IT’s Academic

The Google Book Scanning Project

2008-05-07T20:15:21Z

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.

]]> At the May 5 Lunch ‘n Learn, Trevor Dawes and Marie Wange-Connelly provided an overview of the effort at Princeton. Over the next four to six years, the Princeton University Library will be sending many of its out-of-copyright titles to Google for scanning and OCR. These titles will subsequently be accessible via Google Book Search. Google has agreed to digitize approximately one million public domain books, works no longer covered by copyright protections, in the Princeton Library collection. The actual number will likely be lower owing to issues related to the condition and size of individual volumes and the de-duplication of items already scanned from other partner libraries. The combined collections of the University’s libraries include more than 6 million printed works and 5 million manuscripts.

Princeton began by sharing with Google its holdings before 1923. The Library and Google then mutually agreed on the items to be included in the project. To avoid duplication, Google selected those volumes whose text was not already contained within their database. Holdings do include different editions, and there are instances in which text is available from editions that are now out of copyright. Princeton has thus far sent three shipments to Google from the list that Google submitted back. The volumes sent so far are primarily in the humanities and social sciences and involve many languages in non-Roman scripts.

As a result of this partnership, Google will provide free electronic access to works that are out of copyright and more when they are able to obtain permissions from publishers. For its part, Princeton will now have electronic access to many of its volumes. Some of the digitized items can now be stored in areas that are friendlier to their preservation while freeing up valuable shelf space within on-campus libraries for new acquisitions.

Additional details about the project and about the project partners are available .

Trevor Dawes is the Circulation Services Director at the Princeton University Library, where he oversees the circulation, reserve, stacks, current periodicals, Borrow Direct and remote storage coordination operations. Dawes received his MLS from Rutgers University and has additional Masters Degrees in Educational Administration from Teachers College, Columbia University.

Marie Wange-Connelly is the Leader of the Serials, Electronic Resources and Record Management Team within the Catalog Division and is Special Projects Manager within Technical Services. Wange-Connelly also received an MLS from Rutgers University.

The podcast is available.

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

2008-04-30T20:47:58Z

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.”

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.

]]> Above all, don’t worry and don’t fall for unneeded upgrade schemes. Princeton’s Campus Television network will operate as normal. Even without a converter, you will still be able to receive some channels over the airwaves via the analog network. If you use a digital tuner from Comcast, FIOS, DishTV, etc, you will not have to take any action whatever. But if your analog TV is using basic cable without an external tuner, you will need to add one.

The encoding and transmission of images and audio in a digital bit format has many advantages. The delivery of audio and video will be much more consistent. Colors won’t fluctuate, recordings won’t vary from the original, and digital pictures will be free from the “ghosts” and “snow” that can affect analog transmissions. Moreover, the digital formats also facilitate a range of new commercial ventures. For example, you can record content or use a Tivo service to record for you. And digital providers offer free and for-pay on-Demand services that make available large libraries of movies and special features. You can watch them, pause your viewing and resume later, or even rewind to review a favorite scene.

At his April 30 Lunch ‘n Learn seminar, David Hopkins emphasized that hooking up to a digital service does not mean that all programming will be in high-definition. Services simply provide digital signals. To obtain high-definition programming, you will need to subscribe to a more-expensive tier of service. The preferred new wide-screen format is delivered in a 16:9 aspect ratio that emulates a movie-going experience.

Prices for High-definition televisions range from $499 (for 23” sets) to $70,000 (for sets that now reach 103”). Hopkins stressed that consumers ought to pay attention to each set’s contrast ratio, an assessment of its ability to display a full range of color. He recommended a minimum of 2000:1. All high definition models have some disadvantages, says Hopkins. Rear projection sets are relatively bulky and can be difficult to view well from the sides. To avoid costly maintenance, such sets should be regularly vacuumed. LCD’s are much thinner but have relatively slow refresh rates. Plasma displays provide a deeper black than LCD sets but will often experience problems with burn-in. Projectors generate large images but contain loud fans and have expensive bulbs that will need be replaced regularly.

If you are interested in wall-mounting your set, Hopkins recommended that you work with a professional, especially with larger models. When you decide to add a separate audio system, consider 5:1 Dolby Surround Sound.

And lest you think that Comcast, FIOS, and DishTV are the only games in town, Hopkins recommended that you take a look at online providers, notably Hulu, Joost, CNETTV, and tomgreen.com. Be prepared for a new addiction.

The podcast and presentation are available.

The Joys and Ploys of Little Toys

2008-04-23T21:40:58Z

Doug 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.

]]> Dixon displayed a range of portable media players. Some media players add features like video and internet connectivity. Others add Internet radio, streaming video, internet playback, Web access, or GPS navigation. And yet, fortunately perhaps, we’re as yet unlikely on a small device to watch TV while reading a live map and talking on the phone. Apple’s iPods dominate the portable player market, but there are also different options from Creative, Samsung, SanDisk, and Archos. Consumers will appreciate the continuing increase in storage capacity, functionality, as well as the decreases in price.

There are stick players, essentially memory cards with audio jacks; there are simple players, some with displays that give some control over what you want to hear; there are flash media players that play video; and there are hard disk players that offer more storage capacity and often larger viewing screens. In the iPod line, the Shuffle represents the entry level with a small unit that randomly selects what to play from among your stored favorites. Apple favors simplicity, with just a few models and not many options; By contrast, Creative, SanDisk, and Samsung offer a full range of small and large players that include FM radio with presets, speakers, battery slots, and voice recording capabilities, and Bluetooth.

