ADA and Accessibility of Educational Content

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 16:09:45 GMT

Dr. Anne Jelfs from the Open University presents on ADA and the Accessibility of Educational Content for the participants of the Bridge to Success project on September 23, 2011.

The Future is Gray, Small & Female: Disruptive Demographics and Transportation Tomorrow

Tue, 02 Nov 2010 04:00:00 GMT

11/02/2010 4:00 PM 4"237Joseph F. Coughlin, Director, MIT AgeLab; Engineering Systems DivisionDescription: If the prospect of aging and infirmity seems remote, you could use some time with AGNES (Age Gain Now Empathy System), a wearable apparatus that approximates "what it feels like to be a 75"year"old woman." Joseph Coughlin's MIT AgeLab designed the suit to promote better understanding of the challenges of aging -- part of a larger effort to address the evolving demographic reality in the U.S., where a baby boomer turns 64 every seven seconds, 85"year"olds are the fastest growing age cohort, and most of the longest"lived will be women. Coughlin believes society must anticipate the needs of this rapidly emerging population, particularly where transportation is concerned. Coughlin draws from a flurry of statistics a vivid portrait of the near future when great numbers of people, mainly women, will not only live longer, but alone. In the U.S., many of these seniors expect to continue working and playing, sometimes battling chronic illness, but above all, maintaining independence and freedom. Given these expectations, "What is driving?" asks Coughlin. "EverythingIt's the glue that holds life together." Coughlin sees "transportation as a function of all the other activities you do." How then will an aging, frequently ailing, isolated population meet its needs for healthcare, shopping, work, leisure, especially when driving becomes a challenge, if not an impossibility? Older drivers contending with stress or fatigue may turn to such automotive technology as the AwareCar, from Coughlin's lab, which can alert drivers if their performance flags at the wheel. Some communities have developed alternative transportation options for seniors who can't count on relatives or friends to shuttle them to appointments or shopping. Big box stores have begun to recognize that acres of parking lot and warehouse pose insuperable challenges to older folks, and are working on making their locations more convenient and navigable. Coughlin cites additional ways society is beginning to accommodate the specific needs of the elderly, so as to sidestep the problems of transportation altogether. These include smart toilets that monitor human waste and upload information to disease management companies, signaling if a change in diet is indicated, and delivering appropriate foods; and home delivery of health care services and products by such retailers as Walgreens. In spite of these promising moves, the sheer number of aging baby boomers who will need to get around in coming years spells trouble. "We are still going to have a major mobility gap in the U.S.," Coughlin believes, "even if we started yesterday and invested billions to work really fast." About the Speaker(s): Joseph F. Coughlin is founding Director of the MIT AgeLab " a partnership between MIT, industry and the aging community to engineer innovative approaches and technologies to improve the quality of life of older adults and those that care for them. Coughlin's research has been featured in Business Week, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Le Monde and ABC News, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News and CNN World. He has assisted numerous organizations including AT&T, IBM and the American Business Collaborative for Quality Dependent Care, Johnson & Johnson, and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. He teaches strategic management and public policy within the MIT School of Engineering's Engineering Systems Division.Host(s): School of Engineering, Transportation@MIT

Transportation, the Built Environment and Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Developing Cities

