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Wednesday,May 20,2009
The Stanford Daily
sport Atlanta Braves and NYYankees hats in their video;ColoradoRockies and Toronto Blue Jays hatstop the heads of McFadden andDavis.Jay-Z and JD toss money likeit’s nothing;McFadden and Davis dothe same with A-plus papers.But the core value that studentstake away from the video is not theentertainment,but the content,whichis relevant to the specific subject theclass is learning.In non-hip-hopterms,McFadden explained what thevideo was about.“[The] main theme is thatthroughout evolution,differentorganisms are using the same genesand proteins to form very differentbody types,”McFadden said.“Andthe way they do that is by selectivelyregulating different genes.”The video makes regulating Hoxgenes hip.
The Reaction
Though born out of a desire toteach HumBio students,“Regulatin’Genes”has received press fromnumerous media outlets,includingThe San Jose Mercury News,TheNew York Times and England’s TheGuardian.“I’ve been getting contacted by alot of people,”McFadden said.“There’s a science museum in thePhilippines that wants to use thevideo.A lot of developmental neuro-biology professors are like,‘Can yousend me the hard copy so I can use itin my class?’ It’s been nice helpingout other people involved in scienceeducation.”Teaching has driven McFadden tomake “Regulatin’ Genes”and othervideos,but how effective are they?HumBio Professor Robert Siegel,who was in the video “PlasmaMembrane,”described them as use-ful teaching tools.“The essence of teaching is tomotivate students,give them a handleto remember relevant information,make them want to learn,”Siegelexplained in an email to The Daily.“Tom’s videos accomplish thesethings and go even further becausethey are available to such a wideaudience.”In fact,the video has been viewedover 70,000 times on YouTube.Students agree that McFadden’svideos are helpful.Will Lindemann‘11,a HumBio core student,pointedout that the rap provides a differentcontext for the material,bringingentertainment value to biology.“I was really impressed by thevideo when I first saw it,”he said.“Alot of the material we cover can bepretty dry,so to see it remixed likethat made it really amusing.There’soften a moment of realization whenTom says something in his own waythat can be way clearer than in lec-ture.”Another core student,Lara Ortiz-Luis ‘11,agreed.“To be honest,not all of the mate-rial we learn is 100 percent exciting,”she said.“The videos make even thedriest stuff accessible and entertain-ing.”Ortiz-Luis also pointed out thatshe watched the video multiple times just to see her CA in a new context,as a rapper.While the video uses hip-hop toteach science,it hasn’t quite succeed-ed in using science to teach hip-hop.Professors Russell Fernald,MargaretFuller and Siegel admit that theyhave not become hip-hop listenerssince Tom’s videos.“Maybe it is time for me to go onWikipedia and find out what hip-hopactually is,”Siegel joked.
The History
Though McFadden and Davis canmake music,they didn’t learn about itin formal settings.McFadden’s for-mal training is limited to taking drumlessons in sixth grade.Davis’ training,too,was short-lived.“My formal music training endedwith the recorder in third grade,”Davis admitted.But,he added,“I canstill bust out ‘Hot Cross Buns.’”They both learned their craft fromlistening.McFadden’s influencesinclude Wu-Tang Clan,Jurassic 5 andThe Roots.Davis’ influences arebroad,but some favorites are JD andKanye West.Collaboration betweenMcFadden and Davis began not oncampus,but in the mountains nearLake Tahoe.Both were camp coun-selors at last summer’s StanfordSierra Camp,a summer camp for thefamilies of Stanford alumni.Theirfirst raps were for the weekly staff talent show,but they focused on top-ics less complex than gene regulation.For instance,the first effort,set toLil Mama’s “Lip Gloss,”addressedmilkshakes.Back on campus,McFadden andWachtel,another Sierra Camp alum-nus,made a few biology videos.Meanwhile,Davis,a Larkin residen-tial assistant (RA),wrote songs forhis dorm.The three were broughtback together when McFadden calledDavis one day and asked him to be apart of “Regulatin’ Genes.”The two have since collaboratedin the newest video,“Synaptic Cleft,”which also stars some Larkin resi-dents and Sierra Camp alumniexplaining what happens where twonerve cells connect.But that final product comes afterquite a bit of work.McFadden said he’s often inspiredto write the songs while he’s doing hisCA gig.“I’ll be doing my job,basicallyreading the textbook,and as I’mdoing that,I’ll think of a little lyricand write it down,”he reflected.Once he collects enough of thesefor a coherent song,the recordingtakes about an hour and the video-taping takes a couple of hours.Then,Wachtel puts in a hefty chunk of timeediting.“The editor has to listen to it likea thousand times,”McFadden said.So what’s the next step?McFadden doesn’t have any specificideas about the next big video andsaid he’s pretty open to anything.HumBio student Lindemann sug-gested that a rap on what all the hor-mones in the body do would help.Siegel proffered the timely topic of the flu virus.McFadden,as a CA,and Davis,asa senior,are both returning to cam-pus next year,so there will be plentyof opportunities for more collabora-tion.Keep your ears open for thenext HumBio rap track they drop.
