MITPressLog

Climate Talk

Does climate change policy begin with a "top down" approach or is it more effective to start at a local level? What is the potential for using NAFTA for carbon dioxide emissions trading? Stacy VanDeveer answers these questions and more about North American climate policy on E&E TV's "OnPoint". Click here to watch the video.

Stacy VanDeveer, an associate professor in the department of political science at the University of New Hampshire, is the editor of Changing Climates in North American Politics.

Remembrances, continued

We note with sadness the passing of two more of our authors.

Howard W. Johnson, former president of MIT and the author of Holding the Center: Memoirs of a Life in Higher Education, died this past Saturday, December 12. Johnson headed the Institute from 1966 to 1971 and, according to an obituary from the MIT news office, steered MIT through a turbulent era that saw not only changes to engineering education but uprisings over Vietnam and other social issues as well.

"Students have told me, and I agree with them, that they found the institute to be academically vibrant during that time despite the uproar," Johnson wrote in Holding the Center. "Much that was positive emerged from the upheaval, and, as in the aftermath of every revolution, it is important to build upon the good results and minimize the damage. That is what we tried to do at MIT, sometimes with success."

Johnson also served as dean of MIT's Sloan School of Management before becoming president. He was 87.

Yegor Gaidar, a key architect of Russia's transition from communism to a market economy, died on Wednesday at the age of 53. Gaidar, who served as acting prime minister under Boris Yeltsin in 1992, was an architect of what came to be known in Russia as "shock therapy": opening prices that had formerly been set by the state to market competition. According to the AP's obituary, he was "loathed by ordinary Russians who saw their savings wiped out by the inflation that followed his sudden price liberalization that year. But he was praised by others for taking it upon himself to make painful but necessary changes to fix a dysfunctional communist economy."

The AP notes that Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin put out a statement calling Gaidar "a genuine citizen and patriot, a strong spirited person, a talented scientist, writer and expert. ... He didn't dodge responsibility and 'took the punch' in the most challenging situations with honor and courage.''

Gaidar coauthored Russian Reform/International Money with Karl Otto Pöhl in 1995 and was the editor of The Economics of Russian Transition, published in 2003. At his death, he was working on another book, The Long View, which we plan to publish in the future.

Late update: Here is a tribute from UC Berkeley economist Brad DeLong.

We shall miss them both.

Paul Samuelson

As has been widely noted, Paul A. Samuelson died on Sunday at the age of 94. Samuelson was a longtime member of the MIT economics faculty and author of several important books. But in discussing his influence on the discipline, it's nearly impossible to avoid generalizations. Samuelson was simply one of the most important economic thinkers ever, and his impact on the last several decades of work in the field has been so broad as to elude precise description. As MIT's Robert Solow put it:

If you did a time and motion study of what any modern economist does at work, you would find that an enormous proportion of standard mental devices trace back to Paul Samuelson's long lifetime of research. What I can add about my beloved friend of 60 years is that he had a marvelous intuition about how a market economy had to be. "It must work like this," he would say. "Now all we have to do is prove it." There was no one like him.

That quote comes from the obituary published by MIT's new office, which is here. Other worthwhile tributes and retrospectives are available from the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and Samuelson's former colleague Paul Krugman.

All of them mention the phenomenal success of Samuelson's introductory economics textbook, now in its 19th edition. Sure, that's mind-boggling, but many economists will tell you that the heart of economics is the published research paper. On that score, we're pleased to recall the five large volumes of collected scientific papers that he published between 1966 and 1986. One of the most astonishing things about those volumes is that, as of this writing, not one of them is out of print. That alone must say something very meaningful about Paul Samuelson.

Gabriel Orozco at MoMA

The Mexican-born artist Gabriel Orozco is the subject of a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. As both the preview and review articles in The New York Times point out, there are major differences between this show and Orozco's first solo show at MoMA 16 years ago. The earlier show was an unusually furtive show in which the artist used the museum's nooks and corners to display furtive, threadbare pieces of art. The current exhibition, by contrast, is centered on "Mobile Matrix," an enormous whale skeleton fitted onto a metal armature. (See the photo above.) Depending on your point of view, the current exhibit will either solidify or throw into question Orozco's status as one of the major conceptual artists of his generation.

Decide for yourself: Here are the preview and reviews from the Times. Peter Schjeldahl's thoughtful review in The New Yorker mentions the recently published October Files collection on Orozco, edited by Yve-Alain Bois.

Computer Science Education Week's Tuesday Tease

Today's Computer Science Education Week interview is with Jane Margolis and Joanna Goode.  They  both studying gender and race in computer science and looking for ways to broaden participation in computing and are two of the authors of Stuck in the Shallow End: Education, Race, and Computing.  Here's a taste of their interview:

How do you think the field of computer science changed over the years?

