http://mitworld.mit.edu/ MIT World media. en-us Mon, 13 Feb 2012 22:07:01 GMT Fri, 01 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/933 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/933 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 association with his father, resides in collections of the world’s finest art museums.) When Demaine is stuck with a math problem, he “can just build a sculpture to illustrate why the math problem is hard.” He also uses mathematics to figure out how to build a sculpture. He recommends this approach because it offers “the flexibility to jump back and forth between worlds.”

Daniela Rus has been developing an origami free of human labor, where sheets “organize themselves as objects and program their own shapes.” Her ultimate goal is to program various kinds of matter, embedding different materials with actuators, sensors, communication capabilities, and providing the software required for self-shaping processes. She shows a suite of functional objects inspired by origami, including a worm robot made of out of creased patterns, printed three-dimensionally out of a single sheet of paper. Rus has also created smart rocks that are actually a collection of robotic cubes that “talk to each other” and make decisions about how to come together to achieve a desired design, such as a dog. She is aiming for self-assembling robots that might traverse tunnels with snakelike shapes. Rus believes programmable materials will have a great impact on manufacturing. “ Imagine a robot Kinkos of 2020, where you don’t go to print a poster, but to print a robot.”

No origami for Scott Aaronson, but instead deep probing about the limitations of computation, even as technological progress delivers more problem-solving power. He discusses the idea of problems that are simply intractable for computers, and wonders “if there is any feasible way to solve these problems consistent with the laws of physics.” Aaronson envisions hypothetical devices, such as a time travel computer, where in a universe with “closed timelike curves,” nature “would be forced to solve a very hard computational problem” such as going back in time and “telling Shakespeare what plays he was going to write.” Another, less hypothetical concept for solving problems involves quantum computing. Groups today are working on implementing such computers, using ion tracks and nuclear magnetic resonance. However, says Aaronson, quantum computing to date can only “verify that with a high probability, 15 is equal to three times five.” While it is possible “to imagine mathematical computers that vastly exceed” the capability of current technology, enormous challenges remain. ]]> Fri, 01 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/934 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/934 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 computer technology in developing countries, Negroponte started One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), a program that has now placed approximately three million laptop computers in the hands of children in 40 countries. Some nations have implemented the program more successfully than others, he admits: Libya’s Qaddafi just toyed with adopting OLPC, but the president of Uruguay “decided it would be his legacy.” Negroponte shows photos of children from different countries taking advantage of their laptops, including one teaching grandparents how to read and write, and another walking home with the computer balanced on her head.

Back in 1969, Tim Berners-Lee was unaware of the first message traveling along ARPANET, but 20 years later at CERN, his passion for the internet ignited, leading to the development of HTML, URLs, and the World Wide Web. Berners-Lee describes how Michael Dertouzos recruited him to MIT’s Lab for Computer Science, and then took Berners-Lee “under his wing” to launch the international consortium behind the web. Today Berners-Lee says this “linked data cloud” sees a doubling of content every 10 months, and that information systems must be built to cope with the nearly “ridiculous” numbers of devices that tap into the Web. “Some people would like it on their watch, others want it built into their glasses,” he says.

Berners-Lee asks for involvement from technology literate citizens in addressing issues of access equity (only 25% of the world is connected to the web). He views this as a matter of “human rights,” given the way the web is integrated into government, business and culture. The web now has 10¹¹ pages, about the same number as neurons in the brain, and Berners-Lee would like to formalize a “science to study this thing, to understand how information propagates across it,” he says. “Humanity is connected by technology,” and “we have a duty to think about the protocols that affect it.”

Even her good friend and computing guru Michael Dertouzos did not foresee the degree to which “digitization and IT would radically change the big players in the world,” says Suzanne Berger. At the end of the 1980s, huge, vertically integrated companies operating in mass markets began losing their dominance, says Berger, as the digital revolution allowed firms to distribute activities previously undertaken in a single location to the four corners of the globe. Corporations now create products as if they are constructing LEGOs, she believes. IT has enabled modularity, where manufacturing and services “don’t matter, and are simply cheap commodities that can take place anywhere.”

This is no longer a healthy state of affairs, believes Berger, because innovation in so many areas of the economy (biotechnology, for instance) increasingly requires a close link to production. While the U.S. is still strong in R&D, it must also “master production in new technologies” or it will not be able to maximize the value of innovation to society. Dertouzos understood this well, she says: “We can’t just ship production out and hope to remain a society that lives well.” ]]> Thu, 30 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/932 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/932 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 beneficial to millions: stock option valuation formulas enabled the launch of new exchanges, and the evolution of computing has made electronic trading possible and cheap for multitudes. But there have also been “unintended consequences,” says Lo, a “theme that runs across all technology, not just finance.” He shows an index of U.S. residential housing prices from 1890 to 2006, which shows a major uptick at the end – graphic illustration of last decade’s “extraordinary run up of housing prices.” This inflation and the subsequent crash Lo traces to “the confluence of human behavior interacting with new financial technology, allowing us to pump tremendous amounts of money into residential real estate.”

Because of the complexity and size of financial networks and interactions, markets are increasingly interconnected, so breakdowns in one sector inevitably impact others. Lo points to the “quant meltdown” of March 6, 2010, where in 13 minutes, a $35 billion company shrank to $1 million. This kind of flash crash, triggered by human error coupled with all-electronic trading systems, “will happen more frequently, not less,” says Lo. “We have the ability to wipe out a large amount of life savings at the click of a mouse. We have to do better. Technology must account for the frailty of human behavior.”

Despite advances in technology, says John Thain, it is still the case that “garbage in results in garbage out.” Back in 1979, when Thain started at Goldman Sachs, he analyzed financial transactions on large sheets of green paper, and did calculations by hand. A single merger transaction with 12 different structures and 12 different prices required 144 sheets of paper, and mistakes meant literally cutting and pasting. Excel, PowerPoint, and powerful computers have made the work of financial analysts more productive, says Thain, but none of the new technology “will tell you if a transaction is good for shareholders. We still have to make sure the numbers are right.”

