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Geography RSS FeedsCurrent Research IV - Research can be serious fun, as these three scientists demonstrate in wide-ranging presentations encompassing sculpture, robotics and even time travel. Forget the swan-shaped napkins served up by restaurants. Erik Demaine?s origami involves thousands of folds and a year?s worth of labor, and leaps from art to math and back. In these creations, Demaine finds infinite challenge and engagement. He shows examples of pleated folding in which hyperbolic paraboloids link up, via complex algorithms into intriguing new geometries. Demaine says, ?On the scientific side, I want to know what the paper is doing,? so he builds simulations using photographs of real paper, ending up with a virtual model of a physical piece of paper, to generate more paper origami creations. (Demaine?s work, sometimes accomplished in asso...Feed Source: mitworld.mit.edu Computing for Everyone - In three presentations that look back to digital-age milestones, and glimpse ahead to what may come next, speakers share some previously undisclosed stories, great enthusiasms, and a few concerns.
Nicholas Negroponte tells a few ?dirty secrets? about the start of the MIT Media Lab, including the fact that Negroponte and co-founder Jerome Wiesner wanted to admit people ?who wouldn?t normally apply to MIT, let alone get in,? and that the lab was viewed by top administrators as a ?salon de refuses:? a refuge for brilliant researchers such as Seymour Papert, ?who were not welcome? elsewhere.
After heading up the lab for 25 years, Negroponte wanted to end his peripatetic, fund-raising duties and start a project of his own. Having witnessed on a small scale the transformative power of co... Business and Economics - Even the most sophisticated technology and computational methods may not be enough to prevent the kind of disastrous errors that recently played out across the global economy, suggest these two speakers. Human temperament and judgment will remain critical factors in financial markets.
When there is an economic incentive, says Andrew Lo, ?technology has always been put into practice quickly.? Soon after the invention of the telegraph, Wall Street was draped in wires. Lo offers a thumbnail of significant milestones in computer and financial technologies, including macroeconomic modeling, linear programming, portfolio optimization, and the controversial securitization and CDO models implicated in the 2007-08 economic debacle.
Many of these marriages of high tech and finance proved successful and benefi... Current Research III - Three ?young Turks? of computation science, in the words of moderator John Guttag, discuss recent, and quite varied, research.
The traditional approach to characterizing neurological diseases in large populations assumes ?there is an average brain that represents us all,? says Polina Golland, and that we are all ?noisy? iterations of this central type. But in fact there is such great variability of brains in a normal population that it is hard to catch the ?subtle differences induced by varied diseases.? So Golland has ?put the problem upside down,? and using neuroimaging, developed models for the developing brain. Using 400 brain images of subjects from 18-96 years of age, Golland has discovered three templates that correspond to the young, middle-aged and older brain. Since her algorithms are ?b... The March of Technology - Moore?s law and energy efficiency emerge as themes in these two lectures on past and future progress in microprocessors and robotics.
Back in the old days, recalls Rodney Brooks, people were not allowed near computers, because the smoke from human cigarettes might damage delicate machinery. Then humans had to steer clear of robots, lest they come out on the losing end of an encounter with a hulking machine limb. But following the explosion of PC and portable computing technology, the last 10 years have brought robots into close proximity with people. Brooks says more than nine thousand robots now serve in the U.S. military, and six million work in human homes -- including his own line at iRobot.
Brooks attributes this proliferation of AI aides to ?IT exponentials that beget other exponentials.?... Turing Award Winners Panel Discussion - Winners of the A.M.Turing Award, the Nobel Prize of computing, describe their singular contributions to the field, and their works? impact. They also find time to discuss the current and future state of computer science.
Moderator Stephen Ward starts with 1990 prize winner Fernando Corbato, who remembers MIT?s 100th birthday celebration. Corbato pioneered the idea of timesharing, and notes ?how frozen the attitude of industrialists and computer manufacturers were.? They resisted the idea of timesharing, not understanding ?why they needed to change anything.? The ultimate goal of his work, says Corbato, was ?man-machine interaction.? His achievements led to Unix and C programming language and ?are being rediscovered today in cloud computing.?
