Food for sale in Marrakech, Morocco (© 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 Web site.
{ 1 comment }
Interested in the newest research and ideas developed by faculty and grad students at MIT Sloan School of Management and contributors to the MIT Sloan Management Review? Look no further.
Sloan has created the Innovative Thinking Web page that lines up the newest work in these areas—Best Practices, Academic Research, and Books.
Enjoy!
{ 0 comments }
Computer modeling has scientists revising their theories about this very active volcano.
For decades, scientists have theorized that bubbles the size of swimming pools have been rising through the magma of Italy’s Stromboli Volcano, causing it to erupt every five to 20 minutes for thousands of years. New research from geophysics Ph.D. candidate Jenny Suckale of the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences suggests that the big bubble theory goes against basic laws of fluid dynamics.
Volcanologists figured that as magma oozes toward Stromboli’s surface, pressure drops, and small bubbles merge into a huge one, which explodes at the top of the volcano’s neck. But Suckale reasoned that magma does not have enough surface tension or viscosity to maintain such big bubbles. So with MIT colleagues, she developed a computer model of the volcano’s gas- and magma-filled innards. When she changed the scale parameters, she found that a massive gas bubble wouldn’t last longer than a second in Stromboli’s belly.
Instead, Stromboli is more likely stoppered by a cork-like plug of crystals and gas bubbles. The accumulating pressure of more tiny bubbles forces the plug to fracture, shooting ejecta—gas, rocks, and liquid—out of the volcano.
Experts say Suckale’s research is a small step toward modeling a complex system. We’re nowhere near able to make accurate predictions of natural disasters, like the giant ash plume from Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull, which wreaked havoc on European airspace this spring after laying low for over 190 years. Still, Suckale says, future modeling might help mitigate such disasters. “It would be a big step forward if we could compute an average particle size, ejecta height and speed, and duration of the eruption, to inform decisions about flight traffic, even if we cannot predict the actual event itself,” she says. For now, she says, “The most fun was really to brainstorm about what had been missed in the previous model and how we can come up with a more convincing framework.”
Read the full story.
{ 0 comments }
Student Charles Guan's latest creation, Fankart! is a propeller-powered shopping cart. Photo: www.etotheipiplusone.net
Remember LOLrioKART? Around this time last year, student Charles Guan ’11 sparked a brief Internet sensation when he created a test platform for electric vehicle controller development using a shopping cart and a set of large nickel cadmium batteries (and some other things like a motor, controller, and four-channel surround sound music system). Video of his extreme grocery carting went viral and got featured in Gizmodo, Engadget, Popular Science, among other publications.
Well, not surprisingly, Guan is back–and this time he’s outfitted a standard grocery cart with a ducted fan thruster for the purpose of (in his words) having “the biggest EDF array on campus.” After all, he goes on to say, “I can’t work without a false sense of competition and engineering machismo.”
Guan calls his creation Fankart!, and you can read all about it on his website (including a detailed account of his build process).Video of LOLrioKART and Fankart! posted below.
{ 4 comments }
Guest blogger: Bob Ferrara ’67, senior director for strategic planning, communications, and alumni relations, Division of Student Life
L to R: Ray Magliozzi '72, Ron Faccenda '68, Stan Zdonik '70, and George Swift '69 pose at the NRSA reunion.
Perhaps the most exceptional of all the living group receptions hosted at Tech Reunions 2010 was the event organized by alumni of an organization that has not existed for the last 25 years. Alumni from the mid-80s and earlier may remember the Non-Resident Student Association, which was headquartered in a row house on Memorial Drive next to McCormick Hall. NRSA was the commuters’ “fraternity,” a thriving bunch known not only for their great intramural hockey teams but also for their excellent parties. Alumni from the 1950s and before knew this group as the 5:15 Club, from the departure time of an important train from North Station. When the group was first organized back in the early 1930s, almost a third of MIT students commuted from home.
Thanks to the determined efforts of past NRSA presidents Allen Clark ’63, SM ’65, PhD ’69; Steve Corman ’58, SM ’61; Dave Williams ’61; and others, a hugely successful reunion was organized this June. Some 40 NRSA alums (from as far away as Italy) attended, including the renowned Magliozzi brothers, Tom ’58 and Ray ’72, of “Car Talk” fame. Both grew up near MIT in East Cambridge.
Building on their successful reunion, the 5:15/NRSA alumni have created a new Web site, written the first history of the organization, and even compiled a near complete list of all past presidents of the group. Allen, his wife, Claudia, Steve, and Dave did a lot of homework to find contact information, but if for some reason you or a friend were missed, please contact the group. Future reunions are definitely in the works.
