Flying high to enable sustainable delivery, remote care

Flying high to enable sustainable delivery, remote care

Five years ago, what began as three nervous Norwegians spotting each other across a study room has evolved into a drone company enabling sustainable deliveries, elder care, and more against a backdrop of unforgiving conditions.

Lars Erik Fagernæs, Herman Øie Kolden, and Bernhard Paus Græsdal all attended the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, but their paths first crossed in the MIT Professional Education Advanced Study Program lounge in 2019, while they were apprehensive about their impending English exam. From there, they each pursued different tracks of study through the Advanced Study Program: Fagernæs studied computer science, Kolden took applied physics classes, and Græsdal, robotics. Months later, when the world shut down due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the trio’s professional trajectories intertwined.

At the height of the pandemic in 2020, Fagernæs, Kolden, and Græsdal launched Aviant — a drone delivery service company. Aviant flew blood samples across Norway’s vast countryside to assist remote hospitals in diagnosing Covid. Today, their drones are delivering groceries, over-the-counter medicines, and takeout food to populations outside city centers. 

Capitalizing on momentum

The pandemic waned, but the need for medical sample delivery did not. Remote hospitals still require reliable and rapid sample transportation, which Aviant continues to supply through its commercial contracts. In 2021, instead of sticking with commercial-only deliveries, the Aviant founders decided to use their momentum to reach for the largest market within autonomous transportation: last-mile delivery.

“Yes, you need a higher volume for the business case to make sense,” explains Fagernæs of the expansion. “Yes, it is a lot more risky, but if you make it, it’s such a big opportunity.” The Norwegian government and various venture capital firms backing Aviant agree that this risk was worth their investment. Aviant has secured millions in funding to explore the consumer market through its newest offering, Kyte. 

To scale operations, work still needs to be done to ingratiate drone delivery to the general population. Emphasizing the environmental benefits of aerial versus traditional road deliveries, the founders say, may be the most compelling factors that propel drones to the mainstream.

So far, Aviant has flown more than 30,000 kilometers, saving 4,440 kilograms of carbon dioxide that would have been emitted through traditional transportation methods. “It doesn’t make sense to use a two- to four-ton vehicle to transport one kilogram or two kilograms of sushi or medicine,” Fagernæs reasons. “You also have cars eroding the roads, you have a lot of car accidents. Not only do you remove the cars from roads by flying [deliveries] with drones, it’s also a lot more energy efficient.”

Aviant’s competitors — among them Alphabet — are spurring Fagernæs and Kolden to further improve their nicknamed “Viking drones.” Designed to sustain Norway’s harsh winter conditions and high winds, Aviant drones are well-adapted to service remote areas across Europe and the United States, a market they hope to break into soon.

The unmatched MIT work ethic

Fagernæs and Kolden owe much to MIT: It’s where they met and hatched their company. After his time with the Advanced Study Program, Græsdal decided to return to MIT to pursue his doctorate. The professors and mentors they engaged with across the Institute were instrumental in getting Aviant off the ground.

Fagernæs recalls the beginning stages of discovering the drones’ theoretical flying limit; however, he quickly ran into the hurdle that neither he nor his peers had experience deriving such data. At that moment, there was perhaps no better place on Earth to be. “We figured, OK, we’re at MIT, we might as well just ask someone.” Fagernæs started knocking on doors and was eventually pointed in the direction of Professor Mark Drela’s office. 

“I remember meeting Mark. Very, very humble guy, just talking to me like ‘Lars, yes, this, I will help you out, read this book, look at this paper.’” It was only when Fagernæs met back up with Kolden and Græsdal that he realized he had asked elementary questions to one of the leading experts in aeronautical engineering, and he truly appreciated Drela’s patience and helpfulness. The trio also credit Professor Russ Tedrake as being an inspiration to their current careers.

Additionally, the work ethic of their fellow Beavers inspires them to work hard to this day. “I was finishing an assignment, and I think I left the Strata Student Center at 5:30 [in the morning] and it was half-full,” Kolden remembers. “And that has really stuck with me. And even when we run Aviant now, we know that in order to succeed, you have to work really, really hard.”

