Stanford University Quotes

Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice." [Stanford University commencement speech, 2005]

Originally, he'd wanted to focus his work on the convict leasing system that had stolen years off of his great-grandpa H's life, but the deeper into the research he got, the bigger the project got. How could he talk about Great-Grandpa H's story without also talking about his grandma Willie and the millions of other black people who had migrated north, fleeing Jim Crow? And if he mentioned the Great Migration, he'd have to talk about the cities that took that flock in. He'd have to talk about Harlem, And how could he talk about Harlem without mentioning his father's heroin addiction - the stints in prison, the criminal record? And if he was going to talk about heroin in Harlem in the '60s, wouldn't he also have to talk about crack everywhere in the '80s? And if he wrote about crack, he'd inevitably be writing, to, about the "war on drugs." And if he started talking about the war on drugs, he'd be talking about how nearly half of the black men he grew up with were on their way either into or out of what had become the harshest prison system in the world. And if he talked about why friends from his hood were doing five-year bids for possession of marijuana when nearly all the white people he'd gone to college with smoked it openly every day, he'd get so angry that he'd slam the research book on the table of the beautiful but deadly silent Lane Reading Room of Green Library of Stanford University. And if he slammed the book down, then everyone in the room would stare and all they would see would be his skin and his anger, and they'd think they knew something about him, and it would be the same something that had justified putting his great-grandpa H in prison, only it would be different too, less obvious than it once was.

In a now famous commencement speech at Stanford University, Steve Jobs urged the graduating class to “stay hungry. Stay foolish.” Never let go of your appetite to go after new ideas, new experiences, and new adventures. Compete with yourself, not with others. Judge yourself on what is your personal best and you’ll accomplish more than you could ever have imagined. Life stops for no one, so keep moving. Stay awake and stay alive.

Pick up a pinecone and count the spiral rows of scales. You may find eight spirals winding up to the left and 13 spirals winding up to the right, or 13 left and 21 right spirals, or other pairs of numbers. The striking fact is that these pairs of numbers are adjacent numbers in the famous Fibonacci series: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21... Here, each term is the sum of the previous two terms. The phenomenon is well known and called phyllotaxis. Many are the efforts of biologists to understand why pinecones, sunflowers, and many other plants exhibit this remarkable pattern. Organisms do the strangest things, but all these odd things need not reflect selection or historical accident. Some of the best efforts to understand phyllotaxis appeal to a form of self-organization. Paul Green, at Stanford, has argued persuasively that the Fibonacci series is just what one would expects as the simplest self-repeating pattern that can be generated by the particular growth processes in the growing tips of the tissues that form sunflowers, pinecones, and so forth. Like a snowflake and its sixfold symmetry, the pinecone and its phyllotaxis may be part of order for free

By the time I slip back to my room, it's almost six. Jasmine is in bed, awake and waiting for me..."Where were you?" Where was I? Chased by a fat guard, hit by a laugh attack and nearly thrown out of Stanford University Math Camp, never to see the light of the campus ever again, and certainly not as a future student.

Stanford University suggests that a two-year mission to Mars would have about the same effect on one’s skeleton. Would an astronaut returning from Mars run the risk of stepping out of the capsule into Earth gravity and snapping a bone?

On the Threshold is beautiful and very touching and a moving tribute to my friend, colleague and mentor Irvin Yalom.

Broad-Based Education: Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country.… I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this.… It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. —Commencement address, Stanford University, June 12, 2005

One whose testimony made a major impact more than a decade ago is Ben Barres, formerly Barbara Barres, a biologist at Stanford University. In 2006, he wrote in the journal Nature about the bias he had experienced as a woman in the sciences, from losing fellowships to less qualified male candidates to being told a boyfriend must have helped her with her math. He was told that he was smarter than his sister by a man who confused his former, female self for that sister. (“A Short History of Silence”)

Epictetus has had a long-standing resonance in the United States; his uncompromising moral rigour chimed in well with Protestant Christian beliefs and the ethical individualism that has been a persistent vein in American culture. His admirers ranged from John Harvard and Thomas Jefferson in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau in the nineteenth. More recently, Vice-Admiral James Stockdale wrote movingly of how his study of Epictetus at Stanford University enabled him to survive the psychological pressure of prolonged torture as a prisoner of war in Vietnam between 1965 and 1973. Stockdale’s story formed the basis for a light-hearted treatment of the moral power of Stoicism in Tom Wolfe’s novel A Man in Full (1998).52

In our culture of multitasking, according to Professor Clifford Nass of Stanford University, “The neural circuits devoted to scanning, skimming, and multitasking are expanding and strengthening, while those used for reading and thinking deeply, with sustained concentration, are weakening or eroding.”5

Create a failure résumé. Most of us have a résumé—a written compendium of jobs, experiences, and credentials that demonstrate to prospective employers and clients how qualified, adept, and generally awesome we are. Tina Seelig, a professor of practice at Stanford University, says we also need a “failure résumé,” a detailed and thorough inventory of our flops. A failure résumé offers another method for addressing our regrets. The very act of creating one is a form of disclosure. And by eyeing your failure résumé not as its protagonist, but as an observer, you can learn from it without feeling diminished by your mistakes. A few years ago, I compiled a failure résumé, then tried to glean lessons from the many screwups I’d committed. (Disclosing these embarrassments to myself will be sufficient, thank you very much.) I realized I’d repeatedly made variations of the same two mistakes, and that knowledge has helped me avoid those mistakes again.

Stanford University's psychologist Carol Dweck and her colleagues have discovered that what you believe about intellectual ability—whether you think it's a fixed gift, or an earned ability that can be developed—makes a difference to your behavior, persistence, and performance. Students who see ability as fixed—as a gift—are more vulnerable to setbacks and difficulties. And stereotypes, as Dweck rightly points out, "are stories about gifts—who has them and who doesn't." Dweck and her colleagues are shown that when students are encouraged to see math ability as something that grows with effort—pointing out, for example, that the brain forges new connections and develops better ability every time they practice a task—grades improve and gender gaps diminish (relative to groups given control interventions).

In 2011, two studies out of Stanford University showed that comedy was a more helpful tool than solemnity in helping participants deal with traumatic imagery.

Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck, author of Mindset: The Psychology of Success, discovered in her research that the most successful people are those with a growth mindset

Tinkerers built America. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, all were tinkerers in their childhood. Everything from the airplane to the computer started in somebody's garage. Go back even further: the Industrial Revolution was a revolution of tinkerers. The great scientific thinkers of eighteenth-century England couldn't have been less interested in cotton spinning and weaving. Why would you be? It was left to a bloke on the shop floor who happened to glance at a one-thread wheel that had toppled over and noticed that both the wheel and the spindle were still turning. So James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny, and there followed other artful gins and mules and frames and looms, and Britain and the world were transformed. By tinkerers rather than thinkerers. "Technological change came from tinkerers," wrote Professor J.R. McNeill of Georgetown, "people with little or no scientific education but with plenty of hands-on experience." John Ratzenberger likes to paraphrase a Stanford University study: "Engineers who are great in physics and calculus but can't think in new ways about old objects are doomed to think in old ways about new objects." That's the lesson of the spinning jenny: an old object fell over and someone looked at it in a new way.

