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Stanford psychologist partners with ‘30 Rock’ actor

October 12th, 2012
Photo by Jason Anfinsen

'30 Rock' actor John Lutz. Photo by Jason Anfinsen

“Comedian JOHN LUTZ, who plays a sketch writer on the popular TV series 30 Rock, is often the fall guy for others’ mischief and the target of practical jokes on the show. So when I read in a recent Arts Beat blog entry about a new endeavor titled The Lutz Experiment, I naturally assumed he’d be the lead role in some sort of new reality TV show where he would eat strange and unusual foods, perform death-defying acts and, in general, test his emotional and physical limits,” LIA STEAKLEY, a social media producer for the Medical School, posted recently on the school’s SCOPE blog.

Jamil Zaki, assistant professor of psychology at Stanford

As it turns out, Lutz has teamed up with JAMIL ZAKI, assistant professor of psychology at Stanford, for a series of experiments and a book.

In that New York Times Arts Beat piece that Steakley refers to, Zaki describes Lutz as “the perfect lab rat.”

“You see him on 30 Rock and he comes off as this total goofball, a little bit of a doofus, even,” Zaki said. “It’s so strange to then meet him and see this incredibly well-spoken, thoughtful guy in the same body.”

Read Steakley’s full post on the SCOPE blog.

Third annual Stanford Food Summit set for Oct. 24

October 11th, 2012

Food Summit 3 takes place Oct. 24.

Stanford researchers and scholars and local food activists are invited to Food Summit 3, a one-day symposium designed to connect Stanford faculty, graduate students and undergraduates who are interested in food-systems research with members of community-based food organizations who are interested in improving the quality of the food we produce, provide and consume. The symposium will take place from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Oct. 24 at the Arrillaga Alumni Center, with a public forum to follow that evening at Memorial Auditorium.

The symposium will present findings from three pilot projects that grew out of the Stanford-community partnerships established at the second Food Summit event in 2011. The projects, in the areas of farm-to-school food, hospital food and food-bank food, are examples of what the organizers hope will become a larger effort to encourage food-systems research at Stanford.

In the SCOPE blog, Erin Digitale rates her own diet.

“Our longer-term goal is to build a food-systems research center on campus,” said CHRISTOPHER GARDNER, associate professor of medicine, who is organizing the summit. The engagement of all seven Stanford schools in a variety of food-related research projects gives Stanford a unique niche in addressing local, national and global food problems, Gardner said. “Of 7 billion people on the planet, a billion are hungry and nearly a billion are overweight or obese,” he said. “There’s enough food to go around, but how do you produce it and how do you distribute it? Those are systems issues in growing a sustainable-food movement that Stanford may be able to help solve.”

The Food Summit’s public forum, set for 7 p.m. on Oct. 24, will feature a keynote presentation by author and speaker JOHN ROBBINS, who walked away from his family’s Baskin-Robbins ice cream fortune to become a social activist, first rising to prominence with the publication of his 1987 book, Diet for a New America. Robbins’ presentation is titled “Food Revolution 2012.” It will be followed by a panel discussion titled “Farm Bill or Food Bill?” with Stanford and Bay Area food activists.

More information and registration for the summit is available on the event website. The daytime symposium is targeted at faculty, researchers and students with an interest in food-systems research and community food activists, and is limited to 400 participants. The evening forum is open to the general public. Both events are free.

Read the Food Summit’s full announcement by ERIN DIGITALE on the Medical School’s news website. And speaking of food, check out Digitale’s post in the SCOPE blog about her efforts to reach her personal best in the nutrition department and beyond.

 

The Stanford Band encouraging good behavior? Say it isn’t true!

October 10th, 2012
Stanford Band

The Stanford Band replicating the notorious Circle of Death.

THE LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY MARCHING BAND isn’t generally known for encouraging good behavior among fellow students. The renowned scatter band is generally better known for its irreverent humor, various clever hijinks and for being—how to put this?—a tad anti-authority.

But good advice about wearing bicycle helmets is exactly what the Band gave new students during its halftime show in this past weekend’s Homecoming football game against Arizona.

In a script called “Survival Guide,” the Band hilariously replicated the notorious Circle of Death, the dangerous intersection located near the clock tower. The on-field shenanigans featured Band members chaotically running in a giant circle, narrowly averting crashes.

