A graduate student faces felony charges after MIT Police found three students in a caged room in Building NW16 late Saturday night. The incident is reminiscent of the felony charges filed against three hackers found exploring the Faculty Club in October 2006.

Two MIT Police officers responded to a motion-triggered alarm just before midnight on Saturday, June 7 in the basement of NW16, where they found MIT graduate students Michael P. Short and Harold S. Barnard and Brandeis University graduate student Marina Dang. Short was subsequently arrested and taken to the Cambridge Police Department headquarters for booking.

Short has since been charged with breaking and entering at night with intent to commit a felony and possession of burglarious instruments, both felony charges. If convicted, Short faces up to 20 years in state prison for breaking and entering and up to 10 years in state prison or a fine of up to $1,000 and two-and-a-half years in jail for possession of burglarious instruments.

It is unclear why the police did not arrest the other two students. In the police report for the incident, officer Duane R. Keegan writes that Barnard and Dang “will be issued criminal summons for Breaking and Entering in the Nighttime.”

No documents concerning Barnard or Dang could be found, according to Jessica Venezia, a spokeswoman for the Middlesex District Attorney’s office. But past experience with the Faculty Club incident suggests that those students may still be charged.

Short, who is a former Tech features writer, declined to comment because of the pending charges against him, referring questions to his lawyer, Steven J. Fack. Fack was on vacation and could not be reached for comment yesterday afternoon.

Barnard declined to comment. Dang could not be reached for comment.

Short, Barnard, and Dang were found in the caged room NW16-038, according to the police report filed by Keegan, one of the two arresting officers. They had apparently entered the room after opening a combination lock with a tool traditionally called a “shim,” a piece of metal cut from the side of a Diet Coke can.

According to Keegan, Short said “that he was there to see what he could find for parts in the area.” Short voluntarily showed the officers the tool he had used to open the combination lock and demonstrated how he had done it, according to Keegan’s report. Short was arrested after he confirmed that he was in the locked area after having broken the lock open, Keegan writes in the report. The list of evidence Keegan reports includes “17 pieces of Diet Coke can” identical to the one used to open the combination lock.

NW16, located at 167 Albany St., is one of the buildings that house the Plasma Science and Fusion Center. Barnard conducts research at the PSFC; Short has an office in NW22, two buildings further down Albany St.

A felony charge of breaking and entering requires an intent to commit a felony. But the court documents do not explicitly indicate what felony Short is believed to have intended to commit. Keegan’s report suggests that he suspected theft: “NW 16 [sic] is a common area for theft due to the specialty metals and electronics equipment present in the area.”

Short was taken to the Cambridge Police Department for booking. Along the way, “Mr Short’s cuffs were double locked and checked for comfort,” Keegan writes in the report. After his booking, Short was arraigned on Monday, June 9 and released on $200 bail. His next court date is a July 18 pretrial hearing, Venezia said.

Undergraduate Association President Noah S. Jessop ’09, who has been in contact with Short, said that he “was totally floored” when he learned about this incident. He said that it was his understanding that the three had been hacking at the time, and that Short had been fully cooperative with the officers.

Jessop said he worried about the negative effect that this incident might have on future hackers’ interactions with the MIT Police. “I fear that this sort of response to hacking will undermine hackers’ first instincts to cooperate — complying, they shouldn’t have to worry about being slapped with state charges,” he said.

The current incident is reminiscent of the incident at the Faculty Club in October 2006, when Kristina K. Brown ’09, David Nawi G, and Matthew W. Petersen ’09 were charged with trespassing and breaking and entering with intent to commit a felony after being found by two officers responding to a burglar alarm on the sixth floor of Building E52.

Those charges were eventually dismissed at MIT’s request following substantial public outcry that raised questions of how MIT’s hacking community is to coexist with the police.

Petersen was in possession of an L-shaped piece of metal which he “proudly identified ... as a slide, to slide doors open,” according to the report filed by MIT Police officer Sean Munnelly. He faced an additional charge of possession of burglarious tools.

The students were summonsed to court to face the charges on Nov. 17, 2006, almost a month after the Oct. 22 incident. This delay between the incident and the charges suggests that the two students who have not yet been charged in the NW16 incident may still be charged.

Keegan was present at both the October 2006 incident and the incident on Saturday.

Brown, Nawi, and Petersen characterized themselves as hackers who were, in the words of a statement released by their attorneys at the time, “engaging in a longstanding tradition among MIT students of after-hours exploration of the university campus.” They disputed a claim by MIT Police that they had broken into a locked area — instead, the students said, they simply pushed the sixth floor button on an unlocked elevator.

The public disclosure of the charges in The Tech in February 2007 brought a storm of criticism from student leaders and some faculty and alumni who believed that the matter should have been handled internally at MIT and should not have escalated to external charges. The charges were eventually dropped at the end of that month.

That incident also sparked a campus-wide discussion of how MIT should balance its concerns about physical security with students’ traditional interest in exploration. The Institute eventually drafted an official statement on hacking based on the traditional “Hacker Code of Ethics” to be added to the student handbook in fall 2008. MIT also updated its unauthorized access policy. (For both, see box below.) The wording was finalized in February 2008 and was completely approved by April, said former UA Senator Steven M. Kelch ’08, who was involved in the drafting process.

“It’s not necessarily a policy so much as it is a statement,” said Kelch. “It doesn’t necessarily say that [MIT administrators] want to support it, because they can’t for legal reasons.”

It had seemed that the 2007 discussion was going to change the way MIT handled hacking cases in ways which should have prevented the NW16 incident. Last fall, then-UA President Martin F. Holmes ’08 told The Tech that all future hacking cases dealing with unauthorized access would be brought to the faculty-student Committee on Discipline.

Only the CoD — not MIT Police or individual deans — should be involved in handling hacking cases, Kelch told The Tech in fall 2007. They “can’t have multiple tracks,” he said. “It’s to hard to be accountable.”

But ultimately the committee working on MIT’s hacking policy “didn’t establish any kind of procedure for police involvement other than to keep basically what was already there, which was that there is always a possibility of legal action in addition to disciplinary action,” Kelch said in an interview last night.

David Kennedy, director of the Office of Student Mediation and Community Standards, clarified that all official disciplinary actions made by MIT receive their authority from the Committee on Discipline, but that the MIT Police are separate, being “state agents.” Kelch also stated, “MIT Police answers to the state first, and MIT second.”

Former MIT Police chief and current MIT security director John DiFava did not respond to phone calls last night. Deputy Chief of Police John E. Driscoll could not be reached for comment.

Captain David Carlson of the MIT Police confirmed the information in the public police log that Short had been arrested, but he declined to comment further, referring questions to the public court documents.

Graduate Student Council President Oaz Nir said he hoped that the MIT administration would support Short as this case proceeds. “MIT should fully support this student as the facts of the case are investigated,” Nir said.

“In responding to this event, I hope that the MIT administration keeps in mind the lessons learned from its responses to similar recent events,” Nir said, referring to the Faculty Club incident and the Star A. Simpson ’10 incident.

Jessop expressed similar sentiments. “I hope the administration supports the students, and from what little I know about the incident, this response seems surprising, particularly considering the community’s response to the Faculty Club incident,” he said.

Kelch also noted the level of discontent among student leaders, who have mounted recent efforts to try to increase the amount of say students have in administration decisions. Kelch warned that improper handling of this most recent event might add “fuel to that fire.”

The court documents of Short’s case, including Keegan’s full statement, are available online at http://tech.mit.edu/V128/N28/hackers/complaint.pdf.

Angeline Wang contributed to the reporting of this story.

Pouring rain gave way to calmer skies as MIT’s 142nd Commencement began last Friday. Over 2,000 students received degrees in front of approximately 10,000 guests, including members of the 50-year reunion Class of 1958.

For the third year in a row, the senior class set a record for participation in the Senior Gift campaign, reaching 64 percent participation and contributing over $41,000 to the Class of 2008 Externship Assistance Fund. The gift included a $25,000 challenge gift from Alumni Association President Harbo Jensen PhD ’74, for the class achieving over 56 percent participation.

Muhammad Yunus, who won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for his work in microfinance, gave the Commencement address. He spoke about his own experiences in building the Grameen Bank in Bangaladesh and urged graduates to spend time “making the world a better place.”

Yunus reminded graduates they represent “the future of the world.” He spent most of the speech describing the step-by-step approach to building a microcredit empire which has focused on helping the poor build their own businesses.

“Whenever I needed a rule or a procedure in our work, I just looked at the conventional banks,” Yunus said. “Once I learned what they did, I just did the opposite.”

Yunus went on to describe his unique approach to lending — essentially focusing on those with the least collateral to offer, and currently reaching 7.5 million borrowers, 97 percent of whom are women. He explained that small loans to the poorest individuals offer a near 100 percent repayment record.

Yunus described the difference between the profit-maximizing ideal that a traditional business is expected to pursue versus the multi-dimensionality inherent in people’s natures. “For a real-life human being money-making is a means, not an end,” Yunus said. He then encouraged graduates to pursue businesses with social objectives and described a wide array of businesses he has built in a variety of industries, based on the roots of Grameen Bank.

