Walking down the streets of Santiago (or anywhere else in Chile or Argentina) female Stanford students can expect to receive acknowledgement that they are attractice. The person acknowledging their beauty can be a taxi driver, a man walking down the street, construction workers, or anyone else.

The acknowledgement can range from slightly funny but still tasteful (my favorites are the man in Mendoza, Argentina that told a friend and I “you two, you are very pretty,” and the clerk in the Santiago shoe store that told me I had very beautiful eyes); to the still amusing but slightly annoying- whistles, claps, loud kissy noises; and then the worst- the men who just stare at you on the subway and do not look away, or the college aged boys who lean into your personal bubble space when you walk by to say “linda” or beautiful.

We’ve discussed this in our Spanish classes here at the Stanford in Santiago center, and my Spanish teacher strongly defends it as a cultural practice, insisting that it is a compliment to our looks. Yet in our discussions most of the (US) girls in the room indicated that it made them uncomfortable, that it made them feel like they were only a sexual object. I know from my personal experience I’ve avoided walking past certain groups of guys because I don’t want to feel uncomfortable. And yet even listening to all of us describe our feelings of uncomfortableness, and thinking that we’re just sexual objects, my Spanish teacher still maintains that it’s a compliment, and we should take it as such.

There is something sinister in the air. The evidence is everywhere: social outtings are canceled or postponed, student group meetings have half their normal turnout, the libraries are always full. Ah yes, the four weeks of rolling midterms have arrived. And with them comes thousands of stressed out Stanford students.

The problem with midterms at Stanford is that each class often has two, making it hardly "midterm". Add to that the 10 week quarter, and students get basically 2-3 weeks of free time before all hell breaks loose.

And we've all heard the horror stories: 3 midterms in 36 hours. A paper, a pset and an exam all on the same day. I personally have 2 quantitative midterms both on Tuesday of next week. 4 hours of equations doesn't sound like my idea of a good time.

How does your midterm schedule look? What's the worst story you've heard?

Word on the street is that the Black Student Union has been selected by the ASSU as 2007 Voluntary Student Organization of the Year, while sociology and political science professor Larry Diamond has been selected the 2007 Teacher of the Year. An honorable mention for Teacher of the Year goes to Jeff Koseff, professor of civil and environmental engineering.

It's not clear yet what the ASSU will choose to highlight about this year's recipients, but in the case of Diamond and Koseff, at least, their public and high-profile roles in perhaps the two most important issues on students' minds -- Iraq and the environment -- surely played a role. Professor Diamond is widely regarded as one of the foremost experts on democracy and Iraq, while Professor Koseff directs Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment. I'm not familiar with Professor Koseff, but know from personal experience that Professor Diamond is quite deserving of the award, being an excellent teacher, an inspiring scholar, a willing participant in student events and campus dialogue, and an advocate for students he respects.

Congrats!

As we head into the final stretches of the quarter we find ourselves working feverishly on midterms, papers, problem sets and final projects. And at the very same time we're checking our facebook news feed to see who updated their profile picture and refreshing our email for new smells in the girl's bathroom.

What ends up happening is that hours will pass and a few paragraphs get written. If this happens to you, and I know it happens to me all the time, I've got an easy solution:

Block out everything and focusing for 5 minutes.

Sit down and get cracking and don't let yourself check your email for the full 5 minutes and you'll get your work done in no time. If it sounds too easy, that's because it is.

If you really focus for 5 minutes, you'll get into the groove and will end up working for 10 or 20 minutes before you actually end up checking your email. Sometimes you just need to fool yourself into working hard and it will happen. Don't believe me? Try it for yourself.

Stop reading this and focus on your work for 5 minutes. And then come back and tell me what happened. I dare you.

What an abyss of uncertainty, whenever the mind feels overtaken by itself; when it, the seeker, is at the same time the dark region through which it must go seeking and where all its equipment will avail it nothing. […] It is face to face with something which does not yet exist, which it alone can make actual, which it alone can bring into the light of day. Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, History 136B

Look at that beautiful piece of literature I read today for a class. Gorgeous. Reading it got me thinking: across various Departments and Programs in the University, students read a vast canon of literature. How often do you read something so great-- so transcendent-- that you dog-ear it, underline it, highlight it...and then share it with your roommate? Wouldn't it be great if you could share it with even more people?

Now, instead of reading spam in your inbox, you can enjoy some good writing in a weekly email containing a short snippet that was read in a Stanford class this month. Add yourself by sending an email with “Subscribe me!” in the subject line to ALineofLit@gmail.com.

Also, when you’re reading a text for class and you come across a passage you like, send it to us. We take the one we like best and send it out for everyone to enjoy each week or so.

For those of you familiar, this idea is similar to The Paragraph of the Day. The big difference is that all our texts referenced are currently being read at Stanford! It’s a nice way to wake up in the morning--with a piece of great writing sitting in your inbox…so don’t forget to sign up and to submit your favorite prose today!

Firefox is a clear choice for many students and tech aficionados thanks to personalized browsers, security, and the overall notion of fighting against the Man!

