Top billing.
If you could make up a law, what would it be? All suggestions were welcome when California State Sen. Josh Becker, JD/MBA ’99, announced his inaugural Ought to Be a Law contest in November. Continuing the tradition of former state legislators including Joe Simitian, MA ’00, Becker invited residents of California’s Senate District 13 to propose new laws or suggest repealing one. This year’s winner is Jill Grey Ferguson, a doctoral student studying environment and resources at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. Ferguson’s proposal (now Senate Bill 755), would require the California Energy Commission to create a one-stop digital portal where Californians can discover which energy incentive programs they’re eligible for and apply for them. The streamlined process would increase access for low-income Californians in particular. “Applying for energy incentives is simply too challenging right now, and this one-stop application will make the process substantially easier,” Becker said.
Cold and creepy.
A Slip ’N Slide of apocalyptic proportions may be forming in West Antarctica. At the heart of the Thwaites Glacier—given the vibe-killing nickname Doomsday Glacier for its potential to raise sea levels—there’s an 80-mile-wide stream of ice sliding toward the sea. “It’s like a torrential river eating away at the riverbanks and widening in the process,” said Jenny Suckale, an assistant professor of geophysics. The stream’s width influences how much ice collapses into the sea in any given time period, and a new study shows that both the eastern and western sides could creep outward by a few miles over the next two decades. While a “doomsday” scenario of several feet of sea rise is one possible outcome, relative stability is also still on the table. Getting better indications of where things are headed will require updating ice-loss models and expanding related research efforts. This finding is only the tip of the iceberg.
Making a splash.
Photo: StanfordPhoto.com
Stanford artistic swimming won two national titles—in the trio and team events—at the Collegiate Nationals and missed the top overall spot by just 0.6 points, a mere drop in the pool, if you ask us.
The charges against Trump.
In a Legal Aggregate blog Q&A, David Sklansky, a professor of law and faculty co-director of the Stanford Criminal Justice Center, discussed the 34 felony counts brought against former President Trump, which tie charges of falsification of business records to campaign finance caps and tax laws. “The campaign spending part is the novel part of the case, because there don’t seem to be other examples of federal crimes being used as a predicate for a felony violation of New York’s prohibition on falsifying business documents,” he said. “Trump’s lawyers will likely argue—among many other things—that the New York statute doesn’t sweep that broadly.”
Meanwhile, Hoover fellow Lanhee Chen told CBS that while the ongoing case is unlikely to be good for Trump’s 2024 campaign, the charges of falsifying business records is “the weakest of all the cases.” If he were Trump, he said, he’d be much more concerned about a prosecution from Georgia for 2020 election interference or potential charges related to classified documents. “The other cases out there are fundamentally less political,” Chen says. “They deal with items that I think are deeply problematic and deeply troubling.”
News that will make you weak in the knees.
More than 50 million U.S. residents have osteoarthritis (OA), which has no known treatment to prevent its progression. The disease has long been thought to be the result of wear and tear on cartilage. But now, researchers have linked OA to the same type of inflammatory allergic reaction responsible for asthma and eczema. In a longitudinal study of more than 1.3 million patients, scientists found that those with asthma or eczema had a 58 percent increased risk of developing OA over 10 years. If the patients had asthma and eczema, the risk increased by 115 percent. The findings lay the foundation for research into existing medications, like those used to treat asthma attacks, as possible candidates to inhibit the mast cells that contribute to disease-causing inflammation.
But wait, there’s more.
Last week, the Stanford Graduate Workers Union publicly launched a unionization campaign. In its proposed platform, the group seeks expansion of benefits, improved support for international graduate workers, affordable living conditions, and more. President Marc Tessier-Lavigne and Provost Persis Drell wrote in a letter to the campus community that the university greatly values the contributions of graduate students, urged students to “consider closely what it means to become a member of a union” for themselves and their successors, emphasized that graduate students “must be free to make this decision on their own,” and stressed that unionization is a decision about employment, not academic matters.
Computer scientist Marc Levoy tells the story of how the Stanford Bunny became a commonly used computer graphics 3D test model.
Mark “Mad Dog” Madsen, ’00, MA ’12, co-star of the 1998 Miracle Minute that put Stanford into the Final Four, former NBA player, and, most recently, head coach at Utah Valley University, is finally returning to the Bay—on the wrong side. In March, Madsen became head coach of Cal’s men’s basketball program.
It started with 10,800 eggs headed for a landfill. Early in the pandemic, James Kanoff, ’22, wanted to connect food banks with farmers, who were throwing away millions of pounds of unsaleable food every day. The Farmlink Project has now delivered more than 100 million pounds of food to schools, food banks, churches, mosques, and more, with the goal of providing 1 billion meals by 2026.
Check on your soggy California friends. The state has experienced 30 atmospheric rivers since October, but according to UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain, PhD ’16, that was just a taste of what’s to come. The future could include similar storms ... except with no breaks between them and double the precipitation we saw this year. “We’re nowhere near to a plausible worst-case storm and flood scenario for California,” he said.
Junior Jadon Geathers gave up tae kwon do to become a classical pianist and switched from studying physics to math. He finds beauty both in the visual representations of mathematical objects and in music, where he says colors and textures arise from combinations of chords and melodic statements. Now he encourages other students to find their own versions of beauty.
What actually is an algorithm? (Asking for a Golden Bear.) In a short video, the Graduate School of Business explains. Turns out you use algorithms all the time, from baking a cake to tying your shoes.
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