A decade ago the image of a computer scientist was someone working in isolation, squirreled behind the computer screen, talking to no one but other “number crunchers,” but now because computing is so critical to the innovation in the arts, science, communication, to everything that makes science and culture swing at this moment, the image of computer science is changing, and to be a computer “geek” seems to be much more cool than it used to be. Computer science is not as off on its own as it once was. It is now the discipline that is creating exciting developments across an array of disciplines and professions. As a result, it seems as if an interdisciplinary perspective is much more valued within computer science itself.

Check out the rest of their answers and watch for new interviews all week. 

Celebrate National Computer Science Education Week

Congress has recently passed a resolution  to make the week of December 7th National Computer Science Education week in honor of Grace Hopper’s birthday. To celebrate this event, we asked several scholars about their thoughts on the current state of the field, as well the current state of education in computer science.  First up is Thomas H. Cormen.  He teaches at Dartmouth and is a co-author of Introduction to Algorithms, the third edition is just out.

Here's a taste, but check out the whole interview here:

What kinds of changes (if any) do you think we need to make in computer science education?

Two things make me feel like an old fogey: seeing surfers off Lighthouse Point in Santa Cruz, and thinking about computer science education. Although it's great that students have their own computers now, there was an educational advantage in the old machine room/batch processing model that I grew up with. Because we got very few runs in during the course of an evening, every run of every program was precious. When my program didn't work, I pored over the listing, really trying to understand what was going on. Today's students tend to randomly morph the program until it works, and when they finally get it working, I'm not sure they understand why. (I will confess that's exactly how I write LaTeX macros.) So there are times that I think, not so facetiously, that we should revert to a model where students get to run a program at most once every 20 minutes. My real answer is not that I think we need big changes in computer science education; it's that I think we need students to have a better understanding of what computer science is. Too many think that it's about making websites, or that being a dedicated gamer gives a leg up in learning how to write good programs. We might have been better off in the old days, when students had no idea what computer science was before taking a course in it, than now, when students harbor misinformed ideas about computer science.

And watch for interviews with Jane Margolis and Joanna Goode, Mitchell Wand, Ken Ford, and Bob Harper throughout the week. 

Award News: MLA Publication Awards

Three MIT Press authors will be honored with awards for their books at the upcoming Modern Language Association (MLA) convention. The MLA, the largest and one of the oldest American learned societies in the humanities (est. 1883), promotes the advancement of literary and linguistic studies. The 30,000 members of the association come from all fifty states, as well as from Canada, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. These awards are three of eighteen awards that will be presented on December 28th during the association's annual convention, held this year in Philadelphia

Below is a list of the awards and the books, along with the committee citation for each of them:

The sixteenth annual Prize for a First Book will be given to Matthew G. Kirschenbaum of the University of Maryland, for Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination.

Mechanisms is a genuinely original, field-defining contribution to media studies, promising to have a major impact on the fields of literary studies, book history, and digital culture. Matthew G. Kirschenbaum brilliantly puts new media studies into dialogue with book history and textual studies, teaching readers anew how to think about materiality, form, durability, and ephemerality in a digital age, while offering a primer in how to read and teach digital works, including works of literature. The book tracks the fate and transformations of electronic works by William Gibson and Michael Joyce, among others, in a manner somewhere between technical bibliography and detective work. Kirschenbaum engagingly and efficiently educates-and thus may help to produce-a new audience for digital literatures.

The tenth Morton N. Cohen Award for a Distinguished Edition of Letters will go to William G. Holzberger for The Letters of George Santayana, Book Seven, 1941-1947 and Book Eight, 1948-1952.

These volumes complete an important project, publishing a scholarly edition of the complete correspondence of George Santayana, a major figure in the history of American philosophy and cultural criticism. The letters cover the last years of Santayana's life-spent in Rome, where he was in effect trapped by World War II-and the years after the war during which he prepared his final publications and was visited by many American admirers. William G. Holzberger admirably documents this period of Santayana's life with carefully edited texts, thoughtful and comprehensive introductions, and supporting notes and apparatuses that are never obtrusive and invariably helpful.

The nineteenth annual Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize for an outstanding book published in English or Spanish in the field of Latin American and Spanish literatures and cultures will be given to Nicolás Wey Gómez, of Brown University, for The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies.

The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies, by Nicolás Wey Gómez, is already gaining recognition as a landmark study. The book's main argument is supported by an astonishing knowledge of the development of cosmography, geography, history, literature, geometry, astrology, and philosophy. The analysis combines meticulous archival research (in several languages) as well as contemporary theoretical concepts of space and place and the North-South divide. Few would have imagined it possible to say anything new about Columbus or his enterprise, yet Wey Gómez not only says something new, he also challenges the foundation of what is commonly accepted as the logic that conferred legitimacy on the European discovery and colonization of the Americas.

 More information can be found at http://www.mla.org/resources/awards/awards_winners.