A press release on the names of the new dormitories includes two apparent firsts by Dartmouth: the first building, or part of a building, named for Samson Occom (Occom Commons in the McLaughlin Cluster) and the first building given someone’s first name or nickname: McLane Hall is still named for John Roy “Judge” McLane ‘07, but it is switching to Judge Hall.

This month’s Wired calls out the digital model of Hanover’s Main Street as one of twenty sights to see in the online community Second Life.

A researcher at the Homeland Security-funded Institute for Security Technology Studies started the project as part of the Institute’s Synthetic Environments for Emergency Response Simulation (run by its ER3 Center).

The researcher later joined The Electric Sheep Company, which the Institute hired to build the model.

Satchmo Prototype has posted photos of the model, and Electric Sheep has 64 more photos.

[Update 09.24.2006: Post rewritten, Electric Sheep information added.]

[Update 11.30.2006: The Dartmouth has an article on Hanover in Second Life.]

This site now permits comments regarding individual posts. They will be moderated and may take a day or more to appear.

[Update 10.06.2006: Comments are disabled because they do not work consistently.]

Writer Matthew Stewart responds to Tuck Dean Paul Danos’ letter in this month’s Atlantic by stating that “the Tuck School at Dartmouth was indeed founded first, as Paul Danos says; but Harvard was first to offer a master’s degree in business administration.”

This is a petty point, but it’s not clear how Stewart could be correct if he’s referring to the degree in lower-case letters: the Amos Tuck School of Administration and Finance was founded in 1900 and granted its first business master’s degree to Walter Blair and his two classmates in 1901. Harvard did not admit its first students until the fall of 1908.

No graduate degree in the administration of modern businesses existed in 1900. The Tuck School started by calling its degree the “Master of Science (Tuck School)” but renamed it during 1902 the “Master of Commercial Science,” a reference to the Bachelor of Commerce degree that many schools had been awarding for years. (Wayne Broehl, Tuck & Tucker (1999), 43-44.)

Harvard’s business school (which also might have begun by calling its degree the M.C.S.) did not seem to rename whatever graduate degree it was granting as a “Master of Business Administration” until 1921, and that’s the name that caught on. (Harvard probably did more than simply rename its existing degree — it probably invented a wholly-new curriculum that revolutionized business education; but Harvard did not open “the first graduate school in the country to offer a master’s degree in business” as Stewart stated in the original article last month.) In 1953, the Tuck School changed the name of the degree it had been awarding since 1901 to the conventional M.B.A.

[09.12.2006 update: reworded post, fixed typo.]

Photos from the Office of Planning, Design and Construction show the Varsity House in relation to the gym and, on August 31, with its steel frame completed.

Back in May of 2005, the school mentioned that the Cambridge firm of Tsoi/Kobus & Associates, Inc. was handling the conceptual design for the Life Sciences Building north of Gilman. The school presumably then sent that design to other firms for proposals to build the building itself.