In the Media

After Samuelson, the elementary student was taught to deal with data (real and hypothetical), analyze them by diagrammatic methods or with simple equations, and use economic principles to answer concrete questions: What would you expect to happen if? - Economics Professor Emeritus Robert Solow, on the legacy of Paul Samuelson, who died on Dec. 13.

"Music is really audible time. It can’t be experienced in an instant; it has to be unfolded in time." - Marcus Thompson, professor in the Music and Theater Arts Section, on the "Musical Time" series, which starts tomorrow, Saturday, Jan. 9.

"We can now digitally turn off regions of the brain. We can alter the information in the brain in a strategically useful way." - Neuroscientist Ed Boyden, on a way to shut down parts of a brain just by shining light on them

Together, Ford and MIT are embarking on a study of driver workload and to identify new opportunities to use in-vehicle technologies to improve driver safety by lowering stress.

"What’s amazing about this is that he beat out an incumbent. That’s not easy to do. It’s a big deal. Everybody gave him the thumbs up." - Gautam Dutta, executive director of the Asian American Action Fund, on MIT's Leland Cheung, the first Asian-American and first student elected to the Cambridge City Council.

"We have [players] looking at us now that would not have taken us seriously six to seven years ago. We used to call ourselves the best basketball team that no one had heard of.” - MIT men's basketball coach Larry Anderson, on the team's success last season and its 11-0 start to this season.

"It’s like a Broadway play that you’ve practiced and practiced for months, and something always goes wrong." - Peter Belobaba, director of the MIT Global Airline Industry Program, on airline delays from this weekend's storm

It is not easy to reinvent the wheel, but researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are giving it their best shot. - Story on two powered bicycle-wheel projects taking place at MIT

His speeches and his voluminous writing had a lucidity and bite not usually found in academic technicians. He tried to give his economic pronouncements a “snap at the end,” he said, “like Mark Twain.” - Obituary for Paul Samuelson, MIT professor and Nobel-winning economist, who died on Sunday at age 94.

"I remember school dances that I didn't go to, mid-terms I failed and family occasions that I missed. Only now do I realize how much of my life was mangled and distorted by this illness." - Padma Lakshmi on her battle with endometriosis. The 'Top Chef' host visited MIT Friday to open the new Center for Gynepathology.

With 20/20 hindsight, a few generations worth of experience, and better, faster technology, this time researchers in AI -- an ambiguous field to begin with -- plan to get things right. - Story on MIT's Mind Machine Project, which is re-examining artificial intelligence from the ground up.

"This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to perform an experiment at a massive scale." - Riley Crane, postdoctoral fellow at MIT, on his team's approach in winning the recent DARPA red balloon challenge.

What would President Obama's pledge to reduce U.S. carbon emissions by 83% by 2050 mean in practice for the U.S. energy infrastructure? - Professor Richard Lester, head of the nuclear science and engineering department at MIT, comments on the implications of these reductions ahead of the President's speech at the Copenhagen climate change summit.

If you want to tout that fake Louis Vuitton Le Radieux handbag as the real deal, you had better look the part, according to a Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher. - Story on research by Renee Richardson Gosline, an assistant professor of marketing at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

"I like to say that there are no disabled people. Only disabled technology." - Professor Hugh Herr, director of the biomechatronics group at MIT's Media Lab, on his work designing better prosthetic devices.