Thomas Watson, former CEO and chairman of IBM, was famous for putting the word "THINK" on prominent walls of every IBM building. The tradition has carried on into modern times. Not long ago in a restroom at IBM's Watson Center, a supervisor placed a "THINK" sign directly above the sink.
The next day, when he entered the restroom, he glanced at the sign. Just below it and immediately above the soap dispenser, someone had carefully lettered another sign that which read: "THOAP!"
How often do you laugh at work? Actually, humor can make a serious difference. In the workplace, at home, in all areas of life - looking for a reason to laugh is necessary. A sense of humor helps us to get through the dull times, cope with the difficult times, enjoy the good times and manage the scary times.
Case in point: six-year-old Hannah. Hannah encountered one of the most frightening times of her life when she discovered she had cancer. Six years old and she might not live. And if she were to give life a shot, Hannah would have to endure painful, almost endless medical treatments. At one point she lost all her hair due to chemicals pumped into her tiny body. On days when she felt strong enough to get out, she often covered her head.
One day while shopping with her mother, Hannah donned a ball cap with a fake pony tail sewn into the back. Unless one looked closely, she looked as if she had a full head of hair. Before long Hannah noticed a small boy staring at her as if he were trying to figure out what was slightly off about the girl. She tried to ignore him, but he followed her around the store. Finally, she ripped off her cap revealing her shiny, hairless head. In a stern voice she warned, "This is what happens when you don't eat your vegetables!"
I don't know what became of the boy, but I suspect he is now a committed vegetarian. As for Hannah, her sense of humor helped get her through one of life's scariest times.
Like entertainer Bob Hope once said, "I've seen what a good laugh can do. It can transform tears into hope." And sometimes, a little more hope is all we need.
Wishing all a happy and smooth year of the snake!!


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Celebrating another step towards bringing AI to the people
With the opening of the VU Campus Centre for AI & Health, another piece of Amsterdam's wildly ambitious 'AI Technology for People' initiative falls into place. The online launch event highlighted how a diversity of specialists is required to bring a people-centric artificial intelligence to healthcare.
The long road to the greater good
On Friday, 23 October 2020, a Zoom-based launch event celebrated the opening of the VU Campus Centre for AI & Health.
As host and one of the initiators, Mark Hoogendoorn (VU Computer Science) explained that the centre is very much a network organisation out to fuel collaboration for improving healthcare by developing, implementing and evaluating AI technologies.
With partners including UvA, CWI, Smart Health Amsterdam and many others, the centre features 60 staff members from six faculties and hundreds of researchers. A soon-to-appear website will track all participants and their interactions and collaborations.
Collaboration, team spirit, impact
Mirjam van Praag, president of VU's executive board, explained how the centre is an integral part of 'AI Technology for the People', which involves a collective investment of one billion euros over the next decade. "There are huge opportunities in terms of e-mental health, imaging, decision support, personalised treatment and prevention. We can have a huge impact on the society we serve," says Van Praag.
Yet issues remain. "Privacy, confidentiality and informed consent all need to be addressed," says Chris Polman, president of Amsterdam UMC's executive board. "We also need to ensure that the data ownership stays with the citizens. We have to deal with inequalities – for example, to make sure that white male data is not applied to black females."
"But the opening of this centre is a huge step forward," says Polman. "It's just a shame we have to wait until we can raise our glasses of champagne in person."
Red dot alert
It was now time for the research presentations. Among other titles, Mihaela van der Schaar is a professor of machine learning, artificial intelligence and medicine at the University of Cambridge and a fellow at The Alan Turing Institute in London.
She opened her keynote 'AutoML and interpretability: powering the machine learning revolution in healthcare' with a warning: "Some of my slides are really only for the geeks – I've marked them with a red dot. I did try to use as few of these slides as possible," says Van der Schaar before diving deep into a blur of red dots.
Turning black boxes into white boxes
The work of Van der Schaar's lab seeks to lower the threshold in the successful application of AI by non-experts, for example by automating the use of machine learning (AutoML). Meanwhile, interpretability seeks to deal with ML's often effective but unexplainable 'black box' outputs (which, unfortunately, only get darker when automated).