Our ability to leave our physical bodies and travel to other places has been demonstrated in controlled laboratory experiments by researchers with good academic credentials. These include Charles Tart at the University of California in Davis, and Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff at the Stanford Reesearch Institute. Russell Targ's research of "remote viewing" involves two people. The "viewer" stays in a carefully controlled laboratory environment while a "beacon" person is located somewhere outside that vicinity. A computer then selects a location that is unknown to the viewer. The beacon person is secretly notified where he or she is to go, based on the computer's random selection of a site. After the beacon person gets to the site, the viewer is asked to describe what the beacon person is seeing. The distance between the beacon person and the viewer appears to have no significant effect on the viewer's ability to accurately describe the site; the distance between them can be a few blocks or many thousand miles. In several successful attempts, a Soviet psychic not only accurately described the location of Targ's associate Keith Harary who acted as a beacon, he also described what Harary would see at the next computer-selected site--even before he got there or knew what he would see!

My travels took me as far north as Thorsminde, Denmark (in February no less); as far south as Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia; as far west as the Hoover Library at Stanford University; and to various points east, including the always amazing Library of Congress and the U.S. National Archives, and equally enticing archives in London, Liverpool, and Cambridge.

Moscow State University.”4 MGU was to the USSR what Harvard is to the United States—except that in the Soviet Union there was almost nothing else, no Yale, Princeton, or Stanford, no Ivy League, no equally distinguished state universities, no elite liberal arts colleges. Moscow the city was itself unique:

Democracy “Democracy is the most fragile thing on earth, for what does it rest upon? You and me, and the fact that we agree to maintain it. The moment either of us says we will not, that’s the end of it. It doesn’t rest on anything but us; it doesn’t rest on armed force, the moment it does it isn’t democracy. It isn’t something to kick around or experiment with.” —Allen Drury, Stanford University (age 19)

Jim Clark was interviewed at an event held at Stanford University. At some point in the interview, the topic turned to social media. Clark’s reaction was unexpected given his high-tech background: “I just don’t appreciate social networking.” As he then clarifies, this distaste is captured by a particular experience he had sitting on a panel with a social media executive: [The executive was] just raving about these people spending twelve hours a day on Facebook . . . so I asked a question to the guy who was raving: “The guy who’s spending twelve hours a day on Facebook, do you think he’ll be able to do what you’ve done?

During a recent visit to the United States, French President François Mitterrand stopped to tour California’s Silicon Valley, where he hoped to learn more about the ingenuity and entrepreneurial drive that gave birth to so many companies there. Over lunch, Mitterrand listened as Thomas Perkins, a partner in the venture capital fund that started Genentech Inc., extolled the virtues of the risk-taking investors who finance the entrepreneurs. Perkins was cut off by Stanford University Professor Paul Berg, who won a Nobel Prize for work in genetic engineering. He asked, ‘Where were you guys in the ’50s and ’60s when all the funding had to be done in the basic science? Most of the discoveries that have fuelled [the industry] were created back then.’ Henderson and Schrage, in the Washington Post (1984)

Robert Sapolsky, a neurobiologist at Stanford University, has argued that the main job of the modern prefrontal cortex is to bias the brain—and therefore, you—toward doing “the harder thing.” When it’s easier to stay on the couch, your prefrontal cortex makes you want to get up and exercise. When it’s easier to say yes to dessert, your prefrontal cortex remembers the reasons for ordering tea instead. And when it’s easier to put that project off until tomorrow, it’s your prefrontal cortex that helps you open the file and make progress anyway.

Steve Jobs gave a heartfelt talk to a graduating class at Stanford University. His advice: “Don’t let the voice of others’ opinions drown out your inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.”3

One of the most bizarre and intriguing findings is that people with brain damage may be particularly good investors. Why? Because damage to certain parts of the brain can impair the emotional responses that cause the rest of us to do foolish things. A team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, and the University of Iowa conducted an experiment that compared the investment decisions made by fifteen patients with damage to the areas of the brain that control emotions (but with intact logic and cognitive functions) to the investment decisions made by a control group. The brain-damaged investors finished the game with 13 percent more money than the control group, largely, the authors believe, because they do not experience fear and anxiety. The impaired investors took more risks when there were high potential payoffs and got less emotional when they made losses.7 This

Stepford University--one of the leading research university on the PLANET with over THREE MILLION likes on Facebook. That's more than Harvard, and SIX times as many as Stanford.

Three researchers at Stanford University noticed the same thing about the undergraduates they were teaching, and they decided to study it. First, they noticed that while all the students seemed to use digital devices incessantly, not all students did. True to stereotype, some kids were zombified, hyperdigital users. But some kids used their devices in a low-key fashion: not all the time, and not with two dozen windows open simultaneously. The researchers called the first category of students Heavy Media Multitaskers. Their less frantic colleagues were called Light Media Multitaskers. If you asked heavy users to concentrate on a problem while simultaneously giving them lots of distractions, the researchers wondered, how good was their ability to maintain focus? The hypothesis: Compared to light users, the heavy users would be faster and more accurate at switching from one task to another, because they were already so used to switching between browser windows and projects and media inputs. The hypothesis was wrong. In every attentional test the researchers threw at these students, the heavy users did consistently worse than the light users. Sometimes dramatically worse. They weren’t as good at filtering out irrelevant information. They couldn’t organize their memories as well. And they did worse on every task-switching experiment. Psychologist Eyal Ophir, an author of the study, said of the heavy users: “They couldn’t help thinking about the task they weren’t doing. The high multitaskers are always drawing from all the information in front of them. They can’t keep things separate in their minds.” This is just the latest illustration of the fact that the brain cannot multitask. Even if you are a Stanford student in the heart of Silicon Valley.

The Allied governments, for example, with the British as executors, maintained in place the food blockade of Germany that had been in effect since 1917. A British authority would note that “in the last two years of the war, nearly 800,000 noncombatants died in Germany from starvation or diseases attributed to undernourishment. The biggest mortality was among children between the ages of 5 and 1 5, where the death rate increased by 55 percent. . . a whole generation [the one which had been born and lived during Hitler’s rise to power] grew up in an epoch of undernourishment and misery such as we [British] have never in this country experienced.”3 A distinguished American authority on United States foreign policy in the first half of the twentieth century, Stanford University professor Thomas A. Bailey, noted that “the Allied slow starvation of Germany’s civilian population was quiet, unspectacular, and censored.”4 The Englishman Gilbert Murray, writing in 1933, noted that future historians would probably regard the establishment and continuation of the blockade as one of those many acts of almost incredible inhumanity which made World War I conspicuous in history. -- Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny, p. 122

The intelligent want self-control; children want candy. —RUMI INTRODUCTION Welcome to Willpower 101 Whenever I mention that I teach a course on willpower, the nearly universal response is, “Oh, that’s what I need.” Now more than ever, people realize that willpower—the ability to control their attention, emotions, and desires—influences their physical health, financial security, relationships, and professional success. We all know this. We know we’re supposed to be in control of every aspect of our lives, from what we eat to what we do, say, and buy. And yet, most people feel like willpower failures—in control one moment but overwhelmed and out of control the next. According to the American Psychological Association, Americans name lack of willpower as the number-one reason they struggle to meet their goals. Many feel guilty about letting themselves and others down. Others feel at the mercy of their thoughts, emotions, and cravings, their lives dictated by impulses rather than conscious choices. Even the best-controlled feel a kind of exhaustion at keeping it all together and wonder if life is supposed to be such a struggle. As a health psychologist and educator for the Stanford School of Medicine’s Health Improvement Program, my job is to help people manage stress and make healthy choices. After years of watching people struggle to change their thoughts, emotions, bodies, and habits, I realized that much of what people believed about willpower was sabotaging their success and creating unnecessary stress. Although scientific research had much to say that could help them, it was clear that these insights had not yet become part of public understanding. Instead, people continued to rely on worn-out strategies for self-control. I saw again and again that the strategies most people use weren’t just ineffective—they actually backfired, leading to self-sabotage and losing control. This led me to create “The Science of Willpower,” a class offered to the public through Stanford University’s Continuing Studies program. The course brings together the newest insights about self-control from psychology, economics, neuroscience, and medicine to explain how we can break old habits and create healthy habits, conquer procrastination, find our focus, and manage stress. It illuminates why we give in to temptation and how we can find the strength to resist. It demonstrates the importance of understanding the limits of self-control,

