MacGregor Campbell

Scope Correspondent
MACGREGOR.CAMPBELL@GMAIL.COM

Ant-Based Computers

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Scope Correspondent

Loizos Michael at the University of Cyprus talks about the basis of biological computing, using ants.
By MacGregor Campbell ’09.

Ant Computing

by
Scope Correspondent

Loizos Michael at the University of Cyprus talks about the basis of biological computing, using ants.
By MacGregor Campbell ’09.

The Feline Law of Thermodynamics

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Scope Correspondent

If you want to understand thermodynamics, a good thing to do is to grow up in a house with seven cats. At some point, you will be visited by a relative who is allergic to little Snowball and her minions and this will require you to sequester the little dander factories in the bathroom until your Dad and Uncle Charlie head out to get a beer. If you then open the bathroom door, a stream of feline hell spawn will shoot by you to do wind sprints in the dining room leaving you to clean up rolls of shredded toilet paper.

The process of moving cats from bathroom to house is easy, but its reverse–moving cats from house to bathroom–is very difficult. When you open the door to a bathroom full of cats, they will naturally spread out across the house, finding their various favorite spots in no time. To reverse the process you’ll have to go around the house, pick each one up, bring it to the bathroom door, and then very deftly open, toss the cat in, and close the door before the other prisoners escape. This process is likely to take the better part of an afternoon.
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Build Day

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Scope Correspondent

It’s a gray Saturday morning, and the MIT campus is dead. Empty courtyards testify that most students are either sleeping off last night’s fun or still attached to a screen after an all-night computer programming session. Some are up, however, and I’m headed to meet them at Build Day, a semi-regular congregation of musicians and hackers who like to make their own musical instruments. Not much of a builder myself, I’m curious to see how overworked yet hypercreative MIT grad students use their precious spare time.

I approach the Media Lab, a four-story box banded with three black stripes of windows. Light gray square tiles cover the rest, outlined in black with occasional highlights of faded neon pink, orange, and green. It’s a spaceship from planet 1985, dry-docked in the middle of campus.

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When Going “Green” May Prove Harmful

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Scope Correspondent

Going green may be the mantra of the day, but at least one “green” solution—introducing insects to target invasive knapweed—can have indirect destructive consequences for the native species they’re meant to protect.

Gallflies used to combat invasive knapweed in Montana, which does an estimated $14 million of damage statewide, have recently been shown to hurt native plant growth through indirect food chain “ripple effects.” The flies, originally introduced in the 1970s, provide an attractive source of extra calories for native deermice, which leads to a deermouse population increase. Since the deermice are natural predators of native seeds, the increased population means more hungry rodent mouths eating native seeds that would have otherwise taken root and grown.
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Looking-glass Logic

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Scope Correspondent

“Build the Bomb—it will remove the great danger from us.” With this order to his scientists, Soviet leader Josef Stalin both acknowledged the nuclear specter at his door and perfectly captured the special logic of the Cold War. Somehow, both the United States and the Soviet Union came to believe that they could make their respective nations safer by placing each other ever closer to complete annihilation.

Stalin got his bomb in 1949. The escalation that followed birthed horrendous weapons and perverse strategies. Harnessing the atom took years of concerted rational effort and yet initiated decades of what, in hindsight, seems like madness: Target civilians instead of military forces; sacrifice cities like pawns; maintain spheres of influence. Most of all, build more, and bigger, and more terrifying bombs.
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Scientists Discern the “Dance” of the Mussels

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Scope Correspondent

It’s a lousy dancer who steps on his partner’s foot, but groups of mussels use a similar foot game to form intricate patterns in a newly discovered underwater dance that benefits all involved.
Scientists in the Netherlands have for the first time shown how individual mussels, acting seemingly independently, naturally self-assemble into large-scale, net-like clusters that balance the competing needs of safety and access to food.

“Mussel fishermen already knew this,” said Johann van de Koppel of the Netherlands Institute of Ecology. “If you put baby mussels—mussel seeds—in a bucket, they naturally form clumps.” Studying seeded mussel beds in Wales, Van de Koppel’s team was able to show why.
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Snakes on the Plains

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Scope Correspondent

Just after the demise of the dinosaurs, some 65 million years ago, dense forests receded, giving way to grasslands. In these open plains, primitive snakes—ancient relatives of boas and pythons—found that large muscular bodies left them too slow to catch a rapidly diversifying population of mammals. Smaller snakes, on the other hand, had the agility to catch prey, but lacked the sheer strength to subdue or kill it.

Enter the fang.
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Maximizing Happiness

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Scope Correspondent

Elan Pavlov works in the space between theory and reality. An independent computational economist based in Massachusetts, he explores how to use the formulas of classical economics in the real world. His goal: to maximize the total good—defined as whatever it is that makes an individual happy. “We’re trying to allow individuals to find out what their own goals are and maximize them,” he explains.

One way to maximize happiness, according to some economists, is to design a mechanism—a theoretical arrangement to determine who gets what and how much they should pay. Pavlov’s’s interested in the details of implementing these mechanisms, methods for computing prices and allocations. His specialty is auctions.
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