Date & Time: Thursday October 11, 2012 – 7:30 PM

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Location: Montgomery Community College (Rockville Campus) – Humanity Building (HU), Conference Room 009 (Get Directions, Campus Map )

Speaker: Mitra M. Lore

Synopsis:

This talk focuses on designing one’s future for maximum fulfillment. More than half of the college-educated workforce of all ages report that they are unsatisfied by their careers. The majority of recent graduates are uncertain of their future direction. Half of marriages fail, and many of those that remain are less than happy. It often seems that our choices are a very limited set of options over which we have little say.

Based on her first-hand experience with hundreds of career-changers, young people choosing a career for the first time, and people both seeking and finding a more fulfilling personal life, Mitra Lore will present a view that it is possible to realize both achievement-oriented goals while, at the same time, living a life that fosters inner wellbeing.

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Date & Time: Thursday September 13, 2012 – 7:30 PM
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Location: Montgomery Community College (Rockville Campus) – Humanity Building (HU), Conference Room 009 (Get Directions, Campus Map )

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Speaker: Professor Rudi Mathhee

Language: English

Synopsis:

The decline and fall of Safavid Iran is traditionally seen as the natural outcome of the unrelieved political stagnation and moral degeneration which characterized late Safavid Iran. “Persia in Crisis” challenges this view. Rudi Matthee revisits traditional sources and introduces new ones to take a fresh look at Safavid Iran in the century preceding the fall of Isfahan in 1722, which brought down the dynasty and ushered in a long period of turbulence in Iranian history. Inherently vulnerable because of the country’s physical environment, its tribal makeup, and a small economic base, the Safavid state was fatally weakened over the course of the seventeenth century. Matthee views Safavid Iran as a network of precarious alliances subject to perpetual negotiation and the society they ruled as an uneasy balance between conflicting forces. In the later seventeenth century, this delicate balance shifted from cohesion to fragmentation. An increasingly detached, palace-bound shah; weakening links between the capital and the outlying provinces; the regime’s neglect of the military; and its short-sighted monetary policies combined to exacerbate rather than redress existing problems, leaving the country with a ruler too feeble to hold factionalism and corruption in check and a military unable to defend its borders against attack by Russians, Ottomans and Afghans. The scene was set for the Crisis of 1722.

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Date & Time: Thursday August 9, 2012 – 7:30 PM

Location: Montgomery Community College (Rockville Campus) – Humanity Building (HU), Conference Room 009 (Get Directions, Campus Map )

Speaker: Armin Kiany

Language: Farsi

Synopsis:

As the world ever increasingly relies on technology for everything from entertainment to the functioning of sophisticated industrial operations, the battlefield of the future will evolve to take advantage of this growing dependency. Nations and criminal organizations are developing capabilities to wage cyber warfare against unsuspecting and unprepared adversaries. This talk will walk you through a short history and the landscape of cyber warfare, its battlefields, worriers, techniques and motivations deriving it forward.

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