Csikszentmihalyi teamed up with two other leading psychologists—Howard Gardner at Harvard, and William Damon at Stanford—to study these changes, and to see why some professions seemed healthy while others were growing sick. Picking the fields of genetics and journalism as case studies, they conducted dozens of interviews with people in each field. Their conclusion32 is as profound as it is simple: It’s a matter of alignment. When doing good (doing high-quality work that produces something of use to others) matches up with doing well (achieving wealth and professional advancement), a field is healthy. Genetics, for example, is a healthy field because all parties involved respect and reward the very best science. Even though pharmaceutical companies and market forces were beginning to inject vast amounts of money into university research labs in the 1990s, the scientists whom Csikszentmihalyi, Gardner, and Damon interviewed did not believe they were being asked to lower their standards, cheat, lie, or sell their souls. Geneticists believed that their field was in a golden age in which excellent work brought great benefits to the general public, the pharmaceutical companies, the universities, and the scientists themselves.

When Northwestern and Stanford researchers analyzed the networks that give rise to creative triumph, they found what they deemed a “universal” setup. Whether they looked at research groups in economics or ecology, or the teams that write, compose, and produce Broadway musicals, thriving ecosystems had porous boundaries between teams.

Man was considered until the 20th century to include women by implication. They were referring primarily to males. It is now frequently understood to exclude women. This had real consequences. They are endless, but a few come to mind. Heart attacks were described by how they affected men, so that women's symptoms were less likely to be recognized and treated. A situation from which many women died. Crash test dummies replicated male bodies, meaning that vehicular safety design favored male survival and women died at higher rates. The Stanford Prison experiment of 1971 presumed that the behavior of young men at an elite university could be universalized to stand for that of all humanity.

By all indications, Mike has made his parents proud. His e-mail username is “A-student,” and he’s just won a coveted spot in Stanford University’s freshman class. He’s the kind of thoughtful, dedicated student that any community would be proud to call its own. And yet, according to an article called “The New White Flight” that ran in the Wall Street Journal just six months previously, white families are leaving Cupertino in droves, precisely because of kids like Mike. They are fleeing the sky-high test scores and awe-inspiring study habits of many Asian-American students. The article said that white parents feared that their kids couldn’t keep up academically. It quoted a student from a local high school: “If you were Asian, you had to confirm you were smart. If you were white, you had to prove it.

Dr. Thomas Sowell, senior fellow at the Hoover Institute, Stanford University, notes that “There was a time when the purpose of taxes was to pay the inevitable costs of government. To the political left, however, taxes have long been seen as a way to redistribute income and finance other social experiments based on liberal ideology.”3 The consequences for the rising generation and future generations of the statists’ immoral, politically expedient, and economically ruinous behavior and policies are unambiguous as evidenced by statistic after statistic, which are mainly ignored, discounted, or excused by most of the media, academia, and, of course, governing statists. Nonetheless, there is no mistaking the eventual societal turmoil these facts and figures portend—evidence all Americans, and especially younger people, must heed.

Kelly McGonigal, a health psychologist at Stanford University, warned about the dangers of stress for a full decade before she realized that maybe it was her advice, rather than stress itself, that was sending people to their graves faster. “I’m converting a stimulus [stress] that could be strengthening people into a source of disease.” With a breakthrough in her thinking, and some powerful new research, McGonigal made a complete turnaround. Turns out, stress might just be our friend. Just as you put stress on a muscle to make it stronger (by lifting weights or running), emotional stress can make us physically and psychologically stronger too. McGonigal now highlights new research showing that when you change your mind about stress, you can literally change your body’s physical reaction to it. In an eight-year study, adults who experienced a “lot of stress” and who believed stress was harmful to their health had a 43% increase in their risk of dying. (That sure stressed me out.) However, people who experienced an equal amount of stress but did not view stress as harmful were no more likely to die! McGonigal says that physical signs of stress (a pounding heart, faster breathing, breaking out in a sweat) aren’t necessarily physical evidence of anxiety or signs that we aren’t coping well with pressure. Instead, we can interpret them as indications that our body is energized and preparing us to meet the next challenge. The bottom line is, science has now proven that how you think about stress matters—the story you attach to stress. Telling yourself it’s good for you instead of harmful could mean the difference between a stress-induced heart attack at 50 or living well into your 90s.

A month passed, and it was time again for Marcus to return to his research. He had been avoiding it because it wasn’t going well. Originally, he’d wanted to focus his work on the convict leasing system that had stolen years off of his great-grandpa H’s life, but the deeper into the research he got, the bigger the project got. How could he talk about Great-Grandpa H’s story without also talking about his grandma Willie and the millions of other black people who had migrated north, fleeing Jim Crow? And if he mentioned the Great Migration, he’d have to talk about the cities that took that flock in. He’d have to talk about Harlem. And how could he talk about Harlem without mentioning his father’s heroin addiction—the stints in prison, the criminal record? And if he was going to talk about heroin in Harlem in the ’60s, wouldn’t he also have to talk about crack everywhere in the ’80s? And if he wrote about crack, he’d inevitably be writing, too, about the “war on drugs.” And if he started talking about the war on drugs, he’d be talking about how nearly half of the black men he grew up with were on their way either into or out of what had become the harshest prison system in the world. And if he talked about why friends from his hood were doing five-year bids for possession of marijuana when nearly all the white people he’d gone to college with smoked it openly every day, he’d get so angry that he’d slam the research book on the table of the beautiful but deadly silent Lane Reading Room of Green Library of Stanford University. And if he slammed the book down, then everyone in the room would stare and all they would see would be his skin and his anger, and they’d think they knew something about him, and it would be the same something that had justified putting his great-grandpa H in prison, only it would be different too, less obvious than it once was.

The spread of semiconductors was enabled as much by clever manufacturing techniques as academic physics. Universities like MIT and Stanford played a crucial role in developing knowledge about semiconductors, but the chip industry only took off because graduates of these institutions spent years tweaking production processes to make mass manufacturing possible. It was engineering and intuition, as much as scientific theorizing, that turned a Bell Labs patent into a world-changing industry

Jack Dorsey is best known as the creator of Twitter and as the founder and CEO of Square, a mobile payments company. His Essentialist approach to management is a relatively rare one. At a dinner I attended recently where he spoke, he said he thinks of the role of CEO as being the chief editor of the company. At another event at Stanford University he explained further: “By editorial I mean there are a thousand things we could be doing. But there [are] only one or two that are important. And all of these ideas … and inputs from engineers, support people, designers are going to constantly flood what we should be doing…. As an editor I am constantly taking these inputs and deciding the one, or intersection of a few, that make sense for what we are doing.”3 An editor is not merely someone who says no to things. A three-year-old can do that. Nor does an editor simply eliminate; in fact, in a way, an editor actually adds. What I mean is that a good editor is someone who uses deliberate subtraction to actually add life to the ideas, setting, plot, and characters.

IN 2012, researchers at the University of Rochester, altered the 1968 Stanford Marshmallow experiment in one crucial way. One group of children experienced a broken promise before the marshmallow test was conducted. The researchers left the room and said they would return when the child rang the bell, but then didn't. The other group of children were told the same, but when they rang the bell, the researcher returned. The children in the latter group where the researcher came back, were willing to wait up to 4 times longer - 12 minutes - for a 2nd marshmallow, than the children in the broken promise group.