When a trade takes less than a millisecond to execute, human errors become rampant. (Thain notes that traders want their servers next to official exchanges to “reduce the speed of light delays caused by the distance an electronic order has to travel.”) Sometimes input filters catch the extra zero or an improbably repetitive trade, but “people are creative in their mistakes,” says Thain. While the New York Stock Exchange features human specialists to catch these, there is a lack of human intervention in the many purely electronic exchanges. He rues the overly complex mortgage tranching schemes that led to “ninja loans” and a hyper leveraged real estate market and disaster for financial institutions worldwide. Thain concludes, “It’s not good to buy things you don’t understand,” and trades with no realistic inputs. The greatest advances in methodology and technology cannot substitute for human judgment. ]]> Mon, 27 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/930 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/930 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 “blind to the ages,” older subjects might possess an anatomically younger brain, with lots of gray matter and smaller ventricles. Structures in the older brains correlate in clinical populations to a higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, and Golland believes her methodology of linking brain structure to function will help in diagnostics and in surgery.

Dina Katabi may have found an answer to the annoying glitches and stalls that seem to plague mobile video users. Whether due to changes in distance or something as simple as raising the handheld device up or down, wireless video suffers from a performance cliff, working really well, and then suddenly dropping off. This is because the current coding system uses bits of information for compressing video and for error protection, which means small errors can result in massive drop off in performance. Katabi’s solution, called SoftCast, joins the two codes that compress and error correct the video into a single, linear stream of information. If there is a small perturbation in video code, the impact on channel quality is barely noticeable. Katabi shows a convincing comparison of her scheme versus the MPEG4 standard on a smart phone, and SoftCast is the clear champion, with video quality “changing smoothly with channel quality” as the phone moves farther away from the transmitter.

The ‘wisdom of crowds’ on the Internet can be applied to solve all kinds of problems that are too hard for software alone, says Rob Miller. He shows how “highly elastic human resources” -- what he calls “crowd computing” --are being used to tackle a variety of tasks, including translating someone’s messy handwriting, and even editing a paper. With the help of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service, where vast numbers of people contract to perform tiny tasks for equally tiny amounts of money, it is possible to create online services that proofread, alter content, and shorten documents. With the right algorithms shaping user interaction, a mass of helping hands can make multiple passes for proper grammar, improved sentence structure and length. Repeated iterations by the crowd to “find, fix and verify,” says Miller, can produce results equivalent to the work of a single professional proofreader—but in minutes, and at a fraction of the cost. ]]> Mon, 27 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/931 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/931 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.” Leaps in processing speed enormously aided in the development of essential robotics systems, such as vision, machine learning, wireless networking, and speech understanding. He shows a robot, “The Cart,” from Stanford’s AI lab circa 1979. The device relied on a giant mainframe (shared with the music department), and moved 20 meters in six hours. By 2005, Stanford’s AI vehicle Stanley was traveling 200 kilometers in six hours. Brooks runs videos of the latest robotic achievements, such as following a human’s gaze and commands and delicately manipulating objects. Roboticists have a way to go before their creations can recognize a class of objects such as a shoe and pick out speech in a noisy background.

Much of these advances will depend on a continuation of the progress in computing power that has been driving the digital revolution. John Hennessy believes that we will soon reach an “incredible inflection point,” when desk-based computing will give way to tablets and smart phones—“a land grab evolution of internet access.” In addition, the number of servers in clouds is expected to grow by more than 30% a year. What this means, he says, is that “energy will be a key factor in determining how useful devices are.” The costs of powering and cooling all these devices, not to mention giant server farms, will increasingly impact their design and performance.

Hennessy offers a brief history of the connections among computer architecture, speed, and energy efficiency since the late 1970s. Today, the Jaguar of the processing world, Intel’s Core i7 has a detector that slows down its clock rate if the chip gets too hot, says Hennessy. Researchers eager to maintain steady progress in performance while keeping transistors cool are exploring variations on multithreading and multicore devices, some with simpler memory hierarchies, others with aggressive memory hierarchies. The desired outcome would permit the portability of these processors across architectures “so we don’t have to turn every single programmer into a hardware architecture expert,” says Hennessy. ]]> Wed, 22 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/929 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/929 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 the nearly free rein Xerox gave him and colleagues at PARC starting in 1970, which led to the first personal computer, a series of LISP machines, and other revolutionary technologies that developed into “pretty much all the things you’re now accustomed to in the world of personal computing,” he says. The only vision Lampson was unable to explore was the web, and that was “because we didn’t have a big enough sandbox to play in.”

Andrew Chi-Chih Yao earned his 2000 Turing for the complexity-based theory of pseudorandom number generation, cryptography and communication complexity. Yao attributes his successes in part to the times (late ‘70s), when it became apparent that public key cryptography would herald big networks, electronic commerce and the need for cryptography. He also notes that a group of researchers were “trying to break away from Claude Shannon” and “embraced computational complexity as our savior.” It should come as no surprise, given these trends, says Yao, “those of us lucky enough in those days to be thinking about these issues would come up with concepts that would become very important.”

Inspired by a paper in public key cryptography,
Ronald Rivest and MIT colleagues came up with an algorithm known as the RSA scheme, based on the difficulty of factoring two large prime numbers, launching a new era for cryptography (and garnering the 2002 Turing Award). This field achieved “paradoxical things,” says Rivest. “The character that cryptography can have is that you can ask something that seems like you shouldn’t be able to do it, and yet you can in the end.”

The panel’s youngest Turing winner (2008),
Barbara Liskov, recounts the “wonderful ‘ah ha’ moment few people are lucky enough to have,” when she came up with a new conceptual framework for computer programming languages. Her 1972 breakthrough involved a “big black box” concealing complicated data structures and code, which was manipulated by means of carefully defined operations. Relating “this multioperation module to data types” was the start of object-oriented programming. After spending several years “figuring out what this idea really meant,” Liskov “switched to distributed systems,” where she saw other “really important problems.” These eminent scientists recognize today’s breakthrough work -- Corbato cites Google, for instance -- but they don’t embrace social networking. Liskov has neither a Facebook nor Twitter account, because she is “not interested in that kind of exposure,” which she perceives as dangerous. Rivest admits to logging into Twitter “once a decade.”

In a final ‘lightning’ round on important computer science problems, Yao recommends “brilliant” students work on “factoring of large integers by classical means;” Lampson suggests cyber physical systems; and Liskov points to computational biology. ]]> Thu, 16 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/928 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/928 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 to the University of Michigan computer center, and worrying about “one little bug ruining the whole program.” He held onto the cards until he moved to Cambridge in 1990.