The goal is a 'white box' where the outputs are transparent, trustworthy and meaningful – and thereby making it acceptable to patients, clinicians and regulatory bodies. Happily, Van der Schaar and her team are developing various clinically-proven tools that integrate interpretability into AutoML frameworks.
The power of cross-discipline fertilisation
The presentations by junior researchers showed the importance of cross-fertilisation – may it be between disciplines or across the academic-business world divide.
'Improvement and evaluation of AI techniques for personalised mental health interventions' brought together clinical psychologist Marketa Ciharova with computer scientist Ali el Hassouni. They use reinforced learning to personalise internet-based interventions – to minimise the change of users disengaging and maximise the chance of those seeking help to follow quality advice (e.g. "do something fun every day.").
Managing better healthcare through AI
With 'The intersection of AI and knowledge work: a case study in radiology', VU researcher Bomi Kim took a more anthropological approach to uncover best practices when applying AI in an area where the changes will be immense.
"We need a middle management to get their hands dirty and follow the whole complex process – keeping those involved in the loop without overselling the tech or underselling the necessary prep work and costs," says Bomi.
Outcomes for cancer patients
With 'Deep learning for tumour response evaluation', Nina Wesdorp (Amsterdam UMC – Cancer Center Amsterdam) brought us back to basics: that AI can really have a direct impact on patient care and cure. Her collaborative project with analytics software leader SAS is improving outcomes for patients with colorectal cancer – the third most common cancer worldwide – by better identifying those 20% of patients who respond well to chemotherapy and thereby more likely candidates for life-saving surgery.
And now with the opening of the VU Campus Centre for AI & Health, we can welcome the acceleration of more such collaborations.
AI technology for people
AI technology for people is a collaborative partnership between the Amsterdam Economic Board, Amsterdam UMC, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek/Netherlands Cancer Institute, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, the City of Amsterdam, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, Sanquin, University of Amsterdam and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
amsterdam economic board | data | data | health |

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Is it that good Indian Remy?
Or the new virgin Brazilian?
Could it be that mixed girl smooth curl?
Possibly that nice and natural?
Or my favorite that silky relaxed "laid to the gods"?
Hair is a huge issue in the Black community and it causes just as much controversy as the #teamlightskin vs #teamdarkskin tomfoolery. I guess "good hair" is some type of magical concoction whipped up by the hair gods and only bestowed upon lucky little black girls and boys, in the words of my best friend "everybody ain't able"! I found myself watching this video clip of an excerpt of the Tyra Show. After watching this it struck me that "good hair" is a demeaning thing to say when it is used in reference to someone's hair texture. It is usually given as a loaded compliment to say that someone's hair is better than someone else's. Everytime someone says "you have good hair" what they really mean is that your hair looks more similar to European hair and because of that it looks better than others that have a bit more kink and curl to their hair. Its really not a nice thing to say because its hurtful and is another tool used to separate the black community. As a result of this big push of good hair, weave has exploded and little girls of all ages, starting as early as preschool have extensions flowing down their backs, perms are being administered to toddlers, and natural vs. relaxed hair people are at odds. All because of people being after that magical potion of good hair. So I urge you to think twice before you tell someone that they have "good hair". Maybe say "your hair looks nice to day" or "I like your new style". Lets not cause more division among our community.
I think this video and you bring up some interesting points. Yes for so long and still today "good hair" is defined as straight, shiny, with bounce. I believe that good hair should be defined as healthy, well-kept, with style. Here in America in many different situations we (Americans) live through the images of Europeans. Many black women aim to live their physical appearances through these images. In recent there is a big "movement" within the black women community towards natural hair. I believe this movement towards natural hair is not only to promote persons natural hair, but also aim to promote healthy, not damage hair. Weaves were brought up in the video as well I know that people wear weaves for different reasons. Some wear it to resemble white people's hair, and some do it because they feel it is easier to manage. I am a black woman who has been transitioning to natural hair for over two years now. I also wear weaves. I wear weaves because I can apply heat, moistures, and other chemicals to the weaves without it damaging my hair. So I would conclude by saying "good hair" comes in many forms.
