Artificial intelligence, like any software, relies on two fundamental components: the AI programs, often referred to as models, and the computational hardware, or chips, that drive these programs. So far, the focus in AI development has been on refining the models, while the hardware was typically…
Using art and science to depict the MIT family from 1861 to the present
In MIT.nano’s laboratories, researchers use silicon wafers as the platform to shape transformative technologies such as quantum circuitry, microfluidic devices, or energy-harvesting structures. But these substrates can also serve as a canvas for an artist, as MIT Professor W. Craig Carter demonstrates in the latest One.MIT mosaic.
The One.MIT project celebrates the people of MIT by using the tools of MIT.nano to etch their collective names, arranged as a mosaic by Carter, into a silicon wafer just 8 inches in diameter. The latest edition of One.MIT — including 339,537 names of students, faculty, staff, and alumni associated with MIT from 1861 to September 2023 — is now on display in the ground-floor galleries at MIT.nano in the Lisa T. Su Building (Building 12).
“A spirit of innovation and a relentless drive to solve big problems have permeated the campus in every decade of our history. This passion for discovery, learning, and invention is the thread connecting MIT’s 21st-century family to our 19th-century beginnings and all the years in between,” says Vladimir Bulović, director of MIT.nano and the Fariborz Maseeh Chair in Emerging Technology. “One.MIT celebrates the MIT ethos and reminds us that no matter when we came to MIT, whatever our roles, we all leave a mark on this remarkable community.”
A team of students, faculty, staff, and alumni inscribed the design on the wafer inside the MIT.nano cleanrooms. Because the names are too small to be seen with the naked eye — they measure only microns high on the wafer — the One.MIT website allows anyone to look up a name and find its location in the mosaic.
Finding inspiration in the archives
The first two One.MIT art pieces, created in 2018 and 2020, were inscribed in silicon wafers 6 inches in diameter, slightly smaller than the latest art piece, which benefited from the newest MIT.nano tools that can fabricate 8-inch wafers. The first designs form well-known, historic MIT images: the Great Dome (2018) and the MIT seal (2020).
Carter, who is the Toyota Professor of Materials Processing and professor of materials science and engineering, created the designs and algorithms for each version of One.MIT. He started a search last summer for inspiration for the 2024 design. “The image needed to be iconic of MIT,” says Carter, “and also work within the constraints of a large-scale mosaic.”
Carter ultimately found the solution within the Institute Archives, in the form of a lithograph used on the cover of a program for the 1916 MIT rededication ceremony that celebrated the Institute’s move from Boston to Cambridge on its 50th anniversary.
Incorporating MIT nerdiness
Carter began by creating a black-and-white image, redrawing the lithograph’s architectural features and character elements. He recreated the kerns (spaces) and the fonts of the letters as algorithmic geometric objects.
The color gradient of the sky behind the dome presented a challenge because only two shades were available. To tackle this issue and impart texture, Carter created a Hilbert curve — a hierarchical, continuous curve made by replacing an element with a combination of four elements. Each of these four elements are replaced by another four elements, and so on. The resulting object is like a fractal — the curve changes shape as it goes from top to bottom, with 90-degree turns throughout.
“This was an opportunity to add a fun and ‘nerdy’ element — fitting for MIT,” says Carter.
To achieve both the gradient and the round wafer shape, Carter morphed the square Hilbert curve (consisting of 90-degree angles) into a disk shape using Schwarz-Christoffel mapping, a type of conformal mapping that can be used to solve problems in many different domains.
“Conformal maps are lovely convergences of physics and engineering with mathematics and geometry,” says Carter.
Because the conformal mapping is smooth and also preserves the angles, the square’s corners produce four singular points on the circle where the Hilbert curve’s line segments shrink to a point. The location of the four points in the upper part of the circle “squeezes” the curve and creates the gradient (and the texture of the illustration) — dense-to-sparse from top-to-bottom.
The final mosaic is made up of 6,476,403 characters, and Carter needed to use font and kern types that would fill as much of the wafer’s surface as possible without having names break up and wrap around to the next line. Carter’s algorithm alleviated this problem, at least somewhat, by searching for names that slotted into remaining spaces at the end of each row. The algorithm also performed an optimization over many different choices for the random order of the names.
Finding — and wrangling — hundreds of thousands of names
In addition to the art and algorithms, the foundation of One.MIT is the extensive collection of names spanning more than 160 years of MIT. The names reflect students, alumni, faculty, and staff — the wide variety of individuals who have always formed the MIT community.
Annie Wang, research scientist and special projects coordinator for MIT.nano, again played an instrumental role in collecting the names for the project, just as she had for the 2018 and 2020 versions. Despite her experience, collating the names to construct the newest edition still presented several challenges, given the variety of input sources to the dataset and the need to format names in a consistent manner.
“Both databases and OCR-scanned text can be messy,” says Wang, referring to the electronic databases and old paper directories from which names were sourced. “And cleaning them up is a lot of work.”
Many names were listed in multiple places, sometimes spelled or formatted differently across sources. There were very short first and last names, very long first and last names — and also a portion of names in which more than one person had nearly identical names. And some groups are simply hard to find in the records. “One thing I wish we had,” comments Wang, “is a list of long-term volunteers at MIT who contribute so much but aren’t reflected in the main directories.”
