• 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

And while coders from the Ivy League and New York area are nothing to sneeze at, another group of Princeton programmers – Ferreira, John Pardon, Jarett Schwartz, and Zhan – will take on a whole new level of competition in May at the IBM ACM International Collegiate Programming Competition.

Doug Heintzman, an executive at IBM, said it’s the Olympics of programming – “they’re like professional athletes.” The prizes are elite-level too – the top 12 teams get an open offer for a job at any of IBM’s offices worldwide. And at the qualifier, Princeton, which typically isn’t among the 18 US colleges invited to compete, nabbed not only the #1 spot for a ticket to the world championships, but also had teams take 2^nd, 6^th, and 13^th. Heintzman , clearly a fan of the athletics metaphor, said Princeton’s depth makes us a school to watch in the next couple of years.

Welcome to the Ivy League, folks. We may never be a powerhouse in something the rest of the country considers a sport, but in academic athletics we’ll eat the people who crush us on the field/court/pitch for breakfast.

Read more on Google Games at HuffPost Tech.

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.

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

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

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.

Einstein Aficionados: Extreme

By the way, Omicienski is just about the biggest fan of Princeton you’ll ever meet. Or just the biggest fan of Princeton ever, period. No offense to Orange Key, but Omicienski’s tours blow other Princeton tours out of the water. She eats breakfast with townie old-timers at Carousel at 6 a.m., just so she can get their stories about the days when Princetonians were still segregated/woman-less/fighting in Vietnam. She has a website devoted expressly to Princeton’s black squirrels. She won the Nassoons’ #1 Fan Contest earlier this fall.

She also tells genuinely creepy stories about our campus being haunted, like how the Fitzrandolph family’s ghosts visit their corpses, which are supposedly buried in the walls of an arch in Rocky … I was skeptical, until she pointed out how many devoted alumni throng to Reunions every year. Did I really think that they wouldn’t keep coming back to Old Nassau after they crossed to the “other side”?

Hm. Good point.

Even if you won’t be around for the Pi festivities, you can still celebrate (read: procrastinate on studying for midterms. I mean, this is semi-academic anyway, right?) by contributing to Omicienski’s online collection of Pi paraphernalia. Example:

PI TRANSPOSED INTO MUSIC FORM. WHOA.

More pi, ghosts, and Omicienski at the Princeton Echo.