News from Inside Campus Drive and Beyond

EXECUTIVE DECISIONS

Off-Course Housing Site Solves Hole Problem

ROUGH GOING: A plan to put houses on the first fairway faced strong opposition.

Courtesy Stanford Golf Course

AN ISSUE that threatened to overshadow the otherwise upbeat first few weeks of John Hennessy's Stanford presidency appeared settled in early October when the University and the city of Palo Alto found an alternate site for a housing development that would have been built on part of the Stanford Golf Course.

Stanford had proposed building about 500 apartments and townhouses for faculty--housing that even critics of the plan concede is desperately needed--in an area that included the fairway of the first hole of the golf course. According to director of government and community relations Larry Horton, '62, MA '66, a combination of covenants, restrictions and University set-asides had narrowed the available sites for a new faculty "neighborhood" to a parcel of land just east of Junipero Serra Boulevard that incorporates the first fairway. "Believe me," Horton told a gathering of University administrators in early September, "the last thing anybody wants to do is build housing on the golf course."

But, by then, the plan had teed off the Stanford golf community--drawing criticism from golf professionals Tom Watson, '71, Notah Begay, '94, Tiger Woods, '98, and others. A letter to Hennessy signed by Watson et al said, "We know that the University is now in a period of rapid development, and that student and faculty housing is needed. However, while the University has its eye on new buildings and new programs, it should not be in such a rush toward the future that it abandons or abuses precisely those assets, such as the Golf Course, which have played a significant role in the University's history and its world stature."

Athletics director Ted Leland, PhD '83, at a press conference on September 22, outlined what he called Operation Hope Not, a redesign of the first seven holes of the course that would accommodate the loss of the first fairway but "preserve championship play." Acknowledging that the redesign was no substitute for the "architectural elegance" of the original, Leland said the University had run out of options and, failing an 11th hour development, would have no choice but to capture the first hole for the housing tract.

Eight days later, Hennessy and Palo Alto Mayor Liz Kniss announced a possible solution--amend a 1997 agreement and allow the University to build housing on 13 acres near Searsville Road and an adjacent 25-acre lot on Campus Drive. That area was previously off-limits because of a contract that restricted use of the land--a total of 108 acres abutting Sand Hill Road--to athletic fields, academic field research and open space until 2020.

The agreement was contingent on acceptance by the Palo Alto City Council and Palo Alto Planning Commission, but University officials were optimistic both bodies would affirm it. "This would be a happy outcome for all parties," Hennessy said.

"Certainly, President Hennessy and the city are to be congratulated for coming up with a plan that works for everybody," said Richard Harris, '68, a former captain of the Stanford golf team and an outspoken opponent of the plan to build on the first fairway.

SLEEP RESEARCH

One Peptide Short of Sweet Sleep

EMMANUEL MIGNOT'S recent finding might be compared to the discovery of insulin.

The Parisian-born associate professor of psychiatry, who directs the Stanford Center for Narcolepsy, and scientists in his lab spent 10 years mapping a specific gene in narcoleptic Dobermans. They took another year to apply those findings to studies of brain tissue from deceased human narcoleptics. They found thousands of hypocretin cells--a small peptide--in healthy brains. But diseased tissue had virtually none.

Now that the cause of some forms of narcolepsy has been identified, Mignot predicts that help soon will be on the way for an estimated 125,000 to 200,000 affected Americans, many of whom suffer paralyzing bouts of weakness and hallucinations.

Designing a drug to treat narcolepsy by replacing the missing hypocretin is "totally doable," Mignot says. But delivering it will be a challenge. Unlike insulin, which can be taken intravenously, hypocretin must go directly into the brain. So, while a substitute drug will be the immediate remedy, brain-cell transplantation likely will be the best long-term treatment.

Mignot's team reported its findings in Nature Medicine in September, the same month a UCLA team published similar findings in the competing journal Neutron. To reward his lab, Mignot took all 30 scientists to a hotel on Hawaii's Big Island, where they swam with turtles and considered the future direction their research might take.

"When you get a discovery like this, it's important to try to reflect," he says.

