Spreadsheet One
*Coming to Terms with Title Envy
*Recession Hits Student Pocketbook
*A Generous Class in a Tight Year
*Library Databases Open to Alumni

Spreadsheet Three

VC Invests in Hometown Youth

Robert Kagle, MBA '80

Robert Kagle, MBA ’80, is best known in Silicon Valley as a savvy investor in startups. In Flint, Mich., the general partner in Benchmark Capital makes news for investing in startups of a different sort.

Kagle, who grew up in the industrial town, has not forgotten where he came from. In May he flew nine Flint-area teenagers to Stanford to be interviewed for the Quest Scholars Program. The program teaches high-achieving youth raised in poor households and neighborhoods how to prepare for admission to the nation’s top universities.

Founded by two former Stanford students, Michael and Ana McCullough, the intensive summer residential program now operates on both the Stanford and Harvard campuses. Of 42 students who were accepted nationwide into the program this past summer, nine were from Flint, thanks to Kagle, who also sponsored three Flint students the previous year.

TERRY COLON

Journal Explores Life in the Electronic Age

ALMOST ONE-THIRD of an average adult American’s day is spent with electronic devices—TV, radio, telephone, computer —that did not exist a century ago, says Norman Nie, a Stanford political scientist who studies the impact of information technology on society. Nie, who holds a courtesy appointment at the Business School, finds that in some cases, spending time on the Internet can have negative effects on personal life.

In research partly funded by the School’s Center for Electronic Business and Commerce, Nie and doctoral student Sunshine Hillygus report: “Internet use at home has a strong negative impact on time spent with friends and family as well as time spent on social activities, while Internet use at work has no such effect. Similarly, Internet use during weekend days is more strongly related to decreased time with friends and family and on social activities than Internet use during weekdays.”

Their report is one of the research articles in a new interdisciplinary online journal, IT& Society (www.ITandSociety.org), launched in August by the Stanford Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society and the University of Maryland’s Survey Research Center. Nie, who directs the Stanford institute, said the goal is to encourage scholars of different disciplines to share their research.

Future issues will deal with psychology, sociology, and economics. According to Nie, subjects may include the future of the workplace as society becomes saturated with broadband technology, enabling more people to work at home, and how the phenomenon of oppression has been altered by access to information technology.

Nie will teach a course on Internet technology and marketing at the Business School during winter quarter.