“I’m impressed with how much Aviant has accomplished in such a short time,” says Drela. “Introducing drones to a wider population is going to make large improvements in high-value and time-critical payload delivery, and at much lower costs than the current alternatives. I’m looking forward to seeing how Aviant grows in the next few years.” 

“For the betterment of humankind”

Drones are the future, and Kolden is proud that Aviant’s electric drones are setting a sustainable precedent. “We had the choice to use gasoline drones. It was very tempting, because they can fly 10 times farther if you just use gasoline. But we just came from MIT, we worked on climate-related problems. We just couldn’t look ourselves in the mirror if we used gasoline-driven drones. So, we chose to go for the electric path, and that’s now paid off.”

In the age of automation and perceived diminishing human connections, Kolden did have a moment of doubt about whether drones were part of the dilemma. “Are we creating a dystopian society where my grandfather is just meeting a robot, saying, ‘Here is your food,’ and then flying off again?” Kolden asked himself. After deep conversations with industry experts, and considering the low birth rate and aging population in Norway, he now concludes that drones are part of the solution. “Drones are going to help out a lot and actually make it possible to take care of all people and give them food and medicine when there simply aren’t enough people to do it.”

Fagernæs also takes to heart the section of the MIT mission where students are urged to “work wisely, creatively, and effectively for the betterment of humankind.” He says, “When we started the company, it was all about using drones to help out society. We started to fly during the Covid pandemic to improve the logistics of the health-care sector in Norway, where people weren’t being diagnosed for Covid because of lacking logistics.”

“The story of the success of Lars Erik, Herman, and Aviant makes us proud of what we do at MIT Professional Education.” says Executive Director Bhaskar Pant. “Share MIT knowledge that leads people to be innovative, entrepreneurial, and above all pursue the MIT mission of working toward the betterment of humankind. Kyte is a shining example of that.”

Nobody Wants to Die Review – A Beautiful But Limited Mystery – Game Informer

Nobody Wants to Die Review – A Beautiful But Limited Mystery – Game Informer

Nobody Wants to Die’s world terrifies me. Set only a few hundred years in the future, it paints a dystopian society where humanity has unlocked the secret to immortality, but instead of eternal bliss, it paved the way for the government to have full legal control of our bodies. The world is as fascinating as it is upsetting, and a high-profile murder becomes the catalyst for a gripping (though not always actively engaging) mystery within it. 

Since Blade Runner‘s release in 1982, renditions of a cyberpunk metropolis have been plentiful and familiar. Nobody Wants to Die’s bleak depiction of 2329 New York City stands out as one of my favorites due to its effective fusion of Art Deco. The game looks as if technology skyrocketed in the 1930s while retaining that era’s aesthetic; vintage cars soar across the polluted airways of the concrete jungle, and futuristic gadgets have a Tomorrowland-esque design. In addition to a strong art direction, the graphical fidelity is top-notch with beautiful lighting illuminating the densely detailed cityscape and interiors. Nobody Wants to Die is a gorgeous game, and a clever introductory reveal of its world ranks among my favorite moments of the year. 

The visuals invited me in, and the world-building kept me. After developing the ability to transfer human consciousness to different bodies, humanity has essentially solved death. People routinely live for centuries by switching to new, more desirable bodies, engendering a terrible system where citizens must pay a subscription fee to keep their original shell after coming of age. Failing to do so results in government seizure, where your consciousness is forcibly extracted and stored in a memory bank while your body goes up for sale. The less affluent 99% may have to settle for occupying aging or medically compromised bodies. If you can’t afford a new body, your conscious mind could be trapped in a bank for decades or longer. From Orwellian government promotions of a healthy lifestyle to prevent citizens from becoming damaged goods to reintroduction parties where people familiarize loved ones with their new bodies, developer Critical Hit Games has crafted an intriguing culture around this concept. Every lore detail, whether through new paper headlines or radio broadcasts, added substance to the presentation’s sizzle.  

