Prof. Winston’s Ideas

The Infinite Connection Advisor

by Patrick on April 1, 2012

in Alumni Life,Prof. Winston's Ideas

Photograph courtesy of Patrica Sampson

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

These days, whenever you you walk down the Student Street in the Stata Center, you are likely to see students, sitting alone, staring at computer screens, jabbering away with friends and family in myriad foreign tongues, via Skype.

When I was a kid, my parents and I had awkward, monthly, expensive feeling, long-distance telephone calls. Now, I use Skype to work with collegues from California to Istanbul.

For me, Skype is a great enabler, far superior to telephones and email. Somehow, seeing adds a powerful social dimension.

So why not use Skype to help fix MIT’s undergraduate advising problem.

There are points of light, of course. Some departments have effective associate advisor programs; the Alumni Association offers a career-guidance service to alumni; and many FSILGs have alum-engaging mechanisms of various sorts.

Still, the advising problem has been admired, sometimes mitigated, but never fixed, for decades. Not all advisors have been in the nonacademic workforce recently; not all get to know their advisees. Many are spread too thin.

Among those who complain are seniors, soon to become young alumni. So, let’s put together a Skype-based system to create a connection between our students and on-line young alumni, thus putting the young alumni to work on the problem they have been complaining about:

Skype × Alum = Infinite Connection Advisor

By making systematic and intentional connections we might get a highly non-linear return on investment. A systematic and intentional connection is one that involves definite, mediated assignment of students to volunteer alumni, with contact proactively initiated by the alum, rather than a passive offering of a find-it-and-opt-in service.

Infinite Connection Advisors would provide career advice that complements other MIT sources. Young alums are well positioned to describe how they like working in their fields in general; to relate how they like the organizations they work for in particular; to suggest how they have made use of their MIT degrees in both obvious and nonobvious career paths; and to recommend organizations friendly to interns and attractive as long-term employers. A successful program could contribute to lifelong bonds between advisor and advisee, strengthening the alumni interpersonal network.

The idea still sounded good the day after I thought it up, so I tried it on a few people in the obvious places.

Alas, interest, but no traction. So, off to the Arcosanti file it goes, the place on my computer where I put ideas I write up just for discussion and fun.

Editor’s note: Some of the 3,000+ MIT graduates signed up as Institute Career Assistant Network (ICAN) advisors may be using Skype—it’s certainly a great idea. Alumni and students can search the Online Alumni Directory for an ICAN advisor. Interested in sharing your experience? Learn how to become an advisor.

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Anytime, anywhere, any pace, any age

by Patrick on January 1, 2012

in Classroom,In the News,Prof. Winston's Ideas

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

Like all years, it was the best of years and the worst of years. People of future influence were born; people of past influence died. Companies started up; countries almost went broke.

At MIT, it was a special year because we made it to our 150th birthday, and all the celebrating encouraged us to think about the next 150 years. Here is my prediction: MIT will change more in the next 20 years than it has in the past 100. We have to. Our students learn differently. They have the web. They have Skype. They are on line. We have an obligation and an opportunity to change the way we engage with them.

Many of our successes will be exportable. So, I’m betting that if MIT lasts another 150 years, 2011 will be known as the year when the Provost Rafael Reif launched MITx. Here is what he had to say:

Many members of the MIT faculty have been experimenting with integrating online tools into the campus education. We will facilitate those efforts, many of which will lead to novel learning technologies that offer the best possible online educational experience to non-residential learners. Both parts of this new initiative are extremely important to the future of high-quality, affordable, accessible education.

We are going global, and, eventually, you will be able to earn certificates for completing subjects from MIT, anytime, anywhere, at any pace, at any age, and it won’t cost $50,000/year. And perhaps the best part is that we are doing it all open source and inviting other universities to join with us.

Of course, distance education has been around for a long time. What’s new is that technical advances have just about reached a threshold where on-line is not just a poor shadow of the real thing but rather a different thing with relative advantages and disadvantages, just as movies are different from live theater, with relative advantages and disadvantages.