When the Stanford d.school and Firefox joined forces to spread Firefox for the Spring 2006 class, CIA: Creating Infectious Action, the synergy and results were incredible. Rockstar students, guided by rockstar teaching coaches, created some of the best Firefox extensions and marketing campaigns to date (check out this sex and religion combo: Firefoxies and Faith Browser).

Thanks in part to this success, the d.school launched CIA 2.0: CIA-KGB (ARRR!). And guess what, Firefox is back, and better than ever!

Students this quarter are once again doing some really cool stuff. For example, Madalina Seghete and Tyler Griffin Hicks-Wright's project, My Friendly Fox, seeks to improve the eBay shopping experience by customizing the browser with an eBay toolbar and an ad blocking feature. Moreover, they added oomph to the little fox that could... by adding another fox! Say hello to foxkeh.

At the d.school, the design process is highly looked upon. These students are working long and hard, and smart, to help users understand the benefits of a better browser.

Write to the Registrar at registrar@stanford.edu

It was my sneaking suspicion that the Registrar would not be releasing (and making readily available) the results of its new Online Course Evaluations. E-mails to the Registrar's Office last week were replied to with simply "You can find some information on our website." Genius.

Today, the Daily confirmed that the Registrar currently has no plans to make the results available to students. It was always inexcusable that it is so hard to find out how students rate their professors, but now that the Course Evaluations are online and sport a 90% completion rate, it's a shame. Transparency should be the University's default, not its exception.

The ASSU must insist that the full results of Course Evaluations be made available to students, including at least a random sampling of student written comments.

I recently spoke with one of my favorite professors, democracy and Iraq expert Larry Diamond, about this lack of transparency from the administration. I was venting about how, in my opinion, the teaching in the Economics department is mediocre but that, like the rational economists they are, they would never improve unless they were given proper incentives -- i.e. the possibility of embarrassment -- by the availability of student ratings of the courses.

Professor Diamond was surprised that this information on the performance of professors and departments was not already available due to his leading of the original effort at the ASSU to get courses evaluated in the first place. When the Daily published its article today, I wrote to Professor Diamond and asked him to comment. Here's what he said (this letter should also be published in tomorrow's Daily):

I was disturbed to read today that the results of the course evaluations are not routinely and systematically made available to the student body. The current policy (or lack thereof) is ill-considered and indefensible for a number of reasons. The most obvious one is that students and their families are paying over $30,000 a year in tuition (or as much of that as they can possibly afford) for the privilege of taking these classes. The least that Stanford could do—and the minimum I think it is morally required to do—is to make this most fundamental piece of consumer information available to students before they spend something like $3,000 on a class.

Related to this is the difficulty students have in making informed choices about classes and professors. Four years go by very quickly for a Stanford undergraduate. There are often painful opportunity costs to taking one course instead of another. In terms of maximizing the quality and richness of their undergraduate experience, students should have as much information at their disposal as possible.

So finally the quarter ends! And you are basking in the California sun in the spring/summer/winter break! Yeah, welcome to CA baby, its sun-shiny all year round. And even if you are a grad student stuck on campus (like me!), you still feel great now that the well-deserved breather is here. Weather news apart, its interesting to see how the classes that i took this quarter designed their last class of the quarter in a real fun way! So the three courses I took were (in short), Database Systems Design(CS245), Global Entrepreneurial Marketing (MSANDE 271) and Intro to Biomedical Systems Design (BMI211/CS271).

CS245: So Hector has this real kewl idea of having a joke-break in the middle of his classes - just to keep people from going into deep slumber. The class is usually in the afternoon so people cant sometimes help going to sleep. The thing is that one guy has to volunteer to tell a joke, of course its not necessary that one do it, and in that case Hector comes prepared with his own list of poor jokes, but usually some or the other wise guy cracks a very smelly and geeky joke. Anyways, at the end of the quarter, the guy with the best joke gets the Stanford InfoLab Tshirt (pretty much a collectors item as larry and sergey were both part of the InfoLab here - though it was called the DB group then). And yea, yours truly won a Tshirt this quarter. But yet again, I was second best, Hector had 2 prizes, 1st and 2nd. Ushah won the first prize, so I am happy that both prizes stayed in my alma mater! So I am the official comedian of the class, and judging by my grade in that course, I probably was just that - a comedian! Here is Jennifer Widom wearing the InfoLab TShirt.

From Professor Frankel:
This is the Age of Human Rights. Since World War Two, we’ve seen the rise of the concept of universal rights and the growth of a global movement dedicated to the cause. Governments have signed treaties and conventions committing themselves to opposing genocide, torture and other crimes against humanity.

At the same time, nation-states have jealously guarded their own sovereignty, cracked down whenever threatened and ignored outbreaks of genocide, while superpowers like the United States have forged alliances with despots of many stripes. The distance between what governments have pledged on human rights and what they actually do is a gaping chasm. It’s here---in the gray zone between ambiguity and hypocrisy---that journalism lives.

This course will discuss the role of journalists in exposing human rights abuses. We’ll examine a number of case studies...