MITPressLog

Bill Gates reads Vaclav Smil (again)

We were quite pleased when we discovered, some time ago, that Microsoft founder and chairman Bill Gates is a faithful reader of our author Vaclav Smil. The latest issue of Gates's newsletter is out and it has a review of one of Smil's Why America is Not a New Rome, a dismantling of oft-made comparisons between the two regimes. Here's a snippet of Gates's thoughts:

 

After reading so many articles and speeches predicting what will happen to America because of some supposed similarities to the Roman Empire, Smil felt it was important to explain that there is no predictive power in these comparisons. Smil is a great student of history, including Roman history and the dynamics of its Empire over time. Even though I took five years of Latin and enjoyed being able to understand some of the quotes in the book, my understanding of the Roman Empire was greatly expanded by reading this book.

He concludes that Smil has done "his normal, thorough, fact-driven logical job on this topic...I hope this book will help us focus on fixing these trends without thinking that analogies from the Roman Empire will help us find the right approach."

RTWT here. And we would be remiss if we didn't point out that Smil has an even more recent book out exploring the engineering innovations driving globalization. We'll hope for Gates's thoughts on that one down the line.

In Memoriam: A Trio

One of this blog's most difficult duties is to take note of the passing of our authors. This post is especially difficult to write, as we must say goodbye to three who passed away in recent months.

--Peter Kennedy, retired professor of economics at Simon Fraser University, where he taught for 40 years, died this past August. Kennedy was best known as the author of A Guide to Econometrics, of which we published several editions. That book, in the author's own words, "has become a classic as a comprehensive guide to some incredibly technical stuff." An obituary about him from Simon Fraser is available here.


--Lawrence Badash, of the history department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he had a 36-year career. He was the author of A Nuclear Winter's Tale and his course on "The Bomb" was apparently a student favorite at UCSB. He passed away in September, after a brief battle with pancreatic cancer.

 

--Partha Niyogi, Louis Block Professor in Computer Science and Statistics at the University of Chicago, passed away on October 1 at the age of 43 after a bout with brain cancer. He was the author of The Computational Nature of Language Learning and Evolution and was regarded with warmth and admiration by his colleagues and former students, according to some of the tributes here and here. A memorial will be held at the University of Chicago's Bond Chapel at 2pm on Saturday, October 30.

They will all be missed.

Lionel McKenzie (1919-2010)

As we celebrate our Nobel laureates, we also pause to remember another distinguished economist who died last week. Lionel McKenzie, one of the chief architects of modern equilibrium theory, passed away on October 12 at the age of 91. Known for the mathematical rigor of his work, McKenzie was the author of Classical General Equilibrium Theory, which was called "a modern classic" by no less than Paul Samuelson.

More about his life and work can be found in this article on the website of the University of Rochester, where McKenzie taught for many years. He will be missed.

A Nobel Trifecta

We are both humbled and happy to have scored an authorial trifecta in this year's Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. This year's prize went to three economists for their work on search friction - the phenomenon in the labor market where unemployment persists even where a large number of job vacancies exist.

The new laureates are Peter Diamond, on the faculty of MIT since 1963; Dale Mortensen of Northwestern University; and Christopher Pissarides of the London School of Economics. We are proud to have published all three and congratulate them on their well-earned laurels.

Recent Award News

We're pleased to announce some exciting awards recently won by MIT Press titles:

     

 

 

 

 

 

Laws, Outlaws, and Terrorists: Lessons from the War on Terrorism by Gabriella Blum and Phillip B. Heymann has won the 2010 Chicago-Kent College of Law/Roy C. Palmer Civil Liberties Prize.

This prize was established in 2007 by Chicago-Kent alumnus Roy C. Palmer and his wife, Susan. Palmer, to honor an exemplary work of scholarship exploring the tension between civil liberties and national security in contemporary American society. Previous prize recipients include David D. Cole and Jules L. Lobel for their book Less Safe, Less Free: Why America Is Losing the War on Terror (The New Press); Harold H. Bruff for Bad Advice: The President’s Lawyers in the War on Terrorism (University Press of Kansas); and Scott M. Matheson, Jr., for Presidential Constitutionalism in Perilous Times (Harvard University Press).

 

Megan Mullin’s Governing the Tap: Special District Governance and the New Local Politics of Water has won the 2010 Lynton Keith Caldwell Prize for the best book published on environmental politics and policy, given by the American Political Science Association’s Science, Technology, & Environment section.  The award committee chair stated, "There were over 35 nominations for this year's award, and the committee had a difficult time choosing among the top books.  However, we agreed that your book stood out for its impressive research and the important contributions that it will make to your field."

 

Carl Rasmussen’s Gaussian Processes for Machine Learning won the 2009 DeGroot Prize for the best book in statistical science, awarded by the International Society for Bayesian Analysis. The prize was announced at the Valencia International Meeting on Bayesian Statistics.

 

D.G. Webster’s Adaptive Governance: The Dynamics of Atlantic Fisheries Management    won the 2010 Harold and Margaret Sprout Award for the best book published on international environmental affairs, given by the International Studies Association. The Sprout Award was established in 1972 and named in honor of two pioneers in the study of international environmental problems. The award is given annually to the best book in the field – one that makes a contribution to theory and interdisciplinarity, shows rigor and coherence in research and writing, and offers accessibility and practical relevance.

Mark Brown’s Science in Democracy: Expertise, Institutions and Representation received honorable mention for the 2010 First Book Award from the Foundations of Political Theory section of the American Political Science Association.

 

Congratulations to our winning authors!