Learning

Of Sunflowers and Solar Plants

by Jay London on February 1, 2012

in Design,Energy,Engineering,In the News,Learning,Research

When looking for ways to increase solar energy efficiency, MIT researchers simply stopped and smelled the…sunflowers.

Using the flower as inspiration, a team of researchers led by Professor Alexander Mitsos developed a solar panel layout that mimics the arrangement of sunflower florets, a pattern called Fermat’s spiral.

From MIT News:

“The MIT team…looked to nature for inspiration — specifically, to the sunflower. The florets of a sunflower are arranged in a spiraling pattern, known as a Fermat spiral, that appears in many natural objects and has long fascinated mathematicians: The ancient Greeks even applied the patterns to buildings and other architectural structures. Mathematicians have found that each sunflower floret is turned at a ‘golden angle’—about 137 degrees—with respect to its neighboring floret.”

The new layout takes up to 20 percent less space than Spain’s PS10 Solar Power Plant, Europe’s first concentrated solar power plant, which can covert enough electricity to power 6,000 homes.  Compared with the PS10’s configuration, where mirrors are arranged around in circles and the distance between mirrors akin to the seats in a movie theater, the new layout reduces shading and blocking, and increases total efficiency.

The research team, which includes Corey Noone SM ’11 and Manuel Torrihon of RWTH Aachen University in Germany, found that their new pattern could reduce shadowing and blocking throughout the day. Their findings were published in the journal Solar Energy, and the team has recently filed for patent protection.

From MIT News:

“…the spiral pattern reduced shading and blocking and increased total efficiency compared with PS10’s radially staggered configuration.

Mitsos says arranging a CSP plant in such a spiral pattern could reduce the amount of land and the number of heliostats required to generate an equivalent amount of energy, which could result in significant cost savings.”

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Faculty Forum Online: Making Desalination Efficient, Feb. 2

by Amy Marcott on January 26, 2012

in Engineering,Health,Learning

MIT Faculty Forum Online logo

Update: View a video of the presentation.

More than a billion people worldwide lack access to clean drinking water. Sea water is one possible solution. But current methods of desalination are expensive, energy intensive, and require infrastructure not usually available in areas most in need of it.

Tune in to hear how MIT Mechanical Engineering Professor John Lienhard P’15, who is also the director of the Center for Clean Water and Clean Energy at MIT and King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, applies basic science and engineering to address this problem.

Lienhard will offer his thoughts and take questions from the worldwide MIT alumni community via video chat on Thursday, Feb. 2, from Noon to 12:30 p.m. ET.

Register for this free event to receive the link for live viewing. After the event, come back here and continue the conversation in the comments.

John Lienhard. Photo: Len Rubenstein.

John Lienhard. Photo by Len Rubenstein.

About John Lienhard

John Lienhard P’15 is a professor of mechanical engineering at MIT as well as the director of the Center for Clean Water and Clean Energy at MIT and King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals.

He earned his BS and MS in chemical, nuclear, and thermal engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles and a PhD in fluid dynamics from the University of California, San Diego.

His research interests include desalination, water supply, energy, heat and mass transfer, fluid mechanics, convective transport, extremely high heat fluxes, and electronics thermal management.

Learn more in this Spectrum article—Drinkable Water for All.

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DIY IAP: MIT Gaming from the Inside Out

by Nancy DuVergne Smith on January 24, 2012

in Learning,Media,Modern Geekhood

Games are more than fun at MIT. One place to get a bead on the action is the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, a five-year collaboration between MIT and the government of Singapore that is exploring gaming as an academic and commercial medium. A video featuring Philip Tan ’01, SM ’03, the U.S. executive director, describes the lab’s mission.

GAMBIT develops and studies games.

GAMBIT develops and studies games.

Update March 2012: MIT was ranked #2 school in the nation to study video game design by Princeton Review.

One product is a stream of games that you can download and play for free. Play a Gambit game—there are four featured games for download and 30 more prototypes to toy with.

Another result is understanding what is intriguing about games. Watch a recent video titled Marc LeBlanc’s eight kinds of fun to learn about psychology of gaming.

During IAP, GAMBIT held a session to introduce this year’s MIT Mystery Hunt, an annual puzzle competition, and hosted a night of problem solving. Relive the 2012 Mystery Hunt—and see the problems and the solutions.

