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[STANFORD UNIVERSITY www.stanford.edu]

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Announcer: This program is brought to you by Stanford University. Please visit us at stanford.edu

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[APPLAUSE]

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Thank you

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[Steve Jobs - CEO, Apple and Pixar Animation]

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I'm honored to be with you today for a commencement from one of the finest universities in the world.

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[CHEERING]

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Truth be told, I never graduated from college and this is the closest I've ever gotten the college graduation.

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[LAUGHTER]

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Today, I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it: No big ideal, just three stories.

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The first story is about connecting the dots.

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I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as the drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit.

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So why did I drop out?

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It stared before I was born.

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My biological mother was a young, unwed graduate student, and she decided it to put me up for adoption.

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She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates,

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so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife..

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Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl.

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So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking:

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"We've gotten an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course."

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My biological found out later that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school.

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She refused to sign the final adoption papers.

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She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would go to college. This was the start in my life.

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And 17 years later I did go to the college. But I naively chose the college that was almost as expencise as Stanford,

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and all of my working-class parents saving were being spent on my college tuition.

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After 6 months, I couldn't see the value in it.

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I have no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out.

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And here I was spending all the money my parents had saved their entire life.

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So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK.

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It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was a one of the best decisions I have made.

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[LAUGHTER]

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The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me.

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and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting.

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It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friend's rooms. I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with.

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And I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple

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I loved it.

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And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuinition turned out to be priceless later on.

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Let me give you one example:

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Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country.

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Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beutifully hand-calligraphed.

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Because I was dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this.

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I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations,

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about what makes grat typography great.

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It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and found it fascinating.

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None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life

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But ten years later when we was designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me.

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And we designed it all ino the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography.

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If I had never dropped in on that single course in college,

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the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.

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And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them.

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[LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE]

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If I have never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class,

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and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.

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Of course, it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college .

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But it was very, very clear when you looking backward 10 years later.

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Again, you can't connect the dots looking foward; you can only connect them looking backwards.

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So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connec in your future.

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You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.

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Because beliving that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart,

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even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.

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My second story is about love and loss.

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I was lucky - I found what I loved to do early in life,

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Woz and I started Apple in my parent's garage when I was 20.

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We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees.

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We'd just released our fiinest creation - the Macintosh - a year earlier, and I'd just turned 30.

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And then I got fired.

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How can you get fired from a company you started?

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Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought very talented to run the company with me,

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and for the first year or so things went well.

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But then our visions of future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out.

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When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him.

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And so at 30 I was out. And very publicly out.

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What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

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I really didn't know what to do for a few months.

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I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me.

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I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly.

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I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the Valley.

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But something slowly began to drawn on me - I still loved what I did.

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The turn of events as Apple had not changed that one bit. I been rejected, but I was still in love.

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And so I dicided to star over.

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I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me.

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The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything.

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It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

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During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar,

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and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife.

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Pixar went on to create the world's first computer aminated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world.

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[APPLAUSE AND CHEERING]

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In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT and I returned to Apple.

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And the technology we was developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance.

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And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

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I'm pretty sure none of this would have happed if I hadn't been fired from Apple.

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It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it.

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Sometime life can hit you in the head with a brick.

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Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did.

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You've got find what you love. And that is as true for work as it is for your lovers.

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Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is the great work.

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And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.

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If you haven't found it yet, keep looking and don't settle.

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As with all matters of the heart, you'll when you find it.

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And like any great relationship, it just better and better as the years roll on.

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So keep looking. Don't settle.

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[applause]

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My third tory is about death.

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When I was 17, I read a qoute that went somthing like:

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If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right.

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[LAUGHTER]

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It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked the mirror every morning and asked myself:

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"If today is the last day for my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?"

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and whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change somthing.

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Remembering I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.

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Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure

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- these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.

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Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have sometime to lose.

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You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

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About a year ago, I was diagnosed with cancer.

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I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas.

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I didn't even know what a pancreas was.

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The doctosr told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, that I should expect to live no longer than 3 to 6 months.

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My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die.

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It means to try and tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in jsut a few months.

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It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family.

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It means to say your goodbyes.

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I lived with that diagnosis all day.

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Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach, into my intestines,

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put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor.

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I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, tole me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying,

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because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery.

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I had the surgery and thankfully, I'm fine now.

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[APPLAUSE]

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This was a closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades.

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Having live throught it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

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No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there.

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And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it.

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And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life.

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It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

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Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away.

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Sorry to be so dramatic, but it's quite true.

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Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life.

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Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking.

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Don't let the noise of other's opinion drown out your own inner voice.

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And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.

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They somehow already know know what you truly want to become.

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Everything else is secondary.

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[APPLAUSE]

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When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation.

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It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch.

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This was in the late 60's, before personal computer and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras.

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It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

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Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog,

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and then when it ihad run its course, they put out a final issue.

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It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age.

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On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous.

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Beneath it were the words:"Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell massage as they signed off.

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Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I alway wished that for myself.

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And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

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Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

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Thank you all very much

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[APPLAUSE]

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[Stanford University - www.stanford.edu]

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Annoucer: the preceding program is copyrighted by Stanford University.

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Please visit us at Stanford.edu