Millions, Billions, Zillions -- (In)numeracy Still Matters
Says Princeton Computer Science professor Brian Kernighan: “As calculators and computers have become steadily more powerful, they have buried us in an avalanche of numbers and graphs and charts, many of which claim to present the truth about important issues. But at the same time, our personal facility with numbers has diminished, often leaving us at the mercy of quantitative reasoning and presentation that is sometimes wrong and often not disinterested.”
For the past ten years, Dr. Kernighan has been teaching a course that satisfies “QR”, Princeton’s dreaded Quantitative Reasoning requirement. Increasingly, he has come to view a significant part of the QR component as basic numeric self-defense: assessing the numbers presented by other people, and producing sensible numbers of one’s own.
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The traveling salesman problem, or TSP for short, is easy to state: given a number of cities along with the cost of travel between each pair of them, find the cheapest way to visit them all and return to your starting point. Simple to state, but remarkably difficult to solve! Despite decades of research by top applied mathematicians around the world, in general it is not known how to significantly improve upon simple brute-force checking. It is a real possibility that there may never exist an efficient method that is guaranteed to solve every instance of the problem. This is a deep mathematical question:
Is there an efficient solution method or not? The topic goes to the core of complexity theory concerning the limits of feasible computation. For the stout-hearted who would like to tackle the general version of the TSP, the Clay Mathematics Institute will hand over a $1,000,000 prize to anyone who can either produce an efficient general method or prove an impossibility result.
Imagine a computer that made direct use of quantum mechanical phenomena. Such a machine would likely operate exponentially faster than our present computers.
In the Internet’s early years, some observers believed that the new technology would reduce social inequality in at least two ways. First, by reducing the price of information, it would make information more available, and therefore level the playing field. Second, because young people appeared to have the inside track in mastering and using the new technologies (and because youth is negatively associated with wealth and uncorrelated with other indicators of socioeconomic status), some felt that the advantage of the young would likewise reduce certain kinds of inequality in access to and use of information. By contrast, other more jaded observers predicted that the well to do and well educated would use their resources to extract more benefit from the Web than for their less prosperous and well schooled neighbors, reproducing or even exacerbating inequality rather than moderating it.
For the past three decades, the 
During the past decade, Princeton’s web site has grown from a relatively simple tool supporting producers and consumers of information about the institution, its programs, and its people to what is today a complex, mission-critical appliance for teaching, research, administration, and collaboration.
The Google Books Library Project is a collaborative effort between Google and more than 20 academic libraries and publishers to scan and make searchable major research collections. When books are out of copyright and in the public domain, the public can now use Google Book Search to view bibliographic information, to read and search the texts, and even download them.
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) refers to a family of hardware and software technologies that deliver voice communications over the internet rather than the public, switched telephone network. To make it work, technologists have to convert traditional analog signals into a digital format and then translate that signal into IP packets for transmission over a private or public network.
Why has the use of Facebook and other social networking sites exploded? Perhaps, suggest John Jameson and Shani Hilton of Princeton’s Office of Communications, because it is now possible to interact socially with very large numbers of people in ways that are no more difficult than sending out a simple e-mail.
Imagine trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle without knowing the number of pieces or even what the final image might look like.
The current recession has persuaded institutions of higher education to look in new places for significant savings. And so, rather than flying cross country for a conference, imagine being able to take part in sessions, or even delivering a paper, right from your office or from a specialized videoconferencing facility on campus.
You don’t have to be a fan of Sex in the City to know that it’s important to backup your data. If you have not seen this 
For those who still assume that the Psychology faculty analyze subconscious thoughts and place rats in mazes, Matthew Botvinick represents an eye opening cup of java. Building on the foundations of cognitive psychology, 
The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at the Princeton University Library holds world class archival and manuscripts collections. The Mudd Manuscript Library, with more than 35,000 linear feet of storage, holds two major collections: The Princeton University Archives and “Public Policy Papers” which include very significant collections in the areas of foreign policy, economics and economic development, Civil Liberties, Law and Jurisprudence.
A compelling technology, flash memory continues its march through the consumer electronics industry, yet again doubling quickly in capacity and dropping in price. In its wake, the wreckage of other, once proud, technologies and products — the floppy disk wiped from computers by the USB drive, the CD Audio disc humbled by portable flash players, and tape-based video cameras that now seem clunky compared to smaller flash cams. And next in the sights: computer hard drives giving way to faster and more rugged Solid-State devices.
Imagine being paid, or getting Princeton credit, for playing with trains and Legos™.
How did three distinguished women in research computing overcome political and societal obstacles? How have they dealt with the different work/life expectations that our society places on women? Do they see progress toward equaling the playing field?
The new Peter B. Lewis Library contains a new OIT-operated Broadcast Center with a high definition video studio that features a green room with a 65 inch LCD screen, a professional audio recording studio, as well as the hardware and software to edit video, color correct footage, and sweeten and edit audio. The Studio also has a Broadcast van with full, mobile production capabilities.
Launched in 1998, Google’s stated its mission: “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” And so it is. Today, everyone Googles - in the U.S, about 12 billion times a month (including search engines that aren’t Google). We are mostly pleased with the results we get. How can it be that we give an automated system a couple of words and it finds reasonably relevant documents among one hundred billion or so possibilities? Will our satisfaction with these tools increase or decrease as the Web and our expectations grow?
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