Bede was the "teacher of the whole Middle Ages" – and one Stanford scholar has devoted a lifetime to his achievements.
Stanford
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Stanford News Headlines
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Celebrating the man called 'Father of English History,' Venerable Bede
19 Nov 2009 | 12:00 am -
The court will now call its expert witness: the brain
19 Nov 2009 | 12:00 amWill advances in neuroscience make the justice system more accurate and unbiased? Or could brain-based testing wrongly condemn some and trample the civil liberties of others? The new field of neurolaw is cross-examining for answers. -
What's next in plan to reduce energy costs, greenhouse gas emissions
13 Nov 2009 | 12:00 amJoseph Stagner, executive director of the Department of Sustainability and Energy Management, explains what comes next in Stanford's $250 million Energy and Climate Plan. -
Stanford workshop recreates the world of Incan pottery
12 Nov 2009 | 12:00 amThe Inca artisans of the 1570s tried to recreate the pots their predecessors had made before the Spanish Conquest. Now Stanford's Archaeology Center retraces their steps and in doing so, rediscovers a vanished world. -
'Quirky, off-kilter' Stanford author gets $50K award
11 Nov 2009 | 12:00 am"Why not have a spaceship come into the story? Why not?" asks the author who has been praised for his "satiric glee and elegiac compassion."
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Stanford University Press Blog
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The Return of Tintin
13 Nov 2009 | 3:21 pmAs a recent review in Publisher’s Weekly put it, “Those who lament the dearth of books about Tintin in English will welcome this translation of a landmark French study, first published in 1984.” The book The Metamorphoses of Tintin: Or Tintin for Adults by Jean-Marie Apostolidès (translated by Jocelyn Hay) revives the memory of Tintin in an analysis of the complex cartoon character. Apostolidès examines the evolution of the character from political, social, and psychological standpoints. The book recounts Tintin’s famous adventures, all the while telling… -
Punishment - A Self-Conscious Act?
3 Nov 2009 | 4:40 pmI think that most of us can agree that punishment is often the most effective way to enforce certain rules. We associate punishment with what is right and good – it is not a selfish act, but a necessary one. What if someone told you there are other motives to punishing a person? In a recent article in the Science Daily, Christine Horne explains that “We punish because we care what people think of us.” In her book The Rewards of Punishment: A Relational Theory of Norm Enforcement, Horne develops her theory further, finding that the more cohesive the group is, the more likely that… -
Love Letters Spell out a Lifetime
1 Nov 2009 | 11:17 amThe love and life of Robinson Jeffers, one of the most prominent American poets of the 20th century, is recorded in time by the newly published love letters between him and his eventual wife, Una. The volume, The Collected Letters of Robinson Jeffers With Selected Letters from Una Jeffers 1890-1930, is the first of three that will chronicle Jeffers’ life. The book is praised and quoted in a recent article by Cynthia Haven of the Stanford Report, “For those who think of Jeffers as the craggy, roughhewn poet of the Pacific Coast, the letters show something of the heart of the man who wrote:… -
Innovation helps shape the HP Way
26 Oct 2009 | 3:25 pmLooking at the histories of big companies, we often contribute their successes to the competent leaders and the loyal employees who follow their direction. But what if defiance could be even more of a breakthrough for a company’s success? In their book, The HP Phenomenon: Innovation and Business Transformation, Charles H. House and Raymond L. Price explain how not following the leader can yield great results for the individual, the leader, and the company. In a recent review in Forbes, George Anders commends House and Price for pointing out many of these sorts of bottom-up instances of… -
Are you in need of a transformation? Goldman on Transforming Toxic Leaders
20 Oct 2009 | 12:53 pmWe all encounter problems in the workplace at one time or another: your boss is too hard on you, you don’t get along with your co-workers. But these are minor complaints that most of us learn to deal with. Lately, there have been major concerns coming up about toxicity in the workplace. Alan Goldman, author of Transforming Toxic Leaders, discusses in an interview on Psychjourney Podcasts how “toxic” leaders affect the workplace and how, many times, a transformation of the organization of the system is what can remedy a toxic situation, not just an adjustment of the leader themselves.
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The Unofficial Stanford Blog
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Beat Cal!
20 Nov 2009 | 11:26 pmA student helms the Birdcage booth Banners hang from Green library Signage at the Intersection of Death roundabout -
Free Dumpster Water: Source Discovered!
20 Nov 2009 | 11:30 amAccording to a representative from Student Housing: "The emergency water and food ration bars in the dumpster are Student Housing emergency supplies that have in fact expired. I did consult with Julie Muir our fantastic Recycling Program Manager at Peninsula Sanitary Service, and the University’s Surplus Property program to see if there was some way we could donate the supplies. However, we determined that because they are expired we could not risk human consumption, and the person-power it would take to open the individual containers to use the water for other purposes made that… -
Free water in the dumpster between Bob and Theta Delt
20 Nov 2009 | 12:14 amAccording to an anonymous source, word on the street is that at this very moment "there's an entire enormous dumpster full of packaged water that was thrown out earlier this week between bob and theta Delt...The water seems to be past it's expiration date (whatever that means for water)...At the very least it may be worth salvaging some" My gut environmentalist's first question is of course, "WHY WOULD YOU EVER BUY BOTTLED WATER??" My second, more reasonable question is, "Wait, water can expire?" Obviously to attempt to solve the mystery of this supposed 'expiration' I jump to my BFF,… -
Stanford in the NYTimes: Heisman, Handlebars, and Hard Times
19 Nov 2009 | 4:45 pmThe New York Times has been giving a whole slew of attention to Stanford recently--and for those who have given up reading newspapers in favor of problem sets and papers, here's a recap: The Times profiled Stanford running back Toby Gerhart, who has been instrumental all season (and particularly helpful in obliterating highly-ranked Pac-10 foes Oregon and USC), as he becomes a likely contender for the Heisman trophy. The Times' editorial observer writes about the diversity of bicyclists and their equally varied transportation devices on Stanford's campus. As mentioned earlier on TUSB,… -
BEAT CAL - International Style
19 Nov 2009 | 7:58 amFollowing in the great footsteps of overseas trips before us... including this awesome trick that apparently got students in trouble with the Italian police several years ago: ...A couple of Overseas Programs decided to celebrate Big Game week with a little international flavour: Florence: Ponte Vecchio Oxford: Radcliffe Camera Stanford House Australia: GO CARD! Props to Alexis Arnold, Shruti Tibrewala and Joyce Truong for the pictures!
