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> Li began collaborating with two professors at the University of San Francisco: Hani Goodarzi, also an incoming Arc Institute Core Investigator, and Laura Van’t Veer, a clinician who leads the I-SPY 2 Trial, a groundbreaking breast cancer trial.

These famous researchers are actually at UCSF, not University of San Francisco. UCSF is really a leader in breast cancer the world over, far more influential than Stanford's much smaller amount of faculty on the topic. So it's a bit weird to see such a basic mistake.

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For those who are not familiar, the I-SPY 2 trial is quite remarkable. It is an adaptive trial design - in essence reinforcement learning with human experiments.[1]

For all the criticism FDA gets, they should also get credit for leaning into new approaches to testing drugs like adaptive trials. Part of why the US remains one of the most innovative countries.

1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7731787/

It should be clarified that adaptive trial design was studied for several decades before being applied to games and called reinforcement learning by computer scientists. The multi-armed bandit papers all reference "Asymptotically efficient adaptive allocation rules" because they derived the optimal lower bound for regret [1].

[1] - https://doi.org/10.1016/0196-8858(85)90002-8

I genuinely appreciate the link, but not so much the campaigning for the FDA or USA more broadly, which, my stance aside, feels like a trap leading to a fruitless discussion.

It seems to be a typo. The credits at the bottom state:

> Additional co-authors are from the University of California, San Francisco, and Arc.

university of california, san francisco

university of san francsico

to someone not from the area this is a very easy mistake to make

Stanford is from the area.

As someone who watches NCAAF, this is just the tip of the iceberg of confusing US college names.

Miami University comes to mind

Yeah, but I think that Indiana University of Pennsylvania which is located in Indiana, Pennsylvania probably takes the cake for confusing.

You can literally send physical mail to Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Indiana, Pennsylvania.

I always get super confused with the Indiana school acronyms IU, IUP, etc

IIRC they recruited and actually signed a kid (Football maybe?) who later decommitted once he realized it wasn't in Florida. I'm not sure that's entirely accurate because I don't think you get to signing without an on-campus visit but maybe that isn't always true.

Wasn’t that a plot point in an episode of the office?

Maybe -- I don't watch that show, too close to real life.

I tried to find any reporting on this, and while apparently it's happened to a few students (they applied, got accepted, then discovered the school is in rural Ohio and not Florida) but not the specific case of it happening with an athlete (seems really unlikely).

My wife was telling me about a foreign student who got a full ride scholarship to Miami university and was so excited to move to Florida… only to realize it was in Ohio

Miami of Ohio is a pretty good school, and I think Ohio still has academic freedom and other standard civil rights.

As much as I dislike many aspects of living in most of both Ohios (NE (which, to me, should be Cleveland/Akron/Canton/Kent/Youngstown/PGH/Buffalo),vs the rest of the state), I am super impressed with the leniency (latitude?) tolerated in that place re: "academic freedoms," while not going [dipshit] (ok, I cannot describe or conceive of a more comprehensive term, my bad, my apologies).

I do think it’s a little lacking in palm trees, though.

Amherst College vs. University of Massachusetts Amherst

Washington University in St. Louis

Pennsylvania has both Indiana University of Pennsylvania (located in the town of Indiana, PA) and California University of Pennsylvania (in California, PA). Both were formally teachers colleges named after their respective towns.

It's pretty common to have very slight name differences for universities.

There's also San Francisco State University.

I wonder if journnalists used to actually do research

This story is not written by an independent journalist nor published by an independent news organization.

Right. Stanford IP promotion/marketing crew.

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