MITPressLog

dirty air

The Beijing Olympics are less than a year away, and many athletes and scientists are voicing concerns about the level of pollution and poor air quality in China. Several articles have recently appeared in the New York Times highlighting the dire health risks associated with exposure to dense, particulate-filled air. 

Clearing the Air: The Health and Economic Damages of Air Pollution in China examines the national damage caused by China's degraded air quality. This volume represents a pathbreaking, interdisciplinary U.S.-China collaboration that utilizes unique approaches to measuring and synthesizing the health and economic consequences of dirty air.   

Mun S. Ho and Chris P. Nielsen, the editors of this book, write in their introduction “With a focus on health risk, we must keep in mind that what concerns us is not the level of pollution itself, but rather the level that reaches human lungs-a distinction that fundamentally motivates and shapes this assessment. We must consider such factors as the rapid urbanization in China and how expanding cities and rural-to-urban migration locate an increasing proportion of Chinese citizenry nearer to pollution sources. In terms of total population risk, this could even outweigh whatever gains in pollution control have occurred. The crucial factor of human exposure is not often considered carefully in pollution damage assessments in China.”

Olympic athletes train under a wide array of conditions to simulate competition day, but how to train for air pollution is yet to be determined.

Wednesday Blog Watch - Design

Designers, do you know that September 4, 2007 to September 10, 2007 is Istanbul Design Week?
Boxes and Arrows, an online journal devoted to the practice, innovation, and discussion of design, maintains a calendar of design events all over the world.  The journal also recently posted a review of Bill Moggridge's Designing Interactions.

Another major current event for designers is the recent launch of a programming manual for designers: Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists.  The Processing language, for audio and visual designers, is easy to learn and use, and has been developed as an open project initiated by Ben Fry and Casey Reas.  According to a post on the mercurious blog , "Originally created as a learning tool, [Processing] is maturing through a Beta phase currently while winning tremendous support within the academic and design community. It appears to be emerging as the Sketchpad of the future". 

More details from the Processing website:

Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. It is used by students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool. Processing is developed by artists and designers as an alternative to proprietary software tools in the same domain.

A cluster of blog entries discussing the Processing language can be found here.

To see an example of Processing in action, have a look at this mesmerizing video created by Casey Reas.  More sample programs, videogames, movies, and audio files can be found in the exhibition section of the Processing website.

TURNING TWO

Our beloved child, this PressLog, is two years old today. A year ago we marked its first birthday with a breezy-bordering-on-narcissistic post patting ourselves on the back for some of our favorite postings. This time, however, in honor of the occasion, we’re treating you to…well, the same thing.

Hey, what can we say? It’s good to be the MITP. We even won a prize this year. We published our 8000^th title and started a new series of books with our friends at Boston Review. And we played lots of games – okay, we didn’t actually play any games, chained to our desks as we are, but we wrote about them – from old-fashioned games like baseball to videogames, which are fast becoming central to the cultural landscape. Our author Ian Bogost even went on TV and taught that nutty Stephen Colbert about them.

We also instituted the Wednesday Blog Watch, in which we reported on blogospheric chatter on topics near and dear to our heart. Like videogames, again, and bikes and streets and, uh, shrapnel. Not to mention our magnificent colophon. We had our eye on current events, like America’s misadventures in the developing world and the presidential campaign.

For all the gaming, this year wasn’t total fun. We did more posts than we’d like on dark, tough subjects, like a few on global warming and one on prisoner abuse. We sadly bade farewell to a few of our authors, including Jean Baudrillard, Stephen Meyer, and Bernd Becher, whose photographic achievement was, you should pardon the expression, towering.

Through it all, though, we just tried to keep it simple. And that's tough enough in this nutty world.

Thank you all so much for reading – stick around for Year Three. Next time we promise cake. Really – we swear.

Wednesday Blog Watch - rankings

Economics blogger Aaron Schiff recently calculated a ranking of popular economics blogs on his 26econ.com blogsite.  Here is his listing of the top ten.  He also recommends viewing Brian Gongol's Traffic ratings for economics websites, found here. 
In other "top ten" news, if you've ever wondered about the top-selling programming books in any given programming language, Antonio Cangiano from the blog Zen and the Art of Ruby Programming has compiled a list based on Amazon sales.  Would we be mentioning this if the MIT Press title The Little Schemer weren't the winner in the Scheme programming language category?  View the top programming book list 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.

Trinidad Carnival

In honor of this year's Cambridge Carnival (Sunday, August 26 here in Kendall Square) The MIT Press Bookstore is featuring the photography of Kathy-Ann Hart in its Main Street windows. The work, entitled "Trinidad Carnival", is an exhibition of photographs from the internationally renowned Trinidad Carnival. All photographs were shot on location in San Fernando, Trinidad, in February 2007. Stop by and take a look!

