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Farm Report

CAMPUS NOTEBOOK   Tough Competition for the Class of 2004 A spot in the Class of 2004 is one of the hottest tickets around. This year, 2,391 students -- just 13 percent of the 18,338 who applied -- were offered admission, says Robert Kinnally, dean of admission. Ninety percent of those admitted rank in the top 10 percent of their high school classes, and more than half have straight-A records. The newly admitted frosh hail from every state and 44 countries. Thirty-six percent are from California. Just over half are members of minority groups. The students have until May to decide if they will accept the offer.   The Health Center Gets a New Home It's old. It's ugly. It's the source of many student complaints. Now the Board of Trustees has given preliminary approval for construction of a new facility to replace the Cowell Student Health Service building. University administrators say Cowell, built in 1965, has too few exam rooms and does not meet today's standards for seismic safety and access for the disabled. To comply with limits on construction set by Santa Clara County, builders will erect the new facility on what is now a parking lot next to Cowell, and then tear down the existing building. Construction of the $10 million, 30,000-square-foot facility is expected to begin by July 2001. The new building should be ready for use in the fall of 2002.   HighWire's Act Now Includes More Full Text For years, Stanford's HighWire Press has been the one-stop shop for online scientific articles -- provided you had a subscription. But now, publishers of the journals hosted by HighWire -- including those of the British Medical Association and the American Society for Microbiology -- provide free online access to the full text of more than 137,000 articles. The change makes HighWire (highwire.stanford.edu) home to the second-largest free full-text science archive in the world -- and the largest in the life sciences. HighWire also has developed a novel plan to preserve electronic articles by making multiple copies and storing them on different computers.   At Jasper Ridge, a $5 Million Makeover Since Stanford's founding in 1891, ecologists have flocked to land at the University's northwest border -- called Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve -- to do research and teach others about the environment. But in recent years, preserve director Philippe Cohen has concluded that the site's facilities are overused and outdated. In February, he announced plans to replace the old buildings with a $5 million, 10,000-square-foot research and educational center. The new building's design and construction will use methods that minimize its impact on the delicate environment, Cohen says.   For Humanities, a Boost from Casper For eight years, Gerhard Casper has led a university well-known for its prowess in science and technology. But during his last major speech, Stanford's president focused again on the humanities. In his March 2 state of the University address, Casper announced a grant to the Stanford Humanities Center to support three more years of presidential lectures and symposia. He also spoke about two new initiatives to support graduate students in the humanities. One, with the help of the Mellon Foundation, will endow 20 fellowships for doctoral candidates finishing their dissertations. The other will provide tuition-only fellowships to small departments that have little grant money available.   Harrison Takes the Women's Center Helm The Women's Center will have a new director in June. Laura Harrison, currently coordinator of the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender program at Ohio University, will lead the 28-year-old Stanford center, which provides programs and services for women in the Stanford community. Harrison earned her bachelor's degree in English and women's studies and her master's degree in counselor education at Ohio University, where she served as a resident director. She succeeds Fabienne McPhail, who resigned January 3.   Stanford Fights Back Against Hacker Attack Stanford and other universities, including UCLA and UC-Santa Barbara, were unwitting accomplices in "denial-of-service" hacker attacks on several major consumer websites in February. Hackers programmed a computer at Stanford's Hopkins Marine Station in Monterey to attack the website of the online auction house eBay. The attackers crippled eBay by flooding its site with messages, which prevented other users from gaining access. Stanford computer-security experts provided FBI agents with information that may help in the ongoing investigation.   After a Billing Glitch, the Bookstore Faces Fines The Stanford Bookstore double-billed customers and was slow to issue refunds -- and now it has to pay. That was the finding of a civil ruling in March by Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge William Martin. The Bookstore agreed to pay $100,000 in penalties. A software snafu led to double-charging customers who used credit cards for five days in October 1998. About 400 students who noticed the overbilling received refunds, but about $150,000 in erroneous charges remained unpaid until the Daily reported the problem in June 1999. History professor David Kennedy, '63, who chairs the Bookstore's board of directors, says he hopes the future of the store, now being run by the Follett Corp., will be smoother.