MIT | Something's Brewing

The Center of People

Posted on October 24, 2014October 23, 2014 by Sam Kornstein in India Food Waste, Photography, Travel

Via Joost Bonsen, whose Development Ventures Class in the MIT Media Lab was among the best course decisions I made in grad school, a graphic that’s trending on reddit showing the world’s population by longitude and latitude: From the graphic alone, I would have guessed this was in northwest India, but after looking up the coordinates, it turns out the center of people is just over the border in Pakistan: Coincidentally, as a direct result of Joost’s course, I ended up conducting some research on food waste in India right by the border, just 100 miles from the above coordinates in Pakistan. Here’s what it looks like:

Lasers for Space Broadband

Posted on May 27, 2014May 27, 2014 by Sam Kornstein in Cartoons, Technology

Speeds of 622 Mbps from the moon: Wireless broadband service went cosmic in a demo conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Lincoln Laboratory and NASA, in which a laser-based communication uplink between the moon and earth beat the previous record transmission speed by a factor of 4,800. … The team’s Lunar Laser Communication Demonstration (LLCD) transmitted data over the 384,633 kilometers between the moon and earth at a download rate of 622 Mbps. In addition, data was transmitted from the earth to the moon at 19.44 Mbps, a factor 4,800 times faster than the best radio-frequency uplink ever used, MIT said. Other moon-laser applications here:

The Super PAC App!

Posted on August 22, 2012August 22, 2012 by Sam Kornstein in Current Events, Technology

As I previously mentioned here and here, my good friend Dan Siegel has been hard at work developing the Super PAC App, an iPhone app that helps people who are interested in researching election-related commercials funded by Super PACs identify (1) which organizations are paying for the ad, (2) what other political initiatives they support, and (3) what research has been done to substantiate their claims. Today the app was officially released in the Apple App Store. I’m obviously a bit biased, but I must say I’m very impressed. The first thing I did was pull up an election ad on YouTube and try out the Shazam-like tagging feature. While the ad was playing, I pressed the tag button in the app, and