Theater Arts Associate Professor Jay Scheib wins Obie Award

The first work, Untitled Mars (This Title May Change), simulated Mars on Earth, coupling material from the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah with the science-fiction visions of Philip K. Dick, Stanislaw Lem and Kurd Lasewitz. The second work, Bellona, Destroyer of Cities, simulates a world that has become stuck in a loop of civil upheaval through Samuel R. Delany’s monumental novel Dhalgren. The final work, World of Wires, models one Earth inside of another Earth by borrowing heavily from the fictional backbone of computer science and artificial intelligence. It is a performance about the unveiling of a computer simulation so powerful that it is capable of simulating the world and everything in it. W.O.W was adapted by Scheib after the film Welt am Draht by Rainer Werner Fassbinder; the screenplay is based on the novel Simulacron-3 by American science fiction writer Daniel F. Galouye.

Reeling from the reality of people living their lives inside of machines, the play is an all-bets-are-off homage to the startling possibility that you too might be ones and zeroes in someone else’s programmed world. World of Wires is also inspired by the works of Oxford University Professor Nick Bostrom, including his compelling paper, “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?”

Directed by Scheib, the sold-out three-week engagement in January 2012 at the Kitchen in New York featured Sarita Choudhury, Mikéah Ernest Jennings, Rosalie Lowe, Jon Morris, Ayesha Ngaujah, Laine Rettmer and Tanya Selvaratnam. The scenic design was by Sara Brown (a lecturer in theater arts at MIT), the costumes by Alba Clemente, the sound design by Anouschka Trocker, lighting and video by Josh Higgason, and camera by Jay Scheib. The stage manager was MIT alumna Susan Wilson ’08. Kasper Sejersen and Laine Rettmer were the assistant directors, and Tanya Selvaratnam was the producer.

Civil engineers find savings where the rubber meets the road

A new study by civil engineers at MIT shows that using stiffer pavements on the nation’s roads could reduce vehicle fuel consumption by as much as 3 percent — a savings that could add up to 273 million barrels of crude oil per year, or $15.6 billion at today’s oil prices. This would result in an accompanying annual decrease in CO₂ emissions of 46.5 million metric tons.

The study, released in a recent peer-reviewed report, is the first to use mathematical modeling rather than roadway experiments to look at the effect of pavement deflection on vehicle fuel consumption across the entire U.S. road network. A paper on this work has also been accepted for publication later this year in the Transportation Research Record.

By modeling the physical forces at work when a rubber tire rolls over pavement, the study’s authors, Professor Franz-Josef Ulm and PhD student Mehdi Akbarian, conclude that because of the way energy is dissipated, the maximum deflection of the load is behind the path of travel. This has the effect of making the tires on the vehicle drive continuously up a slight slope, which increases fuel use.

The deflection under the tires is similar to that of beach sand underfoot: With each step, the foot tamps down the sand from heel to toe, requiring the pedestrian to expend more energy than when walking on a hard surface. On the roadways, even a 1 percent increase in aggregate fuel consumption leaves a substantial environmental footprint. Stiffer pavements — which can be achieved by improving the material properties or increasing the thickness of the asphalt layers, switching to a concrete layer or asphalt-concrete composite structures, or changing the thickness or composition of the sublayers of the road — would decrease deflection and reduce that footprint.

“This work is literally where the rubber meets the road,” says Ulm, the George Macomber Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “We’ve got to find ways to improve the environmental footprint of our roadway infrastructure, but previous empirical studies to determine fuel savings all looked at the impact of roughness and pavement type for a few non-conclusive scenarios, and the findings sometimes differed by an order of magnitude. Where do you find identical roadways on the same soils under the same conditions? You can’t. You get side effects. The empirical approach doesn’t work. So we used statistical analysis to avoid those side effects.”

