MITPressLog

Access Controlled Poster Censored at IGF Meeting

 A reception hosted by Open Net Initiative (ONI) was rattled by the United Nations-sponsored Internet Governance Forum (IGF) security, who objected to a poster advertising Access Controlled, which is based on ONI research and due out in March.  "The poster was thrown on the floor and we were told to remove it because of the reference to China and Tibet. We refused, and security guards came and removed it. The incident was witnessed by many," Pakistani delegate, Shahzad Ahmed reported.

The poster promoting Access Controlled was removed by the IGF's organizers because a sentence in the poster apparently violated UN policy. The sentence in question reads, "The first generation of Internet controls consisted largely of building firewalls at key Internet gateways; China's famous "Great Firewall of China" is one of the first national Internet filtering systems."

Co-author Ronald Deibert spoke with the BBC about the incident this morning, saying "If we are not allowed to discuss topics such as internet censorship, surveillance and privacy at a forum on internet governance, then what is the point of the IGF?

Professor Deibert and Rafal Rohozinski also posted their comments on YouTube.

Would you go to Art School?

How should artists be educated? And is it worth attending a $35,000-a-year art school so that one graduates in debt into an uncertain market?

The last major change in art education came nearly a century ago, when the German Bauhaus was formed. Today, dramatic changes in the art world, combined with a revolution in information technology, raise fundamental questions about the education of today's artists. Nevertheless, an estimated 30,000 Master of Fine Arts degrees are granted each year.

Those in New York can join a discussion about the future of art schools with the editor and contributors of Art School, a book that looks at these issues. All are invited to join the conversation this Sunday, November 15, in the Rose Auditorium at Cooper Union's incredible new 41 Cooper Square building.

Three conversations will take place, discussing the most pressing issues facing the transmission of cultural knowledge today and for the future. Speakers and moderators include Dennis Adams, Thierry de Duve, Shirin Neshat, Hans Haacke, Boris Groys, Liam Gillick, Saskia Bos, Steven Henry Madoff, Ernesto Pujol, Ute Meta Bauer, Paul Ramirez Jonas, Jeffrey Schnapp, Anton Vidokle, Matthew Higgs, Charles Renfro, Dana Schutz, and Brian Sholis.

Schedule:

1:00 p.m.
Flows of Knowledge, Infections, Temporary States
Steven Henry Madoff, moderator
Ute Meta Bauer
Thierry de Duve
Boris Groys
Jeffrey Schnapp
Anton Vidokle

2:15 p.m.
The Usefulness of the Academy, Learning and Doing—or Nobody Asked You to Do Nothing
Brian Sholis, moderator
Paul Ramirez Jonas
Matthew Higgs
Shirin Neshat
Dana Schutz

3:30 p.m.
Social Context and the Role of the Academy in the 21st Century
Saskia Bos, moderator
Dennis Adams
Liam Gillick
Hans Haacke
Ernesto Pujol
Charles Renfro

Free and open to the public.

Frederick P. Rose Auditorium
The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art
41 Cooper Square
New York, NY 10003

Miami Book Fair International

The 26th annual Miami Book Fair International kicked off this week, and tomorrow its Street Fair begins. The Street Fair includes the Festival of Authors, with more than 350 authors reading and discussing their work, along with about 250 publishers, booksellers, and exhibitors. A good time should be had by all.

Abdellah Taïa, author of Salvation Army, and one of the "Best 39 Arab Writers Under 40", will be part of the session "An Evening of Francophone Literature" on Friday at 8pm. If you're in the Miami area, be sure to stop by.

Neuroscience 2009

Promotions Coordinator, Allison Hoch, was one of four MIT Pressers manning our booth at the Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting in Chicago last month.   Here are some highlights:

Society for Neuroscience is one of my favorite meetings to attend as an exhibitor. The folks at this meeting - all 30,000+ of them - spend plenty of time on the exhibits floor and especially along publisher's row. Our reputation seems to proceed us - our strong history in this field garners us a lot of attention. I love getting to interact with our customers who seem as equally passionate about buying our books as I am about selling them. It was a thrill to attend this conference for the fourth time and be greeted by familiar faces returning to our booth to purchase new titles and beloved favorites for their friends or students.

