MetaFilter posts tagged with MIT

Cameras, Cartography and Competition

Groundhog Week — Sat, 18 May 2013 10:27:51 -0800

PITCHF/x and SportVU data analysis shows... 1. Pitch framing, once nebulously understood, can be quantifiably measured and taught. 2. The secret dead spot on the NBA floor, along with the hidden advantage of low percentage, long range shots. [Bonus Kirk Goldsberry analysis of Golden State Warriors' coach's claim that Klay Thompson and Stephen Curry are "the greatest shooting backcourt in the history of the game."] Further analysis can be found by combing through the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference.

Boston in lockdown as hunt for marathon bombers unfolds

Rhaomi — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 07:22:07 -0800

What started as a report of a convenience store robbery near the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology last night has sprawled into a chaotic manhunt for the perpetrators of the recent terrorist attack on the Boston Marathon. The deadly pursuit, involving a policeman's murder, a carjacking, a violent chase with thrown explosives, and the death of one suspect, has resulted in Governor Deval Patrick ordering an unprecedented lockdown of the entire Boston metropolitan area as an army of law enforcement searches house by house for the remaining gunman. The Associated Press has identified the duo as Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and his 19-year-old brother Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, who remains at large. Both are immigrants from wartorn Chechnya in southwestern Russia. The Guardian liveblog is good for quick updates, and Reddit's updating crowdsourced timeline of events that has often outpaced mainstream media coverage of the situation. You can also get real-time reports straight from the (Java-based) local police scanner.

HTBYERRF

Harald74 — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 07:19:09 -0800

A few years ago Charles Guan was a teacher's assistant in MIT's 2.007 introductory design and manufacturing class. To help out his fellow students he made a guide to building robots quickly and efficiently. Now he has expanded the original guide, retitled it How to Build your Everything Really Really Fast (HTBYERRF) and published it on Instructables, available for anyone wishing to progress from the "zip ties and duct tape" stage of building things.

Tony Stark, eat your heart out.

Morriscat — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 14:29:04 -0800

Defense contractor takes break from F-35 JSF, finds a way to eliminate 99% of the energy cost of desalination. Lockheed-Martin has developed a way to craft sheets of carbon a single atom thick, which can filter the salt (and just about anything else) from water with a tiny fraction of the energy required by current processes. "Lockheed officials see other applications for Perforene as well, from dialysis in healthcare to cleaning chemicals from the water used in hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," of oil and gas wells." Previously.

The Factory Floor

rider — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 12:19:35 -0800

Andrew "bunnie" Huang (previously) offered MIT students insight on how to bring electronic designs from paper to manufactured product. He summarized the process in a four part series: The Quotation, On Design for Manufacturing, Industrial Design for Startups, and Picking (and Maintaining) a Partner. Bonus: He's been working on an interesting ARM laptop design, FPGA included.

Stress at MIT

Rustic Etruscan — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 19:22:21 -0800

The Tech, a newspaper at MIT, has published a report about MIT students' stress. (via) The paper's introduction to this issue. The blog post that prompted the study. The open letter from MIT's president urging students to read said blog post.

DJ Focus

not_that_epiphanius — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 11:06:28 -0800

DJ Focus couldn't wait to get back to Sierra Leone. AKA Kelvin Doe, this young man makes beautiful, functional and very useful electronic devices out of trash found in his native Sierra Leone. It's not clear whether he or M.I.T. was more impressed after his visit there.

What's gonna happen outside the window next?

cthuljew — Sun, 18 Nov 2012 13:51:19 -0800

Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong

This is The Song That Never Ends...

SomaSoda — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 12:11:55 -0800

Ever wished your favorite song could be extended infinitely? Well, today's your day. Behold: The Infinite Jukebox. Created by Paul Lamare at MIT's most recent Music Hack Day. Upload a song yourself! Or choose from a lengthy list of previously loaded tracks. Doesn't seem to work in Firefox. Does in Chrome though. [via]

A Slower Speed of Light

brundlefly — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 12:50:50 -0800

A Slower Speed of Light is a first-person game prototype, built by the MIT Game Lab, that emulates the visual effects of special relativity.

MIT Gangnam Style feat. Sadoway and Chomsky

d. z. wang — Sat, 27 Oct 2012 15:15:41 -0800

MIT Gangnam Style feat. Sadoway and Chomsky

Automatic building mapping could help emergency responders

crunchland — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 05:30:00 -0800

Researchers have developed a backpack that generates building layout map in realtime. (yt) The prototype system automatically maps the wearer’s environment, recognizing movement between floors. It was designed at MIT to be used by emergency responders. Read more.

