MetaFilter posts tagged with MIT

Facebook outing

Kirth Gerson — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 05:23:30 -0800

It started as a simple term project for an MIT class on ethics and law on the electronic frontier. Using data from the social network Facebook, they made a striking discovery: just by looking at a person’s online friends, they could predict whether the person was gay.

Catch you later.

knave — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 21:43:43 -0800

Two AI Pioneers. Two Bizarre Suicides. Wired's David Kushner examines the work of two young, competitive AI researchers, and the eerie circumstances of their deaths.

Near Space Photography Under $150

mccarty.tim — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 21:20:05 -0800

With the integration of cameras, GPS receivers, and more into cellphones, many people take for granted the lightweight, energy efficient technology in their pockets. MIT ties all that tech together to a weather balloon in Project Icarus, where for $150 a prepaid cellphone becomes a high-altitude near-space camera.

Personas

juv3nal — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 10:59:44 -0800

Personas is a part of the MIT Metropath(ologies) exhibit that scours the web for information and attempts to characterize a person based on an entered first and last name, showing visualizations of the process as it chugs along. Can't say it was particularly adept at digging anything up on me, but maybe you need to be internet-famous for it to work well. Still neat.

From the Poor Man's Tesla to the Rich Man's Sedan

filthy light thief — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 14:54:49 -0800

From the successful conversion of a Porsche 914 into a battery electric vehicle (BEV), MIT's Electric Vehicle Team are now working on the conversion of a Mercury Milan Hybrid into a quick-charging BEV. Instead of the typical 10 to 12 hours for a full charge, the MIT team is looking at an 11 minute charge-time for their BEV, dubbed "elEVen," and they're blogging in detail about their progress. (via) The Porsche conversion cost $60,000 plus labor for a two-seater that goes from zero to 100 km/h (~62 mph) in 23 seconds, whereas the BEV Milan conversion has a goal of < 9 seconds from zero to 60 mph and a price tag of $200,000 (but much of the materials were donated and the Electric Vehicle Team isn't paid). The batteries alone take under half of the total cost, at about $80,000, but this cost should go down as the market for lithium iron magnesium-phosphate batteries increases. The amazing charge time requires 350 kilowatts, available through a direct connection to MIT's power plant. Though this kind of power isn't available on a residential level, the dilema of rapid charging stations and vehicles was seen as "a chicken or the egg scenario," with the MIT team showing the feasibility from the vehicle side.

I am a strange loop.

loquacious — Sat, 30 May 2009 21:30:41 -0800

Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid has been recorded as a series of video lectures for MIT's Open Courseware project.

MIT faculty vote for university-wide Open Access mandate

tarheelcoxn — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 15:19:53 -0800

The MIT faculty unanimously adopted a university-wide Open Access mandate. Open Access got a big boost yesterday because of MIT's move. For those of you not in academia/libraries or who are too lazy to click either of the links, this basically means that if you're on faculty at MIT and you publish something, you grant MIT (among other things) the right to make that work available for free on a website they set up to be a repository for such work.

Sixth Sense: wearable tech

peacay — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 09:10:17 -0800

MIT demo of some very interesting wearable tech (~7 mins vid from TED)

Videos of university courses

Kattullus — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 14:59:36 -0800

Academic Earth collects lectures on a wide variety of subjects from UC Berkely, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford and Yale that the universities have released under Creative Commons. The site is still in beta so it doesn't quite have the thousands of lectures its frontpage promises. It has many full courses, for example Benjamin Polak teaching game theory, Amy Hungerford on the American novel since 1945, Charles Bailyn's introduction to astrophysics, John Merriman on the history of France since 1871, Shelly Kagan on death and Oussama Khatib's introduction to robotics.

80 Million Tiny Images

carsonb — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 17:46:00 -0800

A visualization of all the nouns in the English language arranged by semantic meaning. [NSFW words included!]

Currently computers have difficult recognizing objects in images. While practical solutions exist for a few simple classes such as human faces or cars, the more general problem of recognizing all different classes of objects in the world (e.g. guitars, bottles, telephones) remains unsolved. Computer Vision researchers are currently investigating methods that can recognize and localize thousands of different object categories in complex scenes. A key component of these algorithms is the data used to train the computers' model of each object. Current approaches use collections of images gathered by hand. Our research explores how the billions of images available on the Internet can be used to train models for object recognition. With overwhelming amounts of data, many problems can be tackled with simple algorithms. We gathered from the web 79 million images. We are using this massive dataset to train a computer to recognize objects within an image and to understand the scenes depicted in photographs. You can help... get better training data for computer vision algorithms by labeling some of the images.

WordNet prev iously

Blind, Yet Seeing

grapefruitmoon — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 09:33:17 -0800

Blind, Yet Seeing : New research into blindsight from Harvard University and M.I.T. showing that people who have been blinded by brain injury have resources beyond sight to do such tasks as navigate an obstacle course (movie).

Reality Mining

tractorfeed — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 01:19:44 -0800

"Reality mining is just like data mining... except instead of being applied to text and web pages... we're trying to find patterns in real life." MIT students "swap their privacy for smartphones that generate digital trails." Alex "Sandy" Pentland tracks how humans interact by looking at the trails left by the devices they use. This movie (.mov file) shows a little of what he's up to. Could the accelerometer in your iPhone detect a change in your gait, which can be an early indicator of Parkinson's? Maybe cell phone data could be used to track the spread of diseases like SARS. Thomas Malone, another researcher at MIT, thinks we might be overly-focused on privacy: “For most of human history, people have lived in small tribes where everything they did was known by everyone they knew,” Dr. Malone said. “In some sense we’re becoming a global village. Privacy may turn out to have become an anomaly.”

