Blog | Global Catastrophic Risk Institute

GCRI’s First Publication, On Emerging Technologies And International Law, By Grant Wilson

Post Date November 27, 2012

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Author Seth Baum

Category emerging technologies, law & policy, publications

As part of its research, GCRI is working on several research papers for peer-reviewed publication. The first of these papers has now been accepted, and so we are adding a publications page to our website. We will be adding more publications to this page as they become available.

The first paper, by Grant Wilson, is titled “Minimizing global catastrophic and existential risks from emerging technologies through international law“. The paper has been accepted at Virginia Environmental Law Journal and can be downloaded from the Social Science …

Meet The Team Tuesdays: Tony Barrett

Post Date November 20, 2012

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Author Seth Baum

Category meet the team Tuesdays, nuclear war

This post is part of a weekly series introducing GCRI’s members.

Tony and I met at the 2010 Society for Risk Analysis Annual Meeting. I was co-chair with Vanessa Schweizer of two sessions on global catastrophic risk. Vanessa and Tony had attended Carnegie Mellon’s Engineering & Public Policy PhD program together. Tony and I both wanted to focus our careers on GCR, and started thinking about the most effective ways of doing this. We benchmarked many other organizations and concluded that there was a need for …

Meet The Team Tuesdays: Arden Rowell

Post Date November 13, 2012

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Author Seth Baum

Category law & policy, meet the team Tuesdays

This post is part of a weekly series introducing GCRI’s members.

Arden and I met at the 2008 Society for Risk Analysis Annual Meeting. We were both at a presentation together, I think by Cass Sunstein, with whom Arden co-authored a paper on discounting while she was a law student at the University of Chicago. I had read the paper and recognized her name on her name tag after the presentation, so she and I got to talking. The conversation has continued ever since, and I …

Meet The Team Tuesdays: Jianhua Xu

Post Date November 06, 2012

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Author Seth Baum

Category meet the team Tuesdays, risk analysis

This post is part of a weekly series introducing GCRI’s members.

Global catastrophic risk is an inherently global issue. Likewise the study and response to GCR benefits from global collaboration. I was thus delighted when Jianhua expressed interest. Jianhua is based in Beijing, but we met in Sydney, at the 2012 World Congress on Risk, sponsored by the Society for Risk Analysis. Jianhua attended the session on global catastrophic risk I chaired and approached me afterwards. Her research is excellent, spanning several aspects of risk analysis. …

Hurricane Sandy & GCR In Scientific American

Post Date November 06, 2012

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Author Seth Baum

Category natural disasters

Here’s a quick FYI: I just published an article Hurricane Sandy Hints At The Perils Of Global Catastrophe in Scientific American. This discusses the impacts of Sandy on the US and Haiti, and what this means for global catastrophic risk. The basic idea is that when one event disrupts multiple parts of the world, they can’t help each other out like they usually do. Right now the US can’t help Haiti as much because it’s busy helping itself. In a global catastrophe, there may not …

November 2012 Newsletter

Post Date November 02, 2012

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Author Seth Baum

Category newsletter

Yesterday GCRI sent out its monthly email newsletter. The main updates are reprinted below, slightly modified for the blog. To sign up for our newsletter, click here.

GCRI Releases Blogs & Newsfeeds Resource

To help the global catastrophic risk community stay up to date, GCRI has released a new blogs & newsfeeds resource, compiling 36 blogs and 18 newsfeeds related to catastrophic risk. Further details are available here. We expect to be releasing more resources in support of the global catastrophic risk community soon.

Katherine Thompson To Present …

Meet The Team Tuesdays: Tim Maher

Post Date October 31, 2012

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Author Seth Baum

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 …

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

Post Date October 28, 2012

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Author Seth Baum

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 …

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

Post Date October 25, 2012

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Author Seth Baum

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 …

GCRI Welcomes Research Associate Tuncay Alparslan

Post Date October 23, 2012

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Author Seth Baum

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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