In the Media

Seandor Szeles of PBS profiles Tom Scholz, an MIT alumnus and lead guitarist for the band Boston. Scholz first picked up guitar during his junior year at MIT.

MIT scientists have compared the brain activity of adults who had ADHD as children and adults who still have the disorder, reports Melissa Malamut in Boston Magazine. Researchers uncovered, “key differences in a brain communication network that is active when the brain is at wakeful rest and not focused on a particular task,” Malamut writes. 

Los Angeles Times reporter Amina Khan features new MIT research examining a child’s ability to decipher when adults are committing “sins of omission.” Researchers found that, “kids can tell when someone isn’t giving them the whole story – and they learn not to trust the information that person gives them,” Khan reports.

Joel Brown reports for The Boston Globe on the new Innovations of Cambridge tour, which features several research labs at MIT. “It leaves them with the feeling that they’ve experienced MIT in a way that the casual person wandering the streets would not,” explains guide Daniel Berger-Jones. 

Benjamin Swasey of WBUR reports on a project led by Professor Ofer Sharone that examines long-term unemployment. The project paired unemployed job seekers with career coaches and counselors. The research, “indicates to me that the damage being done by the unemployment can be mitigated,” explains Sharone.

Wired reporter Liat Clark writes about how researchers from MIT, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania have demonstrated a self-assembling lamp at the IEEE Conference on Robotics and Automation. 

Arian Campo-Flores interviews Professor Kerry Emanuel for this Wall Street Journal article on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Coyote drone, designed to measure conditions at low altitudes in a hurricane. If the drone is successful, “it will be an enormous boon,” says Emanuel.

Douglas Martin writes for The New York Times about the late Professor Morris Adelman who died at his home in Newton on May 8. Adelman spent six decades as a faculty member in the MIT economics department.

The Economist looks at the work of Professor David Autor while investigating how technological advances are influencing future employment. Autor’s research indicates that the fact that a job can be automated does not guarantee it will be and other factors, such as the cost of labor, play a role.

“Where noncompetes are not enforced, there’s a more open labor market — companies compete for talent,” said Professor Matthew Marx in this New York Times article by Steven Greenhouse. Marx sites California’s ban on noncompetes as a major reason for Silicon Valley’s success. 

The Economist spotlights increasing concerns about how private consumer data is accessed and employed, highlighting the recent White House big data privacy conference hosted at MIT and Professor Vinod Vaikuntanathan’s work with homomorphic encryption.

John Naughton includes research by Professors Eric Brynjolfsson and Sandy Pentland for this Guardian article on Big Data. Both Brynjolfsson and Pentland acknowledge that Big Data analytics provide a great deal of information about individuals and organizations.

Dan Adams covers the 2014 MIT commencement for The Boston Globe. “I want you to hack the world, until you make the world a little more like MIT,” said President L. Rafael Reif. 

Joshua Rothman writes for The New Yorker about Professor Alex "Sandy" Pentland’s book, Social Physics. “In fact, part of what makes the book so interesting is that Pentland has figured out how to capture, in numerical form, the intimate social vibrations of office life,” writes Rothman.

Kelly Kennedy of USA Today reports on Prof. Jonathan Gruber’s research showing that health insurance premiums went up 10% on average in the three years before the Affordable Care Act took effect. "The two main lessons are the notion that there was a pre-existing double-digit trend, and that it was variable," says Gruber.