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Geography RSS FeedsImperative of Science and Technology in Accelerating African and Rwandan Development - Paul Kagame The news these days from Africa isn’t all bad. In fact, in some places, it’s downright hopeful, as Rwandan President Paul Kagame attests. “Our continent is no longer all about violence and disease and human disasters that scarred many African countries in recent decades,” says Kagame. “We are now becoming a continent of opportunities.” There are those who doubted Rwanda could “constitute a viable state,” says Kagame, but 14 years after bloody genocide and civil war, his country has managed an astonishing revival -- enough “stability and resilience to allow the economy to grow at an average 7% annually in the past several years.” Other African nations have been expanding at the same pace; oil producers are zooming along at even faster clips. Kagame attributes this recovery to such factors as the “leapfrogging power of mobile technology,” where hundreds of millions of new cell phone users, even in remote areas without electricity, drive ...Feed Source: mitworld.mit.edu Foreign Policy and the Next U.S. Administration - Barry Posen, Carol Saivetz, Taylor Fravel After tuning in closely to the presidential campaign, these panelists don’t discern worlds of difference in the candidates’ approaches to foreign policy. But the speakers convey key concerns and offer words of advice to the next U.S. president.
Barry Posen is interested in the future of U.S. grand strategy, by which he means our plan for achieving and maintaining security and power. Thus far, says Posen, both presidential candidates “largely share the same view on U.S. grand strategy,” which is very expansive, with “a long, global agenda for U.S. security goals.”
Both sides agree on the continued struggle against terror, containment of rogue states, and a commitment to the spread of democracy. Their disagreements are “tactical, though not trivial,” involving for instance the relevance of international institutions, and the role of diplomacy. Posen worries that both campaigns “overlook key problems in U.S. p... Personal Robots - Cynthia Breazeal SM ‘93, SCD ‘00 Cynthia Breazeal’s eminently charming and huggable creatures appear to have stepped out of Santa’s North Pole workshop. But Breazeal wants you to know that her robots are attempts to create socially intelligent machines “whose behaviors are governed not just by physics but by having a mind,” and which might someday collaborate with humans in critical interactions.
Breazeal wants to shift the concept of robots from machines that explore distant places like Mars, or vacuum floors, to devices that can function in society at large, dealing with people on a daily basis “to enhance daily life, to help us as partners.”
Building sophisticated machines means delving into human social intelligence, our ability to develop a sense of self, communicate thoughts and feelings in words and gestures, and interact with others. Humans are wired to read the underlying mental states of our fellows. Can robots learn to “sense and perceive a... The Black Hole at the Center of Our Galaxy - Charles H. Townes, HM The Nobel Prize-winning physicist talks about various aspects of our galaxy, and discusses new methods in astronomy and astrophysics that make possible explorations deep into the heart of the Milky Way. -- [April 23, 2001]... A New Age of Exploration: From Earth to Mars - Dava Newman, SM‘89, PhD ‘92 Happily for human spaceflight, Dava Newman and her students enjoy working in such laboratories as NASA’s “Vomit Comet.” Newman’s work aims to provide a better understanding of how humans can withstand the rigors of space missions. Her decades studying human physiology and performance in extreme environments may prove key not just to the success of reaching Mars this century, but to improving the quality of life for people disabled by disease or accident on Earth.
Studies of astronauts in flight, training on Earth, and on long engagements at the International Space Station, reveal “significant physiological deconditioning,” Newman says. Microgravity produces musculo-skeletal loss, especially in the vertebrae and leg bones, as bipeds become “more like snakes, using a swimming type of motion.” Muscles also atrophy from 20-30%. It’s possible some of this loss could be restored once on the moon (where people are 1/6th their weight), ... Precision Cosmology - Max Tegmark Buzz Lightyear has nothing on Max Tegmark, who takes his alumni audience on a dizzying tour of the universe and beyond.