While working as a young faculty member in the field of optical holography, Vest said his team became the “nth group to develop the idea of computer tomography—where n is a big number.” Even after he fell into the “dark chasm of academic administration,” Vest plunged forward with computing, as an early email adopter. He is especially proud of helping to bring Tim Berners-Lee to the MIT computer lab, and supporting the launch of the World Wide Web.

While Vest believes computation in its next phase will be used to “model and simulate at extreme scales, to understand and perfect systems of unprecedented complexity,” and help meet the critical challenges of our times, he worries that problems of cybersecurity might “mess up the grand global adventure” of the World Wide Web, and that the systems computer science and engineering create might “become so complicated we can’t think about all the possible end states,” conceivably resulting in disaster. But as an avowed optimist, Vest trusts that the collaborative spaces engendered by computing will lead to new forms of global problem solving and learning.

Computation methods have opened up new ways of looking at the earth and its systems, says Maria Zuber. She unveils a set of remarkable visualizations, all courtesy greater computing muscle, that help explain events from the past, illustrate complex interactions of the present, and predict the future. A simulation has bolstered the theory that a giant impact striking earth at a “strafing angle” sent enough material in orbit to form the moon several billion years ago. Another model demonstrates why a period of heavy bombardment of the moon occurred, and how comparable impacts on earth caused vulcanism, degassing, and the formation of our planet’s atmosphere, oceans and life itself.

Zuber shows animations of the dynamics inside the earth; the evolution of enormous landscapes; the circulation of ocean currents, including the underappreciated role of eddies; and the distribution of phytoplankton. MIT computer programs verify greenhouse gas emissions regulated under the Kyoto Protocol, tracing the flow of these gases around the planet, and the Institute is behind a lot of the improvements in weather prediction models.

Zuber sees several areas ripe for computational progress: modeling subsurface transport, which will prove critical in the effort to sequester CO₂ underground; atmosphere-ocean exchange, which describes how sea spray captures CO₂ and deposits it on the ocean floor as organic carbon; and finally a super-detailed model of the entire earth system, including solids and fluids. ]]> Wed, 15 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/927 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/927 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 service, IDEO emulates this kind of fearless fun with its “principles of practice,” which include role play, encouraging the ridiculous, and thinking with your hands.

Boyle suspects that “every brilliant idea at one point probably seemed ridiculous.” Co-author of The Klutz Book of Inventions, he invites audience members to brainstorm a new product using the ‘mash up’ technique: list 5-10 unique things found in a typical drug store, and 5-10 things found in a junk drawer at home, and then come up with a product that combines one from each list. The MIT crowd manages to invent self-adhesive wrapping paper and a combination of Preparation H and stamps.

Bray lauds “thinking with your hands:” taking materials and putting them together quickly to see if any idea works. He describes a “classic failure project,” where an airline hoped to find a way to use flat beds on planes, and wondered if passengers might accept bunk configurations. The IDEO team quickly pushed chairs together, and had some people lie beneath others stretched out on chairs. Says Bray, “We built this idea in 10 minutes and saw that it was absurd.” Role-playing is also central: IDEO sent an anthropologist to an emergency room to document the patient experience with videorecorder. The medical staff learned how dehumanizing the hospital environment was, and how to make it a bit more welcoming.

Make sure to “give people permission to be creative,” Bray concludes. Assign a playspace at work -- a safe environment to innovate in, for role-playing and for good-spirited humor. While some companies believe “play is recess, and kind of goofy,” says Boyle, role-playing is actually inspiration, ridiculous the start of exploration and ideation, and hands-on play essential to implementation. ]]> Tue, 14 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/925 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/925 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 and its impact both at ground level and on the atmosphere, hence worldwide regulations attempting to reduce these emissions. But researchers understand a lot less about particulates, micron-sized chemicals born aloft in aerosol form. They matter because, as Kroll relates, epidemiological studies link high levels of particulates to increased rates of mortality (lung cancer, cardiopulmonary disease), and to impacts on climate. By scattering or absorbing light, particulates can mask the effects of global warming. Additionally, “we just don’t like to see this pollution,” says Kroll.

The traditional picture of the composition of these particles has proven inadequate, says Kroll, because it hasn’t taken into account the way particulates interact over time with each other and under different conditions once they exit vehicles -- forming wholly new compounds. Regulators have typically focused on what pours out of tailpipes in the first few seconds of burning fuel.

Kroll, intrigued by how secondary aerosols form, and where they end up, has developed a new instrument to measure and identify the organic carbon particulates when burned at different temperatures. He has also run experiments over days in a refrigerator-sized “smog chamber” outfitted with UV lights to see what reactions occur. At different points in this box, the particles shift into gas phase, and back, as oxidation occurs. Ultimately, Kroll wants to measure the lifecycle, quantities and properties of this plume of pollutants, as they transform from primary to secondary aerosols, with the hope of offering regulators a more fine-grained picture of potentially harmful emissions. ]]> Tue, 14 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/926 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/926 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 home, where children inevitably turn to digital entertainment that parents object to. Parents also admit to, and regret, the scheduling of play around their own and their children’s busy lives, and the need to cram education and other ‘purpose-driven’ goals into play. Kids resent play that is about an end result, and in a large majority, declare their preference for spontaneous play, outdoors, shaped by their own rules.

“Technology is both a unifier and divider,” says Gould, providing “moments of absolute closeness, and exasperation.” Parents worry constantly about their children’s exposure to virtual worlds and digital devices, while kids are unabashedly fascinated and excited by technology. Parents admit to using these devices as babysitters, and also note the power of online media to connect their children with friends, or to rich fantasy experiences. Parents “tell us they prefer their kids to engage in traditional play that engages the mind and body, and that their kids don’t know how to entertain themselves without technology,” says Gould. They believe digital fun substitutes scripted for unguided play, and therefore does not qualify as “play play” -- what parents insist they did when they were younger.

