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Geography RSS FeedsIf the World is Flat, What are We Still Doing in Cambridge? - Allan Goodman At the very moment when “we have to confront the opportunity or challenge of globalization,” says Allan Goodman, higher education appears woefully unprepared. The world is not ‘flat’ for the vast majority of college students. Only 30 of 192 U.N. member states boast enrollments of international students at levels that exceed 1%. In the U.S., it is a little over 3%. Of the 2.7 million international students, 600 thousand come to the U.S. -- most hoping to end up at Harvard, according to Goodman. They are distributed among just 150 schools, usually in very small numbers. This is bad news, because “never has there been a more difficult time for us in the world,” says Goodman, and education exchange broadens not just the “knowledge enterprise” but enhances the image of both host and origin country. Goodman worries about a shortfall in capacity, as developing countries graduate students from secondary schools with no, few or bad choic...Feed Source: mitworld.mit.edu Chantal Akerman: Moving through Time and Space - Chantal Akerman This exploration/homage arrives in the form of a lecture/conversation, breaking some conventions, not unlike the object/subject of the event, Chantal Akerman, filmmaker and video artist. Two Akerman experts discuss her work in the kick-off event to an exhibition at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center.
First, Giuliana Bruno offers history and perspective on Akerman’s oeuvre, starting with her pathbreaking 1975 film, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which “changed the way we looked at film, and opened up ideas for feminist thinking, theory and filmmaking.” Bruno discusses Akerman’s unique way of breaking down barriers between documentary and fiction film, and more recently between film and museum installations. Akerman fascinates, says Bruno, for her “movement of space and time,” particularly long duration shots “showing the unfolding of everyday life, and especially flowing temporality, and women’s time.” Akerm... Global and Regional Climate Change: Underlying Science and Emerging Riddles - Veerabhadran Ramanathan Veerabhadran Ramanathan recaps 35 years of key findings, and brings his audience up to date on the latest climate data, models, and observations which together demonstrate how CO2 is but one piece of a complex puzzle.
Ramanathan deploys simple but extremely helpful metaphors to describe the processes behind warming. CO2 in the atmosphere, whether manmade or natural, surrounds the earth like a blanket, holding onto the radiation from the sun. When the blanket is behaving properly, enough sun’s heat stays on earth to keep biological forces humming, and the rest escapes back into space. But if this blanket gets thicker, it “prevents the body from losing heat.” CO2 is particularly noxious, since it “lives in the atmosphere for a century if not longer.” But it turns out we have other molecules circling the globe to worry about.
Starting in the 1970s, scientists discovered that compounds in... So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits and the President Failed on Iraq - Greg Mitchell Greg Mitchell has found both comedy and tragedy in the shameless and near-universal complicity between the American press and the Bush Administration around the Iraq war and occupation. Mitchell’s amply documented account of the run-up to the invasion through the recent surge forms the basis of his new book, So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits and the President Failed on Iraq, and this talk.
The nation’s mainstream media flunked a basic test of journalism, according to Mitchell: displaying a healthy skepticism. “Even if you’re reporting for a tiny newspaper in Topeka, and interviewing the local garbage department official, don’t take what he says as gospel. Check it out with other people.” From the multiple rationales offered by the Bush Administration for the invasion, to their progress reports on the occupation, the news media gobbled up the official line, hook and sinker, as Mitchell recounts in detail. ... Sociable Robots - Cynthia Breazeal SM ‘93, SCD ‘00, Sherry Turkle Cynthia Breazeal makes social robots, machines with the capacity to interact with people on psychological terms. She says they “open up a new world of questions.” But these increasingly sophisticated devices make Sherry Turkle uneasy, since they challenge the idea of human relationships and the very “purpose, importance, of living things.”
Since inventing her famously expressive, anthropomorphic Kismet, a robot that engages and learns from people through auditory, facial and social cues, Breazeal has evolved her work using robots as a scientific tool for social understanding. Her labs are putting robots through the paces of major child development milestones, such as appreciating the mental states of others. For instance, robot Leonardo has rudimentary object permanence, inferring from a tricky human’s behavior where a Big Bird toy has been hidden.