1992 award winner Butler Lampson describes th... Physical Sciences and Engineering - Personal reminiscence and professional observations share the stage in the second panel of this symposium on computation.
As a boy, former MIT President Charles (Chuck) Vest daydreamed about going on a rocket ship to the moon, having a tiny TV, and obtaining a Dick Tracy wristwatch. While he never made it to the moon (though he knows those who have), he has fulfilled other wishes, thanks to ?amazing developments in computing:? mobile devices he can carry in his pocket that combine watch, TV and many more functions.
Vest was on hand for the dawn of the digital revolution, and recalls learning to program in Fortran in college in 1961, and describes a computer with 8 bits of memory held in a mercury vapor tube. He developed a recurring nightmare after many nights carrying boxes full of punched cards t... From Ridiculous to Brilliant: Why We Play at Work - The American workplace might be better off if it borrowed some concepts from a typical kindergarten classroom, including bins with toys, and unstructured time with friends. Two partners from IDEO, a global power in design and branding, discuss the importance of play in their creative process, and offer techniques that other organizations could profit from.
Brendan Boyle first asks audience members to sketch portraits of each other, noting how reluctant adults often are to share such crude sketches. He says that adults, unlike children, worry too much ?about being judged and failing.? Only by ?taking ourselves outside of our comfort zone? can we come up with new ideas, adds Duane Bray. Child?s play naturally involves ?naivete and a willingness to engage,? says Bray. In designing a new product or se... Beyond the Tailpipe: Particulate Matter Pollution from Vehicular Emissions - It turns out that the exhaust exiting a car?s tailpipe is just the first part of a complex journey of pollutants that scientists like Jesse Kroll are starting to map out. He wants to know just what these emissions consist of, how they change over time, and what their possible impacts are.
The term ?smog,? with which most cities have become all too familiar, is not really the direct result of vehicle emissions but the end-product of a photochemical process that was identified 60 years ago, according to Kroll. When nitrogen oxides and hydrocarbons from exhaust mix with sunlight, the result is smog, which itself comprises ozone and particulate matter. Neither of these is good for human or planetary health, and the bulk of these emissions come from vehicles.
Scientists have done a good job dissecting ozone ... Permission to Play: Game Changing Research - Are there now too many issues attached to the practice of play for it to be just plain fun? Nickelodeon executive Jane Gould describes a study on kids? play that reveals real tensions within the family on the subject. Although parents feel confused and conflicted, and kids stifled and controlled, families are managing to find some happy common ground as well.
Gould?s team spent an ?entertaining and exhausting hot summer? traveling around the U.S., and camping out entire days with hundreds of real families to chronicle how kids played and to capture different family members? take on their activities. Not surprisingly, parents wax nostalgic about their own youth, when play was reportedly much freer and imaginative. Today, these same parents feel the need to keep their children safe, and so confine them more to... Design for Fun: What Makes a Game Good, and a Good Game? - Drew Davidson likes to play with blocks in his sandbox, as he demonstrates in a show-and-tell to interactive media colleagues. In this case, the playground is an online game called Minecraft, a two-year-young internet sensation with millions of followers, developed single-handedly by a programmer named ?Notch,? (A.K.A. Markus Persson).
Walking the audience through the game, Davidson shows what makes it irresistibly playable for so many. He also shares his interest in talking ?about games in a formalized way, other than saying this game is ?awesome.?? Davidson wants to capture the game play experience, which he believes to be ?radically different from anything else, because agency is involved.? Minecraft takes place in the course of a 20-minute ?day,? and in spite of crude graphics, rapidly immerses a player in an... Plays Well With Others: Leadership in Online Collaboration - Amy Bruckman finds the accomplishments of such online collaborations as Wikipedia, Apache and Firefox ?nothing less than astounding,? and is both eagerly seeking and hoping to foster the next creative group Internet sensation.
