A long-building “chaos” narrative being pushed by President Donald Trump suggests that the election is fatally flawed, fraud is rampant, and no institutions other than Trump himself can be trusted. There is no evidence for any of that, and as the election math increasingly turns against him, the actual election systems around America continue functioning well.
Nothing about the 2020 elections is normal, of course, because nothing about 2020 is normal. The fact that the vote count is slower than usual is unavoidably stressful—but it’s also exactly what officials and experts have said for months would happen as every vote is counted.
“I think how the election process has played out has been remarkable,” says David Levine, the elections integrity fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy. “I think the entire country owes a tremendous gratitude to state and local election officials and those that have worked closely with them against the backdrop of foreign interference, coronavirus pandemic, civil unrest, and frankly inadequate support from the federal government. We have an election that has gone reasonably well.”
By any measure, the 2020 election scores better than any in recent history on security, integrity, and turnout. Election infrastructure is more secure: the Department of Homeland Security installed Albert sensors in election systems, which warn officials of intrusion by hackers, and the National Security Agency has been aggressively hunting hacking groups and handing intelligence to officials around the country. Election officials have invested in paper backup systems so they can more easily recover from technical problems.
The pandemic itself is one reason for these improvements. The increase in mail-in and early voting meant that ballots were cast over a month-long period. That helps security because activity isn’t all focused on a single day, said a CISA official in a press briefing. It gives election officials more time to deal with both normal mistakes and malicious attacks, and any problems that do arise affect fewer voters. And more Americans will want to vote this way in the future, said Benjamin Hovland, the top federal elections official and a Trump appointee.
That means the pandemic that many feared would wreck the election has paradoxically made the system stronger. “All of that uncertainty resulted in tremendous scrutiny and transparency, and most importantly, public education about all of these administrative processes,” says Eddie Perez, an elections expert at the Open Source Election Technology Institute.
The calls from the president and his allies to stop vote counts can still undermine confidence in the outcome. But so far, few of Trump’s arguments have carried any weight in court. Judges denied or threw out lawsuits in Georgia and Michigan on Thursday. Even calls for recounts look unconvincing right now. Historically, recounts matter when races are within just a few hundred votes in a single state, as in the 2000 election. Right now, all of the half-dozen contested states have margins much bigger than that.
And while the president’s family and allies have been attacking fellow Republicans for not sufficiently supporting his efforts, several prominent party members have publicly rebuked him for his impatience, including Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader. “All things considered, I think that the media and the public are doing a better than average job at remaining patient and resisting inflammatory rhetoric,” says Perez.
“This election is going remarkably well considering the obstacles election officials have faced all year long,” says Mark Lindeman, co-director of the election integrity organization Verified Voting. “Election officials in many states have had to field two entirely new election systems: massive-scale mail ballots where they have handled only a handful in the past, and also reengineering in-person voting to accommodate social distancing. There’s a chaos narrative, but what I see is not chaos. What I see is people working very hard to finish a difficult job.”
On Thursday evening, Trump gave a rambling news conference in which he repeated his many unsubstantiated claims about fraud. Most of the news networks cut away after a minute or two. Even Fox News’s anchors said afterwards that they “hadn’t seen the evidence” for Trump’s claims. The president seemed, they said, to be readying for Biden to be declared the winner—but then to start mounting legal challenges. The counting may be over soon, but the election is far from finished.
Millions of voters across the US received robocalls and texts encouraging them to stay at home on Election Day, in what experts believe were clear attempts at suppressing voter turnout in the closely contested 2020 political races.
Employing such tactics to spread disinformation and sow confusion amid elections isn’t new, and it’s not yet clear whether they were used more this year than in previous elections—or what effect they actually had on turnout.
However, there is some speculation that given the heavy scrutiny of election disinformation on social media in the wake of the 2016 presidential election, malicious actors may have leaned more on private forms of communication like calls, texts, and emails in this election cycle.
Among other incidents on Tuesday, officials in Michigan warned voters early in the day to ignore numerous robocalls to residents in Flint, which encouraged them to vote on Wednesday to avoid the long lines on Election Day. Meanwhile, around 10 million automated calls went out to voters across the country in the days leading up to the election advising them to “stay safe and stay home,” the Washington Post reported.
New York’s attorney general said her office was “actively investigating allegations that voters are receiving robocalls spreading disinformation.” A senior official with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency told reporters on Tuesday that the FBI is looking into robocalling incidents as well. The FBI declined to confirm this, saying in a statement: “We are aware of reports of robocalls and have no further comment. As a reminder, the FBI encourages the American public to verify any election and voting information they may receive through their local election officials.”
The use of robocalls for the purpose of political speech is broadly protected in the US, under the First Amendment’s free-speech rules. But the incidents described above may violate state or federal laws concerning election intimidation and interference. That’s particularly true if the groups that orchestrated them were acting in support of a particular campaign and targeting voters likely to fall into the other camp, says Rebecca Tushnet, a law professor at Harvard Law School.
The tricky part is tracking down the groups responsible, says Brad Reaves, an assistant professor in computer science at North Carolina State University and a member of the Wolfpack Security and Privacy Research Lab.
The source of such calls is frequently obscured as the call switches across different telecom networks with different technical protocols. But as long as the call originated in the US, the source generally can be ascertained with enough work and cooperation from the telecom companies.
In fact, late last year President Donald Trump signed into law the TRACED Act, which should make it simpler to identify the source of robocalls by creating a kind of digital fingerprint that persists across networks. Among other challenges, however, it doesn’t work on the older telecom infrastructure that plenty of carriers still have in place, and it won’t do much to clamp down on bad actors based overseas, Reaves says.
For her part, Tushnet says it’s crucial to aggressively investigate such acts, and prosecute them when appropriate. While it’s already too late to change the turnout for this year’s election, it might discourage similar practices in years to come. “We know it’s pure fraud, it’s purely bad, and there is no excuse for it,” Tushnet says. The only question is “what kind of resources should we be devoting” to stopping it.
During the 2016 primary season, Trump campaign staffer Matt Braynard had an unusual political strategy. Instead of targeting Republican base voters—the ones who show up for every election—he focused on the intersection of two other groups: people who knew of Donald Trump, and people who had never voted in a primary before. These were both large groups.
Because of his TV career and ability to court controversy, Trump was already a household name. Meanwhile, about half America’s potential voters, nearly 100 million people, don’t vote in presidential elections, let alone primaries. The overlap between the groups was significant. If Trump could mobilize even a small percentage of those people, he could clinch the nomination, and Braynard was willing to put in the work.
His strategy, built from polls, research, and studies of voting behavior, focused on two goals in particular. The first was registering, engaging, educating, and turning out non-voters, the largest electoral bloc in the country and one that’s regularly ignored. One recent survey of 12,000 “chronic non-voters” suggests they receive “little to no attention in national political conversations” and remain “a mystery to many institutions.”
One way to turn out potentially sympathetic voters would be to use a call center to remind them, which would also help with his second goal: to investigate and expose voter fraud.
“If you’re trying to do systematic voter fraud, you’re going to look for people who haven’t or are not going to cast their ballot,” he told me in a recent interview, “because if you do cast a ballot for them and they do show up at the polling place, that’s going to set up a red flag.”
So the plan was that after the election, the call centers would contact a sample of the people in the state who had voted for the first time to confirm that they had actually cast a ballot.
Not only was pursuing voter fraud popular with prospective donors, Braynard says, but it was also an endeavor supported by the academic literature. “I believe it’s been documented, at least scientifically in some peer-reviewed studies, that at least one senator in the last 10 years was elected by votes that aren’t legal ballots,” he says.
This single voter fraud study has become canonical among conservative, and many of today’s other claims of fraud—such as through mail-in voting—also trace back to it.
