Felix Boyeaux – The Stanford Daily https://stanforddaily.com Breaking news from the Farm since 1892 Wed, 26 Feb 2014 10:30:34 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 https://stanforddaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/cropped-DailyIcon-CardinalRed.png?w=32 Felix Boyeaux – The Stanford Daily https://stanforddaily.com 32 32 204779320 Managing director of IMF speaks on world economy https://stanforddaily.com/2014/02/26/managing-director-of-imf-speaks-on-world-economy/ https://stanforddaily.com/2014/02/26/managing-director-of-imf-speaks-on-world-economy/#comments Wed, 26 Feb 2014 10:30:34 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1082714 Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), addressed a packed Bechtel Conference Room in Encina Hall on Tuesday, in a talk that focused on the current state of the world economy and global innovation and interconnections.

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Photo by Rod Searcey
Photo by Rod Searcey

Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), addressed a packed Bechtel Conference Room in Encina Hall on Tuesday, in a talk that focused on the current state of the world economy and global innovation and interconnections.

Lagarde had recently flown in from the G-20 summit in Sydney, Australia, during which the financial leaders of the world’s 20 largest economies had agreed to complete core financial reforms in order to mitigate the risk of another global financial crisis.

Lagarde herself expressed ambivalence about the current global economic performance.

“While unemployment and public and private debt is still too high, and global growth is still too low, we certainly see some economic momentum in the works, with global economic growth of 3.75 percent this year, rising to four percent next year,” she said.

However, this growth, largely due to positive advancements in the United States economy, has led to the tapering of quantitative easing, the Federal Reserve’s unconventional asset purchasing scheme.

“For emerging markets, […] a rising tide came with more choppy waves,” she said, pointing to the fact that weakening economies along with asset-purchase tapering prompted capital flight from emerging markets, generating market volatility and currency variations.

Lagarde also touched upon Stanford’s role in promoting technological learning and spurring innovation, asserting that students need to recognize the role that they play in driving progress.

“If the previous [economic] revolutions were about using machines for brawn, this one is about using machines for brains,” she said, pointing out that science fiction is rapidly becoming “science fact.”

Lagarde noted that despite unprecedented levels of innovation, technology has led to growing concerns about rising inequality.

“The bottom half of the world’s population owns the same as the richest 85 people in the world,” Lagarde, citing figures from Oxfam International.

She suggested that Stanford is, and should continue to be, at the forefront of the fight against inequality.

“I know that these concerns resonate strongly at this university, which was founded—to use the words of Jane Stanford—with a ‘spirit of equality,’” she said.

In Lagarde’s mind, alleviating this inequality starts with education.

“Fundamentally, we need to change what people learn, how people learn, when people learn and even why people learn,” she said. “We must get beyond the traditional model of students sitting passively in classrooms.”

In an interview with The Daily after her talk, she urged Stanford to help democratize the “bridge” that education provides.

“Given where it is located and given the density of innovation in Stanford’s ecosystem, I am sure that it will use some of the tools, be it e-learning or e-teaching, to propagate the learning, research and work that is being done here at Stanford,” Lagarde said.

According to Lagarde, the private sector should communicate more openly about what its scenarios for the future are, and what its strategies will be, in order to help educational institutions actually adapt to that market.

“It is only through that dialogue that we can ensure that education really is a bridge between today’s and tomorrow’s economy,” she said. “This is a great test of our time, and I know that the Stanford community is intricately linked to the developments that will shape out future.”

The event was co-sponsored by the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.

 

Contact Felix Boyeaux at fboyeaux ‘at’ stanford ‘dot’ edu.

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Alvin Roth: Unconventional economist https://stanforddaily.com/2012/10/19/alvin-roth-a-look-at-the-economist-nobel-winner/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/10/19/alvin-roth-a-look-at-the-economist-nobel-winner/#respond Fri, 19 Oct 2012 09:34:14 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1072030 Alvin Roth M.A. '73 Ph.D. '74, visiting professor of economics, won this year's Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science.

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Alvin Roth: Unconventional economist
Courtesy of Linda A. Cicero/ Stanford News Service

“I can’t talk to you about the world economy. I don’t know anything about the world economy!” Alvin Roth said to a journalist on the phone as he stepped off the treadmill in his office in the Landau Economics Building.

It might be surprising that Roth M.A. ’73 Ph.D. ’74, visiting professor of economics and this year’s winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science, claims not to know anything about economics. But Roth does not define himself as an economist.

“I went into operations research with the idea of fixing things up so they work better,” he said. “Operations research led me the game theory, which later on became economics. I just stayed where I was; the borders shifted.”

As the numerous congratulatory Elmo balloons floating around his office testify, Roth went on to become one of the most acclaimed economists in his field.

“He is there at the frontier of the fields of market design, game theory and experimental economists,” said Jonathan Levin ’94, chair of the economics department. “He is a real intellectual leader.”

As a teenager, Roth dropped out of high school in Queens, N.Y. because, according to a 2010 interview with Forbes, he felt “understimulated.” He went on to graduate from Columbia University in 1971 with a degree in Operations Research and received his masters and doctoral degrees in the same discipline from Stanford in 1973 and 1974. After a stint at the University of Illinois, he then moved on to the University of Pittsburgh. In 1998, he became the George Gund Professor of Economics and Business Administration at Harvard University and Harvard Business School, a position he will hold until January 2013.

