Chris Berdik of The Boston Globe interviews Professor David Wilson about his proposal in the 1970s to implement a fossil fuel tax. “I started calculating this fossil fuel tax, and I realized that with the amount we use in this country, there would obviously be a vast flow of money into the government where people would do silly things with it,” says Wilson.
“Nancy L. Rose PhD ‘85, a professor of applied economics at MIT, has been named Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Economic Analysis by the U.S. Department of Justice,” writes Katherine Nazemi for The Tech. Rose will head the DOJ’s anti-trust division.
“The MIT Sloan School of Management announced on Tuesday that professor Simon Johnson won a spot at the Treasury Department’s Office of Financial Research,” writes Natalie Kitroeff of Bloomberg Businessweek. Johnson’s appointment follows the publication of a book that he coauthored: “13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown.”
Jeffrey R. Young writes for The Chronicle of Higher Education about the final report released by the Institute-wide Task Force on the Future of MIT Education. Speaking of the Task Force’s recommendation to make education more modular, co-chair Sanjay Sarma says, “we see modularity becoming a key part of on-campus experiences as well.”
“[A]s an educational researcher, I believe that MIT has captured, perhaps uniquely, both the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead for colleges and universities,” writes Dan Butin for The Huffington Post about a new report released by the MIT Task Force on the Future of MIT Education.
Bloomberg News reporter Kelly Blessing writes about the final report produced by the Institute-wide Task Force on the Future of MIT Education. “The Task Force encourages MIT to evaluate possibilities to achieve increases in undergraduate class size so that more students can experience the rich magic of an MIT residential education,” the Task Force wrote in their report.
The Associated Press reports that Professor Marin Soljacic was one of three Massachusetts scientists to receive the prestigious Blavatnik National Award. Soljacic was recognized for his “discoveries of novel phenomena related to the interaction of light and matter, and his work on wireless power transfer technology.”
In a piece for The Guardian, Charles Darwent looks back at the life and work of Professor Emeritus Otto Peine, the former director of the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies. Peine, who died last week in Berlin at the age of 86, was one of the pioneers of the ‘Zero’ art movement in postwar Germany.
Stephen Dowling writes for the BBC News about the legacy of former MIT professor of electrical engineering, Harold Edgerton. Edgerton’s pioneering photography work captured detailed images of moments occurring at speeds too high for the human eye to detect.
The Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin is presenting Professor Emeritus Otto Piene’s large-scale slide installation The Proliferation of the Sun through Aug. 31, reports The Huffington Post. Piene, the former director of MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, died shortly after the exhibit opened.
Bruce Weber of The New York Times reports on the legacy of Professor Emeritus Otto Piene, who died on July 17. “So many of his ideas are relevant today, from project-oriented work, to discussion-led thinking, to the ephemeral; all of that is now commonplace,” says Joachim Jäger, head of the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin.
Boston Globe reporter Bryan Marquard memorializes the life and work of MIT Professor John G. King. “John G. King wanted students, and essentially everyone else, to watch science unfold before their eyes. It was, he believed, the only way to truly learn a subject,” Marquard writes.
In a piece for The Washington Post, Gregory Rodriguez highlights new MIT research on diversity. “The authors concluded that homogenous groups ‘were actually further than diverse groups from an objective index of accuracy,’” Rodriguez writes.
John McDermott of The Financial Times interviews Professor Junot Díaz about his childhood, his career as an author and teaching at MIT.
Institute Professor Noam Chomsky writes for The Huffington Post about how U.S. foreign policy is determined. Chomsky argues that U.S. policy urgently needs reexamination in order to address proximate and existential threats such as nuclear weapons and climate change.