Meet The Team Tuesdays: Tim Maher

Post Date October 31, 2012
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Category astrobiology, environmental change, meet the team Tuesdays

This post is part of a weekly series introducing GCRI’s members. It’s running one day late this week. Yesterday my attention was fixed on Hurricane Sandy, which still loomed over my apartment.

It turns out that there are not many people working on both climate change policy and contact with extraterrestrials. But here at GCRI and our parent organization Blue Marble Space, well, yes, we do both, sometimes in the same study. So Tim must have been pretty surprised when he found us via web searches …

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Tony Barrett Gives CSIS Practice Talk On Inadvertent Nuclear War To GCRI Nuclear War Group

Post Date October 28, 2012
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Category discussion groups, nuclear war

On Thursday 11 October 2012,* GCRI hosted the second of a series of discussions among a group of nuclear war scholars. The discussion centered around a practice talk that Tony Barrett gave for an upcoming conference at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
* We apologize for the delays in getting this post online.

Meeting participants included Martin Hellman of Stanford and Seth Baum, Tony Barrett, and Jacob Haqq-Misra, all of GCRI.

Barrett’s talk, Analyzing and Reducing the Risks of Inadvertent Nuclear War between the United …

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Wei Luo Talks To GCRI About Geo-Social Visual Analytics And Pandemics

Post Date October 25, 2012
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Category infectious disease, nuclear war, online lectures, risk management

Wei Luo is a PhD candidate in Geography at Pennsylvania State University and researcher in Penn State’s GeoVISTA Center. He’s also a good friend of mine from my own time at Penn State Geography. Yesterday, Wei presented his research on geo-social visual analytics to GCRI, exploring how this research applies to global catastrophic risk.

Visual analytics can be defined as “the science of analytical reasoning facilitated by interactive visual interfaces”. As an illustration of visual analytics, Wei recommends the video Precision Information Environments Envisioning the future …

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GCRI Welcomes Research Associate Tuncay Alparslan

Post Date October 23, 2012
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Category integrated assessment, new affiliate, uncertainty

We’re pleased to announce our newest affiliate, Research Associate Tuncay Alparslan. Here’s his bio from the GCRI People page.

Tuncay is an Assistant Professor in Mathematics and Statistics at American University. Tuncay holds a Ph.D. in Operations Research from Cornell University (2006), an M.S. in Operations Research from Cornell University (2005), and a B.S. in Industrial Engineering from Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey (2001). As a Research Associate, Tuncay contributes to GCRI research on uncertainty and integrated assessment.

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Meet The Team Tuesdays: Jacob Haqq-Misra

Post Date October 23, 2012
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Category astrobiology, environmental change, meet the team Tuesdays

This post is the first in what will be a weekly series introducing GCRI’s members.

I was introduced to Jacob in 2008 via our mutual friend Shawn Domagal-Goldman when the three of us were grad students at Penn State. Shawn and Jacob were part of Penn State’s Astrobiology Research Center. They were thinking a lot about the implications of astrobiology (the study of life in the universe) for human civilization today, and invited me to join the conversation. The conversation has resulted in several papers together …

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New Blogs & Newsfeeds Resource

Post Date October 18, 2012
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Category resource

GCRI is pleased to announce the publication of its newest resource for the global catastrophic risk community, a compilation of blogs and newsfeeds. The resource features 36 blogs and 18 newsfeeds, each with an annotation describing the blog/newsfeed.

The blogs and newsfeeds presented here cover a wide range of GCR topics. Most cover specific risks such as nuclear war, pandemics, climate change, or emerging technologies. Some cover cross-cutting topics such as law, uncertainty, and preparedness. They also come from a wide range of sources, including academia, …

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October 2012 Newsletter

Post Date October 05, 2012
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GCRI just sent out the first run of its monthly email newsletter. The main updates are reprinted below. To sign up for our newsletter, click here.

GCRI Launches New Website

Our website, gcrinstitute.org, has been completely redesigned. The site was designed in WordPress by Melissa Thomas. The new look features most of the previous site’s content, plus a new blog. We’ll be blogging regularly about GCRI and the broader theme of global catastrophic risk. Keep tuned in, and feel free to leave us a comment!

GCRI Launches New …

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GCRI Hosts Discussion Of Religion & GCR

Post Date October 05, 2012
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Category discussion groups, religion

On Friday 28 September 2012, GCRI hosted the first of what looks to be an ongoing series of discussions among a group of religion scholars. The discussion covered several topics, including an extended discussion of the inevitability of catastrophe.

Meeting participants included Hassan Hussain of UCLA & Columbia University, Jun Zhuang of University at Buffalo, and Seth Baum, Tony Barrett, Mark Fusco, and Jacob Haqq-Misra, all of GCRI.

The group observed that some religious communities view catastrophe as inevitable, such as in ideas about apocalypse. These communities …

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GCRI Hosts Discussion Of Nuclear War

Post Date October 05, 2012
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Category discussion groups, nuclear war

On Thursday 27 September 2012, GCRI hosted the first of what looks to be an ongoing series of discussions among a group of nuclear war scholars. The discussion covered several nuclear war topics, including an extended discussion of nuclear winter.

Meeting participants included Martin Hellman of Stanford, James Scouras of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, and Seth Baum, Tony Barrett, Jacob Haqq-Misra, and Tim Maher, all of GCRI.

The group considered an observation that the United States government has not been as active as it …

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Welcome To The New GCRI Website & Blog

Post Date October 04, 2012
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We are excited to have this new look for the organization as it continues to grow. The structure and content of the website is, for the moment, largely the same, except we now have this blog. However, we’ll be adding new content soon – stay tuned!

Big thanks go to everyone who helped make this happen. The website design and development was lead by Melissa Thomas. James Evans of Knightsbridge Online helped get the site running on our server.

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