Cambridge, Massachusetts is one of the world’s great intellectual crossroads. With Harvard University at one end of town and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the other, many of the most influential thinkers of our time either work there or visit. That gave César Hidalgo an idea.

Hidalgo is a professor at M.I.T., where he studies the relationship between physics, network science and economic development. Building on his own interdisciplinary curiosity, Hidalgo thought it would be interesting to share a little of Cambridge’s intellectual wealth with the outside world, so in October he and the M.I.T. Media Lab launched a series of informal Web interviews called Cambridge Nights: Conversations About a Life in Science.

Cambridge Nights is a little like The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, if Leno talked about things like fractal geometry in the metabolic theory of ecology. That’s the subject of the discussion above featuring the renowned physicist Geoffrey West, professor and past president of the Santa Fe Institute, who gives a fascinating account of the universal scaling laws that pervade all life, from single-celled organisms and complex species to whole ecosystems.

What sets Cambridge Nights apart from other Web forums, like BigThink, is that guests are under no pressure to compress or “popularize” their ideas. “We invite them because we want to hear what they have to say, and we want to give them the time to say it comfortably,” writes Hidalgo. “There are many high-speed formats out there. Cambridge Nights is an alternative where thoughts can be developed and reflected upon without the need to rush.”

In the first season, Hidalgo talks with six scholars from fields spanning the natural and social sciences, including physicist and network scientist Albert-László Barabási, biologist Marc Vidal and international development expert Lant Pritchett. A number of guests are already lined up for Season Two, including experimental psychologist Steven Pinker.

To view all six videos from Season One, and to learn more about the project, visit the Cambridge Nights website.

Courses from MIT can be found in our collection of 400 Free Courses Online.

via The New York Times

Cambridge Nights: Late Night TV-Style Show Takes Deep Look at Scientific Thinking is a post from: Open Culture

It happens at least a few times a day. Students look through our list of 400 Free Online Courses, and ask us whether they can get a certificate for taking a class. And, unfortunately, our answer has been no — no, you can’t. But that may be about to change.

Earlier this fall, Stanford launched a highly-publicized series of free courses that offer students something novel: the ability to take tests and receive a “statement of accomplishment” from the instructor — though not the school itself — if they pass the class. (Stanford will launch 14 more courses starting in January and February. Click link for details.)

Now, MIT wants to up the ante on the certification of free courses. Starting next spring, the university, already famous for its OpenCourseWare project, will launch MITx, an e-learning initiative that will offer certificates to students demonstrating mastery of free MIT courses. According to a new set of FAQs, the certificates won’t bear MIT’s name. Rather, “MIT plans to create a not-for-profit body within [MITx] that will offer certification for online learners of MIT coursework. That body will carry a distinct name to avoid confusion.” The courses will be free; the certificates will cost just a “modest” sum. It’s all a big step in the right direction.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has more on MITx. Expect a formal announcement from MIT on Monday.

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MIT to Offer Certificates to Students Taking Free Courses on the Web is a post from: Open Culture

Think of it as the ultimate slow-motion movie camera. Researchers at M.I.T. have developed an imaging system so fast it can trace the motion of pulses of light as they travel through liquids and solids. To put it into perspective, writes John Markoff in The New York Times, “If a bullet were tracked in the same fashion moving through the same fluid, the resulting movie would last three years.”

The research was directed by Ramesh Raskar of the Camera Culture group at the M.I.T. Media Lab. In an abstract, the research team writes:

We have built an imaging solution that allows us to visualize the propagation of light. The effective exposure time of each frame is two trillionths of a second and the resultant visualization depicts the movement of light at roughly half a trillion frames per second. Direct recording of reflected or scattered light at such a frame rate with sufficient brightness is nearly impossible. We use an indirect ‘stroboscopic’ method that records millions of repeated measurements by careful scanning in time and viewpoints. Then we rearrange the data to create a ‘movie’ of a nanosecond long event.