Once the design was completed, Carter and Wang handed off a CAD file to Jorg Scholvin, associate director of fabrication at MIT.nano. Scholvin assembled a team that reflected One.MIT — students, faculty, staff, and alumni — and worked with them to fabricate the wafer inside MIT.nano’s cleanroom. The fab team included Carter; undergraduate students Akorfa Dagadu, Sean Luk, Emilia K. Szczepaniak, Amber Velez, and twin brothers Juan Antonio Luera and Juan Angel Luera; MIT Sloan School of Management EMBA student Patricia LaBorda; staff member Kevin Verrier of MIT Facilities; and alumnae Madeline Hickman ’11 and Eboney Hearn ’01, who is also the executive director of Engineering Outreach Programs.
Convening for cultural change
Whether working with fellow students in the Netherlands to design floating cities or interning for a local community-led environmental justice organization, Cindy Xie wants to help connect people grappling with the implications of linked social and environmental crises.
The MIT senior’s belief that climate action is a collective endeavor grounded in systems change has led her to work at a variety of community organizations, and to travel as far as Malaysia and Cabo Verde to learn about the social and cultural aspects of global environmental change.
“With climate action, there is such a need for collective change. We all need to be a part of creating the solutions,” she says.
Xie recently returned from Kuala Lumpur, where she attended the Planetary Health Annual Meeting hosted by Sunway University, and met researchers, practitioners, and students from around the world who are working to address challenges facing human and planetary health.
Since January 2023, Xie has been involved with the Planetary Health Alliance, a consortium of organizations working at the intersection of human health and global environmental change. As a campus ambassador, she organized events at MIT that built on students’ interests in climate change and health while exploring themes of community and well-being.
“I think doing these events on campus and bringing people together has been my way of trying to understand how to put conceptual ideas into action,” she says.
Grassroots community-building
An urban studies and planning major with minors in anthropology and biology, Xie is also earning her master’s degree in city planning in a dual degree program, which she will finish next year.
Through her studies and numerous community activities, she has developed a multidimensional view of public health and the environment that includes spirituality and the arts as well as science and technology. “What I appreciate about being here at MIT is the opportunities to try to connect the sciences back to other disciplines,” she says.
As a campus ambassador for the Planetary Health Alliance, Xie hosted a club mixer event during Earth Month last year, that brought together climate, health, and social justice groups from across the Institute. She also created a year-long series that concluded its final event last month, called Cultural Transformation for Planetary Health. Organized with the Radius Forum and other partners, the series explored social and cultural implications of the climate crisis, with a focus on how environmental change affects health and well-being.
Xie has also worked with the Planetary Health Alliance’s Constellation Project through a Public Service Fellowship from the PKG Center, which she describes as “an effort to convene people from across different areas of the world to talk about the intersections of spirituality, the climate, and environmental change and planetary health.”
She has also interned at the Comunidades Enraizadas Community Land Trust, the National Institutes of Health, and the World Wildlife Fund U.S. Markets Institute. And, she has taken her studies abroad through MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI). In 2023 she spent her Independent Activities Period in a pilot MISTI Global Classroom program in Amsterdam, and in the summer of 2023, she spent two months in Cabo Verde helping to start a new research collaboration tracking the impacts of climate change on human health.
The power of storytelling
Growing up, Xie was drawn to storytelling as a means of understanding the intersections of culture and health within diverse communities. This has largely driven her interest in medical anthropology and medical humanities, and impacts her work as a member of the Asian American Initiative.
The AAI is a student-led organization that provides a space for pan-Asian advocacy and community building on campus. Xie joined the group in 2022 and currently serves as a member of the executive board as well as co-leader of the Mental Health Project Team. She credits this team with inspiring discussions on holistic framings of mental health.
“Conversations on mental health stigma can sometimes frame it as a fault within certain communities,” she says. “It’s also important to highlight alternate paradigms for conceptualizing mental health beyond the highly individualized models often presented in U.S. higher education settings.”
Last spring, the AAI Mental Health team led a listening tour with Asian American clinicians, academic experts, and community organizations in Greater Boston, expanding the group’s connections. That led the group to volunteer last November at the Asian Mental Health Careers Day, hosted by the Let’s Talk! Conference at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. In March, the club also traveled to Yale University to participate in the East Coast Asian American Student Union Conference alongside hundreds of attendees from different college campuses.
On campus, the team hosts dialogue events where students convene in an informal setting to discuss topics such as family ties and burnout and overachievement. Recently, AAI also hosted a storytelling night in partnership with MIT Taara and the newly formed South Asian Initiative. “There’s been something really powerful about being in those kinds of settings and building collective stories among peers,” Xie says.
Community connections
Writing, both creative and non-fiction, is another of Xie’s longstanding interests. From 2022 to 2023, she wrote for The Yappie, a youth-led news publication covering Asian American and Pacific Islander policy and politics. She has also written articles for The Tech, MIT Science Policy Review, MISTI Blogs, and more. Last year, she was a spread writer for MIT’s fashion publication, Infinite Magazine, for which she interviewed the founder of a local streetwear company that aims to support victims of sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
This year, she performed a spoken word piece in the “MIT Monologues,” an annual production at MIT that features stories of gender, relationships, race, and more. Her poetry was recently published in Sine Theta and included in MassPoetry’s 2024 Intercollegiate Showcase. Xie has previously been involved in the a capella group MIT Muses and enjoys live music and concerts as well. Tapping into her 2023 MISTI experience, Xie recently went to the concert of a Cabo Verdean artist at the Strand Theatre in Dorchester. “The crowd was packed,” she says. “It was just like being back in Cabo Verde. I feel very grateful to have seen these local connections.”
