MITPressLog

Apollo: Progress in Technology?

David Mindell looks at the turn in technological progress since the historic moon landing 40 years ago today:   

Forty years ago, Neil Armstrong’s definitive line of technical poetry, “Tranquility base here, the Eagle has landed,” marked a human achievement that still inspires awe. It also challenges the twentieth century idea of progress and helps us redefine it for the future.

We often hear that progress in technology is incremental, an ever upward arc of performance. Apollo showed how a perfect storm of politics, engineering and skilled pilots can leap ahead of ordinary rules. Yet we have not returned to the moon, not ventured to mars, and only rarely, if ever, matched Apollo’s excitement in subsequent human spaceflights. Apollo remains an historical anomaly that undermines our twentieth-century notions of progress.

Public discourse today is fond of measuring progress with Moore’s law about the power of the microchip. Back in the twentieth century, it was aviation and spaceflight that marked technology’s advance, relentlessly breaking barriers. Leading the way, the Apollo astronauts’ role was carefully crafted to epitomize the modern heroic explorer: the man who risks his life in a far away place for the national or scientific good. Apollo 11 followed Charles Lindbergh’s flight by only forty two years. Higher, faster, farther were the watchwords, and history suggested the progress might continue indefinitely.

Apollo’s six lunar landings seemed like a point on that upward curve, but in fact they were its apogee. For some, twentieth-century progress seemed to stop right about 1970. People assumed they would soon fly on supersonic airliners, but the American super sonic transport SST project was canceled in 1970 (even its European competitor, the Concorde, stopped flying six years ago). Apollo was celebrated as the start of a new wave of human exploration, but forty years later the six lunar landings remain the highest, the fastest, the farthest that humans have ever gone.

Life After Analog

TV is now all digital. No more snowy channels, no more rabbit-ear antennas. So what does this mean for the consuming public? Slate writer, Farhad Manjoon explores the technological advances in how Digital TV translates into broader internet- bandwidth (and faster internet connectivity). Paul Saffo, futurist and writer, interviewed on NPR about white noise, offers a look back at a cultural phenomenon and the emotional connections people have to technological limitations.

Sherry Turkle's Inner History of Devices features a deeply felt essay by Orit Kuritsky-Fox about television's role in social cohesion and religious identity. But what strikes the reader in this essay is the collision between religious observance and social construction of technology. Kuritsky-Fox's grandmother loved watching television,but the religious community she lived in didn't support the idea of television. 

"As I was waiting at the cemetery, the receptionist approached me and asked what I was looking for. I told him I was there for my grandmother's funeral. He stared at me in dismay. [...] 'Are you religious?" he asked, and I started to mumble. Then, he found a way to cut to the chase: 'Do you own a television?' I hesitated a second and then told him the truth."

Will digital television change they way we watch television or the way we participate in the cultural exchange of ideas? How does the "improved" platform affect the experience?

Opening Up Education

Today's the pub date for a book that's important not only for its scholarship but for how that scholarship is being delivered to the reader. Opening Up Education is a collection of papers by scholars that explore how open access - the free, online availability of materials - can transform education. The book - a copublication with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching - describe the challenges and benefits of a whole range of initiatives that marshal open access tools, resources, and knowledge.

Fittingly, in addition to making the book available in standard hard copy form - for a very reasonable price, might we add - we're also making the book itself and open access resource. You can go here and either download a PDF version or read a very attractive iPaper edition.

How to Be a College President

How is John Maeda going to tackle his new position as President of RISD?  Well, according to an interview with Dominique Manning in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, one way will be to use his Eighth Law of Simplicity, TRUST: In Simplicity we trust, featuring sections "Relax, Lean Back", "Just Undo it" and our personal favorite, "Trust Me". 

For all of Maeda's laws, there are ten in all, check out The Laws of Simplicity.  The whole Wall Street Journal interview can be found here. 

China, Censorship, and the Olympics

The Olympics, which kick off in three days, are attracting more attention than usual this year. One reason is the Internet censorship to which foreign journalists are being subjected during the Beijing games. Less than a week ago, it was reported that China would prevent access to web pages dealing with issues that the government deems overly sensitive, such as those involving Tibetan and Taiwanese independence. This seven years after China, in its bid to land the 2008 Olympics, declared that there would be "no restrictions on journalists in reporting the Olympic Games."

These restrictions are similar to those routinely imposed on Chinese citizens, a detailed analysis of which is available in the report on China in Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering, which we published in March. The book grew out of the work of the OpenNet Initiative, which studies Internet filtering and surveillance.

ONI is monitoring the internet filtering in China during the Olympics, and promises frequent updates. Read all about it here.