The new study defines the key parameters involved in analyzing the structural (thickness) and material (stiffness and type of subgrade) properties of pavements. The mathematical model is therefore based on the actual mechanical behavior of pavements under load. To obtain their results, Ulm and Akbarian fed their model data on 5,643 representative sections of the nation’s roadways taken from Federal Highway Administration data sets. These data include information on the surface and subsurface materials of pavements and the soils beneath, as well as the number, type and weight of vehicles using the roads. The researchers also calculated and incorporated the contact area of vehicle tires with the pavement.

Ulm and Akbarian estimate that the combined effects of road roughness and deflection are responsible for an annual average extra fuel consumption of 7,000 to 9,000 gallons per lane-mile on high-volume roads (not including the most heavily traveled roads) in the 8.5 million lane-miles making up the U.S. roadway network. They say that up to 80 percent of that extra fuel consumption, in excess of the vehicles’ normal fuel use, could be reduced through improvements in the basic properties of the asphalt, concrete and other materials used to build the roads.

“We’re wasting fuel unnecessarily because pavement design has been based solely on minimizing initial costs more than performance — how well the pavement holds up — when it should also take into account the environmental footprint of pavements based on variations in external conditions,” Akbarian says. “We can now include environmental impacts, pavement performance and — eventually — a cost model to optimize pavement design and obtain the lowest cost and lowest environmental impact with the best structural performance.”

The researchers say the initial cost outlay for better pavements would quickly pay for itself not just in fuel efficiency and decreased CO₂ emissions, but also in reduced maintenance costs.

“There’s a misconception that if you want to go green you have to spend more money, but that’s not necessarily true,” Akbarian says. “Better pavement design over a lifetime would save much more money in fuel costs than the initial cost of improvements. And the state departments of transportation would save money while reducing their environmental footprint over time, because the roads won’t deteriorate as quickly.”

This research was conducted as part of the Concrete Sustainability Hub at MIT, which is sponsored by the Portland Cement Association and the Ready Mixed Concrete Research & Education Foundation with the goal of improving the environmental footprint of that industry.

“This work is not about asphalt versus concrete,” Ulm says. “The ultimate goal is to make our nation’s infrastructure more sustainable. Our model will help make this possible by giving pavement engineers a tool for including sustainability as a design parameter, just like safety, cost and ride quality.”

“This MIT research pioneered a rigorous mathematical framework relating fuel consumption with mathematically predicted pavement deflection. This framework lays a foundation for continued development and future improvement of advanced pavement-vehicle interaction models,” says Lev Khazanovich, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Minnesota who was not involved in this research. “Integration of the results of this study with the Mechanistic-Empirical Pavement Design Guide recently adopted by the American Association of State Highway Transportation Officials will enable transportation agencies to account for traffic fuel consumption in pavement design decisions. This makes Akbarian and Ulm’s research especially important today in light of the efforts of transportation agencies to reduce the environmental footprint of the transportation system.”

Is Mobile Computing Good For Productivity?

Consultant Deborah Lovich could be accomplishing the management feat of the mobile era. She’s convinced hundreds of agile-thumbed, on-at-all-hours colleagues to put down their smart phones and stop working or checking e-mail all evening long.

True, the break happens only once a week. But Boston Consulting Group’s “predictable time off” experiment has been a hit. Since it was widely introduced in 2009, more than 900 internal teams have taken part, and the program has become standard practice at most BCG offices in North America and Europe.

Lovich, head of BCG staff in Boston, developed the program with Harvard Business School professor Leslie Perlow, who in studies begun in 2005 found that BCG consultants felt burnout not only because of long hours, but because they could never predict or control when they might have a break from work.

The problem was BlackBerrys and other mobile devices. BCG workers felt pressure to respond to e-mails from a boss or client right away, even when it wasn’t urgent. Responding to one message could set off a chain reaction of e-mails lasting until bedtime.

“Our lives are all about being either on, or on call,” says Perlow, who just published Sleeping with Your Smartphone: How to Break the 24/7 Habit and Change the Way You Work, a book describing her work with BCG and other companies. “That is the fundamental interesting question: What is work these days? How do you define it? Is it work when you’re at the beach thinking you have to check your e-mail?”

