Stephen Cobbe – The Stanford Daily https://stanforddaily.com Breaking news from the Farm since 1892 Wed, 26 Mar 2014 12:27:41 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 https://stanforddaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/cropped-DailyIcon-CardinalRed.png?w=32 Stephen Cobbe – The Stanford Daily https://stanforddaily.com 32 32 204779320 Palantir co-founder talks technology transformations https://stanforddaily.com/2014/03/16/palantir-co-founder-talks-technology-transformations/ https://stanforddaily.com/2014/03/16/palantir-co-founder-talks-technology-transformations/#respond Sun, 16 Mar 2014 07:58:17 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1083504 Joe Lonsdale ’04, co-founder of Palantir and Addepar, spoke on campus last Wednesday on the subject of “the coming transformation” in technology, in a talk that also featured Lonsdale’s own career experiences across the financial and technology sectors.

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Joe Lonsdale ’04, co-founder of Palantir and Addepar, spoke on campus last Wednesday on the subject of “the coming transformation” in technology, in a talk that also featured Lonsdale’s own career experiences across the financial and technology sectors.

Lonsdale opened the talk by recalling how, as a computer science major with a strong interest in finance, he had worked as intern with PayPal. He framed the connections established through that experience as a critical factor in his subsequent success.

“Twelve years ago, PayPal was a company that attracted some of the best talent in Silicon Valley,” Lonsdale said. “Working with these guys before many of them were famous really taught me a lot.”

Lonsdale noted that he developed a close relationship with PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel ’89 J.D. ’92, an association that led to a position at Thiel’s multi-billion dollar hedge fund Clarium Capital.

However, in an effort to leverage his prior experience at PayPal, Lonsdale, along with a handful of colleagues, began working in 2004 on a project that would ultimately spawn Palantir, the Palo Alto computer software and services company that is currently valued at $9 billion.

Lonsdale remembered how daunting the undertaking had seemed at the time, joking that he and his four colleagues thought of themselves as just “kids trying to be spies.”

“One of the challenges we faced early on at PayPal was dealing with fraud,” Lonsdale said. “At one point, we were losing seven million dollars a month. So a few of us [at Clarium] decided to take what we learned at PayPal solving fraud problems for the FBI and CIA, and scale it into something bigger.”

Lonsdale framed his more recent work in the financial sector as reflecting a desire to improve efficiency and transparency in the way that resources are allocated.

“In theory, [finance] should be very data driven, like here’s what we own, here’s what possible, here’s how it fits in with what we are doing,” Lonsdale said. “And one part, stocks and bonds – the part that everyone sees – is in fact data driven. But the vast majority of it is still very relationship driven, which to me says that the system is broken.”

Drawing parallels to the military industrial complex, Lonsdale said that inefficiency, nepotism and, in some cases, outright corruption within the financial sector have come to characterize the way business is done, and argued that technology could have a curative effect in the decades to come.

“When you look at how to make an impact, most people focus on the obvious areas like education and healthcare, which are valuable,” Lonsdale said. “But I think that there are a few other systems that have as big if not a bigger impact, like energy, government, and especially finance.”

More recently, Lonsdale applied his experience in system optimization to the local government sector, co-founding OpenGov, a start-up designed to make government budgets and financial data more easily accessible.

“It’s hard because governments are more stubborn than anyone else about modernizing and changing,” Lonsdale explained. “But I think it’s much easier to fix things when there’s metrics that are comparable. There are tens of thousands of cities and municipalities, so you can look and say okay, this city is doing well in these five areas but in these 10 areas, it’s spending twice as much relative to these metrics.”

The event was part of an ongoing lunchtime series hosted by the Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students (BASES).

Contact Stephen Cobbe at scobbe “at” stanford “dot” edu.

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Click for change https://stanforddaily.com/2012/06/07/click-for-change/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/06/07/click-for-change/#respond Thu, 07 Jun 2012 10:04:13 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1068028 The website, founded by Rattray and a former dormmate, Mark Dimas ’02, facilitates the creation of online social petitions to address specific instances of social inequity. Petitions support a host of different causes, including gay rights, the environment, economic and criminal justice, education and immigration. Nearly 15,000 petitions are started each month on the site -- a number that continues to grow.

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Ben Rattray ’02, founder of Change.org, discusses his popular social justice site

Correction: The original version of this article incorrectly reported that Change.org estimates $100 million in revenue within the next three years. Predicted annual revenue for this year is $15 million.

By his junior year at Stanford, Ben Rattray ’02 planned to become a banker, earn a lot of money, then retire and enter politics. A double major in economics and political science, Rattray was well-equipped for such a career path. But after returning home for winter break that year, one of his brothers revealed that he was gay and everything changed for Rattray.

Click for change
(Courtesy of Alison Bank)

“My brother said the thing that was most painful when he was younger wasn’t the people who were explicitly homophobic or anti-gay that he saw around him, but that people would refuse to stand up and speak out against it, people like me,” Rattray said. “Frankly, I was ashamed in a deep way for the first time in my life.”