"We're all various varieties of dorks"

-- First year student Alex Robbins of Los Angleles, on the egalitarian, collegial ethos at Stanford.

Cardinal Numbers

STANFORD IN OCTOBER announced the beginning of the Campaign for Undergraduate Education with a fund-raising goal of $1 billion. Just how much is that?

Distance, in miles, of one billion dollar bills, laid end-to-end: 98,646

Number of undergraduates who could attend Stanford tuition-free, for four years, for $1 billion: 10,229

Undergrads who could attend Cal: 61,782

Undergrads who could attend the University of Arkansas: 84,517

Time, in years, the computer science department could run on $1 billion: 40

Years the classics department could run: 476

Home football games at which one could put a $100 bill on every seat in Stanford

Stadium: 116 (23 seasons)

Other universities that have successfully completed campaigns for $1 billion or more: 6

SOURCES: www.stanford.edu; registrar.berkeley.edu; www.uark.edu; Office of the Provost, Stanford University; The Chronicle of Higher Education.

VISITORS

Reading to Inspire Better Writing

WOMAN WARRIOR: Kingston aims to improve storytelling.

Courtesy Vintage International/Jerry Bauer

EVER BEEN SO INSPIRED by a book or poem that you've wanted to give writing a try, right then and there? Maxine Hong Kingston, UC-Berkeley professor and author of The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, China Men and Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book hopes to show a few lucky Stanford undergraduates how to jump in and begin writing. This winter, Kingston will inaugurate the Isaac and Madeline Stein Visiting Writers Program, which each year will invite an outstanding author to teach a seminar for one quarter in the English department's creative writing program.

"My plan is to give the students reading that will inspire their writing," Kingston says of Reading for Writers, the course she has designed. "While authors are telling us a story, they are also teaching us how to write that story." Kingston has told interviewers that she is looking for ways to make a nonviolent story more dramatic in her upcoming work, The Fifth Book of Peace, and she says she will use some of her own work to show students the step-by-step process of creating fiction.

Each participating author will be free to tailor the course to his or her interests. In addition, the broader campus will be treated to a public lecture and reading.

Coming next year? Indian writer Vikram Seth, ma '79, whose latest book is An Equal Music.

Head of the Class

SPYING FROM SPACE: Sidney Drell and William Perry, '49, MS '50 are among 10 scientists honored as "founders of national reconnaissance as a space discipline" by the National Reconnaissance Office, which uses satellites to collect information for the intelligence community. Drell is professor emeritus of theoretical physics and former deputy director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, and Perry, former U.S. Secretary of Defense, is the Michael and Barbara Berberian Professor of Management Science and Engineering.

TOP PROFS: Joanne Martin, the Fred H. Merrill Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Business School, has received the Distinguished Educator Award from the 10,000-member Academy of Management for her research in organizational behavior and issues of gender and race in employment. Roland H. Horne, professor of petroleum engineering, was elected a Distinguished Member of the Society of Petroleum Engineers. Eric T. Kool, professor of chemistry, has won the American Chemical Society's Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award for his innovative research on DNA replication.

A SHOW OF SUPPORT: John D. Krumboltz, professor of education and psychology, has won the Online Mental Health Research Award. He co-authored a study evaluating the impact of an online support group for Asian-American males at Stanford, a group historically reluctant to use face-to-face counseling services. Martin Hellman, MS '67, PhD '69, professor emeritus of electrical engineering, has received the Marconi International Fellowship, which supports advances in telecommunications for humanitarian benefit.

EDUCATION

Keyboards Vs. Creativity

CLASSROOM VISITS: Larry Cuban shadowed kids and teachers in Silicon Valley schools.

Linda Cicero

IF YOU WANT to advance your kids' development, forget computers and buy them Legos and crayons.

That's essentially the advice of education professor Larry Cuban, PhD '74, and fellow educators, doctors and child-development experts who describe what they see as the false allure of computers in classrooms for young children. In a report that made national headlines in September, the Alliance for Childhood called for a moratorium on buying computers for elementary schools and urged parents to look at specific health hazards that can result from hitting the keyboard too early in life.