This parent cohort wants in on their children’s play, and the children more than welcome their participation -- as long as it does not actually translate to another aspect of supervision. Parents must put down the mobile phones, and mom should stop documenting the action “and just sit down and have fun,” say the kids. Gould eventually hopes to take the benefits of the digital structured world of play, and bring them together with the benefits offered by traditional unstructured play, and develop new toys, content and play experiences so parents can take advantage of what’s needed for these kids.” ]]> Mon, 13 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/924 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/924 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 entire world where all the features of the landscape can be built or manipulated for different ends—an activity called ‘crafting.’ Players can chop blocks to create shelters, whack trees to make axes, pull wool off of sheep and grow wheat. This is not a simulation game: bad things happen at ‘night,’ so there is an element of suspense and strategy.

The two elements of “creativity and survival,” says Davidson, add up to a classic game play experience. Plus, he says, Minecraft “breaks all the rules:” it lets you play for free by yourself, learning how to craft by trial and error; interested players can contribute new elements because the code is freely available; and multiplayer groups can get together online to create projects and pool their worlds. It is “snackable, just like Lays potato chips,” says Davidson. You head for the game frequently, but at the same time, the “complete play experience fits easily into life,” because “it is simple to get in and out of the game.”

Minecraft meets all the mechanical, aesthetic and design criteria for great gaming, says Davidson, enabling speedy involvement, deep immersion and long-term investment, and has great potential as an educational tool. Players can model their worlds on real life or complete fantasy. They may devise electronic switches to control tram systems, or fiddle with physics, sending waterfalls upward, and suspending structures midair. Ultimately, concludes Davidson, this game “taps into the ludic core of who we are,” calling on players’ storytelling and performance impulses. ]]> Tue, 31 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/920 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/920 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 modes, including the remix (adapting someone else’s project); the benevolent dictatorship (as in open-source software, where a leader decides what contributors may add to the project); and open-content publishing, in which participants work in parallel checking one another’s work. She remarks that the last type of collaboration can prove surprisingly efficient and accurate. A Wikipedia entry that evolved in the first 100 hours after Japan’s recent earthquake contained 2900 edits made by 761 people. Online collaborations often follow a project’s “narrative” structure, says Bruckman, so people may work in parallel; or by continuation (with pieces handed off sequentially to the next person); or by collection, with a leader gathering the parts into a whole.

Some factors in online communities are more likely to encourage participation than others, such as clearly defined reciprocity (if I help you, you help me in return); or that contributions are clearly attributed to an individual, and may improve that person’s reputation. Bruckman is creating a suite of tools called Pipeline that attempts to enumerate the best practices of online collaboration to help digital producers kick start their own creative communities. She is certain that projects featuring “broad, diverse participation” will always “surprise you with intelligence and creativity,” if people get the right tools and social context for making that happen. ]]> Tue, 31 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/921 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/921 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 PBS stable, that mantra translates to building online games, mobile games, and apps around well-known figures like Martha (the eponymous Speaking dog) and the Kratt Brothers. The U.S. Department of Education has funded transmedia research at PBS, so studies are underway on the impact of games such as “Prankster Planet,” using assets from "The Electric Company" television series. PBS wants to find out how easily kids move between media platforms, and whether transmedia really contributes to learning.

With a breathless sports video, Rachel Schiff introduces Microsoft’s Kinect, which harnesses body motion as the game controller. Why is more of this technology good for kids? Kinect gets couch potatoes up and moving; it can bring people together, since the system recognizes you as soon as you walk in the room; and it can spur children to undertake sports and other activities in the real world – transmedia of a different sort.

At the other end of the activity spectrum,
Wendy Bronfin shows off digital picture books created for the Barnes & Noble Nook Color. In response to parents’ concerns about “empty calorie screen time,” the Nook invites e-reading, along with using Android apps and the ability to view videos on the Web.

Gershenfeld’s new company serves students eager to design their own games. One of the highlights here is a video showcasing the twelve 5th – 8th grade winners of the White House-sponsored National STEM Videogame Challenge.

About the “less” side of the debate: Gershenfeld wonders when engagement becomes addiction, and whether technology can help discourage its own over-use. The burden is mostly on parents, to share media experiences with their children – and to make sure the kids get outside sometimes. ]]> Tue, 31 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/922 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/922 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 pickup times to kids’ phones during the day. After school, mom makes playdates using Red Rover appointment software, while her youngest draws on the iPad. Older kids take up educational videos and software, or seek homework help on YouTube. High school age children use special apps for SAT prep, or Tigertext -- a system that automatically deletes texts from sender’s and receiver’s phones, and the answer to “snooping parents.” There are fights at dinner over tweeting at the table. After dinner, there may actually be family time spent together playing Wii or Kinect, or watching movies. Van Petten recommends RunPee, an app “that tells you the best time to pee during a movie so you only miss the boring parts.” Bedtime may be delayed by arguments over turning off devices, or kissing daddy goodnight via Skype (he’s on away on business).

While Van Petten likes how technology makes everyday routine much easier to manage, and connects people at any distance, whether for social, academic or professional reasons, she is less enthusiastic about some other far-reaching and less obvious effects. Studies show kids that “jump from device to device” are exhausted by day’s end, and spend less time daydreaming. Texting after bedtime, a very common habit, leaves kids overexcited and unable to sleep. And all those games and screen time render children unable to savor the deeper, richer play experiences, and also leave them feeling lonely and sad: social networks provide lots of “connections with no emotional value,” says Van Petten.

She suggests establishing boundaries and balance in the home, such as “no electronics zones” and times set aside for creative electronic play, especially with parents involved. “A lot of parents feel they should be engaged, but that their child is in a bubble with the device,” she says. Instead, they can be “bonding over a shared experience.” ]]> Tue, 31 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/923 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/923 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 new perspectives and fresh ideas to educational innovation. The task is harder, Rhoten believes, because the field isn’t guided by a strong theoretical framework – we need a successor to behaviorism and constructivism that embraces young people’s affinity for game play, connectivity, and technical skill.

Startl’s role is to recruit entrepreneurs and support them in developing products that are “learning rich and market smart.” That’s where the other movie parallel comes in: Rhoten’s model is Robert Redford’s Sundance portfolio. The Sundance Institute nurtures new talent, and Startl does this through its Design Boost five-day boot camp for product designers, as well as a summer-long Accelerator to help entrepreneurs build their companies. The Sundance Film Festival helps filmmakers meet distributors; Startl runs a VC Summit and a Venture Fair to introduce educational technology entrepreneurs to capitalists. The Sundance Channel is a new distribution outlet, while Startl hopes to bypass the school market and enable new products to get directly to learners.

