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What’s your contribution to ‘That’s So Stanford’?

March 1st, 2012

A recent photo post to "That's So Stanford"

Stanford has launched a new Tumblr site called “That’s So Stanford” and is looking for “shout-out” contributions from anyone in the Stanford community.

For anyone unfamiliar with the format, Tumblr is a microblogging platform and easy-to-use social networking website that allows users to post short content to a “tumblelog.” You can submit words, photos and videos.

“That’s So Stanford” is designed to be a celebration of people, places, events and moments that make Stanford a special and inspiring place, according to IAN HSU, director of Internet media outreach in the Office of Public Affairs. It was Hsu’s students in the Stanford Digital Media Internship Program who initiated the new site, including MIRANDA MAMMEN, TORI LEWIS and ALFREDO MARTINEZ.

Among the featured items so far is an appreciation of sophomore JULIA LANDAUER, a sophomore who is also a professional racecar driver, written by Mammen. She writes, “Thanks, Julia, for your continued inspiration. And maybe you can give me a driving lesson sometime?”

In another post, MARK APPLEBAUM, associate professor of music, writes about his student, MAX FRIEDMAN, saying “I’m especially grateful to have Max remind me that students can take ownership of their education, effectively turning an imperfect teacher into a useful one.”

Visit the site at https://thatssostanford.tumblr.com/

Ask Stanford Med how to ‘spring forward’ without feeling fatigued

February 29th, 2012

Trouble sleeping has been linked to heart problems, increased risk of Type 2 diabetes, development of Alzheimer’s disease and weight gain. Despite the health risks of not getting enough sleep, recent statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicate that more than a third of Americans are sleep deprived.
Changes to our sleep schedules, such as the upcoming daylight-saving time change on March 11, can cause difficulty falling or staying asleep and trigger sleep problems. To help you spring forward and stay on track, the Medical School’s SCOPE blog asked Professor RAFAEL PELAYO to field your questions on sleep research and ways for making sure daylight-saving time doesn’t cut into your snooze time. Pelayo has long researched and treated sleep conditions, including insomnia, sleep disruptions and sleep apnea. He sees adult and pediatric patients.
You can submit questions to Pelayo by sending an @reply message to @SUMedicine and include the hashtag #AskSUMed in your tweet. (Not a Twitter user? Then please submit your question in the comment section of the SCOPE blog post.) The blog will collect questions until 5 p.m. today, Feb. 29.

Read LIA STEAKLEY‘s full blog post here.

Love and other drugs: Ask Stanford Med

February 14th, 2012

When you ask someone to describe the physical sensation of love, chances are you’ll get an answer like falling head-over-heels, having butterflies in the stomach or walking on sunshine. As it turns out, and as described in a Stanford study, those intense, consuming feelings of love can do more than make you happy: They appear to block pain in ways similar to painkillers or illicit drugs.

In honor of Valentine’s Day, the Medical School’s SCOPE blog asked SEAN MACKEY, associate professor of anesthesia and senior author of that pain study, to respond to your questions about the analgesic effects of love – and he’s happy to answer general questions about pain research, too.

You have until Friday at 5 p. m. to submit your questions. For more information, visit LIA STEAKLEY‘s full SCOPE blog post.

Linda Darling-Hammond talks to Dan Rather

February 7th, 2012

Last month, the Stanford News Service published a story titled “How the Finnish school system outshines U.S. education.”

The article featured a Jan. 17 lecture delivered by PASI SAHLBERG, a Finnish education expert, about how the previously failing Finnish educational system had become a success story.

“Finland had been traditionally thought of as the lowest achieving country in Scandinavia, and one of the lower achieving ones in Europe for a very long time. It was not a highly developed education system,” said education Professor LINDA DARLING-HAMMOND, who introduced Sahlberg.

Recently, veteran journalist DAN RATHER interviewed Darling-Hammond for a two-part series on Finland’s education system on his show Dan Rather Reports. According to the website for the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education, Finnish First Part One “looks inside Finnish schools to examine the practices behind the so-called ‘Finnish miracle.’ Part Two asks, What can the United States learn from Finland’s success?

An excerpt of Rather’s interview with Darling-Hammond is below. The full episodes of Finnish First are available for download from iTunes.

SLAC kicks off golden anniversary

February 6th, 2012

SLAC communications staffers, from left, Thanh Ly, conference and event manager; Lina Ruhlman, tour coordinator; LaPria Genevro, administrative associate; Melinda Lee, outreach manager, and Rod Reape, multimedia services supervisor

SLACers are no slouches when it comes to having fun, and the photos just in from the lab’s recent 50^th anniversary kickoff celebration demonstrate that SLAC people work hard and play hard.