In her lab?s empirical studies, Bruckman has dissected different types of ensemble internet projects. She describes them as ?naturally occurring constructionist learning environments,? where individuals bring ?who they are to the process of making meaning,? and receive from their community technical and emotional support. This stuff matters, she says, because ?people working together can create mind-bogglingly interesting stuff,? not least because the most inclusive projects reflect the values of all their contributors.
Bruckman identifies some typical collaborative mode... Technology: Do Kids Need More or Less? - The ultimate questions for this Sandbox 2011 panel, posed by moderator Alan Gershenfeld, are ?Where is technology not working? When is technology not the answer?? That?s a bold agenda for a panel of children?s media creators and a roomful of other producers in the industry, from Sesame Workshop, WGBH, 360 Kid, and elsewhere. From the panel?s energetic presentations emerges an unapologetic enthusiasm for more technology engagement and richer media experiences for kids ? generally in the form of ?transmedia,? connecting stories and personalities across platforms. The ?less? side of the panel?s title comes back only briefly in a few questions at the end.
The mantra at PBS Kids, says Sara DeWitt, is that ?every technology is a new opportunity for learning.? Given the popular television characters in the PB... Where the Wired Things Are: A Day in the Life of a Modern Family - Vanessa Van Petten bears witness to a strange new future rapidly becoming reality: devices and apps available for every aspect of family life. Her Radical Parenting website draws on the perspectives and insights of teen interns and thousands of correspondents (including frustrated and befuddled parents), so Van Petten can knowledgeably report that as home and technology intersect, relationships and the rhythms of daily life are shifting ? and not always in a good way.
In her surveys of hundreds of thousands of families, Van Petten chronicles how both parents and children increasingly integrate technologies into their day. She offers a 24-hour cycle, starting with iPod alarms awakening everyone, morning texting, iKibble tracking the dog?s meals, and the family online management system that send chores and pick... The Future of Learning - Although she is committed to boosting interactive digital technology for learning, Diana Rhoten?s talk is framed by movies. Waiting for Superman is the starting point: a good demonstration of how schools are failing our children, but very unimaginative, Rhoten says, when it comes to solutions. In fact, one of the assumptions on which Rhoten has built Startl is that the future of education is about learning, not about schooling. The companion assumption is that technology has a critical role to play, not as an end but as a means. Her stance is buttressed by hard data: in New York City, 50% of teens drop out before completing high school, but 97% of them go online, and more than half have mobile devices.
Startl chooses to work ?on the edge,? taking risks, and seeking to engage outsiders who bring ne... Learning 3.0: Why Technology Belongs in Every Classroom - The Obama Administration?s recently unveiled plan for transforming American education through technology does not envision ?plugging kids in and making them smarter,? declares Karen Cator. Instead, it focuses on leveraging aspects of digital technology ?to create way more compelling environments in schools,? and to address educational inequities and the larger issue of undereducated Americans.
Cator illustrates the pervasive presence and transformative power of digital media with current examples: the use of Facebook and Twitter in Arab political uprisings; mobile media coverage of the Japanese tsunami; Super Bowl ads embedded with secret codes that invite viewers to go online and play games. Educators could bring this kind of immediacy and creativity to schools, finding opportunities ?to work with stude... Welcome and Opening Remarks, History - It?s Day 95 in MIT?s 150 days of sesquicentennial celebration, and all thoughts turn to the evolution of computer science and MIT?s pivotal role in that history. As Victor Zue puts it so succinctly, ?Computers sure have changed.? They are even invading biology, and President Hockfield (who is also a Professor of Neuroscience) sees this history as another branch in the tradition, initiated by William Barton Rogers, of education bringing the ?useful arts? (or as we now say, technology) to bear on the economic development of the United States.
Tom Leighton asserts that ?To say computers are transforming everything is an understatement.? Leighton offers a brief lesson in theoretical computer science, defining an algorithm through the example of searching for the prime factors of a given number N, and... Rethinking Climate Change: The Past 150 Years and the Next 100 Years - At a time of great political paralysis around climate change internationally -- and apparent backtracking by American politicians and the public on the science of global warming itself -- there are ?reasons to rethink our approach,? says moderator John Reilly. He hopes to ?create a civil discourse that helps us understand better the varied concerns of people on the topic.?
