justinanderson · November 12, 2013 19:30
diff --git a/gistfile1.json b/gistfile1.json
 [
  {
    "id": "19420",
    "source_url": "http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/hierarchical-capitalism-in-latin-america-1112.html",
    "title": "A new path for growth",
    "published_at": "2013-11-12T05:00:00-05:00",
    "author": "Peter Dizikes, MIT News Office",
    "dek": "In a new book, MIT political scientist Ben Ross Schneider sets out an agenda for growth with greater equality in Latin America.",
    "featured": true,
    "body": "The last three decades have represented a time of tectonic change in much of Latin America: Many authoritarian governments have been replaced by democracies, and free-market principles have supplanted many of the command economies of the past. Overall, these “shifts in the role of the state in Latin America have been epochal,” as MIT’s Ben Ross Schneider writes in a new book on the state of capitalism in the region. <br /><br />But the redevelopment of many of those states has not gone quite as politicians, policymakers, and economic theorists might have anticipated, as Schneider asserts in the book, “Hierarchical Capitalism in Latin America,” just published by Cambridge University Press. Many industries in the region, he contends, lack dynamism, since they are controlled by entrenched multinational firms or agglomerations of “business groups.” As a result, Schneider thinks, economic inequality remains higher than it should be.<br /><br />“A lot of the conventional wisdom was that with market reforms, Latin America would gradually evolve into something that looked like the United States, in terms of corporate governance and labor markets,” says Schneider, the Ford International Professor of Political Science and director of the MIT Brazil program. “But it is something quite different — a different set of institutions, and a different form of capitalism.” <br /><br />Schneider sets out a reform-minded agenda, noting the importance of both education and job opportunities — and observing that the persistence of comfortable relationships between entrenched business and government may prevent new growth opportunities from surfacing.<br /><br /><strong>The dominance of business groups</strong><br /><br />Schneider’s book is based on economic data, archival research on policy and business, and many interviews. “I thought it was a good time, after all of the reforms of the 1980s and 1990s, to study what we have now,” he says, adding: “We need to look more at what the private sector has been doing and thinking, not just government policy.” <br /><br />Schneider’s research helped confirm the extent to which sprawling, often family-run business groups, with arms in many industries, dominate many national economies. These groups do not really have an equivalent in the U.S. or Europe, Schneider notes, and often grip business sectors so tightly that competition is seriously limited. <br /><br />By the 2000s, the 20 largest firms in Chile, for instance, were responsible for half of the country’s GDP; in Colombia in 2006, 28 business groups controlled 90 percent of the 523 largest nonfinancial firms. A notably low proportion of Latin American companies trade on public stock markets, even in countries such as Brazil and Chile where such markets have grown recently. <br /><br />Among other consequences, the influence of both business groups and multinational firms means that there is relatively little bottom-up growth in, for example, many types of manufacturing. It also creates a cozy, mutually reinforcing stasis between business and policymakers — hurting workers, who do not have wide choice among employers and, with little leverage, experience short tenures in the jobs they do obtain. <br /><br />Such corporate structures, and the resulting lack of competition, affect the incentives for workers to acquire education — one reason the education sector is smaller in Latin America than it is in the U.S., Europe, and much of Asia.<br /><br />“One reason individuals don’t invest so much in skills is because job tenure is so short,” Schneider says. “And many individuals who have invested in their skills are not getting jobs commensurate with their skills.” <br /><br /><strong>‘We should understand them in their own terms’</strong><br /><br />As a general remedy, Schneider would like to see a balance between job-creation policies, investment in education and research — and, if political circumstances ever allow it, a reduction in political interference from entrenched business interests.<br /><br />“You’ve got to have a combined approach,” Schneider asserts. “What’s missing is more the job-creation side.”<br /><br />“Hierarchical Capitalism in Latin America” has been well received by other scholars. Torben Iversen, a political scientist at Harvard University, calls it a “rich and agenda-setting study” that poses “a stark challenge … to those who advocate simple solutions such as continued liberalization or renewed state intervention.” <br /><br />Schneider himself describes the book as a “first cut” at a number of issues, hoping it will provoke a more extended discussion about the exact contours of capitalism in the region, and the policies that might help broad-based growth. <br /><br />“I wanted to get this debate started,” he says. “I’m arguing these countries may be on a separate trajectory that’s unique to them, and will result in a different constellation of institutions and strategies. We should understand them in their own terms.”",
