B-C Kitchen Rumors Spark Dorm Concern
Rumors have cropped up regarding plans to replace Burton-Conner’s kitchens with undergraduate rooms, though administrators claim there are no plans to do so. The rumors surfaced in the week before President Susan Hockfield’s Feb. 13 visit to Burton-Conner, prompting a petition, two bills by the Undergraduate Association, and a small flutter of e-mails across the bc-talk mailing list.
Presbrey Makes Millions With Startup
What with some successful startups making hundreds of millions of dollars these days, $6 million may not seem like a lot. But it is still enough to impress most college students, and Joseph W. Presbrey ’08 earned that very amount back in March 2006 by selling a social networking site for high school students to Alloy, a media and marketing company targeting young consumers.
CME Being Funded Another Year
The Cambridge-MIT Institute is providing funding for the Cambridge-MIT Exchange program in what will be the last year of the CMI. Funding from CMI for the exchange program was originally supposed to last until 2006, and it was uncertain where funding for CME would come from. CMI is expected to fold up in 2008, and other funding sources will need to be found for CME.
In Short
MacGregor House is running another dining pilot program similar to the one held last semester to continue gauging student interest in bringing back MacGregor Dining. Dinners will be held Monday nights for at least four weeks from 6 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. The all-you-can-eat dinners will cost $7 without preferred dining and $3.50 with preferred dining. The first dinner was last night.
MacVicar Day Celebrates Learning, MIT Professors
Five professors were honored on Friday, March 2, MacVicar Day, as the 2007 Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellows for demonstrating excellence in teaching. The award includes $10,000 per year for 10 years to be spent on improving teaching methods and course curriculum.
Ronald H. Stowell
Ronald H. Stowell, a postdoctoral research associate in the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center, passed away shortly after 3:30 a.m. on Sunday, March 4, as confirmed by the Somerville Police. He was 36.
CEOs, Faculty Join in Search For MIT Sloan Dean
MIT’s Sloan School of Management is opening a search for a new dean to succeed Richard L. Schmalensee ’65, who is scheduled to step down in June after nine years at the helm of the business school.
News Briefs
Come early April, the Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility will hand off their recommendations on whether MIT should divest from corporations doing business in Sudan to the MIT Corporation’s Executive Committee. In a letter to <i>The Tech</i>, Alan Spoon, the chair of the ACSR, wrote, “We expect to deliver our recommendation on possible courses of action to the Executive Committee for its consideration in early April.”
Letter From Advisory Committee Chair
Knowing that many in the community are deeply concerned about the tragic events on the ground in Sudan, I write to offer an update on the work of the Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility, which has been asked to make a recommendation to the Executive Committee of the MIT Corporation about whether any action should be taken with regard to MIT’s investments in multinational companies that may be doing business in Sudan, and if so, what that action should be.
UN Agency Suspends Work With North Korea, Curtails Programs
The U.N. Development Program said Monday it was suspending work in North Korea because the country had failed to meet conditions set up in response to American complaints that U.N. money was being diverted to the government of Kim Jong Il.
Arctic Blast
The high temperature on Saturday was 57°F (14°C), yet today’s high will be below 20°F (-7°C)!
Afghans Say US Strike Killed Nine Family Members Sunday
Nine members of a family, including five women and three children, were killed in an American airstrike in central Afghanistan late Sunday, during a battle with militants, Afghan officials said Monday.
Bomb Kills at Least Twenty in Famed Baghdad Book Market
The book market along Mutanabi Street was a throwback to the Baghdad of old, the days of students browsing for texts, turbaned clerics hunting down religious tomes and cafe intellectuals debating politics over backgammon.
Shorts (left)
The fallout from last week’s global stock dive showed few signs of letting up on Monday, as markets from Hong Kong to New York deepened their losses.
Shorts (right)
When the Democrats swept to victory last fall, after a campaign fueled partly by attacks on President Bush’s trade policies, trade deals promoted by the administration seemed doomed in the new Congress. But that was then.