Before Tegmark begins, MIT President Susan Hockfield highlights some newsworthy Institute milestones and initiatives, including breaking ground on a new cancer research center that will bring together engineering and life sciences; and pioneering work on new energy solutions, with a focus on harnessing light from the sun. Since federal funding for research has diminished, says Hockfield, MIT is increasingly pursuing philanthropy to move these key ventures into their next phase. She also describes a banner year for MIT admissions, in spite of turmoil nationally in higher education applications and financial aid; and a record for 2008 Alumni fund giving.
In his “little ride” from Earth into the far reaches of space and time, Max Tegmark demonstrates the success of new technologies such as orbiting space telescopes... Innovation to Commercialization: Using Government Funding to Kick Start Your Start-Up - Thomas Allnutt, Milton Chen, Christopher Loose PhD '07, Bill Townsend '84, SM '77 This informative roundtable provides useful tips to aspiring entrepreneurs on obtaining government dollars. Through conversation and Q&A, moderator Bruce Gellerman elicits some key dos and don’ts from a National Science Foundation small business program officer, and from tech CEOs who have benefited from the government’s programs.
Thomas Allnut says that NSF is but one of 10 agencies that distribute money to small businesses, and that his program is “in the middle of the pack, with $110 million per year to give away to responsible small businesses to get technology into the market place.” All told, in 2007, the government gave away $2.5 billion to businesses of fewer than 500 employees. While some agencies, like Department of Defense, have mission-driven solicitations (e.g., better bullets or vests), NSF has a broader mandate.
While NSF’s firs... Neuroeconomics - Drazen Prelec A pioneer in a “dangerously hot research area,” Drazen Prelec peers into the human brain while it makes decisions. In his corner of the new field of neuroeconomics, Prelec uses a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine to scan minds pondering the pros and cons of purchasing and selling products like Godiva chocolate and flash drives.
Prelec first provides a brief background on the emergence of his discipline, made possible by technological advances in measuring brain activity, and the recent introduction of psychology into economics. The convergence (or perhaps collision) of behavioral approaches and economics has led to a “sustained criticism of the rationality assumption in economics,” says Prelec, most prevalent in game theory. So much current research, he says, “is a series of responses to the incorrect predictions of the rational normative model.”
Some Nobel Prize-winning work has emerged in the past few decades f... Software Innovation—Do You Think the Last 20 Years Were Exciting? The Next 20 Years Will Blow Your Mind - Brad Feld '87, SM '88 In a trip down memory lane, Brad Feld regales us with the pre- and recent history of electronic innovation, with a rapid-fire delivery that achieves vaudevillian pitch.
Via a slide-laden PowerPoint presentation -- and, by the way, Feld claims to hate PowerPoint, because as a venture capitalist “I’ve only received about 6,723,000 of them” -- he narrates landmark moments in the evolution of the computer age. He touches on the room-size ENIAC computer, and pays tribute to the Jetsons cartoon as embodying his view of the future as a child. He cites his first programming language (APL, 1976), and first computer (Apple II, 1978). Feld speaks sentimentally of the familiar A> prompt as a quaint relic of the DOS operating system era.
Jump to the late ’80s, when Hypercard on the Macintosh was a pre-web foreshadowing of distributing data through multiple applications…“a major breakthrough.” Windows 3.0 heralded the ’90s and subsequen... Projects for Change: Bringing Management Tools and Ideas, Collaboration, and Learning-by-Doing to the Challenge of Global Health Delivery - Anjali Sastry ‘86, PhD ‘95 The Latin motto on the MIT seal, mens et manus – mind and hand – encapsulates Anjali Sastry’s view of the combined theoretical and practical education that students gain at the Institute. She cites MIT founder William Barton Rogers’s 1860 exhortation for “the most earnest cooperation of intelligent culture with industrial pursuits” as the paradigm of learning by doing, the ideal way to gain and apply knowledge. This undergirds her approach to teaching in tandem with projects in which students practice, test, reflect, share, and thereby enact change for the benefit of an enterprise.
The need for practice is a constant theme in Sastry’s view of learning. Just as in music, sports, and chess, practice in management skills results in organizational improvement. That is why she considers it imperative that students have opportunities to apply theory to real-world situations. Such hypothesis testing is the logical and essential e... Copyright © 2008, Chicago Best Price. All Rights Reserved. |