Yes, MIT, that bastion of nerdier education, has been paying student bloggers to yap about their campus experience. Though the posts range in topics — Star Wars is boring! Bacon's a great garnish! — the school's convinced individual outbursts help give prospective students a realistic view of the institution's world. Other colleges, like that blasted Vassar, are also bringing bloggers into their admissions fold, but still there are some who disbelieve.

Art Rodriguez, some admissions official at Pomona, remarks: "...There's always the concern about the political ramifications, that bloggers may open up an issue or topic that starts something negative."

Yes, well, there's that; and then there's the fact that the internet is EVERYWHERE! Even if schools don't incorporate bloggers, potential freshman will still see all the dirty truths posted by non-endorsed internet rats.

So, if you ask us — and, tacitly, you have — all schools should be sending out armies of pre-approved bloggers to counter all the negatrons on the horizon. Until you run out of money, which will happen.

Image via id-iom's flickr.

In a move that should earn them national kudos, MIT-goer Oliver Yeh and his equally brainy friend, Justin Lee, grabbed these images of earth by putting a cell phone into a Styrofoam box, stuffing the box with disposable hand warmers and attaching it all to a helium balloon. The camera snapped a picture every 5 seconds for a journey 17 miles above the planet and back after the balloon popped. A GPS in the phone helped track it all down. And it only cost $150!

Meanwhile, NASA's over paid nerds are looking to build a base on the moon, which will serve as a stop-off station for missions to Mars, a trip that will itself make astronauts radioactive. To achieve all of their unnecessary and harebrained schemes, NASA would need another $3 billion a year. MIT costs about $48,000 a year — give or take a few grand.

Wouldn't the country be better off just sending kids to MIT and receiving these pictures in return, rather than sending red-blooded Americans into space to become the Fantastic Four? Who needs that dang universe, anyway?

Problem: You wake up in bed with someone, and you have no recollection of the night before — including his/her name.
Solution: Go with Michael or Elizabeth! According to admissions statistics, those have been the most popular names for the last 2 years

Problem: She goes dry.
Solution: Do not just keep thrusting, didn’t you learn about friction in physics class?

Problem: You left your iTunes on shuffle and Zelda music came on.
Solution: Do not stop kissing, and ask the girl, “how far do you want to go?” “Err, we can go to base 3.14,” is probably how you should respond.

Problem: You haven’t had sex in months or you’ve never had sex.
Solution: Join the club. I haven’t had sex in months.

See, Paul? Bedroom success for MIT students hasn't changed since your own college days!

(Nerd sex illustrated by Randall Munroe/xkcd.com)

Graduated from MIT in 1965. A small number of us communicated via email within the same computing environment. Worked at DEC during MIT and then afterwards. We had a PDP-6 that allowed us to intercommunicate. Then, we hooked our machine up to MIT's PDP-6, and got it communicating with ours via email. That broke when each wanted the other to do all the talking.

Years later my future wife Toni and I worked for a NYC-based firm. Toni worked at the Comshare data center somewhere in godawful New Jersey and I worked in Ann Arbor. But they had us on the nationwide time-sharing service bureaus at the time. We connected the two machines remotely, so that we could communicate inexpensively via email rather than expensive phone calls.

(Photo by hiddenloop)

Gehry's Disney Center in downtown Los Angeles allegedly gives passers-by sunburn, Case Western has experienced the same problems of falling ice, and the University of California had to demolish a leaky Gehry building in 1986. It doesn't take a slide ruler to add this one up. (Photo from Wikimedia Commons)

At the flip side of MIT's absurdly outfitted LandRover is team Lux's Volkswagen Passat, a joint venture between German supplier of automotive sensors Ibeo and parent company Sick. Hands-down winner of the nonexistent prize for stealthiest install, their diesel grocery-getter has a mere three sensors; one on each corner up front, mounted behind black Plexiglas in the bumper and a prototype model mounted in the center of the read bumper. Data from these units is collected and processed by four computers in the trunk. Even the actuators for steering and velocity are stealthily mounted. Apart from the big honkin' kill switches on the read windows, one might miss the fact that it's a robot car at all.

It's hard to pick favorites in an event like this, and looking at this brief comparison shows why. Despite their differences, both vehicles did well in Saturday's qualifying runs. [DARPA Grand Challenge]

In fact, if you're toting electronic gadgets of any sort, even commonplace ones like Sony's PlayStation Portable, you up the odds that you'll be targeted by the TSA. And, let's not forget, Boston was the city shut down by a bunch of blinking LEDs. Honestly, you sometimes need to be aware of your surroundings. (Photos by Associated Press/Lisa Poole and Cory Doctorow)

So, no sign of MySpace on campus this week. But the entire CS department job email list just got a recruiting email from Facebook. It's got a bunch of the same stats you already knew, but maybe some new ones too.

They mention, among other things, that that they plan to start doing "ad targeting, personalization, recommendation systems, and general data analysis." Hmm...

After the jump, Facebook's pitch to MIT students.

Facebook is the 7th most trafficked site in the US. They are a privately held company located in downtown Palo Alto near Stanford.

The environment is very fast-paced. New code is released every night. This is a huge difference from most companies where code is developed and tested for months or years before release.

There are lots of applications of:
Distributed systems - Most software needs to scale across hundreds of servers. Systems need to detect failures and work around them.

Machine learning - Facebook has over 7 million members, 60% of whom visit the site every day and over 90% of whom visit every month. The dataset is highly structured, and has applications for ad targeting, personalization, recommendation systems, and general data analysis.

Algorithms and optimization - With huge datasets (e.g. 7+ million active members with an average of 140 friends each), and hundreds of millions of page loads per day, efficiency starts to matter.

One measure of the impact you'll have is what they call the engineering leverage ratio: the number of page views the site gets every month divided by the number of engineers who build it. Facebook currently sends 9 billion pages per month with only 30 engineers, giving a ratio of 300 million page views per engineer. Google, on the other hand, has thousands of engineers and about the same number of page views as Facebook.

Facebook photos, created by just one engineer and one interaction designer over a couple of months this fall, already gets more traffic than any other photo site (e.g. webshots, yahoo photos, flickr). Over a million photos are uploaded every day.

Salary is competitive for silicon valley, and comes with stock options that have a good chance of being worth a lot of money in the future.

I'm down here in Los Angeles, where the closest that we come to "Silicon Valley" is between the mountains of a wanna-be actress's chest, but MySpace representatives can be found this week on the campuses of MIT and Harvard trying to get some new recruits. From what I hear they have some deep pocket$$ to recruit (with Rupert's Money). I think that they are probably visiting Akamai also.

Her presentation at MIT Technology forum here in NY was jaw dropping [...] She put up a slide for news.google.com, and mumbled about how some software engineeer thought the idea of creating an automatically generated news page would be cool.

The series of summary slides stole the show. It started with a 3Mpixel photo of a Mission church somewhere in beautiful California. She then switched to new slides that zoomed in on a fresco on the side of the church (taken from the same 3Mpixel image, of course). This was pitched as a "metaphor" for how Google delivers value.

Someone in the audience asked what they plan to do with the proceeds from their secondary. "New servers" came back the answer. Goldman Sachs analysts/underwriters were probably nodding their heads.

She gave away the store with a pie chart showing how her reports divide their time (20% doing something, the rest of the time working on search and user experience). I wasn't taking notes, but what was presented in that slide seemed disappointing. In fact, her whole presentation seemed like a disaster.

For the record, I'm short GOOG.

She may not have been that awful — after all, this is coming from a stock shorter who hadn't heard of Google's much-hyped 20% time.