Throughout his career, Roth brought to light the relatively new fields of game theory and market design, contributing to the very foundations of both disciplines. He is notably acclaimed for his work on the theory of matching markets.

Roth shared the Nobel prize with Lloyd Shapley, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles, “for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design.”

When asked if he could explain what this description meant in layman’s terms, Roth answered jokingly, “Probably not, it usually takes me a quarter to explain what it means!”

“For a long time, economists studied markets the way botanists studied plants,” he said. “‘Look at that, what a remarkable plant, let us be good scientists and describe how it’s constructed and how it works,’ and of course botanists were not expected to make new plants.”

Roth explained that in the same way botanists have now started to engineer new plants, economists have realized that the markets they observe suffer certain kinds of failures. Market design is about making them work better.

So far, Roth has made kidney donor matching, the national medical residency program and New York and Boston public high school systems all work better.

“He is a really great representative of economics because he is working on problems that are applications of economics to make the world a better place,” Levin said. “He is trying to figure out how to let students pick schools to let as many of them get into the one they want or get as many people off the kidney transplant list as possible.”

Roth received the call from Sweden at 3:30 a.m. on Monday morning while, predictably, he was sound asleep. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences gave him 25 minutes to prepare a press conference.

“[The Nobel] wasn’t expected in the sense that I was sound asleep,” he said. “I did not think I was going to get this Nobel Prize, but it wasn’t a crazy thought.”

Indeed, Roth has been nominated for the prize for a long time now.

“They nominate you and you fill out a form but you never know if they are going to pick you,” he said. “They have their own process. It is a very Swedish process.”

Levin, however, predicted the win.

“He gave a fabulous talk in my class on Friday,” he said. “I had told my students to show up since the guest lecturer they were about to listen to might win the Nobel prize the following Monday, and he did!”

While Roth is at the forefront of market design research and theory, Levin explained that he always finds time for his students, for whom he has great affection. Four of his former doctoral advisees are now faculty members at Stanford, a record matched only by professor of economics Kenneth Arrow, who also received a Nobel prize in economics back in 1972.

“Al is one of the nicest people I know, ” said Muriel Niederle, professor of economics and a former doctoral advisee of Roth’s in an email to The Daily. “Al as an advisor is almost like Al as a parent: he is very invested in his students, very accessible, and he deeply cares…his door was always open, and usually you would find a student (or a former student visiting) inside.”

This close relationship with his students was one of the biggest factors that caused Roth to choose to move from Harvard to Stanford last year, after 14 years spent in Cambridge. He will become a full-time professor beginning January 2013.

“Harvard was great but one of the biggest attractions of Stanford was that many of my wonderful students are professors here, and I get to be their colleague now,” he said.

His former students see him as more than just a colleague. For example, Roth is almost always on the guest list of his former students’ weddings, and has even officiated one.

Roth’s schedule will remain busy over the next few weeks and months. He has scheduled interviews with journalists from The Economist, the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times and will attend both a White House reception, as well as his award ceremony in Stockholm.

“The ceremony is on Dec. 10, which is the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s birth. Or death,” he said. “Maybe I should get that fact straight before the ceremony.”

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I Love This City, After All https://stanforddaily.com/2012/06/01/i-love-this-city-after-all/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/06/01/i-love-this-city-after-all/#respond Fri, 01 Jun 2012 07:39:08 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1067927 It was last weekend in the arid hills of Mountain View that the I Love This City Music Festiva – perhaps better dubbed I Love This Suburb after the venue change from the AT&T Lot to the local Shoreline Amphitheater – took place. Surprisingly enough, despite the countless organizational blunders, the festival managed to deliver a fantastic experience to the thousands who attended.

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I Love This City, After All
MADDY SIDES/The Stanford Daily

It was last weekend in the arid hills of Mountain View that the I Love This City Music Festival – perhaps better dubbed I Love This Suburb after the venue change from the AT&T Lot to the local Shoreline Amphitheater – took place. Surprisingly enough, despite the countless organizational blunders, the festival managed to deliver a fantastic experience to the thousands who attended.

 

The outlook was not so good. Only three weeks before the event was scheduled, the organizers announced the change of location, the lowering of the age limit to 16-plus and, most surprisingly, that the two-day passes were now $50 cheaper than when people originally bought them. As compensation, early ticket-buyers got access to priority seating. Fair enough.

 

Of course, these announcements lead to many claiming reimbursements or threatening LiveNation and Skills – the producers of the festival – with lawsuits. The tension on the Facebook page was palpable. However, on the first day of the event, 25,000 people still showed up.

 

Over 40 artists performed on the three different stages, but for fans of something other than hardcore dubstep, the main stage was the place to be.

I Love This City, After All
MADDY SIDES/The Stanford Daily

 

After queuing up for over 45 minutes to get into the reserved seating area in front of the main stage, paying 10 dollars for a hotdog and being informed that we would not be able to leave the reserved area – even for bathroom breaks – unless we were willing to give up our spot on the fifth row right in front of the stage, we were ready for the night to start.