In one survey of 1,600 managers from multiple companies, Perlow found that about half checked e-mail continuously while on vacation or just before bedtime. Some didn’t stop there: 26 percent admitted to Perlow that they brought their mobile device into bed with them.

Today, BCG teams that join the predictable time off program meet regularly to work out schedules so that every member can take an official break from e-mail one night each week, not including weekends.

While digital communications and computers have led to huge gains in efficiency, there is evidence that heavy smart-phone use may also interfere with work. Statistics gathered by Perlow, for example, indicate that consultants who had time off felt happier and better at their jobs than those who did not. They were also more efficient. One team she studied decreased its average workweek from 65 to 58 hours while accomplishing essentially the same amount.

Some companies, particularly in Europe, are starting to enforce time away from e-mail during nonwork hours. Volkswagen has programmed its e-mail servers to stop sending messages to many of its German employees after their shifts end. Atos Origin, a French IT company, has plans to end internal company e-mail entirely, claiming it is a waste of time—only 15 of the 100 e-mails its average employee received each day were deemed useful.

It’s not just about time off. In some professions, e-mail and the Web are considered a hazard to clear decision making at work. Some venture capitalists who invest in mobile devices say tablets and phones should be banned from board meetings when important decisions are being made. In hospitals, experts worry, the devices are now the cause of “distracted doctoring.”

The blurring of work and personal life doesn’t only affect highly paid white-collar workers. Union workers, or those with regulated work hours, are also using mobile devices. That is raising new legal questions: Brazil, for example, just passed a law requiring employers to pay overtime when employees use smart phones at home to answer messages from work.

 

Google’s Knowledge Graph and Two Other Stories You Need to Know

Welcome to this morning’s edition of “First To Know,” a series in which we keep you in the know on what’s happening in the digital world. Today, we’re looking at three particularly interesting stories.

Google Revamps Search With Knowledge Graph

Google has made perhaps the most significant set of changes to its search engine yet with the rollout of the Knowledge Graph — a set of semantic tools which aim to make your search results more relevant and informative.

Google Search now asks you to point it into the right direction when offered ambiguous terms, and offers informative summaries for terms, with descriptions, photos and related items. The feature is live for users in the US, while other countries will get it in a matter of weeks.

Pinterest Raises $120 Million at a $1.5 Billion Valuation

Pinterest is raising $120 million at a $1 to $1.5 billion valuation, in order to fuel international expansion. Japanese commerce giant Raukten is leading the round with a $50 million investment.

US Smartphone Owners Use 28% More Apps Than Last Year [REPORT]

A new report from Nielsen sheds some light on app usage among US smartphone owners, and things are looking cheery for app developers. On average, a US smartphone owner uses 41 apps, a 28% year-over-year increase.

Furthermore, smartphone owners are spending more time using apps than using the mobile web, about 10% more than last year. As far as individual apps go, the top five are Facebook, YouTube, Android Market, Google Search, and Gmail.

2012 Computer Science Internships in Los Angeles, CA

Find a 2012 computer science internship in Los Angeles, CA. Do you enjoy building new algorithmic processes? Do you like thinking about computational theories and how they can scale to solve big technical problems? If your answer is yes, then you’re a perfect candidate for a computer science internship.

But what does an internship in computer science involve and what types of companies can you work for? A CS internship can take you down a lot of different paths, often depending on what type of programming languages you currently use and which you want to learn. Whether you are a front end coder, using Java and CSS, a back-end coder who currently works with Ruby, Python, or Scala, or a mobile developer who knows how to build on either the Android or the iPhone platform, there are a lot of ways you can make an impact at companies of various sizes. Chances are, by holding an internship in computer science, you’ll be working with several of these languages and learning the intricacies of each from veterans with plenty of experience in the field.

The really exciting thing about a computer science internship is the range of different companies to work for. Whether it’s a small startup, that needs extra hands to help push new code daily, or a large non-profit that needs a tech savvy student to build new site features, your skills will be in high demand during your computer science internship and there will be no shortage of challenges or learning experiences.