Flash Video Players add displays for viewing video clips as well as access to album art, photographs, and of course, the ability to play videos. As players add storage for thousands of songs, larger displays are needed to scroll through the lists. How will consumers react to watching video on a small screen? We’re about to find out, says Dixon, because Apple and many companies are introducing video on players and phones. They have 4-8 GB of storage, access to significant collections of videos, and some have the ability to communicate with external Bluetooth speakers or headphones.

Some players have wi-fi capability in support of online streaming. And mobile phones are adding Interent connectivity for on-demand audio and video. It’s an interesting idea, says Dixon, but not yet particularly successful. They are reasonable for short videos, or “snacking,” but mobile providers are not anxious to encourage continuous video streaming.

Then there are the hard disk players like the iPod Classic and models from Creative with 4-7 inch screens that can store even more songs and videos with built-in wi-fi internet browsing. Photographers could store their portfolios, business travelers could share their presentations, and anyone could effectively share videos with friends.

Phones today provide an interesting range of features. For example, your phone can provide wireless data services to your PC for DSL type access from anywhere. Media to the phone is the hot issue, says Dixon. Verizon provides a vCast service that provides on-demand video and music. Subscribers can watch snacks, notably news, weather, and segments from Comedy Central, on their phones. Sprint offers Mobi-TV, live streaming video to a handheld device over the cellular network as part of its bundles. There are more than 30 video channels, including the major networks, and more than 50 channels of digital radio. Dixon expects that within two years or so, all of our cell phones will provide digital TV service for the major broadcast channels as well as other clips on demand.

Smartphones (like Apple’s iPhone, the Google Phone, and the Verizon touch) combine impressive functionality with comprehensive integration. And so, from these phones, you can browse the web, send e-mail, take pictures, watch TV, play music, get GPS services on Google maps, and even open a small QWERTY keyboard.

The main trends for audio are Bluetooth and noise reduction through soft and hard devices that stick in or hang on your ear. Dixon recommended the Jawbone, a device that hangs on your ear but reaches out to touch the cheek in order to sense when you are talking. Some have slides to bring the microphone closer to your mouth, as well as extra connections to provide stereo. With these devices, your computer, media player, or phone can provide a stereo experience that won’t bother your neighbors.

Doug Dixon is an independent technology consultant, author, and speaker specializing in digital media. A graduate of Brown University, and previously a product manager and software developer at Intel Corp. and Sarnoff Corp., he consults and provides expert witness services on the digital media market and technology. He is the author of four books and has published more than 250 feature articles. He is currently Editor-in-Chief of CDSA’s Mediaware magazine and East Coast Technical Editor for Camcorder & Computer Video magazine, and has contributed to DV Magazine, CNET Reviews, and the U.S. 1 Newspaper in Princeton. Dixon blogs about new developments and makes his articles and technical references freely available on his Manifest Technology site.

A podcast is available.

Professor links mind and musical experience

2008-04-18T16:55:09Z

By KATE BENNER
Senior Writer

Daniel 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.

Emerging Tools for Research and Instruction

2008-04-16T21:12:10Z

The 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.

]]> Early Foundation efforts notably included:

• JSTOR, which digitizes and makes available scholarly journals in dozens of academic discipline and is now an independent, self-sustaining, not-for profit organization serving more than 2,000 institutions worldwide.

• ArtSTOR, a parallel to JSTOR that creates, maintains, and distributes an electronic library of digital works of art, architecture, cultural objects, manuscripts, and related scholarly materials.

• OpenCourseWare, an initiative to encourage colleges and universities to make their instructional materials available online under licenses that permit free and open use by others.

• The Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI), an effort among several institutions of higher education to facilitate the development and delivery of learning management and educational software applications.

• Sakai, a collaborate effort among more than 50 institutions of higher education to integrate and synchronize the best features of their course management systems, the tools that faculty use to post course requirements, readings, and assignments and to facilitate students within courses to share their ideas and their work.

The interconnections among the applications reflect Mellon’s purposeful efforts to seek projects that build upon existing work, and to foster actively collaboration and synergies among the efforts. The VUE [Visual Understanding Environment] software that supports such concept mapping was developed at Tufts University and is itself a Mellon Foundation-supported application. The most recent version 3 is incorporating PowerPoint-like features that support presentations within the classroom.

Thematically linked applications in the diagram are clustered. For example, administrative applications that provide functions common to most institutions of higher education occupy the lower left quadrant. These new systems are being written by and for colleges and universities under open source licenses for administering research projects, financial systems, student systems, and the like.

The Foundation recently funded OpenCollection, an application developed by the Museum for the Moving Image that aims to assist small and mid-sized museums to manage increasingly robust types of holdings. The Museum maintains objects of all sorts, from traditional drawing and paintings through film costumes and audio and multi-media files.

Fuchs demonstrated several newly developed Mellon Foundation-supported software applications.

Sophie attempts to redefine the future of the book or academic paper. Rather than treat such works as a series of linear, textual pages, Sophie treats books and papers as multimedia objects, facilitating the integration of text with rich media and encouraging reader feedback and conversations. Sophie runs in a virtual machine called Squeak (a variant of the Smalltalk language), so it can operate on any platform on which Squeak is supported, including Windows, the MacOS, and Linux. More importantly, such books can move from machine to machine without affecting the actual contents of the book or the way those contents are integrated and displayed.

Sophie is intuitive and relatively to ease, and far easier to use than comparable tools such as Flash. From a reader’s perspective, Sophie books can be artistically formatted, incorporate audio and video, and they offer the unprecedented opportunity to add personal annotations or even to share thoughts about the work with an online community of other readers.

