MITPressLog

Grad Roundup

School's out, which means no more teachers, but definitely more books. Here are a few titles that we think are great for graduates, whether preparing articles for submission to professional journals or looking for a guide to architecture:

Atlas of Science by Katy Börner

Allowing us to visualize scientific results, science maps help us make sense of the avalanche of data generated by scientific research today. Atlas of Science serves as a visual index to the evolution of modern science and as an introduction to "the science of science"—charting the trajectory from scientific concept to published results.  

Advice for a Young Investigator by Santiago Ramon y Cajal

In addition to leaving a legacy of unparalleled scientific research, Cajal sought to educate the novice scientist about how science was done and how he thought it should be done. This is an anecdotal guide for the perplexed new investigator as well as a refreshing resource for the old pro.

101 Things I Learned in Architecture School by Matthew Frederick

These 101 concise lessons in design, drawing, the creative process, and presentation provide a much-needed primer in architectural literacy, making concrete what too often is left nebulous or open-ended in the architecture curriculum.

The Atlas of New Librarianship by R. David Lankes

Lankes recasts librarianship and library practice using the fundamental concept that knowledge is created though conversation. New librarians approach their work as facilitators of conversation; they seek to enrich, capture, store, and disseminate the conversations of their communities.

Art School by Steven Henry Madoff

The essays in the book range over continents, histories, traditions, experiments, and fantasies of education. Accompanying the essays are conversations with such prominent artist/educators as John Baldessari  and Marina Abramović, as well as questionnaire responses from a dozen important artists—among them Mike Kelley and Shirin Neshat—about their own experiences as students.

A Guide for the Young Economist by William Thompson

For young economists working on their dissertations, preparing their first articles for submission to professional journals, getting ready for their first presentations at conferences and job seminars, or facing their first refereeing assignments.

 

"Pedestrian Accelerators"

It’s Bay State Bike Week! Here’s a bit of bicycling history from David Gordon Wilson’s Bicycling Science:

It seems likely that the most important discovery in the development of the bicycle was made by chance. Baron Karl von Drais, a resident of Mannheim, studied mathematics and mechanics at Heidelberg and was an inventor of a binary digit system, a paper-strip piano-music recorder, a typewriter, and—during a series of bad harvests since 1812—two human-powered “driving machines” on four wheels. In 1815 the Indonesian volcano Tambora exploded, expelling the greatest known mass of dust in the atmosphere (estimated at seven times the amount from Krakatoa in 1883) and making 1816 “the year without a summer” in central Europe and the New England states. Starvation was widespread, and horses were killed for lack of fodder, the price of oats then playing the same role as the oil price today…The constant shortage of horses led von Drais to develop his two-wheeled “running machine” with front-wheel steering from the outset…

However it was attained, the major discovery in bicycle history had been made, and it was scarcely recorded. Von Drais’s vehicle was, however, noted in the German newspapers in 1817 and those of the United Kingdom in 1818 and the United States in 1819. In Paris, where von Drais obtained a five-year patent it was called le vélocipède or the Draisienne, misspelled “Tracena” in the United States initially. In Britain it became known as the Pedestrian Accelerater and was nicknamed Hobby Horse. (Live horses needed constant care. These mechanical “horses” could be used or left at will and were thus treated as a hobby.)

Despite some initial skepticism and ridicule, von Drais was soon demonstrating that he could exceed the speed of runners and that of the horse-pulled “posts,” even over journeys of two or three hours. His ability to balance when going down inclines and to steer at speed must have been important in this, but it awed the unathletic majority of the population. He indeed must have the principal claim to being the originator of balance on two wheels by steering.

 

A Q&A with Paula Caplan

May is Mental Health Awareness month, and, fittingly, The New York Times addressed the U.S. Court of Appeals’ strong support of veterans’ complaints about mental health services on its At War blog yesterday. In her new book, When Johnny and Jane Come Marching Home, Paula Caplan explains why war trauma shouldn’t be called a mental illness, questions the effectiveness of therapy for veterans, and provides alternatives for how we can help veterans returning from wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

What are some of the risks associated with sending veterans to therapy?