You can learn more by watching the video above by Melanie Gonick of the M.I.T. News Office, or by visiting the project website.

via Kottke

M.I.T. Camera Captures Speed of Light: A Trillion-Frames-Per-Second is a post from: Open Culture

The video you’re watching is a real-life demonstration of an optical illusion developed in 1995 by Edward Adelson, a professor in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. The Checker Shadow Illusion, as Adelson calls it, shows that our “visual system is not very good at being a physical light meter.” But more importantly, the optical illusion offers important insight into how our visual system tries to break down “image information into meaningful components, and thereby perceive the nature of the objects in view.” Adelson’s full explanation of the illusion and what it reveals appears below the jump (or here). H/T 3 Quarks Daily

The visual system needs to determine the color of objects in the world. In this case the problem is to determine the gray shade of the checks on the floor. Just measuring the light coming from a surface (the luminance) is not enough: a cast shadow will dim a surface, so that a white surface in shadow may be reflecting less light than a black surface in full light. The visual system uses several tricks to determine where the shadows are and how to compensate for them, in order to determine the shade of gray “paint” that belongs to the surface.

The first trick is based on local contrast. In shadow or not, a check that is lighter than its neighboring checks is probably lighter than average, and vice versa. In the figure, the light check in shadow is surrounded by darker checks. Thus, even though the check is physically dark, it is light when compared to its neighbors. The dark checks outside the shadow, conversely, are surrounded by lighter checks, so they look dark by comparison.

A second trick is based on the fact that shadows often have soft edges, while paint boundaries (like the checks) often have sharp edges. The visual system tends to ignore gradual changes in light level, so that it can determine the color of the surfaces without being misled by shadows. In this figure, the shadow looks like a shadow, both because it is fuzzy and because the shadow casting object is visible.

The “paintness” of the checks is aided by the form of the “X-junctions” formed by 4 abutting checks. This type of junction is usually a signal that all the edges should be interpreted as changes in surface color rather than in terms of shadows or lighting.

As with many so-called illusions, this effect really demonstrates the success rather than the failure of the visual system. The visual system is not very good at being a physical light meter, but that is not its purpose. The important task is to break the image information down into meaningful components, and thereby perceive the nature of the objects in view.

This video now appears in our collection of 125 Great Science Videos.

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The MIT “Checker Shadow Illusion” Brought to Life is a post from: Open Culture

Deb Roy is the director of the Cognitive Machines group at the MIT Media Lab. For the first few years of his son’s life, Roy installed cameras in every room of the family home. Now he jokes that he has the “largest home video collection ever made” – roughly 90,000 hours of images and footage of the growing baby’s world. The purpose was to consider and analyze all the factors impacting his son’s first words, including the 7 million words that the boy heard from his father, mother, nanny, and other visitors to the house.

Roy’s talk made one of the biggest splashes at TED this year, not only for what he learned about early language acquisition, but also for his breathtaking data visualization maps. Even by TED standards, it’s an idea-packed 20 minutes: Impressive. And when you consider that Roy is now on sabbatical and employed by the AI company Bluefin Labs, working on, among other things, social media and market research, it all becomes more than a little bit frightening.

On a brighter note, Roy’s son turned out to be an early talker.

Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Variety, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.

The Birth of a Word: Deb Roy at TED is a post from: Open Culture

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Long ago, long before MIT hatched plans for its OpenCourseWare initiative, the university taped a lecture series covering the equivalent of a freshman-level calculus course. Released in 1970, the introductory class taught by Herbert Gross was suited for any student brushing up on his/her calculus, or learning the subject for the first time. MIT has now revived the lecture series, called “Calculus Revisited: Single Variable Calculus,” and you can find it on YouTube, iTunes Video and the Web. It’s also listed in the Math section of our Free Online Course collection (where you’ll find many other calc courses)…

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Vintage MIT Calculus Lessons: Before OpenCourseWare is a post from: Open Culture

Below we have listed the first five courses in the OWC Scholar collection. (They’re entirely free.) Fast forward three years and you will find 20 courses online, says MIT. All will be added to our big list of Free Online Courses.

Physics 1: Classical Mechanics
Physics II: Electricity and Magnetism
Introduction to Solid State Chemistry
Single Variable Calculus
Multivariable Calculus

MIT Introduces Complete Courses to OpenCourseWare Project is a post from: Open Culture

1. UC Berkeley — Stanford’s neighbor to the north makes available a large number of courses online. The collection features lectures taken directly from the undergraduate classroom. And they can be accessed through multiple means — that is, through the web/rss feed, through Berkeley’s iTunesU site, and via YouTube. Overall, this is probably the deepest collection of free academic content out there. And here you’ll find one of the most popular undergraduate courses at UC Berkeley: Physics for Future Presidents, taught by Richard Muller. You can download the course in audio (iTunes – Feed – MP3s) or watch it in video here.