Over the following weeks, Rattray realized that finance was not his calling. He wanted to somehow shed light on stories of social injustice and help give a voice to those who had been victimized. Eventually, these ideas culminated in the launch of Change.org in 2007.

The website, founded by Rattray and a former dormmate, Mark Dimas ’02, facilitates the creation of online social petitions to address specific instances of social inequity. Petitions support a host of different causes, including gay rights, the environment, economic and criminal justice, education and immigration. Nearly 15,000 petitions are started each month on the site — a number that continues to grow.

“My concern was that there was a disconnect between general interest in taking action and the specific, practical ways to do so effectively,” Rattray said.

After graduating from Stanford, Rattray received a master’s degree from the London School of Economics (LSE), where he weighed how best he could turn his ideas on social change into action. He then traveled to Washington, D.C., to work as a political consultant, and later as co-founder of GFS, a social entrepreneurship venture that provides software to help nonprofits automate the federal grant application process.

During his time in Washington, Rattray experienced firsthand “how power works” and the many barriers to galvanizing nationwide change through the existing political framework. But when he learned of a new website called TheFacebook (later Facebook), he recognized the incredible potential for connecting large groups of people with the Internet. While Mark Zuckerberg’s website centered on sharing photos and friends, Rattray wanted a website that would unite people based on mutual grievances.

Change.org began as a social networking website designed for people with a common interest in bringing about social change. It shifted focus after Rattray witnessed the power of the online petition in late 2010, when a South African woman named Ndumie Funda used Change.org to start a petition to end the “corrective rape” of lesbians. The petition, which was launched from an Internet café in Cape Town, gathered over 171,000 signatures from 175 countries. In response, the South African government formed a special team to tackle the problem.

Domestically, Change.org attempts to circumvent the political process of lawmaking and debate by focusing its attention only on specific instances of a broader issue.

“Right now, it’s legal in 29 states to fire someone for being gay. Because of that, there are lots of people fighting this national battle for equality around a bill called the Employment Nondiscrimination Act — but it won’t pass in Congress,” Rattray said. “But if you look at the way that the issue manifests itself in local communities, it’s not as divisive.”

A year and a half ago, Seth Stambaugh, a teacher outside of Portland, Oreg., was fired for being gay. In response, angry parents and community members started a Change.org petition that opposed the firing. Supporters sent thousands of emails to the school district and protested at school board meetings to demand Stambaugh’s reinstatement. Eventually, the school district rehired the teacher, issued an apology and passed a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) inclusive nondiscrimination policy.

“An individual success like that spawns dozens and eventually hundreds of other campaigns of people fighting the firing of gay Americans in other circumstances,” Rattray said. “This in turn starts to build overall momentum such that it becomes more likely that the national issue will pass in the future because of this aggregation of victories.”

But the most widely felt Change.org petition came in March from the parents of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed 17-year-old boy who was shot and killed by a neighborhood watchman. The petition, which received an unprecedented 2.2 million signatures, helped bring Travyon’s death to the national spotlight.

Charlotte Hill, communications manager for Change.org, remembered the atmosphere at the organization’s San Francisco headquarters while the petition was going viral.

“As excited as we were to see the petition from Trayvon’s parents taking off and gathering support, we all knew that a victory would only be a victory in a certain sense; this kid had died and there was no bringing him back,” Hill said. “But there was also a feeling of pride in our model that it could serve Trayvon’s parents in this way, and that it could allow their story to more easily spread and resonate with people across the country.”

A number of causes affecting the Stanford community have also found a platform in Change.org. The site hosted a petition to the Israeli government to free Stanford graduate Fadi Quran ’10 in February of this year, and is currently hosting a petition to President Obama to commute the 36-month jail sentence of Missouri businessman Shakir Hamoodi, father of Salahodeen Abdul-Kafi ’12.

While the majority of successful petitions succeed independently of any help from Change.org, the organization’s staff, which has grown from 20 to almost 90 in little over a year, plays a role in fostering the development of certain petitions by offering services like peer-to-peer support, campaign advising and media training.

“We look for petitions with an incredible personal story that appeal to a broad swathe of people and that aren’t highly divisive,” Rattray said.

Another part of the team focuses on developing algorithms to match petitions with the people who are most likely to be passionate about the cause. Change.org’s emphasis on technological innovation is reflected in the many rows of computers that fill the organization’s San Francisco office. In fact, Rattray said that without the team’s chief technology officer, Dimas, the organization would not have succeeded.

“The most critical element in the beginning stages of almost any start-up is having someone who is extremely technically competent,” Rattray said. “The only way we got through all the challenges we faced was Mark [Dimas] and his willingness to wake up every day to code at home for 14 hours in his underwear, though he says he was dressed.”

Tyler Rattray, Ben’s brother and executive assistant of Change.org, also made an important contribution to the organization in its early stages. As a college freshman, he loaned his life savings to help keep the organization afloat in its first year.

Four years later, Change.org is now profitable and growing rapidly.  This year, the organization will bring in an estimated $15 million in revenue by running campaigns for a variety of organizations such as Amnesty International.