Contact Andrew Hellman at ahell-man@stanford.edu.
By ELIZABETH TITUS
CONTRIBUTING WRITER
T
he young man wrote home a fewtimes the summer before heentered college.He asked his momto check his test scores and wishedfor her homemade fried chicken.He assured his dad he was staying out of trouble.“I am not doing anything that I would not[be] doing [in] front of you,”he wrote.In another letter,he told them about histravels.“After we passed Washington [there] wasno discrimination at all,”he wrote.“We go toany place we want to and sit any where wewant to.”The young man was Martin Luther King,Jr.,and to track his life through the docu-ments he left behind—letters like these—scholars have long had to navigate a maze of books,archives and Web sites to find wherethese documents exist.But on Monday,the Martin Luther King,Jr.,Research & Education Institute atStanford aimed to simplify that search bylaunching a free online database (http://king-papers.org) with information on 100 years of King- and civil rights-related documents.Major documents cover the Montgomery BusBoycott and more records will be added,staff said.“This is the only public database on Kingarchives that provides scholarly details anddescription on each individual item,”wroteInstitute Director Clayborne Carson in areleased statement.“It will prove to be of immense value to King researchers and indi-viduals interested in the life and work of Dr.King and the civil rights movement.”The project was funded by a three-year,$450,000 grant from the Andrew W.MellonFoundation,according to Carson.Two otherinstitutions lent assistance—the MorehouseCollege King Papers at Atlanta UniversityCenter and the Howard Gotlieb ArchivalResearch Center at Boston University.Historians agree the database is an impor-tant step toward opening history to a broaderaudience.“I think this is one of the most forward-looking projects in the scholarly world today,and one of the most important,”said MichaelHoney,a King scholar at the University of Washington,Tacoma.The author of threebooks on labor and civil rights history,he saidhe finds it increasingly difficult to get access toKing’s papers.Carson told The Daily that the project was“democratizing research.”“There’s always been an elitism in scholar-ly research that those who have resources cando much better work than those who don’thave resources,”he said.“When we [the KingInstitute] started our work in 1985,my guess isthat there weren’t more than a dozen peoplein the world who were doing concerted Kingresearch.Now,anyone with access to a com-puter and an Internet connection can engagein the same kind of research.”Carson’s vision for the database,then,wasforeshadowed in a way by what King wrote tothe editor of The Atlanta Constitution as acollege junior:“We want and are entitled to the basicrights and opportunities of American citi-zens,”he wrote,including “equal opportuni-ties in education.”That,the Institute intends,is whereOnline King Records Access—or OKRA—comes in.OKRA works like this:A simple screen onkingpapers.org allows users to search bydetailed criteria—by author,title and date,of course,but also by topic,names involved andgenre.Selecting “City of Montgomery v.Martin L.King”from the topic list providedby the Institute yields four results,includingKing’s arrest warrant and court transcripts.Entering “Paul,Saint”returns 18 records.Searching by genre,13 “manifestos”comeback.The records—and the project—havelimitations.Because the King family holdscopyright on many of King’s papers,theInstitute can’t put original documents online.Instead,the database directs users to wherethey
can
