http://mitworld.mit.edu/ MIT World is a free, open, video streaming web site that provides on-demand video of significant public events at MIT. These are the 10 most recent video-taped presentations http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/555/
Fred Salvucci ponders the role of contingency in history, and in the evolution of Boston and its transportation system. He starts from the time the glaciers pulled back from Boston, leaving a soggy near-island and a river for the first white settlers to contend with. “The reason the city is here because of an accident of history,” he says. In the 1600s, “when the English first came, they made a mistake,” Salvucci reports. Thinking that the Charles would run deep and wide for a thousand miles inland, offering vital trade routes, the English hunkered down.

Once they realized their mistake (the Charles is about a foot deep in Watertown, MA, six miles away), the settlers built on the resources at hand, which included enormous stocks of cod and good ship-building lumber. The “poverty of a place forces skills, which in turn makes the place not poor,” says Salvucci. These Protestant settlers also set about, in near record time, establishing schools like Boston Latin and Harvard.

Boston’s rapid expansion and prosperity led to innovations such as filling land, which in turn led to unexpected transportation developments. The first commercial use of rail in the New World, Salvucci tells us, was to haul in granite for the Bunker Hill monument, and to bring dirt from the suburbs for Boston builders. When people realized they could use the new technology to transport farm products, the Boston & Worcester Railroad was born. But the idea of moving people around didn’t emerge until the 1800s, when the concept of living one place and working in another led to streetcars in Boston and elsewhere. Around 1900, Boston led the nation with the first subway (“a little dinky one”) running just two blocks. In two decades, the guts of the city’s subway system emerged, making Salvucci’s own Big Dig project appear modest in comparison (adjusting for inflation).

Salvucci remarks on the numerous cases of “indirect causality” through human history, how things “built in ways that are unanticipated and probably unanticipatable.” In 1865, there were no electric street cars. By 1900, U.S. East Coast cities were covered by them. In 1900, there were 2,000 autos in the U.S., and by 1920, there were so many cars that city rail networks began dying out. Don’t be fooled into thinking you can “predict tomorrow based on yesterday plus a small delta,” warns Salvucci. -- [February 12, 2008 2:00 PM]]]> http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/554/
This panel offers some evidence that sustained alliances between academia and other organizations may help us more effectively address climate change issues.

In Sweden, Lennart Billfalk says, universities have historically cooperated with industry. In the 1980s, when interest in electrical engineering was waning, Billfalk’s Vattenfall power company financed new labs and committed to extra teaching resources, spawning a whole new generation of electrical engineers attuned to key energy issues. In the 90s, the government and industry financed joint research centers, which are helping Sweden fulfill its commitment to reduce CO₂ emissions 50% by 2030, and 80% by 2050. R&D from these collaborations has led to carbon capture and storage projects, and several CO₂ free pilot power plants in Europe.

Ernest Moniz pegs several factors integral to the success of academic-industrial collaborations, including a long-term commitment from both sides --“think about programs, not projects”; the alignment of these programs with the corporation’s strategic plan; and a joint steering mechanism. MIT tries to apply these principles to its Energy Initiative, bringing multidisciplinary teams from across campus to focus on research, education, campus energy management and public outreach (as an “honest broker” on climate change and energy issues). Moniz describes some flagship programs around coal conversion and carbon capture with MIT’s key industry research partners, as well as a seed grant program funding bold ideas from across the campus; and fellowships encouraging students to direct their talent toward the energy innovation field.

The world’s best endowed foundations are “missing from important fields” such as physics and the biosciences, and few have turned their attention to climate change, says
Theodore Smith. And while academia has focused on the science and technology of climate change, it has not cultivated “a civic voice” to speak on these issues in the broader public discourse. Smith regrets this neglect, because there’s a “yearning from those of us outside the academy to hear voices speaking in clear English.” Smith’s Henry Kendall Foundation seeks to promote greater communication between academia and the world at large. It also hopes to spark transformative change in Cambridge, by supporting a massive reduction in energy consumption that requires Harvard and MIT to play central roles.

Elizabeth Kolbert acknowledges “the pretty colossal failure over the last decade of communication on the issues of climate change and sustainability,” and says there’s plenty of blame to go around. Journalists hate complicated issues, and sustained the climate change “debate” long after it ceased to be a scientific argument. Scientists generated long, technical reports while maintaining neutrality and avoiding a policy agenda. The level of ignorance in Washington is staggering, says Kolbert, and the public simply tunes out when the story is climate change. Kolbert insists “we must challenge ourselves” as academicians and journalists. She suggests that MIT put a lot of effort into making its own campus a model for sustainability, a “bold step” that might garner public interest. -- [January 30, 2008 9:45 AM]]]> http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/553/
John Sterman pokes holes through some popular proposals for addressing climate change, with sobering case studies that demonstrate why “technological solutions are not enough to address the problem of creating a sustainable world.”