After graduating, Xie hopes to continue building interdisciplinary connections. “I’m interested in working in policy or academia or somewhere in between the two, sort of around this idea of partnership and alliance building. My experiences abroad during my time at MIT have also made me more interested in working in an international context in the future.”
Gil Pekelman, Atera: How businesses can harness the power of AI – AI News
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Q&A: Kate Brown on the power of tiny gardens and their role in addressing climate change
To address the climate crisis, one must understand environmental history. MIT Professor Kate Brown’s research has typically focused on environmental catastrophes. More recently, Brown has been exploring a more hopeful topic: tiny gardens.
Brown is the Thomas M. Siebel Distinguished Professor in History of Science in the MIT Program in Science, Technology, and Society. In this Q&A, Brown discusses her research, and how she believes her current project could help put power into the hands of everyday people.
This is part of an ongoing series exploring how the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences is addressing the climate crisis.
Q: You have created an unusual niche for yourself as an historian of environmental catastrophes. What drew you to such a dismal beat?
A: Historians often study New York, Warsaw, Moscow, Berlin, but if you go to these little towns that nobody’s ever heard of, that’s where you see the destruction in the wake of progress. This is likely because I grew up in a manufacturing town in the Midwestern Rust Belt, watching stores go bankrupt and houses sit empty. I became very interested in the people who were the last to turn off the lights.
Q: Did this interest in places devastated by technological and economic change eventually lead to your investigation of Chernobyl?
A: I first studied the health and environmental consequences of radioactive waste on communities near nuclear weapons facilities in the U.S. and Russia, and then decided to focus on the health and environmental impacts of fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear energy plant disaster. After gaining access to the KGB records in Kiev, I realized that there was a Klondike of records describing what Soviet officials at the time called a “public health disaster.” People on the ground recognized the saturation of radioactivity into environments and food supplies not with any with sensitive devices, but by noticing the changes in ecologies and on human bodies. I documented how Moscow leaders historically and decades later engaged in a coverup, and that even international bodies charged with examining nuclear issues were reluctant to acknowledge this ongoing public health disaster due to liabilities in their own countries from the production and testing of nuclear weapons during the Cold War.
Q: Why did you turn from detailed studies of what you call “modernist wastelands” to the subject of climate change?
A: Journalists and scholars have worked hard in the last two decades to get people to understand the scope and the scale and the verisimilitude of climate change. And that’s great, but some of these catastrophic stories we tell don’t make people feel very safe or secure. They have a paralyzing effect on us. Climate change is one of many problems that are too big for any one person to tackle, or any one entity, whether it’s a huge nation like the United States or an international body like the U.N.
So I thought I would start to work on something that is very small scale that puts action in the hands of just regular people to try to tell a more hopeful story. I am finishing a new book about working-class people who got pushed off their farms in the 19th century, and ended up in mega cities like London, Berlin, Amsterdam, and Washington D.C., find land on the periphery of the cities. They start digging, growing their own food, cooperating together. They basically recreated forms of the commons in cities. And in so doing, they generate the most productive agriculture in recorded history.
Q: What are some highlights of this extraordinary city-based food generation?
A: In Paris circa 1900, 5,000 urban farmers grew fruits and vegetables and fresh produce for 2 million Parisians with a surplus left over to sell to London. They would plant three to six crops a year on one tract of land using horse manure to heat up soils from below to push the season and grow spring crops in winter and summer crops in spring.
An agricultural economist looked at the inputs and the outputs from these Parisian farms. He found there was no comparison to the Green Revolution fields of the 1970s. These urban gardeners were producing far more per acre, with no petroleum-based fertilizers.
Q: What is the connection between little gardens like these and the global climate crisis, where individuals can feel at loss facing the scale of the problems?
A: You can think of a tiny city garden like a coral reef, where one little worm comes and builds its cave. And then another one attaches itself to the first, and so on. Pretty soon you have a great coral reef with a platform to support hundreds of different species — a rich biodiversity. Tiny gardens work that way in cities, which is one reason cities are now surprising hotspots of biodiversity.
Transforming urban green space into tiny gardens doesn’t take an act of God, the U.N., or the U.S. Congress to make a change. You could just go to your municipality and say, “Listen, right now we have a zoning code that says every time there’s a new condo, you have to have one or two parking spaces, but we’d rather see one or two garden spaces.”
And if you don’t want a garden, you’ll have a neighbor who does. So people are outside and they have their hands in the soil and then they start to exchange produce with one another. As they share carrots and zucchini, they exchange soil and human microbes as well. We know that when people share microbiomes, they get along better, have more in common. It comes as no surprise that humans have organized societies around shaking hands, kissing on the cheek, producing food together and sharing meals. That’s what I think we’ve lost in our remote worlds.
Q: So can we address or mitigate the impacts of climate change on a community-by-community basis?
A: I believe that’s probably the best way to do it. When we think of energy we often imagine deposits of oil or gas, but, as our grad student Turner Adornetto points out, every environment has energy running through it. Every environment has its own best solution. If it’s a community that lives along a river, tap into hydropower; or if it’s a community that has tons of organic waste, maybe you want to use microbial power; and if it’s a community that has lots of sun then use different kinds of solar power. The legacy of midcentury modernism is that engineers came up with one-size-fits-all solutions to plug in anywhere in the world, regardless of local culture, traditions, or environment. That is one of the problems that has gotten us into this fix in the first place.