The Mystery Hunt, an annual IAP event, draws solvers of all stripes

The Mystery Hunt, an annual IAP event, draws solvers of all stripes. Photo: John A. Hawkinson—The Tech

The GAMBIT website is a cornucopia of game riches:

Listen to a podcast with Terri Brosius and Dan Thron, members of the highly influential Looking Glass Studios, pioneers of 3D first-person narrative game design.

Watch the GAMBIT Summer Summit 2011 closing keynote by Jeff Orkin of the MIT Media Lab and Cognitive Machines titled “Next Generation A.I. & Gameplay: Big Data, Big Opportunities.”

Find out how to take part in the annual Summer Game Development Program For Undergraduates.

Beginning February 20, a new video exploring the origins and processes of developing each project will be posted on Mondays. Watch the trailer.

More about Games at MIT

  • MIT is betting that games will be a key learning tool in the future. A new $3 million grant will support the MIT Education Arcade‘s development of a massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) to help high school students learn math and biology.
  • Learn how to play the Mercury Game, a negotiation simulation that is designed to teach people about the role of science in international environmental policy making
  • Test your invention IQ with the Lemelson-MIT Program’s interactive Brain Drain game and other games.
  • The Tech reviews The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, released in December.
  • Read earlier Slice posts on Flu Math Games and other Video Learning and Play Platform Wars, a Sloan simulation.

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DIY-IAP: Play Platform Wars

by Nancy DuVergne Smith on January 13, 2012

in Learning,Management

Want to turn a fresh idea about video game platforms into a fabulously successful startup? You’ll need some business savvy to do that. You can start building those skills right now with a free, online simulation offered by the MIT Sloan School of Management—Platform Wars: Simulating the Battle for Video Game Supremacy.

MIT Professor John Sterman created Platform Wars.

MIT Professor John Sterman created Platform Wars.

In this real-time simulation, you play the role of senior management of a video game hardware platform producer with a hot new methodology. You will learn about the dynamics of competition in markets that depend not only on a product’s price and features, but also on how many people own it and how many games and applications are available. You plug in numbers, advance, and see how markets react.

The stakes are high, according to MIT Professor John Sterman PhD ’82, an expert in system dynamics who developed the simulation with colleagues. “The first truly successful video game was PONG, the arcade and home versions offered by Atari,” he says in an introductory video. Atari sales jumped from $100 million a year to $200 billion a year in just a few years in the 1970s largely because of their market dominance.

“Platform wars are not restricted to the Internet world, of course,” Sterman notes. “And important example that is playing out now is the competition to become the new standard for automobiles. We have the competition between the dominant platform of internal combustion engines being powered by gasoline or fossil fuels and that is being challenged by a variety of new contenders including plugin electric vehicles, plugin hybrids, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, and biofuel types of vehicles. So the lessons you can learn in the simulator are application to a variety of other markets.”

Get Started:

Go the Platform Wars page and watch the Student Instruction Video (26 minutes) and then log in to the Platform Wars simulation itself.

For more business savvy, download the 24-page case study “Sony’s Battle for Video Game Supremacy” by Sterman, Khan Jekarl, Cate Reavis.

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DIY IAP: Say it with a Photo Essay

by Amy Marcott on January 6, 2012

in Campus Culture,Classroom,Design,IAP,Learning,Student Life

Each fall, freshmen involved with the Discover Product Design (DPD) pre-orientation program document their weeklong class experience—of campus lab tours, visits to design firms, and various design exercises and activities—with photo essays. These are intended to teach basic photography, but DPD also shows students how to document work for a design portfolio and conduct ethnographic research for understanding existing behavior to inform the design process.

Take a look at the gallery of each student’s top three photos. During the week, they designed a product for their dorm room (created on a laser cutter in thin acrylic), created posters to encourage student life, and disassembled existing products to learn how they are manufactured.

DPD is run by members of the MIT Ideation Lab, a mechanical engineering research group studying early-stage design processes. Check out some of the designs from the 2010 program.

Want to create your own photo essay? Check out Sensing Place: Photography as Inquiry on OpenCourseWare for instruction (including videos) and inspiration, especially the student image galleries that explore things like light, significant detail, and landscape poetics.

