55 research outputs found
The Creation of OpenCourseWare at MIT
This paper traces the genesis of the MIT OpenCourseWare project from its initial strategic precursors in 1999 and 2000, through its launch in 2001 and its subsequent evolution. The story told here illuminates the interplay among institutional leadership, and strategic planning, and with university culture in launching major educational technology enterprises. It also shows how initiatives can evolve in unexpected ways, and can even surpass their initial goals. The paper concludes with an overview of challenges facing OpenCourseWare in moving from the end of its production ramp-up and towards sustainability
Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion
382 p.Libro ElectrĂłnicoEach of us has been in the computing field for more than 40 years. The book is the product of a lifetime of observing and participating in the changes it has brought. Each of us has been both a teacher and a learner in the field.
This book emerged from a general education course we have taught at Harvard, but it is not a textbook. We wrote this book to share what wisdom we have with as many people as we can reach. We try to paint a big picture,
with dozens of illuminating anecdotes as the brushstrokes. We aim to entertain you at the same time as we provoke your thinking.Preface
Chapter 1 Digital Explosion
Why Is It Happening, and What Is at Stake?
The Explosion of Bits, and Everything Else
The Koans of Bits
Good and Ill, Promise and Peril
Chapter 2 Naked in the Sunlight
Privacy Lost, Privacy Abandoned
1984 Is Here, and We Like It
Footprints and Fingerprints
Why We Lost Our Privacy, or Gave It Away
Little Brother Is Watching
Big Brother, Abroad and in the U.S.
Technology Change and Lifestyle Change
Beyond Privacy
Chapter 3 Ghosts in the Machine
Secrets and Surprises of Electronic Documents
What You See Is Not What the Computer Knows
Representation, Reality, and Illusion
Hiding Information in Images
The Scary Secrets of Old Disks
Chapter 4 Needles in the Haystack
Google and Other Brokers in the Bits Bazaar
Found After Seventy Years
The Library and the Bazaar
The Fall of Hierarchy
It Matters How It Works
Who Pays, and for What?
Search Is Power
You Searched for WHAT? Tracking Searches
Regulating or Replacing the Brokers
Chapter 5 Secret Bits
How Codes Became Unbreakable
Encryption in the Hands of Terrorists, and Everyone Else
Historical Cryptography
Lessons for the Internet Age
Secrecy Changes Forever
Cryptography for Everyone
Cryptography Unsettled
Chapter 6 Balance Toppled
Who Owns the Bits?
Automated CrimesâAutomated Justice
NET Act Makes Sharing a Crime
The Peer-to-Peer Upheaval
Sharing Goes Decentralized
Authorized Use Only
Forbidden Technology
Copyright Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance
The Limits of Property
Chapter 7 You Canât Say That on the Internet
Guarding the Frontiers of Digital Expression
Do You Know Where Your Child Is on the Web Tonight?
Metaphors for Something Unlike Anything Else
Publisher or Distributor?
Neither Liberty nor Security
The Nastiest Place on Earth
The Most Participatory Form of Mass Speech
Protecting Good Samaritansâand a Few Bad Ones
Laws of Unintended Consequences
Can the Internet Be Like a Magazine Store?
Let Your Fingers Do the Stalking
Like an Annoying Telephone Call?
Digital Protection, Digital Censorshipâand Self-Censorship
Chapter 8 Bits in the Air
Old Metaphors, New Technologies, and Free Speech
Censoring the President
How Broadcasting Became Regulated
The Path to Spectrum Deregulation
What Does the Future Hold for Radio?
