10:54 p.m. “How do you plan to educate yourself on student issues?” – The Tech
“I’m surrounding with people who are very knowledgeable about those issues. I want to understand everything that we’re doing. I try to engage students continuously because I need to know how they are viewing MIT.” – Reif

10:54 p.m. “You have a chance to get there if you apply yourself.” – Reif

10:52 p.m. “If you apply yourself, you have a good choice of where you are going to be.” Reif, on what he would tell others who grew up like he did.

10:51 p.m. “You’ve always been very accessible? How will you remain accessible?
His answer? “Who says I will?”
“Something that I’ve done quite successfully that every morning and afternoon, I go for a walk and so people can approach me.

10:50 p.m. “How will the education here differ from your education?”

10:49 p.m. “How will you be different from Susan Hockfield?”

10:48 p.m. The Q&A begins.

10:46 p.m. Reif also thanks President Susan Hockfield. “I want to thank Susan for the opportunity she gave me to work by her side. I have learned a tremendous amount from her. I want to thank her for giving me an opportunity of a lifetime.”

10:45 p.m. Reif thanks his family — his wife, his daughter, her husband, his son.

10:43 p.m. “I believe the job of the administration is to support the faculty and staff.” – Reif

10:40 p.m. “In leading MIT, I will be guided by MIT’s values and provided. This includes a commitment to meritocracy, excellence, to always take the high road and always do what is right, make a positive contribution…” – Reif

10:39 p.m. “This is a dream come true.” – Reif

10:39 p.m. Reif begins his remarks.

10:37 p.m. Rafael Reif will take office Monday, July 2nd.

10:36 p.m. John Reed, chairman of the Corporation, is kicking off the press conference.

10:21 a.m. We are setting up at the Media Lab for the press conference that will begin in 10 minutes.

10:20 a.m. The Tech caught the MIT’s 17th president, Rafael Reif, outside the Bush Room where the members of the Corporation were meeting this morning. First words from Rafael Reif? “I love The Tech.”

The MIT Corporation will be announcing MIT’s 17th President in a press conference at 10:30 a.m. The Tech will be liveblogging the event. Follow along for live updates starting near 10:15 a.m.

The Tech: You play many different musical instruments.  How did you pick which instrument to play?  I guess piano came first?

Dustin Katzin:  Piano came first.  I started when I was five and took lessons from then until now.  I started out with the middle school band and I originally wanted to play saxophone because I thought it was the coolest thing but my band director said I should start out with clarinet.  I’m not sure why, but I guess if you play clarinet you can learn how to play saxophone.  As soon as I could, I switched to sax.  The band director suggested I switch to bassoon, and I was like “What, that’s not cool or jazzy.”  I ended up staying with clarinet and then playing bassoon at the request of the band director.  Since I [already] played piano, I started playing percussion and then I just shuffled around through MITSO through the four years which is really nice.

TT:  So you played mostly percussion in MITSO or also clarinet?

DK:  The first couple years, I was shuffled around a lot more.  It wouldn’t be uncommon to have a concert where I played clarinet first then bassoon and then percussion and call it a day. As time went on, I started specializing more and realized that clarinet, besides piano, was my favorite instrument to play.  I got a lot of respect for percussion while I was here.  People think cymbals are easy…far from it.  If you’re a little bit off everyone in the audience knows.

TT:  I guess this gave you a lot of experience for writing for an orchestra…

DK:  Exactly! I chose MITSO so I could be exposed to strings.  The nice thing is that if you watch how they bow, you see how their phrasing works and what they can and can’t do.

TT:  This is important, indeed since many composers write orchestral music without considering the actual performers. So now let’s talk a little bit about music.  Who are your favorite composers?

