New York Times reporter Eduardo Porter speaks with Prof. Paul Osterman about his new book, which examines the need for better home health care in the U.S. Porter writes that in his book, Osterman suggests that improving home health care jobs, “could actually improve the quality and efficiency of the entire health care system.”
Wired reporter Eric Niiler writes that Prof. Kerry Emanuel has found that the probability of a storm like Hurricane Harvey hitting Texas has increased due to warmer waters in the Gulf of Mexico and the lack of high-level winds that normally push such storms out to sea or towards Oklahoma.
MIT tops Class Central’s list of the “Top 50 MOOCs of all Time, ”reports Class Central reporter Dhawal Shah. Several MITx MOOCs were featured on the list, including The Analytics Edge, Circuits and Electronics 1, Introduction to Biology, and Introduction to Computer Science and Programming Using Python.
Writing for The New York Times about educational technology, Prof. Cynthia Breazeal describes her research examining the importance of social cues in learning from technology. “If we want to use technology to help people learn, we have to provide information in the way the human mind evolved to receive it,” she explains.
Prof. Max Tegmark speaks with Ira Flatow of PRI’s Science Friday about his new book, “Life 3.0,” which examines how AI might reshape the future. “We should try to create a great future with [technology] by winning this race between the growing power of technology, and the growing wisdom with which we manage it," says Tegmark.
Wall Street Journal reporter Frank Rose reviews Prof. Max Tegmark’s new book, “Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.” The book asks reader to ponder the possibility that “a computer program will become not just intelligent but wildly so—and that we humans will find ourselves unable to do anything about it.”
A study by MIT researchers found that after a law was passed in Louisiana allowing public-school teachers to contradict the scientific curriculum, students scored lower on the science section of the ACT, reports Kevin Lewis for The Boston Globe. The study also showed that, “at the same time, creationism-related search terms on Google became more common, relative to evolution-related terms.”
MIT researchers have developed a system that allows drones to scan and read RFID tags, reports Amy Wallace for UPI. Rather than use the drones to carry RFID readers, researchers found a way to use “the drones to relay signals emitted by a standard RFID reader, allowing for the more effective locating of tags,” writes Wallace.
Prof. Kerry Emanuel speaks with Washington Post reporter Chris Mooney about how several factors related to climate change, such as sea levels and atmospheric moisture, can help intensify hurricanes like Harvey.
WGBH reporter Robin Washington examines a new study by researchers from the MIT AgeLab, which examined how accurately salespeople explained new car safety features. “We found that there is a lot of variability in how dealerships are communicating advanced safety systems to consumers,” says Research Specialist Hillary Abraham.
Prof. Mohammad Alizadeh and his colleagues "have developed a way to approach network monitoring that provides flexibility in data collection while still keeping both the circuit complexity of the router and the number of external servers low," writes Amy Wallace for UPI.
Steve Annear of The Boston Globe writes about the tradition of MIT students building a roller coaster to welcome freshmen to campus. “It was a good part of the reason that I became a mechanical engineer and I know that’s also true for other people,” says senior Andrea Meister.
Two new papers from CSAIL researchers “aim to help doctors make better use of the digital information they’re presented with,” writes Adi Gaskell for The Huffington Post. One examines a tool that uses ICU data to choose the best treatment option based on a range of symptoms, while the other facilitates “predictive models based upon an electronic health record system.”
Prof. Max Tegmark speaks to Ian Sample of The Guardian about the likelihood of creating superintelligent AI. “From my perspective as a physicist, intelligence is simply a kind of information processing formed by elementary particles moving around, and there’s no law of physics that says we can’t build machines more intelligent than us,” says Prof. Tegmark.
As the population ages and the labor force decreases, the U.S. can remain one of the world’s youngest populations with continued immigration, write Joseph Coughlin, director of the AgeLab, and research associate Luke Yoquinto. “There is broad agreement that slashing the raw number of immigrants to the U.S. would be an economic mistake.”