Tyler joined the Change.org team after having a lengthy conversation with his brother about the direction in which his life was headed.

“Ben always talked about the importance of leaving a legacy no matter what you’re doing,” he said. “After our conversation, I realized that building a tool that could give anyone the power to leave their own legacy was such a powerful thing and was something that I wanted to be a part of.”

Looking toward the future, Ben Rattray plans to further expand into the international market and develop the website’s mobile interface. Last year, mobile phone activity accounted for 6 percent of Change.org’s total traffic. This year, that number rose to 28 percent.

“The future’s clearly in the computer in your pocket so we’re spending a lot of time finding more effective ways to engage people through their cell phones to allow for more responsive and dynamic types of organizing,” Rattray said.

When reflecting on his time at Stanford, Rattray said he believes that the culture of audacity that permeates the campus was a key inspiration for him.

“Instead of making it seem like a scary thing, Stanford makes quitting your job, raising money and disrupting an industry you have no experience with seem like the most natural thing in the world,” he said.

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Nathan Wolfe: Exterminator of epidemics https://stanforddaily.com/2012/05/08/exterminator-of-epidemics/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/05/08/exterminator-of-epidemics/#respond Tue, 08 May 2012 10:02:25 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1065750 High above Sutter Street in downtown San Francisco, a team of Global Viral Forecasting Initiative (GVFI) scientists is hard at work studying how the next viral epidemic might be contained or prevented. From its sixth-floor office, the group has a clear view of the bustling city around them, a fitting reminder of the enormous scale […]

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High above Sutter Street in downtown San Francisco, a team of Global Viral Forecasting Initiative (GVFI) scientists is hard at work studying how the next viral epidemic might be contained or prevented.

From its sixth-floor office, the group has a clear view of the bustling city around them, a fitting reminder of the enormous scale of the work. Tribal artwork hangs from the walls in the office, directly across from a world map dotted with the organization’s different field sites around the globe.

It is here that GVFI founder and CEO, Nathan Wolfe ’92, coordinates the organization’s multipronged approach to combatting epidemics. Wolfe, the Lorry I. Lokey visiting professor in human biology at Stanford, has received a great deal of coverage in the media for his work in recent years. In 2011, he was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people in an article that called GVFI “the CIA of infectious disease.” Wolfe published a book that same year, “The Viral Storm,” detailing his work in the context of the historical interaction between humans and viruses.

Wolfe left his tenured professorship at UCLA in 2008 to found GVFI and change the way scientists fight epidemics. In an increasingly globalized and interconnected world, the possibilities for an epidemic to take hold are greater than ever before, but so are the resources available to stop one. The problem Wolfe and others witness, however, is that the current strategies are often more focused on responding to pandemics than working to avoid them in the first place.

Nathan Wolfe: Exterminator of epidemics
Nathan Wolfe, founder and CEO of Global Viral Forescasting Initiative (GVFI), has dedicated his professional career to combatting infectious diseases. (Courtesy of Tom Clynes)

“Not too long ago, people said that the best way to stop a heart attack was to actually wait for the heart attack to occur, then do bypass surgery,” Wolfe said. “About 10 years ago, it became clear to a small number of us [scientists] that what had happened in individual medicine, where it had become very obvious that an ounce of prevention was worth a pound of cure, also made sense on a population level.”

As a boy, Wolfe was drawn into the world of science by a particular fascination with some of humanity’s close relatives, the chimpanzees and the gorillas. He remembers watching a National Geographic documentary that detailed the close genetic connection between humans and apes. This portrayal clashed with his memories of going to the zoo, where a clearly defined hierarchy separated humans and animals, often by iron bars.

“I remember the idea that by interrogating nature and studying it, you could fundamentally change the way we saw the world,” Wolfe said, reflecting on the memory.

Wolfe’s fascination with apes continued into his adult life, leading him to conduct field research in Africa as a graduate student at Harvard. The experience paved the way for many years of work in the field and his future path in virology.

During his time in the field, Wolfe would contract malaria three different times, the last of which nearly killed him. It is not hard to see why he is sometimes known as “the Indiana Jones of virus hunters” among professionals in his discipline.

Through sometimes perilous field research, Wolfe gleaned valuable insights into some of the avenues of transmission that viruses can take. In particular, Wolfe recognized the tremendous danger of viruses jumping from animals to humans when local hunters prepared meat. Many of the viruses that affect humans originate in animals, and the interspecies leap is rarely easier than during the close and intimate contact of butchering.

Though monitoring such activity in rural parts of Africa is often difficult and costly, technological innovations are allowing scientists like Wolfe to track viruses in a way they simply could not before.

“Fifteen or 20 years ago, the best we could do was to be able to look at viruses that were cultured in the laboratory,” Wolfe said. “Now new sequencing technologies allow us to look at the sum total of genetic diversity in a particular specimen, so we’re finding viruses that we otherwise would not [have].”

