BIOENGINEERING

A New Department Fuses Medicine and High Tech

SCOTT DELP'S BUSINESS CARD, which sports an image of Eadweard Muybridge’s 1878 photo of Leland Stanford’s trotting horse, speaks to his passion for his lifework. The associate professor and co-chair of the biomechanical division of the department of mechanical engineering has long been fascinated by the beauty of movement, and much of his research aims to improve muscle function in limbs deformed by cerebral palsy.

As a graduate student, Delp, MS ’87, PhD ’90, latched onto Gene Bleck, a specialist in the treatment of movement disorders at the School of Medicine. When he wasn’t in class, Delp would cross the street to watch Bleck examine patients or follow him into the operating room.

“By chance I met this guy who was the world guru in the field and whose brother was an engineer, so he somehow thought engineers were smart,” Delp recalls. “But as far as I knew, I was the only engineer at the Medical Center.”

Although Delp was able to cobble together courses that suited his interests and skills, he wants to spare future generations of bioengineers the trouble. “I randomly grabbed whatever classes I could, but we can certainly make that educational process less ad hoc and more streamlined,” he says. “I think one of the key goals of the new department will be defining a world-class, coordinated program.”

Delp is referring to the new department of bioengineering that is scheduled to begin admitting graduate students in the fall of 2003 and undergrads by 2005. A joint venture of the schools of engineering and medicine, it will bring together some of the sharpest intellects on campus to work on such challenges as aging and environmental sustainability. “If Stanford is to remain one of the top research universities in the world, it must tackle these problems aggressively and strategically,” wrote Philip Pizzo, dean of the School of Medicine, and Jim Plummer, dean of the School of Engineering, in an announcement in June.

Of the top five engineering schools in the United States, Stanford is the only one without a department of bioengineering. But Plummer, MS ’67, PhD ’71, notes that a significant number of faculty in mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, materials science, and civil and environmental engineering have collaborated with faculty at the Medical School for years on research in bone growth, cardiovascular flow, imaging, neural signal processing and medical robotics. For a long time, he says, he was not convinced that a separate interdisciplinary department was needed. Then came the revolution in biological sciences.

“Engineers need to be able to write equations, develop models and do computer simulations,” Plummer says. “And what finally got us to the point of strongly believing that we should form a bioengineering department was the fact that the discipline of biology in the last 10 years has become more amenable to engineering measurements and quantifications of living things at all scale levels, from genes all the way up to organs and full systems.”

The developments in the biological sciences mean that researchers in his school can now engineer living systems, from replacement organs to new kinds of prosthetic devices, Plummer says. “They can work in harmony with the body, as opposed to putting artificial materials into the body.”

Pizzo emphasizes that the new department will be strongly committed not only to interdisciplinary research but also to undergraduate and graduate education. As a result, he says, “there will be a new generation of individuals who will think about the connections between engineering, biology and science—and their fusion—early in their college careers and through graduate school, with some of them perhaps getting medical degrees.”

At press time, Pizzo and Plummer were launching searches for a department chair and approximately 20 faculty members. “The majority of hires will be junior faculty—brand-new assistant professors who have creative ideas,” the engineering dean says. “We’re really looking for a new kind of person, who has a fairly deep understanding of biology and living systems, and also a strong engineering background.”

Delp notes that when he taught at Northwestern University, his lab in the biomedical engineering department was housed at the teaching hospital. “The clinical and basic sciences departments were separated by 15 miles there; and at Cornell, they’re separated by 200 miles,” he says. By contrast, the proximity of the schools of engineering and medicine at Stanford will serve students and faculty well. “Students could go to clinical rounds at 7:30 a.m. (if you can get them out of bed), take engineering classes in the afternoon and work in biology labs in the evening,” he says. “It’s very hard to do that in other settings.”

In his own work in computer-assisted surgery and computational neuroscience—he uses high-performance computers to model how the nervous system coordinates movement—Delp says the people he most frequently talks with are orthopedists, neurologists, radiologists and surgeons. “I would be lost without a medical school.”