No one has a crystal ball good enough to see what lies on the other side of the coming education revolution. Are we talking about adjustments or starting over? Are we freeing faculty to spend more time with students one-on-one or are we automating the faculty out of work? And of course it is easier to predict the future than it is to predict when it will happen.

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The Studio 360 Story

by Patrick on December 18, 2011

in In the News,Prof. Winston's Ideas

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

I hear my Studio 360 inteview turned out ok.  I attribute that to a sort of aural cosmetology. Jonathan Mitchell came into my office about a month ago, chatted me up for an hour or so, and somehow he and the other geniuses at Public Radio International and WNYC found a few coherent sentences on the tape about my group’s research on story understanding.

Here is the story: As a species, we became symbolic and different from other primates a little more than 50,000 years ago; becoming symbolic meant that we could describe events. Once we strung events together into sequences, we could tell stories. Mastering story telling meant we could teach through case studies, ranging from fairy tales to blogs. Finally, by learning to blend stories together to make new stories, we developed one highly useful kind of creativity. So, if we are to understand intellligence, we need to put a lot of effort into understanding story understanding.

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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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Boot Camp

by Patrick on November 20, 2011

in Campus Culture,Prof. Winston's Ideas

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

Our new Dean of Engineering, Ian Waitz, came to the EE&CS lunch the other day, talking about exciting new School of Engineering initiatives. He also reported a sobering survey statistic: MIT students arrive as freshman with extremely high self esteem; they leave with greatly diminished self esteem.

Of course, there are a lot of monster brains around here, in all ranks, and that takes some getting used to for ordinary geniuses.

Enter Vikash Mansinghka ’05, MEng ’09, PhD ’09, a graduated student of mine, who wandered into my office a while back when he was in town. Because I had just read Making the Corps, a terrific book about Parris Island, by Thomas Ricks, we started comparing MIT to boot camp. Much is the same: not much sleep, bonding through working and suffering together, demanding authority figures, and occasional humiliation (in our case, via quizzes).

The difference is, the Marines don’t just take the recruits apart; they put them back together such that they end up with increased self esteem. They seem to know what they are doing down there in South Carolina. Their vision, conspicuously displayed on their website, is:

We are a cohesive team of Marines, Sailors, and Civilians committed to upholding the legacy and operational relevance of the Corps by attracting qualified young men and women and transforming them mentally, physically and morally into U.S. Marines.

 

So, “Vikash,” I said, “they pound duty, honor, country, and that sort of thing into the recruits. What should we pound into our students?  Without hesitation, he replied,

You can do it

Only you can do it

You can’t do it alone

Pretty good, I think. Now we just have to figure out how to get a message like that across, along with Newton’s laws and Maxwell’s equations.

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The MIT 100

by Patrick on October 23, 2011

in Prof. Winston's Ideas


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

Some say that the United States has a second diplomatic corps that is sometimes more effective than the official one.

Its origins are at places such as the Naval War College, the Air War College, and the Army War College, which are interesting to visit, in part, because of the variety of foreign uniforms you see on campus.

Most of the foreign military-school students are carefully selected by their home countries and most are on a fast track toward positions of high influence and responsibility. Having learned our values and bonded with people in our military, foreign graduates of our military schools provide a back-channel way of getting messages through.

During the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, American Officers who knew Egyptian Officers were getting in touch and reminding their Egyptian friends about some important principles.*

So, why not have MIT create an analog of what happens in our military schools, an analog aimed at educating the next generation of world leaders both technically and culturally. Each year, we would welcome to the campus 100 seniors nominated by 100 universities from 100 countries all over the world. We would embed them in MIT dormitories and FSILGs for a senior year and perhaps a fifth year master’s degree.

Sure, we have a lot of foreign students already, and we have a demonstrated appetite for deals with foreign universities that involve large financial packages. A big deal with Russia’s government-funded Skolkovo Foundation is nearly final.** But few students come from poor countries and none of our deals are with universities in poor countries or universities in the Western Hemisphere or especially universities in poor countries in the Western Hemisphere, such as, say, Haiti.