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d.school news
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Jaipur Knee featured in TIME Magazine's 50 best Inventions 2009
18 Nov 2009 | 3:22 pmKamal climbs a tree with his new knee. d.school Fellow Joel Sadler and d.boocamper Eric Thorsell's re:motion project has received some pretty amazing recognition from TIME magazine and it's readers.Developed in a Stanford Mechanical Engineering medical device design class, the "Jaipur Knee" has been listed as one of Time Magazine's 50 best inventions of the year. During the class, Joel and Eric flew out to India to need-find with their partner, the Jaipur Foot Organization. Once there, they discovered that one thing they needed was a much more stable knee joint than… -
Driptech Makes Business Week's 25 Most Intriguing New Businesses
18 Nov 2009 | 2:06 pmPeter Frykman poses with a hot-off-the-press copy of Business Week featuring Driptech, the drip irrigation company Peter formed using technology he developed with his Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability team. Business Week's story exposes the newest and most interesting companies that are being born even in the midst of this recession. "History shows that great companies are often built during bad times." says Spencer Ante of Business Week. Congratulations on landing the story Peter! We look forward to hearing more. -
Customer Focused Innovation
17 Nov 2009 | 5:19 pmTwenty executives from around the world used design thinking last week to help re-invent the purchasing experience for a company that’s busy re-thinking an entire industry: Tesla Motors. The project was part of Customer Focused Innovation, a week-long executive education program co-hosted by the d.school and the GSB. The program takes a “clean models, dirty hands” approach: in the mornings, the execs attend lectures and delve into case studies at the GSB. In the afternoons, they take on real-world innovation challenges using design thinking. CFI started four years ago as the… -
East Palo Alto Teachers Save Mom and Pop
9 Nov 2009 | 11:03 pmLast Thursday on California Ave in Palo Alto, teachers from East Palo Alto Phoenix Academy, an Aspire school, and East Palo Alto Charter School began a two day professional development workshop run by the k12 lab research team. The teachers, who excelled at previous design thinking modules around brainstorming and prototyping, finally got the opportunity to put all their skills together and completed a design challenge around redefining the Mom and Pop store for the 21st century. The energy and passion of the group was apparent from the first empathy exercise held in the parking lot… -
(Thurs. 11/5 @ 5:30pm) d.school Winter/Spring classes info session
4 Nov 2009 | 4:54 pmCalling all Stanford University Graduate Students!Come to the d.school for an info session about our 2010 Winter AND Spring quarter classes on the evening of Thursday, November 5, from 5:30 - 7:00 PM. (that's TOMORROW!!)Preview classes that might interest you for 2010. We'll have a succession of quick overviews of all the upcoming classes (that we know about), followed by small breakout sessions with the teaching teams for you to learn more about specific classes.
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VentureBlog
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Berkman Center Reception This Wednesday
17 Nov 2009 | 7:36 amIn his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell talks about the power of circumstance. He explains that Bill Gates and Bill Joy had unprecedented access to the earliest computers and, as a result, they built a couple of the most important computer companies in the history of computation. A quick look at the folks who graduated from law school with me at the dawn of the Internet age (it sounds so long ago when you put it that way) and you can see the power of circumstance at work again. In my law school class were four of the most well-respected Internet scholars: Professors Jonathan Zittrain, Yochai… -
Monetizing Twitter -- Bring on the Ads!