HEALTH RESEARCH

Halting the Hormone Study

MARCIA STEFANICK was as surprised as anyone when the hormone-replacement trial she had directed since 1995 ended three years earlier than planned.

Stefanick, PhD ’82, chairs the steering committee of the nation’s first long-term, large-scale clinical trial of hormone replacement in healthy women. In July, the study was cut short because the results already showed that women taking the hormones faced increased risks of breast cancer and cardiovascular disease.

“I would never have predicted that we would know for sure at this point that the risks exceeded the benefits,” says Stefanick, a Stanford associate research professor of medicine. “We thought we would not have the answer until 2005.”

In the study, supported by the National Institutes of Health, 16,608 women between 50 and 79 who have intact uteruses were randomly assigned to take either a pill containing estrogen and progestin or a placebo each day. Stefanick and the other investigators hypothesized that the hormones would reduce bone fractures and heart disease.

As it turned out, they found that over 5.2 years, the women taking hormones had 29 percent more heart attacks, 41 percent more strokes, a 26 percent increase in invasive breast cancer and more than twice as many blood clots compared to those taking placebos. The benefits were a 34 percent reduction in hip fractures and 37 percent fewer incidents of colon cancer. (Postmenopausal women who have had hysterectomies are continuing in an estrogen-only study.)

“What we’ve provided now is very definitive information about how big the risks are and how small the benefits are,” Stefanick said in an interview in her office at the Stanford Center for Research in Disease Prevention. “With 6 million women on estrogen plus progestin in the country, we really needed to get that message out there in such a way that the medical community would recognize that this is not just a little controversy anymore. This is information that should, in fact, change their practicing habits if they’ve been prescribing these drugs for prevention.”

Stefanick acknowledges that the benefits of short-term hormone replacement in treating menopausal symptoms such as hot flashes “may justify the risks.” (A spokesperson for Wyeth-Ayerst, which makes the drug Prempro that was used in the study, says 90 percent of hormone-replacement prescriptions are for menopausal symptoms.) “As long as a woman understands that there are risks and is clear about what they are,” Stefanick says, “then she knows better than anybody whether she can tolerate the symptoms or not.”

Stefanick has been delivering talks called “Controversies in Hormone Replacement Therapy” for about four years—ever since a study of 2,000 women with histories of heart disease linked estrogen plus progestin with blood clots in lungs and legs. “It’s really quite interesting how often people have gotten quite angry with me for just presenting the data and making the argument that we needed evidence-based medicine.”

Now that the evidence is in, Stefanick says, “the medical community is in a bit of a tailspin because they’re being besieged by their patients.” She and the other investigators have been trying to “calm everybody down” in the aftermath of the initial press coverage. “The last four years have been a period of re-evaluation,” she said in July, “and the last three days have been a period of major reconsideration.”

Cardinal Numbers

Percentage of applicants for 2002-03 who were admitted: 12.7

Percentage admitted 10 years ago: 22

Consecutive years in which children of alumni have been admitted at a rate more than double that of the regular applicant pool: 10

Incoming freshmen who listed “undecided” as their primary area of interest: 205 (13 percent)

Freshmen from Singapore: 15

Freshmen from North Dakota: 0

Source: Office of Undergraduate Admission

FRESHMEN

Branner Shuts!

J.T. BATSON’S introduction to the Branner mystique was, well, Brannerish.

He arrived several days early last September, before the other 182 frosh assigned to the dorm, to start a job with the varsity soccer program. And he had dyed his usually brown hair blond. “One of the RAs looked at me and was, like, ‘You don’t live here.’”

Batson had unwittingly circumvented the RA practice of identifying frosh from photos mailed in the previous spring. But he survived the initial rebuff and has become one of Branner’s most enthusiastic supporters. He even spent the summer on campus, working as an orientation coordinator, to help create an inviting atmosphere for the incoming Class of 2006. Just one hitch: none of them will live where he did. Branner, which was built in the early 1920s, will be closed this year for renovations. Under the University’s 18-year capital improvement program, it’s Branner’s turn to receive seismic retrofitting, electrical upgrades, a plumbing overhaul, and new paint and carpet.

