MITPressLog

The Political Theology of President Bush's Faith-Based Initiative

Bush's faith-based social policy is getting quite a bit of media these days.  There are many theories and opinions floating around, but Lew Daly's God and the Welfare State is the first detailed study of the theological roots of this policy in the U.S. Tomorrow afternoon at The University of Chicago Divinity School, Daly will discuss how century-old confessional ideas about the state were transformed into public policy by a small group of scholars, lawyers, and policymakers who worked closely with George W. Bush from his earliest days as governor of Texas. Neglected aspects of this lineage, he argues, lead to an anti-poverty debate that neither opponents nor proponents of Bush's efforts are prepared to have.

The discussion begins at 4:00 pm in Swift Hall, Room 106.  Additional information can be found here. 

Happy Halloween

-- X-Ray of Human Skull, c. 1920, from Ghost in the Shell: Photography and the Human Soul, 1850-2000

ITID Goes Open Access

The first MIT Press Open Access project is underway: from the latest issue forward,Information Technologies and International Development (ITID) will publish all content in an "OA" format. Supported by funding from Microsoft, this represents an exciting experiment for the journal and MIT Press; now, anyone interested in the intersection of communications technologies and development around the world can now retrieve peer-reviewed full text PDF articles from the journal's website, free of charge, from any location with internet access.

The editors of ITID - Dr. Ernest J. Wilson of the University of Maryland, and Dr. Michael L. Best of Georgia Institute of Technology - seek not merely to inform scholars interested in this emerging field; they seek to solicit the participation of individuals who might benefit from the research and proposals put forth by scholars, researchers and practitioners across the globe, independent of location or financial means. Providing open access to ITID through the best possible online environment will
help to create this wide-reaching forum for dialogue.

A Feeding Frenzy for the Brain

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The Fall 2006
MIT PRESS BOOKSTORE LOADING DOCK SALE
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DAY:    Saturday & Sunday
DATE:    October 21 & 22
TIME:    10:00am to 7:00pm
ROOM:    MIT E38, 292 Main Street, Cambridge

The MIT Press Bookstore will hold its legendary Loading Dock Sale. Literally *tons* of books will be on sale at drastically reduced prices—up to 90% off their original retail price. Can't come in the morning? Don't worry—new items will be added throughout the course of this two day extravaganza.

Come enjoy snacks, balloons, prizes...and most importantly...

HUGE SAVINGS on:
MIT Press overstock
damaged books (minor scratches and dings)
out-of-print MIT Press books
journals & magazines
other publishers' overstock
plus much more...

For parking or event information call 253-5249, email [email protected],
or check here.

Garbage Town Hall

What should Toronto do about its trash?  Come to MaRS  on Saturday October 21st at 2:00 pm to help answer this critical question.

Alphabet City is calling on students, activists, researchers, and concerned citizens of every stripe to come to MaRS and help us answer this most critical question for the city: what should we do about our garbage? The Town Hall will be facilitated by a team of MBA students from the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, members of the Net Impact club, which works to advance corporate social responsibility. The event will be connected live to the larger community through an on-site blog operated by Robert Ouellette of the Reading Toronto website. 

Admission to the Garbage Town Hall is free. Alphabet City's  TRASH will be available at the door ($20, tax included). TRASH is your ticket for free admission to all TRASH festival events.

TRASH festival art exhibitions continue at the Drake Hotel, the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, David Mirvish Books, and Susan Hobbs Gallery. Here's a full festival schedule. 

The MMOGs are coming!

Perhaps you are already aware of the massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) phenomenon. Perhaps you are an active MMOG participant. If so, I’m sure you realize that MMOGs are going to take over the world. And I don’t mean the virtual world. It has already happened in South Korea, where top players are more famous than rockstars and parents actually encourage their children to game to relieve stress and hone their strategic thinking skills. In a recent article in the New York Times, Seth Schiesel describes the overwhelming domination that MMOGs have in the South Korean social scene. Yes, that’s right, social scene. While most people (outside of South Korea) assume that these online games are isolating and alienating, the players disagree. In South Korea there are thousands of  “PC bangs,” which are similar to the near extinct arcade, where gamers hang out in both the real world and the virtual world.

