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An Independent Publication
THURSDAY www.stanforddaily.com Volume 239
March 31, 2011 Issue 31

Fukushima prompts nuclear reevaluation

Japan quake,tsunami motivate overhaul of nuclear reactor standards
By IVY NGUYEN
DESK EDITOR
As the struggle to regain con-
trol of the Fukushima nuclear
power plant continues, Stanford
experts say nuclear power faces a
critical reevaluation.
When a 9.0 earthquake struck
offshore of northeastern Japan on
Mar. 11, it triggered a massive
tsunami that swept over sea walls
built for much smaller waves and
swamped the Fukushima nuclear
power plant, damaging the backup
generators and power grid. These
latter devices were meant to stabi-
lize the plant in the event of such
an emergency, said physics profes-
sor Burton Richter.
With its last source of energy
gone, workers at the plant were no
longer able to cool the plant’s re-
actors, which soon overheated,
leading to hydrogen gas explo-
sions, fires and the release of ra-
dioactive elements.
As workers worked to prevent
further damage to the plant, alarm
spread when a plume of radioac-
tive particulates floated over the
Pacific Ocean, bringing increased
levels of radiation to the United
States a week later. The fact that
such a disaster occurred in Japan,
which boasted some of the strictest
earthquake safety codes in the
world, has prompted experts to re-
visit their relationship with nu-
clear power.
Preparing for the unexpected
In light of failures in Fukushi-
ma’s safety designs, the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission (NRC)
has begun a major evaluation of its
policies toward reactor safety sys-
tems, marking the agency’s third
such major overhaul.
The first occurred after the
1979 Three Mile Island partial
meltdown. The second overhaul
came after the 9/11 attacks, when
the commission studied ways to
guard against terrorist attacks — a
possibility that, like the combined
tsunami and earthquake, no one
had previously thought was possi-
ble, Richter said.
Richter speculated that one
major point of interest for the
commission would be to calculate
how long a plant would have to
rely on emergency generators be-
fore power could be reconnected.
This failure was one of the factors
that precipitated the weeklong cri-
sis at Fukushima.
“I think that having lost power
for two weeks was something of a
surprise,” Richter said. “The right
question to be asked is, do we have
to change requirements for the
amount of fuel for on-site emer-
gency generators in the United
States?”
The commission may also study
the possibility of what Richter
calls “multiple catastrophe” sce-
narios at each nuclear site. These
scenarios include floods and tor-
nadoes in the Midwest and
tsunamis and earthquakes in Cali-
Please see NUKE, page 2

NEWS BRIEFS All Right Now UNIVERSITY

Students return from SULAIR digitizes

South Korea
scholarship exchange despite Google case
MARIANNE LeVINE
By THE DAILY NEWS STAFF STAFF WRITER

Sam Garrett ‘12, Daniel Khalessi
‘13 and Tenzin Seldon ‘12 were
among 75 college students selected
to take part in the prestigious South
Korea Scholarship Program.
The students were hosted at Yon-
sei University, located in Seoul, and
had the opportunity to attend vari-
ous academic lectures and cultural
trips from Mar. 18 to 26.
Having just returned to the states,
Khalessi described his trip as “an
amazing experience” that took him
to museums, the U.S. military base
and the demilitarized zone between
North Korea and South Korea.
“This experience is a very mean-
ingful way to understand what we
learn in those courses,” said Kha-
lessi, who is a political science major.
“Going to a place like Korea and
seeing the divide between North and
South Korea . . . really gave me a
better picture of what’s going on. It
really supplemented the materials I
was learning in my classes in an ex-
ceptional way.”
The Council on International Ed-
ucation Exchange (CIEE) and the
Korea Foundation teamed together
to organize the scholarship program.
— An Le Nguyen
New Nano Center
upgrades Stanford’s
nanotech facilities
By THE DAILY NEWS STAFF
Last week, Stanford opened its
new Nano Center, providing the
University with access to one of the
world’s most advanced nanotech-
nology facilities with future projects
including better solar cells,more effi-
cient batteries and more effective
ways to detect cancers.
Although the idea for the Center,
in development since 2007, stems
from the needs of 77 labs across cam-
pus,creating just a single structure was
necessary to protect the very expen-
sive (each new tool ranges from $6 to
$10 million) and sensitive equipment.
In fact, most of the two-story
building was built underground in
order to reduce vibration and tem-
perature instability that could tamp-
er with the equipment’s effective-
ness.The Nano Center even has sev-
eral “clean rooms” that are kept free
of dust and allow researchers to
work on any relevant elements un-
like traditional “clean rooms” which
only work for silicon.
While the Center’s staff has
begun working with students and re-
searchers, the building is not fully
equipped. Machines and devices will
continue to come in throughout the
spring and summer quarters.
— Cassandra Feliciano
Students marched to a sweet and familiar beat at last night’s Band Run. The Leland Stan-
ford Junior University Marching Band lit up the night with its (in)famous array of colorful and
quirky costumes and outlandish props.
STUDENT GOV’T
Students boost GPA in just 60 minutes
By MARY ANN
TOMAN-MILLER
CONTRIBUTING WRITER
A Stanford study published in
Science magazine earlier this
month suggests that a simple one-
hour session in confidence build-
ing can boost both the academic
and emotional well-being of
African-American college fresh-
men — perhaps even enough to
curb the nation’s achievement
gaps.
The study’s co-authors, psychol-
ogy professor Geoffrey Cohen and
assistant professor Greg Walton,
conducted their intervention pro-
gram at a “selective university”
over a seven-year period ending in
JIN ZHU/The Stanford Daily
2008. Walton declined to identify
the institution for confidentiality
reasons.
The intervention’s one-hour ex-
ercise provided 49 African-Ameri-
can and 43 European-American
students with a narrative that de-
scribed anxieties as “shared and
short-lived,” before requiring
them to write essays and deliver
speeches expressing this senti-
ment. Participants also completed
daily surveys for a week thereafter.
Walton and Cohen focused on
avoiding the implication that stu-
dents were in need of help, and in-
stead encouraged participants to
view the problems of freshman
year as challenges faced by every-
one.
U.S. District Court Judge Denny Chin’s Mar. 22
decision may have thwarted Google’s plans to create
an online library and bookstore and rejected a $125
million settlement. But it wasn’t enough to deter
some of the Internet giant’s partners, including Stan-
ford.
“We’re continuing to scan,” said Andrew
Herkovic, director of communications and develop-
ment at Stanford Libraries. “We’re continuing to re-
ceive scanned versions of things back from Google,
and we’re doing so for the purpose of both preserva-
tion and the future of scholarship using those digi-
tized texts.”
The Google library and e-bookstore, which pro-
vide online versions of books that are in the public
domain, aimed to give readers access to books that
are out of print. Google already has snippets of cer-
tain texts but the original lawsuits were concerned
that these passages infringed on copyright laws.
“What the publishers are concerned about is los-
ing control over their revenue streams,” Herkovic
said.“Once the book is out of print, no one is making
any money off of that book at all unless it goes into a
new edition. The publishers and authors are worried
that somebody had figured out a way to make money
off of their stuff after it left their hands — that some-
body was Google.”
Stanford, along with several other institutions like
Harvard, Oxford, the University of Michigan and the
New York Public Library, primarily intend to use
Google Books as a means to preserve historical texts
and give their patrons increased access to scholarly
works. But Google’s pet project could also give them
more opportunity for text mining, or the ability to
better measure word frequency and sentence struc-
ture in particular texts, Herkovic said.
Chin rejected the settlement in order to prevent
Google from having a monopoly on the e-book in-
dustry. Such monopoly power would provide unfair
protection for the Internet giant from competition.
In his ruling, Chin suggested that Google create an
“opt-in” policy instead of its current “opt-out” policy
for authors and publishers.
But Herkovic asserted that such a policy would
provide a significant logistical challenge. He added
that some questions have been left unanswered.
For instance, Google’s recent lawsuit brought to a
Please see GOOGLE, page 2
“It’s normal for students to
have ups and downs,”Walton said.
He emphasized that the transi-
tion is difficult for everybody,“not
just members of groups that aren’t
represented well in academic set-
tings.”
But the researchers said mi-
nority students are more likely to
blame themselves, rather than
environmental factors, for
problems they encounter.
After tracking academic ANASTASIA YEE/The Stanford Daily
performance, for which stu-
dents gave researchers access pared to the control group.
to their transcripts, results showed More importantly, by senior
an increase in the academic per- year, the achievement gap between
formance of black students partici- the African-American and Euro-
pating in the intervention over the
first three years of college com- Please see GPA, page 2