The lecture includes information and promotional videos about three products Startl has helped to nurture: Mind Snacks, language games for young people; Toontastic, an app that supports storytelling and animation; and Project Noah, a mobile tool for exploring and documenting wildlife habitats. ]]> Mon, 23 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/918 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/918 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 students in the moment and build experience, before, during and after,” says Cator.

Now is the right time to push for these opportunities, she believes, because of 24/7 internet mobility; the explosion of social interactivity and digital content online; and new methods for aggregating and analyzing data “to help students learn better.” We’re at “an inflection point,” she claims, “between the print-based classroom and the digital-based environment,” and must design and develop “entirely new learning environments that take us further, where the locus of control moves from teacher to student.”

The National Educational Technology Plan (NETP) delineates five goals for engaging and empowering learners of all ages through technology. In the first, Learning, the plan aims to personalize learning environments, incorporating life outside the school, and help for people with disabilities. New Assessment, objectives involve measuring a “full range of standards, not just those in bubble tests,” and should employ real-time feedback, as well as “persistent learning records” available to the parents of students. In Teaching, technology should “augment human performance,” just as it does in other industries, says Cator, enabling teachers to connect to experts and each other. Infrastructure, improvements mean bringing broadband internet to 98% of the country in a few years’ time, so no matter where they live, all students have online access. The Productivity, goal involves offering technology platforms so students may accomplish the most in a given subject.

Finally, the NETP addresses large-scale, persistent inequities in American education, says Cator. Some estimates suggest 90 million adult Americans may be undereducated – for instance, reading at grade school level or worse. Broadband access and new learning platforms will create a richer set of informal learning pathways for such adults and provide new opportunities for lifelong learners. ]]> Mon, 23 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/919 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/919 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 identifying the key follow-up questions: Can you prove it works? How long does it take? How good is it? Then the big question: Does theoretical computer science matter? Leighton cites some powerful examples of the field’s impact on our lives, from encryption to Google’s page-rank algorithm to the content delivery system of Akamai Technologies (which he co-founded in 1998).

Ed Lazowska asks a very different question: What four important events happened in 1969? If you guess the landing on the moon, the Woodstock festival, or the Mets winning the World Series, you’re right but no cigar: the most important event was the first data transmission over the ARPANet, forerunner of the Internet. Since then, relentless innovation has produced computer systems that make possible digital media, mobility, search – and set the stage for the next generation of smarts, i.e., computers embodied in our homes, cars, healthcare, and in a sense, ourselves, via crowd-sourcing. In all this, even when viewed from the “left coast,” MIT’s role continues to be central.

But the rock star of this symposium is actually IBM’s Jeopardy-winning Watson, whose glowing blue countenance beams in all three talks. Patrick Winston takes off from Watson to look for the beginning of artificial intelligence, and after a few hops backward through the late 20th century, arrives at Aristotle and then Neanderthals and the paintings at Lascaux. The modern progenitors of artificial intelligence, whom Winston honors one-by-one in a digital photo gallery, include Marvin Minsky (for focusing on human cognition), Roger Schank (storytelling), and David Marr (layers of explanation).

Where is artificial intelligence headed? Winston is working on a “trinity of strong hypotheses” – about story, perception, and social interaction – and he promises to report on the success of this way forward at the MIT bicentennial celebration. ]]> Sun, 22 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/917 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/917 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 core measurements has tracked dramatic temperature changes on earth over tens of millions of years. But the last 100 years have been unprecedented, with the famous hockey stick illustration capturing the connection between human industry and increased CO₂ release. When scientists run some models forward, they show temperature increases ranging from 1.5 to 4°C. While these projections contain uncertainty, says Emmanuel, “this does not mean we should do nothing.”

Diverse climate change reconstructions agree: the warmest years of the past century were 1998, 2005 and 2010. “This is happening in real-time,” says
Ronald Prinn, and whether or not “Florida has a cold winter,” warming is occurring “at a rate that should worry us all.” The amount of heat the earth absorbs is simply much greater than it can bounce back into space, courtesy of greenhouse gas already accumulated in the atmosphere, and increasingly, by the secondary impacts of climate change such as the melting of ice sheets. At MIT, Prinn’s group runs models that factor in clouds, ocean mixing, and varying levels of greenhouse gas emissions. In a “business as usual” model, with no real efforts to rein in fossil fuel use, Prinn puts the risk of a temperature increase higher than 4°C at 85%. If we manage to stabilize CO₂ emissions at 550 parts per million (we’re at 472 today), there is still a 25% chance of getting greater than 2°C change. Prinn worries about the instability of the arctic tundra and permafrost, which stores 200 times the amount of current human emissions in carbon, as well as the acidification of oceans, placing plankton, basis of all ocean life, at risk.

Against this bleak backdrop, MIT newcomer
Chris Knittel describes the policy options for tackling climate change. He acknowledges the “dismal and frustrating science” of environmental economics, which had counted on the equivalent of a carbon tax to discourage carbon emissions, only to meet a wall of political rejection. Carbon pricing lowers demand for the fuel intensive products that matter the most in climate change, and whether in the form of cap and trade, or a direct tax, also spurs technologies aimed at fuel efficiency or encouraging alternative fuels. The nation’s fuel standards, set to rise to 35.5 mpg by 2016 are modest, believes Knittel, and subsidies seem to encourage carbon intensive activities rather than reducing them (nb:corn and cellulosic ethanol). States like California are more ambitious, but recent court rulings blocked its cap and trade policy “for environmental justice reasons.”

“The question is whether we can substantially decrease energy and carbon intensity while accommodating economic growth,” says Ernest Moniz. New technologies that emerge must drive the cost of carbon “very, very low” if they are to make a major impact. With cheap coal the primary fuel generating electricity in the U.S., Moniz offers a “Michelin guide type rating” of possible alternative, ‘carbon-free’ fuels: At the top are renewables such as solar; nuclear; and coal with capture and sequestration. Natural gas doesn’t really figure, since it does not wean society effectively from carbon. Moniz believes the best fuel technologies require substantial innovations to bring down their prices. The nuclear industry may want to try small modular reactors of 50-300 megawatts, rather than the 1600 megawatt behemoths that after Fukushima, are even more controversial. Carbon capture and sequestration will require brand new approaches and full-scale testing. Moniz believes solar technology is making the most rapid progress, specifically in silicon photovoltaics, courtesy in part of work in novel materials at MIT. Also, the “global, peanut-sized industry” of batteries may play a “huge role in transforming the picture” of electric vehicles, possibly making them economically feasible in a decade.”

