More students pass chem & bio ASEs this year
During freshman orientation this year, over 39 percent of the incoming freshman class sat for Advanced Standing Exams to receive credit for a variety of classes. The overall passing rate for ASEs was 59 percent, which is slightly higher than the past two years’ average of 55 percent.
Random Hall eschews Family Weekend security policies
Random Hall will not be compelled to comply with the DSL’s dorm security policy for Family Weekend — parents will not be granted automatic access to the building.
Maker pioneers from Iraq visit MIT campus
Three Iraqi technologists who founded the first makerspace in Basra, Iraq visited MIT on Monday and Tuesday to meet with various labs and student groups as part of a tour hosted by the Media Lab and the Undergraduate Association Innovation Committee.
MIT hackers show support for Ahmed Mohamed
Four days after high school student Ahmed Mohamed was arrested for building a clock that his teachers mistook for a bomb, hackers at MIT showed their support for the 14-year-old by constructing their own digital clock display and hanging it over a banister in Lobby 7 last Friday.
Pilot program will recruit spouses of grad students as child care providers
A new program led by the MIT Family Childcare Network will support the training, licensing, and operations of child care providers caring for children of graduate students in Eastgate and Westgate residences. In the first phase of the pilot program, spouses and partners of MIT graduate students will be recruited as caregivers.
Random Hall’s express guest list experiment continues this year
Random Hall’s express guest list system, implemented this past spring, is continuing into its second year. A similar program at Maseeh, implemented in fall 2014, will also continue.
3Q: Prof. Karen Gleason on the Metro Storage Warehouse
MIT is advancing a proposal to create a new hub for undergraduate residential life that would include housing, dining, maker space, common and study space, and street-level public retail. The proposed development at 134 Massachusetts Ave. — which could house more than 400 students — would incorporate the unique historic nature of the Metropolitan Storage Warehouse and provide needed flexibility as the Institute continues to enhance its undergraduate and graduate student housing stock. Associate Provost Karen Gleason, the Alexander and I. Michael Kasser Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering, is leading the effort and spoke with MIT News about the project.
More grads choose industry over PhDs
As students flock to Career Fair today to speak with recruiters from tech companies, hedge funds, and startups, many will be seeking full-time jobs and internships. If recent trends in GECD survey results are any indication, more MIT students than ever will enter the workforce upon graduating next semester.
Kendall development project poses traffic concerns
As MIT prepares to move forward with redevelopment plans for the east campus and Kendall Square area, Cambridge officials have expressed concerns that the project will draw increased traffic to an already-congested area.
Picturesque fall weather to continue
This week’s pattern of sunny, seasonable weather will continue through the weekend, with a strong high pressure system forecast to move in from the northwest. High pressure systems, or anticyclones, tend to be associated with calm, sunny weather, since their clockwise motion (in the Northern Hemisphere) induces large-scale subsidence, or downward motion of air from the upper troposphere. The air warms as it descends due to the increase in atmospheric pressure, and it remains dry, since air in the upper troposphere cannot retain much water vapor.
Prominent activists call on MIT to sell fossil fuel stocks in open letter
Activists from Fossil Free MIT have acquired signatures from various personalities, including actor Mark Ruffalo and professors Noam Chomsky and Junot Díaz, on an open letter addressed to President L. Rafael Reif calling on MIT to divest.
Weather
Just in time for the autumnal equinox, the first hints of fall have arrived in the form of cooler weather. After last week’s unseasonably warm weather, a cold front passed through the Boston area on Sunday morning, bringing with it a cool northwesterly breeze. This breeze has ushered in a colder Canadian air mass that has brought temperatures down to around their normal levels. For this time of year, the normal high temperature is 70°F (21°C), while the normal low is 55°F (13°C). Indeed, the highs and lows for the next few days will be very close to those marks, as a strong high pressure system settles in over the northern East Coast.
Ig Nobels recognize silly science
There is no such thing as bad science — or at least that’s the general theme of the Ig Nobels. Every year, Nobel laureates convene at Harvard’s Sanders Theatre to award ten lucky groups Ig Nobel awards, consisting of “ten trillion Zimbabwean dollars” and a potted plant. And all they had to do was come up with some of the strangest scientific results.
MIT mourns loss of Cara Anne Nickolaus
Cara Anne Nickolaus, a third-year economics graduate student, “died suddenly” Sunday morning, President L. Rafael Reif wrote in an email to campus on Monday.
Talk series is launched to humanize professors
MIT Faculty Talks, a series of chats intended to build a closer relationship between students and faculty, launched last Wednesday, Sept. 16. The joint effort between the chancellor’s office and Lorna Gibson, a professor of materials science and engineering, opened with a presentation on “teaching, scholarship, and the imposter syndrome” by Arthur Bahr, a medieval literature professor.
U.S. Secretary of Commerce visits the Institute
U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker toured MIT’s campus and delivered a speech on Sept. 18 at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. Her address was followed by a Q&A session with President L. Rafael Reif, in which they discussed the challenges in academic research when long-term projects are only backed by short-term investments.
Frank Urbanowski, longtime head of MIT Press, dies at 79
The MIT Press mourns the loss of Frank Urbanowski, who served as director of the press for an unprecedented 27 years, building it into one of the largest and most successful scholarly publishers in the world. Urbanowski passed away after a long illness on Sept. 19 in Essex Junction, Vt. He was 79.