Tue, 06 Apr 2010 04:00:00 GMT

04/06/2010 4:00 PM 3"270Chris Zegras, Ford Career Development Assistant Professor of Transportation and Urban Planning, MITDescription: It seems that income and travel are inextricably linked. As communities gain wealth and prosperity, their travel footprint increases. While this relationship affords benefits to those in developed nations, it is not scalable. Global population is projected to increase by nearly 2 billion people by 2030. If this newly added population drove just 3,000 kilometers a year, they would emit more tonnes of C02 annually, more than all the countries of Latin America emit today. "The world simply cannot afford to add another Latin America", says Chris Zegras. Zegras observes that fundamentally, people do not desire travel . they wish to have accessibility. Travel is a derived demand, prompted by our activities. If we could make better use of telecommunications, or, if our cities were more compact, perhaps we would find less need for vehicle trips. This is not a new concept for Americans. Nearly 100 years ago, planners envisioned "garden cities" where urban space could be better designed to promote community and neighborhood. Zegras and his students are modeling the trajectory of travel and growth in the developing world" primarily Asia and South America. In Santiago, Chile there has been a large growth of the middle class, accompanied, not surprisingly by an increase in automobile ownership. However, vehicle ownership and rising income are only part of the explanation. The research has noted that distance to the Central Business District, and proximity to Santiago's Metro system are also important factors. Neither urban density nor income entirely explains the picture of travel behavior. In Jinan, China the research team has compared travel in four distinctly different types of neighborhoods, and conducted a survey with 9 areas and 300 households per district. Counter intuitively, the data shows vehicle trips are more prevalent in higher density. These are new style developments consisting of very tall residential superblocks. In fact, looking at total energy consumption, the superblocks use more mega joules of energy than households in more traditional or older Chinese neighborhoods. At the end of the day, Zegras notes that there is a complex, and perhaps reflexive mechanism between the built environment and travel. The built environment may simply not provide enough accessibility to get us to a different standard, and behaviorally, people may cling to their implicit "travel time budgets". If they are able to reduce their daily travel on the one hand, might they then accumulate the savings, so to speak, and take one longer, leisure trip at month"end on an airplane? Measuring the carbon footprint of transportation within the built environment is difficult and there is "leakage". If we save in one area, we might spend in another. About the Speaker(s): Chris Zegras teaches graduate"level courses in urban transportation planning, statistics, and land use"transportation planning in the Department of Urban Studies at MIT, where he has also co"taught urban design and planning studios and Practica in Beijing, Santiago de Chile, and Mexico City. He currently serves as the MIT Lead for the MIT"Portugal Program Transportation Systems Focus Area. He is also a member of the Campus Energy Task Force of the MIT Energy Initiative. Zegras previously worked as a Research Associate at MIT's Laboratory for Energy & the Environment. He also spent 6 years with the International Institute for Energy Conservation (IIEC) in Washington, DC and Santiago de Chile. He has consulted widely on transportation, land development, environment, and finance, including for the International Energy Agency, the Government of Peru, the World Bank, the U.S., Canadian, and German overseas development agencies, and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. Zegras holds a BA in Economics and Spanish from Tufts University, and the Master in City Planning, the Master of Science in Transportation, and the Ph.D. in Urban and Regional Planning from MIT Host(s): School of Engineering, Transportation@MIT