DG yes! The hair issue in the black community reminds me so much of the unattainable beauty goals black women especially have to follow. I personally think all black hair is "good" hair, but the way this idea is perpetuated in our community is very interesting.
I love all types of hair. Although I've recently transitioned to wearing my hair in more natural styles, I have worn every style at one point because that was what worked for me at the time. I think we should be encouraged to embrace whatever hair we feel beautiful with, not put down because our hair is too big and nappy or considered to not be black enough because of a perm. This is our body, our skin and our hair so we should be able to rock it however we want without media, politics or society attempting to dictate it.


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Gun Carry Permit Expansion In NJ Beaten Back By Legislature
By David Madden December 23, 2016 at 12:49 pm
Filed Under:David Madden
(Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)
TRENTON, NJ (CBS) — New Jersey legislators have blocked an attempt by the Christie Administration to administratively expand the rules under which someone can obtain a permit to carry a handgun within the state.
Lawmakers have passed resolutions indicating that the proposed rule is incompatible with legislative intent, a rarely used move that stops the rule from taking effect.
Scott Bach, Executive Director of the Association of New Jersey Rifle and Pistol Clubs, suggests the need for the change is real.
"Only in the Garden State could legislators oppose something that allows people facing serious threats to protect themselves," Bach told KYW Newsradio.
The governor's office had sought to expand the definition of "justifiable need," which a judge uses to approve a carry permit. Bach believes what the legislature did was legally flawed, but isn't sure whether the issue will be taken to court.
Assembly Majority Leader Lou Greenwald (D-Cherry Hill) helped to get those resolutions approved. While he says he and his colleagues by and large support the second amendment, this action would put too many people in danger.
"Lessening this ban for concealed carry, we believe, was a dangerous principle and that's why the action was necessary," Greenwald said.
He is also not worried about a possible court challenge, claiming the tactic used to block the change has withstood prior attempts to bring it down.
New Jersey is known for having one of the strongest gun control laws in the nation.


Students at the Institute of Design at Stanford, or d.school, work this spring on an irrigation project for farmers in Burma. The work is part of the university's focus on interdisciplinary education.
Stanford University is so startlingly paradisial, so fragrant and sunny, it's as if you could eat from the trees and live happily forever. Students ride their bikes through manicured quads, past blooming flowers and statues by Rodin, to buildings named for benefactors like Gates, Hewlett, and Packard. Everyone seems happy, though there is a well-known phenomenon called the "Stanford duck syndrome": students seem cheerful, but all the while they are furiously paddling their legs to stay afloat. What they are generally paddling toward are careers of the sort that could get their names on those buildings. The campus has its jocks, stoners, and poets, but what it is famous for are budding entrepreneurs, engineers, and computer aces hoping to make their fortune in one crevasse or another of Silicon Valley.
Innovation comes from myriad sources, including the bastions of East Coast learning, but Stanford has established itself as the intellectual nexus of the information economy. In early April, Facebook acquired the photo-sharing service Instagram, for a billion dollars; naturally, the co-founders of the two-year-old company are Stanford graduates in their late twenties. The initial investor was a Stanford alumnus.
The campus, in fact, seems designed to nurture such success. The founder of Sierra Ventures, Peter C. Wendell, has been teaching Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital part time at the business school for twenty-one years, and he invites sixteen venture capitalists to visit and work with his students. Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Google, joins him for a third of the classes, and Raymond Nasr, a prominent communications and public-relations executive in the Valley, attends them all. Scott Cook, who co-founded Intuit, drops by to talk to Wendell's class. After class, faculty, students, and guests often pick up lattes at Starbucks or cafeteria snacks and make their way to outdoor tables.
Spiegel knows that mentors like Wendell will play an important part in helping him to realize his dreams for the mobile app. "I had the opportunity to sit in Peter's class as a sophomore," Spiegel says. "I was sitting next to Eric Schmidt. I was sitting next to Chad Hurley, from YouTube. I would go to lunches after class and listen to these guys talk. I met Scott Cook, who's been an incredible mentor." His faculty adviser, David Kelley, the head of the school of design, put him in touch with prospective angel investors.
