Alice H. Amsden, an expert in economic development who served as the Barton L. Weller Professor of Political Economy in MITâs Department of Urban Studies and Planning, died suddenly on March 14 at her home in Cambridge. She was 68.A prolific scholar, Amsden wrote extensively about the process of industrialization in emerging economies, particularly in Asia. Her work frequently emphasized the importance of the state as a creator of economic growth, and challenged the idea that globalization had produced generally uniform conditions in which emerging economies could find a one-size-fits-all path to prosperity.âShe will be sorely missed,â said Amy K. Glasmeier, professor of geography and regional planning and head of MITâs Department of Urban Studies and Planning. âUpon hearing the news, one student said to me, âshe was a titanâ in the field of development. While others took the conventional way, Alice took another path. She was fearless. By any measure, Alice was one of the most, if not the most, accomplished heterodox economist in the world.âAmsden wrote or co-authored seven books, and dozens of journal articles, essays and chapters in edited volumes. She also wrote frequently for general-interest publications; her work appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Dissent, Boston Review, Technology Review and others. One of Amsdenâs best-known books was âThe Rise of âThe Restâ: Challenges to the West from Late-Industrializing Economies,â published by Oxford University Press in 2001. In it, she examined the way Asian countries such as South Korea and Taiwan had helped produce growth through state-promoted industrialization. By contrast, Amsden observed, some Latin American countries had accommodated a greater degree of overseas investment, leaving more economic decisions in the hands of multinational firms, not state actors. Amsden was a co-winner of the 2002 Leontief Prize, along with Harvard Universityâs Dani Rodrik, an annual award granted by Tufts University in recognition of important âcontributions to economic theory that ⌠support just and sustainable societies.â The prize is named for the prominent late economist Wassily Leontief. In her acceptance remarks for the Leontief Prize, Amsden stressed the importance of the close study of developing countries, because âthere are a lot of people out there that are disappointed and that desperately want improved living conditions and social standards.â Amsden was born in New York City, received her undergraduate degree from Cornell University in 1965, and her PhD from the London School of Economics in 1971. She began her career as an economist at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and before joining MIT in 1994, taught at the University of California at Los Angeles, Barnard College, Harvard Business School, and The New School. At MIT, she held the Ellen Swallow Richards Institute Chair from 1994 until 1999, when she was named the Weller Professor. Beyond her teaching and scholarship, Amsden served as a consultant to the OECD, the World Bank, and multiple programs within the United Nations. In 2009, she was appointed by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to a three-year seat on the U.N. Committee on Development Policy, part of the U.N. Economic and Social Council; the committee provides advice to the council on a wide range of economic development issues.Amsden is survived by her sister and brother-in-law, Myra Strober and Jay Jackman of Stanford, Calif.; nephew Jason Strober, his wife, Joanna Strober, and their children, Sarah, Jared and Ari, of Los Altos Hills, Calif.; niece Elizabeth Strober, her husband, Bryan Cohen, and their son, Leo Strober Cohen, of Seattle; nephew Rashi Jackman, his wife Maike Ahrends, and their son, Jasper Ahrends, of Palo Alto, Calif.; nephew Jason Scott and his wife, Lena Chu, of Mountain View, Calif.; and niece Tenaya Jackman of Oakland, Calif. Amsden was previously married to John Amsden and to Takhashi Hikino.NOTE: A memorial service will be planned at MIT at a later time. More details will be posted as they become available.Economists have measured America’s growing wealth gap in great detail: by income, educational attainment, and in terms of the country’s declining social mobility, among other metrics. At an MIT forum on Tuesday night, however, economists suggested the issue matters for an overarching reason that’s slightly harder to quantify: Inequality, they said, constitutes a threat to America’s values and political system. „If there’s any national religion that we have, it’s the religion of meritocracy, the belief that people get where they end up in life because of hard work and playing by the rules,” said moderator David Autor, professor of economics and associate head of MIT’s Department of Economics. „That’s a very powerful belief system to have ⌠it makes people say, fundamentally, ‘I can accept the outcome I get, because it’s not arbitrary, it reflects some kind of justice.’” By contrast, Autor noted, a decline in opportunities for advancement threatens to undermine that confidence. „If rising inequality makes our society more dynastic, less determined by what you do and more determined by choosing the right parents, that’s harmful ⌠the system is not rewarding [those] values and virtues.” Inequality can also distort the ways political decisions are made, noted Peter Diamond, Institute Professor and professor emeritus of economics at MIT. âGiven the way we organize Congress and the presidency, [corporations and individuals] with a lot of money ⌠have a lot more of an impact on policies,â Diamond said at the event, hosted by MITâs Technology and Culture Forum, a program of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts. In this sense, he added, inequality is not just a symptom of larger economic or social problems, but a problem in itself.Â
