Dear Physics Community,

I am sorry to have gone so long without a community message.  Recently, the Academic Continuity Meetings have been more sporadic than usual — which is good as these meetings were born of the crisis last March.  At the same time, much has been happening in other venues.

I’m away this week and will return, with our student announcements, next week.

Above the Fold

Campus operation – Research is going at the 50% occupancy level while the rest of the campus is at about the 5% occupancy level.  The number of positive COVID-19 tests remains very low (Dashboard here).  Testing has ramped up with the opening of the new test center on the Ice Rink in Johnson athletic center.  Access to the campus is possible – please contact Matt, Peter (after next week), or the head of your lab to you would like some time to use your office occasionally. Lots of data here. There have been 34 positive cases since testing started, and MIT Emergency Management and MIT Medical have analyzed where the infections cames from here.

Cool thing – The Alm Lab in Biological Engineering has been analyzing wastewater and can see Sar-COV-2 biomarkers that lead detection by testing by at least five days.  They have set up a pilot in 7 MIT buildings, slides here.  Wastewater sampling is great stuff, and I’ve invited the research lead, Dr. Katya Moniz, to give a lunch talk about their work.

Many discussions about ramping to 100% research and one of the milestones is full compliance, hence this rather unpleasant memo here.

What is going to happen this Spring?  This note just went to academic officers (but not faculty or Department Heads, I’m told).  I have also heard from our students they are being asked about their preferred plans for the spring (i.e. will you be here or there).

Department

• Last week, we had David Elwell from ISO talk about OPT, slides here
• Arup has a new book out on viruses, vaccines, and immunity.
• I’ve spent almost a year working with Tavneet Suri of Sloan on companion reports on how MIT should evolve our gift processes.  They are here.  There will be a Town Hall week after next to hear comments and, I am sure, much more strum und drang after that.
• Information on MIT sponsored tutoring programs for MIT children up to high school.
• Thursday, I hosted a panel, “Should I go to graduate school?” The panel was Wolfgang Ketterle, Richard Fletcher, Yannick Selelim, and Alyssa Rudelis.

Physics

• PRL Cover – Hubbard Model from Martin
• Wha? Department – Nature article on Numpy
• Dark matter – could be primordial black holes, according to Quanta.  I’ve always liked this solution: no new theory is needed.  But, they are hard to find.
• Insight Fellows announcement

Los Endos

I watch “The Social Dilemma” on Netflix – tech CEO’s tell-all about how the tech companies use our data.  Did not learn much new – but if you don’t know, read Soshona Zuboff’s book – but I’ve decided to remove everything Google from my computer. To replace Chrome, I’ve installed Brave as my browser and am using Qwant as my search engine.

Peter

Dear Physics Community,

This marks the end of the first week of classes in our new virtualized reality — the summer is now officially behind us. It was long and arduous at times, but hopefully, everyone got a bit of sun. In the midst of everything, a number of organizations in the Department embarked on new initiatives, instituted policy and procedural changes, and began a variety of other efforts to benefit students. This report, by the SPS and PGSC presidents, summarizes the tremendous amount of work done on almost every front this summer to improve the way students move through the Department.

Peter, Stella, and Anjali

Above the Fold

• Op-Ed by Kerston Perez in Inside Higher Education
• New department-wide Piazza forum, Communic.8.  You may post semi-anonymously (poster’s name known to instructors only).  the instructors (Jesse Thaler, Matt Hodel, Kaylee de Soto, and Peter Fisher) will review how the site is working any may move to fully anonymous posting in mid-October…
• New positions: Prof Lindley Winslow has agreed to serve as Undergraduate Coordinator and Prof. Claude Canizares will serve as Graduate Student Advocate.  Announcement here.

Physics

• Tech article on Hen lab
• The biggest black hole so far
• Gravitational wave function collapse? Not yet…

New news

• • Physics Values Committee restructuring. The Physics Values Committee underwent a major restructuring this summer to best respond to community needs, and has uploaded its new charter on its website.
  • Metrics of student success survey — faculty and graduate students, please fill out this survey from the PGSC’s admissions advisory council, GAGA, about metrics of student success
  • GWIP and UWIP rebranding. GWIP, along with UWIP, is working with LGBTQ+ services to make the organization more inclusive of all gender marginalized physics students. Outward-facing changes include a name change from “Women” to “Womxn”, new logos, and updated web resources, in addition to more internal efforts. GWIP and UWIP are planning to host joint inclusivity training events during the fall 2020 semester.

In case you missed it

• 8.391 and 8.398 in-person policy
• Opportunity for undergrad and grad students to be a mentor for core undergrad courses (~$840 stipend available)
• Want to learn more about opportunities in our Department or at MIT? The Physics Values Committee website has nice lists of resources you can access and ways to get involved.

