‘Psychological autopsies’ in Palo Alto… ASSU finances… Hospital expansion… Caltrain delays… Class of 2014 notable… Hispanic Americans and higher education… Climate bill… Football and the Pac-10… Immigration ruling… Stanford news from around the Web for Friday, July 30, 2010.

Parkinson’s disease research … Brook Lopez on his way to US world championship team … Stanford Send-off Season … Chelsea Clinton and Marc Mezvinsky tie the knot … Zac Efron (sort of) comes to Stanford … Stanford news from around the web for July 29, 2010.

The sheer scope of the “Odyssey” would seem to preclude theatrical adaptation. The story leaps from island to island with a multitude of characters. Its narrative tropes, too, are anything but performance-friendly. Third-person narration is elliptical and verbose, frequently employing paragraph-long “epic similes” that are pretty much exactly what they sound like.

To perform this tale in a way that is not only comprehensible but also entertaining seems next to impossible, but Rush Rehm and Stanford Summer Theater have managed to do both.

I spent the week leading up to “Public Relations” poring over thinly veiled promotional journalism about Matt Weiner’s universe of 1960s advertising titans in Manhattan. Even though that research led me to descriptions of the first words of the new season, “Who is Don Draper?”, those five syllables still sent chills up and down my spine.

Precious then, is the movie that truly succeeds at captivating the public’s attention, like “Inception” has done in the past two weeks…

A new website has gone viral. It’s called “I write like,” and you can find it at http://iwl.me. Enter any text and it tells you which, of the works of 50 famous authors, the writing is most similar to…

Lengthy discussions of a key component of the Stanford hospital expansion have concluded, marking a crucial milestone for the project.

In September 2005, Stanford purchased a 35-acre portion of land at MidPoint Technology Park in Redwood City, intending to use the MidPoint facilities for administrative offices that did not need to be housed on the Palo Alto campus. But five years later, the Redwood City campus remains undeveloped.

With concerns abounding about the fiscal viability of the University’s significant financial aid commitments, Stanford announced new changes in its 2010-11 budget designed to ensure that the program can continue to meet the “demonstrated financial needs” of all admitted undergraduates.

Stanford University and the Deputy Sheriffs’ Association (DSA) are putting the finishing touches on a new labor agreement that will be revealed and put to vote the first week of August.