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Enlarge / The Battletoads are back. We wish that were better news. (credit: Dlala Studios / Rare, Ltd. / Xbox Game Studios)
As an early '90s pre-teen, I was convinced that Battletoads was absolutely massive. I later realized that wasn't the case; a lot of people hated how hard the first game was, while subsequent games flopped. But I'll always be fond of the original game's graphical tricks, over-the-top combat, and wacky mix of genres.
Nothing—not even this week's inspired-yet-messy series rebirth—can take that away from me. For all of its good moments, this year's 10GB version of Battletoads is somehow less diverse and exciting than the 256KB original.
When three players are battling simultaneously, the results can be a mess to keep track of. [credit: Dlala Studios ]
The new game, simply titled Battletoads, sees the series' corporate handlers at Rare Ltd. hand their web-toed fighters to Dlala Studios, an English developer with an eye for hand-drawn 2D art. You can tell why they got the job after playing the first two levels. The game's best bits are a delight to play, either solo or with friends.
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Facebook removes over 980 Groups, 520 Pages, and 160 ads for “US-based militia organizations” and those that identify as Antifa — Facebook has taken down or restricted more than 10,000 groups, pages and Instagram accounts associated with QAnon, in the latest effort …
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?”
https://ift.tt/3gbGMCK https://ift.tt/eA8V8JAs 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.
https://ift.tt/34pS9ov https://ift.tt/eA8V8JBy 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.”
https://ift.tt/2Q2KPqg https://ift.tt/eA8V8JAs 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.”
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.
https://ift.tt/31b31V3 https://ift.tt/3aDwl9ZThe 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.
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.
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.
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.
https://ift.tt/34pS8kr https://ift.tt/3hnPkrHSince Bonny Kellermann ’72 and Bob Ferrara ’67 first launched the Tech Challenge Games in 1992, reunion classes have competed in a range of zany contests from a three-legged race to collect pi plates to a 2.007-style design challenge on the Saturday of Tech Reunions. Although in-person challenges weren’t possible this year, Kellermann and Ferrara kept the tradition alive with a series of virtual challenges. The first-ever Virtual Tech Challenge drew alumni from all 10 reunion classes from 1970 to 2015 as well as some newly minted alums from the Class of 2020. In the end, the Class of 1970 emerged victorious. Check out some standout submissions to the haiku and limerick contest and test your estimation skills, campus knowledge, and first-year smarts below.
In the Alumni Bowl, contestants faced questions like these on topics covered in the first year at MIT:
Alumni (and their offspring) penned 53 poems on one of four topics: Earth Day, covid-19, Zoom, or Google. Here are just a few of our favorites.
Fifty Earth Days gone,
Mother Earth said, “Is it hot?
Or is it just me?”
—Ron Searls ’70
The 50-year class is aware
That these days we must take special care.
But given that we
All survived MIT,
We aren’t so easy to scare.
—Alan Chapman ’70
There was an old nerd from the ’Tute
Who outgrew his snazzy red suit.
So to Lester* he penned,
“Despite covid, please send
A replacement before it seems moot.”
—Richard Tavan ’70
*Lester Gould has supplied red jackets to MIT 50th reunion attendees for decades.
I ZOOM from my room,
Visiting friends on a screen.
New? Yes. Normal? No.
—Beth Karpf ’75
Not beer, not the sun,
corona is a virus,
not a friend, not fun.
—Inge Gedo ’85
MIT Makers
united are covid’s bane:
face shields and hand san.
—Ngozi Eze ’05
Answers:
Photo Challenge: A. 51: MIT Sailing Pavilion; B. E1: MIT President’s House; C. E52: Chang Building; D. W98: Alumni Building; E. W15: MIT Chapel F. W15: MIT Chapel; G. Building 1 courtyard
First-year Challenge: 1. Catenary; 2. Vibrational energy; 3. DNA (A) is transcribed to mRNA (B) using RNA polymerase (C.)
There are 232 brass rats in the beaker.
https://ift.tt/319fE2T https://ift.tt/3aGIs6aOn June 2, one week after the killing of George Floyd, the MIT community came together for an online vigil. I would like to share with you my remarks from that gathering. But I know that mine is not the voice that is most needed right now. As we intensify our work to combat systemic racism and injustice, I urge you to watch the vigil (at web.mit.edu/webcast/vigil), and listen to the powerful voices of Black students, staff, and faculty at MIT.
We come together now because we know, and we insist, that Black lives matter. That Black lives are worthy and complex and inspiring. That every Black person is unique and beautifully human, and that every Black person of every age, everywhere, deserves dignity and decency and respect.
And of course, we come together because we know that these truths, and the basic humanity of people of color, are violated in our nation every day. Last week, the example that shocked the nation was the brutal killing of George Floyd. But so many have suffered before him over weeks and decades and centuries.
Our nation is in terrible trouble. And part of that trouble is the systemic racism that is destroying us from the inside. A society that tolerates official brutality thereby, of course, encourages it.
If we hope to live in a society that is better than its worst impulses, we must use this awful moment to drive and accelerate positive change.
I hope we can join together in doing those outward things. But we also have work to do closer to home.
All of us who can count on the advantages of education, money, power, and even safety in our homes and neighborhoods—all of us with those advantages benefit, every day, from a society with a racist history and a racist present. And MIT is part of that society.
This is our community. I believe it is a wonderful community. But it is our responsibility to make it better. So it is more important than ever that we continue and accelerate the efforts that are already under way with the leadership of our Institute community and equity officer, John Dozier, to develop a strategic plan for diversity, equity, and inclusion, so that as a community we can live up to our highest ideals.
I have enormous faith in and love for the MIT community. In our online graduation celebration last week, I was overwhelmed by the images of our old familiar life together and the incredible beauty of all those faces. Faces of every complexion. Your faces. On campus. Working and playing and thinking and making together.
It is difficult to face this moment in our forced separation without even the consolation of being able to embrace or to wipe each other’s tears.
To those of you who are African-American or of African descent: I know that I cannot know what you are feeling. But I can stand with you. I do stand with you. And I am certain all the people of MIT do too.
https://ift.tt/316k7Dw https://ift.tt/eA8V8J
A ban on TikTok is overdue as the US confronts China's asymmetrical “net nationalism” and fights for the future of the open internet — Critics say we shouldn't abandon the ideal of an open internet. But there is such a thing as being a sucker.
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