Iranian Authorities Arrest Women After Protests Outside Courtroom
Iranian authorities arrested 33 women on Sunday after protests outside a court where five of the women were being tried for leading a campaign to gain more legal rights for women, newspapers reported Monday.
Letters to the Editor
Ali S. Wyne’s Feb. 27 opinion article, “Defending Free Speech at MIT,” misses the point made by numerous students and alumni who protested the event “Foreign Policy and Social Justice: A Jewish View, A Muslim View.” Mr. Wyne states that “we cannot claim to support free speech if we only invite individuals whose views fall within an acceptable continuum.” While it is true that Dovid Weiss’ views fall far outside the views of any member of the MIT Jewish community — and indeed more than 99 percent of the world’s Jewish population—that is not the reason for opposition to Weiss speaking at the event. The MIT Jewish community so greatly opposed Weiss because he was brought under the guise of presenting a Jewish view, not the skewed, radical view he presented that is condemned by nearly every sect of Judaism worldwide.
Corrections
Because of an editing error, a March 2 letter from Noel Elman, PhD ran under the headline “MIT Complicit in Holocaust Denial,” which conveys misleading impressions of the author’s opinions; the headline should have been, “MIT Allows Disgraceful Forum Speakers.”
Men’s Tennis Sweeps Doubles, Wins 3 Singles to Beat Brandeis
The MIT men’s tennis team swept the doubles matches and won the top three singles matches en route to a 6-3 victory over Brandeis University on Saturday. With the win, the Engineers improved to 2-0 on the year while the Judges dropped their first contest of the season.
MIT Dominates Bates To Start Spring Season With Big Tennis Victory
The MIT women’s tennis team kicked off its spring campaign with an 8-1 victory over Bates College on Saturday. With the win, the Engineers improved to 9-3 on the year while the Bobcats fell to 2-2.
Hockey’s Brenman Nabs ECAC Award
Sophomore defender Stephanie V. Brenman ’09 was named an ECAC East All-Conference Team Honorable Mention after tallying seven goals and seven assists to rank third in scoring on MIT’s women’s ice hockey team. She is the second player in the program’s history to receive this award as goaltender. Regina M. Sullivan ’05 was chosen in 2004-05. The Engineers recorded the best season in the program’s existence as they finished the year with an overall record of 5-14 and set new Institute standards in every offensive category.
Scott’s Travels
I have the great fortune of being able to begin this week’s column in the same way as I began last week’s column, as once again I found myself cold and alone in the streets of Moscow, only this time it was in the middle of the night. My companion Oscar, who happened to have the only key to the apartment complex in which we were staying, had failed to meet me as planned, and so I found myself wandering the large section of city between the bar where we were supposed to meet, and our apartment complex.
Imminent Collapse
Since we are so deep in the midst of term, I consider it my duty to help inform some of my less-fortunate (ie, course VI) friends about what’s been happening in the world lately. I mean, when you’ve been coding and debugging for eighteen hours straight, looking for that one parenthesis you missed, or whatever the heck you do, the larger things that go on in the world just might not seem that interesting.
Babblefish
How many of you recall your very first semester at MIT? I’m sure you can’t forget it; you know, that one time long ago when you put minimal effort into your classes and ended up passing with that obscure letter P. Man, wasn’t pass/no record great? My young self thought naively at the time, “This place isn’t all that bad. MIT is a pretty darn fun place. People shouldn’t be complaining so much. All this complaining just coalesces into a negative stereotype of this place.” That is, to outsiders all we do is work and work. Yeah right … I laughed, and laughed some more when thinking about the truth. Then that fateful day came: second semester started.
Not Your Mom’s TV Dinner
Shortly after getting food poisoning on a day when I’d bought all my food on campus and long after deciding I hated cooking for just myself, my level of knowledge about the dark world of frozen and microwavable food began to skyrocket. One day when I was in a group looking at the frozen food options in LaVerde’s while trying to improvise dinner in the half-hour break between rehearsals, I impressed some friends with my knowledge of what you were or weren’t going to regret putting in your mouth. One even suggested that these skills could have a humanitarian bent, rather than just being kinda sad. Thus this column was born.