Yunus concluded with a look toward the future. “You will take your grandchildren to the poverty museums with tremendous pride that your generation had finally made it happen,” Yunus said.

Speeches from Graduate Student Council President Leeland B. Ekstrom G and 2008 Class President Phi Ho ’08 followed Yunus’ address.

“It is our spirit that sets us apart,” Ekstrom said. “That entrepreneurial, push through the limits, refuse to accept no attitude — if you export one thing from MIT, let it be that spirit.”

“We are stretching ourselves beyond our limits,” Ho said. “Our perspective, shaped by our experiences and ambitions and goals, will empower us to shape the world.”

After accepting the Senior Gift, President Susan Hockfield took the podium and charged graduates to focus on the state of the world as they leave MIT.

“The changes that erupted during your time at MIT have transformed our cultural landscape. Facebook and social networking have changed the structure and texture of friendship; they have transformed business and politics; and they have established entirely new networks of understanding,” Hockfield said.

Hockfield stressed the pursuit of realistic but ideal-driven goals, describing Yunus as a practical visionary, the founding of MIT as “practical inspiration” and the “practical, unwavering spirit that pushed MIT researchers and graduates through … immense technical problems.”

“We will certainly miss you, but the world right now needs you.” Hockfield said.

Graduate Shiva Ayyadurai ’87 took the exhortation to act immediately and literally, procuring poster board during the ceremony to make a sign saying “Out of Iraq” which he pulled out from under his gown and held up on his way back from the podium after receiving a postdoctoral degree in Biological Engineering.

“Yunus was saying powerful things … and we’re supposed to be the next generation of leaders,” Ayyadurai said in an interview yesterday. “I wanted to wake people up a bit.” He added that while the Commencement speakers addressed problems in the developing world, “I was upset that no one up there said anything about the fact that we have a war going on.”

Parents and family members attending the ceremony expressed their pride at watching their students graduate.

MIT has provided a “diverse set of exceptional programs,” said Seward Pulitzer Jr., whose son Seward Pulitzer ’98 graduated from MIT 10 years ago.

“Joining a sorority” was the most surprising thing her daughter did at MIT, said Tama Andres, mother of Teagan Andres ’08, a member of Alpha Phi. “In the end, it helped a lot.”

Yun-Pung Paulhsu, an MIT postdoctoral student in 1981, said he has witnessed many changes watching his daughter Irene Hsu ’08 attend MIT. “I still remember my old office, Building 16, Room 439,” said Paulhsu. “But there are a lot of new buildings now.”

Rosa Cao contributed to the reporting for this article.

An MIT graduate student was injured Wednesday in a small lab explosion in Building 16.

An experiment “had an exothermic reaction and exploded,” according to WBZ-TV’s Web site.

The explosion occurred at about 6 p.m. in 16-276, located at the junction between Buildings 16 and 56. The room is part of Professor Angela Belcher’s lab.

The injured student was taken to a nearby hospital, according to the MIT News Office. The student suffered injuries to his hands and arms, according to WBZ-TV.

The student’s injuries were not life-threatening, said David M. Barber of MIT’s Environment, Health and Safety Office. “We believe he will eventually be fine.”

William VanSchalkwyk, managing director of EHS, said the damage to the facility was limited to one table and an adjacent window.

EHS, MIT Police, the Cambridge Fire Department, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation assessed the situation at the site on Wednesday evening.

The room was closed off yesterday as the Cambridge Fire Department investigated what chemicals were used and what caused the explosion. VanSchalkwyk said that Cambridge Fire Department had completed its investigation on Thursday, though the results have not yet been released.

The Cambridge Fire investigations unit did not immediately return a call for comment.

“In general, any time we have any incident where there has been a spill or a release in the laboratory, once it is stable and once the investigation has taken place, there’s a clean-up that has to be done,” Barber said. “An environmental contractor comes in and decontaminates.” EHS then tests the area to make sure the lab is safe to reenter.

The lab was cleaned and was expected to return to service yesterday, according to the News Office. But yesterday evening, the lab was still closed off.

Students in Belcher’s lab declined to comment and directed questions to the MIT News Office. Belcher declined to comment yesterday.

The Task Force on Student Engagement was established to increase student involvement on Institute decisions, announced administrators and student government leaders in the March/April issue of the MIT Faculty Newsletter.

The task force was created as part of a new effort to address student concerns about faculty and administrative support for students and student involvement in Institute decisions. These concerns have been provoked by recent administrative actions cited by the letter: the presentation of NW35 to the MIT community, the conversion of Green Hall from graduate to undergraduate housing, the response to Star A. Simpson’s ’10 arrest at Logan Airport, and the response to three students’ arrests at the MIT Faculty Club.

The task force, which met for the first time in early May, is comprised of four graduate students, four undergraduate students, five administrators, and two faculty members. In a draft mission statement, they describe their intention to “identify issues relevant to student life and learning that have not been appropriately vetted by existing committee structure on which students serve” and to “propose ways to obtain student input on those issues.”

The task force was conceived in meetings between former Undergraduate Association President Martin A. Holmes ’08, Graduate Student Council President Leeland B. Ekstrom G, Chancellor Phillip L. Clay PhD ’75, Vice President for Institute Affairs Kirk D. Kolenbrander, and other senior officers.

Following the announcement of the task force’s creation in the Faculty Newsletter, 26 faculty members signed a statement of support for the group, Holmes said. In addition, Holmes said that about 600 undergraduate students signed a petition supporting the task force and asking that its work be taken seriously. He said the petition has yet to be submitted because the UA is still deciding how and to whom the petition should be presented to maximize its impact.

Students have held voting positions in several faculty and presidential committees, but until the creation of the task force, there had been no centralized body to solicit student input on issues outside the business of those committees. Dean for Graduate Education Steven R. Lerman ’72, said, “There are areas that don’t naturally fit into a committee,” and the task force will be a means to address issues that are out of the scope of those committees but still involve students.

Holmes, one of the letter’s authors, hopes that the group will serve as a means to bridge that gap and allow students to be more involved in decision-making processes.

Incoming GSC President Oaz Nir G said, “I would like for us to have a solid vision of what student engagement should be and have it signed up by administration and faculty leaders.”

“I would like to avoid disappointments of the past where decisions are made unilaterally,” he added. He said he hopes that the task force will mark the beginning of a renewed effort “to keep up consistent meetings between major administrators and student leaders.”

A copy of the article in the Faculty Newsletter can be found at http://web.mit.edu/fnl/volume/martin.html.

Robert S. Langer ScD ’74, an MIT Institute professor and a leader in the development of controlled drug delivery and tissue engineering, has won the world’s largest award for technology innovation.

Langer received the Millennium Technology Prize Wednesday from Technology Academy Finland for his research, which advanced the treatment of cancer, heart disease, and other illnesses. Winners receive 800,000 euros, or about $1.2 million.

Langer was given the prize in Helsinki Wednesday by President Tarja Halonen. The award is given every two years to the developers of technology that “significantly improves quality of human life.”

“He and his laboratory have pioneered the use of new materials to allow drugs to be delivered to patients in new and very flexible ways,” said Tyler E. Jacks, the director of the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for which Langer heads a laboratory.

Langer said he developed the materials for controlled drug delivery in the 1970s while successfully working with oncologist Judah Folkman to inhibit the growth of blood vessels, a process used to treat cancerous tumors as well as certain forms of blindness.

“I was trying to figure out a way to stop blood vessels from growing, and that led me to this,” Langer said in an interview. “Now today, there are new treatments for people with prostate cancer based on this, schizophrenia, and heart disease.”

Controlled drug delivery is commonly used in heart stents, which clear blocked heart arteries and slowly emit drugs to prevent the arteries from closing up after the insertion of the stent. More than 100 million people a year benefit from advanced drug delivery systems, according to Technology Academy Finland.

Langer, who has taught at MIT since 1977, runs the largest biomedical engineering lab in the world at the university and has written about 900 research papers. In 2005, he was made an Institute Professor, an honor given to a handful of MIT professors that gives them more academic freedom.

He is working toward developing nanotechnology that would allow for the precise delivery of genes and drugs to specific cells.

“I feel very pleased that we’ve been able to accomplish some things,” Langer said.

A deeply controversial plan put forth by MIT scientists to end the standoff over Iran’s nuclear program is getting increased interest from senior members of both parties in Congress and nonproliferation specialists.

The plan, which was rejected three years ago by the Bush administration, argues for a dramatic shift in U.S. policy: Rather than trying to halt Iran’s efforts to enrich uranium, the United States should help build an internationally run enrichment facility inside Iran to replace Iran’s current facilities.

Supporters argue that such a program would fulfill Iran’s insistence on enriching uranium on its own soil, while preventing the dangerous material from being diverted to weapons.

Three years ago, when the proposal was first advanced, it was widely considered unthinkable. Administration officials argued that tougher sanctions and the threat of military strikes would force Iran to stop its program to enrich uranium, a process that uses thousands of spinning centrifuges to create fuel out of rare uranium isotopes that can be used for nuclear power or weapons.

