THE WEEKLY BLOG

Exploring the nuances of fear

One aim of the enlightenment was to end the era of fear, according to Gyan Prakash, director of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies. Scholars hoped to use science, rationality, and knowledge to eliminate the anxieties of the Dark Ages. But, Prakash said, “It turned out to be different.”
Fear endured, taking new forms throughout history, and this year, the Davis Center is taking a closer look at the nuances of fear in several periods, from the Incan empire during the Spanish conquest to fascist Italy in the first half of the 20th century. “I thought that it would be interesting to look at other contexts of fear, so that we don’t always see fear in the context of the present,” Prakash said.
Weekly workshops draw 40 to 50 participants to discuss papers about sources of fear in history. The author’s paper is distributed in advance, and a designated commentator opens the discussion with questions about the research.
Prakash said that Davis Center devotees were very enthusiastic about the idea of studying fear. (Other popular seminar themes have included “utopias and dystopias” and “cities: space, society, and history.”) In addition to papers from historians, the center received submissions from psychoanalysts, political scientists, diplomats, and retired military officers.
Prakash, the Dayton-Stockton Professor of History, said that the discussions have been building from week to week, despite the seemingly disparate topics. The series resumes its weekly schedule Feb. 7 when Alain Boureau of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales will discuss “Fear as a Passion of the Soul in Scholastic Thought.” A full-day fear workshop is scheduled on April 12. For more information, visit the Davis Center Web site.

Tigers on the ’Tube

If you search for “Princeton” on YouTube, you’re likely to find a range of material not related to the University, from clips of Avenue Q to rock concerts featuring New Jersey teenagers. But the video-sharing site also includes material from Princeton’s student artists, athletes, scientists, engineers, and amateur filmmakers. Here are just a few recent additions spotted by PAW:

Roaring 20 meets Third Eye
A capella singers from the Roaring 20 perform Third Eye Blind’s “Semi-Charmed Life” at Richardson Auditorium, with soloist Julian Hertz ’07 front and center.

Let’s hear it for the bio
Molecular biology students learn lab techniques, with inspiration from the movie Footloose.

Goal! Goal! Goal!
CSTV posted highlights from its broadcast of the women’s soccer team’s Oct. 2 win over Rutgers, which gave coach Julie Shackford the program record for wins. Ivy League Player of the Year Diana Matheson ’08 sparkles with two near-perfect assists. Also on YouTube: a maddening moment for Princeton soccer, from a Sept. 17 men’s game against Seton Hall. One of the Pirates scores from near midfield in a clip dubbed the “most incredible soccer goal ever.”

Fine tuning
A team of undergraduate engineers takes a spin through town to make final adjustments to its self-driving truck, which was entered in the DARPA Urban Challenge, a Pentagon-sponsored contest. Reporter Kevin Coughlin of the Newark Star-Ledger captured the action.

Back to school
In their undergraduate days, Nick Confalone ’03, Brandon Tung ’03, and Andrew Wang ’03 experimented with walking, running, and even talking backwards and then reversing the film and soundtrack to create an amusing video.

Programming note: Princeton-Dartmouth at Baker Rink

The Princeton men’s hockey team’s home game against Dartmouth will be broadcast nationally on ESPNU Jan. 4 at 4 p.m. The game will be Princeton’s first ECAC Hockey game since Dec. 1, when it beat Union 4-3 at Baker Rink. The Tigers also face Harvard Jan. 5 at 7 p.m.

Kaiser ’10 helps men’s hockey sweep Dartmouth, Harvard

Princeton men’s hockey outshot Dartmouth 28-14 in the first two periods at Hobey Baker Rink Jan. 5 and took a commanding 3-0 lead halfway through the third period. But a minute after the third score, the Big Green fired back with a goal of its own. Dartmouth nearly narrowed the gap to one goal when a slapshot popped out of the glove of Princeton goalie Zane Kalemba ’10 and tumbled toward the goal. But center Kevin Kaiser ’10 sprinted to the crease and cleared the puck before it reached the net.
Princeton coach Guy Gadowsky said Kaiser’s defensive recovery was “a tremendous hockey play” that helped to determine the game’s outcome. Brett Wilson ’09 scored a few minutes later, giving Princeton some room to breathe, and the Tigers went on to win 5-2.
PAW AUDIO: Listen to Gadowsky’s description of Kaiser’s open-net save against Dartmouth.
The following night against Harvard, Kaiser again skated into the spotlight at a key moment. With the score tied 1-1 late in the third period, Landis Stankievech ’08 slid to block a Harvard shot. The puck deflected toward Kaiser, who rushed to the opposite net on a breakaway and scored the game-winning goal.
With the two wins, Princeton climbed to a tie for first place in the ECAC Hockey standings and improved to 3-0 in Ivy League games. The Tigers also re-established some much-needed confidence on their home ice, where the team had started 1-6.
“We love to play here, [and] we feel badly about our record here,” Gadowsky said after the Dartmouth win. “We’ve played well on the road, but we haven’t had the big wins here. So this was an opportunity, getting back in league play and having an Ivy League game, to prove that we love playing at Hobey.”

