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Archive for the ‘Seen on Campus’ Category

Nobel week in pictures

October 17th, 2012

It begins with a phone call in the wee hours of the morning, and while the media calls eventually come in at a slower pace, the glory of a Nobel Prize lasts for generations.

This year the Scandanavians rang twice for Stanford. First, on Oct. 10, BRIAN KOBILKA, professor and chair of molecular and cellular physiology at the Stanford School of Medicine shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with ROBERT LEFKOWITZ, professor of biochemistry and of medicine at Duke University. The two men were selected for their work on G-protein-coupled receptors.

Then on Monday, Oct. 15, ALVIN ROTH, a Harvard economist who is transitioning to Stanford, was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on market design. He shares the prize with LLOYD SHAPLEY, professor emeritus at UCLA. Roth is a pioneer in the field of game theory and experimental economics and in their application to the design of new economic institutions.

University Photographer LINDA CICERO created slideshows of Kobilka and of Roth.
Videogrpher STEVE FYFFE, put together videos of Kobilka and Roth as well.

‘Gangnam Style’ flash mob at the GSB

October 16th, 2012

Last week Stanford Report received a request to encourage members of the Stanford community to show up for a “mystery event” at the Knight Management Center. When the caller would not reveal the nature of the event, we took a wait-and-see attitude. It turns out that the mystery event was the Sloan Management Program’s class of 2013′s take on “Gangnam Style,” the hit song by South Korean rapper Psy.

STEN TAMKIVI, a GSB student, said their version of the video got about 10,000 hits over the weekend. “It has also gone quite viral in China, sporting 36,000 views and a lot of comments on Youku, their version of YouTube,” Tamkivi added in an email. Here’s the action, caught by CNN.

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.

 

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

 

Student residential staffers welcome dorm mates to the “punny” Farm

September 25th, 2012
Roble Hall resident assistants

Roble Hall student staff promote the Roble Rangers dorm theme. (photo by Linda Cicero)

Each year, Stanford’s undergraduate residence halls adopt themes that serve to welcome new and returning students to their campus homes through humor.

Themes, which are most often puns, lend themselves to clever T-shirt designs and entertaining interior dorm decorating.

The themes, created by student residential staff members before the arrival of residents, can be both familiar and obscure. Many allude to popular culture, television shows or movies.

For instance, ARROYO’s “Atroyo” theme harkens to the movie Troy and is, in the words of one student staff member, “mostly about Brad Pitt.”

But BURBANK’s “Burbanksy” theme may be a tad more obscure. It alludes to the work of English graffiti artist Banksy.

Student residential staff in FLORENCE MOORE HALL opted for multiple themes.

On Move-In Day, the west side of the dorm adopted the theme “NickeFlodeon.” T-shirts featured the distinctive orange Nickelodeon logo. The east side student staff members chose East Flomography and designed font-themed T-shirts that were “Typed with Flove.”

To complicate matters, individual houses within FloMo also adopted distinctive themes, including PALOMA’s “Palomulberry Street,” which evokes Dr. Seuss’ first children’s book.

Among the more entertaining themes this year is TWAIN’s “Public Twainsportation.” The dorm’s T-shirt features symbols of a metro system, and each hall has a train-related sub-theme, ranging from the Hogwarts Express to Soul Twain.

Other freshman and transfer dorm themes include:

KIMBALL: KimBatman
SOTO: Sotohana
SERRA: Pirates of the Serrabbean
DONNER: Alice in Donnerland
LARKIN: Sherlarkin Holmes
JUNIPERO: J-Roald Dahl
OKADA: Okadavengers
TRANCOS: Trancolympics
CEDRO: Cedrocket Power
ROBLE: Roble Rangers

Stanford Libraries launches user-friendly website; changes name

September 5th, 2012

The Stanford University Libraries’ website, which gets about 10,000 visits a day, hasn’t had a major overhaul in a decade. “In web years, that’s 200,” said CHRIS BOURG, assistant university librarian for public services.

Now the libraries’ Internet presence has been revamped to match the times: A brand-new website went “live” on Aug. 28 – with a lot of input from faculty, students, staff, researchers and a range of other users.

“The new site was built with their voices in our heads,” said STU SNYDMAN, who coordinated the redesign as manager of digital production & web application development.

For the past 18 months, the libraries have been offering lottery tickets and Coupa Café coupons to encourage participation for in-depth interviews, postcard wish-lists and rapid-fire user testing. The new website is the result.