Stanford University’s John Koza, who pioneered genetic programming in 1986, has used genetic algorithms to invent an antenna for NASA, create computer programs for identifying proteins, and invent general purpose electrical controllers. Twenty-three times Koza’s genetic algorithms have independently invented electronic components already patented by humans, simply by targeting the engineering specifications of the finished devices—the “fitness” criteria. For example, Koza’s algorithms invented a voltage-current conversion circuit (a device used for testing electronic equipment) that worked more accurately than the human-invented circuit designed to meet the same specs. Mysteriously, however, no one can describe how it works better—it appears to have redundant and even superfluous parts. But that’s the curious thing about genetic programming (and “evolutionary programming,” the programming family it belongs to). The code is inscrutable. The program “evolves” solutions that computer scientists cannot readily reproduce. What’s more, they can’t understand the process genetic programming followed to achieve a finished solution. A computational tool in which you understand the input and the output but not the underlying procedure is called a “black box” system. And their unknowability is a big downside for any system that uses evolutionary components. Every step toward inscrutability is a step away from accountability, or fond hopes like programming in friendliness toward humans. That doesn’t mean scientists routinely lose control of black box systems. But if cognitive architectures use them in achieving AGI, as they almost certainly will, then layers of unknowability will be at the heart of the system. Unknowability might be an unavoidable consequence of self-aware, self-improving software.

When I met Dr. Phil Zimbardo, the former president of the American Psychological Association, for lunch, I knew him primarily as the mastermind behind the famous Stanford prison experiment.7 In the summer of 1971, Zimbardo took healthy Stanford students, assigned them roles as either “guards” or “inmates,” and locked them in a makeshift “prison” in the basement of Stanford University. In just days, the “prisoners” began to demonstrate symptoms of depression and extreme stress, while the “guards” began to act cruel and sadistic (the experiment was ended early, for obvious reasons). The point is that simply being treated like prisoners and guards had, over the course of just a few days, created a momentum that caused the subjects to act like prisoners and guards. The Stanford prison experiment is legendary, and much has been written about its many implications. But what I wondered was this: If simply being treated in a certain way conditioned these Stanford students to gradually adopt these negative behaviors, could the same kind of conditioning work for more positive behavior too? Indeed, today Zimbardo is attempting a grand social experiment along those lines called the “Heroic Imagination Project.”8 The logic is to increase the odds of people operating with courage by teaching them the principles of heroism. By encouraging and rewarding heroic acts, Zimbardo believes, we can consciously and deliberately create a system where heroic acts eventually become natural and effortless. We have a choice. We can use our energies to set up a system that makes execution of goodness easy, or we can resign ourselves to a system that actually makes it harder to do what is good. Ward’s Positive Tickets system did the former, and it worked. We can apply the same principle to the choices we face when designing systems in our own lives.

In fact, the same basic ingredients can easily be found in numerous start-up clusters in the United States and around the world: Austin, Boston, New York, Seattle, Shanghai, Bangalore, Istanbul, Stockholm, Tel Aviv, and Dubai. To discover the secret to Silicon Valley’s success, you need to look beyond the standard origin story. When people think of Silicon Valley, the first things that spring to mind—after the HBO television show, of course—are the names of famous start-ups and their equally glamorized founders: Apple, Google, Facebook; Jobs/ Wozniak, Page/ Brin, Zuckerberg. The success narrative of these hallowed names has become so universally familiar that people from countries around the world can tell it just as well as Sand Hill Road venture capitalists. It goes something like this: A brilliant entrepreneur discovers an incredible opportunity. After dropping out of college, he or she gathers a small team who are happy to work for equity, sets up shop in a humble garage, plays foosball, raises money from sage venture capitalists, and proceeds to change the world—after which, of course, the founders and early employees live happily ever after, using the wealth they’ve amassed to fund both a new generation of entrepreneurs and a set of eponymous buildings for Stanford University’s Computer Science Department. It’s an exciting and inspiring story. We get the appeal. There’s only one problem. It’s incomplete and deceptive in several important ways. First, while “Silicon Valley” and “start-ups” are used almost synonymously these days, only a tiny fraction of the world’s start-ups actually originate in Silicon Valley, and this fraction has been getting smaller as start-up knowledge spreads around the globe. Thanks to the Internet, entrepreneurs everywhere have access to the same information. Moreover, as other markets have matured, smart founders from around the globe are electing to build companies in start-up hubs in their home countries rather than immigrating to Silicon Valley.

I don’t know if I’ll get in at Stanford,” one premed said to me after he had sent in his application. “Or anywhere else,” he added. Another mentioned a different school, but the students’ worries were essentially the same. I seldom got involved in what I called freaking out, but this kind of talk happened often, especially during our senior year. One time when this freaking out was going on and I didn’t enter in, one of my friends turned to me, “Carson, aren’t you worried?” “No,” I said. “I’m going to the University of Michigan Medical School.” “How can you be so sure?” “It’s real simple. My father owns the university.” “Did you hear that?” he yelled at one of the others. “Carson’s old man owns the University of Michigan.” Several students were impressed. And understandably because they came from extremely wealthy homes. Their parents owned great industries. Actually, I had been teasing, and maybe it wasn’t playing fair. As a Chrisitan, I believe that God— my Heavenly Father— not only created the universe, but He controls it. And, by extension, God owns the University of Michigan and everything else. I never did explain.

Beauty Junkies is the title of a recent book by New York Times writer Alex Kuczynski, “a self-confessed recovering addict of cosmetic surgery.” And, withour technological prowess, we succeed in creating fresh addictions. Some psychologists now describe a new clinical pathology — Internet sex addiction disorder. Physicians and psychologists may not be all that effective in treating addictions, but we’re expert at coming up with fresh names and categories. A recent study at Stanford University School of Medicine found that about 5.5 per cent of men and 6 per cent of women appear to be addicted shoppers. The lead researcher, Dr. Lorrin Koran, suggested that compulsive buying be recognized as a unique illness listed under its own heading in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the official psychiatric catalogue. Sufferers of this “new” disorder are afflicted by “an irresistible, intrusive and senseless impulse” to purchase objects they do not need. I don’t scoff at the harm done by shopping addiction — I’m in no position to do that — and I agree that Dr. Koran accurately describes the potential consequences of compulsive buying: “serious psychological, financial and family problems, including depression, overwhelming debt and the breakup of relationships.” But it’s clearly not a distinct entity — only another manifestation of addiction tendencies that run through our culture, and of the fundamental addiction process that varies only in its targets, not its basic characteristics. In his 2006 State of the Union address, President George W. Bush identified another item of addiction. “Here we have a serious problem,” he said. “America is addicted to oil.” Coming from a man who throughout his financial and political career has had the closest possible ties to the oil industry. The long-term ill effects of our society’s addiction, if not to oil then to the amenities and luxuries that oil makes possible, are obvious. They range from environmental destruction, climate change and the toxic effects of pollution on human health to the many wars that the need for oil, or the attachment to oil wealth, has triggered. Consider how much greater a price has been exacted by this socially sanctioned addiction than by the drug addiction for which Ralph and his peers have been declared outcasts. And oil is only one example among many: consider soul-, body-or Nature-destroying addictions to consumer goods, fast food, sugar cereals, television programs and glossy publications devoted to celebrity gossip—only a few examples of what American writer Kevin Baker calls “the growth industries that have grown out of gambling and hedonism.

