November 4, 2009

Princeton's Partnership with Google Books

flower.jpg 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.

Google Books is a product resulting from the combination of the Google Library Partnerships (29 libraries) and the Google Publishers Partnership (many thousands)

The library project began in 2005 with Harvard, the New York Public Library, Stanford University, the University of Michigan, and Oxford University.Princeton joined the project in 2006. Many other institutions of higher education and several publishers have now joined the endeavor.

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October 28, 2009

Digital Telephony at Princeton

BluePhone.jpg 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.

At the October 28 Lunch ‘n Learn, Dave Wirth, Manager of Operations within the Office of Information Technology’s (OIT) Networking/Telephony group, reviewed the technology, its present implementation at Princeton, and the University’s plans for the future.

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October 14, 2009

Blogs, Lulz and Tweets: Social Media Comes to Princeton

PUSocialMedia.jpgWhy 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.

Most users need not worry about the coding or the construction of their pages. They can simply concern themselves with what they should share, and not share.

The technologies are changing rapidly (MySpace, for example, has lost 20% of their users in just two months), bringing enormous opportunities, challenges, and some significant policy headaches.

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October 5, 2009

Reassembling the Wall Paintings of Thera

shard.jpg Imagine trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle without knowing the number of pieces or even what the final image might look like.

The archaeological site of Akrotiri on the small, volcanic island of Thera (modern-day Santorini, Greece) has yielded an unparalleled trove of artifacts and information from the prehistoric Aegean. The ancient trading civilization was destroyed by a volcanic eruption, which buried the remains of a flourishing Late Bronze Age (c. 1630 B.C.) settlement in ash. Among the most significant finds are numerous wall paintings, ranging from every day scenes and coming-of-age rituals to abstract motifs. However, these paintings are recovered as thousands of plaster fragments, and reassembling them consumes a substantial portion of the effort expended at Akrotiri.

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July 14, 2009

Is Academia finally ready for Videoconferencing?

VCLewis349sm.jpg 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.

Professor John Nash and Professor Robert Socolow, for example, have given several keynote addresses via videoconferencing. Says Professor Socolow: “The Princeton Environmental Institute (PEI) and the Center for Human Values sponsored a video conference lecture last spring for the popular Ethics and Climate Change Lecture Series. Robyn Eckersley of the University of Australia at Melbourne presented a virtual lecture entitled: “The Ethics of Carbon Trading” to an audience which was very receptive to the videoconference.” The lecture and more information about the series are available at the ECC website.

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May 28, 2009

Backing Up's Not Hard to Do

GreenData.jpg 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 wonderful vignette, take a moment to see what can happen if your intellectual property is not well protected.

Princeton uses a software application called Tivoli Storage Manager or TSM to back up campus computers. During the current academic year, TSM has backed up 600,000,000,000,000 bytes of stored data on 10,849 campus client accounts using 16 STK/Sun T10000 encrypted tape drives in two silos as well as eight TSM servers in two computer rooms.

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May 6, 2009

Computer Modeling of the Mind and Brain

BrainMap.jpgFor 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, Botvinick’s laboratory works at the intersection of neuroscience, psychology and computer science, seeking to clarify the computational and neural foundations of human behavior. They employ a diverse set of research tools, including functional neuroimaging (fMRI), behavioral techniques (reaction time, error, and decision analyses), and computational modeling (neural networks, reinforcement learning models, and belief nets), typically applying multiple techniques to a single problem.

They are leveraging these tools to investigate a range of specific research questions, spanning the topics of cognitive control, working memory, decision making, sequential action, and language processing. Current projects include the monitoring and control of cognitive processing, the control of sequential behavior, and the representation of sequential order in working memory.

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April 29, 2009

The Cairo Geniza: Ancient Papers in the Digital Age

GenizaPaper.jpg The Cairo Geniza is a collection of an estimated 750,000 manuscript pages found discarded for “burial” in the Geniza chamber of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo in the late 19th century. In addition to holding religious poems and fragments of Torah scrolls, the Cairo Geniza contains approximately 15,000 mundane papers that reflect the daily life of the Jewish community in Cairo during the medieval period (mainly in the 11th to 13th centuries) - letters, contracts, wills, and other legal documents preserved in the area’s arid climate. These “Geniza documents” range in size from a few words to long letters of 80-100 lines.