Members of Wolfe’s team at GVFI put these technologies to use when investigating a recent virus outbreak. They discovered a previously unrecorded virus using deep sequencing techniques. Methods available even a year or two ago would have completely missed the virus, due to its low concentration in the samples studied. The group plans to publish these findings in the coming months.

A critical part of fighting epidemics is simply identifying a given virus, which can offer insights into how quickly the virus will spread, how deadly it might be and what response is appropriate in order to contain it. For example, the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the virus responsible for acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), went unidentified and untreated for decades in human populations. Wolfe called this “a stunning failure in human health services.” In order to prevent this from happening again, GVFI has innovatively used local hunters in Africa to collect dried blood samples of their kills, which are later sent to labs for analysis.

In the years since Wolfe began working on preventing epidemics, a growing recognition has emerged in governments and organizations around the world about the need to adopt a more proactive approach to combatting viruses, especially in places where viruses are easily transmitted from animals to humans.

“It’s exciting for me because now there are a number of young organizations that are starting to do this work, and it’s becoming more of an ecosystem where folks are approaching different angles about how to address these problems,” Wolfe said.

Wolfe also noted the importance of more traditional structures like the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Center for Disease Control (CDC), both of which GVFI regularly coordinates with as part of the WHO Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network. But Wolfe believes the old model is rapidly disappearing.

“Scientists in those [traditional] institutions recognize that they have a lot of limitations in terms of their mission, in terms of their funding and in terms of their ability to move quickly,” Wolfe said. “I think it’s clear to all of us now that the world in five or 10 years is going to look a lot different than it does now in terms of the kinds of structures out there.”

Though GVFI now has staff working in six different African and Asian countries, Wolfe plays more than just the role of administrator as CEO. He still regularly goes out into the field to conduct research and is closely involved in the collaborative analysis of the viruses. Wolfe also brainstorms directly with many of GVFI’s local scientists in Africa, Asia and elsewhere around the world about the best approaches to engaging with the local populations.

Under Wolfe’s guidance, GVFI has expanded into a number of diverse areas for tracking viruses. Wolfe’s background makes him well suited for this kind of innovation, as he sees a parallel between his undergraduate education in human biology (HumBio) at Stanford and the company’s interdisciplinary and collaborative approach to problem solving.

“We work with computer scientists, a lot of virologists, a number of epidemiologists, and one of my team members is a medical anthropologist,” Wolfe said. “The way my career has worked out is fundamentally ‘HumBio’ in a sense. It’s just, pick a problem and pick whatever sorts of disciplines are necessary to effectively address the problem.”

Over the past couple of years, GVFI has also pursued the burgeoning field of digital epidemiology. Tapping into the massive amounts of data available through the Internet, digital epidemiology allows scientists to forecast trends in illness without ever leaving the laboratory. For example, epidemiologists are exploiting the online availability of over-the-counter drug sales records to make short-term predictions about sickness, according to The Atlantic.

On Wolfe’s team, Stephanie Nevins ’11, a GVFI intern and Wolfe’s former student, is currently exploring data mining techniques for extracting information from social networks to plot trends in epidemics.

During her senior spring at Stanford, Nevins took Wolfe’s Viral Lifestyles seminar. For the class, she worked on a project that eventually turned into a formal business plan to overhaul the way patients interface with their medical provider, which attracted Wolfe’s attention.

“In his class, we really asked big questions about how we can change the way we think about public health,” Nevins recalled. “It was so interesting to realize that you could study disease in populations in high-risk places and actually have the ability to stop them before they spread.”

Wolfe is also able to balance this broader view with a sense of pragmatism in his teaching.

“He is one of the most approachable, thought-provoking professors I have interacted with at Stanford,” said Kasey Kissick ’12, who also took the seminar. “He teaches in a very practical manner, leaving students with a sense of guidance and direction, rather than just a collection of abstract concepts and facts.”

Toward the end of “The Viral Storm,” Wolfe writes about the necessity of establishing a 24-hour “situation room” as a command and control center for preventing epidemics. The organization would employ the innovative management of a Silicon Valley start-up to do a variety of tasks, such as sorting massive amounts of data, maintaining regular contact with global health leaders and using a series of field sites to monitor the situation on the ground.

While Wolfe writes that no such situation room exists today, the office above Sutter Street doesn’t appear far from his vision.

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Diplomacy and dissidents https://stanforddaily.com/2012/05/07/1065678/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/05/07/1065678/#respond Mon, 07 May 2012 10:02:32 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1065678 For a farm boy from southeast Kentucky, the odds of dining with Bill Clinton are about as good as the chances of feasting with Kim Jong-Il. But in the summer of 2009, David Straub, director of the Korean Studies Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), did both as part of a small delegation sent to secure the release of two American journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, who were held in North Korea for allegedly entering the country illegally.

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Diplomacy and dissidents
(Courtesy of David Straub)

Korea expert shares experience, views on U.S.-Korea relations 

Correction: The original version of this article incorrectly stated that David Straub is director of the Korean Studies Program. He is the program’s associate director. Gi-wook Shin is the director.

