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Flags RSS FeedsThe Clean Energy Revolution - Beyond guts, a great business plan, and friends with deep pockets, clean energy entrepreneurs will need patience and perhaps most of all, a favorable policy environment to succeed. Fortune magazine editor Brian Dumaine leads a discussion with panelists from the worlds of venture capital, academia and industry on ?how to build a winning green tech company.? Nancy Floyd sees talented and practical entrepreneurs ?solving problems we see in front of us.? Some of these may be ?game changers,? although they are ?certainly not science experiments.? Her firm insists that investment-worthy renewable energy ventures must not pose an additional cost premium, which means that projects must be ?at grid parity or below.? She also dismisses the notion that a great idea will be totally disruptive, complet...Feed Source: mitworld.mit.edu Looking at 20th Century Art through the Eyes of a Physicist - Physicist and art collector Walter Lewin shares his personal insights into major works of art from the first quarter of the 20th century.
Known in the hallways of building 37 for his famous art contests, Lewin succumbs to pressure from students and colleagues to give this lecture as part of an IAP event in advance of trips to the Museum of Fine Arts and the Fogg Art Museum. This talk is centered on pioneering artists whose work changed the world.
Lewin begins by providing a framework to understand pioneering art, by dispelling the myth of ?beauty? in the artwork. An excerpt follows:
?At the turn of the century we?ve reached a point that beauty is no longer an issue. Now you may find some of these works beautiful, but the intention of the artists that you?ve just seen, was definitely not to paint ... How to Read 1,000,000 Manga Pages: Visualizing Patterns in Games, Comics, Art, Cinema, Animation, TV, and Print Media - In his introduction, moderator Ian Condry advocates utilizing the expertise and innovation of all disciplines in order to best explore new directions in the humanities. He suggests that the challenge of discovery may ultimately be useful as theoretical exploration, which incorporates the transformative power of art as well.
What would it mean, Lev Manovich asks, to "be stupid?" That is, what would it mean to take risks and start creating artifacts, interpretations and analysis that reach beyond language? To begin analyzing patterns in massive cultural data sets, Manovich uses computer-based techniques, already commonly employed in the sciences, for quantitative analysis and interactive visualization. "An image is worth thousand words. An interface is worth a thousand images. Why not have both?" he asks.... Lunch with a Laureate: Robert Horvitz - As an undergraduate at MIT, Robert Horvitz did not take a biology course until his senior year. But after only six weeks into his first class with professor Cy Leventhal, he realized this was the field for him. He boldly asked for a recommendation as part of his application to grad school?in biology. ?Is it too late?? he wanted to know. Professor Leventhal explained that his own undergraduate and graduate degrees had been in physics and that Horvitz would, in fact, be ?starting early.?
It was his work in Cambridge, England, however, that set the stage for the discoveries for which he would receive the Nobel Prize in 2002. Here he worked with Sidney Brenner and John Sulston on a phenomenon called ?programmed cell death? or apoptosis. Cell death occurs naturally as part of the genetic program of every cell?a ta... Dendrite Morphogenesis and Channel Regulation: Implications for Mental Health and Neurological Disorders - Lily and Yuh-Nung Jan have been pioneers in the field of molecular neurobiology for more than 30 years, and their genetic studies of fruit flies and mice have provided major insights into many different aspects of brain function and development. In this joint lecture, they summarize their recent work on the genetic control of neuronal shape and of electrical properties, including many implications for human brain disorders.
The brain?s extraordinary wiring complexity is largely due to dendrites, the elaborate branched structures through which neurons receive incoming signals. In the first part of their joint lecture, Yuh-Nung Jan summarizes the genetic mechanisms that control the shapes of these elaborate structures.
Jan describes how dendrites recognize and avoid other dendrites of the sa... Numbers, Words and Colors - Tools developed by Martin Wattenberg and his associate Fernanda Viégas, have changed the way people look at and use visualizations, by empowering and equipping users with the methodology needed to ask different questions. Wattenberg, whose background is in math and computer science, asks how the humanities have influenced the evolution of data visualization and then answers with several examples from his own work.