If the Ivy League was the breeding ground for the élites of the American Century, Stanford is the farm system for Silicon Valley. When looking for engineers, Schmidt said, Google starts at Stanford. Five per cent of Google employees are Stanford graduates. The president of Stanford, John L. Hennessy, is a director of Google; he is also a director of Cisco Systems and a successful former entrepreneur. Stanford's Office of Technology Licensing has licensed eight thousand campus-inspired inventions, and has generated $1.3 billion in royalties for the university. Stanford's public-relations arm proclaims that five thousand companies "trace their origins to Stanford ideas or to Stanford faculty and students." They include Hewlett-Packard, Yahoo, Cisco Systems, Sun Microsystems, eBay, Netflix, Electronic Arts, Intuit, Fairchild Semiconductor, Agilent Technologies, Silicon Graphics, LinkedIn, and E*Trade.
Leland Stanford was a Republican governor and senator in the late nineteenth century, who made a fortune from the Central Pacific and Southern Pacific railroads, which he had helped to found. Stout and bearded, he could be typecast, like Gould, Morgan, and Vanderbilt, as a robber baron. Without knowing it, this man of the industrial revolution spent part of his legacy establishing a center for what would become the Age of Innovation. After his only child, Leland, Jr., died, of typhoid fever, at fifteen, Stanford and his wife, Jane, bequeathed more than eight thousand acres of farmland, thirty-five miles south of San Francisco, to found a university in their son's name. They hired Frederick Law Olmsted, who designed Central Park, to create an open campus with no walls, vast gardens and thousands of palm and Coast Live Oak trees, and California mission-inspired sandstone buildings with red-tiled roofs. Today, the campus extends from Palo Alto to Woodside and Portola Valley, spanning two counties, three Zip Codes, and six government jurisdictions.
Stanford University opened its doors in 1891. Jane and Leland Stanford said in their founding grant that the university, rather than becoming an ivory tower, would "qualify its students for personal success, and direct usefulness in life." From its early days, engineers and scientists attracted government and corporate research funds as well as venture capital for start-ups, first for innovations in radio and broadcast media, then for advances in electronics, microprocessing, medicine, and digital technology. One of the first big tech companies in Silicon Valley—Federal Telegraph, which produced radios—was started by a young Stanford graduate in 1909. The university's first president, David Starr Jordan, was an angel investor.
Frederick Terman, an engineer who joined the faculty in 1925, became the dean of the School of Engineering after the Second World War and the provost in 1955. He is often called "the father of Silicon Valley." In the thirties, he encouraged two of his students, William Hewlett and David Packard, to construct in a garage a new line of audio oscillators that became the first product of the Hewlett-Packard Company.
Terman nurtured start-ups by creating the Stanford Industrial Park, which leased land to tech firms like Hewlett-Packard; today, the park is home to about a hundred and fifty companies. He encouraged his faculty to serve as paid consultants to corporations, as he did, to welcome tech companies on campus, and to persuade them to subsidize research and fellowships for Stanford's brightest students.
President Hennessy believes that the entrepreneurial spirit is part of the university's foundation, and he attributes this freedom partly to California's relative lack of legacy industries or traditions that need to be protected, so "people are willing to try things." At Stanford more than elsewhere, the university and business forge a borderless community in which making money is considered virtuous and where participants profess a sometimes inflated belief that their work is changing the world for the better. Faculty members commonly invest in start-ups launched by their students or colleagues. There are probably more faculty millionaires at Stanford than at any other university in the world. Hennessy earned six hundred and seventy-one thousand dollars in salary from Stanford last year, but he has made far more as a board member of and shareholder in Google and Cisco.
Very often, the wealth created by Stanford's faculty and students flows back to the school. Hennessy is among the foremost fund-raisers in America. In his twelve years as president, Stanford's endowment has grown to nearly seventeen billion dollars. In each of the past seven years, Stanford has raised more money than any other American university.
