magical trip to the post office (nothing like shipping 4,000 RMB worth of books), I thought I'd reflect on my present and past trips to the PRC. Here are roughly forty of the things I love most about living and working in China. (There is no order whatsover to this list, mind you.)

玉米冰淇淋: After eating corn ice cream for the first time, one is inclined to raise one's skinny fists towards the heavens and ask, "What else have You been hiding from me?"

"对对对对对对对..." Foreigners love to agree in China, because it allows us to use the machine gun-like expression "Dui dui dui dui dui dui dui..." (Translation: "Correct, correct, correct, correct, correct, correct..."). I've had entire conversations in which these were the only sounds I uttered.

“厕所里放挂钟－有始有终”: Jokes in other languages are often funnier than jokes in your mother tongue. I think this stems from two seeds. First, when you "get" a joke in Chinese, you feel proud. Not only did you have to understand the meaning of the words, but you had to do so rapidly. The sound of one's own honest, heartfelt laughter doubles as a badge of honor. Secondly, each language is equipped with its own unique ways of crafting jokes. In Chinese, for example, the multiplicity of homophonic characters allows for a whole host of double entendres, my favorite of which is 厕所里放挂钟－有始有终 (rather than translating, I'll let you conduct your own search).

柚子: My single favorite thing about living in Chengdu was probably Chinese grapefruit (youzi). These behemoths are something like three times the size of grapefuits back home, not to mention half as sour and twice as sweet. Many a night did I dine on the flesh of youzi.

"那个那个那个那个..." As with unique forms of jokes, each language has it own unique forms of stuttering as well. I still remember learning 那个那个那个那个... ("That, that, that, that, that...) in 1998. I've been abusing it ever since.

"It just looks like a crescent": Some of the best Chinese-English signs involve typos or awkward phrasings. In other cases, their brilliance is far more subtle. I encountered a new favorite at Mingshashan and the Crescent Lake, just outside of Dunhuang, Gansu. In explaining the origins of the name Crescent Lake, the English sign foregoes all poetry and gets right to the point: "It just looks like a crescent."

I wonder if they knew.

So, I'm back in Beijing now after a ten-day trip to the southwestern cities of Dali (Yunnan) and Chengdu (Sichuan). I attended a week long conference called Crossing Borders and Paradigms: Anthropology of Southwest China Reconsidered. The conference was co-sponsored by the Southwest University for Nationalities, Beijing University, and the Central University of Nationalities, and gave me my first opportunity to present an academic paper completely in Chinese. It went well, the highlight for me being when one of the members of the 1954 Ethnic Classification team (the focus of my dissertation and forthcoming book) chimed in at the end of my talk and announced to the whole room, in essence, "He's right." Needless to say, I "celebrated" at the bar that night. Special thanks goes to Stevan Harrell who, when his schedule did not permit him to attend, passed my name along to the conference organizers.

On July 17, my two best friends Andy and Salley (not pictured above) came to visit me from the United States. It was the culmination of a plot we hatched back at Johns Hopkins University, where the three of us started our Freshman years in 1996. I don't remember this exactly, but Andy reminded me about the first time we met. Apparently, I stopped by his open doorway with, now get this, a plate of brownies which my Mother had baked. Needless to say, I never did succeed in developing that 'bad boy' mystique which worked so well for many of my male classmates. Then again, neither did Andy. I suppose that's why we hit it off right away.

Where in the world is Professor Mullaney

When the balding Chinese man in his sixties began to pound the information counter repeatedly, his voice growing hoarse from berating the stunned airline attendant, I knew that the situation had truly taken a turn for the worse. It was the early morning hours of July thirty-first, nearing one a.m., and the Taiyuan airport had become a temporary base camp for about five hundred displaced passengers. By slamming his half-empty bottle of Wahaha against the table, the man was engaging in what in Chinese is known as yifen (义愤), or "righteous anger." In layman's terms, this translates into (a) a crowd of justifiably perturbed people led by (b) at least one vociferous spokesperson who the larger group openly resents yet quietly endorses (c) surrounding a much smaller number of official personages who (d) endure unceasing emotional abuse from the crowd's advocate for as long as it takes - but rarely with any outcome that (e) is beneficial to the onlookers.

The official, in this case, was the Deputy Director of Taiyuan Airport, who was flanked by a silently weeping flight attendant, paralyzed with fear, and four completely ineffectual security guards. My traveling companion Emily and I were on our way back to Beijing after a brief, five-day visit to Urumqi, in China's northwestern province of Xinjiang, and Dunhuang, site of the famous Buddhist caves in the neighboring province of Gansu. Although scheduled to touch down around eight o'clock in the evening, a smooth return was not in the cards. Come nightfall, Beijing was trapped in the heavy embrace of an unrelenting thunderstorm which, when viewed from the window of our Airbus A320-214, invoked memories of the debut episode of the new Battlestar Galactica: one massive nuclear burst here, another there, an even larger one over there. The flight path went something like this: Dunhuang to Lanzhou to Beijing* to Hohhot to Beijing* to Hohhot* to Taiyuan (where * indicates cities which we enjoyed from the air, but where weather did not permit us to land).