see the documents—whether in oneof the nation’s many King archives,theInstitute’s six-volume “The Papers of MartinLuther King,Jr.,”the Institute’s campus officeor elsewhere.And adding records is time-consuming.Institute staff had to spend more than a yearupdating their internal database before thepublic launch.Even then,the database onlycontains records through 1958.Recordsthrough 1960 will be added by the end of theyear,staff members said,and once they pub-lish the rest of the 14-volume “Paper”series,records for those documents will go onlinetoo.That means that by December,the publicdatabase will hold about 8,000 records—afraction of the nearly 70,000 documentsentered by undergraduate research assistantsinto the Institute’s internal database since1985.Staff members emphasized the value of the public records,which Archival AssistantJosh Kunz called “the best of the best.”“These documents are now considered themost historically important,”he said.Archival Assistant Stacey Zwald addedthat her favorite documents showed her that“really,there is an army”of players in the civilrights movement.Andrew Schneider ‘09,a history majorwriting a thesis on King’s opposition to theVietnam War,agreed that primary documentsshed light on the movement’s players.“Browsing through the King documents,itimmediately becomes apparent that MLKwas but one leader in a larger movement,”hesaid.“The release of thousands of new docu-ments about MLK and the civil rights move-ment would be of great use to any studentwriting a research paper,working on an in-class presentation or writing an honors the-sis.”Susan Englander,an associate director of the Institute,explained that any Stanford stu-dent may ask to look at the physical docu-ments that he or she encounters in the data-base.“We welcome Stanford students to comeby,”she said.“We consider ourselves aresource and we hope more people will availthemselves of us.”“Students would have to check in with thestaff in most cases,”Englander added regard-ing requests.“Just being curious about King isgood enough for me.”In his small office at the Institute on ViaOrtega,Carson—who edited King’s autobi-ography—discussed the future of access tohistoric documents.“We have to overcome [the copyright]obstacle,”he said.“I’m relatively certain thatwe will.Probably within the next coupleyears,we will make many documents avail-able.”“Hopefully in the age of the Internet,doc-uments can be digitized and made available,”he added.“Research will still be hard,but Ithink researchers will be able to undertakemore ambitious topics.”Maybe even young researchers.Carson remembers when his daughter,then a Palo Alto High School student,report-ed that her history textbook said that Kinglaunched the Freedom Rides of 1961.“I could imagine now,a student coming inand saying,‘The history textbook is wrong,’”he described.“‘I know from looking at aninterview with Dianne Nash,who was one of the leaders of the Freedom Rides,that shewasn’t a follower of Martin Luther King,thatshe did it in order to push him to act.’”“Why can’t a high school student come upwith a new interpretation?”Carson said witha smile.With the help of OKRA,that reality—while slow in coming—may be near.Elizabeth Titus is a former employee of theMartin Luther King,Jr.Research &Education Institute.
Contact Elizabeth Titus at etitus@stanford.edu.
His work at our fingertips
After three years,the Martin Luther King,Jr.,Research & Education Institutecompletes its project to make King documents publicly available online
ERICLEW/The Stanford Daily
On Monday, Online King Records Access (OKRA) was launched, making thousands ofrecords related to Dr. King and the civil rights movement available to the public. Many moredocuments are to be added by the end of the year.
F
EATURES
HUMBIO RAP
CONTINUED FROM FRONT PAGECourtesy YouTube-tomcfad
Tom McFadden ‘08 incorporates slides from the HumBio core itself into hismusic videos. Core students said his spin on course themes often lend clar-ity, in addition to entertainment.
