MITPressLog

“Eighteen Years in the Making”

Ellen Faran, Director of The MIT Press, reflects on last week’s PROSE Awards ceremony.

By coincidence, “eighteen years in the making” described each of the two books featured at the PROSE awards ceremony in Washington, DC last week. The PROSE awards recognize excellence in professional and scholarly publishing and are judged by distinguished industry experts. This year’s engaging ceremony provided, along with the chance to applaud several MIT Press category winners*, many good reminders about the things we value in scholarly publishing.        

Last year’s winner of the top prize, the R.R. Hawkins Award, was Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade by Eltis et al., a comprehensive reference work published by Yale University Press. At this year’s awards ceremony, we saw a new short film about the making of the Atlas. I can’t report on the details of this process, of which I have only a fuzzy grasp, but my lasting impressions from the film are the large collaborative team involved (including funders, scholars, cartographers, and the Press); and that team’s clear vision of the book form as superbly effective in presenting this material (to accompany an openly-available database). These impressions call to mind MIT Press’ Atlas of Science by Katy Börner, another Atlas that featured collaborative effort and vision behind its making.

The 2012 Hawkins award went to The Diffusion Handbook: Applied Solutions for Engineers by Thambynayagam, published by McGraw Hill. My grasp of this highly complex, 2,000-page hardcover book is even fuzzier, but I was struck by its evident usefulness for its technical audience and by the author’s invention of a new visual icon system for organizing the solutions he presents (the book contains a 125-page table of contents using these icons!).

The Diffusion Handbook reminded me of several of our own completely unique works, books whose new concepts required custom editorial solutions and/or breathtakingly detailed production work. These include Shape by George Stiny, Color for the Sciences by Jan Koenderink, Aaaaw to Zzzzzd by John Bevis, and The Book of Michael of Rhodes, volumes 1-3, edited by David McGee, Alan Stahl, and Pamela Long. Likely some of these were eighteen years (or more) in the making, as well.

 

*MIT Press 2011 PROSE Award category winners are  Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes by Louise A. Mozingo (Architecture & Urban Planning); The Fate of Greenland:  Lessons from Abrupt Climate Change by Philip Conkling, Richard Alley, Wallace Broecker and George Denton (Earth Sciences); and When Johnny and Jane Come Marching Home: How All of Us Can Help Veterans by Paula J. Caplan (Psychology).

Honorable Mentions include Helvetica and the New York City Subway System: The True (Maybe) Story by Paul Shaw (Architecture & Urban Planning); Artists’ Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art by Gwen Allen (Art History & Criticism); Unlocking Energy Innovation: How America Can Build a Low-Cost, Low-Carbon Energy System by Richard K. Lester and David M. Hart (Business, Finance & Management); and Engineering Systems: Meeting Human Needs in a Complex Technological World by Olivier L. de Weck, Daniel Roos and Christopher L. Magee (Engineering & Technology).

 

What's the Value of Twitter?

As more and more of the value that companies are creating is not showing up on their balance sheets and revenues, it's clear that we need to start paying attention to non-market transactions and exchanges of digital goods and information.  Wired for Innovation's Erik Brynjolfsson talks with BusinessWeek's Reena Jana about how important this is to the economy. 

Listen to the podcast here.  Watch for the book your favorite bookstore in September

Our economists on the financial crisis

As the tumult continues for the global financial system, news shows are mining the insights of economists who can explain in understandable language what's happened and what the likely long-term consequences. Given that recent events have required most of us to play catch up on the meaning of complex derivatives and credit swaps, you can't have too many.

Two Press authors have gone on public radio in recent days to offer their perspectives. On Monday, Barry Eichengreen was a panelist on The Diane Rehm Show, discussing the G-7 summit and prospects for the new global economy. Eichengreen teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, and is the author or editor of six books with the Press. And yesterday, Frederic Mishkin - a former Fed governor and the author of Monetary Policy Strategy - was a guest on On Point, discussing America's place in the world after the crisis.

