Hedging Political Contributions

I was under the impression that individual donors are highly partisan, as this page on “soft money” shows, but corporations would want to hedge their bets to make sure they carry some weight in Washington regardless of which party comes to power. Indeed, a look at the top 100 contributors over the past 16 years confirms that a fair share of corporations seem to be following this strategy: those on the fence include AT&T, FedEx, Citigroup, Microsoft, GE, Boeing, and a bunch of Wall Street firms. The exceptions seem to be drug companies (staunchly Republican) and workers unions (largely Democrat). Even firms that lean slightly to one side, such as Goldman Sachs (Democrat) still contribute a nominal amount to the other side (see graph). Though in Goldman’s case, the majority of these donations were not through political action committees but individuals associated with the organization – and again, they are highly partisan.

the Other Famous Stanford Psych Experiment

Now that Zimbo (the license plate on his car) has bid us adieu, I thought I should mention the rather interesting study a vaguely remember having heard about once: Prof. David Rosenhan back in the late 60s conducted an experiment by getting eight normal people to check themselves into 12 psychiatric wards and see if anyone would be able to expose them as fakes. They entered, complaining of “hearing voices,” and were immediately admitted – as soon as they were, they stopped faking their symptoms, flushed any medications they were told to take down the toilet, and proceeded to document their stays (in fact, writing was seen as an “aspect of their pathological behavior”).

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Each was told that he would have to get out by his own devices, essentially by convincing the staff that he was sane…. each was discharged with a diagnosis of schizophrenia “in remission.”

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You can read the entire paper, “On Being Sane in Insane Places,” published in Science here.Reminds me of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and the story of the depressed Stanford student who was put into solitary confinement against his will. Another reminder of the power of context as espoused by gestalt theory is this social experiment where the renowned classical musician Joshua Bell played his violin in a D.C. subway – and barely anyone stopped to listen.

a History of Stanford Commencement Speakers, 1892-

I hate it when information literally gets discarded or lost… I remember speaking to Prof. Hector Garcia- Molina a few years ago, when he mentioned his passion for photography and how even his digital photos that had been sitting on his hard disk had become corrupted. NASA I believe even makes you submit an age distribution of your group for any research/project proposal, as they want to make sure 20 years from now, someone will still be around who understands what was done. I even recall hearing that some of the records in the Library of Congress are simply useless because the machines needed to read them are no longer in existence nor properly understood by anyone.

The only list Stanford has of all its commencement speakers at graduation ceremonies from over the years is a sparsely-maintained list sitting in the Special Collections of Green Library, without any of their actual speeches. What a shame… if you have excerpts from any of these addresses or information on where to find them, please email me… the following is a transcription of the list; you’ll recognize a few names: Millikan (the oil-drop experiment), Trudeau (creator of Doonesbury), a smattering of Supreme Court justices, and two UN Secretary Generals.

Time Lapse

I probably first really noticed time lapse movies on CNN (where they use them as transitions between shows) and wanted to find some more – the film Chronos looks spectacular.

Marcello, a Stanford CS masters student, also demoed his site 2draw.net, which is a collaborative online drawing site where you can see the drawing process as a time-lapse video by clicking on “show animation” for some of the submissions. Very cool.

This one’s a 4-minute shot of an LA to NYC cross-country drive:

This one shows phototropism in plants – something that trackers for solar arrays now use to keep solar cells perpendicular to the sun (as the power generated is proportional to the cosine of the angle of incidence with the rays):

A Fascinating Tidbit from History

I remember being intrigued when my tenth-grade World History teacher, Phil Neeno, mentioned how the UN Security Council in 1950 had managed to pass a resolution that authorized the formation of a military coalition against the North Korean attack, considering that it would have faced a certain Soviet veto. Here’s how it came to pass, from this BBC article.
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“…President Truman was the first to put together two facts, only one of which was public knowledge.

In the spring of 1950 the Soviet Union had decided to boycott the Security Council because the General Assembly refused to have the Communist regime of mainland China replace Formosa – Taiwan – in the Security Council.

So at dawn of the North Korean invasion of the South, if the Russians wanted to have a say in the Security Council’s response, in other words if it was going to use its veto as it surely would have done, it would have to get a representative Russian delegate to New York as soon as possible.

What Harry Truman instantly remembered was that the Russians, at that time, had not developed a big commercial jet. They boasted about the superiority of a giant turbo-prop, but it was slower than a jet. Hence Harry Truman’s snappy order to Secretary Acheson: ‘Get to New York now – take a vote – go.’”

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As an “empty seat” abstention is treated as non-blocking, the resolution went through.