May 7, 2008

The Google Book Scanning Project

googlebooks.jpgThe 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.

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April 30, 2008

Tuning In or Tuning Out? The New World of Digital TV

tvs.jpgSince 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.”

After more than a half century of use, NTSC transmissions will be replaced in the United States by a new standard, ATSC [Advanced Television Systems Committee] on February 19, 2009. After that date, full-power stations will broadcast digital signals only. For more information about the deadline and its possible impact, link to www.DTV.gov. As it turns out, 3,000 low-power stations will not be making the transition immediately owing to its costs. To see the new digital transmissions, owners of older analog television sets will need a decoder or set-top box to translate the new digital signals into an analog signal that the older TVs can understand.

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April 23, 2008

The Joys and Ploys of Little Toys

devices.jpgDoug Dixon, Manifest Technology, returned to Princeton to exhibit the hottest, miniature technological wonders in the electronic marketplace, notably media players, communication devices, and audio accessories. On his web site, Dixon maintains a technology blog as well as thematic galleries with information on trends and sample products including detailed specifications and prices about these latest hip-pocket wonders.

So much fun, or too many choices? As became obvious at his April 23 Lunch ‘n Learn presentation, there’s no one integrated full-featured gadget that does it all. Suggests Dixon, it’s a wonderful, but confusing, world at the electronics store — for consumers as well as manufacturers. What is the industry to do? There’s so much new technology to leverage, so many possible features to add, and so much potential in integrating multiple devices. But you can’t ask customers what they want, because the new devices have not been invented yet. So instead we see a profusion of different combinations of features, form factors, and price points thrown into the market to see what sticks.

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April 18, 2008

Professor links mind and musical experience

By KATE BENNER
Senior Writer

daniellevitin.jpgDaniel Levitin is working to bridge advanced neuroscience and good old rock and roll.

In a lecture titled “This is Your Brain on Music: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Musical Experience” yesterday afternoon in the James Stewart Theater at 185 Nassau, Levitin spoke to around 180 students and community members, addressing the connections between science and art, the development of musical experience and what music reveals about the brain.

“Music attempts to mimic the functions of the brain … more so than speech. Music can represent the complexity of human emotion and its dynamic nature,” Levitin said.

He described humans as expert music listeners, referencing Noam Chomsky’s theory that because children learn to speak before being taught.

Levitin added that “by the age of 5, most children have internalized the rules about what chords progressions are legal or typical in their own culture’s music.”

Levitin then played music clips and asked the audience to identify the wrong note. The audience overwhelmingly found the change.

“All I did was move a note by a semi-tone, which is the smallest legal note,” Levitin said in response.

Levitin said that though finding wrong notes is easy, becoming an expert musician is much more difficult. He pointed to studies showing that expertise in most activities requires 10,000 hours of practice and countered the idea that there could be a single music gene.

Read the complete Daily Princetonian article.

April 16, 2008

Emerging Tools for Research and Instruction

EmergingTools.jpgThe Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is interested in promoting the application of digital technologies to academic research as well as learning and teaching. The Foundation also supports investigations of new technical approaches to the archiving of textual and multimedia materials that require improved search and storage techniques and improvements in user-interfaces.

At the April 17 Lunch ‘n Learn session, Ira Fuchs summarized several of the most recent Foundation technology initiatives. He began by showing a diagram that illustrates the interrelationships among many of the Mellon-funded technology initiatives. Each node in the diagram represents a specific initiative. The lines reflect relationships between and among the nodes.

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April 9, 2008

Collaboration Tools at Princeton

collaborationtools.jpg 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.

To help oversee these efforts, OIT has hired Mark Ratliff, one of the original developers of JSTOR, a popular online scholarly journal archive, as our new “digital repository architect.” And OIT has acquired and installed several products that aim to simplify the management of digital content for all members of the University community.

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April 2, 2008

The Sporting Edge: IT Tools for Winning Soccer

trophy.jpg 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.

The reasons for Princeton’s athletic successes have much to do, of course, with a talented student body. As was clear at the April 2 Lunch ‘n Learn, the success of the university’s athletic programs owes also to an exciting set of IT tools and a remarkable coaching staff.

Julie Shackford, the Head Coach of Women’s Soccer and Scott Champ, the Assistant Coach, began by showing off a recruiting application that helps them to maintain contacts with a large pool of talented high school students. Some e-mail in their interest; some are referred by alumni; and the coaches see others at tournaments or soccer camps. The coaches encourage more than 400 prospects a year to visit goprincetontigers.com and fill out and submit a questionnaire that requires some effort and which provides an indication that the students are serious about Princeton. With the data, the coaching staff can, even when traveling, track prospects’ academic progress, their campus visits, and e-mail students directly. The coaches emphasized that they respond to everyone.

