Over on the farm they have people who are not students hanging out. On Friday The Stanford Daily reported a person claimed to be a graduate student and had used the physics lab and offices for four years. This comes right after Stanford discovered another person was posing as a student a few days earlier.

The Daily also reports there were signs that the “student” was not what she claimed to be. As reported:

But to the physics doctoral students who work in the lab, Okazaki’s lack of an affiliation with Stanford was not surprising. Dan Green, a doctoral student in theoretical particle physics, said he became suspicious that Okazaki was at the lab under false pretenses more than two years ago. He said that his relationship with Okazaki soured about a year and a half ago when she moved into a visitor’s office in the building and stayed there for more than a month.

However, the administration did not listen to students’ concerns.

“We met significant resistance from the office,” Green said. “When we tried to describe Okazaki’s behavior to them, they gave us the same stories that she had told us. The office was willing to accept every excuse she gave them.”

I can understand people not questioning a person who knows what s/he is doing. I remember hearing about someone (Steven Spielberg I believe) who just took over an unused room on a movie lot and acted like he worked there. However, he was one of the best at what he did. It is reported this person does not even know physics very well.

If I do not get into graduate school I can always go to Stanford. If someone can hide out there for four years I should be able to do at least as well with a real physics degree.

From the Stanford Daily:

Erin Lashnits, a coterminal student in biological sciences, has been suspended for the remainder of her tenure as the Stanford Tree.

Band Manager Mike Priest and Assistant Manager Adam Cohen announced their decision to Lashnits on Thursday night, just hours after UC-Berkeley Athletic Department officials Breathalyzed her at a .157 blood-alcohol content at halftime of the men�s basketball team�s 65-62 loss at Berkeley, according to sources, including several in the band.

But a school mascot never lets things get her down. Lashnits stays positive and demonstrates her school spirit and winning attitude:

�The Tree�s going to be just as awesome as it ever was,� Lashnits said. �Nothing fundamental�s going to change. The Tree will be the Tree forever and ever.�

And though Lashnits said she�ll miss what she called �the closest she�ll ever become to being a rockstar,� she added that her time had come.

�I�m so fucking burnt out,� Lashnits said. �I have shin splints that are killing me and my costume got torn up and destroyed against Washington when Sixth Man stormed the court. The only things I�m missing are two home basketball games which really aren�t that big of a deal to me. I�m not that big of a sports fan.�

Anyway, what I really want to see is an Oski vs. Tree brawl. How awesome would that be?

Update: According to this Playboy interview with the Tree (not necessarily Ms. Lashnits), there was indeed an incident between the rival mascots in the past:

PB: Who’s your biggest rival? You have a bad history with Cal’s mascot, Oski, and in 1998 you got in such a nasty brawl that it was covered on ESPN’s SportsCenter.

ST: Well, he’s a tool, first of all. And just for the record, Oski attacked me. But most of the time I’m not even going to waste my time interacting with another mascot, although I may say a few coarse words here and there.

Last week, the Wall Street Journal posted an interesting article about football players and IQ tests. How interesting? I don’t know, as you have to be a subscriber to read it. But the blogs have been discussing it, and that’s all that matters.

We’ll have to make do with second hand sources:

Friday’s edition of The Wall Street Journal carried an analysis of how college players fared on the Wonderlic Personnel Test, which is administered to prospects at the NFL’s scouting combine.

The article focused on “the NFL’s Smartest Team” (St. Louis Rams), but included a listing of how players fared by college. The analysis was limited to schools that have at least 20 players with reported Wonderlic scores over the past seven years. The WSJ came up with 39 schools.

For reference, the average score on that test is 21. The average score of the “smartest team” in the NFL, the Rams, is 21.

But who cares about that? How do our schools rank up?

School / Score / Tests Taken

1. Stanford 28.8 21
2. Purdue 25.3 21
3. BYU 25.2 29
3. California 25.2 22
5. UCLA 24 21
6. Oregon 23.5 22
7. Wisconsin 23.2 29
8. Iowa 23 33
9. Oregon State 22.8 21
10. Nebraska 22.6 34
…
21. Southern Cal 20.3 30
…
39. Miami (Fla.) 16.3 40

Any thoughts?

Ilias Chrissochoidis, a lecturer at Stanford, wrote a letter to the Stanford Daily to explain the cause of terrorism: capitalism!

Has anyone considered how desperate the life of an ordinary person can become in recent years? To be such a person today means, more or less, that you are an expendable employee of a large company (or a sector subject to the currents of market forces), you see your income falling year after year, you lose health and educational benefits, you find fewer opportunities to improve the quality of your life and more closed doors. To be ordinary is to be nobody, because you have no control over the conditions of your life…

More than anything else, suicide bombers are the sons of despair and idealism. Indoctrination and jihad are simply methods of directing this energy to specific aims.

And lest we forget who should take the blame:

The London bombings were only a tiny repercussion of the bomb that the USA released to the world two years ago, as much as Sept. 11 was a boomerang of terrorist activity this country had brewed for decades through CIA. What one sows in Afghanistan and Iraq, one reaps in New York and London…

You may not know the guy, but you probably have heard the story about him:

Dr. George B. Dantzig, a mathematician who devised an algorithm that helped create linear programming, now a vital tool in computing, industry and other fields, died on May 13 at his home in Stanford, Calif. He was 90.