Molecular landscape

The image above, created by graduate student Sieu Ha, is science fiction. Science, because the details were captured by a scanning tunneling microscope, but fiction because the “sky” and “land” are pasted from separate samples (the former is the organic molecule THAP on a gold substrate, exposed to a high background pressure of cobaltocene, while the latter is hexaazatrinaphthylene, also on a gold substrate).
Ha, a fourth-year graduate student in the electrical engineering department who studies the physical and electronic properties of organic materials with Professor Antoine Kahn *78, submitted the image to the Science as Art competition, held in November at the Materials Research Society’s fall meeting in Boston. Ha’s image earned second-place recognition.
Courtesy Sieu Ha

Faculty in the blogosphere: Presidential politics edition

A Dec. 19 New Republic story by Sean Wilentz that examined political pundits’ tendency to build an “emotional attachment to [a] candidate’s oratory or image” sparked a debate about experience vs. instinct on the New Republic’s Open University blog. … In a Dec. 19 entry on the Huffington Post, Woodrow Wilson School professor Julian Zelizer aligned the three top Democrats with three of the party’s political traditions: populism (John Edwards), anti-politics (Obama), and pragmatic liberalism (Hillary Clinton). … In a Dec. 20 entry on his blog, Freedom’s Power, Woodrow Wilson School professor Paul Starr previewed his article in the January-February American Prospect, “The Democrats’ Strategic Challenge,” which “set[s] out what the Democrats could accomplish if they win the election and take control of the White House and Congress.”

Alumni in the news

Curator Jodi Hauptman ’86 earned acclaim for her Museum of Modern Art exhibition, “Georges Seurat: The Drawings,” which closed Jan. 7. Critic Patricia Zohn wrote in her Huffington Post blog that the exhibit showed “a quiet brilliance that perfectly echoes one of the artist’s defining features: his self-chosen muteness.” … Word of mouth can help underdog candidates keep up with well-funded frontrunners in the presidential primaries, according to a Jan. 6 New York Times op-ed by pollster Mark Mellman ’78 and colleague Michael Bloomfield. Voters tend to trust their neighbors, Mellman said, at least more than they trust what they see in 30-second advertisements. A December poll of Iowa voters found that 69 percent trusted “comments from friends, relatives, and colleagues,” compared to 38 percent who trusted information provided by TV ads. … Colbert Report writer Jay Katsir ’04 discussed life on the writers’ guild picket lines with Metro, a free daily newspaper in New York, Jan. 8. Katsir joked that he has turned on the TV for positive reinforcement. “I have been getting a lot of support from people like Dr. Phil. He helped me today to not be ‘that girl.’”
The Boston Globe’s Dec. 31 roundup of books to watch for in 2008 mentioned three Princeton alumni: Randall Kennedy ’77, a Harvard Law professor whose book about betrayal in the black community, Sellout: The Politics of Racial Disloyalty, is due out this month; Joseph Nye ’58, the former dean of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, who will address international affairs in The Powers to Lead: Soft, Hard, and Smart, which will be published in February; and Louis Masur *85, a professor at Trinity College, who will examine a famous photo from Boston’s antibusing demonstrations of 1976 in The Soiling of Old Glory: The Story of a Photograph that Shocked America, slated for an April release.