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March 26, 2008

Beyond Words: Environmental History, Digitization, and GIS

quickbird.jpgEmmanuel 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.

To study the past and the sweeps of environmental change, Africanists and indeed, many humanists and scientists have conventionally relied upon written archival records as well as oral histories, the individual perspectives of elders or oral traditions that have been handed down through the generations. The nature of the existing data made it difficult or impossible for researchers in any field to establish a link to the physical reality or even to draw meaningful conclusions about the complex processes of environmental change. Oral histories, for example, often tell us more about the present than the conditions in the past.

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March 25, 2008

Entering the Paperless Revolution (Finally)

noprint.jpgAlthough 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.

In 1993, Adobe Systems created the Portable Document Format (.pdf), a standard for the layout of two-dimensional documents that includes the text, fonts, and images in manner that is independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems.

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March 12, 2008

The Greening of Technology: Sustainability Initiatives at Princeton

sustainability.jpgAdopted 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 Lunch ‘n Learn explored the challenges and options in energy conservation in computing at Princeton.

Shana Weber, the University’s Sustainability Manager, began by providing an overview of the University’s comprehensive sustainability efforts as the University enters the implementation phase of the effort. With regard to Greenhouse Gas production, the University has set two aggressive goals: By 2020, to reduce campus emissions to 1990 levels and to reduce the number of single-occupancy vehicles coming to campus by 10%. Of course, the campus’s size is growing; we’re adding students, staff, and faculty, making the meeting of both goals all the more challenging.

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March 5, 2008

History, Remote Sensing, and GIS: the Avkat Survey Project

avkat.jpgPrinceton 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 Lunch ‘n Learn. The effort is a collaborative archeological and historical research project that seeks to integrate a number of different approaches to studying the past, using recent technological advances to integrate medieval sources as well as disparate datasets into a cohesive framework of analysis. The project offers the opportunity to trace the history of a single region across a period of more than 1500 years. Haldon hopes to clarify the political role of the area throughout the period, and to show the effects of human activity in transforming the landscape, tracking shifting settlement and demographic patterns, and explaining transformations in land-use, agricultural and pastoral farming, and urban-rural relationships.

The 10-year project employs cutting edge survey, mapping, and digital modeling techniques to enrich our understanding of the society, economy, land use, demography, paleo-environmental history and resources of the late Roman, Byzantine, and Seljuk/Ottoman periods. From the 1980s, archaeological field survey methodologies have rapidly developed. We also now have remote sensing techniques ranging from ground-penetrating radar to airborne radar systems and satellite imagery. However, the integration of these techniques into a unified project design has rarely been achieved. All too often, notes Haldon, these methodologies are simply tacked onto existing project designs.

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February 27, 2008

Digitizing the Universe From Your Backyard

horsehead.jpgSays Robert Vanderbei, chair of Operations Research and Financial Engineering at Princeton, the modern digital world is making it possible, and almost easy, for amateurs to take astrophotos in their own backyards that are as good as or better than those taken at professional observatories only a generation ago. The key enablers are computer controlled mounts for very precise pointing control, CCD cameras, and modern image processing tools.

In his February 27 Lunch ‘n Learn talk, he shared many of the images that he captured with his own equipment from his Montgomery, NJ home, as well as a working methodology to guide amateurs who wish to pursue astrophotography affordably.

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February 13, 2008

The Changing Face of Programming

kernighan2008.jpg 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 Lunch ‘n Learn talk, he illustrated some of the challenges and discussed ways in which we might use complexity and rapid change to our advantage.

The good news, he notes, is that we have available more memory, processor power, disk space, and bandwidth. The bad news is that these advances don’t encourage good programming practices and, on top of that, expectations are changing. Programmers expect more elaborate features and environments that facilitate quick delivery. Kernighan quotes a New York Times article that a web site cobbled together in just a week is now pulling in a million dollars a year for its programmer. “How to prepare students when the creation of such a simple application can have such a profound effect upon the world?” he asked.

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January 11, 2008

Google Search Strategies

googlesearch.jpg You may be a typical Google searcher who simply pops in a word or two in the Google search box and hopes for the best? As it turns out, Google has placed impressive functionality within that seemingly simple search box.

At OIT’s January 9 Lunch ‘n Learn seminar Nancy Pressman Levy, the Head of Princeton University’s Donald E. Stokes Library for Public and International Affairs, introduced a range of basic Google searching tips that will help users to maximize the power of Google.