We are staking too much hope for a climate change fix on “the better mousetrap theory of innovation,” says Sterman. It goes like this: New technology from places like MIT will drive down the cost of renewable energy, increase demand for carbon-free renewables and displace fossil fuels. New energy markets emerge, after a regulatory nudge or two from the government, or some incentives and emissions fees.

To demonstrate how completely wrong this theory is, Sterman first discusses great products never adopted by consumers, such as the Sony Betamax video recorder. More to the point, he notes current opportunities that would significantly reduce our carbon footprint yet have been ignored by society at large, such as improving fuel efficiency, and insulating buildings. Our rejection of these opportunities suggests we can’t comprehend “the complexity of systems in which we are embedded and into which we deploy technologies,” particularly the concept of feedback.

Sterman runs through a ‘thought experiment’ involving the introduction of a hydrogen-based, zero tailpipe emission alternative fuel vehicle (AFV) into California – a conceivable leap toward creating an ecologically and economically sustainable transportation system. The government kick-starts the AFV market, rolling out fuel stations in urban centers, and essentially subsidizing the transition for a decade. You’d expect this AFV eventually to command at least 50% of the market share. But when Sterman runs his simulations, the AFV stagnates at around 25%.

It turns out that if fuel stations are not distributed through even the remotest parts of the state, people worry about where they’ll find fuel, leading to weak demand for AFVs. This is “only one of the many reinforcing feedbacks which create strong barriers to the entry of technologies which are as good or better than incumbent technologies,” says Sterman. Even an AFV with higher fuel efficiency can’t win market share, Sterman’s California simulations show.

The models offer some faint promise. When Sterman puts more fuel stations in rural areas, the AFV market succeeds -- after an extraordinarily long time. Sterman believes there’s a tipping point in the adoption of new technologies. Dethroning gasoline will be difficult, he says, so we need to create multiple reinforcing feedbacks to change the behaviors of all the players. “We must push that ball, which represents where the market is, up a steep mountain, and only after crossing the peak will the market become self-sustaining.” -- [January 30, 2008
9:00 AM]]]> http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/552/
The world is counting on the fulfillment of (Intel co-founder) Gordon Moore’s Law for at least another half century. In Craig Barrett’s view, solutions to the crucial challenges of our time depend on improving on already nano-sized microprocessors every few years.

He points to the astonishing improvements in efficiency and miniaturization in Intel’s semiconductors, which around 1972 came loaded with 2,000 transistors that could be seen with the naked eye. Today’s integrated circuits, 11 generations down the road, bear 1-2 billion transistors that can be seen only with a scanning electron microscope. Intel has had to make other improvements too, says Barrett, as they moved into the nanoscale, attempting to improve functionality and performance without power dissipation. Dual and quad core microprocessors now permit parallel computing within a single PC. Barrett recounts how the first teraflop computer he worked on at Sandia Labs required 10 thousand Pentium processors and took up 2,000 square feet. “The challenge is in the next six to eight years, going to exascale, getting up to a million teraflops,” through multiple core processors, he says, and then there will be a “huge challenge in terms of software paradigms.”

These changes must come, says Barrett, if the world is to confront its “grand challenges,” such as making solar energy affordable, solving issues of carbon sequestration, and figuring out the hydrogen cycle. Those extra teraflops and exaflops will also prove essential to the next generations of visual computing, where scientists (and gamers) want the feel of HD reality on their computer screens. Barrett says silicon photonics will help pave the way for such improvements.

Barrett wants current and emerging technologies put to use as well in education, which he sees as fundamental to helping developing economies. He describes efforts Intel is making to get computers into classrooms around the world, as well as providing training in their use, and helping with broadband connectivity. He also wants computer power brought to bear on the U.S. healthcare scene, which he describes as more of a looming financial crisis than a bankrupt social security system. He’s looking for a political candidate who sees the value of revamping healthcare to take advantage of electronic medical record-keeping, and personalized remote monitoring and diagnostics, “to shift the issue of healthcare from the hospital to individuals and the home.” -- [February 20, 2008 2:00 PM]]]> http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/550/
The rising public awareness of climate change, says MIT President Susan Hockfield, comes with a price. “The public dialogue has evolved from nothing is wrong, so we need to do nothing, to everything is so wrong, that there’s nothing we can do.” Citizens are “starving for a sense of focus, clarity and direction,” and with that in mind, MIT and other organizations “need to speak louder,” declares Hockfield, by elevating the public debate, telling the truth about the power and limitations of technology, and focusing on the harsh reality that the scale of a proposed solution can “doom a clever idea to nothing more than a dilettante’s distraction.”