Both shows are archived for streaming and downloading - Diane Rehm here and On Point here.

Oh, and did we mention that Paul Krugman won the Nobel Prize? And that while he was doing all that fancy work on trade geography he was our author? We did? OK - never mind.

New Dean of UC Berkeley's Hass School of Business

Richard K. Lyons, the chief learning officer of Goldman Sachs, New York, was named the 14th dean of the University of California, Berkeley's Haas School of Business, Chancellor Robert Birgeneau announced today.                  

Lyons holds a professorship at the Haas School and served as acting dean of the school in 2004/05. He succeeds Tom Campbell, an economist, a former Stanford Law School professor, and former Congressman, who led the Haas School since 2002.  Lyons is the author of The Microstructure Approach to Exchange Rates .   

Congratulations Professor Lyons!  More information on Lyons and his new position (including a brief video) can be found here. 

Extra Credit

 

As 1.7 million freshmen enter college campuses this fall, many of them with brand new credit cards, it might prove useful to brush up on this industry. Credit-card companies offer rewards for airline miles, cash back, and now a new card that gives 1% cash back to reduce greenhouse gases, combined with recent revelations of dodgy business practices it is understandable to ask, “How did we get here?”

Paying with Plastic explores more than the history of credit cards, it examines the industry’s evolving structure, lending practices, and how e-commerce could dramatically impact the future of credit cards. The authors, both of whom have researched the industry for more than 25 years, have created the definitive source on the credit card industry.

The Secrets of Selling

This weekend's 'Five Best' series in the Wall Street Journal focuses on the "secrets of selling":  Steve Cohn lists the top five books about selling.  #1?  Marshall McCluhan's Understanding Media.  Named the patron saint of Wired Magazine, media theorist Marshall McCluhan coined the phrases "the medium is the message" and the "global village".  According to Cohn:
...the most brilliant marketing mind of all belonged to Marshall McLuhan. "Understanding Media" is a timeless analysis of how language, speech and technology shape human behavior in the era of mass communication. The book is a cautionary tale for marketers today who hear the Web's siren call and ignore the power of the spoken word. Whether heard onstage, over the phone, or on radio or TV, McLuhan says, the spoken word is ultimately much more powerful than the written. Part anthropologist, part psychologist, part behavioral scientist, McLuhan ponders many other aspects of how we connect, such as the persuasive powers of typography. He was a genius who understood why mass media holds us in its grip and never lets go.

Save Yourselves

Much has been made of recent news that in 2005, for the first time since the Great Depression, Americans registered a negative annual personal savings rate. We are spending more than we are earning and accumulating greater debt. Experts cite a number of possible causes including rising housing and health care costs, a consumer culture that relies heavily on credit, and the historically low interest rates which have prevailed for the past several years (and provided less of an incentive to put money away).

Boston University economics professor Laurence Kotlikoff has spent decades studying spending and saving habits. In his book The Coming Generational Storm, co-authored with Scott Burns, he warns of the potentially disastrous fiscal crisis that awaits the U.S. as a result of the widening gap between total projected federal expenditures and total projected federal taxes. He is also the co-developer of ESPlanner, financial planning software that calculates a household's highest sustainable living standard and the savings and insurance needed to maintain that living standard. Despite the consensus opinion that we collectively will be in dire fiscal straits upon retirement, Kotlikoff considers the possibility that financial planning calculators such as ESPlanner are advising people to save too much. In the June 5th edition of Forbes, Kotlikoff argues that the estimates exceed anticipated retirement spending habits, thus causing consumers to take more risks with their current investing and savings plans. The full article is available here.

This is Not Your Father's Philanthropy

Mary Ellen Capek and Molly Mead, authors of Effective Philanthropy: Organizational Success through Deep Diversity and Gender Equality, talk about how a new understanding of diversity and gender equality can strengthen organizations and increase public benefit.