For a farm boy from southeast Kentucky, the odds of dining with Bill Clinton are about as good as the chances of feasting with Kim Jong-Il. But in the summer of 2009, David Straub, associate director of the Korean Studies Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), did both as part of a small delegation sent to secure the release of two American journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, who were held in North Korea for allegedly entering the country illegally.

“I wish I could say that I played a major role in the incident, but the very capable people in the U.S. government worked it out in an astute way and we were on the ground for less than 24 hours,” Straub said.

Straub, who had previously visited North Korea four times, was chosen for the mission because of his extensive knowledge of Korean culture and politics.

“Basically, I was there as a resource person. I could understand the Korean that the North Koreans were speaking so I could correct the interpretations,” Straub said. “I was able to reassure our people that what the North Koreans were proposing was not a problem.”

Straub also recalled giving the two journalists some gastronomical advice following their release–no doubt feeling like an expert on the subject following his fine dining with high dignitaries.

“On the way back to the United States…I advised the two women not to eat much of the greasy American food we had out on the table,” he said with a laugh. “They had been eating Korean food for many months, and if you suddenly change your diet like that, you can easily get sick.”

Straub brings both gastronomical and professional experience to his current position at Stanford’s Korean studies program, where he has worked since 2008. Thirty years of experience in the U.S. Foreign Service provide him with a unique perspective on academia.

“One thing that is special about APARC is that you have people like David [Straub] who come not from a purely academic background, but who are comfortable in an academic setting and who can bring the knowledge that they have gained in other places in their lives to the University,” said Daniel Sneider, associate director for research at APARC.

Growing up in southeastern Kentucky, Straub had few opportunities to travel but always longed to visit other countries. After graduating from the University of Louisville and attending graduate school at Harvard for a year, Straub left to join the Foreign Service and was assigned to work in Germany for two years. Building on his years of classroom German, Straub became fluent in the language by the end of his stay in the country.

“At that point, I was feeling pretty cocky and I thought that now that I’d learned a European language, I ought to tackle a really hard language,” he said.

In 1979, Straub was assigned a position in South Korea. Because speaking Korean was essential for his new role in the U.S. embassy, Straub attended a language school in Washington and later a top university in Seoul to master the difficult language.

Straub’s work in South Korea involved maintaining lines of communication with dissidents, student movements and Christian organizations involved in human rights and democratization efforts after the 1979 military coup. He regularly met with top opposition members and leaders during this “interesting and difficult time for South Korea.”

These everyday interactions with broad segments of Korean society would later serve Straub well in the classroom.

“Because of his almost perfect command of the Korean language, his extensive knowledge of Korean culture and especially his linguistic abilities, I felt a familiarity and a sense of intimacy with him,” said Youna Oh, a former student of Straub’s who is studying at Stanford as part of her overseas training for diplomacy in South Korea.

Straub recalled that following the 1979 military takeover many Koreans blamed the United States for not doing enough to prevent the coup and supporting dictator General Chun Doo-hwan.

He remembered that as a 28-year-old, it was frustrating to be one of the only people in contact with the opposition leaders. According to Straub, the U.S. ambassador rarely met with leaders of dissident groups, some of whom went on to lead the country following its return to democracy in 1987. This was in line with President Reagan’s policy, which emphasized communism and not totalitarianism as the real threat to peace.

“Traditionally, it has been a tenet of American foreign policy that people of our embassies should stay in contact with all legitimate members of society,” Straub said, expressing his disapproval of the strategy.

Straub would again experience the frustration of diplomatic intransigence during the Six-Party Talks on North Korean’s nuclear program from 2002 to 2004. Responsible for assembling the diplomatic briefing books for the negotiators, Straub remembered that the event was large and quasi-public, so carrying out successful negotiations was difficult. The first Bush administration was also determined not to have side negotiations with the North Koreans, which minimized the space for compromise.

“The world is a complex place. You can’t just take these rigid positions and be black and white all of the time,” Straub said, adding that the Bush administration would engage in more bilateral talks during its second term.

Now, as a teacher, Straub is able to foster dialogue and understanding among his students.

“We have students in our classes from China, Japan and South Korea among other places,” Straub said. “I think it’s great that future leaders like these can study this early in their career with people who have worked in the U.S. government and who are speaking to them frankly. I think it will make them more capable officials and on the whole will help improve U.S. relations abroad.”

Gea Kang ’11 said she believes many of the discussion and communication skills she gained from Straub’s tutelage help with the work she does in governance through a fellowship from the Haas Center for Public Service.

“I think it is difficult for any instructor to strike a balance between remaining substantive and fostering discussion, but Straub did a very good job navigating that effectively and patiently,” Kang said.

After his time in South Korea, Straub was stationed with the Foreign Service in various locations around the world. In Washington, he spent time writing guidance packets for press officers who often faced difficult questions about the Korean dictatorship’s alleged atrocities and use of torture.

When he assumed a position at the U.S. embassy in Japan, Straub found himself in a culturally fascinating environment, yet missed working in South Korea’s less mature political scene. After several years, Straub returned to Korea, where he worked on and off, accumulating almost 12 years of experience in the nation by the end of his diplomatic career.

