0 Physicists and engineers at Stanford take first step toward quantum cryptography

Stanford Report, November 15, 2012

Stanford researchers demonstrate the first step in a scalable quantum cryptography system that could lead to uncrackable telecommunications.

By Bjorn Carey

Furqan M Fazal

The spin-photon entanglement experimental apparatus.

Quantum mechanics offers the potential to create absolutely secure telecommunications networks by harnessing a fundamental phenomenon of quantum particles. Now, a team of Stanford physicists has demonstrated a crucial first step in creating a quantum telecommunications device that could be built and implemented using existing infrastructure.

Quantum cryptography relies on the curious aspect of quantum mechanics by which pairs of electrons can become "entangled." Electrons have a property called "spin": Just as a bar magnet can point up or down, so too can the spin of an electron. When electrons become entangled, their spins mirror each other.

If the spin of electron A is found to be pointing "up," then electron B's spin will also point up. If electron A's spin measures "down," so too would electron B's. An amazing feature of entangled electrons is that this pairing persists no matter the distance between electron A and electron B.

This behavior can be applied to create a perfectly secure communications network, which is of great interest to governments as well as members of private industry, such as banks. If one has a set of electrons in San Francisco and another set in New York, and the electrons can be made to be entangled, then it is possible to distribute cryptographic keys – strings of 1s and 0s, in which the different electron spin directions correspond to either 1 or 0 – between San Francisco and New York. The nature of quantum entanglement means it would be impossible for an eavesdropper to intercept the keys without the original parties noticing.

The work done by the Stanford research group of Yoshihisa Yamamoto, a professor of applied physics and of electrical engineering, in collaboration with the group of applied physics Professor Martin Fejer, provides a solution to one of the key wrinkles of quantum telecommunications. In the example above, the electrons are thousands of miles apart, so they can't be directly entangled; instead, they become entangled by sending photons between the two over fiber optic cables.

In this case, the San Francisco-based sender would coax its electron to emit a photon, which would itself be entangled to the electron. The New York-based recipient's electron would also emit an entangled photon, and when the two photons interact, the electrons on either end would then become entangled and share the same quantum spin.

A challenge is that light "leaks" from even the best fiber optic cables; current systems employ multiple devices called "repeaters" that receive a fading light signal and then amplify and reproduce it to send to the end recipient. In order to transmit quantum messages, scientists need to build "quantum repeater" systems that enable entanglement between electrons to be created over many repeater stations between the start and end locations.

Quantum telecommunication networks such as this are still years away, but the new Stanford research – published this week in Nature, with recent PhD graduate Kristiaan De Greve as lead author – demonstrates a critical first step in that chain.

Other researchers have entangled an electron and photon and created a memory using the electron, but those efforts required complex systems that are bulky and difficult to duplicate. The new approach, however, is potentially easier to scale up to systems that have many entangled pairs of electrons, said one of the study co-authors, Peter McMahon, an electrical engineering PhD candidate at Stanford.

The Stanford group used a quantum dot array – provided by collaborators at the University of Würzburg in Germany – that sits on a postage stamp-size semiconductor chip that contains a layer that is covered with millions of tiny bubbles, or dots. Each of these so-called quantum dots contains a single electron; in essence, each quantum dot is an artificial atom. By focusing a laser on a single dot, the researchers excited the electron inside and caused it to emit a photon. Tests showed that the emitted photon's orientation corresponded to the electron's spin direction, confirming that the photon and electron were quantum entangled.

An advantage of quantum dot arrays is that they could be produced using standard semiconductor-manufacturing technology. A single chip could contain millions of dots, arranged in a regular grid layout that would allow for the generation of long keys at high speeds.

Another experimental first achieved by the Stanford group is that the photon entangled with the electron is produced at the optimal frequency for transmission along fiber optic cables. The ability to slide into existing telecommunications networks and the ease of manufacture make Stanford's approach particularly appealing for future research, McMahon said.

The next step will involve building a receiver and confirming that electrons on both ends become entangled. And though that work could take several years, McMahon and his colleagues are optimistic. "We have demonstrated a fundamental building block of a quantum repeater node," he said. "It should not be impossible to create the second link."

The paper by Kristiaan De Greve and co-contributors Leo Yu, Peter McMahon, Jason Pelc et al. appears in Nature, Vol. 491. The work was done in collaboration with researchers from the University of Würzburg and Heriot-Watt University.

The work was supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Special Coordination Funds for Promoting Science and Technology, and the State of Bavaria. Funding also came from the Herb and Jane Dwight Stanford Graduate Fellowship, a David Cheriton Stanford Graduate Fellowship and a Robert N. Noyce Stanford Graduate Fellowship.

Kristiaan De Greve, lead author: kdegreve@stanford.edu

Bjorn Carey, Stanford News Service: (650) 725-1944, bccarey@stanford.edu

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0 Stanford Libraries acquire the archives of leading environmentalist William McDonough

Stanford Report, November 15, 2012

Stanford Libraries will create a "living archive" with the visionary who is considered to be the leading environmental architect of our time.

By Cynthia Haven

Courtesy William McDonough

Environmental architect William McDonough

William McDonough is one of the superstars of the environmental movement. Time magazine heralded him as a "Hero for the Planet" in 1999. President Clinton awarded him the Presidential Award for Sustainable Development in a 1996 White House ceremony. McDonough is the only individual to receive the award, the nation's top environmental honor.

Now the man who has been called the leading environmental architect of our time will be donating his extensive archive and professional papers to Stanford University Libraries.

Roberto Trujillo, head of the libraries' Special Collections, hailed McDonough's partnership with Stanford as a new kind of "living archive": "We see the possibility to capture not just the writings and artifacts but the activities and conversations of a designer and thought leader – and the many influential individuals he works with – as they happen. It's a real-time archive."

McDonough is perhaps best known for the iconic 10-acre green roof atop Ford Motor Co.'s River Rouge truck factory in Dearborn, but his influence has been felt beyond architecture. He is co-author of Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, with German chemist Michael Braungart. He is founder of William McDonough + Partners and co-founder (again with Braungart) of McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry. In 2010, he launched the Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute to promote the design and manufacture of safe and healthy products and materials.

His environmental motto is "Being less bad is not being good." He has criticized moves to "reduce the carbon footprint" when, for example, they merely recycle items that may be carcinogenic or otherwise environmentally harmful.

According to Time, "His utopianism is grounded in a unified philosophy that – in demonstrable and practical ways – is changing the design of the world."

The extensive McDonough historical collections cover more than 40 years of the designer's professional career. But McDonough is very much active and alive, and constantly generating new material for the archive. Hence, one of the challenges the libraries face will be managing the process of continually harvesting material for the archive from a living donor, and creating technological (and human) protocols so that the process will not be invasive.

The acquisition was announced at an event in San Francisco Wednesday night. Susan Sarandon was the emcee for the event, with Meryl Streep as a special guest.

The Stanford Libraries and McDonough have agreed to collaborate on a comprehensive approach to archiving the McDonough collections, which include paper and born-digital material. The libraries will use the digital components to create a set of open-source archival technologies that will allow creators, archivists and selected contributors to actively collaborate.

Stanford is an international leader in creating standards and best practices for realizing the digital library – one of the reasons McDonough was attracted to Stanford in the first place.

Speaking of the collaboration with the libraries, McDonough said he was "especially excited about their interest in new ways of archiving and look forward to working with their team. We are doing something new here. It's not just pulling the past into the present. We are pulling the present into the future."