Transportation in Contemporary Society: A Complex Systems Approach

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 05:00:00 GMT

03/09/2010 4:00 PM 3"270Joseph Sussman, J R East Professor of Civil and Environmental EngineeringDescription: In the nineteen fifties and sixties, students of transportation focused on building infrastructure and applied lessons from the physical sciences to designing mobility. Mobility was facilely linked to the engines of economic growth and expanding GDP. In time, that perspective was replaced by a focus on transportation systems and networks. There was a newfound emphasis on environmental impacts, land use, and intermodal freight. There was also a growing concern on unpriced externalities. Today, Joseph Sussman explains, with many of those problems still unsolved, transportation has entered a new phase-- a period of immense complexity or CLIOS, which stands for complex, large scale, interconnected, open and sociotechical is an acronym that is becoming the mantra of transportation engineers. While it is not as far"reaching as "chaos" to a physicist, it is an approach with far"reaching consequences for the transportation field. To participate in "Complexity 101" engineers must take account of stochastic systems, difficulties relating cause and effect, and non"linear behaviors. They must also recognize complex feedback loops between macro and micro issues; time scale anomalies, and evaluative complexity brought by new stakeholders. Sussman observes, " Even if we could wish away behavioral complexity, it would not mean that we know what we should do." He says that transportation engineering must now embrace management, the social sciences and planning and he warns us eschew narrow representations of complex systems because they are implicitly easier to solve. Sussman walks us through the new tools of math and advanced technology which have evolved with with CLIOS. In earlier times engineers could not respond with full information, disaggregate demand analysis, or real time operational data. He cites the need to apply these to find new solutions and designs--particularly ones that incorporate flexibility, reliability, and sustainability. Sussman terms these the "bilities". Taking flexibility as an example, he notes that some transportation providers, and particularly the airlines, are creating tailored and customized services for users. Sussman poses whether the concept of flexibility could be extended to highway travel and " pay as you go". Likewise, in automobile design, we are moving away from crash worthiness to a concept of crash avoidance. At a more macro level, Sussman says that we can now solve problems of a scale that seemed unthinkable 5 or 10 years, i.e., problems that were seen to be beyond our computational scope. Sussman observes a growing connection between economics and transportation. "We are moving toward a period where new technology and mathematical solutions allow us to better recognize and value previously un"priced externalities". Increasingly, he views transportation as a regionally scaled enterprise that can be managed at the scale of the metropolitan regional level. That aligns us, he says, with economists who have long talked about metro based regions as the economic engine of society. He also says there is a need for a large national vision on the scale of the one that created the national highway infrastructure. Sussman endorses the view that the American people yearn for a big vision and are tired of cycles of crisis and doom. Host(s): School of Engineering, Transportation@MIT

The Future of Civic Engagement in a Broadband"Enabled World

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 05:00:00 GMT

03/01/2010 4:00 PM Wong AuditoriumEugene J. Huang, Government Operations Director, National Broadband Task Force, Federal Communications CommissionDescription: The digital revolution that brought us Facebook, Twitter and YouTube could help revive participatory democracy in the U.S., says Eugene J. Huang. He unveils the FCC's plan for providing broadband access to every American, and describes how its recommendations could spur more open government and greater civic engagement. Huang is leading an FCC taskforce developing a plan to provide every American with high quality broadband internet capability. Mandated by the Recovery Act, $7.6 billion will soon flow to deploy infrastructure throughout the U.S., by cable, wireless, or satellite; to ensure affordable access for all; and to address a group of national priorities. Huang describes the process of fact"gathering, analysis and recommendation development as the "most open and transparent" in the FCC's history, involving public workshops, and the use of social media and blogs to encourage citizen input. This process in many ways has come to shape the larger goals of the broadband plan. As Huang says, at the end of months of data collection and public discussion, "we came to an obvious conclusionthat civic engagement is the lifeblood of our democracy," and that the broadband plan should play a major role in creating a more informed and engaged citizenry. Vast numbers of Americans are already online, talking, debating and viewing -- an astonishing 120 million people watch more than 10 billion videos monthly. So Huang, his taskforce, and citizen participants began envisioning ways that universal, high"speed digital communication and interactivity could work for the public sector. They ended up with five recommendations: building a more open and transparent government, by making all government and judicial records freely available online, and streaming government meetings and hearings; helping public media such as PBS and NPR expand beyond their broadcast models in providing news content, and removing copyright obstacles to sharing historic materials, ultimately leading to a national digital archive; deploying social media in all government agencies; recruiting technological innovators into government, engaging citizen experts from the private sector and starting an innovation corps; and bringing the election process into the digital age, eliminating mistakes in voter registration, standardizing the process across states, and enabling military personnel overseas to cast ballots electronically. While these measures will require a commitment across all levels of government, Huang feels sure they will lead to a transformation that can "renew democracy in a broadband enabled 21st century." About the Speaker(s): Eugene J. Huang is helping to craft the "national purposes" section of the National Broadband Plan, with a specific focus on the topics of government operations and civic engagement. From 2006 to 2009, Huang served at the US Department of the Treasury. He covered a wide range of international economic and finance issues with a special responsibility for U.S. bilateral relations with China. Previously, Huang was a Visiting Scholar at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research at Stanford University. From 2002 to 2006, he served the Commonwealth of Virginia as the Secretary of Technology and previously as the Deputy Secretary of Technology. Huang was responsible for managing the state's award winning information technology reform initiative, fostered the development of advanced broadband communications, and facilitated the growth of emerging technology industries throughout Virginia. Huang graduated magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania, with a B.S. in Economics from the Wharton School, a B.S. in Electrical Engineering, and a M.S. in Telecommunications Engineering. He received a Thouron Award from the University of Pennsylvania and studied at St. John's College, Oxford University, where he received a M.Phil., with distinction, in Economic History. Huang is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Host(s): School of Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences, Center for Future Civic Media