I waited a day and the idea still seemed interesting, so I started it off on a shakedown cruise, as I generally do, by writing up a prospectus, complete with possible solutions to a dozen obvious problems. I calculated it would cost a visionary donor about $10 million per year.

Of course, it might not work, and it certainly would not work at a place other than MIT, and perhaps the place up the street, and three or four other universities. On the other hand, if it worked, it would have a nice ring to it: the MIT 100, a corps of future world leaders all bonding together with MIT students headed in important directions.

* Economist 24 February 2011.

** Agreement announced 26 October 2011.

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How to make yourself smarter

by Patrick on October 9, 2011

in Prof. Winston's Ideas

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

It happened again. Marvin Minsky guessed my idea before I had half explained it.

I was talking with him about what would happen if smart computers took over. The subject comes around like a comet, every 20 years or so, this time stimulated by this year’s Watson and next year’s 100th anniversary of Turing’s birth.

“Well,” I said, “really smart robots could be incrediby dangerous; we better not turn any of them loose before we do a lot of simulation.”

“Oh,” he said, “and we’re the simulation?”

One or two decades ago, Danny Hillis wandered into my office and said, “Marvin has a short attention span.”

“Yes,” I replied.

“Have you noted that he will often guess your idea before you’re half through?”

“Yes, generally,” I agreed.

“And his guess is often better than the idea you were trying to explain?”

“Just about always,” I regretted.

“Do you talk to yourself when you solve problems?” he asked.

“Yes, certainly.”

“Well,” Danny said, “maybe that inner conversation does what talking to Marvin does—the words and phrases uncover a sequence of improving ideas.”

We agreed that it is good to talk to yourself, and even better to talk to someone else. It makes your ideas better. Be careful about talking with yourself out loud though. Unless you are wearing a Bluetooth device, people may think you’re strange.


 

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Lettvin

by Patrick on September 25, 2011

in Classroom,Events,Prof. Winston's Ideas

Lettvin discussing frogs in Winston's 6.xxx class

 

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

Jerry Lettvin died just as the spring term was ending, so his friends gathered together today, when more could attend, in the big lecture hall in the Stata Center, near where Jerry did much of his work in Building 20.

 

 

Here is the cover page of the program:

 

 

Many stories were told, as Jerry was not only a great scientist, but also one of MIT’s great personalities, and a role model for many of us who were his students in the classroom or laboratory.

I especially like the one about the time when his wife, Maggie, left him at home to mind their three children. When she came home, the children were sitting motionless, staring off into the distance. “What have you done,” she said. It turned out that he had hypnotized them so he could get some work done.

Once, when I was an undergraduate, I screwed up my courage and went to ask him if he had anything I could do.  His reply: “Have you read Helmholtz?”  Not realizing that this was one of his standard tests of resolve, I dutifully bought the two volumes of Helmholtz and started to read.  Because it was more than 1000 pages, I never finished and never became his student.

When I became a Professor, Jerry always called me Tom.  I felt twice honored: first that he recognized me consistently; second that he seemed to be confusing me with Tom Knight,whom I much respect.

Years later, when I started teaching my boutique, seminar-style subject on computational accounts of human intelligence, I always invited Jerry in, not to lecture, but rather to answer questions and reminisce about his life as a scientist. The students had just read Jerry’s seminal, 1959 paper, “What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain.”

One year he told the story of the German Scientists. To me, the story reflected what Jerry was all about: big ideas rather than incrementalism, blue-collar dress rather than sartorialism, meritocracy rather than pedigree.

Here is the story as Jerry told it: He got a call one day from a friend in California. The friend said, “I have some foreign visitors who have not been able to duplicate your frog experiment. They are planning to publish a paper that claims your work is a fraud. Will you come show them the technique?”

“Do they wear white lab coats?” Jerry asked.

“Yes.”

“Are they Germans?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll come.”

Jerry spent some time deciding what to wear. He finally settled on a thoroughly stained yellow dress shirt and grubby, well-worn work pants.

When he showed up, he was escorted into the experiment room. He reported that the place looked more like an operating room for open heart surgery on humans than a place to stick needles into the optic nerves of frogs.

“We have assembled some instruments for you,” said his friend, pointing to an immaculate tray of scalpels, clamps, and other paraphernalia.

“That’s ok,” said Jerry, “I brought my own.” Then, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a pair of needle-nose pliers and a pair of diagonal cutters.

A minute or two later, with the frog prepared, the German scientists were waiting skeptically to see if anything at all would come out of the speakers attached to the amplifier attached to the needle Jerry had stuck into the frog.

Then, Jerry passed black dot the size of a fly past the frog’s eye.

“Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrup.”

 

Editor’s Note: Read about Jerry Lettvin’s life in an MIT New Office article.

 

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Arrogance

by Patrick on July 3, 2011

in Campus Culture,Prof. Winston's Ideas

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

The evolving plan for the campus is newly up on a website, MIT 2030: envisioning our future campus.

There are many points of interest, particularly the graphic shown on the Process tab.

The circles indicate where you can go by walking away from the Great Dome for 5, 10, or 15 minutes.

Note that all the circles extend into the Charles River. There are several interpretations.

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8,000 Years of MIT Experience

by Patrick on May 29, 2011

in Campus Culture,Prof. Winston's Ideas,Remember When...

Paul Gray, Professor and President Emeritus

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

It came the old fashioned way, delivered by a mail carrier. “…I cordially invite you to a special luncheon … Sincerely, Paul Gray.” The price of admission was 50 years at MIT in one capacity or another.   I just joined that august group, along Jeff Meldman ’65, SM ’70, PhD ’75, who conceived the luncheon idea.

I figured it would be an intimate affair, in one of the small dining rooms at the Faculty Club. Maybe 15 or 20 of us lifers would show up.

It turned out to be 150, and two or three had come to MIT before 1940, so 8,000 years is a conservative estimate of the experience present. If you lined those years up, you would get fairly close to when Cambridge was under an ice sheet.

At my table, we talked about what has caused MIT people to be so loyal to the community over the past fifty years. We agreed that meritocracy has had a lot to do with it. Taking care of, developing, and promoting our own has been another important theme. Pride in being different also contributes.

Then came story time.* with a dozen storytellers contributing.

Yvonne Gittens told one of my favorites. She talked of how she first came to interview at MIT, unsure about whether there were jobs for Cambridge kids just out of high school, especially Cambridge kids who happen to be African American. There were, she discovered, and she became a clerk in the Personnel Department. Then, she took advantage of MIT’s benefits to earn Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees, and subsequently rose to become Associate Director of Financial Aid and President of the Massachusetts Association of Financial Aid Administrators and then the Regional Association of Financial Aid Administrators. “Thank you,” she said, more to the Institute than to anyone present.

“That’s our MIT!” observed Bill Hecht, a tablemate and longtime Executive Vice President and CEO of the MIT Alumni Association.

Another favorite story came a little later, and a little lighter. Tony French recalled the strange case of the daffodil girl.

It happened one day when Tony was new to MIT, teaching 8.01, freshman physics, in 26-100. Part way into his lecture a trumpet sounded. Annoyed by the disruption, he scolded, “That will do,” in the accent of the other Cambridge, and went on with his lecture.

A little later the trumpet sounded again, and a young woman, carrying a bunch of daffodils, but wearing only a top hat, bounded down the steps from the back of the hall, handed a daffodil to Tony, and departed.

“What would you have done?” Tony asked rhetorically. Tony himself decided to retire from the field for the rest of that day. This evidently led to considerable complaint from the students, who all felt improperly deprived of one hour’s worth of tuition.

*Video link courtesy of Traci Swartz, who organized the event and did a lot of detective work, tracking down as many semicentennials as possible.

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