Another project uses robots in home-based... Reflections on an MIT Education - A. Neil Pappalardo '64 In a neat series of time capsules tagged to his MIT experience, Neil Pappalardo shares his story with MIT graduates in the hope that it will give them “an idea of the possibilities that lie ahead.”
His story begins in 1964, when as a senior majoring in Physics, he decided to pursue a thesis on a medical topic, without, Pappalardo notes, having attended a single course in design or synthesis. He met cardiologists at a Boston hospital searching for a labor-saving way to analyze hours’ worth of EKG data. In a matter of months, he had invented a device to solve the problem, graduated in Electrical Engineering, and set out for a career at Mass. General Hospital. Lesson learned: “An MIT education will awaken creativity and discovery within you.”
Pappalardo recounts his early financial hardships (he had to sell blood for 12 weeks in order to buy a piano for his wife), as well as setbacks in trying to improve the complex... "The New Epoch" and the 21st Century Imperative for Engineering History - David P. Billington Great civil engineers finds an aesthetic appropriate for their building’s material and structure, asserts David Billington, whose life work has been the study of some of the world’s most stunning engineering feats.
He reviews his own intellectual journey, first honoring some of his forebears, including Elting Morison, industrial historian and a founder of MIT's Program in Science, Technology and Society, and R. G. Collingwood, philosopher/historian. Billington describes a momentous turn in his career at Princeton, when architecture students in one of his courses rebuked him: “They told me, we hate what you’re teaching us. You’re teaching us stick diagrams and formulas. That’s how you teach structural engineering. Why can’t we study beautiful structures?”
They showed him a picture of the Salginatobel Bridge, built by “an obscure Swiss engineer, Robert Maillart,” about whom there was little published in English. This led ... High-Eco-Tech: Building Avant la Garde - Werner Sobek There’s more than a little magic in Werner Sobek’s constructions, which balance aesthetics, architectural constraints and pathbreaking science to, in his words, “go beyond” nature’s own limits.
Sobek walks us through his portfolio of engineering feats, enabled by a worldwide architecture and engineering business, and by his affiliated institute, where researchers are let loose on the most demanding problems of the business. For instance, in 1997, his group began to address a key issue the architecture and construction trades engaged in only through “theoretical discussion:” how to design a Triple 0 building –for zero energy consumption, zero energy emissions and complete recycle-ability.
Such innovative constructions require new, lightweight, recycle-able, load-bearing material. His interdisciplinary research team found inspiration in human bones, whose internal architecture is made up of cells arranged according to a certain geo... Youth and Civic Engagement - Lance Bennett, Ingeborg Endter SM '00, Alan Khazei With the right tools and backing, children of the 21st century are set to make their mark on the world. These panelists want to ensure that young people passionately engage with the world, using new media to “shape changes around them,” as Mitchel Resnick puts it.
For Lance Bennett, “the future of democracy seems to be at stake.” Typically, schools fail to teach children politics, and civic education turns kids off. This is happening as modern society “falls apart in important ways,” with social hierarchies and authorities fading in importance, and membership organizations that confer status losing clout. But new forms are emerging such as social networks and participatory media. Young people born into the digital age have a different take on citizenship, and are “predisposed for interacting, sharing knowledge across peer networks,” for creating content and assessing the credibility of people a... A Roadmap for the Edge of the Internet - Alan Benner In the curious way of technological evolution, we first had computers that occupied entire rooms, watched them shrink to desktop, laptop and palm-sized devices, and now find ourselves coming full circle, and then some, Alan Benner reports. He tells this MIT class about warehouse-sized data centers, linking processors, and ensembles of processors, in dizzyingly complex hierarchies. These gigantic operations, some with their own power and air conditioning plants, are central to the enterprise of Internet behemoths Google, Amazon and YouTube, but have not yet percolated out to more traditional companies like insurance firms -- a situation Benner and his IBM colleagues would like to remedy.
Benner describes in broad strokes how these data operations are organized into levels of “virtualization and consolidation,” where the hardware is hidden, yet the data is both fully accessible and secure, no matter where the user and the computers are located. ... Copyright © 2012, Online Business Idea. All Rights Reserved. |