Here’s Rajendra K. Pachauri’s panic-inducing assertion: We have a window of seven years to stabilize CO₂ at today’s levels if we are to limit our global mean temperature increase to around 2.4⁰C. A world this hot would be a very unpleasant place to be. Pachauri lays out unequivocal” evidence of climate change, and describes how extreme precipitation events, heat waves and other natural catastrophes will become more frequent, endangering vast swaths of humanity. We stand to lose 20-30% of species if warming exceeds 1.5 to 2.5 ⁰C. Pachauri also notes this “scary prospect”: the rapid loss of ice sheets on polar land, leading to sea level rises of several meters, and the flight of large populations in response.

Pachauri describes the kinds of adaptations humanity must make to the changes already underway, including protection from flooding; preventing water scarcity; and retooling agriculture. Developed nations have a head start in these, and must help out developing nations, or risk global conflicts. Yet adaptation alone “cannot cope with all the projected impacts of climate change,” says Pachauri, so greenhouse gas mitigation efforts are urgent. In the midst of this desperate panorama, Pachauri holds out some hope: “Anyone who says, what’s the point, why take action—if we start today, we can really make a difference in the next two to three decades.”

What’s more, we have at hand a portfolio of technologies that are currently or soon to be available that could achieve significant mitigation, he says. If we invest in public transport and efficient vehicles, the right kinds of R&D, technology transfers and incentives, we could achieve our goals. And he notes, the cost of taking such actions “are not high at all.” To stabilize CO₂ at around 500 PPM, the costs in 2030 would be less than 3% global GDP, which amounts to a minuscule .12% annually.
http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/551/
Rajendra K. Pachauri leads fellow members of the Nobel Prize-winning IPCC in a remarkable public session of soul-searching. Now that the IPCC has helped make climate change a signal issue of our times, what next?

John Reilly wonders whether the IPCC should be celebrating any success, given that greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise in spite of all the comprehensive study. Given the “dismal outcome so far,” it’s important that the IPCC “avoid the complacency that comes with big awards,” and that “much, all of the work is still there to be done.”

“It’s probably time for sunset, Michael Golay suggests.” Now that the IPCC has succeeded in establishing climate change as “a reality among at least the chattering classes,” the next step is actually a social question, one that is much more difficult than coming up with new technologies. “We’re really talking about interfering with markets, and doing this in a way that doesn’t become simply another vehicle for creating profits for special interests….”

William Moomaw believes IPCC reports have made possible policy and corporate innovations that would have been unthinkable only a decade ago, and the IPCC should continue to serve in an advisory capacity to the world, laying out the technological and economic possibilities. Says Moomaw, “We got off to a bad start. We talked about global warming as being an environmental issue when in fact global warming is a symptom of maldevelopment."

The IPCC “should continue as the voice of science and help a well-informed society make tough decisions,” declares Andreas Fischlin . This will mean “facing the issue of sustainability in the context of climate change to an extent many of us won’t like.” Research challenges in developing nations may impede efforts to “optimize the IPCC’s work and help in the whole issue of moving toward a more sustainable world.”

Akimasa Sumi believes IPCC should continue to have a powerful role in the future, because the “climate change issue is driven by science.” He proposes refining climate models in the hope of reducing uncertainty around such matters as the role of aerosols and clouds. He says the focus must now be on adaptation and mitigation, particularly over a 30-year time scale.

The IPCC established its relevance because it drew a line between being policy relevant and policy prescriptive, says Adil Najam. Now, “we need to claim victory on understanding the mechanics of the science and stop debating.” The next step must mean “focusing not on the scope of the problem, but on potential for solutions.”

Should the IPCC attempt to become more prescriptive, believes Howard Herzog, “it would lose respect.” In his years with the organization, “anytime we got into policy prescriptive areas, when we got close to the line, tensions rose, arguments intensified, we lost consensus.” He thinks it’s important to continue the IPCC’s work, because the science will change, and we need a “broker out there to summarize where science is on critical issues.” -- [January 29, 2008 9:45 AM]]]> http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/548/
After 205 years, DuPont has transformed itself substantially while remaining true to its character, suggests Ellen Kullman. “We’re a company with a passion for science,” says Kullman. DuPont, which got its start making black powder for explosives, pursued chemicals for its first 100 years, but is now taking its science into energy, biotechnology and nanotechnology, with products and services in agriculture, nutrition, coating and color technologies, performance materials and safety and protection.