But now, as Iran appears on the verge of mastering enrichment technology, the call to try to internationalize Iran’s facilities is getting more attention on Capitol Hill and from nonproliferation specialists as a face-saving compromise.

Iranian officials proposed building an international enrichment plant inside Iran in a letter they submitted to the United Nations last month, but declined to say whether such a plant would be in addition to or a replacement for their own facilities.

In an interview last month, Iran’s ambassador to the U.N., Mohammad Khazaee, said the details should be negotiated.

Thomas Pickering, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under President George H.W. Bush, endorsed the idea in a March article in the New York Review of Books that was co-authored by Jim Walsh, a nonproliferation specialist at MIT, and William Luers, president of the United Nations Association, which organizes meetings with Iranian officials. The three have spent more than a year in informal talks with officials from Iran’s foreign ministry and Atomic Energy Organization.

John Thomson, a former British ambassador to the United Nations who is now at MIT, and Geoffrey Forden, an MIT physicist and former weapons inspector in Iraq, have spent more than two years on separate research into the technology needed to safeguard such an international facility, including equipment that would prevent Iranian scientists from taking control of it or learning how it works.

Senators Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, and Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican, have said publicly that the plan should be explored.

Representative Edward J. Markey, a Malden Democrat, went further, calling the plan “a creative, thoughtful, and productive potential solution.”

Presidential candidates John McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee, and Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee, have both endorsed using international consortiums to produce nuclear fuel as a way to take production out of the hands of unpredictable states, but neither has said he would consider placing such a facility inside Iran. McCain’s campaign said an Iran-based plant would not be “subject to transparent and accountable international safeguards.” But advisers to Obama did not rule the option out.

“This is nobody’s first choice, but it may be the compromise we end up with,” said Joseph Cirincione, a nonproliferation specialist who serves informally as an adviser to Obama’s campaign. Cirincione is president of the Ploughshares Fund, a nonproliferation organization based in San Francisco that provided funding for talks that Pickering and his associates held with Iranian officials.

International consortiums to make fuel for nuclear power plants have been around for decades. In 1973, France, Belgium, Spain, and Sweden formed a joint enrichment company called EURODIF, and a year later the shah of Iran lent $1 billion to the project in exchange for a 10 percent share in the venture. But after the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran, the deal was canceled and the loan frozen. The United States, fearing that Iran’s radical regime was secretly pursuing a nuclear weapon, pressured the rest of the world to cease all nuclear cooperation with Iran.

For the next 20 years, Iranian scientists worked in secret to construct their own enrichment facility using items purchased on the black market, violating the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which mandates that nuclear work be monitored by the U.N.

In 2002, an Iranian exile group exposed the existence of the facility, prompting the U.N. Security Council to demand that Iran halt all enrichment efforts.

Russia has offered to supply Iran’s reactor with enriched uranium under a deal that would ensure that no fuel is diverted to weapons. But so far, Iranian officials have refused, saying they can’t rely on outsiders.

In early 2005, officials from the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency studied the idea of placing a facility inside Iran. Later that year, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran gave a speech at the U.N. inviting other countries to join in Iran’s enrichment facility. U.S. officials dismissed it as insincere.

That summer at MIT, Forden began researching how to design a plant in a way that would prevent Iran from taking control of it. Later, Walsh and Pickering began their talks with Iranian officials. “I think that there are parts of the Iranian establishment, and more parts than not, that are open” to it, Walsh said.

But Forden and Walsh initially got a cold reaction from U.S. officials and other nuclear experts. At the time, Iran had only 164 centrifuges and seemed far from being able to enrich enough uranium for a bomb. But now, as Iran ramps up to more than 3,500 centrifuges, despite international sanctions and pressure, the idea is getting a second look, they said.

“When we first talked about it, people in Congress were openly hostile,” said Forden. Now, he said, it is easier to get meetings on Capitol Hill. “People are starting to take it much more seriously,” he said.

Cirincione initially opposed the idea, but now says it is “worth exploring.”

“The preferred option is no centrifuges in Iran, but that horse has left the barn,” he said. “Their position has gotten stronger and ours has gotten weaker. The longer that deal isn’t made, the higher the price goes.”

Still, many remain deeply skeptical. Stephen Rademaker, who recently served as the State Department’s assistant secretary for nonproliferation, said the plan rewards Iran’s bad behavior and does not guarantee that Iran will not try to secretly reproduce the international equipment on its own. “We would be standing up a far more capable facility on Iranian soil than they would ever stand up on their own,” he said.

But others say the MIT plan may eventually become the best policy choice, if the current strategy fails. Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, said it is too early to give up on trying to persuade Iran to halt its enrichment program. “But in the long run, it may not be possible,” he said. “In which case, this proposal may be the best available option.”

Most TV series are propelled into the world by creative vision, ambition, all-out effort, and dreams of market domination. With “Click & Clack’s As the Wrench Turns,” the upcoming PBS cartoon featuring “Car Talk” stars Tom Magliozzi ’58 and Ray Magliozzi ’72, it took something else — a whole lot of cajoling.

Cajoling the proudly indolent Magliozzis into believing that a series about themselves would require minimal work on their part. Cajoling PBS into buying the concept of an animated show for grown-ups. And now comes the real trick: cajoling PBS viewers into sampling a show built not on some high-minded notion of quality, but on Click and Clack’s popular NPR shtick of self-mockery and perpetual sarcasm.

“As the Wrench Turns” is a tongue-in-cheek take on what Click and Clack’s off-air lives might be like, featuring those familiar radio voices in exaggerated cartoon bodies. It centers on a fictionalized version of the brothers’ car repair shop in Cambridge, where some characters glug motor oil in coffee cups and a local politician is named Marty Bezzle. (The campaign button reads “M. Bezzle.”)

PBS is treading cautiously into this new world. The show premieres July 9 as a limited experiment: five Wednesdays worth of back-to-back half-hour episodes, followed by “we’ll see.” Which, on some level, suits the “Car Talk” guys just fine.

“How much stupid stuff can we possibly — oh, in that case, the show might be able to go on forever,” Ray Magliozzi said in a recent conference call with his brother, who pointed out that all they had to do for the show was sit in a studio and read a script.

“It’s dumb work; we didn’t have to think much,” Tom Magliozzi said. “We usually don’t.”

On one hand, it should be no surprise that PBS, which has suffered from flagging ratings and waning corporate sponsorships in recent years, would turn for help to one of public radio’s most successful franchises. The talk show about cars — featuring two mechanics with MIT degrees, loud guffaws, and thick Boston accents — is NPR’s most popular entertainment program, drawing 4.5 million listeners each week on more than 600 stations. “Car Talk” spinoffs include a twice-weekly syndicated newspaper column, a franchise of books and CD compilations, and products that range from T-shirts to coffee mugs. (The Magliozzis own the show and the business behind it and declined to release revenue figures or reveal their stake in “Wrench.”)

“I like the idea of doing something unexpected and surprising that may cause viewers to stop the remote in its tracks,” said John Wilson, PBS’s senior vice president for programming. “I like the idea of doing something that’s animated. I like the idea of doing humor. I like the idea that it’s not completely terra incognita.”

On the other hand, PBS has reason to tread with caution, given how much “Wrench” departs from the network’s identity, said Laurie Ouellette, a communications professor at the University of Minnesota and author of “Viewers Like You: How Public Television Failed the People.”

“PBS has an aura of middlebrow educational sensibility. That’s been one of the reasons why it’s occupied such a small place in television culture,” Ouellette said. “As the Wrench Turns,” by contrast, “isn’t being promoted as educational or superior in any way,” she said. “I think that’s a really positive development for PBS.”

Comedy itself is hardly new to public television: PBS introduced “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” to America and has often filled its lineup with British comedies. But “As the Wrench Turns” owes much more to “Family Guy” than “Fawlty Towers.” The show’s quirky characters cook up schemes to avoid honest work at the garage; they range from Fidel, a mechanic partial to Armani suits, to a Harvard-professor-turned-repairman named Crusty. In the cartoon, Click and Clack have a radio show, too. In one of many public-radio jokes, their producer is an earnest type named Beth Totenbag.

The plots often touch on topical subjects, from globalization (they decide to outsource the radio show, and ratings soar) to the environment (they invent a car that runs on pasta). In one episode, the guys face cancellation after they actually lose money in a PBS fund drive. They decide to make up for the loss by running jointly for president so they can apply for federal matching funds.

“All we wanted to do is be funny,” said Howard Grossman, an independent producer who dreamed up the show and spearheaded its creation. Grossman, a longtime “Car Talk” fan, has produced a couple of serious dramas for PBS, including an “American Playhouse” episode from 1984. He first had the idea for a cartoon take on “Car Talk” in late 2000, found the show’s e-mail address from its website, and sent a pitch cold. In February 2001, “Car Talk” executive producer Doug Berman gave him a call.

The Magliozzis had been offered TV opportunities for years and usually had little interest, Berman said. “They didn’t want to be TV stars. They didn’t want to be recognized when they went to their Chinese restaurant.”