 

NERVO, the bubbling Australian twin sisters, was the first act we were able to catch, closely followed by a somewhat tired-looking Claude VonStroke, whose bass made everyone’s ears ring and chests vibrate disturbingly.

 

The problem was that his set went on and on, way past Chuckie’s scheduled appearance time. As the crowd began to get impatient and VonStroke slowly ran out of songs to play, word started spreading that Chuckie had missed his flight from Las Vegas.

 

It was thus a disappointed audience that welcomed Steve Aoki onstage right before sunset. Luckily enough, Aoki’s showmanship, cake-throwing and crowd-surfing rubber boat managed to revive the atmosphere right in time for Duck Sauce’s appearance. Everyone in the audience was happily jumping to the sound of “Barbra Streisand,” wearing plastic duck noses tossed out by stagehands just before the show.

 

Sebastian Ingrosso was next. Ingrosso, a third of Swedish House Mafia, started his set with the brand-new song “Greyhound” and finished with what has now become an EDM anthem, “Save The World,” which was sung in harmony by all 15,000 people present at the main stage. In the meantime, he managed to set fire to the audience with his pumping beats and laser show. Ingrosso’s mix was unequivocally the best performance of the festival and left the amphitheater in a state of buzzing happiness all through Afrojack’s set and until the doors opened on Saturday.

 

I Love This City, After All
MADDY SIDES/The Stanford Daily

Unfortunately, due to the fire marshals having to intervene to shut off the already overfilled seating area early on Saturday, I was a little irritated that we entered the amphitheater with just enough time to see Madeon perform his two most famous songs. The young Frenchman was overflowing with energy – an energy that he managed to transmit to the audience before giving over the decks to Laidback Luke, who was followed by Tiësto.

 

David Guetta then opened his performance with a remixed version of “Titanium,” to which everyone sang along. As Guetta lowered the volume of the music to hear the audience sing, one could not help but to get goosebumps from the sense of unity that all the performers had managed to create. This was even more accentuated as Guetta finished with “Without You,” during which the entire crowd held on to each other, swaying back and forth, before jumping as Guetta dropped the bass for the last time of the weekend.

 

In the car back to campus, despite the irritation that the production company created, we could not help but smile at those two days we spent in Mountain View, feeling like a part of something greater.

 

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Dropbox co-founder talks start-ups, relays experience https://stanforddaily.com/2012/05/31/dropbox-co-founder-talks-start-ups-relays-experience/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/05/31/dropbox-co-founder-talks-start-ups-relays-experience/#respond Thu, 31 May 2012 10:00:59 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1067856 “The whole start-up world is sort of like climbing Mount Doom,” said Drew Houston, CEO and co-founder of the file hosting service Dropbox, to a packed NVIDIA Auditorium on Wednesday afternoon. “You don’t really know how tall it is, but there is a lot of fire and things exploding around you. There’s a lot of smoke and it is very steep.”

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“The whole start-up world is sort of like climbing Mount Doom,” said Drew Houston, CEO and co-founder of the file hosting service Dropbox, to a packed NVIDIA Auditorium on Wednesday afternoon. “You don’t really know how tall it is, but there is a lot of fire and things exploding around you. There’s a lot of smoke and it is very steep.”

Houston, invited as part of the DFJ Entrepreneurial Thoughts Leader Seminar, used the metaphor to explain the problems associated with starting a company as a recent college graduate.

Dropbox co-founder talks start-ups, relays experience
Drew Houston, co-founder and CEO of file hosting service Dropbox, spokes Wednesday afternoon about his experiences developing a multi-billion dollar firm. Houston emphasized the importance of commitment and vision above business experience. (IAN GARCIA-DOTY/The Stanford Daily)

“Even if you know where you are going right now, things are going to get gnarly down the road,” he said.

Rather than discouraging potential entrepreneurs, however, Houston sought instead to demystify the process of bringing a concept all the way to commercial actualization.

Drawing on his experience with Dropbox, which was created on a bus ride to New York and which currently enjoys a market valuation of billions of dollars, he encouraged students to leave the beaten path.

“People imagine that life is all about filling checkboxes,” Houston said. “They think the right path to a start-up is getting a bunch of graduate degrees, be a really good engineer, get an MBA, then work at a lot of different companies, and finally, sometime around their thirties, forties or fifties, they’ll be prepared to start a company.”

Houston emphasized that successful start-ups have rarely followed that path.

“Empirically, so many companies that you would think about in the hall of fame were started by people who, basically, didn’t know what the hell they were doing,” he said.

Houston cited several of Silicon Valley’s most successful companies — such as Facebook, Google and Apple — as examples of firms that were started by first- or second-time entrepreneurs learning how to run a successful business on the fly.

“Don’t be too daunted if you don’t have all the answers,” he advised the audience.

Houston emphasized the benefits of an environment such as Stanford for furthering entrepreneurial ambitions among fellow students with shared desire to change the world.

“Someone once said that you are the average of your five closest friends,” he said. “Being in an environment where people are also interested in start-ups and where you are all pushing each other can really be helpful.”

Houston originally moved to Silicon Valley, scrapping plans to found an SAT test preparation company when inspired by a friend’s ability to easily access funding from investors.

