Said and Done

November 2014 Edition
Published by the Office of the Dean
MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences
 

 
QUOTABLE

               “With this new initiative, we want to look at illness
                and disease from multiple perspectives, not only
                as a matter of individual physiology. This means
                also thinking through the political, economic, social,
                and cultural determinants of health.
 

                   — Erica Caple James, MIT Associate Professor of Anthropology,
                    and lead, MIT Global Health and Medical Humanities Initiative

HONORS AND AWARDS 
   

Robert Solow and Mildred Dresselhaus awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom
Two Institute Professors, Mildred Dresselhaus (Physics and Electrical Engineering, emeritus) and Robert Solow (Economics, emeritus) are among 19 new recipients of the nation’s highest civilian honor.
Story at MIT News |  Solow video interview for MIT150 

Robert Solow, Nobel laureate in Economics, Institute Professor, emeritus, and Professor of Economics, emeritus; the Presidential Medal of Freedom; Mildred Dresselhaus, Institute Professor, Professor of Physics and Electrical Engineering, emeritus. Photocredits: Olaf Storbeck (Solow); Bryce Vickmark (Dresselhaus)
 

 

ECONOMICS
James Poterba awarded the Daniel M. Holland Medal
The National Tax Association made the award to Poterba for outstanding contributions to the study and practice of public finance. The Mitsui Professor of Economics, Poterba is the first MIT faculty member to receive the Holland Medal, which was established in 1993 to honor the late Daniel E. Holland, a longtime member of the MIT Sloan faculty.
Story

LINGUISTICS
The Art and Craft of Semantics | Honoring Irene Heim
The MIT linguistics community has published a festschrift to honor linguistics scholar and professor Irene Heim on her recent birthday.
Festschrift: The Art and Craft of Semantics    

L to R: James Poterba, Mitsui Professor of Economics; Irene Heim, Professor of Linguistics

LINGUISTICS
DeGraff receives award from Haitian Studies Association
"I accepted the award as another kudo to our MIT-Haiti Initiative, another signal of a historic shift in attitudes about Kreyòl. This weekend, many of the sessions [at the HSA conference] were in Kreyòl."
HSA of UMB | MIT-Haiti Initiative  | Video: Teaching in Kreyòl
 

 

FEATURE  |  STUDENTS

LITERATURE + MECHANICAL ENGINEERING
I'm studying poetry to be a better engineer, and here's why
"Poetry is such dense, compact form of language. It packs pages and pages of meaning into just a few verses... reading a piece where every syllable, every punctuation mark, every line, is carefully considered...it's a breath of fresh air. And that ability to convey lots of meaning very succinctly is vital in any walk of life. As one of my NASA supervisors told me over the summer, “Nobody cares unless you tell a story.”
Full commentary by Michael C. '16, Course 2
 

A new MOOC also has positive impact in the classroom at MIT
This fall, MIT Professor Shigeru Miyagawa taught his "Visualizing Japan" course to both online and residential students. MIT students in the residential class were assigned the MOOC video lectures and quizzes to complement their classroom work. As a result, students arrived in class well prepared to discuss the material, which increased classroom conversations significantly, and made the class more fun for both students and the professor. “I don’t think I can ever go back to a pure lecture-style teaching,” says Miyagawa.
Story
 

"A Mirror of Japanese Nobility” by Toyohara Chikanobu, August 1887, from MIT Visualizing Cultures website; Throwing off Asia I, unit; woodblock prints of domestic "Westernization" (1868-1912)
 

FEATURE |  MEDICAL HUMANITIES
 

MIT Global Health & Medical Humanities Initiative presents inaugural event
As a debut event, the MIT Global Health & Medical Humanities Initiative presented “Examining Ebola,” a panel of experts that probed the current global public health emergency from multiple disciplines and perspectives. The gathering also shared goals of the new initiative, which is based in the Anthropology section of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, and led by Erica Caple James, Associate Professor of Anthropology.
Story | Video
 