The Jan. 26 event started with employees assembling on SLAC’s main green for a variety of photos and videos taken from land, lift bucket and helicopter by BRAD PLUMMER, the lab’s multimedia manager, plus four other professional photographers.

Later, employees enjoyed sumptuous edibles while local band “So Timeless” got funky on stage. There was a photo booth complete with outrageous wigs and shiny shades that staff definitely weren’t shy about putting on for the camera.

Many of these wacky images are online and available now at https://buzzimages.smugmug.com/SLAC.

LAPRIA GENEVRO, administrative associate in SLAC’s communications office, led the party planning. Among the myriad tasks checked off over the two months leading up to the event, she and colleagues selected the menu and band, created 34 reusable centerpieces and assembled the 1,700 “50th Anniversary” and “SLAC” buttons that employees took away.

Genevro said her team especially enjoyed thinking up fun “SLACspeak” names for the drinks: Project M (mock mojito), the Photonic Tonic (faux kir royale), the Accelerator (coffee), Tau Tea (hot water for tea), Synchrotron Cider (hot apple cider) and Cosmic Cocoa (hot chocolate).

The golden anniversary will be a central theme for many of the lab’s outreach activities this year, such as tours and public lectures, said MELINDA LEE, SLAC’s community relations manager. A scientific symposium and special event for VIPs and employees will be held in August and a community event is planned for September.

Read the full story by SLAC science writer MIKE ROSS on the lab’s News Center website.

Sleep research pioneers return to Jerry House

January 31st, 2012

Professor William Dement stands in front of the commemorative plaque. Photo by Robert Tognoli

For a 10-year period starting in the mid-70s, the residence now known as Jerry House served as the site of a series of pioneering sleep studies: Undergraduates and members of the community lent themselves for study during “summer sleep camps” at the house, named for the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia. Until that time, the field of sleep research - still in its infancy – had centered on nighttime events, but researcher MARY CARSKADON, now a professor of psychiatry & human behavior at Brown University, focused these camp studies on the role of sleep in daytime function. The participants’ sleeping and waking were manipulated, recorded and examined; and the end result was important data on sleep restriction and sleep deprivation, and the establishment of clinical protocols still used today.

“Much of the essential, pioneering sleep work at Stanford was done in these camps,” sleep expert RAFAEL PELAYO recently told SCOPE blog writer MICHELLE BRANDT. “The work had great consequences on the development of the field of sleep research here and around the world.”

This weekend, WILLIAM DEMENT, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, who established the Stanford Sleep Disorders Clinic and Research Center at Stanford in 1970, joined Pelayo, Carskadon and others in honoring this early, important research and unveiling a wood-and-glass commemorative plaque to be housed there. (Writer Patrick May was there and reported on the event for the San Jose Mercury News.) The plaque outlines the significance of the studies and highlights the successful careers of Carskadon and Dement.

Read Brandt’s full post on the Medical School’s SCOPE blog.

Forgiveness expert Fred Luskin inaugurates new SCOPE blog feature

January 24th, 2012

Fred Luskin, a research associate in the Stanford Prevention Research Center and co-founder of the Stanford Forgiveness Project, gave a presenation during Parents' Weekend 2011. Photo: L.A. Cicero

This week, the medical school’s SCOPE blog has introduced a new feature that gives readers the opportunity to send questions on a specific topic to our medical school faculty.

Once a month, SCOPE will select a specific topic and invite a professor or researcher to answer your questions on the subject. Editors will take questions in the comments section of the blog post and via the @SUMedicine Twitter feed over the course of a week. (Just send an @reply to @SUMedicine and include the hashtag #AskSUMed in your tweet.)

“Once the submission period ends, we’ll select questions for the faculty member and post them here on SCOPE with the answers,” the blog post says.

To get things started, they have asked FRED LUSKIN, a research associate at the Stanford Prevention Research Center and co-founder of the Stanford Forgiveness Project, to respond to your questions about why forgiveness is important for health.

A central goal of Luskin’s research is to show that forgiveness is beneficial for emotional, physical and relationship well-being. His work demonstrates how learning to forgive leads to increased physical vitality, hope, optimism and conflict resolution skills as well as decreased anger, depression and stress. For more information about submitting your questions to Luskin, visit the full SCOPE blog post.

—By Lia Steakley

Rampersad wins biography award

January 19th, 2012

ARNOLD RAMPERSAD is the recipient of the 2012 BIO Award, given each year by members of the Biographers International Organization.

Rampersad, the Sara Hart Kimball Professor in the Humanities, Emeritus, will receive the honor during the 2012 Compleat Biographer Conference in May in Los Angeles, where he will deliver the keynote address.

Rampersad’s biographies include Ralph Ellison; The Art and Imagination of W.E.B. DuBois; The Life of Langston Hughes; Days of Grace: A Memoir, co-authored with Arthur Ashe; and Jackie Robinson: A Biography.

