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Posts tagged mit
OLPC Wants To Collaborate With India On The $35 Tablet
Aug 4th
Well well, One Laptop Per Child Corp does not look at India’s $35 tablet as a competitor. Rather, OLPC wants to collaborate with India on the project. OLPC chief Nicholas Negroponte invited officials from the Indian Ministry Or Human Resource Development to visit MIT and see how the OLPC project has come along. The move seems to be a diplomatic one since the Indian tablet does not use Intel’s processors or chip set. Intel is one of the main sponsors and suppliers for the OLPC project. On a global scale that means a huge loss for Intel if the $35 tablet becomes successful.
Since there has been debate on India’s capability to deliver the product as promised, the OLPC invitation must provide the Indian project some amount of credibility. Looking at India’s track record of siding with the US in terms of technology (remember the $10 laptop drama where India ended up buying 250,000 pieces of OLPC laptops?) the $35 price tag might wither away to something on the lines of the how much an OLPC laptop costs.
Negroponte went on to advice the Indian government to use the $35 tablet to uplift primary school students rather than restricting the device to university students. He said
1. Focus on children 6 to 12 years old. They are your nation’s most precious natural resource. For primary school children, the tablet is not about computing or school, it is about hope. It makes passion the primary tool for learning.
2. Your tablet should be the death of rote learning, not the tool of it. A creative society is built not on memorizing facts, but by learning learning itself. Drill and practice is a mechanism of the industrial age, when repetition and uniformity were systemic. The digital age is one of personalization, collaboration and appropriation. OLPC’s approach to learning is called constructionism. We hope you adopt it too.
We too hope that this works out without sacrificing the Indian version of the device.
MIT researchers demonstrate how much candidate appearances affect election outcomes
Aug 1st
Per study, people around the world have similar ideas about what a good politician looks like. Read on.
MIT Students Develop A Low-Cost Portable Ventilator
Jul 20th
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — A team of students from MIT has devised a new low-cost ventilator to keep patients breathing in places that lack standard mechanical ventilators, or during times of emergency such as pandemics or natural disasters, when normal hospital resources may be overextended. They have designed a system that uses the same widely available
Ideabing Daily Roundup: Gasoline Edition
Jul 14th
MIT researchers create fibers that can detect and produce sound
How Many Gallons Of Fuel Are You Using Per Mile?
MIT researchers create fibers that can detect and produce sound
Jul 13th
For centuries, “man-made fibers” meant the raw stuff of clothes and ropes; in the information age, it’s come to mean the filaments of glass that carry data in communications networks. But to Yoel Fink, an associate professor of materials science and principal investigator at MIT’s Research Lab of Electronics, the threads used in textiles and even optical fibers are much too passive. For the past decade, his lab has been working to develop fibers with ever more sophisticated properties, to enable fabrics that can interact with their environment.
Cellphone-Based Eye-Test System Could Help Millions
Jul 8th
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — There are two standard systems for determining a prescription for eyeglasses. One is to have the patient look through a large device called a phoropter, fitted with dozens of different lenses that can be swung into place in front of each eye in various combinations, while the patient tries to read a
Two brain circuits found to be involved with habitual learning
Jul 2nd
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Driving to and from work is a habit for most commuters — we do it without really thinking. But before our commutes became routine, we had to learn our way through trial-and-error exploration. A new study out of MIT has found that there are two brain circuits involved with this kind of
Ideabing Daily Roundup- Nuclear Fusion Version
Jun 30th
DIY: More Nuclear Fusion Reactors View Out Of A Space Shuttle Computer Automatically Deciphers Ancient Language
Computer Automatically Deciphers Ancient Language
Jun 30th
In his 2002 book Lost Languages, Andrew Robinson, then the literary editor of the London Times’ higher-education supplement, declared that “successful archaeological decipherment has turned out to require a synthesis of logic and intuition … that computers do not (and presumably cannot) possess.”
Regina Barzilay, an associate professor in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, Ben Snyder, a grad student in her lab, and the University of Southern California’s Kevin Knight took that claim personally. At the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics in Sweden next month, they will present a paper on a new computer system that, in a matter of hours, deciphered much of the ancient Semitic language Ugaritic. In addition to helping archeologists decipher the eight or so ancient languages that have so far resisted their efforts, the work could also help expand the number of languages that automated translation systems like Google Translate can handle.
The Most Economical Airplane? MIT Thinks So
Jun 23rd
If you are flying to a place, you’re most likely to have done more damage to the planet than you can think. Now that the world is feeling guilty about pollution, MIT has stepped in to design an aircraft that will consume 70% less fuel than current commercial airplanes. The team also claims that the