An integrated search function makes looking for resources in the collections or in the library far more straightforward. The homepage highlights a chat link for contacting librarians – not a new feature, but one previously buried under layers of clicks. It even helps students find places for group study – “That’s a piece of information we didn’t have on the site before,” said Bourg. “Students learned about the Bender Room maybe by the time they were seniors.” It also directs users to subject librarians, who can give special help.

Another change: When getting help at the information desk, the librarians’ online search often didn’t look like anything you ever saw on the home page. Here’s one reason why: The information center site website had been updated more recently, as had many of the branch library sites. Think of a dinosaur surrounded by racecars. Now the dinosaur has been traded in for a Maserati, and all the vehicles are going at the same speed, together. They’ll be using the same website you’re using.

And it’s going to get even better. “A hundred library staff members are building content, starting now. That’s highly distributed authorship,” said Snydman.

According to Bourg, “The bottom line is that research, teaching and learning at Stanford will be easier now because the new library website rocks!”

The careful viewer will notice another change: The campus network of library, technology and publishing services previously known as SULAIR (that is, Stanford University Libraries & Academic Information Resources) is now called simply “Stanford University Libraries.” In early August, a quiet announcement to this effect went to the staff.

– Cynthia Haven, Stanford University Libraries

 

Newly aquired book includes original Manet etching

August 29th, 2012

There’s a new cat at the Art and Architecture Library in the Cummings Art Building—and it’s well over 100 years old.

The 1869 cat is featured in an original etching by the famous French artist ÉDOUARD MANET (1832-1883). The feline is hidden away between the pages of a newly acquired book, the deluxe edition of an 1870 art classic called Les Chats, by JULES-FRANÇOIS-FÉLIX HUSSON, who used the pen name “Champfleury.” The etching is an aquatint that uses a powdered rosin to create a muted gray-blue background. Manet made the plate by hand, etching fine lines with a needle.

“Le Chat et Les Fleurs” is described as one of Manet’s most subtle combinations of the complex and simple. According to the late art historian Jean C. Harris, the etching shows the traces of Japanese influence, with its flatness of spatial arrangement and the “rather freely drawn and widely spaced strokes to describe the flowers,” which “help to animate the surface and to relieve the monotony of the uniform aquatinting.”

The etching had been sold separately as a stand-alone work prior to this edition. The new acquisition recalls a time when it was much more common for books to include original artwork, including engravings, etchings, lithographs and even paintings. Too often nowadays, they are razored out and sold separately, but this etching is presented as the author and artist intended. Les Chats is one of well over 1,000 such books at the Art and Architecture Library, which now has about 150,000 books on site.

Cat-lover and assistant art librarian ANNA FISHAUT discovered the book while shopping online at a favorite London rare books store and had to have it, “because it is one of the great artists’ books and because I have a penchant for cats.”

It’s not the only new cat in town—from the same British dealer, the library acquired a 1918 limited-edition book of original woodcuts from the Omega Workshops, affiliated with LEONARD and VIRGINIA WOOLF’s Hogarth Press. It includes woodcuts from ROGER FRY, VANESSA BELL, DUNCAN GRANT—and a cat by French artist SIMON BUSSY.

—CYNTHIA HAVEN, Stanford University Libraries

 

 

On video: Tina Seelig gives crash course in creativity

July 30th, 2012

TINA SEELIG, executive director for the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, gave a crash course in creativity during TEDxStanford in May.

“Everyone, everyone has the key to their innovation engine. It’s up to them to turn it,” Seelig said.

Need some inspiration? Watch her TEDxStanford talk on video.


 

School of Engineering’s 13th annual eDay keeps ’em curious

July 25th, 2012

Future engineer appears fascinated by a talk titled "Computers That See" presented by Fei-Fei Li, assistant professor of computer science. (Photo by Norbert von der Groeben)

Some 500 or so Stanford Engineering alumni and their family members ages 10 and up came to campus on July 21 for the 13th eDay—a day of insightful talks by engineering faculty, hands-on student demos and catching up with old friends.

TINA SEELIG, an author, professor and executive director of the school’s entrepreneurship program, the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, kicked off the day with a talk on the creative spark in all of us and how to unlock that sometimes hidden genius to accomplish great things.

With the eDay keynote complete, the attendees disbursed from the Hewlett Teaching Center to locations in the Huang Engineering Center, where the bulk of the day’s activities took place.

The day’s sessions included:

Click here for an eDay slideshow.

BY ANDREW MYERS, Stanford School of Engineering