Triangle sold out so fast when people thought this was a real Sondheim-adapted rap musical.

Cornel West, African-American Studies/Religion professor and one of our many celebrity academics, recently announced that he will be leaving his Princeton post in 2012 to teach Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York, the school where he first began his career in academia.

For his time at Princeton, West will be remembered for more than just his commitment to paideia (which I learned is not a Spanish rice dish), his multiple political arrests, and his theological bromance with fellow professor Robbie George.

Oh, and that time his cartoon self roundhouse kicked some R. Kelly supporter in the Boondocks.

Since he began teaching at Princeton in 2001, West’s radical liberal politics have made him a controversial figure. A smattering of editorials and always well-phrased comments in the Prince since his arrival highlight the various opinions on West: “Princeton’s foremost hire” to “clownish entertainer,” “hero” to “charlatan,” and “exemplary human being” to “media whore.” My crowd of friends isn’t a big fan of West either, and as one friend once put it: “Why is he in academics at all? Why does he matter?”

I’ll be honest. Despite his platitudes, gangster proclivities, and propensity for showmanship, I believe Professor West matters.

After following (not creeping) West around and hearing him speak to various communities, both in academics and outside of them, I understand why some in the academic community object to his pathos-heavy, Baptist-preacher style of lecturing. He doesn’t fit the mold of your standard university professor. Princeton kids aren’t used to lecture information being disseminated like a Sunday morning sermon.

But Professor West matters in a different way to the African American community at large. When he spoke at the One Table Café dinner last year, a community dinner comprised of lower-income families and youth from Princeton, Trenton, and Camden, that’s when I really got up close and personal with Professor West. (Literally, two feet from his face.) And that’s the relative distance needed to really understand the impact that he has on the African American community.

As one person I spoke to at the dinner put it best, “He is one of the few black male role models these kids have today who isn’t either an athlete or a rapper.” (Granted, he does have a rap group named after him.) As an academic, West is a model of how intellectualism, faith, and badassery can co-exist for a community with a long history of academic disenfranchisement and systematic oppression. The students at the dinner were enraptured. They asked him question after question about his feelings on the political implications of rap music, intellectualism, President Obama, etc. This was West doing what he does best: engaging, provoking, and inspiring — something he doesn’t change or curtail once behind a lecture podium.

I could go on about our need for Afrocentrism, radical academia, and an energized dialogue on race and religion at Princeton, but my point is, Professor Cornel West matters as a role model in the academic sphere — if not for us, then for a generation of young intellectuals coming from places with less privilege than our Orange Bubble.

Okay, maybe I’m just hoping that he’ll secure me a seat on the Council of Zion to combat the rise of the machines.

I know kung fu too, Keanu.

CVS on Nassau Street: Where civil rights figures get their cough drops.

Apparently, Dr. West is back in Princeton, after getting arrested on Sunday for protesting on the steps of the Supreme Court in DC as part of the Occupy movement.(Certainly, not the first time this G’s been behind bars). No charges were pressed, but I’m guessing he’s lying low in Princeton for the time being.

West, who’s been on leave from his teaching post at Princeton this semester, has been very vocal about his support for Occupy Wall Street.

Without getting into a whole kerfuffle about #Occupy and the 99%–for interested students, Princeton’s ACLU is holding an event: #OccupyWallStreet: An Examination next Tuesday, October 25, at 4:30pm. Location: TBA– I will ask this: Is it just me, or does Cornel West only own one type of suit? Maybe he didn’t have time to change since his arrest.

Christopher A. Sims (image source: www.nobelprize.org, Denise Applewhite)

Thomas J. Sargent (image source: www.nobelprize.org, NYU Stern)

After almost four decades of work exploring the causal relationships between policy decisions and the economy, Sims and Sargent received the Nobel Prize this morning in recognition of their independent, but complementary, research.

While Sargent’s research focused on more long-term economic trends as inflation targets, Sims, the Harold H. Helm ‘20 Professor of Economics and Banking, focused more on short-term economic developments. Through statistical analysis, Sims and Sargent investigated whether changes in economic policy cause these developments, or whether policy-makers anticipate these developments when shaping policy.

And although the Nobel Prize website has yet to post details about the research and the winners, congratulations have already begun to flow in from around the world, some more cryptic than others. A personal favorite? “go VIKINGS we fianlly [sic] won.” Surely somebody gets it…

In an interview with the New York Times this morning, Sims said that his research holds real and important implications for the current state of global economic affairs, and recovery from it:

The methods that I’ve used and that Tom has developed are central for finding our way out of this mess.

When pressed for a simple policy solution, though, he hesitated. Whoever finds one of those, it seems, will be in the running for the next Nobel.

At the most recent meeting of the Faculty of Princeton University, members voted unanimously to grant “The Trustees of Princeton University a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide license to exercise any and all copyrights in his or her scholarly articles published in any medium, whether now known or later invented, provided the articles are not sold by the University for a profit, and to authorize others to do the same.”

Translation?