College as a dividing lineTo be sure, the basic numbers on economic inequality in the United States are striking, as detailed at the event. In 1980, the top 1 percent of U.S. households earned about 10 percent of the nation’s income; today that top percentile receives about 25 percent of income. The top 10 percent of households accounted for a bit more than 30 percent of income from World War II until about 1980, but now receives 50 percent of all income.And among the top 1 percent of households, 70 percent of income stems from returns on capital â the assets they already own â whereas for all households, only 20 percent of income comes from capital, noted Arjun Jayadev, an economist at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. This income inequality often manifests itself in educational inequality, which in turn helps perpetuate the divisions in society; 82 percent of children in the wealthiest quartile of households obtain a college degree, compared to just 8 percent of children in the bottom quarter.”College really begins to be a dividing line in terms of things like family formation,” said Frank Levy, the Daniel Rose Professor of Urban Economics in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning, noting that wealthier people are more likely to marry and have children. With this in mind, Levy added, Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum’s recent remarks on the subject â he called President Barack Obama a „snob” for promoting the idea that all Americans should attend college â „speak to a real and deep resentment.” Mixture of solutionsTo be sure, identifying the inequality problem is easier than resolving it. But the panelists all suggested that certain policy initiatives, if implemented, would help address the issue.Diamond’s own policy wish list features items designed to help an economy that, in his view, remains in an „incredibly awful” position. He called for more infrastructure investment â which he noted would be a relative bargain at the moment, given the country’s very low borrowing rates â and further investment in education. The latter, Diamond emphasized, does not require a search for elusive „shovel-ready” spending projects, but could be accomplished by the federal government providing aid to school districts so they could re-employ some of the thousands of teachers laid off during the recent downturn. „While we also know that merely throwing money at the [education] problem won’t solve it, taking money away from the problem is unlikely to solve it, yet that is exactly what has been happening in state after state as they deal with the fallout from the financial crisis,” Diamond said. „We need the federal government to pump more money through the states and local governments into education.”Diamond also pointed to some of his own recent research, with economist Emmanuel Saez of the University of California at Berkeley, which found that the optimal marginal income tax rate on the highest earners â those making $400,000 or more per year â is well above the current 36 percent, or even the 39 percent level that existed during the 1990s. Â „The Washington debate right now is between the Bush and Clinton tax rates on the top,” Diamond said. But his work with Saez shows that a more efficient rate for raising revenue â without significantly deterring the wealthy from trying to earn more â is „somewhere between the tax rate at the top in Reagan’s first administration, which was 50 percent, and the tax rate at the top from the Johnson years up to the Reagan change, which was 70 percent.” A few of the panelists also emphasized the need for improved education at the community college level, and for providing job-training opportunities for high school graduates affected by the movement of manufacturing and technical jobs overseas. All of them emphasized educational improvements, at every level of school, as a way of helping to restore a society with a reasonable equality of opportunity, though not necessarily of outcomes. „The playing field is tilted right from the beginning, and it’s very hard to avoid that,” Levy said. „That’s not going to stop.” Through education, he added, „You have to do things to try to even up [opportunities] for kids who don’t have access to as much.”Eran Ben-Joseph wants to rethink parking lots. Photo: Dominick Reuter
Quick: Name a great parking lot.You probably cannot think of one offhand. If you did, it would certainly surprise Eran Ben-Joseph, a professor of landscape architecture and urban design at MIT. A few years ago, teaching MITâs venerable site-planning class, Ben-Joseph found himself confronted with the problem of explaining to students why parking lots are so often nothing but vast fields of asphalt occupying prime urban and suburban real estate. So Ben-Joseph started asking people if they could name parking lots that even had a few good qualities to them. âIt started with this quick question: âHave you seen a great parking lot lately?â I surveyed a lot of people I know, students and colleagues, and most people canât point to one,â Ben-Joseph says. Before long, he had come to one conclusion: âPlanners, developers and public officials should pay more attention to the issue.âWith that aim in mind, Ben-Joseph has produced a new book about the subject, Rethinking a Lot: The Design and Culture of Parking, published this month by MIT Press, in which he details the centrality of parking lots in our lives, questions their most common forms and suggests ways of improving them.âWe all use parking lots, and we all kind of hate them,â Ben-Joseph says. âYet theyâre part of everyday life and we have to deal with that. There are cultural and psychological issues around parking lots, and a lot of anxiety about how people behave and drive in them. We need to think about these spaces as being an important part of our daily lives.