Cuban, who has been writing about technology in schools for more than 15 years, was hardly surprised by the findings of the advocacy group. "Technology is an unalloyed good in the American value system and has always been seen as a kind of handmaiden to the economy," he says. "Computerization is taking place in an economy where people are insecure about their skills in getting good jobs, and the idea is that you've got to start young with kids."

In his 1986 book, Teachers and Machines (Teachers College Press), Cuban documented how business entrepreneurs, including Thomas Edison, have long tried to get schools to adopt new technologies of film, radio and instructional television. Cuban will revisit that theme in a study of Silicon Valley classrooms due out next year, Oversold and Underused: Reforming Schools Through Technology, 1980-2000 (Harvard University Press).

With help from graduate students Heather Kirkpatrick, Huey Ru Lin, Craig Peck and Lawrence Tovar, Cuban compiled his own empirical data instead of relying on the often inflated self-reports of administrators and superintendents. "What makes my study uncommon, I think, is that I actually went into schools, observed teaching and shadowed kids as they moved from class to class," he says. "Do the new technologies really mean that teachers are teaching better, that kids are learning more? Those are the kinds of questions that haven't been asked until now."

Certain types of tutorial software--so-called "drill and kill" software in which, for example, kids blast falling letters out of a virtual sky--have had modest effects on academic advancement, Cuban says. But he's not concerned only about classroom use, he observes in his upcoming book. "The biggest market for little kids, in terms of software, is the home market," he says. "And you have to remember that we are talking about a very strong belief system wedded to economic interests in a valley that sells an awful lot of technology to schools and to kids."

GRADUATE STUDIES

Simplify, Then Simplify Again

THINK OF IT as an "elevator talk." Someone in an elevator asks you what your research is about, and you have to respond in the time it takes to go from the lobby to the fifth floor.

That's the first conceptual step 120 graduate students will be asked to take in November, as they try to write 1,000-word statements about their doctoral work in language a nonspecialist would understand. They've all volunteered for the Integrating Research into the Teaching Environment program that aims to post the statements on Stanford department websites by early April.

Last year, 35 graduate students piloted IRITE, then known as CREATE. They signed on with the Center for Teaching and Learning and the Stanford Learning Laboratory (SLL) to get help in writing concisely and compellingly about their work--skills they need to complete dissertations and write grant proposals. Trading drafts with peers in different departments, they learned how to make their own research more accessible. One medical sciences essay, for example, was originally titled "Investigating Cytoskeletal Dynamics in the Development of

Glenn Matsumura

Epithelial Cell Polarity," before being recast as "How Do Cells Know Up from Down?"

"I think it's wonderful that at least some graduate students are learning to write comprehensibly for an audience of people outside their own disciplines," says Tom Wasow, professor of linguistics and philosophy.

Faculty members who volunteer to read and critique research statements written by students in fields other than their own play an important role in IRITE. "We expected they would be critical of students' efforts to simplify," says Rick Reis, co-director of the program and director for academic partnerships at SLL, and a consulting professor in electrical and mechanical engineering. "But faculty have told us, across the board, that they want even more simplifying. They make comments like, 'You haven't told me what an atom is.'" The broad appeal of IRITE is evident in the campuswide funding it is receiving from the School of Humanities and Sciences, the School of Earth Sciences and the School of Engineering. But the ultimate audience will be savvy undergraduate and high-school consumers.

MUSEUM

Having a Good African Hair Day

NIGERIAN MASK: One of 170 works of art on display from The Museum of African Art.

Courtesy Cantor Center for Visual Arts

ON A RECENT TRIP to Amsterdam for a conference on popular culture, history associate professor Kennell Jackson slipped into a coffee bar one afternoon for a drink. He emerged with a photograph that told a story he used in his autumn-quarter colloquium, African Coiffure and Its Legacy in the Americas.

The picture Jackson snapped showed an Italian teenager in a Dutch cafe who'd returned from a vacation in Thailand, where he'd had his hair beaded and braided in the style of tennis super sisters Venus and Serena Williams.

"Black hair today is the product of a global influence of styles and ideas from Africa, the Caribbean and North America," Jackson says.

