Clear for Halloween Night
The departing low-pressure system which brought rain to the area this morning is now heading off into eastern Canada. Tomorrow, skies should clear as northwesterly winds blow cooler, drier air into the region and high pressure builds in. For Halloween, the high pressure system will creep up the eastern seaboard and keep skies clear for Boston. Halloween night looks to be a bit chilly, with temperatures in the low 40s°F through the late evening. As we enter November, we leave the statistically snow-free month of October behind. Students new to Boston have already begun to question the reality of our beloved winter weather, but we’re climatologically approaching snowier times. Boston typically sees its first measurable snowfall around November 4, but the first snow day varies significantly from year to year. Snowfall greater than 0.5 inches (1.3 cm) typically arrives around December 5.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
When I read the Climate Change Action Plan sent out by President Rafael Reif, I was squarely unimpressed, but I wasn’t surprised. In terms of climate change, MIT seems to have a history of grand, empty gestures. This email didn’t stray from tradition.
MIT’s Climate Plan doesn’t add up. So we’re sitting-in.
We write from the office doorstep of MIT’s President, where on October 22, we began a sit-in in response to the President’s announcement of MIT’s Plan for Action on Climate Change (hereafter ‘Plan’). As President Reif acknowledged, the Plan originally “emerged in response to” Fossil Free MIT’s ongoing call, since April 2013, for MIT to divest its now $13.5 billion endowment from fossil fuel companies. Here, we share our take on MIT’s Plan and explain why it has left us no choice but to respectfully plant ourselves, around-the-clock, along MIT’s corridor of power to call for a bolder approach.
When terror hits close to home
For the past few weeks, I’ve been glued to my phone. I check it first thing when I wake up in the morning, while I’m eating, while I’m walking down the Infinite, in class, while I’m working on problem sets, and before I go to sleep. But I’m not checking fantasy football stats. I’m checking for reports of another terror attack and word that my little brother is safe.
Islam and the West
Last month, the MIT Center for International Studies hosted a talk by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Raised a Muslim, she witnessed abuse of women in Muslim communities. She renounced her religion and became an activist for women’s rights. Her criticisms of Islam led to death threats, and her courage was recognized by several awards. Her latest book, Heretic, calls for a fundamental reformation of Islam.
CORRECTIONS
Due to an editing error, the headline to the weather forecast last Thursday read, “Developing Hurricane Joaquin is unlikely to affect Massachusetts,” though forecasts at the time indicated that the hurricane might have impacted Massachusetts this week. (Since then, the hurricane has in fact veered away from the U.S. east coast.)
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Before coming to MIT as a postdoc in 2013, news of student suicides hadn’t affected me as they do now. I went to large schools: UMass-Amherst for undergrad and The University of Texas at Austin for my PhD. I only recall hearing news of a suicide about once a year, but the rate here feels painfully higher. Following last week’s report of an MIT graduate student’s death, I felt compelled to get involved and began to search for organized efforts within the MIT community. I have to say, what I found (or, rather, what I did not find) shocked me. Despite several articles in which MIT acknowledged the problem of suicides and appeared to commit to addressing the issue, even citing resources, nowhere could I find a salient lifeline for students in crisis at MIT.
The always-entertaining Donald Trump
The jury is still out on the question, and they’re likely to be out for a while longer. Despite the fact that Trump has been the Republican frontrunner for months now, some people still can’t wrap their minds around the idea that the real-estate mogul and TV personality has his eye on the Oval Office. The issue as it stands today boils down to this: Is Donald Trump a real presidential candidate with a vision, or is this ultimately a PR stunt?
An FSILG Village would hurt MIT’s Greek system
Over the past year, there has been discussion about transitioning MIT fraternities and sororities stationed in Boston into a “Greek Village” located on West Campus grounds in Cambridge. This concept of an FSILG Village has moved quickly amongst FSILG officials and MIT administrators but has not gained support within the actual Greek community. According to a survey reported on by The Tech, “Of 80 total alumni and student representatives, only five alumni ‘expressed high interest in the project,’ and only five students thought it was at all likely that their living group would be willing to move into an FSILG village.”
Five years after the American Red Cross efforts to rebuild Haiti
Following the January 2010 earthquake that killed over 200,000 Haitians and left more than a million homeless, donations flooded in from governments, financial institutions, and individuals around the world. U.S. households donated a total of more than $1.4 billion, and the American Red Cross raised the most of any charity for the cause: nearly half a billion dollars in the span of a single year.
A farewell to the Class of 2015
Today, new scientists and engineers, economists and financiers, academics and professionals leave MIT and begin their careers, among them many of my closest friends and colleagues. What strikes me most about this time of year is the atmosphere: not the fatalism that follows exam week or the relief at having reached a vacation, but rather a quiet (or not so quiet) sense of anticipation and hope for life beyond the Institute from those convening in Killian.
Abroad, at home
According to recent estimates, 1.65 million American households are now living in “extreme poverty” — trying to survive on less than $2 per person per day — despite the national recovery from recession. The number of such households has doubled since 1996.
Refocusing the Climate Change Conversation
This week, the initial phase of the MIT Climate Change Conversation will conclude with the release of a committee report weighing the pros and cons of actions proposed by the MIT community. A focus of that report will be on divestment of the Institute’s endowment from fossil fuels. Without the early, critical efforts of Fossil Free MIT (FFMIT), the energetic, campus-wide discussion of MIT’s options for climate action would never have begun.
Statistics and the new Institute for Data, Systems, and Society
Earlier this semester, Provost Martin Schmidt and the Deans of the five schools announced the establishment of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, headed by Professor Munther Dahleh. This exciting new entity aims to “address societal challenges using analytical tools from statistics and information and decision systems,” and will officially launch on July 1.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
There have been more suicides at MIT this academic year than any other in recent memory. This is unacceptable. The MIT community as a whole needs to have a systematic, active, and open discussion about how to combat the issue. Each individual who chose to commit suicide had a life that cannot be summarized by a statistic, but if we study all of these individuals as a group, then we may find important insights.
Profiting from ignorance
By now many of us have heard that America’s favorite “fast casual restaurant” — Chipotle “Mexican” Grill — has gone GMO-free. Although Chipotle’s decision represents the singular action of a private company, it still speaks to the increasing success of the anti-GMO movement. And while private companies have every right to decide what products they sell, Chipotle’s decision to pander to the anti-GMO movement is dangerous and irresponsible.
The twisted incentives behind the Atlanta Public Schools cheating case
This month, verdicts were handed down in one of the largest standardized test cheating scandals in a public school system to date. Eleven out of twelve defendants ranging from test administrators to teachers and principals in the Atlanta Public Schools system were convicted for racketeering, making false statements, and other crimes. An investigation led by former Georgia Attorney General Michael Bowers discovered that more than 250,000 wrong answers were changed in thousands of students’ standardized tests since 2001. Yet as staggering as the Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal seems to be, perhaps the real crime here lies in high-stakes standardized testing, which is blindly mandated across the board without attention to the unique contexts surrounding individual school districts.