Meanwhile, scientists are studying certain drugs that may erase traumatic memories that continue to haunt and disturb us. In 2009, Dutch scientists, led by Dr. Merel Kindt, announced that they had found new uses for an old drug called propranolol, which could act like a “miracle” drug to ease the pain associated with traumatic memories. The drug did not induce amnesia that begins at a specific point in time, but it did make the pain more manageable—and in just three days, the study claimed. The discovery caused a flurry of headlines, in light of the thousands of victims who suffer from PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). Everyone from war veterans to victims of sexual abuse and horrific accidents could apparently find relief from their symptoms. But it also seemed to fly in the face of brain research, which shows that long-term memories are encoded not electrically, but at the level of protein molecules. Recent experiments, however, suggest that recalling memories requires both the retrieval and then the reassembly of the memory, so that the protein structure might actually be rearranged in the process. In other words, recalling a memory actually changes it. This may be the reason why the drug works: propranolol is known to interfere with adrenaline absorption, a key in creating the long-lasting, vivid memories that often result from traumatic events. “Propranolol sits on that nerve cell and blocks it. So adrenaline can be present, but it can’t do its job,” says Dr. James McGaugh of the University of California at Irvine. In other words, without adrenaline, the memory fades. Controlled tests done on individuals with traumatic memories showed very promising results. But the drug hit a brick wall when it came to the ethics of erasing memory. Some ethicists did not dispute its effectiveness, but they frowned on the very idea of a forgetfulness drug, since memories are there for a purpose: to teach us the lessons of life. Even unpleasant memories, they said, serve some larger purpose. The drug got a thumbs-down from the President’s Council on Bioethics. Its report concluded that “dulling our memory of terrible things [would] make us too comfortable with the world, unmoved by suffering, wrongdoing, or cruelty.… Can we become numb to life’s sharpest sorrows without also becoming numb to its greatest joys?” Dr. David Magus of Stanford University’s Center for Biomedical Ethics says, “Our breakups, our relationships, as painful as they are, we learn from some of those painful experiences. They make us better people.” Others disagree. Dr. Roger Pitman of Harvard University says that if a doctor encounters an accident victim who is in intense pain, “should we deprive them of morphine because we might be taking away the full emotional experience? Who would ever argue with that? Why should psychiatry be different? I think that somehow behind this argument lurks the notion that mental disorders are not the same as physical disorders.

Here's a simplified version of what the Stanford group did. They started with a much-studied kind of string theory-a flat four-dimensional spacetime with a small six-dimensional geometry over each point. They chose the geometry of the six wrapped-up dimensions to be one of the Calabi-Yau spaces (see Chapter 8). As noted, there are at least a hundred thousand of these, and all you have to do is pick a typical one whose geometry depends on many constants. Then they wrapped large numbers of electric and magnetic fluxes around the six-dimensional spaces over each point. Because you can wrap only discrete units of flux, this tends to freeze out the instabilities. To further stabilize the geometry, you have to call on certain quantum effects not known to arise directly from string theory, but they are understood to some extent in supersymmetric gauge theories, so it is possible that they play a role here. Combining these quantum effects with the effects from the fluxes, you get a geometry in which all the moduli are stable. This can also be done so that there appears to be a negative cosmological constant in the four-dimensional spacetime. It turns out that the smaller we want the cosmological constant to be, the more fluxes we must wrap, so we wrap huge numbers of fluxes to get a cosmological constant that is tiny but still negative. (As noted, we don't know explicitly how to write the details of a string theory on such a background, but there's no reason to believe it doesn't exist.) But the point is to get a positive cosmological constant, to match the new observations of the universe's expansion rate. So the next step is to wrap other branes around the geometry, in a different way, which has the effect of raising the cosmological constant. Just as there are antiparticles, there are antibranes, and the Stanford group used them here. By wrapping antibranes, energy can be added so as to make the cosmological constant small and positive. At the same time, the tendency of string theories to flow into one another is suppressed, because any change requires a discrete step. Thus, two problems are solved at once: The instabilities are eliminated and the cosmological constant is small and positive.

A different approach was taken in 1972 by Dr. Walter Mischel, also of Stanford, who analyzed yet another characteristic among children: the ability to delay gratification. He pioneered the use of the “marshmallow test,” that is, would children prefer one marshmallow now, or the prospect of two marsh-mallows twenty minutes later? Six hundred children, aged four to six, participated in this experiment. When Mischel revisited the participants in 1988, he found that those who could delay gratification were more competent than those who could not. In 1990, another study showed a direct correlation between those who could delay gratification and SAT scores. And a study done in 2011 indicated that this characteristic continued throughout a person’s life. The results of these and other studies were eye-opening. The children who exhibited delayed gratification scored higher on almost every measure of success in life: higher-paying jobs, lower rates of drug addiction, higher test scores, higher educational attainment, better social integration, etc. But what was most intriguing was that brain scans of these individuals revealed a definite pattern. They showed a distinct difference in the way the prefrontal cortex interacted with the ventral striatum, a region involved in addiction. (This is not surprising, since the ventral striatum contains the nucleus accumbens, known as the “pleasure center.” So there seems to be a struggle here between the pleasure-seeking part of the brain and the rational part to control temptation, as we saw in Chapter 2.) This difference was no fluke. The result has been tested by many independent groups over the years, with nearly identical results. Other studies have also verified the difference in the frontal-striatal circuitry of the brain, which appears to govern delayed gratification. It seems that the one characteristic most closely correlated with success in life, which has persisted over the decades, is the ability to delay gratification. Although this is a gross simplification, what these brain scans show is that the connection between the prefrontal and parietal lobes seems to be important for mathematical and abstract thought, while the connection between the prefrontal and limbic system (involving the conscious control of our emotions and pleasure center) seems to be essential for success in life. Dr. Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, concludes, “Your grades in school, your scores on the SAT, mean less for life success than your capacity to co-operate, your ability to regulate your emotions, your capacity to delay your gratification, and your capacity to focus your attention. Those skills are far more important—all the data indicate—for life success than your IQ or your grades.

Getting A’s no longer means that everything’s okay, assuming that it ever did. “We have students, who, no matter what else is going on in their lives, know how to get those grades,” Rabbi Patricia Karlin-Neumann, Stanford’s university chaplain, has said. “It’s important for us to take away the blinders that keep us from seeing their distress.

It’s not hard to perceive a certain deadening sameness that has begun to blanket the world under the sway of the Stacks, as the planet’s extraordinary diversity of lifeways yield to the unlimited perfect reproduction of the modes of taste, self-expression and subjectivity these new hegemons are tuned to. All of them are headquartered on the west coast of the United States, three of them within a ten-mile radius of Stanford University. They share a set of assumptions about who their user is, how that person lives and what they want; they share a grounding in the Californian Ideology18 and the casual technolibertarianism that has long reigned in the Bay Area; and latterly, they even tend to share a single overarching aesthetic.

Dr. B. J. Fogg, founder of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University, wrote his graduate dissertation with a far less aggressive commitment. Even if he came home from a party at 3:00 A.M., he had to write one sentence per day. He finished in record time while classmates languished for years, overwhelmed by the enormity of the task. Understanding this

the most elementary material constituent, atoms consist of a nucleus, containing protons and neutrons, that is surrounded by a swarm of orbiting electrons. For a while many physicists thought that protons, neutrons, and electrons were the Greeks' "atoms." But in 1968 experimenters at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, making use of the increased capacity of technology to probe the microscopic depths of matter, found that protons and neutrons are not fundamental, either. Instead they showed that each consists of three smaller particles, called quarks—a whimsical name taken from a passage in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake by the theoretical physicist Murray Gell-Mann, who previously had surmised their existence. The experimenters confirmed that quarks themselves come in two varieties, which were named, a bit less creatively, up and down. A proton consists of two up-quarks and a down-quark; a neutron consists of two down-quarks and an up-quark.

