Word: teche
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This discomfort has been evident in the recent debates about TECH, Harvard's proposed center for technological exploration. Proponents have likened TECH to the IOP; somewhere students can go to play around with bleeding edge technology, gain programming skills that they can't get in class, get support for Web ventures and learn from the best minds in the wired world. Opponents worry that TECH will become an assembly-line producer of little capitalists, encouraging the moneymaking impulse exactly when we students should be waxing Platonic...
...have supported TECH from the beginning, but I've been surprised by the diversity of its reception. The need, I thought, was clear. Suppose I want to pursue a distance education project, to set up a hyper-linked classical lexicon, or script an international math-help bulletin board to study the way children learn. An institute, rather than a computer science affiliation, would provide the perfect opportunity...
...TECH, others say, will take up all of a student's time; it will encourage full-time participation in what should only be a part-time activity. Computer science and Internet projects, this argument goes, are 24/7 and not compatible with class. This line of reasoning stops at the office of The Crimson president, the Let's Go publishing director, certain sports teams' captains, the HSA and Advocate presidents, the head of PBHA and dozens of other campus heroes. We are not averse to full-time projects as evidenced by the wealth of them on campus. So what...
There are several responses to this. One is to shun the new at all costs: As long as there are people trying to make a buck off the Net, some might argue, it's not a valid subject for study. As soon as one student comes to TECH solely to make money, the hands of all the streaming-media researchers will be dirty...
...thrill: a helicopter smashes into the face of the Statue of Liberty. That brings on an architectural restorer; her fiance, an N.Y.P.D. detective; and her former lover, a research neurologist who can repair brain damage and bad attitudes with a computer and molecular smart bombs. An ingenious bio-tech love triangle ensues, as does the hunt for a sadistic killer with an acetylene torch. Then it's back to the top of Lady Liberty for the climax, a breakneck update of the finale to Hitchcock's 1942 tingler, Saboteur...