By the time he shifted to academia in 2006, teaching initially at Johns Hopkins University before coming to Stanford, Straub was ready for a change.

“When you’re in government, you spend all day long going from meeting to meeting, dealing with the crisis du jour, and you spend a tremendous amount of time coordinating,” Straub said. “While it’s very interesting, it’s exhausting after a while and doesn’t allow you to focus deeply on one thing.”

At Stanford, Straub has been focused on researching topics related to North Korea. In April, he moderated an event at Stanford featuring two North Korean defectors who recounted harrowing stories of hardship in their country.

Straub found the event moving.

“In substance, I had heard similar stories, but when you hear it directly–especially from two young people–that’s very powerful,” he said.

Straub sees an important message in such events. He believes that Americans do not focus enough attention on the humanitarian issues in North Korea, although he acknowledges that this is in part due to the lack of free press. However, he also believes that American society as a whole is not well versed enough in international affairs.

But it is unlikely that Straub’s students will be caught unprepared by an international incident. In a class he co-teaches with his colleagues on U.S. policy in Northeast Asia, students are asked to produce memorandums that detail an appropriate response to a hypothetical crisis. The idea is for students to pretend they are National Security Council personnel and draft the paper accordingly.

“Even after working 30 years in government, that’s not an easy thing to do,” Straub said.

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‘We will achieve peace’ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/04/26/we-will-achieve-peace/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/04/26/we-will-achieve-peace/#comments Thu, 26 Apr 2012 10:02:34 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1064639 Quran, 24, has bachelor’s degrees in both physics and international relations from Stanford. He is a leading figure in the burgeoning Palestinian youth movement committed to achieving “freedom, justice and dignity” for the Palestinian people.

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 Palestinian activist Fadi Quran ’10 seeks a nonviolent path to the future of the Middle East

At its core, quantum physics is a science of probabilities.  When dealing with particle uncertainties and ambiguous dualities, a calculated likelihood is the closest thing to certainty. Fadi Quran ‘10 believes there is a lesson in this concept that can be applied to his work in social activism.

“The paths that particles take have multiple histories, each of which you must add together in order to predict the probabilities of where the particles may land,” Quran said. “In much the same way, as a social activist, every time I try and plan a strategy in advance, I take all the possible scenarios on that path and add them up to approximate what needs to be done to achieve the most successful result.”

'We will achieve peace'
(Courtesy of Fadi Quran)

Quran, 24, has bachelor’s degrees in both physics and international relations from Stanford. He is a leading figure in the burgeoning Palestinian youth movement committed to achieving “freedom, justice and dignity” for the Palestinian people. The movement, according to Quran, is not associated with any political factions, and categorically rejects the use of violence to achieve its goals.

Growing up in Ramallah in the West Bank, Quran witnessed firsthand the destructiveness brought on by violent protest during the Second Palestinian Intifada, which began in 2000.

“Your whole worldview changes,” Quran said, as he recalled bullets flying through his sister’s bedroom.

The devastation of the uprising impressed upon him a feeling of responsibility for changing the status quo in the Occupied Territories.

In recent months, Quran and his movement have risen greatly in prominence, receiving coverage from news organizations such as The Washington Post, Time Magazine and Al Jazeera. The “Freedom Rides” the group undertook last November received especially strong media attention. Inspired by the freedom riders of the 1960s civil rights movement who defiantly rode on segregated buses through the Jim Crow South, Quran and fellow activists boarded an Israeli commuter bus in the West Bank, hoping to end what they see as a discriminatory system.

Shortly after the bus departed for Jerusalem however, it was stopped and boarded by Israeli police. All six of the activists were arrested for trying to enter Jerusalem without the proper permits.

Last February at a protest in Hebron, Quran was again detained by Israeli authorities. This time, it was on charges of obstructing a law enforcement officer, assault and resisting arrest. During the incident, Quran was pepper-sprayed by police. Though he was released five days later on bail for lack of definitive evidence, Quran remains under investigation and is due for questioning again on May 3, as The Daily reported.

Being in prison had a profound effect on Quran. He spent his first two days in solitary confinement.

“When they [Israeli security forces] brought me in, I couldn’t see anything because of the pepper spray — the only thing open was my mind’s eye,” Quran recounted.

The pain and isolation forced Quran to evaluate his priorities.

“During that time, I thought about the world I wanted to see, the legacy I wanted to leave behind,” he said. “I was in pain and I was afraid for the first hour or two, but it was one of the most eye-opening experiences of my life.”

Quran’s resilience comes from a number of sources. As a teenager, he was moved by books about Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, Jr., two activists who also spent time in prison. The Palestinian community, too, inspired young Quran.

As a 10-year-old boy, he witnessed the selflessness of those who risked their lives to bring food to the needy and to assist the elderly who couldn’t leave their homes.

“Usually when we think of mentorship, we think of individuals — here in Palestine, the whole community acts organically to grow and mentor young men and women,” he said.