Stanford University Librarian Michael Keller sees the acquisition as "an extraordinary opportunity not only to advance and redefine what an archive can be, but also a chance to engage with William McDonough to explore and document such questions as how the sustainable movement happened, and to examine links between pioneering thinkers such as McDonough and Buckminster Fuller."

Keller's mention of Fuller is apt. Stanford Libraries acquired the Buckminster Fuller archives in 1999, and it is one the libraries' most in-demand collections. It is also one of the most extensive personal archives anywhere. In a sense, the new McDonough acquisition is an extension of that visionary effort. It is a connection, also, that is personally meaningful for McDonough.

As a student at Dartmouth, McDonough heard one of Fuller's famously long lectures (more than three hours) – an encounter that left an indelible mark.

Speaking to Forbes Magazine in 2010 about his early influences, McDonough said, "In design, people like Buckminster Fuller amazed me at the levels at which he could think. He could think molecularly. And he could think at the almost galactic scale. And the idea that somebody could actually talk about molecules and talk about buildings and structures and talk about space just amazed me." Some consider McDonough an heir to Fuller's legacy.

According to McDonough, "That Buckminster Fuller's archives are at Stanford University Libraries is especially meaningful to me. He was an important influence on my early thinking."

Roberto Trujillo, Stanford Libraries: (650) 387-6816, trujillo@stanford.edu

Andrew Herkovic, Stanford Libraries: (650) 725-1877, andrew.herkovic@stanford.edu

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0 Glycine plays key link in a deadly staph bacteria, Stanford researchers discover

Stanford Report, November 14, 2012

A new study from Stanford's Department of Chemistry reveals that the cell wall structure of Staphylococcus aureus, a bacterium responsible for a broad range of diseases, depends on growth stage and nutrient availability.

By Melissa Pandika

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The researchers' work on Staphylococcus aureus could eventually change the way bacterial infections are treated.

Chemistry graduate student Xiaoxue Zhou had carried out an experiment to find out how antibiotics affect cell wall structure in Staphylococcus aureus, a bacterium responsible for a slew of ailments from food poisoning to boils and abscesses.  As she sifted through the data, she uncovered a peculiar result that could ultimately change how bacterial infections are treated.

The study in Biochemistry shows that the Achilles' heel of these germs may be the nutrient glycine, which keeps intact the cell walls of the staph bacteria that cause acne in teenagers and sneak up on elderly hospital patients.  

 "This started very serendipitously," said Lynette S. Cegelski, an assistant professor of chemistry. The researchers relied on a highly sensitive technique called solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance, allowing them to study the chemical structure of a major component of the bacterial cell wall – a large, cage-like molecule called peptidoglycan.

In S. aureus, peptidoglycan units are linked together by a bridge made from molecules of the amino acid glycine, forming a dense, sturdy cell wall that maintains cellular shape and integrity. Shortening of this bridge prevents peptidoglycan linking. Previous research has shown that this shortening impairs bacterial growth and overcomes resistance to the powerful antibiotic methicillin, the defining characteristic of the "hospital bug" MRSA, or methicillin-resistant S. aureus.

While poring over the solid-state NMR results, Zhou noticed a peak in the readings that appeared higher at later growth phases of the bacteria. Further analysis showed that the peak corresponded to a structure missing a glycine bridge.

"It was a control experiment, and we started chasing it down," Zhou said.

While earlier studies already showed that cell wall structure varies with growth phase, what caused these differences remained a mystery. Zhou’s NMR results hinted at glycine levels, showing that they also depend on growth phase.

Bacteria use glycine as they divide at an exponential rate, which slows and eventually plateaus as the cells use up nutrients and space. At that point, called the stationary phase, the bacteria have depleted the glycine needed to assemble the cell wall bridges.  

Zhou and Cegelski proved that glycine availability was the "master dial" controlling cell wall structure. As expected, when they turned the dial themselves by starving S. aureus of glycine, peptidoglycan molecules with missing bridges appeared earlier. Supplementing the cells with glycine resulted in relatively normal peptidoglycan with only a few missing bridges.

"It's always the case when you tip nature off balance a little bit, in this case with changing nutrient conditions, you discover something neat," Cegelski said. 

Previous studies have traced alterations in peptidoglycan's structure to antibiotics or genetic changes and have focused on bacteria still undergoing exponential division, when they're thought to be most vulnerable to antibiotics.  Zhou's and Cegelski's study is the first to explore the role that nutrient availability plays in cell wall assembly in bacteria in the stationary phase.   

"People normally only study (bacteria) in the exponential phase … but we think we need to check all the different conditions," Zhou said. "That's why we looked at the stationary phase, which is more relevant in persistent and biofilm-associated infections."

"Bacteria tend to grow as communities, Cegelski explained.  They form complex arrangements called biofilms, which are associated with serious, persistent infections, like those associated with cystic fibrosis.

Bacteria can produce their own glycine, so they could theoretically wait until they've made enough to assemble complete peptidoglycan units, with full-length bridges, before transporting them to the cell surface.  Instead, Zhou and Cegelski observed the opposite, with bacteria transporting incomplete units that lack the ability to crosslink.

The next step is to determine whether growing the cells in environments with even less glycine would cause them to transport more of these incomplete peptidoglycan units to their surfaces, eventually causing the cell wall to weaken and the bacterium to burst.

"If you can figure that out … how to mimic that glycine deprivation and encourage the transport of stems without bridges, in a sense molecularly, you could exploit that to develop an antibacterial strategy," Cegelski said.

"The results are just as exciting as what we were originally after," she said, adding that researchers should "always be ready or prepared for these unanticipated discoveries that might lead your research to new heights that you hadn't necessarily charted out."

Melissa Pandika is an intern with the Stanford News Service.

Lynette Cegelski, Department of Chemistry, (650) 725-3527 cegelski@stanford.edu

Xiaoxue Zhou, Department of Chemistry, (650) 725-1853 xiaoxuez@stanford.edu

Dan Stober, Stanford News Service, (650) 721-6965, dstober@stanford.edu

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0 Superstorm Sandy shows climate change isn't science fiction, top U.N. official tells Stanford audience

Stanford Report, November 12, 2012

Helen Clark, the administrator of the United Nations Development Program, visited Stanford to set the stage for international climate talks taking place in Doha, Qatar, later this month.

By Rob Jordan

Courtesy of New Zealand Office of the PM

Helen Clark leads the UN Development Program

"Until recently, climate change seemed like a science fiction scenario," Helen Clark told a Stanford audience recently.

Clark, the administrator of the United Nations Development Program and former prime minister of New Zealand, argued that a lack of coordinated global action on the issue is undermining efforts to alleviate extreme poverty. Climate change is damaging agriculture, driving up food prices, creating water insecurity, destroying coral reef fishing grounds and exposing millions to diseases such as diarrhea, dengue fever and malaria, she said.

Ahead of global climate negotiations set to begin in Doha, Qatar, later this month, Clark visited campus on the heels of Superstorm Sandy in the Eastern United States and a wave of extreme weather events worldwide. "It's not just a problem for small coastal regions in developing countries," she said.

Her Environmental Forum talk was co-sponsored by the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and Stanford's Program in Human Biology.

The Doha talks will be the 18th conference of the 192 signatory countries of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol – the only internationally legally binding regulations on climate protection.

International discussion on the issues has tended to focus on the long term rather than the short term, and to underestimate the effect on poor populations, Clark said. Commitments such as developed countries' pledge to give $100 billion to an adaptation fund have fallen through.

Clark reviewed key areas: regular reviews of international climate actions planned and taken; private climate financing and carbon markets; increased international cooperation to deploy new technologies; and addressing greenhouse gas emissions created through forest loss and degradation.