More information on the Cambridge Carnival can be found here. 

Wednesday Blog Watch - fun with mispelling

Are you a spelling snob?  Find your cure with John Maeda's Misspeller application on his Simplicity blog.  This tool allows you to type in some text, hit a 'misspell' button and it will efficiently misspell some of the words in your text.  According to Maeda, he's "not sure what this could be useful for", and neither are we - but we had fun with it anyway.   
The Misspeller is not the only application that Maeda has posted on his blog.   Games, mazes, fonts, and other java goodies from the author of The Laws of Simplicity are all available here. 
 

becoming green

According to Grist Magazine, an online publication dedicated to environmental news, Tufts University is one of the top “15 Green Colleges and Universities.” You may wonder how a College or University gets to be “green.” In Degrees that Matter: Climate Change and the University, Ann Rappaport and Sarah Hammond Crieghton, drawing on almost a decade of experience leading the Tufts Climate Initiative and other institutional “greening” efforts, provide both the basic facts and more detailed information about climate issues on campuses and offer practical guidance for those who want to motivate change and inspire action within complex organizations. Here is a short excerpt about the beginning of the Tufts Climate Initiative:

Stories of climate action are emerging on campuses across the country: stories of grassroots efforts of  edicated individuals, top-down institutional responses, and creative collaborations with governments, non- government organizations, and the private sector. These groups are blazing the trail for others to follow to take action to reduce climate-altering gas emissions. The Tufts story begins in 1998, with William Moomaw, professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and Kelly Sims, then a master’s candidate at Fletcher. Moomaw is the senior director of the Tufts Institute for the Environment and an active contributor to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Sims came to Fletcher after years as Science Policy Director at Ozone Action in Washington, D.C. They both had become frustrated and angry at the U.S. government’s refusal to act on climate change. Moomaw converted his frustration into a challenge: “What if we are joined by others in making a commitment to meeting or beating the emission reductions associated with the Kyoto Protocol? Maybe we can shame people in Washington into acting responsibly. If the people lead, maybe the leaders will follow.”

At an April 1999 conference, the Tufts Climate Initiative was born when Tufts President John DiBiaggio, along with a handful of companies and nongovernmental organizations, announced their commitment to reducing climate-altering emissions. More ambitious measures have since been endorsed by Tufts’ current president, Lawrence Bacow. Tufts made a strategic decision to continue its leadership in developing and implementing a campus stewardship program; we had both experience and data. Prominent Tufts interdisciplinary programs have a track record of fostering productive working relationships among faculty, staff, and students across Tufts departments and schools. Before committing to specific emission targets Tufts made rough estimates of campus carbon emissions. Benefits in reducing emissions ranged from efficiency savings to creating opportunities for students, faculty, and staff to engage in active citizenship on campus and in our communities.

Protecting America or making it more vulnerable?

Susan Landau, coauthor of Privacy on the Line, has an op-ed in today's Washington Post, commenting on the recently passed Protect America Act, which updated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Among the more noteworthy features of the Act is the fact that it allows the NSA to tap foreign nationals' internet and phone communications that are routed through the U.S., without obtaining a FISA warrant. Landau points out that the infrastructure needed to accomplish this task effectively would likely be subject to misuse by others:

"Grant the NSA what it wants, and within 10 years the United States will be vulnerable to attacks from hackers across the globe, as well as the militaries of China, Russia and other nations."

Read the entirety of "A Gateway for Hackers" here. More information about the new edition of Privacy on the Line is here.

Wednesday Blog Watch - Game On

What are your favorite games blogs?  This week we will present a blogroll of our favorite blogs and other online destinations for people interested in games and game studies.  The MIT press is well-known for game studies titles, so don't be surprised to find that many of the authors of online journals or blogs about the topic are also MIT Press authors.

Game Studies Journal  (old-skoolers might want to check out Nick Montfort's article in Game Studies Journal about the importance of Atari's Combat.  The image above, from Montfort's article, is a screenshot of Combat.)

Loading (games studies research in Canada)

Gameology (an active game studies community, with forums and events calendars)

Escapist Magazine (for game developers)

Ludicidal Tendences (Tracy Fullerton's Interactive Media blog)

Gender and Computing  (Hilde Corneliussen)

The Ludologist (Jesper Juul)

Klastrup's Cataclysms (Lisbeth Klastrup)

Ludology.org  (Gonzalo Frasca)

Zone of Influence (Matthew Kirschenbaum)

Ian Bogost's Webpage

NewMediaFix ("a portal to online resources and projects...news, opportunity announcements and occasional reviews, and periodically releases in depth texts as well as interviews on new media culture")

GameSetWatch (from the people who run game developer and gamasutra)

Guardian Gamesblog

Memory Card (Mia Consalvo)

Grand Text Auto (a "group blog about machine narrative, games, poetry, and art")

Kotaku (a site for gamers)