Conclusion After the Explosion
Bits Lighting Up the World
A Few Bits in Conclusion
Appendix The Internet as System and Spirit
The Internet as a Communication System
The Internet Spirit
Endnotes
Inde
Measuring the Usability and Capability of App Inventor to Create Mobile Applications
MIT App Inventor is a web service that enables users with little to no previous programming experience to create mobile applications using a visual blocks language. We analyze a sample of 5,228 random projects from the corpus of 9.7 million and group projects by functionality. We then use the number of unique blocks in projects as a metric to better understand the usability and realized capability of using App Inventor to implement specific functionalities. We introduce the notion of a usability score and our results indicate that introductory tutorials heavily influence the usability of App Inventor to implement particular functionalities. Our findings suggest that the sequential nature of App Inventorâs learning resources results in users realizing only a portion of App Inventorâs capabilities and propose improvements to these learning resources that are transferable to other programming environments and tools.Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (Google Research and Innovation Scholarship
Amorphous Computing
The goal of amorphous computing is to identify organizationalprinciples and create programming technologies for obtainingintentional, pre-specified behavior from the cooperation of myriadunreliable parts that are arranged in unknown, irregular, andtime-varying ways. The heightened relevance of amorphous computingtoday stems from the emergence of new technologies that could serve assubstrates for information processing systems of immense power atunprecedentedly low cost, if only we could master the challenge ofprogramming them. This document is a review of amorphous computing
Post hoc Explanations may be Ineffective for Detecting Unknown Spurious Correlation
We investigate whether three types of post hoc model explanations--feature
attribution, concept activation, and training point ranking--are effective for
detecting a model's reliance on spurious signals in the training data.
Specifically, we consider the scenario where the spurious signal to be detected
is unknown, at test-time, to the user of the explanation method. We design an
empirical methodology that uses semi-synthetic datasets along with
pre-specified spurious artifacts to obtain models that verifiably rely on these
spurious training signals. We then provide a suite of metrics that assess an
explanation method's reliability for spurious signal detection under various
conditions. We find that the post hoc explanation methods tested are
ineffective when the spurious artifact is unknown at test-time especially for
non-visible artifacts like a background blur. Further, we find that feature
attribution methods are susceptible to erroneously indicating dependence on
spurious signals even when the model being explained does not rely on spurious
artifacts. This finding casts doubt on the utility of these approaches, in the
hands of a practitioner, for detecting a model's reliance on spurious signals
The Risks of Key Recovery, Key Escrow, and Trusted Third-Party Encryption
A variety of "key recovery," "key escrow," and "trusted third-party" encryption requirements have been suggested in recent years by government agencies seeking to conduct covert surveillance within the changing environments brought about by new technologies. This report examines the fundamental properties of these requirements and attempts to outline the technical risks, costs, and implications of deploying systems that provide government access to encryption keys
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The Risks of Key Recovery, Key Escrow, and Trusted Third-Party Encryption
A variety of "key recovery," "key escrow," and "trusted third-party" encryption requirements have been suggested in recent years by government agencies seeking to conduct covert surveillance within the changing environments brought about by new technologies. This report examines the fundamental properties of these requirements and attempts to outline the technical risks, costs, and implications of deploying systems that provide government access to encryption keys
Omecamtiv mecarbil in chronic heart failure with reduced ejection fraction, GALACTICâHF: baseline characteristics and comparison with contemporary clinical trials
Aims:
The safety and efficacy of the novel selective cardiac myosin activator, omecamtiv mecarbil, in patients with heart failure with reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF) is tested in the Global Approach to Lowering Adverse Cardiac outcomes Through Improving Contractility in Heart Failure (GALACTICâHF) trial. Here we describe the baseline characteristics of participants in GALACTICâHF and how these compare with other contemporary trials.