“I thought a lot about what I wanted to do next,” Houston said. “It had to be something deeply technical. I also wanted something that I could explain to people in a bar or a coffee shop and have them vaguely know what I was talking about and, finally, I wanted something with a working business model.”

In 2006, according to Houston, cloud storage was seen as the “next big thing — a parallel he drew with social networks and mobile apps today — but existing products were largely inadequate, with at least three items of software needed to back up, store and share data over the Internet.

“I can’t really imagine Tom Cruise in Minority Report logging in to his Gmail to pick up the attachment he sent himself that morning, or forgetting his thumb drive,” Houston emphasized.

In fact, Houston cited the experience of forgetting his thumb drive as his prompt to start coding Dropbox out of frustration at the lack of progress in cloud storage. A subsequent trip to California secured him a co-founder, Arash Ferdowsi, and funding from a number of venture capital firms.

“One thing you discover very quickly as a technical co-founder is that you know a lot about the engineer, but very little about the business side of things,” Houston said.

He added, however, that such skills are rapidly acquired with experience and pale in significance compared to being completely invested in a project.

Audience member George Burgess ‘15, chief operating officer at E2.0, expressed a favorable view of Houston’s talk.

“I pay for Dropbox and use it daily, so it was great to learn a bit more about what they’re working on and their priorities,” Burgess said. “Drew offered great insight into start-up life. It was particularly useful to hear about some of the mistakes he made in the early days of Dropbox.”

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Stanford team explores hypersonic flight theory https://stanforddaily.com/2012/05/24/stanford-team-explores-hypersonic-flight-theory/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/05/24/stanford-team-explores-hypersonic-flight-theory/#comments Thu, 24 May 2012 09:45:25 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1067345 The possibility of hypersonic flight -- offering endless potential in air and space travel but also posing numerous engineering challenges -- recently became the domain of Stanford engineers. The Stanford Predictive Science Academic Alliance Program (PSAAP) received a five-year $20 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to investigate the subject virtually.

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The possibility of hypersonic flight — offering endless potential in air and space travel but also posing numerous engineering challenges — recently became the domain of Stanford engineers. The Stanford Predictive Science Academic Alliance Program (PSAAP) received a five-year $20 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to investigate the subject virtually.

The DOE awarded grants to five universities interested in researching and developing solutions to overarching problems as varied as the hypervelocity impact of metallic projectiles and the atmospheric re-entry of space capsules. The Stanford team chose to tackle the challenge of hypersonic flight, which could potentially result in speeds of up to 15 times the speed of sound.

Stanford team explores hypersonic flight theory
(M.J MA/The Stanford Daily)

“We considered many applications for our predictive science program before submitting our final proposal,” said Parviz Moin M.S. ‘75 ‘78 Ph.D. ‘78, professor of mechanical engineering and PSAAP faculty director. “We finally settled with hypersonic flight as we thought it would be a project we would have fun with and enjoy working on, and it was a technological grand challenge.”

The project also allows for multidisciplinary cooperation between the Computer Science, Aeronautic and Astronautic Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Mathematics departments, as well as Stanford’s Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering.

“An overarching problem like this one is the best catalyst to promote interdisciplinary research,” Moin said. “Thanks to the combined work of these departments, we have already pushed and developed new numerical techniques, physical models and computational platforms that are paving the way for predictive science.”

Stanford is at the cutting edge of research in the discipline, according to Moin, having even pioneered a new science known as uncertainty quantification.

“Uncertainty quantification allows us to assess uncertainties in our numerical solutions,” Moin explained. “We can back up our predictions with data about the error bounds.This might be the most important topic in the future of computational science.”

Moin also highlighted the impact of the DOE grant on the program’s operations.

“We have essentially been able to create a new mini national laboratory,” Moin said. “We have a large cadre of postdoctoral fellows and graduate students who interact in a way that has never been seen before. It has been a paradigm shift in the way we do research.”

The “large cadre” of faculty, postdoctoral fellows and graduate students is necessary to tackle the challenges of hypersonic flight, according to Moin.

“Nobody has been able to sustain hypersonic flight propulsion for a longer amount of time,” Moin said. “Most tests have failed, and the few who succeeded lasted for only a few seconds.”

The problem, Moin said, is that at hypersonic speed air flows into the combustion chamber of a scramjet engine at speeds up to Mach 15. The time in which the combustion has to occur is infinitesimally short, and mastering such a reaction is the main challenge of the project.

“The equations are all well-known, but they are very hard to solve,” Moin said.

The team’s extensive collaboration with the Computer Science Department, and the use of some of the world’s fastest supercomputers to model hypersonic flight, is a direct consequence of the equations’ complexity.

“We are heading towards exascale computations, with more than one quintillion flops [floating-point operations per second] and one million cores running simultaneously,” Moin said, explaining that the coding and handling of such supercomputers has required extensive Computer Science involvement.

The breakthroughs the Stanford PSAAP team has already made and anticipates making in researching hypersonic flight are likely to impact many other fields.

“We now know how to simulate very complex flow dynamics,” Moin said. “This very technology can also be applied to automobiles, wind turbines, new energy conversion technologies and in environmental science.”

