Articles filed under “In Print”

“In Print”
is a running roster of published articles written by Press Club members that are available online

Last weekend, Nobel prizewinning economics professor Paul Krugman took part in a panel discussion on the jobs crisis that’s hit Newark and other New Jersey cities particularly hard. Whether you agree with his views on the economy or not, you have to admit he’s pretty good with metaphors. A few favorites from his talk:

  • On the financial crisis and mounting consumer debt: “It was our Wile E. Coyote moment. We were going along just fine until we looked down and realized we’d run off a cliff.”
  • On Occupy Wall Street: “The state of discussion was so surreal, the emperor had no clothes, yet no one was saying it. And then a fairly ragtag group started camping out in a few parks in major cities, and it’s like the country woke up.”
  • And then there was the whole business with aliens. After explaining that the surge in demand accompanying World War II is what finally ended the Great Depression, he suggested a modern-day equivalent – defense against an intergalactic invasion. Turns out, he’s kind of a fan of the belligerent extraterrestrials metaphor. According to this CNN interview, a massive buildup of outer space defenses could end the current crisis in as little as 18 months.

More on the jobs panel here.

Consider a device the size of a grain of salt that can process information a billion times faster than the human brain. Inspired by animal nervous systems, the “photonic neuron” uses light instead of electrochemical impulses to process information at lightning-quick speeds.

And in the lab of electrical engineering professor Paul Prucnal, it’s becoming a reality. “It’s a way of encoding more information and processing it more quickly,” Prucnal said.

Alex Tait ’12, one of the lab’s summer interns, has contributed a device that acts as the decision-making part of the neuron. It’s called the double ring enhanced asymmetric Mach-Zehnder interferometer. (Thankfully, it makes an easy acronym: They call it the DREAM device.)

But more on that later. Before there was a DREAM, there were meetings — and the occasional free pizza.

Read more at the Princeton Alumni Weekly.

oct3yawnIt’s getting to be that time of the year when classes are finally in full swing, first papers are due, and hours spent in bed are slowly trickling away. If the readjustment to the grind is taking its toll and you’re getting grilled for yawning during that 50-minute lecture, Andrew Gallup, a researcher in Princeton’s EEB department, has a new explanation you can try on your professor.

In a study published earlier this month in Frontiers of Evolutionary Neuroscience, Gallup found that that the purpose of a yawn is to cool the brain. People were shown to be more likely to yawn in winter than summer, and Gallup thinks this might be because an overheated brain gets no relief from taking in warmer air.

Gallup said having an overheated brain could cause feelings of drowsiness, explaining why we also yawn when we are sleepy.

“When you are warmer you are more likely to feel tired. At night when you are about to sleep your body temperature is at its highest point of the day,” he said.

Check out more about the study at the Times of Trenton.

“Wait, we have our own student-run radio station?”  Lindsey-Paige McCloy ‘12 gets that question a lot.

The answer? Actually, yeah, we do. Tune your radio dial (if you still own one) to WPRB (103.3 FM) and you may hear that guy in your precept reading the local headlines.

WPRB began broadcasting over 60 years ago from the radiator pipes in this guy’s dorm room in Holder. Now their multi-room station is located in the basement of Bloomberg, equipped with turntables, LP archives, and a broadcast center. This unique operation is completely student-run and not affiliated with the University, with McCloy as their station manager and James Corran ‘13 as the program director.

With music, news, sports, and DJs from on and off-campus, WPRB’s broadcasts can be heard from New York to Philadelphia.

Check out a UPC original behind-the-scenes look at their studio:

Read more about WPRB at AllPrinceton.com.

Xufan Zhang, Eddy Ferreira, Arman Suleimenov, and Bohua Zhan on the way to a 2nd-place finish

Xufan Zhang, Eddy Ferreira, Arman Suleimenov, and Bohua Zhan on the way to a 2nd-place finish

Princeton stole the show at the first-ever New York Google Games last Saturday, which brought 175 students hailing from Columbia, NYU, Stony Brook, Rutgers, Princeton to Google’s NYC headquarters for some head-to-head competition.

It was sort of like a heptathlon, but not one any track fans out there would recognize. Teams vied to be the first to finish challenges like geek trivia, a word association game, coding challenge, and gaming blitz.

Michael Sobin, Alex Ogier, Jeff Hodes, Adam Hesterberg, and Frank Xiao took first  place, crushing Carnegie Mellon’s former speed record while completing an extra puzzle along the way. Hesterberg won the individual title as well, scoring a new tablet in addition to the Android phones each team member received.

Another Tiger team – Xufan Zhang, Eddy Ferreira, Arman Suleimenov and Bohua Zhan, Edward Zhang – took second place, while Columbia ruined a would-be Princeton sweep.

Continue reading…

The second most important lineup this spring (after Lawnparties!) is finally out. Brooke Shields will be the Class of 2011’s Class Day speaker, as announced today. New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg will speak at Baccalaureate on May 29.

Shields, a member of the Class of 1987, is one of Princeton’s most famous alumni, and is known for her starring roles in movies like “The Blue Lagoon” and “Pretty Baby.” This picture is of Shields at her own graduation, where she was escorted by a bodyguard, and surrounded by classmates wearing buttons that said, “Yes, I went to Princeton. No, I never met her.”

Read more at the Star-Ledger.

Princeton University sophomore Ben Levenson still has two years before he gets his degree. But he knows what is waiting after graduation: $50,000 of debt.