Politically, it’s a good idea to avoid making people feel they’re being pushed around by one set of codes, one set of laws in terms of coming up with solutions that work. There are ways of deriving energy and nutrients that enrich the environment, ways that don’t drain and deplete. You see that so clearly with a plant, which just does nothing but grow and contribute and give, whether it’s in life or in death. It’s just constantly improving its environment.
Q: How do you unleash creativity and propagate widespread local responses to climate change?
A: One of the important things we are trying to accomplish in the humanities is communicating in the most down-to-earth ways possible to our students and the public so that anybody — from a fourth grader to a retired person — can get engaged.
There’s “TECHNOLOGY” in uppercase letters, the kind that is invented and patented in places like MIT. And then there’s technology in lowercase letters, where people are working with things readily at hand. That is the kind of creativity we don’t often pay enough attention to.
Keep in mind that at the end of the 19th century, scientists were sure that the earth was cooling and the earth would all under ice by 2020. In the 1950s, many people feared nuclear warfare. In the 1960s the threat was the “population bomb.” Every generation seems to have its apocalyptic sense of doom. It is helpful to take climate change and the Anthropocene and put them in perspective. These are problems we can solve.
In international relations, it’s the message, not the medium
Over 180 world leaders maintain social media accounts, and some of them issue policy warnings to rivals and the public on these platforms rather than relying on traditional government statements. How seriously do people take such social media postings?
A new study suggests the general public and policymakers alike take leaders’ social media posts just as seriously as they take formal government statements. The research, by MIT political scientists, deploys novel surveys of both the public and experienced foreign policy specialists.
“What we find, which is really surprising, across both expert audiences and public audiences, is that tweets are not necessarily seen as this form of cheap talk,” says Erik Lin-Greenberg, an MIT faculty member and co-author of a new paper detailing the results. “They’re viewed as the same type of signal as that being offered through more formal and traditional communications.”
The findings suggest that people have become so fully acclimatized to social media that they regard the medium as a vehicle for messages that have just as much credibility as those generated through the old-school method, in which official statements are released in formal language on official government documents.
“One clue that sheds some light on our unexpected findings is that a slight majority of our survey respondents who read a tweet identified what they read as a White House press release,” says Benjamin Norwood Harris, an MIT doctoral candidate and co-author of the paper. “Respondents really seemed to believe that tweets were just another way presidents communicate in their official capacity.”
The paper, “Cheap Tweets?: Crisis Signaling in the Age of Twitter,” appears in the June issue of International Studies Quarterly. Greenberg is the Leo Marx Career Development Assistant Professor of the History and Culture of Science and Technology at MIT; Harris is a PhD candidate in MIT’s Department of Political Science who specializes in security studies and international relations.
The study fits into a larger body of political science research in the area of “crisis signaling” — the way words and actions in international relations are interpreted, which is often critical to diplomacy. However, when it comes to the use of social media, “There’s been very little research that looks at the credibility of public signals,” Lin-Greenberg notes.
The research consisted of a multilayered set of surveys, conducted in 2021. Using the survey platform Lucid, the scholars surveyed 977 members of the general public about a hypothetical confrontation between the U.S. and Iran, using facsimiles of messages on Twitter (now known as X) and formal White House statements that might have been sent by U.S. President Joe Biden during such a scenario. Separately, the scholars also recruited foreign policy experts from the U.S., India, and Singapore, which all have active English-language think tank spheres, to take the same survey.
Asked to rate the credibility of tweets and official statements on a five-point scale, the public rated official press releases at 3.30 and tweets at 3.22. The policy experts gave a 3.10 rating to the official statement, and a 3.11 rating to the tweets.
“No matter how we cut the data, we just don’t see much difference in how respondents rated Tweets versus official statements,” Harris says. “Even when we vary the formality of the tweet language — including things like all caps and lots of exclamation points — we don’t find an effect.”
A follow-up layer of the survey then asked respondents about a related hypothetical conflict between the U.S. and Iran in 2026, with facsimile tweets and White House statements attributed to both Biden and former president Donald Trump, given that either could be president then. The aim was to see if different leaders influenced perceptions of the two forms of statements.
But in this instance, the public and policy experts regarded tweets and official statements virtually equally seriously. Trump’s statements were given slightly more credibility overall, but with a strong partisan divide: Liberals took Biden’s statements to have more credibility, and conservatives took Trump’s statements to have more credibility.
Overall, the study suggests that many people are simply unaffected by the medium in which a global leader might choose to issue a warning to leaders of other nations. In the surveys, participants were given the opportunity to describe qualitatively what shaped their responses; only about 2 percent cited the medium as an issue.
As Harris notes, the survey data also indicate that slightly more than 51 percent of respondents believed a tweet constituted an officially released government statement. Additionally, about 73 percent of respondents thought tweets were generated in the same way as statements that have the official imprint of a national government.
“People who see a tweet don’t really differentiate it in their minds. They don’t think the tweet is not an official statement,” Lin-Greenberg says. “About three-quarters of the population think it’s coordinated, whether it’s a tweet or an official statement.”
In the paper, the scholars suggest there is considerable room for follow-up research in this area. Among other things, future studies might compare the effect of social media statements to other types of communication, such as speeches. Scholars might also study other social media platforms or broaden the set of countries being studied. Such research, Lin-Greenberg and Harris conclude in the paper, “will further enrich our understanding of the interactions between emerging technology and international politics.”
A modest intervention that helps low-income families beat the poverty trap
Many low-income families might desire to move into different neighborhoods — places that are safer, quieter, or have more resources in their schools. In fact, not many do relocate. But it turns out they are far more likely to move when someone is on hand to help them do it.
That’s the outcome of a high-profile experiment by a research team including MIT economists, which shows that a modest amount of logistical assistance dramatically increases the likelihood that low-income families will move into neighborhoods providing better economic opportunity.
The randomized field experiment, set in the Seattle area, showed the number of families using vouchers for new housing jumped from 15 percent to 53 percent when they had more information, some financial support, and, most of all, a “navigator” who helped them address logistical challenges.
“The question we were after is really what drives residential segregation,” says Nathaniel Hendren, an MIT economist and co-author of the paper detailing the results. “Is it due to preferences people have, due to having family or jobs close by? Or are there constraints on the search process that make it difficult to move?” As the study clearly shows, he says, “Just pairing people with [navigators] broke down search barriers and created dramatic changes in where they chose to live. This was really just a very deep need in the search process.”
The study’s results have prompted U.S. Congress to twice allocate $25 million in funds allowing eight other U.S. cities to run their own versions of the experiment and measure the impact.
That is partly because the result “represented a bigger treatment effect than any of us had really ever seen,” says Christopher Palmer, an MIT economist and a co-author of the paper. “We spend a little bit of money to help people take down the barriers to moving to these places, and they are happy to do it.”
Having attracted attention when the top-line numbers were first aired in 2019, the study is now in its final form as a peer-reviewed paper, “Creating Moves to Opportunity: Experimental Evidence on Barriers to Neighborhood Choice,” published in this month’s issue of the American Economic Review.
The authors are Peter Bergman, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin; Raj Chetty, a professor at Harvard University; Stefanie DeLuca, a professor at Johns Hopkins University; Hendren, a professor in MIT’s Department of Economics; Lawrence F. Katz, a professor at Harvard University; and Palmer, an associate professor in the MIT Sloan School of Management.
New research renews an idea
The study follows other prominent work about the geography of economic mobility. In 2018, Chetty and Hendren released an “Opportunity Atlas” of the U.S., a comprehensive national study showing that, other things being equal, some areas provide greater long-term economic mobility for people who grow up there. The project brought renewed attention to the influence of place on economic outcomes.
The Seattle experiment also follows a 1990s federal government program called Moving to Opportunity, a test in five U.S. cities helping families seek new neighborhoods. That intervention had mixed results: Participants who moved reported better mental health, but there was no apparent change in income levels.
Still, in light of the Opportunity Atlas data, the scholars decided revisit the concept, with a program they call Creating Moves to Opportunity (CMTO). This provides housing vouchers along with a bundle of other things: Short-term financial assistance of about $1,000 on average, more information, and the assistance of a “navigator,” a caseworker who would help troubleshoot issues that families encountered.
The experiment was implemented by the Seattle and King County Housing Authorities, along with MDRC, a nonprofit policy research organization, and J-PAL North America. The latter is one of the arms of the MIT-based Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), a leading center promoting randomized, controlled trials in the social sciences.
The experiment had 712 families in it, and two phases. In the first, all participants were issued housing vouchers worth a little more than $1,500 per month on average, and divided into treatment and control groups. Families in the treatment group also received the CMTO bundle of services, including the navigator.
In this phase, lasting from 2018 to 2019, 53 percent of families in the treatment group used the housing vouchers, while only 15 percent of those in the control group used the vouchers. Families who moved dispersed to 46 different neighborhoods, defined by U.S. Census Bureau tracts, meaning they were not just shifting en masse from one location to one other.
Families who moved were very likely to want to renew their leases, and expressed satisfaction with their new neighborhoods. All told, the program cost about $2,670 per family. Additional research scholars in the group have conducted about changes in income suggest the program’s direct benefits are 2.5 times greater than its costs.
“Our sense is that’s a pretty reasonable return for the money compared to other strategies we have to combat intergenerational poverty,” Hendren says.
Logistical and emotional support
In the second phase of the experiment, lasting from 2019 to 2020, families in a treatment group received individual components of the CMTO support, while the control group again only received the housing vouchers. This way, the researchers could see which parts of the program made the biggest difference. The vast majority of the impact, it turned out, came from receiving the full set of services, especially the “customized” help of navigators.
“What came out of the phase two results was that the customized search assistance was just invaluable to people,” Palmer says. “The barriers are so heterogenous across families.” Some people might have trouble understanding lease terms; others might want guidance about schools; still others might have no experience renting a moving truck.
The research turned up a related phenomenon: In 251 follow-up interviews, families often emphasized that the navigators mattered partly because moving is so stressful.
“When we interviewed people and asked them what was so valuable about that, they said things like, ‘Emotional support,’” Palmer observes. He notes that many families participating in the program are “in distress,” facing serious problems such as the potential for homelessness.
Moving the experiment to other cities
The researchers say they welcome the opportunity to see how the Creating Moves to Opportunity program, or at least localized replications of it, might fare in other places. Congress allocated $25 million in 2019, and then again in 2022, so the program could be tried out in eight metro areas: Cleveland, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Nashville, New Orleans, New York City, Pittsburgh, and Rochester. With the Covid-19 pandemic having slowed the process, officials in those places are still examing the outcomes.
