Welcome Prospective Students! MIT’s The Weather Oldest and Largest Today: Cloudy, late rain, High 53°F (12°C) Newspaper Tonight: Rain, Low 41°F (5°C) Tomorrow: More rain, High 48°F (9°C) http://tech.mit.edu/ Details, Page 2 Volume 128, Number 18 Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139 Friday, April 11, 2008 Sloan Group Received A Record Number of Students Homophobic Threats Attend Campus Preview Weekend After Incident, Community Discussed Values By Arkajit Dey By Ramya Sankar spend it at resuscitation department. and Nick Bushak STAFF REPORTER If this is what you want, go ahead.” STAFF REPORTERS A Sloan student was not ex- The full message is available on- A record number of prospective pelled or suspended after sending a line along with a response from the freshmen — 1021 — have descend- homophobic, threatening e-mail to LGBT group at http://tech.mit.edu/ ed upon MIT for this year’s Campus members of the Sloan LGBT stu- V128/N18/sloan/. Preview Weekend, according to Ben dent group. Group officers contacted the Jones, Associate Director of Admis- The e-mail was sent in Decem- Sloan administration, who notified sions. The event, which ten years ber; the resulting Committee on the MIT Police. Soon a court case ago was meant to attract women Discipline case was resolved in was filed, said Tom Armet G, an of- and minority students to MIT, is February; a letter to the Sloan com- ficer of Sloan LGBT. now open to all admitted freshmen. munity was sent in March; and an After proceedings in January, CPW has grown explosively since open forum was held in April. The “the Cambridge Court case was then, increasing from 974 last year incident and subsequent discussion closed pending further action,” said and 868 the year before. have forced the Sloan school to se- Eric J. Silverberg G, another officer CPW runs from April 10 to April riously reevaluate its values and to of Sloan LGBT. 13. Living groups, student groups, implement diversity training, ac- MIT’s Committee on Discipline MIT organizations, and other groups cording to students. heard on Feb. 14 a case against the offer more than 600 events through- On Dec. 10, the officers of the student who sent the e-mail, whose out all hours of the weekend. MIT Sloan LGBT received a ho- name has not been released, and the A smorgasbord of activities char- mophobic e-mail from a fellow case was resolved a few days after- acterized last night’s CPW opening Sloan student, threatening violence. ward, Silverberg said. festival, held in the Johnson Athlet- A case was filed with Cambridge COD officials would not con- ics Center. Perennial favorites, like officials, and Sloan administrators firm or deny that they had heard liquid nitrogen ice cream, drew long filed a complaint with MIT’s Com- such a case, standard practice for lines. Meanwhile, eager combatants mittee on Discipline. the tight-lipped committee. “I can’t wielded foam-laden swords and The offending e-mail was a re- confirm” that this case or any other competed in “boffing” duels. sponse to an invitation sent out by had been heard, said Sheila E. Wid- Elsewhere, crowds of prospec- the Sloan Lesbian, Gay, and Trans- nall ’60, the committee’s current tive freshmen contorted their bod- MONICA KAHn—THE TECH gender Club to an end-of-semester chair. ies in novel ways in large games of Benjamin W. Charrow ’08 wears a “CRYO-FAC” box in reference to celebration. The response reads in The details of the proceedings Twister and four-square. Raucous East Campus’ Friday Afternoon Club at the 2008 Campus Preview part: “If you fucking fags send me and the outcome are not known to potential rock stars amused them- Weekend in Johnson Ice Rink yesterday. something like that once again or anyone outside of those present at selves playing Guitar Hero and terday being Thursday, had not re- others. contact me in any other way, I swear the hearings, which did not include Rock Band. ally yet begun — was pretty intense Laura Bagamery, a Pittsburgh you won’t be able to study at Sloan Prospective freshmen agreed and slightly crazy. The fast pace of for some time because you will Sloan, Page 15 that the weekend — which, yes- events appeals to some more than Preview, Page 11 Students Use MIT Student Fights to MIT Skills Protect Activists’ Privacy By Michael McGraw-Herdeg paragraph about how his system theo- For Indian EXECUTIVE EDITOR retically protected people’s privacy, he A New York City Law Department learned that New York City had just subpoena to an MIT graduate student put his theory to the test. Flood Relief over text messages has raised ques- “If you just use a commercial pro- By Saajan S. Chana tions