One of the other great aspects of being a computer science major is that your skills are in high demand. According to a recent Forbes study computer science majors are one of the top 10 most sought after hires, and often are getting paid some of the most competitive wages in the country for both jobs and internships. Average salaries tend to be in the $15 to $17 per hour range, but a really talented hacker can make up to $30 an hour at leading tech companies in Silicon Valley or Fortune 500s on the east coast or elsewhere.

With an internship in computer science, you will also be able to explore one of the many sub-fields such as computer graphics, computational problems, software engineering or quantitative analysis. So whether or not you’re a hard-core techie, any of the many CS internships will be the perfect start to developing a diverse skill set in relationship to writing code and advanced programming.

The elusive capacity of networks

Recently, one of the most intriguing developments in information theory has been a different kind of coding, called network coding, in which the question is how to encode information in order to maximize the capacity of a network as a whole. For information theorists, it was natural to ask how these two types of coding might be combined: If you want to both minimize error and maximize capacity, which kind of coding do you apply where, and when do you do the decoding?

What makes that question particularly hard to answer is that no one knows how to calculate the data capacity of a network as a whole — or even whether it can be calculated. Nonetheless, in the first half of a two-part paper, which was published recently in IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, MIT’s Muriel Médard, California Institute of Technology’s Michelle Effros and the late Ralf Koetter of the University of Technology in Munich show that in a wired network, network coding and error-correcting coding can be handled separately, without reduction in the network’s capacity. In the forthcoming second half of the paper, the same researchers demonstrate some bounds on the capacities of wireless networks, which could help guide future research in both industry and academia.

A typical data network consists of an array of nodes — which could be routers on the Internet, wireless base stations or even processing units on a single chip — each of which can directly communicate with a handful of its neighbors. When a packet of data arrives at a node, the node inspects its addressing information and decides which of several pathways to send it along.

Calculated confusion

With network coding, on the other hand, a node scrambles together the packets it receives and sends the hybrid packets down multiple paths; at each subsequent node they’re scrambled again in different ways. Counterintuitively, this can significantly increase the capacity of the network as a whole: Hybrid packets arrive at their destination along multiple paths. If one of those paths is congested, or if one of its links fails outright, the packets arriving via the other paths will probably contain enough information that the recipient can piece together the original message.

But each link between nodes could be noisy, so the information in the packets also needs to be encoded to correct for errors. “Suppose that I’m a node in a network, and I see a communication coming in, and it is corrupted by noise,” says Médard, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science. “I could try to remove the noise, but by doing that, I’m in effect making a decision right now that maybe would have been better taken by someone downstream from me who might have had more observations of the same source.”

On the other hand, Médard says, if a node simply forwards the data it receives without performing any error correction, it could end up squandering bandwidth. “If the node takes all the signal it has and does not whittle down his representation, then it might be using a lot of energy to transmit noise,” she says. “The question is, how much of the noise do I remove, and how much do I leave in?”

In their first paper, Médard and her colleagues analyze the case in which the noise in a given link is unrelated to the signals traveling over other links, as is true of most wired networks. In that case, the researchers show, the problems of error correction and network coding can be separated without limiting the capacity of the network as a whole.

Noisy neighbors

In the second paper, the researchers tackle the case in which the noise on a given link is related to the signals on other links, as is true of most wireless networks, since the transmissions of neighboring base stations can interfere with each other. This complicates things enormously: Indeed, Médard points out, information theorists still don’t know how to quantify the capacity of a simple three-node wireless network, in which two nodes relay messages to each other via a third node.

Nonetheless, Médard and her colleagues show how to calculate upper and lower bounds on the capacity of a given wireless network. While the gap between the bounds can be very large in practice, knowing the bounds could still help network operators evaluate the benefits of further research on network coding. If the observed bit rate on a real-world network is below the lower bound, the operator knows the minimum improvement that the ideal code would provide; if the observed rate is above the lower bound but below the upper, then the operator knows the maximum improvement that the ideal code might provide. If even the maximum improvement would afford only a small savings in operational expenses, the operator may decide that further research on improved coding isn’t worth the money.

