SiliconBeat

Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg (pictured) resigned from the board of directors at eHealth Wednesday “so she could devote more of her time toRan personal and professional obligations,” according to a filing the online health insurance company made Friday announcing her replacement on the board, Stanford Chief Financial Officer Randall Livingston.

Sandberg once served as chief of staff for the United States Treasury Department during the Clinton Administration under Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, who has been named President-elect Obama’s chief economic advisor. Between Treasury and Facebook, she worked at Google, serving as vice president in charge of online sales and operations. She was also instrumental in launching Google’s philanthropic arm, according to her Facebook bio.

Moody’s, the financial ratings firm who’s boss, Raymond McDaniel, testified before Congress earlier this month, along with the chiefs of the two other major ratings firms, about their agencies’ lousy performance in assessing the risks of mortgage-backed securities, named Stanford finance professor Darrell Duffie to its board. (That’s him in the photo, which we found on the professor’s home page.)

Among the documents uncovered by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform was a board presentation delivered by McDaniel to Moody’s directors in October 2007. Read the rest of this entry »

Stanford President John Hennessy, who sits on the board of directors at both Google and Cisco Systems, added his voice to the rising chorus calling for resolution sooner rather than later to the credit crisis enveloping the U.S. economy, in an interview with Bloomberg News. Read the rest of this entry »

Jen-Hsun Huang, the founder and chief executive officer of graphics chip-maker Nvidia, will donate $30 million to help build a “modern and sustainable destination for education and research” at Stanford’s school of engineering, according to a Stanford press release.

To be called the Jen-Hsun Huang School of Engineering Center, the 130,000-square-foot building is already under construction and expected to be completed Read the rest of this entry »

Every once in awhile we come across a press release that is so entertaining in its own right that we just have to share. Here’s just such a one: written by Tracie White, it was issued by Stanford University’s Medical Center early this afternoon touting an article by Stanford professor Richard Goode (intriguingly pictured here), an ear-nose-and-throat MD, titled “The unhappy patient following facial plastic surgery.” Feel free to go directly to it. If you only have time for a sampling, we quote directly some of our favorite parts: Read the rest of this entry »

The Fair Use Project of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society has signed on to defend a film producer’s right to use a clip of John Lennon’s song “Imagine” in its documentary “Expelled:No Intelligence Allowed” for the purposes of commentary and criticism.

The film, released last month, “is about alleged discrimination against people who supportalternative theories of evolution such as intelligent design. The song is played for roughly15 seconds to illustrate and criticize the ideas suggested in it –  that the world might be a better place without religion,” according to a press release put out by Stanford today.

Read the rest of this entry »

Attendees at Stanford’s annual “Cool Product Expo‘ will be eligible to win one free “Personal Genome Service” from 23andMe, the Google-backed Web company “that helps you read and understand your DNA.” The service — “valued at $999!” — allows you to send a sample of your saliva using an at-home kit, and then use 23andMe’s “interactive tools to shed new light on your distant ancestors, your close family and most of all, yourself.”

(Just like Chris Rock, Oprah Winfrey, Don Cheadle and all the other folks get to do on the PBS program African American Lives hosted by Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates Jr.)

The Expo, put on by Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, is (breathlessly) billed as a
“showcase of companies and products at the intersection of manufacturing, design, and ‘cool.’ Be among the first to touch radically new products, and meet the industry pioneers who created them.”

And who knows, maybe you can touch the pioneers as well. Or their husbands. (23andMe co-founder Anne Wojcicki is the wife of Sergei Brin.)

It all happens this Wednesday.