Tackling Covid-19 | | Mariana Matus PhD ’18 (left), and Newsha Ghaeli hold the robot they designed to collect wastewater. The bot, they say, can help paint a picture of an outbreak’s progression. | From the earliest days of the Covid-19 crisis, MIT’s labs, alumni, and spinoffs have been reworking their research and inventions to meet the pandemic’s pressing challenges. Here are five of their many bold attempts — and how things are going so far. Full story via MIT Technology Review → |
Covid-19 testing ramps up as MIT enters the next phase of campus reopening | Over 8,000 tests were performed last week by MIT Medical. Full story via MIT News → |
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A 5-part framework for talking about racism at work | With a willingness to listen and validate, and acceptance that learning can be uncomfortable, conversations on race and racism can be easier and more productive. Full story via MIT Sloan → | |
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3 Questions: Historian Emma Teng on face masks as 公德心 | “Doing something for the community good is good for me also” is gongdexin (in Mandarin), kootokushin (in Japanese), and kongdokshim (in Korean). Full story via MIT News → | |
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Tips for digital teaching from prizewinning professors | Distance learning is now standard, whether hybrid or fully online. Here’s how to excel at remote teaching, according to five MIT Sloan faculty members. | Full story via MIT Sloan → | |
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Face-specific brain area responds to faces even in people born blind Study finds that the fusiform face area is active when blind people touch 3D models of faces. Full story via MIT News → | |
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A math problem stumped experts for 50 years. This grad student solved it in days // The Boston Globe | “When you perform a calculation, sometimes there’s really clever tricks you can use or some ways that you can be an actual human and not a computer in the performing of the calculation,” says Assistant Professor Lisa Piccirillo, who is known for her work solving the Conway knot problem, on what drew her to math. “But when you make a logical argument — that’s entirely yours.” Full story via The Boston Globe → |
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MIT and Boston Dynamics team up on Dr. Spot, a robot for remote Covid-19 vital sign measurement // TechCrunch A paper by MIT researchers details how they outfitted a Boston Dynamics robotic dog with contactless vital sign monitoring equipment. The system “has the potential to not only reduce the risk of exposure for medical personnel, but also drastically reduce use of personal protective equipment.” Full story via TechCrunch → |
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First female director of MIT CSAIL: “Want more women in STEM? Inspire them early.” // Forbes | “We need to educate all students – male and female – equally on the opportunities available in these fields, give them the chance to shine, and ensure that we’re creating inclusive environments for them to work in,” says Professor Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL. Full story via Forbes → |
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Covid-19 is dividing the American worker // The Wall Street Journal Professor Daron Acemoglu has explored how automation impacts employment, making workers more vulnerable, while an essay from the MIT Task Force on the Work of the Future finds that “technology-driven trends unique to this pandemic might continue to disrupt the lives of some of America’s most vulnerable workers, even once things get back to some semblance of normalcy.” Full story via The Wall Street Journal → |
| | | Teach your children to be antiracist. Teach them the breadth of Black and Indigenous history left out of schoolbooks. Teach them not to be silent in the face of jokes and anecdotes that perpetuate racist ideas. Take them to a protest and teach them to march for Black lives. Teach them to vote for policies that acknowledge and deconstruct institutionalized discrimination. Teach them to sacrifice their privileges and financial power for the sake of those unheard and unseen. If you do not, they will default to ... the culture that is already present. | | —Corban Swain, PhD student in biological engineering, in a recent essay, “Dismantling the racist mindset” Full story via MIT Technology Review → | This edition of the MIT Weekly was brought to you by masked Tesla. ⚡ Have feedback to share? Email mitdailyeditor@mit.edu. Thanks for reading, and have a great week! —MIT News Office |
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