Felix Salmon kindly put the questions I posted this week about Udacity to its founder, Sebastian Thrun, and wrote up a lengthy post about it here. Thrun helps to explain some of the uncertainty about the relationship between his various employers (Stanford and Google) and his new start-up venture, Udacity. Read the entire piece, as [...]
Read more...Sebastian Thrun has made headlines for a variety of his accomplishments as computer scientist doing groundbreaking work on artificial intelligence. He has long been interested in robotic vehicles, leading the team that developed the car which won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. He is the co-inventor of the Google Street View mapping service and is [...]
Read more...The Center for Ethics in Society at Stanford University is once again seeking applicants for several post-doc fellowships. There’s a terrific roster of current post-docs available here Postdoctoral Fellowship Opportunities for 2012-2013 For 2012-2013, The McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society seeks up to four new postdoctoral fellows. We welcome candidates with substantial normative [...]
Read more...Ten years ago David Brooks wrote a provocative piece, in his trademark comic sociology genre, about the lives of undergraduates at elite universities. It was called The Organization Kid, and it portrayed the average Princeton/Yale/Harvard/Stanford student as extremely bright and morally earnest but ultimately rather uninspired and herd-like conformists. Meritocratic hoop-jumpers. It’s a piece that [...]
Read more...The Center for Ethics in Society is sponsoring a great event in early April. We will offer a free screening of the Oscar-winning documentary Inside Job. And then director Charles Ferguson will come to campus the following night to join a panel of Stanford scholars to discuss the issues raised in the film about the [...]
Read more...Wendy Kopp, the founder and CEO of Teach For America, will be visiting campus tomorrow, Wednesday, Jan. 11. She’ll be delivering a lecture as part of the BASES program on social entrepreneurship. And she’s doing an event, in conversation with me, at 3pm, co-sponsored by the Program on Ethics in Society and the Center on [...]
Read more...The New York Times is running a Room for Debate forum on whether the federal government should provide a tax credit to families who home school their children. The Fordham Institute chief Checker Finn and Home School Legal Defense Association legal counsel William Estrada are among the contributors. In my contribution to the forum, I [...]
Read more...The Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society is a relatively new outfit here at Stanford. Its mission is to cultivate research from any corner of the university on issues related to philanthropy, nonprofits and nongovernmental orgs, or civil society/associational life. We understand the subject matter quite broadly. For the past four years we have been [...]
Read more...Jumo is a new and much heralded social networking site for stimulating, coordinating, and occasionally funding social change. It was created by someone with a sterling track record in social media innovation. Chris Hughes was a co-founder of Facebook, departing the booming company to join the Obama campaign as official social networking impresario. When Jumo [...]
Read more...The Ethics in Society Center received a major grant from the Spencer Foundation this past summer. We are excited to announce a call for post-doctoral fellowship applications for visits of 1-2 years at Stanford. We seek applicants from philosophy, political science, economics, history, sociology, Law or Education. Deadline to apply is Jan. 12, 2011.Full description [...]
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