MIT is known for many things, including its legendary hacks. Long a part of MIT folklore, hacks
can tell much about MIT's culture and subculture—providing a deeper understanding about
intelligence, strategic design, humor and general outlaw behavior—and serve as another
indication of the interdisciplinary nature of MIT.

In 2005 MIT Professor Emeritus Samuel Jay Keyser gave a talk on the history of hacks.
In Where the Sun Shines, There Hack They, he tells stories from his days as associate provost for student life, brings gadgets and other hack artifacts and gives some very deep background on legendary and notorious hacks, with passion, humor and a high regard for hackers and hacking. He explains that hacks are not silly pranks, but complex and intelligent statements, filled with irony, wit, and meaning that ultimately "do no harm". He also deconstructs the psychological nature of hacking, and gets to the inner zen of hacking and what it really reflects about MIT. If you're looking for an unusual but relevant introduction to MIT, I highly recommend this video on MIT World.

Keyser is also the author of a brilliant essay in Nightwork, a 2003 book on hacking published by The MIT Press. Little is known about its author, Institute Historian T.F. Peterson, but readers are encouraged to pay very close attention to the notion that perhaps the book in itself represents a new kind of hack.

I have always had a gut feeling that the whole closure thing was wrong, but it wasn't until I heard
Ed Linethal's talk The Predicament of Aftermath: Reflections on 9-11 and Oklahoma City that I understood the human reactions toward trauma and memorialization and the complex issues around dealing with a huge tragedy. Linenthal is Professor of History at Indiana University, Editor of the Journal of American History, and author of "The Unfinished Bombing: Oklahoma City in American Memory."

In the past five years, I have watched all 429 videos that are published on MIT World, however no talk has influenced me more or stayed in my consciousness as much as this talk. Ed Linenthal has enabled many to understand the human response to tragic events and the impulse to memorialize innocent victims of horrific events. He documents with incredible insight and compassion, the unsolicited memorial response to the Oklahoma City bombing and details the development of what became the Field of Empty Chairs and other memorials at the bombing site. This talk was one of 13 of The Resilient City series sponsored by the Joint Program in City Design and Development, the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, and the School of Architecture at MIT.

This is an incredibly insightful talk. I first watched it in 2002, and have watched it several times since. His deeper understanding of the human dimensions of memorial responses has given me a way to think, now about Virginia Tech, as it did during the year following September 11th.

"Working" had a profound affect on me as I thought about work, and the basic human factors in what we bring to and need from our work. The one story that stayed with me for many years was called Car Hiker, a profile of Al, a man who for thirty years, parked cars in a garage. HIs nickname was "One Swing Al", as he could get any car into any parking space with one turn, using one arm. He never missed. He took great pride in this and through the prism of the dailiness of parking cars, knew more about human behavior and human foibles just by observing people in relation to their cars and how they treated the person who parked their car.

Thirty years after Terkel's landmark book, I found myself completely drawn to MIT Sloan Professor Tom Malone's book
The Future of Work. The title alone is enough for me to want to dive in and think about what "work" will mean for future generations, and how much the nature of work itself has changed dramatically through the 20th century. Now as the first decade of the 21st century is more than half over, just what is the future of work?

Malone spoke at Sloan's Back to the Classroom series in 2005, a little more than a year after the book was published. In it he talks about how the cost of communication is the single most influential factor in how we work, from the decision making process to working in global e-lance economies, to thinking about asking more for advice than approval. He cites some interesting examples of empowerment in the workforce and projects an optimistic view of the future.

Malone heads up the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence whose central goal is to address the question: "How can people and computers be connected so that—collectively—they act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers have ever done before?"

After 30 years, Terkel's Working still holds up, it's a great read. I suspect in 2034 we'll be able to go back to "The Future of Work" and say the same thing.

The MIT Museum's Soap Box series recently invited MIT molecular biologist Nancy Hopkins to talk about her work with zebrafish and cancer research that begins with taking an undergraduate course in molecular biology with James Watson.

Zebrafish and Cancer: What's the Connection? is a rich narrative that has many twists and turns, including how she went from being "a mouse person to a fish person" and how a trip to Germany during a sabbatical dramatically changed her research efforts.

You will hear the expression, "the cure for cancer is research" throughout the corridors at MIT, Nancy Hopkins provides a passionate, first person account of the challenges and hopes to finding a cure.

With that in mind I started thinking about The Universe is a Strange Place, a lecture given by MIT Physics Professor and Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek. Wilczek won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004 at the age of 53 for work he did at the age of 21, while a graduate student at Princeton.

This is an amazing talk. You don’t have to get theoretical physics to get Frank Wilczek, as he is also a writer, poet and is known to tell a good joke or two. He shares Einstein's favorite physics joke with the audience, and he recites his sonnet, Virtual Particles in this talk, which ends with

To be or not
the choice seems clear enough
but Hamlet vacillated
and so does this stuff.

If you find yourself pondering the question "how is it possible to construct heavy objects out of things that don't weigh anything?" and want to see more from Wilczek, you can find 3 additional lectures The World’s Numerical Recipe, The Origins of Mass and the Feebleness of Gravity, and the Physics 2004 Nobel Colloquium on MIT World.

Let me begin by introducing you to MIT World, a free and open on-demand video streaming web site that features public lectures at MIT. MIT World has been in operation since 2001 and today has a collection of almost 400 videos in its online collection (you can also find it on the MIT home page under Education — click on "video"). This primary source of unmediated content reflects a wide range of ideas that are discussed every day at MIT. Inside you will find more than 20 Nobel Laureates, leaders of many companies who have changed our world, who tell their first hand accounts of start up days (Amazon, Akamai), or amazing histories of longer established companies that have led innovation (UPS, Xerox, HP), as well as a vast assortment of engineers, technologists, innovators, poets, peacemakers, and scientists - and even a physicist who is a poet — Frank Wilczek.

With a collection of almost 400 videos, it's a little daunting to pick one to be the first one to reflect on in this new forum. So, I thought it best to start with a modern day adventure story about a company that has changed the world, told by one of the founders of the company. Check out The Akamai Story: From Theory to Practice by Tom Leighton.

Akamai's founders entered the MIT $50k competition (and lost) and today the company delivers tens of billions of daily web interactions on the web, (including MIT World's videos and MIT OpenCourseWare's courses) on 20,000 servers in 71 countries. Leighton, who is co-founder and Chief Scientist at Akamai and a Professor of Applied Mathematics at MIT, tells it all - the $50k competition, the business plans, the start up, the bubble, the personal tragedy of September 11th and the loss of co-founder Danny Lewin, the bubble bursting, and recovery. Akamai means "clever and cool" in Hawaiian — another thing they got right.