For history buffs, here’s a look at the group’s lifespan:
1933–1959: The 5:15 Club, an organization serving student commuters, is founded.
1956–1959: A second group, the Commuter Association, is formed with offices on the second floor of Walker Memorial.
1959–1966: The two groups combine to form the Non-Resident Student Association (NRSA). They are recognized as an Independent Living Group with offices at 318 Memorial Drive.
1966–1986: The group moves to 311 Memorial Drive to make way for McCormick Hall expansion and is then disbanded due to low number of commuters.
{ 0 comments }
Launching drone aircraft thousands of miles from the U.S. is a high-tech but sometimes controversial combat tool. Especially when the pilotless craft go beyond observation and launch missiles that kill local people in error. Now drones are a lot closer to home. In June, the federal government okayed using them over the U.S.-Mexican border for surveillance.
The challenges of flying these planes across America are now front-burner issues. The FAA recently opened a new lab to explore how air traffic control systems can control them for civilian and law-enforcement purposes.
In a recent News Office interview, Nicholas Roy, director of the Robust Robotics Group, discussed the logistical hurdles of regulating drone aircraft for non-military use.
Q. What are the advantages and disadvantages of using unmanned planes for non-military purposes?
Q. Why is it so tricky to regulate UAVs for non-military use? What are the technological challenges involved, and how does the FAA plan to address them?
Q. The FAA is expected to move from a radar-based traffic control system to a GPS-based one within the next decade. How exactly will this make it easier to track UAVs and prevent collisions?
{ 1 comment }
Dolphins swimming in the Mediterranean off of Monte Carlo (© Owen Franken for 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 Web site.
{ 0 comments }
No one will be surprised that looks influence election outcomes, but new research from MIT political scientists shows that people around the world have similar ideas about what a good politician looks like.
“Ever since Aristotle, people have written about the concern that charismatic leaders who speak well and look good can sway votes even if they do not share the people’s views,” acknowledges Gabriel Lenz, an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at MIT and a co-author of the study.
An MIT News Office article describes how Lenz and his colleagues tested that assumption: They showed voters in the United States and India pairs of candidate photos from real election matchups in Brazil and Mexico. When asked which candidate would make a better elected official, the participants in the study, regardless of where they lived, largely selected the same candidates.
Moreover, their choices corresponded closely to the outcomes of those Brazilian and Mexican races, meaning the public attribution of good looks to a candidate is a leading indicator of a campaign’s result.
“We were a little shocked that people in the United States and India so easily predicted the outcomes of elections in Mexico and Brazil based only on brief exposure to the candidates’ faces,” says Lenz. “These are all different cultures, with different political traditions and different histories.”
For more depth on image and electability in new democracies, read their 44-page paper.
{ 1 comment }
In case you haven’t heard, this year’s graduate theses from the Comparative Media Studies are now online at http://cms.mit.edu/research/theses.php. Here’s a taste of what you’ll find:
Interpreting abstract games—Jason Scott Begy SM ’10 proposes that understanding the various formal elements of games (such as the descending blocks in Tetris) as metaphors can serve us in two ways: it can make it easier for us to critically interpret the games and it can help designers make them more expressive.
Civic production in live-streaming mobile video—Audubon McKeown Dougherty SM ’10 analyzes overall production trends of mobile videos and investigates the motives and practices behind the production of civic content specifically.
Inclusive game play—Hillary Kolos SM ’10 argues that despite the recent increase in digital gaming players and platforms, digital gaming is not as inclusive as it could be. Kolos’ research includes an eight-month study focused on a group of MIT undergrad gamers.
Designing game ethics—Michelle Moon Lee SM ’10 explored ways to engage players in ethical decision making by designing a pervasive game adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo. Watch a video of Lee’s thesis presentation:
{ 1 comment }
Optical mice made mouse pads pretty much pointless. Now, infrared technology could make the computer mouse obsolete too. Behold the invisible mouse, aka Mouseless, an invention created by Pranav Mistry SM ’08, a PhD candidate in the MIT Media Lab.
Just move your hand as if a mouse were underneath and mimic gestures you’d normally use to interact with your computer: left and right click, drag, and scroll, and an infrared laser and camera embedded into the computer detect and translate your motions onto the screen.
The working prototype cost about $20 to build and Mistry hopes to improve the algorithms to include more commands, such as zooming, and even perhaps novel gestures.
{ 3 comments }