âA lot bigger than Puerto RicoParking lots are indeed ubiquitous in the United States: They take up one-third of the surface area in some major cities. No one knows how many parking spaces exist in the country: Past estimates have ranged from about 100 million to 2 billion. The first figure seems far too low, since the nation has about 255 million registered passenger cars. Further estimates suggest that on average, three non-residential parking spaces exist for every car in the United States. That would yield almost 800 million parking spaces, comprising a total area larger than Puerto Rico.That is a lot of lots. Indeed, one problem with parking spaces is that we seem to have too many of them. As Donald Shoup, an urban planning professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, and others have shown, civil engineers and planners routinely use rules of thumb about the number of parking spaces per capita they must build that seem to vastly overstate the actual needs of the population. Among other effects, plentiful and cheap parking keeps urban areas locked into a car dependency with social, economic and aesthetic drawbacks. In some places, to be sure, this problem has lessened, particularly with the urban revival in many cities during the last couple of decades. âYou look at aerial photography of the downtowns of U.S. cities in the 1950s and 1960s, youâll be amazed at how many surface parking lots there were,â Ben-Joseph says. But the parking lot problem is also a suburban issue, not just an urban one. Many huge suburban parking lots are built to accommodate a maximum capacity of cars that is only rarely needed. The largest mall near you probably has a parking lot that only approaches capacity during the holiday season; football stadiums have massive parking lots that may only be used 10 times per year. Apart from everything else, these parking lots can create multiple environmental problems: More asphalt creates more heat, and leads to faster water runoff â which means plants might not have the chance to extract pollutants from water, as they often do in creeks and streams. Moreover, the economics of parking lot construction means that surface parking lots, where the whole lot is on ground level, occupy a large footprint because they are relatively cheap to build â four times less expensive than parking garages and six to eight times less expensive than underground parking lots. The trees have itSo what can be done to make parking lots greener and better integrated into their civic surroundings? Ben-Joseph recommends a menu of ideas to improve parking lots according to their settings â which he regards as âa healthier approach to planning, rather than giving prescriptive ideas about how to design them.âFor one thing, planners might simply plant trees throughout parking lots, as the architect Renzo Piano did at Fiatâs Lingotto factory in Turin, Italy. Low-use parking lots need not be entirely paved in asphalt, either: Miamiâs Sun Life Stadium features large areas of grass lots that are environmentally better year-round.âThe whole space does not have to be designed the same way,â Ben-Joseph says. âOverflow parking can be designed differently, and not paved with asphalt.âLots can also incorporate green technology. Some parking spaces in Palo Alto, Calif., have charging stalls for electric vehicles. A Walmart parking lot in Worcester, Mass., has 12 wind turbines that generate clean electricity for the store. The Sierra Nevada Brewery parking lot in Chico, Calif., has solar panels built into its lattice structure.Other parking lots are user-friendly because they recognize that drivers become pedestrians once they park. Ben-Joseph likes the redesign of the Porter Square parking lot in Cambridge, Mass., which helps pedestrians traverse its entrance more easily â âit has a nice relationship to the street, almost more like an urban plazaâ â and cites an IKEA parking lot in San Diego that has built pedestrian walkways into the design.Some urban planners who have read Rethinking a Lot say they approve of Ben-Josephâs pragmatic approach. âI think every solution has to be quite contextual,â says Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, a professor of urban planning at the University of California at Los Angeles, who also calls the book âdelightfulâ and âuseful.â Partly due to this variety of settings in which parking lots are found, Ben-Joseph regards the issue as a work in progress â for planners, designers, architects or anyone reading his book who has a better idea about making lots a lot better. âParking lots are not going to disappear,â Ben-Joseph says. âMy intent is not to champion their abolition or to advocate strict codes and standards ⌠but rather to illustrate their contemporary effects on our life and their great potential for the future.â Rybnik SEO The MIT-Japan Program at the Center for International Studies (CIS) has received a grant for the MIT Japan 3.11 Initiative from The Japan Foundation’s Center for Global Partnership.The Initiative is MIT’s response to the devastating March 2011 earthquakes and tsunami in the Tohoku region of Japan. The $69,000, one-year grant will be used for planning costs connected with the creation of a symposium and a community center in Minami Sanriku, Japan, a village virtually destroyed during last year’s disaster.This multi-use interim town center will be planned in conjunction with the residents of Minami Sanriku’s largest temporary housing site. The center will provide a vital gathering space for this displaced community, offer a wide range of services to the village, and help residents return to their daily routines and draw strength from each other during the rebuilding process.Richard Samuels â MIT-Japan Program director, Ford International Professor of Political Science, and CIS director â expressed his enthusiasm for the opportunity to bring political scientists, architects and planners together in this project.MIT is also creating a university curriculum as part of a wider effort to study and promote disaster-resilient town planning, design and reconstruction.