Kullman says that in its first 180 years of existence, DuPont did everything itself. “We believed firmly that nobody could do it better than us.” Now, the company is “thinking without borders,” seeking customers and collaborators globally. With a central lab in the U.S., the company targets R&D and application development close to customers in such key markets as Japan, India and China. The company also partners with research institutions worldwide. Says Kullman, “We talk about interdependent innovation, which has to be mutually dependent and mutually beneficial,” in order to convert technology rapidly into new products and processes, as well as to “develop deep market insights and strengthen our marketing and technical integration globally.”

These innovations must spring from “pressing human needs,” and to be successful must be introduced to the marketplace and accepted by society via “partnerships and dialog with all stakeholders, including governments, NGOs and academia,” she says. Sometimes it’s possible “to invent ahead of the curve, ahead of understanding what the payoff will be.” One of her favorite examples is Kevlar, the tightly woven material used in bullet proof vests. It was originally invented 40 years ago to replace steel in tires, when the price of steel went sky high. After 10 years in development, DuPont introduced Kevlar to tire manufacturers, at which point the steel industry dropped its price, and DuPont had to figure out what to do with an invention on which it had spent tens of millions of dollars. Today, Kevlar has found uses not just as life protection material, but as a way of strengthening structures against bomb blasts and hurricanes, in sails and ropes, in hockey sticks, and yes, finally, in tires.

Kullman offers some parting advice: Collaborate with customers and suppliers; seek opportunities beyond your assets; open up new business models; embrace the future; and think big and think different. -- [February 13, 2008
12:00 PM]]]> http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/549/
In this heartfelt address, Tom Brokaw characterizes the transformation of the world by digital technology as a second “Big Bang,” a time of great possibility, but also of danger.

This revolution is being advanced not by “a small collection of monkish wonks working in a secret lab” but by a vast and ever larger population ranging from inventive teenagers to military analysts in the Pentagon, says Brokaw, who feel “power at their fingertips and in the bowels of their servers.” They believe that the world is limited only by their imagination. Yet, cautions Brokaw, “life is not a virtual experience. If we develop capacity and leave out compassion, what is the reward? What are the consequences if speed overruns reason?”

The most memorable people Brokaw has met during 45 years in journalism are not world leaders and movie stars, but “brave young, black and white civil rights workers” determined to end the "moral hypocrisy” of the segregated south; a doctor saving a young girl’s life in Somalia; a fireman searching for lost comrades in the wreckage of the Twin Towers. For Brokaw, greatness is defined by unrecognized and modest heroes “who put their hands in the dirt and spend nights in scary places to make this precious planet a better place for us all.”

The technology revolution must serve a larger purpose, Brokaw believes. He describes American aid workers using the internet to help victims of an earthquake in Pakistan, both to speed rebuilding and “to make a lasting impression on those poor souls who believe the world has forgotten them, especially the Western world.” Brokaw states, “These are new tools that require a human face as we attempt to diminish and lower the temperature of Islamic rage.” Brokaw has written of the “defining generation” who fought in World War II. He suggests an analogy with those in our own time who meet our greatest challenges with powerful new technologies: the growing divide between haves and have-nots; disappearing ice caps and rainforests; and increasingly scarce and expensive energy.

The generation that rises to answer these challenges must have “an attention span and patience longer than the conventional post on YouTube.” They must also search for truth amid “distortion, fraud and anarchy.” Brokaw ends by asking the privileged generation that wields new technological tools, his listeners, to make “a moral and intellectual commitment to leave this precious planet a better place than we found it.” -- [April 2, 2008 3:30 PM]]]> http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/547/
These panelists serve up straight talk and occasionally dish on various aspects of going public, giving aspiring entrepreneurs an unvarnished view of the process.

In the mid-90s, Jonathan Bush started a health care IT business in the cellar of his Boston-area home, with the server sitting on a basement dryer. After a failed initial attempt to “create an incredible service experience around birth,” his team decided to focus on solving healthcare’s “insidious integrity problem.” Athenahealth set about providing billing and medical records services via internet to health care groups large and small.

The 10-year journey to public offering was bumpy, according to Bush. There was a great deal of pressure, with VCs pushing the timing, and “lots of swanky, large black cars would show up to talk about selling out opportunities.” His advice today, around setting an IPO price: “Push and squeal and rail, get a really good pricing committee, people that will get your back, and do not let your price go down unchallenged the night before.”

