EAGER BEAVER
A kick-off party for the MIT Beaver Costume Design Contest will be held Tuesday, Feb. 2 in Lobby 7 from 4-5pm, announced Ted E. Johnson, Campus Activities Complex. assistant director for programs.
"We will be holding a student design contest for the costume this semester. Our plans are to have students submit designs and the winner will receive a cash prize. A group of judges from the CAC Advisory Board, Undergraduate Association, CAC Program Board, Graduate Student Council, the Varsity Club and a few others will choose the finalists. The final drawings will be published and there will be a campus-wide election to pick the winning design," Mr. Johnson said.
The CAC Program Board's Registration Day party is actually an 85th birthday party for the original beaver costume. It will include music, a giant birthday cake and an announcement of the design competition.
Volunteers are needed to help organize and advertise the birthday party and to formulate the rules for the Beaver Design Contest. Contact Mr. Johnson at beaver@mit.edu.
WEB IN A NUTSHELL
Richard Schmalensee, the new dean of the Sloan School, will "seal" Sloan's digital time capsule into the cornerstone of the School's new web site at a relaunch party on Thursday, Feb. 4 at 5pm in Wong Auditorium.
The time capsule, which will be opened in 2004, includes digital products, people and ideas that capture the spirit and essence of the Internet, business and education at the beginning of 1999. Also included will be predictions from MIT community members, alumni/ae and luminaries about what the world can expect from the Internet in the decade ahead. The program includes a panel of interactive media experts from Fast Company, ABC.Com, the Boston Globe and others discussing the future of the web.
Dean Schmalensee will open with remarks on how the web site and other planned initiatives will help better position Sloan as one of the world's leading business schools. "We have given some thought as to what an engineer really needs to know about business, and what a business student needs to know about engineering," he told the Financial Times of London. "We have a reputation as a good place. But watch us over the next five to ten years. We will become a force to be reckoned with."
MR. DIGITAL DECADE
Nicholas Negroponte, co-founder and director of the Media Lab, made numerous print media appearances to note the passing of the 1990s.
In an e-mail interview with the New York Times (January 4), he called the 1990s "the digital decade... where the biggest asset is having none. The energy, people, spaces and vehicles needed to move physical things from country to country are suddenly a liability in an age of weightless, sizeless, colorless bits which move at the speed of light."
Five days earlier, he told USA Today that "things like the nation-state are basically the wrong size" in a world where entities must be either global or local.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on January 27, 1999.
