When undergraduates moved into brand-new Baker House in 1949, Dick Holmgren ’50 remembers that changes were afoot.
Baker House residents skirt the necktie requirements.
“It was much more elegant than the dorm we were used to,” Holmgren said. “In keeping with the much classier quarters, someone decided that we students should also clean up our act. So the edict went out that all student should wear coats and ties in the dining room. To us students, of course, this was an outrage. Our rights were being trampled on, to say nothing of our pocketbooks, with all the additional washing, drying, and pressing.”
In typical MIT fashion, Holmgren and his buddies decided to design their own ties “so we could claim that we WERE following the rule. Everyone got crayons or little bottles of paint, and created neckties for each other,” as shown in the photo he provided.
“As I recall, the whole episode ran out of steam soon. I think that the dining room managers gave up on the issue, and soon people looked almost as grubby as in the beginning, although maybe a little better than in the very beginning.”
Holmgren sits first on the left in the bottom row. He identifies Max Schubert ’50 and George Spencer ’51 second and third left. Joe McCluskey ’50 and Jake Bartas ’50, SM ’52 stand first and second left in the back row.
Hackers installed an illuminated Doctor Who-style police call box (also called the TARDIS—for Time And Relative Dimension(s) In Space) on the roof of Building 7 overlooking 77 Mass. Ave. for the start of Rush and Freshman Orientation. The banner reads
A Seaswarm robot at work; thousands working together could clean up an oil spill.
Kevin Costner is not the only person who’s been working on how to remediate disasters like this summer’s BP oil spill. MIT researchers introduced a prototype of their solution on August 28 at the Venice Biennale, which focuses this year on nanotechnologies. It’s called Seaswarm.
Their solution, a fleet of boxy vehicles with attached conveyor belts, relies on a new nanomaterial that can absorb oil in water—without the water—and then release the oil when heated. Their idea is that thousands of these autonomous, self-directed robots would roll along the water’s surface and quickly, effectively, and inexpensively collected spilled oil. They estimate 5,000 units operating continuously would be able to clean up an oil spill the size of the BP accident in one month.
And it’s energy efficient. A Seaswarm robot, which measures 16’ x 7’ feet, uses two square meters of solar panels for self-propulsion. With just 100 watts, the equivalent of one household light bulb, it could clean continuously for weeks. Watch a video of the oil suckers at work.
Whew! I have to admit, I was a little apprehensive when I ran the data. Back in December, on the front page of the 6.034 final, we asked each student to estimate what fraction of the lectures he or she attended. About 170 of about 200 of the students gave us their guesses.
Today, I made a scattergram of average quiz grades, on a five point scale, against those guesses.
It wasn’t very scientific, of course, because the students were just guessing and because we have a highly nonstandard and nonlinear way of computing grades.
Nevertheless, I was glad to see there was a positive correlation between grades and the percentage of lectures attended. I had braced myself against the possibility that the regression line would be flat or downward sloping.
Of course, I quickly reminded myself not to confuse correlation with cause. A likely explanation is that those who take grades more seriously are more engaged in general, and that more engaged means spending more time studying as well as dragging oneself out of bed for a 10 am lecture.
But then of course, there is another of course under that of course. I would not have been all that crushed if the line had a gentler slope. All that grades measure is problem-solving skill in an exam context. They don’t measure, for example, whether a powerful idea gets conveyed.
As I see it, just as the proverbial lost horseshoe nail lost a kingdom on the negative side, one powerful idea from one lecture in one subject may be the idea that makes a lot of teaching and learning effort worthwhile. So when someone quotes back to me a powerful idea I mentioned in class a couple of decades ago, it pleases me more than any regression line could.
And then there is the matter of creativity. One of my best graduate students ever got a C in the subject.
Dr. Meryl Nass ’75 is a small-town doctor concerned with issues of national importance. She’s an internist in Bar Harbor, Maine. At her clinic for complex disorders like chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, and Gulf War Syndrome, she sees patients from all over the state plus some who come up from Massachusetts. But her voice is heard as far away as Washington.
Nass has testified before U.S. Congressional committees twice on Gulf War Syndrome and once on the potential dangers of the anthrax vaccine given to all soldiers who ship out; she’s prepared written testimonies for the record about the anthrax vaccine and the prevention of and response to bioterrorism. In 2008 Nass served as a consultant to the federal director of national intelligence on preventing domestic bioterrorism. She is now the chair of the Commission to Protect the Lives and Health of the Maine National Guard.
Nass, who majored in biology, traces her chutzpah at least as far back as her MIT days. Outside the classroom, she protested the Vietnam War. In the lab, she says, “We weren’t pushed into any mold. We were encouraged to think and to question.”
