Physical Education class has been reorganized around no-contact sports. Some students play tossing rings while others play a modified version of dodge ball called gaga ball in the background. How Rhode Island Reopened Schools During a Pandemic For the New York Times At LaPerche Elementary School Principal Julie Dorsey takes a student’s temperature as students […]
Professor Ali Mohamed Zaki and the Corona Virus
A portrait of Professor Ali Mohamed Zaki in his office in CAIRO, EGYPT on March 15 . Dr. Zaki diagnosed the first patient with a strain of the Corona Virus in Saudi Arabia. He was then fired for announcing it himself, but the information was later used to help diagnose another patient in the UK.
Robots learn to use their hands
Self-Supervised Correspondence in Visuomotor Policy Learning A video Peter Florence, Lucas Manuelli, Russ Tedrake of in MIT’s CSAIL lab. It was republished by MIT. Having robots learn dexterous tasks requiring real-time hand-eye coordination is hard. Many tasks that we would consider simple, like hanging up a baseball cap on a rack, would be very challenging […]
Vagabond Monickers
In 2007 I was photographing for a month in Clarksdale, Mississippi and ran across this series of marks on the side of some trains that were pulled off the main track. They are called “streaks” if done with chalk or a grease pencil or a lumber crayon “Tags” ared done with spray paint. Sometimes they […]
The Best Egyptian Photographers on Instagram
There has been a surge of high quality photographers in Egypt and many of them are sharing their work on Instagram. I started with a list of 50 photographers and edited it to about 15 that I feel have something special to say about Egypt and the world through their photography. Nariman El-Mofty – Started covering […]
Chelsea, A Covid-19 Hotspot
Ambulance Ride-Along in a Covid-19 Hotspot Chelsea, Massachusetts was designated as a Covid-19 hotspot with the highest infection ratio in the state. For weeks the local ambulance services and fire-fighters work circling the Boston suburb picking up suspected cases, transferring them between hospitals and trying not to get infected themselves. These photos are from a […]
Who still supports Morsy?
When President Morsy was removed from office by a military Junta thousands joined a month long sit-in at Rabaa al-Adawiya. State media reported that the protesters were terrorists, weapon wielding, foreign, mercenaries. These portraits are an attempt to directly photograph and quote the people I met in Rabaa al-Adawiya to decrease any distortion. Taher Gamal […]
Behind the scenes of a contact tracing study
Proximity Pilot Contact Tracing App A video produced for Julie Shah’s team and their study of a contact tracing app, Proximity Pilot. It is long and descriptive because it was designed for the longform TEDxMIT. This talk describes the launch of a study on the effectiveness of digital contact tracing and aims to mature new […]
Jihadi Rehab
Al-Ha’ir Prison and The Prince Mohammed bin Nayef Center are two of Saudi Arabia’s five facilities holding its more than 5,000 inmates charged with terrorism-related offenses. They are part of a reform program staffed by psychologists and religious officials who try to deradicalize inmates by teaching them what Nasser al-Ajmi, a psychologist with the center, […]
Sinai Trail
The Sinai Trail has been in development since 2014 and is now ready to walk. Egypt’s first long distance public hiking trail and one of a number of new hiking trails being built across the Middle East. Beginning by the Gulf of Aqaba and ending in the highlands of St Katherine – the so-called Roof […]
Mahraganat Music
Through the warren of Cairo’s unplanned neighborhoods, mahraganat (festival) music blasts from tuk-tuks, cigarette stalls and cranked up cellphone speakers; auto-tuned voices mixing with heavy electronic rap beats. The sound quality is low and the lyrics are unmistakably vulgar. Egyptians can’t get enough. Sha’abi music (literally translating to the music of the ‘poor’) is the […]