MAS Special Freshman Year Program - Seminars FRESHMAN ADVISING SEMINARS As part of the special Media Arts and Sciences program, we offer a variety of freshman advising seminars. Although these are open to any freshmen, students who register for these seminars (through the standard seminar selection process) are encouraged to enroll in the MAS freshman program; conversely, we encourage students interested in the MAS freshman program to register for one of these seminars before they arrive on campus. Because several of our usual seminar leaders are on leave or sabbatical this coming academic year, we have only two seminars to offer for 2006: Henry Holtzman MAS.A16 Steal These Bits Schedule TBA Nobody really wants to pay for music, TV, movies or even software. In this seminar we'll take a look at how digital media is created and distributed, how those systems are protected and pirated, and delve a bit into the law and ethics involved. Topics will range from taking a look at how mp3s work, to DVD encryption methods, to "fair use." Along the way we'll discuss how software is different from music, and copyright from trademark. We'll take a look at why Napster was hugely popular, what caused it to be all-but-shut-down, and how that was even possible. Can the old business models survive? What might take their place? Henry Holtzman is a Research Scientist at the MIT Media Lab. He was once an MIT freshman himself, and spent a good deal of his undergraduate years in the basement of Walker at WMBR, the campus radio station. As a researcher, Mr. Holtzman worked on the MPEG standards committee, innovated infrastructure for distributing on-demand multi-media via the Internet, and looked beyond the desktop metaphor for interacting with computers. He returned to MIT after having spent 3 years away founding and running a technology start-up. V. Michael Bove, Jr. and Andrew Lippman MAS.A18 Engineering: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Mon, 3:00-5:00 PM, E15-363 What makes good ideas work? Is it the quality of the basic idea, the user interface, the times, the marketing campaign, or just the luck of the draw? We will examine a set of intellectual successes and failures drawn from the past, present, and future and use them to uncover principles to help us learn how to think about problems and solutions. Examples will be drawn from a varied list including the ink-jet printer, the MIT blackjack team, the four-tined fork, video on demand, the telephone, and (we hope) some brought in by the students. V. Michael Bove, Jr. directs the Media Lab's consumer electronics research program. His group developed HyperSoap, the world's first hyperlinked TV soap opera, as well as the world's smallest video projector, and Clocky, an alarm clock that runs away and hides when the snooze button is pressed. He is listed in the current edition of Who's Who in Entertainment, and has really, really obscure musical and literary tastes. Andrew Lippman directs the Media Lab's Media and Networks Group. He has challenged broadcasters throughout the world by pioneering interactive and digital extrapolations of television via the MIT Television of Tomorrow Program and the Advanced Television Research Program. These included early exemplars of scalable digital encodings, on-demand structuring of video, archiving and interactivity. Questions about the MAS Special Freshman Year Program? Email the MAS program office through our Contact Us page.