But the concept of an animated series had appeal, said Berman, who is now also head writer for “Wrench.” “They’re larger than life on radio, and to just put them on TV as themselves sort of makes them only life-sized. Whereas if you animate them, you can keep them larger than life.”

Eventually, Grossman visited the “Car Talk” offices in Harvard Square and started to tinker with concepts. His first proposal was to present the radio call-in show as is, but with animated characters — a sort of PBS version of Comedy Central’s “Crank Yankers” puppet show. PBS didn’t like it. Grossman went back to the drawing board. For years he toyed with ideas, wooed investors, and provided “Car Talk” with frequent updates.

“You’d be sitting in a stall in a public restroom and he’d knock on the stall next to you,” Berman said.

It took about four years, Grossman said, to sell a final concept to PBS. The Magliozzis, notoriously reluctant to do anything promotional, agreed to attend the “green light” meeting via conference call.

PBS’s Wilson said the show is a calculated risk. (PBS declined to release information on funding for “Wrench,” but said its financial stake in the shows it airs varies widely, averaging 20 percent.) Fitting the show into a lineup dominated by serious mainstays like “Masterpiece,” “Frontline,” and “American Experience” was a challenge, Wilson said. And he didn’t have a compatible half-hour show to pair it with, which is why he’s running episodes back to back.

As for the future of the series, Wilson is circumspect. “This could be one of those things where we slap our foreheads and say, ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time,” he said. “Or it could be the start of something big.”

The image of Asian-Americans as a homogeneous group of high achievers taking over the campuses of the nation’s most selective colleges came under assault in a report issued Monday.

The report, by New York University, the College Board, and a commission of mostly Asian-American educators and community leaders, largely avoids the debates over both affirmative action and the heavy representation of Asian-Americans at the most selective colleges.

But it pokes holes in stereotypes about Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders, including the perception that they cluster in science, technology, engineering, and math. And it points out that the term “Asian-American” is extraordinarily broad, embracing members of many ethnic groups.

“Certainly there’s a lot of Asians doing well, at the top of the curve, and that’s a point of pride, but there are just as many struggling at the bottom of the curve, and we wanted to draw attention to that,” said Robert T. Teranishi, the NYU education professor who wrote the report, “Facts, Not Fiction: Setting the Record Straight.”

“Our goal,” Teranishi added, “is to have people understand that the population is very diverse.”

The report, based on federal education, immigration, and census data, as well as statistics from the College Board, noted that the federally defined categories of Asian-American and Pacific Islander included dozens of groups, each with its own language and culture, as varied as the Hmong, Samoans, Bengalis, and Sri Lankans.

Their educational backgrounds, the report said, vary widely: while most of the nation’s Hmong and Cambodian adults have never finished high school, most Pakistanis and Indians have at least a bachelor’s degree.

The SAT scores of Asian-Americans, it said, like those of other Americans, tend to correlate with the income and educational level of their parents.

“The notion of lumping all people into a single category and assuming they have no needs is wrong,” said Alma R. Clayton-Pederson, vice president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, who was a member of the commission the College Board financed to produce the report.

“Our backgrounds are very different,” added Clayton-Pederson, who is black, “but it’s almost like the reverse of what happened to African-Americans.”

The report found that contrary to stereotype, most of the bachelor’s degrees that Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders received in 2003 were in business, management, social sciences, or humanities, not in the so-called STEM disciplines: science, technology, engineering, or math. And while Asians earned 32 percent of the nation’s STEM doctorates that year, within that 32 percent more than four of five degree recipients were international students from Asia, not Asian-Americans.

The report also said that more Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders were enrolled in community colleges than in either public or private four-year colleges. But the idea that Asian-American “model minority” students are edging out all others is so ubiquitous that quips like “UCLA really stands for United Caucasians Lost Among Asians” or “MIT means Made in Taiwan” have become common, the report said.

Asian-Americans make up about 5 percent of the nation’s population but 10 percent or more — considerably more in California — of the undergraduates at many of the most selective colleges, according to data reported by colleges. But the new report suggested that some such statistics combined campus populations of Asian-Americans with those of international students from Asian countries.

The report quotes the opening to W.E.B. Du Bois’ 1903 classic “The Souls of Black Folk” — “How does it feel to be a problem?” — and says that for Asian-Americans, seen as the “good minority that seeks advancement through quiet diligence in study and work and by not making waves,” the question is, “How does it feel to be a solution?”

That question, too, is problematic, the report said, because it diverts attention from systemic failings of K-12 schools, shifting responsibility for educational success to individual students. In addition, it said, lumping together all Asian groups masks the poverty and academic difficulties of some subgroups.

The report said the model-minority perception pitted Asian-Americans against African-Americans. With the drop in black and Latino enrollment at selective public universities that are not allowed to consider race in admissions, Asian-Americans have been turned into buffers, the report said, “middlemen in the cost-benefit analysis of wins and losses.”

Some have suggested that Asian-Americans are held to higher admissions standards at the most selective colleges. In 2006, Jian Li, the New Jersey-born son of Chinese immigrants, filed a complaint with the Office for Civil Rights at the Education Department, saying he had been rejected by Princeton because he is Asian. Princeton’s admission policies are under review, the department says.

The report also notes the underrepresentation of Asian-Americans in administrative jobs at colleges. Only 33 of the nation’s college presidents, fewer than 1 percent, are Asian-Americans or Pacific Islanders.

The Guantanamo Bay detention center will not close today or any day soon.

But the Supreme Court’s decision Thursday stripped away the legal premise for the remote prison camp that officials opened six years ago in the belief that American law would not reach across the Caribbean to a U.S. naval station in Cuba.

“To the extent that Guantanamo exists to hold detainees beyond the reach of U.S. courts, this blows a hole in its reason for being,” said Matthew Waxman, a former detainee affairs official at the Defense Department.

And without that, much will change.

The decision granted detainees the right to challenge their detention in civilian courts, meaning that federal judges will now have the power to check the government’s claims that the 270 men still held there are dangerous terrorists. That will force officials to answer questions about evidence that they have long deflected despite international criticism and expressions of support, from President Bush on down, for closing the camp.

Some cases, though no one can be sure how many, are likely to result in court orders freeing detainees. The government said Thursday that its prosecutions before military commissions at Guantanamo would continue, but habeas corpus suits resulting from the justices’ decision are certain to complicate the 19 war crimes cases under way, giving detainees’ lawyers a vehicle to try to stop those proceedings.

Just as important, some lawyers said, defending scores of cases will be a huge burden for the government, likely increasing pressure inside the Bush administration to send detainees back to their home countries.

Nearly 100 of the 270 detainees are Yemenis. American officials have said they have not repatriated many of them because of fears that they would be released quickly. The decision Thursday, several lawyers said, could encourage American officials to take their chances, shrinking the population by a third or more.

Detainees’ lawyers have long claimed that the government will not be able to justify the detention of many of the men. Pentagon officials, on the other hand, have maintained that classified evidence establishes that many of them are dangerous. The federal courts will now have the power to sort through those claims.

But the justices’ decision did not change some realities that have long made it easier to say that the Guantanamo detention center should be closed than to figure out how. Just last month Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who advocates closing the camp, told Congress that “we’re stuck” in Guantanamo.

One military official said Thursday that those complications remained as confounding after the ruling as they were before. The official, who was not authorized to discuss the court ruling and spoke on condition of anonymity, noted that practical difficulties had stalled plans for an alternative to Guantanamo. Among those is the question of where to put detainees whom the administration views as too dangerous to release.

Angered by what they consider sexist news coverage of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, many women and erstwhile Clinton supporters are proposing boycotts of the cable networks, putting up videos on a “Media Hall of Shame,” starting a national conversation about sexism and pushing Clinton’s rival, Sen. Barack Obama, to address the matter.

But many in the news media — with a few exceptions, including Katie Couric, the anchor of the CBS Evening News — see little need for reconsidering their coverage or changing their approach going forward. Rather, they say, as the Clinton campaign fell behind, it exploited a few glaring examples of sexist coverage to whip up a backlash and to try to create momentum for Clinton.

Phil Griffin, senior vice president of NBC News and the executive in charge of MSNBC, a particular target of criticism, said that although a few mistakes had been made, they had been corrected quickly and the network’s overall coverage was fair.

“I get it, that in this 24-hour media world, you’ve got to be on your game and there’s very little room for mistakes,” Griffin said. “But the Clinton campaign saw an opportunity to use it for their advantage. They were trying to rally a certain demographic, and women were behind it.”

His views were echoed by other media figures. “She got some tough coverage at times, but she brought that on herself, whether it was the Bosnian snipers or not conceding on the night of the final primaries,” said Rem Rieder, editor of American Journalism Review. “She had a long track record in public life as a serious person and a tough politician and she was covered that way.”

Nicholas Lemann, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, said: “I have not had a lot of regretful conversations with high-ranking media types and political reporters about how unfair their coverage of the Hillary Clinton campaign was.”

Among journalists, he added, the coverage “does not register as a mistake that must not be allowed to happen again.”