Web Seer compares Google's "auto-suggest" feature in one-to-one, weighted comparisons such as "why doesn't he?" and "why doesn't she?" The resultant text image uses the size of arrows and words to reflect frequency, demonstrating how text can impart meaning.
Another Wattenberg/Viégas collaboration is Many Eyes, a social media tool and Web site that has "democra... Alzheimer?s Disease: Realizing the Promise of Molecular Medicine - In 1906, when Alois Alzheimer first described the disease that bears his name, it was a rarity; life expectancy in the US was around 50 years, and few people lived long enough to develop Alzheimer?s disease (AD). But as life expectancies have risen around the world, AD has become vastly more prevalent, and it is now one of the major public health problems of our time. In this lecture, Steven Paul, former Executive Vice President at Lilly, reviews our current understanding of the pathological mechanisms and implications for future treatments of this disease.
People with AD experience a progressive loss of memory and other cognitive abilities, the result of slow degeneration within the brain. Postmortem examination of patients? brains reveals myriad deposits known as amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tan... Visual Overviews for Cultural Heritage: Interactive Exploration for Scholars in the Humanities, Arts, and Beyond - A focus on designing technologies that allow the "visualization of things not visible" has been at the center of Ben Shneiderman?s work over the past two decades. He advocates the discovery of temporal patterns, relationships and clusters via an empowering user experience which enables discovery at a customizable pace and depth.
Shneiderman makes a clear distinction between high-resolution presentation (ala Edward Tufte) and discovery, which he defines as "the dynamics of interaction." Noting that different patterns will be interesting to different people, he suggests that the capacity to quickly test out a viewpoint, to ask a large number of questions in a short amount of time?is an "enriching gift."
Shneiderman cites several different projects which utilize various methodologies ... Lunch with a Laureate: Jack Szostak - Jack Szostak started his first lab as a ?freshly minted assistant professor? working in DNA recombination and repair reactions. While researchers had known for years that the broken ends of DNA strands behaved differently from broken DNA in the middle of the strand, they did not know the details. Because cells do not like broken ends, ?they?ll do lots of things to repair that broken DNA.?
While attending a conference in New Hampshire in 1980, he met Elizabeth Blackburn who was working on an isolated piece of DNA that acted like a normal chromosomal end. They began collaborating on DNA that led to discovering the biochemistry of telomeres?those particular ends of DNA strands and predicting the existence of the enzyme, telomerase, which regulates them.
Through their work, medical applications have em... Annual Technology Day Report 2010 - Note: This video has some audio problems, which get resolved early on with some help from an audience member, presumed to be a Course VI alum.
MIT President Susan Hockfield delivers a general update on the Institute to MIT Alumni gathered in Kresge for the annual Technology Day event.
Focusing first on everyone?s most pressing concern, Hockfield provides an overview of the Institute?s finances, and reports on a campus-wide response to the economic downturn that has resulted in a leaner and stronger MIT. Going forward with a balanced budget, MIT is benefitting from The Idea Bank, a community-wide on-line discussion that produced hundreds of ideas on how to reduce expenses. Many of these changes required an examination of business practices aimed at more efficient, streamlined operations. One highly... Innovation in Energy Storage: What I Learned in 3.091 was All I Needed to Know - In a lecture that could have been titled, Better Education through Chemistry, Don Sadoway begins with solar energy, grid-level storage, and liquid metal batteries and moves into education innovation, sharing creative ways to teach chemistry.
Calling 3.091 a chemistry-centered class or Chemistry and the World Around Us, Sadoway uses examples from art, literature, music, and film to bring the topic alive. He weaves a complex chemistry tale with special features that include materials science jokes, insights into Salvador Dali, the story of human greed that took down the Titanic, and the use of primary sources in science.
He also shares some amazing student innovations around learning chemistry, including the periodic table of the chemical elements set to ?Do-Re-Mi?, and periodic tabl... Sex Battles in the Brain - The expression of certain genes depends on whether they were inherited from the mother or the father, a phenomenon known as imprinting. Catherine Dulac has discovered that a surprisingly large number of brain genes are imprinted, often in complex ways. Her findings have broad implications for understanding the inheritance of behavioral traits and disease susceptibility.
