The Google Book Scanning Project
The Princeton University Library is one of nearly 30 partners in the Google Book Scanning Project, an effort to integrate major library collections. Google expects that the project will connect researchers with key scholarly works and resources and that it will one day provide comprehensive access to all scholarly literatures.
Google Scholar currently supports searches for peer-reviewed papers, abstracts, and journal articles across many disciplines. Searches conducted at Princeton will provide a Find it @ PUL button when the library makes the full text available. Search results that contain a “book” link will provide a link to that book, the full text of which may be available.
In 2004, Google began the book-scanning project with a core group including the New York Public Library and academic libraries at Harvard University, Oxford University, Stanford University, and the University of Michigan. The agreements varied in scope. Michigan, for example, agreed to the digitization of all 7 million volumes in their collection. The project at Stanford involved approximately 2 million books in the first phase but could extend to full digitization during the life of the project. By contrast, the New York Public Library and Oxford are contributing only their non copyright, public domain material, although those holdings will exceed one million volumes. The second round of schools included Princeton, as well as the University of California, the University Complutense of Madrid, the National Library of Catalonia, the University of Wisconsin, Madison, the University of Virginia, and the University of Texas at Austin.
Since the early days of television, one of the principle challenges has been to deliver transmissions of high quality video with consistency. Throughout the world, several video standards, notably PAL, SECAM, and NTSC have attempted to achieve such quality. Since just after the Second World War, the United States has been committed to NTSC, named for the National Television System Committee that adopted it. This analog television system uses 525 lines of resolution and 30 frames per second but is constrained in no small part by the complexities and inconsistencies involved in transmitting audio and video over the air waves. Hence, its nickname among technicians: “Never The Same Color twice in a row.”
Doug Dixon,
Daniel Levitin is working to bridge advanced neuroscience and good old rock and roll.
The
OIT’s recent Strategic Planning effort identified the need for a “data lifeline,” a comprehensive way to store digital information, ways to search and archive the data, and policies to control data retention and disposal. OIT has begun the construction of an “information infrastructure” that will include massive central data storage, comprehensive data repositories, and simple-to-use collaboration software.
Last year, Princeton ranked 35th in the Sears Director’s Cup standings, a list that reflects success in all intercollegiate sports. Princeton’s ranking is remarkable in no small part because the university is the only non-scholarship school to appear in the top 50.
Emmanuel Kreike, Associate Professor of History at Princeton, combines models and methodologies from the humanities and social sciences with approaches from environmental science and forestry to analyze how ecological, political, social, cultural, and economic processes affect the use and management of natural resources in past and present southern Africa.
Although the computer age promised a paperless revolution, we are, in many ways, more dependent on paper than ever before. This year alone at Princeton University, students will print more than 8,000,000 pages in the campus computing clusters. Significant sustainability efforts are ramping up, but there are some clever steps that we can individually take within higher education to lessen our dependence upon paper and to help launch a paperless existence.
Adopted in January by the University’s trustees, Princeton’s Campus Sustainability Plan includes comprehensive efforts to reduce waste and to conserve resources in all areas of University operations, as well as initiatives in research, education, civic engagement, and communications. Computing is becoming a large part of the University’s energy-use footprint and considerable efforts are underway to find sustainable energy and conservation solutions. From high energy super-computers to paper use to videoconferencing, the March 12
Princeton Professor John Haldon, the director of the Euchaita/Avkat Project, an archaeological and historical survey based around the village of Avkat in north-central Anatolia, introduced the Avkat Archaeological Survey at the March 5
Says Robert Vanderbei, chair of
For the past eight years, Dr. Kernighan has taught a Computer Science course on advanced programming techniques that is meant to reflect how programming is used in the real world. Over time, the course has become more and more stretched between important old material and new unproven material that might be important. With more and more material to cover within a fixed time period, Dr. Kernighan acknowledged that he wrestles continually with the issue of what matters, what old information to preserve, and what new techniques and approaches to cover. In his February 13
You may be a typical
In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore predicted that the number of transistors placed on an integrated circuit would double approximately every two years. That prediction, notes Bernard Chazelle, Computer Science Professor at Princeton, if anything underestimated the results during the past half century and should continue for at least another decade. Moore’s Law, he posits, is responsible for most of the desktop and hip-pocket wonders of the computer age, notably remarkable improvements in processing speed, memory capacity, and network bandwidth.
A student-led research group at Princeton University,
Microsoft Vista and Office 2007 will begin to be installed on campus desktop computers in January 2008. The new Word 2007 offers powerful new functionality but the interface is a marked departure from the past. The comforting File-Edit menu has given way to a Quick Access toolbar and a set of “ribbons” that contain thematically related sets of Task Groups and Commands.
In the wake of the 2000 Florida recount debacle, many states turned to computer voting machines to increase election accuracy and security. Many computer scientists have long been skeptical of such machines, but only recently have researchers had access to them for study. At the October 24
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