CBS Boston lists the MIT Museum gift shop among the top-five museum gift stores in the city: “Not only will visitors find a wealth of MIT memorabilia in the MIT Museum Store, they will also find lots of math presents and barware.”
Professor John Hansman reflects on the two Malaysian airliners lost in 2014 in this Boston Globe article. “It appears that in 2014 more people perished from terrorist acts in commercial aviation than all other aviation accident causes combined,” writes Hansman.
Christopher Capozzola, an associate professor of history at MIT, has written extensively about the relationship between military policies and civilian politics. In his latest article, published by The Diplomat, Capozzola writes about extended relations between the U.S. and Philippine militaries and the handling of an alleged murder by a U.S. service member.
According to The Economist, a battery design “being developed by Donald Sadoway of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology would use two sorts of liquid metal, separated by a liquid electrolyte.” Using metals of varying densities, Sadoway’s design would allow the substances to float as separate layers in a container.
William Aulet, managing director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, speaks with Cheryl Conner of Forbes about what entrepreneurs can gain from taking online courses. “Entrepreneurship is not a gift,” Aulet explains. “It’s a skill. People should think of becoming an entrepreneur in the same way they think of becoming a teacher or lawyer.”
Visiting Scholar Michael Schrage speaks with Jared Bowen of WGBH about the hack on Sony pictures ahead of the release of “The Interview,” as well as subsequent widespread Internet outages in North Korea. “I think this is a very, very serious breach and it sets a very dangerous precedent,” says Schrage.
“A team of MIT researchers found that an existing computer vision system can achieve object recognition as well as humans and other primates,” writes Jamie Ducharme for Boston Magazine. Professor James DiCarlo’s team compared the visual recognition abilities of primates to those of the advanced computer system Super Vision.
Shana Lebowitz writes for Forbes about a study co-authored by Dr. Sara Ellison that determined that gender-diverse teams are more productive than their single-gender counterparts: “[R]esearchers estimated that transitioning from a single-gender office to an office evenly split between men and women would translate to a whopping 41% revenue gain.”
Dennis Overbye of The New York Times speaks with Brother Guy Consolmagno, an MIT alumnus and planetary scientist at the Vatican Observatory, about what the existence of extraterrestrial life would mean for Christianity. “Science is stuff we understand about truths we only partially grasp,” says Consolmagno. “Religion is trying to get closer to truths we don’t understand.”
Professor Jeremy England appears on WGBH television’s Greater Boston to discuss his work examining the origins of life. England explains his theory that, from the perspective of physics, energy played a role in the formation of life.
Paul Krugman writes for The New York Times about Professor JoAnne Yates' book “Control Through Communication.” In her book, Yates examines the history of the filing cabinet and the “coevolution of information technology and the business world before the digital age.”
CSAIL PhD students Elena Glassman, Neha Narula and Jean Yang write for Wired about their recent Reddit Ask Me Anything session and gender disparities in STEM. “By raising awareness and generating discussion, we hope to help women and other minorities feel more supported pursuing careers in STEM,” write Glassman, Narula and Yang.
Vijee Venkatraman writes for BetaBoston about Kumbhathon, a tech buildathon co-founded by Professor Ramesh Raskar to address problems specific to the Kumbh Mela religious gathering in India. “This is a bottom-up approach to innovation,” says Raskar.
In an article for Science based off his AAAS Presidential Address, Phillip Sharp, Institute Professor and former president of the AAAS, discusses the need to accelerate the transition from discovery to innovation to address the challenges facing society. “To meet oncoming global challenges, we will need to better link discovery, innovation, and entrepreneurship,” Sharp explains.
Financial Times reporter John Authers highlights Prof. Andrew Lo’s work examining how human aversion to risk impacts financial decisions. Lo’s research provides evidence that “investors in markets will take risk-averse actions rather than the purely rational decisions that economists have classically assumed."