Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

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'Open Access' Tributes To Aaron Swartz

Caleb Garling | San Francisco Chronicle | January 14, 2013

The suicide of hacker and digital activist Aaron Swartz has prompted academics from around the globe to post their research online for free, and led the university involved in Swartz's prosecution to launch an investigation into its own role in events leading to his death. Read More »

'The Internet's Own Boy' Is A Powerful Homage To Aaron Swartz

Samantha Murphy Kelly | Mashable | January 21, 2014

The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz received a standing ovation at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival this week just a few days after the one-year anniversary of the web pioneer's death rattled the Internet. Read More »

10 of Today's Really Cool Network & IT Research Projects

Bob Brown | Network World | February 1, 2016

University at Buffalo and Northeastern University researchers are developing hardware and software to enable underwater telecommunications to catch up with over-the-air networks. This advancement could be a boon for search-and-rescue operations, tsunami detection, environmental monitoring and more. Sound waves used underwater are just no match for the radio waves used in over-the-air communications, but the researchers are putting smart software-defined radio technology to work in combination with underwater acoustic modems...

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15 Blockchain Whitepapers Awarded Winners of US Department of Health and Human Services Challenge

Luke Parker | Brave New Coin | August 30, 2016

A challenge held by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)  to encourage Blockchain use in the Health Information Technology field resulted in 15 winning whitepapers. The Department’s Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) first announced the “Use of Blockchain in Health IT and Health-Related Research” challenge in July...

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2017 Prediction: Some "Oops" Ahead

Predictions for 2017 are everywhere this time of year, and it is no wonder.  There are so many technological advances, in health care and elsewhere, and a seemingly endless appetite for them.  We all want the latest and greatest gadgets, we all want the most modern treatments, we all have come to increasingly rely on technology, and we all -- mostly -- see an even brighter technological future ahead. Here's my meta-prediction: some of the predicted advances won't pan out, some will delight us -- and all will end up surprising us, for better or for worse.  Like Father Time and entropy, the law of unintended consequences is ultimately undefeated...

3 Open Source Alternatives to MATLAB

For many students in mathematics, physical sciences, engineering, economics, and other fields with a heavy numeric component, MATLAB is their first introduction to programming or scientific computing in general. It can be a good tool for learning, although (in my experience) many of the things that students and researchers use MATLAB for are not particularly demanding calculations; rather they could easily be conducted with any number of basic scripting tools, with or without statistical or math-oriented packages. However, it does have a near ubiquity in many academic settings, bringing with it a large community of users familiar with the language, plugins, and capabilities in general...

3D Printing: Saving Soles, One at a Time

Drew Turney | Brisbane Times | September 20, 2017

While some treatment and disability tools, such as wheelchairs, have a one-size-fits-all nature, many are personal to the individual needs of the user or their carers, and it's a tricky balance to manufacture them in small enough numbers to be cost effective for both manufacturers and patients. That's where 3D printing comes in – digitally scanning a user's unique body profile and building the solution on a one-off basis faster and cheaper than a factory tooled up for mass manufacture...

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7 Google Ventures Poised To Revolutionize Healthcare

Erica Garvin | HIT Consultant | December 22, 2014

Forget the “sky’s the limit.” Google is reaching for the moon when it comes to healthcare innovation...

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7 Resources for Open Education Materials

Shrinking school budgets and growing interest in open content has created an increased demand for open educational resources. According to the FCC, "The U.S. spends more than $7 billion per year on K-12 textbooks, but too many students are still using books that are 7-10 years old, with outdated material." There is an alternative: openly licensed courseware. But where do you find this content and how can you share your own teaching and learning materials? This month I've rounded up a list of seven open educational resources for K-12 and higher education...

A DIY Pharmaceutical Revolution Is Coming—If It Doesn’t Kill Us First

Kristen V. Brown | Gizmodo | August 2, 2017

As Mixael Laufer tells it, the vision came to him in El Salvador. Laufer was visiting Central America as a human rights envoy, touring a tiny, rural mountain town with the Marin County Peace and Justice Coalition. When he arrived at the town’s medical clinic, it had just run out of birth control. “I thought to myself, ‘This is a country where there are there are methamphetamine and ecstasy labs everywhere. Birth control isn’t that much more complicated,’” Laufer told Gizmodo. “‘Why aren’t these people just making their own birth control?’”...

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A Peek At The Open Hardware Summit 2013

Caleb Kraft | EE Times | September 9, 2013

This weekend, in the wankel-shaped dome of the Kresge auditorium at MIT, nearly 1,000 obsessed and passionate people who believe in giving away their work came together. Known as the Open Hardware Summit, this was the fourth gathering of these peculiar and wonderful people who have gathered to discuss open-source hardware. Read More »

Aaron Swartz Isn't The First Hacker To Commit Suicide In The Face of A Federal Investigation

Adam Clark Estes | The Atlantic Wire | January 14, 2013

Few people close to him doubt that an overzealous federal prosecution team contributed to Aaron Swartz's suicide last Saturday. And quite tragically, he wasn't the first to find himself in that position. Read More »

Academics Agree MIT Should Have Done More For Aaron Swartz

Robinson Meyer | The Atlantic | August 7, 2013

In late July, MIT issued its report, written by computer science professor Hal Abelson, on the university's own actions in the Aaron Swartz case. Swartz, an information activist, faced extensive charges for downloading a huge number of academic articles from the online service JSTOR over MIT's network. Swartz committed suicide in January. Read More »

An Open Platform Revolutionises Biomedical-Image Processing

Press Release | Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology | August 31, 2012

Ignacio Arganda, a young researcher from San Sebastián de los Reyes (Madrid) working for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is one of the driving forces behind Fiji, an open source platform that allows for application sharing as a way of improving biomedical-image processing. Read More »

Archaeology, Open Access, And The Passing Of Aaron Swartz

Eric Kansa | Digging Digitally | January 13, 2013

I don’t post to this blog as much as I used to, but every once in a while there are some developments in the world of data sharing and scholarly communications that I think worthwhile discussing with respect to archaeology. [...] Read More »