MIT

Wednesday, June 16, 2010
2010 Knight News Challenge: Winners Announcement Ceremony
Speaker: Alberto Ibarguen, Knight Foundation

Time: 2:30p–4:00p

Location: 10-250

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, hosted by the MIT Center for Future Civic Media, will announce the 2010 Knight News Challenge winners. The winners represent the cutting-edge of technology for news, shaping the future of communities and media.

The announcement will feature "lightning sessions" from the 2010 winners.

Learn more about the Knight News Challenge at http://newschallenge.org.

Open to: the general public

Sponsor(s): Comparative Media Studies, MIT Center for Future Civic Media

For more information, contact:
Andrew Whitacre
617.324.0490
awhit@mit.edu

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Thursday, June 17, 2010

EurekaFest 2010 - Presentations by 2010 Lemelson-MIT Collegiate Student Prize Winners and InvenTeams

Time: 1:00p–3:30p

Location: 32-123

Attend presentations and demonstrations by the winners of the $30,000 Lemelson-MIT Collegiate Student Prizes at MIT, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the California Institute of Technology, as well as several high school InvenTeams.


Web site: http://www.eurekafest.org

Open to: the general public

Cost: Free

Tickets: N/A

Sponsor(s): Lemelson-MIT Program

For more information, contact:
Michael Perry
617.45.2170
mperry@mit.edu

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Thursday, June 17, 2010

EurekaFest 2010 - Introduction of the Inventing merit badge

Time: 3:30p–4:00p

Location: 32-123

Attend a presentation by the Lemelson-MIT Program and the Boy Scouts of America introducing the Inventing merit badge


Web site: http://www.eurekafest.org

Open to: the general public

Sponsor(s): Lemelson-MIT Program

For more information, contact:
Michael Perry
617.452.2170
mperry@mit.edu

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Thursday, June 17, 2010

EurekaFest 2010 - InvenTeams Showcase

Time: 6:00p–8:45p

Location: 32, Stata Student Street, Stata Center, 1st Floor

The 2010 InvenTeams, teams of high school students nationwide, will exhibit their invention prototypes.


Web site: http://www.eurekafest.org

Open to: the general public

Cost: Free

Sponsor(s): Lemelson-MIT Program

For more information, contact:
Michael Perry
617.452.2170
mperry@mit.edu

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Thursday, June 17, 2010

EurekaFest 2010 - Presentation by the 2010 $100,000 Lemelson-MIT Award for Sustainability Winner

Time: 7:30p–8:15p

Location: 32-123, Kirsch Auditorium

2010 Lemelson-MIT Award for Sustainability winner, BP Agrawal, will discuss his innovations including a rainwater harvesting system, mobile health clinics and cultural implementations

Open to: the general public

Cost: Free

Sponsor(s): Lemelson-MIT Program

For more information, contact:
Michael Perry
617.452.2170
mperry@mit.edu

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Friday, June 18, 2010

EurekaFest 2010 - InvenTeams Showcase

Time: 5:30p–8:30p

Location: 32, Stata Student Street

The 2010 InvenTeams, teams of high school students nationwide, will exhibit their invention prototypes.

Open to: the general public

Cost: Free

Sponsor(s): Lemelson-MIT Program

For more information, contact:
Michael Perry
617.452.2170
mperry@mit.edu

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Friday, June 18, 2010

EurekaFest 2010 - Lemelson-MIT Awards Ceremony

Time: 6:30p–8:00p

Location: 32-123, Kirsch Auditorium

This public ceremony will honor the work of inventors improving our world. The 2010 Lemelson-MIT Award winners will be recognized, including a special presentation by the 2010 $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize Winner.

Open to: the general public

Cost: Free

Sponsor(s): Lemelson-MIT Program

For more information, contact:
Michael Perry
617.452.2170
mperry@mit.edu

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Friday, June 18, 2010

Reporting a black hole : A journalist's experiences from Chhattisgarh in Central Tribal India

Speaker: Shubhranshu Choudhary

Time: 7:00p–9:00p

Location: 2-105

A talk by Shubhranshu Choudhary, founder CGnet (a community news platform dealing with Chhattisgarh issues).

The talk will be preceded by a short screening of a documentary film titled ?India's Hidden War,? made in 2007 by a team of which Shubhranshu was a part and screened in a program called Unreported World on Channel 4 in the UK.


Web site: http://aidboston.org

Open to: the general public

Cost: Free

Sponsor(s): AID-MIT

For more information, contact:
Ramya Aja
aid-mit-exec@mit.edu

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Saturday, June 19, 2010

EurekaFest 2010 at the Museum of Science, Boston

Time: 10:00a–5:00p

Location: Museum of Science, Boston

Cheer on over 200 high school students in an all-day design challenge that explores the invention process. Come meet Marvel Comics artist Nick Dragotta, and professional toy designer Ingrid Dragotta, as they teach the creative process of making your own inventions. Families are encouraged to attend!

Open to: the general public

Sponsor(s): Lemelson-MIT Program

For more information, contact:
Michael Perry
617.452.2170
mperry@mit.edu

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Harvard

Don't Hate the Player, Hate the Game: Internet Games, Social Inequality, and Racist Talk as GriefingLisa Nakamura, University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign
Tuesday, June 15, 12:30 pm
Berkman Center, 23 Everett Street, second floor
RSVP required for those attending in person (rsvp@cyber.law.harvard.edu)
This event will be webcast live at 12:30 pm ET and archived on our site shortly after (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/webcast).

