EQN

The current issue of The Economist magazine features a story on a fascinating plan by Princeton’s Martin Wikelski to outfit birds and insects with radio transmitters and track them by satellite.

The project — called ICARUS for the International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space — “would revolutionise the way animal behaviour is studied, by allowing pests and disease carriers to be followed as well as by providing the answers to some important conservation questions,” The Economist writes.

Jeremy Kasdin, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton who leads the satellite-design team, told The Economist that he is hopeful this ambitious effort can be achieved by modifying off-the-shelf equipment.

Last spring, undergraduate students in a class taught by Kasdin and Edgar Choueiri designed exactly such a satellite system. Kasdin and some of the students recently demonstrated a computer simulation of the idea to researchers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

Read the complete Economist article online.

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One of the richest purses in architecture is the Latrobe Prize, $100,000 awarded every other year in honor of the United States’ founding father of architecture, Benjamin Latrobe.

This year’s prize, officially announced this week, goes to Princeton’s Center for Architecture, Urbanism and Infrastructure to fund a project with the ambitious goal of transforming the Upper Bay of the New York Harbor into a Central Park of the 21st century.

Guy Nordenson, professor of architecture, is the principal investigator on the project. “Guy has been investigating the interplay between architecture and engineering for a long time,” co-investigator James Smith told EQN.

Smith, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Princeton, said that his role in the project is to assess the hazards of restructuring the area into a grand public space. “It is a complex ecosystem that has been dramatically altered for several hundred years by human activities,” he said. “Restructuring it will require a great deal of sensitivity.”

As an investigator in the National Science Foundation’s Long Term Ecological Research Program, Smith has been wrestling with big hydrologic issues in Baltimore that have direct relevance to the Latrobe project. Both projects, he said, address the question of how to create a sustainable environment in a highly urban area.

Smith’s work in small-particulate detection also bears on the project. As part of MIRTHE, the new NSF-funded engineering center at Princeton that promises to revolutionize sensor technology, he is working with other researchers to build a new generation of environmental sensors. “Fine particulate matter is one of the major health issues in New Jersey and New York,” Smith said.

That’s the beginning of interesting research from Smith. He has just coauthored a marvelously counter-intuitive research paper with graduate student Alexandros Ntelekos on how the urban environment alters the nature of thunderstorms. You can find that paper here .

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The online literary journal Wild River Review features computer scientist David Dobkin.

In the interview with Joy Stocke, Dobkin, who is a professor and dean of faculty at Princeton, explains some of the challenges behind trying to develop a 3-D version of Google.

“Imagine that we’re fifty years forward, which is probably really ten years forward, and we’re teenagers, and we want to build our avatars (computer images of ourselves and our world) for a game we’re playing,” Dobkin said. “And our avatar consists of building a model of a room so we need to find a chair somewhere. How do we tell Google that we want to look for a chair? We’ve already crawled the Web and have gotten somewhere between thirty and fifty thousand models of chairs.

“How do we know that the image we’ve pulled up is a chair rather than an airplane? And when we find one chair, how do we find other chairs? We all know how to type, so typing in the word chair is easy. The problem on the front end is that constructing a picture of a three-dimensional rendering of a chair is not so easy. So, if we type in the word chair we would get pictures of chairs, some of them beach chairs, some of them desk chairs.”

Sometimes, he notes, what you will turn up is not a chair at all but rather a person with the title of chairman.

Dobkin also explores fractals, ponders the language of nature, and elaborates on his world-class collection of snow domes.

You can read the full interview of Dobkin here. It is part of a series highlighting the scientists and artists who collaborated to create works for the late, lamented Quark Park. In a previous issue of Wild River, Stocke interviews sculptor Jonathan Shor about the paleo-techno lithophone he created with Princeton computer scientist Perry Cook for Quark Park.

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In the current issue of Time magazine — a “survival guide” to global warming — writer Michael Lemonick highlights the much-lauded carbon-stabilization concept developed at Princeton.

“While the solution to global warming seems dauntingly complex, physicist Robert Socolow and ecologist Stephen Pacala have come up with a remarkably straightforward way of approaching it,” writes Lemonick. “To stabilize the world’s carbon emissions, they propose not chasing a single magic bullet but harnessing seven different categories of reduction, using available technology. Their goal is to draw a road map for reducing CO2 emissions that is both realistic and effective.”

You can read the Lemonick piece here. Socolow, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton, also recently testified before the Senate on the future of energy in the United States. For those who will be in Princeton on April 12, Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, will deliver the 2007 Taplin Environmental Lecture, sponsored by the Princeton Environmental Institute. The topic of Sachs’s talk is “Negotiating the Post-Kyoto Climate Change Framework.”

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