Phil Rice ’77 and Eve Glazer ’06 are coming to the Princeton campus to give their firsthand perspective of construction on the Second Avenue Subway project, New York City’s largest expansion of the subway system in more than 50 years. When completed, it will provide a new line on the east side of Manhattan.
Princeton’s student chapter of the American Society of Civil Engineers is sponsoring the talk, which will take place on Nov. 13 in Friend 008. The talk begins at 4:30 p.m. Rice and Glazer are part of the Parsons Brinckerhoff construction management team.
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One of the first satellites designed to provide space-based digital radio service to consumers in North America was recently donated to the Smithsonian. The Sirius FM-4 broadcasting satellite was built as a flight-ready back-up for a constellation of three satellites manufactured by Space Systems/Loral. The FM-4 satellite will be on display in the James S. McDonnell Space Hangar of the National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center.
“We are honored that our FM-4 satellite will help the National Air and Space Museum tell the story of modern satellite communications and its powerful impact on everyday life,” said Princeton engineering alumnus Robert Briskman, a co-founder of SiriusXM. “Satellite radio now takes its place as one of the great innovations of our time to inspire the next generation of broadcasters.”
Briskman graduated from Princeton in 1954 with a degree in electrical engineering.
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A special Princeton Art of Science traveling show, consisting of 44 images chosen from the more than 250 images exhibited during the competition’s first five years, opened last month at Liberty Science Center. The traveling show was selected by celebrated photographer Emmet Gowin and Joel Smith, former curator of photography at the Princeton Art Museum.
The exhibit will be on display at Liberty Science Center through the end of August, when it will travel to other venues. More photos of the exhibit here.
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The Times Higher Education has just issued its list of top 50 engineering schools for 2012-13, and Princeton’s School of Engineering is ranked number 2, after Caltech and ahead of MIT, University of California-Berkeley, and Stanford.
Princeton Engineering was ranked number 3 in last year’s line-up.
When making its rankings, the publication says it takes into consideration a school’s core missions: teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook.
See the full list here.
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Former Princeton computer science grad student Timothy Lee interviewed Ed Felten of the Center for Information Technology Policy about his time as the Federal Trade Commission‘s first Chief Technologist. The piece has the provocative title of “Geeks are from Mars Wonks are from Venus.” Read the full ars technica piece here.
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Cambridge University Press this month has released a new book by Mung Chiang titled Networked Life: 20 Questions and Answers. Driven by twenty real-world questions — from how Google figures out what to charge for ads to why Skype and BitTorrent don’t cost you a cent — this book pulls back the curtain on the Internet and explains the hidden guts of our networked lives.
The book quickly became the Number 1 Bestseller both in engineering and in networking on Amazon when it was released; at one point it ranked 322 of all books.
In other news, today marks the start of Chiang’s Coursera class, “Networks: Friends, Money and Bytes.” An article by Daily Princetonian‘s Rebecca Zhang says that Chiang is encouraging his 40,000 Coursera students to write blog posts and contribute to what he said he hopes will become an archival-quality wiki. In the process, Zhang says, Chiang intends to crowd-source the writing of a companion textbook based on the wiki contributions.
The Prince story offers a lot more on Chiang’s game plan for the Coursera class and also talks about two other online Princeton Engineering courses: David Wentzlaff‘s on computer architecture and the algorithms course by Robert Sedgewick and Kevin Wayne.
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Robert Vanderbei has published a new paper describing a computer program that allows one to analyze data from a specific weather station to detect whether the local climate has changed. First he applied the model to data from a local New Jersey weather station, which showed that temperatures have gone up in that area by about 2F over 55 years. Then for fun (Vanderbei remarks in the paper) he fed that same computer model data from thousands of local weather stations across the world over the same time period. The result was a global map, which you see above, that shows climate change at the local level.
The paper appears in the current issue of SIAM Review. Vanderbei is a professor of operations research and financial engineering at Princeton.
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Amruta Sarma, who graduated from Princeton with a degree in civil and environmental engineering in 2008, has won a Fulbright to India to study the implementation of a heat-wave “early warning system” for health officials so that they can help communities better anticipate and respond to extreme environmental conditions.
After conducting her research in Ahmedabad during the current academic year, Sarma will attend Yale University, where she will pursue her doctorate in environmental studies.
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Princeton engineers have won a highly competitive grant of $1.2 million from the U.S. Department of Energy to collaborate with the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab in order to tackle materials science challenges in the creation of fusion energy.
One key challenge is how to contain the hot plasma that fuels fusion power — maintaining the so-called “star in a jar.” The hot plasma “star” tends to react with the so-called ”jar” (a torus-shaped device that uses a magnetic field to confine plasma) in a way that that halts the energy-producing fusion reaction.
The new DOE grant will focus on the science and engineering behind using liquid metals as an interface between the hot plasma and the interior surface of the torus-shaped device containing it. The Princeton Engineering proposal is unusual in that it addresses the materials science challenge of plasma-facing components at all scales and includes a dream team of researchers whose expertise ranges from atoms to macroscopic fluid flows.
“How do you maintain the plasma so that you can turn it into a real source of energy?” said Howard Stone, the lead principal investigator of the grant. ”This research addresses fundamental science questions.”
Stone is an expert in the field of fluid dynamics and his laboratory researches thin-film flows along curved boundaries and flows in porous materials. Co-PIs are Emily Carter, director of the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, who studies quantum mechanical simulations at the atomic scale; Thanos Panagiotopoulos and Pablo Debenedetti, theorists who employ classical simulations at the molecular level; and Bruce Koel and Steve Bernasek, who conduct experiments on the surface science of metals. PPPL senior collaborators Robert Goldston, Richard Majeski, and Charles Skinner helped Princeton researchers prepare the grant application.
Bruce Koel, who has been working with PPPL scientists on liquid metal issues, said he expected that the grant would “lead to new synergies that will be essential to solving the hard, interdisciplinary materials science challenges facing fusion energy.” Koel has been experimenting with lithium metal films (see photo above), which are being used at PPPL and elsewhere as a liquid metal lining, with promising results.
The Princeton proposal was one of four selected for funding out of a field of about 80 applicants. It grew out of discussions beginning two years ago with Stewart Prager, the director of PPPL, who wrote an excellent op-ed last year in the New York Times explaining the need for fusion research.
Photo by Elle Starkman, courtesy PPPL.
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