Go 2 Clickbank DirectoryYou are here » Go 2 Clickbank » Links Directory » Reference » Geography (0)
Geography RSS FeedsEnergy: The Past Must Not Be Prologue - There are few people who have spent as much time wielding high-level influence in Washington as George Shultz, and in such a variety of roles (Secretary of Labor, Treasury and State, plus the Office of Management and Budget, among others). So the MIT Energy Initiative has much to gain from a friend with this kind of distinguished government record. Shultz discusses our nation?s ?roller coaster? energy ride. He harks back fondly to Dwight Eisenhower, who thought if the U.S. imported more than 20% of its oil, ?we would be headed for trouble in national security.? Eisenhower instituted an oil import quota program, many viewed as the ?OPEC of its day,? says Shultz. Prices stood at a whopping $3 per barrel. Then came the oil shocks of the ?70s ? the Arab oil embargo, the Iranian revolution and the Iran-Iraq war. The U.S. f...Feed Source: mitworld.mit.edu Leading Change: A Conversation with Ron Williams - In what Dean Dave Schmittlein bills as a master class, Ronald A. Williams discusses how an emphasis on new technology and application of basic values helped turn around the health care giant Aetna.
Williams? case study begins in 2001, when he arrived to find a corporation bleeding out -- having lost $280 million in the past year. He diagnosed key areas of failure and opportunity in Aetna?s vast enterprise: orchestrating medical, dental and other health and insurance benefits in a network of 843 thousand health care professionals with 37 million members. Williams shaped a path to recovery focusing on a better understanding of Aetna?s current customers, from small employers to the largest corporations, and the best way of expanding into new markets such as retailers, banks and law firms. To do this, Aetna needed to buil... The International Development Fair: The Human Factor at Work in the World - Imagine if thousands of Amy Smiths were unleashed on the world, providing simple, ingenious inventions to make life easier for those subsisting on less than $2 a day -- half of humanity. This MacArthur Award-winning inventor has been seeding such programs at MIT, and describes tangible results of efforts to inspire students to apply innovative thinking and technology to everyday problems in the developing world.
The Designs for Developing Countries Project, the MIT Program in Developmental Entrepreneurship and D (Development)-Lab have spawned a range of initiatives, spanning the fields of public health, labor, and agriculture. In Ghana and Ecuador, MIT students are helping provide safe drinking water, with low-cost water testing methods that can be applied in the field with no electricity.
In cou... Beyond the Bench: Preparing MIT Students for the Challenges of Global Leadership - MIT produces students who are ?deep, entrepreneurial, passionate, diverse and active,? says Phillip Clay, the kind of talented individuals who should play major parts on the world stage. MIT has begun a drive to ensure that its students fulfill their promise. Central to this mission, Richard Samuels says, is the kind of education that steeps students in the realities of globalization. In a world that?s not so much flat as converging and increasingly complex and diverse, students must ?step boldly and intelligently into the global market of ideas and commerce,? says Samuels, lest they ?become cogs in a global machine.? MIT hopes ?to create the people who design and operate those machines.?
This means making international studies a core part of the MIT experience, and establishing MIT in an internationa... Opportunities in Infrastructure and Built Environment - Half the world?s population currently lives in cities, and that number is spiraling upward, as urban settlements gobble up most of the world?s natural resources and emit the most pollutants. No wonder that these panelists perceive the challenge (and opportunity) of sustainability as much bigger than getting people to switch from incandescent light bulbs to fluorescents.
The ?latest craze in city governance,? says Judith Layzer is making your city as sustainable as possible. New York for instance, has vowed to plant one million trees, and convert its entire taxi fleet to hybrids. Chicago is covering its rooftops in green; Toronto composts. Layzer believes there are ?good reasons to worry we?ll see symbolic commitments with not much done.?
Cities struggle to undertake systemic change, partly because they do... Opportunities in Building More Sustainable Supply Chains - When a global corporation implements sustainability standards, it pays to work closely with supply chains, as these panelists attest.
From his research, Richard M. Locke knows that the traditional methods of achieving decent labor conditions don?t work well. When Locke examined years of records gathered by Nike and other companies concerned with employee treatment in overseas factories, he found the conventional compliance route -- auditing, policing and enforcement -- just hadn?t brought about consistent improvements in child labor, or excess hours.