9 Nov 2009 | 8:00 amTrue, no one asked me. But here's my two cents anyway. Twitter should open up its platform to advertising. That's right, advertising. Forget all this hoo-ha over selling data or paid business accounts or dashboards . . . Twitter has everything it needs to build a wildly-successful ad driven business model. It should get on with it. The two hallmarks of successful advertising-driven businesses are 1) massive scale and 2) abundant context. How has MySpace built such strong advertising revenue atop their social media platform? Huge scale and a ton of context. Same is true of Facebook and Yahoo… -
Welcome Reid Hoffman to the VC Side of the Table
5 Nov 2009 | 2:40 pmFirst came the announcement earlier in the year that Marc Andreessen was joining the ranks of "capital" -- a welcomed defection from "labor." And now my friend Reid Hoffman has jumped into the fray as well, joining Greylock Partners in their new fund (although he is not quite abandoning "labor" -- for the time being he will continue on as Executive Chairman of LinkedIn). Having two superstars like Marc and Reid join the venture business is excellent news at a time when the press is gleefully touting the demise of our profession. While the venture business is, no doubt, under serious pressure… -
Lessons from Rajeev Motwani's and Craig Johnson's Lives
12 Oct 2009 | 4:07 amIn the past three weeks, I have attended 2 memorial services and 2 brises. The brises celebrated the births of two future superstars -- the sons of four of the smartest entrepreneurs and venture investors in the Bay Area. The memorial services celebrated the lives of two recently deceased superstars -- both entrepreneurs and venture investors in their own right. As I listened to the stories of the lives these great men had lived, and listened to the toasts and prayers for these great men-to-be, it struck me that there were lessons to be learned for entrepreneurs and venture investors alike. -
Pen and Paper are Mightier Than the Laptop
29 Sep 2009 | 7:37 pmRelatively recently I hosted a meeting of the advisors to one of my portfolio companies. It was an impressive group of tech veterans. Each of them had been involved in the building of multi-million dollar high tech companies. Yet, what struck me about this summit was how many of these computer gurus carried with him a good, old fashioned notebook. Two varieties seemed to dominate the gathering -- the classic, leather-bound Moleskin and the pocket-sized graph paper Rhodia. I was surprised to see so much scribbling and so little typing. Since that meeting, I have kept my eyes out for this…
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Clastic Detritus
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Friday Field Foto #97: Trace fossils in Californian anthropogenite
20 Nov 2009 | 7:34 amA few weeks ago I went up to the Sierra Nevada mountains to get some fresh air and go for a bike ride with some friends. We started our ride at a trailhead parking lot near the town of South Lake Tahoe and as I walked to the restroom I noticed some nice trace fossils preserved in this sedimentary rock from the anthropocene. I thought it might be raccoon, but they seem to elongate. Anyone have other ideas? To give you a sense of scale, the biggest tracks are about 6-8 cm long. In case you’re wondering, yes, the other imprints in the “rock” are pine needles. Happy Friday! -
Stunning image of sediment plumes in Gulf of Mexico
14 Nov 2009 | 10:56 amI was alerted to this image from a reader and also saw it linked to on geology.com/news and just had to share it. Absolutely beautiful patterns of sediment plumes mixing with each other and surrunding water in the Gulf of Mexico from NASA’s Earth Observatory website. The image was taken last week a few hours after Tropical Storm Ida passed by to the east of here. The waves associated with the storm churned up the sediment on the shelf. The limit of sediment with the dark blue water to the south essentially marks the edge of the continental shelf. Click on the images below, or here, to… -
Going to be quiet here for a while
28 Oct 2009 | 8:24 amJust a quick note. Unfortunately, my lack of posting will continue for a little longer. In addition to trying to finish up a manuscript in my “free time” I will be traveling for the next couple of weeks for work (nowhere exotic, unfortunately). If you want, you can follow me on Twitter — twitter.com/clasticdetritus — although I can’t guarantee it will be interesting in any way. These days it consists of me tweeting about working on the manuscript mentioned above and lamenting the actions of people like Joe Lieberman. In the meantime, here are a few internet… -
Friday Field Foto #96: A view of Aconcagua from the air
23 Oct 2009 | 4:00 amThis week’s Friday Field Foto is one I snapped as the flight from North America I was on was starting it’s decent into Santiago, Chile. It was about an hour or so after sunrise and when I opened the window shade I saw this: Cerro Aconcagua (© 2009 clasticdetritus.com) Cerro Aconcongua (6,962 m/22,841 ft) is in the Andes Mountain range between Mendoza, Argentina and Santiago, Chile and is the highest peak in the western hemisphere. A very nice view to wake up to after a long flight. Below I try to recreate the view in GoogleEarth … close enough. credit: GoogleEarth Happy… -
GSA in Portland: Wrap-up
22 Oct 2009 | 3:46 pmI meant to blog about the 2009 GSA meeting in Portland each day but … well, I didn’t. This is mainly due to the fact that I spent each evening with friends I haven’t seen in a long time (or with friends I’ve never met in person) combined with a lack of internet access in my hotel room. And, even though, there was free and abundant internet access at the convention center I found it very difficult to find the time to sit down and collect my thoughts. The fact that conferences are so whirlwind and busy is why I like them — but, is not the best for blogging.