Diploid species such as mammals inherit two copies (alleles) of each gene, one from the mother and one from the father. For most genes, the maternal and paternal alleles are expressed at equal levels. But for imprinted genes, only one allele is expressed while the other is silenced.
Twenty years ago, David Haig proposed an evolutionary explanation for imprinting based on genetic conflict between the parents. For species su... Lunch with a Laureate: Eric Chivian - In 1978, in his last years of residency in psychiatry at Mass General Hospital, Eric Chivian decided to do something bold. Encouraged by Australian physician, Helen Caldicott, who spoke of the medical dangers of the nuclear fuel cycle and of nuclear power, in particular, he decided to restart an old medical organization?Physicians for Social Responsibility. Their opening public meeting was scheduled, coincidentally, on the same day of the partial-core meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. Within weeks, Physicians for Social Responsibility became a national organization with thousands of new members as a result.
While many older physicians within the organization were more concerned with nuclear war, others were focused on the use of nuclear power. Both were interested in diss... Humanistic Approaches to the Graphical Expression of Interpretation - The session begins with brief introductory remarks by moderator Kurt Fendt. He points out the need for new tools that will examine data in meaningful ways through aspects of interpretation and visualization. Dean Deborah Fitzgerald emphasizes the importance of support for digital humanities and visualization interpretation as supplemental to textual analysis, and the creation of new forms of scholarly and cultural communication; Peter Donaldson offers a concise welcome to participants.
It is in sharp contrast to a period of enlightenment and empirical science that a re-humanization of digital activities may now take place, says Johanna Drucker. Humanistic approaches are the motif against which she frames her assertion that "interpretation" introduces an epistemological shift?which she id... Applied Humanities: Transforming Humanities Education - In the first of four panels celebrating the 10th Anniversary of the Comparative Media Studies (CMS) program at MIT, panelists reflect on the wide range of projects and media studies offspring that have emerged from this innovative program.
Major CMS themes include the development of community, creation of a deeper understanding of collaboration, working across disciplines, participatory culture, and collective intelligence. Panelists discuss the MIT approach to applied humanities, and share insights on education, game design, public media and visual information. William Uricchio moderates.
Scot Osterweil brings his background as a theatre major to the effort of game design, citing the need to engage the user, not just create games that are based on reciting facts?just as an actor has t... MIT?s Entrepreneurial Development and Impact Over the Past 50 Years - Ed Roberts reviews the effects of entrepreneurship within MIT and the relation of MIT entrepreneurship to larger communities.
Much of the research under discussion comes from a 2006 study of MIT alumni conducted by Roberts and Charles Eesley of the Sloan School. The study polled MIT alumni about companies they had started or co-founded and which were still in business. 20% reported founding a total of 25,800 companies that met this standard. These companies had a total employment of 3.3 million and generated revenues of almost one trillion dollars. Put in other terms, living MIT alumni constitute the equivalent of the eleventh largest economy in the world. "MIT is the most productive institution anywhere in the world in creating new companies," Roberts says.
The study found many intriguing ... Shaped by Booms and Busts: How the Economy Impacts CEO Management Style - Antoinette Schoar analyses how general economic conditions affect the CEO career path.
More details about the lecture coming soon.
... Warning: Physics Envy May be Hazardous to Your Wealth - In this talk Andrew Lo addresses the problem of finding the right level of abstraction with which to think about economic phenomena. He compares economics to physics, with some surprising results.
For at least several decades economics theorists have assumed that the
highest level of abstraction is the best. Lo argues that this
assumption has stemmed from what he calls "physics envy": the enviable
ability to explain a huge range of phenomena with a small number of
rules or laws.
Admittedly physics envy has led to the development of many useful ideas,
including utility theory, game theory, and general equilibrium theory,
among others. These have been real successes; however Lo
takes up the argument recently made by some observers that the recent
fiscal crisis is evidence that economics is by the na... Capitalism 3.0: An Institutional Revolution In the Making - C. Otto Scharmer points to what he calls a "blindspot" in
contemporary leadership research: the organization and management of
attention. He argues that there are different kinds of awareness or
attentiveness, that different problems require different qualities of or
approaches to awareness. Leaders who understand this can adapt
the structure of their awareness to optimize their approaches to
specific problems.