Meanwhile, the announcer encouraged freshmen to, “Look to your right. Now look to your left. All of you will crash your bikes in the Circle of Death. Fifty students enter, four will not leave. Instead, they’ll crash into each other with one carrying a giant project that is now ruined. Survival tactic: Wear a helmet, and walk all large projects to your classroom.”

But then, the Band being the Band, the announcer reconsidered, “Come to think of it, don’t go to class.”

The Band also warned freshmen about GREEN LIBRARY, with the announcer explaining, “Your professors, and even your fellow students, will convince you that Green is an amazing library. You know what it really is? A confusing labyrinth that you will never find your way out of. Survival tactic: Use a buddy system. Use GPS. Use a system of mirrors that when aligned lights the way to the exit. Just don’t go inside without an exit strategy.”

On-field, the Band replicated a labyrinth, while the Jumbotron screen flashed some more good advice: “The librarians are not Minotaurs. Please do not try to defeat them.”

Stanford Libraries to host open house

October 9th, 2012

There’s much more to Stanford Libraries than just books nowadays. So the libraries’ staff is inviting the Stanford community to a Green Library open house from 1 to 4 p.m. today to learn about everything from book-scanning robots to medieval manuscripts to experts who can help researchers organize and preserve massive amounts of data. Coupa Café will provide refreshments for the afternoon.

“People will be surprised, pleasantly surprised, at how much the library has to offer and how many ways we support teaching and research,” said CHRIS BOURG, assistant university librarian for public services. “And, of course, we have lots of books – including plenty of great free books we will be giving away.”

That’s not all they’re giving away. An Apple iPad and a set of Beats Solo HD On-Ear Headphones will be raffled, along with autographed books from the 2012 Saroyan Prize for Writing. In addition to the drawing prizes, other giveaways will include free books from previous Saroyan Prize for Writing winners.

The Stanford Mendicants, Stanford’s oldest a cappella group, will kick off the event at 1 p.m.

Stanford’s radio station, KZSU (98.1 FM), will be broadcasting live outside of Green Library’s east entrance (that is, the one by the red fountain), featuring music from Stanford’s music library and hosting on-air interviews with students and library experts from 1 to 4 p.m. Talisman, which performs a cappella music from around the world, will make a guest appearance, singing live on KZSU at 3:15 p.m.

A curated tour of the Green Library’s current exhibit, “Scripting the Sacred: Medieval Latin Manuscripts,” will begin at 3 p.m. Demonstrations of the page-turning robotic book scanner will begin at 1:15, 2:15 and 3:15 p.m. (limit eight people at a time for the 45- to 50-minute tours). Other tours will show how the libraries preserve and provide access to born-digital media such as computer hard drives, floppy disks and CD-ROMs, and demonstrate how Stanford’s renowned map collections is digitized.

“The bottom line is that libraries, especially the Stanford Libraries, are all about the joy of discovery in all its forms,” said Bourg. “Our open house is a chance for us to show off all the cool stuff we do.”

 

— BY CYNTHIA HAVEN, Stanford Libraries

Multicultural Alumni Hall of Fame inducts four distiguished new members

October 8th, 2012

From left, Michelle Alexander, Juju Chang, Annie Gutierrez and Loren Kieve. Photo by David Gonzales

On Friday morning, a reporter spotted an alumna looking at a map as she walked across campus and stopped to ask the woman if she needed directions. The visitor was looking for El Centro Chicano, and since the reporter was headed in that direction, they walked together. The alum marveled at how much the campus had changed, particularly its diversity. She said that when she arrived on campus in the late ’60s, she was one of only a handful of Chicano students. As they parted, the alumna introduced herself simply as “Annie.”

Fast-forward to Friday evening, the two ran into each other again, this time in Tresidder Union. “Annie,” it turned out, was ANNIE L. GUTIERREZ, JD ’71, a retired judge of the Superior Court of the State of California and a nationally and internationally recognized attorney. She was among four distinguished alumni being inducted into the Multicultural Alumni Hall of Fame.

Each year since 1995, inductees representing the campus’ four ethnic community centers are honored during Reunion Homecoming Weekend.

In addition to Gutierrez, who represented El Centro, the other inductees for this year were JUJU CHANG, ’87; MICHELLE ALEXANDER, JD ’92; and LOREN KIEVE, ’69.