Individual Departments
Some graduate departments havebeen forced to make cuts,but others,buoyed by increased external fundingstemming from increased researchspending,are actually adding to theirsupport of doctoral cohorts.In at least two departments,signif-icant reductions in the number of admitted doctoral students havealready been made.The historydepartment has already had toreduce the size of its admitted cohortfor 2009-2010,according to HistoryChair Paula Findlen.In an email to The Daily,Findlennoted that the decision came about inresponse to a combination of risingcosts and reduced resources.“Increasing costs,including thenew healthcare fees,and decliningendowments mean that each studentpackage costs more and we have lessto spend overall,”Findlen said.“Inrecent years,the University has askeddepartments to contribute more dis-cretionary funds in support of gradu-ate student admissions packages,which means that we have less of thisfunding for students as they finish.”Findlen also emphasized that sup-porting graduate students entering adifficult job market was an importantconsideration.“We need to support graduate stu-dents making good progress not onlyin the beginning and middle stages of their degree,but in the critical finalstage,”Findlen said.Communications has also reducedits number of admitted students,froma class last year of eight to a currentcohort of three.“We would hope for a somewhatlarger class,just so we have a criticalmass and cohort,”saidCommunications Chair James Fishkin.Fishkin said that the choice wasmotivated by caution,particularly atthe uncertain levels of funding fromsponsored projects that provide cru-cial resources.“We thought this was a prudentchoice,”he said.Many other departments are com-mitted to retaining their current num-bers of doctoral students.At theSchool of Humanities and Sciences(H&S),numbers are currentlyremaining relatively steady,accord-ing to H&S Dean Richard Saller.“Our entering number of Ph.D.students next year is going to be justabout the same as this year and overthe past few years,”Saller wrote in anemail to The Daily.“It happens thatthe natural sciences are down some,and humanities and social sciencesare up,not by design,but again [by]the random variation from year toyear.”English Chair Jennifer Summitsaid that she expects no reductions.“We made the decision this yearnot to reduce the number of stu-dents,”Summit said.“It just felt tooessential,both to our mission and toour profession...We feel we have aresponsibility to train the next gener-ation of scholars.”The same financial crisis forcingthe budget cuts,however,is also pro-viding a benefit to certain depart-ments.Government research grants,provided in association with stimuluslegislation passed earlier this year,are helping to offset losses and evenexpand the financial resources avail-able,according to School of Engineering Dean Jim Plummer.“In the short term with the stimu-lus,I think support for Ph.D.studentswill be more,not less,”Plummer said.Dean of the School of EarthSciences Pamela Matson echoed hisassessment.“We’re assuming with the stimu-lus money and federal researchmoney that we can support a fewmore students,”Matson said.Plummer said that this was indica-tive of the school’s predominantreliance upon external funding,suchas organizations like the NationalScience Foundation and the NationalInstitute for Health.“It’s less of an issue in engineeringthan it is in other departmentsbecause so many of our students aresupported externally,”Plummer said.Plummer noted,however,that if funding from Stanford GraduateFellowships (SGFs) were to decline,then admitted cohorts might seereductions in size.Many departments that do notdraw primarily upon external fund-ing,however,are also weathering thecuts.Other departments reportinglow numbers of admitted studentswill be consistent with prior years,including modern thought and litera-ture,religious studies and classics.In an email to The Daily,ClassicsChair Walter Scheidel emphasizedthe importance of flexibility indepartmental budget allocations forweathering the economic downturn.“Departments are currentlyallowed to roll over grad aid savings(i.e.anything that’s left over from theannual grad aid allocation,that is sur-pluses created by attrition,outsidefellowships,other internal resources)into future years,which makes it eas-ier to smooth out fluctuations inyield,”Scheidel said.“If we will stillbe allowed to do that in future yearsand funding is held constant at cur-rent levels,we don’t anticipate signif-icant cuts in terms of the number of admits.”Religious Studies Chair HesterGelber also noted the importance of accrued funds that had been leftunused in prior years.“Our particular department wasin a really good situation because wehad not had to spend all of the fundswe had received,”Gelber said.“Wethink going forward we’re going to bealright.”Departments with traditionallylow levels of graduate students notedthe importance in upcoming years of maintaining their current levels.Linguistics Chair Tom Wasow,in anemail to The Daily,said that hisdepartment’s current level of five toseven new students per year was atabout the minimum necessary level.“If cohort sizes drop from that lowlevel,there is a real danger of nothaving a critical mass of students atapproximately the same stage of theirgraduate education,”Wasow said.“We do not anticipate having to gobelow that level,but we recognizethat,with the economy in the state itis in,future budget cuts might makereductions in our Ph.D.cohortsunavoidable.”Administrators also put anemphasis on ensuring the financialsecurity of any admitted studentsover the long term.“We are committed to supportingour graduate students,”Matson said,“and we won’t admit our students if we can’t provide them funding.”
Contact Eric Messinger at messinger @stanford.edu.
PHD
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turn on a tap and have access to allthe water they could need,”saidDarcy White ‘09,the Be Hope to Hercampus coordinator.“It is importantto get people to realize that this is notthe case in places like Africa,wherethe lack of readily available cleanwater keeps girls from going toschool or getting jobs.”Many Stanford groups supportedthe April 21 event,including FACEAIDS,Dance Marathon andInitiative Against Malaria.More information on Be Hope toHer can be found at www.nuruinter-national.org.
Contact Ellen Danford at edanford@
WATER
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“Future budget cutsmight makereductions inour Ph.D.cohortsunavoidable..”
— TOM WASWO,Linguistics Chair
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