“It’s thrilling to us that Congress has appropriated money to try this program in different cities, so we can verify it wasn’t just that we had really magical and dedicated family navigators in Seattle,” Palmer says. “That would be really useful to test and know.”
Seattle might feature a few particularities that helped the program succeed. As a newer city than many metro areas, it may contain fewer social roadblocks to moving across neighborhoods, for instance.
“It’s conceivable that in Seattle, the barriers for moving to opportunity are more solvable than they might be somewhere else.” Palmer says. “That’s [one reason] to test it in other places.”
Still, the Seattle experiment might translate well even in cities considered to have entrenched neighborhood boundaries and racial divisions. Some of the project’s elements extend earlier work applied in the Baltimore Housing Mobility Program, a voucher plan run by the Baltimore Regional Housing Partnership. In Seattle, though, the researchers were able to rigorously test the program as a field experiment, one reason it has seemed viable to try replicate it elsewhere.
“The generalizable lesson is there’s not a deep-seated preference for staying put that’s driving residential segregation,” Hendren says. “I think that’s important to take away from this. Is this the right policy to fight residential segregation? That’s an open question, and we’ll see if this kind of approach generalizes to other cities.”
The research was supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, the Surgo Foundation, the William T. Grant Foundation, and Harvard University.
UltaHost Review – Outstanding Performance and Protection
As a web hosting consultant who’s helped hundreds of my clients choose the best hosting providers, I can tell you that Ultahost is one of the best hosts currently. A relatively new company, they already outperform some of the older hosting providers in the market. However,…
Kingmakers Preview – Historically Accurate Absurdity – Game Informer
If you haven’t seen the trailer for Kingmakers, I encourage you to watch it now before continuing. If you have, or perhaps you are reading this magazine in an effort to limit screen time (you’re doing great, and we appreciate your support), I can’t continue to talk about the game without spoiling its major twist. The trailer teases what appears to be a medieval strategy game with base-building elements before a contemporary, but admittedly junky truck screams through time to arrive in the middle of a battlefield brimming with horses, suits of armor, and presumably the shouting of old English phrases, but it’s difficult to hear through the chaos.
What follows is something closer to Dynasty Warriors, where one man with modern weapon technology like guns and missile launchers wages war against armies of the past. The premise is immediately enticing, bizarre, and funny, but Kingmakers’ creators, brothers Ian and Paul Fisch, are taking a surprisingly grounded approach to its game while fully embracing the absurd but compelling idea.
“The plot is important, especially when it comes to the historical accuracy,” Ian says. “It’s not just a generic medieval setting. You’re in the 15th century. You’re fighting against Henry Bolingbrook – Henry IV – and his son, Henry V.” This came as a shock to me because after watching the trailer, I fully assumed Kingmakers was a tongue-in-cheek action game about fighting medieval soldiers with modern weaponry, and while that is certainly the case, Ian is clearly passionate about history. He spends the next few minutes of our interview talking about that era of history, England’s relationship with France at the time, and commiserating about how the 2018 Timothée Chalamet film The King and Shakespeare’s Henry V both got the history wrong. “Ian likes to history-nerd out and go really deep,” Paul says. “We do try to keep this accurate lore, and then you intervene. Then the idea is that – you know – you’re altering history.”
And that historical intervention will apparently offer different outcomes. “The game has many endings,” Paul confirms. The trailer does not go deep into the game’s story, which is by design. The Fischs did not want to bog down potential players with lore in that first look. “I don’t think a trailer should start naming a bunch of proper nouns and places and characters,” Ian says. But for those who do dive into Kingmakers when it releases, the story will be a driving force.
Despite the action of fighting medieval armies with modern weaponry, you will not be playing as a trained soldier. Instead, you are a member of a team of scientists who are trying to figure out what in the past led to the current-day apocalypse. Your team has invented a time machine that lets them see the world shift and change around them due to decisions made in the past. They learn they must unite England, Wales, Scotland, and “a little bit of Ireland,” as Ian phrases it, to prevent a terrible future. You’re not an army with an unlimited government budget – you’re a scientist trying to prevent present-day calamity.
And it is possible to fail, or at least arrive at a very confusing finale. The trailer offers a tease of what appears to be an optimistic outcome in a futuristic city with cat-shaped floating ships, but everything is not as it seems. “If you pay close attention at the end, you’ll see that that cat-ship opens up and just rains down human skulls and other bones. So, it’s not exactly optimistic,” Ian says.
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The story was the unexpected element of Kingmakers that drove my conversation with the Fisch brothers, but the duo and their team are also passionate about making a compelling action game with unique mechanics. As the time-traveling scientist, you will be jumping into the middle of the fray, but you will also be building defendable bases and commanding your army. So, alongside firing guns and driving trucks through swaths of soldiers, you will also be issuing orders, and doing it all with others online if you so choose. You will be able to assist your friends with their ongoing campaigns, and they can do the same for you. While specific details about how multiplayer will work are still being locked in, the Fisch brothers make it clear they want it all to be jump-in-jump-out.
“It’s a third-person, but it’s also simulation?” Paul says, not ready to fully commit to a specific genre. “It doesn’t have to be these narrow genres because people like lots of genres, and they want to see interesting matchups of those genres,” Ian says. Kingmakers enters Early Access later this year, which will be our chance to see exactly what this unusual game really is.
This article originally appeared in Issue 365 of Game Informer.