A study like this does in fact exist, and it and is peer-reviewed. In fact, it goes even further than Braynard remembers. Published in 2014 by Jesse Richman, a political science professor at Old Dominion University, it argues that illegal votes have played a major role in recent political outcomes. In 2008, Richman argued, “non-citizen votes” for Senate candidate Al Franken “likely gave Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote needed to overcome filibusters in order to pass health care reform.”
The paper has become canonical among conservatives. Whenever you hear that 14% of non-citizens are registered to vote, this is where it came from. Many of today’s other claims of voter fraud—such as through mail-in voting—also trace back to this study. And it’s easy to see why it has taken root on the right: higher turnout in elections generally increases the number of Democratic voters, and so proof of massive voter fraud justifies voting restrictions that disproportionately affect them.
Academic research on voting behavior is often narrowly focused and heavily qualified, so Richman’s claim offered something exceedingly rare: near certainty that fraud was happening at a significant rate. According to his study, at least 38,000 ineligible voters—and perhaps as many as 2.8 million—cast ballots in the 2008 election, meaning the “blue wave” that put Obama in office and expanded the Democrats’ control over Congress would have been built on sand. For those who were fed up with margins of error, confidence intervals, and gray areas, Richman’s numbers were refreshing. They were also very wrong.
The data dilemma
If you want to study how, whether, and for whom people are going to vote, the first thing you need is voters to ask. Want to reach them by phone? Good luck calling landlines: very few people pick up. You might have a better chance with cell phones, but don’t expect much.
Telephone surveys are “barge in” research says Jay H. Leve, the CEO of SurveyUSA, a polling firm based in New Jersey. These phone polls, he says, happen at a time that’s convenient to the pollster, and “to hell with the respondent.” For that reason, the company aims to limit calls to four to six minutes, “before the respondent begins to feel like he or she is being abused.” Online surveys are preferable because respondents can complete them when they want, but it’s still hard to motivate people. For that reason, many survey companies offer something in return for people’s opinion, typically points that can be exchanged for gift cards.
Even if you’ve found participants, you want to make sure you’re asking good questions, says Stephen Ansolabehere, a government professor at Harvard. He is principal investigator of the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), a national survey of more than 50,000 people about demographics, general political attitudes, and voting intentions—and the data set used in Jesse Richman’s voter fraud study. It’s easy to generate bias in your results by wording your survey questions poorly, says Ansolabehere.
“We’ll try and be literal and give brief descriptions, and we generally don’t do things too adjectivally,” Ansolabehere says. But what about when the bill you’re asking about is called something inflammatory, like the “Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act?” “We don’t use that title,” he says.
Another problem with opinion polling is that what somebody thinks doesn’t really matter if it’s not going to translate into a vote. That means you have to figure out who will actually show up to the polls.
Here, demographic data is helpful. Women vote slightly more than men. White people vote more than people of color. Those 65 and older vote at rates roughly 50% higher than those 18 to 29, and advanced degree holders up to nearly three times as often as those without a high school diploma.
However, even if you ladle on the enticements, some demographic groups are simply less likely to respond to survey requests, which means you’ll need to adjust the numbers coming out of your survey group. Most polling firms do this by amplifying the responses they get from underrepresented groups: a survey with a small sample of Hispanic voters, say, might weight their responses more heavily if trying to predict behavior in a battleground state like Arizona, where 24% of voters are Latino.
One 2016 presidential poll conducted included a young Black man living in the Midwest who supported Trump. Because he represented several harder-to-reach categories—young, minority, male—his responses were dramatically over-indexed.
But beware: this weighting can backfire.
One 2016 presidential poll conducted by the University of Southern California and the Los Angeles Times recruited 3,000 respondents from across America, including a young Black man living in the Midwest who turned out to be a Trump supporter. Because he represented several harder-to-reach categories—young, minority, male—his responses were dramatically over-indexed. This ended up throwing the numbers off: at one point the survey estimated Trump’s support among Black voters at 20%, largely on the basis of this one man’s responses. A post-election analysis put that number at 6%.
The media, grasping for certainty, missed the error margins of the study and reached for the headline figures that amplified these overweighted responses. As a result, the survey team— which had already made raw data, weighting schemes, and methodology public—stopped releasing sub-samples of their data to prevent their study being distorted again. Not all researchers are as concerned about potential misinterpretation of their work, however.
An academic controversy
Until Richman’s 2014 paper, the virtual consensus among academics was that non-citizen voting didn’t exist on any functional level. Then he and his coauthors examined CCES data and claimed that such voters could actually number several million.
Richman asserted that the illegal votes of non-citizens had changed not only the pivotal 60th Senate vote but also the race for the White House. “It is likely though by no means certain that John McCain would have won North Carolina were it not for the votes for Obama cast by non-citizens,” the paper says. After its publication, Richman then wrote an article for the Washington Post with a similarly provocative headline that focused on the upcoming 2014 midterms: “Could non-citizens decide the November election?”
Unsurprisingly, conservatives ran with this new support for their old narrative and have continued to do so. The study’s fans include President Trump, who used it to justify the creation of his short-lived and failed commission on voter fraud, and whose claims about illegal voting are now a centerpiece of his campaign.
AP PHOTO/TALLAHASSEE DEMOCRAT, BILL COTTERELL, POOL
For starters, he argued, the paper overweighted the non-citizens in the survey—just as the Black Midwestern voter was overweighted to produce an illusion of widespread Black support for Trump. This was especially problematic in Richman’s study, wrote Ansolabehere, when you consider the impact that a tiny number of people who were misclassified as non-citizens would have on the data. Some people, said Ansolabehere, had likely misidentified themselves as ineligible to vote in the 2008 study by mistake—perhaps out of sloppiness, misunderstanding, or just the rush to accumulate points for gift cards. Critically, nobody who had claimed to be a non-citizen in both the 2010 survey and the follow-up in 2012 had cast a validated vote.
Nearly 200 social scientists echoed Ansolabehere’s concerns in an open letter, but for Harold Clarke, then editor of the journal that published Richman’s paper, the blowback was hypocritical. “If we were to condemn all the papers on voting behavior that have made claims about political participation based on survey data,” he says, “well, this paper is identical. There’s no difference whatsoever.”
As it turns out, survey data does contain a lot of errors—not least because many people who say they voted are lying. In 2012, Ansolabehere and a colleague discovered that huge numbers of Americans were misreporting their voting activity. But it wasn’t the non-citizens, or even the people who were in Matt Braynard’s group of “low propensity” voters.
Instead, found the researchers, “well-educated, high-income partisans who are engaged in public affairs, attend church regularly, and have lived in the community for a while are the kinds of people who misreport their vote experience” when they haven’t voted at all. Which is to say: “high-propensity” voters and people likely to lie about having voted look identical. Across surveys done over the telephone, online, and in person, about 15% of the electorate may represent these “misreporting voters.”
Ansolabehere’s conclusion was a milestone, but it relied on something not every pollster has: money. For his research, he contracted with Catalist, a vendor that buys voter registration data from states, cleans it, and sells it to the Democratic Party and progressive groups. Using a proprietary algorithm and data from the CCES, the firm validated every self-reported claim of voting behavior by matching individual survey responses with the respondents’ voting record, their party registration, and the method by which they voted. This kind of effort is not just expensive (the Election Project, a voting information source run by a political science professor at the University of Florida, says the cost is roughly $130,000) but shrouded in mystery: third-party companies can set the terms they want, including confidentiality agreements that keep the information private.
In a response to the criticism of his paper, Richman admitted his numbers might be off. The estimate of 2.8 million non-citizen voters “is itself almost surely too high,” he wrote. “There is a 97.5% chance that the true value is lower.”
Despite this admission, however, Richman continued to promote the claims.
In March of 2018, he was in a courtroom testifying that non-citizens are voting en masse.
Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state, was defending a law that required voters to prove their citizenship before registering to vote. Such voter ID laws are seen by many as a way to suppress legitimate votes, because many eligible voters—in this case, up to 35,000 Kansans—lack the required documents. To underscore the argument and prove that there was a genuine threat of non-citizen voting, Kobach’s team hired Richman as an expert witness.
Kris Kobach.
AP PHOTO/CHARLIE RIEDEL, FILE
Paid a total of $40,663.35 for his contribution, Richman used various sources to predict the number of non-citizens registered to vote in the state. One estimate, based on data from a Kansas county that was later proved to be inaccurate, put the number at 433. Another, extrapolated from CCES data, said it was 33,104. At the time, there were an estimated 115,000 adult residents in Kansas who were not American citizens—including green card holders and people on visas. By Richman’s calculations, that would mean nearly 30% of them were illegally registered to vote. Overall, his estimates ran from roughly 11,000 to 62,000. “We have a 95% confidence that the true value falls somewhere in that range,” he testified.
The judge ended up ruling that voter ID laws were unconstitutional. “All four of [Richman’s] estimates, taken individually or as a whole, are flawed,” she wrote in her opinion.
Unseen impact
One consequence of this unreliable data—from citizens who lie about their voting record to those who mistakenly misidentify themselves as non-citizens—is that it further diverts attention and resources from the voters who lie outside traditional polling groups.
“For the [low-propensity] crowd it is a vicious cycle,” wrote Matt Braynard in his internal memo for the Trump campaign. “They don’t get any voter contact love from the campaigns because they don’t vote, but they don’t vote because they don’t get any voter contact. It is a persistent state of disenfranchisement.”
Campaigns focus on constituents who are likely to vote and likely to give money, says Allie Swatek, director of policy and research for the New York City Campaign Finance Board. She experienced this bias firsthand when she moved back to New York in time for the 2018 election. Though there were races for US Senate, governor, and state congress, “I received nothing in the mail,” she says. “And I was like, ‘Is this what it’s like when you have no voting history? Nobody reaches out to you?”
According to the Knight Foundation’s survey of non-voters, 39% reported that they’ve never been asked to vote—not by family, friends, teachers, political campaigns, or community organizations, nor at places of employment or worship. However, that may be changing.
Stacey Abrams’ campaign for governor of Georgia targeted “low propensity” voters.
BOB ANDRES/ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION VIA AP
Braynard’s mobilization strategy played a role in the 2018 campaign for governor of Georgia by Democrat Stacey Abrams. She specifically targeted low-propensity voters, especially voters of color, and though she ultimately lost that race, more Black and Asian voters turned out that year than for the presidential race in 2016. “Any political scientist will tell you this is not something that happens,” wrote Abrams’s former campaign manager in a New York Times op-ed. “Ever.”
But even if campaigns and experts try to break these cycles—by cleaning their data, or by targeting non-voters—there’s a much more dangerous problem at the heart of election research: it is still susceptible to those operating in bad faith.
Backtracking claims
I asked Richman earlier this summer if we should trust the sort of wide-ranging numbers he gave in his study, or in his testimony in Kansas. No, he answered, not necessarily. “One challenge is that people want to know what the levels of non-citizen registration and voting are with a level of certainty that the data at hand doesn’t provide,” he wrote me in an email.
In fact, Richman told me, he “ultimately agreed” with the judge in the Kansas case despite the fact that she called his evidence flawed. “On the one hand, I think that non-citizen voting happens, and that public policy responses need to be cognizant of that,” he told me. “On the other hand, that doesn’t mean every public policy response makes an appropriate trade-off between the various kinds of risk.”
Behind the academic language, he’s saying essentially what every other expert on the subject has already said: fraud is possible, so how do we balance election security with accessibility? Unlike his peers, however, Richman reached that conclusion by first publishing a paper with alarmist findings, writing a newspaper article about it, and then testifying that non-citizen voting was rampant, maybe, despite later agreeing with the decision that concluded he was wrong.
Whatever Richman’s reasons for this, his work has helped buttress the avalanche of disinformation in this election cycle.
Throughout the 2020 election campaign, President Trump has continued to make repeated, unfounded claims that vote-by-mail is insecure, and that millions of votes are being illegally cast. And last year, when a ballot harvesting scandal hit the Republican Party in North Carolina and forced a special election that led to a Democratic win, one operative made an appearance on Fox News to accuse the left of encouraging an epidemic of voter fraud.
“The left is enthusiastic about embracing this technique in states like California,” he said. “Voter fraud’s been one of the left’s most reliable voter constituencies.”
The speaker? Matt Braynard.
However, Braynard is unlike some voter fraud evangelists, for whom finding no evidence of fraud is simply more evidence of a vast conspiracy. He at least purports to be able to change his mind on the basis of new facts. This suggests that there may be a way out of this current situation, where we project our own assumptions onto the uncertainty inherent in voting behavior.
After leaving the Trump campaign, he founded Look Ahead America, a nonprofit dedicated to turning out blue-collar and rural voters and to investigating voter fraud. As part of the group’s work, he and 25 other volunteers served as poll watchers in Virginia in 2017.
The process wasn’t as transparent as he would’ve liked. He wasn’t allowed to look over poll workers’ shoulders, and there were no cameras to photograph voters as they cast their ballots. But even though he wasn’t absolutely certain that the election was clean, he was still confident enough to issue a press release the following day.
“At least where we were present, the local election officials faithfully followed the lawful procedures,” LAA’s statement said. “We did observe a few occasions where polling staff could benefit from better education on the relatively recent voter ID laws. Nonetheless, they worked diligently to ensure the election laws were followed.”
The 2020 “Support Black Lives at MIT” petition by the Black Graduate Student Association (BGSA) and Black Students’ Union (BSU): http://bgsa.mit.edu/sbl2020
What does America with defunded police look like? Here is one version:
.@AOC's answer to "what does defund the police look like?" was "a suburb" and that is totally gonna be my answer from now on pic.twitter.com/JIlIfngMCv
With an unprecedented number of Americans voting by mail this year, it may take longer than normal for results to come in this Election Day—including even unofficial results. Yet President Donald Trump’s disinformation campaign about election security continues to falsely suggest that any “delay” would be the result of fraud.
But government officials charged with protecting the election made it clear that slower-than-usual results should be totally expected.
“We are likely to see delays in the processing of the election,” says Brandon Wales, the executive director at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA. “The truth is that nothing about this process changes when the election will be officially done.”
We may not have results on election night… [but] it doesn’t mean the process has been compromised, it means the system is working.”
“Everything you hear on election day has always been unofficial results,” he adds. “The vote isn’t done until the election is certified by that state’s chief election official, which often comes several weeks after the election. Even the unofficial results might not be available on election night in some places, including in crucial swing states, so we may not have results on election night. We encourage people to not be concerned about that. That is normal. It doesn’t mean the process has been compromised, it means the system is working. Local and state officials are professionals. Let them do their jobs.”
The Election Project, a running tally of early voting activity, shows that over 2.5 million Americans have already returned mail in ballots. Counting them can take longer than in-person votes because of security measures like verifying signatures and processing the outer and secrecy envelopes. Add to that the fact that counting often starts late and it can push back the expected timeline for results. Mail ballots are still secure and fraud is extremely rare, contrary to the president repeatedly lying about the subject.
But we’re not out of the woods yet
If America doesn’t get results on election day, a storm of disinformation is likely to be kicked up in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of the vote. Federal officials, like Wales, have said that foreign actors like Russia could insert extra chaos at a delicate time for American democracy.
“I think our role is, first, trying to correct election disinformation,” Wales said.
In one recent example, a Russian news site reported that a Michigan voter database was hacked, and news began to spread quickly. CISA—and journalists—corrected the record: All the information that had been apparently “stolen” was actually already publicly available, like most state voter rolls are. There was in fact, no compromise of the system, despite word of an attack spreading like a small wildfire.