Before turning to the dark side, he was a Berkeley grad student. You may recognize his story (via Slashdot):

George B. Dantzig, then a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, arrived late for a statistics class one day and found two problems written on the board. Not knowing they were examples of “unsolvable” statistics problems, he jotted them down and solved them as a homework assignment. (The equations Dantzig tackled are perhaps more accurately described not as unsolvable problems, but as unproved statistical theorems for which he worked out proofs.)
—
This legend is used as the setup of the plot in the 1997 movie Good Will Hunting.

Decent movie, I must say. Dr. Dantzig, your story has been an inspiration to all us engineers who struggle through even the “solvable” problem sets. May you rest in peace and your legend live on forever through Matt Damon’s acting.

One theme that has been popping up recently is how “underrepresented minorities” are choosing private schools over public schools. The reason given is that it is much easier for private schools to woo students on the basis of race, as Prop. 209 does not apply. I blogged on this phenomenon before.

Thursday’s Stanford Daily covers the story. This passage stood out to me:

�Applying to college, I was choosing between two very different institutionalized approaches to race,� said Stanford senior Jeffrey Trevino. �Stanford flew me � all expenses paid � up for a weekend of programming that presented Stanford as a culturally enlightened haven of diversity for intelligent minority students.

Oh man, “culturally enlightened haven of diversity for intelligent minority students.” Try saying that three times fast. I wonder what that makes our campus…

Berkeley and San Diego, on the other hand, were unable to give me any special treatment because Prop. 209 prohibits them from devoting attention to race in admissions.�

This says it all. Do you want special treatment? Or would you rather be treated as an equal? I choose the latter.

Here’s the AP reporting on an interesting new theory:

If winning is everything, British anthropologists have some advice: Wear red.

Their survey of four sports at the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens shows competitors were more likely to win their contests if they wore red uniforms or red body armor.

“Across a range of sports, we find that wearing red is consistently associated with a higher probability of winning,” report Russell A. Hill and Robert A. Barton of the University of Durham in England. Their findings are in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature.

More research will have to take place, of course. Until then, our friends across the bay can take heart in knowing that they’re the exception that proves the rule.

So there hasn’t been a new Daily Cal in a while…

Anyway, let’s see what the big story is across the bay. Last Friday, the Stanford Daily reported on Playboy coming to town to interview girls and shoot a few photos. You see, the mag is preparing their annual “Girls of the Pac-10″ feature. But their search for hot models has been met with cold shoulders:

Playboy photographer Kim Mizuno will be leading the interviews on May 9 and 10, but so far student response has been lackluster.

�We haven�t even gotten a little bit of a response from Stanford yet, especially compared to the other schools like Berkeley,� Mizuno said.

(more…)

Yeah right. Yesterday, the Contra Costa Times wrote “Cal may be starting to look a lot like Stanford,” in reference to the possibility that UC Berkeley may be privatized. The Daily Cal has more on the issue, with additional comments from Boalt Dean Edley.

Things get even more interesting when we take a look at this article from yesterday’s Stanford Daily, “Tuition to be waived for low-income admits“:

Of the students Stanford admits each year from Logan High School in Union City, some end up on the Farm while others choose less-expensive University of California schools. But Sharon Hope, program manager for the public high school�s college and career center, says that many talented students from low-income families don�t even consider Stanford because of its $40,000-a-year price tag.

University President John Hennessy recently announced a financial aid policy intended to change that. By 2010, families earning less than $45,000 per year will not be expected to contribute any money toward their child�s undergraduate education at Stanford. The student may still have to do work-study and take out loans, but Stanford will cover everything else, from tuition to books to toothpaste.

Stanford trying to make the UCs less attractive?

�If you have a student who�s admitted to Stanford and they�re also admitted to UC-Berkeley, and cost is an issue, they�re going to go with the one they can afford,� she said. And though Stanford does offer financial aid to middle-class families, �the plan involves loans � that�s the scary thing for kids, and parents too.�

Is this a role reversal? Berkeley discusses plans to go “private,” while Stanford acts to be more “public”? Are we at a turning point in public education, where we have come to understand that maybe the market can serve the “public good” better after all?

What does it mean to be a public or private school in this day and age? Berkeley’s looking into the issue:

It’s perhaps the most horrible thing a UC Berkeley person can hear: Cal may be starting to look a lot like Stanford.

But before breaking out the Stanford tree costume, UC Berkeley professors want to know just how close they are to becoming a private university. After all, with state funding being stretched increasingly thin, private donations have sometimes saved the day.

The university’s Academic Senate will discuss the issue Monday at the prompting of retired physics professor Charles Schwartz, who said he just wants scholars to be aware of the possible effects of a reliance on private money.

“This issue is bubbling around in the background,” Schwartz said. “This is a live issue.”

Boalt Dean Edley has brought up the issue before. I disagree with him on many issues, but he may be right on this one:

UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau has expressed his distaste for the idea of the school’s privatization, but has said the university may need to rethink its funding process.

One of the most vocal supporters of bringing more private money to UC Berkeley has been Christopher Edley, dean of its Boalt Hall School of Law. If the state can’t afford to support quality higher education, then plenty of donors can, he said.

Too many in higher education dismiss the idea of increased privatization before understanding it, Edley said. Corporate donors and others don’t have to be the enemy, he said.

“It’s naive to think that private money is necessarily problematic,” he said. “Public and private and nonprofit donors all have agendas. More often than not, it’s fairly easy to be clear to everyone concerned what the expectations are, and that’s advancing the university’s mission.”

So does it even matter where the money is coming from? Is there something intrinsically special about being a public institution? If we became a private school tomorrow but everything else remained the same, would you have a problem? Things to think about.