Using California as a model of climate progress, she pointed specifically to the state's cap-and-trade program launching this year as part of the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006.

Any action should be interdisciplinary in approach, Clark said, arguing that real progress would require holistic changes in government and social structures, "just as fixing health problems is about far more than fixing your hospital system." She pointed to corruption and weak government as enabling forces behind deforestation and forest degradation – the source of about a fifth of the world's greenhouse gas emissions.

Like any intractable problem, climate change cannot be tackled by government alone, Clark said. Grassroots advocacy and consumer choices – "bottom-up action" – will drive meaningful progress, she said, citing recent surveys showing increased public support for action on climate change. "The costs of inaction are increasingly clear."

In an interview following her lecture, Clark stressed the need for President Obama to use the momentum of his re-election to act quickly on climate change. "There is a window of opportunity to see the U.S. take a strong position," Clark told ClimateWire. "This is the hour for moving on climate change. I think it's time to mobilize, and not just the U.S., but worldwide."

Read the full text of Clark's speech.

Rob Jordan is the communications writer for the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.

Rob Jordan, communications, Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment: (650) 721-1881, rjordan@stanford.edu

Dan Stober, Stanford News Service: (650) 721-6965, dstober@stanford.edu

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0 Stanford scholars discuss Asia-Pacific policy during Obama's second term

By Sarah L. Bhatia

Philip Scott-Andrews/Reuters

Confetti obscures the stage as President Barack Obama celebrates winning re-election, Chicago, November 2012.

Fresh off his re-election victory, Barack Obama – the "Pacific President" – will become the first president to visit Myanmar and Cambodia when he travels to the Southeast Asian countries this month.

The trip highlights the region's importance to the United States and signals that Obama's second term will significantly focus on Asian trade, security and governance issues.

Scholars from the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center sat down to discuss reactions to the election in Asia, and possible directions for U.S.-Asia relations and foreign policy during the second Obama administration.

How do you think countries in Asia view the outcome of the U.S. presidential election?

Karl Eikenberry: Overall, I think the countries of Asia will view President Obama's reelection as positive, including because of the likely continuity in American policy toward the region.

Thomas Fingar: Beijing is troubled by Obama's policies toward Asia because it sees them as directed against China and detrimental to its interests. But it was more troubled by Romney's rhetoric during the campaign and probably interprets the election outcome as portending more continuity than change in U.S. policy. On balance, Beijing would rather deal with a devil it knows than cope with the uncertainties of a new U.S. administration.

Gi-Wook Shin: There was some concern in South Korea that Mitt Romney would have reverted to the hardline North Korea policy of George W. Bush's first term. It would have created a bit of tension between the United States and South Korea, so in that context many Koreans are relieved that Obama was re-elected.

David Straub: Interestingly, President Obama personally is overwhelmingly popular in South Korea, but opinion polls show that most South Koreans continue to have complex, even critical views of American foreign policy under him.

Is President Obama likely to make major changes to Asia policy in his second term?

Eikenberry: Some of the people in key positions in the second Obama administration will change, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, but President Obama will of course be in office for four more years. He has been in Asia and knows the players. He has a clear strategy, so overall I expect continuity in his administration's Asia policy.

Michael H. Armacost: Events are really what shape foreign policy, and developments can occur that are hard to predict.

Henry S. Rowen: We tend to assume there is a continuity or gradual evolution to events, but there are also discontinuities. Something could happen in North Korea, for example. Unexpected events do happen from time to time, and the question is to try to figure out what they might be.

How could U.S. China policy develop?

Fingar: If President Obama has a clear plan for his second term, its goals and priorities are not yet clear to the Chinese. They worry that he may continue, or ratchet up, efforts they see as designed to constrain China's rise. That said, they know that steady relations with the United States are essential for their own continued economic success and will respond positively to U.S. efforts to reduce distrust and enhance strategic stability. They will be troubled, however, by likely – and overdue – U.S. pressure to secure enforcement of China's intellectual property and other trade-related commitments, and by likely U.S. efforts to deepen trade relations with other countries.

How could the possible election of a more conservative Japanese government during the second term of the Obama administration affect U.S.-Japan relations?

Armacost: The Trans-Pacific Partnership is an issue where we both have potential constraints on the extent to which Japan can be included, and it is not certain whether that will change very much under a Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) administration. Secondly, there is the longstanding Okinawa base issue. The LDP did not do anything about the base from 1996 onward, and that will probably also be the case if the LDP comes into power again. Finally, the United States will probably push Japan to take more of a stand on the ongoing Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands dispute with China.

After the failure of the United States' Leap Day agreement with North Korea this year, and especially with the election of a new South Korean government next month, do you think that Obama's second term could bring a renewed effort in diplomacy with North Korea?

Shin: It will be important to watch the outcome of the South Korean election. If the opposition party wins, they will move very quickly to engage with North Korea and the question then will be how the United States will respond.

Straub: In any event, the United States periodically reaches out to North Korea, to test it or just because time has passed. It may do so again after the election, particularly since there is a still fairly new leadership in North Korea, and also because there are elections or leadership changes in all the countries in the region. A number of the Six Party Talks member states, likely including South Korea, may also push harder for a resumption of those talks, which were never held during President Obama's first term. But the Obama administration will be cautious because it was burned by North Korea's breaking of their Leap Day agreement.

What direction might U.S. policy toward South Asia take?

Eikenberry: Our presence in Afghanistan is going to remain an important part of our overall military posture in Central, South and East Asia. Managing properly the transition to full Afghan responsibility for their internal security will remain very high on President Obama's agenda. At the same time, it will be important to keep some U.S. counterterrorism capability in Afghanistan, with the permission of the Afghan government.

The nature of our security dialogue with Pakistan will change in emphasis from one that since 9/11 has mostly been informed by international terrorism. If we continue to make progress against al-Qaida, I expect our conversation with Pakistan will place more emphasis on its nuclear weapons programs and deployments. This is a potentially destabilizing issue and a concern not only to India, but also to China.

There has been a steady appreciation in the current and future importance of India. It will continue to be key in terms of the administration's broader Asia-Pacific policy, but with a clear understanding of the limits of defense engagement with India.

Will the rebalancing, or "pivot," toward Asia continue to be a central theme in U.S. foreign policy in Obama's second term?

Donald K. Emmerson: Asia will continue to loom large on Washington's policy horizon. Although the pivot was originally all about security, the rebalance has since been "rebalanced" to encompass economic concerns. In July 2012, when Secretary Clinton went to Phnom Penh to attend the security-focused ASEAN Regional Forum, she brought along the largest delegation of American businesspeople ever to visit Southeast Asia. Their presence upgraded the profile of the U.S.-ASEAN Business Forum, which met the following day. The Obama administration has also taken the lead in promoting a Trans-Pacific Partnership to liberalize Asia-Pacific trade.

Sarah L. Bhatia is the communications and outreach coordinator at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

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0 Stanford School of Education course tackles challenges of digital learning

Stanford Report, November 15, 2012

A free-flowing, ambitious course brings students, faculty and professionals together to debate Education's Digital Future.

By R.F. MacKay

Chris Wessleman/Stanford School of Education

Mitchell Stevens, associate professor of education, (with mic) draws questions from an audience of students, venture capitalists, educators and entrepreneurs at the Oct. 9 lecture in the class, Education's Digital Future.

Amid all the hyperbolic proclamations that massive open online courses, or MOOCs, are poised to take over the educational universe, dispassionate and well-trained minds are needed to assess just exactly what is going on with digital and online learning and what we can reasonably expect.

