Gates asks students to tackle world’s problems

[KNRX]

“Are the brightest minds working on the most important problems?” Bill
Gates asked an audience of students and faculty in Kresge on
Wednesday.

The Microsoft co-founder, now a full-time philanthropist, visited MIT
to talk about pressing problems like health care in the developing
world and the U.S. education system — “important” problems, he said in
his speech, that affect billions of people, yet fail to attract the
attention of talented people who could make a difference.

“We have lots of talent that could be shifted, at least to some
degree, from sports, entertainment, investing.” he said. “Even in the
area of innovation…a lot of that focuses on the needs of the rich.”

Gates spoke highly of MIT’s OpenCourseWare project, which he praised
for inspiring many other colleges to put their course notes and
lecture videos online. “MIT’s absolutely at the forefront,” he said.

He added that there is still plenty of work to be done, like making
online learning more interactive and aggregating the best lectures,
which are right now scattered across the internet.

Before the speech, Gates attended a round-table discussion with
professors, and spoke with students who presented their projects on
global development.

The visit was part of a cross-country college tour, starting with
Stanford and Berkeley on Monday, the University of Chicago on Tuesday,
and finishing with MIT and Harvard on Wednesday.

It was the first time that Gates has spoken to college students since
he left Microsoft to focus on philanthropy.

Tackling the world’s toughest problems

During his talk, titled “Giving Back: Finding the Best Way to Make A
Difference,” Gates asked students to consider the world’s most serious
challenges: improving the lives of the poorest; improving education,
health, nutrition.

“It always stuns me how few bright minds have worked on those things,
how little effort and energy and investigation there is on those
things,” he said.

He referred to his 30-plus year career at Microsoft as something he
“fell into,” without necessarily thinking through the social impact of
his work. He said his generation was not as aware as people are today
of problems like poverty. Only until he was in his forties, Gates
said, did he start to realize, for instance, “how tough health
conditions were.”

Gates outlined two of the world’s most pressing problems, childhood
mortality and education, to illustrate the volume of work that needs
to be done.

Since 1960, he said, the number of children under five who died each
year fell from 20 million to nine million. “By far, most of that
[reduction] is vaccines,” Gates said. Despite their benefits, he
pointed out that vaccines get less than one percent of medical
spending.

For many countries, childhood deaths are still a huge problem. Gates
illustrated that point with a factoid: If you take all the people in
the U.S. who were born in the same year you were born, a quarter of
them will have died by the time you turn 60. But in the poorest
countries, a quarter have already died before age four.

Gates also emphasized the importance of education and the grave
challenges that the U.S. faces. “I was absolutely blown away at the
statistics,” Gates said. “I had no idea of how poorly the education
system in the U.S. is working: Over 30 percent of kids drop out of
high school. If you’re a minority, 50 percent drop out of high
school.”

He identified teaching quality as one aspect of education where the
potential for improvement is huge — if only researchers fully
understood what makes a good teacher.

Another way to improve education is through technology. Here, Gates
said, MIT has been a leader with OpenCourseWare.

“I’m a super-happy user,” he said. “I re-took physics with Walter
Lewin, I took Professor Sadoway’s course and loved that ­— I recommend
it to everybody.” Of the 33 courses that have video, Gates said he’s
taken 11.

But Gates made it clear that projects like OCW are just the beginning.
He envisions a system that brings together the best lectures and
course materials, and blends them with interactive elements and user
feedback and possibly the opportunity for accreditation.

“Right now it’s all pretty fragmented,” he said. “This can improve
very substantially.”

Ultimately, Gates said he did not know how exactly to attract “bright
minds” to these challenges, but asked the audience to imagine such a
future, in which education policy and agricultural technologies are
debated with the same fervor as March Madness.

“If we really did that,” he said, “we might delay the invention of a
new financial product by a few years, [and] we might even delay that
new baldness drug by a few years, but if it helps on the important
problems, I think it’s a good thing.”

After his speech, Gates invited students to pepper him with questions.
Matthew R. Denman, a graduate student in Nuclear Engineering asked
about the future of nuclear power, referencing Gates’s startup
TerraPower, which has a design for a new kind of reactor that uses
depleted uranium, not enriched uranium as most plants do.

Gates was firmly pro-nuclear. He criticized what he called “cuddly”
technologies like wind and solar for requiring large amounts of land
and for relying on intermittent sources of energy. Gates said. He
called for more innovation in nuclear power plants. “I love nuclear,
it does this radiation thing that’s tricky, but...” he said, to
audience laughter.

Gates was also asked how it felt to be the richest person in the
world.

“Well the marginal return for extra dollars does drop off,” he said.
“I haven’t found any burgers at any price that are better than
McDonalds,’” he said. He admitted that he did enjoy some of the perks
of wealth, like private air travel, though he added that after a “few
million or something, it’s all about how you’re going to give it
back.”

Student innovation displayed on project tours

Before the speech, Gates discussed development issues with professors
at a private meeting. He also attended a poster session in the Gates
tower at Stata, where seven students presented their development
projects.

Christopher A. Moses ’10 showed off Sana (formerly Moca), a software
system that lets nurses send diagnostic information to doctors using
camera-equipped cell phones. Moses said he was impressed by Gates’s
knowledge of development issues. “It was great hearing his feedback,
it’s not all the time you get someone, because he’s so well versed in
all of these projects,” he said.

Ritu Tandon ’10 developed a website that bridges OpenCourseWare and
syllabi from Monterey Tech in Mexico, allowing students to supplement
their classes with materials from MIT. During her presentation, Gates
asked, since so few OCW courses have video content, whether linking to
plain lecture notes would be as useful. “On OCW, it’s 33 courses out
of 1,981 that have the full videos right now,” he said, rattling off
the numbers by heart.

Later, Tandon remarked, “I was expecting it to be a lot more
intimidating, but he was so laid back. It was like having a
conversation with any ordinary person.”


By Jeff Guo and Rob McQueen
NEWS EDITORS
April 23, 2010
http://tech.mit.edu/V130/N21/gates.html

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Tamarind Tree Lime" group.
To post to this group, send email to tamarind-...@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to tamarind-tree-l...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tamarind-tree-lime?hl=en.