Index Features/3 • Opinions/4 • Sports/6 • Classifieds/7 Recycle Me

2 ! Thursday, March 31, 2011
GOOGLE
Continued from front page
light an important question regard-
ing the copyright laws of “orphan
books,” or books with unknown
copyright holders. These books,
Herkovic said, were most likely
published after 1922 and before
1972. While the majority of these
books are currently in libraries, the
lawsuit has generated unanswered
questions regarding the copyright
laws related to these orphan books.
The subsequent steps for
Google remain to be seen. Both
Google and the American Publish-
NUKE
Continued from front page
fornia, he said.
California currently only has
two active reactors Diablo Canyon
and San Onofre and both are near
active fault lines, according to Ed-
ward Blandford, a postdoctoral fel-
low at the Center for International
Security and Cooperation
(CISAC), whose work focuses on
nuclear reactor design. Unlike
Japan, California lies on many slip-
strike faults, which are much less
likely to generate tsunamis than
Japan’s thrust faults.
Blandford also noted that the
Fukushima plant responded well
to the actual earthquake and was
actually damaged by the resulting
tsunami. The California plants, he
added, are also designed to with-
stand 6.7 G peak round accelera-
tion during an earthquake, which
is double of what the Fukushima
site experienced.
Reevaluating policy
In addition to changing current
nuclear plant regulations, the cri-
sis will also greatly shape the de-
bate over national nuclear policy.
California senators Dianne Fein-
stein and Barbara Boxer, for ex-
ample, have called for an immedi-
ate review of the California plants.
Blandford predicts that the
most immediate impact will be ei-
ther design or operational
changes, particularly whether
many older plants will be granted
permission to continue to operate
or be phased out.
The bigger question, Blandford
noted, was whether new plants
would be constructed.
The criteria that the NRC is
reevaluating suggests that there
will be a delay in granting site li-
censes, which evaluates proposed
locations for nuclear plants,
Richter agreed. As the NRC stud-
ies its current licensing and safety
requirements, there will likely be a
pause in the licensing of new nu-
clear reactors.
Blandford said there are cur-
rently two to four nuclear reactors
in the process of acquiring licens-
ing and construction permits.
Many of the problems encoun-
tered during the Fukushima crisis
also revolved around the spent
fuel ponds, which Blandford said
will “reinvigorate” the conversa-
tion over how such fuel should be
stored, both temporarily and in
the long run.
The initial proposal to store the
spent fuel in the Yucca Mountains
in Nevada was taken off the table
after Obama’s election.
“There’s been a lot of concern
over the politicization of the nu-
clear regulatory commission,”
Blandford said.
The end of nuclear?
A recent poll by the Nuclear
Energy Institute, a lobbyist group
for the nuclear industry, found
that support for nuclear energy in
the U.S. had dropped to 2008 lev-
els. This abrupt decline comes
after five years of increases in the
number of supporters for nuclear
power plants.
But plans to build new nuclear
power plants in the United States
have dwindled long before the
Mar. 11 earthquake struck Japan
due, in part, to the weakened econ-
omy and the high upfront costs for
building a reactor, Blandford said.
Although some larger public
utilities companies, such as South-
ern Nuclear, which serves resi-
dents in Alabama and Georgia,
are currently in the process of con-
structing additional plants, many
companies are not able to make
that same investment and have
asked for government aid.
“If you’re a utilities company
that has a capitalization of $15 bil-
lion, it’s very difficult for you to
make a $10 billion-dollar invest-
ment in a two-unit type plant,”
Blandford said. “A lot of the utili-
ties companies have asked the
government to step in and help
provide some loan guarantees
with respect to make that invest-
ment upfront.”
The 2005 Federal Energy Act
earmarked $50 billion dollars for a
loan-guarantee program to facili-
tate the construction of nuclear
power plants, but it remains to be
seen whether the current adminis-
The Stanford Daily
The Piano Man
er’s Association declined to com-
ment to The Daily. Hillary Ware,
Google’s managing Counsel has
publicly revealed that Google
would continue to pursue its cre-
ation of a worldwide online library
and bookstore.
“Like many others, we believe
this agreement has the potential to
open-up access to millions of books
that are currently hard to find in the
U.S. today,” Ware said. “Regardless
of the outcome, we’ll continue to
work to make more of the world’s
books discoverable online through
Google Books and Google
eBooks.”
Contact Marianne Levine at mlevine
2@stanford.edu.
tration will provide that same
amount of support.
With the price of natural gas
decreasing to about $4 dollars per
million btu from $10 per million
btu in 2008, Blandford predicts
that these companies will be more
likely to place their long term bets
with natural gas, which currently
produces about 24 percent of en-
ergy in the U.S. In comparison, nu-
clear reactors produce 20 percent
and coal 40 percent.
Addressing media coverage of
the current crisis, Richter said that
nuclear is still one of the safest
forms of energy currently in use, if
the risks associated with coal min-
ing and oil drilling are properly
taken into account. JIN ZHU/The Stanford Daily
“The only thing that’s better is French composer Jean-Claude Risset, known for his pioneering contributions to computer music, serenaded his
wind,” he added. Dinkelspiel Auditorium audience with pieces he interpreted himself after a discussion on sound processing.
As uncertainty over the fate of
the crippled Fukushima plant
looms, some have declared this cri-
GPA
sis the end of the nuclear age. Walton added that the study professor Walton’s research and
Blandford, however, thinks that nu- raises fundamental questions as to have actually been in conversa-
clear power will not disappear any how freshman orientations should tion with him over the past few
time in the near future. That’s be- be conducted, stressing that an years about how to augment our
cause, although the United States Continued from front page
emphasis on school pride at some programming efforts,” said Julie
has other natural resources to tap universities can actually stand in Lythcott-Haims, dean of fresh-
for energy, many nations — such as pean-American experimental the way of these programs. man and transfer students.
France, where nuclear reactors groups had been reduced by almost This is especially true because “Whether NSO is the right venue
provide 80 percent of the coun- 80 percent. freshman year can “set the tone or not is an open question. The
try’s energy, or Japan, where nu- However, more than 80 percent for the rest of one’s academic ex- concept of a ‘Stanford 101 cur-
clear produces 30 percent — face of the intervention’s participants perience,” Cohen said. riculum,’ currently in the devel-
space and demand constraints, as were skeptical, and only 8 percent “It’s important to identify with opmental phase, may be a better
well as a lack of abundant natural even remembered it when they your school,” he said. “But if that’s vehicle for delivering such mes-
resources. were evaluated at graduation the only thing that people get from sages [and] experiences.”
This need for a high-density en- three years later. Walton said orientation, it doesn’t prepare Meanwhile, Walton said similar
ergy source that requires little these reactions were good, be- them well when problems arise.” interventions, which are already
land space — which nuclear cause the beneficial effect did not Such sentiments are heard loud showing the same promising re-
power provides — is why over 100 require “conscious awareness.” and clear on the Farm, where Wal- sults, are currently in progress for
of the world’s approximately 400 “The intervention affects how ton and Cohen’s study may lead to women in engineering and His-
reactors are located in the United people encode ongoing personal changes in Stanford’s annual panic-American students.