Sustainable Accessibility: A Grand Challenge for the World and for MIT

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 05:00:00 GMT

02/09/2010 4:00 PM 3"270John Sterman, PhD '82, Forrester Professor of Management and Engineering Systems, and; Director, System Dynamics Group, MIT Description: Transportation systems, as we know them today, will simply not sustain the worlds' growing population. Imagine a projected population of nine billion individuals. If this future population had mobility patterns like drivers in the United States, there would be a staggering 7.6 billion motor vehicles, using 440 million barrels of oil and producing 62 billion tons of CO2 per year. John Sterman says it is self"evident that our current transportation model simply will not scale. But, since the gross world product (GWP) is growing at 3.2% annually, and doubles every twenty years, our current model of development is an overture for environmental disaster. It is clear to Sterman that we need to think differently about the problem. People need access to goods, services, people, and opportunities. This access is what traditional forms of transportation provide. We also need to see transportation in its complexity, and expect that our planning efforts will have totally unintended, unexpected "rebound" effects. Sterman provides two examples of these rebound effects. The first examines the relationship between reducing traffic congestion and mass transit. Traditionally, the solution to traffic congestion has been one of supply and demand, and new roads are built to accommodate the increase in vehicle traffic. But, notes Sterman, augmenting road capacity just does not work: When new capacity is added, new vehicle trips, or longer ones, are encouraged. These trips quickly fill up the new road capacity, which produces a spiral of more severe traffic congestion. Meanwhile, some portion of these new auto trips come at the expense of public transit, which, upon losing riders, then reacts by either cutting service, or increasing fares. This downward spiral of public transit has a feedback loop which increases the attractiveness of driving. Sterman observes that planning is chaotic if we don't pay attention to these feedback loops and really think through what it is people want to achieve. A different, but equally complex set of feedback loops, has been the undoing of the alternative fuels industry. Over a thirty"year horizon, three countries, namely Brazil, New Zealand, and Argentina each developed a national policy and provided incentives to reduce their dependence on foreign oil. Unfortunately, none of their fuel programs grew large enough to achieve sufficient scale economies. Sterman characterizes these new starts as "sizzle and fizzle". He cautions us from repeating their mistakes as a current initiative gets underway to develop a hydrogen vehicle and fueling network in California. Having volume and scale will help us go down the learning curve, and we also need to bring many groups into the problem solving" these include vehicle manufacturers, fuel retailers, suppliers, and consumers. But, technology alone will not solve the problem. Sterman says we should prepare for the counter"intuitive lessons of transportation, and recognize that we will achieve better results if we make driving less attractive. Host(s): School of Engineering, Transportation@MIT

Session IV: Panel

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 15:32:31 GMT

Discussion with Session IV presenters.
Moderator: Alex Pentland, Toshiba Professor of Media, Arts, and Sciences, MIT; Director, Human Dynamics Lab. 10/12/2009

Access Oriented Web Design

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 08:00:09 GMT

Web design guru Scott Jehl from Boston's The Filament Group speak on Access-Oriented Web Design: Building highly-interactive web apps that work for everyone. Scott specializes in website design and development, is a member of the jQuery and jQuery UI design teams, and runs WriteMaps, an application for planning websites.

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