Farm Report

NEWS FROM INSIDE CAMPUS DRIVE AND BEYOND

Quote "I tried to act like the lawyers I've seen in movies, but it just wasn't working." -- Aaron Bell, a senior, on his efforts to convince University administrators to allow photos from the freshman Facebook to be posted online.

Celluloid Stanford LIGHTS, CAMERA: Jordan at bat. Courtesy Stanford Archives Turn-of-the-century trivia: Herbert Hoover was admitted to Stanford's first freshman class as a "special" after he failed the entrance exam. Jane Stanford sold strings of pearls to pay faculty salaries when the family fortune got tied up in court. The University used to shut down for one day each spring so everyone could attend the faculty-senior class baseball game, which featured President David Starr Jordan in padded knickers. These are among the nuggets revealed in a two-part documentary, Becoming Stanford: The Making of an American University. Backed by the President's Fund, produced by the Stanford Channel and first screened in mid-October at Reunion Homecoming, the film was made in the style of Ken Burns's The Civil War -- constructed from diaries and letters, interviews with historians and professors, and rich archival images. It covers University history from the 1852 arrival of Leland Stanford in California to the 1991 Centennial celebration. Says the documentary's director, Anne Flatte, MA '95: "It treats the University as the main character instead of [showcasing] the many famous faces who studied here, as previous films have done." Price: $39.95; $29.95 for alumni. To order: (650) 723-5100.

Root of the Rivalry Rod Searcey Don't mess with the Tree. That's the message from junior Evan Meagher, this year's incarnation of the Cardinal mascot. He is under the protection of a group of burly undergraduates who call themselves the TPG -- Tree Protection Gangstaz. His handmade costume (a palm, not the traditional redwood) is moved to a different "safe house" each night, and it's equipped with a global positioning device. "I can track the Tree at all times within a 1,000-mile radius," Meagher claims. The dancing shrub has reason for caution as the November 20 Big Game draws near. In recent years the rivalry with Cal has turned increasingly ugly. A rundown: 1998 Cal students steal the Tree costume. Threatened with arrest and a ban of Cal mascot Oski the Bear, they return the Tree three weeks before Big Game. 1997 Twenty-three are injured and six arrested when enraged Cal fans storm the Stanford Stadium field after a 21-20 Big Game loss. 1996 Cal fans tackle the Tree after another Big Game defeat. The mascot loses several branches. 1995 At a Stanford-Cal basketball game, the Tree and Oski are ejected for fighting. 1992 Cal fans pelt the Band with fruit, attack the Tree and tackle a Stanford yell leader.

Rod Searcey

At the Top of Their Game The numbers say it all: 354 varsity athletes, 25 NCAA titles, 117 full athletic scholarships, 10 alums playing in the WNBA. Those were some of the stats that helped convince the editors of Sports Illustrated for Women to name Stanford the No.1 college for women athletes. Farm athletes pop up throughout the magazine's fall issue. Freshman volleyball phenom Logan Tom made the cover and was the subject of a doting profile inside. Olympic swimming hopeful Jenny Thompson, '95 (who still works out with the Stanford team), let a reporter and photographer follow her around for a "day in the life" feature. And junior Julia Stamps and senior Sally Glynn were tagged as the leaders of the nation's most promising cross-country team. "It's great that our athletic program is recognized," says women's basketball coach Tara VanDerveer. "It's well-deserved." Then again, it didn't hurt that two of the cover story's three writers -- Kelli Anderson, '84, and Ivan Maisel, '81 -- are alums. If You've Got the Time, He's Got the Book CHEERS: Myers at work Courtesy Ben Myers On his first night at Stanford-in-Oxford, Ben Myers was dragged on a pub crawl. "Here were 50 jet-lagged college students, some of whom were under 21 and weren't even allowed to drink 12 hours before," says Myers, '92. "It was every British person's nightmare." Then and there, the group split into those who liked British brews and those who didn't. Myers loved them. After graduation, he dashed back to England to learn more. A year later, he returned to the United States and took up freelance beer writing. Now he has written Ben Myers' Best American Beers: An Enthusiast's Guide to the Most Distinctive Craft Brews of the U.S. and Canada (CLB International, 1999; $9.99). To produce the pint-sized guide, Myers and a team of writers sipped their way through 100 craft breweries. In addition to profiling each brewer, the book recommends specific suds in the manner of a wine guide ("complex, fruity, with citrus-hop notes") and provides a glossary for those who can't tell an ale from a lager. The book, Myers says, should "get people excited about beer and expand their beer horizons." Not to mention their waistlines.

Read Her Clips NEW FACE OF HP: Fiorina Associated Press/Hewlett-Packard Co. Hewlett-Packard's new CEO, Carly Fiorina, '76, has her work cut out for her. As the first woman to head a Dow 30 company, the former medieval history major and UCLA Law School dropout hopes to revamp her company's stodgy image while strengthening its Internet services and jazzing up marketing efforts. It's too early to know whether the former star executive of Lucent Technologies will succeed, but she had one thing going for her from the moment she accepted the job last summer -- great press. A sampling: Business Week: "Carly Fiorina has a silver tongue and an iron will." Financial Times: "Affable and strikingly confident, she is a natural leader." Forbes: "This may be the boldest move for HP since William Hewlett and David Packard started the company in a Palo Alto garage 60 years ago." Fortune: "Her ascent continues." New York Times: "What no one questioned today were Ms. Fiorina's leadership skills." Wall Street Journal: "On a trip to China . . . [she] had to match her hosts drink for drink, and she managed to outlast them all." Los Angeles Times: "Fiorina is widely seen as a good bet to push slow-moving HP ahead in the fast-moving Internet-centric economy." Newsweek: "At Lucent, she was legendary for her crushing travel schedule, as well as her deft human touch." San Francisco Chronicle: "In the 1970s she held a lowly part-time gig with a local technology firm. It was in the shipping department of HP."

STILL SERVING SCIENCE: The Dish Linda Cicero

Hikers, Leave the Phone at Home Call it a close encounter -- of the cellular kind. Mike Cousins was making his daily drive up to the Dish one afternoon last fall when he spotted a hiker gabbing on a wireless phone. "I just suggested he not use it so close to our facility," says Cousins. "If the timing is right, it ruins the data." Such are the pitfalls of operating the world's third-largest radio telescope amid some of the busiest airwaves in the country. Cousins, a program manager for SRI International, oversees the government-owned Dish on a hilltop above campus. The 35-year-old telescope has become increasingly popular among scientists and government agencies since it was restored to full operation 10 years ago. It's used for everything from calibrating satellites to measuring the expansion of the universe. Now the trick is screening out the ever-increasing interference from radar, airplane transmissions, TV stations, pagers and cell phones. "There's no way to hide anymore, and it's getting worse," says Ivan Linscott, a senior research associate at STARLab, Stanford's Space Telecommunications and Radioscience Laboratory. Linscott and his colleagues have been developing software that isolates such phenomena as the faint pulsations of distant black holes received by the Dish. At least one PhD dissertation has been written on the so-called filters. "At its best," Linscott says, "this lets you get the kind of data you'd get from the back side of the moon" -- a location that, for now, is blissfully free of phone-toting hikers.