In her new book Play Between Worlds, T.L. Taylor explores the blurring of offline and online life. She draws on her own experience as an EverQuest player (as a female Gnome Necromancer) and extensive research to illustrate the complex social networks in the MMOG world as well as the broader cultural issues that arise from computer-mediated communication. Here is an excerpt from the first chapter:

I am returning to Boston for a convention after having moved away a few years earlier. When I lived in the area during the 1990s, I several times found myself making my way to a downtown hotel—for a twenty-fifth Internet anniversary celebration, a popular regional science fiction convention, or a virtual reality (VR) show. This time I am heading to the Park Plaza Hotel for an event that seems to link these previous forays together. I am going to an EverQuest convention. EverQuest (EQ) is a massively multiplayer online game (MMOG), which launched commercially in March 1999 and hosts hundreds of thousands of players who participate in a virtual game world in real time using the Internet. Using avatars of Gnomes, Elves, and a variety of other fantasy-inspired characters, players move through a vast 3-D landscape and battle mythical creatures with magic and virtual swords. Within a block of the hotel. I begin seeing people wearing nametags—typical enough for a convention— but I quickly notice something different. The names written on them are odd sounding and seem to contain arcane information. From this small detail alone I know I am at the right place. I slip on my own badge declaring my game character name, my server, and my (by then defunct) guild. Now identified as “Iona, Bailerbents, Hidden Lore,” I quickly feel the silent shift from outsider to fellow gamer.

The Rise of Social Neuroscience

In a recent issue of Science, Sarah Jayne Blakemore comments that “social neuroscience has come from almost nothing to be one of the most flourishing research topics in neurobiology.”  She goes on to discuss MIT Press' Social Neuroscience series of edited volumes, with a focus on the third volume in the series, Social Neuroscience: People Thinking about Thinking People, edited by John Cacioppo, Penny Visser, and Cynthia Pickett.   She looks at how the contributors handle questions such as: Do dedicated cognitive and neural mechanisms exist for understanding and interacting with other people?  And are social cognitive processes are fundamentally different from general cognitive processes (attention, perception, memory, etc)? 

Blakemore may just be on to something with her claims that social neuroscience is gaining influence.  The relationship between personal networks and physical health was also the topic of an article by Daniel Goleman in the New York Times last week.   Goleman discussed the topic of emotional healing with John T. Cacioppo, Director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Chicago and editor of Social Neuroscience. Cacioppo comments:

The emotional status of our main relationships has a significant impact on our overall pattern of cardiovascular and neuroendoctrine activity.  This radically expands the scope of biology and neuroscience from focusing on a single body or brain to looking at the interplay between two at a time.  In short, my hostility bumps up you blood pressure, your nurturing love lowers mine.  Potentially, we are each other’s biological enemies or allies.   

Look for more on this topic in future volumes of the Social Neuroscience series, but the first three volumes, Foundations in Social Neuroscience, Essays in Social Neuroscience, and Social Neuroscience, provide a good introduction to the neurobiological foundations of interactions among humans.

Exploring Technologized Humanity

Sensorium, a new two-part exhibition organized by the MIT List Visual Arts Center, explores various ways in which artists address the influence of technology on the senses. The impact of new technology has reshuffled the established hierarchy of the senses and radically changed people's lives. The art in Sensorium captures the aesthetic attitude of this hybrid moment when modernist segmentation of the senses is giving way to dramatic multi-sensory mixes or transpositions. The artists in the exhibition respond and question the implications of this significant epochal shift.

The List Center (located in Cambridge, MA) will celebrate the opening of Part 1 on Thursday, October 12, from 5:30-7:30 p.m. On Friday, October 13, Caroline A. Jones will moderate "Sensorium: A Public Discussion" at MIT's Bartos Theatre at 6 p.m., featuring artists Mathieu Briand, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, and Sissel Tolaas along with Sensorium curators Bill Arning, Jane Farver, Yuko Hasegawa, and Marjory Jacobson. Jones is also the editor of the Sensorium catalogue, co-published by the List Center and the MIT Press.

Part 1 of the exhibition runs until December 31, 2006; Part 2 will be shown from February 8 - April 8, 2007.

The Truth Behind Fiction

If you've ever met someone who would rather make up an elaborate false answer to a question, rather than say, "I don't know", you may have experienced an example of confabulation. Confabulation happens when one fails to recognize a false answer as fantasy rather than reality. William Hirstein's latest book, Brain Fiction, looks into this phenomenon, which has been getting a lot of media attention lately.  BoingBoing's David Pescovitz encourages you to check it out in this post. 

Doonesbury at MIT

If you've been reading Doonesbury for the past few weeks, you know that Alex Doonesbury has enrolled at MIT (class of 2010).  Today, on Slate's Doonesbury Daily Dose, Alex discovers the Frank O. Gehry-designed Stata Center while walking through campus:

For the backstory behind the buiding of this widely discussed and often misunderstood building, check out Nancy Joyce's Building Stata.

cartoon: Univerisal Press Syndicate @ 2006 G.B. Trudeau