Funny how the Stanford School of Education reached that same conclusion. Throughout this academic year, a 1-unit course called Education's Digital Future (EDF) is bringing together students, faculty and professionals from Stanford and its community to study how digital education works and which models work better.

Start with the graduate students of the School of Education, then add students from around campus, faculty and local K-12 teachers. Mix in software developers, venture capitalists, policy experts and anyone else who cares to walk in to join the Tuesday conversations in the CERAS building.

It's more than a course: It's a website, a hub, a potential movement. And it's way more than technology.

"We're at a moment of an epic shift in the political economy of higher education; how we measure it, fund it, govern it are all in flux," says Mitchell Stevens, one of the course's organizers. For one thing, he said, the progression from K-12 to college, with a high school diploma in between, does not necessarily reflect the true pace of human learning. "We need to rethink the relationship between college education and the life course and radically re-narrate the chronology."

Stevens, an associate professor of education, and Roy Pea, the David Jacks Professor of Education, are the organizers of EDF (Educ 403x), which combines the classroom experience with a speakers series and online forums on the Piazza platform for enrolled students. This quarter, 37 students are officially enrolled in the course. Dozens of nonstudents also take part; sometimes the room overflows.

The idea was to create a low-barrier town square where all relevant players could gather, talk, listen and sift out the substance from the hype. Stevens, who came to Stanford in 2009 from New York University, acknowledged that the whole thing is an experience unlike anything he has ever taken part in, "a pedagogical challenge I never envisioned having." But it's a challenge he has fully embraced.

"It's great," he said. "You say 'digital' and 'Stanford School of Education,' and everyone says 'yes.'"

Although many think the promised land is around the corner, the 403x speakers throughout fall quarter let their audience know that they're in for an uphill struggle, both conceptually and on the ground. Suddenly, it seems, all our preconceived notions of educational institutions are being challenged and even threatened by digital and online technologies. Will they work? Will they, to use Schumpeter's expression, be creatively destructive?

Stevens is quick to point out that though this may feel to some like a sudden dilemma, in fact, it's the culmination of a long process.

"This is not just a technical transformation," he said, "it's economic and political, and it has been turbo-charged by new business models. It's happening so quickly now because of larger changes that have been going on in U.S. education for 30 years."

Speakers at 403x have represented just about every sector relevant to its ambitious agenda. They included Adrian Sannier, senior vice president for product at Pearson, a leading education services company; Candace Thille, director of Carnegie Mellon University's famed Open Learning Initiative (OLI); Catherine Casserly, CEO of Creative Commons; Tom Vander Ark, formerly with the Gates Foundation and now a venture capitalist focused on education; Prasad Ram, founder and CEO of the nonprofit Ednovo; and Steve Midgley, a consultant with the U.S. Department of Education.

All, as well as Stevens and Pea, see a tension between two narratives that are not mutually exclusive: On the one hand, the possibilities are infinite. With new technology, education can be everywhere, flexible, responsive, better, cheap. On the other, we have to deal with resistant technologies, market rigidities, closed minds, anxious school districts, missing infrastructure, a shrinking tax base and politics.

But, Ednovo's Ram noted at the EDF panel held on Election Night, "everyone these days wants to be the Education President, so something is going right!"

Class sessions explore both university-level MOOCs and hybrid learning in general, as well as K-12 learning, whose challenges are quite different. In her presentation, Carnegie Mellon's Thille, for example, addressed the twin missions of learning about learning and teaching those who otherwise would not have access to high-quality higher education.

OLI comprises hybrid, mostly core-curriculum courses created by multidisciplinary Carnegie Mellon teams and then made available to a wide range of colleges and universities. Students learn both in a real classroom and using CMU's videos, and instructors are able to gather valuable data about how students learn. In fact, Thille said, it is the research that is most compelling: "OLI is not just the technology; it is an approach, a research question. … We need a research agenda that goes way beyond the technology."

Beyond concerns about how MOOCs might upend higher education, many of those crowded into the auditorium are most worried about K-12 education. That was best illustrated in the Nov. 6 forum on digital curricula, delivered to an overflow crowd of several hundred, with dozens watching on a screen in the lobby.

Venture capitalist Vander Ark set the tone. "The shift we're going through now is the most important in the history of learning," he said. "It's one of the most important trends of the world," along with phenomena such as the spread of democracy and the rise of biotechnology. The shift in question is toward "personalized learning with new tools in new kinds of schools," with online learning being just one piece of the puzzle.

Ednovo CEO Ram similarly stressed the absurdity of arbitrarily deciding that six hours a day are for school, two hours are for homework "and the rest is not learning." Rather, he suggested, learning should be (and in fact is) pervasive. We learn every minute of every day. The challenge is to ensure that K-12 students have the means for making learning possible and gaining as much as they can from it.

But school districts and public school teachers were not front and center in the panel's presentations, a deficit that questioners immediately pointed to. They also wondered who or what is going to pay for all these innovations (schools? government? foundations? companies?) and how the new financial or fiscal infrastructure would be coordinated with existing school district structures.

The EDF website is nearly as busy as the classroom itself. Homework assignments and comments are posted on Piazza forums, most class readings are available to the world, course assistants post summaries of lectures and panels weekly, and video footage of most guest speakers can be viewed.

Looking ahead to the rest of the year, Stevens said 403x students will be working on team projects, with EDF functioning as an incubator of ideas. He would like to see more discussion about the digital revolution and equity and about the whole notion of diploma-laden education, which he believes has far more to do with statistical convenience than with measuring true learning.

Overall, he said, he is pleased with the experiment and with what he calls the "plural conversations" every week in the large and diverse 403x community. "The future is coming," he said. "We need to think about it."

Jonathan Rabinovitz, School of Education: (650) 724-9440, jrabin@stanford.edu

R. F. MacKay, Communications Manager, Stanford Online: rmackay@stanford.edu

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0 Stanford expert: Energy efficiency wins big in California election, but debate looms over dividing $2.5 billion

Stanford Report, November 12, 2012

A ballot initiative to increase taxes on corporations that sell products in California but have few employees in the state faced scant opposition and won voter support with little fanfare. The real fight lies ahead in the state legislature: dividing up $2.5 billion intended for energy efficiency projects in government buildings.

By Mark Golden

California's Proposition 39 did not get much attention in the months leading up to Tuesday's election, but voters handily approved the measure to increase taxes on some corporations, with $2.5 billion of the money going for projects to conserve electricity and natural gas consumed by schools and other government buildings.

The appeal to Californians was understandable. Basically, the additional taxes will be paid by companies that sell their products in the state but have relatively few employees and little property here. In turn, $500 million annually for five years will pay for public building retrofit projects, each of which must save taxpayers more on energy costs in the long term than the retrofits cost.

The money can be used for renewable energy installations like solar panels too, but the cost-effectiveness requirement currently favors energy efficiency projects like insulation or modernizing heating, air-conditioning, water or lighting systems, according to James Sweeney, professor of management science and engineering, and director of the Precourt Energy Efficiency Center at Stanford University.

"Many efficiency improvements can pay for themselves in several years," said Sweeney.

According to a McKinsey & Co. report in 2009, state and local government buildings in the United States could reduce energy costs by $49 billion for $26 billion in efficiency investments, while also slashing their greenhouse gas emissions by a third. For decades California has been more aggressive than most states in promoting energy efficiency. State regulations result in utilities spending about $1 billion annually on financial incentives primarily for homeowners and businesses rather than large government buildings. Such programs are funded primarily by utility customers, not tax receipts.

Under Proposition 39, $500 million to $550 million a year will be spent in three areas: outright grants to cover the costs of projects, low-interest loans for such projects and workforce training to increase the skilled workers available to install the new technologies.