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MIT Tech TV
Shun Kanda, Senior Lecturer, MIT School of Architecture + Planning, discusses the Japan 3.11 project.In December, two School of Architecture + Planning alumni conducted a workshop in Istanbul that brought together 24 young architects, planners and engineers â half from Armenia, half from Turkey â for a weeklong series of lectures, discussions and site visits focused on environmental sustainability.While the primary aim of the workshop was professional development, the organizers hope to create a cross-border network of faculty, students and young professionals that will foster human bonds and enhance understanding between the two estranged countries. Read moreLast August, Hurricane Irene spun through the Caribbean and parts of the eastern United States, leaving widespread wreckage in its wake. The Category 3 storm whipped up water levels, generating storm surges that swept over seawalls and flooded seaside and inland communities. Many hurricane analysts suggested, based on the wide extent of flooding, that Irene was a â100-year eventâ: a storm that only comes around once in a century. However, researchers from MIT and Princeton University have found that with climate change, such storms could make landfall far more frequently, causing powerful, devastating storm surges every three to 20 years. The group simulated tens of thousands of storms under different climate conditions, finding that todayâs â500-year floodsâ could, with climate change, occur once every 25 to 240 years. The researchers published their results in the current issue of Nature Climate Change.MIT postdoc Ning Lin, lead author of the study, says knowing the frequency of storm surges may help urban and coastal planners design seawalls and other protective structures.âWhen you design your buildings or dams or structures on the coast, you have to know how high your seawall has to be,â Lin says. âYou have to decide whether to build a seawall to prevent being flooded every 20 years.âLin collaborated with Kerry Emanuel, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT, as well as with Michael Oppenheimer and Erik Vanmarcke at Princeton. The group looked at the impact of climate change on storm surges, using New York City as a case study. To simulate present and future storm activity in the region, the researchers combined four climate models with a specific hurricane model. The combined models generated 45,000 synthetic storms within a 200-kilometer radius of Battery Park, at the southern tip of Manhattan.They studied each climate model under two scenarios: a âcurrent climateâ condition representing 1981 to 2000 and a âfuture climateâ condition reflecting the years 2081 to 2100, a prediction based on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changeâs projections of future moderate carbon dioxide output. While there was some variability among the models, the team generally found that the frequency of intense storms would increase due to climate change. Once they simulated storms in the region, the researchers then simulated the resulting storm surges using three different models, including one used by the National Hurricane Center (NHC). In the days or hours before a hurricane hits land, the NHC uses a storm-surge model to predict the risk and extent of flooding from the impending storm. Such models, however, have not been used to evaluate multiple simulated storms under a scenario of climate change. Again, the group compared results from multiple models: one from the NHC which simulates storm surges quickly, though coarsely; another model that generates more accurate storm surges, though less efficiently; and a model in between, developed by Lin and her colleagues, that estimates relatively accurate surge floods, relatively quickly. Today, a â100-year stormâ means a surge flood of about two meters, on average, in New York. Roughly every 500 years, the region experiences towering, three-meter-high surge floods. Both scenarios, Lin notes, would easily top Manhattanâs seawalls, which stand 1.5 meters high. But with added greenhouse gas emissions, the models found that a two-meter surge flood would instead occur once every three to 20 years; a three-meter flood would occur every 25 to 240 years.âThe highest [surge flood] was 3.2 meters, and this happened in 1821,â Lin says. âThatâs the highest water level observed in New York Cityâs history, which is like a present 500-year event.âCarol Friedland, an assistant professor of construction management and industrial engineering at Louisiana State University, sees the groupâs results as a useful tool to inform coastal design â particularly, she notes, as most buildings are designed with a 60- to 120-year âusable lifespan.â âThe physical damage and economic loss that result from storm surge can be devastating to individuals, businesses, infrastructure and communities,â Friedland says. âFor current coastal community planning and design projects, it is essential that the effects of climate change be included in storm-surge predictions.