Zotero is a free, open-source, easy-to-use Firefox plug-in that permits users to integrate many traditional academic activities such as word processing, bibliographic management, and online archival access into a single application. Like commercial bibliographic management tools such as Endnote and RefWorks, Zotero supports common bibliographic formats and it obviously eases the chore of populating bibliographies and citation collections, but Zotero has the advantage of directly supporting Web-based research as well. For example, when you load a web page, Zotero can detect relevant bibliographic information, and will permit you to add the citation and even the page contents to your digital collection. Fuchs demonstrated one unique new feature: After Zotero automatically brought in a YouTube video, Fuchs was able to clip and annotate a segment. Zotero then saved an exact citation to that segment. Fuchs noted that, for the second year in a row, Zotero has won PC Magazine’s award for the best free software and that the software has been downloaded now more than 750,000 times, and is growing at a current rate of more than 75,000 new users per month.

The Internet Archive has stored billions of pages in an effort to preserve the information as well as the look and feel of the World Wide Web. A Mellon-supported effort at George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media (CHNM) uses Zotero to create a URI, [Uniform Resource Identifier] and has the Internet Archive store a copy of the page. The result is a guarantee that your web-citation will persist. To share citations and comment, CHNM is also working on a Zotero Commons that will permit researchers to save citations, content, and indeed, any digital object that you want to share with other scholars.

Another Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded project, SEASR (Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research) is creating a modular research and development environment in support of leading digital initiatives in the humanities. SEASR will permit researchers to build interesting research environments; it will help scholars to access existing large, multimedia data stores; it will provide enhanced data synthesis and query analysis; and it will enable sophisticated collaboration among scholars.

Fuchs demonstrated the use of the SEASR environment for music information retrieval and classification, sending a piece of music through different classifiers to assess both the genre and the mood of the piece. The result is that it’s possible to classify large repositories of music data for discovery and comparative analysis.

About the Speaker:

Ira Fuchs joined The Andrew W. Foundation in July 2000 in the newly created position of Vice President for Research in Information Technology and began directing the Foundation’s investigations of digital technologies. Prior to joining The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Mr. Fuchs served as the Vice President for Computing and Information Technology at Princeton University (1985-2000), where he was responsible for the overall management of the University’s academic and administrative computing services, electronic communications, media, intranet, and printing services.

He was Vice Chancellor for University Systems at the City University of New York (1980-1985) and Executive Director of the CUNY Computer Center (1973-1980). In 1981 he founded the BITNET Network, the first and world’s largest academic telecommunications network, and later served as president of its successor, the Corporation for Research and Educational Networking (CREN).

Fuchs currently serves on the board of trustees of JSTOR, Sarah Lawrence College, and the Princeton Public Library. He received his M.S. in Computer Science and B.S. in Physics at Columbia University.

A podcast is available.

Collaboration Tools at Princeton

2008-04-09T20:23:12Z

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.

]]> At the April 9 Lunch ‘n Learn seminar, Mark introduced three members of OIT who demonstrated new collaboration tools. Dennis Hood, Manager of Courseware within OIT’s Academic Services, introduced Princeton’s WebShare file management system; Sal Rosario, Coordinator of Process Improvement within OIT’s Finance, Administration, and Planning presented the Miscrosoft SharePoint service; and Harris Otubu, Manager of the Help Desk Phone Center within OIT’s Support Services, gave an overview of WebEx.

Ratliff explained that, while WebShare and Sharepoint appear to provide similar services, they may serve different constituencies. WebShare is primarily for managing and collaborating with files and may therefore appeal to individual faculty and students who are involved in academic or administrative collaborative efforts. By contrast, SharePoint is a tool designed primarily for team communication within a web intranet. It contains useful widgets such as discussion boards, calendars, and document libraries.

Any member of the University community, explained Dennis Hood, can automatically establish an account by accessing WebShare with any popular web browser. The system easily and intuitively permits users to create folders, store files, and share them with others here at Princeton or indeed with anyone throughout the world. You can use WebShare to share your files with your colleagues. You can link WebShare files to Blackboard for use with your teaching or simply to share files with your classes. You can also use WebShare as a repository for your web pages. The system can store any file type and has a built-in Wiki that would permit a team, through a public or private web site, to add information incrementally to the group’s efforts.

SharePoint offers a full-fledged collaboration environment for website creation, document sharing, group discussions, blogging, calendaring, and Wikis. Sal Rosario emphasized that the Microsoft’s SharePoint collaboration tool is especially useful for managing projects. In addition to most of the features contained within WebShare, Sharepoint offers discussion and announcement lists, task and contact lists, calendars, Blogs, and surveys. Contact lists , Events, and Tasks can be integrated into Microsoft Outlook. Survey results can be exported to Microsoft Excel. Sharepoint also permits you to create picture libraries with a slideshow viewer. Questions about the SharePoint implementation can be directed to Sal Rosario; Training classes will be scheduled starting in May.

The University also has a license with WebEx, in this case for hosting web-based desktop conferences and training. Simply put, you can use WebEx to share your desktop with a collaborative group, perhaps to deliver real-time presentations to remote PCs, described Harris Otubu. To set up a WebEx event, members of the University community go to OIT’s conferencing page. There, you will learn how to install the WebEx Meeting Maker client. Once you have an account and have installed the software, you may then schedule your event. You may also need to arrange for voice conferencing.

Mark Ratliff, Princeton’s new Digital Repository Architect, will work with members of the University community to understand their digital content management needs and to ensure that the University’s digital repository architecture is designed to meet those needs. He will help to develop overall strategies for the development and management of digital repositories and their content.

A podcast and the presentation are available.

The Sporting Edge: IT Tools for Winning Soccer

2008-04-02T19:54:10Z

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.

