After multiple return-to-office dates, COVID-19 surges and delayed expectations, one thing is clear: Companies have no idea when they’ll return.
From the moment companies sent employees home to work remotely in the early phases of the pandemic, those same companies have been looking to return to the office, to a sense of “normal.” At every step, however, new COVID variants, spikes in cases and fresh government restrictions have pushed back return-to-office dates around the world.
According to The New York Times, many companies are giving up altogether on trying to predict when their employees will be coming back. Apple, CNN, Ford and Google are just a few of the companies adopting a wait-and-see approach, and giving up on specific predictions.
“The only companies being dishonest are the ones giving employees certainty,” Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford professor and advisor to dozens of CEOs told The Times. “As a parent you can hide stuff from your kids, but as a C.E.O. you can’t do that to adult employees who read the news.”
“Folks have hedged appropriately this time around and they understand that it’s a dialogue with their employees, not a mandate,” Zach Dunn, co-founder of the office space management platform Robin, told The Times. “If that sounds a little kumbaya, maybe. But the reality is, folks are learning that sharing the intention of their return plan is more important than sharing the plan itself.”
With the omicron variant now sweeping the globe, it’s a safe bet leaving the return-to-office open-ended — or just going all-in on remote work — is likely to be the “new normal” moving forward.
California is in the midst of a “brain drain” as companies leave the state at double the rate in 2021 as 2020.
There have already been a number of high-profile companies that have announced plans to move their headquarters away from California, including Oracle and HPE, both of which moved to Texas. Unfortunately for the Golden State, the pace of companies leaving is picking up.
According Stanford’s Hoover Institution, there were 265 companies that moved their headquarters out of California from January 1, 2018 to June 30, 2021. The first half of 2021, however, accounted for 74 of those defections. The monthly averages for the first half of 2021 was greater than the monthly averages for the first half of 2018 and 2019. 2021 is also on course to double the number that left in 2020.
The top destinations are Texas, Arizona and Nevada. The Hoover Institution attributes the migration to high real estate taxes, expanding civil liability and disproportionate legal costs of doing business. The COVID-19 pandemic has also opened the door for more remote work, making expensive Silicon Valley headquarters less important.
Notably, the Hoover Institution’s data is not comprehensive, as many smaller companies move without the news coverage or public awareness that major tech companies bring.
Malia Obama has reached that pivotal point in most teenager’s lives when it’s time to seriously consider the colleges to which she’ll apply. The 16-year-old daughter of President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama will head off to college in the fall of 2016.
President Obama has said in the past that Malia wants to be a filmmaker. The media reported last summer that Malia Obama toured two northern California rivals–both Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley.
Berkeley, of course, is California’s flagship public university. It is known as a liberal enclave. It also has an internationally renown department of film and media.
Stanford is a private university in Palo Alto, and is a far more conservative school. Chelsea Clinton and some Supreme Court justices including Sandra Day O’Connor graduated from there. At Stanford, students can major or minor in film and media studies. The university has more NCAA championships than any other U.S. school. Malia Obama is known as an athlete, excelling at tennis, so she might be a good fit for “Nerd Nation.” That’s the unofficial nickname for Stanford’s sports fans.
Malia Obama certainly has a wealth of fodder for her college essay. She’s lived in the White House since she was just 10 years old, and that alone must be an education of sorts. She’s had a front-row seat to her father’s two presidential campaigns. She has traveled around the world, and met world figures such as Queen Elizabeth, Nelson Mandela and Malala Yousafzai.
Malia Obama’s parents are Harvard-educated lawyers with Ivy League undergraduate degrees–the president’s from Columbia and Michelle Obama’s from Princeton. That said, expectations for Malia undoubtedly run high.
David Hawkins is an official at the National Association for College Admission Counseling in Arlington, Virginia. What did he have to say about Malia Obama with regard to her college applications?
“Given the educational attainment of her parents, which is exceptional in itself, I can only assume she is going to be a bright and well-qualified student,” he said.
What do you predict? Will Malia Obama be heading to Stanford or to Berkeley? Or might she surprise everyone and head somewhere completely unexpected?