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  {
    "id": "19419",
    "source_url": "http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/cooling-droplets-1111.html",
    "title": "Cooling when there’s too much heat",
    "published_at": "2013-11-11T05:00:02-05:00",
    "author": "Nancy W. Stauffer, MITEI",
    "dek": "MIT researchers make surfaces that are easier to cool under extreme heat; finding could benefit power plants, electronics.",
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    "body": "When an earthquake and tsunami struck Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant in 2011, knocking out emergency power supplies, crews sprayed seawater on the reactors to cool them — to no avail. <br /><br />One possible reason: Droplets can’t land on surfaces that hot. Instead, they instantly begin to evaporate, forming a thin layer of vapor and then bouncing along it — just as they would in a hot cooking pan. <br /><br />Now, MIT researchers have come up with a way to cool hot surfaces more effectively by keeping droplets from bouncing. Their solution: Decorate the surface with tiny structures and then coat it with particles about 100 times smaller. Using that approach, they produced textured surfaces that could be heated to temperatures at least 100 degrees Celsius higher than smooth ones before droplets bounced. The findings <a href=\"http://link.aip.org/link/?APL/103/201601&amp;aemail=author\" target=\"_blank\">are reported this week</a> in the journal <i>Applied Physics Letters.</i> <br /><br />“Our new understanding of the physics involved can help people design textured surfaces for enhanced cooling in many types of systems, improving both safety and performance,” says Kripa Varanasi, the Doherty Associate Professor of Ocean Utilization in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and the lead author of the study.<br /> <br />The goal for Varanasi and his co-authors, recent MIT PhD recipient Hyuk-Min Kwon and former MIT postdoc J.C. Bird, was to find a way to increase the temperature at which water droplets start bouncing. Past research indicated that rough materials would add more surface area to hold onto the droplets, making it harder for them to bounce. But the research team discovered that not just any rough surface will do. <br /><br />Through systematic studies using well-defined surfaces, they found that installing microscale silicon posts on a silicon surface raised the temperature at which droplets transitioned from landing to bouncing. But it worked best when the posts were relatively diffuse. As the posts got closer together, the transition temperature gradually dropped until it was no higher than that of a smooth surface. <br /><br />“That result was surprising,” says Bird, who is now an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Boston University. “Common knowledge suggests that the closely spaced posts would provide greater surface area, so would hold onto the droplets to a higher temperature.” <br /><br />By analyzing the physics involved, the researchers concluded that closely spaced posts do provide more surface area to anchor the droplets, but they also keep the vapor that forms from flowing. Trapped by adjacent posts, the accumulating vapor layer under a droplet builds up pressure, pushing the droplet off. When the force of the vapor exceeds the attractive force of the surface, the droplet starts to float.<br /><br />“Bringing the posts closer together increases surface interactions, but it also increases resistance to the vapor leaving,” Varanasi says.<br /><br />To decouple those two effects, the researchers coated the surface featuring spaced-out microscale posts with nanoscale particles. This “micro-nano” surface texture provides both the extensive surface area of the tiny particles and the wide spacing of the posts to let the vapor flow. <br /><br />Experiments confirmed their approach. When they sprayed water on their micro-nano surfaces at 400 C — the highest temperature their experimental setup could provide — the droplets quickly wet the surfaces and boiled. Interestingly, under the same conditions, the droplets did not wet the surfaces of samples with either the microscale posts or the nanoscale texture, but did wet the surfaces of samples with both.<br /><br />In addition to nuclear safety systems, this work has important implications for systems such as steam generators, industrial boilers, fire suppression, and fuel-injected engines, as well as for processes such as spray cooling of hot metal. One application now being considered by Varanasi and his colleagues is electronics cooling. “The heat fluxes in electronics cooling are skyrocketing,” Varanasi says. It might be a job for efficient spray cooling — “if we can figure out how to fit a system into the small space inside electronic devices.”