DK:  My favorite composer is John Williams.  I mentioned that I loved jazz when I was younger.  When Star Wars: Episode I came out, I found one track it was called “Anakin’s Theme.”  I listened to it once and then kept repeating it.  It was the first time I saw what orchestral music could be. Williams has always been my favorite.  I’ve found some of his scores and studied them; that’s been kind of my default orchestration.  He’s definitely the number one.  I’m definitely a fan of more traditional composers like Tchaikovsky, Mallard, Ravel.  Recently Copland has been pretty influential also.  Another composer is Nobuo Uematsu from the Final Fantasy game series.  The biggest thing for me is the effect on the audience.  My conception of music is dramatic, is theater.  If I were writing three hundred years ago I guess I would be doing opera.

TT:  You talked a lot about John Williams, and for sure the beginning of that march in “The Cat Lives” is very reminiscent of some of his film music orchestration.

DK:  That’s why I wrote that part first.  I was using him, almost exclusively, as a source of inspiration during the early stages. I knew how to do happy.  It took a lot more effort to figure out the unsettled music and the sad music. Then, the happy ending needed a lot of revision.  That was the last thing I did—cut out some filler parts and add things that worked better.

TT:  Originality is something that a lot of the contemporary composers are looking for.  In my opinion, they try to achieve that at the expense of making the music accessible.  How do you stay original?

DK:  One general trend is to go to complicated musical ideas like atonal and twelve tone music.  You take a sequence of twelve notes, reverse it, and mess around with the sequence.  I don’t think anyone can decode it, and go “Wow! You went to the sixth column of the matrix and went backwards”.  The big danger for me was being too gimmicky.  It was already a pretty bold thing to have two endings.  The really hard thing was to make sure that both were similar in quality and that I would be happy with both endings.

TT:  What’s next?  What are the projects you’re working on now?

DK:  I haven’t started yet but I will be writing a piano concerto next.  I’m not sure I should give away exactly what it is in case someone does it before me.

TT:  Are you thinking of a traditional piano concerto?

DK:  I really like the romantic style, but I want it to be a mixture of style. Definitely some Prokofiev elements. I think it’ll expand my horizons.  I will be drawing from a physics concept.  There will be three types of music for this one.  Maybe I will get back to you and let you know what they are once I’ve gotten something written.

TT:  Have you written a lot of piano pieces?

DK:  Small things for classes.  The concerto will be challenging.  Maybe it would be worth starting with a short 2 or 3 minute piece just to warm up.  I guess the reason why I wanted to do a piano concerto is that when I’m improvising at the piano I find similar motifs coming out and similar ideas and so those could be a good basis for something.

TT:  In terms of motivation for music, a lot of romantic era composers dedicated their music to their (potential) girlfriends. Have you ever written music dedicated to a special someone in your life?

DK:  (laughs) Not yet. We’ll see one day. I dedicated “Schrodinger’s Cat” to MITSO and Adam Boyles, but in a different way, obviously. But no less special.

Storytellers, developers, web designers, and people who can offer innovative ways of describing the state of religion at MIT are all welcome.

The goal of the hackathon will be to develop presentable projects that can be displayed in a multimedia package that will be released on The Tech’s website on May 11. All work will be available over Github.

Example projects include:
* a Facebook app that looks at a user’s hometown, current town, and age and gives statistics about people in their area or age group
* a Facebook app that compares a user’s religious demographics with a prediction of their friends’ demographics based on their hometowns
* an interactive map that displays various religious metrics from the survey around parts of campus

New ideas are welcome!

Tentative Schedule:
10 a.m. – Introductions, split up into groups
10:30 a.m. – Brainstorm ideas for projects to work on during the day
5:30 p.m. – Start wrapping up
6 p.m. – Present your projects!

Food, drinks, and raffles for gift certificates will be provided throughout the day.

To register, go to http://bit.ly/techhack2012.

For more information, email onlinemedia@tech.mit.edu.

According to Sunshine, the Bitrans neither confirm nor deny the SEC’s report, and Sunshine gave the following statement:

The Bitrans invested the vast majority of their (and their family’s) net worth in the GMB funds, alongside other investors, and had great confidence in GMB’s quantitative models.

To be sure, 2008 was a difficult year for the markets and for the investment industry as a whole.  That aside, the majority of GMB’s funds and managed accounts either made money for investors, or significantly outperformed the S&P 500 ove their operating lifetime.