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The politics surrounding immortality means morally dubious politicians and celebrities can maintain their status and control for obscenely long periods of time. In a world where true death is a rarity, the mysterious murder of one elite figure rattles the cages. Protagonist James Karra, a 120-year-old loose-cannon detective, is tasked with finding the culprit in an off-the-books case. The first-person adventure sees James visiting crime scenes and using a small set of high-tech forensic tools to collect clues and reverse engineer sequences of events. Whether using a handheld X-ray to trace a bullet’s trajectory, shining a UV lamp on hidden blood trails, or, most often, using a time-manipulating gauntlet to rewind and scrub through a chaotic moment, I enjoy assembling the pieces of smaller puzzles to form the big picture. 

Detective work isn’t difficult, relying less on deductive reasoning and more on thoroughly poking around and uncovering every intractable element available. I don’t mind this more guided approach, as finding clues can lead to insightful and entertaining conversations with James’ partner Sara, who provides remote tech support in his ear. The two share some fun, sarcasm-heavy banter, such as an optional exchange where Sara asks James to describe the smell of chocolate (which no longer exists). The performances, especially Sara’s, are strong enough to make their relationship feel genuine and endearing. Their back-and-forth also adds welcomed levity, though James’ hard-boiled noir detective act means he often spews verbose monologues with metaphors that sometimes make limited sense.

Connecting clues in a flow chart between investigations is a game of determining which piece of evidence answers the question at hand. In reality, you can cheese this by just slotting in every clue until the right one fits, but I always wanted to deduce the answer properly. That said, Nobody Wants to Die is ultimately a narrative-focused adventure that uses detective-inspired gameplay as a vehicle to tell its story. You can’t really get anything wrong, and so if you’re hoping for true agency in how you approach solving this conspiracy, you’ll be disappointed.

You can, however, steer the plot in different directions thanks to the choice-driven dialogue and significant decision-making moments, adding stakes to conversations. Some choices have timers and can be as simple as deciding whether or not to drink on the job; an inebriated James may open an additional dialogue option. Bigger decisions, like deciding whether or not to kill a suspect or to destroy or preserve incriminating evidence, alter the plot more significantly. While that provides a good incentive to replay the roughly five-hour adventure, you’ll have to trek through the entire game again since it lacks a chapter selection, which is unfortunate.

Nobody Wants to Die does an admirable job juggling three main story threads: the aforementioned murder, James’ struggle to remember and come to terms with a traumatic event surrounding his wife’s death, and a heartbreaking tale involving Sara I won’t spoil. These plot points are disjointed at times; I’d make a big breakthrough in the murder case I wanted to follow up on immediately, only for the story to shift focus on James’ problems for a period. A mysterious villain at the center of it all is menacing at first but winds up feeling too obscure by the end. Perhaps it’s a result of my choices, but I’m still not entirely sure what the antagonist’s true goal was or even who they were. Though the main threat falls a bit flat, the story regularly gripped me and sprinkled a few effective twists and revelations that kept me guessing until the conclusion. 

Nobody Wants to Die delivers a few hours of largely engaging storytelling, easy yet well-presented puzzle-solving, and jaw-dropping sights. It has an ideal length, as it wraps up just when the long investigation segments begin feeling repetitive since your toolset never changes. While I didn’t get to wear my detective hat as tightly as I wanted, I enjoyed my tour through this cautionary vision of the future.

Professor Emeritus Ralph Gakenheimer, mobility planner and champion of international development, dies at 89

Professor Emeritus Ralph Gakenheimer, mobility planner and champion of international development, dies at 89

Ralph Gakenheimer, MIT professor emeritus of urban planning, passed away on June 17 in Concord, Massachusetts. He was 89 years old.

A faculty member in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), Gakenheimer focused his research on the dynamic relationship between how we classify and use land with the mobility choices individuals make in cities. He was particularly interested in the intentions and choices behind the selection of a particular mode of mobility and how those choices intersect with sustainability and accessibility in developing nations.