Following its publication in 1981, Saints, Slaves, and Blacks received further scrutiny from scholars in a series of reviews published in newspapers and professional journals. Stanford J. Layton, Managing Editor of the Utah Historical Quarterly, praised the book in the Salt Lake Tribune. The volume, Layton opined, projected “the heft and feel of scholarship . . . apparent on every page,” which deserved the attention of all those seeking to understand “how a racially discriminatory priesthood policy emerged during Mormonism’s formative years and solidified over time.”21 Likewise, Eli M. Oboler, head librarian at Idaho State University in Pocatello, Idaho, wrote in the Idaho State Journal and characterized the volume as

Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler used his paper as a megaphone to promote eugenics, and universities such as Yale, Stanford, and Harvard bestowed their academic credibility to the cause.

Stanford University offers up to 100 free online courses to make their classes accessible to the masses.

Allen Barbour, an internist at Stanford University, had said that depression isn’t a disease; depression is a normal response to abnormal life experiences.

In reality, though, it usually worked like this: A female candidate who will buzzkill your weekly happy hour? “Cultural fit.” A soft-spoken Indian or Chinese engineer, quietly competent but incapable of the hard-charging egotism that Americans almost universally wear like they do blue jeans? “Cultural fit.” Self-taught kid from some crappy college you’ve never heard of, without that glib sheen of effortless superiority you get out of Harvard or Stanford? “Cultural fit.” And so it goes. Shaffer’s machine-gun questioning and imperiousness had rattled me. I suspected that I had failed to pass his bar, and I needed to clear my head. The day had been nothing but a series of interrogations inside small, gray, rotten-smelling rooms. The Guantánamo vibe was fatiguing. Despite the NSA-level security on checking in and the way we were handed off like booby-trapped hot potatoes that no one could drop, nobody appeared for the next interview. Wining and dining evidently not in the offing, I wandered off and tried to find something to eat.

Male valedictorians attended Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, and Stanford. Only one woman chose an Ivy League university-Cornell.

Dr. James Milgram, an actual mathematician from Stanford University who was on the original Common Core math committee in the summer of 2009. Once he saw what the final product was, he refused to sign the document. Since then, he has widely criticized Common Core math.

Rob Reich, a professor of political science at Stanford University and co-director of the Stanford Center for Philanthropy and Civil Society, explains that private foundations, which “represent virtually by definition plutocratic voices,” were “troubling because they were considered deeply and fundamentally anti-democratic…an entity that would undermine political equality, affect public policies, and could exist in perpetuity.

studies conducted by Stanford and Harvard Universities have shown that once you meet a threshold that covers your basic needs, more money will not make you any happier. According

Then the science started telling us more about stress. In 2011 came the results of a study at Stanford University that had followed 1,548 ten-year-old children for ninety years. One of the big conclusions was that lack of anxiety was associated with early death. Apparently, we need some stress in life: The “don’t worry, be happy” people die early because they underestimate the risks in their lives and tend to make poor decisions.

From its ancient roots to its modern application, the practical utility of the Enneagram has been appropriated by the CIA to profile world leaders, written about in The Paris Review, Newsweek, Forbes, and CNN.com, and taught in graduate courses at several academic institutions, including Stanford University. The Enneagram is even used to explain leadership styles and decision making styles in the workplace.

According to a standard account (which is probably correct), genetic engineering in the modern sense was born in 1972, when two biologists met for a late-night snack at a delicatessen near Waikiki beach in Hawaii. Stanford University medical professor Stanley Cohen and biochemist Herbert Boyer, of the University of California–San Francisco, were in Honolulu to attend a conference on plasmids, the circular strands of DNA found in the cytoplasm of bacteria.

Supporters of the psi-mediated instrumental response (PMIR) model and first-sight model and theory (FSMT) would probably say yes. PMIR is a model for channeling experiences that happen spontaneously in daily life. It proposes that people unconsciously get information that is relevant to what they need. They then unconsciously use this information to modify their behavior to meet their needs (Stanford 2015), just like I was unconsciously late and avoided a car accident. PMIR refers to the psychological ways that channeling might function in a person’s life that serves their inherent qualities of mind and character and needs. It basically says that you use channeling without any conscious effort or awareness that it is even happening. Similarly, the first-sight model and theory (FSMT) proposes that it is in your essential nature to participate actively, all the time, and unconsciously in your world. And that your world is much larger in time and space than your immediate boundaries. All of your experiences and behaviors result from unconscious psychological processes that are acted out based on multiple sources of information, including those beyond your traditional five senses (Carpenter, n.d.). FSMT proposes that channeling is not an ability that needs to be nurtured or trained or coaxed into working but an innate universal characteristic of all living organisms.

Joseph Joffe aptly differentiated between these two concepts in a lecture on anti-Americanism at Stanford University: “To attack particular policies—say, the refusal to sign on to Kyoto, the Complete Test Ban or the Landmine Ban—is not anti-American. These issues are amenable to rational discourse.. . . To argue that the U.S. defied international law by going to war against Iraq may be true or false. It is certainly not anti-American.”3 What, then, is the “real thing,” the real anti-Americanism? In his analysis, Joffe groups anti-Americanism with other forms of “anti-isms” that—for him—must satisfy the following five conditions: 1. Stereotypization (that is, statements of the type: “This is what they are all like.”) 2. Denigration (the ascription of a collective moral or cultural inferiority to the target group) 3. Omnipotence (e.g., “They control the media, the economy, the world.”) 4. Conspiracy (e.g., “This is what they want to do to us surreptitiously and stealthily—sully our racial purity, destroy our traditional, better, and morally superior ways.”) 5. Obsession (a constant preoccupation with the perceived and feared evil and powerful ways of the hated group)

Here’s the Stanford University researcher Rosamond Naylor, who conducted some of the most recent calculations: “I think what startled me the most is that when we looked at our historic examples there were ways to address the problem within a given year. People could always turn somewhere else to find food. But in the future there’s not going to be any place to turn.”61 It doesn’t get any more basic than that.

Hoover’s John Cochrane wrote what most at Stanford were afraid to even say: “What is the point of all this? There can only be one: Don’t work for Republicans, don’t advise them, don’t deviate from the campus orthodoxy on policy issues, censor yourself from speaking unpopular opinions. And expect to be isolated, publicly shamed with vague and undocumented charges, and drummed out of the university if you do.

The far-right ideas had been there for as long as the tech industry had existed—all the way back to the founding of Stanford University. But it had taken Peter Thiel to bring those ideas above the surface, and then to weaponize them.

To be sure, most dropouts do not become geniuses or success stories. But prominent among the dropout titans of recent history are Bill Gates (Harvard), Steve Jobs (Reed College), Mark Zuckerberg (Harvard), Elon Musk (Stanford), Bob Dylan (University of Minnesota), Lady Gaga (New York University), and Oprah Winfrey (Tennessee State). Jack Ma never went to college, and neither did Richard Branson, who dropped out of high school at age fifteen. Creative force Kanye West dropped out of Chicago State University at age twenty to pursue a musical career; six years later he released his first album to great critical acclaim and commercial success: The College Dropout (2004). The point is not to encourage dropping out but rather to observe that these transformative figures were somehow able to learn what they needed to know. Here successful people and geniuses share a common trait: most are lifelong learning addicts. It’s a good habit to have.

