Dr. Alice Amsden, Ellen Richards Professor of Political Economy in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, is co-author of a book receiving widespread attention in academic and economic circles.
Essentially, The Market Meets Its Match (Harvard University Press) asks whether the shock therapy route is the only true path to capitalism?
Peter Passell, writing in The New York Times, says that the book-co-authored by Dr. Amsden, Jacek Kochanowicz of the University of Warsaw and Lance Taylor of the New School for Social Research-"offers a critique of `shock therapy' as practiced in Eastern Europe, envisioning instead a gradual transition to free markets bast on East Asia's experience."
One of the most difficult tasks facing science writers at universities such as MIT is learning about faculty research. When this became the subject of an article in SPECTRA, the newsletter of the Speech Communication Association, the News Office's own intrepid science writer, Elizabeth Thomson, was one of those surveyed about their own methods of finding out about interesting projects.
While Ms. Thomson has many tricks up her sleeve, two of the methods she specifically mentions in the article are reading departmental newsletters and attending public lectures by faculty members.
This item also serves as a useful reminder to faculty members and other researchers (including students) that the News Office is always interested in work you are doing that may have news value. Our appetite ranges from gene research to robotics to dimpled baseball bats (one of last year's biggest "hits"), so please keep us in mind.QUOTES:
"We've learned from both North-ridge (CA) and this quake, that in the world's best earthquake-engineered areas, we still have inadequacies in the design standards." -Dr. M. Nafi Tok-soz, professor of geophysics, in a Boston Herald article on the Japan earthquake.
If this same earthquake had occurred under a city in one of the least developed countries of the world, we would have been hearing about tens of thousands of deaths, maybe hundreds of thousands." - Dr. Robert Whitman, professor emeritus of civil and environmental engineering, in The Boston Globe.CLIPS:
The Washington Post on January 23 carried this item about former MIT provost and professor John M. Deutch:
"Friday was just another working day for Deputy Defense Secretary John M. Deutch, morning meetings and such till lunch time. He then met longtime sweetheart Patricia Lyon Martin in his anteroom, took her to lunch and then to the Arlington [Virginia] courthouse where they got married in a civil ceremony. He left Patricia Lyon Deutch at the courthouse and went back to work.
"President Clinton called to congratulate and didn't complain about the long lunch hour.
"The happy couple, high school classmates at Sidwell Friends a few years back, had been married to other spouses for 20 years and each was divorced 10 years ago. Her two children, two of his children, a grandson and assorted relatives attended the event. Why now? It was her birthday.
"Ah, romance Pentagon style."
The item was carried under the headline: "I Do. Have to Return to Work."
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on January 25, 1995.