On Election Day, though, the threat is a much bigger blaze.
While the threat of foreign disinformation is serious, it’s also simpler to deal with than the almost-guaranteed domestic disinformation. The president has effectively promised that he will claim the election is stolen if he is losing or if results are not immediately reported.
What is the playbook for Wales when the malicious actor is American rather than foreign?
“There certainly is a difference in what the United States government can do because under the First Amendment people have freedom of speech,” he said. “Social media companies can take action under their terms of service. CISA’s role doesn’t change. Our role is to get to the American people and provide them the right way to evaluate information they’re seeing. Ultimately we can do that whether disinformation comes from foreign or domestic sources.”
CISA’s plan, whether disinformation comes from abroad or home, is to point Americans to trusted sources.
“In almost all cases,” Wales explains, “that’s likely to be state and local election officials who are the professionals who run these elections and who have a vested interest in making sure votes are counted correctly.”
California Governor Gavin Newsom made a bold attempt today to ban sales of new gas-guzzling cars and trucks, marking a critical step in the state’s quest to become carbon neutral by 2045. But the effort to clean up the state’s largest source of climate emissions is almost certain to face serious legal challenges, particularly if President Donald Trump is re-elected in November.
Newsom issued an executive order that directs state agencies, including the California Air Resources Board, to develop regulations requiring every new passenger car and truck sold in the state to be zero-emissions vehicles by 2035. That pretty much limits future sales to electric vehicles (EVs) powered by batteries or hydrogen fuel cells. Similar rules would go into effect for most medium and heavy-duty vehicles by 2045.
If those rules are enacted, the roughly 2 million new vehicles sold in the state each year will all suddenly be EVs, providing a huge boost to the still nascent sector.
“California policy, especially automotive policy, has cascading effects across the US and even internationally, just because of the scale of our market,” says Alissa Kendall, professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Davis.
Indeed, the order would mean more auto companies will produce more EV lines, scaling up manufacturing and driving down costs. The growing market would, in turn, create greater incentives to build out the charging or hydrogen fueling infrastructure necessary to support it all.
The move also could make a big dent in transportation emissions. Passenger and heavy-duty vehicles together account for more than 35% of the state’s climate pollution, which has proven an especially tricky share to reduce in a sprawling state of car loving-residents (indeed, California’s vehicle emissions have been ticking up).
But Newsom’s executive order only goes so far. It doesn’t address planes, trains, or ships, and it could take another couple decades for residents to stop driving all the gas-powered vehicles already on the road.
Whether the rules go into effect at all, and to what degree, will depend on many variables, including what legal grounds the Air Resources Board uses to justify the policies, says Danny Cullenward, a lecturer at Stanford’s law school focused on environmental policy.
One likely route is for the board to base the new regulations on tailpipe emissions standards, which California has used in the past to force automakers to produce more fuel-efficient vehicles, and nudge national standards forward. But that approach may require obtaining a new waiver from the Environmental Protection Agency allowing the state to exceed the federal government’s vehicle emissions rules under the Clean Air Act, the source of an already heated battle between the state and the Trump administration.
Last year, Trump announced he would revoke California’s earlier waiver to set tighter standards, prompting the state and New York to sue. So whether California can pursue this route could depend on how courts view the issue and who is sitting in the White House come late January.
It’s very likely that the automotive industry will challenge the rules no matter how the state goes about drafting them. And the outcome of those cases could depend on which court it lands in—and, perhaps eventually, who is sitting on the Supreme Court.
But whatever legal hurdles it may face, California and other states need to rapidly cut auto emissions to have any hope of combating the rising threat of climate change, says Dave Weiskopf, senior policy advisor with NextGen Policy in Sacramento.
“This is what science requires and it’s the next logical step for state policy,” he says.
When Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would stop accepting political advertising in the week before the US presidential election, he was responding to widespread fear that social media has outsize power to change the balance of an election.
Political campaigns have long believed that direct voter contact and personalized messaging are effective tools to convince people to vote for a particular candidate. But in 2016, it seemed that social media was amplifying this threat, and that invasive data-gathering and sophisticated political targeting had suddenly created a recipe for democratic disaster.
The idea of algorithmic manipulation schemes brainwashing large swaths of the US electorate online is a nice way to explain the polarized nature of American public opinion. But experts say it’s actually pretty unlikely that targeted political advertising has had much influence on voter behavior at all.
“Very quickly you get absolutely nowhere”
Much of the reasoning behind the ban relies on the idea that social media can convince undecided voters. This has been the narrative since the 2016 election, when Cambridge Analytica claimed it used “psychological warfare” to manipulate vulnerable undecided voters on Facebook into believing fake news and convincing them to vote for Donald Trump. The Guardian reported extensively on the Cambridge Analytica’s idea “to bring big data and social media to an established military methodology—‘information operations’—then turn it on the US electorate.”
But in reality, campaigns still can’t persuade undecided voters much better than they could 10 years ago.
Some suggest that associating certain online attributes with voter profiles allows campaigns to group target voters into smaller, more specific groups that care about particular things, which might offer an avenue to getting them to vote a certain way. For example, you could assume all independent first-time Minnesota voters who have liked the Bass Pro Shop are likely to care about gun rights.
But Eitan Hersh, an associate professor at Tufts University, says these assumptions get layered with errors. A campaign might assume that “the person who watches Jersey Shore has X kind of personality traits,” he says, but “those things aren’t going to be perfectly correct.”
“Then I’m going to try to make an ad that is focused on that personality trait. Go to any ad seller: how easy is that to make an ad just right for that personality trait? And then it has to come at exactly the right moment on your timeline where you’re receptive to it. When you add all of these layers of error atop each other, very quickly, you get absolutely nowhere. It’s just all noise.”
Even if these errors didn’t exist, it’s nearly impossible to measure whether ads were effective in changing somebody’s voting behavior. Voting, after all, is secret.
That doesn’t mean advertising can’t be effective, however. In fact, the online targeted political advertising system has advanced in two meaningful ways: first, it has allowed campaigns to more accurately sort decided and undecided voters using data, and second, messaging has gotten more effective as a result of sophisticated A/B testing.
The bigger problem
But the true strength of online political advertising has been in sowing discord. Social-media networks function by running powerful content recommendation algorithms that are known to put people in echo chambers of narrow information and have at times been gamed by powerful actors. Instead of getting voters to switch their position, political messages delivered this way are actually much more effective at fragmenting public opinion. They don’t persuade voters to change their behavior as much as they reinforce the beliefs of already-decided voters, often pushing them into a more extreme position than before. That means the ads being banned—the ones from the campaigns—are not what is changing democracy; it’s the recommendation algorithms themselves that increase the polarization and decrease the civility of the electorate.
Sam Woolley, the project director for propaganda research at the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas, says that while he’s “glad that Facebook is making moves to get rid of political ads,” he wonders “to what extent the social-media firms are going to continue to take small steps when they really need to be addressing a problem that is ecosystem-wide.”
“Political ads are just the tip of the iceberg,” he says. “Social media has horrendously exacerbated polarization and splintering because it has allowed people to become more siloed and less civil because they’re not engaging as much in face-to-face communications, because they’re behind a wall of anonymity and because they don’t really see consequences for the things they do.” These algorithms may seem mathematical and objective, but Woolley says the system is “incredibly subjective,” with many human decisions behind how and why particular content gets recommended.
So Facebook’s ban ahead of November 3 won’t do much to change voter behavior. Indeed, since Facebook’s algorithms give more weight to posts with some time and circulation behind them, Zuckerberg’s ban might not have any significant impact at all.
Tackling the rest of the iceberg requires a total reframing of what social-media networks actually are.
“There’s no denying that the fundamental alteration of our media system from broadcast to social media has irreparably changed the way we share information, and also the ways in which we form opinions, and also the ways in which we get along—or don’t get along,” he says.