What does work, Locke discovered, are collaborative approaches -- when the corporate buyer offers to show the way, sharing know-how and resources with its suppliers. For instance, when one of Nike?s Vietnamese apparel factories -- an under-performer in prod... Getting Unstuck: How to Promote More Sustainable Practices in Our Organizations - All that?s required to achieve sustainability, says Rebecca Henderson, is to clean up your current operations and/or rethink the business. ?That?s easy,? she says -- with a smile. Henderson has spent much of her career trying to help firms embrace and survive such transformations. She and her colleagues have analyzed why businesses get stuck in their ways, and how they can break free to act boldly around the challenge and opportunity of sustainability.
Overload proves the single greatest obstacle for many organizations, Henderson says. Too many projects and too little time result in ?toxic effects, including making it difficult to undertake creative thinking and purposeful redirection? that responding to sustainability requires. Single-minded focus on short term financials can put unbearable pressure on individuals, wh... Climate Change: Challenges and Opportunities for Business and Society - If ?organizations are the way that ideas change the world,? as MIT Sloan Dean Dave Schmittlein puts it, then look to institutions like MIT, which has wrapped its arms around the issues of energy and climate change, to help make sustainability real and attainable. The Dean describes some showcase work launched at MIT, including a long-lasting battery for electric cars, and MIT?s own green campus efforts.
For MIT Sloan, explains Richard Locke, sustainability is not an ?in vogue concept? that is about environment or climate change. Rather, it is ?an incredible opportunity for new business, and for existing enterprise to reinvent their practices.? He invites panelists and audience at Convocation sessions to engage in dialog about moving beyond theory to meet the challenges of sustainability.
Forget the notion that the climate challenge... A View From Industry - GM knows you?ll be skeptical, says Gary Cowger, but this icon of American business has committed to transforming itself via a comprehensive regime of environmental sustainability. Cowger offers proof of the corporate giant?s efforts to date and even more ambitious plans for the future.
From its headquarters in Detroit, to 185 manufacturing sites around the world, to the cars and trucks people drive out of a dealership, GM sees ?environmental sustainability more and more ingrained in our operating culture every day.? Cowger says employees in every plant, in every language around the world must embrace environmental metrics along with safety and quality.
This means, for instance, that GM is installing giant solar panels at sites in Europe and the U.S., in some cases, sending electricity back to the gri... A Report Card on Media Coverage of the Presidential Election - There?s anxiety, outrage, and some wistfulness in this panel devoted to weighing the strengths and weaknesses of political reporting during the 2008 campaign season. In the age of the internet and cable news, ?enormously courageous journalism?is lost in the clutter,? notes moderator Ellen Hume. Basic tenets of journalism fall under assault.
From his research, Tom Rosenstiel quantifies what?s changing and what?s not in political journalism. One enduring pattern: 65% of the news hole is dedicated to covering the campaign as horse-race (tactics, strategy), and only 20% concerns policy. This has been true for two generations, he says. Today, cable news dominates political coverage, devoting 62% of its time to the presidential election. This might be a good thing, except that ?cable news has abdicated ... Imperative of Science and Technology in Accelerating African and Rwandan Development - The news these days from Africa isn?t all bad. In fact, in some places, it?s downright hopeful, as Rwandan President Paul Kagame attests. ?Our continent is no longer all about violence and disease and human disasters that scarred many African countries in recent decades,? says Kagame. ?We are now becoming a continent of opportunities.?
There are those who doubted Rwanda could ?constitute a viable state,? says Kagame, but 14 years after bloody genocide and civil war, his country has managed an astonishing revival -- enough ?stability and resilience to allow the economy to grow at an average 7% annually in the past several years.? Other African nations have been expanding at the same pace; oil producers are zooming along at even faster clips. Kagame attributes this recovery to such factors as the ?leapfrogging power... Foreign Policy and the Next U.S. Administration - After tuning in closely to the presidential campaign, these panelists don?t discern worlds of difference in the candidates? approaches to foreign policy. But the speakers convey key concerns and offer words of advice to the next U.S. president.
Barry Posen is interested in the future of U.S. grand strategy, by which he means our plan for achieving and maintaining security and power. Thus far, says Posen, both presidential candidates ?largely share the same view on U.S. grand strategy,? which is very expansive, with ?a long, global agenda for U.S. security goals.?
