This paper was submitted for “Political Science 20: World Politics” with Professor Richard Anderson in Spring 2009.

In the international system, there are various lenses or perspectives to view war and conflict and the intentions or rationale behind it. There are three dominant perspectives that exist: the realist, liberal and identity perspectives. I will focus on the realist and liberal perspectives only. In War and Peace in Zaire/Congo: Analyzing and Evaluating Intervention 1996-1997 , the analysis of United States and French intervention or lack thereof is explained through a mix of the realist and liberal perspectives, noting both the power struggle in Central Africa and the economic interests and failed negotiations.

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This column was first published in the UCLA Daily Bruin on April 3, 2009.

I’ve always wanted to be a meteorologist.

The forecast? Cloudy. Well, the technological forecast, anyway. The next big Internet innovation is cloud computing.

In this case, the “cloud” represents the intricacies of all of the interconnected computers on the Internet. Cloud computing is a way to store your data on the Internet and make it accessible anywhere, through any computer.

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This column was first published in the UCLA Daily Bruin on March 16, 2009.

In the spirit of the World Wide Web’s 20th birthday last Friday, I’d like to celebrate my favorite thing on the Web right now: Twitter.

On the surface, it is deceptively simple. It’s a social network and a micro-blogging tool in which you exchange 140-character updates with your “followers.” These blurbs are publicly visible by default, but can be restricted to just your friends.

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This paper was submitted for “Global Studies 100A: Globalization – Concepts and History” with Professor Russell Burgos, Professor David Rigby, Professor Dominic Thomas and Aron Ballard in Winter 2009.

Globalization will strengthen the United States absolutely and not only at the expense of other actors. In the past and currently, the US has benefited economically and politically, however unfairly, from smaller and weaker economies. In the long run, the US – as the nation-state becomes more relevant again – will remain a leading world power, but in a different context. In analyzing the changing role of the nation-state and the economic logic of governance, I believe that the US will be expected to participate and more importantly, lead, in a plurilaterialist system, as proposed by Philip Cerny, alongside potential super powers even if it requires learning the limits of its hegemony.

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This column was first published in the UCLA Daily Bruin on February 2, 2009.

The information highway just got a little more crowded. There are now more than 1 billion people on the Internet, according to comScore, an Internet research firm. The Internet’s democratization of information has made a seemingly infinite amount of knowledge easily accessible. However, this also has its pitfalls.

Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the Internet, wrote, “The notion that the world’s knowledge is literally at your fingertips is very compelling and is very beguiling.”

The question remains: Is the Internet making us stupid?

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