The state legislature is to write by June the rules that will determine how the money will be divided among these three groups.

That will require debate, said Sweeney. Cities and school districts in these tough budget times would much prefer grants to loans. Even 1 percent interest loans create more debt on already strained government balance sheets.

Federal stimulus funds that California allocated to energy conservation grants for small cities and counties were taken up quickly, while a related low-interest loan program is still taking applications.

"For public buildings, capital constraints have prevented cost-effective investments to conserve electricity and natural gas. Grants under Prop. 39 will clearly overcome these capital constraints," said Sweeney.

On the other hand, most policymakers in Sacramento have a strong preference for low-interest loans, which upon repayment can fund additional projects. A significant loan program could leverage the Prop. 39 program far beyond five years and $2.5 billion by conserving more energy and creating more jobs than one-time grants. Such a program might also be extended to private companies rather than just governments.

Under state mandates, half of the proceeds from the higher taxes must go to certain types of spending, primarily public education. After five years, the annual $500 million for energy efficiency will become available for general purposes.

Mark Golden works in communications at the Precourt Energy Efficiency Center at Stanford University.

Mark Golden, Precourt Energy Efficiency Center: (650) 724-1629, mark.golden@stanford.edu

Dan Stober, Stanford News Service: (650) 721-6965, dstober@stanford.edu

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0 Stanford author Adam Johnson shares secrets of his writing process

Stanford Report, November 14, 2012

The author of the bestselling novel "The Orphan Master's Son" says the personal characteristics seen as flaws during his early years - daydreamer, liar, rubbernecker, exaggerator - all came together to make for a successful career as a storyteller.

By Kelsey Geiser
The Humanities at Stanford

L.A. Cicero

Adam Johnson, associate professor of English and best-selling author, uses a spreadsheet to track his productivity.

Spreadsheets are not typically equated with creativity. But acclaimed novelist Adam Johnson relies on rows and columns to keep him focused and on schedule.

In addition to his bestselling novel The Orphan Master's Son, Johnson's numerous short stories and essays have appeared in Harper's Magazine, Esquire and The Paris Review, to name a few. His first novel, Parasites Like Us, won a California Book Award. Given Johnson's prolific creative writing endeavors, one might imagine that words flow effortlessly from his mind to his keyboard.

But, as Johnson shared during a recent presentation as part of the "How I Write" series at Stanford, each of his works is the result of methodical research, self-imposed discipline and a lifelong passion for storytelling.

An associate professor of English at Stanford, Johnson records his writing habits in a detailed Excel spreadsheet. He keeps track of the location, number of words he writes, the time of day he writes and how many of those words actually make it into the final product. 

His data revealed that he was the most productive at the medical library at the University of California-San Francisco, a fact he attributes to his lack of access to the Internet and the effort needed to use the bathroom there. 

"In the library, honestly, you have to pack it all up and take a trip," admitted Johnson. "I would just think, 'I can make it another half hour before I have to pack all my gear up.'"

Working in his home office proved to be difficult because he could hear his children playing in the room above him.  "I had to put the test to my work," said Johnson. "Are these imaginary people more important than the real people I am spending time away from?" Johnson found that moving outside of his home put some of that guilt to rest and allowed him to focus on his writing.

His spreadsheet also keeps him on a writing schedule.  If he missed writing days, it would become increasingly apparent.

 "When you miss a day or two it's like a gap tooth, but if you miss a couple of weeks it's like someone died," Johnson said.

Research played a major role in the development of The Orphan Master's Son, Johnson's New York Times bestseller about a young man's journey through the world's most evasive dictatorship – North Korea, under the rule of Kim Jong Il. 

Johnson, who received his doctorate in English from Florida State University in 2000, did everything in his power to understand this isolated culture, about which precious little is written.  

He read everything he could get his hands on, including agricultural and historical books and propaganda materials. He also read the few available testimonials of people who had escaped the country.

"Once I started reading these stories, everything changed," said Johnson.  "There was a weight of them in me … They were real people."

To prepare his writing, Johnson combined general knowledge, personal stories and first- hand impressions he gained from a tightly controlled, state-sponsored trip to North Korea.  With these multiple perspectives, Johnson attempted to write from the point of view of a native North Korean.

With the personal stories, Johnson felt a familiar pull.  "When you get that story, you are beholden to it," Johnson admitted.  "It is like bearing witness to it.  You have to live up to it."

Despite Johnson's organized academic approach to his creative work, he ran into all the typical setbacks faced by writers – including writer's block.  "I think [being] stuck is part of the process," said Johnson. 

He would write until he would not believe the setting, the person or the place he was writing about, then he would hit the books again, "extending my imagination as far as I trusted it and then going back to the sources," said Johnson. 

The accomplished fiction and short story writer began his "How I Write" conversation with a deeper look into his own life.  He talked about going to the zoo after hours with his father, who was a night watchman at the Phoenix zoo; digging through neighbors' trashcans to figure out more about their lives; and working as a construction worker, all the while looking for stories. 

It was not until he took a creative writing class at Arizona State University as an undergraduate that he found a home for this inquisitiveness.  "Suddenly all the flaws I had been told I had had in my life – I was a daydreamer, a liar, a rubbernecker and an exaggerator - they all came together to make a story that was suddenly valuable." From that moment on, he devoted himself to telling stories and figuring out what stories do for us as people. 

Throughout his career, Johnson has attempted nearly all forms of storytelling, including work on graphic novels such as Shake Girl with the Stanford Graphic Novel Project. He has found that writers must often place themselves entirely outside of their own experience to gain a more truthful outcome. 

Johnson said storytelling has contributed to his own self-awareness. "I was using the distance of fiction to get to know the stranger of myself," admitted Johnson. 

"If your story is overwhelming enough that it could incapacitate you, then you're going to have to break it into pieces," Johnson said.  "You have to break it, or tell it out of order, or tell it without causality, or tell it as if it happened to someone else, or leave out the pain altogether."

Johnson's talk will be available on Stanford on ITunes U, where more than two-dozen previous "How I Write" talks are archived.

Kelsey Geiser is an intern with the Human Experience, the Humanities web portal for Stanford University.

Corrie Goldman, director of humanities communication: (650) 724-8156, corrieg@stanford.edu

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0 Stanford campus to honor its past and present veterans

Stanford Report, November 8, 2012

The Stanford community will celebrate Veterans Day with several events, including a reception today in the Law School lounge, a private event at the Graduate School of Business on Friday, an evening of storytelling on Sunday in the Old Union, and the placement of floral wreaths in Memorial Court and Memorial Auditorium on Monday.

By Kathleen J. Sullivan

Elaine Enos

On Monday, as in 2010 shown above, the university will place floral wreaths in Memorial Court as well as in the entrance to Memorial Auditorium as tributes to those who have devoted years in service to the country.

On Sunday – Veterans Day – the Stanford Storytelling Project is hosting an evening of personal stories, music, letters and conversation with six Stanford student veterans who recently returned from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Stanford veterans and some of their family members will come together for a single special event, "Voices from the Front: Stanford Students Returning Home from War," to share what they have experienced and learned, both about war and about the journey home.

The event begins at 5 p.m. in the A3C Ballroom in the Old Union. It is free and open to all.

"We're really hoping that "Voices from the Front" will create a unique space for the Stanford community to start a dialogue about the experiences that veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan have as they transition to war and return home," said Xandra Clark, senior producer and events director at the Stanford Storytelling Project.

"These personal stories aren't much heard in the news, but it's a conversation we really should have in America today."