Scharmer claims we are
passing though a period requiring a new approach to awareness,
especially on the part of society's leaders. In these times,
leaders the need to navigate multiple deeply interlinked crises (such as
climate change, health care, and fiscal management), all of which
include a radical transformation in the relation of business to
society (which Scharmer calls "Capitalism 3.0"... Jenkins? Farewell: Reflections on a Career at MIT - In conversation with William Uricchio, Henry Jenkins returns to reflect on his time at MIT and offers insights into MIT?s culture, his new life at USC, and the state of digital cultures, new media and collective intelligence.
Jenkins shares that complex feeling of loving and hating MIT, at the same time and often within the course of one day. Providing his own insights into MIT?s culture and the legacy of IHTFP, he looks back on a long career and the evolution of film and media studies into the Comparative Media Studies program we know today. He attributes his longevity at MIT to the inspiration provided by the students, and makes a strong case for the value of humanities education, while questions remain for some on how the humanities fit into an MIT education.
The reflection ends with Jenkins re... Denialism: Media in the Age of Disinformation - A few hundred years after the Enlightenment, western civilization is rushing back to the Dark Ages. The causes are debatable, but, argue these science journalists, the public increasingly rejects the findings of science, from climate change to evolution, and is turning away from rationality and reason in general.
?People are afraid of anything that will hammer away at their preconceived notions,? says Michael Specter. He points to the fanatic opposition in some quarters to genetically engineered foods, and the worship of organic products. Almost everything we eat is the result of genetic modification, he notes, and ?organics kill people, too.? It doesn?t make sense to think that returning to ?the old ways? will keep us healthy and supply the world with food. ?We?re hurting ourselves in lots of ways,? says ... Environmental Impacts of Aviation - Knowing more about the environmental impacts of aviation is increasingly essential, but according to Ian Waitz, it is also an area where uncertainties abound. One thing we know for sure is that the airplanes developed today will be flying for next 30 years, as the fleet dynamics are very stable, due to the extraordinary costs and lead-time to design and build. Meanwhile, an increasingly affluent population will travel more, and more of that travel will take place on today?s airplanes.
Waitz and his students have been developing state-of-the art modeling impacts, and advising the Federal Aviation Agency (FAA). He characterizes the environmental impacts of aviation into three broad categories. The most omnipotent impact, noise pollution, is associated with quality-of -life issues, health, and property los... Rusnano: Fostering Nanotechnology Innovation in Russia - In both lecture format and conversation with Sloan Senior Lecturer Noubar Afeyan, RUSNANO CEO Anatoly Chubais presents an ambitious plan to create Russia?s Nanotechnology Center?a $10 billion, entrepreneurial ecosystem that incorporates education, research and business incubation. Noting that a plan of this depth also requires the deep engagement with an academic institution Chubais discusses the launch of SKOLKOVO, the Moscow School of Management, where MIT Sloan has been involved in a major collaboration.
From MIT Sloan School of Management Newsroom
RUSNANO, part economic development entity, part venture capital firm, recently turned to MIT Sloan to devise a custom Executive Education program to help i... Lunch with a Laureate: Richard Schrock - Growing up in Indiana, exploring the local woods and pit where fossils were found, Richard Schrock early on became interested in the natural world. He was captivated by the way things worked. When he was eight, his older brother gave him a chemistry set and he knew that was what he wanted to do. ?Like many things, you slide into what you enjoy doing.?
Schrock explores his fascination with science and his own field of expertise?inorganic chemistry. While working at DuPont Central Research in the early 70s, where ?you?re supposed to make discoveries,? he began working with metal compounds from Group 6 in the Period Table that ultimately led to the catalytic reaction that won him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (2005).