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Thoughtful Ideas
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19 Nov 2009 | 9:25 am
19 Nov 2009 | 9:25 amChina, Interest, and TaxesChina’s central bank, the China Investment Corporation, and other Chinese entities hold well over a trillion dollars in securities of U.S. federal debt and U.S. government sponsored enterprises. What is not widely understood is that the tens of billions of dollars of interest earned on these holdings are tax free. China piles up billions more simply collecting tax-free interest.Democrats are proposing new taxes at an unprecedented rate to finance the extension of health insurance, new job creation, deficit reduction, and who knows what else. They include higher… -
17 Nov 2009 | 8:55 am
17 Nov 2009 | 8:55 amObama in China: Learn from ChinaAnalysts, pundits, and numerous China experts keep naysaying China’s economic growth. Sooner or later, they say, China will undergo a financial and economic implosion that hit Western economies in 2008-09.They are wrong because they underestimate China. Chinese laborers work six-day, sixty-hour weeks, which compensates for a raft of other problems. Hard work is a key to China’s success.Many of the pundit-analyst-experts lack long-term vision. I first saw Shenzhen in 1963 from the hills above the Lok Ma Chau lookout in Hong Kong. Shenzhen then was a small… -
16 Nov 2009 | 7:47 am
16 Nov 2009 | 7:47 amConfucius Redux: Obama in ChinaObama’s travels in China are a good time to take in some Chinese history and culture.When the Communists took over China and established the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949, an early goal was to increase literacy. To that end, Chinese linguists introduced "simplified characters," which reduced the number of strokes needed to memorize more complex traditional characters. Despite this massive national undertaking, Shanghai-based China Eastern Airlines, which provided the ramp on which Obama descended from Air Force One, still uses the traditional… -
15 Nov 2009 | 4:21 pm
15 Nov 2009 | 4:21 pmImmigration Reform: A Path to Citizenship?It is said that millions of illegal aliens in the United States make an economic contribution by doing jobs that other Americans won’t do. This is one of the key arguments made by proponents of immigration reform who advocate amnesty, a path to citizenship for those living in the shadows of American life.On purely economic grounds, apart from considerations of the rule of law, the argument might make sense in the context of a full employment economy. But does it hold with unemployment exceeding 10 percent. If those having dropped out of the labor… -
15 Oct 2009 | 9:24 am
15 Oct 2009 | 9:24 amThursday’s MusingsJob creation is the top concern of the Obama administration and Congressional Democrats. The several million lost jobs and millions more underemployed are creating real hardship for the affected, and imperiling Democrat election prospects in 2010 and 2012. Imagine, then, that China has to create 15 million jobs a year to keep pace with its graduates and those moving from the countryside to cities. And, for the most part, it has succeeded.It would be good for the U.S. dollar to lose its reserve currency status. The U.S. is able to issue debt in its own currency. If it could…
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Folding@home
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Changes to psummary files in the works
18 Nov 2009 | 10:48 amWe will be adding one new field to the psummary web pages (eg, http://fah-web.stanford.edu/psummary.html) to include a new part of FAH stats. We will give more info soon, but for now, please note the additional column on the far right. For third party tools which parse these web pages, we have added the column at the far right in the hopes that this would not break current tools' parsing routines. Note that we are also looking in developing more systematic ways to interact with third party utilities, although that is still in the works. For now, we will give heads up to changes… -
stats hiccup -- we're on it
12 Nov 2009 | 6:54 amThere was a problem with the stats server over the night. We got to it first thing in the morning (around 6:30am pacific time), but it looks like a few stats updates were missed. The missed data is backed up on another machine and we can re-enter it. However, we typically take a couple of days to re-enter it, to make sure it is done right.So, the bottom line is that the stats system is back up, will we recredit some missing WUs not credited over the night, but this will take a couple of days to complete. Sorry for the delay on the recredit, but it's good to make sure we do it… -
Updates on new cores: Protomol and GPU3 core
22 Oct 2009 | 10:07 amThere has been a lot of work on updating the Protomol core to bring it in line with the other cores in Folding@home. I'm happy to say that a lot of progress has been made and it's looking much better. Joe will continue to test it, but it looks close to be moving to the next levels of QA.The GPU3 core is also moving along. It will be called core_15 (the natural next number in the GPU series). The main changes there have been to incorporate the updated GPU code from OpenMM. OpenMM was based on our FAH GPU MD code to start, but has had several enhancements and additions. In… -
New servers coming soon
13 Oct 2009 | 7:01 pmWe've ordered a new class of servers which should make a big impact on FAH server load, and also allow us to release several new big projects with more WUs. We're very excited about this since we've been limited by server space recently, which has also lead to WU shortages. The new servers each have 24 x 2TB drives, so we should have plenty of space.The servers should physically arrive next week, so including set up time, WU testing protocols, etc, it will still take a few weeks to get the new WUs out broadly, but at least the ball is rolling. -
Update on new FAH cores and clients
25 Sep 2009 | 11:42 amWe have been pretty busy with new cores for FAH and I wanted to give donors an update.1) SMP2: Gromacs and Desmond. Much effort has gone into our "SMP2" project, the codename for the second generation SMP client. The main goal here was to make it MUCH easier to use. In order to do that, it meant getting rid of our use of MPI. We have had two approaches to this. Both ditch MPI by using threads instead. One was to switch to a new piece of software for the core. This has led to the "Desmond" core, based on software from DE Shaw Research. The second approach…
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Stanford MBA Admission Blog
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Winter Campus Visit Event Registration Starts 30 November 2009
19 Nov 2009 | 1:28 pmOur academic calendar is materializing for the Winter quarter. This means it's time to open registration for our on-campus events. On Monday, 30 November 2009, initial registration will open for Winter class visits and information sessions. The first opportunity for class visits will be Monday, 11 January 2010. In December, once our class enrollment numbers are confirmed, we will post additional spots for class visits. As I mentioned in my previous blog entry, attending our on-campus events is neither required nor expected. Our events offer a chance to experience a day at the GSB, but do not… -
Myra Strober: Thirty Five Years of Gender Scholarship
11 Nov 2009 | 9:59 amMyra Strober, Professor of Economics, reflects on 35 years of research on gender issues and her role in spearheading Stanford University's first Center for Research on Women (now known as the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research). The first woman to join the faculty at the Graduate School of Business, Strober recalls the path that led her to her lifelong interest in the economics of work and family. Thanks to Theresa Johnston who interviewd Professor Strober and to photographer Ashley Tindall. Full Story -
Round One Interviews Begin
2 Oct 2009 | 3:47 pmToday we extended our first interview invitation for the 2009-2010 application year. This is just the first invitation of many, but we thought it was worth celebrating. Just as a reminder, the Round One application deadline is 7 October. We will be extending interview invitations up until the decision notification deadline of 16 December. -
2009 Siebel Scholars
18 Sep 2009 | 3:36 pmWe're happy to announce that Stanford GSB students Ashley Evans, Kenneth Hammond, Andy Martin, Matthew Skaruppa, and Iain Ware (all MBA 2010s) received the distinguished Siebel Scholarship. The award recognizes students for their academic achievement, leadership, and citizenship within the Business School community during their first year. Along with receiving a $35,000 tuition grant, scholars have the opportunity to serve as key advisors to the Siebel Foundation. We are proud to have Ashley, Kenneth, Andy, Matthew, Iain, at the GSB! Read more -
Registration for Fall Campus Visit Events Available 9 Sept 2009
4 Sep 2009 | 4:45 pmGreetings from the Stanford MBA Admissions Office. After a quiet summer, it is time to welcome our students and prospective students to campus. On Wednesday, 9 Sept 2009, registration will open for Fall class visits and information sessions. Our events will begin on Monday, 28 Sept 2009. As soon as our academic calendar is finalized, we will make additional class visits opportunities available. While we encourage you to visit the Stanford GSB and get to know our program better, a campus visit is neither required nor expected. Out of fairness to all applicants, we do not give preferential…
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Philosophy Talk: The Blog
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200 and Counting!