]]> Shackford and Champ also demonstrated video clips of game tape using the Dartfish TeamPro software. Dartfish permits coaches to break down games for players on all levels. Each year, the staff has become more adept at using the system and now have it running on laptops to make it easier to share film quickly with players when the team is traveling. They use it throughout the fall season once or twice a week to review film highlights with individual players, units, or with the whole team.

They have a professional record each game. Rather than rely upon tape, which would require as long as the game took to transfer into the database, they now record the game digitally and transfer it in just four minutes. That’s especially important, says Champ, when you’re on the road, on the bus home, when players don’t want to wait to review the game.

Shackford noted that it’s possible to tag clips for individual players, for defensive or offensive miscues, for great saves, for chips shots over the keeper, and the like. Just a 30 minute film session with the players is as useful, she says, as a separate practice. Simply put, the tape doesn’t lie. For some players, the sharing of film has permitted them to succeed. The coaches have also used video clips as recruiting tools because they illustrate Princeton’s team approach better than any words could.

Since the program went to the Final Four in 2004, they have been in a rebuilding phase. They feel strongly that the video software is a great learning tool as the college game continues to get more competitive. At times, coaches get so emotionally tied to games that is difficult to remember everything. The software lets the team replay (for better or worse) segments that will help improve individual and team performance.

Julie Shackford is the Head Coach of Women’s Soccer at Princeton University. Among many honors, she was named the Division I coach of the year by the National Soccer Coaches’ Association of America in 2005. Shackford became the fourth woman and second Ivy League coach to be named national coach of the year in the 23-year history of the honor. Under Shackford’s leadership, the 2004 Tigers put together the greatest season in Ivy League women’s soccer history. Princeton amassed a league-record 19 wins and became the first league women’s soccer team to reach the NCAA Final Four.

Scott Champ enters his fourth season as an assistant coach at Princeton. Champ came to Princeton from Texas A&M, where he helped guide the women’s soccer team to the Big 12 championship. Champ is a 1992 graduate of the University of Virginia, where he was a member of the Cavaliers’ 1989 and 1991 NCAA championship teams. He graduated with a degree in chemistry after earning Academic All-ACC honors. He also completed coursework toward a Ph.D in organic chemistry while at Texas A&M. After graduation Champ played professionally in Hungary and then in the United States in the USISL. He also has 10 years coaching experience on the youth level and holds a U.S. Soccer “A” certification.

A podcast is available.

Beyond Words: Environmental History, Digitization, and GIS

2008-03-26T21:52:35Z

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.

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.

]]> Recognizing that such written and spoken words are abstractions from the physical reality that frequently contain propaganda, exaggerations, and misstatements of fact, Kreike found a fascinating approach to complement and supplement traditional methods. He located boxfuls of aerial photographs from the 1943 and 1970 that cover broad landscapes. With encouragement and assistance from University faculty and staff, notably Professor Mike Mahoney, Bill Guthe, Wangyal Shawa, Ben Johnston, Kirk Alexander, Raf Alvarado, and Carla Zimowsk, Kreike found that he could place these images, as well as well as comparable satellite imagery from the modern era, within a Geographical Information System [GIS] framework. With its map-based focus, Kreike also uses GIS and digitization to tie together qualitative and quantitative information, notably individual old photographs, archival documents, household survey data, and even oral interviews to their geographic origin. In some instances, the finely detailed GIS images permitted Kreike to identify the exact location of old photographs. Far more than simply a geographic filing system, the result is an exciting new methodology that permits vivid and finely detailed comparisons through time for the whole Namibia-Angola border region. With no rivers or mountains as a guide, the relatively flat terrain complicated the matching of the aerial photographs to the satellite data. Even modern roads did not exist in 1943. At the March 26 Lunch ‘n Learn seminar, Kreike demonstrated that many local patterns and features, notably seasonal water courses and large fruit-bearing trees survived the intervening years, provided useful geographical markers to align the maps. By comparing the 1943 and 1970 photographic data with 2006 satellite imagery, it’s possible to determine over time changes in the types of vegetation, the crops that were grown, the number of people and livestock, as well as extent of the forest cover. One surprising conclusion is that the area today has more and bigger trees than existed in the 1940s.

Kreike concludes that the integration of digital tools and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) has the potential to add dramatically to the capacity of the humanities to understand and explain more fully the dynamics of environmental change. Digital and GIS datasets and modeling not only add powerful new sources and tools, but also provide the means to more effectively link time (the domain of history as a discipline) and space (the environments people use and move through), qualitative and quantitative sources, as well as word and image, greatly enhancing the understanding of the processes involved as well as offering new visual ways of presenting the results of the research.

Kreike is author of Recreating Eden: Land Use, Environment, and Society in Southern Angola and Northern Namibia, 2004. He is now working on Paradigms and Paradoxes of Environmental Change: Deforestation and Reforestation in Namibia.

A podcast and the presentation are available.

Entering the Paperless Revolution (Finally)

2008-03-25T16:19:37Z

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.

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.

]]> There are many ways to create .pdf documents. The simple rule of thumb is that if you can print a document, you can turn it instead into a .pdf. Acrobat Professional offers a simple mechanism for creating .pdf documents from Office applications such as Word, Excel, or PowerPoint or from any web page or site. But the simplest and fastest way to create .pdf documents is from within Microsoft Office 2007 applications. There, you can simply SAVE AS PDF, an action that takes just seconds.

Of course, many scholarly documents are already available in .pdf format. For example, Princeton students have access to their reserve reading in .pdf format. If you open a .pdf document within Adobe Professional, you can (within the Review and Comment tab) add a “Sticky Note” or highlight any portion of the document.

Members of the University community can also use Acrobat Professional to create digital portfolios of their work. From within Adobe Acrobat Professional, select “Combine Files” and then select the documents that you want to include within your digital portfolio. You can include a cover page that introduces or summarizes the contents.