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Dean Julie stresses independence as key for kids https://stanforddaily.com/2012/05/21/dean-julie-stresses-independence-as-key-for-kids/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/05/21/dean-julie-stresses-independence-as-key-for-kids/#comments Mon, 21 May 2012 09:06:21 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1066950 “Once upon a time, a child came across a butterfly, struggling to emerge from its chrysalis, and filled with compassion, the child helped by peeling back the paper shell,” said Julie Lythcott-Haims ’89, Dean of Freshmen and Undergraduate Advising and Associate Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education at TEDxStanford on Saturday. “Soon, the butterfly emerged, but it could not fly. As it turns out, the butterfly needs the process of struggling on its own, in order to be able to fly.”

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“Once upon a time, a child came across a butterfly, struggling to emerge from its chrysalis, and filled with compassion, the child helped by peeling back the paper shell,” said Julie Lythcott-Haims ’89, Dean of Freshmen and Undergraduate Advising and Associate Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education at TEDxStanford on Saturday. “Soon, the butterfly emerged, but it could not fly. As it turns out, the butterfly needs the process of struggling on its own, in order to be able to fly.”

During her talk, Lycott-Haims warned against the dangers of what she calls the “padded cell of childhood.”

“What worries me and my colleagues nationwide is the steady decline in the number of [undergraduate students] that are capable in going out into the world as adults,” Lythcott-Haims said.

According to her, this behavior is a symptom of the increasing tendency of parents to overprotect their children.

“We hover, we hover over them to ensure their success, hoist and intervene when needed,” Lythcott-Haims said. “But do you know what the message we send them is when we do that?”

“We are sending the message: ‘Hey kid, I do not trust that you can do this without me,’” she said.

As a result, Lythcott-Haims noted that there are more and more “adult children” that emerge into the world who are happy when their parents take care of them and who cannot tackle problems and face failures alone. However, she finished her talk on a positive note.

“I still think there is time for us to do right by these amazing young people in our midst — our children, our future,” she said.

To do so, Lythcott-Haims proposed letting the rising generation explore and experience on their own.

“We need to back off,” Lythcott-Haims said. “It is our job as parents to put ourselves out of the job.”

Acknowledging that parents want to see their offspring succeed, Lythcott-Haims nevertheless concluded that the main burden should be on the child.

“Sure, we want to see that our offspring has emerged from that chrysalis, but it is their job to do so,” she finished. “It is their job to fly.”

In an interview with The Daily after the talk, Lythcott-Haims explained why she chose this topic for TEDxStanford.

“I am making my way out into the world by the end of June to write about the things that concern me,” she said. “Chief among them is the topic that I chose today. It was an opportunity for me to test-drive the ideas and see how the metaphors worked.”

Lythcott-Haims is stepping down in June to pursue a master of fine arts in writing with an emphasis in poetry from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.

According to Lythcott-Haims, Stanford tries to foster this idea of independence through several methods.

“When parents seek to behave in ways that are overinvolved, we explain that we would really like to have this conversation with the student only,” she said. “More proactively with students, we work on this notion of reflections, small group conversations with freshman students and advisors where the students can get to know themselves better.”

Lythcott-Haims said she saw the TEDxStanford event as a tremendous success.

“I loved it,” she said. “When I heard that TED was coming here, I was really excited for Stanford. The event was incredibly well-produced, very professionally organized and an immense pleasure to be part of.”

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Spotify co-founder talks music https://stanforddaily.com/2012/05/17/spotify-co-founder-talks-music/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/05/17/spotify-co-founder-talks-music/#respond Thu, 17 May 2012 09:50:57 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1066576 “I never really thought of myself as an entrepreneur,” said Daniel Ek, cofounder and CEO of the music streaming service Spotify, to a packed NVIDIA Auditorium Wednesday afternoon. “I simply see a bunch of problems to solve and needs to satisfy, issues that no one else wanted to do anything about. Eventually, I decided to do it myself.”

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“I never really thought of myself as an entrepreneur,” said Daniel Ek, cofounder and CEO of the music streaming service Spotify, to a packed NVIDIA Auditorium Wednesday afternoon. “I simply see a bunch of problems to solve and needs to satisfy, issues that no one else wanted to do anything about. Eventually, I decided to do it myself.”

Invited as part of the DFJ Entrepreneurial Thoughts Leader Seminar, Ek spoke on his entrepreneurial career as well as the future of the entertainment industry.

Spotify co-founder talks music
Daniel Ek, co-founder of Spotify, discussed his entrepreneurial career and the future of the entertainment industry on Wednesday afternoon, addressing issues such as piracy (IAN GARCIA-DOTY/The Stanford Daily)

“An entrepreneur is someone who has an itch for a problem and is annoyed enough to solve it,” Ek said.

Since starting his first company designing and coding websites at age fourteen, Ek has moved on to found the advertising company Advertigo and has worked as chief technology officer of the online community Stardoll and chief executive officer of uTorrent, a BitTorrent client. He started his presentation, however, by explaining his rationale for founding Spotify.

“After the immense success of services like Napster and Kazaa around the millennium shift, it was clear to me that people wanted to consume music this way, on-demand and readily available,” Ek explained.

The fast Internet infrastructure in Sweden led Ek to found Spotify — together with Martin Lorentzon — there in 2004.

“Our goal was to create servers that were faster than the pirate servers,” he said. “We thought that if we managed to do this, we could get a big chunk of the 500 million people who consumed music illegally.”

