FARM REPORT DIGEST
Light on Your Feet
Runners Mike Strasser, MS '01, and Steve Myers, MS '98, recently unveiled an invention that signals when shoes need to be replaced. The IMPACT Shoe Wear Indicator uses sensors in the heel and toe to monitor the force exerted on the sole. The sensors relay the information to a microprocessor linked to a tiny light panel on the back of the sneaker. As the shoe ages, the lights dim, then begin to blink when the end is near. Strasser says the invention works rather like test strips that show when a battery is weakening. The idea, he says, is to prevent foot and knee injuries caused by poor shoe cushioning. "It's ridiculous to have pain before you replace your shoes." The shoe device was one of dozens of prototypes--including several from Stanford--exhibited at the Smithsonian's "March Madness for the Mind 2001," sponsored by the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance. |
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Quote "Now I have to go get a job." -- Senior guard Michael McDonald, to a reporter, on the implications of the Cardinal's season-ending loss to Maryland in the NCAA regional finals.
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What Goes Around, Comes Around
In 1970, Nestell, then a graduate student at Dartmouth, left the ring in a service station restroom after washing up. He didn't realize until a few days later that the keepsake was missing. Seven years later, a cable television technician named Rick Barrow spied a ring with a red stone and a large "S" lying on the ground near a northern New Hampshire project site. He took it home and placed it in a drawer. There the ring languished until 1996, when Barrow's wife, Leslie, came across it while looking for something else. She queried her husband and deduced that the original owner was a Stanford alumnus. She sent it to the Stanford Alumni Association, explaining where and how it was found, but after some failed attempts to ascertain its ownership, the ring was set aside. In February, dislodged by an office move, the ring landed in the hands of Rene Spicer, '57, a veteran SAA staffer. Spicer cross-referenced its engraved initials with those of members of the Class of '68, made a reasoned guess and called Nestell. "I was just floored," says Nestell, an engineer with MPR Associates in Alexandria, Va. "That ring was a graduation present from my grandmother, and I was sick to my heart when I realized I had lost it." Though ring and owner are reunited, Nestell admits it's still kept in a nontraditional location: "It only fits my pinky now," he says. |
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Bad News, Bears
At least that's the view of sportswriter Ray Ratto, who in February gave a tongue-in-cheek admonishment to the Bears faithful after UC-Berkeley Chancellor Robert Berdahl said that his school's athletics department should try to be more like Stanford's. Ratto, writing for espn.com, was referring to Berdahl's comments in the San Francisco Chronicle suggesting that the Cardinal athletic program is worthy of emulation. "The Stanford basketball team certainly has some players who are definite NBA prospects, but they didn't come to Stanford just to play basketball," the chancellor said in an interview with the newspaper. Later in the article Berdahl noted, "Stanford has carved out a niche where they can get the top athletes who are also top students. . . . They have a good overall program, winning the Sears Cup every year." Wrote Ratto: "This is troublesome. . . . We want Cal fans taking to the streets. In fact, we want them to take to the streets of Palo Alto, emptying the Starbucks of frappuccinos and the Sharper Images of plutonium-powered Palm Pilots." Meanwhile, Cal Monthly, the alumni publication of UC-Berkeley, wondered out loud whether the Bears should capitulate once and for all. "Should We Drop Football?" read a headline in February. "It was telling that, following the 2000 version of Big Game torment, no one threw frozen oranges at the Stanford Band," wrote Carolyn Jones, a former Cal Monthly assistant editor. "No Cal fans stormed the Tree. Everybody just shrugged and politely filed out of Memorial Stadium. "After so many seasons of unfathomable disappointment for fans, maybe it would be best if the new [athletic director] swiftly pulled the plug. They shoot horses, don't they?" |
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A Hateful Story Hits Home
Flashback: the attacker, wearing a yarmulke, challenges his rabbi on points of theology. The Believer, a film written and directed by Henry Bean, MA '74, hauls viewers inside the mind of a tortured anti-Semite who was born and raised Jewish. A brutal, squirm-in-your-seat movie, it won the Grand Jury Prize at this year's Sundance Film Festival. Bean, a screenwriter whose credits include Internal Affairs and Desperate Measures, based the film on a true story of a Ku Klux Klan member who killed himself in 1964, two hours after a New York Times story hit the streets revealing his Jewish past. Critics at Sundance loved The Believer, Bean's directorial debut. New York Times reviewer Elvis Mitchell described it as "a volatile, edgy picture that has audiences divided and talking." Although the film's provocative theme scared off some potential distributors, Bean--who has signed on as a writer for the upcoming Basic Instinct 2--is confident Believer will find a wider audience. "This film will get distribution," he told Entertainment Weekly in March. |
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