From Canabalt To Tunic – Finji’s Independent Approach To Publishing And Creating Games
In 2009, a video game called Canabalt was published on the iOS App Store. It had a simple premise: Your character flees through a crumbling urban landscape, making great leaps across rooftops at the touch of your phone screen. It met great success and charted in what was then only a burgeoning mobile game ecosystem. Canabalt popularized the infinite runner genre and would ultimately put its designer, Adam Saltsman, on the map.
Now working under the name of Finji as its creative director, Adam’s rise as a designer as well as his partner’s, Bekah Saltsman, as both a publisher and CEO, has been stunning to watch, especially considering the simplicity of that first big hit. Whether you’re playing the bass guitar as Mae Borowski in Night In The Woods, organizing patchwork-colored boxes in Wilmot’s Warehouse, or floating listlessly through space in Capsule, Finji continues to offer memorable, beautiful experiences from trailblazing game designers unlike any other.
But for Adam and Bekah, in those early days of entering the indie game industry, everything always led back to that original, impossible question: How do you even make a video game?
Overland
Bridging The Gap
For as long as Adam can remember, he wanted to be a video game artist. Fascinated with the vibrant colors and rich SunSoft sound chips of original NES cartridges, the video games of his childhood quickly took over his imagination. He designed his own levels for Super Mario Bros. on sheets of grid paper. He ordered floppy disks with the Wolfenstein level editor built-in. He experimented with the Doom level editor, then eventually the Quake editor. However, despite being a part of this growing generation of designers with a dream to create console games that felt like some of their childhood favorites, it was never clear how exactly you get from hobbyist to career.
“That gap, in the early 1990’s in rural Michigan, is a very wide gap,” Adam says.
Upon graduating from the University of Michigan alongside Bekah, the Saltsmans made the move out to where the ever-growing indie scene was just beginning to flourish: Austin, Texas. An environment with excellent studios and cheap rent seemed the perfect place for Adam to cut his teeth and enter the industry. Unfortunately, getting your foot in the door at major developers of the time was much more complicated than anticipated, so he looked to other routes. In 2006, Adam transitioned into tech contractor work to dedicate sufficient time toward launching his and Bekah’s new studio, Last Chance Media. Beginning with only a few days each month, the two created simple, arcade-feeling Flash and iOS games that promoted simple game mechanics and aesthetic sensibilities that fit into Adam’s love for pixel art and incredible game soundtracks. Around this time, Adam’s first major titles begin appearing: Canabalt, Gravity Hook, and Fathom. Adam’s platformer, Fathom, had an especially intriguing finale that took some of his fans at the time by surprise – a boss fight you could not win.
Canabalt
“You die, and you have this bizarre exploration experience,” Adam says. “You find this door at the bottom of the ocean, it opens up, and you sink down into it.”
Until that point, the Saltsmans’ stories in games always seemed to present something both unexpected and unnerving: a sinking robot, a crumbling city, a suffocating space mission. The games were always fun and engaging, but they had something larger to say. Each new project from Adam and Bekah were then examples of both creativity in design and were challenging the idea of what a game could even look like. That philosophy would eventually spur the change of Last Chance Media into their latest team-up and best-known collaboration: Finji.
Finji Begins
Having scraped and saved for nearly 10 years, the Saltsmans were finally ready to unveil their development studio, Finji, on March 3, 2014, along with its first major internal project: Overland. It marked an exceptionally creative endeavor for Adam and Bekah, leaving behind action platforming in favor of eerie, strategic grid-based movement. Any given level is presented from a bird’s eye view, showing various interactable elements for your character and hiding others within obscuring shadows.
“The diorama, at a glance, should look like a little apocalyptic story,” Adam said. “That was the rule for the level design: there should clearly be your characters, menacing forces and an escape route.”
Night In The Woods
However, before they could reach that final product, the Saltsmans put out a very candid, transparent request on their blog, seeking animators and audio engineers who weren’t looking to create something that sounded or looked like anything else on the market. Rather than base qualifications simply on prior experience or padded portfolios, they ensured interested artists were considered through paid, practical demos and tests that proved their intuition and problem-solving skills rather than simply their past work.
Adam and Bekah have always been keenly aware of the toxicity in some of the gaming industry’s highest-stake work environments, particularly regarding “crunch time” before release. That attitude bleeds not only into their game development but also into their relationships with creators as studio publishers themselves. In fact, before they agreed to publish Tunic with creator Andrew Shouldice, they mentored him on the project for years prior. This way, Finji could view Shouldice’s work on the game not only from a marketability, quality-assurance, or localization perspective (which was crucial) but also as fellow creative partners.
I Was A Teenage Exocolonist
“Our relationship didn’t start with a publishing negotiation; it started with them taking time to give a stranger some feedback and advice,” Shouldice said. “It’s that willingness to help that I think makes them such an important part of the game development community.”
Another of Finji’s published games, Wilmot’s Warehouse, first appeared as a part of Humble Monthly on Steam, but creator Richard Hogg knew that in order to improve the game’s performance and expand its audience, he would need a proper publisher. While Hogg had worked with various publishing groups before, it seemed that Finji was especially capable of providing a friendly, cooperative relationship in which everyone involved could have input on the game’s design. Much like an indie record label that emerges from veteran bands supporting younger artists, Finji’s own history in creating games sets it apart from other publishers.
“Finji is exactly like this, and, just like with those labels, there is an integrity and a camaraderie that naturally comes out of it,” Hogg said.