“The separation theorem they proved is of fundamental interest,” says Raymond Yeung, a professor of information engineering and co-director of the Institute of Network Coding at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. “While the result itself is not surprising, it is somewhat unexpected that they were able to prove the result in such a general setting.”

Yeung cautions, however, that while the researchers have “decomposed a very difficult problem into two,” one of those problems “remains very difficult. … The bound is in terms of the solution to another problem which is difficult to solve,” he says. “It is not clear how tight this bound is; that needs further research.”

A new look at prolonged radiation exposure

“There are no data that say that’s a dangerous level,” says Yanch, a senior lecturer in MIT’s Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering. “This paper shows that you could go 400 times higher than average background levels and you’re still not detecting genetic damage. It could potentially have a big impact on tens if not hundreds of thousands of people in the vicinity of a nuclear powerplant accident or a nuclear bomb detonation, if we figure out just when we should evacuate and when it’s OK to stay where we are.”

Until now, very few studies have measured the effects of low doses of radiation delivered over a long period of time. This study is the first to measure the genetic damage seen at a level as low as 400 times background (0.0002 centigray per minute, or 105 cGy in a year).

“Almost all radiation studies are done with one quick hit of radiation. That would cause a totally different biological outcome compared to long-term conditions,” says Engelward, an associate professor of biological engineering at MIT.

How much is too much?

Background radiation comes from cosmic radiation and natural radioactive isotopes in the environment. These sources add up to about 0.3 cGy per year per person, on average.

“Exposure to low-dose-rate radiation is natural, and some people may even say essential for life. The question is, how high does the rate need to get before we need to worry about ill effects on our health?” Yanch says.

Previous studies have shown that a radiation level of 10.5 cGy, the total dose used in this study, does produce DNA damage if given all at once. However, for this study, the researchers spread the dose out over five weeks, using radioactive iodine as a source. The radiation emitted by the radioactive iodine is similar to that emitted by the damaged Fukushima reactor in Japan.

At the end of five weeks, the researchers tested for several types of DNA damage, using the most sensitive techniques available. Those types of damage fall into two major classes: base lesions, in which the structure of the DNA base (nucleotide) is altered, and breaks in the DNA strand. They found no significant increases in either type.

DNA damage occurs spontaneously even at background radiation levels, conservatively at a rate of about 10,000 changes per cell per day. Most of that damage is fixed by DNA repair systems within each cell. The researchers estimate that the amount of radiation used in this study produces an additional dozen lesions per cell per day, all of which appear to have been repaired.

Though the study ended after five weeks, Engelward believes the results would be the same for longer exposures. “My take on this is that this amount of radiation is not creating very many lesions to begin with, and you already have good DNA repair systems. My guess is that you could probably leave the mice there indefinitely and the damage wouldn’t be significant,” she says.

Doug Boreham, a professor of medical physics and applied radiation sciences at McMaster University, says the study adds to growing evidence that low doses of radiation are not as harmful as people often fear.

“Now, it’s believed that all radiation is bad for you, and any time you get a little bit of radiation, it adds up and your risk of cancer goes up,” says Boreham, who was not involved in this study. “There’s now evidence building that that is not the case.”

Conservative estimates

Most of the radiation studies on which evacuation guidelines have been based were originally done to establish safe levels for radiation in the workplace, Yanch says — meaning they are very conservative. In workplace cases, this makes sense because the employer can pay for shielding for all of their employees at once, which lowers the cost, she says.

However, “when you’ve got a contaminated environment, then the source is no longer controlled, and every citizen has to pay for their own dose avoidance,” Yanch says. “They have to leave their home or their community, maybe even forever. They often lose their jobs, like you saw in Fukushima. And there you really want to call into question how conservative in your analysis of the radiation effect you want to be. Instead of being conservative, it makes more sense to look at a best estimate of how hazardous radiation really is.”

