MIT
Class of 1963, Class Notes for July/August 2001 issue of Technology Review:
One of the pleasures
of being class secretary is hearing from classmates that I haven't heard about
or from in years and years. These days
most of that communication comes via E-mail, but I still get the occasional
phone call. There's something to that
voice-to-voice contact that brings up memories of our MIT days more effectively
than E-mail does. But don't stop
sending E-mails.
Notes from the IOXI trio are still reverberating. A few months ago I wrote about this MIT singing group, and I heard from one of the members, Paul Cohen. One day in late March I had a phone call from a second member, Patrick O'Neil. Pat and Paul hadn't been in touch in over 35 years, but they reconnected after seeing their names mentioned, and they're trying to find the third member, Jim Reisa, who left MIT before graduating. If anyone knows Jim's whereabouts contact Paul (pcohen2@optonline.net) or Pat (PONeil@cs.umb.edu) or send the info to me and I'll relay it. Pat filled me in on what he's been up to lately and over the years. In 1965 Pat married a classmate, Elizabeth (Betty) Hall, and both are professors in the computer science department at UMass, Boston. This spring Pat and Betty were on sabbatical, and they spent the time in the Pacific Northwest, developing an SQL server for Microsoft. (Sounds like a busman's holiday to me!) One of Pat's areas of expertise is databases, and he has written articles and a textbook on that subject. MIT connections run deep in the family. Their daughter, Kathy O'Neil, holds a Moore Instructorship in the MIT math department, and her husband, Jan de Jong, is a math professor who works in algebraic number theory. Kathy and Jan are the parents of a son, Isa O'Neil, so Pat and Betty are enjoying the pleasures of grandparenthood, and have their family close by. The O'Neils recently moved to a new home a few blocks from Harvard Square, and are enjoying the Cambridge environment again. Though Paul Cohen hasn't done much singing in recent years, Pat has continued to do some folk singing, and he belongs to a humor group. Maybe the IOXI trio is planning a reunion and a nostalgia tour. Buy your tickets early.
Another classmate has made the move from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific. I had an E-mail from Jim Evans telling me that after over 40 years in the Boston area (starting with our freshman orientation week), he moved to Berkeley, CA in April 2000. Jim started a west coast aviation weather field office for MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory on the campus at UC Berkeley. Most of Jim's current projects focus on safely reducing aviation delays due to adverse weather such as thunderstorms. A major new project will focus on improving traffic handling in the busy en route corridor from Chicago to New York. This work was written up in Scientific American's on line magazine (Feb. 26, 2001 – check out the "Flying on Time" link on http://www.sciam.com/). The system Jim developed is called the Integrated Terminal Weather System. To create its forecasts ITWS uses a variety of sophisticated algorithms and data from radar sources, sensor-equipped planes, lightning sensors and surface wind and temperatures monitors. Putting the information together, it pinpoints the location of storms to within one kilometer and calculates where they will be in the next 10 to 20, 30 and 60 minutes. It predicts tornadoes and microbursts – sudden downdrafts of air that are dangerous to planes during takeoff and landing. And unlike the National Weather Service’s reports, which come out every six minutes, ITWS updates every minute. In the article Jim says, "There’s a lot out there, and the key thing we do is grab it all, combine it and translate it into a form that can be used easily. We don’t want to show raw data … We want to take the information, update it continually and display it seamlessly." Jim's wife, Ilse, left the Sloan School to become the head of MBA admissions and career services at UCB’s Haas School of Business. The Evan's live in the hills 10 minutes from the campus. Jim says the housing in Berkeley is much more expensive than in Boston, and they live on the Hayward seismic fault to boot! On the other hand, the views, weather and campus/city ambiance are wonderful. He enjoys being on a campus again and UCB has lots of things to do. The Pac10 athletic facilities are amazing in relationship to what we had at MIT. Moving west has made it easier for Jim and Ilse to interact with their children. Derek, 29, is a movie producer in Los Angeles, and Kirsten, 31, is a legislative analyst for the Seattle City Council (after having been a Peace Corp volunteer in Panama).
In March Barbara and
I visited our daughter Laura and her family in North Carolina. While we were there we stopped in at
Violette and Ira Blumenthal's home in Durham. Ira's daughter, Robin, was visiting with her new daughter, Emma,
and Ira's mother was there that day as well.
We got to see four generations of Ira's family. Ira looked very relaxed cradling Emma in his
arms. When he's not working at being a
grandpa, Ira is working with a software startup company in Raleigh called
SoftWare Research Associates. SWRA is
bringing out a product called "Business Agility Software" that uses
engineering modeling techniques to understand how a particular business
condition was reached. It gives
managers a quantitative way of analyzing their business and making decisions
based on objective, rather than seat of the pants, criteria.
About the time
you're reading this Barbara and I will be in New Hampshire. In the dawn hours I'll be gliding around
Lake Sunapee in my canoe, sharing the still surface of the lake only with the
herons and a few other early risers.
Hope you're enjoying your summer, and don't forget to keep those E-mails
and phone calls coming in. Your
assignment this month is to E-mail me with a short essay on the subject
"How I spent my summer vacation."
You can reach me at: Mike Bertin, 22 Gillman St, Irvine, CA 92612. E-mail: MCB1@aol.com. If you want to schmooze, call me at (949) 786-9450.