Category Archives: MIT

MIT and Alpha Delta Phi and the Boston Globe

MIT is celebrating its 150th birthday this month.  For the last week, the Boston Globe and boston.com have been hyping up a special insert in today’s Globe, The 150 Ways MIT Has Made a Difference.

A few notes from the insert:

  • Colin Angle (#7) is a fraternity brother, as is Eran Egozy (#90), as is Jim Bellingham (#111), as is John Underkoffler (#147), as are the half-dozen mentioned in #140.
  • Not a single other fraternity was mentioned in the Globe – we got #140.
  • Re: #140, the “not Animal House” reference is both right and wrong.  The real Animal House was another chapter of Alpha Delta Phi, the Dartmouth chapter in the 60s.  That chapter has since gone local and is known simply as “AD”.
  • #140 left a couple notable VCs out, including Mark Siegel of Menlo Ventures and Sameer Ghandi of Accel.

What does it all mean?  That’s tough to say.  But I’m really proud of the fact that we’ve created a culture of entrepreneurship that spans more than 30 years.  I’m very proud of it.  We’ve built something special, and it’s very nice to have that recognized by an institution like the Globe.

I know that I did a lot of growing up in the fraternity.  I work pretty hard to keep that experience alive for incoming students.  Hopefully they can get the rewarding experience that I did.  And maybe I’ll appear in that list some day.

The relevant parts of the article:

  • Number 7: The new robots: When they started iRobot Corp. in 1990, MIT grads Helen Greiner and Colin Angle knew they wanted to build robots; they’d figure out their business model later. Did they ever. The Roomba vacuum arrived in 2002, the first truly functional robot to find its way into American households. Last year it earned iRobot more than $400 million in revenue. On a more serious note, iRobot developed a reconnaissance robot for the military. PackBot acts as eyes and ears for troops and neutralizes roadside bombs, screens vehicles and people for devices, and goes into caves. iRobot has built about 3,500 PackBots for US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
  • 90: Ticket to Ride: Why would somebody go to MIT for a bachelor’s degree in music?  Alex Rogopulos did, and, along with musician and engineering student Eran Egozy, the pair launced Harmonix Music Systems.  After a slow start, the Cambridge company in 2005 published Guitar Hero, which came with a plastic instrument and let anybody pretend to play lead guitar in a rock band.  It became one of the decade’s biggest game and the more advanced Rock Band game that followed helped Harmonix rack up $3 billion in sales . . .
  • 111: Underwater robots: Anyone who’s seen “Titanic” knows how undersea robots helped revolutionize exploration. Submersibles such as Alvin and Jason have helped discover everything from sunken treasure to species. None of this would have been possible were it not for the pioneering effort of the MIT Sea Grant Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) Laboratory. In 1988 engineer Jim Bellingham created a 3-foot-long robot named Sea Squirt and sent it exploring the depths of the Charles River.
  • 140: Not “Animal House”: Only at MIT does a single fraternity, Alpha Delta Phi, produce venture capitalists (Brad Feld, founder of the TechStars program for aspiring entrepreneurs), videogame innovators (“Rock Band” developer Eran Egozy), public company CEOs (Colin Angle of iRobot), flying car invetors (Carl Dietrich of Terrafugia), and solar power innovators (Frank van Mierlo, CEO of 1366 Technologies).  Oracle recently paid $1 billion for ATG, a Cambridge e-commerce software company founded by, yes, two former brothers of the ADP fraternity house, Jeet Singh and Joe Chung.
  • 147: “Minority Report”: John Underkoffler graduated from MIT in 1988 and went on to become the science and technology adviser to a big Hollywood director named Steven Spielberg.  The dazzzling technology in “Minority Report’ was his team’s doing.

MBTA Screws Up (Repeatedly)

It’s hard for me to characterize the MBTA’s most recent insanity: Are they in denial about their security problems? Or are they so disconnected from reality that they think they can hide their security problems? Let’s explore the question.

First, a review of recent events: Three MIT students study the MBTA’s security and prepare a presentation to DEFCON 16. (Their advisor is Professor Ron Rivest, the “R” in RSA.) Dr. Rivest contacts the MBTA about the research. The students, the professor, and the MBTA have a meeting. Later that week the MBTA seeks an injunction in federal court to prevent them from delivering the presentation. The injunction is granted and the presentation is canceled. The presentation is filed as a part of the request for injunction, making it a public record. The presentation had also already been distributed on a disc to all of the DEFCON attendees. The article is readily available on MIT’s student newspaper website, The Tech.

Did you click the article? You should. It’s a big file, almost 5 megs, but it’s chock full of great pictures and clear explanations.

So, let’s review option 1, that the MBTA is in denial that there are security problems:

  • Do you think MBTA General Manager Dan Grabauskas believes his own words when he says that he’s “confident” that the claims will be “dismissed or dealt with.”? I’m assuming he looked at the same presentation I just did. He really thinks the claims can be dismissed? It seems to me that he’s spouting a line of bull, and the people who can contradict him have an injunction preventing them from proving him wrong.
  • Did he see the same pictures that I did of open locks, exposed fiber cables, empty surveillance rooms, and unprotected keys?
  • Maybe the MBTA is confused by that presentation. Maybe they just don’t understand how data is encoded in magnetic stripes.

And option two, that the MBTA thought they could simply hide the problems?

  • They sought the injunction, right?  That argues that they thought they could hide the information. But if they’re trying to hide information, why did they file the information themselves as a public document? (ABC News: “But, not only had the presentation already been distributed at the Defcon convention, it was entered into public record when the MBTA filed its complaint.”)  It doesn’t add up.
  • Maybe they thought that the injunction wouldn’t get any attention.  It’s possible, I guess.  But is the MBTA’s PR department that clueless?  That’s a reach, even for Lydia Rivera.

I guess there is always option three, which is just incompetence. There’s an argument to be made here.

It doesn’t really matter which explanation is the right one.  The presentation speaks for itself.  The MBTA is a security disaster.

A final note: As a former editor of The Tech, I’m proud of their role in this.  Good for them for publishing the research.

Jumper Cables for the Space Station

I came across this interesting article about the problems in the space station a few months ago.  Key points:

  • You can’t count on a cable to heat itself if you put it by the dehumidifier.
  • It’s worse if the dehumidifier is balky.
  • It’s a bad idea to have your three-way redundant power system depend on a single wire.
  • It’s a good thing you have jumper cables to bypass the whole crappy deal.

I’m doing my space station reading because it’s about to become the temporary home of my fraternity brother Dan Tani.  He goes up on October 23rd and will stay through December.

Five Injured on the Charles – MIT Prank?

First the Universal Hub told me that the Charles was flammable and I wondered what was going on. Later I read that the fire might be the result of MIT students and the annual sodium drop.

In this post-9/11, post-Aqua-Teen-Hunger-Force world, how long can it be until Mayor Menino demands vengeance?  How soon until he demands the closing of the fraternities and their irresponsible hijinks?

And what will he say when he finds out that it was actually a dorm?

Some Decisions Look Even Better in Hindsight

Two years ago Dr. James Sherley became one of the hundreds of talented MIT professors who were denied tenure and sent packing.  Unlike most, he started on a hunger strike.

I postulate: If someone thinks that a hunger strike is a good way to get tenure, they’re likely not a good candidate for tenure.

I’ve never met the guy and I don’t know his research, but from my perspective his tenure committee made a good call.