A prisoner in Georgia, USA (© Owen Franken).
Curious about Owen Franken? View more of his work via the Franken Photo of the Week category, learn more in this profile, read a What Matters opinion column he wrote called “Life in Brownian Motion,” or visit his website.
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Slice asked MITers for reading recommendations. What did they have to say? Here are some of their suggestions followed by a small selection of new spring titles published by MIT Press.
What will you be reading this summer? Finished any good books you think alumni would enjoy? Share in the comments.
Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier by Neil DeGrasse Tyson
Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier
By Neil DeGrasse Tyson
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
By Siddhartha Mukherjee
(Features Professor Robert Weinberg ’64, PhD ’69, also of 7.012 fame.)
The Technologists
By Matthew Pearl
Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West
By Tom Holland
The Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy
By Daniel Yergin & Joseph Stanislaw
Chaos Walking trilogy
By Patrick Ness
(In the category of juvenile fiction that’s not just for juveniles.)
Once Upon a Car by Bill Vlasic
Once Upon a Car: The Fall and Resurrection of America’s Big Three Auto Makers—GM, Ford, and Chrysler
By Bill Vlasic
Wool
By Hugh Howey
Any P.G. Wodehouse “Jeeves” story
(A couple titles are available free for Amazon Kindle.)
Alumni! Did you know you receive a 20% discount on any MIT Press title?
ReThinking a Lot: The Design and Culture of Parking by Eran Ben-Joseph
ReThinking a Lot: The Design and Culture of Parking
Eran Ben-Joseph
MIT Professor of Landscape Architecture and Planning Eran Ben-Joseph shares a different vision for parking’s future.
Beyond Red and Blue: How Twelve Political Philosophies Shape American Debates
Peter S. Wenz
Wenz maps out twelve political philosophies–ranging from theocracy and free-market conservatism to feminism and cosmopolitanism–on which Americans draw when taking political positions.
The Future Was Here: The Commodore Amiga
Jimmy Maher
Maher argues that the Commodore Amiga 1000′s capacity to store and display color photographs, manipulate video (giving amateurs access to professional tools), and use recordings of real-world sound were the seeds of the digital media future.
Engineering Play: A Cultural History of Children's Software by Mizuko Ito
Engineering Play: A Cultural History of Children’s Software
Mizuko Ito
The children’s software boom (and the bust that followed), says Ito, can be seen as a microcosm of the negotiations surrounding new technology, children, and education. The story she tells is both a testimonial to the transformative power of innovation and a cautionary tale about its limitations.
Effective Cycling, Seventh Edition
John Forester
An essential handbook for cyclists from beginner to expert, whether daily commuters or weekend pleasure trippers. Offers cyclists the info they need for riding a bicycle under all conditions: on congested city streets or winding mountain roads, day or night, rain or shine and provides the nuts-and-bolts details of how to choose a bicycle, maintain it, and use it in the most efficient manner.
Thanks to Catherine Gehrig de Chavez ’85, Laura Martini ’08, Michelle McKiernan ’89, Bruce Robert Mendelsohn, Chris Stow ’00, and Georgina Maldonado Yergin ’91.
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Sure, your brass rat is good to wear to job interviews and can help spot a fellow MITer across a crowded cocktail party, but did you know it also comes in handy for celestial events? New Mexico resident David Hamby ’99 projected the annular solar eclipse of May 20, 2012, onto his ring using a pinhole camera.
Nice work, David!
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Want to get ready for MIT’s Commencement speaker Sal Khan ’98, MNG ’99, the founder of the viral hit Khan Academy videos? Or just want to explore learning materials for a young student?
You can check out a new series of education videos aiming at students from kindergarten through high school made by MIT students titled Making Video to Make a Difference.
Here are a few highlights among the first videos:
For grades 5-7, Forces takes a lighthearted look at concepts such as lift and thrust and explains why air density matters. ~ 8 mins.
The Colorful Chemistry of Acids and Bases
Colorful chemistry with household products.