The quick result is a digital portfolio that will permit you to share any or all of your work in a digital format without any printing. You can tailor portfolios to suit your needs, to share work with an adviser or a potential employer. Here’s a screenshot of what a how a portfolio would appear. You can quickly switch among documents simply by clicking on their filename in the left column.

Princeton seniors working on their theses may be especially interested in another Adobe Professional feature, the ability to combine .pdf documents into a single document that can have its own page numbers, headers, footers, and watermarks.

The Software Depot at the OIT Solutions Center in Frist offers Adobe Professional at a significant discount.

The Greening of Technology: Sustainability Initiatives at Princeton

2008-03-12T15:48:50Z

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 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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In 1990, the University’s emissions of CO2 were approximately 95 metric tons. In 1996, the University installed a cogeneration facility that dramatically increased the efficiency of the central power plant and scaled back CO2 emissions nearly to 1990 level. Since then, and before then, emissions continued to rise. To return to 1990 levels, the University intends to build new buildings and major renovations 50% more energy efficient than code requires. To reduce carbon throughout the existing campus, the University will pursue a strategy that includes energy conservations projects within existing buildings, updating existing heating, ventilating, and air conditioning systems, and improving the efficiency and runtime of the University’s power plant.

Another important part of the University’s sustainability efforts, resource conservation, reflects the manner in which we run our campus on a daily basis. The campus is committed to protecting ground water, improving recycling rates and reducing solid waste, implementing use of green cleaning products, and in general, purchasing products that have a low environmental footprint.

Shana explained that information about these interrelated initiatives is located at the sustainability web site. For Earth month in April, the web site will list a calendar of related events.

A range of efforts and opportunities exist within OIT to contribute to the campus sustainability effort. Leila Shahbender, Senior Manager of OIT Customer Services, discussed the challenges of greener printing and described Web-ex, a tool for online videoconferencing and collaboration. To date in FY08, 5,556,856 sheets have been printed in the student computing clusters, open locations where students can work on their papers. By the end of the year, with the usual crunch of work in the spring, we expect that number to exceed last year’s total of more than 8 million printed pages.

The impact of our paper culture is well known. The paper industry has itself a high carbon footprint, deforestation has a wide range of pernicious effects, and even toner cartridges and the packaging of paper products have a significant impact.

To lessen the University’s impact on the environment, we are following the University standard by using 100% post consumer waste paper. We require students, once they submit a job, to confirm that job directly at the printer. We are considering the implementation of a quota on the total number of pages that students can print. We are encouraging students to submit their academic work electronically by making tools available in the clusters that ease the creation of .pdf documents. And we can encourage students not to print out e-reserves, posters, and flyers.

Shahbender noted that the University has a license with WebEx for hosting web based desktop conferences. Increased use of such facilities might help to reduce travel needs within the community. The University’s license supports up to 20 conferences at any given time. You can set up a conference in advance, use the system to invite participants to attend by sending them a link, and then during the conference share your desktop or theirs. Shahbender noted that if you want a voice component, conferencing is available through the University. Skype is also an option.

To get a WebEx account, link to www.princeton.edu/conferencing. Once you have an account, you can set up conference at princeton.webex.com.

Charles Kruger, Manager of OIT Enterprise Servers and Storage, addressed how we can reduce administrative computing power requirements for the 450 administrative servers that support applications such as the University e-mail systems and web sites. The number of supported servers has been increasing 10- 20% a year. Servers are getting faster, but that also means that they require more power. To reduce the amount of electricity that we need, we are placing multiple applications on single servers, buying greener machines, and using virtualization techniques to run multiple operating systems on single servers

Rather than place the growing number of University applications on their own servers, Kruger noted that there is a meaningful effort today, when possible, to consolidate applications on shared servers. For example, more than 50 administrative application databases now share 3 Oracle servers, and more than 80 departmental LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) websites share a single server.

We have recently begun to take advantage of Green Machine offerings such as Sun Fire T2000 CoolThreads servers, providing twice the resources while using half the power. Such energy savings compound because less power is needed, in turn, for less cooling infrastructure. And we are using virtualization technologies like VMware and Solaris Zones or Xen to run multiple OS instances on a single physical server. Today OIT runs 48 virtual servers on two physical VMware ESX servers providing savings of 10,500 watts of power consumption. OIT expects to use 1/5 the power, a saving of 13,800 watts, for every 60 servers that we virtualize. Further energy savings are possible through virtualized storage, essentially disk pools on the network with attached storage. In this more efficient architecture, storage unneeded by one application can be used by another.

Curt Hillegas, Director of the TIGRESS High-Performance Computing Center and Computational Science and Engineering, reviewed sustainability efforts within high performance computing at Princeton. The TIGRESS Web Site shows the five major high performance systems that in place. Much attention is being focused on the fact that these systems have very high power requirements. The key towards efficiency, says Hillegas is centralization of high-performance facilities, to take full advantage of the large centralized UPS and transformers, good power distribution, and good cooling systems. The most recent acquisition, Artemis, is the most power friendly of the five machines because it uses an SGI architecture that involves no disks at any of the nodes and a power distribution in each rack that eliminates the need for many separate power supplies.

In the future, Multicore processors will deliver more cycles for cumulatively less power. SiCortex has introduced a new computer architecture that combines a large number of slower processors within massively parallel systems with an environmentally interesting result. Huge efficiencies may also be possible with Fully Programmable Gate Arrays and Cell Processors. They are much harder to program but offer significant power savings on certain types of projects. Data Center improvements also offer the hope for significant new efficiencies. This coming weekend, for example, we are installing a new UPS to replace a 26 year-old unit that has moving parts, notably a rotating flywheel. The new unit will offer immediate energy savings. A new data now contemplated will be designed to offer very significant energy efficiency.

