Two students partnered up to take on the latest Internet fad: the online social networks that were exploding into the mainstream. With people signing up in droves to reconnect with classmates and old crushes from high school, and even becoming online “friends” with their family members, the two wondered what the online masses were unknowingly telling the world about themselves.
Allen & Co.’s Sun Valley, Idaho, media fest got off to a gloomy start Wednesday, with downbeat panel discussions on the economy (getting worse) and the digital future (looking murky).
Last week, as physicist Stephen Wolfram was demonstrating his new Web-based “computation engine”–Wolfram Alpha–to the public, Google announced a data-centric service of its own.
The Singularity–the prophesied moment when artificial intelligence leaps ahead of human intelligence, rendering man both obsolete and immortal–has been jokingly called “the rapture of the geeks.” But to Ray Kurzweil, the most famous of the Singularitarians, it’s no joke.
Ellen Spertus, a graduate student at MIT, wondered why the computer camp she had attended as a girl had a boy-girl ratio of six to one. And why were only 20 percent of computer science undergraduates at M.I.T. female?
A member of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority’s board seized a report by three MIT students about flaws with the Boston subway’s fare collection system and delivered a scathing indictment of the subway system and its general manager, calling the system “a mess” and saying she had “lost all confidence” in the system’s general manager, Daniel A. Grabauskas.
A transit agency in New England has filed a federal lawsuit to stop three Massachusetts Institute of Technology undergraduates from publicly presenting research at Defcon demonstrating gaping security holes in two of the agency’s electronic payment systems.
It’s difficult for us layfolk to gauge the real implications of breakthrough research announcements, but when the scientists start throwing around words like “nirvana,” it does catch the attention. And from the description of the latest work of MIT’s Daniel Nocera, the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy, it’s easy to get excited. Nocera and team [...]
Some scientists see their work make headlines. But MIT meteorologist Edward Lorenz watched his work become a catch phrase. Lorenz, who died in April, created one of the most beguiling and evocative notions ever to leap from the lab into popular culture: the “butterfly effect,” the concept that small events can have large, widespread consequences.
The most memorable reporting I’ve encountered on the conflict in Iraq was delivered in the form of confetti exploding out of a cardboard tube. I had just begun working at the MIT Media Lab in March 2006 when Alyssa Wright, a lab student, got me to participate in a project called “Cherry Blossoms.” I strapped on a backpack with a pair of vertical tubes sticking out of the top; they were connected to a detonation device linked to a global-positioning system receiver.
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