âMIT President Susan Hockfield and about a dozen members of the MIT faculty traveled to Davos, Switzerland, last week to participate in the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF). The five-day meeting, which brings together leaders in business, politics, academia and other areas, hosted a variety of discussions revolving around this yearâs theme: âThe Great Transformation: Shaping New Models.â A troubled global economy with high unemployment dominated many of the meetingâs conversations. In a panel on the future of economics, economists including Peter Diamond, Institute Professor Emeritus and a winner of last yearâs Nobel Prize in Economics, and MIT graduates Bob Shiller and Joe Stiglitz agreed that many economic models failed to recognize the nature of the current economic crisis because they largely ignored the effects of contagion and connectedness â unable to factor in the financial connections between institutions and the global risk of bankruptcy cascades. Panelists said more attention to models recognizing the role of collateral and new models, such as those incorporating behavioral economics, may offer a more accurate outlook.MIT researchers also said that basic research in neuroscience will play a significant role in shaping societies, behavior and economic progress. MIT President Susan Hockfield spoke at Davos of the importance of basic brain research in fields other than neuroscience.âNew findings from neuroscience will have profound implications in fields far beyond the brain and mind, and well beyond psychology or medicine,â Hockfield said.An analysis of how human nature could improve society was the topic of discussion among faculty members H. Robert Horvitz, the David H. Koch Professor of Biology and a Nobel laureate; Nancy Kanwisher, the Walter A. Rosenblith Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience; Alex âSandyâ Pentland, the Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences; and Tomaso Poggio, the Eugene McDermott Professor in the Brain Sciences and Human Behavior. One example is what the group termed âtrust networksâ: communities, such as open-source software users, that combine technical know-how with a certain amount of trust. Code creators, sharers and users need to trust each other in order to build on and propagate a software program. The researchers argued that understanding how trust plays into such large-scale networks may foster more successful innovations for society. The researchers also discussed new advances in brain imaging, exploring the ever-closing gap between artificial and human intelligence. In the near future, they said, neuroscientists may be able to construct a precise model of the human brain, which could serve as a testing ground for potential therapies as well as a blueprint for artificially intelligent machines. Yossi Sheffi, the Elisha Gray II Professor of Engineering Systems, moderated a panel on vulnerabilities in the global supply chain. Piracy, the effects of climate change, and weaknesses in cybersecurity are significant risks to the global trade of goods and services; panelists suggested that governments work together to reduce the impact of such risks.Other MIT researchers who participated in Davos this year included Ed Boyden, the Benesse Career Development Associate Professor of Research in Education; Neil Gershenfeld, Director of the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms; Carlo Ratti, Associate Professor of the Practice in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning and Director of the SENSEable City Laboratory; Adèle NaudĂŠ Santos, Dean of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning; and Tim Berners-Lee, 3Com Founders Professor of Engineering and director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).Ed Boyden participated in a panel on leadership, in which panelists looked at the complex pressures that leaders face, including rapidly changing environments, technology, and social crises. Carlo Ratti presented a project for a new, interactive urban design in Mexico, called Ciudad Creativa Digital, with Mexican president Felipe Calderon. Adèle NaudĂŠ Santos and Neil Gershenfeld contributed to a broad discussion on innovations in social and technological models. Gershenfeld noted that smart materials and the digital revolution have made it possible for ordinary people to create new technologies, while Santos argued that the physical environment â particularly modern cities â is essential to making connections between people. Susan Hockfield and MIT hosted three private events: a breakfast discussion about neuroscience moderated by Nature Editor in Chief Philip Campbell and featuring Bob Horvitz, Nancy Kanwisher and Tomaso Poggio; a dinner discussion about the fate of the Eurozone featuring Peter Diamond and Nouriel Roubini, a Professor of Economics and International Business at New York Universityâs Stern School made famous for having predicted the housing crisis; and a reception for friends of MIT. Hockfield, who serves as a Director of the WEF, said, âThe large number of MIT faculty in attendance covered a lot of academic ground, but one message they all sent to Forum attendees was this: solving the toughest problems in the world requires science, mathematics and engineering. Itâs an important message in any era and particularly important in times of fiscal austerity.