In an essay he wrote for the catalog of "Hair in African Art and Culture," an exhibition on display at the Cantor Arts Center through December, Jackson looks at Afros, cornrows, dreadlocks and jheri curls. He examines the influence of 'do's worn by '60s radical Angela Davis and '90s bad boy Latrell Sprewell. And he returns to the dark days of the 1850s, when debates raged in the American South about whether black hair might be wool--in other words, nonhuman.

The last time Jackson taught a course on Black Hair in African-American Culture, in 1992, he was mocked by the Wall Street Journal. But his students produced such remarkable research--looking at the political role black barbers played in America's Reconstruction, for example--that Jackson says the public harassment was worth it.

"As Richard Pryor used to say, 'What is really happening here?'" Jackson asks.

LITERATURE

PAGE TURNER: Moretti delves deeply into the novel.

Linda Cicero

Novel Reading and Reimagining

WHILE RESEARCHING the catalogs of private lending libraries in 19th-century Britain and France, Franco Moretti was overwhelmed by the thousands of titles he had never heard of.

"The extent of the archive is unimaginable," he says. "I had not expected so many novels to have been published and forgotten."

Those works, along with the canonical greats, may well find a new readership at the Center for the Study of the Novel that Moretti launched on campus this fall. Moretti, who joined the Stanford English faculty after teaching for 10 years at Columbia University, hopes to replicate the excitement about literary works that he has experienced in his native Italy.

"Book discussions are something that happen in Europe not in the academy but in the public sphere," he says. "In my 20s, almost every week there would be a book presented in Rome at the cultural branches of the political parties or the trade unions that would show you different ways of looking at the subject matter. The format was fascinating and very beautiful."

Moretti's latest work, Atlas of the European Novel, 1800-1900 (Verso) is filled with maps that explore the geography of Jane Austen's Britain and Dickens's London. He plots out dwellings of characters in Oliver Twist and shows who traveled where in Our Mutual Friend. "I have met one genius--my math professor in middle school," Moretti says. "She taught me that logic and imagination should not be conceived as opposites, and what I personally would like to do is apply a lot of logic to the study of the products of the imagination."

At the first of three conferences the center will host this year, scholars explained why cultural and religious forces in China and Europe considered the novel a challenge to their authority and banned it at every opportunity. "When you see the novel as the object of a struggle, you see it in a different light," Moretti suggests. "The truth is that the genre might not have happened, and so it is dangerous for us to take the novel for granted."

In addition to the conferences, the center will host three public debates about historical and contemporary issues and also post essays and dissertations on the Web (www.novel.stanford.edu) for discussion by the international salon.

Inquiring Minds

GENES, SCHMENES: In his new book, Human Natures: Genes, Cultures and the Human Prospect (Shearwater Books/Island Press), biologist and Bing Professor of Population Studies Paul Ehrlich argues that cultural evolution has influenced human behavior much more than has genetic evolution. Ehrlich says he's concerned about the resurgence of genetic determinism--the belief that human dna contains instructions that govern behavior, including so-called "gay genes" or "criminal genes." To talk about genes being self-replicating, Ehrlich adds, is misleading: "Genes cannot be reproduced except by being embedded in a complex cellular mechanism--they're about as self-replicating as a printed page lying in a copying machine."

BEYOND 3-D GLASSES: Stanford's Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory has received a $6 million, five-year grant to help determine the three-dimensional structure of about 2,000 proteins encoded by human DNA. Now that scientists have nearly completed a map of the human genome, Stanford researchers are using a powerful technique called X-ray crystallography to obtain detailed, 3-D images of proteins at the molecular level.

COULD YOU REPEAT THAT? Thirty-five Stanford students, supervised by communication professor Clifford Nass, last summer tested how 1,000 computer-generated voices in computer applications affected responses by computer users. The students who looked at the new technology known as VUI--voice user interface--found that they could manipulate people's attitudes toward the content of commercial messages by changing the emotional tone, pitch and speed of a "virtual" voice.

RESEARCH

Lab Work for Humanists

HENRY LOWOOD years ago played board strategy games--Tactics, Diplomacy and Gettysburg. Those led him to computer games and video simulations.

Now Lowood, who is curator for Germanic collections and for the history of science and technology collections at Green Libraries, has a new game plan. He and history professor Tim Lenoir have gotten the green light to pursue their computer-graphic fantasies by launching one of five pilot projects for the Stanford Humanities Laboratory. The playful title of their academic collaboration: "How They Got Game: The History and Culture of Interactive Simulations and Video Games."

The humanities lab, which opened this fall, grew out of Gerhard Casper's Presidential Lectures and Symposia in the Humanities. The goal is to create something, well, different--a performance, exhibition, website, course or book aimed at a general audience. For example, lab director Jeffrey Schnapp, PhD '84, the Rosina Pierotti Professor of Italian Literature, and art historian Leah Dickerman, an expert on Soviet photography of the 1920s, will produce a film and website about crowds. In their research, they are examining mass cultural forms, including a 1934 open-air Fascist spectacle that involved 3,000 actors, hundreds of trucks, an airplane squadron and military searchlights on the banks of the Arno River in Florence, Italy.

Instead of producing traditional, single-author books or articles, the five research teams funded by the lab will use technology to study topics in the humanities from collaborative angles. One group will produce a HyperText book on CD-ROM about "Medieval Spains," and another will write and perform a new composition titled "The Music and Science of Sonorification."

"It's still just a gleam in our eyes," Lowood says about the web-based documentary he and Lenoir plan to produce over the next few years. "We'll be using lots of video and looking for a new model for how to tell a story."

Schnapp sent a call for proposals last spring to more than 300 faculty in the humanities and to curators at the Stanford Libraries and Cantor Arts Center, asking prospective research teams to think in terms of what he calls "big humanities."

"In the sciences, everybody's used to the idea that you're the first author and I'm the third; but in the humanities, the tradition is single-author," Schnapp says. "So these are all exploratory projects that will be changing, to a degree, the ways people think about authorship and intellectual property in the humanities."

Although the lab will be decked out with a speedster G4 computer and a souped-up video-editing system, Schnapp says the lab is not about pushing technology. "The technology has to flow out of the nature of the research," he adds. "It can't be, as people like to say in the technology world, demo-driven. It's not about toys."

Bookmarks

MICHELE MARINCOVICH, '68, assistant vice provost and director of the Center for Teaching and Learning

• National Center for Postsecondary Improvement at Stanford -- An excellent postsecondary education site, it includes data from student surveys and assessments of how well students learn.
• Resources in Science and Engineering Education -- Created by a professor of chemical engineering, the site states, "College teaching may be the only skilled profession for which no preparation or training is provided or required."

STEVE SANO, MA '91, DMA '94, associate professor of music

• San Francisco Bay Area Hawaiian Resources -- Where can you find guava chiffon cake, kalua pig and a lei to be proud of? For Hawaii devotees like Sano, this site is a great guide to cultural events, music and the best hula houses in town.
• Choral Public Domain Library -- With more than 2,500 scores downloaded daily, this site strikes just the right note with choral music fans.

RABBI PATRICIA KARLIN-NEUMANN, associate dean for religious life

• Jewish Women's Archives -- A virtual museum, documentary center and bat mitzvah planner, the Jewish Women's Archives is devoted to spreading the legacy of Jewish women and helping Jewish girls stake out their terrain.
• CrossCurrents -- Filled with reflections on issues such as the Internet as a metaphor for God, the site strives to integrate religious and academic life.

ATHLETICS

How to Level the Playing Field

FAIR PLAY: Roger Noll calls for NCAA reform.

Linda Cicero

ROGER NOLL, A PROFESSOR of public policy in the economics department, played football and basketball at Cal Tech and is an active recruiter for Stanford varsity sports. He's also the author of Sports, Jobs and Taxes (Brookings Institution, 1997) and Government and the Sports Business (Brookings Institution, 1974), and he frequently sounds off in print about the National Collegiate Athletic Association, which, he says, behaves like a cartel, promoting the interests of universities and coaches over those of students.

