Nasty, nurturing nitrogen
When Captain N.C. Middlebrooks claimed the Brook Islands for the United States in 1859, he had no idea they would later be known as Midway Atoll, site of a World War II turning point more than eighty years later. The island cluster was coveted for a humbler reason: guano.
A new model of public education
<i>This is the last in a three-part series on education reform in America.</i>
Should we bomb Iran?
Last week the hostile-war rhetoric against Iran went up a few notches. Hillary Clinton, the State Department’s warrior princess, declared that Iran is transforming from a theocracy to an outright military dictatorship. Clinton’s statement came after the Senate overwhelmingly voted for punitive sanctions against Iran including denying the Iranian people essential household items such as gasoline.
Corrections
Because of an editing error, a Tuesday article on the MIT-Washington Office stated incorrectly that Scott A. Uebelhart ’98 is a current postdoctoral fellow and is working on a white paper entitled “The Future of Human Spaceflight.” Uebelhart has already finished his postdoctoral work, and published the white paper in 2008.
Interim elections and upcoming campaigns
Composting at MIT is expanding! Composting facilities are now available at Cafe Four and in Stata. Additionally, there are compostable take-out containers at many on-campus dining locations: Bosworth’s, Cafe Four, Steam Cafe, Stata, and Refresher Course.
It’s the incompetence, stupid
In George Washington’s farewell address, the president warned of the growing influence of partisanship and the dangers of entangling alliances abroad. In Dwight Eisenhower’s goodbye, the president intoned menacingly about the creation of what he called a “military-industrial complex” and its undue influence on the American political landscape. George Bush’s farewell address was devoted to one topic — terrorism — and though the tenor was optimistic, the message was clear: Our enemies remain, and they will attack us again.
MIT needs to take a hard look at labor relations
The most visible and most highly touted aspects of MIT are its faculty and student body. But amid the faculty and students are thousands of hard workers who make possible everything that students and researchers do. The MIT custodians, administrative assistants, police, and countless other employees are just as much part of the MIT culture and success as are the students, faculty, and those ridiculously overworked and underpaid things commonly called post-docs. For anyone who considers the importance of the MIT labor force, it is immediately clear that MIT’s success depends on the groundskeepers, police, staff, custodians, and other facilities personnel. Many of the MIT workers have been on campus for a long time and know the ins-and-outs of the facilities better than anyone else. They know where money is wasted and where inefficiencies arise. With this in mind, it is only logical that the top MIT administrators should make it a priority to maintain and invest in the MIT workforce. MIT administration should consider the campus workforce as an essential partner that is to be respected as much as the faculty and student bodies.
What’s so bad about an online ring premiere?
Future Ring Committees should stop it with the elaborate fake rings and special guests at Premiere and focus more on their core task: designing a ring to represent their class to be revealed at Premiere. Along with that comes the prerequisite that they keep the ring design controlled and only release it when they are ready to. Until they can execute their basic, fundamental jobs correctly, they should drop the frivolities.
Corrections
An article on Friday about the a capella serenades misstated the year of Devorah Kengmana, a Muse. Kengmana is Class of 2012, not 2011. Also, the article stated incorrectly that the Muses sold three times as many serenades this year as they did last year. In fact they sold two times as many.
Biodiversity: the invisible crisis
One hundred species will go extinct today. Another hundred tomorrow, and a further hundred the day after that. We lose roughly one hundred species of plants and animals every single day, and it’s all your fault.
Bomb ’em when they’re down
It shouldn’t be necessary at this point, but given the pockets of feigned disbelief that remain abroad, it deserves repeating: The Iranians are developing nuclear weapons. Rhetorically, they continue to maintain the pretense of pursuing peaceful nuclear power, but the structure of their program belies its true nature as a weapons development effort. Their near-exclusive focus on isotopic enrichment, their construction of clandestine facilities, and their recent decision to enrich uranium to levels higher than what is necessary for commercial power plants are all signals that should remove whatever doubt remains of Iranian intentions. What Iran has achieved to date amounts to a small but growing breakout capacity. If they continue on their current pace, by mid-2010 they will have enough low-to-medium enriched uranium to produce several atomic bombs and the centrifuge capacity to bring that material to weapons readiness within a few months.
One country, one set of standards
<i>This is the second in a three-part series on education reform in America.</i>
Corrections
The headline for the sports column “Saints beat Colts 37-17 for their first Super Bowl title” in Tuesday’s issue misstated the final score of the Superbowl game. The correct score was 31-17.
Interim elections and upcoming campaigns
The first Senate meeting of the Spring semester was held on Monday, February 8. Interim Senate Speaker and Vice-Speaker elections were held during the meeting: Tim J. Stumbaugh ’12 was elected Speaker of the Senate, and Tim R. Jenks ’13 was elected Vice-Speaker. Senate members discussed ways to unify the voices of undergraduate student leaders to clarify the undergraduate viewpoint in the eyes of administrators. Other discussion topics included the proposal for allowing second semester freshman to live off-campus, suggestions to improve the FSILG recycling program, the release of the final version of the Institute-wide Planning Task Force report, and reformatting the procedure for nominating undergraduates to Institute Committees.
Corrections
Because of an editing error, a news article from May 8, 2009 titled “No Choice for Police” was erroneously re-run as an opinion column in the 2009 Year in Review. The article was about the Burton Third Bombers’ concrete “bomb” hack on the Kresge lawn.
Biodiversity misses the point
“Dad, look, it’s a bald eagle!” I exclaimed, pointing up through the car window to track the enormous bird in flight. My father, who has a sad history of disregarding his daughter’s birding prowess (“Holly, there’s no way you saw a hummingbird in New Jersey” and “That can’t be a kingfisher”), was at least curious enough to turn the car around, if only to prove me wrong.
One undergraduate voice
In the wake of several hasty decisions by the MIT administration such as the decision to convert Green Hall to a sorority residence, a string of hacking incidents that resulted in arrests, the Star Simpson statement, and transparency problems surrounding the preliminary Blue Ribbon Dining Committee report, members of the MIT community began to evaluate the framework of student engagement. Administrators bolstered their communication staff and refined their methods of connecting and involving students in important decisions. Some faculty members began to question the merits and foresight of these decisions. Student leaders asked for more direct methods of communicating with senior members of the administration, which lead to the formation of the Task Force of Student Engagement (now the Student Engagement Committee).
The Golden Triangle of a public education system
This is the first of a three-part series on how we can fix public education in the U.S.
Global warming in the hot seat
In November 2009, hackers released of thousands of confidential e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia. Although the e-mails did not reveal scientific fraud or the fabrication of scientific evidence (as recently concluded in a partial decision by an internal review board) they did suggest that researchers at the CRU had become partisan in their support of the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis.