Disruptive Effects of the Coronavirus – Errors of Commission and of Omission?

It is increasingly evident that the coronavirus disease, COVID-19, is more than a health problem; it is and will continue to adversely affect work and workplaces, education, families and social engagements, political and environmental dimensions, and financial indicators. Apart from its health ramifications, the crisis is revealing serious challenges in the global supply chain. Those difficulties are, at least in part, consequences of unwise, short-sighted business decisions made over the course of decades to outsource and downsize

Our Wicked Problem

The Coronavirus is more than a health problem. It is a “wicked” problem disrupting work, education, travel, politics, financial indicators, and more. This label came about in 1973 to help describe a special class of situations that are volatile, uncertain and ambiguous, often difficult to recognize, and difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements. There is no clear problem definition due to interdependencies so the problem cannot be fully understood until after the solution comes about

Development of legged, wheeled, and hybrid rover mobility models to facilitate planetary surface exploration mission analysis

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2007.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Includes bibliographical references.This work discusses the Mars Surface Exploration (MSE) tool and its adaptation to model rovers featuring legged, wheeled, and hybrid mobility. MSE is a MATLAB based systems engineering tool that is capable of rapidly designing a large trade space of rovers to fulfill a user defined science mission. This allows mission planners to make well informed design decisions in the earliest stages of a rover mission. The original version of MSE models exclusively six-wheeled rovers. This wheeled mobility model is refined, validated, and applied to an analysis of a Mars Sample Return fetch rover. The trade off between using a larger, more capable rover or a highly accurate landing system to retrieve a sample is examined. The results indicate that highly accurate landing systems are only needed if the fetch rover has a short period of time to retrieve the sample. After the wheeled mobility model and its application are presented, the motivation to model legged and hybrid mobility is explained. Many scientifically interesting locations cannot be reached by traditional wheeled mobility systems, thus new forms of mobility should be considered for future Mars rovers.(cont.) A survey of different forms of mobility is presented, with particular emphasis on the Modular Rover for Extreme Terrain Access (MoRETA) developed at MIT. The detailed implementation of fourwheeled, eight-wheeled, legged, and hybrid mobility models and their integration into MSE is discussed. The enhanced MSE tool is benchmarked against other simulations and existing robots. Finally, initially application of the tool reveals that wheeled mobility is best suited for flat and level terrain, and legged mobility is best suited for rocky or steep terrain.by Scott H. McCloskey.S.M

Redesigning the Basic Communication Course: A Case Study

In the competitive environment of higher education, the basic communication course is under pressure to defend its place in the curriculum. One way to do this is to engage in a course redesign program. In this case study, we detail our experience taking part in such a program to (re)evaluate our course. Over the course of a year, we collected active participation data and conducted a series of three qualitative surveys that focused on student perceptions of our course. In doing so, we explored the ways in which the basic communication course can take advantage of course redesign efforts. Specifically, we found that we were better able to (1) articulate our unique course identity to constituents across the campus as we (2) developed a more holistic view of the ways we were (or were not) achieving our stated learning outcomes. Based on these findings, we developed practical implications including explicating how a well-planned course redesign program can be used in the basic communication course, the need for “collaborative consistency” when redesigning a course, and the imperative to incorporate student voice into redesign efforts

OpenContrails: Benchmarking Contrail Detection on GOES-16 ABI

Contrails (condensation trails) are line-shaped ice clouds caused by aircraft and are likely the largest contributor of aviation-induced climate change. Contrail avoidance is potentially an inexpensive way to significantly reduce the climate impact of aviation. An automated contrail detection system is an essential tool to develop and evaluate contrail avoidance systems. In this paper, we present a human-labeled dataset named OpenContrails to train and evaluate contrail detection models based on GOES-16 Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) data. We propose and evaluate a contrail detection model that incorporates temporal context for improved detection accuracy. The human labeled dataset and the contrail detection outputs are publicly available on Google Cloud Storage at gs://goes_contrails_dataset

Design and Estimation of Coded Exposure Point Spread Functions

Abstract-We address the problem of motion deblurring using coded exposure. This approach allows for accurate estimation of a sharp latent image via wellposed deconvolution and avoids lost image content that cannot be recovered from images acquired with a traditional shutter. Previous work in this area has used either manual user input or alpha matting approaches to estimate the coded exposure Point Spread Function (PSF) from the captured image. In order to automate deblurring and to avoid the limitations of matting approaches, we propose a Fourier-domain statistical approach to coded exposure PSF estimation that allows us to estimate the latent image in cases of constant velocity, constant acceleration, and harmonic motion. We further demonstrate that previously used criteria to choose a coded exposure PSF do not produce one with optimal reconstruction error, and that an additional 30 percent reduction in Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) of the latent image estimate can be achieved by incorporating natural image statistics

A scalable system to measure contrail formation on a per-flight basis

Persistent contrails make up a large fraction of aviation's contribution to global warming. We describe a scalable, automated detection and matching (ADM) system to determine from satellite data whether a flight has made a persistent contrail. The ADM system compares flight segments to contrails detected by a computer vision algorithm running on images from the GOES-16 Advanced Baseline Imager. We develop a 'flight matching' algorithm and use it to label each flight segment as a 'match' or 'non-match'. We perform this analysis on 1.6 million flight segments. The result is an analysis of which flights make persistent contrails several orders of magnitude larger than any previous work. We assess the agreement between our labels and available prediction models based on weather forecasts. Shifting air traffic to avoid regions of contrail formation has been proposed as a possible mitigation with the potential for very low cost/ton-CO2e. Our findings suggest that imperfections in these prediction models increase this cost/ton by about an order of magnitude. Contrail avoidance is a cost-effective climate change mitigation even with this factor taken into account, but our results quantify the need for more accurate contrail prediction methods and establish a benchmark for future development.Comment: 25 pages, 6 figure