Stanford: You're not exactly a fan of the NCAA, are you?
Noll: The NCAA has been completely captured by the coaches and athletic directors of the athletic factories that are run as businesses inside academia. The whole point of NCAA rules is to transfer revenue from the revenue sports to the pockets of athletic directors and coaches in the revenue sports. The non-revenue sports get starved.

Where does Stanford fit in that picture?
There's a handful of universities that play this thing completely straight, and Stanford is one of them. Stanford is incredibly lucky that there are still some people out there, like [football coach] Tyrone Willingham and [men's basketball coach] Mike Montgomery, who are willing to turn down $1 million a year to be in the right environment.

So the financial stakes are pretty high?
Twenty years ago, a team would take in between $5 and $10 million in revenue. Now some of them take in $100 million.

And why is that bad for student-athletes?
The tragedy is that this is one of the few avenues of significant financial success open to disadvantaged kids. But most universities don't keep them for four years and give them a shot at earning a degree. If by the end of their sophomore year they're not playing, they're cut--and their scholarships are withdrawn.

What's the answer?
I go exactly the opposite way of most people who worry about intercollegiate athletics. Most people find it abhorrent that universities would pay athletes, because they say it leads to professionalization. But I think if you paid athletes, the profitability of athletics would disappear as a motive for profit. It seems to me that the best way to force universities to examine their own values is to eliminate the financial restrictions on scholarships.

Is change likely?
I think things are now sufficiently out of control that over the course of the next decade or two, it's very likely there will be some reforms. But it's going to be very difficult because the beneficiaries of the existing system know who they are, and they're going to fight like holy hell to keep the privileges they currently enjoy.

AGING RESEARCH

New Conversations About Old Age

TOUGH TALK: Mary Goldstein looks at health care.

Courtesy Stanford Medical Center

THE DOZEN PANELISTS seated around the oval conference table at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender had listened to presentations about Social Security reform and orthopedics, among other topics affecting the elderly. But physician Mary K. Goldstein, MS '94, was hitting almost too close to home.

"Well, we actually do die," she said to nervous laughter as she talked about the realities of health care for the aging, including arthritis, drug and disease interactions, stroke, hypertension and memory impairment.

An associate professor of medicine at the School of Medicine and a specialist in geriatrics and medical decision-making, Goldstein made her sobering presentation in September, during the fourth of six discussions in a series called "Difficult Dialogues: A Stanford Forum on Gender and Ethnicity." Co-sponsored by the Research Institute of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, the initiative is bringing experts in economics, medicine, biomechanical engineering, psychology, sociology, political science and demography to campus to look at the topic of this year's Difficult Dialogues--"Aging in the 21st Century"--from the perspectives of their disciplines. In March, the panel will deliver a consensus report to all congressional representatives in Washington, D.C., and to state and local policymakers.

"When we talk about old people, there's very often an omission of the fact that we're talking about women," says Laura Carstensen, a Stanford professor of psychology and specialist on aging who is director of the institute. "It's the invisibility problem, and it has a lot to do with why the elderly are treated the way they are--set aside and not taken seriously."

By 2030, one in five Americans will be over 65, Carstensen notes. At age 65, women outnumber men 100 to 83; by age 85, they outnumber men 100 to 39. Women also are far more likely than men to suffer from chronic diseases, live alone and live in poverty in their later years.

"If the elderly were primarily rich white men, we'd have different kinds of conversations," she adds.

MLA PROGRAM

In Her Own Artistic Words

COVER STORY: Carter showcases Jessie Wilcox Smith.

LIKE THE OTHER 72 adults who have earned a Master of Liberal Arts degree at Stanford, Alice Carter did not sign up because she was twiddling her thumbs at home. A professor of illustration and animation at San Jose State University, she was juggling a full-time career with a demanding freelance business, and the youngest of her three children was only 3 when she was accepted as a graduate student in 1991, the year the mla was launched.

Carter enrolled because she had a compelling idea she wanted to research&emdash;and write a compelling book about. "I'd read books other artists had written and they sounded like artists writing books," she recalls.

The paper Carter submitted for the first seminar taught her a lot about organization: "I quickly learned that I needed to get some structure before I plunged into writing. And I also learned that I needed merciless criticism."

