Would not want you to go to jail for this.
I do not subscribe either, but was able to read the article by clicking
on the original link.
I am inclined to give Seth Lloyd the benefit of the doubt. I met him
with his wife and child at the Downtown Subscription many years ago.
They seemed to be nice people.
Joe
On 1/22/20 10:50 AM, Tom Johnson wrote:
You realize I could go to jail for this. Be a good citizen, a
supportive member of the community and buy the LOCAL newspapers.
-sss#ssssssssdsdddd
An external professor and member of the science board at Santa Fe
Institute has been placed on paid leave by the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, after a new report shed new light on the MIT faculty
member’s relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Seth Lloyd, a tenured professor of mechanical engineering who has ties
with the
<https://www.abqjournal.com/1410925/mit-students-protest-prof-with-sfi-ties.html/jn01_jd_19jan_mit2>
MIT Students Against War held a silent protest outside of Professor
Seth Lloyd’s classroom in October. (Courtesy photo)
Santa Fe Institute dating back to 1988, had received $225,000 of the
$850,000 that Epstein foundations had donated to MIT, with all but
$100,000 of the total received by the prestigious Cambridge school
after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for solicitation of prostitution in
Florida.
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Epstein, a billionaire financier who had a fascination for abstract
concepts and young women and girls, had over the years also given
$275,000 to SFI, a renowned complexity science research and education
center located on Hyde Park Road. But only $25,000 was donated to SFI
after Epstein pleaded guilty to the Florida charges.
Last month, SFI donated $25,000 to Solace Crisis Treatment Center, a
Santa Fe-based non-profit that works to empower victims of sexual
violence and other trauma.
While MIT has said it would contribute an amount equivalent to the all
of the contributions it received from Epstein to his victims or
organizations that work on behalf of victims of sexual violence, SFI
told the Journal late last year that it
<https://www.abqjournal.com/1410925/mit-students-protest-prof-with-sfi-ties.html/jn01_jd_19jan_mit>
MIT students have staged protests calling for Professor Seth Lloyd and
President Rafael Reif to resign (Courtesy photo)
doesn’t plan to give away any more than the $25,000 it received from
Epstein after his conviction.
Nor does it appear that SFI is taking any action regarding Lloyd, as
MIT did.
“As far as I know, SFI does not have plans to follow suit, though it’s
worth noting that as an external professor, Seth is not actually on
our payroll,” SFI spokeswoman Jenna Marshall wrote in an email to the
Journal.
She did not respond to follow up questions she invited the Journal to
submit.
Besides making contributions to SFI, Epstein, who investigators
determined died by suicide in a New York jail in August while awaiting
trial on sex trafficking charges involving dozens of girls, had at
least one other tie to New Mexico. He owned a ranch in southern Santa
Fe County that according to New York Times reporting last year he
planned to use as a base to impregnate women in order to “seed” the
human race with his DNA.
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*Student pressure*
MIT has been under pressure from some students and alumni to sever its
ties with Lloyd.
Joi Ito, director of MIT’s Media Lab, the institute’s research
laboratory that was the beneficiary of most of the contributions
Epstein made to the Cambridge university, was forced to resign in
September.
The new MIT report released Jan. 10, conducted by the Goodwin Proctor
LLC and commissioned by the university “to better understand” the
extent of Epstein’s interactions with the school, states that both Ito
and Lloyd deliberately concealed donations from Epstein, something
Lloyd denies. He was placed on leave that same day.
In October, Eleanor Graham, a student in one of Lloyd’s classes, set
off a string of guest columns slanted against Lloyd that appeared in
The Tech, a weekly student newspaper. In it, she wrote that allowing
Lloyd to continue to teach at MIT puts the next generation of
scientists in a difficult position.
“The opportunity to study quantum computation should not be restricted
by how easily you can put aside your moral discomfort regarding a man
who takes money from pedophiles as a supposed act of charity,” wrote
Graham, who ended up dropping the class. “By continuing to teach, by
continuing to be a part of the scientific community, Seth Lloyd is
continuing to do harm.”