For more than two decades, Mark Cohen and his Princeton colleagues have been working to bring these ancient papers into the digital age. Their work, called the Princeton Geniza Project, has created the world’s only online, searchable-text database of the Cairo Geniza’s historical documents.

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April 22, 2009

Archives and Manuscripts: Library Finding Aids

FAbook.jpgThe 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.

Finding aids, descriptive inventories created by archival repositories in order to provide access to collections, serve as the entry points for scholars and researchers to discover and explore these collections. In order to provide a standard structure for finding aids, the archival community developed an international XML metadata standard, Encoded Archival Description (EAD) in 1995. Comparable to AACR2 and MARC for bibliographic records, the content standard for Finding Aids has now been adopted by numerous institutions. EAD reflects the hierarchical nature of archival collections and provides a structure for describing the whole of a collection, as well as its components. And the standard supports flexible searching by collection, creator, biographies, title, call number, or topic.

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April 15, 2009

Flash Forward: The Rise of Small Tech Gadgets

gadgets.jpgA 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.

Again this year, Doug Dixon of Manifest Technologies worked the January Consumer Electronics Show to scope out the new products. This year’s show saw even more examples of the impact of flash memory: rugged HD camcorders, replacement solid state storage devices, Wi-Fi integrated on SD memory cards, new formats promising 2 terabyte memory cards, and card slots everywhere, from mobile phones to HDTV displays. Dixon returned to Lunch ‘n Learn on April 15 to explore the developing trends in the rise of flash memory and to show off dozens of fun, new, high-tech gadgets. His web site, contains his Lunch ‘n Learn presentation, as well as more than 200 additional articles and a blog about a range of technology topics. The site also contains more detailed information about the products that Dixon demonstrated during his talk.

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April 1, 2009

All Aboard! Teaching Engineering with Computerized Toys

train.jpgImagine being paid, or getting Princeton credit, for playing with trains and Legos™.

For more than 25 years, Professor Michael G. Littman, of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton, has taught MAE 412 Microprocessors for Measurement and Control, a course about microcomputer control.

In the class, students design single-board microcomputer controllers, and apply them for the automation of a modular n-scale model railroad. For example, a computer might be used to automate railroad switches to prevent collisions, facilitate traffic flow through a ladder network of tracks on a project board, or even regulate the loading of pipes onto train cars.

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March 25, 2009

Women in Research Computing

WomenComputer.jpgHow 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?

On March 25, three prominent members of the faculty at the University joined moderator Betty Leydon, Vice President for Information Technology and CIO to discuss their use of Princeton’s high-performance computing facilities and a range of varied issues, from the challenges of performing research in a male-dominated field to the importance of mentorship.

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March 12, 2009

Princeton University's Broadcast Center: First Cuts

bcshield.jpg 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.

The Broadcast Studio staff is happy to assist members of the University community from the beginning through the end of their A/V projects, from the actual shoots through video editing and the final distribution. Some of the projects involve location shoots (from single camera shoots through full production), live event productions (such as Commencement and Opening Exercises), and in-studio shoots that aid in control of lighting and other key conditions. The Center also manages lecture recordings (including he integration of lecture A/V and speaker slides), podcasts, and rich media content.

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March 9, 2009

The Foundations and Future of Information Search

search.jpg 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?

At the March 4 Lunch ‘n Learn seminar, Computer Science Professor Andrea LaPaugh gave a peek “under the hood” of major search engines. Core techniques range from word occurrence analysis for text documents, which originating in the 1960s, to Web linking analysis, pioneered by Google’s 1998 PageRank document ranking method.

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February 26, 2009

Creative Commons: Guilt-Free Reuse of Others' Work

CCWorkTogether.jpg Modern copyright law guarantees authors full rights over their work even without the inclusion of the © copyright notice. “All rights reserved” gives authors (for the length of their lives plus 70 years) the sole right to copy their works, to prepare derivatives or revisions of their works, to distribute or publish, or to perform or display their works in public.