That’s right. Come September, the dorm that usually houses more than 10 percent of the freshman class will be unoccupied and inaudible. No “Branner Presents” speakers or eight-foot B-R-A-N-N-E-R lawn letters. No musicals, spelling bees or sand-castle build-a-thons. And that has generations of Brannerites worried. For whom, they ask with gnashing angst, will the familiar chorus rise, “Branner sucks!”?

“The thought that the Class of ’06 will not have Brannerites really saddens me,” says Julie Lythcott-Haims, ’89, assistant vice provost and dean of freshmen and transfer students—and former Branner RA. “I think it will be interesting to see who rushes in to claim that spot and fill that vacuum.”

So it’s an envy thing?

“I think it’s more about bashing,” Batson says about The Chant. “They can only bash Cal for one weekend, but they can do us for the entire year.”

Associate professor of history Kennell Jackson, the resident fellow in Branner since 1980, says it’s not easy to define the Branner mystique. He says a Daily writer tried to get it down on paper back in 1986, citing the size of the dorm, its reputation for extroverted residents, its ability to maintain a consistent culture despite 100 percent annual turnover. But the aura remains elusive.

“Some people think Branner’s all right, and other people are horrified by it,” Jackson says. “It can be very rambunctious and it can test your patience. It’s entertaining and it has its primitive elements. But Branner is really about tolerance and eclecticism, with a ‘live and let live’ philosophy, where everybody can find a place.” Even after they change their hair color.

TEACHING

Designing Courses Backward, and Other Tricks of the Trade

DESIGN YOUR COURSES backward, Robyn Wright Dunbar tells faculty in the sciences and engineering. Start with a “learning outcome”: something you want students to have mastered by the last day of the class. Then, make that central to homework assignments, projects and exams.

A professor teaching an introductory course in geology, for example, might want her students to be able to make an informed analysis of unfamiliar topography by the end of the quarter. If she keeps that goal in mind while projecting a slide of rocks onto a screen during a lecture, Dunbar says, she’ll be more likely to say, “Okay, interpret this,” instead of, “Isn’t that a nice picture of a fault?”

As senior associate director of the Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL), Dunbar is fascinated by how people process science information. A former professor of geology at the University of New Mexico and Rice University, she now helps Stanford science and engineering faculty organize courses, works with teaching assistants who are giving their first lectures and sits in on classes to provide feedback on teaching styles. Two other associate directors of the center—Marcelo Clerici-Arias and Valerie Ross—offer similar services to faculty and teaching assistants in the social sciences and humanities. And Doree Allen, MA ’82, PhD ’92, helps undergraduates and graduate students hone their speaking skills as director of the oral communication program.

Stanford’s CTL, which marked its 25th anniversary in 2000, is one of the oldest teaching centers in the United States. Most were established between 10 and 15 years ago, and some—including Princeton’s—have been around for less than five years. Michele Marincovich, ’68, assistant vice provost for undergraduate education and director of Stanford’s center, says these are “exciting days” for the field, noting that the center directors from the so-called “Ivy-plus” campuses gathered for the first time in May.

Improving teaching is the core of the center’s mission, and Marincovich says that requires a particular climate. “There was a strong sense that teaching and learning centers would only succeed if the faculty themselves bought in and felt comfortable. So we always promise our clients confidentiality and we never share with the administration who is, or isn’t, using us.”

When a department chair wants to refer a faculty member to the center, Marincovich often suggests several alternatives, including having the instructor work with colleagues and mentors in the department first. “If faculty then choose to come to us, they will be more receptive to advice,” she says. “Whereas if they feel they have to come, they may be resentful about any suggestions for change.”

CTL works with an estimated two-thirds of the University’s 1,000-plus teaching assistants, often helping them prepare for their first classes and walking them through the fine art of leading discussion sections. At an annual orientation workshop in the fall, Marincovich and her staff spell out University policies that can affect teaching, from sexual harassment to disability services. “If you say something to TAs like, ‘What are you going to do if, after your first section, a deaf student comes up to you and wants to know how they’re going to be able to absorb your material?’ then people begin to be interested in knowing what the disabled-student services are.”

