The Olmsted Homes project in May 2010. (File/The Stanford Daily)

No place like it | Houses Stanford is building for athletics staff on El Camino Real and Olmsted Road are almost ready for move-in, the University says. It will rent the three-bed, two-bath houses mostly to coaches, for whom it hopes to ease the affordable housing search. Alum John Arrillaga is the project manager. All of the homes, which are 1,550 to 1,880 square feet, are set to be done by Christmas.

Tennis | Stanford’s Bradley Klahn, NCAA champion this year, fell in four sets to Sam Querrey in the first round of the US Open on Wednesday.

Video | Sociology professor Michael Rosenfeld discusses his research on the academic performance of the children of gay couples.

Team players | Stanford Hospital & Clinics has partnered with the San Francisco 49ers to study sports injuries.

ASSU | In an e-mail Wednesday evening, Undergraduate Senate Chair Michael Cruz ‘12 called an online, “unofficial” meeting of the Senate for Thursday at 6 p.m. On the agenda are the group’s fall retreat, its Senate associates program and committee updates. The group’s policy on online meetings, per its bylaws: “All rules that apply to actual meetings should apply to online meetings, such as giving 72 hours public notice and providing previous notice for all bills.” We pointed that out to Cruz and Deputy Chair Madeline Hawes ‘13 and await a reply about whether or not they will go ahead with the meeting tomorrow. Update: After The Daily contacted Cruz, he announced later Wednesday the meeting is now set for Sept. 6 at 7 p.m. He wrote to the Senate: “Seems like a lot of people are back at Stanford already for SoCo [Sophomore College]. We’ll move the unofficial meet-up to September 6, 2010 at 7 PM so everybody can make it.”

Overheard | “I don’t get nervous like that, but she made me nervous. I’m going to enter school undecided about my major and she told me she entered school undecided on a major and she ended up in the Senate. I was able to calm down after a few minutes, but it was a long conversation.” — Anthony Sarao, Stanford football recruit from New Jersey, on his meeting with political science professor Condoleezza Rice.

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Bradley Klahn '12 (Stanford Daily File Photo)

Cardinal Tennis | Stanford representatives—Bradley Klahn ‘12, Hilary Barte ‘11 and Lindsay Burdette ‘10—receive wild cards into the first round of the US Open.

High-Speed Fail | Palo Alto may declare having “no confidence” in the High Speed Rail Authority’s rail plan. The plan has faced opposition in local cities in past months as city councils and residents debate the plan’s feasibility and logistical details.

Exports | “President Obama and this Administration are to be commended for taking a serious look at the changes that are needed in our export control policies to make them more effective in the global business, research, and education environment of the 21st century.” President Hennessy and Robert M. Berdahl, President of the American Association of Universities supported the White House’s recent pledge to reform the nation’s system of export controls.

Water Express | New technology speeds up water filtering processes.

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Not arriving today | Overseas Seminars students. (Flashback.)

Stanford students who participate in ROTC programs at nearby universities speak on a panel in May 2010. (File/The Stanford Daily)

ROTC | As Stanford weighs whether or not to revive ROTC, some say it’s the right question for elite colleges to be asking.

Saturday, SP1, New York Times | “Stanford’s Luck Is a Star in the Crowd.” Pete Thamel writes: “Standing out by blending in, [redshirt sophomore Andrew] Luck has finally given everyone at Stanford a reason to cheer. The university’s best quarterback prospect since John Elway, Luck is a former high school co-valedictorian and a potential top pick in the N.F.L. draft…’Jim [Harbaugh] has taken Stanford kids — and they all come from pretty good families; I’m sitting in the parents’ section with doctors and lawyers — and he’s convinced them they are a group of lunch-pail, blue-collar, smack-you-in-the-face, union kind of guys,’ Oliver Luck said. ‘I just love the irony of that. It’s the last school you would anticipate where you could create that.’…Perhaps the part Andrew Luck likes best is that his profile on campus has not changed. During his freshman year, one of the resident assistants in his dormitory, Roble Hall, sent out occasional articles about Luck as part of an e-mail newsletter to the dorm’s residents. After the R.A., James Barton, had done it a few times, Luck sent a polite e-mail. ‘Hey, James, could you tone down sending those e-mails with stories about me?’ Barton recalled the message saying. ‘It’s kind of embarrassing.’ With college football coming off a season when celebrity quarterbacks like Tim Tebow, Colt McCoy and Sam Bradford dominated the landscape, Oliver Luck said that his son picked Stanford in part because he did not want to sign autographs on campus or be stalked by fans with cellphone cameras.” @StanfordFball tweeted Luck’s photo shoot with The Times on Aug. 18.

Video | Harbaugh cancels team meetings on Friday night, says he’s taking the team to “the Shoreline movie theater there in Mountain View” instead. Coach: “Each man will also get $10 worth of popcorn.”

Dalai Lama | Tickets went on sale today for the Dalai Lama’s Oct. 14-15 visit to Stanford. Public talk at Maples Pavilion: $20/student, $40/faculty, $60-80 general. Conference talk at Memorial Auditorium: $30/student, $75/faculty, $165 general. Rathbun lecture at Memorial Church: pricele — random drawing of students.

Sweet talk | Prof. Cliff Nass on why people treat devices like humans. “To find out, I ran an experiment at Stanford University,” Nass writes. “After being tutored by a computer, half of the participants were asked about the computer’s performance by the computer itself and the other half were asked by an identical computer across the room. Remarkably, the participants gave significantly more positive responses to the computer that asked about itself than they did to the computer across the room. These weren’t overly sensitive people: They were graduate students in computer science and electrical engineering, all of whom insisted that they would never be polite to a computer.”

Countdown | Fifteen days until freshmen. (h/t Dean Julie.) The Unofficial Stanford Blog has published its perennial course guide. Seinfeld appears.

Tomorrow | Stanford’s fiscal year ‘10 ends. (FY09 in review.)

Overheard | What to order for lunch at Treehouse between football practices: two grilled chicken tacos, a slice of pepperoni pizza, “and a cup for water, please.”

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Mayer | Did singer John Mayer compare The Huffington Post to Cristina Warthen J.D. ‘01, the Stanford Law graduate who allegedly ran a call service and was convicted of tax evasion last year? Maybe. In a blog entry criticizing The Post for a story about Mayer dating rumors, Mayer wrote: “You’re a stripper wearing reading glasses. Or maybe you’re an insolvent law student willing to dance for a few extra dollars.” (h/t CJR, which discusses Mayer’s point: “The reason I’m calling you out instead of all the other magazines that make stories up out of thin air is that In Touch and Star Magazine aren’t concurrently writing pieces about Pat Tillman or WikiLeaks.”)

(File/The Stanford Daily)

Caltrain | Cuts to weekend Caltrain service likely are off the table for now, according to a late-Friday news release. Caltrain has been considering cutting weekend routes to address a $2.3 million budget deficit. The possibility of weekend cuts will likely return next year, said Director Michael Scanlon. A public hearing on other cuts is set for Sept. 2.

Trustees | Stanford named two new trustees this month: Ruth Porat ‘79, chief financial officer of Morgan Stanley, and Penny Pritzker J.D./M.B.A. ‘84, chair of TransUnion, a credit-reporting company, and the Pritzker Realty Group. Pritzker also is on President Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board. Her family this spring donated $10 million to Stanford for financial aid.

Meanwhile, Goodwin Liu ‘91, a UC-Berkeley law professor, remains on a list of trustees on Stanford’s website dated Sept. 1, 2010. Senate Republicans this month blocked a vote on Liu’s confirmation to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. If Liu is confirmed, precedent apparently would not prevent him from continuing as a trustee: Pamela Rymer L.L.B. ‘64 served from 1991 to 2001 while a Ninth Circuit judge.

King and Beck | The Stanford scholar who helped draft Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech wrote this week about the rally Fox News’ Glenn Beck plans at the Lincoln Memorial for Aug. 28, the anniversary of King’s 1963 March on Washington. Clarence Jones, scholar in residence at Stanford’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, said he takes Beck, who said the date was a coincidence, “at his word.” “Beck, Sarah Palin and others who are summoning people today to join them to restore the honor of America, whether intended or not, are following in the footsteps of Dr. King,” Jones said. “He spoke prophetically about their generation. Yes, he had a ‘Dream’ that young Becks and Palins, when they became adults, would join hands not only with members of their ‘Tea Party,’ but, all Americans of goodwill, regardless of their race, color or ethnicity, to restore the honor and values enshrined in our Declaration of Independence and Constitution.” Clayborne Carson, director of the King Institute, spoke about the rally Thursday on NPR.

Schneider | A campus memorial service for professor Stephen Schneider, the climate scientist who died last month, is set for the afternoon of Sunday, Dec. 12, two days after autumn finals end. Patricia Mastrandrea, a research assistant to Schneider, announced the date in an e-mail forwarded to Earth Systems students. She said a memorial scientific symposium in summer 2011 also is in the works.

Football | Stanford football players elected their captains, coach Jim Harbaugh tweeted today. Ryan Whalen is “consummate competitor and worker,” Sione Fua a “quiet leader but fiery competitor” and Owen Marecic a “perfect football player and a true throwback,” their coach said.

Golf | Michelle Wie ‘11 hit a hole-in-one, the second of her professional career and her eighth overall.

Pakistan floods | ASSU leaders have set up a donation page for Pakistan flood relief efforts. Proceeds go to UNHCR.

Plans for the new East Campus Dining Commons. (Stanford University Project Management)

DINING DIGS |Construction work begins at the new Stanford Dining Facility at East Campus Dining Commons. The new dining hall—located in the former Toyon parking lot– will support about 450 students in Crothers, Crothers Memorial Hall and Toyon Hall. The East Campus Dining Commons is slated to open in late spring 2011.

BLACK HOLES | SLAC’s Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology and a host of other research teams are featured in a paper today in Nature that traces the origin of super-massive black holes.

OH, THE SUMMER FIGHTS | Historian Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institution takes a historical look at the spate of world violence that has broken out in late summer. “Maybe it is the effects of the heat, or the sense of urgency to do something before the cold of winter; but nonetheless, we’ve also seen a lot of late-summer violence the last few decades,” writes Hanson. Here’s to countries keeping their cool during these dog-days of summer.