States. experiences, preventing them freshman welcome, New Student
“The nuclear renaissance is not from having global responses to Orientation (NSO). Contact Mary Ann Toman-Miller at
United-States-centric; in fact, it’s events,” he said. “We are very excited about tomanmil@stanford.edu.
hardly that,” Blandford said.
Business as usual
China recently announced
plans to build enough plants to
supply about 100 gigawatts of
power, equal to the amount of nu-
clear power produced in the Unit-
ed States. Though it remains un-
clear how Beijing’s policies might
change in light of the Japanese cri-
sis, other countries such as Ger-
many, which had planned to heav-
ily rely on nuclear fuel to reach its
high renewable energy standard,
have temporarily halted their nu-
clear expansion programs.
Blandford nonetheless predicts
that many nations will eventually
continue to pursue nuclear power.
“It’s silly for these countries to
not stop and think about what
happened in Japan and to reevalu-
ate,” Blandford said. “But my
guess is that the nature of the acci-
dent is such that people will either
make appropriate designs or addi-
tional changes or will determine
that it’s not a significant enough
risk to them that they will contin-
ue to build out.”
Despite the practical reasons
for supporting nuclear energy,
many who are nervously watching
the Fukushima plant feel that the
potential for another similar dis-
aster are too great to accept, and
protests calling for its end have
erupted worldwide. Current pub-
lic outcry notwithstanding, Bland-
ford cites the gradual loss of inter-
est in banning offshore drilling a
year after the 2009 Deepwater
Horizon spill as an example of
how “public distress does not nec-
essarily enable action.”
“People have very short atten-
tion spans,” he said. “We saw the
same thing happen with offshore
drilling and at this point it appears
that it’s business as usual.”
“I’m not sure that public re-
sponse is going to impact long
term changes to our policy,” he
added.
Experts say that many con-
cerns over nuclear energy is due to
the public’s ignorance on the
issue.
“We have an overwhelming
lack of understanding about some
of the most important industries
that drive our countries,” Bland-
ford said.
“Numbers are not going to re-
lieve the public’s fear of nuclear,”
Richter said. “It’s frightening and
it’s up to the experts and the regu-
lators to convince the public that
they’ve done it right.”
An Le Nguyen contributed to this
article.
Contact Ivy Nguyen at iknguyen@
stanford.edu.
The Stanford Daily
FEATURES
SOLIDARITY IN EL SALVADOR
Students travel to Central America to study liberation,human rights struggles
!By ERIN INMAN
STAFF WRITER
T
raffic looms on either side as police
officers attempt to direct the crowd
off the street, too large to be con-
tained by the plaza. Spanish words
buzz past my ears at speeds too fast
to comprehend, so instead, I focus on retriev-
ing my bagged dinner and candle for the vigil.
Just before 6 p.m., the chaotic crowd trans-
forms into three orderly lines drawing people
down San Salvador’s main avenue.The march
in honor of El Salvador’s martyr and unoffi-
cial saint, Oscar Romero, has begun.
People of all sorts flow past me in the sea
of celebration: Salvadorian youth energized
for a man of another time, Salvadorian elders
who remember their hero with pride, interna-
tional students and workers affected by the
legacy of Romero and us, a group of 20 Amer-
icans attempting to build solidarity with the
Salvadorian nation.
As participants and professors of the win-
ter quarter class, El Salvador: Liberation The-
ology and Human Rights, we were joined by
members of South Bay Sanctuary Covenant
(SBSC), a local religious group committed to
creating social justice in Latin America, for a
week of confronting the past and present re-
alities of El Salvador.
Throughout the week, we met with social
activists about the evolving tension and vio-
lence in the Cabañas province due to mining
and environmental issues. We heard from a
variety of voices detailing El Salvador’s cur-
rent drug, gang, female inequality and immi-
gration problems. Though 19 years have
passed since the end of its civil war, many of
the issues prompting it remain unresolved.
At the chapel where Monseñor Romero
was assassinated, we stood with our hands on
the altar, each offering a word of what the
man, a conservative, Roman Catholic arch-
bishop turned liberal voice for the oppressed,
represented for us.
“Faith.” “Hope.” “Love.” “Justice.” Each
word is said with conviction, as if a strong
voice could will these words into being.
“The transformation of our people and
our society is in our hands. Not in those of
Obama nor those of Funes,” offers our guide,
a Carmelite nun, in closing.“Rather, change is
brought about through my hands and the
small decisions I make each day in which I act
with justice, peace and solidarity.”
After five days of meetings in San Sal-
vador, interlaced with good food and good
conversation, we packed up our mini bus for
the two-hour drive out of the capital and into
the rural countryside of the Lower Lempa.
Every time the bus stopped along the shack-
lined roads, we were met with a chorus of
“Mango! Pan dulce!,” as sellers thrust food
items towards us through the open bus win-
dows.
When the bus pulled into Comunidad Oc-
tavio Ortiz, a partner community of South
Bay Sanctuary Covenant, signs and general
excitement welcomed us.After introductions,
we jostled through a rendition of “Heads,
Shoulders, Knees and Toes” for the children.
“You do realize this means we’ll never be
able to run for public office,” a fellow Stan-
ford student joked, upon realizing we were
The 2011 Stanford delegation to El Salvador, joined by members of the South Bay Sanctuary
Covenant, traveled as part of a winter class on liberation and the struggle for human rights.
Thursday, March 31, 2011 ! 3
being taped.
Soon, as the energy dwindled down, I was
following my host brother down the main
road toward his home. We approached a
house with two girls preparing dinner near
the outside fire, a dog sleeping quietly be-
neath it.A quick peek into the house revealed
hammocks as the only furniture, besides a
table or two, upon which sat a stereo and a
blaring television.
As the girls chopped vegetables, preparing
a soup for dinner, I took in the scene around
me. Laundry hung on multiple lines. A heavy
duty truck stood alone on one side of the lot;
firewood was stacked against the house, and a
pile of freshly picked corn lay waiting to be
husked, while four dogs, a cat and many chick-
ens snuck in the house, only to be shooed out.
A dog approached me, and when I asked
for its name, my host brother looked up from
his work, smiled and said “Gringo,” the irony
not lost on either of us.
The next two days passed in a blur of tor-
tilla and jam making, sugar cane processing,
Courtesy of Hannah Rich
Courtesy of Erin Inman
Young girls hold photos of Oscar Romero, a
Salvadorian hero, at a march in San Salvador.
soccer games, mishaps with outdoor showers
and latrines, loud music waking us up at 5
a.m.,a developing hatred for cockroaches and
my own attempts to avoid butchering the
Spanish language.
After living with my host family, meeting
with the community board and partaking in
the community’s Celebration of the Word,
what speakers in San Salvador had alluded to
became a reality for me: the Salvadorian peo-
ple welcomed our solidarity. Young and old
alike passed “La Paz” after service, and few of
us were without a little girl climbing onto our
laps or laying siege to our hands.
On the last night, at a concert celebrating
Romero at the University of Central Ameri-
ca, stood the very same segments of society
from the march a week prior, only this time,
our group was not interested in building soli-
darity. Instead, I smiled, realizing that we em-
bodied it as we echoed back the nationalistic
responses in the song, “Sombrero Azul”:
“Dale salvadoreño, (dale)
que no hay pájaro pequeño, (dale)
que después de alzar el vuelo, (dale)
se dentenga en su volar.”
“Let’s do this Salvadorians (let’s do this),
There is no little bird (let’s do this),
That after take-off (let’s do this),
Stops in its flight.”
Contact Erin Inman at einman@stanford.edu.
4 ! Thursday, March 31, 2011 The Stanford Daily