Sarah Slaughter believes the incredible challenge of climate change might make possible wholesale transformation of infrastructure, energy, and other resource systems. She cites New York City’s planning efforts to adapt to sea level rise, which would likely flood the sewer system. All communities must think ahead, for hurricanes, or other disasters likely to flow from warming, but rather than replicate what exists today, says Slaughter, planners should focus on “building the world we want to live in.” MIT and its partners around the world hope to develop “ground breaking technologies” to help transform communities and make them safer, and healthier. Slaughter envisions solutions such as district-wide heating and cooling, and describes a system introduced in Kenya that converts agricultural waste into fuel for cooking food. “There is an opportunity to do things right as we move forward,” she concludes. ]]> Fri, 20 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/914 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/914 “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.

When Braun first graduated from Penn State decades ago, he worked on “human to Mars” programs. There were huge technological obstacles then that persist today. Says Braun, “We need a series of technological advances crossing multiple disciplines to make a human Mars mission feasible.”

The recently minted NASA Space Technology Program (STP), under Braun’s wing, intends to seed R&D ventures -- whether in early stage innovation, experimentation or pilot demonstrations -- that may ultimately solve the kinds of problems hampering human space exploration. The program will also yield numerous other benefits, Braun predicts, in many other areas of science and engineering. These investments in disruptive technologies will pay off in turn by creating spinoff high tech industries, spurring new jobs, economic growth and global competitiveness.

Initial STP R&D money is headed for the International Space Station, which offers unique opportunities to explore long-term human degradation in space, water reclamation, and human-robot collaborations. Other projects include different kinds of space telescopes that could be assembled in space. STP hopes to nurture many ideas, selecting the most promising for larger investment and potential mission status. But the R&D itself “will pay large dividends for scientists,” he promises. As evidence, Braun points to NASA-spawned technology that has proved useful if not essential on our home planet: spacecraft tracking the Gulf oil spill; the capsule used to rescue Chilean miners trapped underground; protective armor for police and firefighters; nutritional supplements in baby formula. “Down-to-earth applications help us, and also create jobs, companies, products, and stimulate the economy,” says Braun. The Apollo program was “actually all about technological leadership,” he concludes, and “that’s what it’s still all about today.” ]]> Fri, 20 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/915 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/915 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 to its policy of tackling the problem, focusing on clean energy R&D to transform the economy and cut emissions. He recounts proudly that investments made by the U.S. government are leading to advanced vehicle batteries, electric charging structures over the nation, and a vast increase in energy production from wind, solar and geothermal sources.

But progress internationally is much harder to come by. There are deep divisions among nations who gather to discuss the way forward under the umbrella of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC). The main cause of acrimony involves a “firewall” between developed and developing nations, which sprang up in 1992 when the UN began work on an international treaty to reduce global warming. According to Stern, developing nations have approached these climate conventions insisting that legally binding commitments to reducing greenhouse gas emissions fall primarily on developed nations, which are responsible historically for the lion’s share of CO₂ output.

The problem with this argument today, says Stern, is that many of these developing nations have evolved such strong economies in the past decade that they are closing in on developed nations in emissions. Stern believes the U.S. cannot agree to a treaty that doesn’t take into account this reality; and that the U.S. must insist instead that certain countries “graduate” from the category of lower to higher emitter when they meet the right criteria, and then assume an appropriate set of obligations.

Stern has been involved in international negotiations for a long time, watching the ebb and flow of effort and politics around the climate issue. His hope is that the next UNFCC convention prove “a cooperative and mutually beneficial platform for combating climate change,” rather than “a platform focused mostly on rhetorical thrust and parry.” ]]> Fri, 20 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/916 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/916 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 forget social responsibility as a mission: “Your obligation is to win, because it’s after you have resources and money that you can give back.” Management “fads” such as “thinking and dreaming time” (this means you, Google) don’t strengthen businesses long-term, believes Welch. Just innovate and produce better products that can beat the competition.

In tough times, such as the recent recession, a company’s challenge “is to come out stronger than when it came in,” and managers must acknowledge not only that “it’s awful,” but “what it will look like on the other side.” Some “jackass” CEOs like to launch major change during such periods, but fail to “explain to people what’s in it for them.” Key to setting a direction and maintaining it through the inevitable bumps of economic and political change, says Welch, is “the right team,” where everyone knows their roles, and how they are performing. This means committing to a process of “differentiation,” where top, middling and failing employees learn exactly where they stand in the eyes of top management, and get compensated (or terminated) on the basis of ability. It’s “cruel” not to be brutally honest with employees, believes Welch. People can make mistakes, of course, but concealment is an error, and admission of failures while risk-taking a kind of heroism. “Never punish someone for taking a swing,” Welch says. And he doesn’t buy the idea of “burn out,” because this simply doesn’t happen in exciting jobs where you’re “turned on every minute, and always want more.”

To a student who wonders if the right way to enter the job market involves “blending in and not rocking the boat,” Welch simply responds: “Yuck, yuck, yuck.” For tips and an in-depth education on managing and winning, Welch suggests visiting his new online MBA program, the Jack Welch Management Institute. ]]> Wed, 18 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/913 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/913 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.

A new discipline, industrial ecology, makes possible a minute study of the connection between the creation of things in human systems, and their impacts-- a life cycle analysis (LCA). Goleman describes what goes into the creation and disposal of a simple glass jar, from the extraction of sand, use of chemicals, melting at high temperatures, and its end in a landfill or recycling center.

This new methodology offers “a vast opportunity to rethink everything we do,” says Goleman. Thanks to websites and downloadable apps that analyze all the ingredients in food, and the thousands of chemicals in daily use, “it is now possible to know the hidden impacts of what we buy when we go to the store,” he says. Consumers can learn instantly whether their product contains properties toxic to health, the environment, and even to social welfare. Empowered buyers can now make choices based not just on value and quality but on their eco and health impacts, collectively swaying companies to do better. Procter and Gamble, performing LCA on their detergents, realized they could wash clothes with cold water, enabling energy savings at home, and this became a marketing point for them. Walmart, says Goleman, is running with the strategic value of sustainability, pushing all its suppliers to report impacts, and sharing this information with shoppers.

