August / September 2007

Reading

Publisher Charles Scribner Jr. once said that "reading is the essential process by which…intellect is cultivated beyond the commonplace experiences of everyday life." Indeed, books have long served to interpret and illuminate the human condition. But reading materials have expanded to include irises and fingerprints, text messages, bar codes, and brain processes. This issue offers a look at the varied ways MIT community members and others seek to understand the world, whether examining a concrete bridge's deficiencies with radar, observing the body through improved x-ray technology, or curling up with a good book.

Bookish Sorts

A rocking chair made entirely with 98 old campus phone directories and designed by MIT staffer Stephanie Hartman sits in the CSAIL reading room.

Building with books
An Independent Activities Period course became an art exhibition for the Boston Public Library and MIT's Rotch Library. View artists' projects created with disused books, including a chair (above), bench, lamps, and umbrella stand.

Book smart
Matt Mankins SM '03, an independent used book store owner, looks to revitalize a lagging industry with a little ingenuity and some code.

Digital media projects from Foreign Languages and Literatures
Includes ReelWords, an interactive film subtitling program, and Gedenken und Gedächtnis, an interactive module for German students that creates a writing community.

Vanished Libraries
Claudio Antonini SM/NUE '82 has mapped out worldwide libraries, archives, and religious sites that disappeared or were victims of wars, fires, natural disasters, and more from 3000 BCE to the present.

Philosophical reading groups
Discussions ranging from probability and logic to gender and political philosophy for members of the MIT community and others.

MIT's Michael Hawley PhD '93 creates world's largest published book
Hawley made the Guinness World Records list with a 130+ pound book about Bhutan standing nearly as big as a Ping-Pong table.

MIT World: Author readings

Poet and Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney

Fiction writer Russell Banks

Prolific creative writer Margaret Atwood

MIT adjunct writing professor and four-time Nebula Award winner Joe Haldeman

MIT World: Why Newspapers Matter
David Thorburn, literature professor and director of the MIT Communications Forum, moderates a panel on the future of newspapers and cyber journalism.

OpenCourseWare

Readings in American History Since 1877
Covers a broad range of topics—political, economic, social, and cultural—and historical methods.

Major Media Texts
A comparative media studies course analyzing historically significant media "texts" including oral epics, plays, novels, films, opera, TV drama, and digital works.

MIT Blogs

Student voices
Check out Admissions Office bloggers representing undergraduate classes, updates from students working on international projects, and fieldwork diaries from engineering graduate students working in Ghana, Sri Lanka, and the Virgin Islands.

MIT's community blog portal
Search student, faculty, and staff blogs.

SIMPLICITY
Thoughts from Professor John Maeda SB/SM '89 on the Media Lab's research program focused on developing technologies for designs that are simpler to understand and easier to use.

MIT Sloan
Learn what's going on with Sloan students, faculty, programs, alumni, and events.

What Matters: Blogs and Their Effects on Society
Cultural analyses on blogs from two students and an alumna active in the blogging community.

Political power relocated by blogs, Internet
A Science, Technology, and Society visiting professor says the Web and mobile informational technology has reshaped the public space where political battles are waged.

Technology Review opinions
Read posts from the editors and others about emerging technologies, IT, and life sciences.

Tomorrow's Professor
A collaboration between MIT and Stanford creating a forum to discuss issues concerning higher education.

MIT PressLog
Thoughts from those at the press with links to author blogs.

Best Sellers

MIT Press all-time best sellers in order of lifetime unit sales. MIT alumni receive 20 percent off all MIT Press titles.

1. Experiencing Architecture, 2nd Edition (1964)
   By Steen Eiler Rasmussen



2. The Image of the City (1960)
   By Kevin Lynch '47



3. The Character of Physical Law (1967)
   By Richard Feynman '39



4. The Classical Language of Architecture (1966)
   By John Summerson



5. Learning from Las Vegas, Revised Edition (1977)
   By Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour



6. Primer of Visual Literacy (1973)
   By Donis A. Dondis



7. Matter and Consciousness, Revised Edition (1988)
   By Paul M. Churchland



8. Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architecture (1975)
   Edited by Ulrich Conrads



9. Introduction to Algorithms (1990)
   By Thomas H. Cormen SM '86, PhD '93, Charles E. Leiserson, and Ronald L. Rivest



10. Made in America (1989)
    By Michael L. Dertouzos PhD '64, Richard K. Lester PhD '80, Robert M. Solow HM, and The MIT Commission

Photos: ©iStockphoto.com clockwise from top left: Duncan Walker, Janne Ahvo, Valerie Loiseleux

Scientific Scrutiny

Handheld device 'sees' damage in concrete bridges, piers
MIT engineers have developed a radar device that could increase the safety of aging infrastructure by allowing easier on-site inspections.

MIT poet develops 'seeing machine'
The small machine projects images onto a blind person's retina and allows them to access the Internet, view the face of a friend, or use a visual language, mixing short words with graphics and symbols, to aid reading.

Security Measures

Detecting lies and identity
MIT researchers and others debate the merits of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the brain to detect lying, while one Technology Review editor considers the privacy implications of relinquishing iris scans and fingerprints for a registered-traveler program.

Tracking onboard contaminants
Biological and chemical agents can now be traced back to a single seat.

Literacy, text messaging, and social networks
While some experts explore the implications of text and instant messaging on young people's literacy, Twitter members use the company Web site or cell phones to transmit messages to their social networks and Twitter's public timeline.

Predicting rogue waves
Analyzing satellite data has allowed researchers to create a map showing where massive, sometimes deadly waves, are likely to appear.

Reading the body

Speed-reading the genome
The next major milestone toward personal-genome sequencing might be a new technique that draws DNA through nanopores.

Hydrogel particles pave way for new bedside diagnostics
Using tiny bar-coded, customizable particles, MIT researchers have created an inexpensive method to screen for millions of different biomolecules (DNA, proteins, etc.) in a single sample.

Computer model mimics neural processes in object recognition
MIT scientists used a busy street scene to show how computers could imitate the brain's visual information processing. Applications include surveillance, visual search engines, and robots with realistic vision.

OpenCourseWare: Reading the Blueprint of Life
This biology course examines transcription, stem cells, and differentiation to investigate such questions as how a stem cell knows when to become a specific cell type.

Reading the landscape
View student projects from the class Sensing Place: Photography as Inquiry.

A different kind of phone book
Based on a device used to teach speed-reading techniques, new software allows users (most often teenagers) to read novels on their cell phones by flashing one word or short phrase on the screen at a time.

Taking Readings

New MIT techniques weigh cells, display cell receptors
Researchers have found a way to measure the mass of single cells in fluid with high accuracy, a technique that could lead to inexpensive diagnostic devices and offer a unique glimpse into cell division. Other researchers have observed and measured the rate at which individual molecules join and separate from receptors.

Telescope to probe early universe, more
The Mileura Widefield Array, a novel telescope built in part by MIT and located in Australia, will commence operation in 2008 and aid the understanding of the early universe.

New x-ray imager uses info traditional machines ignore
MIT researchers are developing a new kind of x-ray imager that looks at how tissue refracts rays, not simply how it absorbs them, and hope to increase the resolution of mammography, enabling doctors to detect smaller tumors earlier.

Responsive Environments Group
View projects from these Media Lab researchers who explore how sensor networks augment and mediate human experience, interaction, and perception.

Copyright©2006 Massachusetts Institute of Technology