New hand-held CNC from MIT

aleph — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 08:47:19 -0800

You supply the muscle to move the tool and the computer supplies the accurracy. The tool shown here is a router but it seems like a more general technique. You move a hand held power tool around sloppily and a computer makes small movements of the tool as you do that keeps it to a corrected path.

How MIT students beat the lottery

DanCall — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 05:28:46 -0800

Beating the system: The Boston Globe reports how a group of MIT students beat the Massachusetts state lottery by working out that you were almost guaranteed to get a return on the game Cash Win Fall at certain times, and only buying tickets at that point. It's reckoned that they made $48m on a $40m stake over several years, that other syndicates were also involved, and the state 'bent and broke' the rules by allowing them to buy tickets in bulk. The game was closed down after the Globe started to investigate. Some publications are calling this a scam (NY Daily News, Time - headline updated but url still says 'scam'), but it's clearly the case that the game and its management was at fault. Earlier on the Blue - a mathematician works out how to predict which scratch cards will win.

This perpetual motion machine she made today is a joke! It just keeps going faster and faster!

CynicalKnight — Wed, 30 May 2012 18:00:44 -0800

As they become more readily available to consumers, LEDs will undoubtedly replace CFLs as the primary light source for residential and commercial, inside and out, due to their dramatic efficiency gains. In an unexpected turn of events, however, MIT researchers have developed an LED with 230 percent efficiency. Previously Unpossible, you say? Supposedly , the Law of Thermodynamics is not violated because the device converts ambient heat into photons. Cue the skeptics!

No more tapping the 57

tocts — Thu, 24 May 2012 06:38:13 -0800

Have you ever been frustrated because you can't get the last bit of ketchup out of the bottle? MIT has a solution for you.

Everything we know about basketball is a lot

Potomac Avenue — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 08:23:44 -0800

"Ever wondered why there are only 5 positions in basketball or how a player’s position is determined?" Maybe not. But analytics are becoming more and more important in basketball, to the point where some are questioning some fundamental 'facts' about the game. After the MIT Sloan Sports conference this year specifically addressed the role of analytics in basketball, there has been a bit of a backlash against the practice among commentators, coaches and fans. Yet the projects just keep coming, including this recently updated web project using some amazing mapping analysis: Courtvision Is basketball headed for a moneyball moment? In some ways the 2011 Championship Mavericks prove it's already there. More APBRmetrics resources. Intro to APBRmetrics "A Starting Point for Analyzing Basketball Statistics" Play Index+ Simple Ratings from 82game.net Basketball Prospectus Hoop Analyst on Bad Shooting PopcornMachine tracks player efficiency

Telnet Times Ten Thousand

schmod — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 08:16:08 -0800

If you've ever worked with the command prompt on a Unix-based computer, you're likely familiar with SSH (Secure SHell), which is a program and a protocol that allows you (yes, you!) to securely access a remote system. While SSH has certainly earned the "Secure" portion of its namesake over the years, it's functionality as a shell has ironically received very little attention, and has begun to show signs of age and obsolescence: SSH doesn't work very well on mobile connections, and its support for Unicode is buggy and incomplete. A group of MIT researchers think they've found solutions to these problems, and have created Mosh as a potential successor to SSH, which fixes many of the old protocol's annoyances and shortcomings, while retaining all of SSH's security features.

To-Go-Bots

BlackLeotardFront — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 13:04:53 -0800

MIT is leading an NSF-funded project with researchers from University of Pennsylvania and Harvard that aims to enable anyone to "design, customize and print a specialized robot in a matter of hours." Constructed from "cyber-physical primitives," the robots (some early examples here) would be able to be made in bulk on demand and could help change the entire workflow of device and robot creation, from engineering to warehousing to assembly.

I see you!

darkstar — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 13:57:42 -0800

MIT's new laser camera can see around corners (excellent explanatory video included). By combining a femtosecond pulse laser and a camera with a time resolution of 2 picoseconds, a computer algorithm can measure the delay in photons bouncing repeatedly off of surfaces not in its direct line of sight. An image is then constructed based on the time delay of the photons returning from the reflected surfaces. MIT's original publication, here.

Pushing Mushrooms

obscurator — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 12:27:51 -0800

"We want to eat, not be eaten by our food, right?"[TED]. Artist/MIT graduate Jae Rhim Lee's current project explores the possibility of, and interest in ecologically responsible interment. She is currently cultivating personalized Infinity Mushrooms, which in combination with the Mushroom Death Suit will promote postmortem mycological growth, and more importantly intimacy with and acceptance of the physical realities of decomposition as vehicles toward death acceptance. Lee, in conjunction with MIT, planned the FEMA Trailer Project after discovering that many trailers intended for Hurricane Katrina refugees were either unused, or led to further, unforeseen problems. The pilot project converted a surplus trailer into a mobile composting unit/community garden and teaching center. She has received substantial financial grants and "additional funds" to pursue the Infinity Burial Project, part of her overarching mission to "explore alternative relationships between self, body and environment through living systems and applied design, drawing on her background and strong interests in psychology, environmental sustainability, Eastern religion and disaster management."