First, veterans will tell you that they worry that having a psychiatric diagnosis and a record of treatment for a mental disorder will impair their career progress in or out of the military, and they are right in believing that that is a substantial risk. Second, since mental illness is generally thought to imply trouble that comes from within, to call the devastating effects of war a mental illness is a serious error that leads veterans to consider themselves sick for having understandable, human reactions to the horrors they have experienced. It adds to their burdens, and it leads us in wrong directions—such as using psychiatric medications that may help some people but often cause severe harm and certainly get in the way of our trying to find out what really will help. Some therapists can help, of course, but statistics show that after decades of using therapy as one of the two primary courses, we still have millions of veterans from all wars who are homeless, jobless, addicted to drugs or alcohol, imprisoned for acts of violence, attempting or committing suicide, and plagued by insomnia, fear and anxiety, guilt, shame, a sense of betrayal, moral conflicts, spiritual crises, and more. So something more is needed.

How did the labels for the emotional effects of war change over the twentieth century?

In the Civil War, it was called “soldier’s heart”; in World War I, “shell shock”; in World War II, “combat fatigue”; then after the Vietnam War, “Post-traumatic Stress Disorder.” Use of the term “PTSD” masks the emotional carnage wrought by war, making it impossible for us as a society to see its full horror and thus increasing the ease with which we will allow our government to go to war next time, before seeking other routes.

How do such labels impact society’s view of veterans?

Because no term directly referring to war is part of the term "Post-traumatic Stress Disorder," it becomes a euphemism when applied to war veterans (and to others, such as rape victims, for similar reasons). There is something unseemly about using a euphemism to apply to an experience of intense horror or sorrow. To use these psychiatric euphemisms distances therapists and the loved ones of those who are traumatized from the traumatized person's experience. It isolates the latter as we move that much farther away from sharing their experience with them and from having the chance to show that we respect the fact that they have been through hell (quoted from my Psychology Today blog).

How does the term “PTSD” hide the source of suffering for servicepeople?

The term “stress” is used freely these days to apply to such things as being caught in traffic when you are late for a meeting. Thus, as noted above, use of the term “PTSD” masks the emotional carnage wrought by war. The images that come to mind when one thinks of “PTSD” do not, for the civilian, come close to the horror of the images that come to mind when one thinks of “war trauma.”

What drives people to believe that therapists can fix the emotional damage done by war?

The lobby groups such as the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association spend vast fortunes persuading the public that if you are experiencing emotional pain, it’s a therapist you need and that the therapist uses scientifically-developed and -proven techniques to alleviate that pain. They have gone far to persuade people that just about any emotional upset is a mental illness and thus requires treatment by professionals and that laypeople cannot do much to help. This is simply wrong. The drug companies have massive budgets aimed solely at persuading both the public and professionals that psychiatric drugs can alleviate emotional pain, despite the millions of war veterans who have been treated with therapy and/or psychotropic drugs and are still homeless, jobless, addicted to drugs or alcohol, unable to readjust to non-military culture and life with family and friends, imprisoned for violent conduct...or dead from suicide related to war.

What are the top three ways society can help veterans returning from wars in Afghanistan and Iraq?

The top three?! So many needed, and it's hard to prioritize, but here are some that are extremely important and certainly low-risk, compared to much of what happens in the mental health system:

(1) Listen to a veteran's story about what they have been through, how it was for them in the military, and how it has been since returning home. As part of that, try to put yourself in their position, and see if you can honestly tell them you do not think that they are crazy, that you can well imagine feeling as they do if you had experienced what they have.

(2) Look for ways to help them reconnect with the wider community. Listening to their story is a good beginning but only a beginning.

(3) See if you can help them orient toward creativity, productivity, and care (through the arts, paid work, volunteer work for others in need) as part of an explicit discussion that can take place between individuals and also in the wider society about the enormous and clashing differences between the two cultures — military/war and home — where they have lived. Moving toward creativity, productivity, and care means moving away from military hierarchies and the aims of war.