What does this mean for democracy?
This is not an entirely new problem. The American political system has used targeted political advertising for decades, long before the internet. In the 1950s, before cookies tracked your online behavior to create detailed logs, campaigns would send canvassers to specific addresses that were home to undecided voters. In the 1960s, before online advertisers started serving custom-made ads that convinced you your iPhone was listening to your conversations, data scientists were engineering messages aimed at small groups of persuadable voters.
Social media’s role has not been to dramatically change the direction of this system, but to intensify the polarization and fragmentation it causes. On top of this, larger and more extreme groups also become vectors of misinformation and propaganda, which accelerates and worsens the problem. These challenges go far beyond Facebook’s ban—they challenge the whole online economic and information ecosystem.
“Social-media networks, in particular, have challenged what we think of as democracy,” says Woolley. “They’ve undermined our democratic communication system in a big way, contrary to what we thought they were going to do. That being said, I do believe that democracy is a work in progress.”
Rock climb without fear. Play a symphony in your head. Superhuman vision to see radar. Discover the nature of consciousness. Cure blindness, paralysis, deafness and mental illness. Those are just a few the applications that Elon Musk and employees at his neuroscience company Neuralink, formed in 2016, believe that electronic brain-computer interfaces will one day bring about.
While none of these advances are close at hand and some are unlikely, in a “product update” streamed over YouTube on Friday, Musk, also the founder of SpaceX and Tesla Motors, joined staffers wearing black masks to discuss the company’s work towards an affordable, reliable brain implant which Musk believes billions of consumers will clamor for in the future.
“In a lot of ways,” Musk said, “It’s kind of like a Fitbit in your skull, with tiny wires.”
Although the online event was described as a product demonstration, there is as yet nothing that anyone can buy or use from Neuralink. (This is for the best since most of the company’s medical claims remain highly speculative.) It is, however, engineering a super-dense electrode technology that is being tested on animals.
Neuralink isn’t the first to believe brain implants could extend or restore human capabilities. Researchers began placing probes in the brains of paralyzed people in the late 1990s in order to show signals could let them move robot arms or computer cursors. And mice with visual implants really can perceive infrared rays.
Building on that work, Neuralink says it hopes to further develop such brain-computer interfaces (or BCIs) to the point where one can be installed in a doctor’s office in under an hour. “This actually does work,” Musk said of people who have controlled computers with brain signals. “It’s just not something the average person can use effectively.”
Throughout the event, Musk deftly avoided giving timelines or committing to schedules, including when Neuralink’s system might be tested in human subjects.
As yet, four years after its formation, Neuralink has provided no evidence that it can (or has even tried) to treat depression, insomnia, or a dozen other diseases that Musk mentioned in a slide. One difficulty ahead of the company is perfecting microwires that can survive the “corrosive” context of a living brain for a decade. That problem alone could take years to solve.
The primary objective of the streamed demo, instead, was to stir excitement, recruit engineers to the company (which already employs about 100 people) and build the kind of fan base that has cheered on Musk’s other ventures and has helped propel the gravity-defying stock price of electric car-maker Tesla.
Pigs in the matrix
In tweets leading up to the event, Musk had promised fans a mind-blowing demonstration of neurons firing inside a living brain—though he didn’t say of what species. Minutes into the livestream, assistants drew a black curtain to reveal three small pigs in fenced enclosures; these were the subjects of the company’s implant experiments.
The brain of one pig contained an implant, and hidden speakers briefly chimed out ring-tones which Musk said were recordings of the animal’s neurons firing in real time. For those awaiting the “matrix in the matrix,” as Musk had hinted on Twitter, the cute-animal interlude was different than hoped for. To neuroscientists, it was nothing new; in their labs the buzz and crackle of electrical impulses recorded from animal brains (and some human ones) has been heard for decades.
A year ago, Neuralink presented a sewing-machine robot able to plunge a thousand ultra-fine electrodes into a rodent’s brain. These probes are what measure the electrical signals emitted by neurons, whose speed and patterns are ultimately a basis for movement, thoughts and recall of memories.
An illustration of a prototype neural sewing machine with a helmet to secure a patient’s head.
WOKE STUDIO
In the new livestream, Musk appeared beside an updated prototype of the sewing robot encased within a smooth, white plastic helmet. Into such surgical headgear, Musk believes, billions of consumers will one-day willingly place their heads, submitting as an automated saw carves out a circle of bone and a robot threads electronics into their brains.
The futuristic casing was created by the industrial design firm Woke Studio, in Vancouver. It’s lead designer, Afshin Mehin, says he strived to make something “clean, modern, but still friendly-feeling” for what would be voluntary brain surgery with inevitable risks.
To neuroscientists, the most intriguing development shown Friday may have been what Musk called “the link,” a silver-dollar sized disk containing computer chips which compresses and then wirelessly transmits signals recorded from the electrodes. The link is about as thick as the human skull, and Musk said it could plop neatly onto the surface of the brain through a drill hole then be sealed with superglue.
“I could have a Neuralink right now and you wouldn’t know it,” Musk said.
Elon Musk holds “the link” a circular device loaded with computer chips during a demonstration. It serves to collect and wirelessly transmit brain signals.
The link can be charged wirelessly via an induction coil and Musk suggested people in the future would plug in before they go to sleep to power up their implants. He thinks an implant also needs to be easy to install and remove, so that people can get new ones as technology improves. You wouldn’t want to be stuck with version 1.0 of a brain implant forever. Outdated neural hardware left behind in people’s bodies is a real problem already encountered by research subjects.
The implant being tested by Neuralink on its pigs has 1,000 channels, and is likely to read from a similar number of neurons. Musk says his goal to increase that by a factor of “100, then 1,000, then, 10,000” to read more completely from the brain.
Such exponential goals for the technology don’t necessarily address specific medical needs. Although Musk claims implants “could solve paralysis, blindness, hearing,” as often what is missing isn’t ten times as many electrodes, but scientific knowledge about what electro-chemical imbalance creates, say depression, in the first place.
Despite the long list of medical applications Musk presented, Neuralink didn’t show it’s ready to commit to any one of them. During the event, the company did not disclose plans to start a clinical trial, a surprise to those who believed that would be Neuralink’s next logical step.
A neurosurgeon who works with the company, Matthew MacDougall, did say the company was considering trying the implant on paralyzed people, for instance to allow them to type on a computer, or form words. Musk went further: “I think long term you can restore someone full body motion.”
It is unclear how serious the company is about treating disease at all. Musk continually drifted away from medicine and back to a much more futuristic “general population device,” which he called the company’s “overall” aim. He believes that people should connect directly to computers in order to keep pace with artificial intelligence.
“On a species level, it’s important to figure out how we co-exist with advanced AI, achieving some AI symbiosis,” said Musk. “Such that the future of world is controlled by the combined will of the people of the earth. That might be the most important thing that a device like this achieves.”
How brain implants would bring about such a collective world electronic mind, Musk did not say. Maybe in the next update.
Rock climb without fear. Play a symphony in your head. Superhuman vision to see radar. Discover the nature of consciousness. Cure blindness, paralysis, deafness and mental illness. Those are just a few the applications that Elon Musk and employees at his neuroscience company Neuralink, formed in 2016, believe that electronic brain-computer interfaces will one day bring about.
While none of these advances are close at hand and some are unlikely, in a “product update” streamed over YouTube on Friday, Musk, also the founder of SpaceX and Tesla Motors, joined staffers wearing black masks to discuss the company’s work towards an affordable, reliable brain implant which Musk believes billions of consumers will clamor for in the future.
“In a lot of ways,” Musk said, “It’s kind of like a Fitbit in your skull, with tiny wires.”