Levenson, who wants to be a teacher, said his parents told him he will be responsible for the $50,000 in loans he estimates he will need to cover tuition and expenses at the Ivy League school.

“It’s kind of imprisoning when I think about it,” said Levenson, 20, of Morristown. “I don’t have any money, and I owe money to someone.”

For a growing number of New Jersey students, graduating from a four-year college means accumulating tens of thousands of dollars of debt, according to a Star-Ledger survey of nearly two dozen local campuses.

Read more at The Star-Ledger.

from paw.princeton.edu

from paw.princeton.edu

The band calls them “the hecklers”: two students who go to as many home men’s basketball games as the plaid-clad band itself does — which is to say, all of them.

They stand, dressed in orange and black, at the front of the student section in Jadwin Gym, armed with a megaphone and a cruel wit. Among the opponents’ offenses that attract their attention are “looking unkempt” and “general lack of talent.”

“It’s fair — it’s all fair,” said Andrew Whitener ’12. “We work with what they provide us,” added a jersey-clad Tom Boggiano ’12.

Boggiano and Whitener, who play varsity baseball and have friends on the basketball team, have attended every home basketball game since their freshman year. Since then, they’ve noticed the bleachers behind them filling up…

To read more, read the Princeton Alumni Weekly.

Spring Break 2011: Geeks Gone Wild

Spring Break 2011: Geeks Gone Wild

Calling all math nerds, Pi lovers and Einstein devotees! If you’re staying on campus for spring break (so near and yet so painfully far), don’t miss out on the second year of a recently birthed Princeton tradition: Pi Day.

Mimi Omicienski of the Princeton Tour Company dreamed up this celebration of all things geeky last year, when she realized that March 14th coincides with Albert Einstein’s birthday. Last year, Omicienski worked with the Princeton Public Library and Joy Chen from JOY Cards (on Chambers Street, close to Masala Grill, FYI. Check it out if you want a cute alternative to Paper Source) to create the first ever Pi Day. It included pie-eating contests, an Einstein look-alike competition, and an intense pi recitation showdown. The winner? Gareth Conway, son of our own superstar mathlete John Conway.

But this year, the Pi Day people are stepping up their game. March 14th has been extended to an entire “Geek Freak Weekend,” featuring Dinky and plane rides with Einstein (as in, Einstein re-enactors. Not his dead body. That would be morbid), presentations from our plasma physics lab, pi-themed sales, more pie eating, and a math competition with a $314.159 prize.

“Think Disney, and instead of Cinderella, you have Einstein,” Omicienski said.

Yeah. Get excited.

Continue reading…

Here at Princeton, we all love to play something I call the Sleep Deprivation Game. You know what I’m talking about. The one where you nonchalantly throw statistics about just how tired you are and just how little you slept last night into conversation. The one where you one-up your friends by saying that you pulled more all-nighters than them last week. The one that leads to exchanges like:

A: Hey what’s up?
B: I’m so tired dude. I slept 3.5 hours last night.
A: Ohhh my God that’s crazy … I totally know how it feels though because I’ve gone like three days on 2 hours of sleep each.
B: Oh yeah that’s intense. But last week I pulled two all-nighters in a row, AND I had 9 a.m. lab the next morning.
A: Aw I’m so sorry, but you know during discussions I just didn’t sleep at all, for like four days straight!
(At this point, B stops talking. A is gloating and thinking, “YES I WIN I’m so exhausted and hardcore haaaa.”)

It is twisted and masochistic. But you know you play this game all the time. With that in mind, consider this statement:

“So I get up at 3 a.m. to work. Usually I keep going until around 7 in the morning … then I take a quick nap and get back to business at 9. As for sleep, I get a few hours here and there. It’s enough to keep me going.”

Would you rather be staring at a few hundred of these or at your thesis?

Would you rather be staring at a few hundred of these or at your thesis?

Sound familiar? Surprisingly, this quote doesn’t come from a Dean’s Date victim. It comes from a little-noticed minority group, whose constituents are even more sleep-deprived than you: the local public works crews.

Continue reading…

This couple has been competing together for 12 years straight. Can we get any cuter?

This couple has been competing together for 12 years straight. Could our town get any cuter?

When I mentioned to a friend that I was going to the New Jersey Oyster Bowl on Sunday, he looked confused for a second – “What, is that like, an ocean science competition?”

Typical Princeton kid. Unfortunately, the Oyster Bowl isn’t related to marine biology in any way. It is, however, a perfect example of the small-town charm that surrounds our university. For the 12th year in a row, hundreds of townies gathered at Blue Point Grill on Nassau Street this Sunday (if you haven’t been there, I can now vouch for their amazing oysters and clam chowder, and I’m sure the other dishes are great too. Dinner only, though) for Princeton’s 12th annual Super Bowl Sunday oyster-slurping contest!

Highlights included a surprise appearance by Congressman Rush Holt, a competitor who’d been on Hell’s Kitchen with Gordon Ramsay, and a thrilling one-minute slurp-off between the two women’s finalists – one of whom had cut her finger on an oyster shell in an earlier round, but still slurped her way to victory with blood dripping into her cocktail sauce, refusing to take a band-aid in case she accidentally ate it. Hardcore? Yeah. Fo real.

Maybe someone from our undergraduate student body should compete next year – the grand prize last year was a trip for 2 to Cancun, and this year’s was a vacation in the Caribbean. Plus, all the proceeds went to support the Susan G. Komen Foundation for breast cancer research. If your eating club serves oysters, start practicing now.

More town cuteness available at the Princeton Packet.