For grades one-five, Colorful Chemistry starts with a chemistry magic show, where the student pours a clear liquid into a series of apparently empty beakers, creating a different bright color (red through violet) in each one. Later, the student shows you how to extract an indicator liquid by cooking cabbage and then use to test whether a common household items is a base or an acid. ~11 mins.
You can browse by grade or category and new videos are coming soon.
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What is it like to share a meal with Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? Jim Walsh PhD ’00 has dined with Ahmadinejad on five occasions and discussed topics like human rights, nuclear weapons, and the unrest in the Middle East.
Walsh is one of a small number of Americans who has traveled to North Korea and Iran for talks with officials about nuclear issues. A research associate in the MIT Security Studies Program, he is an international security expert who has testified before the US Senate on terrorism and Iran’s nuclear program.
Walsh will offer his thoughts on international security, nuclear weapons, and terrorism, and take questions from the worldwide MIT community via video chat on Monday, June 4, 2012, from noon-12:30 p.m. ET.
Register for this free event—My Five Dinners with Ahmadinejad: Discussions on Iran, North Korea, and the Nuclear Age—to receive the link for live viewing. After the event, come back to the Slice of MIT blog and continue the conversation in the comments.
About Jim Walsh PhD ’00
Walsh was previously Executive Director of the Managing the Atom project at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and a visiting scholar at the Center for Global Security Research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He received his PhD in political science from MIT in 2000.
In 2008, British newspaper The Independent selected his thoughts on Iran’s nuclear activities as one the year’s 10 best ideas. Walsh’s analysis has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, NPR, and other national and international media outlets and he served as editor for the book series, Terrorism: Documents of International & Local Control.
Related:
Walsh discusses dining with Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
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As innovations in software and technology make the world more complex, one MIT professor is focusing on the basics—safety.
STAMP is a holistic approach to engineering safety.
Nancy Leveson, professor of aeronautics and astronautics and engineering systems at MIT, says that this increasing complexity makes systems more vulnerable to accidents. In addition, traditional engineering safety practices—such as checking individual components—won’t guarantee the safety of a complex system. All the parts must work together.
So Leveson and her students have developed a new, holistic approach to safety engineering. Their approach, dubbed STAMP for System-Theoretic Accident Model and Processes, addresses the impacts of human, social, economic, and governmental factors as well as the technical components.
The first applications were for aviation and transportation systems but it is now being used to address issues in nuclear power plants, occupational health, and medicine.
The system is holistic, according to her website, because of its comprehensive nature:
“Our techniques are based on a new system-theoretic model of accidents (STAMP) that replaces the traditional chain-of-events model underlying most current accident investigation, prevention, and assessment procedures. The model includes software, organizations, management, human decision-making, and migration of systems over time to states of heightened risk.”
The approach is gaining attention. The Federal Aviation Authority adopted the formal requirements specification for a real collision-avoidance system required on all commercial aircraft in U.S. airspace that she and her students developed. More than 250 safety engineering professionals from around the world came to campus for a three-day April workshop to learn about STAMP. The event also coincided with the publication of Leveson’s new book on the topic, titled Engineering a Safer World: Systems Thinking Applied to Safety.
Learn more about her work:
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Black and white demonstrators hold hands, Paris, 1995 (© Owen Franken/CORBIS).
Curious about Owen Franken? View more of his work via the Franken Photo of the Week category, learn more in this profile, read a What Matters opinion column he wrote called “Life in Brownian Motion,” or visit his website.
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The wildly popular TED talks are spawning an appetite for presentations by MIT students. Thus TIMtalks—for “Think. Inspire. Motivate.”—was recently born as a student club.
A call went out for students who have invented, implemented, succeeded, or failed at a wide range of ventures or ideas to tell their stories. Students teed up and launched TIMtalks at a May 16 event introduced by MIT Chancellor Eric Grimson PhD ’80. Watch the talks (about 15 minutes)—or try these samples:
Kanjun Qiu '12
Kanjun Qiu ’12 talked about Expanding the Culture of Computing. According to Qiu, in 1985 some 37 percent of undergraduate computer science degrees were awarded to women. By 2010, when the computation world had vastly expanded, the percentage had actually dropped—to 11 percent.