Diabetes is quickly becoming more prevalent in many parts of the world, even among the young. Part of the problem can be traced to the expanding waistlines of people in western countries, but preventative health programs to battle obesity are still just beginning to make a dent in the rising numbers. With doctors having to deal with the rise in diabetes diagnoses in the present, a new technique promises to quickly diagnose the type-1 diabetes even without access to expensive lab equipment.
Researchers at Stanford University this week published a study in the journal Nature Medicine that outlines the new technique. The field test is described in the study as both inexpensive and portable – perfect for doctors outside traditional healthcare settings. The test uses microchips to distinguish type-1 diabetes from type-2 diabetes, detecting the antibodies only present in type-1 diabetes.
According to the study’s authors, the distinction between the two types of diabetes is important due to the more aggressive treatment needed for type-1 diabetes. The new test is even more important now that more children than ever are being diagnosed with type-2 diabetes. In the past children were simply assumed to have type-1 diabetes, since doctors only saw type-2 diabetes appear in older, obese patients.
“With the new test, not only do we anticipate being able to diagnose diabetes more efficiently and more broadly, we will also understand diabetes better – both the natural history and how new therapies impact the body,” said Dr. Brian Feldman, senior author of the study and an assistant professor of pediatric endocrinology at Stanford.
Feldman and his colleagues are hoping that the new test, which doesn’t yet have a marketable name, will soon be approved for use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. In contrast to expensive lab tests, the microchips for the new test are estimated to cost around $20 each and last for up to 15 separate tests. The new test also uses just a finger-prick worth of blood compared to the vials of blood needed for older tests.
“There is great potential to capture people before they develop the disease, and prevent diabetes or prevent its complications by starting therapy early,” said Feldman. “But the old test was prohibitive for that type of thinking because it was so costly and time-consuming.”
For the past year, the big story in 3D printing has been researchers trying to create living materials through the 3D printing of cells. Companies like Organovo are on the cusp of creating working organs with 3D printers, and other researchers are already dabbling with 3D printed meat. While all of that is very exciting, researchers are now looking to 3D printers for the creation of non-living biomaterials.
TechCrunch reports that two Stanford University researchers – Lynn Rothschild and Diana Gentry – are attempting to 3D print wood. To be more specific, they are wanting to help NASA grow trees in space. Wood isn’t the only thing in their sights either as the two believe their research may yield the ability to print other non-living organic matter, like bone and tooth enamel.
Here’s how Rothschild described it to TechCrunch:
“Cells produce an enormous array of products on the Earth, everything from wool to silk to rubber to cellulose, you name it, not to mention meat and plant products and the things that we eat. Many of these things are excreted (from cells). So you’re not going to take a cow or a sheep or a probably not a silk worm or a tree to Mars. But you might want to have a very fine veneer of either silk or wood. So instead of taking the whole organism and trying to make something, why couldn’t you do this all in a very precise way – which actually may be a better way to do it on Earth as well – so that you’re printing an array of cells that then can secrete or produce these products?”
This isn’t the first time NASA has dabbled in 3D printing. The space agency is already using the technology to produce food and rocket parts. This is probably the most advanced use of 3D printing seen at the space agency though and it probably won’t be ready for quite a while, unlike the aforementioned food and rocket printers that are already producing tangible results.
Still, it’s another major step forward for a technology that has been, until a few years ago, used exclusively for manufacturing and prototyping. With 3D printers, researchers now have an inexpensive way to manipulate cell structures. Just as some want to spare cows by 3D printing meat, we may one day spare trees by 3D printing wood.
Normally, the Thursday night games are not such a big deal, and most people do not tune in to football until Saturday afternoon. However, this week is a bit different, and college football fans are given the opportunity to see a couple of excellent match-ups, especially the face-off between a couple Pac-12 powerhouses during the Oregon-Stanford game.
Oregon and Stanford have both looked impressive throughout the season, and Oregon still remains undefeated with a record of 8-0, while Stanford is 7-1. Oregon is led by their star quarterback Marcus Mariota, who has had all sorts of Heisman Trophy buzz surrounding him and the excellent play that he has shown all year.