BOWL CUT | ESPN’s Kirk Herbstreit predicts the Stanford Cardinal has what it takes to go to the Rose Bowl this year.

iTUNES | Stanford’s getting in-tune with the latest class technology, according to Brent Izutsu, senior program manager for Stanford on iTunes U and YouTube. Izutsu says that Stanford has more than 3,200 iTunes files available and maintains about 1 million downloads monthly. The most popular program? A course in iPhone application programming. In the past months, Stanford joined a network of other schools in starting up a new iTunes U system.

CORAL GRIEF | In case you missed it, this issue of Stanford Magazine features the work of Steve Palumbi, director of Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station, who is studying dying coral reefs near a tiny island in the South Pacific.

Stanford's conservation plan is up for more review. (File/The Stanford Daily)

Land use | The Dish trails now attract 500,000 visitors annually compared to “maybe 300,000 or 400,000″ a decade ago, says Charles Carter, director of Stanford Land Use and Environmental Planning. His comments come in a long Stanford Report feature on the Dish just as a habitat conservation plan for Stanford’s land is up for an extended period of public review, set to end Aug. 30. Under the plan, the federal government would allow Stanford to “take,” or harm, endangered species as Stanford develops its land — development that, in the past, has included paving the Dish trails, for example. In return, Stanford would agree to minimize or mitigate its impact on species. Five species found on Stanford land would be protected under the plan. “It’s a contentious process,” said Philippe Cohen, director of Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve, in May. “Still, if there is no HCP, everyone loses — the species, Stanford, the students and staff.”

$2.15 million | That is the revenue boost Ravenswood City School District gets from students returning from two now-closed charter schools in the district, including one run by Stanford, a district official said this week. The district faced a $1.8 million budget deficit in May, a month after trustees voted not to extend Stanford’s charter. The relationship underscores what some call a conflict of interest in the state’s charter-school laws. “We’re all working toward the same end, but oftentimes it becomes competitive,” said Superintendant Maria de la Vega in December.

Hospital expansion | Officials from Portola Valley, Menlo Park and San Mateo County told the city of Palo Alto they have concerns about the environmental impacts of the proposed Stanford hospital expansion, including traffic congestion and housing prices. Meanwhile, Stanford has been lobbying state legislators to extend the deadline to meet state earthquake safety codes, reports the San Francisco Business Times.

Overheard | “Y Combinator’s demo day keeps growing and growing…”

(BECCA del MONTE/The Stanford Daily)

TABLO SPEAKS | Daniel Lee ’02, aka rapper “Tablo” of the Asian hip-hop group Epik High, is once again trying to prove that yes, he did indeed attend Stanford. Internet rumors have swirled that Lee lied about his English degree from the farm. Tom Black, University Registrar, has had to deal with the Internet naysayers, and says “the ignorant mob is just spewing poison for no reason.”

STEM CELLS | Dr. Irving L. Weissman, director of the Stanford Institute for Stem Cell Biology, said that a federal district judge’s ruling yesterday to halt Obama’s expansion of stem cell research was “devastating to the hopes of researchers and patients who have been waiting so long for the promise of stem cell therapies.” Chief Judge Royce C. Lamberth blocked President Obama’s 2009 order to move forward with stem cell research, arguing it violated a federal ban on the destruction of embryos.

BIG GREEN | KQED takes a look at all of the green initiatives on the Farm. Stanford embarked on a $250 million project to slash Stanford’s greenhouse gas emissions to 20 percent below 1990 levels within 10 years.

THAT’S GECKO | Mechanical engineer Mark Cutkosky looks to gecko toes to create a robot. His Stickybot can climb smooth surfaces with a design based on the lovable lizard’s toes.

WHO NOSE? | Scientists think that an artificial nose made of sensors may be able to deliver more information than normal human noses. Smells like a winner.

THANKS, GENES  | “Everything we’ve been taught about evolution would indicate that we should be evolving away from developing it,” says Atul Butte, MD, PhD, assistant professor of pediatric cancer biology and a bioinformatics expert. Her research found that evolution may have pushed humans toward a greater risk of Type-1 Diabetes.

Stanford School of Education (File/The Stanford Daily)

Charter | Standardized test results for Stanford New School, a Stanford-run charter school in East Palo Alto, improved this year, according to last week’s release of state data: 23.4 percent of students scored as proficient or advanced in English, compared to 16 percent last year. In math, 22.2 percent scored as proficient or advanced, compared to 16 percent last year. Other subject areas saw smaller jumps. But the scores come too late for the venture, which the school district decided to shutter in April, citing poor performance. Stanford School of Education officials disputed the decision at the time, saying more years of data would have proven the school’s potential. “We were pretty confident our scores would look good this year but it’s almost painful to see because it’s a few months too late,” said School of Education Dean Deborah Stipek on Friday. She said she hopes “we’ll figure out how to maintain that high school” — the high school that is part of the charter, which the district gave two more years. Stipek recently said she will step down as dean in 2011.

CourseRank | Chegg, a textbook-rental company, announced last week it bought CourseRank, which was started in 2007 by Stanford computer science students Benjamin Bercovitz, Filip Kaliszan and Henry Liou, all of the Class of 2009. Students at 175 schools, including 95 percent of Stanford students, use the site, say the founders.

Room service | Stanford Hospitals & Clinics has finished a six-year, $1.5 million project to improve patient amenities. Patients can now check their e-mail, get hospital announcements, answer poll questions or watch a “dreamy beach sunset on the Sea of Cortez” on high-definition monitors in their rooms, says the hospital.

Hospital CEO | Mike Peterson will become interim CEO of Stanford Hospitals & Clinics in September, replacing retiring exec Martha Marsh.

Pakistan floods | Student organizers on Friday picked UNHCR to receive money they plan to raise in a campus campaign for Pakistan flood relief, says ASSU President Angelina Cardona ‘11.

Go Saints | Political science professor Condoleezza Rice appears in Spike Lee’s second post-Hurricane Katrina documentary, “cooperative” and supporting the New Orleans Saints, the filmmaker said. Rice was spotlighted in Lee’s first Katrina documentary for reportedly shopping in New York during the hurricane.

Overheard | “For the first time, there is now a public interest lawyer in the Oval Office.” — Diane Chin, director of the law schools’s Center for Public Service and Public Interest Law, on a possible explanation for why more Stanford Law students are committing to public service (36 this year, compared to 25 in 2009).

Cardinal Cruise | Chad La Tourette ‘12 won silver in the 1500 meter freestyle for Team USA at the Pan Pacific Championships in Irvine. Jayne Appel was added to the Team USA pool, competing for a spot on the team that will play at the world championships and Olympics.

Rankings Season | PoetsandQuants.com ranks Stanford’s Graduate School of Business as second only behind Harvard’s Business School. BusinessWeek rankings usually give the top spot to the business schools at Northwestern, University of Pennsylvania, and University of Chicago.

Sit Too Much? | “Set a timer to go off every 30 minutes and stand up and move,” advises BeWell.

Many Men on the Moon | As commercial space travel becomes less of a pipe dream, Stanford researches have been tapped to set guidelines for commercial space travel.

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(Stanford Daily File Photo)

Historically, the NCAA singles champion has a strong chance at receiving a wild-card entry into the Open. Other entries are won through victories on the USTA circuit.

Although Klahn will win some prize money as a result of his participation, taking the prize would result in a forfeiture of his remaining two years of NCAA eligibility.

Last spring, Klahn took home his first NCAA singles title by defeating Louisville’s Austen Childs, 6-1, 6-2. It marked the first time a Stanford men’s tennis player had won the title since Alex Kim in 2000.

In addition to Klahn, the USTA announced six other wild-card winners yesterday: Americans James Blake (a former top-five player), Jack Sock, Ryan Sweeting and Donald Young, Australian Carsten Ball and Frenchman Guillaume Rufin. A final wild card will be awarded to the winner of a playoff being held this week in Boca Raton, Fla.

The condensed fest had fans trekking from Speedway Meadow to the Polo Field and back through both Saturday and Sunday, although the mileage was alleviated by the wine and local food booths lining the human channel. Festival-goers were able to enjoy Maverick’s famed pulled-pork sandwiches and Rosamunde’s to-die-for cherry chicken sausages as they danced and nodded along to a consistently solid music lineup.

As crowds flooded out of the park Sunday night, MUNI lines were packed like a mosh pit and cars hit stop-and-go in every direction, but all transports were carrying satisfied music fans. Outside Lands proved it didn’t need an isolated venue to put on a good party, but could bring food, wine and mucho music into the heart of the city for a weekend that many can’t wait to repeat.

Saturday

It’s never easy to have a festival set slated to start before 1 p.m., but Freelance Whales rallied to the cause. Despite most of their spectators taking it easy, sitting in couples and groups on the grass, the Whales went ahead and gave the crowd the best afternoon-chill music they could have, rocking out when necessary and dialing it back with equal ease. “Ghosting” opened the set with unique instrumentation — a guitar played with a bow — that continued into the band’s signature banjo, which, rather than being traditionally plucked, was strummed with vigor. Although the band’s use of keyboards and synths sometimes makes it sound like a souped-up Owl City, the Whales proved that an early set is no guarantee of a fail-whale as they plowed through hits like “Generator ^ First Floor” and “Kilojoules” without missing a beat.

After an oddball set from Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars, the gypsy punk outfit Gogol Bordello force-fed some life into the zombie herd crowded about the Lands End stage. From New York City’s Lower East Side in name and Eastern Europe by heart, the band’s relentless pace and “screw-the-man” aesthetic had the still-dazed crowd unwittingly fist-pumping to put the Jersey Shore to shame. Through the afternoon, Gogol Bordello relied on recurring bouts of chanted “hey”s set to frenetic instrumentation and layered, if a little warbled, vocals. They were led by the grungy magnetism and Ron Burgundy mustache of lead singer Eugene Hütz, whose jerky spasms had him doing the running man, spinning around on one leg and performing a textbook tooshie wiggle all in sequence. It may be the first and last time accordions, Spanish beatboxing and mosh pits coexist peacefully.

