MIT’s The Weather Oldest and Largest Today: Sunny and chilly, 37°F (3°C) Newspaper Tonight: Clear, 29°F (-2°C) Tomorrow: Warmer, 49°F (9°C) http://tech.mit.edu/ Details, Page 2 Volume 129, Number 12 Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139 Friday, March 13, 2009 Students MIT Libraries Lays Form New Off Staff, Plans to Dining Close Two Branches By Arkajit Dey In an e-mail to The Tech, Heather Comm. NEWS AND FEATURES DIRECTOR Denny, the MIT Libraries Communi- Facing Institute-mandated budget cations Officer, said “the Libraries are By Emily Prentice cuts, the MIT Libraries are planning facing budget reductions as part of the STAFF REPORTER to close two branch libraries, Lindgren Institute-wide mandate to reduce Gen- The Undergraduate Association Library, which serves the Earth, At- eral Institute Budget expenditures” in Senate passed legislation on Mon- mospheric, and Planetary Sciences the next fiscal year. day night creating a new UA Dining Department, and the Aeronautics and Ann Wolpert, Director of Librar- Proposal Committee charged with Astronautics Library. Some staff have ies, could not be reached for comment recommending “a comprehensive received advance notice of layoffs or before this article’s publication date. program that meets the needs of the hour reductions that will take effect at And saying it was “premature to issue MIT community,” according to the the end of the fiscal year. a statement,” Denny was also unable bill. The new committee will consist According to a Libraries staffer to give specific details and could not entirely of students and will develop who asked to remain anonymous for confirm the layoffs. a dining proposal at the same time the lack of explicit permission to speak Ian A. Waitz, Course XVI Depart- Blue Ribbon Committee on Dining, with the press, around 15 to 20 MIT ment Head, met with Wolpert and charged by the MIT administration Libraries staff members may be affect- Steven Gass, the Libraries’ Director with re-envisioning dining at MIT, ed by the budget cuts: six people are to of Public Services, yesterday morning aims to develop its own. be laid off and the others face dimin- to discuss the possibility that the Aero- The UA Senate also passed legis- ished hours or pay. The layoffs were Astro library would be closed. lation requiring that the Blue Ribbon not limited to just the closing libraries, As he learned in the discussion, Committee on Dining release raw but also affected the Institute Archives, Waitz said the two libraries, Aero- data from a student dining survey Acquisitions and Licensing Services Astro and Lindgren, were identified as collected by its consultant, Envision and Rotch Library. Some staffers were “having very low people per hour rate” Strategies, “for the purpose of allow- offered transfers to other libraries. and therefore the Libraries are “trying ing independent analysis.” The data is PERRY HUNg—THE TECH The source also said that there to identify other ways” to offer those currently only available in summary Institute Professor and Associate Provost for Faculty Equity would be other cuts in the MIT Librar- services. form. Barbara H. Liskov of the Electrical Engineering and Computer ies’ budget as they face an Institute- At yesterday’s meeting, Waitz said In response to this bill, the Blue Science Department won the 2009 Association for Computing mandated eighteen percent budget cut he shared his view about what “criti- Ribbon Committee on Dining met on Machinery’s A.M. Turing Award, one of the highest honors in over the next three years, six percent cal services” students needed, while Thursday night and agreed to submit computer science, for her work on the theory of programming each year. the Libraries talked about the resource a recommendation to Dean for Stu- languages and system design. Liskov was the first woman to MIT has publicly announced that it constraints they were facing. “There earn a computer science PhD in the U.S. aims to cut the overall Institute budget Dining, Page 15 by 15 percent. Libraries, Page 13 Men’s Basketball Cements Bringing a Bit of MIT to Space Astronaut Greg Chamitoff Discusses Half a Year on the International Space Station Legacy with Historic Run By Ramya Sankar By Caroline Huang ’09, and Bradley H. Gampel ’09 CONTRIBUTING EDITOR CONTRIBUTING EDITOR entered MIT in the fall of 2005, the Space, at first glance, was “hard Four years ago, MIT basketball MIT men’s basketball team had an to look at,” said Greg E. Chamitoff players planned to make history. ambitious goal in mind: “We com- PhD ’92. Exciting as it may have been This year, they made it. mitted to each other that we would to travel out of this world and