Later that month, MIT Students Against War staged a silent protest
outside of Lloyd’s classroom, prompting Lloyd to conduct his lecture
over a video link with police officers guarding both the classroom
where the students were and the one in which Lloyd gave his talk.
During Parent’s Weekend last fall, the group printed hundreds of
posters with messages like “Seth Lloyd Must Go” and posted them around
campus.
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The group demanded Lloyd’s resignation and pressured MIT President
Rafael Reif to get rid of him. When he at first didn’t take action
with Lloyd, they called for Reif’s resignation and staged protests
that were anything but silent.
Alonso Espinosa-Domínguez, an MIT senior majoring in mathematics, said
in an email to the Journal that Reif told them that all he could do
was ask the provost and Lloyd’s department head to look into options.
But it was Rief who eventually placed Lloyd on leave.
“Which means Reif had more authority than he let on initially,” said
Espinosa-Domínguez, who is also one of the co-founders of MIT Students
Against War.
He says that Reif placed Lloyd on leave pending the department head’s
determination of appropriate action.
“But we do not trust that MIT will not simply decide that the
‘appropriate action’ is to reinstate him once the media attention dies
down, and so we intend to continue applying pressure,” he said.
Espinosa-Domínguez said that keeping Lloyd on staff at MIT sends the
wrong message.
“People like Seth Lloyd, Joi Ito, and all the other high-profile
scientists, business people, publicists, etc., who over the years
continued to vouch for Epstein, despite all the obvious evidence
available of his multiple sex crimes against women and underage girls
and his overall patriarchal attitude toward women, directly enabled
him,” he wrote. “This is reflective of a broader issue in our society
wherein, especially in elite, male circles, sexual predators and the
commodification of women are widely tolerated and enabled. If MIT were
serious about combatting this grave issue which plagues it, science,
and society overall, they would take the basic step of parting ways
with Lloyd.”
*Lloyd’s SFI associations*
Lloyd’s association with SFI started four years after its founding in
1984.
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One of the founders was Murray Gell-Mann, under whom Lloyd studied
applications of information to quantum-mechanical systems while a
postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology.
Gell-Mann, a professor at the University of New Mexico in the 1990s
and early 2000s who died in Santa Fe last year, was friendly with
Epstein and acknowledged Epstein’s financial contributions to SFI in
his 1994 book “The Quark and the Jaguar, Adventures in the Simple and
the Complex.” The New Times reported he was also a guest of Epstein at
dinners and scientific conferences.
According to the MIT report, Lloyd was introduced to Epstein by his
book agent at a dinner in 2004. Lloyd told investigators that he
received his first contribution from Epstein in 2005 or 2006.
Epstein was first investigated for committing sex crimes with children
in 2005 after a parent of a 14-year-old girl contacted police in Palm
Beach, Florida. A probable cause affidavit was filed by police in 2006.
But there was something unusual about that first donation of $60,000.
“In a possible violation of MIT policies and certainly in violation of
MIT norms, Professor Lloyd deposited the gift into a personal bank
account and did not report it to MIT,” the report states.
In a statement Lloyd posted last week on the online publishing
platform medium.com <http://medium.com> – the same website Lloyd
published an apology to Epstein’s victims in August – Lloyd explained
that Epstein offered him a “personal grant” for his research and told
him to set up a nonprofit as a vehicle to accept the grant. That took
a long time, he said, and Epstein ended up giving him the money as a
gift, on which he paid a gift tax. The money was used to support his
scientific research, he said.
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He also said that he wasn’t then aware of any accusations of sexual
misconduct against Epstein.
“At the time that I accepted the 2006 grant (years before his 2008
conviction), my knowledge was that Epstein was a wealthy individual
who liked to support science, and so accepting an unrestricted
personal grant from him for performing scientific research was
unproblematic,” he said.
Later, Lloyd visited Epstein’s private island near St. Thomas, where
it is now alleged that Epstein committed many of his sex crimes. A
lawsuit against Epstein’s estate filed last week by the government of
the U.S. Virgin Islands alleges Epstein raped and otherwise sexually
abused girls, some as young as 12 and as recently as 2018, after he
lured them to the island of Little St. James.