The center’s customers give it high marks. “I especially appreciate the way Michele brings people together across the disciplines and schools for highly productive exchanges,” says history professor Estelle Freedman, who helped Marincovich organize a series of workshops on incorporating the study of gender into certain areas of the curriculum. “I think the results were tangible—I certainly incorporated ideas raised by panelists into my teaching, and I think that grad section leaders and new faculty especially benefited from hearing experienced teachers share the tricks of the trade.”

MUSIC

Boom Times for Taiko

WHEN SHE STARTED DRUMMING two years ago, junior LaCona Woltmon didn’t particularly like to yell—or kiai, as taiko performers call it.

“But then you get into it and realize that you need to engage your entire body in taiko—including your voice,” Woltmon says.

Throaty, guttural yells. Rhythmic, graceful arm extensions. Pounding feet. And those massive drums—six feet across, some of them—that literally shake the stage when they are struck. Oh, taiko!

The art form originated centuries ago at rice-planting festivals in Japan, where mere mortals stood back and marveled as folk bands called down the rain gods. But North American taiko has a thunder and athleticism all its own, and the 15-member Stanford Taiko has been a high-energy crowd pleaser since its earliest days.

Established in 1992 with funding from an Undergraduate Research Opportunities grant to build an odaiko, or big drum, Stanford Taiko was conceived in a workshop class that linked the performance art with Japanese-American culture. “Some saw Stanford Taiko as a symbol of Japanese-American activism, and some saw it as helping to break through the stereotypes of the weak and exotic Asian-American female,” says Linda Uyechi, ’79, MS ’81, MA ’90, PhD ’95, a lecturer in taiko who advises the coed, multiracial, student-run group with her husband, Stephen Sano, MA ’91, DMA ’94, an associate professor of music and director of choral studies. The pair also teaches a sophomore seminar called Perspectives in North American Taiko.

Each taiko group builds its own drums and writes its own songs. As Stanford performers literally have bent over backwards to accommodate the stances of slant-style drumming, they’ve become identified with a style that is physically challenging and aesthetically compelling.

And when performers graduate, it’s boom times ahead, says Sano: “We have as many Stanford Taiko alums making their living as taiko performers as we have music department alums making their living as Western classical musicians.”

ECONOMICS

What to Tell High-Schoolers

FOR NINE MONTHS EACH YEAR, Kathy Emory spends her days standing before a classroom of Sacramento high school students, trying to help them grasp the basics of supply and demand. This summer, though, she spent a week on the other side of the desk—as a student in a free-of-charge Stanford workshop for high school economics teachers.

Economics professor John Shoven and others at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research started the teachers’ program 15 years ago, after California mandated economics education for all high school students. The Stanford professors, Shoven says, thought the state didn’t have enough qualified high school economics teachers. Their aim isn’t to review Econ I, but to examine the real-life issues and current topics that are behind all those graphs and charts and curves. “This is not remedial,” Shoven says.

Rather, top professors dissect subjects the teachers might read about in the Wall Street Journal. Roger Noll talks about the economics of college and pro sports, Shoven about entitlement programs and Frank Wolak about the California electricity market. Between sessions, the 43 teachers meet to discuss pedagogical issues and challenges.

The sessions include a mixture of lecture and give-and-take with the teachers. During a class on antitrust issues, for example, Journal of Economic Perspectives managing editor Tim Taylor talks about companies ranging from Standard Oil to Microsoft. He sprinkles his presentation with history, current headlines, statistics and law. The teachers seem engaged. Emory points out that the popular video-game consoles Xbox and PlayStation 2 sell for the same price. “I thought they did that on purpose, that it’s obvious,” she says. “Obvious and provable are different things,” says Taylor, MA ’84—in other words, a court may not find an antitrust violation. “None of these issues are new,” Taylor tells the group. “There are no easy solutions. That’s why competition is a hard issue. That’s why economics is interesting.”