A look at ‘computing in the cloud’

When services run on a Web browser and store information in the provider’s data center, technology experts refer to the setup as “computing in the cloud” - keeping data on remote servers instead of on the user’s computer. E-mail services such as Hotmail and G-mail are among the most common examples, and other applications are attracting users who want to engage friends on social networks, manage personal finances, or store photos, documents, or spreadsheets. But what does this mean for privacy and security? Who owns the data in the cloud? Who controls how it is used? On Jan. 14 and 15, experts from academia, industry, law, and politics gathered at Princeton to examine some of the open policy questions in “cloud computing” at a workshop organized by the University’s Center for Information Technology Policy and sponsored by Microsoft.
Panelists offered a range of opinions on controversial topics. In a discussion of possession and ownership of data, Tim Lee, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, proposed that sharing personal information is “a prerequisite to any useful online service,” and users make informed tradeoffs. For instance, G-mail users have been willing to accept Google’s practice of scanning e-mails for advertising purposes because they like the product and the extra storage space that comes with it. But Marc Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center questioned whether users truly understand the privacy implications of using G-mail or even accepting cookies on their Web browsers. Much of privacy, he argued, is about transparency, and Web companies are not being transparent about how they are using the information they collect.
Other panels in the two-day workshop covered security, public engagement, and future applications for cloud computing. The audience was filled with open laptops, and some participants blogged about the discussions, including Luis Villa, who commented on wesabe.com’s “data bill of rights”; Khürt Williams of Island in the Net, who posted his notes and comments; and Chris Tengi, an infrastructure operations analyst and manager for Princeton’s computer science department, who reviewed the opening remarks and the first panel discussion.
UPDATE (1/17/08): Video of the introductory remarks by engineering dean H. Vincent Poor *77 and CITP director and computer science professor Ed Felten is available on YouTube, courtesy of UChannel.

Coming soon: Princeton’s most influential alumni

The Jan. 23 issue of PAW will feature a list of the University’s most influential alumni, as chosen by a panel of seven faculty members and an alumnus. The list includes U.S. presidents and Nobel laureates, as well as some notable contributors to medicine, philanthropy, architecture, education, and several other fields. To preview the coming issue, The Weekly Blog has disguised the names of six alumni from the list by creating anagrams, transposing the letters in their names to form other words or phrases. So for instance, James Madison, Class of 1771, could be rearranged to read “Join a mad mess.” Join our mad mess by decoding the anagrams below, and e-mail your responses to The Weekly Blog. One lucky winner will receive a vintage Princeton Alumni Weekly poster. Answers will be posted on Jan. 23.

Indoor owls, wow! (Class of 1879)
Banjo nerd, eh? (Ph.D. 1936)
Turnover tribe (Class of 1947, MFA 1950)
Hippie funeral (Class of 1771)
Landlords fumed (Class of 1954)
Harder plan (Class of 1955)

The beat goes on

Drummer Hannah Valdez ’11 and the Princeton Band rallied the crowd at men’s basketball’s Jan. 9 home game against Lafayette. The Tigers led by as many as 18 points in the first half, but the Leopards fought back to win in overtime, handing Princeton its 12th consecutive loss. The Tigers return to action Jan. 27 against Dominican and open Ivy League play against Dartmouth Feb. 1 at Jadwin Gym.
Photo by Frank Wojciechowski

Princeton and the birth of ultimate Frisbee

The game was created in a parking lot. In 1968, a group of kids from the high school newspaper in Maplewood, N.J., created a team game that used a Frisbee - mixing elements of soccer, football, and hockey - and called it the “ultimate” sport, or ultimate Frisbee.
A few years later, in another parking lot in New Brunswick, N.J., one of those high schoolers from Maplewood, Jonny Hines ’74, joined with friends from Princeton and Rutgers to play the new sport’s first intercollegiate match.
The turnout that day in November 1972 was remarkable, considering that ultimate was still unknown beyond a small network of high school and college students. About 1,000 spectators gathered on the sidelines, along with a reporter from The New York Times and sportscaster Jim Bouton, the former New York Yankee pitcher, who covered the game for New York’s ABC affiliate. Rutgers edged Princeton, 29-27.
“We publicized it well, somewhat as a half-joke, but it was taken seriously,” said Hines, now a Moscow-based partner at an international law firm. “People were surprised to see it was a real sport - a fast-paced, athletic, competitive sport.”
Joel Silver, one of the sport’s co-founders and a Lafayette College student at the time, helped to promote the event. Silver would go on to produce movies, including The Matrix and Die Hard. The third co-founder, Bernard “Buzzy” Hellring ’74, had been a student at Princeton but was killed in a car accident during his freshman year.
In the decades since the game in New Brunswick, ultimate Frisbee has spread and grown at a remarkable rate, particularly on college campuses. Hines said his Frisbee-throwing days dwindled after Princeton, when he devoted his time to law school, his career, and his family, but he still takes some pride in being there at the beginning.
“I’m proud, it was fun, and still fun to think that I had such a part in it,” Hines said in an e-mail. “[But] I’m so absorbed in interesting work as an international lawyer (in New York and now in Russia) - work that’s really fascinating and influential - that I don’t really have time to stop to seek to bask in any such past ‘glories.’”
Read about other Princeton innovations and innovators in the Jan. 23 issue of PAW.
Above, Jonny Hines ’74, left, and Bernard “Buzzy” Hellring ’74 in a photo of the 1970 Columbia High School varsity Frisbee team. Photo by Mark Epstein, courtesy of “Ultimate: The First Four Decades,” www.ultimatehistory.com.