Taking aim from the inside, though, was Couric, who has herself has faced harsh criticism as the first solo female anchor of an evening news broadcast. Couric posted a video on the CBS Web site on Wednesday about the coverage of Clinton.

Japan, a country not known for its overweight people, has undertaken one of the most ambitious campaigns ever by a nation to slim down its citizenry.

Summoned by the city of Amagasaki one recent morning, Minoru Nogiri, 45, a flower shop owner, found himself lining up to have his waistline measured. With no visible paunch, he seemed to run little risk of being classified as overweight, or metabo, the preferred word in Japan these days.

But because the new state-prescribed limit for male waistlines was a strict 33.5 inches, he had anxiously measured himself at home a couple of days earlier. “I’m on the border,” he said.

Under a national law that came into effect two months ago, companies and local governments must measure the waistlines of Japanese people between the ages of 40 and 74 as part of their annual checkups. That represents more than 56 million waistlines, or about 44 percent of the entire population.

Those exceeding government limits — 33.5 inches for men and 35.4 inches for women, which are identical to thresholds established in 2005 for Japan by the International Diabetes Federation as an easy guideline for identifying health risks — and suffering from a weight-related ailment will be given dieting guidance if after three months they do not lose weight. If necessary, those people will be steered toward further re-education after six more months.

To reach its goals of shrinking the overweight population by 10 percent over the next four years and 25 percent over the next seven years, the government will impose financial penalties on companies and local governments that fail to meet specific targets. The country’s Ministry of Health argues that the campaign will keep the spread of diseases like diabetes and strokes in check.

The ministry also says that curbing widening waistlines will rein in a rapidly aging society’s ballooning health care costs, one of the most serious and politically delicate problems facing Japan today. Most Japanese are covered under public health care or through their work. Anger over a plan that would make those 75 and older pay more for health care recently brought a parliamentary censure motion against Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, the first against a prime minister in the country’s postwar history.

But critics say that the government guidelines — especially the one about male waistlines — are simply too strict and that more than half of all men will be considered overweight. The effect, they say, will be to encourage overmedication and ultimately raise health care costs.

Yoichi Ogushi, a professor at Tokai University’s School of Medicine near Tokyo and an expert on public health, said that there was “no need at all” for the Japanese to lose weight.

“I don’t think the campaign will have any positive effect. Now if you did this in the United States, there would be benefits, since there are many Americans who weigh more than 100 kilograms,” or about 220 pounds, Ogushi said. “But the Japanese are so slender that they can’t afford to lose weight.”

The standard-bearer for Zimbabwe’s opposition was twice detained by the police on Thursday, and one of his most important deputies was arrested to face treason charges.

The events underscored the daunting obstacles to campaigning against President Robert Mugabe in the two weeks before a presidential runoff.

The opposition presidential candidate, Morgan Tsvangirai, who was detained twice last week, was held up by the police twice more on Thursday in what was supposed to have been a day of rallies and campaigning, his party said.

The arrest of the deputy, Tendai Biti, was even more chilling for the party, the Movement for Democratic Change. Biti, the party’s secretary-general, was swiftly apprehended at Harare’s airport on Thursday as he returned from South Africa after a self-imposed absence of two months. He will be charged with treason, a police spokesman said.

Even before his passport could be stamped, “10 men in plain clothes whisked him away,” his party said. “His whereabouts are unknown.”

Senior officials in Mugabe’s governing party, in power for 28 years, have accused Biti, a lawyer who is often the opposition’s public face, of violating the law by announcing the outcome of the initial round of voting in March before the official results were released.

They also alleged that Biti wrote a paper shortly before the disputed March election laying out the opposition’s strategy for a transition to power and efforts to bribe poll officers “so that they exploit any available opportunity to overstate our votes,” according to a quotation from the document published in the state-owned newspaper, The Herald, in April.

The opposition has dismissed the document as a forgery. Others have also found it implausible that Biti, a successful lawyer, would have written something so blatantly self-incriminating.

Jonathan Moyo, formerly information minister and member of the governing party’s Politburo and now an independent member of parliament, said the signature on the document did not look like Biti’s.

“If he authored it, he’s a very stupid fellow,” Moyo said, adding, “We can accuse him of many things, including political naivete, but stupidity as a lawyer isn’t one of them.”

The police spokesman, Wayne Bvudzijena, said Biti was in police custody in Harare. He said Biti was charged with “falsely indicating” that Tsvangirai had won the initial election on March 29 before the official results were released. Election officials announced them after a delay of more than a month.

Biti will be charged with treason, Bvudzijena said, because of statements made in the document on the party’s transition plans. If found guilty, Biti could face death by hanging.

Later on Thursday, Tsvangirai was detained along with an entourage of 20 people at a roadblock near the central town of Kwekwe while they were campaigning, his party said. He was held at the police station in Kwekwe, released after two hours, but later detained again while driving into Gweru, the next stop on his campaign, the Movement for Democratic Change said in a statement. He was released a second time without being charged, a party spokesman told Reuters.

The House took another step Thursday in a running political fight over unemployment insurance by ignoring a veto threat from President Bush and easily approving an extension of benefits for idled workers whose aid is running out.

Less than a day after coming up just short in a vote on the same measure, the House approved granting an extra 13 weeks of unemployment benefits nationwide beyond the standard 26 weeks; the vote was 274-137, the minimum margin needed to override a veto.

Republicans said the result was misleading because a number of lawmakers were absent. They expressed confidence they could sustain a rejection of the bill by Bush if it were to reach the White House.

But in an illustration of the election-year unease among Republicans about the unemployment issue, 49 of them again broke with their party leadership and joined 225 Democrats in backing the proposal, which would also extend benefits even longer in states with unemployment above 6 percent. In those states, benefits would be extended for a total of 26 weeks.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi blamed the Bush administration for a souring economy that was shedding jobs, and she rejected any insinuation that the extra aid amounted to an incentive to remain out of work. “This isn’t about people sitting on their butts back home and saying, ‘Goodie, I am getting an unemployment check,’ ” Pelosi said. “These people want to provide for their families, and to imply anything else is an insult to these millions of people who have lost their jobs through no fault of their own.”

But Republicans said the measure was too generous, would pad benefits in states that do not have high unemployment and drop a long-standing requirement that applicants must have worked at least 20 weeks to draw benefits. Given that the White House has promised a veto, they said, Democrats appeared to be more interested in a political than a policy fight.

“It’s been about politics every day, all day,” said Rep. John A. Boehner of Ohio, the House Republican leader.

Democrats did move quickly to take advantage of Republican opposition to added benefits at time of economic anxiety. After Wednesday’s narrow defeat of the unemployment measure, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee sent news releases to the home districts of 20 potentially vulnerable Republicans, upbraiding them for voting “against desperately needed unemployment relief for struggling American families.”

The fate of the unemployment measure remains uncertain in the Senate even without the veto threat hanging over it.

Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, said Thursday that he would try to win Republican agreement to quickly bring the House measure up for a vote without spending days trying to clear procedural hurdles. Republicans said Thursday they were not certain they would agree to such an arrangement, particularly if Democrats would not allow any attempts to amend the measure.

Microsoft’s four-month-long courtship of Yahoo has finally thrown Yahoo into the arms of their biggest common rival, Google.

Google and Yahoo said Thursday that they had reached an agreement under which Google would deliver ads next to some of Yahoo’s search results and on some of its Web sites in the United States and Canada.

The nonexclusive deal is aimed at giving a lift to Yahoo’s finances, and the company said it would generate an additional $250 million to $450 million in operating cash flow in the first year.

The agreement will also strengthen Google’s dominance over the lucrative search advertising market. It was signed after Yahoo rejected a proposal by Microsoft to acquire both Yahoo’s search business and a minority stake in the company. The rejection appears to end months of on-again, off-again negotiations between the two companies.

An internal investigation by the National Republican Congressional Committee has determined that $725,000 is missing from its fundraising accounts, money that the group says was stolen as part of a six-year scheme carried out by its former treasurer.

The committee, which raises money for Republican congressional candidates, announced Thursday the results of a forensic audit, focusing on the activities of its former treasurer, Christopher J. Ward. It said Ward had fabricated financial statements to hide the missing money, which went undetected until January.

Ward oversaw the collection and distribution of over $360 million from Republican donors while collecting $120,000 a year as treasurer. He made $10,000 a year as treasurer for the President’s Dinner Committee, the party’s biggest annual fundraising event. He also served as treasurer for the campaigns of 80 other Republican candidates, many of whom have also said money was missing.

American air and artillery strikes killed 11 Pakistani paramilitary soldiers during a clash with insurgents on the Afghan border on Tuesday night, a development that raised concerns about the already strained American relationship with Pakistan.

The strikes underscored the often faulty communications involving American, Pakistani and Afghan forces along the border, and the ability of Taliban fighters and other insurgents to use safe havens in Pakistan to carry out attacks into neighboring Afghanistan.