John Shorey, a Software Support Specialist within OIT, addressed desktop computer power management issues. The University has standardized its administrative hardware with a managed desktop environment [DeSC]. The 2,700 DeSC machines do not currently apply power management, explained Shorey, because Windows XP has limited power management controls and because the University’s backup service needs to have the machines powered on in order to work. Security Updates are also set to apply at night; XP Machines do not automatically wake up to install their missing updates. Our SMS (Systems Management Server) software pushes also require machines to be on.

DeSC has eliminated most (if not all) CRT displays within DeSC. All new purchases must include LCD flat panel displays. In 2006, DeSC implemented the EPA’s EZ-GPO policy to control monitor power when no user is logged in. Users control their own monitor power settings when they are logged in. New Dell Optiplex 755 models use EPA “80PLUS efficient” power supplies operating at approximately 10-12% higher efficiency compared to current OptiPlex systems.

With the advent of Windows Vista, machines that are sleeping or hibernating will automatically wakeup at the specified time so long as they are plugged into AC power. With the release of Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008 later this year, we will also have the ability to specify “power management” preferences or defaults that the users will be able to change.

A podcast and the presentations are available.

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

2008-03-05T21:29:50Z

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 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.

]]> To be sure, there are technical difficulties in integrating datasets, but Haldon emphasizes that the development of GIS has now reached a point where such complex problems are more easily handled. At the same time, GIS has rarely been used to its full potential in archaeological research. This project seeks to integrate traditional archaeological survey work with other disciplines into a 100% digital project, developing the use of GIS to enhance our understanding of the past and incorporating large datasets both of traditional archaeological nature, as well as non-archaeological such as large volumes of text, climatic and palynological data, and vegetational and geological classifications derived from multispectral satellite imagery.

The ancient site of Euchaita (Avkat in the Ottoman documents, Beyözü since the 1930s), seems to have been occupied since prehistoric times but has experienced until this project relatively little archeological interest. The small, modern village (of just 58 houses, 20 of which are unoccupied) is dominated by two hills and a strategically placed bronze-age site that is taken to be the location of a Byzantine/Seljuk fortress. The fortress site is not used for grazing giving archaeologists a free hand to investigate.

During the Roman period, the village appears to have been a relatively unimportant rural center. A wall was constructed during the early 6th century and, from the seventh century, with the Arab Islamic conquest of the eastern Roman provinces and the retreat of the Roman — now Byzantine — frontier, Euchaita became a military base behind the frontier. Following its conquest at the time of the Seljuk occupation of eastern Asia Minor in the later 11th century, its importance declined and though most of the Ottoman period it was abandoned. However, the district retained economic viability and several villages in the region can trace archival documents right up to the later nineteenth century.

Among many issues, Haldon hoped to learn more about how armies wound their way across the countryside. Ancient texts frequently mention that a general led a force of a specific size through an area. How could a landscape that supported the existing sedentary population also support the movement of a large army? How was the land organized? What crops were grown? What were the sizes of the local population through time? And in what other ways did communities change over time? Ancient texts, letters, oral histories, and other traditional source materials provide some information about change but often leave fundamental questions unanswered.

The project is managed from Princeton University and the University of Birmingham/UK, with support from GIS and IT specialists at both institutions. The on-site team is comprised of undergraduates and post-graduates from Princeton, Trent University (Ontario) and the College of Charleston. Last summer, the team made substantial progress with a basic digital elevation mapping and ground-penetration radar survey of the fortress hill and nearby areas. Without being intrusive to the site, the radar clearly identifies structures, roads and pathways, as well as clues regarding the density of occupation.

Haldon’s goal is to tie these methods for the first time into a broader range of techniques and technologies to yield a more accurate sense of how the area developed in terms of land use and settlement patterns. Satellite radar helps to identify landscape features, ancient roadways, and water channels which researchers expect to place within broader contexts. Satellite imagery provides spectral analysis to a certain depth below the surface that can reveal how the landscapes have changed over time, even showing the different types of crops that have grown there and supporting speculation about population also reveal shifts in land use and population changes. All of these techniques combine to provide scientific corroboration of often soft historical evidence.

A key part of the effort now is to tie historical, geographic, and paleo-environmental relational data from disparate digital data systems through a GIS that can help research to extract data associated with its geographical contexts.

A podcast and the presentation are available.

John Haldon is a professor of Byzantine History and Hellenic Studies whose research has centered on the socioeconomic, institutional, political and cultural history of the early and middle Byzantine empire from the seventh to the eleventh centuries. He has focused on political systems and structures across the European and Islamic worlds from late ancient to early modern times and has explored how resources were produced, distributed and consumed, especially in warfare, during the late ancient and medieval periods. Professor Haldon is the author and co-author of more than two dozen books. His most recent books are Problems and perspectives in Byzantine social and economic history ( Blackwell, forthcoming 2008) and Byzantium in the iconoclast period with L. Brubaker (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2008).

Digitizing the Universe From Your Backyard

2008-02-27T15:14:34Z

Says 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.

]]> Vanderbei became interested in amateur astronomy around 1999 with a small optical telescope and star catalogs. He was largely unsuccessful in seeing many interesting objects owing to New Jersey’s light pollution. And so, after about a year, he purchased a specialized digital camera that allowed long exposures that made faint objects brighter. With digital processing techniques, he found that he could eliminate much of the effect of local light pollution by subtracting a constant from the brightness of every pixel. The result is a picture that appears to have been taken from a mountaintop.