Although the online event was described as a product demonstration, there is as yet nothing that anyone can buy or use from Neuralink. (This is for the best since most of the company’s medical claims remain highly speculative.) It is, however, engineering a super-dense electrode technology that is being tested on animals.
Neuralink isn’t the first to believe brain implants could extend or restore human capabilities. Researchers began placing probes in the brains of paralyzed people in the late 1990s in order to show signals could let them move robot arms or computer cursors. And mice with visual implants really can perceive infrared rays.
Building on that work, Neuralink says it hopes to further develop such brain-computer interfaces (or BCIs) to the point where one can be installed in a doctor’s office in under an hour. “This actually does work,” Musk said of people who have controlled computers with brain signals. “It’s just not something the average person can use effectively.”
Throughout the event, Musk deftly avoided giving timelines or committing to schedules, including when Neuralink’s system might be tested in human subjects.
As yet, four years after its formation, Neuralink has provided no evidence that it can (or has even tried) to treat depression, insomnia, or a dozen other diseases that Musk mentioned in a slide. One difficulty ahead of the company is perfecting microwires that can survive the “corrosive” context of a living brain for a decade. That problem alone could take years to solve.
The primary objective of the streamed demo, instead, was to stir excitement, recruit engineers to the company (which already employs about 100 people) and build the kind of fan base that has cheered on Musk’s other ventures and has helped propel the gravity-defying stock price of electric car-maker Tesla.
Pigs in the matrix
In tweets leading up to the event, Musk had promised fans a mind-blowing demonstration of neurons firing inside a living brain—though he didn’t say of what species. Minutes into the livestream, assistants drew a black curtain to reveal three small pigs in fenced enclosures; these were the subjects of the company’s implant experiments.
The brain of one pig contained an implant, and hidden speakers briefly chimed out ring-tones which Musk said were recordings of the animal’s neurons firing in real time. For those awaiting the “matrix in the matrix,” as Musk had hinted on Twitter, the cute-animal interlude was different than hoped for. To neuroscientists, it was nothing new; in their labs the buzz and crackle of electrical impulses recorded from animal brains (and some human ones) has been heard for decades.
A year ago, Neuralink presented a sewing-machine robot able to plunge a thousand ultra-fine electrodes into a rodent’s brain. These probes are what measure the electrical signals emitted by neurons, whose speed and patterns are ultimately a basis for movement, thoughts and recall of memories.
An illustration of a prototype neural sewing machine with a helmet to secure a patient’s head.
WOKE STUDIO
In the new livestream, Musk appeared beside an updated prototype of the sewing robot encased within a smooth, white plastic helmet. Into such surgical headgear, Musk believes, billions of consumers will one-day willingly place their heads, submitting as an automated saw carves out a circle of bone and a robot threads electronics into their brains.
The futuristic casing was created by the industrial design firm Woke Studio, in Vancouver. It’s lead designer, Afshin Mehin, says he strived to make something “clean, modern, but still friendly-feeling” for what would be voluntary brain surgery with inevitable risks.
To neuroscientists, the most intriguing development shown Friday may have been what Musk called “the link,” a silver-dollar sized disk containing computer chips which compresses and then wirelessly transmits signals recorded from the electrodes. The link is about as thick as the human skull, and Musk said it could plop neatly onto the surface of the brain through a drill hole then be sealed with superglue.
“I could have a Neuralink right now and you wouldn’t know it,” Musk said.
Elon Musk holds “the link” a circular device loaded with computer chips during a demonstration. It serves to collect and wirelessly transmit brain signals.
The link can be charged wirelessly via an induction coil and Musk suggested people in the future would plug in before they go to sleep to power up their implants. He thinks an implant also needs to be easy to install and remove, so that people can get new ones as technology improves. You wouldn’t want to be stuck with version 1.0 of a brain implant forever. Outdated neural hardware left behind in people’s bodies is a real problem already encountered by research subjects.
The implant being tested by Neuralink on its pigs has 1,000 channels, and is likely to read from a similar number of neurons. Musk says his goal to increase that by a factor of “100, then 1,000, then, 10,000” to read more completely from the brain.
Such exponential goals for the technology don’t necessarily address specific medical needs. Although Musk claims implants “could solve paralysis, blindness, hearing,” as often what is missing isn’t ten times as many electrodes, but scientific knowledge about what electro-chemical imbalance creates, say depression, in the first place.
Despite the long list of medical applications Musk presented, Neuralink didn’t show it’s ready to commit to any one of them. During the event, the company did not disclose plans to start a clinical trial, a surprise to those who believed that would be Neuralink’s next logical step.
A neurosurgeon who works with the company, Matthew MacDougall, did say the company was considering trying the implant on paralyzed people, for instance to allow them to type on a computer, or form words. Musk went further: “I think long term you can restore someone full body motion.”
It is unclear how serious the company is about treating disease at all. Musk continually drifted away from medicine and back to a much more futuristic “general population device,” which he called the company’s “overall” aim. He believes that people should connect directly to computers in order to keep pace with artificial intelligence.
“On a species level, it’s important to figure out how we co-exist with advanced AI, achieving some AI symbiosis,” said Musk. “Such that the future of world is controlled by the combined will of the people of the earth. That might be the most important thing that a device like this achieves.”
How brain implants would bring about such a collective world electronic mind, Musk did not say. Maybe in the next update.
What weird bugs did you pick up last time you rode a subway train? Just as the covid-19 pandemic was taking off, a global network of scientists began mapping the DNA of urban microbes and using AI to look for patterns. Join host Jennifer Strong as she rides along on a subway-swabbing mission and talks to scientists racing to find an existing drug that might treat the disease.
We meet:
Christopher Mason, Weill Cornell Medicine
David Danko, Weill Cornell Medicine
Baroness Joanna Shields, BenevolentAI CEO
Credits: This episode was reported and produced by Jennifer Strong, Tate Ryan-Mosley, Emma Cillekens and Karen Hao with help from Benji Rosen. We’re edited by Michael Reilly and Gideon Lichfield. Our technical director is Jacob Gorski.
Guadalupe Hayes-Mota ’08, MBA ’16, SM ’16, was diagnosed with hemophilia at birth. He had limited access to medication in the small city in Mexico where he grew up, which meant long hospital stays for bleeding episodes. When he was 12, his appendix burst and he underwent emergency surgery, followed by a desperate eight-hour ambulance ride to another hospital in search of better medication to stop the bleeding. Doctors told his parents he was unlikely to survive.
Today, Hayes-Mota is the director of global supply chain and manufacturing at Ultragenyx Pharmaceutical, which is developing treatments for rare and ultra-rare diseases—including a gene therapy for hemophilia that would require treatment only once every few years. He is in charge of developing strategies for manufacturing therapies and distributing them to 35 countries; his responsibilities range from keeping production on schedule to predicting changes in the supply chain. “What motivates me is knowing that whatever I’m doing could determine whether a patient will get a medicine or not—it takes me back to my childhood,” he says.
Frequently confined indoors by his illness, “I was the kid who would break toys apart to put them back together,” Hayes-Mota recalls. During high school in Southern California, where his family had moved seeking better medical care, he heard about MIT. “It sounded like a place where problems can be solved,” he says. After graduating from MIT with a chemistry degree, he worked in health care and public policy, but “I realized what I really care about is organizational transformation—how to scale up changes in systems,” he says. So he returned for a dual MBA and master’s in engineering through the Leaders for Global Operations program.
At MIT, he reflects, “there is the sense that it doesn’t matter where you come from—as long as you’re smart and driven to change stuff, you’ll be part of the conversation.”
Having come out as gay during his first year at MIT, Hayes-Mota was heavily involved in the student LBGTQ+ organization G@MIT. Now he is co-president of the alumni group BGLATA (Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Alumni). He is also a board member for Save One Life, a nonprofit that provides medication, scholarships, and business grants to people with bleeding disorders in developing countries. He says that a sense of responsibility to improve the lives of others drives everything he does: “If I don’t do it, who will?”
