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Last Published: May 15, 2012
Boston Weather: 67.0°F | Mostly Cloudy
By Manohar Srikanth Staff Photographer The idea behind the shot was to get the wide angle perspective of the Simmons Hall, with trail of clouds in the background. The vertical facade, because of the camera position and perspective, gives the illusion of a horizontal surface. To get the type of cloud trails displayed here, the sky needs a variety of scattered moving clouds. The camera needs to be set for a long exposure, typically minutes, depending on the desired length of trails and current speed of clouds. For this photo, the camera was put on remote bulb mode to expose for 95 seconds. The aperture was set to f/9 so that the depth of field is wide and also to reduce the amount of light coming into the camera over the long exposure. The focus was set to hyper-focal length corresponding to f/9, to obtained reasonable overall sharpness. Because the facades are not uniformly illuminated, a hand held flash gun was fired to fill light in darker areas. A sturdy tripod was used to avoid blurring due to wind. The editing steps involved correcting for exposure by editing the curves. The saturation was boosted to bring out the details in the colored windows. The image was edited in Photoshop to remove branches of the trees on the top side of the image. Aperture: ƒ/9.0 Exposure Time: 95.0 sec. Sensitivity: ISO 200 Effective Focal Length: 21 mm
Kyaw report closed
By John A. Hawkinson
STAFF REPORTER
May 15, 2012
The investigation into the Dec. 27, 2011 death of Phyo Kyaw ’10 is complete, and it has been ruled an accident. Kyaw was killed when his bicycle and a J. P. Noonan tanker truck collided as the truck turned right from Massachusetts Avenue onto Vassar Street in rainy weather after dark that evening.
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Three floors of Baker vandalized
By Bruno B. F. Faviero
STAFF REPORTER
May 15, 2012
Baker residents were rudely awakened by fire alarms twice on Saturday morning, once at 2 a.m. and again at 4 a.m. On the second instance, someone also “maliciously” discharged a fire extinguisher on the first, second, and third floors before disposing of it in a third-floor trash can. Baker was evacuated for several hours as a result, according to Baker President Michael E. Plasmeier ’13 and information from Baker House minutes. The fire alarms were pulled in the west wing of the first floor, from where the fire extinguisher was also taken.
CoolChip within rules
By Anne Cai
NEWS EDITOR
May 15, 2012
On April 11, Chancellor Eric Grimson PhD ’80 concluded a review of an intellectual property rights situation with CoolChip Technologies, winner of the 2011 MIT $200K Clean Energy Prize (CEP) Contest. He found that the CoolChip did not violate the rules of the competition, but “was misleading in some of its public presentations.” Grimson said in an interview with The Tech in September that he would be working with the leadership of the CEP to review their rules regarding intellectual property and attribution issues. Since then, he said, he has personally conducted interviews with the three CoolChip founders, the relevant faculty, staff, and students, and the staff of Sandia National Laboratories, which invented the technology in question. Grimson also reviewed CoolChip’s contest submission and the CEP’s rules.
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The Tech has an audio news digest!
By Jingyun Fan
CONTRIBUTING EDITOR
May 15, 2012
In the time that it takes to walk down the Infinite, you can now catch up on campus news! Just listen to The Tech’s new biweekly news digest. It will cost you 10 minutes each week ­— or less than 0.1% of your time. You can subscribe to the podcast at http://tech.mit.edu/rss/newsdigest.xml.
IS&T deploying cell antennas
By John A. Hawkinson
STAFF REPORTER
May 15, 2012
Information Services and Technology is deploying antennas and amplifiers in buildings across campus to improve cellular reception.
Warnings said to be unheeded by JPMorgan Chase
By Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Nelson D. Schwartz
THE NEW YORK TIMES
May 15, 2012
In the years leading up to JPMorgan Chase’s $2 billion trading loss, risk managers and some senior investment bankers raised concerns that the bank was making increasingly large investments involving complex trades that were hard to understand. But even as the size of the bets climbed steadily, these former employees say, their concerns about the dangers were ignored or dismissed.
The Tech’s news digest for May 15
By Jingyun Fan
CONTRIBUTING EDITOR
May 15, 2012
The Tech’s new biweekly digest is the best way to hear news from around campus fast! Take five minutes to listen to the latest happenings at MIT and in the community.
IN SHORT
May 15, 2012
CORRECTIONS
May 15, 2012
An article published Friday about Wi-Fi on Boston Common stated that the project began in February 2012, and gave the impression wireless Internet was added to the park recently. Wi-Fi was deployed on Boston Common over a year ago, in April of 2011, not 2012. The project began in February 2011.
Prepared remarks by L. Rafael Reif, president-elect
May 15, 2012
Reif gave the following remarks at events throughout the day Wednesday. Via the MIT News Office:
Special podcast; Reif elected president
By Jingyun Fan
CONTRIBUTING EDITOR
May 15, 2012
L. Rafael Reif has been named the 17th President of MIT. Reif has spent the past several months heading the MITx and EdX initiatives, stressing MIT’s commitment to improving residential education using online technologies. He was born in Venezuela, received a PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford, and spent many years in the MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department. Listen to our podcast for more on Reif.
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