The evening will feature excerpts from the project's new audio documentary of the soldiers, Returning Home, which will air on KZSU 90.1 FM at 6 p.m. Nov. 12 and 14.

In the documentary, the students talk about their decision to enlist, serving in Iraq, coping with the experience of war, coming home, going to community college, studying at Stanford and trying to figure out what to do next.

During Sunday's program, the audience also will hear other students recite letters that one of the veterans sent to loved ones back home.

Then, the six veterans, including one woman, will take the stage for a discussion with the audience. Joel Brinkley, a former foreign correspondent for the New York Times who teaches at Stanford, will moderate the discussion.

Four of the six veterans who tell their stories in Returning Home graduated from Stanford within the past year. Two are still studying on the Farm.

Clark said many Stanford students are surprised to hear there are veterans studying on campus. Many students would like to talk to veterans about their experiences, she said, but don't know if it's all right to ask questions.

Currently, there are seven undergraduate student veterans studying at Stanford and 58 graduate student veterans enrolled in Stanford's seven schools.

"Veterans do want to talk about their experiences," Clark said. "For Sunday's program, we have created a space where that is permissible, where people can ask questions and begin a dialogue with veterans. It's really important to start that conversation on campus."

A reception will follow in a gallery space that will display special artifacts selected by the veterans, including photographs and other items from their time in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The event is being cosponsored by the Stanford Storytelling Project, the Haas Center for Public Service and the Stanford Military Service Network.

Today, the Haas Center and the Stanford Law School are co-sponsoring a Veterans Day reception from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. in the Law School lounge. All members of the Stanford community and their families are invited to attend.

On Friday, the Graduate School of Business Veterans Club is holding a private event for business school students and their guests.

Also on Friday, the Hoover Institution will hold a 2 p.m. ceremony celebrating the 237th birthday (Nov. 10, 1775) of the Marine Corps. The event, which is free and open to the public, will be held in Room 130 of the Herbert Hoover Memorial Building, located at 434 Galvez Mall. Former U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz will speak at the ceremony, which will last about an hour.

On Monday, the university will place floral wreaths in Memorial Court and at the entrance to Memorial Auditorium as tributes to veterans – past and present – of the Stanford community, and to those who have devoted years in service to the country.

A letter from President John Hennessy will be placed with the wreaths.

"We owe a great debt to those who serve and protect our freedom," Hennessy wrote in the Veterans Day letter.

"Stanford is honored to have about 60 United States military veterans currently enrolled at the university as undergraduates and graduate students," he wrote.

"Many have served in the past few years in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Each year, for the past several years, their numbers at Stanford have been growing. This year we also have nine ROTC students. They contribute to the vibrancy of our community as well as to Stanford's rich heritage of service."

Inside Memorial Auditorium, which opened in 1937 as a memorial to Stanford's fallen in World War I, plaques bear the names of alumni, students, staff and faculty who have died in every war since then, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Nearly four decades earlier, Jane Stanford had dedicated Memorial Court to the memory of Stanford volunteers who fought in the Spanish-American War.

"Please take a moment today to note the names on these walls," Hennessy wrote. "We ask that you pay them a quiet moment of respect and gratitude as we all are reminded that these areas of the campus were established for just this purpose."

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0 Three words sum up the Stanford journey: Integrate, innovate and inspire, Elam tells Faculty Senate

Stanford Report, November 9, 2012

At the third meeting of fall quarter, the senate heard an update on the redesign of undergraduate education that the faculty approved last spring.

By Kathleen J. Sullivan

L.A. Cicero

Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education Harry Elam addressing the Faculty Senate on Thursday.

Six months after the Faculty Senate approved sweeping changes in breadth requirements for undergraduates, Harry J. Elam Jr., vice provost for undergraduate education, presented a progress report on plans to implement the new Ways of Thinking/Ways of Doing program in the fall of 2013.

Speaking at Thursday's senate meeting, Elam said the opportunity to implement the new breadth requirements was an "exciting moment" for the university.

"We'll be reaching out in so many different ways to you, to other constituencies and to students to find ways to make Ways of Thinking work, to evaluate it and to keep Stanford at the vanguard of undergraduate education," he said.

The senate approved the new breadth requirements last May after extensive discussions and debate. The new requirements were one of many recommendations in the 2012 Study of Undergraduate Education at Stanford (SUES).

At the start of his presentation, Elam said he could summarize the recommendations of the SUES report in three words: integrate, innovate and inspire.

The Ways of Thinking/Ways of Doing categories are aesthetic and interpretive inquiry; social inquiry; scientific method and analysis; formal reasoning; applied quantitative reasoning; engaging diversity; ethical reasoning; and creative expression. Starting with the class entering in fall 2013, students will be required to take 11 courses in the eight categories.

Elam said the new Breadth Governance Board, under the direction of Chris Edwards, a professor of mechanical engineering, has already done a lot of work on Ways of Thinking/Ways of Doing.

"They needed by Oct. 15 to come up with a rationale for each of the eight ways, as well as learning outcomes, and to put them into something that was coherent, succinct and available for chairs to look at," Elam said.

The board created an 11-page report, Ways of Thinking/Ways of Doing: A capacity-based approach to fostering breadth in General Education Electives.

The board also has established a process by which faculty and departments may certify their courses to fulfill the new general education electives.  

Elam said there have been a series of Ways meetings, including one Thursday on creative expression. Two more meetings are scheduled: moral and ethical reasoning on Nov. 27, and scientific method and analysis on Nov. 29.

"It's a chance to sit down with others and talk about what would go into that particular Way, why, how your course might fit, ideas that you're thinking about in relation to that course, what it may mean to your department," Elam said.

He said the deadline for submitting courses, Dec. 14, is there as a way of saying to departments, "please help us with this process."

"Put in those courses that you think fit into a certain area," Elam said. "That way, we get a listing of courses, we get a sense of where there are missing areas and where there needs to be more courses. Quite frankly, in terms of needs, three areas come to mind: engaging diversity, creative expression and ethical reasoning."

He said the university will hold summer workshops to fund curriculum development for individual faculty who have the goal of creating new courses in these categories.

"But, if a faculty member wants to work with another faculty member, or another faculty member within a group, then we add additional funding for lunch and additional funding for bringing in someone to speak with them," Elam said, adding that one of his goals is to form "learning communities among faculty."

Elam also discussed the new Thinking Matters program, which the senate approved last March. Stanford launched the program this quarter for incoming freshmen.

The courses – all students are required to take at least one Thinking Matters course – are designed to welcome freshmen into intellectual life at Stanford and to teach them the critical and analytical skills required for rigorous university-level work.  

Citing data from the initial forms returned by students last June, Elam said 88 percent of incoming freshmen got their first choice among the available Thinking Matters courses and 96 percent got their first or second choice.

He said more than half the incoming students said they planned to take at least one Thinking Matters course as an elective in addition to the required course.

Among the courses that earned more than 200 first-choice requests were The Science of MythBusters (fall), How Does Your Brain Work? (winter) and Networks: Ecological, Revolutionary, Digital (spring).

Elam also shared some statistics on Stanford Introductory Seminars, which the senate last March voted to "strongly" encourage first-year students to take. The seminars are small group courses for freshmen and sophomores taught by esteemed faculty.

Currently, 38 percent of freshmen are enrolled in Introductory Seminars, up from 33 percent during fall quarter of last year, Elam said.

He said 39 percent of fall quarter introductory seminars in the humanities are full, compared with 24 percent last year, which he called "incredible growth."

Elam said the online Cardinal Compass, which helps freshmen navigate their first year at Stanford, has received nearly 18,000 page views since it was launched in August.