Ek thought that the problem was not that people did not want to pay for music, but rather that an efficient and convenient platform for doing so was unavailable at the time.

“Because I was young and naive, I just thought ‘Hey, this can’t be too hard,’ but realized soon enough all the problems that arise from creating a service like Spotify,” Ek joked. “I did not even know that you needed licenses from the major [record labels]!”

Getting permission from record labels has actually been Spotify’s single largest problem to date. The negotiations with Universal took over a year, and Spotify has yet to acquire the rights from bands such as the Beatles or Led Zeppelin.

“We were convinced that our model would work, and that majors would make profits from letting us use their content,” Ek said. “But try for yourself to go and tell a 67-year-old man who barely agreed to sell the music on iTunes for 99 cents apiece to now give it away for free.”

The numbers have proved Ek right. While the average American spends $13 a year on music, the “premium” Spotify user pays $120.

“This allows us to compensate the right-holders the way they should be for the great job they are doing,” Ek said.

Responding to a question from the audience on whether Spotify would save the music industry, Ek said that the move away from physically purchasing music has created a need for innovation in the sector.

“Sweden, the first country where Spotify was implemented, is now one of the few countries that have a growing music industry,” he pointed out.

Ek also discussed the future of piracy, which he acknowledged as Spotify’s biggest competitor.

“Most people want convenience and easy access [to music],” Ek said. “With Spotify, people can feel that they have all the world’s music in their music library.”

However, he argued that — unless the television and movie industries work actively to solve the same problems the music industry is facing — illegal downloading will persist.

“I cannot accept that it takes a year for a great TV show like ‘Game of Thrones’ to be seen in Europe,” Ek said. “I want content to be readily available, and if I am willing to pay for it, why not?”

Ek concluded his talk by encouraging audience members to fix the issue, and pursue non-piracy solutions to the problem.

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French vote a rejection of Sarkozy, panelists say https://stanforddaily.com/2012/05/07/french-presidential-round-table/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/05/07/french-presidential-round-table/#respond Mon, 07 May 2012 09:07:51 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1065696 François Hollande defeated incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy to be elected as president of France on Sunday, an outcome predicted by panelists at a round table discussion about the French presidential election Friday in Encina Hall.

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François Hollande defeated incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy to be elected as president of France on Sunday, an outcome predicted by panelists at a round table discussion about the French presidential election Friday in Encina Hall.

“No matter who wins the election, we’re heading towards very difficult times in France,” said Laurent Cohen-Tanugi, a visiting lecturer at Stanford Law School and an international lawyer.

The panel’s speakers pointed out a trend of French voters rallying behind extreme left- or right-wing parties, who represent anti-establishment, anti-globalization and a general distrust in the European Union (EU). They agreed that this trend was true for the election in general.

French vote a rejection of Sarkozy, panelists say“This is clearly an election against Sarkozy rather than a vote for Hollande,” Cohen-Tanugi said.

He added that Hollande, who will be the first member of France’s Socialist Party to become president since François Mitterrand left office in 1995, “has been very successful at playing this game, positioning himself as pro-growth and pro-spending while making Sarkozy appear as an advocate of austerity and welfare cuts.”

Jimia Boutouba, assistant professor in modern languages and literatures at Santa Clara University, agreed that the French almost seem unworried about the future, but focused instead on getting Sarkozy out of office.

“The nation is more and more defined by what it opposes,” he said.

The panelists discussed what Hollande’s election would mean for the future of France.

“If Hollande is elected, he will have to face the test of the financial markets, in view of his electoral promises and his position on the European fiscal compact,” Cohen-Tanugi said.

Arthur Goldhammer, senior affiliate at the Center for European Studies at Harvard and renowned blogger about French political culture, said it would be difficult to act on the current opposition to transnational unions such as the EU in France.

“It is unrealistic and misleading to believe that France could leave the Union,” Goldhammer said.

When asked about the how Franco-Germanic relations would survive the break-up of the “Merkozy” couple – referring to the close relationship between German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Sarkozy – Cohen-Tanugi said he is optimistic.

“The Merkel-Hollande couple would probably fall into place,” he said. “It will work out like these things always do.”

Goldhammer’s view of the future, however, was less bright.

“Hollande is looking for no more than symbolic concessions from Merkel,” Goldhammer said. “But Europe needs more than that to fight the Euro-crisis.”

Goldhammer said another problem that France is currently facing is the integration of its immigrant population.

“The presidential debate has all been about immigration figures and not enough about the integration of these very immigrants,” he said.

“Second and third generation immigrants usually abstain [from elections] since they are alienated by the political discussion,” Boutouba added to Goldhammer’s comment. “This silence is one of the main reasons [behind] Marine Le Pen’s 18 percent of votes, almost 6.4 million people.”

Le Pen, a far-right leader of France’s National Front party, placed third in the first round of the French presidential election.

Cohen-Tanugi, however, said that “if the polls turn out to be true, Hollande’s victory may well lead to the implosion of the right.”

FSI Europe Center Associate Director Roland Hsu said he was pleased with the turnout to the round table discussion.

“At the Europe Center, we always try to make as comprehensive an event as possible, interesting both for faculty and staff, but also mainly for undergraduates,” Hsu said. “We are really happy that so many students actually showed up.”