He also echoed statements, cited in the story, made by the Bitrans’ lawyers that the Bitrans “are pleased to have reached a settlement with the SEC … and to put this matter behind them.”

In her autobiography Extraordinary, Ordinary People – A Memoir of Family, Condoleezza Rice recounts how her parents eventually sold their house to complete payment of her graduate studies: “But losing the house was a bitter pill for Mother and a source of deep embarrassment for my dad. For me it was more evidence that my parents’ investment in me – skating, piano, St. Mary’s Academy – had cost them dearly in terms of their own financial security.” She also cites help from ‘Aunt Theresa’ and her “grandfather’s small trust to help me with down payment.”

Writing in her own autobiography, My Family, The Jacksons, MJ’s mother Katherine Jackson explains how the household managed to make every cent go towards the purchase of instruments and studio time for their nine children by saving on everything, in all other areas than music. “Sometimes, however, there wasn’t a payday to bail us out. From time to time Joe [MJ's Father] was laid off. We could have gone on welfare, but I would rather have scrubbed floors and Joe would rather have picked potatoes – which is exactly what he did when he as out of work. We’d eat potatoes every which day: baked, stewed, fried, and boiled.”

Whether you consider yourself ordinary or extraordinary, the fact is, not everyone has an Aunt Theresa…

In the end, career-wise, things went great for both Mike and Condi. But a question that financial lawmakers and those above them who regulate the student loans market and education industry may well ponder is: is it reasonable to expect the average graduating American student to rely on parental help to finance his/her studies and pay back his/her debts; and likewise, is it reasonable to expect those parents to scrub floors, pick potatoes, or sell their house to do so?

http://www.salon.com/2012/04/22/protesters_furious_new_front/singleton/

SUNDAY, APR 22, 2012 7:00 PM EDT
Protesters’ furious new front
Americans have finally awakened to the decades-long corruption of higher education
BY ALEXANDER ZAITCHIK

Correction: An earlier version of this article said that Katherine Jackson purchased instruments and studio time for the five Jackson children. Jackson actually purchased instruments and studio time for the nine Jackson children. This article has been updated in accordance with our correction policy.”

In the Undergraduate Division, MIT Quiz Bowl President Joshua Alman ’13, Stephen Face ’13, and Neil Gurram ’13 came out victorious and won the best team award within their division. This is MIT’s first time winning the title in this nationally recognized and one of the biggest intercollegiate quiz bowl tournaments. Other teams that competed included Harvard, University of Chicago, UCSC, UVA, and Georgia Tech. Harvard and UVA claimed victory in the remaining divisions. Results were announced on April 16.

Tetris on the Green Building. Joseph Maurer - The Tech

More photos after the jump.

The control panel. Joseph Maurer - The Tech

Joseph Maurer - The Tech

Joseph Maurer - The Tech

Joseph Maurer - The Tech

This seminar is carried out annually to give curious freshmen an idea of what various majors are like, what kind of classes are within those majors, what the faculty and students are like, how much of a workload it is (all of them answered “lots of work”, unsurprisingly), and what life would be like in each major.

There was lots of food, and even more people packed in a room with loads of tables. At each table, there was a representative student from one or more majors ready to talk with students who were unsure about what major to declare. The representatives gave an introduction to their major, a rundown of what a student had to do within them, and their own opinions of the majors, as well as why they chose one major over another.

One topic that many attendees had not thought about before was about the required subjects and restricted electives that students could take within the majors. Representatives also spoke about the different paths within a major that students could take and the differences between some of the majors that seem more similar on the surface — for example, one aero/astro major described his course as a fusion between 2 and 6).

Most majors were represented at the seminar, and one of the highlights of the event was the insights of advice the representatives had to share.

One Course 18 major said, “One thing I did was overload [myself] with interesting classes, and then I dropped the ones I found weren’t for me.”

And while the seminar had students both sure and unsure of what they wanted to do, one upperclassmen shared the wisdom that a continual discovery and discussion with others about what a student wants to do is necessary to fully form the path best for that student. In other words, always make sure to keep talking to people about your path!