As soon as the jamming began, it was obvious why My Morning Jacket was the act immediately preceding Furthur on the Lands End stage. Halfway through “Gideon,” the shaggy-haired band showed their real talents: simply playing their instruments, building off group energy and vamping for minutes, showcasing a real musical talent and synthesis that few bands today can claim. As leader Jim James, with fluffy beard, fluffier hair and long navy jacket, rocked down the house through numbers like “Golden,” “I’m Amazed” and “Smoking from Shooting,” even those who were unfamiliar with the band could see their dedication to the music, even as audiences had to slip on their…evening jackets as it began raining halfway through the set. “They are imitators,” James crooned in “Wordless Chorus,” and other bands are and should be. My Morning Jacket showed how real musicians command a stage.

Chan Marshall knows, if anything, how to give one hell of a show. As Cat Power onstage, she bounces between guttural feline growls and sweet songs, between a vein-popping facial expression and the cutest smile. Saturday was no exception, and after years of unpredictable concerts, it’s true that Cat Power is back on her game. She takes the best aspect of a live show — the chance to morph songs, to examine new approaches to old works — to full tilt, opening with “Good Woman” and moving into a brief intro of Jackson Browne’s classic “These Days” and somehow ending up doing “Song to Bobby” before you could even catch your breath. Shielding the mic and muffling her voice to great effect on songs like Billie Holiday’s “Don’t Explain,” Cat Power made it clear that whether the song’s a cover of a classic or one of her originals, the song and its performance is nothing but her own. Dressed in a black hoodie and jeans with a no-nonsense ponytail, she put all the other hipstered-out acts to shame by looking more like a roadie than a headlining artist. And just to cement her down-to-earth approach, she descended into the photo pit and chilled with us mere mortals while singing “Sea of Love.” No frills necessary for a great show if you’re as good as Cat Power.

The modern day Grateful Dead Furthur, begun last year by original Deadheads Phil Lesh and Bob Weir, gave aging hippies and drugged-out youngins a reason to stick around Saturday night with a self-indulgent two-and-a-half hour set. The music was admittedly targeted to another era, but their technical talent and assured delivery could still be appreciated by the non-Flower Power generation. As tie-dye clad 50-year-olds swayed barefoot on the lawn and air-guitared through 12-minute jam sessions, it was obvious that Furthur didn’t disappoint.

Julian Casablancas of The Strokes was unafraid to rock the sunglasses on Saturday night. (Courtesy of Brian Valdizno)

Hand in pocket, sunglasses on (note: it was a night show) and joking between songs, Julian Casablancas took the stage in Golden Gate Park as if it was 2002 — as if The Strokes were still coolly jaded rather than exhaustedly jaded, and before the megastar microscope had cracked the band into glittering, but still below-grade, solo acts. On Speedway Meadow Saturday night, the band just worked. Simply and effortlessly, The Strokes recaptured what made them The Strokes: tight rhythms by drummer Fabrizio Moretti, interlaced guitars of Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond, Jr. and the famed croon of Casablancas. From opening “NYC Cops” to the frenzied chords of hit “Reptilia,” the band brought the old-school Strokes that the anxious fans were pressed in and dying to hear.

“Sometimes we play these songs and I remember playing them in front of four people. It’s pretty surreal,” Casablancas said during the four-song encore. He may have slurred it drunkenly, but the sentiment was sweet nonetheless. Although Nikolai Fraiture’s bass drowned out the guitars throughout the hour-long set, devoted fans still sang and bounced along to the favorites — which happened to be practically every song on the docket. The Strokes went out appropriately with “Take It Or Leave It,” with the members smiling along as they brought the enraptured audience into a decade time warp. You can take it or leave it.

Sunday

Philly-based Amos Lee inaugurated the Lands End main stage on Sunday, and was more than ready to defend his early time-slot with a little humor. “Good morning, San Francisco,” he said. “Thanks for getting out of bed to see us!” And after crowds swayed a little but didn’t quite perk up to his satisfaction, Lee cajoled, “San Francisco, y’all are supposed to be dancing and shit.” Dancing, indeed — and Lee’s gritty blues and chatty antics certainly got crowds amused after a few songs like “Keep it Loose, Keep It Tight” and “Supply and Demand.” He brought out one of his backup singers in a white zoot suit and had the audience greet him as “Angel,” then proceeded to sing Shai’s “If I Ever Fall In Love Again” to old-school cheers. After Angel rhapsodized for a bit about the Hot Dog of Love (best line: “got me some mustard / girl, you’re as sweet as custard”), Amos got back into his groove and wrapped up the set. If there’s ever been a reason to come early to a festival, it’s to see the more laid-back, interactive early day sets — not to mention the fact that thin crowds make it easy to get up close.

The Temper Trap, hailing from Melbourne, Australia, ratcheted up the epic levels of Sunday with a high-energy, pulsating set. Singer Dougy Mandagi, with a voice that soared at an impossible falsetto through the afternoon, led the sonic crescendo that is their 2009 debut album “Conditions,” jumping onto the drums for “Resurrection” and “Science to Fear.” But it was long-locked bassist Jonathon Aherne who stole the show with his intense body-rolling bass moves through the sing-along perfection of closer “Sweet Disposition.”

There was no volcano to blame for the late arrival of indie-R&B singer Janelle Monáe, who shuffled onto the Sutro stage 25 minutes late due to a delayed flight. Maybe marched would be the more appropriate term, as the famously coiffed star entered the stage Monty Python monk-style, in full black cloak and hood and accompanied by two similarly-clad back up dancers. Sadly for the expectant crowd, her normally theatrical live performance suffered from the rushed entry: her expressive voice was overtaken by the keyboard and guitars through opener “Dance or Die” and jitterbugging “Faster,” while the backup dancers seemed confused as to when they should join her. The sound problems were fixed just in time, however, for the brutal dance-hit “Cold War” and the funky closer “Tightrope.” Gliding across half the stage on one foot and blinded by the bouffant that couldn’t handle her raucous energy, Monáe gave a taste of what her live show could have been.

It was a tale of two festivals for Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes. Last October, who would have remembered that peacenik group of ragtag musicians that took the stage on a blustery fall day on Treasure Island? But even then, people saw something special. Level whatever criticism you’d like at their character or their antics, but behind it all there is musical skill from the tooting of horns to the string arrangements to the vocal love between Alex Ebert and Jade Castrinos. And while they were virtual unknowns for their first festival in the Bay, the second time around they were festival must-sees. The crowd was packed at the Twin Peaks stage and a massive contingent stood behind the festival gates to listen to the crazed musicianship that defines E. Sharpe and his band of loonies. Their rise just shows the power of a packed tour circuit, and for now this is the end of the line for the band. They’re heading home, home, home.

Al Green serenades the crowd at the third annual Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival. (Courtesy of Brian Valdizno)

When soul/gospel/everything legend Al Green busted out on stage, you knew he meant business: three-piece suit, gold-tipped sunglasses and a bouquet of roses as he wooed the ladies with his romance anthem “Let’s Get Married.” The perennial performer, now 64, had the energy of a 20-year-old as he tossed flowers to the crowd, vamped and sang falsetto all while jumping about and chuckling at the crowd. Backed up on vocals by his three daughters (who all sang with incredible style and added an adorable family feel) and a full brass band, Green ran through favorites like “Stay With Me (By The Sea)” and covers  like “Pretty Woman,” all while calling out, “I love you, California!” After a particularly funky rendition of the classic “My Girl,” he summed up what was surely on everyone’s mind in the audience, boldly declaring, “Aw, shit. I’m a bad motherfucker.” Al Green, despite taking the stage hours before artists a third his age, proved that groove never, never, never goes out of style.

Chromeo's Dave 1 surveys the dancing crowd during their Sunday afternoon set. (Courtesy of Brian Valdizno)

Although Al Green ignited a fun-filled groove across the Polo Field , Montreal’s Chromeo — made up of Dave 1 (David Macklovitch) and P-Thugg (Patrick Gemayel) — indisputably launched the largest dance-pit of the festival with their lighthearted and sexually-charged light show. The electrofunk duo sang and cowbelled their way through the set, with P-Thugg often filling the space between songs with riffs through his vocoder, calling out “California” and “Chromeo” and jumping up octaves impossible to do with just his voice. While P-Thugg sported army digs, Dave 1 sang and scatted onstage in a sharp suited ensemble, sans tie — to keep it casual, of course. But Chromeo were all business, flipping through their best hits and keeping the party bumping with “Tenderoni,” “Bonafied Lovin’” and “Fancy Footwork.” A few crowd-surfers managed to make it to the front, only to be carted away by security, who were less successful of stemming the tide of gate-crashers during the iridescent and sharp beats of “Night by Night.” Chromeo put the emphasis on the “romeo” in their name, reminding us why we are lovers for their beats.

Kings of Leon, given their closing night set and big-name status, faced the big problem that can plague headliners: with such expectations and big crowds, it’s hard to create an intimate feel with the audience. Weeks after July’s Pigeongate, the Kings were back onstage Sunday night and did their best to overturn the limitations of a big set by playing old favorites and new songs. Although they predictably hit current radio favorites like “Use Somebody” and “Sex on Fire,” singer Caleb Followill also announced they were going to share a few new gems and they did, including “Southbound,” a song whose country-inspired twang and simple harmonies pay tribute to their Nashville roots. Kings also reeled back in time with a well handled cover of the Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind?” as well as selections from their earlier albums like “The Bucket” and “Milk.” “Arizona” turned into a stretched-out jam session, with crowds waving their hands back and forth in slow hypnosis — quite a sight over the huge polo fields of Golden Gate Park. Closing up with “Black Thumbnail,” the Kings put the final bang on the show with fireworks, in case you hadn’t already realized that they’d killed. The Kings keep on reigning.

A version of this review appeared at Treeswingers.com on Sunday, Aug. 15, and Monday, Aug. 16.