OPINIONS
S EEING G REEN The Stanford Daily
Established 1892 AN INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER Incorporated 1973

Good Nuke, Bad Nuke Board of Directors

Zach Zimmerman
Managing Editors

Kate Abbott Kristian Bailey

Tonight’s Desk Editors
Cassandra Feliciano
President and Editor in Chief Deputy Editor Columns Editor News Editor

I
f you’ve ever seen “sunburns” An Le Nguyen Jacob Jaffe
Mary Liz McCurdy Stephanie Weber
on the skin of a cancer patient Chief Operating Officer Managing Editor of News Sports Editor
after radiation therapy, you’ve Head Copy Editor
seen the hazards of radioactivity. If Claire Slattery Nate Adams Marwa Farag
you’ve seen a picture of a mush- Holly Vice President of Advertising Managing Editor of Sports
Anastasia Yee
Head Graphics Editor Features Editor
room cloud, you’ve seen the dan- Moeller Theodore L. Glasser Kathleen Chaykowski
Alex Atallah
Jin Zhu
gers of nuclear weapons. And if Managing Editor of Features Photo Editor
Michael Londgren Web Editor
you’ve watched the news from Lauren Wilson Sophia Vo
Japan over the last few weeks, you Robert Michitarian Managing Editor of Intermission Wyndam Makowsky
know how fragile human control of plant construction has begun in Copy Editor
Jane LePham Staff Development
nuclear power can be. nearly 40 years, and none will begin Zack Hoberg
without heavy government subsi- Shelley Gao Managing Editor of Photography Business Staff
For those of you who haven’t, I
offer this ripped-from-the-head- dies. Though new technologies like Rich Jaroslovsky Begüm Erdogan
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mi. Failed cooling systems at a efficiency and greater safety, many
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plant’s operators may be down-
playing the situation — whether to In 1986, when the Chernobyl
maintain calm or for self-preserva- plant melted down, 28 people died
tion. Meanwhile, Western accounts
— at some points suggesting immi-
within days from acute radiation
poisoning. But, while those deaths T HIS C OLUMN I S I RONIC
nent catastrophe — may be cater- were both horrific and tragic, the
ing to the opposite extreme. The
true story, when it emerges through
truly insidious fear was cancer. Be-
tween 1991 and 2003, 6,000 cases of
thyroid cancer were diagnosed in
New York, I Love You, But You’re Bringing SF Down
the plumes of steam, will have its
heroes and its failures, likely in- the region.

cluding some loss of life — though
paling in comparison to the thou-
sands killed outright by the tsuna-
mi.)
But for those of us who have
also seen — and believed — the
evidence of the impact of rising at-
mospheric carbon dioxide (climate
change and ocean acidification) on
our planet, there are some things
more terrifying than a reactor on
the loose. How many homes will be
lost to sea level rise? How many
livelihoods will be devastated by
shifting patterns of rain and
drought? How tenuous will human-
ity’s existence become, not just in
zones of radioactive fallout, but on
the entire planet?
Nuclear power’s promise is its
generation of electricity without
the emission of a steady stream of
greenhouse gases (and other,
acutely toxic pollutants), thus slow-
ing the increase of atmospheric
CO2. Today, some thirteen percent
of global electricity comes from nu-
clear power, to the carbon-savings
tune of 2.5 billion tons of CO2
emissions each year. Still, nuclear
power is nonrenewable. It relies
upon the extraction and refinement
of radioactive heavy metals, tempo-
rary use of these materials in reac-
tors and, ultimately, interminably
long storage of radioactive waste in
facilities that have proved impossi-
ble to locate or secure over the
multigenerational timescales in-
volved.
It is for these reasons — and,
perhaps more so, because of the
hazards of a catastrophic meltdown
or the threat of terrorism — that
nuclear power has proven both po-
litically and economically infeasi-
ble. In the United States, no new
But compare that number to the
44,000 thyroid cancer diagnoses
made here in the United States
every single year. Or to the 17,000
annual “premature deaths” which
the EPA attributes to air pollution
from coal plants. Yet the vanishing-
ly small risk of cancer from a super-
diffuse plume of radiation (wafting
5,500 miles across the Pacific
Ocean from Japan’s crippled plant)
is enough to send Californians scur-
rying to buy up all the iodine pills
available.
Like a frog unaware of water
coming to a boil around it, we have
habituated ourselves to a slow de-
cline in environmental quality. We
no longer recognize the baseline
death toll claimed by asthma, by
coal mining accidents, by heavy
metal poisoning. We refuse to ac-
knowledge our role in global cli-
mate change even though the evi-
dence is overwhelming and the
consequences of inaction are dire.
Are the unknowns that lie ahead
really so frightening that we refuse
to engage with them at all? Or are
they so distant that we cannot
stomach making hard choices
today?
Would a more balanced assess-
ment of risks result in economic vi-
ability for nuclear power? A 2009
MIT study found that an emissions
tax of at least $25 per ton of CO2
would be necessary to level the
playing field with fossil fuels. It is
with such a tax in place and in the
absence of other subsidies — for
renewables and nuclear, as well as
for fossil fuels — that we should let
the market determine whether nu-
clear power is a viable option.
Please see MOELLER, page 5
S
pring quarter has sprung at
Stanford — or so I’m told. I’m
still at home in beautiful Scran-
ton, Pennsylvania. There’s snow on
the ground. I don’t leave for Oxford
for another two and a half weeks.
Being at home for such a long peri-
od of time can definitely get boring,
but there’re ways to pass the time.
On Tuesday, I spent the day in New
York City. Being in Manhattan
again reminded me of an argument
that I often have with friends on
campus. I’ll warn you, if your home
state borders the Pacific Ocean,
you’re probably not going to like
what I have to say.
First things first: I love Stanford. I
love the weather, I love the people
and I love the Bay Area.Though the
West Coast has brought me nothing
but pure greatness during my three
years there, I’m still an East-Coaster
at heart. Think of it as an “it’s not
you, it’s me” situation. No matter
how fantastic the West Coast could
possibly be — even if Arrested De-
velopment inexplicably came back
on the air only in California — it still
could never trump the East Coast in
my mind. I’m a homer, what can I
say? And to that extent, I’m going to
make a point that might be a little
controversial back on campus: New
York City is exponentially better
than San Francisco, no matter how
much you West Coasters refuse to
admit it.
There are the important things —
like transportation. First and fore-
most on that topic, New York has
the Cash Cab. It already wins. But if
you insist on going deeper, New
O P-E D
Shane
Savitsky
York’s subway system is the most
useful thing ever.Yes, it’s grimy, old
and rat-infested, but if you need to
get yourself between two places
anywhere in the five boroughs on
the cheap, it’s definitely the way to
go. BART can’t even compare.
There’s what, like six stops in San
Francisco? I guess I could use the
MUNI or the bus, but that might
mean getting accosted by hordes of
homeless people. I mean, seriously,
Gavin Newsom can get Happy
Meal toys banned in San Francisco,
but he can’t get rid of homeless
people? Rudy Giuliani pulled that
off almost a decade ago in New
York City.
(Speaking of Gavin Newsom, I
like the guy a lot, but did San Fran-
cisco seriously reelect him in 2007
after he admitted to cheating on his
wife? That’s political suicide, but
somehow San Francisco rewards it
with a landslide victory. I’m a politi-
cal science major! I study elections!
This stuff is common sense. Adul-
tery loses elections . . . except in San
Francisco. Newsom kind of owned
that town, yet he still bailed for
Sacramento. Ouch.)
Should we talk sports, too? How
about baseball? Okay, so the Giants
won the World Series last year —
their first in San Francisco. Big deal.
LETTERS
They’ve been playing there since
1958. Did it really take you guys that
long? I know the Giants fans out
there will be quick to say, “Hey
Shane, you know the Giants organi-
zation has six World Series titles in
its history. Not just one.” Really?
Well,where did your beloved Giants
get five of their World Series wins?
Oh yeah — in New York. Even the
Giants were five times more suc-
cessful in New York than in San
Francisco. When the Giants some-
how manage to equal the 27 World
Series victories of my Yankees, then
we can talk, okay?
Here’s the thing, San Francisco:
New York is the social, cultural and
financial capital of the United
States.There’s really no way around
it. You guys just can’t top that. You
don’t see the characters in Gossip
Girl stomping around Russian Hill.
They’re on the Upper East Side for
a reason. Even the hipsters in
Williamsburg manage to be more
relevant than the hipsters in The
Mission. There’s at least a music
scene in Brooklyn. However, San
Francisco, you do have the Golden
Gate Bridge, and I’ll admit that it’s
pretty awesome. I might even let
you say that The Presidio is almost
as good as Central Park, but those
are my only concessions. Let’s face
it: no matter which way you look at
it, you’re still New York’s little
brother.
Do any Californians think that Shane
is a complete Nob (Hill) for his blas-
phemy? E-mail him at savitsky@stan-
ford.edu to let him know.
TO THE EDITOR