'We will achieve peace'
(Courtesy of Fadi Quran)

But Quran’s greatest source of inspiration continues to be his mother and grandmothers.

“One of the things that I’ve learned through my life experience is that powerful women who work hard, who nurture and care for their family, friends and community, are the key to a successful society and to great individuals,” he said. “They are the greatest individuals.”

Quran would also develop a close connection with the faculty and students at Stanford after his arrival in 2006. While he was applying to colleges, Quran hoped to pursue his interests in physics while studying a subject that could help him change the situation in Palestine. After consulting with friends and teachers, he discovered that Stanford was a place where he could do both.

Life in California, however, was vastly different from the one Quran had in Palestine.

“I remember days during the month-long curfews when I had to help my family and neighbors get bread,” Quran said. The dichotomy of those experiences and his life at Stanford, a “land of milk and honey,” was an important motivational tool.

“Seeing how challenging life actually is for some people gives you something to prepare for, to work toward,” he said.

Through classes and on-campus activism, Quran quickly developed his argumentative skills and cemented his place in the Stanford community.

“One of the great things about Stanford is that you can debate issues without the sense of fear that might be created at other places,” Quran said.

As a freshman, Quran became an active participant in the debate over whether Stanford should divest from companies allegedly associated with the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank. Taking a strong stance on this controversial issue ensured his position at the center of numerous campus debates.  But, according to faculty members and peers, he always conducted himself with restraint, open-mindedness and tolerance.

“Fadi [Quran] has an incredible capacity to empathize with the perspectives of others,” said Allen Weiner, senior lecturer in law, who taught a conflict resolution seminar in which Quran was a student. Weiner remembers moderating a debate in one of his classes when Quran came under substantial pressure from students on the pro-Israel side of the argument.

“What was really impressive about Fadi was how committed he was to finding areas of common ground and mutual understanding, while still being very staunch in his defense of the interests of his community,” Weiner said.

Joe Gettinger ’11, who befriended Quran at Stanford, admired Quran’s insistence on understanding the other perspective on the divestment issue, but said he believes the most telling aspect of Quran’s character was his personal efforts to bridge the gap between communities.

“I remember he would come to Shabbat dinner to get to know people and to learn about their perspective,” Gettinger said. “That really said a lot because there was very little to gain politically from such a move, it was really about getting to know the community. That’s what makes Fadi so special.”

Being at Stanford also taught Quran important lessons in innovation and entrepreneurship that he would later apply to his start-up in alternative energy, Tayara Energy. Running the business, which is located in the West Bank, requires Quran to tap into his interdisciplinary education, making use of his skills as both a community organizer and a scientist.  Quran sees the start-up as one step toward fulfilling the goal of Palestinian self-sufficiency.

Currently, Tayara Energy’s major projects include designing a high altitude wind generator to provide electricity to rural communities, setting up programs to train young people in proper recycling procedures to benefit refugee camps and integrating affordable solar panels into more construction projects in the Middle East.

When Quran is not participating in protests or running his company, he studies constitutional law and revolutions at Birzeit University in Ramallah, where he is pursuing his master’s degree. Balancing activism, entrepreneurship and academics can often present a heavy load.

The way Quran sees it, though, “it is not so much a question of balancing as it is a question of integration.”

“A lot of the time at Stanford you’re taught to make compartments…something I’ve learned is that actually in most cases, I can integrate everything together through an interdisciplinary approach,” Quran said.

But that doesn’t mean life isn’t full of stress for Quran. The day before his interview with The Daily, a friend of Quran’s was arrested in Bahrain. Quran spent an anxious night worrying about the fate of his friend and writing a paper due the next day.

His community, he says, has become accustomed to arrests.

“There is always a sense of fear and anxiousness when a family member or friend is arrested,” he said. “Sometimes there is a fleeting sense of despair, but it is not as raw as the first time was.”

Regarding the future, Quran is cautiously optimistic, not only for the Palestinians, but for the whole region. All around him, he said, he sees a new generation of Middle Eastern youth focused on social and business entrepreneurship. He also sees young Arab academics in unprecedented numbers pursuing “science and truth.”

All this, he believes, points toward a tipping point in the near future in which acts of nonviolence generate more acts of nonviolence until the Palestinian youth movement and others like it become full-fledged nonviolent uprisings.

“Then, we will achieve peace,” he said.

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Crossing Boundaries: Saldívar explores ethnic identity through literature https://stanforddaily.com/2012/04/17/crossing-boundaries-saldivar-explores-ethnic-identity-through-literature/ https://stanforddaily.com/2012/04/17/crossing-boundaries-saldivar-explores-ethnic-identity-through-literature/#comments Tue, 17 Apr 2012 10:02:31 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1063603 As a winner of the 2011 National Humanities Medal presented by President Obama, Saldívar belongs to a distinguished group that includes writers such as Toni Morrison, John Updike and Elie Wiesel.