Panelists sketch the past, present and future of climate change. Kerry Emanuel reviews the science of climate change, noting that the greenhouse effect discovery dates back to the 18th century, and that by the end of the 19th, scientists had already begun worrying that consumption of fossil fuel and the accompanying release of CO2 would lead to an increase in surface temperatures of 5-6°C. Modern science with its ice c... Investments in our Future: Exploring Space through Innovation and Technology - ?I don?t remember Apollo at all,? confesses Robert Braun, NASA?s chief technologist. ?I feel really bad about it.? Nevertheless, he has spent a lot of time reading and thinking about the mission to the moon, and its significance not just for space exploration, but for the nation?s innovative edge and economy. Braun wonders, ?What is my generation?s space race?.?
Braun offers not one but a handful of ?game-changing civil space possibilities? that he feels certain could be accomplished in his lifetime. These include an asteroid defense system, forecasting major storms in time to move entire populations out of harm?s way; and finding life in space. Braun notes that many others embrace these ?lofty goals,? but that NASA has been hampered in approaching them by a lack of investment in technology.
Wh... The Role of International Negotiations in Addressing the Climate Challenge - With frightening evidence for climate change mounting around the globe, from droughts and massive forest fires to melting glaciers and rising sea levels, you might think nations would wish to work together to meet such a grave threat. Instead, as U.S. climate negotiator Todd Stern reports, there has been only modest progress internationally in facing up to the challenge of climate change.
Stern starts by describing the kinds of devastation beginning to ravage the planet and the perils we face as a result. He also acknowledges the shameful drift from fact to opinion among American political leaders when it comes to dealing with the science of climate change, and the companion drop in poll numbers of Americans deeply concerned by the problem. Nevertheless, Stern notes that the Obama administration has remained true ... A New Conversation with Jack Welch - Jack Welch has never been one to pussyfoot around when it comes to discussions of leadership, and he doesn?t break from form during a lively give-and-take with MIT Sloan Dean David Schmittlein and an audience of Sloan students.
Schmittlein starts with a series of questions involving the reasons why some top corporations lose their market leadership positions. ?Complacency and arrogance,? Welch believes, clearly lie behind these drops in stature -- believing you ?know it all? when in fact you always have to ?know somebody?s doing it better than you.? Managers and their staff must understand ?somebody?s always shooting at you,? and ?you have to always find a better way of doing it.?
When Schmittlein suggests a ?worthwhile purpose? may help motivate people in any organization toward a goal, Welch says fo... Ecological Intelligence - Some people believe the planet would be better off, at least ecologically, if humans had never evolved. These speakers offer grim evidence that human activities threaten to poison much of life on earth, but they also suggest some new methods for treading more lightly, and perhaps reversing some deadly trends.
?We are in deep trouble,? says Daniel Goleman, and not just around climate change. Other catastrophes are underway, including acidification of the ocean, freshwater depletion, and loss of species; some ecological systems have already passed tipping points. The industrial age, with its refined networks of industry and commerce, has ?disconnected the stuff we buy and use to survive? from where and how it is made, leading to vast expanses of human waste, destruction and exhaustion of natural resources. ... Celebrating Science and Engineering Breakthroughs IV - The wind-up session of this multi-part symposium on women at MIT brings together brains and brine -- two researchers? pioneering work in neuroscience and ocean microbes.
In 1985, Sallie (Penny) Chisholm discovered Prochlorococcus, a ?tiny, round, green thing that?s not so beautiful but extraordinary.? Lined up, 100 of these sub-micron size phytoplankton come to the width of a human hair, and they turn out to be the most abundant photosynthetic cell on the planet. There are so many Prochlorococcus distributed through global oceans that their accumulated weight would amount to one billion people. Most important, life as we know it would not be possible without these (and other) photosynthetic ocean creatures, which produce a large share of the planet?s oxygen.
Chisholm has spent more than two decades de... Effective Practices for Recruitment, Mentoring, and Retention - With many years of academic and corporate workplace experience among them, these panelists share expertise and best practices for recruiting and retaining women to science and engineering careers.