<br /> <br />Yoav Peles, a professor of mechanical, aerospace, and nuclear engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute who was not involved in this research, says, “Extending the surface temperature at which [this phenomenon] occurs is a challenging task that has been a century-long research effort. The groundbreaking ‘hierarchical’ texture developed by Varanasi’s research group is a very promising approach to overcoming the unresolved obstacles faced by previous generations of thermal engineers.”<br /><br />The research was supported by a Young Faculty Award from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the MIT Energy Initiative, and the MIT-Deshpande Center.",
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        "caption": "Micrographs showing water droplets landing on specially designed silicon surfaces (top images) at different temperatures. At higher temperatures, the droplets begin to exhibit a new behavior: instead of boiling, they bounce on a layer of vapor, never really wetting and cooling the surface. At 400 C, the droplet continues to boil only on the surface that combines microscale posts with a coating of nanoscale particles (last column). These results demonstrate that this micro&#8209;nano surface can be effectively cooled even at high temperatures.",
        "credits": "Graphic courtesy of the researchers and Adam Paxson",
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  {
    "id": "19411",
    "source_url": "http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/self-steering-particles-go-with-the-flow-1108.html",
    "title": "Self-steering particles go with the flow",
    "published_at": "2013-11-08T16:20:00-05:00",
    "author": "Anne Trafton, MIT News Office",
    "dek": "Asymmetrical particles could make lab-on-a-chip diagnostic devices more efficient and portable.",
    "featured": false,
    "body": "MIT chemical engineers have designed tiny particles that can “steer” themselves along preprogrammed trajectories and align themselves to flow through the center of a microchannel, making it possible to control the particles’ flow through microfluidic devices without applying any external forces.<br /><br />Such particles could make it more feasible to design lab-on-a-chip devices, which hold potential as portable diagnostic devices for cancer and other diseases. These devices consist of microfluidic channels engraved on tiny chips, but current versions usually require a great deal of extra instrumentation attached to the chip, limiting their portability. <br /><br />Much of that extra instrumentation is needed to keep the particles flowing single file through the center of the channel, where they can be analyzed. This can be done by applying a magnetic or electric field, or by flowing two streams of liquid along the outer edges of the channel, forcing the particles to stay in the center.<br /><br />The new MIT approach, described in <i>Nature Communications</i>, requires no external forces and takes advantage of hydrodynamic principles that can be exploited simply by altering the shapes of the particles.<br /><br />Lead authors of the paper are Burak Eral, an MIT postdoc, and William Uspal, who recently received a PhD in physics from MIT. Patrick Doyle, the Singapore Research Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT, is the senior author of the paper. <br /><br /> <br /><strong>Exploiting asymmetry </strong><br /><br />The work builds on previous research showing that when a particle is confined in a narrow channel, it has strong hydrodynamic interactions with both the confining walls and any neighboring particles. These interactions, which originate from how particles perturb the surrounding fluid, are powerful enough that they can be used to control the particles’ trajectory as they flow through the channel.<br /><br />The MIT researchers realized that they could manipulate these interactions by altering the particles’ symmetry. Each of their particles is shaped like a dumbbell, but with a different-size disc at each end. <br /><br />When these asymmetrical particles flow through a narrow channel, the larger disc encounters more resistance, or drag, forcing the particle to rotate until the larger disc is lagging behind. The asymmetrical particles stay in this slanted orientation as they flow.<br /><br />Because of this slanted orientation, the particles not only move forward, in the direction of the flow, they also drift toward one side of the channel. As a particle approaches the wall, the perturbation it creates in the fluid is reflected back by the wall, just as waves in a pool reflect from its wall. This reflection forces the particle to flip its orientation and move toward the center of the channel.