Slashdot Mirror
MIT Professor Michael Hawley
cyranoVR writes "Today's CBS This Morning ran an interesting profile on MIT Professor Michael Hawley. Aside from recently publishing a super-jumbo-sized book about the Kingdom of Bhutan, he has invented (among other things) an interactive kitchen counter, designed a heart monitor embedded in jewelry, contributed to the MIT Toys of Tomorrow project and has written several classical compositions for piano. What really struck me was Hawley's observation that 'today's computers aren't musical enough.' For him, there is 'no difference between an ivory keyboard and a QWERTY keyboard.' I think it's a good thing that the mainstream media is starting to show how 'computer nerds' (as the correspondent identified Hawley) can be rich individuals with much more to their lives than hardware upgrades, programming languages and pocket protectors."
Except that in the case of what I observed, Prof. Hawley would literally drop an in-progress project the moment the media buzz died down.
This is different from popular researchers such as Carl Sagan and Steven Hawking, who routinely give/gave simplified glimpses of their research to the public, but certainly haven't driven their research based on how much media exposure it's likely to generate.
Check his background, CBS and Slashdot. Hawley didn't get tenure because he didn't do much solid research (instead relying on hype and PR). He's no longer a professor at MIT of any sort.