Such unrestricted rights can create problems and generate fair-use confusion for members of the academic community who want to incorporate photographs, illustrations, music, video, and other forms of creative content into their own publications, lectures, presentations, and projects. Fair use may not infringe on copyright, and the factors used to determine what is and is not fair use include the purpose and character of the use, the nature of the copyrighted work, the amount of the work used, and the effect of such use upon the value of the copyrighted work.

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February 19, 2009

Infrared Optical Sensing for Health and the Environment

MIRTHE.jpgThe National Science Foundation has funded a multimillion-dollar Engineering Research Center based at Princeton University that is expected to revolutionize sensor technology, yielding devices that have a unique ability to detect minute amounts of chemicals found in the atmosphere, emitted from factories or exhaled in human breath.

The center, dubbed MIRTHE, for Mid-Infrared Technologies for Health and the Environment, combines the work of approximately 40 faculty members and researchers, 8 post-docs, 77 graduate students, and 30 undergraduates from the six universities (Princeton, Johns Hopkins, Rice, Texas A & M, City College of New York, and the University of Maryland Baltimore County) that are located in areas that are struggling to meet air quality standards.

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February 12, 2009

Sam Wang: Election Predictions and More

SamWang.jpg Having highlighted his work in a previous post, we invited Professor Sam Wang to speak at Lunch ‘n Learn on February 11. He graciously forwarded the following thoughts:

It was great fun to be invited to give the first Lunch ‘n’ Learn talk this spring. My topic was the ups and downs of Campaign 2008, and the understanding that statistical geeks can bring to the process. I also put on my neuroscience hat and got into how and why people form false beliefs, especially political ones. The audience was great and the questions were interesting.

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January 6, 2009

Gold Award for Outreach Efforts

LnLmedal.jpg The integrated outreach effort centered on the Lunch ‘n Learn Information Technology seminars has just received a gold medal for Best Practices in Communications in the 2009 CASE II Accolades Awards. CASE, the Council for Support and Advancement of Education, makes annual awards to educational institutions in 40 different categories, including alumni relations, communications, design, development, grant writing, magazines, marketing, news writing, photography, portals, publications, and Web.

For more than 15 years, Princeton University’s Office of Information Technology has sponsored the lunch time series featuring speakers with varied affiliations exploring a wide array of cutting edge technology topics. During the past four years, Academic ServicesEducation and Outreach Services have sought to transform the existing series into fully integrated outreach, with these blog posts, high quality podcasts, RSS feeds, and through Facebook, demonstrating how a small outreach office with sophisticated collaboration tools can leverage its resources.

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December 10, 2008

Computational Intractability: A Barrier for Computers, Man, and Science

locksilverside.jpgWhile computers are exponentially more powerful and increasingly important in both society and in every area of scholastic inquiry, modern computers appear to be incapable of solving certain problems. In recent decades, computer scientists have begun to develop an understanding of what makes some computational tasks “intractable” not just for current computers but for all foreseeable computers, even if they were joined together.

Princeton is the lead institution for a new $10 million National Science Foundation grant for the study of computational intractability. At the Dec 10 Lunch ‘n Learn seminar, Sanjeev Arora, the principal investigator on the new grant, Professor of Computer Science, the Director of the Center for Theoretical Computer Science, and the Director of the Center for Intractability gave an overview of both the field and what the new center is trying to accomplish.

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December 5, 2008

Challenging Nature

cornana.jpg Professor Lee Silver gets around. He’s discussed cloning with Charlie Rose, stem cells with Ted Koppel, and designer babies on the BBC. You can even watch him tangle with Stephen Colbert. A professor at Princeton in the Department of Molecular Biology and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Silver’s most recent book is Challenging Nature: The Clash of Biotechnology and Spirituality. According to one reviewer, he “gleefully eviscerates the motley preachers, pundits, philosophers, and politicians who, he argues, hinder science on the basis of a vague belief that biotechnology trespasses where mere mortals dare not go.”

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