Chang, an Emmy Award-winning correspondent for ABC News, was inducted by the Asian American Activities Center. She also served as moderator for this year’s Roundtable at Stanford.

Alexander, the Black Community Services Center’s inductee, is a law professor at Ohio State University. A civil rights advocate and litigator, Alexander is the author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.

Kieve, a distinguished trial lawyer and legal scholar who has led several state and American Bar associations, has advanced the fields of civil justice reform, civil rights, and evidence rules and policies. Inducted by the Native American Cultural Center, Kieve is a champion of native arts and culture and interdisciplinary undergraduate education.

—ELAINE RAY

 

Blas Cabrera chases dark matter, wins Panofsky physics prize

October 5th, 2012

Blas Cabrera

Abandoned mines might not be the most obvious places to set up cosmological experiments, but that’s where Stanford physicist BLAS CABRERA and BERNARD SADOULET, of the University of California-Berkeley, search for signs of dark matter. Their efforts have advanced dark matter research, and in recognition they have been jointly awarded the 2013 W.K.H. Panofsky Prize in Experimental Particle Physics. The prize is named for SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory founding director WOLFGANG “PIEF” PANOFSKY and awarded by the American Physical Society.

The pair’s decades-long Cryogenic Dark Matter Search has brought them to several underground sites in the hunt for direct evidence of theorized weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs (the deep shafts largely shield detectors from cosmic rays and other unwanted particle “noise”). If proven to exist, WIMPs could help define and explain dark matter, which is thought to make up about 25 percent of the energy density in the universe and is responsible for the formation of structure in the universe. This, in turn, could improve our understanding of the evolution of the universe and our interpretation of astronomical observations.

Cabrera, a Stanford physics professor who has a term appointment within the SLAC Particle Physics and Astrophysics faculty, said the prize, which includes a $10,000 award and a certificate citing the recipients’ scientific contributions, is gratifying, and it’s “wonderful to share it” with Sadoulet, a Berkeley physics professor and director of the UC Institute for Nuclear/Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology. “We have been leaders of the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search work for many years,” he said. “It’s also nice to have the tie with Panofsky, whom I knew and deeply admired for many years.”

Read the full announcement at the SLAC News Center.

— BY GLENN ROBERTS, JR., SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

 

Scholars awarded grants to explore ecosystem

October 4th, 2012

FIORENZA MICHELI, a professor of biological sciences, and REBECCA BIRD, an ecological anthropologist, were recently awarded National Science Foundation grants of $1.3 million and $250,000, respectively.

Micheli, an affiliate with the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, will study the capacity of natural systems and human communities to adapt to environmental change. Specifically, her project will investigate the impacts of oceanographic variability on coastal marine ecosystems and human communities of the Pacific coast of Baja California, Mexico.

Bird’s project will measure direct effects of indigenous burning practices on woodlands and low-elevation, mixed forests in the Central Valley, Klamath Mountains and Sierra Nevada and indirect effects of these practices on the availability of wild foods and materials used by indigenous peoples that inhabit the woodlands.

Both research projects got their start with funding from the Woods Institute’s Environmental Venture Projects, seed grants for transformative environmental and sustainability research.

 

— ROB JORDAN, Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment

The Flu Crew: Med students provide vaccinations to the community

October 2nd, 2012
Mediratta and Rizal

Medical students Rishi Mediratta and Rachel Rizal are members of the Flu Crew.

Medical student RISHI MEDIRATTA vividly remembers the first time he gave someone a flu shot. “It was with a third-year medical student and I was very nervous having to stick a needle in someone,” said the future physician. But luckily, thanks to the training he received as part of the school’s student-run influenza-prevention program, “My first patient didn’t even feel the needle.”

Now more than a year later, Mediratta is co-director, along with fellow second-year medical student RACHEL RIZAL, of the FLU CREW. Officially called the Medical Student Influenza Prevention Program, Flu Crew delivers no-cost vaccinations to people at Stanford and in the local community in an effort to reduce the burden of influenza and improve public health. It is the largest medical-school program of its kind in the country.

Flu Crew participation is practically a rite of passage for incoming medical students these days: A majority of first-year students are involved in the program, including 75 percent of students in 2010 and 60 percent in 2011. At the beginning of the school year, students are taught about the pathophysiology and epidemiology of the influenza virus, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates is associated with anywhere from 3,000 to 49,000 deaths annually in the United States. They also receive hands-on training on administering vaccines.