15 Nov 2009 | 9:55 amHelp Us Celebrate 200 Episodes of Philosophy Talk!Our 200th episode is coming up, and to mark the occassion we're compiling a Philosophical Top 10 List.What burning issue do you think philosophers and Philosophy Talk should tackle in the years ahead?Send your suggestions for our Philosophical Top 10 list to comments@philosophytalk.org or post them here on our blog. We will be monitoring the blog during the show. -
Does Postmodernism Mean Moral Relativism?
13 Sep 2009 | 5:14 pmFor those not in the KALW Broadcast area, we will be re-airing our episode on Post-Modernism during this coming week. So we're moving an old blog post by our guest Gary Aylesworth, written when this episode originally aired, to the top of the blog. posted by Gary Aylesworth Toward the end of last Sunday’s broadcast of Philosophy Talk, a caller asked whether the “moral relativism” supposedly rampant in our time was part of postmodernism. While I would certainly agree that the current hysteria over moral relativism is a postmodern phenomenon, I don’t agree that postmodern thought takes… -
Am I a Postmodernist
13 Sep 2009 | 5:00 pmFor those not in the KALW Broadcast area, we will be re-airing our episode on Post-Modernism during this coming week. So we're moving an old blog post by our own John Perry -- written when this episode originally aired, to the top of the blog. Am I a Postmodernist? John Perry The term ``postmodern’’ came into use as a description of certain trends in architecture, art, and literature in the 1970’s, although the trends it describes reach back earlier in the twentieth century, to Joyce and Finnegan’s Wake in the case of literature, and to the 1950’s at least in the case of… -
The Post-Modern Family Values: Open Blog Entry
13 Sep 2009 | 8:26 amposted by Ken TaylorIt's pledge week on KALW, our host station. And we're doing a live pledge show that will only be heard on that station and not on our affiliates around the country. But if you'd like to tune it, you can do so at 10am PST time, on KALW's Website where the show is streamed live. Join the conversation. Of course, even if you can't hear a broadcast version of the show, we will eventually put the streaming version up on our own website, from which you can also purchase an downloadable… -
Work and the Self
6 Sep 2009 | 6:40 amThis post was originally published back in January of 2008, when the episode on work -- which was actually recorded in October of 2007 -- first aired. I thought it would be interesting to republish it at the top of the blog as we re-air that episode. posted by Ken Taylor Today's episode was on Work. Our guest was Al Gini from Loyola University of Chicago. He's a philosopher by trade, the author of a number of books about work and the self, and the resident philosopher at WBEZ public radio in Chicago. The episode was recorded a couple of months ago, back in late October, in front of a live,…
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Jackson Blog
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Who Let The Dogs Out?