Surprisingly, perhaps, he has never visually seen most of the pictures that he has captured. He showed images of the Crab Nebula, the remnant of a supernova that exploded in 1054, the Lagoon Nebula, a cloud of glowing hydrogen gas, the Hercules Globular Cluster, a cluster of about a million stars within our Milky Way that emulates a beehive of activity, and Vanderbei’s favorite,the Dumbbell Nebula, whose image involved a two and a half hour hour exposure that brought out many subtle details.

Vanderbei recommends a solid, stable, and accurate mount that can compensate precisely for the earth’s rotation during long exposures. His 1.4 megapixel CCD [charge-coupled device] camera has only a USB cable and a port for power. Its quantum efficiency is approximately 65%; in other words, about 65% of the photons that hit its CCD chip generate a signal. That makes for a vast improvement over conventional emulsion photography. Cooling the CCD chip dramatically reduces random noise, and so there is cooling circuitry that lowers the temperature of the CCD chip to 30 degrees Celsius below the ambient temperature. He notesthat the least important part, for deep sky astrophotography at least, is the telescope itself.

His honed set-up methodology requires only about 20 minutes. Key steps include:

· using a finder scope on the mount to site Polaris, the North Star, loading specialized software that controls the camera;

· loading a planetarium program that assists locating items of interest;

· synching on a star to establish good communication between the telescope and planetarium program;

· and centering the target area and calibrating

The real fun, he emphasizes, starts the next day with the required image processing on the computer. The raw data gathered at night might include as many as 50 images that need to be aligned and combined into one final image. Vanderbei limits the length of individual exposures in case airplanes fly though and because the quantitative measures of a star’s brightness cannot exceed certain limits for individual exposures, but the measures can be added arithmetically from the multiple images. There are also interesting opportunities to enhance images with color and to correct pixel values to provide for greater clarity.

A podcast and the presentation are available.

Robert J. Vanderbei is the chair of Operations Research and Financial Engineering. He also has associated faculty status in the departments of Astrophysics, Computer Science, and Mathematics. Originally from Michigan, he has been “out east” for most of his adult life and here at Princeton since 1990. As a researcher, he applies the tools of his training in mathematics to a broad variety of problems ranging from designing the optics for a space telescope capable of imaging Earthlike planets around nearby stars to the portfolio selection problem in finance. He also likes computer graphics and spends some time every November making a new version of his so-called “Purple America” election map.

The Changing Face of Programming

2008-02-13T19:13:38Z

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.

]]> The rapid evolution of languages, tools, interfaces, components, and methodologies presents major challenges and opportunities for programmers and for software engineering education. Back in the 1930’s, American Linguist Benjamin Whorf observed that “Language shapes the way we think and determines what we can think about.” He was thinking primarily about the natural languages of native Americans in the southwest, but his observation is also true about all the languages we invent to tell our computers what to do. The nature of a language strongly biases what you can accomplish well.

And so, what languages do our students need to know? C is useful, a lingua franca, and brings programmers close to the machine. Many institutions favor Java the introductory programming language, but starting with Java may spoil students from learning how to program well ever again. C++ is the choice for industrial strength programs and therefore something that ought to be known.

Another important class of languages is emerging, though rarely in academic settings. The way we write code today is simply different than the common approach 10-20 years ago. Scripting languages such as Perl, Python, PHP, and Ruby have real advantages that support common web needs. They are more expressive than Java, they handle text far better than C and C++, and the ease with which it’s possible to create arbitrary data structures. The scripting languages have drawback, of drawbacks course. There are few tools, comparatively speaking. And they are slower, but that tends not to matter because Moore’s Law continues to rescue us from programming inefficiencies.

At Princeton, joked Kernighan, rather than teach programming, we expose students to languages and expect somehow that they will learn everything subliminally. Ten years ago, we probably would have favored Perl and today, probably, Python. But Javascript is another interesting choice. It has no academic standing, and does have significant drawbacks, notably a risky object model and inconsistent implementation across browser types. Nevertheless, its widespread use on the web makes it something that students probably ought to know.

In particular, AJAX, or Asynchronous Javascript and XML, is the basis for much interesting software we run today. It allows us to talk about many important programming concepts such as event-driven programming, callbacks, and closures. Google Maps is perhaps the best example of AJAX in action. It always seems to show exactly what you want to see because AJAX is checking on the client side continuously and asynchronously to see what data you are likely to request.

This approach has other interesting applications. As an example, Dr. Kernighan demonstrated a plausible Princeton course site. With just a few lines of AJAX code, he created a site that brings up information as users type, anticipating their needs. Typing “CS” would bring up all Computer Science classes. Adding “Tu Th 11am” brings up only those classes that meet on those days and times.

Tools are extremely useful for the mechanization of repetitive or tedious tasks such as counting and sorting. They can be glued together into larger assemblages. Unix introduced the idea of creating and using tools like grep, diff, wp, sort, and uniq. Microsoft popularized IDE’s (integrated development environments). Their Visual Studio consolidated in one package all of the tools that a programmer would need, from editing and compiling through and testing and debugging. Such thorough testing and debugging environments are very large, but they offer real advantages. They lessen the mundane tasks associated with writing large programs, and they supplement or even replace the documentation by providing automatic lists of possible next steps. These heavyweight systems that may make it hard to accomplish simple tasks and sometimes hide what is really going on.

To build web pages and web services, there are new software systems that take care of many of the mechanical tasks. They handle what users may see on the client side, orchestrate the flow of information back and forth. They also provide administrative tools to assist site owners. Within the past three years, systems like Ruby on Rails now permit users to create complex sites within minutes. With the Google Web Toolkit, developers write in Java, arrange the way their site will look, and then compile. The result will be all the html and Javascript code needed to sustain the site across browsers. Amazingly, there are now more than 130 such frameworks.