As both teams have continually been two of the top teams in the league in the past few years, and especially the Pac-12, each time they meet, it is a big deal for west coast football, which often does not get as much attention.
Yo this Oregon @ Stanford game is taking forever to come on. The Ducks have to get this "W".
In each of the past three years, the loser of the game received its only regular season loss, and the winner of course went on to win the Pac-12 title. This year’s game is especially important as Oregon, the #2 ranked team heads south to play Stanford in their stadium, which is sold out for the game.
Stanford won last year, and will look to do the same this season with the game being in their home. Stanford was able to hold Oregon to their lowest score all season last year, with only 14 points, and this season the Ducks are averaging 55.6 points per game, which ranks them second in the nation.
Marcus Mariota experienced the only loss of his career in last year’s Oregon-Stanford game, and will look to keep it that way with a win this season. He tries to stay positive in the situation and said “When you experience (a loss), it helps you not fear it. There’s a lot of times when you go out there and you fear failure and that’s not how you should play football.” The star quarterback has not thrown an interception since their loss to Stanford in Eugene in 2012.
College football tonight!! Is as good as its going to get!!! #Oregon/Stanford#Baylor/OU
The Oregon-Stanford should be a very competitive one as they prepare to face off against one another late on Thursday night for those not watching on the west coast. This is the first time that two teams in the top ten have ever played on a Thursday night, making it a memorable one for the players and fans.
For at least this year a west coast school can claim supremacy over what is usually viewed as eastern academic superiority. Stanford university in Palo Alto, CA has been named the top university in the country by a recent Forbes list.
The list focused on the areas of Student Satisfaction, Post-Graduate Success, Graduation Rate, Nationally Competitive Awards, and Student Debt. Forbes editor Michael Noer made sure to emphasize that the areas being assessed not only deal with the experience offered by the institutions, but also their economic viability.
“Our college rankings were created to inform consumers about the quality of the educational experience and our brand new financial health grades give insight into which schools will be around for the long-haul.”
In claiming the number one spot Stanford dethroned Ivy League titan Princeton University, which fell to the third slot.
Second place also went to a west coast institution in Pomona College. The private, liberal arts college is located in Clermont California and boasts a student population under two-thousand.
The rest of the top ten is rounded out by Yale, Columbia, Swarthmore College, The United States Military Academy, Harvard, Williams College, and MIT.
The issue, which will be released early next month, will also include rankings of the best public, private, and value schools. Forbes’ coverage will also include an interactive tool called “Find Your Top Colleges” that will allow students to find their best matches based upon their test scores, GPA, and other factors such as region.
Though Google gets the most attention for their work, they are far from the only ones working on driverless car technology. And while Google is churning along, logging hundreds of thousands of miles with their fleet of Priuses and just recently Lexus hybrids, Stanford University feels the need – the need for speed.
Stanford is showing off Shelley, their self-driving Audi TTS which can zip around the track at up to 120 MPH. This means that the car can complete the twisty three-mile course in just under 2 and 1/2 minutes.
Thunderhill track consists of 15 turns – high speed turns, sharp turns after straightaways, and even a blind turn at the top of a hill. “Each one of these really represents a separate challenge for the car, and test a different part of out algorithm,” says engineer Chris Gerdes.
They’re studying the difference between Shelley and a human driver. Apparently, human drivers can still tackle the course a little bit faster (just a few seconds).
“We need to know what the best drivers do that makes them so successful,” Gerdes says. “If we can pair that with the vehicle dynamics data, we can better use the car’s capabilities.”
It’s not just about impressive speed. And it’s also not just about building a system that will chauffeur people around after a night of too many martinis. It’s also about finding out the limits of drive-assist technology, which will continue to show up more and more in cars of the future.
“The experience and data gathered by running Shelley around the track could one day lead to fully autonomous cars that safely drive you and your loved ones from Point A to Point B on public roads. In the nearer term, the technology could show up as a sort of onboard co-pilot that helps the driver steer out of a dangerous situation,” says Bjorn Carey of Standford News Service. “And while Gerdes and crew clearly enjoy racing Shelley, the truth is that pushing the car to its limits on the racetrack – its brake pads melted on its last Thunderhill run – is the best way to learn what type of stress a car is under in a crisis, and what it takes to get the car straightened out.”
