In the Media

Rev. John Crocker Jr., a civil rights activist and former chaplain at Brown University and at MIT, has died at 88.

"Rev. Crocker, a civil rights activist and Vietnam War opponent while serving as a chaplain at Brown University and at MIT, died last Friday in Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge."

"The central question for middle class Americans, however, is: What quality of job is being created?"

"In 'Rethinking a Lot,' a new study of parking, due out in March, Eran Ben-Joseph, a professor of urban planning at M.I.T., points out that 'in some U.S. cities, parking lots cover more than a third of the land area, becoming the single most salient landscape feature of our built environment.'"

"Two of the hottest stories on Forbes.com in the past week or so have been about SOPA (226,810 views!) and MITx (539,810 views!!)."

"It’s as if $2.5 trillion worth of stuff—the equivalent of the entire U.S. economy circa 1958—materialized out of thin air."

"It’s sometimes suggested that American car companies have quit making more efficient cars and trucks in recent decades. But that’s not strictly true, according to MIT economist Christopher Knittel."

"North Americans should breathe easy: New research confirms that the continent has eroded very little over the past 1.5 billion years and, in all likelihood, won’t shed much ground in the next billion years, either."

"The destruction part is easy to see: downturns kill businesses, leaving boarded-up windows on the high street as their gravestones. But recessions may also spur the creation of new businesses."

"All factors being equal, fuel economy increased 60 percent in that time, Knittel notes in 'Automobiles on Steroids,' published in American Economic Review. If we were driving cars that featured today’s drivetrain tech but had the weight and power of vehicles in the Reagan era, the average fuel economy of the American fleet would have climbed from 23 mpg in 1980 to roughly 37 mpg today."

"The CityCar is just one example of how MIT's Changing Places group envisions the urban lifestyle of 2022."

"Although there are notable exceptions, most journalists have limited training in economics, and those who edit the articles often have even less. Hence, out of an understandable but misguided sense of fair play, there is a bias toward wanting to show both sides of an issue."

"The Indian Institutes of Technology have agreed to join the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s OpenCourseWare Consortium, enabling anyone to access online the course content of the elite engineering schools, reports The Times of India."

"They’ve created a suit called AGNES—short for “Age Gain Now Empathy System” -- that simulates the trials and tribulations that come with your average 70-year-old body, by using various braces, bands, and other tricks to limit wearers' mobility, and give them a glimpse of senior citizen discomfort."

"This May, the biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, whose career has mirrored the growth and diversity of molecular genetics, will retire from laboratory research and from most public speaking on women and science."