Monthly Archives: April 2007

How to get into er, out of, MIT

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From the New York Times

Marilee Jones, the dean of admissions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, became well known for urging stressed-out students competing for elite colleges to calm down and stop trying to be perfect. Yesterday she admitted that she had fabricated her own educational credentials, and resigned after nearly three decades at M.I.T. Officials of the institute said she did not have even an undergraduate degree.

“I misrepresented my academic degrees when I first applied to M.I.T. 28 years ago and did not have the courage to correct my résumé when I applied for my current job or at any time since,” Ms. Jones said in a statement posted on the institute’s Web site. “I am deeply sorry for this and for disappointing so many in the M.I.T. community and beyond who supported me, believed in me, and who have given me extraordinary opportunities.”

The funny thing is that, by all accounts, she was absolutely brilliant at her job. As one of her academic friends, Leslie Perelman, director of the M.I.T. program in writing and humanistic studies, says: “It’s like a Thomas Hardy tragedy, because she did so much good, but something she did long ago came back and trumped it”.

Sophie development under threat

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At the ENTER_ conference in Cambridge yesterday, Bob Stein of the Institute for the Future of the Book gave a terrific demonstration of Sophie — an open source multimedia authoring tool — which he and his colleagues have been developing for some years. It looks like sensational software, but is currently only available as a fairly flaky an alpha version*. When I asked Bob about dates for likely availability, he shrugged gloomily. The project runs out of money next Monday — two days from now.

*Correction: I’ve downloaded the alpha version and although it’s got rough edges, it’s very impressive. Think of it as DTP software for creating multimedia objects. There must be lots of universities and other teaching institutions which could find many uses for this. Surely there’s a basis for finding the necessary funding support for the small team working on the code. One model could be the way my own institution (the Open University) decided to use Moodle as the basis for its Virtual Learning Environment and is now providing significant support to the Moodle developer community. I normally hate (and am suspicious of) the term “win-win”, but these kinds of arrangements seem to me to qualify for it.

‘$100 laptop’ now costs $175 & will run Windows

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Hmmm… GMSV report…

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – The founder of the ambitious “$100 laptop” project, which plans to give inexpensive computers to schoolchildren in developing countries, revealed Thursday that the machine for now costs $175, and it will be able to run Windows in addition to its homegrown, open-source interface.

Apparently, Microsoft is planning to dump XP on the world’s poor for $3 a copy. And the OLPC folks are in discussion with Redmond.

Windows XP eh? Haven’t the poor kids at which the laptop is aimed suffered enough? Or, as GMSV puts it, “that’s $176 for the laptop, $3 for Windows and $500 for the remote tech support”. And who’s going to pay for the anti-virus subscription?

Worse by design

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This is the power supply that came with my Apple MacBook Pro. It’s got the fancy magnetic connector at the other end, but the transformer unit itself is surprisingly large. In fact, it’s very carefully designed to make it impossible to plug it into any mains socket in any British institutional building, where the sockets are invariably in the wainscoting — as, for example, here (Downing College, Cambridge):

It fell to James Cridland to suggest the obvious workaround — to remove the three-pin plug and use a standard mains lead (the kind one uses to charge the batteries of many digital devices).

Obvious when you think about it — or rather when he suggested it. But it means lugging around another piece of wire. Sigh.