America's Deep, Dark Secret

Blasdelb — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 10:57:10 -0800

"One of the deep, dark secrets of America's past has finally come to light. Starting in the early 1900s, hundreds of thousands of American children were warehoused in institutions by state governments." An early part of the American experiment with Eugenics, the Walter E. Fernald State School inspired scores of similar institutions across the country, and more recently, one of the definitive histories of the era. "We thought for a long time that we belonged there, that we were not part of the species. We thought we were some kind of, you know, people that wasn't supposed to be born," says Boyce. And that was precisely the idea. The Fernald School, and others like it, was part of a popular American movement in the early 20th century called the Eugenics movement. The idea was to separate people considered to be genetically inferior from the rest of society, to prevent them from reproducing. Eugenics is usually associated with Nazi Germany, but in fact, it started in America. Not only that, it continued here long after Hitler's Germany was in ruins. At the height of the movement - in the '20s and '30s - exhibits were set up at fairs to teach people about eugenics. It was good for America, and good for the human race. That was the message." Fernald was also the site of human research involving exposure to radioisotopes performed by researchers from Harvard and MIT, and sponsored by the Quaker Oats company, between 1946 and 1953 for which informed consent was never provided. From the linked report,

In 1946, one study exposed seventeen subjects to radioactive iron. The second study, which involved a series of seventeen related subexperiments, exposed fifty-seven subjects to radioactive calcium between 1950 and 1953. It is clear that the doses involved were low and that it is extremely unlikely that any of the children who were used as subjects were harmed as a consequence. These studies remain morally troubling, however, for several reasons. First, although parents or guardians were asked for their permission to have their children involved in the research, the available evidence suggests that the information provided was, at best, incomplete. Second, there is the question of the fairness of selecting institutionalized children at all, children whose life circumstances were by any standard already heavily burdened.

The work produced the following studies, STUDIES IN CALCIUM METABOLISM. THE FATE OF INTRAVENOUSLY INJECTED RADIOCALCIUM IN HUMAN BEINGS "The effect of phytate and other food factors on iron absorption" (PDF) THE DETERMINATION OF PLASMA VOLUME IN MAN WITH RADIOACTIVE CHROMIC CHLORIDE STUDIES OF PLASMA VOLUME USING HUMAN SERUM ALBUMIN TAGGED WITH RADIOACTIVE IODINE¹³¹

The faster Fourier transform

Ardiril — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 22:33:57 -0800

A quicker picker-upper. "[A] group of MIT researchers will present a new algorithm that, in a large range of practically important cases, improves on the fast Fourier transform."

Ivy Level Education-with no debt

Ruthless Bunny — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 12:11:11 -0800

MIT today announced the launch of an online learning initiative internally called “MITx.” Think you can hack it at MIT? If so, the world-renowned university is willing to give you a new kind of credential to prove it. MITx will offer a portfolio of MIT courses through an online interactive learning platform that will: •organize and present course material to enable students to learn at their own pace •feature interactivity, online laboratories and student-to-student communication •allow for the individual assessment of any student’s work and allow students who demonstrate their mastery of subjects to earn a certificate of completion awarded by MITx •operate on an open-source, scalable software infrastructure in order to make it continuously improving and readily available to other educational institutions With Student Loan Debt as the next "bubble", perhaps this idea isn't as wacky as it seems.

Encrypted database queries

jeffburdges — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 02:08:47 -0800

CryptDB executes database queries over encrypted data without ever decrypting it. CryptDB uses a substantial fragment of SQL for the query language and penalizing query times by only about 15-26%. (pdfs : journal, tech report, applications) “The insight we had, the cool idea, is that SQL queries in a database are composed of relatively few types of operations: equal to, less than, summing up, sorting. .. For each operation, we were able to find an encryption scheme that is quite efficient at computing on encrypted data.” Initial applications would resemble securing a datacenter against hackers and insider threats, outsourcing database hosting to an untrusted cloud provider, such as Amazon or IBM, or rigorously enforcing privacy obligations in an application itself. If however an application permitted query construction on a user's machine, then potentially even the application's provider need not be trusted. Craig Gentry has another approach that probably leaks less user data to sophisticated attackers, but runs prohibitively slowly. See previous thread on Homomorphic Encryption.