Both sides agree on the continued struggle against terror, containment of rogue states, and a commitment to the spread of democracy. Their disagreements are ?tactical, though not trivial,? involving for instance the relevance of international institutions, and the role of diplom... Personal Robots - Cynthia Breazeal?s eminently charming and huggable creatures appear to have stepped out of Santa?s North Pole workshop. But Breazeal wants you to know that her robots are attempts to create socially intelligent machines ?whose behaviors are governed not just by physics but by having a mind,? and which might someday collaborate with humans in critical interactions.
Breazeal wants to shift the concept of robots from machines that explore distant places like Mars, or vacuum floors, to devices that can function in society at large, dealing with people on a daily basis ?to enhance daily life, to help us as partners.?
Building sophisticated machines means delving into human social intelligence, our ability to develop a sense of self, communicate thoughts and feelings in words and gestures, and interact ... A New Age of Exploration: From Earth to Mars - Happily for human spaceflight, Dava Newman and her students enjoy working in such laboratories as NASA?s ?Vomit Comet.? Newman?s work aims to provide a better understanding of how humans can withstand the rigors of space missions. Her decades studying human physiology and performance in extreme environments may prove key not just to the success of reaching Mars this century, but to improving the quality of life for people disabled by disease or accident on Earth.
Studies of astronauts in flight, training on Earth, and on long engagements at the International Space Station, reveal ?significant physiological deconditioning,? Newman says. Microgravity produces musculo-skeletal loss, especially in the vertebrae and leg bones, as bipeds become ?more like snakes, using a swimming type of motion.? Muscles also atrophy ... Precision Cosmology - Buzz Lightyear has nothing on Max Tegmark, who takes his alumni audience on a dizzying tour of the universe and beyond.
Before Tegmark begins, MIT President Susan Hockfield highlights some newsworthy Institute milestones and initiatives, including breaking ground on a new cancer research center that will bring together engineering and life sciences; and pioneering work on new energy solutions, with a focus on harnessing light from the sun. Since federal funding for research has diminished, says Hockfield, MIT is increasingly pursuing philanthropy to move these key ventures into their next phase. She also describes a banner year for MIT admissions, in spite of turmoil nationally in higher education applications and financial aid; and a record for 2008 Alumni fund giving.
In his ?little... Innovation to Commercialization: Using Government Funding to Kick Start Your Start-Up - This informative roundtable provides useful tips to wanna-be small biz entrepreneurs on snagging government dollars. Through conversation and Q&A, moderator Bruce Gellerman elicits some key dos and don?ts from a National Science Foundation small business program officer, and from tech CEOs who have benefited from the government?s programs.
Thomas Allnut says that NSF is but one of 10 agencies that distribute money to small businesses, and that his program is ?in the middle of the pack, with $110 million per year to give away to responsible small businesses to get technology into the market place.? All told, in 2007, the government gave away $2.5 billion to businesses of fewer than 500 employees. While some agencies, like Department of Defense, have mission-driven solicitations (e.g., better bullet... Neuroeconomics - A pioneer in a ?dangerously hot research area,? Drazen Prelec peers into the human brain while it makes decisions. In his corner of the new field of neuroeconomics, Prelec uses a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine to scan minds pondering the pros and cons of purchasing and selling products like Godiva chocolate and flash drives.
Prelec first provides a brief background on the emergence of his discipline, made possible by technological advances in measuring brain activity, and the recent introduction of psychology into economics. The convergence (or perhaps collision) of behavioral approaches and economics has led to a ?sustained criticism of the rationality assumption in economics,? says Prelec, most prevalent in game theory. So much current research, he says, ?is a series of responses to... Software Innovation?Do You Think the Last 20 Years Were Exciting? The Next 20 Years Will Blow Your Mind - In a trip down memory lane, Brad Feld regales us with the pre- and recent history of electronic innovation, with a rapid-fire delivery that achieves vaudevillian pitch.
Via a slide-laden PowerPoint presentation -- and, by the way, Feld claims to hate PowerPoint, because as a venture capitalist ?I?ve only received about 6,723,000 of them? -- he narrates landmark moments in the evolution of the computer age. He touches on the room-size ENIAC computer, and pays tribute to the Jetsons cartoon as embodying his view of the future as a child. He cites his first programming language (APL, 1976), and first computer (Apple II, 1978). Feld speaks sentimentally of the familiar A> prompt as a quaint relic of the DOS operating system era.