In the Q&A that followed Elam's presentation, faculty members asked questions on a variety of topics including how to make Introductory Seminars available to student athletes, whose schedules can make it hard for them to attend; the value of capstone projects; team teaching of Ways of Thinking/Ways of Doing courses; and evaluating the long-term impact of the new breadth requirements.

The full minutes of the meeting, including the presentation and the question-and-answer session that followed, will be available next week on the senate's website.

The next senate meeting will be held Dec. 6.

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0 Stanford study: Climate change threatens freshwater source for billions

Stanford Report, November 11, 2012

Stanford scientist and other researchers analyze future snowpack decline from California to the Himalayas.

By Rob Jordan

Courtesy of the California Depatment of Water Resources

Frank Gehrke, left, and Dave Hart of the California Department of Water Resources measuring water content of snow in January 2008. A new study forecasts a drop in the annual snowpack within the next 30 years due to climate change.

Snowpack, an essential source of drinking water and agricultural irrigation for billions of people, could shrink significantly within the next 30 years, according to a study led by Stanford climate change researcher Noah Diffenbaugh.

The study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, forecasts the effect of climate change on Northern Hemisphere snowpack through the 21st century in the Western United States, Alpine Europe, Central Asia and downstream of the Himalayas and Tibetan Plateau. The news is particularly troubling for snowpack-dependent California – the largest producer of agriculture products in the country and the sixth-largest agriculture exporter in the world.

"The Western U.S. exhibits the strongest increases in the occurrence of extremely low snow years in response to global warming," Diffenbaugh said. "It also exhibits some of the strongest decreases in runoff that occurs during the growing season." Diffenbaugh is an assistant professor in Stanford's Department of Environmental Earth System Science and a center fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.

Less snow accumulation, increased cold season runoff and decreased warm season runoff could lead not only to overwhelmed reservoirs and flooding in winter, but also to insufficient water for agriculture in spring and summer when demand is highest. Hydroelectric production, water-dependent ecosystems and snow-dependent recreation industries could also suffer. On top of that, early spring snowmelt has been associated with an increase in wildfires, insect pests and species extinctions in the Western United States and elsewhere.

By filling reservoirs and watering crops when warmer, drier weather sets in, mountain snowpack has become vital to people and ecosystems in regions such as the Western United States, Alpine Europe, Central Asia and downstream of the Himalayas and Tibetan Plateau – home to more than 50 percent of the world's population.

"If we look at the systems that humans currently have in place for managing water resources, we see that much of the Northern Hemisphere is dependent on snowpack for water storage," Diffenbaugh said. "Our results suggest that global warming will put increasing pressure on both flood control in the cold season and water availability in the dry season, and that these changes are likely to occur in some of the most densely populated and water-stressed areas of the planet."

The connection between rising global temperatures and disappearing snowpack has long been evident. Diffenbaugh and his fellow researchers took a new look at the issue by examining predicted extremes in snowpack accumulation and runoff. Using advanced climate modeling techniques, they compared a century's worth of predicted future data for precipitation, accumulation and runoff with the average and extreme rates for the same phenomena during the 30 years between 1976 and 2005.

The researchers found that the occurrence of low snow years will likely intensify throughout most snow-dominated areas of the Northern Hemisphere during this century, becoming the norm more than 80 percent of the time over most of North America, western Eurasia and southeastern Eurasia by 2070.

The areas of North America and Eurasia predicted to have the highest number of low-snow years are also predicted to have extremely low snow accumulation.

"Our analysis highlights the potential impacts of climate change if greenhouse gas emissions continue on their current trajectory," Diffenbaugh said. "While the greatest impacts are likely to occur at higher levels of global warming, our results highlight the fact that continued emissions over the next few decades are likely to substantially reduce snow accumulation in a number of regions, increasing the risk of both flooding and drought in different parts of the year."

The study's co-authors include Moetasim Ashfaq, a research scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Martin Scherer, a research assistant in Stanford's Department of Environmental Earth System Science. The study was made possible by grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Energy.

Rob Jordan is the communications writer for the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.

Noah Diffenbaugh, Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment: cell (650) 223-9425, office (650) 725-7510, diffenbaugh@stanford.edu

Christine Harrison, Communications, Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment: (650) 725-8240, christine.harrision@stanford.edu

Nancy Peterson, Communications, School of Earth Sciences: (650) 776-2276, npete@stanford.edu

Dan Stober, Stanford News Service: (650) 721-6965, dstober@stanford.edu

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0 Stanford expert: 'Black swans,' 'perfect storms' are lame excuses for bad risk management

Stanford Report, November 16, 2012

Instead of reflecting on the unlikelihood of rare catastrophes after the fact, Stanford risk analysis expert Elisabeth Paté-Cornell prescribes an engineering approach to anticipate them when possible, and to manage them when not.

By Kelly Servick

Kenneth William Caleno

Elisabeth Paté-Cornell argues that a true 'black swan' - an event that is impossible to imagine because we've known nothing like it in the past - is extremely rare.

The terms "black swan" and "perfect storm" have become part of the public vocabulary for describing disasters ranging from the 2008 meltdown in the financial sector to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But according to Elisabeth Paté-Cornell, a Stanford professor of management science and engineering, people in government and industry are using these terms too liberally in the aftermath of a disaster as an excuse for poor planning.

Her research, published in the November issue of the journal Risk Analysis, suggests that other fields could borrow risk analysis strategies from engineering to make better management decisions, even in the case of once-in-a-blue-moon events where statistics are scant, unreliable or non-existent.

Paté-Cornell argues that a true "black swan" – an event that is impossible to imagine because we've known nothing like it in the past – is extremely rare. The AIDS virus is one of very few examples. Usually, there are important clues and warning signs of emerging hazards (e.g., a new flu virus) that can be monitored to guide quick risk management responses.

The attacks of 9/11 were not black swans, she said. The FBI knew that questionable people were taking ?ying lessons on large aircraft. And a group of terrorists seemed to have had a similar plan in 1994, when they took over in Algiers, Algeria, an Air France aircraft bound for Paris.

Similarly, she argues that the risk of a "perfect storm," where multiple forces join to create a disaster greater than the sum of its parts, can be assessed in a systematic way before the event because even though their conjunctions are rare, the events that compose them – and all the myriad events that are dependent on them – have been observed in the past.

"Risk analysis is not about predicting anything before it happens, it's just giving the probability of various scenarios," she said. She argues that systematically exploring those scenarios can help companies and regulators make smarter decisions before an event in the face of uncertainty.

An engineering risk analyst thinks in terms of systems, their functional components and their dependencies, Paté-Cornell said. For instance, in many plants that require cooling, generators, turbines, water pumps, safety valves and more all contribute to making the system work. Therefore, the analyst must first understand the ways in which the system works as a whole in order to identify how it could fail. The same method applies to medical, financial or ecological systems.

In the case of a nuclear plant, the seismic activity or the potential for tsunamis in the area must be part of the equation, particularly if local earthquakes have historically led to tidal waves and destructive flooding. Paté-Cornell noted that the designers of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant ignored important historical precedents, including earthquakes in 869 and 1611 that generated waves similar to those witnessed in March 2011.

Paté-Cornell says that a systematic approach is also relevant to human aspects of risk analysis.

"Some argue that in engineering you have hard data about hard systems and hard architectures, but as soon as you involve human beings, you cannot apply the same methods due to the uncertainties of human error. I do not believe this is true," she said.

In fact, Paté-Cornell and her colleagues have long been incorporating "soft" elements into their systems analysis to calculate the probability of human error. They look at all the people with access to the system and factor in any available information about past behaviors, training and skills.