Methods and Results:
Adults with established HFrEF, New York Heart Association functional class (NYHA)ââ„âII, EF â€35%, elevated natriuretic peptides and either current hospitalization for HF or history of hospitalization/ emergency department visit for HF within a year were randomized to either placebo or omecamtiv mecarbil (pharmacokineticâguided dosing: 25, 37.5 or 50âmg bid). 8256 patients [male (79%), nonâwhite (22%), mean age 65âyears] were enrolled with a mean EF 27%, ischemic etiology in 54%, NYHA II 53% and III/IV 47%, and median NTâproBNP 1971âpg/mL. HF therapies at baseline were among the most effectively employed in contemporary HF trials. GALACTICâHF randomized patients representative of recent HF registries and trials with substantial numbers of patients also having characteristics understudied in previous trials including more from North America (n = 1386), enrolled as inpatients (n = 2084), systolic blood pressureâ<â100âmmHg (n = 1127), estimated glomerular filtration rate <â30âmL/min/1.73 m2 (n = 528), and treated with sacubitrilâvalsartan at baseline (n = 1594).
Conclusions:
GALACTICâHF enrolled a wellâtreated, highârisk population from both inpatient and outpatient settings, which will provide a definitive evaluation of the efficacy and safety of this novel therapy, as well as informing its potential future implementation
Open Access at MIT and Beyond: A White Paper of the MIT Ad Hoc Task Force on Open Access to MITâs Research
MIT researchers, students, and staff have long valued and put into action MITâs mission to generate and disseminate knowledge by openly and freely sharing research and educational materials. Indeed, the Institute has been at the forefront of the sharing culture: MIT launched OpenCourseWare (OCW), a free webbased publication of virtually all MIT course content in 2001; in 2002 released DSpace, an open-source platform for managing research materials and publications co-created by MIT Libraries staff; and adopted the first campus-wide faculty open access (OA) policy in the US in 2009.
Convening an open access task force was one of the 10 recommendations presented in the 2016 preliminary report of the Future of Libraries Task Force. In July 2017, Provost Martin Schmidt appointed the MIT Ad Hoc Task Force on Open Access to MITâs Research (OA task force) to recommend ways that MITâs OA policies can be revised and updated âto support MITâs mission to disseminate the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible.â The OA task force is co-chaired by Class of 1922 Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Hal Abelson and Director of Libraries Chris Bourg, and includes a diverse and multidisciplinary group of faculty, staff, postdocs, and graduate and undergraduate students (see Appendix A).
The term âopen accessâ as used by the task force comes from the 2002 Budapest Open Access Initiative and refers to research literature (typically journal articles) that is immediately, freely available on the public internet: Anyone would be able to âread, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.â1
That said, open access is applied in different ways; i.e., OA doesnât always imply that you can reuse research articles for âany lawful purpose.â Articles may be cost-free to read but still subject to publisher policies that limit other uses. Educational materials, data, and code, which MIT researchers routinely create and release publicly, may also be made openly available under different terms.
Open access may have begun simply because the web allowed for easy sharing, but it has evolved into a complex movement with political, social, and economic dimensions. The scholarly journal publishing system is unique in that researchers contribute their articles with no expectation of payment; at the same time, some publishers charge ever-increasing subscription fees, restrict authorsâ rights to reuse work, or both. Variations in the type of open access that will help âfixâ the system are at the heart of debates among researchers, funders, librarians, and publishers.
This white paper is the first deliverable of the OA task force. Its goal is to give MIT students, staff, and faculty an overview of the open access landscape at MIT, in the United States, and in Europe to help inform discussions at the Institute over the next year. These discussions, which will take place at community forums and in other venues, including the task force idea bank, will help inform the task force as it develops a set of recommendations across a broad spectrum of scholarly outputs, including articles and books, data, educational materials, and code.
Part I of this paper provides an overview of current OA policies and movements in Europe and the United States as a way to give broader context to what open access means in practice internationally. Part II explores MIT researchersâ approaches in terms of making their publications, data, code, and educational materials openly available
Teacher's Guide for Computational Models of Animal Behavior
This is an experimental curriculum unit which suggests how the computational perspective can be integrated into a subject such as elementary school biology. In order to illustrate the interplay of computer and non-computer activities, we have prepared the unit as a companion to the Elementary School Science Study "Teacher's Guide to Behavior of Mealworms." This material is based on use of the Logo computer language
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