FACULTY

Settling In, Stanford Style

CALL IT UNIVERSITY 101. It’s a short introduction to Stanford essentials: the business functions of the president’s office, the academic affairs that are the provost’s bailiwick, how the Faculty Senate and the professional schools work, what the Board of Trustees does.

The briefing is part of the new faculty orientation program, a September half-day event for the 130-plus faculty who are hired each year. “We hear from junior faculty, especially, that it’s helpful,” says Pat Jones, vice provost for faculty development and professor of biological sciences. “When you’re a graduate student, you’re into your own research, and you have no clue about university organization and function.” Jones enlists other administrators and faculty to present thumbnail sketches about teaching and technology resources, research protocols and graduate education. And the attendees have a chance to talk about their work, as well.

Jones also organizes the annual Chairs Institute in September, which is designed for new department heads and deans. “In many small departments, every senior faculty member gets to take his or her turn [as chair],” she says. “They don’t necessarily have a lot of management experience, and often haven’t been terribly involved in university governance.”

The institute, now in its fifth year, tackles the nitty-gritty of running a department, from how promotion files should be prepared to appropriate ways to implement affirmative action. “These are very busy people, and they play key roles in hiring, promotion, teaching and research at the department level,” Jones says. “So the goal is to make the day relevant, useful and not boring.”

Current and former chairs talk about how they set priorities for their departments and their role in handling questions about intellectual property ownership and the use of human research subjects. And Jones makes sure that everyone knows how to get to an internal website for chairs. “It’s a website of policy documents and lists of contact people that’s meant to be one-stop shopping,” she explains.

Come October, Jones will unveil another website, launched by the Bay Area Higher Education Recruiting Consortium, that will include a clearinghouse for academic couples. Spouses and domestic partners of those who land jobs with Bay Area institutions will be able to search for faculty, staff and administrative positions at campuses from Sonoma to Monterey to Modesto. Up next: Couples 101?

Campus Notebook

The Public Face of the University
Veteran journalist Gordon Earle joined the University in August as vice president for public affairs. A former award-winning reporter and senior producer with The MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour and a 1988-89 John S. Knight fellow at Stanford, Earle most recently headed his own communications firm. He now oversees the University’s relations with government agencies, coordinates its community-relations initiatives, and supervises communications, media relations and University events. “Gordon is an ideal fit for this critical new position,” says Stanford President John Hennessy.

Where Does the Money Go?
More to undergraduate financial aid, staff and faculty salaries, and debt service payments. Less to land and buildings, libraries and the School of Humanities and Sciences. Departments around the University cut a total of $16.3 million from their budgets for the 2002-03 fiscal year, making up most of the $16.7 million in new budget commitments. Some of the increases, particularly those to financial aid, stem from the sagging economy, Provost John Etchemendy told the Faculty Senate. “The forecast is for tight times,” he said, noting that a $12.1 million deficit is projected for the 2003-04 fiscal year. But, added Etchemendy, PhD ’82, “there’s not going to be major, major anguish in solving that. I don’t want you to be too depressed.”

For Minority Alumni, More Outreach
The Board of Trustees has convened a 15-member task force on minority alumni relations, which is charged with increasing University outreach to this constituency. “The concept here is simple: if you’re going to have a diverse student body, then you’re going to have an increasingly diverse alumni population,” says Board chair Isaac Stein, JD/MBA ’72. Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree Jr., ’75, MA ’75, leads the task force, which will foster communication between Stanford and alumni on diversity issues, recommend ways to involve minority alumni in University affairs and consider holding an “alumni of color conference” in 2004.

A Friend to Freshmen
Julie Lythcott-Haims, who served as assistant to President John Hennessy from October 2000 through July 2002, has been named to the new post of assistant vice provost and dean of freshmen and transfer students. A former Bay Area attorney and associate dean for student affairs at Stanford Law School, Lythcott-Haims, ’89, will help undergraduates adjust to the University’s academic and social environment. “Since the day I entered Stanford in the fall of 1985,” she says, “I have wanted to be a part of delivering the essence of Stanford to the next generation of Stanford students.”