Nancy showed that you can limit the results of your searches [nutrition -recipes] by using a “-” in front of terms that you want to exclude. You can use quotation marks to search for an entire phrase [“telephone switch”]. You can use “OR” to obtain results that include either word [Pakistan OR Kashmir]. The command “define:” will provide definitions or expand abbreviations [define: technology]. You can get the weather or time anywhere in the world [weather: Lima], [time: Venice]. Google will even help you look up the performance of stocks [stocks: aapl].

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December 12, 2007

Why Your Humble iPod May Be Holding the Biggest Mystery in All of Science

chazelle1.jpgIn 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.

Moore’s Law correctly predicted revolutionary technological and social change in the late 20th century. But by 2020 if not before, as transistor features approach just atoms in width, Moore’s Law will have run its course. New technologies may replace integrated circuit technologies to extend Moore’s Law for decades; Chazelle argues that the years ahead will usher in the era of the “Algorithm,” a notion which, he contends, may prove to be the most disruptive and revolutionary scientific paradigm since quantum mechanics.

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December 5, 2007

Computers Driving Down Nassau Street

PAVEonNassau.jpgA student-led research group at Princeton University, PAVE [Princeton Autonomous Vehicle Engineering] has for the past three years pursued the goal of a car that can drive by itself. The team, which consists primarily of undergraduates with assistance from a diverse group of graduate students, has now competed in two DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] Grand Challenges.

Alain Kornhauser, Professor of Operations Research & Financial Engineering, Co-Director, of the Center for NJ TIDE (Transportation Information & Decision Engineering), Director of the Transportation Program and one of the faculty advisors of PAVE introduced members of the group [Derrick Yu ‘10, Christopher Baldassano ‘09, Jonathan Mayer ‘09, Ian Ferguson ‘09, Issa Ashwash ‘09, and Lindsay Gorman ‘10] at the December 5 Lunch ‘n Learn seminar “Computers Driving Down Nassau Street.”

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December 3, 2007

10 Tips for Academic Users of Word 2007

word2007.jpg 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.

The good news is that the new application will permit you much more quickly to create more professional-looking documents. The bad news is that if you take advantage of Word 2007’s new features, you won’t be able to share your files with Word 2003 users unless they download a free compatibility pack.

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November 14, 2007

Tivo for the Internet: RSS Feeds for Research and Leisure

rssicons.jpg Internet users are accustomed to surfing the web, migrating haphazardly or with purpose from site to site. Rather than periodically checking out your most interesting sites to see if anything of interest might have been added, imagine if those sites all came to you.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) technology enables anyone to “subscribe” to content on the web and have updates downloaded into their RSS feed readers automatically. As many in the blogosphere have described it, RSS is like Tivo, but for the Internet. This simple analogy was the inspiration for the name of this talk. RSS feeds are most often used on sites with frequently updated content (e.g., blogs, news sites, scholarly journals, etc.). Steven M. Adams, Biological and Life Sciences Librarian at Princeton University, elucidates this underutilized knowledge discovery tool; it can transform the way you work and play on the web.

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November 7, 2007

Research Computing: Princeton Perspectives

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At the November 7 Lunch ‘n Learn seminar, three Princeton faculty members described their use of the University’s TIGRESS High Performance Computing Center, a collaborative collection of four major HPC resources, storage, and the programmers needed to facilitate computational science and engineering on campus.

Frans Pretorius, Assistant Professor of Physics, gave a brief overview of the computational techniques and resources needed to solve Einstein’s field equations, and described how the TIGRESS facilities are instrumental to his research. He explained that numerical relativity is concerned with solving Einstein’s field equations Gαβ =8∂Tαβ. For the computation work on the University’s supercomputing facilities, the field equations form a system of ten coupled, non-linear, second order partial differential equations each depending upon four or more spacetime coordinates.

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November 2, 2007

Electronic Voting: Danger and Opportunity

memorycard.jpg 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 Lunch’n Learn seminar, J. Alex Halderman, a PhD candidate in the department of computer science, described how he and his colleagues (Joe Calandrino, Ari Feldman, and Halderman’s adviser Ed Felten) examined several widely used electronic voting systems and discovered that they were susceptible to attacks that could alter election results and compromise the secrecy of the ballot.

In spite of these problems, Halderman contended that computers have the potential to make elections more secure. He concluded that new computer-assisted auditing techniques developed at Princeton can significantly reduce the costs of election security.

In response to the 2000 election debacle, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act, a $3.9B legislative package designed to help states upgrade voting machines by November 2006. As a result, many states embraced direct recording electronic (DRE) voting machines that store voting results in the machine’s memory. But these machines are inherently computers are just as susceptible to bugs, viruses, and attacks.

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