Download or read book When M I T Was Boston Tech 1861 1916 written by Samuel Cate 1872-1962 Prescott and published by Hassell Street Press. This book was released on 2021-09-09 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Download or read book Becoming MIT written by David Kaiser and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The evolution of MIT, as seen in a series of crucial decisions over the years.
Download or read book Mind and Hand written by Julius Adams Stratton and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 830 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The intellectual heritage of MIT: an account of "the flow of ideas" about science and education that shaped the Institute as it emerged and that inspires it today. The motto on the seal of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "Mens et Manus" -- "mind and hand" -- signals the Institute's dedication to what MIT founder William Barton Rogers called "the most earnest cooperation of intelligent culture with industrial pursuits." Mind and Hand traces the ideas about science and education that have shaped MIT and defined its mission -- from the new science of the Enlightenment era and the ideals of representative democracy spurred by the Industrial Revolution to new theories on the nature and role of higher education in nineteenth-century America. MIT emerged in mid-century as an experiment in scientific and technical education, with its origins in the tension between these old and new ideas. Mind and Hand was undertaken by Julius Stratton after his retirement from the presidency of MIT and continued by Loretta Mannix after his death; Philip N. Alexander, of the MIT Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies, stepped in to complete the project. The combined efforts of these three authors have given us what Julius Stratton envisioned -- "a coherent account of the flow of ideas" from which MIT emerged.
Download or read book When MIT Was Boston Tech written by Samuel C. Prescott and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2003-03-17 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is more than formal history. It is a personal report, an essay in interpretation and remembrance which is important both for what it tells about MIT's first half-century and for what it tells about what Dean Prescott found important and interesting in that half-century.Dean Prescott was associated with the Institute for nearly two thirds of a century. He knew the Institute from the vantage points of student, teacher, department head, dean, alumnus, and parent. He had a formative influence on its policy-making and was an articulate protagonist of the Institute's program and policies. He viewed MIT's formative years not only with an expert's understanding but out of a deep sense of loyalty and devotion. This book is a testament of faith in an institution, an earnest statement of the author's abiding belief in the staff, students, and alumni he has known. Dean Prescott's account begins four years before the first instruction was given on February 20, 1865 at "Boston Tech" in the vicinity of Copley Square, Boston and concludes with the Institute's establishment in Cambridge in 1916.
Download or read book The Technology Fallacy written by Gerald C. Kane and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2022-08-23 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why an organization's response to digital disruption should focus on people and processes and not necessarily on technology. Digital technologies are disrupting organizations of every size and shape, leaving managers scrambling to find a technology fix that will help their organizations compete. This book offers managers and business leaders a guide for surviving digital disruptions—but it is not a book about technology. It is about the organizational changes required to harness the power of technology. The authors argue that digital disruption is primarily about people and that effective digital transformation involves changes to organizational dynamics and how work gets done. A focus only on selecting and implementing the right digital technologies is not likely to lead to success. The best way to respond to digital disruption is by changing the company culture to be more agile, risk tolerant, and experimental. The authors draw on four years of research, conducted in partnership with MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte, surveying more than 16,000 people and conducting interviews with managers at such companies as Walmart, Google, and Salesforce. They introduce the concept of digital maturity—the ability to take advantage of opportunities offered by the new technology—and address the specifics of digital transformation, including cultivating a digital environment, enabling intentional collaboration, and fostering an experimental mindset. Every organization needs to understand its “digital DNA” in order to stop “doing digital” and start “being digital.” Digital disruption won't end anytime soon; the average worker will probably experience numerous waves of disruption during the course of a career. The insights offered by The Technology Fallacy will hold true through them all. A book in the Management on the Cutting Edge series, published in cooperation with MIT Sloan Management Review.
Download or read book Carbon Queen written by Maia Weinstock and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2022-03-01 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The life of trailblazing physicist Mildred Dresselhaus, who expanded our understanding of the physical world. As a girl in New York City in the 1940s, Mildred “Millie” Dresselhaus was taught that there were only three career options open to women: secretary, nurse, or teacher. But sneaking into museums, purchasing three-cent copies of National Geographic, and devouring books on the history of science ignited in Dresselhaus (1930–2017) a passion for inquiry. In Carbon Queen, science writer Maia Weinstock describes how, with curiosity and drive, Dresselhaus defied expectations and forged a career as a pioneering scientist and engineer. Dresselhaus made highly influential discoveries about the properties of carbon and other materials and helped reshape our world in countless ways—from electronics to aviation to medicine to energy. She was also a trailblazer for women in STEM and a beloved educator, mentor, and colleague. Her path wasn’t easy. Dresselhaus’s Bronx childhood was impoverished. Her graduate adviser felt educating women was a waste of time. But Dresselhaus persisted, finding mentors in Nobel Prize–winning physicists Rosalyn Yalow and Enrico Fermi. Eventually, Dresselhaus became one of the first female professors at MIT, where she would spend nearly six decades. Weinstock explores the basics of Dresselhaus’s work in carbon nanoscience accessibly and engagingly, describing how she identified key properties of carbon forms, including graphite, buckyballs, nanotubes, and graphene, leading to applications that range from lighter, stronger aircraft to more energy-efficient and flexible electronics.