Inquiring Minds

UNCOMMON COLD: Want to kill cancer cells? Give the patient a cold. Medical Center researchers injected genetically weakened cold viruses into patients whose colon cancer had spread to their livers. The virus appeared to take advantage of a defective protein common in cancer cells, causing those cells to self-destruct while bypassing normal cells. On average, the 28 people who received the highest dose of the virus survived almost one year—roughly twice as long as doctors expected they would without the treatment.

PUT ON A HAPPY FACE: The brains of outgoing people are more likely to respond to happy facial expressions than the brains of shy people, according to a study by associate psychology professor John Gabrieli and former Stanford postdoc Turhan Canli. The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging to record reactions in the amygdalae, areas of the brain associated with emotion and memory.

POLLSTERS, TAKE HEED: The most partisan voters—not the undecideds—are more likely to adopt a favorable opinion of another party’s candidate whom they initially disliked but who is predicted to win an election, report researchers at the Graduate School of Business. The researchers say people are more likely to rationalize anticipated outcomes for events in which they are psychologically invested.

FRUIT FLY FOCUS: A new treatment for type 1 (insulin-dependent) diabetes may take flight at the Medical Center. Scientists there have engineered fruit flies with a condition that mimics human diabetes, including low insulin and high blood-sugar levels. By studying the flies, they hope to determine how insulin-producing pancreatic cells develop in humans. The next step: using human stem cells to generate replacement pancreatic cells.

MARINE BIOLOGY

Fishing for Global-Warming Clues

ON THE JULY DAY when forecasters at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that El Niño has returned, a graduate student at Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station did what his predecessors have been doing since 1920. He dipped a bucket in the ocean and took the water temperature with a mercury thermometer.

From his nearby lab, which overlooks the tidepool in Monterey, Calif., station director George Somero watched the timeless ritual, as he often does. As the acclaimed father of the field of biochemical adaptation, Somero, ’64, PhD ’67, keeps his merry blue eyes on the daily temperatures and on the global horizon.

STANFORD: So ocean temperatures are up in Monterey and worldwide?

You have to tease apart the effects of El Niño, which is a one-year phenomenon, from longer-term global warming trends. But, yes, there’s been a significant [long-term] increase in the water temperature.

If 99 percent of scientists agree that there will be additional increases in temperature, what do they disagree about?

How much increase will occur. It’s very difficult to predict global warming, but the range of change on the centigrade scale runs from about 1 to 6 degrees.

If the temperature in the Monterey tidepools has risen by about 0.7 degrees Celsius in the past 80 years, what does that mean for creatures living there?

There have been large changes in the relative [population] levels of cold-loving and warm-loving organisms, with an increase in more southern, warm-loving species. If you’re an organism that lives in a highly fluctuating, variable environment like that, the question is: what kinds of genes do you need? And what kinds of controlling switches have to be on those genes to allow you to cope with environmental change?

And the increase in temperatures has affected the metabolic functions of crabs, snails and mussels?

Crabs that are currently living highest up on the rocks, right at the edge of the envelope, are the most threatened species. They’re within a degree or two of heat death on hot days.

You also study Antarctic fish that have lived for 15 million years in a constant-temperature ice bath, where salinity and oxygen are very stable. Why?

Because they have lost hundreds of thousands of genes—and the ability to respond to environmental challenges. We’re now trying to map those genetic changes.

Although the scenario for global warming seems pretty grim, you look like a man who enjoys his work.

Well, quite often a study at the marine station begins with someone saying, “Holy smokes! What is that?” It’s very different from working with what are called model systems—yeast, fruit flies and humans.

TECHNOLOGY

'Total Access' for the Disabled

THE COURSE OF NEIL SCOTT'S career changed more than two decades ago when he met a 9-year-old girl named Jackie. The child had cerebral palsy and could not talk or use her arms. She could, however, control her knees, so Scott, the dean of an engineering school in New Zealand, helped jimmy together a computer and a device that allowed her to produce Morse code messages by knocking her knees against a sensor. When he returned to visit a few weeks later, Jackie slowly typed out a message: “SCOTT IS OK.”

