Sasha Frere-Jones,  the pop-music critic of The New Yorker, writes about I Am T-Pain, a new iPhone application from Smule that is getting something like 10,000 downloads a day.

Smule, a company that specializes in sonic iPhone apps, was cofounded by Princeton Engineering alum Ge Wang. Hear Ge talk about Smule and about his philosophy of invention in the video above. The Ge profile is by Michael E. Wood '08, who has created a video library of interviews with prominent Princeton Engineering alumni.

Last week, Princeton’s Keller Center hosted a panel titled “iPhone Apps: the New high-tech Gold Rush.” The panel included Princeton Engineering alum David Lieb of Bump Technologies and Matt Conner, an operations research and financial engineering major at Princeton who recently won a $100,000 grant to develop iPhone app that helps diabetics manage their disease.

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Princeton Engineering's Emily Carter appeared yesterday at a Capitol Hill news conference with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and U.S. Rep. Rush Holt to announce a new initiative that will highlight scientific research made possible by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (a k a the congressional economic stimulus package).

Carter said that engineering and physical sciences had been on “starvation budgets” for basic research throughout her 25-year career, northjersey.com reports, and that “with one fell swoop, this bill... really has changed the tone among the whole scientific community."

You can hear Carter describe her work in computational modeling of materials for energy applications in this video of a workshop hosted by Princeton's Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment.

Photo courtesy V. Hume, The Science Collection

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Princeton engineers are building a 92-foot-long replica of the Golden Gate Bridge as part of a $3 million National Science Foundation interactive display that will open in 2012.

Assistant professor Maria Moreyra Garlock is leading the model-building project along with Sylvester Black (pictured in the photo at right), who graduated from Princeton Engineering last year and who did his senior thesis on the Golden Gate bridge.

Interestingly, before the Golden Gate bridge was built, Princeton engineering professor George E. Beggs made and tested a steel model of the bridge tower, built to a scale ratio of 1 to 56. According to the Engineering News-Record of January 25, 1934, Beggs reported his results to some 200 engineers. HIs conclusion? The bridge was sound.

Garlock's colleague and mentor, the legendary David Billington, is interviewed in the current issue of Boston Architecture. In the interview, Billington talks about bridges (naturally), teamwork, and the importance of imagination in engineering. In the video below, Garlock discusses an exhibit on the mid-20th century structures of Felix Candela, which she and Billington co-curated. The exhibit features models of Candela's work created by Princeton students.

Photo of Sylvester Black by Frank Wojciechowski.

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The Keller Center has just posted its spring list of of cutting-edge technology courses, all of which are taught by exceptional teachers and designed to appeal broadly to all undergraduates.

Michael Gordin,  the author of a new history of the Cold War as well as a recent essay in the Los Angeles Times on the United Nations and nuclear arms control, will be teaching a keystone course called Technology and Society.

Why should non-techie undergraduates care about technology? Because virtually all the problems the world faces have some kind of technological dimension. And why should techie undergraduates care about society? Because the deployment of technology always has societal repercussions. But don't take EQN's word for it -- you can hear from Gordin directly in the video above.

A centerpiece of the Keller Center's mandate is to ensure that all students at Princeton gain a clear appreciation of technology and the social and political forces that shape it. To that end, Princeton undergraduates will find spring course offerings in engineering and community service, in entrepreneurship, and in a range of topics at the intersection of technology and society, from alternative energy to the computational universe.

By the way, one of Princeton Engineering's most prominent alumni, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, recently remarked that he was  attracted to Princeton precisely because its engineering school was embedded in a liberal arts setting.  "I believed that the value of a liberal arts education would serve me in some inchoate way," says Schmidt. "That has proven true."

You can watch a 3-minute feature video profile of Schmidt here or on Youtube. It is part of a library of engineering alumni videos  created by Michael E. Wood '08.

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In today's Wall Street Journal, Carl Bialik writes about "statistical time travel" performed by number-crunching researchers.

"In recent years," writes Bialik, "statisticians have created time machines to answer a wide range of historical hypotheticals, from how today's Supreme Court would have voted on Roe v. Wade to what sort of scientific papers Einstein might write today."

One of the researchers highlighted in the article is Princeton computer scientist David Blei, who has done a computational analysis of more than a hundred years' worth of Science magazine.

This is how Bialik describes Blei's research:

"His system identifies topics from scratch and assigns topic scores -- say, 80% neuroscience and 20% philosophy, or 40% biology and 60% chemistry. Any papers that have the same topic scores could then be grouped together, even if they are decades apart and keywords or concepts didn't yet exist. (Think of quarks or H1N1.)