 

Freud and Mexico

Here's an excerpt from Freud’s Mexico by Rubén Gallo in honor of Cinco de Mayo (maybe Freud would have celebrated it, too!).

After the press reported Freud’s troubles in Nazi Austria, a group of activists launched a campaign to bring the professor to Mexico. The local chapter of Red Aid International sent a telegram to [President] Cárdenas, urging him to offer asylum to Freud…Over the next three weeks, the Mexican president received five more telegrams from various organizations urging him to offer Freud a safe haven. Surprisingly, all of these requests came from labor unions…Even the Union of Sugarcane Workers jumped on the bandwagon and sent a telegram…

The plan to bring Freud to Mexico did not get very far. Eduardo Hay, the Mexican Foreign Minister, replied to the telegram sent by Red Aid International, noting that President Cárdenas “had already offered to help all Austrian political refugees.” If Freud requested asylum at the Mexican Embassy, he wrote, “his application would be forwarded to the Interior Ministry.”

Had Freud accepted the hospitality extended by Mexico’s electricians and sugarcane workers, he would have probably settled in Coyoacán, the quiet neighborhood in the south of Mexico City that was home to artists and intellectuals. For old times’ sake he might have chosen to live on Calle Viena, a few doors down from the Trotskys and a short walk from Frida Kahlo’s blue house. He would have had scores of visitors and a fresh supply of new patients...[After his death] the Freud House—including the library and collection of antiquities—would be run by the Mexico City government, and visitors to Coyoacán would, in one day, have the chance to visit the houses of Kahlo, Trotsky, and Freud.

But, alas, the professor never filed his application for asylum at the Mexican Embassy.

—from Chapter 8: Freud’s Mexican Dreams, pages 326-328

James Mongan

Once again we bid farewell to an author - this time a discomfitingly recent one. James Mongan passed away yesterday at Massachusetts General Hospital after a battle with angiosarcoma, a form of cancer that affects the blood vessels. He was 69.

Jim's work on the management, delivery, and quality of medical care was both global and local. As the Boston Globe points out, he was best known in the area for lengthy tenures as the president of both Partners Health Care and Mass General. And he played a significant role in the state's pioneering health care law, passed in 2006. But as the Globe obit notes, he also served in the Carter adminstration and saw the availability of health care as a global problem to be solved globally, or at least nationally.

Both of these strands - the local and the global - come together in Chaos and Organization in Health Care, the 2009 book that Jim cowrote with his Partners colleague Tom Lee. In it they laid out their recipe for broadening access to care through the removal of waste and inefficiency caused by the rapid growth of medical technology. A better delivery model, they argue, can better equip doctors to treat the neediest patients without increasing the cost burden on the system as a whole. It was a large-scale vision, but it was dervied from Mongan and Lee's extensive experience as doctors and administrators.

As the Globe obit notes, for all his enthusiasm for the advances of medical technology, he was himself something of a Luddite. he told a reporter a few years ago that he didn't own a cell phone and never checked his own email. Yet he never wavered in his belief that he could do more to help those in need of care.

He will be missed.

In memoriam: Max Mathews

Sadly, we must bid farewell to another of our authors - in this case one whose connection to us goes back more than 40 years. Max Mathews, a legendary figure in computer music, died on April 21 in San Francisco at the age of 84. Mathews was an emeritus faculty member of Stanford University's Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at the time of his passing. He was the author or editor of seven books for us and also wrote the foreword to last year's The Audio Programming Book, edited by Richard Boulanger and Victor Lazzarini.

A thorough and detailed obituary from Stanford reveals that his pioneering path in computer music goes all the way back to 1957, when he wrote a program called "Music" that would direct an IBM mainframe computer to play a short composition. "Music" was the progenitor of future computer music programs like Csound and Cmix. He also worked with composers such as John Cage and Edgard Varese, and helped Pierre Boulez found the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in Paris in the 1970s.

A memorial service will be held at CCRMA on May 29, according to the Stanford obit, which also notes how involved he remained at the center. Here's proof - a 2010 video of Mathews demonstrating his radio baton controller program, which includes a basic history of computer music itself. Great stuff from a pioneer who will be missed.