Download or read book Retooling written by Rosalind Williams and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2003-08-11 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A humanistic account of the changing role of technology in society, by a historian and a former Dean of Students and Undergraduate Education at MIT. When Warren Kendall Lewis left Spring Garden Farm in Delaware in 1901 to enter MIT, he had no idea that he was becoming part of a profession that would bring untold good to his country but would also contribute to the death of his family's farm. In this book written a century later, Professor Lewis's granddaughter, a cultural historian who has served in the administration of MIT, uses her grandfather's and her own experience to make sense of the rapidly changing role of technology in contemporary life. Rosalind Williams served as Dean of Students and Undergraduate Education at MIT from 1995 through 2000. From this vantage point, she watched a wave of changes, some planned and some unexpected, transform many aspects of social and working life—from how students are taught to how research and accounting are done—at this major site of technological innovation. In Retooling, she uses this local knowledge to draw more general insights into contemporary society's obsession with technology. Today technology-driven change defines human desires, anxieties, memories, imagination, and experiences of time and space in unprecedented ways. But technology, and specifically information technology, does not simply influence culture and society; it is itself inherently cultural and social. If there is to be any reconciliation between technological change and community, Williams argues, it will come from connecting technological and social innovation—a connection demonstrated in the history that unfolds in this absorbing book.
Download or read book Teaching Computational Thinking written by Maureen D. Neumann and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-12-21 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A guide for educators to incorporate computational thinking—a set of cognitive skills applied to problem solving—into a broad range of subjects. Computational thinking—a set of mental and cognitive tools applied to problem solving—is a fundamental skill that all of us (and not just computer scientists) draw on. Educators have found that computational thinking enhances learning across a range of subjects and reinforces students’ abilities in reading, writing, and arithmetic. This book offers a guide for incorporating computational thinking into middle school and high school classrooms, presenting a series of activities, projects, and tasks that employ a range of pedagogical practices and cross a variety of content areas. As students problem solve, communicate, persevere, work as a team, and learn from mistakes, they develop a concrete understanding of the abstract principles used in computer science to create code and other digital artifacts. The book guides students and teachers to integrate computer programming with visual art and geometry, generating abstract expressionist–style images; construct topological graphs that represent the relationships between characters in such literary works as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and Romeo and Juliet; apply Newtonian physics to the creation of computer games; and locate, analyze, and present empirical data relevant to social and political issues. Finally, the book lists a variety of classroom resources, including the programming languages Scratch (free to all) and Codesters (free to teachers). An accompanying website contains the executable programs used in the book’s activities.
Download or read book Technology and the Dream written by Clarence G. Williams and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2003-02-28 with total page 1060 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Transcripts of more than seventy-five oral history interviews in which the interviewees assess their MIT experience and reflect on the role of blacks at MIT and beyond. This book grew out of the Blacks at MIT History Project, whose mission is to document the black presence at MIT. The main body of the text consists of transcripts of more than seventy-five oral history interviews, in which the interviewees assess their MIT experience and reflect on the role of blacks at MIT and beyond. Although most of the interviewees are present or former students, black faculty, administrators, and staff are also represented, as are nonblack faculty and administrators who have had an impact on blacks at MIT. The interviewees were selected with an eye to presenting the broadest range of issues and personalities, as well as a representative cross section by time period and category. Each interviewee was asked to discuss family background; education; role models and mentors; experiences of racism and race-related issues; choice of field and career; goals; adjustment to the MIT environment; best and worst MIT experiences; experience with MIT support services; relationships with MIT students, faculty, and staff; advice to present or potential MIT students; and advice to the MIT administration. A recurrent theme is that MIT's rigorous teaching instills the confidence to deal with just about any hurdle in professional life, and that an MIT degree opens many doors and supplies instant credibility. Each interview includes biographical notes and pictures. The book also includes a general introduction, a glossary, and appendixes describing the project's methodology.
