Free

For some Americans, the recent inauguration provided a chance to reflect on values considered paramount to the American tradition including, of course, freedom. This issue of Quick Take looks at what it means to be free—in a democratic sense but also for other facets of daily life. Free food (this is a university after all), freeware, free radicals, even free art lessons all get their time in the sun. Feel free to read on.

Free-for-All

It was free, so I took it
First East residents reportedly include some 37 MIT students, two furry fish, the occasional yeti, and two cartoon people (pictured above), straight from the synapses of artist Sam Brown's brain.

Say it with MIT style
Save the planet and brighten someone's day with a glimpse of MIT by sending an electronic postcard from the newly expanded gallery.

Alumni membership has its privileges
Exclusive alumni-to-alumni job postings, admission to the MIT Museum, email- and URL-forwarding, and more are available for free to alumni. Check out all the benefits.

Not cultured? No excuses
Gone are the days of dismissing cultural events on the basis of cost alone. Thanks to the MIT Council for the Arts, students can use their IDs to access free performances of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, the American Repertory Theater, and other programs.

Could you go car-free in Cambridge?
CSAIL students think so. They put together a proposal to develop an area of Cambridge called North Point into a car-free neighborhood. Read statistics, projections, and analysis.

Uniting a community through cuddles
Campus Preview Weekend 2008 was a little warmer and fuzzier thanks to one student's free cuddles. Watch the video.

Free Willy Wonka
This 2004 Mystery Hunt puzzle will have you thinking about movies.

Free will

OpenCourseWare: Metaphysics—Free Will
A linguistics and philosophy course that looks at free will through such lenses as the consequence argument, unavoidability, libertarianism, the concept of the person, moral responsibility, action, intention, and choice.

MIT Press: Neurophilosophy of Free Will
By Henrik Walter; translated by Cynthia Klohr
Applies the methodology of neurophilosophy to one of philosophy's central challenges. Neurophilosophical conclusions are based on and consistent with scientific knowledge about the brain and its functioning.

Take a freefall
The MIT Skydiving Club might be just the thing to add a little excitement to your life.

"Free" Science

Frequency liberation could lead to wireless revolution
A recent Federal Communications Commission ruling opened up megahertz frequency bands previously allocated to TV broadcasters to other device manufacturers. As a result, future wireless gadgets will be able to reach currently inaccessible parts of the country and work faster.

Repulsive force could eliminate nanofriction
Researchers have found the right combination of materials to create stictionless, friction-free interaction of nanoscale objects and foresee nanomechanical devices based on what they are calling quantum levitation.

Free Radicals

Carbon nanotubes monitor chemotherapy, detect toxins
MIT engineers have turned DNA-wrapped carbon nanotubes into sensors for living cells that can locate environmental toxins and free radicals that damage DNA as well as ensure chemotherapy drugs are effectively battling tumors.

OpenCourseWare: Synthesis of Polymers
A chemical engineering course that studies the synthesis of polymeric materials. Lecture topics include free radical chain polymerization.

Drop the supplements and optimize your diet
Vitamins A and C are antioxidants that protect cell membranes from damage caused by free radicals. Discover a range of the best foods for each vitamin including eggs and broccoli (vitamin A) and cranberry juice and strawberries (vitamin C).

Tiny nation to create no-carbon-footprint city
Persian Gulf emirate Abu Dhabi is building Masdar, a city designed to house 50,000 people with a total net energy use of zero—without sacrificing modern technology's amenities. An institute of technology modeled after and created in collaboration with MIT, and which is the inaugural founding public member of the MIT Energy Initiative, will sit in the center of the city, slated to be built over seven years.

British baby screened to be cancer-gene free
Doctors tested a pre-implantation, in vitro fertilized embryo for a genetic variation that raises a women's risk of developing breast cancer to about 80 percent. While the event caused a stir overseas, the practice is already happening under the radar in the U.S.

Designing text-free user interfaces for different cultures
The video "Text-Free User Interfaces for Illiterate and Semi-Illiterate Users" explores how different cultures understand images and icons. The presentation is part of a fall 2008 student project, called Mobile Diagnostics, for the Media Lab's NextLab design course in which students worked on creating a mobile web application allowing Zambian doctors to diagnose and recommend treatment for cervical cancer patients remotely via images.

OpenCourseWare: Infinite Random Matrix Theory
A math course that describes how the Stieltjes transform and free probability are used to characterize infinite random matrices.

Photo: ©iStockphoto.com/Alan Crosthwaite.

Democracy & Free Speech

Student site explores claims of YouTube copyright infringement
MIT Free Culture, a student group dedicated to freedom on the Internet and in the digital world, created YouTomb to monitor what kinds of videos on YouTube are removed and how fair use is limited by copyright holders.

