Today is the first day of summer, and it has been 39° Celsius. Summer is supposed to be the most productive period of the year, but I don’t guarantee any productivity over 40°.
Last week commencement took place, the cheerful black-robe ceremony, in which all graduates (Bachelor’s, Master’s and Ph.D.) are called on the stage one by one. It’s a neverending liturgy patiently endured by the families waiting hours for their child’s moment to come.
By the way, after a previous gaffe, I can now distinguish between the Texan and Cuban flag (can you?):
Caltech is quiet now. I presume most undergrads have left for the summer, or maybe they just hide deeper in their caves. Some spend their Californian summer surfing. Except that here “SURF” means Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships. Here is the class of 2008 that will work on Alice, the autonomous car veteran of the Darpa Urban Challenge.
The perspicacious reader might have understood that I bought a new camera, a Sony Alpha 300, which currently is probably better than what I can handle. Coincidently, I discovered that one of next year’s incoming grad students in CDS is a professional photographer. Before starting in the Fall, he’s traveling around the country: I wrote him to enjoy this time, because during the next summers the only animals he will take pictures of are the many squirrels in the campus.
Today I went to a Caltech Social Activism event called “At JPL: the fight against Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12”.
As one of the counter-measures for terrorism threats after 9/11, the directive dictates that every employee or contractor at any federal agency should wear some kind of special badge. This applies also to JPL, which is “operated” by Caltech: the government funds NASA, NASA gives money to Caltech, and JPL people are Caltech employees or contractors. To obtain the badge, the employees had to “voluntarily” sign a waiver for an extensive background check.
Some JPL employees protested because this applied also to the 97% working on nonsensitive projects. They refused to sign the waiver, and started an ongoing legal battle; the whole story with all the documentation is at the website http://hspd12jpl.org/.
I knew the story, but I didn’t know some of the background. The Caltech administration has not been sympathetic to these protests, and this might be understandable in the current situation in which there is political pressure for some laboratories to be privatized. Robert Nelson told the audience that it’s no secret that Lockheed-Martin wants to take over the operations of JPL.
A similar case is that of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, one of the two laboratories that develop nuclear programs, the other being the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. It has been managed by the University of California until 2003. Then political reasons led to a public bidding for the contract. Lockheed-Martin bid together with the University of Texas. The University of California bid together with Bechtel through a newly formed company called Lawrence Livermore National Security, which ultimately won. Now the laboratory has lost the academic atmosphere and is being managed more like a private company; naturally people are worried about the lack of transparency.