But let me rewind a bit, and explain what I've been up to in China over the past few weeks. Stay tuned...

Thomas S. Mullaney
Assistant Professor
Modern Chinese History
Website here

Random shot of me and my buddy/bandmate MG


In all the tumult of the past few weeks, a fog of preparation and closure, I nearly lost sight of a small, personal milestone. It was nine years ago, nearly to the day, when I first set foot in the People’s Republic. I was a Junior at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and my entire life was on the verge of a thorough transformation, one both personal and professional.
Outwardly, I was a confident, highly focused International Studies major quickly absorbing the credits necessary to add a second major (East Asian Studies) and eventually a co-term MA. Inwardly, however, I hadn’t the slightest idea where I was headed. The Ph.D. was an attractive option, but so too was journalism, foreign service, and the private sector (much to my Father’s encouragement). All I knew for certain was: I wanted to travel + I had studied Chinese intensively for two years = Beijing made sense.

Every summer Technology Education Cross-Cultures (TECC) launches summer institutes all over China -- Each institute places teams of US and Chinese college students in rural areas to teach english and technology. TECC was started a couple years ago by Stanford Students in an effort to close the widening economic divide between rural communities and urban cities in China. Here's a clip from the Shaanxi institute last year.

The conference Feminicide = Sanctioned Murder: Race, Gender and Violence in Global Context will examine the murders and disappearances of women in Mexico, Guatemala and Canada that are occurring on an epidemic scale, and interrogate closely the gender, class, sexual and ethnoracial components of this violence against women. The aim and purpose of the conference is to stop the violence and map out ways to bring about justice.

Distinguished participants include Elena Poniatowska, one of Mexico’s most eminent writers, whose innovative writing advocates for women and the poor in their struggle for social and economic justice, and Lydia Cacho, who recently received the 2007 Ginetta Sagan Award for Women and Children's Rights from Amnesty International for exposing a net of pederasts linked to the government and big business, and for creating a shelter for the children, victims of trafficking and abuse in Cancún, Mexico.

The conference, presented by Chicana and Chicano Studies of The Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University, brings together the most knowledgeable experts on the subject of feminicide in recent years, including mothers of murdered and disappeared women, activists, academics, writers and journalists, human rights lawyers, artists and filmmakers.

Students lined up in orange suits and black garbage bags on the steps of MemAud before Alan Dershowitz's speech tonight to highlight his support for torture in "ticking time bomb" scenarios. Stanford Amnesty members were also on-hand with informational fliers and a video camera, taking footage for our upcoming video on student reactions to America's use of torture.

This is probably the most dramatic student demonstration related to America's use of torture since it became a prominent issue post-9/11.

Hoover Tower provided a menacing backdrop, as usual.

New research coming out of Stanford suggests that ethanol might be just as harmful for human health as gasoline (if not more) and may not even have the desired CO₂ reduction benefits we need to actually take a step toward stopping climate change. Add that to the massive land use required for corn production (along with the massive pesticide use), and I'm suddenly feeling less enthusiastic about this as a fuel source. I agree with Civil and Environmental Engineering Professor Mark Jacobson, who produced the results, when he says that better alternatives are electricity generated from solar and wind, and hydrogen fuel also ultimately generated from green power sources.

The Strange Case of Salman abd al Haqq premieres this Wednesday, April 18th at 8PM in Cubberley Auditorium. Don't miss this important moment in Stanford student filmmaking and in the Stanford student body's response to America's torture scandals.

View the Trailer:

The first revelations of America's torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay shocked many in the Stanford community. Even more shocking were revelations by the ACLU and others that the use of torture (including approval of specific techniques) was sanctioned at the highest levels of the Bush administration. Then came news that the CIA, notorious for using the most "aggressive" techniques, was operating secret prisons abroad. And as if that wasn't enough, the US government was also shipping prisoners to other countries notorious for their sanctioning of torture, such as Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Morocco and Uzbekistan. This extra-judicial process of holding prisoners in other countries is known as "extraordinary rendition," or as some would call it, "the outsourcing of torture."

With our government's commitment to human rights crashing down around us, one would hope -- no, one would expect -- that there would be some kind of artistic processing of the phenomenon from the Stanford community. A new film by Tim Gregory and Jeff Orlowski, entitled The Strange Case of Salman abd al Haqq, is exactly this sort of artistic processing. It is a forceful protest, in hopes that the American people and our elected representatives might begin to understand this moral crisis, and then really confront it.

To learn more about the film and the thinking behind it, I sat down for a few minutes with Tim Gregory, co-director, to discuss how it came to be.

I was innocently surfing along on my usual internet routine the other day when I stumbled upon a hair-raising HIV/AIDS awareness ad:

The text reads: "Without a condom you’re making love with AIDS. Protect yourself."

The ad was produced by a French NGO called AIDES ("aide" means "support" or "help" in French), which was founded by Daniel Defert in 1984 following the death of his partner, philosopher (and former Berkeley professor) Michel Foucault. AIDES now operates in over 70 small towns and villages within France, and is recognized as one of the most important European HIV/AIDS NGOs.