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Crossing Boundaries: Saldívar explores ethnic identity through literature
English and comparative literature professor Ramon Saldívar received a National Humanities Medal from President Obama for his work in ethnic and Chicano studies. (Courtesy of Stanford News Service)

Hanging in Ramón Saldívar’s office, across from his many shelves of books, is a framed poster of “The Last Supper of the Chicano Heroes.” The mural, painted on the walls of Casa Zapata’s dining hall, bears the solemnity of a Da Vinci painting, but also brings to mind the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper” album cover with its medley of colorfully garbed icons including Che Guevara, Bobby Kennedy and Frida Kahlo.

As a winner of the 2011 National Humanities Medal presented by President Obama, Saldívar belongs to a distinguished group that includes writers such as Toni Morrison, John Updike and Elie Wiesel.

Last September, Saldívar became director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CSRE) at Stanford. For Saldívar, engaging in ethnic studies is a way of fostering a sense of commonality among America’s many different cultural identities.

Growing up in the border town of Brownsville, Texas, Saldívar was exposed to different cultures at an early age. He vividly remembers seeing the portraits of his uncles in their U.S. military uniforms standing in front of the crossed flags of Mexico and the United States.

“In a very natural way, these pictures represented our binational allegiance, the transnational identification that my family was both Mexican and American,” he said.

When Saldívar left home to attend the University of Texas at Austin, he entered a world characterized by a lack of diversity and a monolingual environment fundamentally different from the one in which he grew up.

However, as a graduate student at Yale, he found himself in an experimental atmosphere in which new ways to think about literature were developing. It was at Yale that he became well versed in European modernism and the Anglo-American tradition, which would later culminate in the publication of his first book, “Figural Language in the Novel: The Flowers of Speech from Cervantes to Joyce,” in 1984.

Inspired by the momentous events and movements of the 1970s, such as the Vietnam War, feminism, labor struggles and the civil rights movement, he chose areas of study in which the canonicity of literature was being radically rethought and reformed.

According to Saldívar, this experience had a profound impact. When he returned to the University of Texas to assume his first teaching position, he felt it was his duty “to open up our sense of why certain kinds of writing are important” and to explore under-recognized works by minorities and women.

Saldívar explored minority-centered writings in his second book published in 1990, “Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference,” which explored the narratives of Chicano communities.

“The book pioneered the field of Chicano literary studies and really helped to recognize the importance of that literary tradition from a hemispheric perspective,” said English Department Chair Gavin Jones,

Prior to this book, there was no definitive account of Chicano literature, which Saldívar found astonishing, considering the fact that certain Chicano communities had already been established for almost 180 years.

Since childhood, Saldívar had wanted to help his community in Brownsville and others like it by representing their unheard voices. He reflected that, in a way, writing Chicano Narratives afforded him that opportunity.

Saldívar said he felt that the writing process was even more meaningful because of his incorporation of the book’s material into his classes.

In addition to his extensive archival research for his third book, a biography on Mexican-American folklorist Americo Paredes, Saldívar used insights obtained from his students to help shape the final product.

“This was a book that sprang from conversation. I’d put out ideas to my students, and they’d respond,” Saldívar said. “I thought it was important to add this interactive aspect to the whole process.”

Saldívar’s target audience included young readers he hoped would take ownership of a “grand tradition of creativity and proud history” not as discussed but still belonging to this younger generation as Americans.

For Saldívar, much of the satisfaction he received from his work inside and outside of the classroom came from opening new avenues for student exploration of literature by allowing students to study writers that they might otherwise never encounter.

Saldívar connected this awakening of literature-induced awareness to his description of his own childhood.

“When you’re young the world you live in is the world,” Saldívar said. “You don’t know other ways of being.”

Saldivar said he has found that when students discover these other ways of “being” in his classes, the discovery has a meaningful impact on them.

“Sometimes two, three or four years after a student graduates, I’ll get a letter from them saying one of the books we read changed their life,” he said.

In 1994, Saldívar led a committee at Stanford that recommended bringing together the African and African American Studies Program and new programs in Asian American, Chicano and Native American studies. This led to the creation of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CSRE) a year and a half later.

The CSRE program has since grown into a model of ethnic studies for universities across the country. According to Saldívar, it is critical that different ethnic studies be studied in concert with one another to emphasize not only the uniqueness of each culture, but also the overarching commonality that makes them all American.

“Where ethnic studies programs are not done as well is where they break down into isolated pockets, where there is no sense of each group’s relationship to a bigger set of shared issues, goals and ideals,” he said. “Here at Stanford, the ethnic studies program pays full attention and respect to the independence of individual communities, but also creates opportunities for them to work together and communicate across ethnic lines.”

Saldívar’s own work does not sit in isolation in academia. Instead, his ideas continue to profoundly affect those around him.

“As a Chicana who aspires to become a literary critic one day, I was quite moved when I watched the live stream of Professor Saldívar receiving the National Humanities Medal from my laptop,” said one of his former students, Guadalupe Carrillo, a sixth-year English graduate student. “At that moment, I realized what makes Professor Saldívar a true intellectual leader is that he not only produces good ideas, he produces ideas that touch the lives of many people in this country.”

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