During his 40-year tenure at MIT, Gakenheimer also served as a World Bank advisor and visiting professor at various universities including the University of Paris XII, the University of California at Berkeley, and the Universidad de Los Andes (Bogota), as well as being a visiting fellow at Balliol College, Oxford. He was a Fulbright Scholar and chaired several international committees, including the United Nations-appointed committee that oversaw comprehensive planning of the city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia.

“So many of us at DUSP were influenced by Ralph in so many ways,” says Chris Zegras, professor of mobility and urban planning, and DUSP department head. “Personally, it is no exaggeration to say he is the reason I am at MIT. He was an advisor, mentor, role model, dear friend, colleague — and I feel immensely privileged to have had the opportunity to have him play those roles in my life. It’s a sad day, but I take solace in thinking of the infinite ways in which his wisdom, knowledge, good humor, and spirit live on.”

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Gakenheimer graduated from Towson High School, where he was recently inducted into its hall of fame for his career accomplishments. He received a bachelor’s degree in engineering science from Johns Hopkins University. Throughout his high school and college years, he helped at the family pharmacy, where he often worked as the soda jerk. He went on to get a master’s degree in regional planning from Cornell University and a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to joining the faculty at MIT in 1969, Gakenheimer taught for seven years at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

The range of his academic background is reflected in his influential book, “Transportation Planning as a Response to Controversy: The Boston Case” (MIT Press, 1976). “Ralph’s scholarship on the 1960s Inner Belt fight is a must-read for anyone seriously concerned about the state of transportation planning in any era,” says Karilyn Crockett, assistant professor of urban history, public policy, and planning in DUSP. “His excellent, groundbreaking work, ‘Transportation Planning as a Response to Controversy,’ is a thrilling example of telling a sprawling urban story at the scale of humans. After every interaction with Ralph, I walked away feeling empowered and much smarter, what I call the Ralph Effect. The Ralph Effect is to be in proximity to someone whose brilliance is so bright that it amplifies your own.”

Gakenheimer brought deep consideration to his work as a scholar of international development, engaging with a range of projects centered on providing sustainable infrastructure and development. Fittingly for an advocate of responsible transportation, Gakenheimer often commuted to MIT by bike. 

“To describe an academic as thoughtful is perhaps redundant,” says Joseph Coughlin, director of the MIT AgeLab and leader of the U.S. Department of Transportation’s New England University Transportation Center. “However, when I think of Ralph, I cannot think of a better word. Ralph was thoughtful of his colleagues and students. He was thoughtful of the world we are imagining and leaving behind. He was, of course, thoughtful in tweaking and pulling the threads of even the most arcane theory. His soft-spoken demeanor and insights will be missed here and in the many places and spaces he touched over the years.”

Gakenheimer is survived by his wife, Caroline (Bierer) Gakenheimer; his daughters, Rachel Gakenheimer MCP ’99 and Katherine Gakenheimer; his grandchildren, Jesse and Vienne Begin; and his brothers, David and Martin Gakenheimer. 

Donations may be made in Gakenheimer’s memory to Bikes Not Bombs, a charity close to his heart. 

Mistral Large 2: The David to Big Tech’s Goliath(s)

Mistral AI’s latest model, Mistral Large 2 (ML2), allegedly competes with large models from industry leaders like OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic, despite being a fraction of their sizes. The timing of this release is noteworthy, arriving the same week as Meta’s launch of its behemoth 405-billion-parameter…

Pop(over) the Balloons

I’ve always been fascinated with how much we can do with just HTML and CSS. The new interactive features of the Popover API are yet another example of just how far we can get with those two languages alone.
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A recipe for zero-emissions fuel: Soda cans, seawater, and caffeine

A sustainable source for clean energy may lie in old soda cans and seawater.

MIT engineers have found that when the aluminum in soda cans is exposed in its pure form and mixed with seawater, the solution bubbles up and naturally produces hydrogen — a gas that can be subsequently used to power an engine or fuel cell without generating carbon emissions. What’s more, this simple reaction can be sped up by adding a common stimulant: caffeine.