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What’s it like to be 75 years old? Try this on.

by Jay London on December 28, 2011

in Design,Health,In the News,Learning,Modern Geekhood,Research

The U.S. population of persons 65 years or older numbered 39.6 million in 2009 and is expected to increase to 72.1 million by 2030. Coupled with falling birth rates and lengthening age expectancies, the U.S. population is rapidly aging.

For engineers and designers, this creates design challenges that didn’t previously exist with younger populations. Existing and developing products may need to be altered to cater to the older demographic.

Thanks to MIT’s Agelab, young designers may be better equipped to understand the needs of their aging clients. Under the direction of Joe Coughlin, Agelab has created AGNES (Age Gain Now Empathy System), a suit designed to approximate the motor, visual, flexibility, dexterity, and strength of a person in their mid-70s.

AGNES simulates a gerontological atmosphere in retail, public transportation, and workplace environments. Braces and bands mimic joint stiffness and muscular fatigue. Leg straps create slower leg movements, and helmet attachments give the wearer an age-induced curved spine. Yellow eyeglasses make it difficult to read small print, and earplugs simulate difficulty with sounds and tones.

MIT Research Fellow Rozanne Puleo told Fastcodesign.com:

“We’ve suited up students and taken them to the grocery store to purchase foods with low sugar, low sodium, and low fat—foods commonly purchased by older adults. They found that it was very challenging to locate these items on the shelf. That’s valuable information that we can take back to organizations.”

Part of the Engineering Systems Division, MIT AgeLab works to transform technologies into practical solutions that improve how products are designed and services are delivered. In addition to AGNES, the AgeLab has created AwareCar (a vehicle that monitors driver state); Miss Daisy (a driving simulator used for evaluating cognitive distraction and the effects of disease and medication); and Miss Rosie (a Volkswagen Beetle that evaluates a driver’s capacity for vehicle operation), among others.

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Blunders, viewed as aids to memory

by Patrick on December 4, 2011

in Classroom,Learning,Prof. Winston's Ideas,Remember When...

Professor Patrick Henry Winston ’65, SM ’67, PhD ’70

I was rummaging around in the attic when I stumbled across my notes and quizzes from my first term, fifty years ago. I opened up the binder and there it was: the dreaded 8.01 quiz #2.

When I was a freshman, I always wrote down F = Ma, force is equal to mass times acceleration, as the first step toward solving 8.01 problems. Writing it down got the formula into my visual field, which generaly is a good idea, because visual problem solving is an important contributor to problem solving.

Alas, on that 8.01 quiz #2, writing F = Ma got me into big trouble.

This was the problem: an open railroad car rolls along a frictionless track at constant speed, v. Then, it starts to rain into the car. What force is required to keep the car going at constant speed?

I concluded that each drop went from zero horizontal velocity to v instantaneously, but then I was baffled, not knowing yet about impulses.

I should written F = d mv/dt, because force is equal to the derivative of momentum, mv. Usually, mass is fixed and velocity changes, so F = m dv/dt = ma; but in the quiz problem, velocity is constant, but the mass is changing, so F = v dm/dt.

Simple, but I muffed it, and because it was simple, and because I was extremely sore at myself for muffing it, I couldn’t ever forget it, so I would never make that kind of mistake again.

Curiously, this year’s 8.01 quiz #2 also featured rail cars moving along a frictionless track.

I wonder if any of the freshmen will remember the problem 50 years from now. Probably just the ones who got it wrong.

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Computing with Light May Answer Need for Speed

by Jay London on December 1, 2011

in Energy,In the News,Learning,Research

Professor Caroline Ross (Photo Credit: Allegra Boverman)

In many communication systems, data is transmitted via light beams through optical fibers. This transmission can be burdensome and relatively slow since once the optical signal arrives at its destination, it must be converted to electronic form, processed through electronic circuits, and finally converted back to light. MIT researchers have created a solution for this multi-tasked process, developing a new device that eliminates the need for conversion of optical to electronic signals.

From MIT News:

This technology could greatly boost the speed of data-transmission systems, for two reasons: First, light travels much faster than electrons. Second, while wires can only carry a single electronic data stream, optical computing enables multiple beams of light, carrying separate streams of data, to pass through a single optical fiber or circuit without interference. “This may be the next generation in terms of speed” for communications systems, (Toyota Professor of Materials Science Caroline) Ross says.

