MIT uses open source platform to map and track flooding in Flordia county hit by Hurricane Irma

(September 11)The Urban Risk Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has launched Riskmap.us an open source platform designed to track flooding from Hurricane Irma in the southern Florida county of Broward.

The project provided citizens and planners updates in real time. People could submit reports via Facebook, Twitter, or Telegram. A chatbot was used by the system that could message directly on any of the three social media sites. A chatbot, also known as a chatterbot or Artificial Conversation Entity, is a computer program that simulates a conversation by auditory or textual means. They are often used in customer service or to gather information. The MIT chatbot sends users a link to which they can upload their location and include the depth of water and a photo which is then uploaded and displayed on the map.

The project is the result of collaboration between county officials and the MIT lab. For now the project is just restricted to Broward |County. The county is just north of Miami and includes Fort Lauderdale. The map is solely designed to gather information on flooding and display it. Individuals needing help, both MIT and county officials warn, should phone the emergency number 911.

Earlier this year, the MIT lab tested out the system during a flood in Indonesia. 300,000 users made reports. The lab is planning a similar project this fall in India. The lab also is hoping to repeat the project in other US countries using additional social media platforms in the future. The map website is here.

Tomas Holrderneess, who is the MIT research scientist who led the project said it showed the important role that citizen data could play in emergencies noting that ".. connecting residents and emergency managers via social messaging, [their] map helps keep people informed and improve response times." In the test in Indonesia the results were integrated in the Uber.app so that drivers could know which roads to avoid.

Google maps is also helping out in the emergency as it promised to mark closed roads in its maps as soon as emergency response teams notify them that a road is closed.

New ketchup bottles allow you to use the last drop

Scientists working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have found a way of making sure you can get the last drop of ketchup from a bottle and do not end up throwing it in the garbage while it still contains some ketchup.

The secret of the new bottles is a coating that makes their interiors super slippery. The coating may be used for other containers such as toothpaste tubes, and cosmetics. The MIT researchers believe that their invention can drastically reduce waste.

Consumers have resorted to vigorous shaking and tapping and other methods to get out the last drop of ketchup. Some enterprising consumers noticed that by turning the bottle upside down the remaining ketchup collects in the cap. Soon manufacturers adopted this idea by making ketchup and other bottles that were meant to regularly stand upside down. As a result it would seem only a limited amount of ketchup will be saved by the new type of bottles. However in the new bottle the last drop of ketchup should slide out without leaving a trace.

The inside of the bottle is coated with a rough surface and then on top of this a thin layer is placed. A liquid is then added to form a very slippery surface and fill in any troughs. The result is a surface as slippery as an oily floor. According to, Professor Kripa Varanasi, the technology is completely safe: "The cool thing about it is that because the coating is a composite of solid and liquid, it can be tailored to the product. So for food, we make the coating out of food-based materials and so you can actually eat it." The co-inventor of the new technology, Dr. David Smith praised it as a means of reducing waste: "With the manufacture of these sticky products there is about 200 million gallons of material each year that gets stuck to tanks and then gets washed off and thrown away. And in packages there are about 40 billion packs with material stuck in packages so the technology has the potential to significantly reduce waste." Professor Varanasi also noted that the cleaner bottles would drastically reduce the use of water and energy in rinsing bottles for recycling, as well as reducing costs.The new coating is known as LiquiGlide. LiquiGlide is already licensed to Orkla a Norwegian consumer-goods producer. It already uses the coating for mayonnaise products sold in Germany, Scandinavia and a number of other European countries.

The scientists say that the technology can be adjusted so as to be used not only by producers of foods but of beauty supplies and many household products. Varanasi says: "Our coatings can work with a whole range of products, because we can tailor each coating to meet the specific requirements of each application."

Varanasi noted that products sticking to the inside of containers led to huge losses in some industries: "For example, in paint manufacturing alone, paint sticking to the inside of mixing and holding tanks costs the industry more than 100 million gallons of lost product and billions of dollars per year in associated waste costs. Using the LiquiGlide platform, we are on a mission to eliminate waste generated across manufacturing applications, in areas ranging from food and agrochemical production to health care and energy, to usher in a new era of sustainable manufacturing."

Top ranked 200 world universities

The QS World University Rankings are issued annually by the Quacquarelli Symonds(QS) company. From 2004 to 2009 QS collaborated with Times Higher Education in issuing rankings but since then have issued separate rankings.

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QS chose to follow the methodology existing at the time of the split but THE adopted new methodology for its own versions. The QS rankings have been criticized for being commercialized and giving weight to some subjective indicators.

The rankings for 200 universities from 57 different countries can be found here. The top 10 universities are dominated by large US universities although the UK and Switzerland also are represented. From first to tenth the top 10 universities are: Massachusetts Institute of Technology(MIT) in the US; Harvard (US); Cambridge in the UK; Stanford (US); Caltech (US); Oxford (UK); UC London (UK); Imperial College (UK); Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, in Switzerland; University of Chicago (US). Singapore boasts the National University of Singapore at 12th and Nanyang Tech at 13th. Australia's highest ranking was their National University at 19th. The highest rated Canadian university was McGill in Montreal at 24thm just ahead of the highest-ranking Chinese school Tsinghua University.

Changes in measurement methodology has led to Canadian universities being lower in the ranks this year as compared to last. The University of Toronto placed 34th and the University of British Columbia in 50th. University of Montreal dropped from 83rd last year to 115th this year. The methodology is based on six indicators that include academic reputation, employer reputation, and faculty-to-student ratio. The survey considered 3,539 institutions of which the 200 best were ranked.

Several high-ranking UK universities saw their ratings drop with the new methodology but the UK still has four universities in the top 10 in the world. One of the biggest casualties was London’s Imperial College, which in 2014 was tied for second with Cambridge but this year dropped to eighth position because of a change in the methodology used to rate universities. Oxford and University College London also slipped from a tie for fifth to sixth for Oxford and seventh for UCL this year. However, some universities climbed in rankings because of the changes with the London School of Economics and Political Science(LSE) jumping from 71st all the way to 35th. Warwick university also gained advancing from 61st last year to enter the top 50 at 48th this year. The methodology changes are an attempt to provide a better balance between universities strong in research and those that are outstanding in the arts and humanities but provide many fewer citations. Critics have claimed that using citations as a key measure also discriminates against universities whose main language of instruction is not English since citations come from predominantly English language sources.

Ben Sowter, head of QS research said about the better rating of LSE under the new methodology:“That the LSE is a world-class institution is not news. Indeed, they have been a firm fixture in the QS top 100 for over a decade, but in any ranking system that places emphasis on medicine and sciences, their strength in their areas of specialty are never likely to shine as brightly as they ought to.The QS methodology now evens the playing field and LSE climbs 36 places to be counted, rightfully, amongst the world’s top 40.”

John O'Leary a board member of the QS advisory board noted that even under the new ratings the UK rated second only to the US as a desitnation for higher education and that UK universities still make up four of the ten top universities This is surely an impressive achievement. Of the top 200 institutions 49 were in the US, 30 in the UK, 12 in the Netherlands, and 11 in Germany. Canada, Australia and Japan all had 8 and China had 7. London has the most of the top universities of any city in the world.