In a study appearing today in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science, the researchers show they can produce hydrogen gas by dropping pretreated, pebble-sized aluminum pellets into a beaker of filtered seawater. The aluminum is pretreated with a rare-metal alloy that effectively scrubs aluminum into a pure form that can react with seawater to generate hydrogen. The salt ions in the seawater can in turn attract and recover the alloy, which can be reused to generate more hydrogen, in a sustainable cycle.

A recipe for zero-emissions fuel: Soda cans, seawater, and caffeine

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A pebble-sized pellet of aluminum, dropped into a beaker of filtered seawater, produces hydrogen gas that bubbles up and out of the container within a few minutes. MIT engineers are optimizing this simple chemical reaction as an efficient and sustainable way to generate hydrogen fuel, which they envision can be used to power an engine or fuel cell aboard marine vessels and underwater vehicles.

The team found that this reaction between aluminum and seawater successfully produces hydrogen gas, though slowly. On a lark, they tossed into the mix some coffee grounds and found, to their surprise, that the reaction picked up its pace.

In the end, the team discovered that a low concentration of imidazole — an active ingredient in caffeine — is enough to significantly speed up the reaction, producing the same amount of hydrogen in just five minutes, compared to two hours without the added stimulant.

The researchers are developing a small reactor that could run on a marine vessel or underwater vehicle. The vessel would hold a supply of aluminum pellets (recycled from old soda cans and other aluminum products), along with a small amount of gallium-indium and caffeine. These ingredients could be periodically funneled into the reactor, along with some of the surrounding seawater, to produce hydrogen on demand. The hydrogen could then fuel an onboard engine to drive a motor or generate electricity to power the ship.

“This is very interesting for maritime applications like boats or underwater vehicles because you wouldn’t have to carry around seawater — it’s readily available,” says study lead author Aly Kombargi, a PhD student in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. “We also don’t have to carry a tank of hydrogen. Instead, we would transport aluminum as the ‘fuel,’ and just add water to produce the hydrogen that we need.”

The study’s co-authors include Enoch Ellis, an undergraduate in chemical engineering; Peter Godart PhD ’21, who has founded a company to recycle aluminum as a source of hydrogen fuel; and Douglas Hart, MIT professor of mechanical engineering.

Shields up

The MIT team, led by Hart, is developing efficient and sustainable methods to produce hydrogen gas, which is seen as a “green” energy source that could power engines and fuel cells without generating climate-warming emissions.

One drawback to fueling vehicles with hydrogen is that some designs would require the gas to be carried onboard like traditional gasoline in a tank — a risky setup, given hydrogen’s volatile potential. Hart and his team have instead looked for ways to power vehicles with hydrogen without having to constantly transport the gas itself.

They found a possible workaround in aluminum — a naturally abundant and stable material that, when in contact with water, undergoes a straightforward chemical reaction that generates hydrogen and heat.

The reaction, however, comes with a sort of Catch-22: While aluminum can generate hydrogen when it mixes with water, it can only do so in a pure, exposed state. The instant aluminum meets with oxygen, such as in air, the surface immediately forms a thin, shield-like layer of oxide that prevents further reactions. This barrier is the reason hydrogen doesn’t immediately bubble up when you drop a soda can in water.

In previous work, using fresh water, the team found they could pierce aluminum’s shield and keep the reaction with water going by pretreating the aluminum with a small amount of rare metal alloy made from a specific concentration of gallium and indium. The alloy serves as an “activator,” scrubbing away any oxide buildup and creating a pure aluminum surface that is free to react with water. When they ran the reaction in fresh, de-ionized water, they found that one pretreated pellet of aluminum produced 400 milliliters of hydrogen in just five minutes. They estimate that just 1 gram of pellets would generate 1.3 liters of hydrogen in the same amount of time.

But to further scale up the system would require a significant supply of gallium indium, which is relatively expensive and rare.