Why is philanthropy important today?

Although philanthropy is increasingly common in many countries, the U.S. has the most institutionalized history of philanthropy—driven at least in part by federal income-tax exemptions for contributions to organizations that are certified "charitable" or "nonprofit" by state governments. In 2004, more than 66,000 foundations with over $476.7 billion in assets gave an estimated $32.4 billion in grants to nonprofit organizations to support a variety of activities, including research, health, education, arts, and culture as well as both systemic and charitable efforts to alleviate poverty and improve people’s lives. Foundation resources are money that would otherwise be added to federal and state treasuries, money otherwise taxed and used for public benefit. For this reason alone, the public should know more about how foundations are managed. By virtue of their "power of the purse" as well as more subtle forms of influence, these foundations are key players in U.S. social, economic, and public policy and are also increasingly influential internationally. So for all these reasons, philanthropy is important to know more about. And when foundations learn to function effectively, the potential for public benefit is tremendous.

Your book is called Effective Philanthropy. What do you mean by "effective" philanthropy?

While many [philanthropic] foundations, especially larger, professionally staffed foundations, work responsibly, collegially, and for "the common good," many more—an estimated five out of six U.S. foundations—are unstaffed and, for want of a better word, idiosyncratic because they are influenced by family members on their boards or financial advisors who may or may not have "the common good" as part of their portfolio. Given their inherently elite status with so few outside pressures to change, foundations are the least likely organizations to model cutting-edge effectiveness initiatives.

Effective philanthropy succeeds at amassing, managing, then allocating financial and human resources in ways that have the greatest positive impact in the sectors that foundations choose to fund. To allocate resources effectively, foundations must have vision and strategies for their grant making that allow them to analyze issues and concerns they want to influence, identifying both challenges and potential resources. They must be able to find the nonprofit organizations most likely to produce the results they intend. They must be able to structure their grants in ways that will be most useful to their grantees. And they must evaluate what they do to ensure they are having the intended impacts. The most important findings from our research revealed links between foundation effectiveness and institutionalizing nuanced understandings of diversity, what in the book we call "deep diversity," including gender.

A New Journal in Town

We're pleased to announce the launch of a new quarterly journal,Education Finance and Policy (EFP). This joint venture between the American Education Finance Association and The MIT Press will address topics in a burgeoning field attracting the attention of increasing numbers of policy makers and analysts.

Edited by David N. Figlio of the University of Florida and David H. Monk of Pennsylvania State University, the first several issues of Education Finance and Policy include important new research contributions on topics such as charter school effectiveness, the education of immigrant students, dynamics in the teacher workforce, higher education finance, and the fiscal burden of school accountability.

Articles from the current (inaugural) issue are now available for free online here.

Talking Innovation

The OpenBusiness blog posted an interview with Eric von Hippel, author of Democratizing Innovation.  They discussed how corporations are making use of  new user-centered innovation to improve the design and manufacturing of new products and services.  In the interview, von Hippel describes what the democratization of innovation means for traditional business models and how larger corporations can adopt the practices of smaller ones to get ahead:

OB: In your book you highlight that the modus operandi of businesses is changing and give as an example Open Source development. And even though it seems a great example of democratized innovation the question remains how business models work, if the core product – software – is distributed for free. What will drive innovation in this space?

Eric von Hippel: I think in the first place motivations are non-commercial. Users who innovate do so basically because they have a need that they cannot fill with available commercial products. Their major reward is the in-house use of what they have developed and recognition by their peers. Innovators in the open-source field gain reputation by publicly reporting their innovations. Its true the core product is free, but its wrong to assume that this means there is no economic activity. Just look at the case of the Apache server, which is used by major corporations. They pay developers to participate in the process, because they benefit from the product. To put it differently: economic activity moves from the Microsoft layer – controlling every step in the development and distribution process in a closed way – to the Open Source or Linux layer. It is still economic activity, just the business models are different.

The entire interview can be read here.