MIT News: around campus

President L. Rafael Reif spoke with Boston Magazine’s Chris Sweeney about the value of investing in science, issues facing higher education, exciting MIT research, and more. “I never imagined that I could end up in this place—and now we are creating digital education tools so that people like me, who are in Venezuela right now, can directly access an MIT professor’s course.” 

New York Times reporter Eduardo Porter speaks with Prof. Paul Osterman about his new book, which examines the need for better home health care in the U.S. Porter writes that in his book, Osterman suggests that improving home health care jobs, “could actually improve the quality and efficiency of the entire health care system.”

In an article for The New York Times, Prof. Kieran Setiya writes that, in his view, living in the present means appreciating activities that cannot be completed and are not incomplete. “If projects are all we value, our lives become self-subversive, aimed at extinguishing the sources of meaning within them,” he explains.  

In an article and accompanying puzzle they developed for The Boston Globe, Aloni Cohen, Sunoo Park, and Adam Sealfon of MIT’s Cryptography and Information Security group write about how bar and QR codes contain hidden messages. Cohen, Park and Sealfon note that the encoding scheme used in these codes, “allows not only error detection, but also error correction.”