While I was googling around to find out more about AIDES, I also (not surprisingly) stumbled upon ads from other NGOs which, through YouTube's helpful "related" feature, led me to even more anti-AIDS ads -- some good, some great, some not so amazing. Continue reading this entry if you'd like to to see some of the best, in my humble opinion.

Notably, most of these ads were produced for broadcasting in the First World, where infection rates are low and AIDS is now considered a "manageable" disease. Some of the ads will make you laugh. Some will shock you. Some might even warm your heart. But after watching several ad spots clearly designed to shock and scare, I can't help but wonder, "Is there such a thing as overkill when it comes to AIDS awareness?" (Pun not intended.)

Psychology Professor Emeritus Phil Zimbardo put in a funny and enlightening performance with Jon Stewart in last night's The Daily Show. They start with a cute exchange wherein Jon notes that he was once a Psychology major himself:

Zimbardo: "What'd you get in introductory psych?"

Jon: "Introductory Psych 101? I got... uhh... 'Yes, your essay was long enough.'"

The very popular and notorious Stanford Psychology professor gave his farewell lecture at Stanford three weeks ago and is now making the rounds to promote his new book, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, which discusses, in detail for the first time, the famed Stanford Prison Experiment of 1971, and then draws parallels to the modern-day events of American prison abuses in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.

Watch the video online here.

From Professor Frankel:
This is the Age of Human Rights. Since World War Two, we’ve seen the rise of the concept of universal rights and the growth of a global movement dedicated to the cause. Governments have signed treaties and conventions committing themselves to opposing genocide, torture and other crimes against humanity.

At the same time, nation-states have jealously guarded their own sovereignty, cracked down whenever threatened and ignored outbreaks of genocide, while superpowers like the United States have forged alliances with despots of many stripes. The distance between what governments have pledged on human rights and what they actually do is a gaping chasm. It’s here---in the gray zone between ambiguity and hypocrisy---that journalism lives.

This course will discuss the role of journalists in exposing human rights abuses. We’ll examine a number of case studies...

We usually think of peace as coming from a macro-level: a treaty between two nations, a peace accord, UN intervention, or a cease-fire. But to what degree can the reality at the micro-level influence peace between governments?

There are numerous projects working towards this effect in the Middle East. A version of Sesame Street for the region has Israelis and Palestinians living peacefully in the same neighborhood, and for adults there are groups such as Arabs for Israel and Coalition of Women for Peace. A number of other groups work to foster dialogue and exchange between Israelis and Palestinians. Perhaps these groups can succeed where governments have failed.

Here at Stanford there's a new group called the Stanford Project for U.S.-China Dialogue. The goal here is to cultivate cultural and political understanding between the U.S. and China, by posting articles on various topics by American and Chinese university students. While the two countries are not at war, the group aims to prevent the sort of misunderstandings that have lead to conflict in the past. You can check out the website at: http://dialogue.stanford.edu/

So what do you think? What are other opportunities for cultural bridge-building? Is this the future of peace?

Lost amidst the top Democratic presidential candidats' Iraq war one-upmanship (or womanship), is the looming threat that the US is about to embark on another adventure: Iran. It's easy for the very real possibility of an attack on Iran to be downplayed as presidential candidates fiddle vocally with details of troop deployment and funding levels for the war in Iraq. However, the threat of strikes against Iran is very real.

In January, I met with retired General Wesley Clark who was very concerned about the current situation in the middle east. (Disclaimer: he's my candidate of choice in '08.) The increasing possibility of strikes against Iran has become great enough that General Clark has made stopping such actions his top priority--at the expense of a possible presidential campaign. Together with VoteVets.org, General Clark has set up a website, StopIranWar.com, aimed at bringing attention to the situation and to push diplomatic efforts in Iran. The rush to war in '03 couldn't be stopped, but there are avenues available in the Democratically controlled Congress that can be used to push diplomacy over war. I'll be discussing upcoming legislation later here and elsewhere. For now, you can sign the petition. (Bill Richardson has a petition as well as Hillary Clinton)

This summer, 8 Stanford students will travel to the Mwange refugee camp in northern Zambia to implement community development projects in collaboration with the community. Undergrads Rhianon Liu, Emily Allegrotti, Elizabeth Kersten, Daniel Gonzalez, Annie Kalt, Katrice Williams, Liz Brody and Alison Root, are the eight Project Facilitators on the 2007 Mwange FORGE team.

A nonprofit organization founded in 2003 by Stanford student Kjerstin Erikson, FORGE, an NGO committed to empowering and enriching the lives of refugees, stands for “Facilitating Opportunities for Refugee Growth and Empowerment" and works to engage U.S. students and African refugee communities in collaborative projects.

The 8-member Stanford team will work in the Mwange Refugee camp near Melu's Village, a rural area near Mporokoso, Zambia. Mwange is home to about 20,500 refugees, all fleeing violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Stanford team will spend seven months in an intensive training and planning phase, in which members will learn about international law and refugee rights, the history of the region, and the problems facing refugees in Mwange.