2. Yale – Last fall, Yale launched an open course initiative known as Open Yale Courses. The university initially came out of the gate with seven courses, and it plans to release another eight this fall. As you will see, Yale’s project is high-touch. Each course features a syllabus, reading assignments, class notes, and polished lectures, which, when taken together, contribute to a well-rounded learning experience. The lectures can be downloaded in one of five formats (text, audio, flash video, low bandwidth quicktime video, and high bandwidth quicktime video). And quite notably, Yale has designed the courses to be downloaded fairly easily, which means that you can put the lectures onto an mp3 player, even if you’re only a little tech savvy. Here’s a list of the course titles that you will find: Frontiers and Controversies in Astrophysics, Modern Poetry, Death, Fundamentals of Physics, Introduction to Political Philosophy, Introduction to Psychology, and Introduction to the Old Testament.

3. MIT – By now, MIT’s OpenCourseWare project is no secret. Leading the open course charge, MIT has put online materials from 1,800 courses, including syllabi, reading lists, course notes, assignments, etc. If there was a downside to the MIT initiative, it was that it originally lacked audio and video lectures. These days, however, MIT has started to fill that gap by adding audio and video components to a number of courses, including Walter Lewin’s very popular and publicized course, Classical Mechanics. Download the course lectures in video via iTunes or in various formats here.

4. Indian Institutes of Technology – In India, there are seven institutes dedicated to training some of the world’s top scientists and engineers, making the country an up and coming world power. They are collectively known as the IITs, or the Indian Institutes of Technology. And now more than 50 IIT courses are being made available in English on YouTube for free. (The main page is here; the courses are actually here.) Some of the titles featured here include: Introduction to Computer Graphics, Core Science Mathematics, Computer Networks, and Introduction To Problem Solving & Programming.

5. Stanford - Yes, last week we mentioned the 10 free courses coming out of the Engineering School. But we should also mention the open course collection maintained by the larger university. Stanford’s iTunes site gives you access to dozens of lectures and lets you download close to 30 courses in their entirety. Clearly, the thinking public loves physics (witness above), and among the Stanford courses you’ll find a multi-course overview of modern physics by Leonard Susskind, who has waged a long-running “Black Hole War” with Stephen Hawking (see his new book on that subject here). The lover of the liberal arts will also find some gems, including: The Historical Jesus, History of the International System, Geography of World Cultures, and African American History: The Modern Freedom Struggle. Lastly, I’ll mention that many courses can also be found on Stanford’s YouTube collection in video. Visit here.

We’ve integrated all of these courses into our own meta list of Free Courses from leading universities. It now includes roughly 250 courses, and we’d encourage you to bookmark the page and use it often. Enjoy.

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The Top Five Collections of Free University Courses is a post from: Open Culture

One way to approach this question is to include the work of literary and cultural critics who are already looking at new and traditional media side by side. Following that line, I try to keep up with the academic blog Grand Text Auto, which covers “computer narrative, games, poetry and art.” One of its contributors, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, is working on a book about digital fictions and computer games that looks perfect for my Orals list—and he’s publishing it, chapter by chapter, on Grand Text Auto for blog-based peer review. It will come out next year with MIT Press, but for now, it’s a work in progress.

All fine so far—I could list it as “forthcoming” and direct my professors to the link. But what happens when I start commenting on this book as I read it? What are we to do with the knowledge that this “text” will most likely change between now and next year? Does this item on my Orals list signify a draft of the book, the blog and its comments, or the experience of reading and writing into the MS myself (including, perhaps, responses from the author)?

I find the dilemma particularly interesting because it touches on a central conflict in humanities scholarship. Are we passive observers of the literary scene or active participants in it? It’s a rare academic critic who thinks of calling up a poet to ask her what she meant in a particular line, but that’s exactly the kind of connection that our hyper-conscious, digitally mediated world offers up.

P.S. After all of this hand-wringing, it’s obvious I’m not going to have time to read Noah’s book before I take my exam, so it’s off the list. But I can’t wait to dig in next month!

A New Media Scholar’s Dilemma is a post from: Open Culture