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Sahami stresses tech education https://stanforddaily.com/2012/04/27/tbd-sahami-speaks-technical-education/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/04/27/tbd-sahami-speaks-technical-education/#respond Fri, 27 Apr 2012 09:12:47 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1064873 “Everyone here is going to be a leader in their field,” said Mehran Sahami, an associate professor in computer science, Thursday during a lunchtime talk at Old Union. “If you understand that technology will have a huge impact in the future and educate yourself accordingly, you will be able to make decisions that impact other people’s lives.”

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“Everyone here is going to be a leader in their field,” said Mehran Sahami, an associate professor in computer science, Thursday during a lunchtime talk at Old Union. “If you understand that technology will have a huge impact in the future and educate yourself accordingly, you will be able to make decisions that impact other people’s lives.”

During the event, organized by Stanford in Government (SIG) as part of the Policy Lunch program, Sahami spoke about the importance of technical education in today’s globally connected world.

“Technology plays a huge role in everyone’s life,” he said. “The biggest problem with our country is that our public policies have not been able to follow this development.”

According to Sahami, the issues are concentrated within three major areas: cybersecurity, intellectual property and education. Bringing up issues such as the Stuxnet virus and stock market flash crashes, Sahami emphasized the major security breaches that our increasingly virtual society faces.

“Think about what would happen if the credit card system were to go down,” Sahami told the 30 students who were present in the conference room.

“You might just be worried that you will not be able to buy your pizza, but the dangers are much bigger than that,” he added, referring to the imminent collapse of our country’s economy if such a breakdown were to occur.

Similarly, Sahami denounced the patent frenzy that is currently sweeping over the United States.

“Intellectual property is one of those things that for a while did not get the play that it is getting now,” he said. According to Sahami, companies now have to give in to enormous cross-licensing deals in order to benefit from the patent portfolios of other companies.

“There is serious money that is being put into this game,” he added. “When patents are awarded for things that your high school friends could have done, it is clear that we are stifling technical innovation. When there is a need for such cross-licensing deals, it probably means that we are awarding patents for things that are not so novel after all.”

Sahami argued that the people who push for intellectual property policies would benefit from having a stronger technical background.

“Patent lawyers who have no technical background<\p>.<\p>.<\p>.are clearly under-qualified to deal which such applications,” he said. “There is no doubt about that.”

According to Sahami, the problem begins with the K-12 system.

“Computer science is neither considered as math or as a science, but rather as vocational training,” Sahami said. He added that “students come to Stanford with an excellent training in math and English, but almost no computer literacy.”

He argued that this is due to a fundamental problem in policy-making, saying that it is not because of a lack of student interest, but schools have not properly advocated the importance of technological education.

“How come Palo Alto High School, across the street from arguably the best computer science institution in the world does not even offer AP Computer Science?” Sahami asked.

He concluded his talk by challenging everyone present to take action.

“I would encourage you to get the technical background to address the problems that you see. Try to inform yourself from the technological perspective,” Sahami said.

Student attendees were enthusiastic about the talk.

“Technology has always been what humanity has been pushing to make better use of resources,” said Zhe Zhang, a second year coterm student in environmental engineering who attended the lunch. “Professor Sahami brought up very interesting points and left me interested in such issues for the future.”

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TEDxStanford sells out in four hours https://stanforddaily.com/2012/04/12/tedxstanford-sells-out-in-four-hours/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/04/12/tedxstanford-sells-out-in-four-hours/#respond Thu, 12 Apr 2012 09:06:24 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1063100 Tickets to TEDxStanford, an independently organized offshoot of the well-known TED talks series, sold out in less than four hours early Monday, leaving students without a ticket to post on Facebook and email classmates in hopes of gaining entrance to the May 19 event. The event will also be streamed live free of charge online. […]

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Tickets to TEDxStanford, an independently organized offshoot of the well-known TED talks series, sold out in less than four hours early Monday, leaving students without a ticket to post on Facebook and email classmates in hopes of gaining entrance to the May 19 event.

The event will also be streamed live free of charge online.

“TEDxStanford was not one person’s idea, but rather an idea that blossomed after numerous students and alumni began discussing it,” said Melinda Sacks, director of media initiatives at Stanford and producer of TEDxStanford. “The Office of Public Affairs is producing the event in partnership with the Graduate School of Business and the School of Engineering.”

A similar prototype event, STAN (Science, Technology, Art and Nature), was produced last year at Stanford in order to test the concept of short talks interspersed with performances.

“It was a great success,” Sacks said. “TEDxStanford was the natural next step.”

TEDxStanford – with the theme this year of  “Illumination” – will feature performances from Stanford Taiko and a 14-year-old cello prodigy, as well as talks by speakers including Tom Brokaw, former anchor and managing editor of “NBC Nightly News,” Dean of Freshmen and Undergraduate Advising Julie Lythcott-Haims ’89 and Jason Mayden, director of innovation at Nike, Inc.

“We are lucky that Stanford has so many wonderful stories to tell, such a variety of exciting, cutting-edge research underway and compelling speakers and performers from every school, department and center,” Sacks said, adding that the only real problem while organizing the event was narrowing down which speakers and groups to include in the program.