A child in a flood relief camp Aug. 13 in Nowshera, Pakistan. (Courtesy of Myra Iqbal/Shajar-e-Ilm)

Pakistan floods | Friends of Asfandyar Ali Mir ‘12 in northwest Pakistan “had to evacuate within minutes to save themselves from the torrent of the raging flood waters,” Mir writes to us today. “Their entire houses were drowned, and thereby they lost everything they had. A friend from Swat Valley tells me that his entire house, by the bank of a river, was swept away by raging waters in front of his family, which was evacuated from it only minutes earlier.” Mir, a native of Rawalpindi who attended two years of high school in Nowshera, is following the floods in Pakistan that have reportedly displaced 20 million people. United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said he has never seen a disaster like it.

Shiza Shahid ‘11 is in Pakistan now helping coordinate flood relief through the nonprofit she founded last year, Shajar-e-Ilm, and is blogging about it. Mir, a 20-year-old economics major, is managing the group’s website from Stanford.

The Stanford community can help by donating money to aid organizations, Mir says: “I think raising support, money and awareness as it was done for Haiti or the tsunami disasters can certainly help alleviate the immediate suffering of the people on ground.” He is working with ASSU to get a formal campus campaign going, he said Wednesday evening.

Shajar-e-Ilm is offering to accept contributions. Its volunteers are delivering food and clothing to flood victims in the Swat Valley and Nowshera, according to its website. Red Cross, Oxfam, Unicef and other aid organizations are accepting donations.

Nothing to see here | U.S. News & World Report college rankings are out, putting Stanford fifth, tied with Penn and behind Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Columbia. Stanford, which blasted Princeton Review rankings earlier this month, “has a practice of not publicizing rankings,” the University wrote in a blog post reporting Stanford’s ranking today. Throwback: then-University President Gerhard Casper’s 1996 letter urging the U.S. News editor to abandon the rankings.

You bet | Ultrinsic.com, a site that lets students bet on their grades, is open for business at Stanford. University officials are “appalled,” said a spokeswoman.

Overheard | “Stanford’s women’s softball team plays 57 games, half of them away, flying to colleges in Arizona, Hawaii and Washington. Even if creative accounting masks athletic deficits, they end up included in students’ tuition bills.” — USA Today commentary: “Where’s all that college tuition money going?”

Housekeeping | The architects of the Lorry I. Lokey Stanford Daily Building, Cody Anderson Wasney Architects, won a 2010 Preservation Design Award from the California Preservation Foundation.

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Bill Lane | A memorial service for Bill Lane, Stanford benefactor and Sunset publisher, will be held Oct. 1 at noon in Memorial Church.

Finding Jupiter | Campus band finishes its album and pays tribute to the role that Chi Theta Chi played in its formation.

Rankings | Given the University’s frequency as a chart-topper for most rankings, take a look at the other side of the argument.

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The LCLS, a $420 million project funded by the Department of Energy, is the world’s first x-ray free electron laser, and currently the world’s brightest and most powerful X-ray source.

U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, former Stanford physics professor, visited SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory on Monday to dedicate the Linac Coherent Light Source. L-R: SLAC Director Persis Drell, University President John Hennessy, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, LCLS Director Jo Stohr, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, former LCLS Director John Galayda, Rep. Mike Honda. (MICHAEL LIU/The Stanford Daily)

“It is a remarkable occasion and I think this dedication has brought together an incredible group of people from Washington, from our user community around the world and of course from the entire SLAC and University community,” said University President John Hennessy on Monday.

Hennessy and Chu were joined by guests close to the project, including SLAC Director Persis Drell, U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose), Rep. Mike Honda (D-Campbell), LCLS Director Jo Stohr and former LCLS Director John Galayda.

For Chu, it was not a first visit to the Farm but a return: he was a Stanford physics professor from 1987 to 2008. On Monday, he recounted meeting Drell when she was a graduate student at UC-Berkeley and he was a post-doctoral student there. He joked that he only taught her two things during their time together: how to drink bourbon and how to drive a stick-shift. He was a longtime colleague to many in attendance Monday.

The co-winner of a Nobel Prize, Chu became energy secretary in 2009 and it was his department that funded the LCLS project. Stanford operates SLAC for the Department of Energy.

The new device enables scientists of fields including biology, material science and chemistry to study matter at smaller and faster scales than ever before. The powerful instrument can identify individual atoms in molecules as well as image at a fast enough rate to create stop-motion movies of chemical and biological reactions for the first time.

The LCLS achieved its first laser light in April 2009. In one of the first published experiments, scientists used the powerful x-ray beam to strip neon atoms of all electrons from the inside out for the first time, demonstrating a new technique to explore internal atomic structures.

Out of six planned experimental hutches, where researchers perform their measurements, two are currently operational. The remaining four are expected to come online within two years.

The two-mile long SLAC accelerator was built in the 1960s to accelerate electrons very close to the speed of light and then collide them in order to study high-energy particle physics. First proposed in 1992 by Claudio Pellegrini of UC-Los Angeles, LCLS uses the last third of the accelerator for a different purpose. The high-energy electrons are routed through a new undulator hall, where a series of strong magnets cause the electrons to wiggle. This oscillation is tuned to generate copious amounts of x-rays, which form the powerful laser.

Lofgren compared the revolutionary new instrument to the high-speed camera Leland Stanford commissioned in 1878 to settle the question of whether or not a galloping horse ever has all four hooves off the ground.

“The principle of examining nature and understanding the truth is the same,” she said at a news conference preceding the dedication.“It’s a fine history for Stanford.”

Both Chu and Lofgren stressed the importance of basic science in expanding scientists’ fundamental understanding of nature and its role in practical applications in medicine, alternative energy, global climate and technology. Chu offered the creation of LCLS itself as proof of that principle.

L-R: U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., Rep. Mike Honda, D-Calif., and Secretary of Energy Steven Chu. (MICHAEL LIU/The Stanford Daily)

“Physicists working on high-energy physics never dreamed that their work would play such an important role in how modern pharmaceuticals work,” Chu said.

However, Chu said, the true potential of LCLS lies beyond what scientists have so far imagined.

“When you go by many many orders of magnitude…you will discover things you never would have dreamed of,” he said. “You will discover something wonderful. Why? Because you have just been the first person to look underneath a new rock that you couldn’t look at before.”

‘Scared up until the last minute’ | A Stanford Law Criminal Defense Clinic project was involved in the release today of a man serving a 25-to-life sentence under California’s three-strikes law.

L-R: U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., Rep. Mike Honda, D-Calif., and Secretary of Energy Steven Chu. (MICHAEL LIU/The Stanford Daily)

X-ray laser | U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, former Stanford physics professor, visited SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory on Monday to dedicate the Linac Coherent Light Source, a super-powerful laser completed in April 2009. The Daily’s Michael Liu was on hand.

Jared Cohen | The 2004 history and political science alumnus is said to be heading up a new Google “think tank” dubbed Google Ideas. Cohen — profiled this spring by Stanford Magazine and last month by NYT Magazine — was hired to the State Department under then-Secretary Condoleezza Rice, now a Stanford poli sci professor.

Hospital expansion | Preliminary “site preparation” for the $3.5 billion project could begin by 2011 and a formal groundbreaking could take place by 2012, a University official said Friday.

Football | Andrew Luck speaks from training camp.

Prop. 8 | The U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a stay on the Aug. 4 ruling that called California’s same-sex marriage ban unconstitutional. The order puts on hold the weddings some hoped would take place starting Wednesday.

iPads | The cost of providing the School of Medicine’s 91 incoming first-years with iPads — $40,000 after a discount — is “only slightly more” than the cost of printing paper course materials, a dean said. A handful of other universities are giving students iPads this fall.

Can you tell | Stanford researchers David Larcker and Anastasia Zakolyukina have struck a nerve around the Web with their new study on how to tell whether or not CEOs are lying.

Dial-up | Adults with Internet access at home are more likely to be in romantic relationships than those without, says sociology professor Michael Rosenfeld.

Outside Lands | Stanford-and-elsewhere bloggers Treeswingers recap Saturday and Sunday at the San Francisco festival.

Billionaires | The winner of this contest is not us. But close.

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Obama Honors Athletes | NCAA champion teams will be honored by the President with a White House reception, including Stanford Women’s Tennis and Men’s Volleyball.

Caltrain Changes | Following announcements of financial difficulty for the public transit system, Caltrain announced it will be holding four community meetings in various Bay Area locations on Thursday, Aug. 19. The meetings will be discussing changes such as cutting weekend service, reducing non-commute hour service, and other changes.

More Reasons to Wear a Helmet | “I wear it because I don’t want to die!”

Avoid Black Cats | Happy Friday the 13th.

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First of all, let me just say, as a self-respecting Ohioan, that Michigan sucks. Furthermore, I can’t understand how any researcher can worry about this generation’s apathy when the crotchetiest old man of “Watchmen,” Rorschach, was complaining about the bystander effect in 1986. Then again, poking holes in psych studies is like calling out white liberals for showing their privilege: it’s just too easy. And if I’m gonna be real, I have a few unnerving stories myself that support this study.

Take, for example, the saga of my best friend from high school (let’s call him Frank) and his roommate, Bob. I always considered Frank a compassionate guy. Bob somehow determined erroneously that Frank was sleeping with his girlfriend and accused Frank several times of doing so, each time with more conviction. Eventually he became so sure that this cuckoldry was taking place that he broke into Frank’s room searching for evidence, destroyed some electronics, then told Frank via text message that he had done so. Frank was justifiably enraged and promptly moved out. Yet only four hours after the incriminating text, Bob sent a follow-up text apologizing for his behavior and confessing that he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and depression. Bob is currently living alone with his schizophrenic self, but when asked about Bob’s well-being, Frank said that he didn’t know or care about his status, even though this guy clearly needs help.

Another friend recently lost multiple relatives and has been spending most of his days in a cannabis-induced haze, even though he’s one of the more driven people I know. It wasn’t until I was on the flight back out here that I even thought to put two and two together, much less ask if he was all right.

And what about at perfect ol’ Stanford? Even though the duck syndrome is well documented, none of my best friends ever asked me about my mental health unless I desperately broached the subject first. I am equally guilty.