Like other élite schools, Stanford has become increasingly diverse. Caucasian students are now a minority on campus; roughly sixty per cent of undergraduates, and more than half of graduate students, are Asian, black, Hispanic, Native American, or from overseas; seventeen per cent of Stanford's undergraduates are the first member of their family to attend college. Half of Stanford's undergraduates receive need-based financial aid: if their annual family income is below a hundred thousand dollars, tuition is free. "They are the locomotive kids, pulling their whole family behind them," Tobias Wolff, a novelist who has taught at Stanford for nearly two decades, says.
In February, 2011, a dozen members of the Bay Area business community had dinner with President Obama at the home of the venture capitalist John Doerr. Steve Jobs, who was in the late stages of the illness that killed him, eight months later, sat at a large rectangular table beside Obama; Mark Zuckerberg, of Facebook, sat on the other side. They were flanked by Silicon Valley corporate chiefs, from Google, Cisco, Oracle, Genentech, Twitter, Netflix, and Yahoo. The only non-business leader invited was Hennessy. His attendance was not a surprise. "John Hennessy is the godfather of Silicon Valley," Marc Andreessen, a venture capitalist, who as an engineering student co-invented the first Internet browser, says.
Hennessy is fifty-nine, six feet tall, and trim, with thinning gray hair and a square jaw. He talks fast and loud, one thought colliding with the next; he bubbles over with information and data points. His laugh is a sharp cackle. Hennessy grew up in Huntington, Long Island. His father was an aerospace engineer; his mother quit teaching to rear six children. As a child, he read straight through the sixteen-volume encyclopedia his parents gave him. He studied electrical engineering at Villanova University and went on to earn a doctorate in computer science at Stony Brook University. He married his high-school sweetheart, Andrea Berti, and, in 1977, became an assistant professor of electrical engineering at Stanford.
In 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who were graduate students, showed Hennessy their work on search software that they later called Google. He typed in the name Gerhard Casper, and instead of getting results for Casper the Friendly Ghost, as he did on AltaVista, up popped links to Gerhard Casper the president of Stanford. He was thrilled when members of the engineering faculty mentored Page and Brin and later became Google investors, consultants, and shareholders. Since Stanford owned the rights to Google's search technology, he was also thrilled when, in 2005, the stock grants that Stanford had received in exchange for licensing the technology were sold for three hundred and thirty-six million dollars.
But Gerhard Casper worries that any president sitting on a board can pose a conflict of interest. Stanford was one of the first universities to agree to allow Google to digitize a third of its library—some three million books—at a time when publishers and the Authors Guild were suing the company for copyright infringement. Hennessy says that he did not participate in the decision and "never saw the agreement." But shouldn't the president of a university see an agreement that may violate copyright laws and that represents a historic clash between the university and the publishing industry? And shouldn't he worry that those who made the decision might be eager to reach an agreement that would please him?
Perhaps because his position is so seemingly secure, and his assets so considerable, Hennessy rarely appears defensive. He knows that questions about conflicts of interest won't define his legacy, and they seem less pressing when Stanford is thriving. Facebook's purchase of Instagram made millions for, among others, Sequoia Capital—which means that it made money for Hennessy and for Stanford's endowment, too.
Two decades ago, when the Stanford humor magazine, the Chaparral, did a spoof issue with the Harvard Lampoon, the Chappie, as it's called, rearranged Harvard's logo—"Ve Ri Tas"—to "Ve Ry Tan." Sometimes the campus stars are athletes. This year, the quarterback Andrew Luck is the likely No. 1 pick in the N.F.L. draft. He stayed through his senior year to earn a degree in architectural design. "I sat next to him in a class once," Ishan Nath, a senior economics major, says. "I didn't talk to him, but I sneezed and he said, 'Bless you.' For the next month, like, 'I got blessed by Andy Luck!' " But, at Stanford, star athletes don't always have the status they do at other schools. When Tiger Woods was a student, in the mid-nineties, not everyone knew who he was. One classmate, Adam Seelig, now a poet and a theatre director, spotted Woods practicing in his hallway one night and returned to his own dorm to ask who "this total loser practicing putts at 11 P.M. on a Saturday night" was.
Thirty-four thousand high-school seniors applied for Stanford's current freshman class, and only twenty-four hundred—seven per cent—were accepted. Part of the appeal, undoubtedly, is the school's laid-back vibe. There are nearly as many bicycles on campus—thirteen thousand—as undergraduate and graduate students. Flip-flops are worn year-round.