“For this idea to be cost-effective and sustainable, we had to work on recovering this alloy postreaction,” Kombargi says.

By the sea

In the team’s new work, they found they could retrieve and reuse gallium indium using a solution of ions. The ions — atoms or molecules with an electrical charge — protect the metal alloy from reacting with water and help it to precipitate into a form that can be scooped out and reused.   

“Lucky for us, seawater is an ionic solution that is very cheap and available,” says Kombargi, who tested the idea with seawater from a nearby beach. “I literally went to Revere Beach with a friend and we grabbed our bottles and filled them, and then I just filtered out algae and sand, added aluminum to it, and it worked with the same consistent results.”

He found that hydrogen indeed bubbled up when he added aluminum to a beaker of filtered seawater. And he was able to scoop out the gallium indium afterward. But the reaction happened much more slowly than it did in fresh water. It turns out that the ions in seawater act to shield gallium indium, such that it can coalesce and be recovered after the reaction. But the ions have a similar effect on aluminum, building up a barrier that slows its reaction with water.

As they looked for ways to speed up the reaction in seawater, the researchers tried out various and unconventional ingredients.

“We were just playing around with things in the kitchen, and found that when we added coffee grounds into seawater and dropped aluminum pellets in, the reaction was quite fast compared to just seawater,” Kombargi says.

To see what might explain the speedup, the team reached out to colleagues in MIT’s chemistry department, who suggested they try imidazole — an active ingredient in caffeine, which happens to have a molecular structure that can pierce through aluminum (allowing the material to continue reacting with water), while leaving gallium indium’s ionic shield intact.

“That was our big win,” Kombargi says. “We had everything we wanted: recovering the gallium indium, plus the fast and efficient reaction.”

The researchers believe they have the essential ingredients to run a sustainable hydrogen reactor. They plan to test it first in marine and underwater vehicles. They’ve calculated that such a reactor, holding about 40 pounds of aluminum pellets, could power a small underwater glider for about 30 days by pumping in surrounding seawater and generating hydrogen to power a motor.

“We’re showing a new way to produce hydrogen fuel, without carrying hydrogen but carrying aluminum as the ‘fuel,’” Kombargi says. “The next part is to figure out how to use this for trucks, trains, and maybe airplanes. Perhaps, instead of having to carry water as well, we could extract water from the ambient humidity to produce hydrogen. That’s down the line.”

Videoguys Studio Renovations | The Show Must Go On! – Videoguys

Videoguys Studio Renovations | The Show Must Go On! – Videoguys

On this week’s Videoguys Live, James is discussing what led to us renovating the Videoguys Studio and how important it is to have a backup plan for your broadcasts and to be ready for anything. Tune in for some great information and valuable tips.

Watch the full video below:

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Things We Learned While Redesigning Our Studio

Why we choose​ LVP Vinyl Flooring​

  • No Static Electricity​
  • Good sound absorption​
  • Padding under feet​
  • Easy to clean​
  • Scratch Resistant​
  • Bonus – Looks Great!​

For Walls Not on Camera:​

  • Get sound absorbing Padds/Curtains​
  • Help absorb sound and reduce echo​
  • Use dark colors to reduce light bounce​

For Green Screen:​

  • Get chroma Key Green Paint​
  • High Saturation helps with Keying​
  • Matte finish reduces Reflection/ Spill​

Alternate Setup – YoloBox Ultra

  • YoloBox Ultra
  • 1 Camera (we used a camcorder with HDMI output)
  • NDI Screen Capture

YoloBox Ultra

  • Encoder, Monitor, Switcher & Recorder​
  • Widescreen & Vertical Orientations​
  • Stream to Facebook, YouTube, RTMPs, & more for widescreen​
  • Stream to Instagram & TikTok vertical​
  • 4 HDMI Inputs​
  • 4K Streaming​
  • ISO Recording​
  • 8″ Display​
  • NDI (additional $99 fee from YoloLiv)