The experience inspired Scott to make such endeavors his life’s work. At Stanford, he is the leader and chief engineer of the Archimedes Project, named for the ancient Greek mathematician and scientist and based at the Center for the Study of Language and Information. A central goal of the project is to provide “total access” to computers and computer-controlled appliances for people with disabilities and the elderly—and perhaps someday for anyone.

To do this, Archimedes Project researchers design two types of devices: one that helps the individual communicate, and one that helps the computer communicate. For individuals, they develop “personal accessors,” tailor-made and often portable personal computers that vary according to the needs of the user. For example, a quadriplegic might wear a headset and issue instructions by speaking, moving his head or blinking—or all of the above.

In the Archimedes Project lab, where several computers are set up to power household appliances, Scott demonstrates how a personal accessor is more flexible than currently available mass-market technology. Rather than issue a memorized command to a voice recognition system, he can look over at an appliance and deliver plain-English instructions such as, “Turn off that damn fan.” And the whirring stops.

Personal accessors link to total access ports (TAPs), which in turn connect to standard computers or computer-controlled appliances. A TAP sends input to a computer in much the same manner as an ordinary keyboard or mouse. To date, Scott’s team has developed TAPs for PCs, Macintoshes, Sun workstations and SGI machines.

Using a system of personal accessors and TAPs, Scott says, is simpler and cheaper than modifying computers themselves. And because personal accessors can theoretically be developed for anyone and TAPs for any computer-controlled thing, the system carries the promise of universal access. Scott envisions people using it to operate everything from microwaves and TVs to lights and gas pumps.

J.B. Galan, ’95, a quadriplegic who worked on the project as an undergraduate and for three years after graduation, says, “There are other systems for doing similar things, but this is really the most elegant. Having one system that would be able to access all of those things seamlessly would be really a good deal.”

For more: The Archimedes Project

STUDENT LIFE

They Huffed and They Puffed and They Almost Built It

TAKE 80 BALES OF STRAW, a truckload of recycled wood and dozens of used tires. Add some spirited students willing to spend their weekends putting it together, and you get . . . well, not exactly what you envisioned.

It started last spring when 18 undergrads joined a student-initiated class (CE 159: Building Alternatives) with the goal of making a tool shed of straw bales. Instead, they wound up with straw-bale benches and a straw-bale sound wall—and a short course in land-use planning. The experience of framing the shed and then learning that it violated county building restrictions gave a 21st-century twist to a 100-year-old building technology hailed for its light impact on the environment.

Straw-bale buildings were popular among late 19th-century settlers of the Great Plains, where wood was scarce. Today, they are experiencing a revival, particularly among people who are concerned about the environment and want to help build their own homes, says architect Ken Haggard of San Luis Obispo, Calif., who co-designed the state’s first permitted straw-bale house in 1992. Holding enough air for insulation but not enough to promote combustion, the hard-packed bales help keep homes warm in winter and cool in summer, not to mention sparing trees, he says. They offer surprising design flexibility, lending themselves to curved walls and any number of architectural styles. And the experience of stacking them with friends and neighbors is, in Haggard’s view, “a way of breaking out of an overly industrialized society.”

In the pioneer tradition of working as a community, the students designed the 270-square-foot tool shed themselves, under the guidance of civil engineering professor Boyd C. Paulson. They decided to build it on the Community Farm, a student-run organic farm on the edge of campus near Sand Hill Road. Together, they secured the materials: bales of rice straw donated by a farmer in the Sacramento Valley, tires from a recycling station and surplus wood from a Habitat for Humanity project. Over a string of weekends in late April and May, they met at the building site to install a foundation of gravel-packed tires, erect the wooden frame and insert the bales. “The whole class was about working together and learning together,” says Lauren Dietrich, ’03, the urban studies major who coordinated the project.

Like most faculty members who guide student-initiated courses, Paulson, ’67, MS ’69, PhD ’71, stayed on the sidelines: “I’d advise them now and then, and I lectured about affordable housing and structural safety, but the students set everything up.”