Those conservative estimates are based on acute radiation exposures, and then extrapolating what might happen at lower doses and lower dose-rates, Engelward says. “Basically you’re using a data set collected based on an acute high dose exposure to make predictions about what’s happening at very low doses over a long period of time, and you don’t really have any direct data. It’s guesswork,” she says. “People argue constantly about how to predict what is happening at lower doses and lower dose-rates.”

However, the researchers say that more studies are needed before evacuation guidelines can be revised.

“Clearly these studies had to be done in animals rather than people, but many studies show that mice and humans share similar responses to radiation. This work therefore provides a framework for additional research and careful evaluation of our current guidelines,” Engelward says.

“It is interesting that, despite the evacuation of roughly 100,000 residents, the Japanese government was criticized for not imposing evacuations for even more people. From our studies, we would predict that the population that was left behind would not show excess DNA damage — this is something we can test using technologies recently developed in our laboratory,” she adds.

The first author on these studies is former MIT postdoc Werner Olipitz, and the work was done in collaboration with Department of Biological Engineering faculty Leona Samson and Peter Dedon. These studies were supported by the DOE and by MIT’s Center for Environmental Health Sciences.

Exploding the myths of manufacturing

The manufacturing sector, its advocates note, is burdened by negative stereotypes. Outsiders often mistakenly think that manufacturing consists of jobs that are “dumb, dirty and dull,” as MIT President Susan Hockfield said at a conference on the subject this week.

Many people also view manufacturing as being in a state of continual decline, a perspective Hockfield has encountered frequently. During discussions about manufacturing around the country over the last 12 to 18 months, “the majority of people I met would assure me without any apparent concern that nothing is made in America,” Hockfield said. “And they would further assert that we should be resigned to the sector’s demise, that it somehow wouldn’t matter.”

The facts present a different story, however. The United States added about 50,000 manufacturing jobs this January alone, the largest monthly gain since 1998. Companies such as Ford Motor Co. have moved overseas plants back to the United States. And high energy costs (which make global shipping more expensive), along with rising foreign wages in some industries, have provided reasons for companies to consider relocating their factories in America. 

To be sure, manufacturing has seen major job reductions in the United States: from 18 million jobs in 2001 to 12 million today. Even so, the sector still accounts for 70 percent of private-sector R&D spending in America and 90 percent of U.S. patents issued today, as U.S. Commerce Secretary John Bryson noted in his remarks at the conference on Wednesday, while listing a slew of administration policy proposals intended to boost manufacturing.

“Those who thought American manufacturing was somehow gone for good have been forced, I think, to re-examine their views,” Bryson said. “I strongly believe that manufacturing, particularly advanced manufacturing based on new technologies, is of fundamental importance to our country’s economic strength in the 21st century.”

A boost from government

The conference, “The Future of Manufacturing in the U.S.,” held on May 8 and 9 at MIT, featured talks by a range of government officials, business executives, management scholars, engineers, economists and labor representatives, with several hundred business leaders and students in attendance. The event was co-sponsored by LGO, a program that offers students both MBAs and engineering master’s degrees, and by MIT’s Industrial Liaison Program (ILP), which develops partnerships between MIT researchers and corporations from around the globe.

Many speakers, like Bryson, voiced the idea that manufacturing remains an essential component of economic growth in the United States.

“It’s very difficult to think about an innovation economy without manufacturing at the core of it,” said Daron Acemoglu, the Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of Economics at MIT, whose work examines, among other things, the institutional conditions that encourage innovation. 

In that vein, a prime topic of discussion at the conference was how government can further encourage innovation; Bryson outlined a series of White House proposals to aid manufacturing. Many of these involve the tax code: tax credits that reduce moving expenses when companies bring jobs back to the United States; a permanent tax credit for R&D; and a reduction in the corporate tax rate. 

Hockfield, who co-chairs the steering committee of the White House’s Advanced Manufacturing Partnership (AMP), discussed some of the imminent recommendations that group is going to make. These fall into three main categories, Hockfield noted: policies intended to improve the business climate for manufacturers; programs to encourage people to develop skills useful for manufacturing jobs, especially through community college education; and funding for new regional technology-development test beds called Manufacturing Innovation Institutes.

