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Geography RSS FeedsWalking the Talk - Theresa Stone GM '76, Jason Jay, Adam Siegel, Anna Jaffe There’s “just exactly enough time, with no time to lose” to address the massive challenge of climate change and renewable energy, says moderator John Sterman. With this sense of urgency, MIT faculty, administration and students have taken to heart the mission of rendering their campus and the larger world more sustainable. Sterman describes a triumph of green construction rising on campus, Building E62, the product of a decade of design and negotiation, which many hope will set the standard for future MIT development. The building features lighting that will use half as much power as existing campus buildings, and heating and cooling that will reduce energy use by one-third. But this is a success story with lessons: green construction requires higher up front costs, and MIT executives were not immediately sold on the benefits of lower operating costs. Theresa Stone lays out the fund...Feed Source: mitworld.mit.edu The International Development Fair: The Human Factor at Work in the World - Amy Smith ‘84, SM ‘95, ENG ‘95 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 countries like Haiti and Tibet, smoke from indoor cooking fires leads to high mortality rates among young children. Solar cookers... Beyond the Bench: Preparing MIT Students for the Challenges of Global Leadership - Richard Samuels PhD '80, Subra Suresh ScD ‘81, Marc A. Kastner, Deborah Fitzgerald, David Schmittlein, Adèle Naudé Santos 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 international context. At a time whe... Opportunities in Infrastructure and Built Environment - Sarah Slaughter, 82, SM'87, PhD 91, Judith Layzer, PhD '99, Milton Bevington, Bill Sisson 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 don’t control the supply and demand mechanism for e... Opportunities in Building More Sustainable Supply Chains - Richard M. Locke PhD ‘89, Fernando Paiz SF ’89 , Bonnie Nixon-Gardiner 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 productivity and labor standards -- inquired about adopting Lean manufacturing,... Getting Unstuck: How to Promote More Sustainable Practices in Our Organizations - Rebecca Henderson ‘81 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, who then can’t focus successfully, leading to failures in their projects. In an ugly loop, employees receive blame for poor... Climate Change: Challenges and Opportunities for Business and Society - David Schmittlein, Richard M. Locke PhD ‘89, John Sterman PhD '82, Vladimir Bulovic, Kevin Moss 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 is primari... A View From Industry - Gary L. Cowger, SF'78 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 grid. It’s harnessing the energy of landfill gases to fire boilers and generate electricity. There are water reduction ... A Report Card on Media Coverage of the Presidential Election - Tom Rosenstiel, John Carroll, Ellen Goodman 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 much of the time to campaign operatives and spin doctors communicating talking points,” says Rosenstiel. It ... Imperative of Science and Technology in Accelerating African and Rwandan Development - Paul Kagame 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 of mobile technology,” where hundreds of millions of new cell phone users, even in remote areas without electricity, drive t... Copyright © 2008, SandyHay.com. All Rights Reserved. |