Download or read book The Longevity Economy written by Joseph F. Coughlin and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2017-11-07 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Oldness: a social construct at odds with reality that constrains how we live after middle age and stifles business thinking on how to best serve a group of consumers, workers, and innovators that is growing larger and wealthier with every passing day. Over the past two decades, Joseph F. Coughlin has been busting myths about aging with groundbreaking multidisciplinary research into what older people actually want -- not what conventional wisdom suggests they need. In The Longevity Economy, Coughlin provides the framing and insight business leaders need to serve the growing older market: a vast, diverse group of consumers representing every possible level of health and wealth, worth about $8 trillion in the United States alone and climbing. Coughlin provides deep insight into a population that consistently defies expectations: people who, through their continued personal and professional ambition, desire for experience, and quest for self-actualization, are building a striking, unheralded vision of longer life that very few in business fully understand. His focus on women -- they outnumber men, control household spending and finances, and are leading the charge toward tomorrow's creative new narrative of later life -- is especially illuminating. Coughlin pinpoints the gap between myth and reality and then shows businesses how to bridge it. As the demographics of global aging transform and accelerate, it is now critical to build a new understanding of the shifting physiological, cognitive, social, family, and psychological realities of the longevity economy.
Download or read book Architects of the Information Society written by Simson Garfinkel and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) hasbeen responsible for some of the most significant technological achievements of the past fewdecades. Much of the hardware and software driving the information revolution has been, andcontinues to be, created at LCS. Anyone who sends and receives email, communicates with colleaguesthrough a LAN, surfs the Web, or makes decisions using a spreadsheet is benefiting from thecreativity of LCS members.LCS is an interdepartmental laboratory that brings together faculty,researchers, and students in a broad program of study, research, and experimentation. Theirprincipal goal is to pursue innovations in information technology that will improve people's lives.LCS members have been instrumental in the development of ARPAnet, the Internet, the Web, Ethernet,time-shared computers, UNIX, RSA encryption, the X Windows system, NuBus, and many othertechnologies.This book, published in celebration of LCS's thirty-fifth anniversary, chronicles itshistory, achievements, and continued importance to computer science. The essays are complemented byhistorical photographs.
Download or read book The Age of Living Machines How Biology Will Build the Next Technology Revolution written by Susan Hockfield and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2019-05-07 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Entertaining and prescient…Hockfield demonstrates how nature’s molecular riches may be leveraged to provide potential solutions to some of humanity’s existential challenges." —Adrian Woolfson, Science A century ago, discoveries in physics came together with engineering to produce an array of astonishing new technologies that radically reshaped the world: radios, televisions, aircraft, computers, and a host of still-evolving digital tools. Today, a new technological convergence—of biology and engineering—promises to create the tools necessary to tackle the threats we now face, including climate change, drought, famine, and disease World-renowned neuroscientist and academic leader Susan Hockfield describes the most exciting new developments and the scientists and engineers who helped to create them. Virus-built batteries. Cancer-detecting nanoparticles. Computer-engineered crops. Together, they highlight the promise of the technology revolution of the twenty-first century to overcome some of the greatest humanitarian, medical, and environmental challenges of our time.
Download or read book Building Technology Transfer within Research Universities written by Thomas J. Allen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-09-18 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Academic thought-leaders in the field of technology transfer analyze critically the factors behind success-oriented entrepreneurial start-up cultures on university campuses.
Download or read book The Poison Squad written by Deborah Blum and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-09-25 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book The inspiration for PBS's AMERICAN EXPERIENCE film The Poison Squad. From Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times-bestselling author Deborah Blum, the dramatic true story of how food was made safe in the United States and the heroes, led by the inimitable Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, who fought for change By the end of nineteenth century, food was dangerous. Lethal, even. "Milk" might contain formaldehyde, most often used to embalm corpses. Decaying meat was preserved with both salicylic acid, a pharmaceutical chemical, and borax, a compound first identified as a cleaning product. This was not by accident; food manufacturers had rushed to embrace the rise of industrial chemistry, and were knowingly selling harmful products. Unchecked by government regulation, basic safety, or even labelling requirements, they put profit before the health of their customers. By some estimates, in New York City alone, thousands of children were killed by "embalmed milk" every year. Citizens--activists, journalists, scientists, and women's groups--began agitating for change. But even as protective measures were enacted in Europe, American corporations blocked even modest regulations. Then, in 1883, Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, a chemistry professor from Purdue University, was named chief chemist of the agriculture department, and the agency began methodically investigating food and drink fraud, even conducting shocking human tests on groups of young men who came to be known as, "The Poison Squad." Over the next thirty years, a titanic struggle took place, with the courageous and fascinating Dr. Wiley campaigning indefatigably for food safety and consumer protection. Together with a gallant cast, including the muckraking reporter Upton Sinclair, whose fiction revealed the horrific truth about the Chicago stockyards; Fannie Farmer, then the most famous cookbook author in the country; and Henry J. Heinz, one of the few food producers who actively advocated for pure food, Dr. Wiley changed history. When the landmark 1906 Food and Drug Act was finally passed, it was known across the land, as "Dr. Wiley's Law." Blum brings to life this timeless and hugely satisfying "David and Goliath" tale with righteous verve and style, driving home the moral imperative of confronting corporate greed and government corruption with a bracing clarity, which speaks resoundingly to the enormous social and political challenges we face today.