about how the First Amendment vider,” he said, “you end up with an I arrived in Delhi, like most inter- protects online speech, and whether archive of messages that could be pro- national travellers, in the middle of the government is allowed to ask vided to the cops if they wanted, and the night, when the temperature was service providers for messages they that might not be great. So I’m writing a mere 70 de- store. that sentence in academese when my grees. I walked On a winter day in February, Ed- phone rings …” Feature out of the ter- ward A. Hirsch G was in the Rotch Hirsch was asked for text messag- minal to see a melee of taxi drivers Library writing a thesis chapter about es sent by his TXTmob service during soliciting the custom of shell-shocked his TXTmob system, which he had the Republican National Convention travellers with the latest Bollywood developed to help protesters commu- in a broad subpoena issued by the New hits blaring out of tinny speakers. It nicate during the 2004 Republican was, you know, the usual spring break National Convention. As he began a TXTmob, Page 16 scene. But I had a mission. I was there as part of the new D-Lab companion MIT News Office Publication subject Information and Communi- cations Technology for Development Violates Federal Law (SP.716). I’m a member of one of eight teams working around the world Wednesday’s issue of Tech Talk appears to violate federal law. A on using IT to solve problems ranging front-page article discussing Dan Ariely’s book “Predictably Irrational” in- from education to matching workers cluded a color image of a U.S. $1 bill. The image is 5.125" long, 85 percent with employers. My team works with as long as a real $1 bill. Printed images of U.S. currency Catholic Relief Services India, a non- must be “of a size less than three-fourths or more than PERRy Hung—THE TECH governmental organization involved in Briefs one and one-half, in linear dimension, of each part of In a sweeping speech on Wednesday in the Tang Auditorium, flood relief in Bihar in northern India. any matter so illustrated,” according to 18 USC § 504, as amended by the Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick outlined a $3.8 billion Bihar is one of the most flood- Department of the Treasury under amendment 411.1. bond proposal to protect the state’s economy. It was Patrick’s prone states in India because of runoff The News Office was unavailable for comment on Thursday night. first official visit to MIT since his inauguration in January of —Nick Semenkovich 2007. India, Page 12 In Short NEWS World & Nation . 2 ¶ Feeling screwed? Voting in the Sunday at 2 p.m. in the Media Lab’s Police Log . 12 Opinion . 4 APO Big Screw charity fundraiser Bartos Theater. Campus Life . 5 ends tomorrow in Lobby 10. Pick someone who’s done their worst to ¶ Yes, MIT has journalism. See for Student Center dry cleaners forcibly Arts . 6 you and vote with dollars! yourself at The Tech’s open house closed by state . .14 Comics / Fun Pages . 7 today, all afternoon, on the fourth floor Sports . 20 ¶ A memorial service for Professor of the Student Center. Current students J. Mark Schuster PhD ’79 will be held and admitted freshmen are welcome. Page 2 THE TECH April 11, 2008 WORLD & NATIO N Security Will Be Tight During Bush Signals No Early Troop Pope’s Visit to New York By Al Baker THE NEW YORK TIMES NEW YORK Reductions for Iraq Forces Portions of the sky above, the water around, and streets all over New York will be sealed off next week when Pope Benedict XVI ar- By Steven Lee Myers ure in Iraq,” he said, sounding a trium- presidency, Bush has begun making rives in the city. and Thom Shanker phant note about his decision last year the case for a war that will continue, As a religious leader and a head of state, recently accused by Osa- THE NEW YORK TIMES to send 30,000 additional troops. “To- one way or another, under another ma bin Laden of leading a crusade against Muslims, the pope presents WASHINGTON day, thanks to the surge, we’ve renewed commander-in-chief. He flatly restated city and federal law enforcement authorities with a security challenge President Bush said Thursday that and revived the prospect of success.” his views on the war that will most de- of considerable complexity. the senior U.S. commander in Iraq As was the case during two days of fine his legacy and set the terms of the Planning began in October for a three-day trip that will involve vis- could “have all the time he needs” congressional testimony this week by debate over Iraq for the coming presi- its to some of the city’s biggest and most high-profile locations: ground before reducing U.S.