Erica Caple James, Associate Professor of Anthropology, and lead, MIT Global Health and Medical Humanities Initiative

RESEARCH

Research Portfolio 
Research is the engine for the School's capacity to help meet the world's great challenges. To name just a few areas of impact, MIT SHASS research helps alleviate poverty, safeguard elections, steer economies, understand the past and present, generate wise approaches to health, environment, water, and energy challenges, inform effective policy, assess the impact of new technologies, understand human language, and create new forms at the juncture of art and science.
Research Portfolio

HEALTH ECONOMICS
Measuring Health | Amy Finkelstein
When Oregon voted in 2008 to use a lottery to determine which low-income adults to add to its Medicaid rolls, Stephen Colbert (in his TV character) joked about the effort as “gambling for health insurance.” MIT economist Amy Finkelstein wasn’t laughing. “I heard about it and immediately thought, ‘Oh my god, drop everything and get on this!’” says Finkelstein, Ford Professor of Economics at MIT. “What they saw as humorous, we saw as an unprecedented opportunity to bring the gold standard in scientific research to one of the most pressing questions of our day.”
Story by Kathryn O'Neill at MIT Spectrum

HISTORY OF SCIENCE + QUANTUM PHYSICS
Is quantum entanglement real? | David Kaiser
"If, as we expect, the usual predictions from quantum theory are borne out in this experiment, we will have constrained various alternative theories as much as physically possible in our universe. If not, that would point toward a profoundly new physics. Either way, the experiment promises to be exciting — a fitting way, we hope, to mark Bell’s paper’s 50th anniversary."
Article in the New York Times


POLITICAL SCIENCE
Why sign rights treaties? | Richard Nielsen
One prominent idea holds that treaty-ratifying countries are essentially bought off: They agree to lend support to the human-rights movement in exchange for material good, such as foreign aid or more trade. However, a new study co-authored by MIT political scientist Richard Nielsen finds that not to be the case; the actions of states, it concludes, are not economic in nature, but probably have to do with internal political maneuvering instead.
Story by Peter Dizikes at MIT News  |  Related story at Slate

 L to R: Amy Finkelstein, Ford Professor of Economics; David Kaiser, Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science; Head, Program in Science, Technology, and Society; Senior lecturer in Physics; Richard Nielsen, Assistant Professor of Political Science
 

ECONOMICS
Why do people earn what they earn? | David Autor
"As MIT economist David Autor notes in a new paper, leaders in the late 1800s and early 1900s, particularly in the farm states, anticipated the coming tectonic shift in the economy and worked to prepare the population for it."
Story at The Boston Globe


INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
Can the U.S. and Russia make more progress on nuclear security?
Striking a note of cautious optimism in an MIT talk yesterday, Rose Gottemoeller, U.S. undersecretary of state for arms control, praised Russia’s “businesslike” enforcement of the U.S.-Russia New START Treaty, but cited a need for continued progress in other areas of nuclear security.
Story by Peter Dizikes at MIT News

POLITICAL SCIENCE
Study aims to shorten Election Day lines | Charles Stewart III
On Election Day in 2012, an estimated 750,000 potential voters across the U.S. left their polling places without voting because the lines seemed too long. Now a unique MIT-led project aims to solve this problem by using Election Day field research to see exactly which parts of the voting process are causing the greatest bottlenecks.
Story by Peter Dizikes at MIT News  | Related story at The Washington Post
 

COMPARATIVE MEDIA STUDIES  | OPEN DOCUMENTARY LAB
Media-makers convene at MIT to explore "The New Reality"
The SHASS-based Open Documentary Lab and the MacArthur Foundation hosted a daylong event to explore the convergences of journalism and interactive documentary in digital space. Participants included practioners from The New York Times, The Guardian, Frontline, Vox, Tribeca and Sundance, and academics studying digital journalism and interactive media. Here's what they said:
Story at The Nieman Foundation