Rampersad, whose first volume of The Life of Langston Hughes was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, has received fellowships from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Rockefeller Foundation. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a 2010 recipient of the National Humanities Medal.

Daily editor named Daniel Pearl intern

January 17th, 2012

Kathleen Chaykowski

KATHLEEN CHAYKOWSKI, editor-in-chief of the Stanford Daily, has been chosen as the 2012 Daniel Pearl Memorial Journalism Intern. Chaykowski, a junior majoring in English, will work in the Johannesburg bureau of the Wall Street Journal this spring.

The internship was established to commemorate the work and ideals of DANIEL PEARL, a Stanford graduate and Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent who was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan in 2002 at the age of 38.

In an essay written as part of the application process, Chaykowski wrote that Pearl’s “attention to the ambiguity and surprises he encountered yielded stories that delve far beyond the black and white. It is the gray — the small, human moments, the contradictions — that I aspire to capture through my own reporting.”

Chaykowski, of Fort Wayne, Ind., plans to be a foreign correspondent. A member of the Stanford Daily staff since her freshman year, she has had internships at the Mail & Guardian in South Africa and the Chautauquan Daily in New York. A committee of faculty in Stanford’s Department of Communication evaluated applicants for the internship. The final decision was made by the Wall Street Journal.

Read the full announcement on the Department of Communication website.

Beyond the Speech: Martin Luther King Jr. Day Challenge

January 13th, 2012

Martin Luther King speaks at Stanford University's Memorial Auditorium in 1967

Last fall, a challenge was issued to students: Come up with a service project that honors the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. beyond a one-day celebration or the “I Have a Dream” speech.

Ten service project proposals were submitted to the first “Beyond the Speech: Martin Luther King Jr. Day Challenge.” The proposals involved issues ranging from education and the environment to homelessness and political empowerment.

The challenge was organized by the Haas Center for Public Service with support from the Martin Luther King Celebration Committee and the Educational Resources Division of the Office of the Vice Provost for Student Affairs.

It was designed to encourage students and student groups to plan and implement service projects that extend the celebration and work of King “beyond one day of service, beyond one day of honor and beyond one month of celebration.” A panel of faculty and staff evaluated the proposals based on the depth of thought or reflection on King’s life or message; creativity, innovation and impact; collaboration, partnership, new audience engagement and new participants; creative marketing and visibility and management of financial resources.

Below are descriptions of the winning projects, which received grants ranging from $350 to $600:

“Hope to Life,” a project submitted by freshman JESSICA REED, who plans to conduct videotaped interviews with Stanford students and faculty to find out how they use their education to bring hope to their lives and to the lives of others. Reed plans to share these interviews with high school students and begin a discussion about how they can use education to fulfill their own dreams.

“Dr. King’s principles root deeply in my goal for this project,” Reed wrote in her proposal. “He once spoke to a group of middle school students in Philadelphia, saying, ‘Whenever a building is constructed, you usually have an architect who draws a blueprint, and that blueprint serves as the pattern, as the guide, and a building is not well erected without a good, solid blueprint.’ I desire to help students understand that they can use their education as a foundation for greatness. However, they also need hope to keep pursuing their education even when obstacles try to stop them.”

JUAN FLORES, a sophomore, proposed a project inspired by the It Gets Better Project designed to combat suicide among LGBT youth. Working with La Familia de Stanford, a queer and questioning Latina/o support and activism group, Flores seeks to incorporate elements from King’s “I Have a Dream” speech into the video that would be posted on the It Gets Better website. Organizers also want to reach out to LGBT teenagers with “mentorship and support” in high schools, homeless shelters “and/or where hope is needed most,” Flores wrote.

Senior MICHAEL TUBBS, who submitted a proposal on behalf of the Stanford Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), plans to implement an initiative to promote political education, empowerment and mobilization among marginalized youth, through voter registration activities for high school students in Oakland.

“As Dr. King once noted, ‘Almost always, the creative, dedicated minority has made the world better.’ We hope to transform the high school students of Oakland into the creative, dedicated citizens they have the potential to be and dispel the notion that young people are apathetic and uninvolved,” wrote Tubbs.

GILLIE COLLINS, a sophomore, proposed a storytelling event, developed in collaboration with STAND, a student anti-genocide coalition, designed to bring attention to the civil rights of Burmese civilians brutalized by the military junta that has ruled the country since 1962. “The Burma storytelling event would highlight these injustices by sharing relevant stories with the Stanford community that would otherwise go unheard,” Collins wrote. “This project is founded on the idea that all human beings deserve equal treatment and basic civil liberties, principles that guided Dr. King’s work.”

The winners of the challenge are expected to conduct their projects during the months of January and February and make a presentation to the Stanford community during the Student Affairs Assessment Poster Fair, which takes place in the spring.