19 Nov 2009 | 4:46 pmWhat happens when a top dog doesn't have his day? On his blog Stanford Professor Bob Sutton discusses research into organizational behavior when high-testosterone individuals are subjugated to those with low testosterone. Some experiments suggest that when 'naturally dominating' individuals are not given high status but are kept lower down the totem pole, organizations perform less effectively. People seem to sense that something is "out of whack", and lose confidence in the group. So what are the implications for corporations who always want that top efficiency? Give their top dogs free… -
Nobels Don't Foretell
19 Nov 2009 | 4:17 pmThe US won 70% of the Nobel awards this year, but the prize is a lagging indicator; Nobels are usually given to scientists at the end of their careers. Are we looking back through a time tunnel, and do these American achievements reflect the past instead of the future? An article by Fareed Zakaria Is America Losing Its Mojo in the November 23rd issue of Newsweek discusses the possibility that we are falling dangerously behind the rest of the world in innovation. For example, Zakaria claims we are far behind the rest of the world in one key resource: human capital. Our students are not… -
Googled
16 Nov 2009 | 2:26 pmKen Auletta, "America's premier media scribe", has written a new book "Googled: The End of the World as We Know It.". Auletta spent 2 1/2 years working on the book, interviewing 150 former and current employees, including founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. He came to see the 11-year-old Google - which now produces two-thirds of all Internet searches in the United States and last year had revenue of nearly $22 billion - as full of brilliance and idealism, contradictions and vulnerabilities. Read about his recent book reading held at Google headquarters in Mountain View. Also check out this… -
Blue Ribbon Blogs
13 Nov 2009 | 6:18 pmGuy Kawasaki on his blog cites the 19 bloggers that Inc. magazine thinks you should read. Included among them is Kawasaki's blog, but we're happy to report that GSB Alum Seth Godin's blog also made the grade. Check it out. -
Tristes Tropiques
11 Nov 2009 | 5:04 pmThomas Friedman makes a powerful argument for rain forest management and preservation in his November 11, 2009 op-ed piece for the New York Times. Friedman claims that the amount of CO2 emitted collectively into the atmosphere by all the cars, trucks, planes, trains and each year is actually less than the carbon emissions that result every year from the chopping down and clearing of tropical forests in places like Brazil, Indonesia and the Congo. We are losing a forest the size of New York State every year. Friedman's strategy is to make saving the rain forest more profitable than clearing…
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Folding@home
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Changes to psummary files in the works
18 Nov 2009 | 10:48 amWe will be adding one new field to the psummary web pages (eg, http://fah-web.stanford.edu/psummary.html) to include a new part of FAH stats. We will give more info soon, but for now, please note the additional column on the far right. For third party tools which parse these web pages, we have added the column at the far right in the hopes that this would not break current tools' parsing routines. Note that we are also looking in developing more systematic ways to interact with third party utilities, although that is still in the works. For now, we will give… -
stats hiccup -- we're on it
12 Nov 2009 | 6:54 amThere was a problem with the stats server over the night. We got to it first thing in the morning (around 6:30am pacific time), but it looks like a few stats updates were missed. The missed data is backed up on another machine and we can re-enter it. However, we typically take a couple of days to re-enter it, to make sure it is done right.So, the bottom line is that the stats system is back up, will we recredit some missing WUs not credited over the night, but this will take a couple of days to complete. Sorry for the delay on the recredit, but it's good to… -
Updates on new cores: Protomol and GPU3 core
22 Oct 2009 | 10:07 amThere has been a lot of work on updating the Protomol core to bring it in line with the other cores in Folding@home. I'm happy to say that a lot of progress has been made and it's looking much better. Joe will continue to test it, but it looks close to be moving to the next levels of QA.The GPU3 core is also moving along. It will be called core_15 (the natural next number in the GPU series). The main changes there have been to incorporate the updated GPU code from OpenMM. OpenMM was based on our FAH GPU MD code to start, but has had several… -
New servers coming soon
13 Oct 2009 | 7:01 pmWe've ordered a new class of servers which should make a big impact on FAH server load, and also allow us to release several new big projects with more WUs. We're very excited about this since we've been limited by server space recently, which has also lead to WU shortages. The new servers each have 24 x 2TB drives, so we should have plenty of space.The servers should physically arrive next week, so including set up time, WU testing protocols, etc, it will still take a few weeks to get the new WUs out broadly, but at least the ball is rolling. -
Update on new FAH cores and clients
25 Sep 2009 | 11:42 amWe have been pretty busy with new cores for FAH and I wanted to give donors an update.1) SMP2: Gromacs and Desmond. Much effort has gone into our "SMP2" project, the codename for the second generation SMP client. The main goal here was to make it MUCH easier to use. In order to do that, it meant getting rid of our use of MPI. We have had two approaches to this. Both ditch MPI by using threads instead. One was to switch to a new piece of software for the core. This has led to the "Desmond" core, based on software from DE Shaw…
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metacool
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Circles of influence
18 Nov 2009 | 3:34 pmAs is her way, Rosabeth Moss Kanter has written an essay which not only hits the the nail on the head, but then knocks it clear though to the other side. Talking about leadership and power in our connected world, she crisply articulates what it means to exert gravitational pull as opposed to hierarchical power. Here's an excerpt:Today, people with power and influence derive their power from their centrality within self-organizing networks that might or might not correspond to any plan on the part of designated leaders. Organization structure in vanguard companies involves… -
metacool Thought of the Day
16 Nov 2009 | 8:14 pm"I'm not sure what a fairy tale is. In terms of the fact that taking something which was on its knees and almost finished, and arriving where we have today is for me an exceptional experience. Just seeing the resolve of people who didn't give up. They were facing being put out on the street and we said 'we don't know what's going to happen but we need your support because if it can happen, without your support, we won't be in a position to do it. And they just did."- Ross Brawn -
Principles 1 & 2 at work: Sam Martin on man spaces
12 Nov 2009 | 10:32 amI really like this talk by Sam Martin about "man spaces". Same came up with this really interesting talk by putting Principles 1 and 2 to work: Experience the world instead of talking abou experiencing the world See and hear with the mind of a child His talk isn't the kind of thing you could whip up out of one's imagination alone, but it does depend on his intellect to synthesize the wonderful narrative we hear above. Taking the time to get out in to the world, and then having the ability to see clearly, are two keys to bringing great stuff to life.Great… -
A tribute to friends and friendship
8 Nov 2009 | 3:30 pmAt the end of the film Truth in 24, Howden Haynes (race winner Tom Kristensen's race engineer) admits that his team's victory has left him emotionally numb: he's not elated, he's not sad, he's just kind of there, hovering above his elated peers, not able to experience everything you'd expect him to be feeling after having guided his drivers to an underdog victory over the course of 24 grueling hours at Le Mans. I've seen the movie many times (it's my favorite bit of in-flight entertainment), but I could never quite understand why Haynes reacted that way… -
Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness
31 Oct 2009 | 3:29 pmFinally got me a proper racing helmet! A boyhood dream come true.Many thanks to everyone who helped me pick the right one and get it set up with graphics: Jeff, Katie, Gerry, Diem, David, and Helen.And I'd like to thank my sponsors, blah blah blah blah metacool.