Jump to the late ?80s, when Hypercard on the Macintosh was a pre-web foreshadowing... Projects for Change: Bringing Management Tools and Ideas, Collaboration, and Learning-by-Doing to the Challenge of Global Health Delivery - The Latin motto on the MIT seal, mens et manus ? mind and hand ? encapsulates Anjali Sastry?s view of the combined theoretical and practical education that students gain at the Institute. She cites MIT founder William Barton Rogers?s 1860 exhortation for ?the most earnest cooperation of intelligent culture with industrial pursuits? as the paradigm of learning by doing, the ideal way to gain and apply knowledge. This undergirds her approach to teaching in tandem with projects in which students practice, test, reflect, share, and thereby enact change for the benefit of an enterprise.
The need for practice is a constant theme in Sastry?s view of learning. Just as in music, sports, and chess, practice in management skills results in organizational improvement. That is why she considers it imperative that student... How Democracy Resolves Conflict in Difficult Games - Using game theory, and with some help from the Bible, Steven Brams argues that voting can resolve certain kinds of conflicts.
He explores in detail the classic game Prisoner?s Dilemma. In his version, players must choose whether or not to contribute to the renovation of a public park. In a two-person variation of the game, in which Brams posits a rich person as one player, and the public as the other, ?each person has an incentive to a free ride.? The dominant strategy for each, he says, is not to contribute, and let the other pay for the public good. Then Brams reframes this game, with the addition of voting. With two persons, a majority means both must vote to finance the park for the renovation to happen. One vote for financing the park won?t cut it. ?You go from non-cooperative to cooperative as ... The Innovator's Prescription: A Disruptive Solution to the Healthcare Crisis - Don?t believe everything you learn in business school, cautions Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen. ?It?s the principles of good management we teach that cause successful companies to fail.? In this meaty lecture, Christensen distills several books? worth of research describing how business leaders sometimes metamorphose into losers when confronted with market-rocking innovations. He also reveals how we may harness his insights in such socially significant and complex industries as healthcare.
Christensen distinguishes between the kind of sustained and incremental technological improvements that help a market leader retain its edge, and ?disruptive technology,? where a simple and affordable idea takes root in ?an undemanding application at the bottom of the market, then improves ... The U.S. and the World?s Recession - Roberto Rigobon somehow makes his audience laugh while summarizing preliminary research on worldwide inflation and recession, data that bring some grim tidings about our global economic state of health. (NB: Argentina and France get knocked about a bit in this talk.)
By pulling favors with friends at central banks, Rigobon has gathered data on the prices of every conceivable product from dozens of nations over many years, from the clothes we wear to the cars we drive. He searches for correlations between the changes in price of major commodities, such as wheat and rice, and price changes in domestic retail items associated with them, such as bread, pasta and cookies (the latter he admits are of special concern to him). He calculates both how much the increases are and how long it takes for the price inc... If the World is Flat, What are We Still Doing in Cambridge? - At the very moment when ?we have to confront the opportunity or challenge of globalization,? says Allan Goodman, higher education appears woefully unprepared. The world is not ?flat? for the vast majority of college students.
Only 30 of 192 U.N. member states boast enrollments of international students at levels that exceed 1%. In the U.S., it is a little over 3%. Of the 2.7 million international students, 600 thousand come to the U.S. -- most hoping to end up at Harvard, according to Goodman. They are distributed among just 150 schools, usually in very small numbers. This is bad news, because ?never has there been a more difficult time for us in the world,? says Goodman, and education exchange broadens not just the ?knowledge enterprise? but enhances the image of both host and origin country.... Chantal Akerman: Moving through Time and Space - This exploration/homage arrives in the form of a lecture/conversation, breaking some conventions, not unlike the object/subject of the event, Chantal Akerman, filmmaker and video artist. Two Akerman experts discuss her work in the kick-off event to an exhibition at MIT?s List Visual Arts Center.
First, Giuliana Bruno offers history and perspective on Akerman?s oeuvre, starting with her pathbreaking 1975 film, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which ?changed the way we looked at film, and opened up ideas for feminist thinking, theory and filmmaking.? Bruno discusses Akerman?s unique way of breaking down barriers between documentary and fiction film, and more recently between film and museum installations. Akerman fascinates, says Bruno, for her ?movement of space and... Global and Regional Climate Change: Underlying Science and Emerging Riddles - Veerabhadran Ramanathan recaps 35 years of key findings, and brings his audience up to date on the latest climate data, models, and observations which together demonstrate how CO2 is but one piece of a complex puzzle.