By the time she graduated in 1997, Carter had revised her thesis many times over. Earlier this year her story of three women who made their marks as commercial illustrators and painters in early 20th-century Philadelphia was published as The Red Rose Girls: An Uncommon Story of Art and Love (Henry Abrams).

The book already has drawn complimentary reviews from the New York Times, Atlantic Monthly and the Philadelphia Inquirer, and Carter is now getting calls from other publishers. Prize work for a first-time artist-author.

Matters of Faith

IN HIS WELCOME at Freshman Convocation in September, the Rev. William "Scotty" McLennan, new dean for religious life, offered three signposts for the voyage students were embarking on at Stanford: "First, spiritual development is just as normal as emotional and intellectual development. Second, see yourself as on a spiritual journey, and enjoy exploring the spiritual terrain along the way. Third, understand that returning to your childhood faith with new adult eyes may be one of the most fulfilling spiritual experiences possible, though by no means the only one."

MEDICINE

Mind If I Take Your Cyber Pulse?

OFFICE VISIT: Students meet Britt Larsson in an Internet waiting room.

Courtedy Karolinska Institute

USING A REVOLUTIONARY simulation model developed at Stanford, a third-year medical student can point her cursor to the spot she wants to suture on a three-dimensional body depicted on her computer screen and actually feel what it will be like to perform a surgical procedure.

"We've devised a joystick that produces a tangible sensation, so that you think you are feeling the tissue," says Parvati Dev, MS '70, PhD '75, director of Stanford University Medical Media and Information Technologies (summit). "It's all virtual, but you can learn what it is like to pull tissue aside or probe an organ for surgery."

Stanford has been a leader in developing surgical simulations and computer-graphic models of anatomy over the past decade, and virtual labs have virtually replaced physiology labs at the School of Medicine. Students now can measure the concentration of chemicals in urine without ever leaving their computer screens.

In spring quarter, SUMMIT will test a new teaching tool that uses simulated patients. Developed with the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, the program will introduce students in the Preparation for Clinical Medicine course to "Britt Larsson," a 45-year-old Swedish patient suffering from an undiagnosed condition. The would-be physicians will type in questions about her medical history and listen to her videotaped descriptions of symptoms, then perform a simulated physical examination and order the appropriate lab tests to make a diagnosis.

What next? E.R. docs for web consultation?

FINANCES

What? I Have to Pay Taxes?

FOR YEARS she listened to stories, told by friends in the bursar's office, about Stanford students who didn't know how to write checks. And she sat at her own desk and heard 18-year-olds say, "I don't have to pay taxes because I'm a student, right?"

Finally, Mary Morrison, senior associate director for financial aid, had heard enough. She put together the kind of money-management course she wished her own son could have taken and found a faculty sponsor in Ross Shachter, resident fellow at Serra and associate professor of engineering-economic systems and operations research.

With no more marketing than an e-mail notice posted to the Stern Hall dorm cluster last winter, the one-unit course, "Financial Literacy," attracted 125 students the first night. Morrison, who had planned on small-group discussion, moved the class from the dorm lounge to Cubberley Auditorium and reworked her notes for a lecture format. The first session--on withholding taxes--appeared to go smoothly, until a student approached her after class. Recalls Morrison: "I thought I'd been brilliant, but he said, kind of quietly, 'I don't think I understand. They take your money and they don't give it back?'

"And I said, 'Yeah, you understand exactly.'"

More than 220 students, from freshmen to doctoral candidates, took Morrison's course last year, and she's now gearing up for another session in winter quarter. The object is to teach otherwise savvy Stanford students how to set up a budget, paycheck by paycheck, for living on $36,000 a year.

In her lectures, Morrison showcases the unglamorous. Utilities. Renters insurance. Security deposits. 1040 forms. Stocks and bonds. Credit card debt.

If it sounds remedial, Morrison says that's because many students have zero experience in money matters. In estimating monthly expenses, she says, "students don't include buying coffee on the way to work. They don't figure in the cost of extension cords for the new apartment."

To underscore the importance of financial planning, Morrison asks them: "Are you going to win the lottery? Or maybe you're planning to inherit from your grandmother? But what if she gets hold of a boy toy [and spends your inheritance on him]?"

