Weekend Roundup email newsletter: Feb. 23 edition

Feb. 23, 2020, 2:35 p.m.

Our Weekend Roundup is released on Sunday mornings during the school year and features an engaging rundown of the news from the previous week in the form of a briefing. It also includes editors’ picks from our Arts & Life, Grind, Opinions and Satire sections, as well as a list of upcoming events to watch out for in the next week. Subscribe here to receive emails like this.


 
 
 
 
Weekend Roundup email newsletter: Feb. 23 edition
 

 
 
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People walk in front of the Jen-Hsun Huang Engineering Center.
 
Despite a “techlash” in the wake of the 2016 election, Stanford students are still attracted to plum jobs with Silicon Valley powerhouses like Facebook, Google and Amazon. However, the future of recruitment is murkier for firms that have sparked more controversy on campus: Following protests, Palo Alto-based software company Palantir — which has come under fire for providing technology to ICE — says its percentage of new recruits from Stanford has decreased.

Another topic related to ethics in tech made headlines this week: data privacy. A teaching assistant was removed from the staff of CS 224N: “Natural Language Processing” after using the course enrollment list to recruit for a startup, potentially violating FERPA in the process. And the team behind “Cardinal Crush” — a form that let students list their crushes and notified them if their crushes listed them too — issued a statement explaining its previously inaccessible privacy policy and clarifying that Cardinal Crush was not, in fact, a project of the Behavior Design Lab, days after all matches had been sent out.
 
Jennifer Rolen stands outside her office.
 
More than 800 people have signed a petition calling for Jennifer Rolen to be appointed as the permanent director of Stanford’s First-Generation and/or Low-Income (FLI) Office. Rolen, the office’s current associate director and assistant dean, was not offered a second-round interview and was removed from the committee’s list of candidates for director.

Students cited Rolen’s leadership on cornerstone FLI initiatives, most notably the FLI Office’s library and FLI Student Orientation, in arguing that Rolen “has essentially been acting director since the conception of the FLI Office but without the title or the pay.” One supporter said on Wednesday that he was resigning from the Graduate Student Council over his frustrations with the Stanford administration’s management of the FLI office.

In response, a University spokesperson told The Daily that “the first round included a very strong pool of candidates” and that “decisions were made after due consideration and careful deliberation.”
 
Junior forward Oscar da Silva dribbles around an Arizona defender.
 
Men’s basketball ended a four-game losing streak on Thursday with a 72-64 victory over Washington. Junior forward Oscar da Silva led the Cardinal in scoring with 16, slightly topping his average of 15.9 points per game. Freshman guard Tyrell Terry added 14 more in the away victory. Stanford takes on Washington State in Pullman today at 5 p.m. PT.

Meanwhile, No. 4 women’s basketball notched its fourth win in a row on Friday, taking down No. 15 Oregon state for the second time this season. The Cardinal will look to avenge an 87-55 loss when they host No. 3 Oregon on Monday.

In other news, softball is cruising, baseball is struggling and No. 16 men’s swimming and diving suffered its first defeat of the year: a 198-98 loss to No. 2 Cal on Senior Day.
 

 
Entrance to Wilbur Hall
 
  • A University committee will evaluate Secret Snowflake — a long-standing frosh dorm tradition in which students anonymously give each other dares — following complaints to the Title IX office.

  • A panel of Ph.D candidates offered advice for students applying to graduate school.

  • Palo Alto is failing to meet California affordable housing mandates.

  • This week in speakers, former poet laureate Louise Glück explained how she draws inspiration from teaching, Vox’s “Today, Explained” host Sean Ramaswaram discussed using hope to make his daily podcast stand out from the crowd and former political prisoner Oscar Lopez Rivera called for an independent Puerto Rico.
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    A photo Jeong Shin took of the TV while watching the team behind 'Parasite' accept its award for Best Picture at the 92nd Academy Awards
     
    In The Grind, Jeong Shin reflects on her jubilation as a South Korean watching “Parasite” win Best Picture at the Oscars. Arts & Life’s Zack Boyd shares insights from author Sarah Broom’s memoir and recent campus appearance. In Satire, Patrick Monreal reveals the link between productivity and number of Outlook tabs open. And in Opinions, Kirsten Mettler takes on rollout rejections, while Nadav Ziv ponders making decisions when uncertainty is the only certainty.
     

     
  • Lan Samantha Chang, director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, will give a reading in Huang Engineering Center on Monday.

  • Jenny Odell, artist and author of the book “How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy,” will speak at the Anderson Collection on Thursday.

  • The Stanford Shakespeare Company presents “The Comedy of Errors” at the Elliott Program Center from Thursday through Sunday.

  • Comedian Ronny Chieng will perform at Dinkelspiel Auditorium on Saturday.

  • Family Weekend will take place on Saturday and Sunday.

    Have an event you’d like featured in next week’s roundup? Let us know at eic ‘at’ stanforddaily.com.

    That’s all for this roundup. For more from The Daily, you can visit our website, subscribe to our daily email digest or pick up our print edition — the original daily digest! — at newsstands around campus.
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