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."
posted by Ardiril
on Jan 18, 2012 -
34 comments
MIT scientist Dr. Todd Rider has
developed a viral infection treatment that works by triggering host cell suicide when it finds the cell has been producing double-stranded RNA. Since dsRNA is the mechanism by which all viral infections proceed, but is not part of normal cellular function, the treatment seems both universal and safe.
[more inside]
posted by seanmpuckett
on Aug 11, 2011 -
49 comments
MIT students created
water bottle light bulbs that diffract natural sunlight and provide the equivalent of a 55 watt light bulb out of an empty plastic bottle, water, and a few drops of bleach. They are being installed and used in shanty towns where no natural light gets into the makeshift tin roof homes.
posted by COD
on Aug 3, 2011 -
74 comments
Every year, nine million children under five die from preventable diseases such as diarrhea and malaria. Often, the treatments for these diseases are cheap, safe, and readily available. So why don't people pick these 'low-hanging fruit'? Why don’t mothers vaccinate their children? Why don’t families use bednets, or buy chlorinated water? And why do they spend such large amounts of money on ineffective cure instead?
Poor Economics is a book and website by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo. It has maps, graphs, and data drawn from the research at MIT's
Poverty Action Lab. It is currently being
reviewed and discussed (
1,
2,
3) at the Economist. BONUS: Duflo
discusses the book and
Randomized Controlled Trials (Wikipedia:
RCT).
posted by anotherpanacea
on Apr 25, 2011 -
46 comments
openculture.com is offering hundreds of links to free online courses from the top universities in the United States (and Oxford).
posted by gman
on Jan 12, 2011 -
16 comments
Andrew Shane Huang is a 35 year old hardware hacker, known to some as
bunnie, and others as that guy who
hacked the Xbox and went on to
write a book about it.
Finding the hidden key to the Xbox was
an enjoyable distraction while he worked on getting his PhD in Electrical Engineering from MIT as
part of
Project Aries. Since then, he has
written for (and
been written about) in
Make Magazine, has
giving talks on the strategy of hardware openness and
manufacturing practices in China, as experienced with the development of the opensource
ambient "
internet-based TV" called
Chumby. When he's not busy on such excursions, bunnie writes about
hacking (and more specifically,
Chumby hacking),
technology in China, and even
biology in exquisite detail on
the bunnie studios blog (
previously).
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on Jun 17, 2010 -
36 comments
"Former Harvard student Adam Wheeler
was indicted [yesterday] on multiple counts of identity fraud and larceny. According to the
Boston Globe, Wheeler allegedly built a 'fraudulent life history that led to his admission to Harvard, and for using forged academic materials from Harvard when he applied for the prestigious Rhodes and Fulbright scholarships.'"
* In his transfer student application to Harvard "...Wheeler claimed he got a perfect score on the SAT, straight A's at prestigious prep school Phillips Academy Andover and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology...In reality, he had never attended either school..."
* He
has plead not guilty to the charges.
[more inside]
posted by ericb
on May 18, 2010 -
164 comments
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.
posted by Kirth Gerson
on Sep 20, 2009 -
80 comments
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.
[more inside]
posted by juv3nal
on Aug 20, 2009 -
55 comments
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.
posted by Kattullus
on Feb 4, 2009 -
10 comments