As a toddler, Brian Brenner ’82, SM ’84, jumped with excitement when he saw the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge being built over New York Harbor. As an adult, he courted his wife, Lauren, by taking her to visit bridges, including ones he’d designed, and the first dance at their wedding was to “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” He’s written a collection of essays on civil engineering life titled Bridginess, and to this day he and Lauren go on “bridge dates,” where they enjoy a meal and admire the view of a nearby span.
“Or, maybe more accurately, I get to see the bridge and she humors me,” says Brenner, who has designed highway and rail bridges at engineering firms Parsons Brinkerhoff; Fay, Spofford & Thorndike; Stantec; and Tighe & Bond. His portfolio includes many bridges in and around New England, elements of Boston’s “Big Dig” Central Artery/Tunnel Project, and what he calls his “most gratifying and interesting project to date”: the graceful 870-foot Kenneth F. Burns Memorial Bridge that carries Massachusetts Route 9 over Lake Quinsigamond at Worcester.
Since its 2015 opening, ahead of schedule and under budget, the Burns Bridge has become an icon for the region. Honors for its five-span, open-spandrel, steel-deck arch design include Project of the Year from the American Public Works Association; Best Steel Bridge Design (medium span) from the National Steel Bridge Alliance; and a Quality of Life/Community Development Award from the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials.
“To be head engineer on a bridge of that size and complexity is, in a way, the culmination of my block-playing career as a four-year-old,” Brenner says.
Since 2004, Brenner has served as a professor of the practice in civil and environmental engineering at Tufts University. As an educator, he feels he is following in the footsteps of his MIT mentors Herbert Einstein, Eric Adams, SM ’72, PhD ’75, and Jack Germaine, SM ’80, SCD ’82, who is now a colleague at Tufts.
“You learn the most about anything, including yourself, by being a teacher,” says Brenner. “It’s a platform to help others without reservation or condition, and ironically, the one who benefits most is the one doing it.”
Brenner is also an active essayist, following up on Bridginess and the earlier Don’t Throw This Away! with Too Much Information in 2015. “I think I’m a best-seller in civil engineering slice-of-life humor stories—and also likely the only one publishing in that category,” he says.
By early February, the health-care system in Washington—the first US state to have a confirmed case of covid-19—was bracing for the spread of the novel coronavirus. When local hospitals began asking for frontline volunteers, Florence (Huang) Sheehan ’71 felt obliged, but disappointed, to decline.
“Being elderly was clearly identified as a risk,” explains Sheehan, 70, who is a cardiologist. “But as a physician, I just felt I ought to be doing something more. So when
I got an email asking about covid training, I immediately threw myself into that. I felt so glad that there was something I could do, that only I could do—that I had unique technology to provide help.”
Over the past decade, as a senior investigator at the University of Washington, Sheehan has developed a line of diagnostic medical ultrasound simulators. These devices—consisting of a computer, a mannequin, a mock ultrasound probe, and a tracking system that tells the computer where the probe is—are used to train fellows, residents, and medical and pre-med students in ultrasound procedures. Now the University of Washington Medical Center was citing multiple requests from hospitalists for training in bedside cardiac ultrasound so that they could monitor their covid-19 patients for heart failure, a dangerous complication.
“Patients were developing heart failure even when they looked like they were recovering from their lung infection,” Sheehan says.
Within a week, she reworked her standard curriculum and launched coronavirus-specific training in two local hospitals, expanding to two more hospitals shortly after. The course is simplified to respond to the urgent nature of the pandemic; for instance, although the standard course covers seven views of the heart, the covid curriculum includes only the four that are needed to identify heart failure. But Sheehan has added new features as well.
“The covid-19 curriculum includes a tool that helps with eye training,” she says. “As you are doing a scan, you see examples of real hearts, comparing the scan you just acquired to hearts with varying degrees of contraction, an indication of heart function. Because they are displayed side by side, and the heartbeats are synchronized, it makes it easier to spot the dysfunction.” Her training tools, she says, are the only simulators of their kind that display images from real patients and provide immediate feedback on whether the user is accurately positioning the probe and capturing diagnostic-quality images.
Sheehan earned her MD at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine after undergraduate biology studies at MIT. She then spent three years at the National Institutes of Health’s National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, where in 1977 she became the first woman to hold the position of clinical associate. She completed her training at the University of Washington and joined the faculty in 1982, eventually being promoted to research professor. She has been working on ultrasound simulators since 2010, and it’s been her most rewarding work, she says. She and her colleagues at the university also built the world’s first vascular and transcranial Doppler simulators (for training clinicians in imaging arteries in the neck, legs, arms, and brain). All of her simulators are available through Sheehan Medical, of which she is the founder and president.
Sheehan credits her MIT training with her success at fusing medicine, engineering, and technology.
“Even though I majored in Course 7, life sciences, I gained a pretty good understanding of what engineering could offer to medicine, so my research has always been on the engineering side of cardiology,” she says. “From my years at MIT, I have the ability to translate between medicine and engineering. Helping the two parts of the team to understand each other is really quite important.”
As a schoolboy growing up in New York City in the 1870s, Herman Hollerith often managed to sneak out of the schoolroom just before spelling lessons. His teacher noticed and one day locked the door; Hollerith responded by jumping out of the second-floor window. Difficult, easily bored, but clearly brilliant, Hollerith gained admission to the School of Mines of Columbia College (now the School of Engineering and Applied Science) and graduated with distinction and an engineering degree in 1879. He was 19.
One of his Columbia professors, William P. Trowbridge, invited Hollerith to join him in Washington, DC. Trowbridge had been appointed as a chief special agent for the 10th (1880) US Census and was responsible for the Report on Power and Machinery Employed in Manufactures. He hired Hollerith to write the section titled “Steam and Water Power Used in the Manufacture of Iron and Steel.”
But being the kind of person who easily got bored, Hollerith found that working on the report wasn’t enough. So in his spare time, he worked for John Shaw Billings, head of the census office’s Division of Vital Statistics. It was there that Hollerith got the idea to mechanize the repetitive tabulations involved in census work. Billings suggested that it might be possible to store information about people as notches in the sides of cards. This wasn’t such a revolutionary idea: the Jacquard loom used punch cards to control weaving patterns, Charles Babbage had envisioned using punch cards for his Analytical Engine, and a player piano that played music as dictated by holes in a long roll of paper had been demonstrated at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876.
Hollerith thought a census machine might have great commercial potential, and he asked Billings to join him in a venture to develop and commercialize it. Billings declined; drawn to organizing information rather than mechanizing it, he would go on to become the first director of the New York Public Library. But Francis Amasa Walker, the head of the 10th census, likely found Hollerith’s idea extremely interesting.
Walker, who’d been born to a wealthy Boston family and went to Amherst, was highly regarded for his work in economics and had been appointed chief of the US Bureau of Statistics in 1869, after serving in the Civil War as an enlisted soldier and then a commissioned officer in the Union Army. Nominated to be superintendent of the ninth (1870) census at age 29, he set out to reform the census by making it more scientific and efficient—and by eliminating the influence of politics on the official statistics. He didn’t reach that last goal, but his work was so well respected that he was appointed superintendent of the 10th census in April 1879.
In the fall of 1881, Walker left government service to become the third president of MIT. The following year, he and George F. Swain, an instructor in civil engineering, persuaded Hollerith to join the MIT faculty. Hollerith taught a senior mechanical engineering course that “took in hydraulic motors, machine design, steam engineering, descriptive geometry, blacksmithing, strength of materials, and metallurgy, among other subjects,” according to his biographer, Geoffrey Austrian, who wrote Herman Hollerith: Forgotten Giant of Information Processing. The Tech called him “energetic and practical.”