Download or read book Being Material written by Marie-Pier Boucher and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-10-22 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explorations of the many ways of being material in the digital age. In his oracular 1995 book Being Digital, Nicholas Negroponte predicted that social relations, media, and commerce would move from the realm of “atoms to bits”—that human affairs would be increasingly untethered from the material world. And yet in 2019, an age dominated by the digital, we have not quite left the material world behind. In Being Material, artists and technologists explore the relationship of the digital to the material, demonstrating that processes that seem wholly immaterial function within material constraints. Digital technologies themselves, they remind us, are material things—constituted by atoms of gold, silver, silicon, copper, tin, tungsten, and more. The contributors explore five modes of being material: programmable, wearable, livable, invisible, and audible. Their contributions take the form of reports, manifestos, philosophical essays, and artist portfolios, among other configurations. The book's cover merges the possibilities of paper with those of the digital, featuring a bookmark-like card that, when “seen” by a smartphone, generates graphic arrangements that unlock films, music, and other dynamic content on the book's website. At once artist's book, digitally activated object, and collection of scholarship, this book both demonstrates and chronicles the many ways of being material. Contributors Christina Agapakis, Azra Akšamija, Sandy Alexandre, Dewa Alit, George Barbastathis, Maya Beiser, Marie-Pier Boucher, Benjamin H. Bratton, Hussein Chalayan, Jim Cybulski, Tal Danino, Deborah G. Douglas, Arnold Dreyblatt, M. Amah Edoh, Michelle Tolini Finamore, Team Foldscope and Global Foldscope community, Ben Fry, Victor Gama, Stefan Helmreich, Hyphen-Labs, Leila Kinney, Rebecca Konte, Winona LaDuke, Brendan Landis, Grace Leslie, Bill Maurer, Lucy McRae, Tom Özden-Schilling, Trevor Paglen, Lisa Parks, Nadya Peek, Claire Pentecost, Manu Prakash,Casey Reas, Paweł Romańczuk, Natasha D. Schüll, Nick Shapiro, Skylar Tibbits, Rebecca Uchill, Evan Ziporyn Book Design: E Roon Kang Electronics, interactions, and product designer: Marcelo Coelho
Download or read book The City of Tomorrow written by Carlo Ratti and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-28 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since cities emerged ten thousand years ago, they have become one of the most impressive artifacts of humanity. But their evolution has been anything but linear—cities have gone through moments of radical change, turning points that redefine their very essence. In this book, a renowned architect and urban planner who studies the intersection of cities and technology argues that we are in such a moment. The authors explain some of the forces behind urban change and offer new visions of the many possibilities for tomorrow’s city. Pervasive digital systems that layer our cities are transforming urban life. The authors provide a front-row seat to this change. Their work at the MIT Senseable City Laboratory allows experimentation and implementation of a variety of urban initiatives and concepts, from assistive condition-monitoring bicycles to trash with embedded tracking sensors, from mobility to energy, from participation to production. They call for a new approach to envisioning cities: futurecraft, a symbiotic development of urban ideas by designers and the public. With such participation, we can collectively imagine, examine, choose, and shape the most desirable future of our cities.
Download or read book Technology and Society written by Deborah G. Johnson and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2008-10-17 with total page 877 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An anthology of writings by thinkers ranging from Freeman Dyson to Bruno Latour that focuses on the interconnections of technology, society, and values and how these may affect the future. Technological change does not happen in a vacuum; decisions about which technologies to develop, fund, market, and use engage ideas about values as well as calculations of costs and benefits. This anthology focuses on the interconnections of technology, society, and values. It offers writings by authorities as varied as Freeman Dyson, Laurence Lessig, Bruno Latour, and Judy Wajcman that will introduce readers to recent thinking about technology and provide them with conceptual tools, a theoretical framework, and knowledge to help understand how technology shapes society and how society shapes technology. It offers readers a new perspective on such current issues as globalization, the balance between security and privacy, environmental justice, and poverty in the developing world. The careful ordering of the selections and the editors' introductions give Technology and Society a coherence and flow that is unusual in anthologies. The book is suitable for use in undergraduate courses in STS and other disciplines. The selections begin with predictions of the future that range from forecasts of technological utopia to cautionary tales. These are followed by writings that explore the complexity of sociotechnical systems, presenting a picture of how technology and society work in step, shaping and being shaped by one another. Finally, the book goes back to considerations of the future, discussing twenty-first-century challenges that include nanotechnology, the role of citizens in technological decisions, and the technologies of human enhancement.