"To me, it felt like a four-year camp," Devin Banerjee, who graduated last year and is now a reporter for Bloomberg News, says. "We had so many camp counsellors. You never felt lost." Michael Tubbs, a senior who was brought up by a single mother and whose father has been in prison for most of his son's life, says that he could not have attended Stanford without a full financial-aid scholarship. He is an honors student, and marvels at how financial aid has produced a campus of diverse students who are unburdened by student debt—and who thus don't have to spend the first five years of their career earning as much money as they can. After he graduates, Tubbs plans to return home to Stockton, California, to challenge an incumbent member of the city council this fall.
Each year, Hennessy visits four to five freshman dormitories to field questions. When he visited the Cedro dorm, on January 30th, the forty or so students gathered around him in the recreation room often asked the kinds of benign question posed to celebrities on TV shows: Did he miss computer science? Or they sometimes asked the questions of young careerists: To be successful, what should we do?
Stanford's proposal contained a cover letter from Hennessy that conveyed his sweeping ambition: "StanfordNYC has the potential to help catapult New York City into a leadership position in technology, to enhance its entrepreneurial endeavors and outcomes, diversify its economic base, enhance its talent pool and help our nation maintain its global lead in science and technology." Stanford proposed spending an initial two hundred million dollars to build a campus housing two hundred faculty and more than two thousand graduate students. It pledged to raise $1.5 billion for the campus.
Not everyone on Stanford's campus shared Hennessy's enthusiasm. Members of the humanities faculty were upset that Stanford proposed to create a second campus without including liberal-arts faculty or students. Casper, the former Stanford president, asked whether the Roosevelt Island project would "reinforce the cliché that we are science and engineering and biology driven and the arts and humanities are stepchildren." According to Jeffrey Koseff, the director of Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment, there were "mixed feelings," because of fears that resources would be drained from the Palo Alto campus. And there were additional questions: Would Stanford be able to recruit top faculty and students to New York when the technological heart of the country was in Silicon Valley? Could Stanford really reproduce in New York its "secret sauce," a phrase that university officials use almost mystically to describe whatever it is that makes the school succeed as an entrepreneurial incubator?
Among the bolder initiatives to create T-students is the Institute of Design at Stanford, or the d.school, which was founded seven years ago and is housed in the school of engineering. Its founder and director is David Kelley, who, with a thick black mustache and black-framed eyeglasses, looks like Groucho Marx, without the cigar. His mission, he says, is to instill "empathy" in his students, to encourage them to see the human side of the challenges posed in class, and to provoke them to be creative. Stanford is not the only university to adopt this approach to learning—M.I.T., among others, does, too. But Kelley's effort is widely believed to be the most audacious. His classes stress collaboration across disciplines and revolve around projects to advance social progress. The school concentrates on four areas: the developing world; sustainability; health and wellness; and K-12 education. The d.school space is open, with sliding doors and ubiquitous whiteboards and tables too small to accommodate laptops; Kelley doesn't want students retreating into their in-boxes. There are very few lectures at the school, and students are graded, in part, on their collaborative skills and on evaluations by fellow-students.
Sarah Stein Greenberg, who is the managing director of the d.school, was a student and then a fellow. Her 2006 class project was to figure out an inexpensive way for farmers in Burma to extract water from the ground for irrigation. Greenberg and her team of students travelled to Burma, and devised a cheap and efficient treadle pump that looks like a Stairmaster, which the farmer steps on in order to extract water. A local nonprofit partner manufactured and sold twenty thousand pumps, costing thirty-seven dollars each. In his unpretentious, book-filled office, John Hennessy displays items that have been produced, at least in part, by Stanford students to assist developing countries, including a baby warmer for premature babies; the simple device's cost is one per cent of an incubator's.
In late January, a popular d.school class, Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability, taught by James M. Patell, a business-school professor, consisted of thirty-seven graduate and three undergraduate students from thirteen departments, including engineering, political science, business, medicine, biology, and education. It was early in the quarter, and Patell offered the students a choice of initial projects. One was to create a monitoring system to help the police locate lost children. Another was to design a bicycle-storage system.
