Tuesday, April 26th, 2016

Time	Event
12:00a	Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala to give address at 2016 Investiture of Doctoral Hoods Chancellor Cynthia Barnhart has announced that alumna Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala MCP ’78, PhD ’81, former Nigerian finance minister, will be the guest speaker at MIT’s 2016 Investiture of Doctoral Hoods. “Dr. Okonjo-Iweala’s leadership on the complex global stage of economics and politics demonstrates the real-world impact of an informed and compassionate scholar. We are honored that she will return to MIT to share that vision of service with our doctoral candidates,” says Barnhart. The Investiture of Doctoral Hoods ceremony, held the day before Commencement, featured a guest speaker for the first time last year. This new tradition solicits input from MIT faculty and doctoral students, with the aim to invite as guest speaker an MIT alum who can encourage and inspire students as they begin their new careers. “I’m thankful to the faculty and the student committee for their thoughtful recommendations,” says Eric Grimson, chancellor for academic advancement and chair of the Commencement Committee. “This is truly a collaborative effort and I’m delighted that we will all have the privilege of hearing Dr. Okonjo-Iweala speak at such an important moment in the lives of our doctoral candidates.” Okonjo-Iweala was born in Nigeria and came of age in the late 1960s, enduring the fragmentation of her nation and the horror of civil war. Undeterred in her commitment to continuing her education, Okonjo-Iweala made her way to the United States, where she received her undergraduate degree at Harvard University. She did her graduate work at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, receiving an MCP in 1978 and a PhD in regional economics and development in 1981. After serving 21 years at the World Bank, first as a development economist and later as vice president and corporate secretary, Okonjo-Iweala became Nigeria’s minister of finance in 2003. During her three-year tenure, her influence was key to repositioning Nigeria as a nation in recovery, including initiating negotiations that ended in Western creditor nations acquiescing to cancel $30 billion of Nigerian debt. In December 2007, Okonjo-Iweala returned to the World Bank as managing director, the second-highest position in the organization. In that time, she oversaw the World Bank’s $81 billion operational portfolio in Africa, South Asia, Europe, and Central Asia, and led several World Bank initiatives to assist low-income countries during the 2008-2009 food crisis. In 2010 she successfully chaired the World Bank’s drive to raise $49.3 billion in grants and low-interest credit for the world’s poorest countries. In 2011, love and loyalty for her country called Okonjo-Iweala back to Nigeria, where she served as minister of finance and coordinating minister for the economy, wherein she was responsible for managing the finances of Africa’s largest economy. She left the position in 2015 and is currently a senior advisor at Lazard, a global financial advisory and asset management firm. She is also the chair of the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization. Okonjo-Iweala has been ranked among the 50 greatest world leaders (Fortune, 2015) and the top 100 most influential people in the world (TIME, 2014). She was awarded the David Rockefeller Bridging Leadership Award in 2014 and the John T. Walker Distinguished Humanitarian Services Award in 2010. “Ngozi is a profound example of the way a leader can transform academic theory into tangible practical results, using knowledge to truly change nations,” says Professor Eran Ben-Joseph, head of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. “We couldn’t ask for a better example of ‘mind and hand’ at work to inspire our students.” The 2016 Investiture of Doctoral Hoods will take place on June 2 at 11 a.m. in the Johnson Athletics Center Ice Rink. The ceremony is open to family and friends of doctoral candidates; no tickets are required. (Comment on this)
8:59a	3 Questions: David Autor on global trade and political polarization In recent years economic studies have illuminated the extent to which global trade agreements, while benefitting many consumers, have also led to significant job losses in the U.S. — particularly due to jobs moving to China after 2001. Now a new study co-authored by MIT economist David Autor (along with non-MIT colleagues David Dorn, Gordon Hanson, and Kaveh Majlesi) identifies a political effect from this economic process. From 2002 through 2010, in U.S. congressional districts particularly affected by job losses due to trade, elected members of the House of Representatives becamemore ideologically extreme, with moderates consistently losing out in both parties. Autor spoke to MIT News this week about the headline-grabbing results. Q. Your new working paper establishes a strong relationship between job losses in the U.S. due to global trade, and political changes in the U.S. Congress — but the phenomenon at work is not what many people might guess. What did you find? A. There’s been a 30-year trend of rising polarization in the U.S. Congress. A lot of areas economically affected by rising trade exposure, especially in the South, have also been moving politically to the right. We wondered if these economic shocks might be contributing to the political factionalization. There are multiple ways this could work. One would be an anti-incumbent effect: It’s well established that politicians are punished for bad economic outcomes. But we don’t find that. Another possibility might be that the effects of trade shocks would just strongly favor one party over another. But the answer there is also no, not really. However, if you look at ideology rather than party, you do see very sharp movements. But they’re movements across ideological space. So moderate Democrats and moderate Republicans are being voted out of office in trade-exposed areas and being replaced with much more ideologically ardent substitutes. A lot of these gains are on the right. But that’s not entirely the case. If you look at initially Democratic voting districts, you see a very sharp movement to the left — as well as, to some degree, gains for Republicans in some of those districts. So you see this polarization occurring where moderates of both parties are being removed in trade-affected areas, and are being replaced by candidates who win by smaller margins and have more ideological views. Q. Is it fair to say this also corresponds to the ethnic composition of the voters in these congressional districts? And what accounts for this subtle wrinkle in the findings, in which a few of these districts do flip from the Democrats to the Republicans? A. We haven’t done an overwhelming number of ethnic breakdowns, but the one we did that we thought was useful, was that we broke districts into those where the majority of the population was non-Hispanic white, and those where less than half of the population was non-Hispanic white. There are only 66 districts in the study [out of 435 in Congress] which are majority-minority. But in those cases you see very sharp movements to the left. By contrast, in the areas that are majority non-Hispanic white, all the movement is to the right: Moderate Democrats are removed from office, moderate Republicans are removed from office to a lesser extent, and conservative Republicans make enormous gains. And there are no gains for Democrats. Q. In terms of voter beliefs, what is the mechanism here? What explains how such similar types of job losses due to trade lead to such divergent political outcomes? A. Imagine you have two groups of people, liberals and conservatives, and they share the same objective: They want workers to be employed and protected from the shocks of globalization. And then you have a big [trade] shock, and a lot of people lose employment. You might think everyone should converge on what we should do about that. But you can have a setting where beliefs are sufficiently disjointed, such that the same information is interpreted in completely different ways by people observing it. Say I’m a liberal Democrat and I want workers to be protected. A trade shock might lead me to say, “ This confirms what I suspected. We need a broader social safety net to make sure that workers aren’t too adversely affected.” Now suppose you’re a conservative Republican and you see the same thing. You might say, “ This confirms what I suspected, that we need strong nationalistic policies [such as tariffs] to protect our workers.” People are responding in a schismatic sense to the same underlying phenomena. The 2016 presidential election shows the parties are not able to maintain discipline and stop people from moving to populist solutions [on trade] that most politicians don’t like — they’ve lost control of that dialogue. But our paper makes clear that this process was well under way throughout the 2000s. And in some sense what we’re seeing now in the presidential primary isn’t as surprising in retrospect, because so much of it had already occurred, in congressional votes, along the economic fault lines of areas badly impacted by declining manufacturing. (Comment on this)
11:30a	Can technology help teach literacy in poor communities? For the past four years, researchers at MIT, Tufts University, and Georgia State University have been conducting a study to determine whether tablet computers loaded with literacy applications could improve the reading preparedness of young children living in economically disadvantaged communities. At the Association for Computing Machinery’s Learning at Scale conference this week, they presented the results of the first three deployments of their system. In all three cases, study participants’ performance on standardized tests of reading preparedness indicated that the tablet use was effective. The trials examined a range of educational environments. One was set in a pair of rural Ethiopian villages with no schools and no written culture; one was set in a suburban South African school with a student-to-teacher ratio of 60 to 1; and one was set in a rural U.S. school with predominantly low-income students. In the African deployments, students who used the tablets fared much better on the tests than those who didn’t, and in the U.S. deployment, the students’ scores improved dramatically after four months of using the tablets. "The whole premise of our project is to harness the best science and innovation to bring education to the world’s most underresourced children," says Cynthia Breazeal, an associate professor of media arts and sciences at MIT and first author on the new paper. "There’s a lot of innovation happening if you happen to be reasonably affluent — meaning you have regular access to an Internet-connected computer or mobile device, so you can get online and access Khan Academy. There’s a lot of innovation happening if you’re around eight years old and can type and move a mouse around. But there’s relatively little innovation happening with the early-childhood-learning age group, and there’s a ton of science saying that that’s where you get tremendous bang for your buck. You’ve got to intervene as early as possible." Breazeal is joined on the paper by Maryanne Wolf and Stephanie Gottwald, who are, respectively, the director and assistant director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts; Tinsley Galyean, a research affiliate at the MIT Media Lab and executive director of Curious Learning, a nonprofit organization the researchers created to develop and deploy their system; and Robin Morris, a professor of psychology at Georgia State University. Self-starting The concentration on early literacy reflects Wolf’s theory, popularized in her book "Proust and the Squid," that the capacity to read, unlike the capacity to process spoken language, is not hard-coded into our genes. Consequently, early training is essential to establishing the neurological machinery on which the very capacity for literacy depends. The researchers’ system consists of an inexpensive tablet computer using Google’s Android operating system. Wolf and Gottwald combed through the literacy and early-childhood apps available for Android devices to identify several hundred that met their quality criteria and addressed a broad enough range of skills to lay a foundation for early reading education. The researchers also developed their own interface for the tablets, which grants users access only to approved educational apps. Across the three deployments, the tablets were issued to children ranging in age from 4 to 11. "When we do these deployments, we purposely don’t tell the kids how to use the tablets or instruct them about any of the content,dz Breazeal says. DzOur argument is, if you’re going to be able to scale this to reach 100 million kids, you can’t bring people in to coach kids what to do. You just make the tablets available, and they need to figure everything out from then on out. And what we find is, the kids do it. When we first did Ethiopia, we had all these protocols and subprotocols. What if it’s a week and they haven’t turned them on? What if it’s three weeks and they haven’t turned them on? Within minutes, the kids turn them on. By the end of the day, they’ve literally explored every app on the tablet." Results The Ethiopian trial, which the researchers conducted in collaboration with the One Laptop per Child program, involved children aged 4 to 11 who had no prior exposure to spoken English or any written language. After a year using the tablets, children were tested on their understanding of roughly 20 spoken English words, taken at random from apps loaded on the tablets. More than half of the students knew at least half the words, and all the students knew at least four. When presented with strings of Roman letters in a random order, 90 percent could identify at least 10 of them, and all the children could supply the sounds corresponding to at least two of them. Perhaps most important, 35 percent of the children could recognize at least one English word by sight. These figures roughly accord with those of children entering kindergarten in the U.S. In the South African trial, rising second graders who had been issued tablets the year before were able to sound out four times as many words as those who hadn’t, and in the U.S. trial, which involved only 4-year-olds and lasted only four months, half-day preschool students were able to supply the sounds corresponding to nearly six times as many letters as they had been before the trial. Since the trials reported in the new paper, Curious Learning has launched new trials in Uganda, Bangladesh, India, and the U.S. In all, 2,000 children have had the opportunity to use the tablets. Currently, the team is concentrating on analyzing data collected from the trials. Which apps do the children spend most time with? Which apps’ use correlates best with literacy outcomes? Curious Learning is also looking for partners to help launch larger pilot programs, with 5,000 to 10,000 children. "There’s a core scientific question, which is understanding what the nature of this child-driven, curiosity-driven learning looks like," Breazeal says. "We need to understand how they learn, which is a fundamentally social process, where they explore the tablet together, they discover things through that exploration, and then they talk-talk-talk-talk, and they share those ideas. So it’s a profoundly social, peer-to-peer-based learning process. We have to have create a technology and an experience that supports that process." (Comment on this)

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