C ORPORATE S PONSORSHIP RUSH K-Sig Dear Editor,

Call to Action

Kenny Mendes is head of recruit-
ing at Box, a Palo Alto-based enter-
prise startup that is changing the way
For Freedom
This letter is a call to action to the Stanford stu-
recruits. Or you may be an entrepre- dent body.An important review of Stanford’s Judi-
neur growing your own team, in cial Charter is under way, and it is crucial that the
which case feel free to borrow from voices of our fellow students be heard.

enterprises manage their data in the
cloud. Over five million people and
60,000 businesses — including 73
percent of the Fortune 500 — use
Box to collaborate with their data
and access it from any mobile device.
Box was named Inc. Magazine’s No.
3 breakout company of 2010 and was
ranked as the second-fastest growing
private company in the Silicon Val-
ley. It has tripled in size to over 150
employees in the last year and a half
and is continuing to expand, espe-
cially in engineering and sales. Inter-
ested in working at Box? Email
Kenny directly at kenny@box.net.
I’m not here to tell you that as-
sembling a killer team is critical to
building a winning startup. There
are enough successful entrepre-
neurs who have sufficiently driven
that point home. At Box, however,
we are hyper-paranoid about this.
Steve Jobs said it best:“Some people
aren’t used to an environment
where excellence is expected.”
Though Box has tripled in size in the
last year and a half, we still have a
laser focus on hiring the type of peo-
ple you could build a startup from
scratch with. I’m going be sharing
some insight into the critical quali-
ties we look for in every new hire at
Box — in other words, what makes
the Perfect Boxer.
Since none of you are currently
responsible for recruiting talent at
Box, why would any of this be useful
at all for you to read? For those of
you interested in working in a start-
up after you graduate, the biggest
value might be the perspective it
gives you into the hiring philoso-
phies of a fast-moving company and
the intangibles we look for in new
the lessons we’ve learned through-
out the years. Thinking back to my
own mindset when I was graduating
college, however, I didn’t under-
stand how to completely evaluate
the organizations that were inter-
viewing me. I was analyzing factors
such as job responsibilities, compen-
sation, product and perks, but I un-
derestimated how important it was
to weigh the horsepower of the peo-
ple I would be working with. Re-
member, amazing teams build win-
ning companies, not ideas.
Aaron Levie, our co-founder and
CEO, used to interview each candi-
date we were considering hiring. He
assessed their raw smarts, quickness,
passion and track record and en-
sured that these hires would add to
Box’s strong culture and make a
huge impact. But as Box began to
grow faster and faster, it became in-
efficient to have Aaron meet with so
many potential hires.As we gradual-
ly delegated more hiring responsi-
bilities to various managers and the
process became increasingly distrib-
uted, Aaron analyzed, articulated
and conveyed to our leadership
team the most important traits he
deemed necessary in the people we
hire.The Perfect Boxer needs to be:
A big thinker - has ambitions and
dreams; will never be outdone.
Successful - we want people who
know what it is like to win.
Enthusiastic - you just want to be
around this person;fun,happy,excit-
ed.
Super smart - you feel like you
can learn a lot from this person.
Resourceful - knows how to
leverage the tools around them.
Please see BOX, page 5
N
o all-campus parties for two weeks, freshmen plot-
ting how they’re going to take over the Row and
girls dressed up at ridiculous hours for reasons
none of them can really explain, I think it might be RUSH
season. I don’t really care if you RUSH, but if you do, join
Kappa Sig.
The totality of my Greek experience was one Theta
Delt rush event freshman year, but I’ve often been told
that the Band is like a fraternity. If so, then our common-
ality would stem from a history of the University dicking
us over. Back in 2006, when the Class of ‘14 were wee
ninth graders just learning how to hate mainstream pop
and I was a high school senior obsessing over my Stan-
ford application, four band members wrecked a trailer
they thought was going to be destroyed. Because some
other band members drank a lot at inappropriate times
two and three years prior, the University banned us from
doing halftime shows and traveling to tournaments. They
thought we needed a significant cultural change.
Much in the same way, ResEd, everyone’s favorite
Stanford administration, has decided that Kappa Sig
must undergo a “significant cultural change” in order to
get its house back. Fear these words, bros, for they are the
work of the devil. They mean that you are too stupid/in-
competent/morally bankrupt to govern yourselves, which
is why Mama ResEd needs to step in and tell you how to
run your student-run organization while all the time in-
sisting it’s a partnership. I can tell you that the only signif-
icant cultural change to come out of the Band’s ordeal is
an organization-wide disdain for University administra-
tors.
According to Deborah Golder, Dean of Residential
Education, Kappa Sig’s mandated “significant cultural
change” is that it needs to go from identifying “just as a
group of tight-knit friends” to being a “true fraternity by
Stanford’s definition.” That’s stupid and possibly evil.
Fraternities and sororities are noxious organizations.
They take personal racism/sexism/heterosexism and
make it institutional. They formalize the “old boys net-
work” that is responsible for perpetuating much of the
economic inequality in America, and they create literal
spaces of privilege and entitlement on college campuses.
The only redeeming factor is the actual people. The most
redeeming part about the Greek system at Stanford is
Please see OPED, page 5
The Office of Judicial Affairs (OJA) is current-
ly undergoing its first major review since 1997,
when Stanford’s Judicial Charter was created.
Fourteen years have passed since then, and we are
investigating what is working, what is not working
and what needs to work differently — and we want
your input in answering those questions.
As a result of the review, many important facets
of student conduct adjudication on campus may
change significantly, including but not limited to
the following issues:
1) Standard sanction for violations of the Honor
Code (one quarter suspension and 40 hours of
community service)
2) Specification and use of the Fundamental
Standard
3) Appeals process
4) Standard of proof for all types of cases
brought to OJA (“beyond a reasonable doubt,”
“clear and convincing” or “preponderance of the
evidence”)
We, the students on the committee conducting
the review, would like to stress the importance of
student awareness and input to the process and to
urge students to contribute their thoughts, be it by
a letter to the review committee or by attending
one of our many events below.
The committee is comprised of representatives
from the Stanford community, including faculty,
staff and students who were nominated by Vice
Provost Boardman and President Hennessy. The
committee has solicited student input through a
few channels. Most prominently, the ASSU coordi-
nated a Student Input Forum where each subcom-
mittee heard from students about the specific is-
sues they are investigating. Additionally, four stu-
dents serve on the committee — two undergradu-
ates and two graduates — with one on each sub-
committee who continuously represents the stu-
dent body. The subcommittees have also spoken
with students who serve as judicial panelists,as well
as students who have reported and responded to
Honor Code or Fundamental Standard violations.
Although students have already contributed
Please see LETTERS, page 5
The Stanford Daily
BOX
Continued from page 4
Creative - has plenty of great,
clever, useful ideas.
Fast - makes intelligent decisions