Mildred Dresselhaus came to MIT to teach physics to engineering students. Although she received a scholarship funding women in science, she always believed ?it was important for men to take you seriously, and not to worry about your sex.? Dresselhaus feels she ?works for her students, and they work for her,? and says she learned a lot about teaching and providing for students? careers from her years as a mother to four children. She believes mentoring serves an important function on campus, for men and women, and that it can prove particularly helpful to women, who may lack self-confidence. Her mentoring, which inc... A Conversation with Sherry Turkle - Please don?t confuse Sherry Turkle with a latter-day Luddite; she knows from email and Twitter, and appreciates the benefits of digital technology. What she worries about are people who are inseparable from their devices, who can?t enjoy, as she does, ?a solitary walk across the dunes.?
In conversation with David Thorburn, she describes her evolving appraisal of the impact of digital technology, beginning with her arrival at MIT, a place she has ?always felt a little bit not at home.? Teaching Freud to computer science students in the 1970s, Turkle realized how differently ?a mind steeped in computers? could perceive the world. With MIT support, she began observing and interviewing technology users, especially children, engaging in the kind of specialized ethnography associated with among others, the sociologis... Afghanistan: Mending it Not Just Ending It - While the U.S. and coalition allies may have an end date in mind for the war in Afghanistan (2014), they have not yet articulated an end game, which to David Miliband threatens ?both the substantive long-term interests we have in Afghanistan, and the final narrative of the Afghan drama that began on 9/11.? In his talk, the former British foreign secretary lays out his ideas for an ?end game process.?
The past 60 years of world history have demonstrated repeatedly that ?there is no military solution to insurgency,? says Miliband, which is why it is ?high time we ?developed a political solution? to the conflict in Afghanistan. A framework for peace will not simply evolve out of the current situation on the ground: Taliban numbers are growing; President Karzai is linked to ?cronyism, corruption an... Quantifying Uncertainty in Complex Physical Systems: Application to Energy Conversion and Environmental Modeling - In search of better-burning fuels, or more accurate projections of climate change, researchers inevitably work through multiple models, sometimes at great cost. Youssef Marzouk hopes to provide energy and environmental scientists constructive and efficient new approaches to modeling complex engineered systems.
In this seminar, Marzouk describes ways of managing uncertainty, which ?is where a lot of idealizations of modeling meet the reality of the complex systems we?re actually trying to study.? Specifically, he aims to ?quantify confidence in computational predictions, and use these predictions in design and decision-making;? learn from ?noisy, indirect experimental observations,? and refine and build models based on the most informative things observed and measured.
With formulas and graphs, Marz... Shaping Policy in Academia and Across the Nation - Issues of work/life balance and campus climate dominate this panel looking at policies to foster and retain girls and women in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). As moderator Marc Kastner notes, in spite of dramatic improvements at places like MIT, significant challenges remain.
The University of California, Berkeley has seen ?slow but steady progress,? reports Chancellor Robert Birgeneau. Women represent just under 30% of the overall faculty now; 20% serve in STEM fields. Much of these gains he attributes to family-friendly policies the university has implemented in recent years, such as lightening duties and extending the tenure clock for new parents; a campus concierge to help with relocation and spouse job hunts; and a large childcare program subsidized for graduate and undergr... The Future Automotive System: The World That Changed The Machine - The world economic order has shifted considerably since 1990, when Daniel Roos and his coauthors wrote The Machine that Changed the World, the story of lean production in the auto industry. Once dominant as a global industry, car manufacturing ?has undergone tremendous stress,? says Roos, and has now reached an ?inflection point,? with major changes brewing.
Manufacturing and markets, once centered in the U.S. and Europe, have migrated to developing nations such as India and China, where demand is skyrocketing, providing opportunities for new players in the industry. More than 18 million cars were sold in China in 2010, and its car market has grown by more than 20% in a short time. The Korean auto industry has positioned itself to take advantage of this auto appetite, and now claims the fastest increase i... Copyright © 2012, TopLooker.com. All Rights Reserved. |