Farm Report

NEWS FROM INSIDE CAMPUS DRIVE AND BEYOND

Quote "It's fun to please him and make him proud. I think that swimming 'fly is the easiest way to do that." -- Dod Wales, a senior and co-captain of the Stanford swim team, after winning the 100-meter butterfly at the NCAA championship meet -- the same event his father won 32 years ago

Expect Fireworks When the World Cup Hits the Farm GETTING HER KICKS: U.S. team co-captain Foudy handles the ball at midfield. J. Brett Whitesell If all goes well, Julie Foudy will be back on campus for a special summer session. Foudy, '93, is co-captain of the U.S. national women's soccer team, which will host the women's World Cup matches this year. Competitors from 16 nations will play 32 games at six venues across the country -- and the semifinals will take place July 4 at Stanford Stadium. Foudy's team stands a good chance of making it to Stanford and, perhaps, to the finals at the Rose Bowl in Los Angeles. After all, with her help, the U.S. squad won the quadrennial World Cup championship in 1991, played in the semifinals in 1995 and took Olympic gold in 1996. Tony DiCicco, who coached that Olympic team, has praised Foudy for "the highest work rate of any central midfielder in the world." Off the field, Foudy has turned down a medical school scholarship and is pursuing a career in broadcasting. She made her TV debut as ESPN's in-studio analyst for the men's World Cup last summer. Television, she says, "is what I'm going to go after." But first, she's hoping for a glorious Fourth on the Farm.

Linda Cicero

Slow Go on Zimbardo-Leonardo Picture Show DICAPRIO DEAL: Leo may star in a film based on Zimbardo's experiment. Greg Gorman/Outline A Hollywood minute can last a long time. Just ask psychology professor Philip Zimbardo, who has watched patiently over the last few years as studio executives, big-name directors and movie stars nibbled at the story of his famous 1971 prison experiment. The latest combination of players includes film studio Twentieth Century Fox and titan Leonardo DiCaprio, whose star power could, as they say, pump up the gross. DiCaprio would play one of the Stanford students who volunteered for an experiment simulating a prison environment. Zimbardo designed the study to find out what happens when you put good people in an evil place. What he learned is still being taught in psychology classes. Zimbardo divided 24 young men into two groups -- "guards" and "prisoners." He turned the basement of the psychology department into a mock prison, gave the prisoners ID numbers and uniforms, and set the two-week study in motion. After only six days, Zimbardo called off the experiment because of the cruelty and sadism exhibited by the guards. In February, Variety described the project as "close to a deal." If the picture is made, Zimbardo will be a consultant. But when spring quarter dawned, the movie was still up in the air. "As of now," Zimbardo says, "all talk, no action."

Rod Searcey

No. 303: Buy This Book After seven years of higher education, Jaysen Gillespie knew he was qualified to do at least one thing -- write a book of advice for college students. The idea came to him in December 1997 after he saw a row of books by the checkout counter at a store in his hometown, Atlanta. "There was Life's Little Instruction Book, The Job Hunter's Instruction Book, The Cat Lover's Instruction Book," says Gillespie, MA '96. "But nothing for college students." So over the next six months, he wrote one. Last summer, 5,000 copies of The College Student's Instruction Book came off press. Subtitled "302 ways to make your college experience more rewarding," the book is a combination of earnestly obvious suggestions (No. 32: Go see campus speakers; No. 220: Back up important files); tongue-in-cheek entries (No. 88: Don't date both roommates); and useful maxims that will make you nod in agreement as you read (No. 70: Don't fret over $10 if you already owe $25,000; No. 206: Shut off your alarm before you leave for breaks). "They're based on practical experience," says Gillespie, who did his undergrad years at Duke before coming to Stanford for a master's (and part of a PhD) in engineering-economic systems. One tip he took to heart -- No. 23: Be known as a source of good information. Is There a Rodeo Star in the House? WHOA, THERE: Surgeon Johnson, right, rides in the team-roping competition. Courtesy Bert Johnson "I'm a wanna-be cowboy who never got over it," says Bert Johnson, a rodeo honcho who also happens to be a gynecologic surgeon at the Medical School. Growing up in California's Central Valley, Johnson, '48, MD '52, bought his first horse at age 13. After a stint at Northwestern Medical School, where he did his residency, he hustled back to teach at Stanford and settled in Los Gatos. "When the other doctors were joining country clubs, I bought a ranch," says Johnson. Since 1960, Johnson has competed in the Salinas Rodeo every year. Last year he won the over-50 team-roping contest -- a two-person event in which one cowboy ropes a steer by the horns or neck and his partner ropes its hind feet. The team with the fastest time wins. Finishing first at Salinas, he says, is "the pinnacle, the World Series, the Final Four." Team roping is a dangerous event, but Johnson seems unfazed by the prospect of losing his fingers -- and thus his livelihood. "I teach residents not to make decisions out of fear," he says. Johnson is just as matter-of-fact with his patients. In post-op rounds, he advises that the best diet includes three to four servings of lean meat per week. Colleagues wince, but Johnson dismisses them. "There are a lot of tofu and vegetarian types around Stanford these days," he says. But not a lot of cowboys. Johnson, 71, plans to be back in Salinas this summer.