MIT trio who exposed fare-card vulnerabilities help secure system
Three MIT students, who were legally banned from speaking at the August 2008 DefCon hacker conference about a security flaw in Boston's subway system payment cards, are partnering with transit officials to shore up the loophole.

MIT World videos

Our World Digitized: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly
Yochai Benkler, Harvard professor of entrepreneurial legal studies, and Cass Sunstein, University of Chicago law school professor, share their hopes and fears for the emergence of online democracy at the MIT Communications Forum.

How Democracy Resolves Conflict in Difficult Games
Using game theory and with some help from the Bible, NYU Professor of Politics Steven Brams '62 argues that voting can resolve certain conflicts.

Thinking out of the box for Obama
Twenty-three scholars affiliated with MIT's Center for International Studies offered fresh ideas for the new president's consideration. The succinct essays, collected in "Advice to President Obama," (PDF) cover issues ranging from security strategy to the financial crisis to human rights and suggest strategies such as appointing a special envoy to Iran and frustrating terrorists by disrupting slowly forming networks of disaffected youth.

MIT Press: Freedom—Reassessments and Rephrasings
Edited by Jose V. Ciprut
New interdisciplinary perspectives on the theory and practice of freedom with field-specific studies.

Scholars weigh in on making every vote count
Prior to the presidential election, a lively conference at MIT, "To Keep or Not to Keep the Electoral College," united a group of scholars to debate the merits of the Electoral College and offer alternate voting strategies. View video of the conference. Charles Stewart III, MIT political science professor and head of the Department of Political Science, examined issues of voting security.

Campaign affected by political humor, deception
In his blog post, "Photoshop for Democracy Revisited: The Sarah Palin File," Henry Jenkins dissects altered images of the republican vice presidential candidate that circulated the Internet and shows how they describe and affect public perceptions of politicians and politics.

Launching a wiki government
Technology Review editors look at two sites that encouraged visitors to propose ideas for President Obama, including The White House 2, where users either endorse or oppose various priorities and see where Obama stands on certain issues.

Art

Ever try a mind map to visually organize your ideas or to brainstorm? Click to enlarge a map of this issue of Quick Take, created with FreeMind.

Students access museums for free
The Council for the Arts at MIT sponsors student memberships to a number of nearby art museums. Students receive free access to the Harvard museums, Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, and Boston University's Photographic Resource Center.

Street art touches night owls
From dusk until 2:00 a.m., pieces of contemporary, 3-D holographic artwork are projected through the windows of the MIT Museum onto the sidewalk outside. This is one breathtaking exhibit that is usually crowd-free.

Draw a freehand anime head
One user of MIT's Scratch software posted a guide for making freehand drawings of anime heads.

Supersize woman stars in graphic novel
MIT Libraries hosts the Virtual Browsery (Beta), which spotlights selected titles from the Humanities Library—including Fat Free: Amazing All-True Adventures of Supersize Woman!

OpenCourseWare free art instruction

Art of Color
Introduces students to a range of topics, including historical uses of color in the arts and color psychology.

Modern Art and Mass Culture
An architecture course that narrows in on modernism and postmodernism by highlighting the way artists use tension between fine art and mass culture to mobilize a critique of both.

Students borrow high art
Students can put more than the Periodic Table of Mixology on their walls, thanks to the MIT Student Loan Art Program, which lets students borrow and display original works of art from the famed List Visual Arts Center.

Food & Health

Free-range cows need free-range fences
A new way of corralling cattle, using satellite tracking and warning signals rather than fences, is being tested in New Mexico thanks to MIT CSAIL Professor Daniela Rus.

Love the French
Tech Staff Columnist S. Campbell Proehl '09 explains the folly of the freedom-fry mentality.

You can't stop playing Free Rice
MIT students wonder if the addictive power of Free Rice could be harnessed for experiments in controlled conditions.

Feel free to be gluten-free
A student MIT admissions blogger assuages concerns for campus diners with gluten-free requirements and other dietary restrictions.

Food scavenging gets competitive
In spring 2006, students used a wiki to record free-food triumphs during a campus contest.

Join MIT faculty for dinner
Dinner@Six is a monthly free dinner between students and MIT faculty and administrators.

2009 Fitness Challenge is on!
Slink through MIT's tunnel system, sample fitness classes, and bend into new yoga poses—all free to participants of the 12-week getfit@mit exercise program.

Don't mess with Kokikai students
View video of MIT students practicing freestyle kokikai self-defense techniques.

Twirl on your head
Study these photos from a lesson on freestyle dancing at MIT, then try twirling on your head. Be careful, and consider keeping a medical professional nearby.