 
This is the largest conference we attend and one of the longest; my co-workers and I spent a week in Chicago where this year's Society for Neuroscience meeting was held. Two days of travel, one day to set-up, four days of selling, and one day off in-between. The days in the convention center start for us at 8:30 am when we arrive early to set-up our computers and end at 5:30 when we finally close up shop and usher the last straggling customers out of the booth. This year things were so busy that we even brought packed lunches to eat between sales. And we celebrated successful work days with hot pastrami, deep-dish pizza, or one of the famous Illinois "Horseshoe" sandwiches.

This year was a record one for us - we practically sold out of every title we brought. Whether it was our new 30% conference discount or just a hunger for knowledge, we'd be hard-pressed to say, but the economy did not seem to waylay the majority of our customers. As always, our bestseller was Ramon y Cajal's Advice for a Young Investigator but we also saw a lot of interest in our new titles: Charles Gross' A Hole in the Head, Why We Cooperate by Michael Tomasello,  Computational Modeling Methods for Neuroscientists by Erik De Schutter, Wednesday is Indigo Blue by Richard Cytowic and David Eagleman, and of course Michael Gazzaniga's new book (4th) editon of The Cognitive Neurosciences.

Charles Gross Reading in SoCal

MIT Press author and Princeton neuroscientist Charles Gross reads from his latest book, A Hole in the Head tonight at The Book Works in Southern California. If you're in the neighborhood, stop in and listen to this great storyteller.

Another Brick in the Wall?

This coming Monday marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and much hoopla has been planned: a grand public party at the Brandenburg Gate, and a new symbolic falling of the Wall to take place in the form of 1000 giant dominoes that will be toppled along the strip that had once divided East Germany from West. U2’s free on-site concert in Berlin to commemorate the occasion has given rise to some interesting outrage,though: a 2-meter high metal barrier has been installed around where the concert is to take place, in order to block viewing by those who missed out on obtaining any of the 10,000 free tickets. The unpleasant irony of the new barrier points to the contradictions and conflict always to be faced and addressed in any country and political climate when walls are addressed, be they mental or physical. It is in recognition of these contradictions that Semiotext(e) has just rereleased its infamous “German issue,” the 1982 installment of the journal that explored all the invisible walls of suspicion, rebellion, hatred, and hope within the cities of Berlin and New York, with the issue itself serving as a conflict-ridden communicative wall between the two. The German Issue evoked the wall through a horizontal division by means of a visual wall of photographs of the Berlin Wall intermingled with Wall Street. In the journal’s memorable and substantive dialogue between Semiotext(e) founder Sylvère Lotringer and the now deceased German dramatist and author Heiner Müller, Lotringer commented: “The wall of history is totally visible here. I’d rather see it that way than in people’s minds.” As the dominoes tumble this Monday, it is good, then, to reflect on the “Mauer im kopf” [the wall in the head] every political and social nation and body must still contend with. The Wall is down, but a new look at The German Issue raises the question as to whether the “German Issue” may today just be everyone’s issue.

Alphabet City Festival

If you are in Toronto this weekend, visit the Alphabet City Festival. This year's theme is water, which coincides with the newly published book. 

The festival will include gallery exhibitions, a book launch and signing, and performances.

Mataric in the New Yorker

This week's New Yorker features a lengthy profile of Maja Matarić, USC computer science professor and author of The Robotics Primer. New Yorker writer Jerome Groopman writes about Matarić's work with stroke and Alzheimer’s patients and autistic children. She and her lab are trying to design machines that can engage directly with such patients and encourage both physical and cognitive rehabilitation.

This excerpt from Groopman's piece shows how human interaction with robots has progressed light years from the Star Wars-Isaac Asimov images that many of us still carry around in our heads:

A woman I will call Mary, a schoolteacher in Los Angeles, suffered a stroke in 2001, when she was forty-six. She spent six months working with a physical therapist at the U.S.C. Medical Center to regain strength in her weakened right arm and leg, before taking part in Matarić’s study. I watched a videotape of her session with Matarić. Mary, who was dressed in a white blouse and dark slacks, shuffled slowly to a desk stacked with magazines. There was a shelf nearby, set above shoulder level. She looked at the robot, several feet away, and waved to it. “Come over here,” she said warmly.