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simon jackman's blog
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mprobit in Stata is…
19 Nov 2009 | 4:47 pmNot what you might think. Take the MNL model (with IIA etc) and add a probit link. It is odd that they would call that multinomial probit. Most people would understand “multinomial probit” as a model for multinomial outcomes with multivariate normal disturbances (in general, with non-zero covariances). A screen full into the documentation for Stata’s mprobit it says: The error terms are assumed to be independent, standard normal, random variables. See [R] asmprobit for the case where the latent-variable errors are correlated or heteroskedastic and you have… -
FFMeta
14 Nov 2009 | 1:54 amA recent e-mail correspondent writes: I have a degree in applied statistics, and I’m really interested in the lectures notes you put on your website about Bayesian approaches and simulations. That’s something i need to discover and it looks really rich and interesting. I also use R on a very regular basis. The purpose of this email is that I’m using LaTeX to write some documents, and i can’t find anything on how to install the FF Meta police, which is very clear and easy to read. Have you anything about that by any chance? First of all, I should take the Bayes notes… -
Stupak amendment
9 Nov 2009 | 2:27 amSome graphs looking at the voting on the Stupak amendment. This roll call sliced up the Democrats pretty nicely. Thumbnails below link to PDFs. Democrats only in the 1st graph, looking at the relationship between the Ayes and Noes and Obama vote share in the representatives’ respective districts. -
House vote, Health Care, by ideal point
8 Nov 2009 | 5:11 pmAnd one more look at last night’s vote, this time with each representative’s estimated ideal point (based on the entire 111th House thus far) as the predictor, similar to what I did for the Coburn amendment in the Senate. Update: and yet another graphical rendering (click on the thumbnail for the PDF). -
Democratic split on Health Care final passage
8 Nov 2009 | 1:45 amHere is a quick look at how Democrats split on the House vote on the Affordable Health Care for America Act, as a (logistic) function of Obama vote in their district. Davis (AL-7) and Kucinch (OH-10) are the big “errors” among the “Noe” votes; Kucinch had been telegraphing his opposition to a too meek reform bill for some time. Davis is the same boat (“is this the best we can do?“). Marion Berry (AR-1) is the biggest “error” among the “Aye” votes; he voted yes while representing an Arkansas district where McCain got 59% of the vote…
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The Desire to Blog is No Sign of Anything to Say
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The Mystery (to me) of Climate Change
2 Nov 2009 | 1:46 pmI was just reading a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science about how the glaciers on Mount Kilimanjaro are melting – the evidence appears to be irrefutable. It is still a great mystery to me about why the topic of global warming/climate change is such a political issue. Do the opponents of measures to combat climate change truly believe that it’s a conspiracy conjured up to punish/regulate big business (e.g., the polluters) or to gain political power (e.g., big government control) via the passage of legislation? Sure, there are some scientists (or “arm… -
Interesting Conversation on a Recent Flight
26 Oct 2009 | 2:35 pmI’ll admit it – I don’t often talk to strangers on airplane flights (or conversely, they don’t often talk to me). Maybe it’s because when I get to my plane seat I quickly set into passing the time (reading, listening to music/audio, sometimes sleeping) and people might interpret this as aloofness. Some conversations that I have had were fascinating such as when I shared a flight with a world-renown judge of cat shows. I did have another interesting one recently with a young man traveling to San Francisco from the East Coast. This kid (he told me he was 24) looked… -
My Visit to ITER
22 Oct 2009 | 12:14 pmSeveral weeks ago I had the unique opportunity to visit and give a talk at ITER (www.iter.org), the multinational laboratory for building a fusion reactor. This visit was especially meaningful since my younger son (Christopher) works at the lab. The goals of ITER are quite lofty – to harness the energy of the stars and thereby provide mankind with a safe, cheap, and inexhaustible source of energy for the future. However, aside from the value of the science, the way that they are approaching this goal and their commitment to the environment impressed me deeply. ITER is a collaboration… -
The California Jug Band Association and the San Francisco Jug Band Festival
18 Jul 2008 | 12:13 pmAs those of you who know me are aware, jug band music is one of my life-long passions. That’s why several years ago some of us formed the California Jug Band Association (CJBA), a 501(c)(3) educational non-profit. Now before you laugh, the CJBA has really filled a niche because jug bands and jug band enthusiasts, old and young, have “come out of the woodwork.” The CJBA now has festivals all over Northern California and a debut festival is planned for Southern California in 2009. The next festival will be in San Francisco next month and promises to be great. Please take a… -
My Grandchild is a Pig
26 Nov 2007 | 10:28 pmNow ordinarily, that would be a terrible thing to say about one’s grandchild, but in the absence of any human grandchildren (at this time), it’s true. We had a great Thanksgiving with my older son, Andrew, at his home in Seattle. Andrew, indeed, has a pet pig, named Wilbur, which, in a sense, makes me the grandpa of a pig. Like any other proud grandfather of a pig, I can take pride in Winston Churchill’s words, ” A cat looks down upon a man, and a dog looks up to a man, but a pig will look a man in the eye and see his equal.” Here is Wilbur and me doing just that…
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LibraryLaw Blog
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Crews: Important studies on ereserves