â”Iâm fascinated by the way humanity has constructed ideas of time as tools for understanding and moving through our world, and how these ideas have come to shape our memories, myths and histories, revised over every age.”Read more”I’m interested in the intersections of new, networked technologies and the urban environment. We are now able to see a city and its people in real-time as we cull from the data created through the normal activities of life. The challenge, and my interest, is how we begin to ‘close the loop’ and use these technological opportunities to impact how we use, see, plan and design the city in new ways (âŚreal time?).”Read moreEran Ben-Joseph’s Bronx practicum was one of 10 winners out of 150 submissions to a design competition sponsored by the Institute for Urban Design; their work was showcased in an exhibit and a special publication at the first ever Urban Design Week Festival in New York City.Masoud Akbarzadeh MArch ’11 has been awarded a $20K Research and Travel Fellowship from the Skidmore, Owings & Merrill Foundation; this is the second year in a row the fellowship has gone to a student from SA+P: last year the distinction went to Azra Dawood SMArchS ’10; both continue their studies here this year.Marcelo Coelho MAS PhD ’12 and Jamie Zigelbaum MAS SM ’09 won Honorary Mention in Interactive Arts at Ars Electronica this year for their project Six-Forty by Four-Eighty, a lighting installation composed of magnetic, physical pixels, stainless steel and remote controllers.Eric Jay Dolin PhD ’95 has received a slew of awards for his most recent book, Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America, including being chosen as one of the best books of 2010 by The Seattle Times and one of the top 10 books of 2010 by the Rocky Mountain Land Library.Maryam Eskandari SMArchS ’11 will present her thesis ‘(Re)Constructing the Place of Gender in Contemporary American Mosque’ at the ACSA Conference in Houston in October.Topher McDougal MCP ’07, PhD ’11 has published his thesis, ‘Law of the Landless: The Dalit Bid for Land Redistribution in Gujarat, India’ as a peer-reviewed article in the L&D Review.Tony Pizzigati SB ’92, an early advocate of open-source computing, died in an car accident on his way to work in Silicon Valley in 1995; his legacy is honored by the annual Antonio Pizzigati Prize for Software in the Public Interest, the nation’s highest honor for software developers working with nonprofits to help advance innovative social change. Nominations have now opened for this year’s $10K prize.Nithya Raman MCP ’08 has published an article in the inaugural issue of Urban Affairs, a peer-reviewed publication put out by Economic and Political Weekly; ‘The Board and the Bank: Changing Policies towards Slums in Chennai’ is based on her MCP thesis. Kelly Robinson PhD ’91 has been appointed director of the Cornwall Center at Rutgers-Newark, a part of the School of Public Affairs and Administration promoting research and interchange among scholars of urban and metropolitan life, government leaders, community-based organizations and private citizens.Alice Shay and Stephen Kennedy, MCP candidates, are among three finalist teams in the AECOM Design + Planning student design competition; they are competing for a prize of up to $15K with up to $25K of in-kind donation to be made available to a charitable organization to help realize the winning entry.Steve Weikal MSRED/MCP ’08 is developing Concord Riverwalk, a pocket neighborhood of high-performance homes in West Concord, Mass., designed for minimal environmental impact, with craftsman-like quality, and featuring a Net Zero Energy standard; more than 75 percent of the homes are already sold.Andres Sevtsuk SM ’06, PhD ’10, principal investigator of the City Form Research Group, has announced a new Urban Network Analysis toolbox to help urban planners describe the spatial patterns of cities, using network analysis methods such as those used to study social networks; the new toolbox is distributed as free and open-source plug-in.
Księgowość w przedsiębiorstwach, to bardzo ważna kwestia, toteż trzeba tutaj zadbać, aby wszystkie kwestie z tym związane były, jak najbardziej profesjonalnie zorganizowane. Trzeba tutaj zagwarantować, aby wszystkie transakcje finansowe w firmie, były perfekcyjnie rozliczone, gdyż w przeciwnym razie, można się narazić na pewne problemy natury prawnej. Oczywiście nie trzeba tego wszystkiego robić samodzielnie, bowiem można bez większego trudu, wynająć zewnętrzną firmę, która w naszym imieniu, poprowadzi całą księgowość. 
Wszelkiego rodzaju przedsiębiorstwa produkcyjne, czy też usługowe, musza stale dbać o odpowiedni poziom czystości na terenie swoich firm, wobec czego konieczne jest albo utrzymywanie własnego działu utrzymania czystości, bądź też korzystanie z usług zewnętrznych firm w tym zakresie. Oczywiście zewnętrzne firmy, są tutaj rozwiązaniem nieco lepszym, bowiem w kwestii kosztowności, wypadają o wiele przystępniej, toteż większość firm, decyduje się właśnie na usługi tego typu zakładów utrzymania czystości.