An October 3, 2021 study in the peer-reviewed journal BioRxiv by Stanford and Emory University scientists suggests that antibody levels generated by the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine can suffer a ten-fold decrease seven months after the second vaccination.93 The scientists warn that the precipitous drop in antibody levels will compromise the body’s ability to defend itself against COVID-19 if the individual is exposed to COVID.

By the late 1980s, starting with eventual PayPal founder Peter Thiel’s class at Stanford University, the dominant philosophy of Silicon Valley would be based far more heavily on the radical libertarian ideology of Ayn Rand than the commune-based principles of Ken Kesey and Stewart Brand.

the American Breeders Association, had nothing to do with horses; its eugenics committee was headed by a man who’d been president of Indiana University, and the first president of Stanford, David S. Jordan. He taught that the human race could be improved only by preventing the disabled or certain nonwhites from reproducing

One of the significant milestones in building the high-tech community occurred in 1953 when Stanford University subdivided some of its vacant land for industrial development to form the Stanford Industrial Park (later renamed Stanford Research Park).

Several studies conducted at Stanford University by Clifford Ivar Nass describe our generation as suffering from an epidemic of multitasking.

Rupshi Mitra is a neuroscientist and artist who enjoys spending time outside of her professional life creating art. Rupshi Mitra spent about five years as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University.

There is a lot of evidence for the power of taking a walk to increase creativity, inspire new ideas, and change people’s lives, whoever they are. A 2014 study by researchers at Stanford University showed that walking increased the creative thinking of 100 percent of the study participants who were asked to walk while completing a series of creative tasks. There is a ton of anecdotal evidence as well. Do a quick Google search for the words “walk” and “change,” and you will see an avalanche of articles with titles like “How Taking a Walk Changed My Life.” They’re written by all sorts of people: men and women, young and old, fit and out of shape, students and professionals, American, Indian, African, European, Asian, you name it. Going for a walk helped them change their routines and their habits; it helped them shake loose solutions to tricky problems; it helped them to process trauma and make big life decisions.

But the true extent to which the survival circuit is conserved between yeast and humans wasn’t fully known until 2017, when Eva Bober’s team at the Max Planck Institute for Heart and Lung Research in Bad Nauheim, Germany, reported that sirtuins stabilize human rDNA.23 Then, in 2018, Katrin Chua at Stanford University found that, by stabilizing human rDNA, sirtuins prevent cellular senescence—essentially the same antiaging function as we had found for sirtuins in yeast twenty years earlier.24

One study, for example, conveyed information about injunctive norms by associating drinking with an unpopular group, thereby implying that only “uncool” people like to drink a lot. Researchers at Stanford University figured that many students beginning their first year would not want to be associated with older, geeky grad students who spend all their time in the library. At the beginning of the academic year, the researchers posted flyers in a freshman dorm that showed a graduate student holding an alcoholic drink. “Lots of graduate students at Stanford drink and lots of them are sketchy,” the flyer said. “So think when you drink… Nobody wants to be mistaken for this guy.” In another freshman dorm, the researchers posted flyers that portrayed the negative health effects of drinking alcohol but made no mention of graduate students. Then, two weeks later, the students in both dorms completed a survey on which they reported how many alcoholic drinks they had had in the previous week. They also indicated how much they would want other people to think that they were like graduate students. It turned out that the “geeky graduate student” flyer had a dramatic effect on the drinking of students who did not want to be associated with graduate students. Among this group of freshmen, those in the “geeky” flyer condition had only had two drinks the previous week, whereas those in the health flyer condition had six drinks the previous week. (The flyers didn’t have any effect on freshmen who admired grad students; interestingly, they didn’t drink much to begin with.) Young people have a keen eye for what their peers approve of, and associating drinking with a geeky, disapproved-of group proved to be a powerful deterrent.

These experiments showed that there was a region on the X chromosome that was vitally important for X inactivation. This region was dubbed the X Inactivation Centre. In 1991 a group from Hunt Willard’s lab at Stanford University in California showed that the X Inactivation Centre contained a gene that they called Xist, after X-inactive (Xi) specific transcript10. This gene was only expressed from the inactive X chromosome, not from the active one. Because the gene was only expressed from one of the two X chromosomes, this made it an attractive candidate as the controller of X inactivation, where two identical chromosomes behave non-identically.

Dr. Thomas Sowell, senior fellow at the Hoover Institute, Stanford University, notes that “There was a time when the purpose of taxes was to pay the inevitable costs of government. To the political left, however, taxes have long been seen as a way to redistribute income and finance other social experiments based on liberal ideology.”3

The Dictator’s Handbook, written by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, and Alastair Smith,

The Mass Extinction Debates: How Science Works in a Crisis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).

Binet himself worried about the potential misuse of the tests he designed. He insisted they were not a measurement, properly speaking. He argued that intelligence comes in many different forms, only some of them testable by his or by any test. His understanding of different skills, aptitudes, or forms of intelligence was probably closer to that of educator Howard Gardner’s concept of “multiple intelligences” than to anything like a rigid, measurable standard reducible to a single numerical score.21 His words of caution fell on deaf ears. Less than a year after Binet’s death in 1911, the German psychologist William Stern argued that one could take the scores on Binet’s standardized tests, calculate them against the age of the child tested, and come up with one number that defined a person’s “intelligence quotient” (IQ).22 Adapted in 1916 by Lewis Terman of Stanford University and renamed the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale, this method, along with Binet’s test, became the gold standard for measuring not aptitude or progress but innate mental capacity, IQ. This was what Binet had feared. Yet his test and that metric continue to be used today, not descriptively as a relative gauge of academic potential, but as a purportedly scientific grading of innate intelligence.

Conflict is ubiquitous. Workplaces, homes, and communities are riddled with it. The trouble is, not nearly enough people understand what to do about it. The 2013 Executive Coaching Survey published by Stanford University, for example, reveals that company CEOs feel a greater need to improve their conflict management skills than skills of any other type.

this really took off in 20116–11 with a Stanford University artificial intelligence class: 160,000 people signed up from 195 countries after one public announcement and 23,000 finished the course.

When I work with experimental gadgets, like new variations on virtual reality, in a lab environment, I am always reminded of how small changes in the details of a digital design can have profound unforeseen effects on the experiences of the humans who are playing with it. The slightest change in something as seemingly trivial as the use of a button can sometimes completely alter behavior patterns. For instance, Stanford University researcher Jeremy Bailenson has demonstrated that changing the height of one's avatar in immersive virtual reality transforms self-esteem and social self-perception. Technologies are extensions of ourselves, and, like the avatars in Jeremy's lab, our identities can be shifted by the quirks of gadgets. It is impossible to work with information technology without also engaging in social engineering.