<br /><br />Slightly asymmetrical particles will overshoot the center and move toward the other wall, then come back toward the center again until they gradually achieve a straight path. Very asymmetrical particles will approach the center without crossing it, but very slowly. But with just the right amount of asymmetry, a particle will move directly to the centerline in the shortest possible time. <br /><br />“Now that we understand how the asymmetry plays a role, we can tune it to what we want. If you want to focus particles in a given position, you can achieve that by a fundamental understanding of these hydrodynamic interactions,” Eral says.<br /><br />“The paper convincingly shown that shape matters, and swarms can be redirected provided that shapes are well designed,” says Patrick Tabeling, a professor at the École Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles in Paris, who was not part of the research team. “The new and quite sophisticated mechanism … may open new routes for manipulating particles and cells in an elegant manner.”<br /><br /><strong>Diagnosis by particles</strong><br /><br /><a href=\"http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/microparticles.html \" target=\"_self\">In 2006</a>, Doyle’s lab developed a way to create huge batches of identical particles made of hydrogel, a spongy polymer. To create these particles, each thinner than a human hair, the researchers shine ultraviolet light through a mask onto a stream of flowing building blocks, or oligomers. Wherever the light strikes, solid polymeric particles are formed in the shape of the mask, in a process called photopolymerization. <br /><br />During this process, the researchers can also load a fluorescent probe such as an antibody at one end of the dumbbell. The other end is stamped with a barcode — a pattern of dots that reveals the particle’s target molecule. <br /><br />This type of particle can be useful for diagnosing cancer and other diseases, following customization to detect proteins or DNA sequences in blood samples that can be signs of disease. Using a cytometer, scientists can read the fluorescent signal as the particles flow by in single file.<br /><br />“Self-steering particles could lead to simplified flow scanners for point-of-care devices, and also provide a new toolkit from which one can develop other novel bioassays,” Doyle says.<br /><br />The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, Novartis, and the Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies through the U.S. Army Research Office.",
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  {
    "id": "19416",
    "source_url": "http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/mit-memorial-lobby-1108.html",
    "title": "MIT’s Lobby 10 to be renamed in honor of fallen veterans",
    "published_at": "2013-11-08T05:00:00-05:00",
    "author": "David L. Chandler, MIT News Office",
    "dek": "Already home to war memorials, central campus location to get official new name: ‘Memorial Lobby.’",
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    "body": "Lobby 10, an area below MIT’s Great Dome that has long been a gathering place and site of spontaneous performances, will soon receive a new official designation: On Nov. 18, it will be renamed “Memorial Lobby” in commemoration of MIT alumni who have given their lives in wartime as members of the military services.<br /><br />The lobby’s walls already bear engraved memorials listing MIT alumni who gave their lives in World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. The lobby is also the site, once a year, of a 24-hour silent vigil by members of MIT’s ROTC programs. Last year, the inscriptions on the walls were restored and regilded, making them much easier to read.<br /><br />Several faculty members, students, and organizations have been advocating for the renaming of the lobby for at least two years.<br /><br />“We wanted to find something to recognize the soldiers who have been past MIT students,” says MIT ROTC Oversight Committee member Ronald Ballinger, a professor of nuclear science and engineering and materials science and engineering who served in the Navy from 1965 to 1972. But while the idea of renaming Lobby 10 had been discussed for some time, he says, the real spur to action came from the students. “Both the undergraduate and graduate members [of the committee] took the bull by the horns,” he says. Credit for the initiative “goes to them, not to us,” he says.<br /><br />The MIT ROTC Oversight Committee’s proposal then moved to Daniel Hastings, the Cecil and Ida Green Education Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Engineering Systems and then the dean of undergraduate education, to whom the ROTC programs report. “Once they brought the idea of renaming Lobby 10, I supported it strongly,” Hastings says. “I think the renaming honors the sacrifices that our MIT graduates have made to the country, and MIT can be proud of all that they and MIT have done to serve the country.”<br /><br />Final approval of the decision to rename the lobby came from MIT President L. Rafael Reif and the Executive Committee of the MIT Corporation.