"Here the critical bridge -- the necessary overlap to relate past decades to the present -- were keywords that were associated with others before they faded... Such techniques connected an 1880 paper on orangutan brains with a 1976 paper on monkey brains.

"That technique helps dig up research that was ahead of its time. For instance, these very time machines, including Dr. Blei's, make use of so-called Bayesian statistics, which were developed decades before there was sufficient computing power to use them fully."

You can hear Blei talk about his work in this 2007 Google Tech Talk. Blei's recent research includes papers on "finding latent sources in recorded music," "a computational approach to style in American poetry," and "augmenting social networks with text" -- this last paper being coauthored with former student Jonathan Chang, now at Facebook, who in a recent blog post describes various visualizations he created of theonion.com's twitter traffic.

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The Silicon Valley Leadership Group honored NetApp Chairman and Princeton Engineering alumnus Dan Warmenhoven last week for lifetime achievement and contributions to the community.

"Dan Warmenhoven is not only a highly talented and creative technology leader, he is one of Silicon Valley's finest community leaders," said Carl Guardino, president and CEO of the Leadership Group. "Along with his wife Charmaine, their contributions to the arts, the culture and the needy in Silicon Valley set the standard that each of us should try to emulate."

The group also honored Stanford President John Hennessy. Among the thousand or so Silicon Valley glitterati at the event were California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and senators Dianne Feinstein, and John McCain.

Both Dan and Charmaine Warmenhoven earned their undergraduate degrees from Princeton -- his in electrical engineering, hers in psychology. Read more in the Silicon Valley Business Journal and the San Jose Mercury News.

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The Princeton and Rutgers chapters of Engineers Without Borders are holding a benefit banquet on Nov. 12. The reception starts at 6 p.m., with dinner and a silent auction to follow.

EWB does amazing work, so if you have an extra fifty bucks to spare (the minimum donation that will get you into the benefit), you would be hard-pressed to find a more worthy cause.

Check out EWB's water irrigation project in Ethiopia in the video above. Or read here about their Ghana library drive. EWB is asking that you RSVP by Nov. 1 to ewb.benefit@gmail.com. If you misplaced your official invite, you can download a copy here.

Video by Taofik Kolade and Anthony Soroka

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The Princeton Alumni Weekly this week has a fascinating profile of bioengineer John Dabiri, who graduated from Princeton Engineering in 2001.

Last year Popular Science magazine named Dabiri one of its "Brilliant 10," dubbing him the "jellyfish engineer." By studying the way that jellyfish propel themselves through water, Dabiri draws inspiration for a range of engineering challenges, from designing energy-efficient underwater vehicles to developing a new method for early diagnosis of heart disease.

Dabiri, who majored in mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton, is now a researcher at CalTech and has also been featured recently by Time, The Epoch Times, Environmental Research, and Ecoworldly.

Photo courtesy John B. Carnett of Popular Science

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The blogosphere is reporting on a new paper coming out of Princeton that applies computer science theory to the field of financial derivatives. The Daily Kos summarizes the paper's fairly astounding findings thusly:

"Scientists have proved that it is possible to create complex financial bundles (you know - bundles of mortgages that have 'a few lemons' that are supposed to average out and make the whole bundle great investment) that hide bad assets in such a way that no computer or human can detect the bad assets."

Worse, the blog continues, "Even after a buyer loses their shirt on the investment, it is impossible for the buyer to prove that they were sold junk, which makes it impossible to regulate."

The paper is Computational Complexity and Information Asymmetry in Financial Products by Sanjeev Arora, Boaz Barak, Markus Brunnermeier, and Rong Ge. Arora and Barak are with Princeton's Center for Computational Intractability and coauthors of Computational Complexity: A Modern Approach, published earlier this year by Cambridge University Press.

Read the full blog commentary on the Daily Kos, Boingboing, Freedom to Tinker, Gödel's Lost Letter and In Theory.

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Computerworld recently profiled Princeton's legendary Brian Kernighan, who in 1978 wrote the now-classic C Programming Language  with C's creator, Dennis Ritchie. You can follow the slashdot conversation about the Kernighan profile here.

The book has sold millions of copies and been translated into a couple dozen languages, including Hebrew, Finnish, and Albanian. The screen grab above, from Kernighan's website, shows the covers of different translations. 

Kernighan -- who earned his doctorate from Princeton in 1969 -- teaches the very popular Computers in Our World course, which The New York Times's Steve Lohr wrote about a few years back in a piece called "To the Liberal Arts, He Adds Computer Science". Kernighan is also a regular columnist for the Daily Princetonian and recently last year wrote an essay for an IEEE publication delineating what every educated person should know about computers. 

By the way, Kernighan helped inspire the name for this blog.

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