Gregory Norris is pressing to open up the sustainability efforts of vast numbers of suppliers with Earthster.org. This website aggregates LCA performed by companies, as well as by other organizations attempting to assess impacts, and publishes the results in a way that can be freely used, so entire supply chains emerge around products. Ultimately, as transparency in reporting impacts becomes the norm, companies and their suppliers will no longer conceal such “externalities” as pollution, or even such social impacts as workers harmed by chemicals on the job. Says Goleman, the “new math for assessing impacts of products and processes” will “for the first time” push sustainable products to the forefront in the marketplace, making it truly possible “to do well by doing good.” ]]> Sat, 14 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/912 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/912 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 devoted to in-depth study of Prochlorococcus, which even as a single species presents many “ecotypes.” Some fare better in great depths, far from the sun, others closer to the surface. Research has verified 12 genetically different strains of Prochlorococcus occupying different ocean niches – and given that there are 10²⁷ cells in the wild, many more genomes are literally floating around. Chisholm ultimately wants to understand why certain types of Prochlorococcus appear in particular ecosystems, and not in others. For instance, Prochlorococcus follow the Gulf Stream, but “disappear near Massachusetts.” With faster gene sequencing, Chisholm and colleagues have been sampling seawater from around the world for Prochlorococcus, hoping to understand better the reasons for their diversity, and how they fit into the larger physical and chemical systems of the oceans.

Nancy Kanwisher approaches fundamental questions involving the nature of the human mind using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), which enables investigation of both structure and function of the brain. In particular, Kanwisher has been exploring whether the brain features regions specialized for specific purposes. Her studies have turned up several such areas: the fusiform face area of the brain, responsible only for face recognition; the parahippocampal place area, a region that responds to images of places or scenes; and the “third and most disreputable region,” the extrastriate body area, which responds to pictures of bodies, body parts – whether stick figures or silhouettes.

These regions are found in the architecture of all normal human brains, Kanwisher says, and their existence raises additional questions that she and other researchers are pursuing. For instance, to learn when these areas become wired in the brain, Kanwisher scanned children. She learned that kids as young as five years showed the same face recognition brain activity as adults. There is evidence “implicating genes” in face recognition. But there is a role for experience as well. Although there is a brain region that responds strongly to visual words and letter strings, the “selectivity of the region” depends on an individual’s history (such as familiarity with written characters from specific languages). Kanwisher concludes that while there are some “highly specialized bits” of the mind/brain made up of specialized components, “these may be relatively rare, and there is probably lots of general purpose machinery.” ]]> Mon, 09 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/910 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/910 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 includes weekly meetings with some young women faculty, emphasizes some basic ideas, such as curiosity, creativity, being skeptical and thinking innovatively. She also wants her protégées to learn how to “handle disappointment,” since work “at the cutting edge doesn’t work most of the time.” She is particularly sympathetic to the challenges of combining work and family life, which still falls most heavily on women, and the continuing requirement that women demand equal treatment “and stick up for themselves.”

Women leave their university positions, says
Lotte Bailyn, for two primary reasons: their sense of a hostile climate, such as lack of department head support, leading to loss of confidence and productivity; and the difficulties of managing child care, elder care and dual careers. Universities can achieve greater success with retention by systematically undertaking climate surveys that demand administrative follow-up; sensitizing faculty and administrators to gender bias; including women proportionately in committee work and decision-making; and offering family policies, including help with dual career couples. Bailyn hopes that universities will come to collaborate and coordinate on issues of retention, perhaps with recruitment consortia.

Cherry Murray brings decades of experience at one of the nation’s premier research labs to her administrative position at Harvard. She derides the “Darwinian leadership model” that holds sway in academia, which “leaves academic scientists and engineers to their own devices to kind of stumble into management and leadership positions. Murray sees this as “wrongheaded,” and that leadership is a learned trait, which can be fostered by “actually training people.” She recommends the kind of leadership development employed by Bell Labs, where managers select “a few stars” to develop as leaders for top positions; mentoring these individuals and middle-level managers; offering challenging assignments internally, and educational opportunities externally; regular, constructive reviews; networking opportunities with others at the same level; and succession planning exercises. Sensitivity training to offset potential “undervaluing of women or minorities” is extremely important, says Murray, and “the upper level management is completely key.” She believes this model could and should “be morphed and used effectively in academia.” ]]> Mon, 09 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/911 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/911 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 sociologist David Riesman, writer of the classic study, The Lonely Crowd. Turkle’s latest book, Alone Together, whose title explicitly connects her thinking to Riesman’s, is the culmination of 15 years of research, and raises some troubling issues about the paradoxically anti-social effects of connecting to the world with sophisticated digital technologies.

Turkle, who has chronicled the increasing portability and pervasiveness of computers and communications technology, believes children may no longer be learning “how to be alone.” They panic at the prospect of disconnecting from their mobile devices, as if being out of touch erases their very existence: “I share therefore I am.” Turkle detects in her interview subjects an “almost instinctive” fear of solitude, which she believes is dangerous, since being alone “is a good thing,” a path to creativity and maturity. Loneliness, she says, “is when you fail to reach that state.”

More and more, Turkle sees a darker side to mobile connectivity, with people plugged in at funerals, dinner tables, and birthday parties. She thinks “in terms of technological affordances and human vulnerability.” Sociable robots capable of simulating human emotion and cognition pose a serious threat, believes Turkle, especially as they ‘try out’ for roles as nannies, elder caretakers, and teachers. She worries that we may come “to expect more from technology and less from each other.” Social networks like Facebook whittle away at privacy, leaving not just individuals but our entire democracy open to abuse and manipulation.

In spite of an expanding “list of things that make me anxious,” Turkle finds cause for optimism: people exhausted by incessant texting or having to “perform” on Facebook reveal “a sense that things have gone amiss.” She describes how, at the end of a one-hour interview, an 18-year-old turned on his mobile phone and reported receiving 100 text messages. He remarked, “How long do I have to keep doing this?” Turkle also speculates that the corporate community must be struggling to maintain productivity in the face of constant connectivity. In the end, says Turkle, there will be a “convergence of many forces where we’re going to get the pushback, and I want to be part of that convergence.” ]]> Sun, 08 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video http://mitworld.mit.edu/video ]]> Sun, 08 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/909 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/909 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 and caprice;” the Afghan people remain desperately poor and undereducated, in spite of aid programs; and neighboring states such as Pakistan have been undermining Afghanistan’s nascent attempts at independence and stability. To overcome this “strategic stalemate,” says Miliband, Afghanistan requires a “reconciliation process” that deals in all players, and takes the nation’s history and culture into account.

What’s needed is “a unified and powerful Western view on the issues of security, the constitution, human rights and governance.” Miliband believes the West must not impose its notion of political organization, but accept Afghanistan’s long-standing tradition of “decentralized politics,” in which clans and tribes play critical roles. Karzai will have an important place “in or out of office” but must understand that institutions matter more than individuals. Miliband warns that while the West hopes to promote “equal treatment of all citizens,” it cannot “stand against a political settlement on the grounds that it is not politically progressive enough.”

Miliband recommends first the appointment of a United Nations mediator to facilitate talks, with the mandate of setting out principles of an end game, and to canvass all parties, including the Taliban. This mediator would help broker confidence-building measures for all sides, leading to localized ceasefires, the end of roadside bombings, and Taliban disassociation from Al Qaeda. Mediation would also attempt to engage regional neighbors, especially Pakistan, with the goal of achieving a balanced, respectful relationship with Afghanistan. This process would secure the meaningful agreement of the U.S. that “political factors have primacy in a counter insurgency.” These negotiations, says Miliband, “would start in conditions of minimal trust and maximal fear on all sides of humiliation.” It is not clear if all will engage, but “we can’t know until we give it a go.” ]]> Thu, 05 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/907 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/907 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, Marzouk shows how he applies such methodologies as polynomial chaos expansion to “construct machinery that lets us propagate uncertainties, evaluate variances, evaluate any aspect of the probability distribution in the model output,” in order “to apply robust formulations much more effectively.” With statistical (Bayesian) inference and inverse problems, Marzouk extracts information from observational data to make models better, “backing out kinetic parameters working at microscale from macroscale data.”

One real-world problem on which Marzouk has been applying his methods: ice sheet dynamics in west Antarctica, which pose “an enormous inference problem,” due to unknowns about sliding friction, geothermal heat flux, and initial temperature of ice. Researchers “need to get a handle on this from the available data,” he says. Another example involves solid oxide fuel cells, which suggest “a lot of potential as high efficiency conversion devices for vehicles or stationary power generation.” Marzouk also hopes his modeling methods can help create better techniques for refining biomass for synthetic fuels. ]]> Wed, 04 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/906 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/906 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 undergraduate students. “Many small things that make life easier for people -- when you remove these typical barriers, have an incredibly important effect on women’s careers and satisfaction levels,” says Birgeneau. The university has also decided that “equity and inclusion need to be part of every conversation,” and has created a senior administrative position devoted to this goal. There is also a new research center focusing on multiculturalism, diversity, and democracy, which Birgeneau hopes will eventually yield “the functional equivalent of Nobel Prizes in equity and inclusion.”

As a single mom with three kids, Heidi Hammel “knows all about family issues.” She describes the difficulty of striking a work-life balance, using props she collected from her own house. She tosses different-colored Lego pieces representing Work and Life into paper cups dangling from either side of a scale held together by straws and a crayon. As urgent job duties vie with family crises, the Legos pile up first in one cup, then the other, and the scale never steadies – just like real life in academia and elsewhere. “Policies can help…but won’t solve the problem,” says Hammel, who relates her early struggles at MIT as a research scientist. “All these programs for faculty don’t help people like me, and there are many young women here who won’t necessarily become faculty. What are we doing to help them?” Hammel left MIT when she wasn’t permitted to work off site, but then found a more accommodating employer. “The message: it’s not easy being a full-time working scientist, academic and parent.” She asks high-level administrators to help “young people in your midst not on tenure track.”

The American Association of University Women has a long history of working on STEM, Lisa Maatz recounts. In 1920, the association gave Marie Curie her first gram of radium (worth $150 thousand). Today, it strives to direct school girls toward science and engineering, and “deal with the climate issue” for women in academia. Some key activities include pressing for changes in the No Child Left Behind law to make science a more prominent course of study; helping girls get into the right math track in middle school; ensuring that educational programs, and not just sports, comply with Title 9 (the 1972 law barring gender discrimination in programs receiving federal financing); and lobbying for increased childcare funding, as well as “commonsense” changes in campus childcare programs such as night and weekend hours. ]]> Wed, 27 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/904 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/904 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 in market share. Aggressive Chinese startups are also looking to move in on the domestic market. India’s car industry (Tata, for example) has had problems with quality, but has begun selling for export to Suzuki, Hyundai and Nissan.

Roos also sees major shifts afoot among the companies that supply vital equipment and parts. For instance, a Canadian parts manufacturer hoped to buy Opal from GM, not content simply “to produce final assembly for vehicles.” Technological innovations driven by concerns about gasoline prices and emissions have brought the first generation of electric cars, as well as improvements in diesel and the traditional internal combustion engine. Some bold ventures suggest completely new industry organization, where car battery manufacturers with proprietary rights “gain tremendous leverage,” much as Intel did in developing chips for personal computers. A Better Place envisions a whole new transportation system, with battery charging stations for electric vehicles, connected by smart networks.

The wild card is demand, says Roos: “Will consumers purchase energy efficient vehicles?” Interest in such cars closely tracks the price in gas prices, he shows, and responds strongly to such incentives as ‘cash-for-clunkers.’ Finland, France and Canada charge less for buying fuel efficient vehicles, and more for gas-guzzlers, but the U.S. seems reluctant to push for these ‘feebates,’ or touch the “political third rail” of a gas tax, says Roos. He finds it “surprising and disappointing” how slowly the U.S. has been developing an Intelligent Transportation System, a “system of systems” that connects “infrastructure, energy and information systems.” Roos says he’s “always skeptical of people who predict what things are going to be like 10-20 years from now,” but can safely say that new technologies, players, business models and networks will bring about major transformations. ]]>