Final Journey to the Hubble Space Telescope
Astronaut Mike Massimino returns to MIT and shares his experience on the Space Shuttle Atlantis (STS-125). Topics include the challenges of space walking while repairing the Hubble, having the right tools on hand for high stakes repairs, and the long hours of practice that lead up to the task.
Welcomed back to MIT by Aer
Autism: What Do We Know? What Do We Need?
“I’ll give you the 30,000 foot view of autism.”
Remarking that autism today, in terms of interest and funding, is like cancer was 20 years ago,
Dr. Thomas Insel provides the latest medical and scientific views on this complex developmental brain disorder. The formal definition of autism includes three main componen
Iraq: What Now?
The gloves come off in this biting review of Bush Administration policy in “post-war Iraq.” Juan Cole believes the administration acted on a fundamental misunderstanding, imagining that by toppling the Hussein regime, all Iraqis “would be happy.” After the U.S. destroyed Hussein’s security apparatus, preexisting constituen
Bill Porter in Conversation with Howard Anderson
Some of the lessons Bill Porter picked up as a 13-year-old ranch hand in Colorado seem to have lasted a lifetime. When his boss told him to drive over a treacherous mountain pass into town for some chicken feed, Porter said he could not yet drive. He was told, “Just do it.” And when he faced taking a team of horses out to pas
El Sistema: Social Support and Advocacy Through Musical Education
Even in the confines of a panel discussion,
Gustavo Dudamel radiates so much passion and ebullience that it requires little imagination to see him at the podium with a baton in hand. MIT’s 2010 McDermott Award in the Arts winner is, at the tender age of 29, one of the world’s top conductors and music disseminators.
Digital comic museum
Digital Comic Museum is a very large website archive of U.S. comic books known to be in the public domain. As such, it includes a wealth of high-quality scans of vintage ("Golden Age", in the terminology of comic book collectors) comics, freely available for reading. Most comics are from the 1940s and 1950s. Some newspaper comic strips are also included. Files are in the standard CBR (Comic Book Reader) format, for which Comical is possibly the best free viewer. Free registration is required to
Microeconomic theory III
The website for this course (14.123 Microeconomic Theory III, Spring 2009) has been made available by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Department of Economics as part of the MIT OpenCourseWare project. This course discusses decision theory and topics in game theory including models of individual decision-making under certainty and uncertainty. Topics covered include preference orderings, expected utility, risk, stochastic dominance, supermodularity, monotone comparative statics, b
Woman with flowers on a table
An older woman is posed seated with two windows in the background. She is wearing a long sleeved blouse with ribbon woven into the lace around the collar and down the front. She is reaching toward a vase of flowers on the table next to her.
9.5 Debate 2: use of language
Sunset Song was written in the early 1930s and is still one of the best-known and most-debated Scottish novels. In this unit, we discuss whether Sunset Song succeeds as critique of capitalism and whether it has value as a work of literature separate from its propagandistic ambitions.
Mandelson: Enterprise-led Recovery
Lord Peter Mandelson gave a key-note speech following an invitation by the Oxford Centre for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Said Business School. In his address he used an imaginary female entrepreneur to underline his argument that markets and ministerial policies need to go hand in hand in order to create the right conditions for an enterprise-led recovery.
1.5.1 Different ways of working Composing for an entire film is an intense and intensive experience, which must usually be completed in a very short time. Composers are always the last people to work on a film, and cannot begin writing the score until the final edit of the film is ready, often only a few weeks before the film is to be released. Composers work in many different ways: David Arnold (the current James Bond composer) uses an electronic keyboard and computers to record and manipulate his ideas, which are or
The Plundered Planet
Paul Collier, Oxford Professor and author of The Bottom Billion, launched a discussion based on his latest publication, The Plundered Planet. Building on his work in developing countries and the poorest populations, Collier argued for proper stewardship of natural assets as a matter of planetary urgency. His arguments charted a course between unchecked profiteering on the one hand, and environmental romanticism on the other to offer realistic and sustainable solutions to these dauntingly complex
Essential Science for Teachers: Earth and Space Science
In-depth interviews with children that uncover their ideas about the topic at hand.,This segment shows a strategy to identify students' ideas about how the surface of the earth has changed over time. The interviewer probes to elicit the idea that the organisms in the fossil came from water. He then challenges a student's thinking about fossils forming in water by showing a map of the location where the fossil was found. This creates dissonance as the student struggles to try and figure out how
Interview With Arthur Jones About Experiences In World War II
Arthur Jones served in WWII with the 219th Field Artillery, 35th Infantry Division of the Third Army. They landed in France shortly after Independence Day, 1944. Arthur's duty was to drive a Jeep that carried encoded messages back and forth between officers, under cover of dark. Hear his first-hand account of the 35th's push across France toward the German border, then their rush to Bastogne to assist the 101st Airborne during the Battle of the Bulge.
John William Gardiner Diary, 1875
John William Gardiner was the third of nine children in the large Gardiner family. His parents, William and Susan, were farmers who moved from Missouri to Jefferson County, Kansas Territory, in March 1855 when John was four years old. These excerpts are from the diary he kept in 1875 while completing classes in Leavenworth in order to obtain his teaching certificate, then teaching at a new school in Winchester in Jefferson County. He impatiently waits for letters from his girlfriend, Mattie. He
Essential Science for Teachers: Physical Science: Session 2. The Particle Nature of Matter: Solids,
In-depth interviews with children that uncover their ideas about the topic at hand.,The segment provides examples of questions used to probe the student's ideas about particles, particularly, that substances such as air are made up of invisible tiny particles called atoms that are far too small to be seen through a regular microscope. When asked if he could draw air, the student responds that air cannot be drawn because it is just a bunch of invisible particles called atoms, but when probed furt
Essential Science for Teachers: Earth and Space Science
In-depth interviews with children that uncover their ideas about the topic at hand.,In this segment the interviewer probes for ideas about how a beach was formed, pointing out different coastlines on a map and asking why they are shaped the way they are. Using the shape of Cape Cod, the student explains the shape is due to swirling water or whirlpools. The interviewer demonstrates how it is helpful to ask students what they mean when they use a term like whirlpool or current.
Portrait of Florence Howard
A photograph of Florence Howard standing with her hands in front of her.
Experimental studies and modeling of an information embedded power system
This thesis is concerned with the design and analysis of the Interconnected Power Systems Laboratory (IPSL), which will allow students to get experience on the realistic operation and control of power systems. Drexel University' Interconnected Power Systems Laboratory (IPSL), provides an interchangeable real-life, three-bus power system network and an Energy Management System interface to the system in order to provide control and data capturing. The designed EMS system utilizes client/server an
Essential Science for Teachers: Earth and Space Science
In-depth interviews with children that uncover their ideas about the topic at hand.,The interviewer is trying to find out the students' ideas about how moutains and volcanoes form. The student demonstrates her thinking by pushing 2 sheets of paper together, showing her ideas about uplifting of mountains. She seems to have a basic notion of plates and what happens when plates collide although it is too simplistic for the benchmark.