Names in the news

In a Jan. 21 story, The New York Times covered Kevin Gover ’78’s challenging first months as director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. … The Newark Star-Ledger highlighted the musical compositions of the late Edward T. Cone, a longtime Princeton professor whose work was performed by the Princeton Symphony Orchestra Jan. 20. Cone’s musical executor, Jeffrey Farrington *75, is quoted in the story. … Physics World reported Jan. 18 that theoretical physicist Edward Witten *76 will receive the Crafoord Prize, which is given by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and recognizes fields not covered by the Nobel prizes. Witten is “widely regarded as the leading figure in the development of string theory,” according to the article.
A New York Times Magazine feature on Ben Bernanke recalled the Fed chairman’s years as a Princeton professor, drawing on interviews with former colleagues Alan Blinder ’67 and Burton Malkiel *64. … In a Jan. 21 opinion piece in Newsday, associate professor of politics and African American studies Melissa Harris-Lacewell argued that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton did a disservice to Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy by “openly disavowing the continuing importance of race in America” at a recent debate in Nevada. “King championed justice by fearlessly engaging racial inequality,” Harris-Lacewell wrote, “not by pretending it did not exist.”

Alumni anagrams, decoded

The Jan. 16 Weekly Blog included the names of six of the 26 people chosen by a PAW panel as Princeton’s “most influential alumni,” disguised in anagrams. The answers are listed below.

Indoor owls, wow! = Woodrow Wilson 1879
Banjo nerd, eh? = John Bardeen *36
Turnover tribe = Robert Venturi ’47 *50
Hippie funeral = Philip Freneau 1771
Landlords fumed = Donald Rumsfeld ’54
Harder plan = Ralph Nader ’55

More at PAW Online

Rally ’Round the Cannon - Gregg Lange ’70 provides a list of 10 Really Important Things that you can’t find on the Princeton Web site.
The salesman - Lud Gutmann ’55 recalls the day a scholarship student and his parents went to Langrock’s to pick out a suit for graduation.
Alumni connections - Four alumni are working together at the headquarters of John Edwards’ presidential campaign.
Working the crowd - Cushney Roberts ’76 gave up an engineering job to perform on the stage; his Motown and R&B tribute group tours the country and on cruise ships.

Football, munchies, and megawatts

About 90 million Americans watch the Super Bowl on television each year, and many view the game in groups — at bars, in living rooms, or in the case of Princeton students, in common rooms at dormitories and eating clubs. But does that communal experience change the way power is used? Is there a drop in demand for electricity when the Super Bowl kicks off, as people stop what they’re doing and gather around the TV? Ted Borer, the University’s energy plant manager, was curious. “I’d always heard of this, as an urban legend,” Borer says, “and I thought, ‘I have the tools to confirm this.’”
On Feb. 5, 2006, when the Seattle Seahawks and Pittsburgh Steelers faced off in Super Bowl XL, Borer tracked the power data from the Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maryland grid during the game along with the power demand on Princeton’s campus. The results, seen on the graph below, are striking: Within one minute of the game’s start, power use on campus dropped 6 percent. “We rarely see that dramatic a change,” Borer says.

Courtesy Edward T. Borer. To view a larger version, click here.

Power use spiked during commercial breaks, as people reheated their nachos, opened the refrigerator to grab another drink, or flushed the toilet (triggering utility company pumps). While the pattern is similar for both the campus and the wider grid, Princeton’s power use showed two notable differences from the community at large. Students seemed more interested in the halftime show (in 2006, the Rolling Stones performed), and after the game, when the rest of the region turned off the lights and headed to bed, power use on campus began to climb. Borer suspects that the postgame jump comes from students returning to their rooms and turning on their computers for a little late-night studying.