The robot, which was three feet high and looked a little like R2-D2, in “Star Wars,” scooted close to her and stopped. “Very good,” Mary said.

Set on a mobile base with rotary wheels, the robot could turn in any direction and move around the room, guided by sonar. It tracked Mary’s movement with a scanning laser range finder; a pan-tilt-zoom camera allowed it to look at Mary, turn away, or shake its head. A speaker, embedded in the robot’s side, produced prerecorded speech and sound effects.

Glancing at the robot, Mary lifted a magazine from the top of the pile and guided it into a rack on top of the shelf. As soon as the magazine was in place, the robot emitted a beep. During the next few minutes, Mary moved each magazine, one by one, to the rack. Gradually, she increased her pace, and the beeps from the robot came faster. Mary began to laugh.

The whole thing's fascinating - read it here. Dying to know more about the book? Dig the video!

Journalist Amira Hass wins IWMF Lifetime Achievement Award

Israeli journalist Amira Hass (author of Reporting from Ramallah) is best known for her reports on Palestinian affairs in the West Bank and Gaza - and for living in those places while writing about them. She was recently honored with a lifetime achievement award from International Women's Media Foundation:

For almost 20 years, Amira Hass has written critically about both Israeli and Palestinian authorities. A reporter and columnist for Ha’aretz Daily, she has demonstrated her ability to defy boundaries of gender, ethnicity and nationality in her pursuit of the truth in her reporting. In covering the Palestinian Occupied Territories, her goal has been to provide her readers with detailed information about Israeli policies and especially that of restrictions of the freedom of movement. For many years, she made her home first in Gaza City and then in Ramallah.

Watch Hass's acceptance speech here, or read more about her and the award in The Guardian, Huffington Post, or Democracy Now!.

Special Issue of Innovations

In conjunction with the clean energy address that President Obama is delivering at MIT today, MIT Press is releasing essays from the soon to be published fall special issue of Innovations journal on energy and climate solution. The pre-released essays are authored by White House Science Adviser John Holdren, 2005 Nobel Laureate in Economics Thomas Schelling, and the Director of MIT’s Washington office, William Bonvillian.

 

In his introducing to the special issue, Holdren states that the forthcoming publication is “as thorough a survey of energy and climate solutions as has yet been compiled.” Of the climate challenge, he writes:

 

“Without energy, there is no economy. Without climate, there is no environment. Without economy and environment, there is no material well-being, no civil society, no personal or national security. The overriding problem associated with these realities, of course, is that the world has long been getting most of the energy its economies need from fossil fuels whose emissions are imperiling the climate that its environment needs.”

 

Schelling, a leader in the study of climate change for over three decades, advances a new proposal for international coordination. Writing with reference to next month’s United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, Schelling states,

“Among the ideas that I do not believe will get serious attention in Copenhagen is one I see as critical to addressing the climate challenge: creating a new institutional structure to coordinate assistance from advanced industrialized countries to developing countries with the objective of transforming the way that people in the developing world produce and utilize energy.”

 

Bonvillian’s essay, co-authored with GeorgetownUniversity’s Charles Weiss, summarizes and advances the core arguments presented in the authors’ MIT Press book title Structuring an Energy Technology Revolution. Bonvillian and Weiss argue that the transformation of the energy technology infrastructure represents an unprecedented challenge for policy-makers as well as for technological innovators:

“Where complex technology sectors like energy are involved, we need to have Congress legislate standard packages of incentives and support across common technology launch areas, so that some technology neutrality is preserved and the optimal emerging technology has a chance to prevail.”

 

The Director of the MIT Press, Ellen Faran, states that “The Innovations special issue reflects the commitment of MIT and the MIT Press to promote innovative solutions to global issues and to encourage the widest dissemination of its scholarship.”

 

Sample articles from the issue follow below. Members of the media wishing to see an advance copy of the issue should contact: editors@innovationsjournal.net.