The Dish Stanford people on the move and in the spotlight

Faculty and staff have many opportunities to do good during this Big Game Week, which will culminate on Saturday with the traditional football game versus Cal.

For instance, on Tuesday, Nov. 17, you can donate blood at the “Rivals for Life” drive from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. at the Arrillaga Center for Sports and Recreation.

The blood drive, sponsored by BeWell and the Stanford Blood Center, is a competition between Cal and Stanford to see which institution can donate the most blood. Either way, hospital patients will be the real winners. Each donor will receive a T-shirt. One lucky donor will win two field passes for Big Game.

Also on Tuesday, Nov. 17, students at both institutions who are members of STAND, an anti-genocide coalition, will be holding a fast and donating the money they would have spent on food to the Darfur Stoves Project. Faculty and staff are welcome to join in.

The Darfur Stoves Project produces and distributes high-efficiency, low-cost stoves to Darfuri refugees. Requiring 75 percent less wood than traditional stoves, the fuel-efficient stoves benefit the environment and reduce the need for Darfuris to risk exposure by leaving camps to collect wood.

Students at Stanford will finish the day with a meal at the “Break the Fast” event from 6 to 8 p.m. on the first floor of Tresidder Union.
Finally, the Student-Athlete Advisory Committee is sponsoring a “Big Drive” for canned food donations all week. Cans will be collected in the Arrillaga Family Recreation Center, and student-athletes also will collect canned food items at the men’s basketball game against Oral Roberts on Nov. 18 and the women’s basketball game against Pepperdine on Nov. 19. At Big Game, bring donations to the Fan Fest area, located on the outside of the stadium near the track.
Traditionally this event has been a competitive canned food drive between the athletic departments of Stanford and Cal. This year everyone is invited to join in. All the food will be donated to Second Harvest Food Bank. The winner of the Big Drive will be announced during the Big Game.

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“Philosophy Talk,” featuring KEN TAYLOR, the Henry Waldgrave Stuart Professor of Philosophy, and JOHN PERRY, the Henry Waldgrave Stuart Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, will air its 200th episode on Nov. 15. The show will feature a Top 10 list of issues that listeners think philosophers should tackle in the coming years, according to a press release. Faculty and staff can weigh in on the subject by visiting the “Philosophy Talk” website.

“Philosophy Talk,” which bills itself as radio that questions everything except your intelligence, originates from KALW 91.7 FM in San Francisco. It is a weekly one-hour program that also airs on the Oregon and West Virginia Public Broadcasting networks and numerous other stations from New York to California.

Every Sunday for the past six years, Taylor and Perry have approached all manner of topics from a philosophical perspective. Topics are lofty (truth, beauty, justice), arresting (terrorism, intelligent design, suicide) and engaging (baseball, love, happiness). As the press release notes, the hosts chat with notable guests and take calls from listeners, giving every broadcast a lively and conversational tone.

Taylor attributes the show’s appeal to the fact that listeners find the questioning spirit of philosophy a refreshing alternative to traditional media content.

“At its worst, the media is designed not to engage us in critical reflection at all but to subject us to a sort of mind-numbing manipulation of our beliefs. Too much of the media underestimates the intelligence and attention span of the public,” says Taylor. “We are convinced that there are millions of thinking, reflective people out there who find much of what they hear and see in mass media unappealing. We’re trying hard to reach such people, to provide them with more substantive fare.”

Perry adds, “Even the most thoughtful programs on radio and TV typically reach a point where they say, ‘We’ll have to leave that to the philosophers.’ It’s as if when one gets to the philosophical issues one has hit bedrock. But it’s not bedrock, it’s the level where you get past the mud and muck and find real gems.”

The BaBar Collaboration at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory recently celebrated its 400th scientific publication just in time for the group’s meeting. The collaboration published its 400th paper Tuesday, less than nine years after publishing its first in 2001. That’s an average of one publication per week, every week, for nearly nine years straight.

“I do not know of any other collaboration that has achieved such a production rate of outstanding quality science in particle physics; it is really something rare,” said BaBar spokesperson FRANCOIS LE DIBERDER.

For those of us who aren’t completely familiar with BaBar, there’s this accessible explanation from the SLAC web pages: “The BaBar experiment seeks to understand the violation of CP (charge parity) symmetry, the fundamental symmetry of nature that may explain why the universe contains more matter than antimatter. BaBar has shown that nature violates this symmetry in various surprising ways, but that it is not enough to explain all of the missing antimatter. BaBar has also led to a vastly increased understanding of how quarks interact with one another, and has the potential to find signs of new physics beyond the Standard Model of particle physics.”

Read more about it in an article by LAUREN KNOCHE in SLAC Today.

It’s a judgment LARRY KRAMER, pictured below, is certainly happy with: The Stanford Law School dean has been honored for his role in building an institution that nurtures a spirit of public service.

Kramer recently received the John R. Kramer Award for Outstanding Law School Dean from Equal Justice Works, a nonprofit group that focuses on public interest law and advocates on behalf of underserved communities and causes.

In giving him the award, Equal Justice Works commended Kramer’s support of public service initiatives and work to groom a new generation of public interest lawyers.

In turn, the Stanford Law School itself recognized advocates of voting and children’s rights.

Debo P. Adegbile, the director of litigation at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, received the National Public Service Award for his work defending against a constitutional challenge to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Adegbile also represented minority voters in a civil rights suit that resulted in improvements in Florida’s election system after the controversial 2000 presidential election.

Corene Kendrick, a 2003 alumna of the Law School and a lawyer at the Youth Law Center in San Francisco, received the Miles L. Rubin Public Interest Award. Kendrick focuses on confidentiality of juvenile records, due process in parole proceedings, education for youth in foster care and juvenile justice, conditions of secure confinement and foster care, and issues relating to race, mental health and developmental disabilities. She is working on a federal class action lawsuit alleging that California violated the constitutional rights of juvenile parolees.

The National Public Service Award is designated for an attorney whose work on behalf of the public has had national impact. The Miles L. Rubin Public Interest Award is given to a Stanford Law School graduate who has demonstrated courage in challenging social inequity and promoting positive solutions for social change. The awards were established in 2006 by the school’s Levin Center for Public Service and Public Interest Law as part of its mission to raise awareness about the importance of public service.

—Adam Gorlick, photo courtesy of Steven Purcell and Equal Justice Works

For the third year in a row, Stanford has won the title of most physically active campus in the Pac-10 division. Thousands of students, staff, faculty, alumni and supporters throughout the conference logged their exercise minutes last week to score for their schools in the Pac-10 Fitness Challenge.

The annual competition began in 2007 as a way to promote regular physical activity across the 10 campuses, and Stanford has won every year.

This year, the Stanford community logged the most minutes in the competition – 697,882 minutes of fitness-related activity from Oct. 26 to Oct. 30. Students accounted for 327,362 of those minutes, with faculty and staff contributing 271,408. Even better, the number of overall participants for the Farm increased this year, with 3,214 members of the Stanford community taking part.

Congrats to the Cardinal!

—Julie Croteau