One Stanford op-ed in particular was picked up by the national press and inspired a website, Stop the Brain Drain, which protested the flow of talent to Wall Street. The Stanford students wrote, The financial industry’s influence over higher education is deep and multifaceted, including student choice over majors and career tracks, career development resources, faculty and course offerings, and student culture and political activism. In 2010, even after the economic crisis, the financial services industry drew a full 20 percent of Harvard graduates and over 15 percent of Stanford and MIT graduates. This represented the highest portion of any industry except consulting, and about three times more than previous generations. As the financial industry’s profits have increasingly come from complex financial products, like the collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) that ignited the 2008 financial meltdown, its demand has steadily grown for graduates with technical degrees. In 2006, the securities and commodity exchange sector employed a larger portion of scientists and engineers than semiconductor manufacturing, pharmaceuticals and telecommunications. The result has been a major reallocation of top talent into financial sector jobs, many of which are “socially useless,” as the chairman of the United Kingdom’s Financial Services Authority put it. This over-allocation reduces the supply of productive entrepreneurs and researchers and damages entrepreneurial capitalism, according to a recent Kauffman Foundation report. Many of these finance jobs contribute to volatile and counter-productive financial speculation. Indeed, Wall Street’s activities are largely dominated by speculative security trading and arbitrage instead of investment in new businesses. In 2010, 63 percent of Goldman Sachs’ revenue came from trading, compared to only 13 percent from corporate finance. Why are graduates flocking to Wall Street? Beyond the simple allure of high salaries, investment banks and hedge funds have designed an aggressive, sophisticated, and well-funded recruitment system, which often takes advantage of [a] student’s job insecurity. Moreover, elite university culture somehow still upholds finance as a “prestigious” and “savvy” career track.6

We were marvelously diverse... and yet we were not: all of us, Sherman included, hailed from the same elite universities- Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Yale; we all exuded a sense of confident self-satisfaction; and not one of us was either short or overweight.

Seventy-five percent of students visiting the Cowell Health Center at Stanford University describe themselves as “sexually active.

Originally, he’d wanted to focus his work on the convict leasing system that had stolen years off of his great-grandpa H’s life, but the deeper into the research he got, the bigger the project got. How could he talk about Great-Grandpa H’s story without also talking about his grandma Willie and the millions of other black people who had migrated north, fleeing Jim Crow? And if he mentioned the Great Migration, he’d have to talk about the cities that took that flock in. He’d have to talk about Harlem. And how could he talk about Harlem without mentioning his father’s heroin addiction—the stints in prison, the criminal record? And if he was going to talk about heroin in Harlem in the ’60s, wouldn’t he also have to talk about crack everywhere in the ’80s? And if he wrote about crack, he’d inevitably be writing, too, about the “war on drugs.” And if he started talking about the war on drugs, he’d be talking about how nearly half of the black men he grew up with were on their way either into or out of what had become the harshest prison system in the world. And if he talked about why friends from his hood were doing five-year bids for possession of marijuana when nearly all the white people he’d gone to college with smoked it openly every day, he’d get so angry that he’d slam the research book on the table of the beautiful but deadly silent Lane Reading Room of Green Library of Stanford University. And if he slammed the book down, then everyone in the room would stare and all they would see would be his skin and his anger, and they’d think they knew something about him, and it would be the same something that had justified putting his great-grandpa H in prison, only it would be different too, less obvious than it once was. When

On paper, I thought, I’m an adult. Graduated from a good college—University of Oregon. Earned a master’s from a top business school—Stanford. Survived a yearlong hitch in the U.S. Army—Fort Lewis and Fort Eustis. My résumé said I was a learned, accomplished soldier,

Money is low bandwidth,” he said, during a speech at Stanford University in 2003, to describe his thinking. “You don’t need some sort of big infrastructure improvement to do things with it. It’s really just an entry in a database.” The

influence on banking with a relatively small investment. “Money is low bandwidth,” he said, during a speech at Stanford University in 2003, to describe his thinking. “You don’t need some sort of big infrastructure improvement to do things with it. It’s really just an entry in a database.” The

In a new book, “Political Order and Political Decay”, Francis Fukuyama of Stanford University argues persuasively that America “suffers from the problem of political decay in a more acute form than other democratic political systems”, a statement that not long ago would have seemed ludicrous.

Stanford University's Shanto Iyengar and Sean J. Westwood's conclusion is stark. 'Partisans discriminate against opposing partisans, and do so to a degree that exceeds discrimination based on race,' they write. Think about that for a moment: at least under certain experimental conditions, our political identities now trump our racial identities.

Reformers have argued loudly and aggressively that our schools and students are failing. But the language they use is by necessity obscure and technocratic, because no matter how emphatically they argue that America’s students are falling behind their international counterparts, the data repeatedly show that when studies control for the effects of poverty, American students are competitive with the top percentile of students in the world. And a 2011 Stanford University study found that family income continues to be far and away the biggest determining factor of student achievement. Make your way through the jargon about achievement gaps and teacher accountability, and the problem becomes clear. Nearly a quarter of all children in the US live in poverty, among the highest rates in the developed world. Combine this with the fact that in America, poor students receive less educational funding than rich ones and you have a real civil rights issue: the U.S. government discriminates against poor children.

There’s clearly a tendency for people to attempt multiple, simultaneous—as much as they can—activities,” said Dr. Adam Gazzaley, director of neuroscience at the University of California, San Francisco.3 But research shows that our propensity for multitasking and distractions is a bad thing. According to UC Irvine professor of informatics Dr. Gloria Mark, once you are captured by a distraction, it can take up to twenty-three minutes to get back on track.4 And since the average person succumbs to distractions an average of every three minutes, it can be difficult to escape.5 It’s even worse if you are a multitasker. You might think a chronic multitasker would be more adept at switching between tasks, but you would be wrong. A recent study by Stanford professor Eyal Ophir found that “heavy media multitaskers”—those who consumed a large amount of media content—were not only more susceptible to irrelevant stimuli, but they were also significantly slower when it came to switching between tasks.6 Another study, from the University of Utah, found that people who identified as “strong multitaskers” were in fact the least capable multitaskers of the 310 subjects they tested. Heavy multitaskers are far less capable of inhibiting distractions than those who identify as light multitaskers.7

In 2008, Box had a good way for companies to store their data safely and accessibly in the cloud. But people didn’t know they needed such a thing—cloud computing hadn’t caught on yet. That summer, Blake was hired as Box’s third salesperson to help change that. Starting with small groups of users who had the most acute file sharing problems, Box’s sales reps built relationships with more and more users in each client company. In 2009, Blake sold a small Box account to the Stanford Sleep Clinic, where researchers needed an easy, secure way to store experimental data logs. Today the university offers a Stanford-branded Box account to every one of its students and faculty members, and Stanford Hospital runs on Box. If it had started off by trying to sell the president of the university on an enterprise-wide solution, Box would have sold nothing. A complex sales approach would have made Box a forgotten startup failure; instead, personal sales made it a multibillion-dollar business.

Explosive population growth in much of Asia was making it less and less plausible that nations like India, Pakistan, and the Philippines would ever be able to feed themselves. In Famine—1975! America’s Decision: Who Will Survive? William and Paul Paddock argued that a Time of Famines would soon lay waste the developing world. “The famines are inevitable,” they warned. And “riding alongside [them] will surely be riots and other civil tensions which the central government[s] will be too weak to control.” The Paddocks derided the naïve hope that “something [would] turn up” to forestall this doom.102 And the Paddocks were not alone in their assessment. Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich, for example, argued that Famine—1975! “may be remembered as one of the most important books of our age.” The Rockefeller Foundation shared these men’s sense of urgency. But, rather than advocate a triage system (as the Paddocks did), in which the worst-off nations would be denied assistance and left to their Darwinian fate, the foundation looked for new ways to attack the problem. The foundation had first extended its agriculture programs to India in 1956, at the request of the Indian national government. In the ensuing years, Rockefeller partnered with USAID and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Together, they “helped establish five state agriculture universities in India. ” 103 These universities collaborated with their American counterparts on research and training. As it had in Mexico, the foundation thereby contributed to the development, in India, of a community of homegrown agriculturalists with access to the most advanced technologies in the world.

Sun Microsystems, a Silicon Valley workstation maker, got its start in 1982 making such machines for use on the Stanford University Network (hence its name). Sun set a record that still stands in the annals of American business for being the company that from a dead start reached the $1 billion sales mark faster than any other manufacturer—it took all of four years.