The attack comes at a time of rising tension between the United States and the new government in Pakistan, which has granted wide latitude to militants in its border areas under a new series of peace deals, drawing criticism from the United States. NATO and American commanders say cross-border attacks in Afghanistan by insurgents have risen sharply since talks for those peace deals began in March.

Although Pakistani government officials softened their response through the day on Wednesday, the Pakistani military released an early statement calling the air strikes “unprovoked and cowardly.” Shaken by the initial Pakistani reaction, administration officials braced for at least a short-term rough patch in relations with Islamabad. “It won’t be good,” said a Pentagon official who followed developments closely throughout the day. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.

A leading Sunni political party’s headquarters in western Iraq was blown up early Thursday morning while in southern Iraq, where Shiite factions have been fighting one another, a powerful bomb was discovered on the road to an important Shiite shrine.

Both episodes pointed to probable tensions in the months ahead of provincial elections in which factions are fighting hard to ensure that they have a place at the political table.

The explosion of the headquarters of the Iraqi Islamic Party in Fallujah, west of Baghdad, happened about 6 a.m., according to witnesses, who said the American military had been near the site of the bombing until about an hour before the detonation.

The Fallujah City Council blamed the Americans for the blast, saying it had also damaged a health center next door. Iraqi Islamic Party members were more circumspect.

“We cannot accuse anyone because we do not have enough information,” said Abid al-Kareem al-Sammaraie, an Iraqi Islamic Party member who serves in Parliament.

“Our information is that the American forces were in the same place as the explosion,” Sammaraie said. “We need more information to figure out who is behind that explosion.”

Voting rights groups are criticizing the Department of Veterans Affairs for its decision to ban registration drives among the veterans living at federally run nursing homes, homeless shelters and rehabilitation centers across the country.

The groups say that such drives make it easier for veterans to register and participate in the political process, which could be particularly important this year in a presidential election in which the handling of the Iraq war and treatment of veterans will be major campaign issues.

Mary G. Wilson, president of the League of Women Voters, said: “It just seems wrong to the league that the VA is erecting barriers to voter registration for our nation’s veterans. They appear to be using technicalities to block many veterans from registering to vote.”

Although veterans are not federal employees, department officials based their decision in part on the Hatch Act, which bans federal employees from engaging in partisan political activity.

The department’s policy is “to assist patients who seek to exercise their right to register and vote,” according to a VA directive issued on May 5. “However, due to Hatch Act requirements and to avoid disruptions to facility operations, voter registration drives are not permitted.”

Matt Smith, a spokesman for the Department of Veterans Affairs, said the department “wanted to ensure that our staff remains focused on caring for our veterans instead of having to determine the political agenda of each group that might try to enter our facilities.”

The European Union on Thursday accused U.S. producers of biodiesel of benefiting from subsidies that threaten to put European producers out of business.

Biofuels are controversial because of accusations that they raise food prices and do little to fight global warming.

But they are also a big business, with sales of about 8 billion euros ($12.3 billion) annually in Europe. European Union trade officials say producers in Europe are at risk because of a tax credit that is granted to American exporters.

The commission said it would begin a formal antidumping investigation on Friday that could lead to the imposition of punitive tariffs.

The commission “will leave no stone unturned in this investigation and will act in accordance with its findings,” said Peter Power, a spokesman for Peter Mandelson, the European Union trade commissioner.

The European Union said the suspect subsidies consisted of federal excise and income tax credits along with a federal program of grants for increases in production.

The tainted-tomato outbreak has spread to six more states, federal health officials said Thursday, even as they acknowledged to lawmakers that they had yet to nail down major aspects of a food-safety plan released seven months ago.

A total of 228 people in 23 states have been reported sickened by salmonella-tainted tomatoes, said Dr. David Acheson, associate commissioner for foods at the Food and Drug Administration. The new states with cases are Florida, Georgia, Missouri, New York, Tennessee and Vermont.

Earlier on Thursday, Acheson told members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee at a hearing that the agency needed six to eight more weeks before it could provide details about the safety plan’s specific measures, their timetables and their costs.

Even then, he said, he was uncertain that he would be able to provide a budget for food safety-related measures that went beyond the next fiscal year.

Federal lawmakers, who have pushed the agency for months to specify what it will do to prevent outbreaks of food poisoning and trace the sources of those that occur, criticized the agency as failing to protect the nation’s food supply.

“How could you put forth a plan for food safety for the nation and have no idea what it would cost after the first year of implementation?” asked Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., chairman of the oversight and investigations subcommittee. “How could you put forth a proposal to protect the American people and not even know what it’s going to cost?”

The series of hot days beginning last Saturday and ending last Tuesday was very unusual for this early in the season. Intense heating of the land relative to the chilly ocean (still about 60°F at the surface) typically supports a strong sea-breeze circulation, which serves to draw relatively cool air from Boston Harbor into Cambridge. During this heat wave, however, large-scale westerly winds generally did not allow the sea-breeze circulation to penetrate beyond the immediate coast line. The result was very hot afternoons, including as estimated high of 99°F (37°C) in Cambridge last Tuesday.

By comparison, the temperature will be relatively mild over the next few days. Dry conditions will prevail for the weekend, with the possible exception of a few showers and thunderstorms late Saturday night and early in the day on Sunday.

MIT sailing master and coach Fran Charles received the prestigious Graham Hall Award for outstanding service by a college sailing professional this past week at the 2008 Inter-Collegiate Sailing Association/Gill National Championship. As the recipient of this coveted honor, Charles was inducted into the Intercollegiate Sailing Hall of Fame.

According to the ICSA Web site, the award description is as follows: “Recognizing organizers, administrators, advisors, or coaches who have served the best interests of college sailing at the club/team, conference, or national level; one or two honorees per year.”

As coach and sailing master for the Engineers’ perennially-ranked intercollegiate program since 1991, Charles has coached at the highest levels of competition. He is also an extremely skilled principal race officer and an impartial judge and umpire at the national and international levels. He imparts knowledge to everyone and has influenced many generations of sailors to play by the rules, respect the competition, and think outside the box.

During Charles’ tenure as coach, MIT sailors have twice won the Hobbs Trophy for ICSA Sportsman of the Year and have earned seven All-America honors. He has successfully run numerous Atlantic Coast, New England, National Dinghy, and Team Race title events, as well as dozens of high-quality races for all skill levels.

Serving as the fourth sailing master in the history of the Institute, Charles is responsible for coordinating the most extensive collegiate recreational sailing program in the country. MIT’s sailing pavilion teaches more than 1,400 people annually how to sail. Not only is MIT proud to be the host of more collegiate regattas than any other school in the country, under Charles’ leadership the Institute also hosts countless events for the local community.

A frequent umpire at the National Team Race Championship Hinman Trophy as well as College Nationals and the International Sailing Federation World Championships, Charles was the recipient of the U.S. Sailing Gay Lynn Award for most devoted service to the sport of team racing. In April he was designated U.S. Sailing’s “Sailor of the Week.”

On Saturday, June 7 the MIT men’s lightweight crew team finished eighth at the Intercollegiate Rowing Association National Championships.

Racing in record high temperatures in Camden, New Jersey, the team rowed against top competitors Cornell, Navy, Dartmouth, and Fordham, which took the top four places at the Championships.

In the Petite Final, the eighth-seeded Engineers finished 3.8 seconds behind winner Columbia over 2,000 meters. MIT had faced Columbia earlier in the season at the Geiger Cup and finished 3.3 seconds behind.

“We are developing the skills and horsepower to row with the best,” Head Coach Ted Benford said. “We have really come a long way and we learned a lot again today. I think next year’s varsity got a good look at where we need to be to succeed on the national stage.”

MIT last competed in the IRA National Championships in 2002, when the team finished 10th.

Heat 1

1. Cornell, 5:49.3

2. Navy, 5:51.6

3. Dartmouth, 5:52.2

4. Fordham, 6:02.1

5. MIT, 6:02.7

Petite Final

1. Columbia, 5:54.1

2. MIT, 5:57.8

3. Fordham, 6:01.8

—Rosa Cao

Praise The Basketball Gods, for you have smiled on us this June, most likely because Red Auerbach has joined your ranks. You have treated us to an incredible Lakers vs. Celtics matchup that has nearly lived up to the hype. (I say nearly because it’s not clear that even a Game Seven triple-overtime buzzer-beater fadeaway jumper could justify this amount of coverage.)

This series has evoked fuzzy memories of Magic and Larry Legend, Rambis and McHale, Worthy and Parish. Showtime vs. The Big Three. Memories we thought were long gone.

Twenty years later, we have a rekindled rivalry with a new cast of characters: the Celtics’ “Big Three” vs. “Kobe … and those other guys.”

These two teams have been analyzed and dissected in every possible way. Stories have run on every tidbit that might turn the tide from one side to another. No stone has been left unturned, except one. Drum roll, please — I shall now upturn it.

Who wins the battle of the nicknames?

This might seem trivial, but it’s not. Having credible nicknames is key to being taken seriously as a championship contender. Just ask the 2006 Mavericks. Did we really expect a team led by the “Big German” and coached by the “Little General” to win a championship against “The Flash” and “The Big Diesel?” That’s right, I didn’t think so.