Alternate Setup – Makeshift Studio

  • TriCaster in One room​
  • 2 guests joined teams and we pulled in NDI feeds
  • Tech Tip: Any empty room can be turned into a studio!​

​LiveU Solo Pro

High performance  ​

  • Up to 4Kp60 full video resolution​
  • Up to 20Mbps streaming​

Exceptional Quality ​

  • Leave a mark with the most engaging content​

4K Quality​

  • Up to 3840×2160​
  • More pixels = sharper image​
  • 4K is future proofing​

OWC Envoy 1TB Ultra-Portable NVMe SSD – Videoguys

OWC Envoy 1TB Ultra-Portable NVMe SSD – Videoguys

In his article for TechRadar, Alastair Jennings evaluates the OWC Envoy 1TB portable SSD, emphasizing its high performance, reliability, and affordability for creatives and business professionals. This ultra-portable NVMe SSD offers a perfect blend of performance, capacity, size, and flexibility, making it an excellent choice for the pro market.

Sleek Design and Durable Build
The OWC Envoy 1TB impresses with its sleek, palm-sized design and aircraft-grade aluminium housing. This durable build provides essential heat dissipation, preventing thermal throttling during intensive tasks such as video editing. The SSD features a single USB Type-C connector, ensuring a simple and straightforward setup. It comes pre-formatted with Apple File System (APFS) for immediate use with Mac devices but can be easily reformatted for Windows devices using OWC’s free Drive Guide or other software.

Impressive Performance
Jennings’ performance tests on a MacBook Pro M1 Max revealed read speeds of 826MB/s and write speeds of 961MB/s using the AJA System Test Lite. The ATTO Disk Benchmark recorded read speeds of 946.36MB/s and write speeds of 1010MB/s. Reformatting to ExFAT for use with an Intel NUC resulted in even better performance, with read speeds of 1036.84MB/s and write speeds of 1041.76MB/s on CrystalDiskMark. This high performance makes the OWC Envoy 1TB ideal for various uses, especially for creatives who need a reliable drive for intensive tasks like video, photo, and audio production.

Versatility and Compatibility
The OWC Envoy 1TB’s compact size allows for easy attachment to a wide range of devices, expanding internal storage. It is compatible with Macs, iPads, PCs, Android tablets, smartphones, cameras, and more. This versatility makes it perfect for on-the-go professionals who need reliable, high-speed storage.

Conclusion
Overall, the OWC Envoy 1TB is a superb portable SSD that delivers on performance. Its combination of speed, portability, and rugged design makes it an excellent option for creative professionals. If you’re looking for a high-performance portable SSD, the OWC Envoy 1TB is a top contender.

Read the full article by Alastair Jennings for TechRadar HERE

Balancing economic development with natural resources protection

Balancing economic development with natural resources protection

It’s one of the paradoxes of economic development: Many countries currently offer large subsidies to their industrial fishing fleets, even though the harms of overfishing are well-known. Governments might be willing to end this practice, if they saw that its costs outweighed its benefits. But each country, acting individually, faces an incentive to keep subsidies in place.

This trap evokes the classic “tragedy of the commons” that economists have studied for generations. But despite the familiarity of the problem in theory, they don’t yet have a lot of hard evidence to offer policymakers about solutions, especially on a global scale. PhD student Aaron Berman is working on a set of projects that may change that.

“Our goal is to get some empirical traction on the problem,” he says.

Berman and his collaborators are combining a variety of datasets — not only economic data but also projections from ecological models — to identify how these subsidies are impacting fish stocks. They also hope to determine whether countries might benefit instead from sustainability measures to help rebuild fisheries, say through new trade arrangements or other international policy agreements.

As a fourth-year doctoral candidate in MIT’s Department of Economics, Berman has a variety of other research projects underway as well, all connected by the central question of how to balance economic development with the pressure it puts on the environment and natural resources. While his study of fishing subsidies is global in scope, other projects are distinctly local: He is studying air pollution generated by road infrastructure in Pakistan, groundwater irrigation in Texas, the scallop fishing industry in New England, and industrial carbon-reduction measures in Turkey. For all of these projects, Berman and his collaborators are bringing data and models from many fields of science to bear on economic questions, from seafloor images taken by NOAA to atmospheric models of pollution dispersion.