quickly and knows how to adapt.
A perfectionist - only knows how
to produce high-quality results.
Curious - incredibly inquisitive
with a desire to always be learning.
We’ve paid an inordinate
amount of time hunting for candi-
dates that show these tendencies,in-
cluding both fresh graduates and
seasoned Silicon Valley veterans.
We’ve been able to hire people who
are insanely smart, eager, enthusias-
tic, creative, happy, resourceful and,
of course, qualified. And we keep
our team incredibly diverse— —
we hire people of every age, sex, re-
ligion, race, nationality and world-
view.
We realized early on that if the
individuals driving hiring in the
company aren’t completely com-
mitted to your company’s stan-
dards, you run into situations where
MOELLER
Continued from page 4
My purpose in this column is not
to downplay the tragedies unfold-
ing in Japan. Nor is it to provide a
glowing endorsement of nuclear
power. No: I ask only that each one
of us stops to think carefully about
the risks we are willing to accept
and how these compare to the risks
we are already taking — either de-
liberately or incidentally — in our
current fossil fuel-based economy.
Nuclear power is one item on a
frighteningly short list of alterna-
tive energy sources. While neither
clean nor renewable, it is scientifi-
cally (if not economically) viable
OPED
Continued from page 4
that everyone is smart enough to
call out the bullshit parts for what
they are and recognize that it’s just
a friend group.
But ResEd wants Kappa Sig to
downplay the social aspects and
see themselves as an organization
first, which means wearing more
coats and ties to chapter meetings
and talking about the frat and the
chapter and the importance of
leadership in somber tones and
doing more community service
(even though they already do plen-
ty), or at least that’s what they’ll
tell them. In reality, what they want
is for them to stop raging and be-
come the type of organization
where “nobody’s really into that
sort of thing” and looks down on
the people that are.Then, they’ll be
a model fraternity true to Stan-
ford’s definition. Sacrificing inter-
personal bonds for the sake of an
impersonal organization at the be-
hest of authority figures, that’s
how people perpetuate injustice in
a society.
RUSH (always written with
caps lock) is a weird process. It’s a
formal audition process for mak-
ing friends, an institutionalization
of high school clique mentality.
Each arbitrary group of letters car-
ries a distinct personality that you
are going to mark yourself with but
LETTERS
Continued from page 4
much to the review, more student
participation is vital for the results of
this process to have the most posi-
tive impact on the conduct process
and campus culture. We are provid-
ing a myriad of ways to give input on
these issues, because we realize the
sensitivity and need for confiden-
tiality in many cases.
Facebook: You can stay updated
about the process on the OJA Face-
book page: facebook.com/Whatis-
StanfordIntegrity
Anonymous Online Survey:
Share your thoughts anonymously
on the online survey form.
https://stanforduniversity.qualtrics.
com/SE/?SID=SV_1TjJC1ssPh-
sQ7B2
Email: Send your input to JAO-
admin@stanford.edu
Input Forums: Members of each
subcommittee will be available to
discuss the review and receive your
input on Tuesday, April 19 at 5:30
p.m. and Thursday, April 21 at 12
p.m., location TBD
Tabling in White Plaza:Members
will be available to discuss the re-
view and receive your input in White
Plaza Thursday, April 6 and Friday,
April 7 12-1 p.m.
These are important opportuni-
ties to learn about the review and to
share your thoughts in a process that
will change Stanford in a significant
way. We sincerely hope you, the stu-
Thursday, March 31, 2011 ! 5
the judgments of hiring managers
are clouded by the pain of not hav-
ing someone in the seat. When they
relax their expectations, even slight-
ly, they may solve a short-term
problem but create a catastrophic
long-term situation for the compa-
ny that becomes incredibly tough to
reverse.
There can be a tendency for A-
players to only hire As,Bs to hire Bs,
Cs to hire Cs (and so on), and this
can be extremely detrimental to all
future hires. Remember, great peo-
ple who thrive off the energy, pas-
sion and hard work of other great
people never want to join an organ-
ization filled with, well, as they
might put it, sucky people.
You want to be part of a compa-
ny where you will be surrounded by
passionate, brilliant people who will
mentor and motivate you. When
you work in a startup with high cal-
iber people who are relentless
about driving innovation, you’ll
have a chance to learn more than
you’ll ever imagine, experience in-
credible individual growth and be
able to make a tremendous impact.
In fact,at Box,we believe there is no
better way to start your career.
right now. And perhaps it deserves
a little less fear-mongering — at
least while some very real dangers
are escaping it altogether.
We’ve come a long way since
the days when the “Firecracker
Boys” of Operation Plowshare
proposed the peaceful (and ludi-
crous!) use of nuclear weapons to
blast Alaskan harbors, widen the
Panama Canal or level inconven-
ient mountain ranges. But we
should not let the pendulum of
public opinion swing too far in the
opposite direction without modu-
lating its path with wisdom.
One nuke, two nuke; red nuke, blue
nuke. We hope this Daiichi thing’s a
fluke. Send thoughts, comments and
anti-nuke propaganda to Holly at
hollyvm@stanford.edu.
which, like, totally doesn’t define
you. The parent website may talk
about promoting kinship or lead-
ership or something like that, but
those are just the same buzzwords
that reside in corporate mission
statements around the world, and
what’s more, there is no dis-
cernible path for achieving them.
Even the Band has teleology; we
come together to play music and
try to get better at that. The end
goal of joining a fraternity/sorority
is to be in a fraternity/sorority,
which is to say, ResEd, that there is
only one true definition of any
Greek organization at Stanford or
anywhere: the list of people in that
Greek organization.
But this year is different, be-
cause ResEd made it different.
Kappa Sig is not just the roster of
its members; it is the frat that “has
had patterns of behavior that go
beyond what I would call shenani-
gans . . . to a level that was danger-
ous” and that got off easy by not
being suspended for four years.
Couched in fake benevolence,
ResEd is using its authoritarian
mission to publicly shame Kappa
Sig into being “a true fraternity.”
There would be no greater middle
finger to ResEd, paternalism and
anti-fun authoritarianism than for
Kappa Sig to have record numbers
of pledges this year.And so, I say to
all RUSHing freshmen and sopho-
mores, even the ladies: RUSH K-
SIG. For freedom.
PETER MCDONALD,‘11
dent body,will take full advantage of
them, and let your voice be heard.
ANGELINA CARDONA ‘11, KEYA
PANDIA, PH.D.‘11, BRITTANY
RINER, M.A.‘11,TED WESTLING ‘12,
KELSEI WHARTON ‘12
Sporting Event Policy
Dear Editor,
My 9-year-old son and I were just
turned away from Stanford baseball
game yesterday because we brought
a youth football. Ironically, we were
there to meet with a visiting star
quarterback prospect from Seattle
and his family with whom we are
deep friends.
This may seem a trivial item, but
my sophomore son and I were
turned away from a Stanford foot-
ball game last year with a Stanford
football.
I think the University needs to
quickly reconsider this. In modern
time-pressure times, much of par-
ent/child sports attendance is to
share love of sports, to do like the
collegiates do, to get up and share
exercise at halftime or seventh-in-
ning stretch.
Stanford Athletics needs to ac-
tively welcome alumni and area res-
idents to fill stadiums, not shun
them.
MARK BREIER ‘81, MBA ‘85, J.E.
WALLACE STERLING AWARD
WINNER, STANFORD ALUMNI
BOARD EMERITUS,
FORMER DAILY COLUMNIST
6 ! Thursday, March 31, 2011 The Stanford Daily