fulfill When James M. “Jimmy” Barto- a childhood dream to become an as- lotta ’09, Willard J. “Billy” Johnson NCAA, Page 12 tronaut, “when you first get up there you are not feeling good so it is hard to look at it at first,” he said. Amherst Alley Steam Leak to Be Once he settled into the new envi- ronment, the view of Earth outside the Repaired This Summer window became clearer: “You know what it looks like — you’ve seen it A steam leak under Amherst Alley between Burton-Conner and the in science fiction movies, pretty darn tennis bubble will be repaired this summer, but until then, steel plates good rendering of it — but it’s confir- will remain in the road covering the site of the leak. mation that this is really the way the Work began in the area to fix “what we thought was a relatively mi- world is.” nor leak,” but turned out be a break in the pipe’s insulation jacket, said And, beyond that, he said, “You re- Randall D. Preston, Director of Utilities for Facilities. It was a “bigger alize how vulnerable [the Earth] is at problem than we originally thought,” he said. the same time. You see it by itself, just Preston said that the problems have not affected the heat or hot like you are floating by yourself.” water services the steam provides. The Course 16 PhD alumnus re- The repair work would take about two months to complete and turned from half a year aboard the In- would cost about $300,000. ternational Space Station in mid-De- There are two options for the repair, Preston said. Facilities could cember, 2008. On a visit to MIT this replace the piping in the trench, or they could re-route that section of week, he recounted his experience on steam pipe. the Space Station working as a flight Preston said that Facilities would probably have to replace sections engineer and NASA science officer of piping to the west of Burton-Conner in the future, but that there are alongside partners from Russia and no definitive plans to do so. They have not yet determined what will Japan. COURTESY OF NASA be replaced when. Aboard the Space Station, Chamit- Astronaut Gregory E. Chamitoff PhD ’92 poses with a picture of MIT’s Amherst Alley is the extension of Amherst Street west of Massa- off worked on several projects, includ- Aeronautics and Astronautics Department aboard the International chusetts Avenue in front of dorm row. ing one that aims to allow satellites to Space Station during his time in orbit last year. —John A. Hawkinson autonomously avoid collisions. The no play: an avid chess player, Cham- “It was a disadvantage to [the control project utilized special test satellites itoff took aboard with him a chess- centers] because they couldn’t coordi- designed by the MIT Space Systems board on which he used Velcro to at- nate [with each other] but if they lost Laboratory. tach pieces. He started playing a game In Short Life in space was not all work and against the various control centers. Chamitoff, Page 16 ¶ PE Registration is open for The suspect was unarmed and de- Quarter 4 Classes at http://www. scribed as a tall, thin white male in his We’ve gotten thinner! Starting with this issue, The Tech mitpe.com/ through March 18. late teens or early twenties. World & Nation . 2 Classes fill on a first-come first-serve is printed by Mass Web Printing Company. Opinion ��������������������������4 basis. Graduate students may register ¶ Lost your bike? Was it outside The printed portion of the page has not changed size, beginning March 16. Classes begin the Student Center when new racks Arts ��������������������������������6 on April 1. were installed? You can retrieve but the margins have decreased. Comics / Fun Pages ������8 your bike by bringing your MIT If you notice anything amiss in the printing or delivery ¶ A woman was robbed Wednesday ID to 290 Albany Street on March Sports . 20 evening at the Bank of America ATM 13, March 20, or March 27 between of your newspaper, write to [email protected]. at Vassar St. and Massachusetts Ave. 10:00 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. Page 2 THE TECH March 13, 2009 WORLD & NATIO N Senior Aide to Saddam Hussein Investors See Glimmer of Sentenced to 15 Years By Marc Santora THE NEW YORK TIMES Hope, Send Shares Higher BAGHDAD Tariq Aziz, the senior aide to Saddam Hussein who gained inter- By Steve Lohr and Jack Healy 239.66 points, or 3.46 percent, to in New York. national renown as the public face of Iraq during the Persian Gulf War THE NEW YORK TIMES 7,170.06, while the Standard & The stock market, Stern said, in 1991, was sentenced to 15 years in prison on Wednesday for crimes NEW YORK Poor’s 500-stock index leaped 29.38 seems to be entering a new phase, against humanity.