Ross, working in a group that includes, Thomas Lord Professor of Materials Science and Engineering Lionel Kimerling, Lei Bi ’11, and Juejun Hu PhD ’09, have developed what Ross calls a “diode for light” described in the Nov. 13 issue of Nature Photonics. Similar to an electronic diode, the device allows light to flow in one direction, but blocks it from returning in the other direction.

Garnet

Researchers used a form of a transparent, magnetic material called garnet, which is commonly used in jewelry but inherently transmits light differently in one direction than in another. The material covers one half of a loop connected to a light-transmitting channel on the chip.  The entire system can be created using standard microchip manufacturing machinery, making it much easier to commercialize than a system based on different materials.

What do you think? Could these advances replace the way fiber optic cables carry phone, TV and Internet signals? Let us know in the comments below or on Facebook.

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Faculty Forum Online: Homeland Security, Dec. 5

by Amy Marcott on November 28, 2011

in Events,Learning

MIT Faculty Forum Online logo

Update: View a video of the presentation.

National security in an age of massive movements of people across borders is a universal concern that involves complex issues. While borders have different characteristics and challenges, there are areas of commonality. Fortunately, the overwhelming majority of crossings are not problematic, but the ones that are raise concerns.

Tune in and hear some of the lessons learned by Chappell Lawson, MIT associate professor of political science, from his recent two-year assignment as executive director and senior advisor to the commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Learn more in this MIT News Office article—3 Questions: Chappell Lawson on border security.

The Faculty Forum Online series continues on Monday, Dec. 5, from Noon to 12:30 p.m. ET. MIT Associate Professor of Political Science Chappell Lawson will offer his thoughts on homeland security and take questions from the worldwide MIT alumni community via video chat.

Register for this free event to receive the link for live viewing. After the event, come back here and continue the conversation in the comments.

About Chappell Lawson

Chappell Lawson

Associate Prof. of Political Science Chappell Lawson

Chappell Lawson is an associate professor of political science at MIT, director of the MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI), and secretary of the faculty. His major research interests are Mexican politics, democratization, political communication, and voting.

From September 2009 through February 2011, he was on leave from MIT as a political appointee in the Obama Administration, serving as executive director and senior advisor to the commissioner at U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Professor Lawson was a national fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University (2002-2003), and a visiting research fellow at the Center for U.S.-Mexico Studies at the University of California, San Diego (1998-99). He earned his PhD from Stanford University in 1999. Before joining the MIT faculty, he served as a director of Inter-American Affairs on the National Security Council.

Books

Consolidating Mexico’s Democracy: The 2006 Presidential Campaign in Comparative Perspective (Johns Hopkins University Press, Forthcoming)

Building the Fourth Estate: Democratization and Media Opening in Mexico (University of California Press, 2002).

Mexico’s Pivotal Democratic Election (Stanford University Press, 2003, coedited with Jorge Domínguez).

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Why Do Grad Students Choose MIT?

by Nancy DuVergne Smith on November 8, 2011

in Campus Culture,Learning,Student Life

Data from the 42-page graduate student survey.

Data from the 2011 graduate student survey (click to enlarge).

Getting into MIT is tough and, once on campus, the experience is intense, yet lots of people want that opportunity. A recent survey of 1,152 MIT graduate students conducted by the Office of the Provost’s Institutional Research office documents why they came to MIT. The survey offers some predictable responses and some surprises.

Here are a few data points:

MIT’s reputation is the most important reason master’s students are at MIT; doctoral students say the match between specialized MIT programs and their interests is the top motivation.

Most important reason that MIT’s grad students are in school now: Personal Intellectual Achievement

Top self-perceived characteristics where students rated themselves in the highest 10%

  1. Drive to achieve
  2. Cooperativeness
  3. Emotional health

Number of years students thought their degrees would take to complete:

  • Master’s: 63% thought two years
  • Doctoral: 60% thought five years

Citizen status: 56% are U.S. citizens

Self-perceived comparisons to other MIT graduate students:

  • Academic Ability: 45% of master’s candidates saw themselves as average; doctorial 47%
  • Cooperativeness: 48% of master’s candidates saw themselves as above average; doctorial 46%
  • Leadership Ability: 41% of master’s candidates saw themselves as above average; doctorial 38%
  • Social Self Confidence: 44% of master’s candidates saw themselves as above average; doctorial 35%

For the full picture, you can download the 42-page report (PDF).

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