Let’s see how the starting five of this year’s Lakers and Celtics stack up.

I assume D-fish stands for dogfish, which isn’t very pleasant, but neither was that time D-fish nuked the Spurs back in 2004. As for Rondo, the naming isn’t quite complete. In most cases, an utterance of Rondo is usually followed by, “Oh crap, please don’t do what I think you’re about to do.” This is occasionally followed by, “YESSSSSSS,” but more consistently followed by an audible groan.

Considering that Doc Rivers forgets Rondo’s name during the long stretches when he inexplicably leaves Sam Cassell in the game, the edge has to go to D-fish.

Advantage: Lakers.

Thanks to Jeff Van Gundy’s numerous and horrific mispronunciations, Vujacic has become a nickname in itself. Bonus points are awarded for the View-ja-sic pronunciation.

For those of you not paying attention in the ’90s, Ray Allen’s nickname derives from his appearance in the Spike Lee project He Got Game. Unfortunately for Allen, “Jesus” lost track of his game somewhere around the start of the playoffs and is only now coming back from wandering the desert. Still, this is Vooooo-ya-chik we’re talking about.

Advantage: Celtics

In a strange twist of fate, Pierce’s “nom de guerre” was given by none other than the Big Diesel back in 2001. Who knew this innocuous gesture of admiration would come back to bite the Lakers and give Kobe more reason to revile Shaq?

As for Kobe, the nickname is somewhat auxiliary, as most of the greatest players of our time are simply known by a single name. Jordan, Bird, Magic, Kareem, etc. … For Kobe, it’s simply Kobe, as in, “Uh-oh, Kobe has the ball.”

The Truth, of course, is that Paul Pierce is tougher than all of the Lakers combined.

Advantage: Celtics

In the PF match up, nicknames are hard to come by. Odom doesn’t have a go-to nickname. In the past, he has been referred to as “Lo,” “The Goods,” or just “Lamar.” After that incident back in 2001, we can only hope that Odom has stayed away from “The Goods.” For now we’ll just assume that Phil Jackson calls him “The Guy Who I Wish Was Scotty Pippen.”

On the flip side, if there were ever a player too intense for something so superficial as a “nickname,” it’d be Kevin Garnett. This is why he goes by KG. It’s more economical, concise, and easy to scream at an opponent’s face after a nasty dunk. Quick digression: at a Celtics game earlier this season, after Rondo made a particularly nifty layup and fell to the ground, Kevin Garnett refused to help him up, and instead kept screaming at him and giving him high fives. That’s KG for you.

To return, Kevin Garnett does not need a nickname, just like he doesn’t need to shoot anything but turnaround fadeaways in the fourth quarter. Sigh. KG, you are six-foot-twenty and being guarded by Ronny Turiaf. Please attack the basket.

Alas, without any compelling nicknames at this position, we’ll have to call it a draw.

Advantage: None.

The centers in this series are quite enigmatic, and their nicknames say about as much. During any given game, Perkins has the ability to “Perk” up and drop twenty and ten. Unfortunately, I’ve also seen him confuse his hands for tennis racquets.

Pau’s nickname comes from the fact that when he’s on fire, everyone gets a “Free Meal.” I’ve never seen him called this, but then again, I’ve also never seen him box out. So I guess it balances out.

Win goes to the “Perk,” if only as a consolation prize for the lackluster applause he received coming back from injury in Game One. Sorry, “Perk,” but unlike Pierce, the Celtics won’t live or die depending on your performance. And by sorry, I mean, thank goodness.

Advantage: Celtics.

Doctor Glenn “Doc” Rivers received his PhD in psychology from Marquette University and is now conducting postdoctoral research on the ability of coaching decisions to cause emotional torment and long -lasting psychological pain. Notable experiments have included repeatedly benching and unbenching Rajon Rondo, playing Sam Cassell, and forgetting what a “rotation” is.

Phil “Zen Master” Jackson took an alternate approach in his study of psychology. And by alternate, I mean a Largely Surreal Daily Regimen of Study. His unorthodox approaches have included thinking NBA players want to learn about Buddhism and comparing former Sacramento Kings Coach Rick Adelman to Hitler. Nonetheless, he has nine rings, so who’re we to question his genius?

Advantage: Lakers

For a final tally, the Celtics win 3-2. An impressive win, considering the Celtics didn’t even have to play the “Big Baby” card.

Next week: Scalabrine vs. Mihm. Who takes the twelfth-man throw down?

Until then, “Beat LA! Beat LA!”

“Wow. It’s pretty chilly out here today.”

That was how I tried to cover up the fact that I was visibly trembling at the prospect of getting into a tiny Cessna 172 for the first time to go on a trip with the MIT Flying Club. Logically, I knew I would be pretty safe. I know that the odds of an accident in a small plane are no worse than those when riding a motorcycle. But that didn’t keep me from blanching when my pilot, Andreas Mershin, a postdoctoral fellow in the Biological Engineering Department, laughed as he showed me how flimsy the hatch on the plane was and explained that the rest of the plane was just as light. He thought it was a marvel of engineering. All I could think was that I was going to have a panic attack as soon as I sat down in the airplane.

Instead, once I got in the plane, I began channeling Buddha and calmed myself down. It would’ve been hard to find a more Zen passenger than myself. Unfortunately, on that first trip, the weather prevented us from flying to Martha’s Vineyard so we just flew around the area. Fortunately for me, that meant I got to try my hand at flying. As I was in charge, I maintained an incredibly tight grip and my knuckles were bloodless the entire time. But I was exhilarated during the entire flight.

The next time I went on a trip with the MIT Flying Club, Tech staff photographer Ricardo Ramirez accompanied Andreas and I to Provincetown, Mass., for lunch. We were meeting up with other members of the club who were flying from other airports in the Boston metropolitan area.

We arrived on a chilly May day at Provincetown and hired a local woman to drive us to the town in her van. She charged exorbitant prices but made up for it with her sense of humor. Two men who were standing on the side of the road flagged us down. They didn’t speak English. She told them that she would come back for them but that they had better not catch a ride with anyone else. Because of the gas, she told us. Then she asked us if we were anybody. This odd question was followed with an explanation of how she once drove Aerosmith (meaning Steven Tyler, I believe) and Liv Tyler and she had no idea who it was, but she knew they were somebody because they kept snickering. So now she always asks. Andreas regretted not telling her that we were somebody.

Provincetown is a small town, but there were lots of shops and restaurants to peruse. Our little self-guided tour was accompanied by the deep tenor voice of a transvestite singing in the center of town. The whole town was painted with light, summery colors. Café Heaven where we ate had bright modern pastel paintings of women lounging about in the nude. After lunch, we went into a shop that appeared small from the outside but was very deep and was filled with summer clothes, nautical bric-a-brac, and some things that you would only expect to find in a military surplus store.

There was also a fantastic bin of old hats that we could not stop digging through. We took turns sporting old British constables hats, safari hats, army helmets, and countless others. I also found a set of pajamas that had been squeezed into a tiny plastic wrapper in the shape of the pajamas themselves, which you are apparently supposed to “grow” in warm water. I must admit I was tempted to buy it.

I had a lot of fun listening to the MIT Flying Club at lunch. They couldn’t stop talking about flying. They were all so excited about it, sharing stories about flights and trips that they had taken, and crazy stories about people they had heard about. Stories heard third or fourth hand spread even further. Eventually we all trickled back to the airport to take off for home. The same van driver as before charged us even more to be driven back to the airport. We had to wait for one of the passengers because Provincetown is known for its Portuguese population and renowned Portuguese cuisine, and he had to have pudding from one of the stands. He said it was all right, but not great.

As we flew back to the airport, I took over for Andreas for a little while. Even though this was my second time flying, I was no less tense. And I couldn’t stop turning the plane left. Every two minutes Andreas would say “Emily, go right.” I guess I just didn’t want to go back home yet.

In a past column, I may have mentioned that I used an iron while building a desk and bookshelf. Although I’ve closed the book on the iron, there is more to say about the desk.

At first glance, building a desk seems like a straightforward operation. After all, IKEA has already fooled half the college kids in America to assemble their own stuff. But when you really start thinking about it, the natural response when building your own furniture is “Please don’t fall apart,” and perhaps even “I hope I didn’t bite off more than I can chew.”

Now, just like any math, engineering, or physics problem, the first hurdle to jump when building a desk is how many, how much, or how big? Qualitatively, these answers are easy: one, cheap, and colossal. Quantitatively, it is a different story.

I decided to put my small civil engineering background to work and calculated exactly how big I could feasibly make my desk. After a few turns of the crank I had everything I needed: required members, loadings, and deflections. But, the numbers looked fishy. I built the desk and bookshelf, half-copying the dimensions from the IKEA catalogue, and sure enough my numbers were wrong. In fact the loadings weren’t even in the same ballpark.