Basically, professors are no longer allowed to give up all rights to their work when publishing, as some academic journals now require – especially in fields like English, history, and chemical engineering. Professors usually publish without expecting compensation, but journals still charge readers around $30 per article, as anyone who’s tried to do research off campus knows. The change would let the university make their work freely available.

While professors can request waivers to the policy if a publication refuses to budge, the faculty hopes that the policy will give them extra leverage to push to retain their rights. Professor Andrew Appel, a member of the committee studying open access, said the Provost is also planning to create a public repository for their work to make it more accessible.

So, why do you care?

It’s a win for the “information wants to be free” camp, but even if you’re not an open access advocate, you can still get excited about never again needing to pay for a Pequod version of any article by a Princeton faculty member.

Appel has the full report here.

Former White House Budget Director Peter Orszag was Krueger’s student at Princeton. In an August 29th New York Times article regarding Krueger’s nomination, Mr. Orszag wrote (in an email), “He was one of my best professors…He taught labor economics and was very clear in explaining the field. He was also very engaged with the class, and used thrilling real-world examples to illustrate his points – very empirical. He also had the whole class over to his house for a cookout.”

We asked some of Princeton’s most revered intellectuals for their summer jams. Though it took almost an entire summer to compile — you weren’t the only ones doing nothing — they are finally listed below. Think of this almost-mixtape as an ode to the last hurrah that is Princeton’s awkwardly pushed back start date.

Robert Hollander, HUM - Translated Dante’s Inferno and Divine Comedy; founding member of the Department of Comparative Literature

Summer was traditionally my time for hard work, now that the easy and pleasant part of the year, the teaching part, was done for nearly four months. Since being emeritus has made the WHOLE year ‘summer,’ I no longer have a summer song, but if I did it would probably be one performed by Louis Armstrong and His Hot Seven, maybe Potato Head Blues. Why? Because it rocks.

Jeff Nunokawa, ENG – Has written extensively on nineteenth century English literature; posted notoriously on Facebook, challenging medium, social media and the Champions League

Okay: press play: Gloria Estefan–”I Just Wanna Be Happy”. And here’s why: the best summer of my life took this song as its soundtrack. It was Amsterdam, and it was the summer of 1998, and I fell in love big time, for the last time, and this was the major song at every club and party and beach I went. And the song just spells all the outdoor hope and warmth of summer love to me.

Press Stop

Harvey Rosen, ECO - Did a stint on President Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors; former Master of Whitman College

My favorite summer song is “Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore.” When I was in high school and went to the beach, kids were always playing it on their transistor radios.

Peter Singer, CHV - Author of Animal Liberation; Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and Laureate Professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne

As an Australian, summer means the beach, so I’ll go for a Beach Boys number, maybe “Surfin’ USA.”

Philip Johnson-Laird, PSY - Pushed the limits of our understanding of human understanding; fellow of the National Academy of Sciences

My favorite summer song is Michel Legrand’s “Once upon a summertime”. There are many great performances, but one that captures it best for me is Miles Davis in Gil Evans’s arrangement (on the album Quiet Nights).

The best musical depiction of the unrelenting heat of summer is, not a song, but Ravel’s Prélude à la nuit at the start of his Rapsodie Espagnole.

Christopher Eisgruber, WWS/CHV, Provost - Graduated magna cum laude in Physics from Princeton; clerked for the Supreme Court; wrote books about the Constitution; named Provost of the University in 2004

Here are two, that I fear nobody will ever have heard (but they should be better known; they’re great!):

‘Perfect,’ written by Ian Broudie and performed by his band, the Lightening Seeds:  I heard it more than 15 years ago on a summer trip to England, and its bittersweet lyrics evoke both the promise and the passing of summer (and it seems to be passing too quickly right now!)

‘Beachcombing,’ by Mark Knopfler and Emmy Lou Harris. My wife and son and I were returning from a Vermont summer vacation a few years back.  We stopped in Middlebury to pick up some tunes for the long drive back (this is the sort of thing that people did back in the days before iTunes!).  We bought the new Knopfler/Harris album, and the salesman declared, “That’s definitely the sound of the summer” (in Middlebury, I guess—but it’s a brilliant album).   “Beachcombing” is the first track on the album, and the refrain is “head on home,” which was, of course, exactly what we were doing.  I can’t hear it without remembering that trip and thinking “sound of the summer.

(no YouTube, so listen here)

Shamik Dasgupta, PHI – Recipient of NYU’s Dean’s Outstanding Dissertation Award in the Humanities, describing “Symmetry as a Guide to Reality”

Personal summer song? Not this summer, but many years ago (’95, to be precise) this defined the summer I graduated high school.

Gideon Rosen, PHI - Expert in moral philosophy; was asked to take NYU Law School’s first-year curriculum under a Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship in 2002 (he accepted)

“Rockaway Beach” by the Ramones, for the obvious reasons.  I’m not a beach person, but I like the idea of the beach.  Songs about beaches get me as close as I need to be.

Also “Dancing in the Street” by Martha and the Vandellas.  I don’t like dancing either, but songs about dancing are fine by me.