Once holes corresponding to demographic characteristics were punched, cards went into Hollerith’s electric tabulating machine, which Hollerith is shown using in 1908.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
While at MIT, Hollerith made what he would later call his “first crude experiments” on the census machine. Like the player-piano roll, his first approach involved punching holes in a long strip of paper, in this case with one row for each person.
But Hollerith wasn’t cut out for academia. Not wanting to teach the same course a second time, he left the Institute at the end of the spring semester, accepting an appointment as an assistant examiner at the US Patent Office in May 1883. He likely took the job to learn firsthand how the US patent system worked. Hollerith resigned his appointment less than a year later, on March 31, 1884, and set up his own office as an “Expert and Solicitor of Patents.” That September, he filed patent application 143,805, “Art of Compiling Statistics.”
Hollerith’s original patent application focused on the idea of storing data on a long strip of paper. But at some point—the timing is unclear—he had taken a trip out West and noticed a train conductor punching each rider’s ticket to indicate that person’s sex and hairstyle, a clever strategy to prevent the sharing of multi-ride tickets. That idea of creating what was called a “punch photograph” stuck with him. And by the time his patent was issued on January 8, 1889, Hollerith had settled on using cards made out of stiff paper instead of paper strips. His three “foundation” patents—all issued on the same day in 1889—describe a complete system for mechanizing the computation of statistics, including a device for punching cards in such a way that the punches correspond to a person’s age, race, marital status, and so on, and a device for electrically counting and sorting the cards using wires that descend through the holes into little cups filled with mercury, activating relays to open and close doors on a sorting cabinet. Electromechanical counters tracked the number of cards that matched particular criteria.
The system was first used to compile health statistics by the City of Baltimore, the US Office of the Surgeon General, and the New York Health Department—all opportunities probably secured with the help of Billings.
In 1889, the census office held a competition for a contract to deliver machines that would be used to tabulate the 11th (1890) census: Hollerith’s system won. As the work on that census progressed, Hollerith worked out the basics of a business plan that would last for more than a century. Because he didn’t want poorly maintained machines to give his company a bad name, he rented the machines to his customers and included both service and support. After the census office used inferior paper cards that left fibers in the mercury, Hollerith required his customers to purchase his own high-quality cards.
Hollerith incorporated his company as the Tabulating Machine Company in 1896; in 1911 he sold it for $2.3 million to the financier Charles R. Flint, who combined it with three of its competitors to create the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR). In 1914 CTR hired Thomas J. Watson Sr. as its general manager. Eight years later, Watson renamed the company International Business Machines.
The first project we remember working on together was drawing scenes from the picture books that our mom brought with her when she immigrated from the USSR. Working on large CVS poster boards, we drew porcupines crawling in forests and swans swimming in lakes. At six years old, sitting at our two-foot-tall, colored-pencil-covered table, we’d swoosh our hands back and forth to create large expanses of grass and water, making sure to divide the coloring evenly between the two of us. Our mom taught us to use colored paper strips and Elmer’s glue to create faux frames for our finished posters, which we hung in our room. We’d each make two of the four sides of the frame.
At age 4, Allan Gelman (left) and Danny Gelman pose with a Lego zoo they built together.
COURTESY PHOTO
Danny Gelman (left) and Allan Gelman at the Class of 2020 ring delivery.
JOSHUA CHARLES WOODARD ’18
Our collaborative creations continued as we grew. In fifth grade, we had a massive friendship bracelet phase, making every single type in our instruction book—from the basic row and chevron patterns to the most complicated tiki statue design. We would each tackle one type of bracelet and then swap knowledge, teaching each other what we’d just learned.
As middle schoolers, we entered a papier-mâché phase. Inspired by the Studio Ghibli films we watched, one of us made papier-mâché Totoros. The other made papier-mâché matryoshka dolls. And then we combined our ideas by making papier-mâché matryoshka dolls, painted to look like Totoros.
In high school, we began knitting, starting with sweaters and hats. But then, inspired by Vi Hart’s amazing mathematical art, we knit and combined various mathematical shapes to create hexaflexagons and Platonic solids. To manage the complexity, we divided the tasks, each knitting half of the necessary polygonal faces before we sewed all the pieces together.
We always worked together the same way. Bouncing ideas off each other, we came up with plans that neither one of us would have thought of alone. Dividing tasks, we accomplished and learned more together than either one of us would have individually. And working together was always fun!
At MIT, we knew we wanted to continue collaborating, and we started by working together to zero in on a major that would encompass our vast array of interests. We liked making things, so maybe Course 2 (mechanical engineering). We liked art and design, so maybe Course 4 (architecture). We liked math, so maybe Course 18 (mathematics) or 6 (computer science). And we liked stories and analyzing them, so maybe CMS (comparative media studies).
Although we took introductory classes in all of these departments, it was working together as artists in OpenMind::OpenArt, a gallery project centered on mental health and wellness, that ultimately helped us choose our major. For our piece, we wanted to explore the concept of empathy through a series of portraits made entirely out of pieces of fabric sewn together. After some trial and error, we discovered that the best way to do this was to hand-draw the portraits and then, using them as a reference, slowly and meticulously cut out every section of fabric from sheets of felt. Holding two tiny, abstractly shaped felt pieces at a time, we sewed them together by hand, poking our fingers more times than we could count. We each made three of the six portraits, and always helped each other in complicated sections that needed more than two hands to sew together.
Their “Stitched Together” felt portraits evoke connection.
COURTESY PHOTO
This experience was so fulfilling that we decided to major in Course 21E (humanities and engineering), a very flexible program that lets you combine any humanities field with any engineering field. (We were surprised to learn that only 0.26% of MIT undergraduates—a total of about three students per year—choose it.) After finishing our felt portrait series, we knew we wanted to continue making projects that tell stories. With CMS as our humanities field and Course 6 as our engineering field, we could develop our storytelling and interactive media skills and build our technical expertise in things like computer graphics—all of which would help prepare us for careers in the animation industry.
We have always been mesmerized by 2D animation—how flat drawings can come to life when played in sequence. So we cross-registered in the animation department at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design twice in our sophomore year, learning things like hand drawing with a light table, experimental sand animation, and digital animation. After taking these courses, we made a collaborative short film, using a simple color palette—one character was orange, the other purple—and our usual systematic approach. We each designed half the backgrounds, all in turquoise, and each animated one character.
Rain falls through gears in a still from their short film “The Rain Above.”
COURTESY IMAGE
In our junior year, we conducted research in the MIT Game Lab, making digital assets for a large-scale puzzle hunt, and helped a researcher at the MIT Media Lab make 2D character animations for an app that helps kids learn to read. We again approached it collaboratively, dividing our tasks by puzzle or animation, and giving each other feedback throughout the process.
As seniors, we finally got to take the computer graphics course we were so looking forward to, learning many amazing ways to visually express the world using code—for example, with ray tracing and particle simulation. For our very last semester at MIT, we constructed independent studies in computer graphics so we could practice and implement various simulation and rendering techniques and use our storytelling and animation skills to create a short film, depicting the formation of rain in an imaginative way. When covid-19 abruptly forced us to leave campus and our friends, we were glad to be able to continue our independent studies—and continue collaborating on our film—remotely. In fact, since the class was already completely in our hands, the transition was very smooth, despite the chaos around us. And that underscored for us the benefits we gained from our unique academic decisions.
There is a poetic feeling to the way our senior year unfolded. We had started our collaborative artistic journey together, drawing from picture books at home by our mom’s side. And there we were in the spring, at home with our mom again as we closed our undergraduate studies together, collaboratively “drawing” by coding.
Not many MIT students major in 21E, cross-register at MassArt, do artistic research, or create independent studies. But with our unique history of collaborating for pretty much all our lives, perhaps it was inevitable that we would work together to craft our own path at MIT.