Apparently I failed the third principle of civil engineering: common sense. I repeated the calculations and sure enough a units conversion screwed me over. Now instead of getting insane answers that suggest my desk is stiffer than an old man on Viagra, I actually had reasonable results. The real difficulty however didn’t lie in the stiffness of the desk, but rather in the bookshelf. There was clearly a frequency response problem. I’m not saying a bad response, like a pole in the right half plane, but bad enough that my siblings were ribbing me over my calculations. Apparently the bookshelf from someone’s high school shop class, which is currently holding the extra toilet paper in our washroom, has its poles in all the right places. My mother came to the rescue, adding her engineering experience as an English major: “Don’t worry, the dynamics will change with a load full of books,” she said.

So here we are in the 21st Century and after my construction experience, I started to realize how much of civil engineering involves convincing the public that everything is all right. Let me elaborate.

Civil engineering was one of my first freshman classes. In fact, during the first 10 minutes of the first lecture we were introduced to the three principles of civil engineering. As mentioned earlier, the third was “common sense” or more precisely: “You must know the answer before you get the answer.”

“You can’t push on a rope” was the second principle and “F = ma” was the first. Yet shortly after introductions we promptly set a = 0. Now every field has its own equations and civ is just F = 0. Seriously! This isn’t even a differential equation anymore. Nevertheless, my brother, a typical civ(il servant), seems perfectly happy, perhaps even proud, with this fortunate state of affairs.

I dare say F = 0 is not for everyone. The following year some adventurous individuals thought it would be fun to set “a” not equal to zero. Their travels directed them up a few rungs on the ivory tower to mechanical engineering (e.g. right under the general assumption that course 6 < 8 < 18, etc. …). But for practicing civs, an accelerating building usually leaves everyone wondering what the “F” happened.

Truth be told, as any civ knows, the problem isn’t just about setting a = 0 or solving F = 0 but convincing the public that a = 0. For example, the general public typically views a building as just that — a static object planted on mother earth. Ask a civ and they’ll tell you a building is really an erect elastic stick. To hammer this point home, even the top of the empire state building, a stiff elastic stick, can sway up to 1.5 inches in a windstorm. Perhaps more dramatically, the golden gate bridge piers bend 1.5 feet from temperature and loading variations. The reason this isn’t too alarming is because we can’t see or feel them. Civs design deflections and accelerations below human observation and sensation. Sure enough, the 22-inch deflections on the golden gate bridge do not saturate the human observation threshold of 1/300th of the 700-foot elevation.

One very elastic structure, which violates the 1/300th rule, is an airplane wing. Next time you’re on an airplane, take note of the large oscillations or deflections and smile that some aerospace engineer has subconsciously convinced you it’s safe. But if you want a tip from your local materials engineer, just make sure you’re not looking through a square window.

Shopaholic that I am, I own five different swimsuits — except, I can’t swim. Well, I can doggy paddle, but flailing pathetically around a pool just isn’t very attractive. I would wear flotation devices, except that’s even less attractive. (But, it’s a fashion statement! Suuure.)

Instead of confronting my fears, I ignored them by hitting snooze on my alarm clock the day of the swim test. I’m a lazy person, so I never thought this act might haunt me. (I really didn’t think MIT would deny me a degree for not knowing how to swim. For not passing physics, yes, but swimming?)

So, when my friends somehow all found incredibly attractive men by the pool — I started thinking of my past flings not met at the pool.

Guy 1: Had a tattoo from a drunken bet he lost that his clothing hid successfully. After his shirt came off, I told him to put it back on. It was Superman, except he wasn’t so super. He then proceeded to tell me of the breakup which lead to it. I can deal with emotional baggage, but when he referred to her as his “kryptonite,” I realized I’d never replace her.

Guy 2: Had a farmer’s tan that his clothing hid successfully. There are varying degrees of a farmer’s tan, and his was like in the third degree. It completely ruined my notion of him being a walking model of perfection. He then remarked he went to tanning beds in a wetsuit. Tanning beds? Wetsuit? Enough said there.

From these experiences, I’ve come to the conclusion that clothes are the most misleading invention.

I’ve also come to the conclusion that the pool tends to be the most honest place to meet anyone. Everywhere else there’s too much clothing, too much make up, and too much booze. You don’t even need a fake ID to go to the pool. It’s the one place where it’s all out there — the gut and the farmer’s tan. Better yet, if the guy is wearing a Speedo, a preview of his package. In this day and age, it’s rare to have it all out there.

It works both ways though — guys get a preview of girls. Nothing can hide cellulite on the legs, and makeup will wash off after swimming. Trust me when I say there’s nothing more embarrassing then hearing a guy remark after stripping, “Is that the freshman fifteen?” (Thanks, jerk — I didn’t say anything about your gut.) At least if the two of you met at the pool, he can’t say he was surprised, which wasn’t the case with one fling who told his whole fraternity.

In the end, the Institute probably has our best interests in mind by forcing us to learn how to swim. (*coughs* And, forcing me to take physics as a humanities major? I will figure out a point to this.) So, maybe I’ll buy a new swimsuit (shopaholic logic), and then I’ll learn how to swim this time. I might even pick up an honest summer fling along the way, and he won’t have a drunken tattoo.

For anyone who particularly cares (i.e. anyone not from America), UEFA’s Euro 2008 soccer tournament started up this week. This marks the 48th anniversary of European nations utilizing soccer as a proxy for war. Since European nations began having organized soccer tournaments in 1960, nary a war has been fought in Western Europe — a tremendous accomplishment for nations that used to invade each other for a laugh. Yes, the Union of European Football Associations, and not the UN, is to be praised for our long peace in Western Europe.

Now the sharp students in class may wish to point out that spirited international soccer competition has not in fact averted wars as the first World Cup was held in 1930. However, I would like to posit that:

1) Italy won two of the first three World Cups prior to WWII and thus only incensed Mr. Fuhrer Cat to invade Poland in order to one-up Mussolini.

2) The World Cup is not a proxy for the refined and gentlemanly pursuit of European warfare, but rather a frightening and disheartening display of former colonies exacting vicious revenge. For instance, the former colonies of Spain and Portugal have won half of the World Cups, while those two colonial powers are still 0 for 18. You would think that being dominated in soccer is not punishment enough for 400 years of colonial brutality, but then clearly, you’ve never been to Europe. Go backpacking. “Find yourself.” Just not in Prague. (Next time I’ll regale you about that time with Michael, the wolf mask, and the gypsies.)

3) Americans, having done so poorly in international competition have yet to have their war lust quelled, as evidenced by the numerous wars we get ourselves into. The fact that third world countries can routinely beat us in soccer only fuels our desire to invade them.

Having heard these arguments, the insufferable know-it-all will point out that the national teams fighting it out in Euro 2008 are full of international players poached from former colonies. How can this be a proxy for war?

Well Mr. Know-it-all, European nations have been using mercenaries in war since the beginning of time. The French employed thousands of Genoese mercenaries in the Hundred Years’ War. At least they did, up until the point when they massacred them during the Battle of Crécy. Those French really try their hardest to lose wars, don’t they?

If you still don’t believe that soccer is a proxy for war, here are a few more points to convince you otherwise. First, go see the movie Victory. The film, which pits Allied POWs up against the Germans in a soccer match, is pretty much a metaphor for the great Allied struggle. So much so that during halftime the players would rather finish the game than escape from the POW camp. Now that’s dedication. Yes, nothing’s more satisfying than watching Michael Caine’s ragtag team of Allied POWs beat the snot out of the Germans against all odds.

Second, and this should convince most of you, soccer was invented by the medieval English. The sport is absolutely antithetical to peace, as it was created when the medieval English managed to combine their favorite pursuits: wagering, pugilism, warfare, and pints of bitter with an inflated pig bladder. Soccer is so much like war that (and this is actually true) Edward III banned it in 1349 so that the English could concentrate on the Hundred Years’ War. During the two hundred or so years that soccer was banned in medieval England, the English picked fights with the Welsh, Irish, Scots, Cornish, French, Castilians, and themselves. It was literally as if out of boredom, those medieval hooligans decided to have a go at anyone within reach of a pint glass.

Luckily, soccer was legalized, and Europe has come a long way forward considering how 30 English and French knights once met on a pitch and fought to the death for the sake of national pride. (Yes, that actually happened too.) Now we just fight to kick a ball into a pen.

One must thank Ebenezer Cobb Morley for all this. He codified modern soccer in 1863 and founded the Football Association. Today, there are more players in the English Football League System than there are soldiers in the British Army. Wars are confined to the pitch and the soldiers are a bunch of overpaid speedy blokes with fancy footwork. Aside from England’s horrifying long ball tactics, brutality is kept to a minimum.

But don’t let that fool you. Soccer is just like war. In the heat of the match, with national pride on the line and the crowds blaring and waving flags, it’s easy to forget that this is only a game. Zidane forgot. And then he head-butted the crap out of Materazzi. If this was 400 years ago and the two of them met like that on a battlefield, and Materazzi talked trash about Zidane’s mom, Zidane would do the same. And then he’d stab him or something.

Yep. Soccer is just like war. Only, by the grace of modern progress, we’ve replaced Edward the Black Prince with a metrosexual Beckham and Peter Crouch doing the robot.