That said, like privilege-showing liberals, I just can’t lay off. I have serious issues with this study and its blind broadcast throughout the news media. Because honestly, Michigan, aren’t these traits of apathy and solipsism more just typical post-adolescence than they are anything generational? I mean, researchers’ statements, such as, “Many people see the current group of college students–sometimes called ‘Generation Me’–as one of the most self-centered, narcissistic, competitive, confident and individualistic in recent history,” are empty and unverifiable, and only serve to reinforce existing kids-these-days mentalities. Researchers: maybe you should check your own textbooks about a little confirmation bias. What’s more, don’t you think that maybe a generation raised on marriage counseling and introspection might be more up front about their narcissistic tendencies instead of hiding behind the socially desirable veil of altruism?

All I know is that I would take care before asserting that everyone within two years of my age cares only about themselves, but then again, you probably assumed that we were all too busy tweeting and replicating “Jersey Shore” to read the news.

With regard to possible causes for this so-called apathy, let me just say that my aforementioned best friend rarely used Facebook, chose “Madden” as his favorite game and never watched reality TV. These things rank among the most-abused bugaboos by intellectuals nationwide for explaining negative trends. And by the way, are we not the most socially active and tolerant generation–the generation that elected Obama–“in recent history,” as you care to phrase it? Michigan, if this study is how you feel about your student body, then I don’t want to know what your convocation speech sounds like. Though perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. After all, Michigan sucks.

It’s been a great run. Please send any hate mail languishing in your drafts folder to petermc@stanford.edu.

Western art isn’t completely devoid of transitory or temporary media. But artists have been known to spend days on end wrapped in felt, fur and lard, locked in a room with a coyote. And monks are supposed to be capable of sitting still so long their appendages fall off. These are people whose actions are strongly tied to a message. These are people to whom others will possibly pay attention. But ordinary folk? Housewives?

I used to think the American spirit must be severely deficient in the ability to sand paint. I could find no widespread devotion to something so small-reaching, short-lived and materially fruitless. Most people I know wouldn’t touch art of any kind with a ten-foot pole. Ordinary Americans, if they create at all, build gazebos, advertise their blog or post videos of their amateur rap on YouTube. They try to make a mark on their environment. And they work in what they consider to be relatively lasting media. Nobody expects digital files or architectural structures to just disappear. The modern Ozymandias is on MySpace. Even gamers, probably the American demographic with the shortest attention span (which is saying something), tend to prefer playing online, where their accomplishments can be witnessed, their statistics recorded and broadcast.

Then I remembered food: bread that takes an hour to knead and has to rise overnight. Salmon in a piccata sauce. Apple goddamned pie. The medium of every American housewife, and others. I might go through an entire day without singing a note, writing a word, sketching a line, without listening or looking or smelling the roses because, my God, there just isn’t time for it!

But I’ve got to eat.

Breakfast, even when I roll out of bed half an hour late and have to scramble to work, is a fried egg on toast with homemade plum preserves. Every time I put in the hour to fry the onions and cumin seeds, cook the vegetables, boil the lentils and spice the soup, only to sit somewhere quiet and eat it the moment it’s barely cool enough, I am sand painting and destroying. This is the only American medium whose appreciation requires its destruction. And even in an era of individually wrapped, pre-made microwave meals, with the foodie fad comes a whole new generation defending the art.

Sure, on one level, food culture is just another form of conspicuous consumption in the pursuit of authenticity. But it is consumption without clutter. You’re not watching, collecting, analyzing. You’re eating. Recipes might be handed down–cast iron pans, too–but the food itself is in the moment, best right out of the oven. Not to be kept for posterity. Like igniting a fleet of gasoline-soaked paper boats in a kiddie pool with a WD-40-can blowtorch.

You can take a picture of your plate of penne puttanesca, but good luck photographing its fire.

Share your best (temporary) food creations at rcima@stanford.edu.

While not billed as a “rave” and attracting an arguably different crowd, this past weekend’s Hard Summer festival in downtown Los Angeles was placed under a lot of scrutiny as the biggest L.A. dance festival since the widely publicized death at EDC. Effective security was of the utmost importance, and it became increasingly hard to ignore the fact that last year’s Hard Summer was shut down after riots ensued. However, this year’s festival, featuring major dance and electro acts like Erol Alkan, Major Lazer and Crystal Castles, seemingly went off without a hitch, not only because of the minimal arrests and speedy, yet thorough, security line, but because of the consistently incredible musical performances and the collective great time had by the 10,000 people attending.

When Intermission arrived at the Los Angeles State Historical Park in the afternoon, we immediately headed to the Hard Stage, while many opted for the other stage, appropriately named Harder – those with a palette for dubstep and heavy electro got their fix at the smaller and more intense option. The first act that we caught was Theophilus London, an urban pop artist straight out of Brooklyn. Accompanied by famed producer Skeet Skeet, Theophilus charmed his way into our hearts with slick dance moves, even slicker hip hop and a charisma perfect for warming up the crowd. The day really started to pick up when he called for all of the ladies out in the audience and announced, “It’s time to make this a rave!” while Skeet Skeet mixed dance beats into Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You.”

From then on out, the crowd was dancing into the night. Sets from Breakbot and The Twelves heavily favored disco elements, and aside from a minor technical glitch at the beginning of Breakbot’s set, all three DJs proved to be up-and-coming talents with infectious sounds. Smoothly transitioning from the Twelves’ set of disco and hit pop tunes was seasoned DJ Green Velvet. Dressed in a casual all-white suit, wearing perhaps the biggest grim of anybody attending, Green Velvet dropped “My House,” the Rhythm Controll classic that proclaims, preacher-style, “And in my house, there is only house music” to wild cheers. He continued to spin electronic and house music that kept the crowd not just dancing, but smiling.

As the sun began to set on the amazing talent that is Erol Alkan – who took the stage after Green Velvet – Thomas Pentz, better known as Diplo, took the stage for an even larger audience. After gaining considerable popularity by producing many of M.I.A.’s best songs (not to mention dating her), as well as working with many other major artists, Diplo is enjoying the peak of his career – and his set at Hard Summer did not disappoint. After an hour of dancing to his electro house set, the audience eagerly awaited his return as half of the wildly popular Major Lazer. Once back on stage with Switch and the rest of the gang for Major Lazer, Intermission was glad to see that this outrageous show lived up to the high bar previously set at this year’s Coachella.

Headliners Crystal Castles opened with eerie chords from Ethan Kath on the synthesizer, surrounded by swirls of fog and hazy lasers. Frontwoman Alice Glass appeared on the drum set, swaying and singing in a seemingly drug-induced trance. With music sounding like a perfect mix of hypnotic tones, thumping drums, video game synths and screeching vocals, the live show is every bit as confusing, haunting and captivating as their recorded work. With Ethan hunched over his equipment in the back of the stage, a hoodie thrown almost completely over his head, we were enraptured with Alice, throwing herself into the crowd from every side, moaning and screeching with seemingly no direction as the security guards made sure that she made it out from the crowd surfing somewhat safely. Their set seemed to go by in the blink of an eye, leaving the crowd with not just goosebumps and awe, but also the sentiment of “what in the hell just happened?”

Closing out the night was Belgian electro-rock band Soulwax. Dressed in their standard blue leisure suits, the four-person band took the stage with little to no fanfare, playing many new tracks that left audience dancing with their mouths wide open, in shock that a rock group could be so intense and non-stop at such a high energy. When the clock struck midnight, the set was abruptly over, and the music stopped for good. Concertgoers trickled out of the park, disappointed at the night’s end, but thrilled with memories of the events prior. Despite all of the danger, death and sadness of this summer’s rave scene, Hard managed to pull together not only a safe and well-run event, but one with music that reminded everybody why dance festivals are so amazing in the first place.

How eco-friendly Outside Lands fits into the summer concert calendar is a work in progress. If Indio’s Coachella is a sunburned attention hog and the maturing Treasure Island is a soggy but lovable eccentric, then Outside Lands 2010, held in the heart of urban wilderness, is the newly-minted vegan sandwiched in between. It’s the type of festival that bills its headliners, wine menu and bike parking at the same height.

Surprisingly, up until 2007, music-rich San Francisco was still without a music festival to call its own. Noise Pop and Another Planet Entertainment whetted appetites with the creation of Treasure Island Music Festival in September of 2007, but floating off the Bay Bridge, TIMF never managed to inspire any homegrown pride. As beloved as TIMF has become, it hasn’t been the defining music event for the City by the Bay.

Cut to the other side of the Peninsula in August 2008. Another Planet Entertainment struck again, dropping big-name acts such as Radiohead, Ben Harper and Jack Johnson into the iconic park for the first Outside Lands, which drew in around 100,000 music and nature lovers. Though the event garnered a smaller attendance in its sophomore year, its sturdy lineup of Pearl Jam and Dave Matthews Band assured Outside Lands of its “annual” status.

For 2010, the festival has moved past survival to self-reflection and improvement. Unable to lock in an anchor act for Friday, organizers shaved off the third day early on, condensing the music and arts fest into Saturday and Sunday. The distilled schedule still packs a potent punch, though the identity of this year’s Outside Lands seems to be split between scenester indulgence and hippie-chic.

On Saturday, ennui-effusing indie-rock vets The Strokes are juxtaposed against Grateful Dead successor Furthur, featuring original Dead members Phil Lesh and Bob Weir. It’ll be an interesting mix of jaded and free spirits – expect to see hippies’ bare feet sharing turf with trendily-aged European leather shoes – a fitting combination for a city famous for both its Summer of Love roots and its Whole Foods-consuming yuppies.

Nevertheless, the central attraction of the festival, the music, promises to deliver on the sonic end. Furthur has the advantage of an excited, if a bit aged, hometown audience. And with a will-they-won’t-they fourth album in the works, the Strokes still enjoy superstar status, even after spawning multiple (and questionable) side projects in their three-year hiatus. Louisville rock natives My Morning Jacket, currently between albums, and now-sober belter Chan Marshall of Cat Power round out the rest of Saturday’s lineup.

They are followed up by Kings of Leon on Sunday, who are looking to finally escape all those pigeon references (unlikely, considered the arboreal nature of the park). The rock outfit may have broken into the mainstream, but fans of both early “Youth and Young Manhood” and commercial “Only by the Night” will roll out for their headlining performance.

Festival mainstays Phoenix, Social Distortion and Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros ensure that this year’s sound system will go out with a bang. A smattering of newcomers such as Freelance Whales, The Temper Trap and the Soft Pack have also been thrown in to satisfy the Bay’s indie tastes.

Equally committed to the arts end of Outside Lands, organizers this year have placed almost as much marketing weight on the wine and food offerings as the festival soundtrack. Attendees will have their pick of 33 restaurants and 26 vineyards to get a sampling taste of the Bay Area.

The vision for Outside Lands 2010 may be the experience of sipping local merlot out of a compostable wine glass on Speedway Meadow, with Phoenix strumming in the background. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Tickets, which are “affordable” in this age of jacked up ticket monopolies, are still available. Proceeds go to the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department, which will have the joy of clearing out all those reusable bottles and once everyone clears out of Golden Gate Park on Sunday night.

The full economic picture of Stanford's undergraduate population is, given available data, impossible to determine. There are indicators that Stanford's student body is less diverse in geographic and socioeconomic background than in other common measures of diversity, such as race and ethnicity (JING RAN/The Stanford Daily)

The composite picture of socioeconomic diversity at Stanford is a patchwork, both in the data available and the efforts made to achieve it.

The first class of students at Stanford, in 1891, famously required no tuition. Among the ranks of the Farm’s “pioneer class” was a young man born in an Iowa village, the son of a blacksmith and a minister, who at the time of his admission was orphaned and living in Oregon.

Herbert Hoover’s enrollment at Stanford has served for more than a century as the University’s archetypal story of success and meritocratic inclusion. Ensuring a diversity of class and background at Stanford, however, has only grown more complicated since the days of Leland Stanford’s recruiting trips across the American West.

Competition is extremely high to enter Stanford, with an admit rate of 7.2 percent. And those who make it in are, as a group, financially better off than the rest of the American population. According to Director of Financial Aid Karen Cooper, the median family income at Stanford is approximately $125,000; by contrast, the median family income in the United States in 2008, the last year for which data are available, is $61,521.

Beyond establishing a rough baseline, however, determining the actual economic diversity of Stanford’s students becomes a far more complex question.

Stanford’s financial aid office only has reliable information for the half of the student population it provides aid to, and the Office of Undergraduate Admission does not assess financial details during its need-blind admission process. No University office looks at the total economic composition of the incoming freshman class, nor does any office actually carry out demographic breakdowns by levels of income.

At the lowest levels of income, 14 percent of the undergraduate population received Pell Grants for the 2008-09 academic year, typically rewarded to families that make under $40,000 a year.

More broadly, 46 percent of Stanford students receive need-based scholarships. While only approximately 50 percent of the Stanford undergraduate population receives need-based financial aid, an additional group of slightly over 30 percent receives some other form of assistance, such as outside or athletic scholarships, while 20 percent attend Stanford without any aid at all.

Of those families receiving need-based aid, only about 15 to 20 percent earn more than $150,000 a year, according to Cooper, and roughly 60 percent make less than $100,000.

“What I have heard students say, both white and black, is that, ‘I didn’t know I was low income until I came to Stanford,” said Sally Dickson, associate vice provost and dean of educational resource centers.

While the Office of Undergraduate Admission strives to ensure the representation of minority racial and ethnic groups in each class, Stanford does not obtain a complete picture of a student’s family income until the student applies for financial aid. As a result, the process of seeking economic diversity is not what Cooper would call an exact science.

“You really can’t make any assumptions on someone’s income based on race or ethnicity or even where they come from,” Cooper said.

Stanford’s administration emphasizes the diversity of background and life experience in its student body, but specific data are not made public by the Office of Undergraduate Admission beyond broad indicators, such as the percent of students admitted from California and the number of states and countries represented.

Still, across the University, steps are being made toward helping students feel more included on campus. Dickson said the most pressing priority for her office is meeting the needs of first-generation college students, who make up an “increasing number” of incoming students.

Dickson is seeking to fill a full-time staff position dedicated to addressing that community, a post that was only quarter-time position during the 2009-10 academic year. Her office also sends special invitations to students who are first generation or of “low income”—from a household under $100,000—during New Student Orientation.

“I think what is important is that our overall climate here at Stanford is welcoming and greeting, and that all students feel they are a contributor to the life of the campus,” Dickson said.

“I do think that for students who come from under-resourced high schools, or areas that are low income, their adjustment and transition may be different,” she added.

Then there are incoming freshmen from rural areas or states, a relatively small yet substantial segment of the student body. While they don’t have a dedicated community center and aren’t greeted as a group during New Student Orientation, the challenges they can face at Stanford are often similar.

Jon Christensen ‘81, the executive director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West, said students from rural areas have to navigate ingrained attitudes or prejudices toward their background.

“There’s a part of the whole modern project and the Western intellectual tradition, that in some ways positions itself toward urban life and away from rural experience,” Christensen said.

“There are students who come from rural America who feel that they still study under that burden, and that their experience is not as valid and that it is not recognized,” he added.

Bea Gordon ’10, who majored in English and environmental history and grew up on a cattle ranch in Wyoming, also said relating to her classmates could be a challenge.

“You can’t really talk about driving a truck when you were seven when you’re with a bunch of people,” she said.

But both Gordon and Christensen said the classroom could provide a means for students to feel more comfortable, and that through academic study rural students could connect their experience with higher education to their life before Stanford.

“For me that was really nice, because I got to learn more about my home,” Gordon said.

She emphasized that to view rural students as one group would be to oversimplify their experience—a problem that Christensen points to as an additional challenge in reaching out to students with diverse backgrounds.

“Everyone has a different rural background,” Gordon said. “I’m not really going to be sympathetic with someone who grew up on a corn farm in Nebraska.”

Christensen, who attended Stanford in the late 1970s, was upbeat in his assessment of the culture of inclusion on campus.

“I think there is more room for encouraging and understanding and respecting rural experience,” he said. “There is still some of that bias, but I think there is more understanding now, and that students feel more comfortable and confident with bringing that experience here to Stanford.”

In assessing diversity at Stanford, one thing is clear: the picture is murky, and in upcoming years it won’t become any more easier for Stanford to match its practices to its stated commitments.

“The world is becoming more diverse, as we know, as well as the realization that there are students with multiple identities,” Dickson said.

But the role of diversity in providing a crucial aspect of education at Stanford seems to be an area of broad agreement—so long as the University can allow a shared place at the table for what Christensen calls the “richer conversation” provided by someone with a distinct background.

“It’s about making space for that kind of experience,” Christensen said.

Former Bing Overseas Study Program (BOSP) director and history Prof. Norman Naimark said that after looking at different options carefully, the decision to cut the seminar program made the most sense.

“The basic problem was financial,” Naimark wrote in an e-mail to The Daily. “As part of BOSP’s need to cut costs, the suspension of the seminar program turned out to be the easiest and most viable way to meet budget.”

BOSP, which at its height supported 10 seminars with 150 students, has not helped students pursue their own trips abroad during this period.

“Generally, BOSP does not get involved in individual student opportunities, unless they are directly related to the students’ study at one of our centers,” Naimark said. “In those cases, we do support individual research, internships and other student activities.”

The cuts to this summer’s overseas seminars have forced students to search for other means to travel abroad. Student in Government (SIG) offers overseas fellowships for students during the summer, but whether the hold on the seminars will largely affect SIG remains unseen, according to SIG chair Valentin Bolotnyy ’11.

“I can say with confidence that the high demand we’ve seen specifically for our international fellowships is a very good indicator of the popularity of international experiences in general among Stanford students,” Bolotnyy said. “It’s hard to say whether or not SIG has been affected or will be affected by cuts to overseas seminars.”

“SIG fellowships and the overseas seminars are not exactly perfect substitutes because the students that apply to our fellowships look for a full summer work experience in public service rather than the shorter and more academic experience that the overseas seminars used to offer,” he added.

But even if students did look to SIG to support their trip abroad, Bolotnyy said that, due to financial constraints, SIG and other student groups would not be able to support them all.

“We would simply not have the resources to soak up the excess demand for international fellowship opportunities that the overseas seminar cuts have left in their wake, even if we wanted to,” he said.

The lack of overseas seminars this summer has compelled students to find new means to study abroad — and some have found that the new opportunities they’ve pursued fit their needs better than the short summer trip.

“While I would have immensely enjoyed attending an overseas seminar, I have decided to pursue a quarter-long program instead,” said Jessica Pih ’12. “I think that a quarter abroad is much more enriching than simply three weeks abroad for a seminar.”

But a short overseas trip can be just as gratifying as a more long-term study abroad program, and other Stanford offerings allow some students this experience.

“I would imagine those three weeks would resemble a glorified, educational vacation rather than a culturally edifying experience,” Pih said. “I had the opportunity to do so though Bill Durham’s Sophomore College class to the Galapagos, so I know that two-week seminars can truly make a difference in one’s intellectual development.”

“It is a great opportunity to meet people who have similar academic interests and to truly get to know a Stanford professor outside of the traditional classroom environment on campus,” she added.

Some students, like Annie Kramer ‘12, however, have not been as affected by the hold as others, opting to design their own study-abroad plans.

“Since I am not participating in any Bing programs, the hold will not directly affect me,” wrote Kramer, who is taking a leave of absence for 2010-11 to travel, in an e-mail to The Daily.

“I won’t be ‘studying’ abroad in the traditional sense,” she added. “Instead, I’m hoping to immerse myself in other environments by working and volunteering so that I can have some ‘real world’ interaction with local populations and other travelers.”

Yet while students are finding new ways to travel abroad, they still hope BOSP and Stanford will resume the seminars.

“Without the overseas seminars, the University misses an opportunity to educate its pupils beyond its walls and to bring them to the teacher that is the larger world,” said Kip Hustace ’11. “I trust that, when the time is right, the University will re-institute the overseas seminars.”

This new method, called photon enhanced thermionic emission (PETE), was discovered by a University research group headed by materials science and engineering Prof. Nick Melosh. Melosh went public with the research on Aug. 1, publishing a paper on the subject in Nature Materials.

“Despite some of the outrageous claims on the Internet,” Melosh said, “this is not a panacea, but is a unique method that can capture both heat and light, and may one day be a valuable part of the energy solution.”