Rod Searcey

Songs of Stanford -- The Early Years When the Stanford Fleet Street Singers were building a repertoire in the early 1980s, they wanted to include historical Stanford tunes. But all they knew was the Stanford hymn ("Hail, Stanford, Hail") and "Come Join the Band." Digging through the archives of the music department, they hit pay dirt: a dozen Stanford songs written between 1901 and 1915. Alumni audiences loved the old stuff. Now Fleet Street has released some of these songs on a CD, Up Toward Mountains Higher. Numbers range from the spirited "Sons of the Stanford Red" ("Fight for the conquering Cardinal! / Over the foe let the victors go, / Triumphant march ahead!") to the wistfully romantic "Stanford Mandelay" ("For the dear old Quad at Stanford / Is the only place for me. / Through the Arboretum wheeling / With a pretty girl I know"). Produced with the help of the Stanford Alumni Association, the CD includes some of Fleet Street's recent -- and more irreverent -- songs, such as "Prayer to the God of Partial Credit" ("So when it's passing midnight, / Put your pencil away. / My advice to you, buckaroo, / is to get on your knees and pray"). It also contains the LSJUMB's rendition of "All Right Now" and Fleet Street's ever-popular 1987 rap version of the Stanford hymn. To order, call (800) 786-3738. Revenge of the Nerd A HEAD FOR TRIVIA: Elman knows his way around high tech. Peter Fox Forget thick glasses, pocket protectors and lousy social skills. Today's nerd, says Adam Elman, is more chic than geek. And Elman should know: in March he was named "Nerd for the New Millennium" after acing a 20-question quiz at San Jose's Tech Museum of Innovation. "I still think of 'nerd' as pejorative," says Elman, '94, MS '96, who admits to some embarrassment at being stuck with the moniker through 2999. "But I don't think of it as a title so much as that I'm a prototype for the nerd of the 21st century." Elman is well-versed in the trivia of 20th-century geekdom. Among the quiz questions he faced in the contest sponsored by website SiliconValley.com: •Which company fostered the development of UNIX? (AT&T.) •What are the five colors of Apple's new iMac? (Strawberry, lime, blueberry, tangerine and grape.) •What IBM RDBMS runs on NT, UNIX and IBM mainframes? (Everybody knows that: DB2.) He credits a Stanford class on computer history for teaching him some of the answers. Elman still possesses some old-fashioned nerd credentials: he has two degrees in computer science, works as a software programmer for Stanford's Internet publishing project, Highwire Press, and has owned 10 computers since he got his first machine (a Commodore VIC-20) at age 9. But there's more to Elman than machine code and databases. He still plays trumpet in the Stanford Band. He's also a member of Sinister Dexter, a swing, funk and blues combo that does gigs around campus. In fact, he plans to use the $1,000 he won in the contest to buy a device that can make CD recordings of his band. It doesn't get much cooler than that.