Stanford professor Clifford Nass has been studying the social-psychological aspects of human-interactive media interaction for many years, and his newest study, released this week, examines the negative emotional and social effects on children who engage in heavy media use. Among its conclusions: that the more girls spend interacting with media online, the less “normal” and [...]

Cornell and Stanford have always had a bit of a strained relationship. When in 1891, former California governor Leland Stanford founded the university, he tried to entice Cornell’s then-president, Andrew White to lead it. White passed, but as a token of goodwill, he recommended the man who became Stanford’s first president: Cornell graduate David Starr [...]

Steve Jobs’ death last Wednesday has spurred an astonishing outpouring of emotion. Beyond the countless makeshift memorials to him, a coming authorized biography of Jobs now sits atop Amazon’s best-seller list. More than 8,500 tributes to the Apple co-founder have been published by major media companies alone. Even the unsurprising details of Jobs’ death certificate became headline news when released to the public earlier this week.

Yet the question of why we’re so preoccupied with Jobs’ passing is as complicated as was Jobs himself.

Certainly, timing is a factor. At 56, Jobs died at the height of his powers, with his company now among the most valuable in the world.

“Like Marilyn Monroe or Kurt Cobain, we’ll never see

It’s Friday! Time to catch up on your reading. Here are the 10 most popular posts among peHUB’s regular readers for Sept. 26 to Sept. 30.

ONE: Bottled Up Liquidity: Ten Cal Regents Funds with High Portfolio Values and Often Low Liquidity (slideshow) – by Mark Boslet
TWO: Slideshow: Top-Performing PE/VC Funds For State of Florida (subscribers only) – by David Toll
THREE: Analyst: Groupon Now Risks ‘Self-Reinforcing Path to Insolvency’ – by Connie Loizos
FOUR: After F8, a Dot-Com Boom Scaled Party – by Alexei Oreskovic, Reuters
FIVE: Harvard and Stanford Nearly Make Up Financial Crisis Losses – by Gregory Roth
SIX: As Groupon’s Fortunes Shift, Chicago Sticks By It – by Connie Loizos
SEVEN: Carlyle’s Sarkozy: The Financial Crisis of 2008 Never Ended – by Luisa Beltran
EIGHT: Andreessen’s Jeff Jordan On Valuations, IPOs And Young Founders (subscribers only) – by Mark Boslet
NINE: CapitalSource Revs Up Lending in Middle Market – by Steve Bills
TEN: Reuters: Groupon Restates Revenue, Loses COO – by Alexei Oreskovic, Reuters

Harvard and Stanford, two of the nation’s richest universities, say that endowment returns for fiscal 2011 brought them to within striking distance of where they stood before the financial crisis lopped off billions of investment value.

The Harvard Management Company, which manages the university’s endowment, reported a gain of 21.4 percent – or $4.4 billion – in fiscal 2011, which ended on June 30. That gain increased the size of Harvard’s endowment to $32 billion.

The gain, on top of fiscal 2010’s return of 11 percent, marks a strong reversal for the giant endowment, which plummeted 27 percent – or $11 billion – in fiscal 2009, from a pre-crisis peak of $36.9 billion in fiscal 2008. That leaves Harvard just $4.9 billion shy of where it was before the financial crisis.

In an age where seemingly everyone in the startup community now blogs, tweets and leaks his or her news, stretching the truth has become de rigueur. But I’d argue that it’s creating distrust; it’s also distorting the way that founders, the real engine of Silicon Valley, see the world.

What can be done about it, if anything? Earlier today, I asked neuroscientist and best-selling author Sam Harris, whose new Kindle essay, “Lying,” explores our fundamental inclination to lie and self-promote. Our conversation has been edited for length.

Q: In your essay, you say your interest in lying was piqued as a Stanford freshman in a popular ethics course. What was so life-changing about it?

A: The course is surprisingly simple in its format and content. Basically, 10 people sit around giving [professor] Ron Howard — a pioneer in management science — examples of lies they think worth telling, and he just …

Recently, New York magazine featured Feross Aboukhadijeh  in a piece titled “Bubble Boys.” Aboukhadijeh is a Sacramento-born, 20-year-old computer science student at Stanford who has been characterized as among the school’s most heavily recruited students by a course adviser. The piece suggested he may ultimately be among those geeks to succeed the Mark Zuckerbergs of the [...]

It’s time to catch up on the stories and slideshows your colleagues found most compelling on peHUB this week. Here are the top 10 posts that garnered the most pageviews from regular readers from Aug. 22 to Aug. 26. Hot topics included fund returns at CalPERS and Louisiana Teachers’, VC- and PE-backed IPOs and M&A, and Apple.

1. Cash Machine Slideshow: CalPERS’ Top 10 VC Funds Based on Return of Cold, Hard Cash — by Mark Boslet
2. Slideshow: Top 10 U.S. Tech/Telecom Advisors, Qatalyst Jumps To 10th — by Luisa Beltran
3. Looking Back at Our Favorite Apple Knockoffs — by Connie Loizos
4. Slideshow: Top And Bottom-Performing Funds Of Louisiana Teachers’ — by David Toll
5. Black Gives Himself 60th Birthday Party of Bad Taste — by Luisa Beltran
6. Slideshow: Top 10 PE-Backed Companies Waiting To Go Public (subscription required) — by Luisa Beltran
7. Stock Market Turmoil Not Expected to Hurt Tech M&A — by Lawrence Aragon
8. Sequoia Capital and Technology Crossover Ventures Stand to Gain from Redemption Rights for eHarmony — by Alistair Barr, Reuters
9. Cornell to Stanford: Stay Out of New York — by Connie Loizos
10. What Today’s 4 IPO Filings Tell Us About the Market for New Offerings — by Joanna Glasner

Most tech observers are well aware that New York’s startup scene has an energetic cheerleader in its mayor, Michael Bloomberg. Among his most recent declarations: naming April 16 of this year “Foursquare Day” in New York City and more recently calling for “immediate immigration reform” that would include a new visa for entrepreneurs with investors ready to back them.

Yet Bloomberg’s biggest industry initiative is a competition that will award one university with roughly 10 acres of New York City real estate and up to $100 million at the end of this year. The idea? To create what he hopes will be a talent-attracting, jobs-creating applied sciences and engineering school.

The big question, of course, is who will get his administration’s blessing — a regional institution like Cornell, which is among roughly 27 schools that have submitted a proposal to the city’s Economic Development Corporation (EDC), or engineering giant Stanford, which has been making it very plain that it wants to get the nod.

If your grad school was the only determining factor in getting onto Forbes magazine’s Midas List of top venture capitalists, which school should you attend?

A.) Harvard Business School
B.) Stanford Business School
C.) None

According to an analysis of the Midas List by James Newell, a senior associate at Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), the answer is B – Stanford.