Paul Muldoon, CWR - Won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; Poetry Editor at The New Yorker, critiqued Ke$ha’s “Tik-Tok” (this was not his “summer song”)

It’s got to be ”In the Summertime” by Mungo Jerry. Though the group took its name from T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, now a jug band had caught up with the “jug jug” of his great poem The Waste Land and our dirty 1970s ears were forever infected.

more photos after the jump….

from NJ.com

The grant is called Project X. The project in question? MAE professor Edgar Choueiri’s “Pure Stereo” filter, which promises sound like you’ve never heard it before.

Project X funds unconventional research projects, and “3D sound” definitely qualifies. Unlike other recordings, Choueiri’s attempt to capture the location of the sound, so that you can, among other things, realistically hear a fly buzz around your head. It’s a little like that cool effect in movie theaters where the sound seems to come from behind you.

Hal Espen of The Atlantic visited Princeton recently to check it out. His descriptions read like a Willy Wonka Chocolate Factory of sound:

Choueiri leaves. A few seconds later, the sound of flowing water fades in and rises in both volume and presence. I have the uncanny sensation of standing neck-deep in a river, with its plashing surface spreading around me. Next, a buzzing fly circles my head. Then an aural nightscape of crickets and the loud croaks of a frog, precisely over there. An excited crowd, children shouting. A train chugs in from the right and comes to a halt across the platform.

Musical selections follow—an a cappella choir in some vast reverberant space, a New Orleans street band, a quartet of classical guitars—featuring shockingly expansive soundstaging, exact source positioning, and vivid ambience. Then Choueiri’s virtual voice is speaking in my left ear, my right ear, behind my head, and lastly he’s simulating giving me a haircut, with scissors snipping sides, top, and back.

Choueiri reappears at the door. “That was absolutely fantastic,” I tell him.

Here’s a video from the Star-Ledger explaining how it works.

"... his impish, abstractedly cerebral face and full, free-wheeling beard giving him something of a jolly professor manner."

Biophysics seems like a feel-good field … it’s always telling us how well-made we are. A recent piece in the Times Science section served up a crash course on that discipline, alluding to the work of William Bialek, who is a professor of physics, an architect of the Integrated Science curriculum, and apparently the happy owner of an “impish, abstractedly cerebral face and full, free-wheeling beard.”

In the article, Bialek explains why the photoreceptors in our eyes are so ideally constructed: they are designed to respond to even single photons, which are the smallest discrete units of light. “Light is quantized, and you can’t count half a photon,” he says. “This is as far as it goes.” So, at the risk of inane analogy, it’s kind of like a perfect gumball machine that would accept even pennies, accommodating the smallest extreme of currency.

That’s the basic idea behind optimization. Evolution has made some biological systems really, really, unsurpassably good at what they do, as good as the laws of physics will allow. According to the article, biophysicists have spotted such systems throughout the living world — in bacteria, in fruit fly embryos, in sharks, in us. Also,”tenets of optimization may even help explain phenomena on a larger scale, like the rubberiness of our reflexes and the basic architecture of our brain.” (Personally, I would be interested in the basic architecture of Bialek’s beard — build some sophisticated mathematical models for that puppy. You’re welcome, Biophysics Student Still Looking For A Thesis.)

Optimization analysis is cool because it allows biophysicists to 1) express deep biological principles in “an elegant set of equations,” 2) use those equations to make predictions about how real-life systems might work, and 3) test those predictions in the lab. The article shows us one example from the man himself:

In one optimization study, Dr. Bialek and his colleagues considered the dynamics of a major signaling molecule in the fruit fly embryo called bicoid.

It was known that bicoid bits were dispensed into the crown end of a fruit fly egg by the mother, that the molecules diffused tailward during development, and that the relative concentration of bicoid at any given spot helped determine the segmentation of a budding fruit fly’s form. But how, exactly, did the fly translate something as amorphous and borderless as a seeping oil spill into the ordered grid of a body plan?

The researchers calculated that, to operate optimally, each cell in the developing embryo would match the strength of its bicoid signal against an overall range of possible signal strengths, essentially by comparing notes with its neighbors. Sure enough, experiments later showed that embryonic fly cells perform precisely this sort of quantitative matching in response to a bicoid stimulus package. “It’s one of those things where we could have failed dramatically,” said Dr. Bialek, “but we succeeded better than we could have expected.”

via nytimes.com

You might have heard Mario Vargas Llosa, Visiting Lecturer in Creative Writing for the Lewis Center, won the Nobel Prize in Literature a few weeks ago. So you’d think, hey, guy’s a big deal, probably wants to get out a place like Princeton.

Nope. Vargas Llosa still happily gets up at 5:30 a.m., boards NJTransit in Manhattan, and commits himself to a “Kafkaesque commute” to our collegiate hamlet.

Nobel Prize winner, novelist and playwright, Peruvian presidential candidate, rival (and physical aggressor) of novelist Gabriel Garcia Márquez — Vargas Llosa’s a lot of things. Add “great Princeton professor” to that.

Read more at the New York Times.