Gail Goodman’s company, incorporated in the founder’s attic in 1995, finally went public in the past year. It’s now a $50 million/year business service company focusing on email marketing for small businesses. She learned lots of things along the way, including “how to make money on an average of $33 per month per customer -- the answer is a lot of customers!” Goodman says the decision to go public flowed from the desire for “a huge branding opportunity.” And with a few dozen small competitors, going public “would create a nice game-over statement,” says Goodman.

She doesn’t paint the rosiest picture of the IPO process: “The whole investment banking industry is due for an overhaul…These guys are lingo rich…and try to snow you at every turn. It’s the worst client relation experience I’ve ever had.” She also frets that as an officer of a publicly traded company, there’s “scrutiny of every syllable that comes out of your mouth in a public setting.” You “can’t be a little casual, and that is the antithesis of my management style.”

Bruce Evans, who’s in the growth part of the private equity business, says he’s often in competition with the IPO market. He seeks companies with “reasonably high rates of historical revenue growth… and good business models, nice cash flow characteristics, and demonstrated profitability.” Evans says, “We do our best to convince people to take our money and not all want to.”

Jono Goldstein says that going public is one of many financing events for a company. “It’s the beginning of a serious journey.” Also, don’t assume that going public means liquidity: “Don’t plan on going public because you think it’s the end of the game. You’ll be seriously disappointed.” He notes that with a recession coming, “the metaphorical IPO window is probably closing.” In bad times, “I would worry more about the impact of economics on the company, and go public when the timing is right.” -- [January 24, 2008 7:00 PM]]]> http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/546/
In this valedictory panel to the two-day symposium, 10 speakers offer brief takes on how the Second Law of Thermodynamics might prove useful in seeking answers to our current energy challenge.

Even before the oil embargo of 1973, Thomas Widmer recalls, Joe Keenan and his MIT colleagues wrote of an “entropy crisis.” They analyzed the flow of work in industries and saw great inefficiencies that became crippling when fuel prices spiked. Despite 30 years of improvement, says Widmer, “the effectiveness of energy use is still less than 12%.” In selling ideas to policy makers, he advises, talk about “energy productivity” rather than conservation.

Ernest S. Geskin doesn’t believe alternative energies will be viable quickly enough to make a serious difference in climate change, so his objective is to improve combustion. He outlines several methods he’s developing that increase the availability of generated heat, reduce heat losses, and integrate combustion with materials production and processing, such as in steelmaking.

James Keck says that “improving the efficiency and reducing emissions of auto engines and power plant burners requires an ability to model hydrocarbon combustion.” He recommends using a method “firmly based on the Second Law of Thermodynamics: the rate controlled constrained equilibrium method,” which, among other advantages, generates fewer equations, and is applicable to any separable system.

Seeking ways to make reactions more efficient and “less exergy destructive,” Noam Lior recommends a detailed, top-down methodology. His lab has been examining oil droplet and coal combustion in an attempt to understand why exergy losses take place, and to determine “which process will give us the highest exergy efficiency.”

Debjyoti Banerjee’s research focuses on enhanced cooling and explosives sensing. His lab explores phase changes for boiling and condensation, and develops new models in molecular dynamics, harnessing the energy of nanosphere transport processes. A “nanobubble” serves as a heat engine, and Banerjee is examining how “nanofins help in transferring heat.”

Richard Peterson is taking a look “at how small you might be able to make the classic thermodynamic heat engine, so you could integrate it into portable equipment or other devices requiring power, and burn fuel with much higher energy density than found in a battery.” He notes that “your efficiency takes a nosedive as you shrink the engine.”

Erik Ydstie is concerned with dynamic systems like power plants, and how they can be improved, by manipulating their inputs and outputs. By designing better controls to regulate these complex systems, there’s a “lot of scope to improve the efficiencies of these plants. You could get quite a bit of mileage by running them better.”

Ron Zevenhoven “presents the embryo of an idea: Can the infrared radiation that causes the enhanced greenhouse effect be put to better use?” He wants to see whether science can modify the infrared radiation that leaves the earth, in order to cut back on radiative forcing higher up.

Zhuomin Zhang discusses radiation entropy and how near-field thermophotovoltaic devices “may be another way of effectively using energy.” He wonders how to apply the entropy concept to near-field radiation when interference is a problem.

Ahmed Ghoniem says that while we won’t run out of cheap fossil fuels for some time, “we need to think about an insurance policy” in response to the predictions of a four to six degree rise in Earth’s temperature by the end of the century. “The dirty little secret is once you burn the fuel you automatically generate entropy -- you lose about 20% right off the bat.” Ghoniem asks whether “combustion and heat engines can be reinvented to reduce entropy generation, practically and at scale.” -- [October 5, 2007 1:50 PM]]]>