He remembers while at DuPont that he had no idea where his research would lead, but does... Transportation, the Built Environment and Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Developing Cities - It seems that income and travel are inextricably linked. As communities gain wealth and prosperity, their travel footprint increases. While this relationship affords benefits to those in developed nations, it is not scalable. Global population is projected to increase by nearly 2 billion people by 2030. If this newly added population drove just 3,000 kilometers a year, they would emit more tonnes of C02 annually, more than all the countries of Latin America emit today. ?The world simply cannot afford to add another Latin America?, says Chris Zegras.
Zegras observes that fundamentally, people do not desire travel ?. they wish to have accessibility. Travel is a derived demand, prompted by our activities. If we could make better use of telecommunications, or, if our cities were more compact, perh... Bill Porter in Conversation with Howard Anderson - Some of the lessons Bill Porter picked up as a 13-year-old ranch hand in Colorado seem to have lasted a lifetime. When his boss told him to drive over a treacherous mountain pass into town for some chicken feed, Porter said he could not yet drive. He was told, ?Just do it.? And when he faced taking a team of horses out to pasture for the first time, he got the same advice. Porter says he learned from those experiences: ?There are risks involved, but so what? What?s the worst that could happen? You might have to get another job.?
This formative time helped shape a career that began with Navy service, then many years devising products for different industries. After a stint at Sloan, Porter decided he ?didn?t like his job.? He was eager to ?go commercial? with several promising new inventions, including an e... The Interaction Between Poverty, Growth and Democracy - Alejandro Toledo has remained a passionate advocate of reform since departing the presidency of Peru in 2006. In his home country, he embodied the possibility of transformation, having risen from poverty in an Andean village to top political power, where he initiated a process of economic and social change for Peru. Now he serves as a kind of roving ambassador on behalf of the most deprived populations in Latin America.
Toledo is advancing a particular initiative, the ?Social Agenda for Democracy in Latin America,? which asserts an inextricable link between effective, inclusive political institutions, and economic justice. ?If we?re not able to reduce high levels of poverty, inequality and social exclusion, then? poverty can conspire against democracy,? says Toledo. Natural resources are not a solution, but actual... Looking Ahead to the Future of NASA - From the MIT News Office:
NASA Administrator Charles F. Bolden Jr. defended President Barack Obama?s controversial plans for the U.S. space agency?s future and touted the president?s plan to invest billions of dollars in basic science research.
Some in Congress have criticized Obama?s proposal to cancel the Constellation program, which would have sent humans to the moon by 2020, saying such a move will effectively cede U.S. space leadership to other nations. But Bolden noted that the White House?s plan would also invest an additional $6 billion in NASA over the next five years, including a 60-percent increase in earth sciences research funding, as well as a 20-percent increase in planetary sciences research. Such an expansion could revitalize NASA?s ties with institutions like MIT, which has played an i... Lunch with a Laureate: Robert Merton - As an MIT Museum audience peppers him with queries ranging from the barter system to development, trade relations, and the role of intuition in economics, Nobel Prize-winner Robert Merton pushes back against any assumptions that he might be a ?renaissance man.? He carefully steers listeners to his areas of expertise -- financial engineering and innovation, and risk management.
Merton starts with the breakthrough work that earned him his laurels, and which has recently stirred up controversy: derivatives. There are ?no mysteries? to these financial instruments, insists Merton. They are neither complex nor threatening. Derivatives are ?nothing more than insurance,? coming into play when people exercise the right to buy or sell an asset or stock at a guaranteed price. Merton developed formulas for valuing su... Civics in Difficult Places - In a live demonstration of globe-straddling communication technologies like Skype, this forum connects to citizen journalists and activists around the world, some of whom frequently test the limits of governmental authority. Moderator Ethan Zuckerman wonders if these new digital forms are fundamentally liberating, providing users access to public spaces they might otherwise be denied. He pursues this line of inquiry in a series of internet conversations with correspondents covering some of the world?s most ravaged or oppressed regions.
Cameran Ashraf makes the case that video distributed by internet and cellphone helped build and sustain efforts by Iranian activists protesting 2009?s election results. The graphic images countered propaganda, and shook up rural parts of Iran and the rest of t... Copyright © 2010, Stop Identity Theft Now. All Rights Reserved. |