Kernighan also noted that many online services such as Amazon, Google, and Ebay have their own programming interfaces that make it possible to access their underlying data in interesting ways. And so, it’s possible to integrate Google maps within other applications. These APIs are critical aspects of what students ought to learn to do, but the reality is that they are rarely taught in CS courses and students seems to lack enthusiasm for the subject.

From Kernighan’s perspective, the most intriguing aspect of deciding what language to use is that his Princeton students seem to migrate to reasonable decisions. Last year, Kernighan simply mentioned that there were interesting tools such as Ruby on Rails, Google’s web toolkit, and Django’s Python web framework and students used them efficiently without any further guidance. He acknowledged that the effort involved has become so easy that he’s casting about looking for ways to make the assignments a bit tougher.

Brian Kernighan is a Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University. He is especially well known for his contributions to the development of Unix at Bell Labs with Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. He is also coauthor of the AWK and AMPL programming languages and coauthor with Dennis Ritchie of the first book on C. The presentation and a podcast are available.

Google Search Strategies

2008-01-11T20:30:32Z

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].

]]> You can find out what movies are playing in your neighborhood [movies: 08540], get the lowest gas prices when you travel [gas prices 08534], and even use the Google search window as a phone directory [phonebook: name city state] or even simply [609-123-4567].

The search window will also permit you to obtain flight information [Continental 23], convert currency [500 rand in US dollars] and other measures [5 degrees C in F], and even do some quick math calculations [88 / 39]. Google’s math calculator guide shows that the window actually supports many advanced math operations.

To search within the websites of colleges and universities, Google provides www.google.com/options/universities.html.

Google provides more advanced tips at www.google.com/advanced_search. For example, to search for topics within specific domains (such as US government sites [.gov], education sites [.edu], and state sites [state.nj.us]), use the google “site:” command. [“global warming” site:gov]. You can also use Google’s advanced search page to search for pages published in different countries or in selected languages. To assist such searches, here is a link to Internet Country codes.

You can limit searches with the “intitle:” or “intext” commands. “intitle: limits searches to within the contents of web page titles. “intext:” searches run against the text within web pages. Use of the “allintitle:” command will permit you find sites that contain more than one word in the title [allintitle: Kirkuk economy]. For other advanced search operations, Nancy recommended the Blachman Google Guide.

Google provides a range of options for translating documents and web pages at Google Language Tools. You can enter text in any of 30 languages or specify the web address of a foreign language page and receive a rough translation into the language of your choice.

Note that Google’s main page contains links to images, maps, and news. All three present useful portals to information. On the images page, entering a name will often provide a range of photographs. Google’s maps are well known; you can use them to find nearby businesses and to get directions. For news mavens, the News page represents a comprehensive portal for international, national, and even regional news that you can search and shape according to your needs and preferences.

The handout and a podcast are available.

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

2007-12-12T15:19:42Z

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.

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.

]]> At the December 12 Lunch ‘n Learn, Chazelle began by confronting the four big ideas in computing: universality, duality, self-reference, and tractability. Universality owes its origin to Alan Turing, who explained first that it would be possible to create a computer that could load separate simple or complex programs and data. The result today is that we have iPods, Blackberries, desktop boxes and supercomputers that are essentially all the same in their architectural approach. Some are heavier, or more expensive, or more colorful or faster, but they are, thanks to Turing, the same. Turing took the idea of duality, the separating of the program from its data, from linguistics. Self-reference involves situations when the program and the data are equivalent, permitting replication of the program as in the replication of DNA from equivalent base pairs.

The modern era, suggests Chazelle, added the concept of tractability, whether tasks are difficult because they are hard, or because we simply don’t understand them. Intractable problems include map coloring, airline scheduling, protein folding, and calculating optimal tours for continuously traveling salesmen. Even with continuing advances in Moore’s Law, there appears to be insufficient processing available to solve such problems. Says Chazelle, the remarkable discovery is that all of these intractable problems are equivalent, variants of the same, in that if you can solve any one of them, though they look very different, you also solve all the others.

The most ingenious and powerful algorithms probably include Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) (useful in digital signal processing and solving partial differential equations), RSA (a key algorithm for cryptography, encryption, and e-commerce), and even Google’s PageRank (used to determine the relevance of web pages to specific search requests). Chazelle gave examples of algorithms that are vastly more amazing. Zero-Knowledge is an interactive dialogue in which one party can prove mathematically that a statement is true without revealing any knowledge. Zero-Knowledge is used in authentication systems in which one party wants to prove its identity to a second party without revealing anything about how it actually proves its identity.

An even more mind-boggling algorithm is PCP (Probabilistically checkable proof) that would permit us to determine the veracity of a proof simply by entering it into a specific format and then by checking a random number of its elements. If bugs exist, the formatting method will spread the error throughout the proof making it easier to detect.

In the future, algorithms will assist us with the deluge of many different kinds of data. Natural algorithms, essentially algorithms that come to us from nature, is an area of research that is most humbling, says Chazelle, because that is where we are most behind and because nature seems to adopt these algorithms so effortlessly. Nature folds proteins quickly and accurately, despite the fact that the algorithms governing such behavior appear to be intractable. Similarly, crowds move effortlessly through complex social situations, fish defend themselves from predators by shaping their bodies collectively to reflect light, and birds flock, swarm, and hunt in intricate and complex patterns. Chazelle notes that we want to build tools to understand these mechanisms, but classical mathematics won’t do and computer science, he insists, is not yet up to the challenge.

A podcast and the presentation are available.