Stanford Report, Mar. 10, 2004

"I'M IN NICE COMPANY," SAID PATRICIA KARLIN-NEUMANN, senior associate dean for religious life, of her co-writers of the new book I Am Jewish: Personal Reflections Inspired by the Last Words of Daniel Pearl. The book, edited by Pearl's parents, Judea and Ruth Pearl, combines the reflections of Rabbi Karlin-Neumann and 149 others from a dozen countries on the murdered Wall Street Journal reporter's last words: "My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am Jewish." Among the book's contributors are Elie Weisel, Nadine Gordimer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Bernard Lewis and 12-year-old Alana Frey of Rockville Centre, New York, who began collecting essays on the topic as a bat mitzvah project. Contributors also include gymnast Kerri Strug and television journalist Mike Wallace. As a group, they are "not necessarily the people you identify with defining Jewishness -- that's the beauty of the book," Karlin-Neumann said. In the book, Karlin-Neumann examines how she tries to incorporate the teaching "Love human beings and draw them close to the Torah" into her family, community and work. "I am Jewish, joining with other beloved human beings to deepen our humanity," she writes. Pearl, who was kidnapped in 2002 in Pakistan while on his way to interview a Muslim fundamentalist leader and killed by his abductors, was a Stanford alumnus.

"A VERY CLEVER PIECE OF SOCIAL engineering" was how DAVID HOFFMAN, manager of information security services for ITSS, described the "Bagle" Internet worm, a particularly pernicious virus that disguises itself on campus computers as a message from ITSS itself. But that was last week's news. On Monday, Hoffman was stalking another spammed virus. "It's a constant arms race between the spammers and the anti-spammers," he said. The good news is that most virus-laden messages are scanned and "scrubbed" at central servers so they are virus-free when they land in users' in-boxes. Some infected mail gets through before viruses are identified, however, so users should never open attachments that they aren't expecting, Hoffman said.

PHYSICS GRADUATE STUDENT PAUL SANGIORGIO was named champion of the 15th annual Fairbank Memorial Run/Walk/Bike last Saturday -- even though SanGiorgio was the fourth participant to cross the finish line and trailed the race leader by nearly five minutes. That's because the race objective is not to be first but to be most precise: The winner of the race is the participant who most accurately predicts his or her own running, biking or walking time. SanGiorgio's time was 30 minutes and 19.2 seconds on a 4.1-mile loop around Campus Drive; he had predicted he would complete the run in 30 minutes and 30 seconds. The win was a relatively distant second to the best race performance ever -- one past winner predicted the final race time to within a tenth of a second, said Bob Wagoner, physics professor and a co-founder of the race. The event is held to honor the memory of Bill Fairbank, a physics professor and avid runner who died in 1989. SanGiorgio's name will appear on a Physics Department plaque of race winners.

Write to Barbara Palmer at barbara.palmer@stanford.edu or mail code 2245 or call her at 724--6184.

Barbara Palmer