“No matter how brilliant our new innovations, they will not translate into the kind of strong economic growth and new jobs that we need unless some substantial fraction of goods are really made in America,” Hockfield said.

Many of the business leaders who spoke also called for new government policies to promote manufacturing.

“These jobs aren’t going to return on their own,” said Joseph Jimenez, CEO of pharmaceutical company Novartis, adding: “I believe we can reclaim leadership in manufacturing, but only if we act now.” Jimenez’s list of needed changes included more incentives for business investment; better worker training on the part of companies, not just within the education system; and continued innovation by U.S. firms.

Innovation from within

Indeed, in addition to government incentives, Jimenez said, U.S. manufacturers must “build leadership in manufacturing innovation” themselves. As he detailed, Novartis, in collaboration with MIT researchers, is working to develop a new system of “continuous manufacturing” that would dramatically reduce the time it takes to produce commercial drugs. 

Similarly, Diana Tremblay, global chief manufacturing officer at General Motors Co., noted that along with the federal government’s efforts to pull the company out of its recent bankruptcy, many of the crucial changes in the firm involved manufacturing adjustments. GM is reducing its number of distinct vehicle architectures from 30 in 2010 to a planned 14 by 2018, she said, giving it more cost efficiency and design flexibility. When a major 24-hour assembly plant in Kansas recently needed to replace a 1.3 mile-long conveyor belt chain without shutting down for an extended time, she noted, its engineers figured out a new method of doing so: They replaced small increments of chain while the assembly line continued to run.

And while manufacturing executives frequently say they face a shortfall of skilled workers, William Green, executive chairman of the management consultant Accenture, said firms should always be able to find new ways of using their own employees to fill skills gaps in the manufacturing process.

“I’ve never seen a company that didn’t have talent trapped somewhere in its ecosystem,” Green said.

It remains to be seen precisely which areas of technological research will provide the biggest platforms for economic growth. Olivier de Weck, an associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics and engineering systems at MIT and executive director of the Institute’s ongoing study of Production in the Innovation Economy (PIE), listed a series of promising research topics, including lightweight materials, flexible electronics, pharmaceuticals, rapid prototyping — such as 3-D printing — and the use of recycled materials for manufacturing. PIE will release an interim report on its research in June of this year.

Thus, while manufacturing is not in a state of terminal decline, as some may think, it is still in a state of uncertainty.

“There is much more work to do to build on the positive trends we see, and create more jobs right here in the United States,” Bryson said.

Whirr, click, hum: Robots go at it in 2.007 finale

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May 11, 2012

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MIT’s Johnson Athletic Center took on the aura of an old-fashioned county fair on Thursday night, complete with popcorn, balloons, jugglers, cotton candy and pitchmen wearing brightly colored jackets and bowties. But rather than ring tosses and sheep-shearing, the central event was a series of one-on-one matchups between an amazing variety of robots that students have spent the whole semester designing, building and testing.

This was the culmination of MIT’s renowned course in mechanical engineering, “Design and Manufacturing 1,” better known by its course number, 2.007. As always, a series of tasks set by the designers of this year’s competition triggered a wild proliferation of imaginative designs and strategies. But in the end, relatively simple, stable and repeatable approaches won the competition.
“You don’t always know what the best approach is going to be,” says Daniel Frey, associate professor of mechanical engineering and engineering systems and the lead instructor of the class. And this year, a variety of tasks for the robots to choose from, on a playing field modeled after a county fair, added to the variety of approaches.

Even seemingly simple challenges can lead to inventive solutions: For example, a “strength tester” — the carnival game where striking a lever with a mallet sends a projectile upward to strike a bell — was approached quite differently by different students. Some struck the lever with an actual hammer or mallet mounted on a hinge, while some ignored the lever and built miniature elevators to gently lift the projectile up to the bell; others built spring-loaded spatula-like devices to flip the projectile up.