Games are a radically transnational medium: as Martin Lister writes in New Media: An Introduction, “even before Pokémon, the videogame was perhaps the most thoroughly transnational form of popular culture, both as an industry (with Sony, Sega ad Nintendo as the key players) but also at the level of content—the characters and narratives of many videogames are evidence of relays of influence between America and Japan.” Internet gameplay is becoming more socially and culturally diverse and ubiquitous than ever before. Yet at the same time, the culture of griefing or pranking that dominates these games and other forms of networked social life such as Second Life and Chatroulette takes increasingly racist and racialized forms. The Patriotic Niggas, a group of griefers who delight in "breaking" Second Life and Habbo Hotel by filling public space with garbage, are assuredly not African American, but resort to offensive racist languages as the shortest route to their goal: the disruption of online community and social life. This essay will recap the history of racist griefing online and link the current crisis in racial discourse in the US with this practice, exploring the implications for digital games as a public sphere.

About Lisa
Lisa Nakamura is the Director of the Asian American Studies Program, Professor in the Institute of Communication Research and Media Studies Program, and Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign.

She is the author of "Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet" (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), "Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity and Identity on the Internet" (Routledge, 2002) and co-editor of "Race in Cyberspace" (Routledge, 2000).

She has published articles in Critical Studies in Media Communication, PMLA, Cinema Journal, The Womens Review of Books, Camera Obscura, and the Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies. She is editing a collection with Peter Chow-White entitled "Digital Race: An Anthology" (Routledge, forthcoming), and she is working on a new monograph on social inequality in virtual worlds, tentatively entitled "Workers Without Bodies: Towards a Theory of Race and Digital Labor in Virtual Worlds, or, Why World of Warcraft needs a Civil Rights Movement."

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Building Bodies and Brains for Autonomous Robots

WHEN
Thu., June 17, 2010, 3 – 4 p.m.
WHERE
Room 521, Wyss Institute
3 Blackfan Circle, Boston, MA 02115

ORGANIZATION/SPONSOR
Wyss Institute at Harvard University
SPEAKER(S)
Daniela Rus, visiting scholar Wyss Institute; professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) Department, MIT; co-director, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), Center for Robotics
NOTE
In this talk, Daniela Rus will discuss the challenges of building brains and bodies to create mobile autonomous systems that can interact in new ways with the physical world, on the ground, in water, and in the air. She will focus on recent progress in Self-Organizing Robots, which constitute distributed networks of robots that can sense, actuate, compute and communicate in support of adaptive self-organization. The nodes in such networks can include static sensors, mobile sensors, robots, animals, and humans. Such systems combine the most advanced concepts in perception, communication, and control to create computational systems capable of large-scale interaction with the environment, extending the individual capabilities of each network component to encompass a much wider area, range of data, and control capabilities.
LINK
http://wyss.harvard.edu/viewevent/66/wyss-visiting-scholar-daniela-rus

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Other

Monday night, June 14th
7pm
The first Greater Boston Slow Money MeetUp
The Nonprofit Center
89 South Street
Boston, MA 02111
617-439-3142

Please sign up at http://www.meetup.com/Greater-Boston-Slow-Money/

The first half of the evening will focus on the Slow Money movement and principles and the second half will be a Slow Money showcase. Presenters will include David Warner from City Feed and Supply, Jessie Benhazl from Green City Growers, Dorothy Suput of The Carrot Project, Julia Frost of CHIVE Sustainable Event Design & Catering, and Glynn Lloyd from City Fresh Foods - City Growers.

We suggest a donation of $10 at the door, or better yet become a member of the Slow Money Alliance for just $25 and admission is free.

The Greater Boston Slow Money MeetUp aims to provide a collaborative forum for Boston's locavore, social investing, and local economy communities to channel capital toward building a sustainable, equitable food system.
The idea is to create a critical mass of people and organizations committed to channeling capital to sustainable ag related enterprises in our area. Our MeetUps will offer entrepreneurs the opportunity to present their business plans and for attendees to consider making investments. We envision an environment where all participants learn something from the process.

Hope to see you there!

Eric Becker
eric@cleanyield.com
(617) 395-9966

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GreenPort Forum

Where Does Our Water Come From?

Tuesday, June 15 at 7:00pm

Central Square Library, 45 Pearl St.

Recent problems in the water supply to Boston have highlighted the need for urban residents to understand where our basic resources, such as the water we drink, come from. How sustainable is the Cambridge water supply? How might it be affected by climate change? What can we do to conserve and help assure the long term availability of fresh water in Cambridge?

Sam Corda, Managing Director of the Cambridge Water Department, will present on these issues and more, followed by a roundtable discussion.

For more information, contact Steve Wineman at swineman@gis.net

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Bikes Not Bombs
GREEN ROOTS FESTIVAL!

June 20th, 2010. Noon to 5:30
in the park in front of the Stony Brook T station, Boylston Street, Jamaica Plain, 02130


Links to events at over 30 colleges and universities at Hubevents (http://hubevents.blogspot.com)
Thanks to Fred Hapgood's Selected Lectures on Science and Engineering in the Boston Area (http://fhapgood.fastmail.fm/site02.html)