“It’s not a bad problem to have,” she said.

As opposed to the majority of other TEDx events, for which invitations are by application, the 580 available seats in Cemex Auditorium at the Knight Management Center were distributed on a first-come, first-served basis, with tickets allocated evenly between students, faculty and general admission.

Tickets cost $35 for students, $69 for faculty and staff and $99 for general admission.

Revenue from ticket sales will be the primary source of financial support for the event. Partnerships with the Graduate School of Business and the School of Engineering will help fund the TEDxStanford showcase and reception. Perkins Coie LLC and Ridge Winery also contributed financing to the event.

A team of nine undergraduates assisted the professional staff in planning the event.

“I am pretty confident we will be able to do it well,” said Jay Patel ’14, co-chair of the student organizing committee. “There are obviously so many challenges to overcome, people losing their way and everything, but we can do it.”

Nick Ahamed ’15 was one of the lucky few to claim a ticket.

“I am really excited to be going, but I feel bad that other people couldn’t go,” Ahamed said. “I am most excited about seeing the 14-year old cellist and Tom Brokaw.”

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Khan Academy founder talks future of learning https://stanforddaily.com/2012/02/17/salman-khan-talks-%e2%80%98rethinking-learning%e2%80%99/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/02/17/salman-khan-talks-%e2%80%98rethinking-learning%e2%80%99/#comments Fri, 17 Feb 2012 10:05:18 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1058672 “Nowadays, there is so much emphasis on student-to-teacher ratio,” said Salman Khan, founder of the online educational site The Khan Academy on Thursday evening at Cemex Auditorium in the Graduate School of Business. “We at The Khan Academy do not believe in this multiple -- we believe in optimizing student-to-valuable-time-with-teacher ratio, or even more importantly, student-to-valuable-time-with-other-human-beings ratio. A one-size-fits-all lecture is not the way to go about education.”

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“Nowadays, there is so much emphasis on student-to-teacher ratio,” said Salman Khan, founder of the online educational site The Khan Academy on Thursday evening at Cemex Auditorium in the Graduate School of Business. “We at The Khan Academy do not believe in this multiple — we believe in optimizing student-to-valuable-time-with-teacher ratio, or even more importantly, student-to-valuable-time-with-other-human-beings ratio. A one-size-fits-all lecture is not the way to go about education.”

 

Invited to Stanford as part of the Expert Speaker Series by the Mastery in Communication Initiative, Khan spoke about how his website, with more than 3,000 lectures and almost four million unique visitors a month, has grown to become a world-renowned leader in the field of online education.

Khan Academy founder talks future of learning
Salman Khan, founder of the online education site The Khan Academy, spoke to an audience in Cemex Auditorium about the challenges of teaching and learning today. Khan announced plans to expand his site. (ROGER CHEN/The Stanford Daily)

 

Khan started his talk with a history of The Khan Academy.

 

“I was a hedge-fund analyst in Boston when my younger cousin, Nadia, came to visit, and I noticed that this brilliant child, who could solve brain-teasers way harder than what would be expected by a twelve-year old, still had gaps in the most fundamental level math,” Khan said.

 

According to Khan, the problem with the current educational system is that the time spent teaching one subject is fixed, and only the student’s level of mastery is variable. What his website is trying to achieve is to make the amount of time spent learning variable in order for a student to attain a certain level of mastery.

 

“We cannot build a house on an 80 percent sound foundation, and then blame the contractor of the fourth floor when the building collapses,” Khan said. “It would be like expecting a child who can barely break or turn left on a bicycle to become a master unicyclist.”

 

After the revelation he had while tutoring his cousin, a friend pitched Khan the idea of uploading some of the videos he had filmed of their tutoring sessions to YouTube.

 

“I had to go home and deal with the idea that I did not come up with that idea myself,” Khan said, adding “this is something very hard for an MBA.”

 

Using YouTube as a medium to convey knowledge was something that had not crossed his mind.

 

“YouTube is for cats playing the piano!” Khan joked.

 

The videos took off, and the children he had previously tutored told him they preferred seeing him on YouTube than in person.

 

“They can work at their own pace, repeat, rewind, fast-forward,” Khan explained. “There is no distraction, and more importantly, there is no shame. They do not feel like they are wasting my time.”

 

After quitting his job and getting several generous donations from, among others, the Gates Foundation and Google, The Khan Academy is now used in more than 700 different schools and has delivered more than 121 million lectures to date.

 

“It is amazing what this has become,” Khan said. “We receive testimonies from children with learning disabilities, dyslexia, ADHD and autism that are — all for the first time — able to understand algebra or physics or economics.”

 

Khan and his team are currently building a platform that would allow anyone to tutor and teach others, he said. The short-term goal is to help the average student become proficient in subjects with which he or she has trouble.

 

“There is an abundance of opportunity for developing The Khan Academy,” Khan said. “In the long run, we envision being able to offer kids in rural Africa access to an education better than they could ever dream of, and enabling children with chronic diseases, student athletes, actors or prisoners to receive a free equivalent to in-person tutoring.”

 

“One couldn’t help but be swept away by the content of his talk,” said student attendee Aaron Sekhri ‘15. “His sincerity and good nature were obvious, and it was perhaps the best talk I’ve been to this year.”

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