The MIT report says Lloyd attended a lunch there with other scientists
and was only there for “a few hours.”
*Visit to Epstein*
Even after Epstein’s conviction, Lloyd continued to carry on a
relationship with Epstein and accept money from him. The Goodwin
Proctor report for MIT says Lloyd made efforts to hide the source of
two $50,000 donations in 2012, which were unsolicited, and a $125,000
contribution in 2017.
Those donations came after Lloyd visited Epstein while he was serving
his 18-month sentence on the 2008 conviction. This was no jailhouse
meeting, however. It occurred in an office Epstein used while on “work
release” during what has been criticized as an exceptionally light
sentence.
Lloyd later explained that in continuing his relationship with Epstein
he felt he could help with his “rehabilitation.”
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The report indicates that Lloyd and Ito fostered a relationship with
Epstein in an effort to obtain funding for their research but they
didn’t want others to know the money was coming from Epstein.
“The fact-finding revealed that, despite Epstein’s criminal record,
and his registration as a sex offender, Professor Lloyd and former
Media Lab Director Ito attempted to cultivate Epstein as a potential
source of research and program funding and drove the efforts to obtain
donations from and through him,” the report states.
This took place while MIT was working “to limit Epstein’s donations,
and affiliation with, MIT.”
“In summary, Professor Lloyd knew that donations from Epstein would be
controversial and that MIT might reject them,” the report states. “We
conclude that, in concert with Epstein, he purposefully decided not to
alert the Institute to Epstein’s criminal record, choosing instead to
allow mid-level administrators to process the donations without any
formal discussion or diligence concerning Epstein. In his interview,
Professor Lloyd acknowledged that he had been ‘professionally remiss’
in not alerting MIT to Epstein’s criminal record.”
Lloyd’s statement last week characterizes things differently.
“I didn’t hide the fact that Epstein was donating money to MIT. Nor
did I conspire with Epstein to avoid any vetting process,” he wrote.
“I actively inquired about MIT’s proper procedures for accepting
donations, and I followed them to the letter.”
But the Goodwin Proctor report found that one of the 2012 donations
listed Lesley Groff, an assistant to Epstein and now a defendant and
co-conspirator in civil cases against Epstein, was handling the
contribution on the donor’s end.
“The only reasonable inference is that Professor Lloyd did this to
obscure the fact that Epstein was the donor and to hinder any possible
due diligence or vetting by MIT,” the report says.
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This, too, Lloyd denies.
“The accusation that I hid Epstein’s identity from MIT, which is
leveled in the recently released Goodwin Proctor report, is completely
false,” he wrote. “I never hid the identity of Epstein as the donor
prior to the donation being accepted. I facilitated the submission of
the donation approval request to the MIT officers exactly so they
could vet it. MIT knew that the donor was Epstein and fully approved
the donation with this knowledge.”
Lloyd said he wasn’t trying to diminish his mistakes or make excuses
for his lapse of judgment, “which will continue to weigh on my
conscience for the rest of my life.”
Lloyd declined to be interviewed by the Journal. He did alert the
Journal to the statement he posted last week.
“I will not be commenting further at the moment,” he added.
/(Editor’s Note: MIT President Rafael Reif’s name was misspelled in
the original version of this story)/
On Wed, Jan 22, 2020, 7:26 PM <thompnicks...@gmail.com
<mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com>> wrote:
Tom –
Pay wall!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Can you say more?
N
Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
thompnicks...@gmail.com <mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com>
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
*From:* Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com
<mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com>> *On Behalf Of *Tom Johnson
*Sent:* Wednesday, January 22, 2020 9:49 AM
*To:* Friam@redfish. com <friam@redfish.com
<mailto:friam@redfish.com>>
*Subject:* [FRIAM] MIT students protest prof with SFI ties »
Albuquerque Journal
https://www.abqjournal.com/1410925/mit-students-protest-prof-with-sfi-ties.html?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=santa-fe-headlines
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Joe
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