MITPressLog

Symposium on Arab Oil Embargo

On October 17, Innovations editor Phil Auerswald will participate in a panel discussion of the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973 at the Symposium on Oil, Innovation, and National Security, held at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The symposium will include notable contributors to the energy policy debate who will discuss what exactly happened during this tumultuous period and how these events are highly relevant to today’s issues of energy dependence. The panel will also include two authors who recently contributed to the Fall issue of Innovations in a special section focusing on oil, innovation, and national security. Journalists, policy-makers, scholars, students and all interested parties are encouraged to attend.

Panel 1 (1:10-2:30PM): Rethinking Lessons from the Oil Embargo
Moderator: Adam Garfinkle (The American Interest)
Panelists:
Philip Auerswald (George Mason University and Innovations Journal)
Eugene Gholtz (University of Texas-Austin)
Charles Doran (Johns Hopkins University-SAIS)

Panel 2 (2:40-3:00PM)
Moderator: Peter Mandaville (George Mason University)
Panelists:
Ambassador Molly Williamson (The Middle East Institute
David Bosch (Saudi Aramco, ret.)
Lawrence Korb  (Center for American Progress)

Jointly Organized by George Mason University, The Middle East Institute,
Innovations, and The American Interest.  More information can be found here. 

Good Deeds

This week, over 5700 books will be shipped from TriLiteral, the warehouse that houses inventory for Harvard University Press, The MIT Press, and Yale University Press, to help replenish the Iraqi National Library. The three presses have partnered with the Sabre Foundation (Humanitarian Aid for the Mind), whose Book Donation Program has a long history of helping get educational materials to countries in need—often those engaged in or recovering from conflict.  The Sabre Foundation (working with a grant from the Unites States Embassy in Baghdad) will cover the logistics and shipping of the titles. 

From left to right, Colin McCullough, Book Donation Program Manager, Sabre Foundation; Rebecca Schrader, Assistant Director, MIT Press; Bill Lindsay, Associate Director, Harvard University Press; Sheila Lilja, General Manager, TriLiteral; John Rollins, Deputy Director, Yale University Press.

Libraries are one of the cornerstones of Iraqi culture.  By the 1970s, Iraqi higher education was widely considered to be the best in the region.  Due primarily to the war with Iran in the 1980s and the US invasion in 2003, higher education and the libraries that serve it have been devastated.  An effort like the Sabre program to rehabilitate principal Iraqi library collections is necessary if Iraq is to re-establish a high standard of education and knowledge.

This initiative is focused on the Iraq National Library and Archive (INLA), and the libraries of Baghdad University, Mustansiriyah University, and Baghdad Technical University, whose heads have committed themselves to act in concert in this process. Harvard, MIT, and Yale each provided a list of titles to the Iraqi Librarians and allowed them to choose the titles—up to three of each book selected—they thought would be the most appropriate.  They chose over 5700 titles—roughly 1700 from MIT Press.  The books chosen cover a wide range of subjects and disciplines: from Philosophy, Law, History and Art, to Environmental Studies.  They include textbooks, new titles, and classic monographs from all three Presses.  “Good things come from collaboration,” commented MIT Press Director Ellen W Faran.  “In this case, the three TriLiteral partners—Harvard, MIT, and Yale university presses—working together to respond to a request from four Iraqi libraries jointly seeking to rehabilitate their collections.”

Leonardo/ISAST Elects a New Board Chair

During elections in the 40th Anniversary Retreat held by the Board of Directors of Leonardo/ISAST, Jeffrey N. Babcock was elected Chairman of the Board, and Roger F. Malina was named Chairman Emeritus while continuing to serve as a voting member of the board.

Jeffrey N. Babcock is a composer, producer, and arts executive, currently serving as Executive Director of San Francisco State University’s International Center for the Arts. He has served on the Leonardo/ISAST Board of Directors since 2007.  Babcock co-founded and served as president and CEO of the New World Symphony and Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute. He was formerly the Dean of Fine Arts at Boston University and Executive Director of the University of Maryland’s Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center.

I am indeed honored to be asked to serve as Chairman of Leonardo/ISAST,” stated Babcock. “I look forward to working to strengthen and broaden the organization's programmatic scope while sustaining and building upon a 40-year foundation and legacy of pioneering publications and initiatives at the intersection of art, science and technology.

Chairman Emeritus Roger F. Malina is an astronomer and space scientist who has served as Chairman of the Board for over 25 years. He is the former director of the Laboratoire d'Astronomie Spatiale CNRS, Marseille, France, and a member of the International Academy of Astronautics. He writes and speaks on the relationship between the arts, sciences and technology.