Photovoltaic solar technology currently relies on semiconductors, which use photons from the sun to excite electrons, ultimately generating an electrical current. This mechanism, however, becomes less efficient with high temperatures, precluding the possibility of using the waste heat to fuel a secondary generator. As a result, photovoltaic and thermal energy conversion are mutually exclusive processes, and current scientific efforts have focused on optimizing one of the two.

Melosh’s new approach, if successful, would solve this dilemma by making high temperatures favorable to semiconductor-mediated energy conversion. By using the semiconductor gallium nitrate, coated with cesium, the researchers constructed a parallel plate thermionic emission device, in which higher temperatures will excite more electrons from the semiconductor cathode and generate current.

When photons strike the cathode, they increase the population of electrons that can participate in the thermionic emission process, which Melosh and his team dubbed “photon enhancement.”

Since higher temperatures increase the efficiency of this process, the researchers envision solar concentrators, which can multiply the sun’s intensity by 500 times, focusing light on a PETE device and siphoning unused heat to drive other thermal conversion systems.

While current monocrystalline solar panels boast an efficiency of around 26 percent, Melosh expects this new process to increase efficiency to 50-60 percent.

And since PETE’s optimal temperature point is achieved well after 200 degrees Celsius, it can function in areas such as the Mojave Desert, whereas today’s solar technology usually fails in temperatures above 100 degrees. However, this new technology is not limited to such high-temperature climates, if large parabolic dishes are used to concentrate the direct sunlight.

“It will actually work a little better in cold but sunny climes,” Melosh said, “but mostly as long as there is direct sun, it should be able to work.”

“This needs solar concentrations of at least a few hundred times, thus is most likely to be used for large scale utilities, though could also be used for remote areas as well,” he added.

While the cost of these dishes, in addition to the semiconductor material and cesium, is not inexpensive, the output of this process has the potential to rival that of fossil fuel combustion.

At the moment, tests have been run using gallium nitride, a common material for household electronics. While the research team has demonstrated the PETE process, stability and cost-effectiveness remain obstacles for the technology.

“We have currently only shown the proof of principle experimentally, and shown theoretically that it could be quite efficient,” Melosh said.

A series of bike thefts and medical emergencies occurred during this period. Bike thefts occurred at the Avery Aquatic Center, Encina Hall, Lucas Center, Herbert Hoover Memorial Building, Graduate School of Business, Studio 4 and Sigma Chi.

Wednesday, July 28

A victim discovered that her wallet had been snatched away by an unknown suspect when she left her purse unattended between 12:15 p.m. and 12:18 p.m. by the Claw.

A victim reported that she had been receiving unwanted, flirtatious calls from an unidentified male caller since May 1.

Thursday, July 29

Between 5 p.m. on July 28 and 5:45 a.m. the morning of July 29, an unknown suspect broke into an office in the basement of Encina Hall and stole over $3,000 worth of equipment.

Between 5:30 a.m. and 7:00 a.m., an unknown suspect entered a temporary construction company office at Casa Italiana, and stole tools and computer equipment valued at about $2,700.

At 8:00 a.m., an unknown suspect broke a window at Bldg. 360.

Friday, July 30

At 3:10 a.m., an unidentified male suspect, most likely trying to get his early morning brew, broke a coffee vending machine in Meyer Library.

At 6:50 p.m., an accident occurred between individuals on a skateboard and in a vehicle on the corner of Campus Drive and Medical Lane. There were injuries.

On July 30, the victim reported that an unknown suspect used his credit card on Nov. 29, 2009 to fraudulently purchase international plane tickets.

Saturday, July 31

Between 12:10 p.m. and 1:10 p.m., an unknown suspect broke the window of a vehicle parked in the Stanford Community Recreation Association parking lot and stole a purse.

Sunday, Aug. 1

Between July 27 and Aug. 1, an unknown suspect entered three unoccupied rooms in Stern Hall and stole about $900 from juvenile camp attendees.

Monday, Aug. 2

Between 9:15 a.m. and 12 p.m., an unknown suspect entered an unoccupied multi-bedroom dorm room at the Escondido-V Highrise, and stole three laptop computers and a digital camera belonging to three victims. The stolen property had a value of over $9,000.

An unknown suspect spray-painted graffiti on the exterior stairwell of Pigott Hall. The graffiti, however, is not believed to be gang-related or hate-motivated.

Wednesday, Aug. 4

It was reported that an unknown suspect entered the Taube Family Stadium between June 24 and July 21, without forcing open a door, and stole three laptop computers from the Epatt Academy.

Thursday, Aug. 5

At 10:40 a.m., an individual was arrested and transported to the San Jose main jail. He was booked for parole violations, driving without a license and possessing burglary tools.

Between 5:30 p.m. on Aug. 4 and 8:30 a.m. the morning of Aug. 5, an unknown suspect kicked out an antique glass window on the north side of the Cantor Center for Visual Arts.

At 6 p.m., a man was bitten by another individual’s dog. Although the bite was minor and both parties were cooperative, San Jose Animal Control was still contacted.

In an incident that occurred between 11:50 a.m. on July 20 and 12 p.m. July 21, but was reported on Aug. 5, an unknown suspect stole the victim’s unattended backpack and its contents from Room 200 in the Packard Electrical Engineering building.

Friday, Aug. 6

Between 12:30 p.m. and 3:40 p.m., an unknown suspect found slim pickings when he broke into the victim’s locked car in Parking Structure 5, stealing only loose change and a pair of iPod earbuds.

At 1:05 a.m., an individual was arrested, cited and released for being a minor in possession of alcohol.

Later that night at 1:50 a.m., another individual was cited and released for being drunk in public.

Sunday, Aug. 8

At 2 a.m., an arrestee was cited and released for being in possession of marijuana in a vehicle.

Also at 2 a.m., a suspect used a fire extinguisher in the hallway of Branner Hall. The suspect fled on foot and is outstanding.

Between 3 a.m. and 3:25 a.m., an arrestee was transported to the San Jose main jail and booked for intoxication.

Monday, Aug. 9

It was reported that between July 18 and July 24, an unknown suspect stole an iPod from the inventory at the Stanford Bookstore.

At 12 a.m., a non-injury hit-and-run, vehicle-vs.-vehicle collision occurred in the Roble Hall parking lot.

Monday, Aug. 10

At 10:40 a.m., an injury bike-vs.-vehicle collision occurred the corner of Lomita Drive and Mayfield Avenue.

As the director of Admission, Patterson will have broad influence over the increasingly competitive Stanford admission process. Stanford’s admission rate dropped to a record-low 7.2 percent for the 32,022 applicants to the Class of 2014. The rate for the Class of 2011, at the start of former director Shawn Abbott’s tenure, was 10.28 percent.

Patterson will also directly affect the makeup of freshman and transfer classes and affect the University’s longer-term admission strategy, including international and athletic admission. He will report to Dean of Admission Richard Shaw and oversee four assistant deans, who each manage a set of admission officers.

Patterson, 34, has worked in Berkeley admissions since Spring 2009, where he oversees a staff of 30. Berkeley had 50,312 applicants for Fall 2010 and admitted 25.6 percent, according to its website.

From 2005 to 2009, Patterson was the associate director of undergraduate admissions at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, according to an office newsletter announcing his arrival to Berkeley. Prior to that, he spent seven years as an admission and financial aid counselor at the University of Pittsburgh, from which he earned his bachelor’s degree. He also holds a master’s degree in higher education.

“It is a honor and privilege to represent such world class university,” Patterson said in an e-mail to The Daily. “I am anxiously awaiting my start at Stanford.”

McCoy said the University opened its search for a new admission director in May and finished last week. She said Shaw, who was on vacation Wednesday, involved senior administrators and admission staff in the hiring decision — one she called a “very intensive and long” process.

Patterson was one of four finalists invited to Stanford to interview after a national search, McCoy said. He replaces Abbott, whom Stanford hired in 2006. Abbott left in May to become assistant vice president for undergraduate admissions at New York University.

— Elizabeth Titus

Leslie Hume, chair of Stanford’s Board of Trustees, said that she believed the extended contract between the University and the DOE would continue to foster the cooperation that has brought on pioneering breakthroughs. Hume and Paul Golan, the DOE site manager at SLAC, signed the lease.

At a time when the results of the first user experiments at the Linac Coherent Light Source, operated by the University for the DOE, are being published, and proposals are being made for multi-purpose experimental research facilities at SLAC, officials say that the lease was signed at a significant moment.

“SLAC is a tremendous resource for Stanford, and over the next 33 years I anticipate that the research facilitated by SLAC will have a transformative impact on our society,” Hume said in an interview with the Stanford Report.

Representatives from both the University and the Department of Energy expressed favorable opinions toward the extended contract.

– Buyan Pan

After 30 years of research into cures for stress, neuroscience Prof. Robert Sapolsky has discovered a possible vaccine-like treatment for chronic stress, devising a genetically engineered formula to influence the chemistry of the brain to counteract hormones that cause stress in the human body.

Sapolsky had been conducting research on chronic stress treatment for 30 years. After graduating from Harvard in 1978 with a degree in biological anthropology, he went to Kenya to study the influence of baboons’ social standings on their health. Through studies such as determining the level of cholesterol and stress hormones in baboons’ blood, Sapolsky saw chronic stress as a dangerous condition linked to many serious health issues, including Alzheimer’s, depressive disorder and heart attacks.

He also found that in humans, hormones called flucocorticoids, released when undergoing stress, were produced in more levels than necessary and lingered after a response to a momentary alert. He therefore applied gene therapy to tackling flucocorticoid levels, using the herpes simplex virus as a carrier of the stress-counteracting genes. The virus, already being used for other gene therapies, could pass through blood-brain barriers, capillaries that prevented excess materials in the blood from entering the brain.

By replacing the dangerous genes in the herpes virus with neuroprotective ones that would neutralize stress hormones, Sapolsky thus created a vaccine-like injection to counteract stress.

When given to rodents, an injection of the modified virus triggered the release of neuroprotective proteins that slowed cell death and limited damages to the brain. While the vaccine-like treatment for stress is not yet available for clinical trials on humans, Sapolsky’s team has proved that it is a possible means to tackle stress response.

