Half of Longfellow Bridge to close from Summer 2013 to Fall 2016
According to the Mass. Department of Transportation, its board of directors approved a construction contract for final rehabilitation of the Longfellow Bridge. During the construction, according to the Boston Globe, the bridge will only accommodate one lane of cars traveling from Cambridge into Boston. One outbound lane will be a feature of the finished bridge, which will have wider bike paths and sidewalks. For the first phase of the project, slated to last from the start of this summer to Winter of 2014 or 2015, Cambridge-bound traffic will be redirected to the Craigie Bridge, which sits next to the Museum of Science. For the remainder of the project, the opposite side of the bridge will be closed, but vehicular traffic will still be restricted to flowing inbound. The Red Line will also be truncated at both ends of the bridge for 25 weekends once construction begins, said the Globe. Shuttle buses will be available to carry citizens across the river during these weekends, and temporary track will be put in place to allow the train to run at normal capacity on the weekdays.
MIT ranks 11th in alumni donations
In 2012, MIT raised $34,795 per student. This puts MIT as the 11th highest fundraiser when compared to other reporting U.S. colleges and universities, according to a press release last week from the Council for Aid to Education (CAE). Stanford University, which received the most total contributions with $1.03 billion in fundraising, ranked fifth with $55,745 per student. Yale University, California Institute of Technology, Princeton University, and Harvard University ranked 7th, 8th, 17th, and 18th, respectively.
Nate Silver talks to a packed MIT crowd
A large crowd packed Bartos Theater last night for a talk with Nate Silver, hosted by Seth Mnookin and the MIT Communications Forum. The auditorium quickly reached its 190-person capacity, and many wannabe audience members were left to watch the live feed outside the theater.
Linked genetic base for mental illnesses
The psychiatric illnesses seem very different — schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, autism, major depression and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Yet they share several genetic glitches that can nudge the brain along a path to mental illness, researchers report. Which disease, if any, develops is thought to depend on other genetic or environmental factors.
SpringFest: a step up from weekends past
The recent announcement of Macklemore & Ryan Lewis as the headliners for this year’s SpringFest spread like wildfire across the MIT campus. In addition to the concert, the Undergraduate Association (UA) Events Committee is working to make SpringFest, previously known as Spring Weekend, bigger and better than ever before.
Nate Silver at MIT Media Lab
A Conversation with Nate Silver: Baseball statistician turned political blogger talks about politics, statistics, and the media. Silver founded the FiveThirtyEight blog to predict political elections in 2008. His success in political forecasting led to his working with the New York Times, and in 2012 he correctly predicted the results in the U.S. presidential election for all fifty states and the District of Columbia. The talk, at the MIT Media Lab, was moderated by Seth Mnookin, a former baseball and political writer. Mnookin now co-directs MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing.
New Media Lab Fellows
What does the co-creator of Lost and director of the next Star Wars film have to do with an international chess grandmaster? A successful fashion designer? The author of a New York Times bestseller? All are members of the MIT Media Lab’s first group of Director’s Fellows, announced last month in a Media Lab blog post.
Cambridge releases Hubway usage statistics
The City of Cambridge released ridership statistics on the Hubway bikeshare program last week. Since its launch in late July 2012, Hubway has proven successful at attracting daily bike riders, especially in the MIT vicinity.
Saturday report of a gunman on campus a hoax
The Cambridge Police received a false report early Saturday morning of a “male with a large firearm and wearing body armor” at 77 Massachusetts Avenue. The report was declared to be false around 2.5 hours later after MIT and Cambridge police searched each building room-to-room. Students were not notified of the situation until after an hour after the initial tip.
IN SHORT
President L. Rafael Reif and former Intel CEO Craig Barrett published a column in the Financial Times yesterday urging the federal government to spare scientific research dollars from the impending sequestration. “To slash America’s R&D capability in the name of fiscal responsibility would be akin to seeking greater efficiency for an aircraft by jettisoning the engines,” they wrote.
An Institute listening tour
On Tuesday evening, President L. Rafael Reif gave a presentation at the Sidney-Pacific graduate residence as a part of his Institute-wide listening tour — one of the methods that Reif is using to gather feedback on a number of topics, including thoughts on education, research, and the community, from students and members of the MIT community. The tour will consist of a dozen open sessions with faculty in all five schools, and will serve as a way in which students and staff can both formally and informally interact with Reif.
Change on the horizon in east campus region
Mixed-use towers rivaling the Green Building in height may be on the horizon for MIT’s east campus after members of the Cambridge Planning Board commended MIT’s Kendall rezoning petition at a meeting Tuesday evening. The board is expected to formally recommend the petition to the City Council early next month.
X University Consortium goes international
Students in Austrailia, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Canada can now feel more represented in the edX universe than ever before. The Australian National University (ANU), Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, McGill University and the University of Toronto in Canada, and Rice University in Texas joined edX on Wednesday, according to an edX press release.
Small crowd attends first State of the Undergraduate Association address
Monday night marked the first State of the UA address, headed by UA President Jonte D. Craighead ’13.
Macklemore is Spring Weekend headliner
The Undergraduate Association (UA) Events Committee has announced Macklemore featuring Ryan Lewis as the headliner for SpringFest 2013, MIT’s annual concert event. The concert will be on April 26 in Johnson, and the opener will be determined in the coming weeks. A survey sent by the committee in the fall showed “overwhelming” support for Macklemore, according to committee member Daniela M. Yuschenkoff ’14. The survey included other artists that, according to Yuschenkoff, were not touring far away or recording at the time of the concert, and also asked students what genres of music they would prefer.
Charges proposed for Syria
GENEVA — The U.N. Security Council should refer Syria to the International Criminal Court in The Hague to prosecute those responsible for war crimes and other abuses committed in nearly two years of conflict, Carla del Ponte, a U.N. human rights investigator, said Monday.
Brass Rat unveiled: 2015 Ring Premiere
It was a chilly 37-degrees as the Class of 2015 began to amass along the perimeter of Kresge on Friday. They came in droves — fraternities, sororities, halls, clubs — all individual groups, and yet on this night united for one reason: the premiere of the Class of 2015 Brass Rat.