Professor Esther Duflo has been awarded Spain's Princess of Asturias social science prize for her work studying poverty in developing countries, the Associated Press reports. The organizers of the prize said that Duflo has “profoundly changed strategies for education, health and employment in Africa, Asia and Latin America.”
In a piece for the BBC about birdsong, Angela Saini highlights Prof. Shigeru Miyagawa’s research that shows human language could have evolved from birdsong. Miyagawa's theory suggests that "human language relies on two distinct systems, both of which had previously evolved in simpler animals."
John Tirman, executive director of the MIT Center for International Studies, writes for WBUR about opposition within the Republican party to immigration reform. “Opposition to immigration reform is one of the more perplexing symptoms of Washington paralysis nowadays,” says Tirman.
Kristin Toussaint reports for Boston.com on “A Shout Across Time,” an event organized by Professor David Kaiser that explains the theory of relativity through dance. “It’s all about objects moving through space and time,” says Kaiser. “What could be more natural than bodies in a dance for that?”
Boston Globe reporter Jon Garelick writes about the MIT Wind Ensemble and MIT Festival Jazz Ensemble, detailing the history of both performance groups. Garelick writes that a new album by the two groups, “Infinite Winds,” is “one of the most compelling CDs of the year.”
In an article for The Huffington Post, John Tirman argues that the wave of migration from African and Latin American countries is a crisis caused partially by economic and political policies that American and European leaders have played a role in shaping. “Until the first world policies change, the third world will keep coming, at all costs,” Tirman writes.
Boston Globe reporter Jeremy Eichler reviews the final concert performed this year as part of Sounding, a new annual concert series at MIT, which featured a celebration of American experimental music. The annual series concluded on Saturday night with a “roiling and joyful 80th birthday tribute to minimalist pioneer Terry Riley,” Eichler writes.
Natasha Singer writes for The New York Times about Professor Natasha Dow Schüll’s research examining how people have begun to use technology to alter their behavior. “It is not really about self-knowledge anymore,” says Schüll. “It’s the nurselike application of technology.”
Writing for the Financial Times, Prof. Daron Acemoğlu argues that reform rollbacks in Turkey have caused the country to lose ground on economic progress. Acemoğlu explains that, “modest improvements in economic and political institutions can trigger rapid productivity growth.”
Chun Han Wong writes for The Wall Street Journal about a study coauthored by MIT graduate student Yiqing Xu that finds an ideological divide in China based on geography. The researchers found that, “provinces with higher levels of economic development, trade openness, urbanization are more liberal than their poor, rural counterparts.”
Seung-yoon Lee interviews Professor Noam Chomsky for The Huffington Post on his views on the current media landscape. “I think it's a good general principle that almost anything that increases the variety and range of available media is beneficial,” says Chomsky.
Brett Smith reports for redOrbit on a new study by Prof. Shigeru Miyagawa on the development of human language. Miyagawa explains his finds that the brain “at some point 75,000 to 100,000 years ago, hit a critical point, and all the resources that nature had provided came together in a Big Bang and language emerged pretty much as we know it today.”
Prof. Nikhil Agarwal has found that a lack of positions at prestigious institutions leads to low salaries among medical residents, reports Angela Chen for The Wall Street Journal. Agarwal found that, "applicants are willing to pay an 'implicit tuition'...to have a prestigious and high-demand residency."
In the first of a series of conversations, Professor Emeritus Robert Solow speaks with Paul Solman of PBS NewsHour about the past week’s economics news. Solow and Solman discuss recent fluctuations in the stock market, Federal Reserve interest rates and the response to the Greek debt crisis.
Ty Burr reviews Prof. Alan Lightman’s Book “Screening Room” for The Boston Globe. “Lightman bends his nostalgia through the prism of a writer’s creativity the way light through a projector blooms into a story on the screen,” notes Burr.