Fixing the world on $2/day

lalochezia — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 11:50:28 -0800

Amy Smith and MIT's D-lab apply engineering principles to real-world problems that affect the world's poorest residents. She organizes an annual conference. Hear her talk at TED. Previously

Lies, damned lies, and graphs

artifarce — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 19:19:48 -0800

Graph your life at MIT's Mycrocosm. Simple interface. Interesting potential. Worrying about. Freelance: No Idea What the Hell Is Going On. Food and Liquid Consumption. Also allows for sharing datasets with other users.

MIT Hackers Restrained

Kirth Gerson — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 13:09:55 -0800

Three MIT students planned to reveal to Defcon how to make counterfeit "Charley Cards" - the electronic passes that allow access to Boston's MBTA transit system. The MBTA sued for a restraining order, and a judge has granted it. The MBTA complaint (PDF) The Judge's order (PDF) Robert Cringely on the subject

All Night Long

chuckdarwin — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 04:51:13 -0800

MIT researchers have overcome a major barrier to large-scale solar power: storing energy for later use. "If you can only have energy when the sun is shining, you're in deep trouble. And that's why, in my opinion, photovoltaics haven't penetrated the market," Daniel Nocera, an MIT professor of energy, said in an interview at his Cambridge, Massachusetts, office. "If I could provide a storage mechanism, then I make energy 24/7 and then we can start talking about solar." Solar has been growing as a power source in the United States -- last year the nation's solar capacity rose 45 percent to 750 megawatts. But it is still a tiny power source, producing enough energy to meet the needs of about 600,000 typical homes, and only while the sun is shining, according to data from the Solar Energy Industries Association. Most U.S. homes with solar panels feed electricity into the power grid during the day, but have to draw back from the grid at night. Nocera said his development would allow homeowners to bank solar energy as hydrogen and oxygen, which a fuel cell could use to produce electricity when the sun was not shining. "I can turn sunlight into a chemical fuel, now I can use photovoltaics at night," said Nocera, who explained the discovery in a paper written with Matthew Kanan published on Thursday in the journal Science.

MIT TechTV

Rykey — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 09:44:07 -0800

MIT TechTV [beta]. Like YouTube for braniacs (minus the scandalous invasion of privacy).

They were applying his own paradigms for learning

Horace Rumpole — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 17:33:32 -0800

Papert, who was a professor of mathematics, education, and media technology at MIT, has devoted much of his career to learning: self-learning (he taught himself Russian) and learning about learning. He was one of the early pioneers of artificial intelligence, and he invented the computer language Logo to teach children about computers. Now he must learn something even more challenging - how to be Seymour Papert again.

And it's day-glow orange. Srsly.

ardgedee — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 06:56:55 -0800

All of the light, 40 times the power. Improve the performance of run-of-the-mill solar cells by standing orange pieces of glass on them. MIT's Mark Baldo describes the technology. The performance claims are outstanding, manufacture is cheap (and defect-tolerant), and the time to market is predicted to be three years. It can also be used to turn building window panes into solar energy collectors. The paper's published in the latest Science Magazine -- but you can only read the abstract unless you're a subscriber.

Video killed

asok — Wed, 21 May 2008 05:43:48 -0800

YouTomb MIT project that tracks youtube file deletions for aledged copyright infringement. They do not host the deleted files, fyi.via wired

Alongside a screenshot of each clip deemed in violation, YouTomb lets users see who posted the offending video, how many views it got before being pulled, when it was removed and by whom (for instance at the request of the user, a media company or third-party). YouTomb, which launched about two months ago, is currently monitoring close to a quarter-million videos, and Jansen says the team is eager to expand its scope. Currently, the site only monitors popular YouTube videos, but Jansen hopes to span as many YouTube data sets as possible. YouTomb is considering offering code to bloggers to use when embedding YouTube videos. That way, when videos were taken down, users could see stats and data instead of a simple error message.

Somewhere, Richard Feynman is smiling.

goodnewsfortheinsane — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 20:46:34 -0800

Swinging from pendulums and facing down wrecking balls, MIT professor Walter Lewin shows students the zany beauty of science.

learning math online

nickyskye — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 21:51:03 -0800

Free math courses online, from very basic to brainiac. No registration required.

free writing courses

nickyskye — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 22:45:49 -0800

10 Universities Offering Free Writing Courses Online.

First of the photojournalists

Abiezer — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 16:55:43 -0800

Japanese places and people photographed by Felice Beato, a pioneer 19th century photographer who documented the Crimean War, the Indian Mutiny and the Anglo-French military intervention in China before opening a studio in Yokohama in 1863. He also seems to have been the first photographer in Korea.Wikipedia NYPL archive First two links are units in MIT's Visualizing Cultures project.

Pasta Printer

mattbucher — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 14:04:19 -0800

The Fabaroni is a 3D printing machine that constructs 3D models with pasta dough. You've also got the 3D chocolate printer made out of lego. And Previously.