Justin Ferrell, who was attending Stanford on a one-year fellowship, on leave from his job as the digital-design director at the Washington Post, said that he was impressed by "the bias toward action" at the d.school. Newspapers have bureaucracy, committees, hierarchies, and few engineers, he said. At the Post, "diversity" was defined by ethnicity and race. At the d.school, diversity is defined by majors—by people who think different.
Multidisciplinary courses at Stanford worked for two earlier graduates, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, the founders of Instagram. In 2005 and 2007, respectively, Systrom and Krieger were awarded Mayfield fellowships. (Only a dozen upperclassmen are chosen each year.) In an intense nine-month work-study program, fellows immerse themselves in the theoretical study of entrepreneurship, innovation, and leadership, and work during the summer in a Valley start-up. Tom Byers, an engineering professor, founded the program in 1996, and says that it aims to impart to fellows this message: "Anything is possible." Byers has kept in touch with Systrom and Krieger and remembers them as "quiet and quite humble," by which he means that they were outstanding human beings who could get others to follow them. They were, in short, T-students.
John Hennessy is familiar with Casper's Jerusalem speech. "It applies to everyone—us, too," he says. Getting into college is very competitive, tuition is very expensive, and, with economic uncertainty, students become preoccupied with majoring in subjects that may lead to jobs. "That's why so many students are majoring in business," Hennessy says, and why so few are humanities majors. He shares the concern that too many students are too preoccupied with getting rich. "It's true broadly, not just here," he says.
The long-term value of an education is to be found not merely in the accumulation of knowledge or skills but in the capacity to forge fresh connections between them, to integrate different elements from one's education and experience and bring them to bear on new challenges and problems. . . . Yet we were struck by how little attention most departments and programs have given to cultivating this essential capacity. We were also surprised, and somewhat chagrined, to discover how infrequently some of our students exercise it. For all their extraordinary energy and range, many of the students we encountered lead curiously compartmentalized lives, with little integration between the different spheres of their experience.
Like any president of a large university, John Hennessy is subject to a relentless schedule of breakfasts, meetings, lunches, speeches, ceremonies, handshakes, dinners, and late-night calls alerting him to an injury or a fatality on campus. His home becomes a public space for meetings and entertaining. He juggles various constituencies—faculty, administrators, students, alumni, trustees, athletics. The routine becomes a daily blur, compelling a president to want to break away and seek a larger vision, something that becomes his stamp, his legacy. For a while, it seemed that StanfordNYC might provide that legacy.
Hennessy declared that a New York campus was "a landmark decision." He invested enormous time and effort to overcome faculty, alumni, trustee, and student unease about diverting campus resources for such a grandiose project. "I was originally a skeptic," Otis Reid, a senior economics major, says. But Hennessy persuaded him, by arguing that Stanford's future will be one of expansion, and Reid agreed that New York was a better place to go first than Abu Dhabi.
On December 16, 2011, Stanford announced that it was withdrawing its bid. Publicly, the university was vague about the decision, and, in a statement, Hennessy praised "the mayor's bold vision." But he was seething. In January, he told me that the city had changed the terms of the proposed deal. After seven universities had submitted their bids, he said, the city suddenly wanted Stanford to agree that the campus would be operational, with a full complement of faculty, sooner than Stanford thought was feasible. The city, according to Debra Zumwalt, Stanford's general counsel and lead negotiator, added "many millions of dollars in penalties that were not in the original proposal, including penalizing Stanford for failure to obtain approvals on a certain schedule, even if the delays were the fault of the city and not Stanford. . . . I have been a lawyer for over thirty years, and I have never seen negotiations that were handled so poorly by a reputable party." One demand that particularly infuriated Stanford was a fine of twenty million dollars if the City Council, not Stanford, delayed approval of the project. These demands came from city lawyers, not from the Mayor or from a deputy mayor, Robert Steel, who did not participate in the final round of negotiations with Stanford officials. However, city negotiators were undoubtedly aware that Mayor Bloomberg, in a speech at M.I.T., in November, had said of two of the applicants, "Stanford is desperate to do it. Cornell is desperate to do it. . . . We can go back and try to renegotiate with each" university. Out of the blue, Hennessy says, the city introduced the new demands.