That’s exactly what she did when, in 1989, she was asked by her chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility to look into some anthrax research going on at UMass Amherst. What she found piqued her interest in germ warfare. She went to the library at Harvard and read up on outbreaks from the 1800s. She thus became an expert in anthrax—and a national PSR spokesperson on biological warfare—just as the first Gulf War broke out, and was later in a unique position to weigh in on the 2001 mailing of anthrax-contaminated letters.
Nass wrote journal articles suggesting that we might not want to give the anthrax vaccine to millions of soldiers without a little more data on how safe it is. In 1995, a Congressional committee published a report that linked higher rates of Gulf War syndrome with the anthrax vaccine. “The Army didn’t pay attention,” she says, and vaccines remain mandatory. She has testified in the courts martial of soldiers and sailors who’d refused the vaccine. She still blogs about anthrax vaccine—and any other public health concerns that cross her mind–almost daily. “Some members of Congress have called for further investigation, but nothing’s happening,” she says.
More recently Nass, who says she is in no way anti-vaccine, has spoken out about the safety of the swine flu vaccine. She was gratified when the U.S. government bought shots without squalene, an additive she considers risky. Her biggest concern at the moment, however, is the epidemic of post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic injuries in soldiers coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan. “They’re not necessarily getting any better,” Nass says. “The Army has good programs, but they’re not reaching enough people.”
One of Nass’s two sons is also an alum; Jake Abernethy ’02 is a PhD candidate at Berkeley. She notes that her boys are related to Richard Cockburn Maclaurin—MIT’s president from 1909 to 1920—through their dad.
The TR35—Technology Review’s annual list of the world’s top innovators under the age of 35—has just been announced. So, did anyone from MIT make the list? Why yes, yes they did. In fact, 40% of the list is made up of MITers—all are alumni with the exception of one, a fellow at the Whitehead Institute.
Here’s a rundown of young innovators changing the world in the fields of medicine, computing, communications, electronics, nanotechnology, and more.
Timothy Lu ’03, MNG ’03, PhD ’08 was named to the 2010 TR35 list for his work engineering viruses to destroy biofilms.
Danah Boyd SM ’02: Shaping the rules for social networks
David Bradwell MNG ’06: Cheap, reliable batteries to store renewable energy
Wesley Chan ’00, MNG ’01: Building new technology businesses
Nick Feamster’00, MNG ’01, PhD ’06: Watching the suspicious behavior of spam
Rikin Gandhi SM ’05: Educating farmers through locally produced video
Jacob Hanna (Whitehead Institute fellow): Reprogramming cells to cure diseases
Richard Tibbetts ’03, MNG ’03: Reacting to large amounts of data in real time
The elite list was selected from more than 300 nominees by a panel of expert judges and the editorial staff of Technology Review. The winners will be featured in the September/October issue of the magazine and at the EmTech@MIT 2010 Conference, held Sept. 21–23, where they will present—in 90 seconds or less—the inspiring work that landed them the honor.
Imagine for a moment that instead of being alumni, as many Slice readers are, you went back in time and became prefrosh again. (!) Would you make the same housing choices that you did the first time around?
To get you thinking, we pulled together a handful of fairly recent i3 videos (Interactive Introduction to the Institute). Take a look, and let us know what you think. Does it seem that things have changed a lot since you were a freshman? Would you ever return to dormitory living? Where would you live?
For the past four years, Nitin Sawhney SM ’98, PhD ’03 has traveled to a part of the world most people wouldn’t think of when considering a summer break: Gaza. For Sawhney, a researcher and lecturer in the Program in Art, Culture, and Technology, it’s more rewarding than any trip to the beach. He runs a digital media and storytelling program that engages young Palestinians in refugee camps in producing short films and photography about their everyday lives and aspirations. It’s called Voices Beyond Walls, and this year it was supported in part by the Center for Future Civic Media. Here’s a slideshow from this summer’s project, “Re-imagining Gaza.”
Sawhney was born in India and grew up in Iran and Bahrain. He did his undergraduate work at Georgia Tech. In 2000, Sawhney was pursuing his Ph.D. at the MIT Media Lab when intense violence broke out in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Sawhney was increasingly drawn to the conflict as he tried to come to terms with the needless loss of life and suffering in the region. He found himself regularly attending and organizing many events on campus to make students better informed about the conflict, including dialogue sessions, film screenings, exhibits and a large public lecture on the topic by Noam Chomsky. “The students and faculty at MIT have been incredible about helping me understand and come to grips with these issues,” he says. “For all its technical legacy, I found the MIT community far more socio-politically engaged and open-minded than many other such academic environments.”
After graduating from MIT, Sawhney founded a startup company that developed open source software to support publicly funded biomedical research. But the Middle East conflict continued to weigh upon him. In 2006 he decided he had to stop thinking and do something. That summer, he took an unpaid leave from his firm and traveled to the West Bank with little more than a laptop and some video cameras in a backpack. His plan: develop a youth media program as a pilot project on the ground. Voices Beyond Walls was born out of a collaboration with local community centers in the refugee camps he visited. Through an international and local volunteer team of artists, filmmakers and educators, the program has been expanded to seven refugee camps in the West Bank, with over 60 video shorts produced in the past four years. Many are posted on the Voices Beyond Walls YouTube channel.
This summer, Sawhney and colleagues conducted the program in parallel in the Al Aroub camp in the West Bank and the Jabaliya camp in Gaza. They first trained 50 young Palestinian adults in a three-day training workshop on digital media and storytelling techniques. This is a short film produced during one of these workshops:
Many of these young adults then facilitated month-long workshops with kids aged 10 to 16 at community centers in the refugee camps. The kids learned photography, neighborhood mapping, script-writing, storyboarding, acting, filming, and video editing. Sawhney regularly blogged about his experiences running the program in Gaza, and the kids interviewed each other as the program came to an end. (“How did you handle the editing software?” one student asked another. “I had some difficulties at first,” came the answer, “but now I feel like a professional.”)
Earlier this month, the kids capped off their program with photo exhibitions, film screenings, and diploma ceremonies. At the end of the final screening in Gaza, Sawhney says, “The young girls on stage were so confident responding to questions from the audience about their films; I can imagine many of them doing the same at an international film festival in a few years.”
Sawhney plans to follow the workshop participants and their families in Gaza this year, collecting data for a pilot study on the role of creative media expression among young children in areas of conflict. He wants to see if the kids regularly engaged in producing their own media-based narratives are coping better than their peers living in the refugee camp without such a creative outlet—Sawhney calls it “participatory media”—to work through the challenges they are confronted with on a regular basis.
Here in Cambridge, Sawhney is working with MIT researchers and local community organizations to jointly develop better ways to empower youth with digital media, as part of an initiative he co-founded called the Department of Play at the Center for Future Civic Media. In the fall semester, Sawhney will teach Networked Cultures and Participatory Media, incorporating many of his experiences and research into the newly-developed curricula. And in late October, he plans to host an exhibition and screening of the youth photography and films from the Re-imagining Gaza program at MIT. Later this year he is also helping to organize a symposium on Gaza with the Center for International Studies and Harvard University’s Middle East Initiative.
In a way, he’s come full circle back to his own struggles with the violence in the Middle East as an MIT student 10 years ago. “Over the years I have realized it’s a far bigger challenge helping Americans understand why the conflict continues,” Sawhney says. “So I feel we should find ways to leverage participatory media both for civic engagement and global awarness. Young voices in the Palestinian Territories are rarely heard but are far more authentic in revealing the context and humanizing the conflict.”
Jay Keyser, MIT linguistics and philosophy professor emeritus, has traveled the world reluctantly. His new book, I Married a Travel Junkie, describes with good humor why he has continued to travel and experience exotic places despite his reluctance. (Love, naturally.)
His adventures include enduring mock charges of lionesses, snorkeling in Lake Malawi rife with the bilharzias parasite, sighting an aardvark, sailing in a felucca in Egypt, and perfecting his technique dealing with baksheesh seekers. Readers will find his travel tales endearing and will also learn some things about his childhood and his marriage.
After walking in the bush in Zambia at the South Luangwa River National Park, he wrote:
“I think this was the first time in my life that I have ever confronted real fear, not the fear that knots your stomach when you’re a kid and you realize you are going to have to fight somebody because they called you “a son of a bitch.” (In my neighborhood any slight against one’s mother had to be avenged.) This was fear mixed with a healthy dose of anger. I had been telling my companions and the guides and Nancy that it was absolutely crazy to go looking for lions, especially on foot. What was the point? Everybody knows what a lion looks like. And when it is chest-high looking right back at you, there better be a bunch of bars in between. Why couldn’t they see that? The more I complained, the more sympathetic their smiles. It was maddening.
My companions were unconvinced. “Jay is really a hoot, isn’t he?” they would say patronizingly. “Afraid to go looking for lions. I’ll bet he never goes out after 10 p.m.”
“I talked and talked and tried my best to get Nancy to abandon this foolishness….So it came to this. The lions roared. And, instead of panic, I felt fear, anger and then, just as suddenly, a sense of beatific ease.”
Copies are available on Amazon.com but only in a Kindle edition, perfect to take with you when you travel or you can get a paperback copy at the Harvard Book Store!
Tuscan cypresses (© Owen Franken).
The 