A Game Looking at the Reality of Climate Change

Eric Klopfer, director of MIT's Scheller Teacher Education Program and author of Augmented Learning describes TimeLab, the program's most recent Augmented Reality Game: 

TimeLab starts with a video that sets the players 100 years in the future when global climate change has wreaked havoc on Cambridge.  They are then sent back in time to present day to study ballot initiatives that could potentially remediate the effects of global climate change in the future.  Players walk around the MIT campus and surrounding areas collecting information (real and virtual) on methods of reducing climate change and the impact of climate change on Cambridge.  For example, at one point they look across the Charles River to the Hancock Tower that currently uses a beacon to provide information about the weather, and consider whether a more comprehensive weather warning system could be of use to warn future area residents of frequent severe weather.  As players stand on Memorial Drive near the MIT campus, they consider how 100 years in the future that location is often under water from floods, and think about ways that those floods could be prevented.  In the end, the players choose a number of ballot initiatives that they must debate, and through some simple game mechanics ultimately find out whether those measures are approved and what impact they have.

Timelab (sponsored by The Center for Future Civic Media) has been played with a number of groups including parents and kids and the Cambridge Science Festival, adults as part of The Center for Future Civic Media, and MIT students as part of a class.  The most recent implementation was this past Wednesday when a class of 20 middle school students from Gloucester came to MIT as part of a summer camp.  Over the course of three hours the students explored the campus, learned about the potential impacts of climate change on Cambridge, and debated how to mitigate these impacts.  The students were very enthusiastic in their response to the game, as they enjoyed exploring the campus, playing a game and learning.  The teachers also enjoyed the game and cited the unique ability to engage students in problems of both scientific and social/political impact as a critical and positive attribute of the game.

To learn more about MIT's AR project here.  We've already mentioned this, but you can also read an interview with Klopfer about his work on Henry Jenkins blog. 

Innovations Offers Free Online Content

Innovations, a journal focusing on creative public policy initiatives, will offer free online content until August 31st. Founded in 2005, Innovations is the most widely read journal dealing with the interaction of technology and governance, with a focus on entrepreneurs whose projects have a public conscience, and innovators who use local solutions to address societal challenges. Click here to access Innovation’s free content.  You'll find articles such as:

• Realizing Rights: Fulfilling Humanity's Promise to Itself  by Mary Robinson
• Removing a Roadblock to Development: Transparency International Mobilizes Coalitions Against Corruption by Peter Eigen
• Empowering the Rural Poor to Develop Themselves: The Barefoot Approach (Innovations Case Narrative: Barefoot College of Tilonia) by Bunker Roy, Jesse Hartigan

Innovations is edited by Philip E. Auerswald, Director of the Center for Science and Technology Policy at the School of Public Policy, George Mason University; and Iqbal Z. Quadir, founding director of the MIT Program in Developmental Entrepreneurship, and founder of GrameenPhone.

Man vs. Machine

David Mindell, author of Digital Apollo was a guest on "Talk of the Nation" last Thursday.  In case you missed it, you can hear the interview here.

Up, Up, and Away

Last night the Discovery Channel wrapped up its series "When We Left Earth."  David Mindell, author of Digital Apollo, offers his thoughts on the documentary:

I watched the entire series of the Discovery Channel's "When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions," all six hours as they replayed last week's episode and then played a new one.  As with so many of these films, the footage and the visuals were great (I'm only sorry I couldn't see it in HD).  But the story lines were generally disappointing--nothing new here, and in fact a great deal left out.  Begin with the subtitle, "the NASA missions," implying that the only NASA missions sent humans into space; the series hardly mentioned any remote missions.  Skylab was given pretty short shrift, despite a great deal of interesting work that went on during that project.  The interviews with key players were interesting in some cases, but they often seemed to be justifying themselves--of course Shuttle astronauts are going to think the shuttle was successful, but what about any other perspectives?  What about some of the interesting glitches, human conflicts, mistakes, and all the other interesting imperfections that make spaceflight a compelling human endeavor?  I was hoping for a little more on the "return to flight" after the Columbia accident; the film brushes over the fact that NASA made many of the same mistakes in recovering from the accident that they had made in leading up to it (not to mention similar ones that had been made on Challenger), and that the first Discovery flight after Columbia showed that the foam-shedding problem had been only incompletely solved.  I suppose there is a place in the world for younger generations to get the basic stories of American human spaceflight, but too often this genre is characterized by repetition more than analysis or originality.  This, I suppose, is partly what leads to the current status of human spaceflight in the US today: some people are for it and will not be convinced otherwise, and others are opposed or uninterested and will not change their minds.

I have higher hopes for the series "Moon Machines" which airs on Discovery July 6-10, made by the same people who made last year's film "In the Shadow of the Moon." David Sington and Chris Riley are smart, creative film makers.  I've seen the third episode, "The Navigation Computer," which is partly based on my book "Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight," and it came out very well.  The episode, and I bet the entire "Moon Machines" series brings to light some of the numerous other stories that went into the Apollo missions.

Rich Gold, your companion

Rich Gold's The Plenitude is a whimsical yet serious meditation on the ecology of stuff within which we live and create. It's also a relatively short book - less than 150 pages. For anyone who's craved more wisdom from this lighthearted polymath, you can now check out "The Plenitude: A Companion." It consists of autobiographical reflections from Gold, in the same literary and visual style as the book.

Check it out.