Read more about the Flu Crew in MICHELLE BRANDT’s article from the Stanford School of Medicine. And then check out the flu website to plan when you are getting your free flu shot this year. Just roll up your sleeve. Trust us, it won’t hurt a bit.

Hellman and two of his graduate students inducted into National Cyber Security Hall of Fame

October 1st, 2012
Martin Hellman

Martin Hellman and two of his graduate students have been elected to the National Cyber Security Hall of Fame.

The Stanford professor and two graduate students who invented public-key encryption are three of 11 inaugural inductees in the National Cyber Security Hall of Fame. In 1977, MARTIN HELLMAN, now a professor emeritus of electrical engineering, and two of his graduate students, WHITFIELD DIFFIE and RALPH MERKLE, introduced the encryption tool that today safeguards many trillions of dollars worth of online financial transactions every day.

“It’s a great honor,” Hellman said. “I’m really pleased that this great work – which almost everyone discouraged me against pursuing – has worked out this way.”

Colleagues discouraged the team’s pursuit because it was going up against the National Security Agency, which many suspected might classify the work. Indeed, this was a worry right up until the group presented its work: Although, the encryption software was written to make online banking communications more secure, there was concern that it could also be used by criminals and foreign adversaries to protect their messages from law enforcement and national intelligence.

Public-key cryptography protects information sent from one user to another – individuals or institutions – using a pair of numeric keys that undo one another. The sender first enciphers his message using the intended recipient’s public key (accessible by everyone), and the recipient uses his secret key (known only to him) to decipher and access the information. (For more details on the encryption process and the history of the work, click here.)

The three were selected from more than 200 nominations and will be enshrined along with eight other inductees at a black-tie gala at the Four Seasons Hotel Baltimore on Oct. 17. The Hall of Fame will eventually be located on the first floor of the World Trade Center in Baltimore, Md., where inductees will be featured in interactive video displays.

Hellman now focuses on the risks associated with nuclear arms proliferation and, on Oct. 18, will be presenting his findings to the Federation of American Scientists in Washington, D.C.

Read more about the National Cyber Security Hall of Fame.

Electrical engineering graduate student wins Marconi Young Scholar Award

September 28th, 2012

The Marconi Society, which is devoted to encouraging scientific contributions in the field of communications and the Internet, has recognized graduate student AAKANKSHA CHOWDHERY with one of three 2012 Paul Baran Marconi Young Scholar Awards. The awards are given to young researchers (no older than 27 at the time of the award—the same age as Marconi when he completed the first radio transmission) who are on track to become leading innovators contributing to the advancement of science and humanity.

Aakanksha Chowdery

Aakanksha Chowdhery

Chowdhery is the first woman to receive the award since it was created in 2008.

According to the Marconi Society’s press release, “Chowdhery’s research in the field of Dynamic Spectrum Management (DSM) for next-generation copper-access networks focuses on improving data rates and stability in digital subscriber lines (DSLs) suffering from intermittent noise effects. Her DSM research promises successful co-existence and deployment of next-generation copper networks that can deliver data-rates up to Gbps with legacy networks.”

Chowdhery is “a superstar on the rise,” according to JOHN CIOFFI, the Hitachi America Professor in the School of Engineering, Emeritus. Cioffi, who is quoted in the society’s online story, is Chowdhery’s advisor and the 2006 Marconi Prize Winner for his invention of the DSL modem.

“Aakanksha solved several difficult mathematical problems instrumental to the practical deployment of the upcoming multi-100Mbps DSL services, preserving the large theoretical gains in numerous practical unbundled deployment scenarios,” he said. “She has found ways to take traditional theories and find the appropriate combinations of well-defined problems that characterize an actual situation via various optimization principles.”

Chowdhery completed her MS in electrical engineering at Stanford and is on track to receive her PhD in December.

This marks the fifth year that Young Scholar Awards have been granted by the Marconi Society. The society looks for those who not only have shown extraordinary early promise but have made an impact through published research.

The Young Scholar Awards include a financial stipend and an invitation and travel funds to attend the annual Marconi Award Dinner.

Read more about the award and about Chowdhery’s research.