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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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].

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.