Resisting the bailout

The story of the day, of course, is the Bush Administration's proposed $700 billion plan to bail out America's ailing financial institutions. Henry Paulson, Secretary of the Treasury, and Ben S. Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, have been testifying before what appear to be deeply skeptical Congressional committees on the nature and necessity of the bailout.

Many voices have been raised against the Administration's plan. Among them are a list of economists who signed this petition decrying certain aspects of the proposed bailout. Several of our authors are signatories to the petition. One of them is David K. Levine, of Washington University in St. Louis, who is coauthor of The Theory of Learning in Games. We asked him for a few additional words on the financial crisis and the proposed cure, and he sent us the following thoughts, edited from posts he's done at the Against Monopoly blog.

The original proposal for a bailout says simply that the Treasury secretary is given a 700 billion dollar credit line and told to go out and play the mortgage backed security market, appointing whoever he chooses, and buying and selling without any oversight, concurrent or retroactive. Can I imagine a better prescription for political corruption? I'm not imaginative enough. I'm imaginative enough to think that however good the intentions of the (politically appointed) Secretary might be, the people who do the buying and selling will feel sympathetic to their friends and will want to do what they think the boss man would "want them to do" towards his friends. Some will not give in to the temptation. Others will. And on the other side those who receive lesser bailouts will think that it is unfair and driven by politics - regardless of whether or not it is.

Current negotiations seem to be in the direction of expanding the authority of the Treasury secretary to buy more kinds of securities, and providing a toothless oversight board. This does not seem an improvement.

Hat tip to Brainiac's Chris Shea for noticing the petition.

Award News - A Culture of Improvement selected as finalist for ISI Book Award

Robert Friedel’s A Culture of Improvement: Technology and the Western Millenium was selected as a finalist for the 2008 Henry Paolucci / Walter Bagehot Book Award given by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

More information about the award (along with the winner and other finalists) can be found at http://www.isi.org/spotlight/bagehot_paolucci/award.html.

“This prestigious award was first launched by the Walter Bagehot Research Council, an organization founded by Professor Henry Paolucci in the late sixties,and beginning in 2004, the annual award has been presented by ISI. The award recognizes and advances the scholarly  and journalistic achievements of Henry Paolucci and Walter Bagehot by honoring each year the book that embodies the humane and liberal spirit of these two men of letters. Books from a  range of humanistic disciplines—including but not limited to American foreign policy, political science (especially political philosophy), higher education in the United States, English literature and comparative literature (nonfiction only), intellectual history,the future of the humanities, history, philosophy, and the history of science—are eligible for selection.   

Founded in 1953, ISI works to “educate for liberty”—to identify the best and the brightest college students and to nurture in these future leaders the American ideal of ordered Liberty.”

Opening Up Education

Today's the pub date for a book that's important not only for its scholarship but for how that scholarship is being delivered to the reader. Opening Up Education is a collection of papers by scholars that explore how open access - the free, online availability of materials - can transform education. The book - a copublication with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching - describe the challenges and benefits of a whole range of initiatives that marshal open access tools, resources, and knowledge.

Fittingly, in addition to making the book available in standard hard copy form - for a very reasonable price, might we add - we're also making the book itself and open access resource. You can go here and either download a PDF version or read a very attractive iPaper edition.

Confronting the Coffee Crisis Discussion on Sept. 17th

If you will be in the Los Angeles area on Wednesday Sept, 17th Christopher Bacon will be giving a talk at Occidental College about his work and recent book, Confronting the Coffee Crisis. 

The talk, hosted by the Urban and Environmental Policy Institute, will be held in the Morrison Lounge at the Johnson Student Center and run from 11:30am to 1pm. 

For Directions or more information please contact the Urban and Environmental Institute at (323) 259-2991

Wednesday Blog Watch - Archinect

Cognitive scientists have their CogNet community, and software nerds have their Slashdot community, but where is the web community for architects? Well, since 1997, the website Archinect has been "making architecture more connected". And now would be a perfect time to visit the site, as the most recent edition of our architecture journal Perspecta is excerpted in the "features" section. While it's true that Perspecta 40: Monster may be in high demand for its glow-in-the-dark cover, let's not forget about the fascinating content: the excerpt in Archinect features part of an interview with star architect Kevin Roche.

How to Be a College President

How is John Maeda going to tackle his new position as President of RISD?  Well, according to an interview with Dominique Manning in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, one way will be to use his Eighth Law of Simplicity, TRUST: In Simplicity we trust, featuring sections "Relax, Lean Back", "Just Undo it" and our personal favorite, "Trust Me". 

For all of Maeda's laws, there are ten in all, check out The Laws of Simplicity.  The whole Wall Street Journal interview can be found here.