Names in the news

The human eye is designed for zooming, not scrolling, according to a Feb. 4 Newsweek story, and Blaise Aguera y Arcas ’98 *04 is redesigning the Web browser to cater to the eye’s natural tendencies. Zoom interfaces aim to bring “the full power of your visual system to bear on processing information,” Aguera y Arcas says. … National headlines earlier this week focused on Barack Obama’s endorsement from Sen. Ted Kennedy, but in Princeton, Toni Morrison’s backing of the Illinois senator topped the news. According to the Princeton Packet, the emeritus professor and Nobel prize-winning author wrote that Obama shows “a creative imagination, which coupled with brilliance equals wisdom.” … On Jan. 28, the Star-Ledger of Newark profiled geosciences professor Gerta Keller, whose work has challenged the conventional wisdom about how dinosaurs became extinct. …
EBay CEO Meg Whitman ’77’s next move could take her from the boardroom to the campaign trail. The Los Angeles Times reported Jan. 25 that Whitman, a top fundraiser for presidential candidate Mitt Romney, is considering a run for governor in California’s 2010 election. A source close to Whitman “downplayed the seriousness” of the campaign talk, according to the Times. … Fear, history professor Jan Gross’ book about anti-Semitism in Poland at the end of World War II, recently was translated to Polish, and the new version has been “sharply criticized” in Poland, the Associated Press reported Jan. 24. Gross has faced his critics in public debates, including a forum in the town of Kielce, where he explained that he wanted the book “to show people what an incredibly strong toxic poison anti-Semitism is in the general psychology of Poles, because it made us incapable of withstanding temptation.”

Dance festival preview

Princeton students rehearse “Name by Name,” one of five pieces that will be performed at the University’s Spring Dance Festival Feb. 22, 23, and 24 at the Berlind Theatre. MacArthur fellow Susan Marshall is the choreographer. Click here for a complete list of festival pieces and performers.
Photo by Frank Wojciechowski

History’s headlines

With Princeton students away for intersession and not much activity on campus, The Weekly Blog takes a look back at PAW news from January in years past:

Jan. 28, 1998 | Wins propel Tigers into top 20
“No less an authority than ESPN’s poster boy for logorrhea, Dick Vitale, predicted that if Princeton could get by St. John’s on December 27, ‘these guys could run the table, baby,’ and finish 26-1. … A glance at the national rankings after their 77-48 rout of Manhattan showed them 15th in the AP and ESPN/USA Today polls. No Princeton team since the 1966-67 version, Butch van Breda Kolff ’45’s swan song, has been ranked that high.” By Peter Delacorte ’67

Jan. 30, 1978 | Crime in the stacks
“Although a sign near the entrance to Firestone Library asks guests to identify themselves, no well-behaved person is ever approached to show identification or to justify his presence in any way. Furthermore, most of the library’s holdings are kept in open stacks to encourage browsing. … This halcyon arrangement is now endangered by rising thievery. … The magnitude of the problem was discovered last spring when the library completed its first thorough inventory in recent years. … [T]he inventory revealed that 4.35 percent of the nearly two million volumes in Firestone’s open stacks and almost 10 percent of the materials in branch libraries are missing. In all, some 150,000 volumes with a replacement cost of approximately $3 million have disappeared.” By Virginia Kays Creesy

Jan. 25, 1963 | A $3,500,000 machine
“This has been called the Age of the Computer - the characteristic instrument of our scientific, rationalized civilization - and as of last month, Princeton was right in the center of it. In the 1960s these ‘giant brains,’ unknown twenty years ago, predict Presidential elections, land astronauts, write acceptable TV scripts, compose serious music (‘The Illiac Suite for String Quartet’), play chess, translate scientific Russian, and in what might be called an act of planned parenthood, design other computers. … [The University’s new IBM 7090] has over 50,000 transistors and 1,000,000 magnetic cores, performs 229,000 additions per second, and with its auxiliary equipment cost over $3,500,000.” By John D. Davies ’41

Programming notes: The 14-game tournament

For Princeton men’s basketball, the nonconference season included few bright spots and one long stretch of frustration — a school-record 12-game losing streak. But now the streak is over, thanks to a 60-46 win over Division-II Dominican College Jan. 27, and the Tigers are set to tip off the Ivy League season Feb. 1 against Dartmouth at Jadwin Gym. Princeton also hosts Harvard Feb. 2 in a game that will be broadcast nationally on ESPNU. Princeton fans can listen to all men’s basketball games, home and away, online at WPRB.com.