Projects

Academy members, with other experts, undertake projects that include events, publications, and recommendations.

Projects

Showing 55-72 of 142 results
Project
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The Transition from Paper

Using the field of chemistry as a case study, this project probed how the expansion of electronic communications is altering the collection, dissemination, and storage of scholarly information.

Chair
R. Stephen Berry
Project
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German and American Refugee and Migration Policies

German and American scholars met in three working groups to address admissions policy, absorption of immigrants, and policies that receiving and sending countries might adopt together to reduce the increasing numbers of refugees and migrants. This study resulted in five volumes comparing migration in the United States and Germany.

Project
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Culture and the Production of Insecurity

Genocide in Rwanda, instability in the Middle East, anarchy on the Internet—insecurities abound. But do they occur "naturally," or are they, as this path-breaking volume suggests, cultural and social productions?

Project
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Censorship and Silencing

For this project, the Academy co-sponsored a series of symposia and conferences to examine censorship from a variety of perspectives. In the resulting volume of essays, an interdisciplinary group of scholars analyzed efforts to regulate speech and examined the subsequent cultural implications.

Project
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The Center for Evaluation

After an examination of research literature showed that evaluations of many educational interventions were nearly useless because they provided little reliable information about whether programs worked, the Academy created The Center for Evaluation to apply meta-analysis to the problem. Researchers extracted information from experimental data from multiple sources to analyze studies on topics such as optimum class size and grouping students according to skill levels.

Chair
Charles Frederick Mosteller
Project
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Social Capital and Public Affairs

This project focused on the critical importance of civic engagement to issues of democratization and economic development, in the U. S. and in developing countries with the aim of sharpening the concept of “social capital” — that is, social networks, norms, institutions and trust — through sustained dialogue among social theorists and empirical researchers.

Chair
Robert David Putnam
Project
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Environmental Scarcities, State Capacity, and Civil Violence

A follow up to an earlier Academy study titled “Environmental Change and Acute Conflict,” this project examined how state capacity influences governmental responses to environmental scarcities, and potential subsequent conflict, in developing countries.

Chair
Thomas F. Homer-Dixon
Project
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Small Arms and Light Weapons

In 1994, the Committee on International Security Studies (CISS) hosted the first major international workshop on the dangers posed by the increased proliferation of small arms and light weapons to areas of conflict around the world.

Project
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The Ethics of Nationalism

The Academy co-sponsored a conference at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, that invited philosophers and political scientists to examine what was driving the global resurgence of nationalism and to discuss how the conflicts it engenders can be resolved.

Project
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The Public Television Project

This project focused on the meaning of “public interest” communication in a 500-channel marketplace, with particular emphasis on television’s failure to fulfill its potential as an educational medium.

Chairs
Newton Norman Minow and Craig L. LaMay
Project
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Emerging Norms of Justified Intervention

This multi-pronged project examined shifts in the boundaries between the internal affairs of member states whose sovereignty is protected by the United Nations Charter and those matters which the U.N. and other international organizations deem to be within their cognizance.

Project
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Preservation of Near-Earth Space for Future Generations

This project brought together physical scientists, legal experts, space program directors, economists, political scientists, and policymakers from all space-faring nations to discuss how to mitigate the problem of ever-increasing quantities of man-made orbital debris in space.

Project
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Initiatives for Children

To address a deepening crisis in the lives of America’s children, the Academy organized a steering committee to explore how the Academy could increase the nation’s commitment to and investment in children.

Chair
Howard H. Hiatt
Project
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Global Climate Change

Working with Argonne National Laboratory and the Midwest Consortium of International Security Studies, the Academy co-sponsored two conferences on global climate change, with one focusing on international security issues and the other focusing on social and economic consequences.

Chair
Harold Karan Jacobson
Project
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US-USSR Environmental Protection Institutions

Representatives of two of the world’s major industrial nations, and thus major polluters, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., met in August 1991 at the Rockefeller Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy, to discuss ways to improve environmental protection practices in the two nations.

Chairs
Charles Monroe Haar and Oleg S. Kolbasov