Ten years after those initial Overland blog posts, Finji is still looking for projects unlike anything else and continues to make space for game developers and creators who wouldn’t usually be in the room. In Adam’s experience, he’s found that indie developers often fit into two modes: People who want to make games just like their favorites or people who want to make games that correct the flaws in those same titles and invent something new. More often, however, a Finji game fits in neither category. There would be no Chicory: A Colorful Tale without Link’s Awakening. No Canabalt without Mirror’s Edge. No Night In The Woods without one of Adam’s own personal favorites: Kentucky Route Zero.
“You are giving the player an experience they otherwise would not have had,” Bekah said. “They are able to experience games in a way that they’ve never experienced games before. That idea is fed through Night In The Woods.”
Wilmot’s Warehouse
Seven years since Night In The Woods’ initial release, the game continues to leave as much of an impact as it did when fans first played it. Its casual platforming roots meant for an especially approachable gaming experience, and Scott Benson’s wholly unique art direction helped the game transcend its medium and find itself in myriad forms; fan art, tattoo designs, cosplays, and more.
“There were thousands upon thousands of responses on social media, from people who discovered it last week to people who discovered it seven years ago, talking about how that game not only changed what games were for them but also changed them as a person,” Bekah said.
The sheer approachability and ease of access toward Finji games like Night In The Woods remains one of the studio’s hallmark factors and one the Saltsmans pride themselves on. “No Fail” mode was included in Tunic so combat-averse players can still enjoy the adventure. In the BAFTA award-winning Chicory: A Colorful Tale, you have a fast-paced, engaging action-adventure that still relies on a touching story about creativity and passion. In these same seminal titles, Finji brings together creative teams and designers who lend their original voices to the blossoming indie game industry.
“Chicory is a great example because you have somebody who maybe hasn’t art directed a game that size before, and so it looks super special,” Adam said. “And you have very subversive gameplay. You don’t hurt anybody in Chicory.”
Tunic
These past 10 years, Finji has shown that person-first, supportive video game publishing and development can lead to higher quality experiences, never sacrificing camaraderie for crunch. The unifying factor between their games, then, is the incredible attention to detail each of their gathered teams present toward story, setting and character.
“You can tell these all go together, even though none of them look the same,” Bekah said. “They have this hyper-dedication to place, where the place is an extra character in the game that has motivations that act out upon the player.”
Nowhere will this be truer than in Finji’s upcoming 2025 title.
Spiritual Successor
Overlapping with the marketing and releases of both Tunic and I Was A Teenage Exocolonist (from Sarah Northway, marking the first woman-led release with Finji) development began for Finji’s newest title, Usual June, in February 2021. The fundamental design was going to be very different from its past published releases, like Tunic. Usual June would be a more bespoke and considered experience, less so an open-world for the player to freely explore. It’s also the first development project from Finji since Overland’s release in 2019. But while Overland and Usual June are both stories about the end of the world, the latter marks another major genre departure for the Saltsmans and Finji: a 3D action-adventure.
“An initial inspiration was Secret Of Mana, which is Bekah’s favorite game,” Adam said. “It has real-time battles with dodging and charge attacks. We thought, let’s take the guts of that.”
Chicory: A Colorful Tale
Usual June is a paranormal story, fundamentally a mystery story, but not with a normal, formulaic detective structure. The playable character, June, has the supernatural ability to speak with ghosts, which when combined with the “weird-looking, glowing stuff” (as Adam puts it) briefly shown in the trailer, you’re left with the notes of impossibility lying at the root of Usual June’s mystery. The worldbuilding for Finji and their narrative collaborator, Sweet Baby Inc., then became a sort of experiment: How would a normal-enough town of people react to sudden changes of supernatural phenomena? What are the consequences of learning about the paranormal beneath the surface?
“In Usual June, you will mostly see what June sees and mostly understand what June understands, which is not going to be everything,” Adam said. “There will be things that you don’t fix, there will be some things that don’t get explained or are too hard to explain. I hope that’s one of the things that people love about it, that there’s space to inhabit and think about it.”
Usual June
One way players will be able to inhabit the mystery of June’s town, Fen Harbor, more fully is through its inclusive storytelling within the detective-mystery as a whole. Rather than rely on checklists for June to mark down as the mystery comes to a close, Adam and Bekah lean further into the common tropes of some of their favorite sci-fi and supernatural mysteries, like Buffy The Vampire Slayer, I Am Not Okay With This, and even, for Adam especially, the Godzilla films.
To demonstrate this, Adam began to act out a noir-like scene where a hard-hitting journalist might be visiting a mysterious character who knows more about the mystery than they’re letting on. He proceeded to fish around and pick up miscellaneous objects from nearby shelves in order to seem aloof as he continued to question his suspect.
“Outside of Phoenix Wright, I’ve never seen a game work like that,” Adam said. “The story areas weren’t a 3D space where you can wander around and look at weird stuff on the shelf while you banter with a character.”
Adam and Bekah Saltsman
With much more to learn about Usual June before its release sometime next year, the Saltsmans and their team at Finji look forward to teasing further secrets. How does a missing kid case fit into June’s life? Where is this alternate world full of neon-colored caves and crystalline monsters? And what’s the connection between June’s powers and Teddy, her friendly ghost companion?
All of that remains to be answered… Or will it be?
“It’s not going to be a game where all the things get explained,” Adam said. “A lot of the joy for us is going to live in leaving places for people to have fun in the fog.
This article originally appeared in Issue 365 of Game Informer.