Ramanathan deploys simple but extremely helpful metaphors to describe the processes behind warming. CO2 in the atmosphere, whether manmade or natural, surrounds the earth like a blanket, holding onto the radiation from the sun. When the blanket is behaving properly, enough sun?s heat stays on earth to keep biological forces humming, and the rest escapes back into space. But if this blanket gets thicker, it ?prevents the body from losing heat.? CO2 is particularly noxious, since it ?lives in the atmosphere for a century if not longer.? But it turns out we hav... So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits and the President Failed on Iraq - Greg Mitchell has found both comedy and tragedy in the shameless and near-universal complicity between the American press and the Bush Administration around the Iraq war and occupation. Mitchell?s amply documented account of the run-up to the invasion through the recent surge forms the basis of his new book, So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits and the President Failed on Iraq, and this talk.
The nation?s mainstream media flunked a basic test of journalism, according to Mitchell: displaying a healthy skepticism. ?Even if you?re reporting for a tiny newspaper in Topeka, and interviewing the local garbage department official, don?t take what he says as gospel. Check it out with other people.? From the multiple rationales offered by the Bush Administration for the invasion, to their progr... Sociable Robots - Cynthia Breazeal makes social robots, machines with the capacity to interact with people on psychological terms. She says they ?open up a new world of questions.? But these increasingly sophisticated devices make Sherry Turkle uneasy, since they challenge the idea of human relationships and the very ?purpose, importance, of living things.?
Since inventing her famously expressive, anthropomorphic Kismet, a robot that engages and learns from people through auditory, facial and social cues, Breazeal has evolved her work using robots as a scientific tool for social understanding. Her labs are putting robots through the paces of major child development milestones, such as appreciating the mental states of others. For instance, robot Leonardo has rudimentary object permanence, inferring from a tricky human... Reflections on an MIT Education - In a neat series of time capsules tagged to his MIT experience, Neil Pappalardo shares his story with MIT graduates in the hope that it will give them ?an idea of the possibilities that lie ahead.?
His story begins in 1964, when as a senior majoring in Physics, he decided to pursue a thesis on a medical topic, without, Pappalardo notes, having attended a single course in design or synthesis. He met cardiologists at a Boston hospital searching for a labor-saving way to analyze hours? worth of EKG data. In a matter of months, he had invented a device to solve the problem, graduated in Electrical Engineering, and set out for a career at Mass. General Hospital. Lesson learned: ?An MIT education will awaken creativity and discovery within you.?
Pappalardo recounts his early financial hardshi... "The New Epoch" and the 21st Century Imperative for Engineering History - Great civil engineers finds an aesthetic appropriate for their building?s material and structure, asserts David Billington, whose life work has been the study of some of the world?s most stunning engineering feats.
He reviews his own intellectual journey, first honoring some of his forebears, including Elting Morison, industrial historian and a founder of MIT's Program in Science, Technology and Society, and R. G. Collingwood, philosopher/historian. Billington describes a momentous turn in his career at Princeton, when architecture students in one of his courses rebuked him: ?They told me, we hate what you?re teaching us. You?re teaching us stick diagrams and formulas. That?s how you teach structural engineering. Why can?t we study beautiful structures??
They showed him a picture of the Salgi... High-Eco-Tech: Building Avant la Garde - There?s more than a little magic in Werner Sobek?s constructions, which balance aesthetics, architectural constraints and pathbreaking science to, in his words, ?go beyond? nature?s own limits.
Sobek walks us through his portfolio of engineering feats, enabled by a worldwide architecture and engineering business, and by his affiliated institute, where researchers are let loose on the most demanding problems of the business. For instance, in 1997, his group began to address a key issue the architecture and construction trades engaged in only through ?theoretical discussion:? how to design a Triple 0 building ?for zero energy consumption, zero energy emissions and complete recycle-ability.
Such innovative constructions require new, lightweight, recycle-able, load-bearing material. His interdisci... Copyright © 2008, Go 2 Clickbank. All Rights Reserved. |