Actually, we have no idea why this guy is just standing in Harvard Square, but we suspect his name isn't Clarence and he's not looking for George Bailey, so a lost bet makes sense to us. Nikki, who snapped his photo at 2:30 p.m., reports:

Won't say what he's up to but hasn't moved in at least 20 mins.

The Crimson reports on a faculty meeting got a little testy when professors wanted to know why the world's greatest university was surveilling them and students. A muckymuck said it was part of a study by one group of researchers on student class attendance.

Prior to beginning the study, Bol said, he was given approval by Harvard’s Institutional Review Board, a federally mandated body that assesses academic research. According to Bol, members of that committee said that his work “did not constitute human subjects research,” and, as such, did not require notification or permission of those involved.

Michael Peretti surveyed the damage at the Inman Pharmacy on Cambridge Street around 12:50 p.m.

Shortly after 4 p.m., Boston and Cambridge firefighters and Boston and State police began rushing to the Mass. Ave. Bridge on a report of a sailboat tipping over in the wind and dumping somebody in the water. Just as firefighters were about to begin their "tech rescue," however, the person managed to get back in the boat and make his way to shore on the Cambridge side - where he was met by troopers and Cambridge firefighters. He declined medical attention.

Neal Doyle captured a new commuter-rail train chugging along the Grand Junction rail line in Cambridge towards the Charles today.

The T and Amtrak occasionally use the line, which crosses the Charles under the BU Bridge, to transfer trains from the north side of Boston to the south - it's the only north/south link inside 495. State officials hope to one day use the line to connect the Worcester Line to North Station, although Cambridge city officials remain opposed.

WBUR reports on the details of a survey of MIT students - which also found most never report the assaults. The Tech reports the school's president is "disturbed by the extent and nature of the problem."

The New Yorker talks to Harvard and MIT researchers trying to figure out how to battle Ebola by deciphering its genetic code, including Harvard biology professor Pardis Sabeti, who heads the "Ebola war room" at MIT's Broad Institute.

The next morning, Gire took a car to the M.I.T. campus, carrying a small box containing the tubes of droplets with the Ebola RNA. There, in a lab at the Broad Institute, he and a colleague named Sarah Winnicki, working alongside two other research teams, prepared the RNA to be decoded. The work took four days, and Gire and Winnicki hardly slept. By the end, they had combined all fourteen samples into a single, crystal-clear droplet of water solution. The drop contained about six trillion snippets of DNA. Each was a mirror image of a piece of RNA from the blood samples. Most of the snippets were human genetic code, but among them were about two hundred billion snippets of code from Ebola.

Gianna Maria reports her inbound Red Line train came to a halt around 6 p.m. on the Longfellow to avoid making pate out of a silly goose who refused to move. After about ten minutes, the goose moved out and so did the train.

And it's crashing trees all over the place. As of 7:10 p.m., Washington Street in Jamaica Plain is blocked in both directions by a tree that came down near Montebello. Memorial Drive near Harvard Square is also down to no lanes thanks to a downed tree.

And people in Smart Cars, Fiats and other tiny little boxes might want to think twice before heading out. Christine reports it's so windy on 95 north of the city that "cars are almost hitting each other."