That prospect elicits nervous laughter and brings out the calculators.

Campus Notebook

Reaching Out to Bay Area Youth
Education professor Milbrey McLaughlin says Stanford will make a "long-term commitment" to youth outreach with the John Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities, which she will direct. Funded by a $5 million endowment from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and a $500,000 grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the center will work with law enforcement officials, social workers, clergy, parents, business people and teenagers in Redwood City and Oakland to find new ways to respond to the needs of Bay Area youth.

Napster Connections Still 'Go'
Stanford is not yet a Napster-free zone. In September, along with Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, UCLA, UC-Berkeley, Duke, MIT and the University of North Carolina, the University decided not to ban the use of the popular Napster digital music file-swapping software on campus. At some schools last year, so many students downloaded music files that campus computer systems were overloaded and administrators blocked access to Napster to relieve bandwidth congestion. This fall, in response to a letter from the attorney representing the band Metallica and rap artist Dr. Dre, which asked universities to restrict access, lawyers for Stanford said that the University "does not condone copyright infringement," but argued there was no legal reason to inhibit online connections.

Engineers and Biologists Exchange Models
Funded by $5.3 million from the U.S. Department of Defense, faculty in developmental biology and the department of aeronautics and astronautics will work together to use air traffic control theory to create a mathematical model for understanding intra- and intercellular communication. That's one example of the collaborative research that will be possible thanks to a three-year grant Stanford received from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The unusual consortium of engineers and biologists may help to resolve fundamental questions about how genes function.

Edging Toward Earthquake Detection
Geophysicist Amos Nur thinks researchers today are on the verge of a seismic revolution. Nur's observations came at the Third Conference on Tectonic Problems of the San Andreas Fault System, held at Stanford in September and co-sponsored by the School of Earth Sciences and the U.S. Geological Survey. Scientists from around the world learned about new technologies that are advancing earthquake study, including data gathered by global positioning systems.

Collaborating on Heart Disease Treatments Predicting it will lead to "pioneering new approaches to the prevention and treatment of heart disease," Eugene Bauer, vice president for medical affairs, praised the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation for its $24 million, four-year grant to establish the Donald W. Reynolds Cardiovascular Clinical Research Center at Stanford. By bringing together basic, clinical and epidemiologic investigators under one roof, the center is intended to build collaborative links among scientists working on new treatments for heart disease, the leading cause of death in the United States.

Alums First, Then a Wider Public
Noting that Stanford "from the beginning . . . has sought ways to extend the power of education to those who might not otherwise have the opportunity," President John Hennessy hailed the September launch of the nonprofit University Alliance for Life-Long Learning. A collaboration with Oxford, Princeton and Yale, the distance-learning venture will offer online courses, interactive seminars, multimedia programs and topical websites to a combined alumni body of about 500,000 by late 2001. In the future, courses may open to a wider public.

New Materials for a New Century
When the long-awaited Theodore H. Geballe Laboratory for Advanced Materials opened in August, professor emeritus of applied physics Geballe predicted that new technologies developed on campus "will help solve the problems of the 10 billion or so people who will be inhabiting the Earth during this new century." The lab will host 220 students and faculty from seven departments who aim to develop semiconducting polymers for lasers and lubricants for computer hard drives, among other projects.

$5 Million for Information Technology
Five Stanford information-technology projects received a total of more than $5 million from the National Science Foundation in September--money that Jim Plummer, MS '67, PhD '70, dean of the School of Engineering, said will be "tremendously helpful." Professors Hector Garcia-Molina, Christopher Manning, Jeffrey Ullman and Jennifer Widom hope to transform the web into a Global InfoBase; Monica Lam and Dawson Engler will create tools for software design; Kincho Law, James Leckie, Gio Wiederhold and Barton Thompson, '73, JD '76, will explore ways to make governmental rules available online; Daphne Koller, PhD '74, and Peter Small plan to develop technology for analyzing biological data; and Lambertus Hesselink will look for ways to research complicated physical phenomena such as electromagnetic fields and weather systems.