“One thing I find really exciting and joyful about the work I’m doing in environmental economics is that all of these projects involve some kind of crossover into the natural sciences,” he says.

Several of Berman’s projects are so ambitious that he hopes to continue working on them even after completing his PhD. He acknowledges that keeping so many irons in the fire is a lot of work, but says he finds motivation in the knowledge that his research could shape policy and benefit society in a concrete way.

“Something that MIT has really instilled in me is the value of going into the field and learning about how the research you’re doing connects to real-world issues,” he says. “You want your findings as a researcher to ultimately be useful to someone.”

Testing the waters

The son of two public school teachers, Berman grew up in Maryland and then attended Yale University, where he majored in global affairs as an undergraduate, then stayed to get his master’s in public health, concentrating on global health in both programs.

A pivotal moment came while taking an undergraduate class in development economics. “That class helped me realize the same questions I cared a lot about from a public health standpoint were also being studied by economists using very rigorous methods,” Berman says. “Economics has a lot to say about very pressing societal issues.”

After reading the work of MIT economists and Nobel laureates Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee in that same class, he decided to pivot and “test the waters of economics a little bit more seriously.” The professor teaching that class also played an important role, by encouraging Berman to pursue a predoctoral research position as a first step toward a graduate degree in economics.

Following that advice, Berman landed at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Evidence for Policy Design, a research initiative seeking to foster economic development by improving the policy design process. His time with this organization included five months in Jakarta, Indonesia, where he collaborated with professors Rema Hanna and Ben Olken — of Harvard and MIT, respectively — on a portfolio of projects focused on analyzing social protection and poverty alleviation.

The work, which included working closely with government partners, “required me to think creatively about how to talk about economics research to several different types of audiences,” he says. “This also gave me experience thinking about the intersection between what is academically interesting and what is a policy priority.”

The experience also gave him the skills and confidence to apply to the economics PhD program at MIT.

(Re)discovering teaching

As an economist, Berman is now channeling his interests in global affairs to exploring the relationship between economic development and protecting the natural environment. (He’s aided by an affinity for languages — he speaks five, with varying degrees of proficiency, in addition to English: Mandarin, Cantonese, Spanish, Portuguese, and Indonesian.) His interest in natural resource governance was piqued while co-authoring a paper on the economic drivers of climate-altering tropical deforestation.

The review article, written alongside Olken and two professors from the London School of Economics, explored questions such as “What does the current state of the evidence tell us about what causes deforestation in the tropics, and what further evidence is needed?” and “What are the economic barriers to implementing policies to prevent deforestation?” — the kinds of questions he seeks to answer broadly in his ongoing dissertation work.

“I gained an appreciation for the importance and complexity of natural resource governance, both in developing and developed countries,” he says. “It really was a launching point for a lot of the things that I’m doing now.”

These days, when not doing research, Berman can be found playing on MIT’s club tennis team or working as a teaching assistant, which he particularly enjoys. He’s ever mindful of the Yale professor whose encouragement shaped his own path, and he hopes that he can pay that forward in his own teaching roles.

“The fact that he saw I had the ability to make this transition and encouraged me to take a leap of faith is really meaningful to me. I would like to be able to do that for others,” Berman says.

His interest in teaching also connects him further with his family: His father is a middle school science teacher and mother is a paraeducator for students with special needs. He says they’ve encouraged him throughout his academic journey, even though they initially didn’t know much about what a PhD in economics entailed. Berman jokes that the most common question people ask economists is what stocks they should invest in, and his family was no exception.

“But they’ve always been very excited to hear about the kinds of things I’m working on and very supportive,” he says. 

“It’s been a really amazing learning experience thus far,” Berman says about his doctoral program. “One of the coolest parts of economics research is to have a sense that you’re tangibly doing something that’s going to have an impact in the world.”