Besides the strength test, other challenges teams could choose for their robots included the mechanical removal of tickets from a roll — which turned out to be surprisingly difficult — and the inflating of a balloon from a container of compressed air — made harder by the difficulty of maintaining a tight seal. A final challenge was a Ferris wheel that could be turned in one direction or the other by robots on opposite sides of the field; the number of rotations the Ferris wheel made served to multiply the points gained through successful completion of the other tests.

Most of the students, all of whom were issued identical kits of parts to work with at the beginning of the term, built single robots to perform one or more of the tasks. But the rules allowed for making multiple robots, and the ultimate winner, Kawin Surakitbovorn, a sophomore majoring in physics, used a two-robot system. One device used a scissors-jack elevator to raise the strength-test projectile, while a second, much smaller robot concentrated on turning the Ferris wheel.

The complexity of the playing field, the different ways of scoring, and the vagaries of actual competition — where sometimes a battery fails or a small piece falls off a robot — led to a wide range of outcomes: Even though preliminary matchups had already winnowed the roughly 130 robots to just 32 final contestants, the scores in the finals ranged all the way from 0 to 150.

As is so often the case at MIT, the students had to deal with competing demands for their time. Runner-up Sarah Southerland, a senior majoring in architecture and mechanical engineering, had to leave in the middle of the competition to take part in a dance performance, getting back in time to control her robot for the final match. Unlike many of the machines that were designed to perform multiple tasks, Southerland’s single small robot was designed to do a single task steadily and reliably: lifting the strength-test projectile using a spatula-like device.

While students compete intensely in the 2.007 finale, winning doesn’t have any effect on a student’s grade, and participation in the contest is optional. But this year’s winners did earn more than just bragging rights: In addition to their awards, the top three finishers won the opportunity to fly to Japan this summer to represent MIT in an intensive two-week International Design Competition.

Two additional cash awards were given for robot designs that were especially clever and innovative, but did not end up placing in the top ranks. The awards went to sophomore Sam Whittemore (for an interesting approach to the strength test that used a spinning flywheel to build up momentum before striking the lever) and junior Joe Church (for a control system that used a touch-tone phone, an unusual system of pivoting wheels, and a clever mechanism for raising the projectile via a device akin to an oversized tape-measure).

“I think the most impressive thing is the teamwork,” Frey says: Even though students compete individually, throughout the semester they share ideas and help each other out with problems. That kind of teamwork and cooperation, he says, is one of the class’s most important lessons.

Do You Know How Your Brand is Perceived Online?

Sharing personal experiences online has become somewhat of a national pastime. So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that as consumers spend more time online that online channels and dialogue are increasingly impacting companies’ brands. A large company may be able to afford to hire a dedicated consultant who manages its online presence. In contrast, a smaller business likely has to manage its online presence internally, creating yet another task heaped on to someone’s already overflowing plate.

I’m excited to share an exciting, new tool Brandify, which can help your business understand and enhance its online presence. Brandify is free and easy to use and designed specifically for small and medium businesses.

To register, you just log in through an existing Windows Live, Facebook or LinkedIn account and claim your company’s website. After scouring more than 80 online sources, Brandify will then provide a comprehensive assessment of your company’s online presence. When this process is complete, it will rate a business with a score between 450 and 850 and offer prescriptive guidance on areas of focus to boost your brand image.

You’ve heard of a SWOT? Brandify essentially conducts a SWOT of your brand’s online standing, evaluating your company’s online strengths (good online visibility and positive reviews), weaknesses (little information available online or negative statements), and opportunities (sites to list your business on and social networks to get involved in), and assesses the presence of your competitors, or your “threats.”  With all this information plus Brandify’s recommended next steps, your business then has the resources necessary to take action to tweak, improve or outright overhaul your online assets and messages.

Brandify also offers ongoing support as a management tool, constantly monitoring for new sites to launch and reviews and conversations about your brand to occur. Consider the Internet as an ongoing conversation. You want your business to be mentioned by others positively and often, but for this to happen you should actively participate in some type of social network. And sometimes the truth hurts…and helps. Believe it or not, you want to know about negative online conversations about your business so you can address issues and move the conversation toward a solution for the customer.