<br /><br />Eric Victor, a graduate student in chemistry who served on the MIT ROTC Oversight Committee and who was one of those who pushed for the renaming, wrote a column last year for MIT’s student newspaper, <i>The Tech</i>, advocating the idea. “It seems like it’s important to recognize that particular place on campus” as a memorial to those who served and sacrificed, he says. <br /><br />Victor, who served two tours of duty in Iraq before coming to MIT, says even though the lobby’s walls already carry memorial inscriptions, he feels the official recognition makes a difference in “recognizing those who serve after they get their education here.” It demonstrates, he says, that the MIT community “still cares about veterans.”<br /><br />Forty-two current MIT students — two undergraduates and 40 graduate students — are veterans. An additional 53 MIT undergraduates are in ROTC programs, and 55 graduate students are currently in military programs.<br /><br />The formal dedication will be made at a Nov. 18 ceremony featuring a mixed honor guard of MIT ROTC cadets and MIT Police officers. Ballinger and Victor will speak, as will fellow veterans Phillip Clay, the Class of 1922 Professor of Urban Studies and Planning; John Reed, chairman of the MIT Corporation; and DiOnetta Jones Crayton, associate dean and director of the Office of Minority Education. The ceremony, set for 5 p.m., will also feature performances by the MIT Chorallaries and brass ensemble. Institute Chaplain Robert Randolph will give the benediction.<br /><br />The dedication ceremony will be followed by a reception in the newly renamed Memorial Lobby.",
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  {
    "id": "19415",
    "source_url": "http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/3q-richard-binzel-near-earth-asteroids-1107.html",
    "title": "3 Questions: Richard Binzel on the discovery of three large, near-Earth asteroids",
    "published_at": "2013-11-07T19:27:16-05:00",
    "author": "Jennifer Chu, MIT News Office",
    "dek": "The largest asteroid is 12 miles in diameter, but poses little immediate threat to Earth.",
    "featured": false,
    "body": "<i>Last week, scientists in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences helped characterize three large, near-Earth asteroids, two of which measure about 12 miles in diameter — the largest asteroids to have been discovered in 23 years. The smallest of the three asteroids measures little more than a mile across, but it may pass within 3.4 million miles of Earth, making it a “potentially hazardous asteroid.” <br /><br />The team made their measurements using NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii as part of a project devoted to determining the compositions of new comets and asteroids relatively close to Earth. While these newest asteroids pose little danger to our planet in the near future, they possess some unusual features. </i>MIT News<i> spoke with Richard Binzel, a professor of planetary sciences, about his team’s measurements, and the likelihood of a close encounter.</i><br /><br /><strong>Q:</strong> What are you able to tell about these three asteroids from your brief observations of them? <br /><br /><strong>A:</strong> So far, we have made spectral color measurements of only the strangest one of these: 2013 UQ4. (These are names only scientists can love!) This object is coming from out beyond Pluto, from the region we call the Kuiper Belt. And to top it off, it is also orbiting in a backward direction compared to all the planets. Nearly all of the 1,000 currently known Kuiper Belt objects reside in orbits that at all times keep them at least as far away as Neptune. This new object, “UQ4,” is on an orbit that carries it closer to the sun than Mars, meaning that it comes rather close to the Earth. From our spectral measurements, we can estimate that its composition is likely carbon-rich, meaning the surface is very dark, reflecting only about 4 percent of the sunlight that hits it. Even though this object does not reflect very much light, the fact that we can see it in our telescopes implies that it must be rather large. From our measurements, we deduce it is nearly 20 kilometers, or 12 miles, across.<br /><br /><strong>Q:</strong> The last large asteroid was detected 23 years ago. Why haven’t these new asteroids been detected until now? And what conditions made it possible for you to see them?<br /><br /><strong>A:</strong> These newly found objects are in orbits that usually keep them rather far from the sun, meaning they are too faint to see. In addition to being far from the sun, they also spend most of their time way above or way below the plane where the Earth and other planets orbit — thus they are far from where astronomers concentrate most of their searches. So it has been a combination of these objects just happening to be getting close enough to the sun and the ongoing diligence of search teams that has revealed them to be there.<br /><br /><strong>Q:</strong> What hazard, if any, do these near-Earth asteroids pose to our planet?<br /> <br /><strong>A:</strong> Fortunately, none of these objects poses any foreseeable hazard to Earth. Only one, 2013 UP8, approaches Earth’s orbit close enough to merit the categorization as “potentially hazardous.” All that means is that astronomers have a long-term interest to continue to track its orbit.",
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