Sapolsky was unavailable for comment at press time.

– Buyan Pan

Among the 11 current FBS conferences, five of them–the ACC, Big 12, Conference USA, MAC and SEC–have at least 12 teams. Per NCAA guidelines, all five of these conferences have been split up into two divisions, allowing these conferences to hold a conference championship game. When the Pac-12 and Big Ten join this list (while the Big 12 leaves it), both will also split into two divisions. Like nearly everything surrounding conference realignment, this move is rooted in monetary interests, because a conference championship game is estimated to bring the conference around $10 million in revenue.

The issue is now how to split the conference into its two divisions. Pac-10 athletic directors have met in the past few days to discuss possible solutions, but a final decision is not expected until October. For now, any proposed divisions are merely speculation, although several ideas have been championed by different coaches and media members.

Four of the five aforementioned conferences are split geographically into either North and South Divisions or East and West Divisions, with only the ACC’s Atlantic and Coastal Divisions representing a non-geographical split. An east-west split would not work in the coastally dominated Pac-12, but a north-south split seems at first glance seems feasible–although it is not without its issues.

One problem with a north-south split is where to draw the dividing line. The Washington schools and the Oregon schools would clearly be in the North Division, while the Arizona schools and the Los Angeles schools would be in the South Division. The Bay Area schools could conceivably play in either division, leaving the two new members to fill in the remaining slots.

However, either choice of split would leave six teams in a North Division, and by all indications no team wants to be part of a North Division. The northern schools would not get to play UCLA or USC every year, so they would only travel to Los Angeles every few years, while South Division teams would go there every season. The Los Angeles area is the most important recruiting region for all the teams in the Pac-12, so exposure there is crucial for building a successful program.

Numerous coaches have spoken out against a divisional split that would isolate northern schools from the benefits of playing in southern California, so Pac-12 officials are looking at other options.

The most popular alternative being considered is the “zipper” format, named because the split would bisect the pairs of schools like a zipper. This would give both divisions equal exposure because each division would have one of the new schools and a team each from Washington, Oregon, the Bay Area, Los Angeles and Arizona.

Among the potential complications of the proposed "zipper plan" for dividing the Pac-12 is the separation of traditional rivals, whose matches are currently built into the annual conference schedule. (Stanford Daily File Photo)

While this strategy solves one problem, it creates more. The most pressing is that longtime rivals would be split into different divisions. The schools would never agree to forgo the rivalry games, so they would be forced to add the game as an annual non-divisional game. While being fairly simple for scheduling purposes, this could lead to a rivalry game being repeated a week later in the conference championship game–which could lessen the championship game, though Stanford Athletic Director Bob Bowlsby has downplayed the issue. Schools might instead move the rivalry game to earlier in the year, which in turn might downplay its significance.

Another potential issue with the zipper is figuring out how to split the teams. There are many more possible combinations for making the two divisions in a zipper format, and any choice is completely arbitrary. Therefore, the Pac-12 would have to be very careful to make the divisions relatively equal talent-wise in order to avoid stacking one division at the expense of the other.

Both scenarios have flaws, and not everyone will be content with the outcome. For instance, Stanford has played Cal, USC and UCLA every year since 1936 (other than during World War II), but few scenarios would allow that tradition to continue. Problems like this have made hybrid divisions (splitting up some rivals while keeping the rest geographical) a third idea, but those create as many dilemmas as they solve.

Stanford will likely end up playing some, but not all, of its current rivals in the new Pac-12, and while Big Game with Cal will undoubtedly continue, it could lose some of its flair when divisional supremacy comes to the fore.

The Pac-12’s final decision, however, like the conference realignment that has made deliberations necessary, will in all probability come down to money.

A major component of the revenue for college football comes from television contracts, and the Pac-12 will have to negotiate a new contract before the 2012 season. This contract will be vital for the conference because a lucrative contract means more exposure as well as more revenue for its member programs.

MARISA LANDICHO/The Stanford Daily

The Pac-10 currently has contracts with ESPN and Fox Sports Net totaling $44.4 million per year. This puts the conference at a significant disadvantage compared to the other major conferences. The Big Ten is due over $200 million per year through 2016, the SEC will receive over $200 million per year through 2023, the ACC is signed for over $150 million per year through 2022 and even the almost-collapsed Big 12 is set to make at least $60 million per year through 2015.

This deficit has spurred new Pac-10 Commissioner Larry Scott into furious action. Along with the additions of Colorado and Utah, Scott has worked to increase nationwide exposure of the Pac-10. He sent Pac-10 coaches and players to New York for a highly publicized press conference in Times Square and a tour of ESPN before heading back to the Rose Bowl. Scott even unveiled a new Pac-10 logo and website.

All the press is aimed at making the Pac-10 a presence around the country, which Scott hopes will lead to a better television contract. The Pac-10 hopes to at least match the ACC, which more than doubled its previous contract with ESPN just last month.

A more profitable television contract would mean more money for all the schools in the conference, and athletic departments rely on football to pay for many of their other sports. Unlike most conferences, however, the Pac-10 does not split its television money equally. Instead, the teams that play on television receive 55 percent of the money, making televised games even more important for each school.

For Stanford, an improved television contract, more conference exposure and a football program on the rise could coincide to bring Cardinal football to the next level. Until then, the television contract and the future of the Pac-12 remain unclear.

After a 20-8 month of July, the Giants are in the midst of close division and wild card races with a chance of reaching the playoffs for the first time in seven years.

Though making the playoffs is far from certain–San Francisco remains one game behind division leader San Diego and is tied for the wild card lead–the Giants have a better shot at playing in October than the 49ers do in January. The Orange and Black’s depth, though often criticized, is not too shabby, despite a range of challenges: last year’s hitting core has for the most part been traded away, fan-favorite Pablo Sandoval has experienced a 70-point drop in batting average down to .264, and the starting rotation has become much less dominant. Even with that, the streaky Giants are still in the mix late in the season.

San Francisco’s success is thanks to the contributions of 3-4-5 hitters Aubrey Huff, Buster Posey and Pat Burrell, additions this year that are all hitting better than .280. The team’s spectacular July was sparked perhaps most of all by Posey, who went .417 in the month and had hits in 21 consecutive games.

As Posey has cooled off somewhat since the end of his hitting streak, gracing us mere mortals with his presence by hitting under .400, the question becomes: Can the Giants hold on to their slim wild card lead, or have they peaked too early?

Indications are that San Francisco has a good shot at making the playoffs.  Despite strong wild card competition from Cincinnati, St. Louis and Philadelphia, the Giants have solid hitters lying dormant in Sandoval, Aaron Rowand, Freddy Sanchez, Juan Uribe and Edgar Renteria.  If a couple of those players can get hot, San Francisco’s lineup will be strong enough to carry it into the postseason.

Easing first-half woes by filling some gaps in the bullpen, the Giants acquired relievers Javier Lopez and Ramon Ramirez at the trade deadline, making their playoff stock much stronger. On Wednesday, infielder Mike Fontenot joined San Francisco, building a deep lineup with room for injuries (such as Renteria’s current bicep strain).

And with a strong coaching staff, exemplified when manager Bruce Bochy bought the team a game after noticing a tiny ninth-inning gaffe by Dodgers hitting coach Don Mattingly on July 20, the Giants might have what it takes to make it further into the playoffs than expected.

Regardless of how long a 2010 playoff run would last (if it happens at all), it would surely be a welcome experience for fans, who have seen just one team make it past the first series since 1989. That 2002 World Series appearance came to a disappointing end after the Giants tossed away the championship with an eighth-inning error in Game Six, and San Francisco’s playoff run the following season was cut short in the first series.

Fans have been waiting seven years for the Giants to get that far again. The San Francisco faithful already seem to appreciate the strides that the Giants have made, as home attendance is up nearly 2,000 per game this year. It’s harder to find tickets nowadays, but that’s just the way it should be to watch the exciting team that the Giants have become.

Though success by the 49ers–whose last playoff appearance also came in 2003– would also be welcomed, opportunity in 2010 will be knocking on the gates of AT&T Park, not Candlestick.

And San Francisco needs the Giants to answer that knock.

Such was the praise Stanford’s All-Sports Camp won this week–its eighth and final of the summer–from a handful of its 6- to 12-year-old campers.

“I really like it,” said a 9-year-old girl from San Jose who has come to camp for several years. “We get to play games and do stuff like rock climbing and gymnastics.”

Stanford’s All-Sports Camps provide local children with an opportunity for low-key, healthy fun and exposure to various activities. In one session earlier this week, a group of campers, above, play a game of “Medic,” a fusion of dodgeball and freezetag. (AUDREY WU/Stanford Daily)

If you’ve been around campus this summer, odds are you’ve seen the camp in action. But what exactly have the kids been up to?

The better question is where, said Pam Mahlow, camp director. The tiny athletes have roamed from the climbing wall to Manzanita Field, from Roble Field to the west campus tennis courts, Mahlow said.

Traditional sports are a big component of the camp. Counselors teach a variety of sports, including baseball, basketball, volleyball, soccer, tennis, track and field, wrestling and gymnastics. On top of this, they also squeezes in rock climbing, slip-n-slide and, of course, Doctor and Spy, a unique variant of dodge ball that is the camp’s most popular activity.

Counselors are the key to the the camp’s success, organizers say.

“Pretty much, our main job is to play with the kids, making sure they are having fun and staying safe,” said Emily Brown, a second-year counselor and local high school student. “It’s awesome to be able to hang out and play summer games as part of your job.”

“We do a little skill training, but mostly, we just let them have fun,” said Alyssa Brown ‘12, a counselor and Stanford gymnast. “If they want to learn more, they come to us.”

Dan Hernandez, head counselor, says counseling is a sought-after job. He said about half of this year’s 23 counselors are Stanford athletes.

“It’s very difficult to become a counselor here,” said Emily. “It’s a summer job that everyone wants, and being a Stanford camp, we have the opportunity to hire the best of the best.”

But it pays off, said Alyssa.

“It’s a great way for us Stanford athletes to give back during the summer. And it’s great for the kids too,” Alyssa said. “I have been athletic my whole life, and it’s fun to show them what I can do.”