Paté-Cornell has found that human errors, far from being unpredictable, are often rooted in the way an organization is managed. "We look at how the management has trained, informed and given incentives to people to do what they do and assign risk based on those assessments," she said.

Paté-Cornell has successfully applied this approach to the field of finance, where she has estimated the probability that an insurance company would fail given its age and its size. She said companies funded her research because they needed forward-looking models that their financial analysts generally did not provide. Traditional financial analysis, she said, is based on evaluating existing statistical data about past events. In her view, analysts can better anticipate market failures – like the financial crisis that began in 2008 – by recognizing precursors and warning signs, and factoring them into a systemic probabilistic analysis.

Medical specialists must also make decisions in the face of limited statistical data, and Paté-Cornell says the same approach is useful for calculating patient risk.

She used systems analysis to assess data about anesthesia accidents – where human mistakes can create an accident chain that, if not recognized quickly, puts the patient's life in danger. Based on her results, she suggested retraining and recertification procedures for anesthesiologists to make their system safer.

"Lots of people don't like probability because they don't understand it," she said, "and they think if they don't have hard statistics, they cannot do a risk analysis." In fact, we generally do a system-based risk analysis because we do not have reliable statistics about the performance of the whole system.

Kelly Servick is a science-writing intern at the Stanford University School of Engineering.

Elisabeth Paté-Cornell, Management Science & Engineering: (650) 723-3823, mep@stanford.edu

Andrew Myers, School of Engineering: (650) 736-2245, admyers@stanford.edu

Dan Stober, Stanford News Service: (650) 721-6965, dstober@stanford.edu

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0 J-School and Stanford Engineering announce joint gift from David and Helen Gurley Brown

     

January 30, 2012

Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and Stanford University’s School of Engineering today announced a $30 million gift from longtime Cosmopolitan magazine editor and author Helen Gurley Brown to establish the David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation.

The Institute and the collaboration between the two schools is groundbreaking in that it is designed to encourage and support new endeavors with the potential to inform and entertain in transformative ways. It will recognize the increasingly important connection between journalism and technology, bringing the best from the East and West Coasts.

The Institute, the first of its kind, is inspired by the memory of Ms. Brown’s late husband, David Brown, a graduate of both Stanford University and the Columbia School of Journalism. Brown, who along with partners Richard Zanuck and Steven Spielberg created such classic American films as "Driving Miss Daisy," "The Verdict" and "Jaws," was also a former journalist, publisher and, late in his career, a stage producer whose credits included the musicals "Sweet Smell of Success" and "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels."

David and Helen Gurley Brown in 1984. Photo/Hearst Corp.

Of the total gift, each school will receive $12 million for Institute activities. The gift to Columbia’s Journalism School, the largest in its history, will endow a professorship whose holder will be the Institute’s East Coast director. The gift to Stanford’s Engineering School will similarly endow the position of the West Coast director. An additional $6 million will go to Columbia which will also pay for the construction of a highly visible signature space at the eastern end of the J-School’s landmark building, featuring a state-of-the-art high-tech newsroom. The funding of the Institute will support graduate and postgraduate fellowships, both at Stanford and Columbia, and competitively-awarded “Magic Grants,” intended to seed the most innovative and promising ideas for future development conceived of by Brown Fellows.

Commenting on the announcement, Helen Gurley Brown said, “David and I have long supported and encouraged bright young people to follow their passions and to create original content. Great content needs useable technology. Sharing a language is where the magic happens. It’s time for two great American institutions on the East and West Coasts to build a bridge.”

The east-west collaboration of the two schools will enable students at both institutions to build upon their ideas with professors and innovators at both universities. At both locations there will be a strong emphasis on executing new ideas and demonstrating products and prototypes. The Institute will establish ongoing links to business leaders and media companies to bring its innovations to market.

“New York City, as the major center for television, music, print media and advertising, is profoundly affected by rapidly evolving digital technology,” said Stanford engineering professor Bernd Girod, who will serve as the Institute’s founding director until Columbia appoints his East Coast counterpart. “The Brown Institute will bring together creative innovators skilled in production and delivery of news and entertainment with the entrepreneurial researchers at Stanford working in multimedia technology.”

“This gift from David and Helen Gurley Brown is truly transformative for the school,” said Nicholas Lemann, Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. “As we enter our Centennial year, the Browns’ generosity will enable us to explore new and exciting realms of leadership in our field. We are thrilled to have this opportunity to collaborate with Stanford Engineering.”

“Stanford brings to this partnership its exceptional research and teaching, a history of transformative technology innovation and a tradition of multidisciplinary collaboration,” said Stanford University President John Hennessy. “We are excited about the opportunity to partner with Columbia University’s truly outstanding School of Journalism, and look forward to combining the expertise of New York and Silicon Valley at a critical point in the evolution of media.”

Stanford Engineering has a storied history of achievement and entrepreneurship. Its faculty and graduates have founded such iconic companies as Google, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco Systems and Yahoo! and contributed to such groundbreaking technologies as lasers, global positioning, magnetic resonance imaging, digital sound synthesis and modern web-search algorithms.

“Under Dean Nick Lemann, Columbia Journalism School is building on its tradition of leadership by developing innovative teaching and research addressing the future of a fast changing news media,” said Columbia President Lee C. Bollinger, a First Amendment scholar who has written extensively about press freedom. “We are deeply appreciative of Helen Gurley Brown’s vision in honoring her late husband by bringing together his two alma maters to develop the next generation of digital journalism. We look forward to working with Stanford in seeking new ways for technology and creativity to enhance a robust free press in our society.”

The Institute will have a distinguished board of advisors including leaders from technology, venture capital and media including, among others, Frank A. Bennack, Jr., CEO of Hearst Corporation; Bill Campbell, Columbia’s Chairman of the Board, Chairman of the Board at Intuit and an Apple Inc. board member; and Eve Burton, Vice President and General Counsel of Hearst Corporation.

Helen Gurley Brown, who turns 90 in February, is one of the world’s most popular and influential editors. She led Cosmopolitan magazine from 1965 to 1996 and authored many books, including the 1962 bestseller "Sex and the Single Girl." Her impact on popular culture and society has reached around the globe, largely due to the three-plus decades when she put her personal stamp on Cosmopolitan in a way that has rarely been replicated. Under her reign, Cosmopolitan became the go-to magazine for women worldwide and remains the best-selling young women's magazine around the world today with 64 editions, in 35 languages and more than 80 countries.

“As both CEO of Hearst Corporation and advisor to the Brown Institute, today marks a very special day for education, journalism and technology,” said Bennack. “I’m very proud of David’s legacy and Helen, who understood the power of community, in particular, and its importance to women, long before social media had a name.”

About the Graduate School of Journalism
For almost a century, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism has been preparing journalists in a program that stresses academic rigor, ethics, journalistic inquiry, and professional practice. Founded by Joseph Pulitzer in 1912, the school offers master of science, master of arts, and doctor of philosophy degrees. For more information, visit www.journalism.columbia.edu.

About Stanford School of Engineering
The Stanford School of Engineering has been at the forefront of innovation for nearly a century, creating pivotal technologies that have transformed the worlds of information technology, communications, medicine, energy, business and beyond. The faculty, students and alumni of Stanford Engineering have established thousands of companies and laid the technological and business foundations for Silicon Valley. Founded in 1925, the school has a tradition of pursuing multidisciplinary collaboration aimed at solving the most pressing global problems. For more information, visit http://soe.stanford.edu.

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The Institute will build upon the work of the J-School's Tow Center for Digital Journalism and its dual-degree M.S. in Journalism and Computer Science program with Columbia's Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science.

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