Upcoming events (if you want to link to the Departmental Calendar, see Christina’s instructions at the end of this message)

• Monday, September 7 – Labor Day (read: three-day weekend! Woo!)
• Tuesday, September 8 – first PhysREFS office hour. Here’s the full schedule of PhysREFS office hours for the semester​
• Also Tuesday, September 8! At 5:30pm, SPS is holding elections for the 2020-21 year. If you can’t make it at that time and want to run for a position, fill out this form to nominate yourself.
• Thursday, Sept. 10, 12-1:30 pm, Physics Lunch talk, Salvatore Vitale “Astrophysical implications of the binary black hole merger GW190521”, see Ryan’s note for zoom link
• Thursday, September 24, 4:00 p.m. — “Is Grad School Right For You?” physics department panel
• November 5-8 — The National Society of Black Physicists Conference is coming up soon! Our department is organizing a small group of students and/or faculty to represent us. If you are interested in learning more, please contact Olumakinde Ogunnaike at ogunnaik@mit.edu.

Community outreach opportunity from graduate student Francesco Sciortino

• ​Recently many of us have felt rising pressure to become more active and address social justice, educational access and diversity issues. If you’re on the same boat, now is the time to change gear! In this document, you can find information about 3 opportunities to volunteer with organizations based near MIT: the Cambridge Community Learning Center, the Science Club For Girls and Enroot. Together, these 3 groups support underserved adult learners, girls learning about STEM, and young immigrants in Cambridge. This semester, the majority of these volunteering opportunities will be remote (via Zoom). We are in contact with representatives of each of these organizations and they have told us that they are in huge need of volunteers to address old and new challenges during the next months. If you’re interested, please look through this document and/or email Francesco at sciortino@psfc.mit.edu!

Accessing the Physics Community Calendar: In cooperation with Christina Andujar and myself, an MIT Physics Community Calendar was created for use in Microsoft Outlook.

If you want to your Physics event on the calendar please email Christina Andujar (candujar@mit.edu) and myself (higginsr@mit.edu) with all of the information for the talk itself as well as how to access it (e.g. a zoom link).

When you set up this calendar, you will be able to view and open the individual appointments on this calendar to find the zoom details and eventually the DropBox link will be added with the video if the talk was recorded. Our hope is to have all events posted to this calendar during our time working remotely to help you have a place where the zoom links can live and login information can be accessed.

Windows Users:
Steps to access the calendar for those who use Microsoft Outlook:
1.     Go to the calendar in Outlook
2.     Click on “Open Calendar” and then “Open Shared Calendar…”
3.     In the text box type: PHYSICS: Community Calendar
4.     When you press “OK” the calendar should appear on your end.

Apple Users:
Steps to access the calendar for those who use Microsoft Outlook:
1.     Go to the calendar in Outlook
2.     Click on “View” then “Go to” and then “Calendar” and then “Open Shared Calendar…”
3.     In the text box type: PHYSICS: Community Calendar
4.     When you press “OK” the calendar should appear on your end.

Dear Physics Community,

Things have been happening fast this week and I’ve gotten behind on the messages.  I will catch up with Anjali and Stella in the next few days, but here are some things from today’s 8 am Academic Continuity Meeting:

• Experiential Learning Opportunities – elo.mit.edu – everyone should look at this.
• New displayed ID requirements – when on campus, need to display your MIT ID, preferably from a lanyard around your neck.  Can pick up lanyards in Lobby 7, residential halls should have lanyards.
• Q-week ends 6 am on Tuesday
• Move-in statistics: 670 undergraduates have arrived, 784 expected.   The normal undergraduate population in MIT housing is 3,200.  1,311 graduate students have arrived out of 1,450.
• Biology, 7.00, on the pandemic,  open to everyone.  (Fauci is listed as a speaker!)
• Rules and Regs. for the start of term
• Pulse survey – Janet Rankin has developed a Pulse Survey for instructors to use in Week 2-3 Guide is here, qualtrics form here.  I mentioned this a lunch yesterday and this will save some time setting up. An early survey can help a lot in improving new online courses.
• Students who have signed up in-person classes for COVIDPass but who do not yet have access to campus will be added to the access list on Saturday, most likely.
• There are now circles around circles various places around campus (Killian Court) for informal gatherings of up to 10 people.

Dashboards

Here is a collection of local university dashboards (and Bates College because my kid goes there).  I’ve love to see someone make a web crawler to produce a consolidated webpage with all the local data.  Please be in touch if you are interested in doing this – I think it would be very popular.

• MIT – just daily testing stats
• NEU– ditto
• Bates – includes isolation statistics
• JHU – NORAD style global view
• COVID calculator – very informative about the risk you and others face in this area.
• Boston University
• BC
• Tufts
• Brandeis

Peter