Graduation day

Today the Fellows had a small "graduation" ceremony in the office of MIT president Susan Hockfield (in the center of the pics). Boyce described one way that Fellows are different from other students: students are all anxious to graduate and leave, while Fellows would love to fail and be forced to stay another year. I'd have to agree with that!

Back to business

Last week was Miles' spring break and my parents were in town. We capitalized on the fantastic weather and did mega-sightseeing. It was a great week! The weather was sunny and hot until just after my parents' flight took off. Then it was back to the rain and cold.

ROFL.con was on the MIT campus this weekend. So, while I was giving my parents a tour of MIT we caught a glimpse of Tron Guy.

Origami at MIT

Here are a couple of the entries from this year's origami contest at MIT. There were a few other interesting creations, but the way they were displayed made them hard to photograph.

Meeting Noam

Sometimes, for example on the rare occasion when you get to meet and coverse with Noam Chomsky, you only get one shot at a picture. Sometimes you have to entrust your half-blind friend with taking that shot. And sometimes you forget to set the camera up in advance to ensure a good photo. Sometimes all of these circumstances converge ...and this is what you get. A blurry under-exposed picture of Keith and Noam Chomsky shaking hands.

Making stuff at the Fab Lab

About a month ago my classmate Alec Resnick told me about the MIT Center for Bits & Atoms (CBA) Fab Lab he works at in Back Bay. Yesterday we finally got to visit and we are hooked. You are looking at Miles' first creation.

He created it in a drawing program in Open Office and then "printed" it on a machine that used a laser to cut his design out of 1/4" thick plastic. Miles chose to use this thick white plastic from a wide selection of materials; he could just as easily have used some other material like wood, mirror or another color of plastic. There were a few little issues, but it turned out great for a first project. In addition to the ability to just make stuff, the atmosphere in the lab is really congenial and communal.

But the goal of the Fab Lab is much greater than to just let people like us make cool stuff, their goal is to bridge the fabrication divide. The fab lab concept and outreach is one of the most exciting things I've been exposed to at MIT, if you have a chance, watch this brief talk that Neil Gershenfeld, CBA Director, gave at TED about a year ago. When I viewed it, it took my breath away.

Fab labs have been opened in rural India, northern Norway, Ghana, Boston, South Africa, and Costa Rica. On the FabLabs site they list examples of what's happening at these labs:

• Fab Lab partners are working on creating mesh wireless, ad hoc networks in the Lyngen Alps of Norway to allow shepherds to keep track of their flocks from afar, and to allow fishermen to keep track of their boats at sea.



• At the Ghana Fab Lab, situated at the Takoradi Technical Institute, students are working on low-cost designs for mobile refrigeration and TV antennas.



• In Pabal, India Fab Lab users are making replacement gears for out-of-date copying machines, reliable tools for testing milk content and for diagnostics on
  human blood.



• At the Costa Rica Fab Lab young people are learning basic electronics and fabrication - by making functional objects with an array of sensors and actuators.



• In Boston Fab Lab users make jewelry, toys and crafts using recycled materials from the community. The projects are picked by the community based on urgency of needs and/or group interests.

All the labs have the same equipment and capabilities so it is possible to share digital designs and fabricated solutions between labs, Forming a network of intellectual property and idea exchange.

Saw this very tall bike on the way to class today. Seems like it might be hard to find just the right spot to park and lock it.

Keith visits the Media Lab

As one of the Knight program’s twice-weekly seminars, we had a fun tour of a program at MIT called the Media Lab. It’s kind of a misleading name, since most of the research underway there has very little connection with what you might think of as media. Instead, it’s all about the intersection of technology and humans. Our group met with four of the researchers there (out of 25 on the faculty).

One interesting project is by Deb Roy, who has been recording every second of his baby’s life. Actually, the baby is now almost 2-1/2, and the recording phase is winding down. He’s hoping to to shed light on childhood language acquisition. His specialty is interactive robots, and he wired his suburban hosue with a ceiling camera in every room. They can be switched off, but he basically has recorded nearly every moment of family life with his son over the past couple years. There’s a whole room at MIT holding the computers that have all that data. His wife is a speech pathologist, so it’s a team effort. In the meantime, he’s developing creative computer techniques to sort and analyze massive amounts of video and audio. The project is titled, "The Human Speechome."

The whole Media Lab is self-consciously promoting itself as “creative,” which is annoying at first, and using the image to solicit corporate contributions. But after talking to the people there, it really does feel like an incredibly creative place, where people are living up to their principles, to work collaboratively across fields and define problems in new ways.

Space 1957

When we were crusing through the infintite corridor on the 50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik (Oct. 4, 1957), Miles and I saw the scale model hanging with beeping emanating from it. Miles loudly exclaimed, "Wow, that is THE largest foil ball I've ever seen." After I explained the significance, his reaction was, "That was the first launch into space? That just looks like a plain old satellite. I'd love to just throw it or scrunch it up. When do you think they'll take it down?" Well, at least the foil ball aspect impressed him.