Everyone assumed it would be okay to go ahead with construction because the shed was intended only as a temporary demonstration project. But no sooner was the scaffolding up than it had to come down. University officials informed the students that Stanford’s county land-use permit prohibited new construction in the zone containing the Community Farm.

The news didn’t quell their enthusiasm—but with less than four weeks left in the academic year, they had to shift gears fast.

“We met and made a list of the remaining things we could do with the allotted time and materials,” says economics major Ben Abadi, ’04. “And we decided that building a wall would allow us to learn the same skills while also providing a benefit to the Community Farm.”

A couple of noisy air conditioners outside the adjacent Environmental Health and Safety building made it hard to carry on a conversation in the garden area. So, working four days straight with straw, bamboo rods and an earthen-colored plaster, the students constructed a hefty sound wall—8 feet tall and 15 feet wide—which effectively damps the noise. They also built a three-sided bench, giving gardeners a shady resting spot.

Regulatory glitches notwithstanding, students came away describing the project as a positive experience. “Everyone said it was incredibly valuable to work outdoors and receive credit for collaborative physical labor,” Dietrich says. “What I learned most is about the time involved in making a construction project run smoothly. It was an interesting and challenging exercise to work through the bureaucratics of regulatory procedures when our project already incorporated a sustainable approach for both design and construction.”

Dietrich and others are already planning a straw-bale shed that will be properly permitted. “We’re excited to work with the administration,” she says, “to create a lasting structure.”

—LEILA WOMBACHER KNOX

MEDICINE

Simulating a Difficult Exam

IMAGINE YOU ARE A YOUNG DOCTOR performing a procedure crucial to women’s health—a pelvic exam. Now picture yourself doing it poorly, completely missing the top of the uterus, the area near the ovaries, even the cervix.

You wouldn’t be alone, according to Carla Pugh, a Stanford-affiliated surgeon who estimates that one-third of new physicians never touch a woman’s cervix during their first pelvic exam. Even more—perhaps 50 percent to 60 percent—fail to palpate the fundus, or top of the uterus, through a patient’s abdomen.

The problem, Pugh says, is that this exam is tough to teach. It’s difficult for instructors to evaluate the quality of medical students’ pelvic exams just by watching them. “There’s no clinician who hasn’t gone home and wondered if the students felt what they were supposed to feel,” she says.

So Pugh, PhD ’01, developed a teaching tool called e-Pelvis—a model of a female pelvis fitted with sensors and connected to a computer—that provides instant feedback about pelvic exams to both students and teachers.

The e-Pelvis grew out of a project for a Stanford class about human-computer interactions that Pugh took in 1998 while earning a doctorate in education. The prototype consisted of a toilet paper roll stuffed with clay and a “cervix” made from the head of a badminton birdie.

Today’s manufactured e-Pelvis looks like the body of a woman from mid-chest to upper thigh. Inside, sensors are strategically placed at the cervix, the adnexa, which contains the ovaries, and the fundus. A laptop with special software attaches to the model and lets both student and instructor know if the right part is being touched. The program also indicates how much pressure is being applied—important for learning bedside etiquette. Interchangeable interiors give students a chance to test their ability to find different pathologies, such as uterine or ovarian tumors.

Pugh has patented both the e-Pelvis and the broader idea of combining computers, mannequins and sensors to simulate other medical exams (at present, she is working on prostate- and breast-exam simulators). So far, two medical schools—Stanford and King’s College in London—are using the e-Pelvis, and Pugh expects others will be able to purchase it for $6,000, including a laptop. The National Board of Medical Examiners has given her a grant for further research that may result in the device being used for gynecologic licensing exams.

But the biggest reward for Pugh is the reaction of students who use her invention. Stanford MD/PhD student George Scott says he and his classmates appreciated the chance to practice on the e-Pelvis before examining a human patient: “It was best for the ability to help me match what I was feeling for to an image of the anatomy that I had in my mind.” In London, Pugh overheard an even stronger endorsement. One student said to another, “Can you believe for a whole month we’ve been doing this exam wrong?”