17 Nov 2009 | 12:18 am(posted by Peter Hirtle) One of the more interesting recent conflicts in the Georgia ereserves case concerns an expert report on ereserves prepared by Kenneth Crews of Columbia for the defendants. The plaintiffs tried to stop the report from being entered into the trial, but the judge allowed it. The plaintiffs then filed their responses to the expert report and Crews has responded to them. I had been hoping that the expert report might show up on the Justia web site for the case or in the RECAP files, but it hasn’t. I therefore got a copy of the report and its appendices from… -
Copyright book now on Amazon
15 Nov 2009 | 1:46 pm(posted by Peter Hirtle)Print copies of Copyright and Cultural Institutions, whose publication I announced here, are now available from Amazon.com at a discounted price of $31.54. It remains available for purchase at CreateSpace, and for free download through SSRN and eCommons@Cornell. -
Action alert: reader privacy
11 Nov 2009 | 7:42 pmFrom Larry Siems, Director, Freedom to Write and International ProgramsDear Core Freedoms Friends and Supporters, Now is the time to raise your voice in support of reader privacy. This week, the House Judiciary Committee approved a bill to amend the Patriot Act’s bookstore and library provisions. This proposed bill would essentially accomplish the principal goals we’ve been working towards with our partners in the Campaign for Reader Privacy. The USA Patriot Amendments Act of 2009 (H.R. 3845) will now head to the floor for a vote, which could come any day. Your representatives need to… -
Photography of and in libraries
9 Nov 2009 | 3:37 amJessamyn West started a fascinating exchange when she reported on her attempts to photograph the Des Moines, Iowa public library. In addition to the extensive comments on her post, it also led to an interesting exchange on an list for architects. Because I know that Carolyn Wright, the Photo Attorney, is interested in efforts to restrict photography in public places, I shared the exchange with her and she weighed in on the legal issues. Anyone interested in policies regarding photographs in library buildings should read all the exchanges, but here is what I have taken away: Copyright… -
GBS: A Legislative Solution?
8 Nov 2009 | 4:18 am(posted by Peter Hirtle) Many of the critics of the proposed Google Book Settlement (GBS) have pointed out that it attempts to use the class action mechanism to effect what should be a legislative prerogative. James Grimmelmann’s amicus brief on behalf of the Institute for Information Law and Policy, for example, argues that the settlement “inappropriately attempts to solve a legislative problem through a class action settlement.” Most recently, Pamela Samuelson has recently written that “The GBS settlement contravenes core rule of law principles of our society. To accomplish such…
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SSIR Articles
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What Workforce Crisis?
19 Nov 2009 | 7:18 pmAmerica’s nonprofit organizations have great difficulty attracting and retaining talent—or so recent newspaper and magazine articles would lead their readers to believe. These articles cite low wages, large student debts, the limited appeal of many frontline nonprofit service jobs, restricted advancement opportunities, and inadequate benefits as causes of the workforce crisis. Yet nonprofit employment has actually been booming, growing at twice the average annual growth rate of for-profit employment between 1990 and 2006. Even during the last recession, between 2002 and 2004, nonprofits… -
Second Chances and a Third Bottom Line
19 Nov 2009 | 6:46 pmInside the steel and glass office towers of Chile’s capital, Santiago, computers, printers, and faxes hum. Out on the streets, business executives and taxi drivers chat away on some of Chile’s 14 million cellular telephones. Urbanized, well educated, and home to 17 million people, Chile is one of the most prosperous countries in Latin America. And as is the case in the United States, all its electronic gadgets are beginning to lead to a whole lot of electronic waste. The country currently discards 300,000 computers a year, and by 2020 it will be grappling with an annual pile of 1.7… -
Grassroots Concrete
19 Nov 2009 | 6:26 pmOn the morning of Jan. 26, 2001, a magnitude 7.6 earthquake struck the western Indian state of Gujarat. More than 20,000 people were killed and 160,000 injured, many of them crushed by falling buildings. International aid agencies flocked to the scene and began reconstruction. One year later, civil engineer Elizabeth Hausler traveled to Gujarat on a Fulbright scholarship, hoping to learn how she could use her skills to build homes that withstand tectonic shifts. She found that many survivors didn’t want to live in their new, donor-built earthquake-resistant houses because they were made… -
Endowment for a Rainy Day
19 Nov 2009 | 5:54 pmJudging from media accounts, U.S. nonprofits are facing unprecedented, if not catastrophic, financial distress because of endowment losses. Hiring is being frozen, facility maintenance is being deferred, programs are being dropped, performance seasons are being shortened, and construction projects are being cut back or even halted. As the president of Harvard University, Drew Gilpin Faust, put it when defending her decision to sharply reduce expenditures following a 30 percent drop in the value of the school’s endowment, “Tinkering around the edges will not be enough.” Harvard isn’t… -
Research: Start them Younger
19 Nov 2009 | 6:00 amVOLUNTEERS Start Them Younger As wealthier nations age, nonprofits are retooling their operations to accommodate an older volunteer workforce. But they would be remiss if they didn’t also look for help at the other end of the life span, reports Charlene S. Shannon, an expert in recreation and leisure studies at the University of New Brunswick in Canada. She documents how “younger youth”— children between the ages of 8 and 12—are an energetic, useful, yet largely overlooked pool of volunteer labor. Interviewing younger youth and executive directors at Boys & Girls Clubs in…