Check out Gerdes explaining the test run below:
Google just announced that their fleet of driverless cars had topped 300,000 miles without incident. They said that some additional testing needs to be done, for instance training in inclement weather. But soon, they say they’ll cut them lose and finally remove the team member failsafe from the equation.
States like Nevada andCalifornia are already taking steps to legalize and regulate self-driving cars. Google thinks that we’re inside a decade away from the technology being road ready, and automakers like Ford think we’re even closer than that.
Students across the world can now access online courses from five prestigious American universities (Stanford, Princeton, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Michigan) thanks to an interactive platform called Coursera.
The site offers dozens of courses that run from 4-12 weeks in duration. The courses fall into the following categories: Humanities and Social Sciences; Computer Science; Mathematics and Statistics; Healthcare, Medicine, and Biology; Economics, Finance, and Business; and Society, Networks, and Information.
Each course has a YouTube video where the professor pitches a class to prospective students. It also gives a synopsis about the course, some background information about the instructor, a list of frequently asked questions, and sometimes they even post a syllabus.
I wish more colleges listed courses this way. It would be a great way to boost enrollment because students would be able to get a feel for the instructor and the material that would be covered.
In the following YouTube video, Michael Kearns, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, pitches his class titled, “Networked Life.”
According to the course profile, “Networked Life explores recent scientific efforts to explain social, economic and technological structures — and the way these structures interact — on many different scales, from the behavior of individuals or small groups to that of complex networks such as the Internet and the global economy.”
Several courses are starting on April 23 so you should register ASAP.
Completing a course on Coursera will not stand in the place of a course taken at an accredited institution and does not convey academic credit but there are occasions where instructors will grant students a letter of completion.
Shock and grief have shrouded the Stanford campus since school officials announced on Monday that sophomore Samantha Wopat passed away. She was just 19.
Wopat, who excelled in sports and was one of the nation’s best volleyball players during her high school years, was hospitalized on March 17th for what officials would only call “a medical emergency“. She died in the intensive care unit of Stanford Hospital on Sunday. The cause of her death has not been disclosed. The official statement read:
“On behalf of all of us at USA Volleyball, we are terribly saddened by the tragic and sudden passing of Samantha Wopat. Sam played on the 2009 U.S. Girls’ Youth National Volleyball Team at the FIVB World Championship and the 2010 U.S. Women’s Junior National Team at the NORCECA Continental Championship. Samantha was a bright and vibrant participant in the USA Volleyball Indoor High Performance Program with a seemingly unlimited and bright future. We cannot begin to imagine the sense of loss to the family, and we offer our thoughts and prayers to them and our most sincere condolences.” – Doug Beal, Chief Executive Officer of USA Volleyball
The young athlete was a three-time junior Olympic competitor and joined Stanford’s volleyball team in 2010 with her twin sister, Carly.
As with the death of any young person, the news of the loss has touched many who didn’t even know her. Twitter reacted immediately.
Sebastian Thrun, an ex Stanford professor decided in January to give up his tenure at the school and reach out for larger audiences. Specializing in machine learning and robotics, Thrun is excited to leave the constraints of formal education and become a key player in a new online university called Udacity.
The professor believes in reaching the people who truly have an aptitude for his material rather than just those who have the financial means. His goal is to reach students all over the World. Also, the professor would like to cover a wider range of topics than he could offer at Stanford.
We believe university-level education can be both high quality and low cost. Using the economics of the Internet, we’ve connected some of the greatest teachers to hundreds of thousands of students in almost every country on Earth.
Starting on February 20th Udacity will begin online learning offering two classes:
CS 101: BUILDING A SEARCH ENGINE
Learn programming in seven weeks. We’ll teach you enough about computer science that you can build a web search engine like Google or Yahoo!
CS 373: PROGRAMMING A ROBOTIC CAR
In seven weeks you’ll learn how to program all the major systems of a robotic car, by the leader of Google and Stanford’s autonomous driving teams.
