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MIT Mapping Students WiFi Access in 3D
GuitarNeophyte writes "Ever wished that you had a way to just look at a map and find your friends across campus? Or wanted to find an open study lounge without having to foot it on over? Well, with MIT's new WiFi Mapping project, you can. They've set up large plexiglass maps, projecting dots over a campus map, allowing you to know the concentration of WiFi users in various parts of the grounds. With over 2800 access points, locations of individual students (if they have opted to reveal their information) can be found with accuracy as close as the individual classroom (even in multi-story buildings). It's also had the affect of providing some interesting research on study patterns, '[R]esearchers also found that study labs that once bustled with students are now nearly empty as people, no longer tethered to a phone line or network cable, move to cafes and nearby lounges, where food and comfy chairs are more inviting.'"
Do they call it "The Marauders Map"?
I reject your reality, and subsitute my own
Did you even read the article? Students have to opt in. Not opt out. Which means they arnt automatically displayed, they have to use their hands and do some typing to be shown on this grid. I dont see any privacy problems when its up to an individual if they want to be shown.
Hmmm...I wonder if he got a grant to go to school?
At the end of the day, when university is empty, you can check on the map if someone forgot his computer. I guess you could get 5-10 pc a year.
affect effect
Which one doesn't belong?
As one of the student developers I can say that that is one of our primary concerns, and part of Phase 2 of iSPOTS is a way to keep the logged data safe from unscrupulous admins, and law enforcement.
Labs are empty and Cafes are full at MIT. Yeah right, those kids don't want to socialize, that is why they got into MIT. They love the lab, in fact they never leave their labs, which is obvious once you smell them. A geek without a lab is like a race car driver without a car.
Of course this makes headlines when MIT does it, but everyone ignores that UC San Diego began something similar years ago. They gave out PDAs (crappy ones, mind you... HP Jornada) to a few thousand students so that they could see each other as long as they were within range of the access points. I have to admit, I never used it because the PDA they gave me lasted about 30 minutes on a full battery charge, but it looked pretty interesting when I was a freshman there. I'm sure they're not the only other campus to have tried this, either. http://activecampus.ucsd.edu/
Forecast for tomorrow: A few sprinklings of genius with a chance of DOOM!
Sounds like a very nice system for stalking girls... Oh wait, MIT
\u262D = \u5350
Seeing bad movies only encourages them. Watch responsibly
teh tin foil hats will still work. however, teh goggles still do nothing.
They call me the wookie man, I guess that's what I am
Here is the iSpots (MIT's WiFi mapping and tracking) home page @ MIT with great pictures and more information
http://ispots.mit.edu/
Enjoy!
Sig
I'm serious. Nothing around you but other computers and students. Chugging the code on an all night project, with nothing but a 2 liter of Mt. Dew to fuel your sleep-deprived, caffeine induced coding hallucinations.
Going to the lab was an explicit statement of "I'm getting shit done" - cutting yourself off from an many distractions as you possibly could (though email/web pervade) and working until you drop / it's done.
I look fondly back at the labs these days - wish I was younger - and remember the all nighters and watching the sun rise. (From the top of the CII).
Researchers find that college students enjoy eating and sitting down.
Tests are currently being conducted on the effect of both of these situations in tandem.
The researchers suspect that children and adults will behave similarly, but have not yet conducted conclusive testing on the matter.
Glog!
"It's also had the affect of providing some interesting research on study patterns"
Well, that is no surprise really. Reminds me of the College that didn't pave any walkways until after the first semester the campus was open... then just paved where people had worn paths. Should provide good, statistically reliable, insight into where resources for social/academic lounges should be located.
OTOH, does MIT have a graduate program in sociology? I'm thinking of a great study on nerd relationships and mating behavior...
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
This is novel how?
.cc file? Yeah.
At UCSD we've had this for ages.
On a related note, Dr. Bennet Yee a prof at UCSD now working at Google, did a pretty cool hack when I was in his class. His laptop was GPS enabled, so whenever he'd turn it on, it'd grab GPS coordinates, then after reverse engineering mapquest's query string (this was before Google Maps, of course) he'd grab a map of the area around where he was, then would upload it to the class web page. It was called the Bennet Tracker, and was very useful for telling if your professor was hanging out at the coffee cart by Mandeville, or in Chicago, or whatever.
I also wrote a tool (when I was TAing a lower division class) that would figure out the physical location of the students logged in to the server. Mainly I used it to stun and amaze my students, as they'd sit a row behind me in the lab, and I, without turning around, would say, "Hi Sean."
But it was also useful when we had a rash of cheating incidents to be able to build a graph of which students had been sitting next to each other, even in other areas of campus. This group of two and this group of two were both sitting next to each other, and had diff-zero code for one entire