SPORTS
SUBS SHINE
Reserves key sweep Tourney
Jacob
Jaffe
Fields of Failure

of UC-Santa Cruz as good as

By MILES BENNETT-SMITH
DESK EDITOR

The Stanford men’s volleyball team ran into

a little trouble last weekend in its return to
league play after several weeks off for finals and
Dead Week.The No. 4 Cardinal split a weekend
series with Cal State Northridge and Long
Beach State, narrowly getting past the last-place
Matadors before dropping a five-set match to
the No. 9 49ers.
But a midweek tune-up against non-league
Div.III rival UC-Santa Cruz last night at Maples
Pavilion might be just what the doctor ordered.
Stanford (16-6, 12-5 MPSF) rested a few players
with nagging injuries, but looked fluid and con-
fident on the court in a 3-0 dismantling of the
Banana Slugs (7-13).
The first set saw the Cardinal get into gear
quickly and take control on the backs of fresh-
man outside hitter Eric Mochalski and junior
setter Evan Barry. Even as the team struggled
from the service line with five errors, the de-
fense held firm and led to a very efficient side-
out game. Mochalski had six kills in the first set,
and Barry finished with 10 assists as Stanford
used several three-point runs to power past
Santa Cruz, 25-15.
“We always want to get better, and it was an
opportunity for our starters to get better
tonight,” said head coach John Kosty. “We did
the right things and really concentrated on our
side. I think Stanford men’s volleyball per-
formed very well tonight.”
With the team on a roll and looking rejuve-
nated after the first set, Kosty went to his bench
to give his starters a rest in anticipation of this
weekend’s showdown with No. 1 and confer-
ence-leading USC.
The reserves certainly made the most of the
opportunity.
Redshirt junior middle blocker Charley
Henrikson built off his success last weekend
when he came in and sparked a Stanford rally
against Northridge with several kills early in the
SPORTS BRIEFS
Softball shuts down Gaels got Stanford on the board with a
Senior outside hitter Ian Connolly (left) and senior libero Jordan Inafuku (right) got rare amounts of
playing time Wednesday night in No. 4 Stanford men’s volleyball’s sweep of UC-Santa Cruz. Along
with five digs, Connolly added six kills on seven attempts as the Cardinal cruised to an easy victory
over the Division III Banana Slugs. Up next for Stanford is a home match against No. 1 USC.
second set against the Banana Slugs. Barry con-
tinued his usual consistent play as he set a solid
offense for the Card with 12 assists to give Stan-
ford a 25-18 margin in set two.
Then the unlikely tandem of junior setter
Dylan Kordic and senior outside hitter Ian Con-
nolly took over in the third set. Kordic, a con-
verted outside hitter, had a career night in his
first extended playing time since he arrived on
the Farm, totaling 15 assists and chipping in
three digs and a kill in one and a half sets.
With the score tied at 19 in the third set, Ko-
rdic combined with freshman middle blocker
Denny Falls for a big block and point. Kordic
then set up Connolly for a kill to put the Card up
23-21 before winning a solo joust at the net to
HAVING A
JIN ZHU/The Stanford Daily
make it 24-21 to give Stanford three match
points.
“Dylan really played great tonight,” Kosty
said. “He has come a long way from being an
outside hitter. Tonight was an opportunity to
give him a measuring stick and see where he is
with his setting ability.”
Kordic himself was humbled by all the atten-
tion focused on him after the match.
“The best thing for me was just the support
of the guys on the bench and the play of the guys
on the court with me.They really helped me out
by playing well; it made my job easy.”
Connolly, for his part, also had a career night
Please see MVBALL, page 8
it gets
T
he other day, I randomly
flipped on ESPN to see
Michelle Beadle and Colin
Cowherd debating various
poll questions on SportsNa-
tion.I usually find the arguments fair-
ly obvious but moderately amusing,
so I was half-watching when they got
to the question “Which NCAA post-
season do you prefer?” The choices
available were the NCAA Tourna-
ment in basketball or the BCS in foot-
ball.
Wait, seriously? That’s even a
question?
I love college football, and bowl
season is one of the highlights of my
year. But have you seen the NCAA
Tournament this year? Even if all the
games were played by the Globetrot-
ters and the Generals with Tim Don-
aghy as the referee, they could not
possibly create more exciting, unbe-
lievable games than this tournament
has had.
Here we sit with only four teams
left, and there are more double-digit
seeds than ones or twos (something
that has never happened before) and
exactly zero outright regular-season
conference champions. The path to
this crazy quartet was even crazier
than Dick Vitale at a Duke-UNC
game . . .
One Final Four team has won all
of its tournament games by single dig-
its, including two nail-biting finishes
won by a basket in the final five sec-
onds. Another Final Four team fin-
ished ninth in its own conference and
barely escaped its Elite Eight game,
with two potential game-winning
three-pointers missed in the final sec-
onds. A third Final Four team tied a
record by winning its four games by a

The No. 12 Stanford softball
team continued its success with a 2-
0 home win over Saint Mary’s last
night. The victory was the Cardi-
nal’s 16th win in its last 17 games.
Senior pitcher Ashley Chinn led
Stanford (24-4) with a dominant
performance on the mound. Chinn
went six innings and allowed only
four hits to improve to 11-0 on the
season. She struck out four without
walking a batter. For the game, only
one Gael batter reached second
one-out, solo home run to center in
the third inning. Freshman Corey
Hanewich tacked on another run in
the fourth inning with an RBI single
after an error by Gael shortstop
Christine Torrise.
The Cardinal almost scored a
third run in the fifth, but sophomore
pinch runner Caitlin Breen was
thrown out at home plate. Despite
managing only two runs for the
game, Stanford had at least one hit
in every inning.
This weekend marks the start of
the Pac-10 season for the Cardinal.
BALL
combined 13 points, including an
overtime game and two of the crazi-
est finishes you will ever see.
Oh yeah, and there’s also VCU.
The Rams’ five wins in 12 days over
teams from the Pac-10, Big East, Big
Ten, ACC and Big 12 — with four of
the five wins coming by double digits
— after having one of the weakest at-
large profiles ever make this Cin-
derella story more unimaginable than
BY DASH DAVIDSON the original Cinderella story itself.
CONTRIBUTING WRITER After this, maybe they’ll need to call
fairy tales “VCU stories.”

