Paul Krugman writes for The New York Times about Professor JoAnne Yates' book “Control Through Communication.” In her book, Yates examines the history of the filing cabinet and the “coevolution of information technology and the business world before the digital age.”
In an article for Science based off his AAAS Presidential Address, Phillip Sharp, Institute Professor and former president of the AAAS, discusses the need to accelerate the transition from discovery to innovation to address the challenges facing society. “To meet oncoming global challenges, we will need to better link discovery, innovation, and entrepreneurship,” Sharp explains.
Financial Times reporter John Authers highlights Prof. Andrew Lo’s work examining how human aversion to risk impacts financial decisions. Lo’s research provides evidence that “investors in markets will take risk-averse actions rather than the purely rational decisions that economists have classically assumed."
Visiting Lecturer Irving Wladawsky-Berger gives his reaction to the preliminary report examining innovation at MIT in a piece for The Wall Street Journal. “Beyond MIT, the report should be of value to anyone interested in the growing importance of innovation to institutions, economies and societies around the world.”
NASA’s Curiosity rover has discovered methane and carbon in Martian rocks, reports Andrew Soergel for U.S. News & World Report. “Organics are important because they can tell us about the chemical pathways by which they were formed and preserved,” says Prof. Roger Summons, a member of the Curiosity team.
In an article for Newsweek about nuclear energy, Josh Freed highlights Transatomic, a company founded by two MIT PhD candidates to commercialize their concept for a molten salt reactor that can safely burn nuclear waste.
David Slocum of Forbes lists “The Second Machine Age” by Prof. Erik Brynjolfsson and Dr. Andrew McAfee as one of the best creative leadership books of the year. Brynjolfsson and McAfee, “explore the forces reinventing fields as diverse as medicine, retail, and transportation and having far-ranging implications for creative collaboration, business leadership and policy-making alike.”
Susan Adams writes for Forbes about research coauthored by Dr. Sara Ellison that indicates that single-sex teams are less productive than their co-ed counterparts. “The authors say their research shows that switching from a single-sex group to a co-ed team could increase revenues by a whopping 41%,” Adams writes.
A study by Prof. Thomas Malone found that social perceptiveness can be gained through electronic communications, writes Financial Times reporter Jonathan Moules. “People develop social intelligence skills even when they cannot see into each others’ eyes,” says Malone.
Wall Street Journal reporter Atish Patel highlights new MIT research indicating that volcanic activity may have contributed to the extinction of the dinosaurs. Patel explains that the findings suggest “dinosaurs were already in decline, suffering from the climate change prompted by the volcanic eruptions.”
Richard Eisenberg of Forbes speaks with Professor Ofer Sharone about his research and tips for white-collar job seekers. “Meeting with people face to face who you worked with in the past and can vouch for your abilities can help you overcome some of the barriers built into the hiring process,” says Sharone.
Writing for Scientific American, Jennifer Ouellette features Professor Allan Adams research on black holes on her list of the 20 best physics papers of 2014. “We showed that when you throw stuff into a black hole, the surface of the black hole responds like a fluid,” says Adams.
Sarah Kaplan of The Washington Post highlights Prof. Sangbae Kim’s work developing a robot modeled after the cheetah. Kim explains that he took inspiration from the cheetah’s movements to design a robot that could run. “We can steal a lot of ideas from nature that we can apply . . . to speed up our engineering evolution,” he explains.
Washington Post reporter Jeff Guo examines new findings from MIT graduate student Manasi Deshpande concerning how the Supplemental Security Income influences a person’s decision to work. Deshpande found that people who were on disability as children “do not have great work prospects as adults,” but parents of disabled children” do have excess capacity to work.”
MIT engineers have “developed an algorithm that shows the relationship between luggage weight and fuel consumption,” writes Heather Hansman for Popular Science. The researchers found that reducing each person’s luggage by 11 pounds would save one percent of fuel consumption.