With the news of Steve Jobs’ death people from all walks of life began spreading condolences via Facebook, Twitter, and other socil media outlets. One thing people began to share was Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford commencement speech. Why, you ask? Well Jobs talked about his impending death and the improtance of living your life to the absolute fullest.
Below is the video of his commencement speech:
Here is the full text from the speech, for those who might like to read through it:
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today, I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned Coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. 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. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents’ garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.
This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960′s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
A physical site for one of Google’s ultra high-speed broadband networks has been chosen. The company announced today that it will build one network for the 850 or so homes that are part of Stanford University’s Residential Subdivision.
This move makes sense for a number of reasons. A post on the Official Google Blog explained, "Most important was Stanford’s openness to us experimenting with new fiber technologies on its streets."
Also, "The layout of the residential neighborhoods and small number of homes make it a good fit for a beta deployment." And location was a key consideration, since the short distance between the subdivision and Google’s headquarters means engineers can check things and interview users whenever they like.
Finally, we must point out that Stanford faculty and staff are perhaps more likely than the average individual to use their fancy Internet connections to make scientific breakthroughs rather than view porn or pirate movies.
Google’s announcement doesn’t mean that all the ordinary communities vying for ultra high-speed broadband networks are out of the running, though, as the Stanford network is a separate matter. So look for more statements about Internet speeds of 1 gigabit per second in the future.
Work on the Stanford network, meanwhile, is supposed to begin early next year.
The Stanford Center has launched a new website, WhatApp.org, where users and experts can review online and mobile apps for privacy and security.
M. Ryan Calo, a residential fellow at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, has helped design WhatApp.org with the goal of reducing the risk of computer hacking, identity theft, spam and phishing.
The reviews are being written by lawyers, computer scientists, and privacy and security experts from Stanford and other institutions.
"People are going online to opine about the security and privacy of apps all the time," Calo said. "But none of that discussion is centralized. What we’re trying to say is that if you’re doing it already, come and do it here."
The site also reviews browsers like Firefox and Safari, social networks including Twitter and Facebook and mobile platforms such as Apple’s iPhone, Windows Mobile and Google’s Android.
Users will be able to register as "expert reviewers" and create public profiles that list their qualifications. Calo and his team will verify that new reviewers are who they claim to be, but will leave it to the WhatApp? members to decide for themselves.
"The idea is not to be exclusive and create a club," Calo said. "If you know something or have an opinion about how good or bad an app’s privacy is, feel free to weigh in."
Reviewers will be asked to rate an app based on a number of questions after reading an application’s privacy and security policy.
The reviews come in the form of written comments and badges that award applications up to five green bars for privacy, security and openness. Wikis accompany the reviews to summarize what the app does, and the site immediately offers a list of links to news stories about an app’s privacy and security issues.
"The entire point is to drive the application market toward better privacy and security practices by rewarding those who do a good job and penalizing those who don’t," Calo said.
"Privacy is about having control over information that pertains to you. I think we’re rapidly losing that control, and this is a way to monitor what’s being done with information being collected."
The last few months were probably long and hard ones for members of the Google Books team; it had started to seem like the whole world objected to their proposed scanning and sharing settlement. But it turns out that Stanford is on Google’s side, as a new deal was announced this afternoon.
Stanford and Google first sealed a book-related deal in late 2004. In fact, Stanford was one of five organizations that, on December 14th of 2004, joined what was then known as an expansion of the Google Print program.
Now, a post on the Google Public Policy Blog has stated, "Stanford University . . . has expanded our original partnership to take advantage of our settlement agreement to make millions of works from its library collection accessible to readers, researchers, and book lovers across the United States."
The post continued, "That means that if the settlement agreement is approved by the court, anyone in the US will be able to find, preview and buy online access to books from Stanford’s library."
So obviously, this could be a significant agreement. We’ll just need to find out how the settlement agreement fares before we can be sure that the terms will stick.
"People are going online to opine about the security and privacy of apps all the time," Calo said. "But none of that discussion is centralized. What we’re trying to say is that if you’re doing it already, come and do it here."
Stanford and Google first sealed a book-related deal in late 2004. In fact, Stanford was one of five organizations that, on December 14th of 2004, joined what was then known as an expansion of the Google Print program.