Why did that happened? “Not because women lost interest but because women lost confidence,” she says.
Qiu, who has begun graduate work in the Media Lab, is involved in a new field that is attracting female students—computational textiles, which combines electronics into fabric and paper using conductive thread. Basically, she sews computers together.
“In the MIT Media Lab, I teach electronics and I don’t force people into traditional computer science modes,” she says. “I believe we need to provide new avenues and entry points into computer science. If you change the idea of what electronics should look like, it changes the people who are willing to get involved.”
Omar Abudayyeh '12
Omar Abudayyeh ’12 talked about Drugging the Undruggable: The Road Not Taken. His focused on his efforts to combat disease by tackling a stubborn problem: only 2 percent of the proteins involved in major diseases can be targeted with current techniques.
“Most major diseases do not have definition cures,” Abudayyeh says. “Spending on drugs is increasing by billions every year, but the number of drugs approved is dropping every year. The trend is only going to get worse.”
He began knocking on doors to get access to labs—even before his first freshman class—and he got lots of nos in response. But he only needed one yes, and he got that. He has subsequently developed a nanoparticle-based vaccine that can use the hosts’ immune system to target tumors and he is now working on a nanoparticle-based urine test for all major diseases. His next challenge, as he begins Harvard Medical School next fall: making a better protein-sequencing technology to increase the number of proteins that can be targeted in new treatments.
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The secret to any great sandwich is its condiments. But what’s the secret to actually pouring those condiments on the sandwich, without smacking the side of the bottle or shaking it up and down?
Enter LiquiGlide, an MIT-developed lubricant that, when applied to the inside of bottles, makes pouring viscous liquids like ketchup, mayonnaise, and honey as simple as eating them and leaves the emptied bottle looking squeaky clean.
The video below illustrates the difference, contrasting the traditional pound-and-shake technique with the easy pour of a frictionless, LiquiGlide-coated bottle.
Selected as a wild card finalist for the 2012 MIT $100K Business Plan Contest, LiquiGlide finished second overall–out of a record 215 teams–and won the competition’s $2,000 Audience Choice Award, as voted by audience members via text messages.
The coating can be applied to glass and various types of plastic. Researchers behind the product are mum on the ingredients, but confirm that LiquiGlide was created using only non-toxic, FDA approved materials.
While the ketchup bottle conundrum seems more like a minor headache than a serious problem, the effects of an empty bottle could have far-reaching effects on the environment and the $33 billion food condiment industry.
LiquiGlide researcher Dave Smith told Fast Company:
“It’s funny. Everyone is always like, ‘Why bottles? What’s the big deal?’ But then you tell them the market for bottles–just the sauce alone is a $17 billion market. If all those bottles had our coating, we estimate that we could save about one million tons of food from being thrown out every year.”
Developed in MIT’s Varanasi Research Group, The team includes doctoral students Smith, Christopher Love ’09, and Adam Paxson ’09; graduate student Brian Solomon; postdoctoral associate Rajeev Dhiman; and Associate Professor Kripa Varanasi SM ’02, PhD ’04.
Described as “kind of a structured liquid…rigid like a solid, but lubricated like a liquid,” LiquiGlide has potential uses beyond food packaging. According to Smith, it was originally developed as a coating to stop oil and gas line clogs, and could potentially stop ice forming on various surfaces.
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Sixty-three years ago, when the all-male a cappella group the Logarhythms formed, they took their influence from barbershop tunes. As the Logs’ website notes, they’ve expanded over the years to include gospel, doo-wop, and modern hits, the latter beginning in the late 1990s. Take a look at a song performed during their spring 2012 concert, a mashup of Jay Sean’s “2012″ and Criss Brown’s “Yeah 3X.”
Peruse old videos on TechTV or on the Logs’ YouTube channel. Like what you hear? Buy albums or even book the logs.
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Provost L. Rafael Reif will assume his new role on July 2, 2012. Learn about him in the News Office article and watch an extensive interview as part of the MIT150 Infinite History collection.