base and none reached third.
Sophomore pitcher Teagan Gerhart
pitched a 1-2-3 seventh inning for
her first save of the season.
Britany Linton took the hard-
luck loss for Saint Mary’s (4-12), as
she only allowed one earned run in
3.2 innings of work.
Junior shortstop Ashley Hansen
Senior pitcher Ashley Chinn was dominant Wednesday night, shutting out
Saint Mary’s over six innings to help the No. 12 Stanford softball team win
2-0, running Chinn’s 2011 record to 11-0 and the Cardinal’s to 24-4.
J
Stanford will open up conference
amin Ball loves tennis.
play with a three-game home series
He started playing at
against No. 7 Arizona starting Fri-
age 7, and by 11, the
day at 7 p.m. Saturday’s game will
sport was already his
start at 1 p.m., while Sunday’s will
self-proclaimed “pas-
start at 12 p.m. All three games will
sion.” Seven years later, the
take place at Smith Family Stadium.
Stanford freshman still loves the
game that has been one of the
— Jacob Jaffe
main components of his young
life.
Tennis is a notoriously brutal
sport, especially for young
teenagers who are thrust into
the throes of competition. Ju-
nior tennis is renowned for
being a hotbed of intense and
overly active parenting, but
Ball’s motivation came from
within.
“I started getting serious —
started playing more and enter-
ing more tournaments — not
because I was particularly good
at tennis at that time, nor be-
cause my parents made me or
anything, but because I really
loved playing,” he said. “At first,
it was always only because I just
really liked it.”
Raised by two athletic par-
ents, Ball was encouraged to
play several different sports —
basketball, baseball, tennis and
soccer — at a young age, and,
even then, he just really “loved
to compete.” But tennis was his
strongest sport, the one where
his natural competitiveness and
drive to win was best suited to
excel due to the isolated, one-
on-one nature of the game.
Ball downplayed the intensi-
ty of his early experience in jun-
ior tennis, saying, “Once I start-
ed playing a lot of tournaments,
that’s when it started to get a lot
better, because, I mean, it’s fun
to practice and everything, but
competition is where you can re-
ally see where you’re at and
everything, see where you
stand.”
JIN ZHU/The Stanford Daily
When asked if he liked the
competitive nature of his life at
this early age, Ball responded,
“It is really intense, like compet-
itively and all, but at the same
time, it’s not that intense, be-
cause, you know, you’re just a lit-
tle kid, and at the end of the day
you really don’t care too much
about a tennis match or a tennis
tournament or anything. Really,
at that point, my favorite part
was the travel [that junior tour-
naments required]. I loved
that.”
Ball told me about these
early tennis experiences while
the two of us were rallying out in
the strong (for March) Califor-
nia sun, something he is used to,
having grown up in the area and
gone to high school in neighbor-
ing Menlo Park. It was a great
treat for me, a tennis player but
certainly not a tennis player as
Ball is. He was being nice to me,
keeping the ball in play and only
occasionally rifling backhands
with ease past me, perhaps set
off by an annoying question I
asked him.
Watching him play, it’s obvi-
ous why he was such a commod-
ity for college programs coming
out of high school; he glides
around the court, stinging balls
and effortlessly repelling the
fiercest of my shots. It was there,
on those blue tennis courts
under the lights at Taube Family
Tennis Center, where Ball al-
ways wanted to end up.
“It was always a goal of mine,
from the time I started playing
tennis competitively, to play in
college,” Ball said. “Of course,
there’s a professional level, but
before that, it’s college tennis.
Everyone always talks about
college tennis and what a great
experience it is . . . Growing up
right around here, it’s kind of
funny, but I’ve always been set
on coming to Stanford, like, ever
since I was a little kid. I didn’t
even take any other official vis-
its anywhere or anything, I just
knew that I really wanted to
Please see BALL, page 8
In any case, it is impossible to be a
sports fan and not acknowledge how
incredible this year’s tournament has
been. Even if you’re a devastated Pitt
fan having nightmares about free
throws and rebounds, you can at least
admit that the other 63 games so far
have been ridiculous. I mean, heck, I
lost my bracket pool to my mom
(that’s what happens when you let
your relatives pick randomly and
your dad went to VCU for medical
school), and this has still been the
greatest month of neutral sports fan-
dom of my life.
How could this possibly be com-
pared to the BCS? Yes, that BCS.The
one that induces outrage every year.
The one with more flaws than Rebec-
ca Black’s “Friday” video. The one
that only exists because no alterna-
tive solution would make the people
in charge as much money.
I honestly could not believe the
question was even being asked. As I
expected, the results were over-
whelmingly in my (and common
sense’s) favor. However, what
bugged me even more than the ques-
tion itself was Colin Cowherd’s argu-
ment in favor of the BCS.
He started off with one of the most
common and obviously flawed phras-
es in defense of the BCS: “College
football has a playoff.It starts on Sept.
1.” Really? So a playoff is a system
where you can lose once or twice as
long as enough other teams lose too,
but you can’t even enter the playoff if
you’re not a school with a big enough
name? By the college football “play-
off” rules, right about now VCU and
Butler would be told that they aren’t
from power conferences, so they are
eliminated from the title race,making
Connecticut vs. Kentucky the de-
facto championship game.
The argument then goes into how
people think Cinderella stories are
fun, but then they want to see the best
teams win. Maybe it’s just me, but I
find the “best teams” argument more
irritatingly useless than the latest up-
date on the Barry Bonds trial. How
can you quantify who the “best”teams
Please see JAFFE, page 8
The Stanford Daily Thursday, March 31, 2011 ! 7

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Continued from page 6
are? There are millions of ways.
Which is exactly why there is a
postseason. Is VCU a “better” team
than Kansas? Who cares — the
Rams won. Were the Giants the
“best”team in baseball last year,even
though they didn’t clinch their own
division until the final weekend of the
regular season? They won when it
mattered, so that makes them the
best. Were the Packers the “best”
team in the NFL, even though they
lost their own division? That Super
Bowl ring will tell you they were.
The whole argument of whether
or not a playoff really crowns the
MVBALL
Continued from page 6
with six kills on just seven attempts
and five digs. Stanford ended the
match with a .402 hitting percent-
age, almost double Santa Cruz’s
.209 mark.
It was important for Stanford to
regain some of the confidence that
was evident during the season-high
five-match win streak the Cardinal
rode into the two-week break.
“On Friday we get the No. 1 team
in the country, USC, and they’ve
certainly earned it, so it’s just a
great opportunity for us,” Kosty
said. “We are going to go out there
and compete. I expect a big, electric
crowd, and we’re really excited to
BALL
Continued from page 6
come here, to play here.”
High school tennis at The
Menlo School and playing in a
team for the first time instead of in
the cutthroat individual game of
junior tennis helped Ball cement
his dream of coming to Stanford
and joining the tennis team.
“Playing for the team there was
a lot of fun,” he said. “Before that,
you know, tennis is all individual:
you go out, you play in tourna-
ments, you compete and, a lot of
times, it just gets boring. The team
was a great time because you’re
with your friends on it, there’s an
awesome sense of camaraderie,
the coach was awesome — it was
just great.”
That experience seems to have
carried over into college: “The
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“right” champion is irrelevant. Each
team knows what it has to do in its
own sport to win the title,so the team
that does that is the best,which is why
playoff games are so entrancing.
That brings us back to this year’s
tournament.I certainly didn’t predict
it, and if you watched a minute of the
regular season this year,you didn’t ei-
ther. But the four college basketball
teams vying for the title of the best in
the country are UConn, Kentucky,
Butler and VCU.
And really, bracket competitions
and favorite teams aside, would you
have it any other way?
Jacob Jaffe would like to remind you
that today it is Thursday, and tomor-
row is Friday. He he he so excited.
Have a ball with him today at jw-
jaffe@stanford.edu.
host SC this weekend.”
Kordic said that the team was
ready to step up its game entering
the final five matches of the regular
season before the MPSF Tourna-
ment begins in mid-April.
“We know that we are now turn-
ing the corner coming into the
home stretch [of the season]. We
have to switch gears and really ded-
icate ourselves this last month,
month and a half,” Kordic said.
Stanford will look to spring the
upset against USC and garner a bit
of revenge for February’s 3-0 defeat
to the Trojans on Friday night at 7
p.m. before taking on Pepperdine
Saturday night at 7 p.m. Both
matches will be played at Maples
Pavilion.
Contact Miles Bennett-Smith at
milesbs@stanford.edu.
whole team aspect is definitely
awesome, especially with a school
like Stanford where everyone is
playing at such a high level,” he
said. “You’re always around guys
who are going to push you, while,
at the same time, we’re all really
close as a team, we all get along
great — we kind of need to since
we spend so much time together
— but, no, it’s really been awe-
some, being able to be on this
team.”
Ball has played an important
role on the Stanford men’s tennis
team this year, contributing in sin-
gles and doubles play for the No.
10 Cardinal. In the next few years,
as he keeps improving his game
and accruing experience, he hopes
to keep helping the team he has
dreamed of playing for ever since
he was a 7-year-old kid picking up
a racket for the first time.
Contact Dash Davidson at dashd@
stanford.edu.