Yet the decision seemed hasty. Why would Hennessy, who had made such an effort to persuade the university community to embrace StanfordNYC, not pause to call a business-friendly mayor to try to get the city to roll back what he saw as its new demands? Hennessy says that his sense of trust was fundamentally shaken. City officials say they were surprised by the sudden pullout, especially since Hennessy had an agreeable conversation with Deputy Mayor Steel earlier that same week.
Steel insists that "the goalposts were fixed." All the stipulations that Stanford now complains about, he says, were part of the city's original package. Actually, they weren't. In the city's proposal request, the due dates and penalties were left blank. Seth Pinsky, the president of the New York City Economic Development Corporation, who was one of the city's lead negotiators, says that these were to be filled in by each bidder and then discussed in negotiations. "The more aggressive they were on the schedule and the more aggressive they were on the amount, the more favorably" the city looked at the bid, Pinsky told me. In the negotiations, he said, he tried to get each bidder to boost its offer by alerting it of more favorable competing bids. At one point, Stanford asked about an ambiguous clause in the city's proposal request: would the university have to indemnify the city if it were sued for, say, polluted water on Roosevelt Island? The city responded that the university would. According to Pinsky, city lawyers said that this was "not likely to produce significant problems," and that other bidders did not object. To Pinsky and the city, these demands—and the twenty-million-dollar penalty if the City Council's approval was delayed—were "not uncommon," since developers often "take liability for public approvals." To Stanford, the stipulations made it seem as if the goal posts were not fixed.
Three days after Stanford withdrew, the city awarded the contract to Cornell University and its junior partner, the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, the oldest university in Israel. Not a few Hennessy and Stanford partisans were pleased. "I am very relieved," Gerhard Casper said.
Sebastian Thrun quit his faculty position at Stanford; he now works full time at Udacity, a start-up he co-founded that offers online courses. Udacity joins a host of companies whose distance-learning investments might one day siphon students from Stanford—Apple, the News Corp's Worldwide Learning, the Washington Post's Kaplan University, the New York Times' Knowledge Network, and the nonprofit Khan Academy, with its approximately three thousand free lectures and tutorials made available on YouTube and funded by donations from, among others, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Google, and Ann and John Doerr.
Since so much of an undergraduate education consists of living on campus and interacting with other students, for those who can afford it—or who benefit from the generous scholarships offered by such institutions as Stanford—it's difficult to imagine that an online education is comparable. Nor can an online education duplicate the collaborative, multidisciplinary classes at Stanford's d.school, or the personal contact with professors that graduate students have as they inch toward a Ph.D.
John Hennessy's experience in Silicon Valley proves that digital disruption is normal, and even desirable. It is commonly believed that traditional companies and services get disrupted because they are inefficient and costly. The publishing industry has suffered in recent years, the argument goes, because reading on screens is more convenient. Why wait in line at a store when there's Amazon? Why pay for a travel agent when there's Expedia? The same argument can be applied to online education. An online syllabus could reach many more students, and reduce tuition charges and eliminate room and board. Students in an online university could take any course whenever they wanted, and wouldn't have to waste time bicycling to class.
But online education might also disrupt everything that distinguishes Stanford. Could a student on a video prompter have coffee with a venture capitalist? Could one become a T-student through Web chat? Stanford has been aligned with Silicon Valley and its culture of disruption. Now Hennessy and Stanford have to seriously contemplate whether more efficiency is synonymous with a better education.


text:
Q: Get innerHTML value - only plain text This is what i'm gonna do...

alert(document.getElementById('test').innerHTML);

  hi..my name is
Soul
 and I am 23 years old
  Thank you.

The alert box will show this:
hi..my name is
Soul
 and I am 23 years oldThank you.

But what I want inside the ALERT BOX is:
hi..my name is Soul and I am 23 years old Thank you.

A: Use textContent instead of innerHTML for getting text content instead of markup

console.log(document.getElementById('test').textContent);

  hi..my name is
Soul
 and I am 23 years old
  Thank you.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange