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Princeton in the News

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NASA Map spacecraft successfully launches and begins its journey to deep space

A NASA spacecraft set to probe the far reaches of the Universe soared into space today.

The Microwave Anisotropy Probe (MAP) lifted off on schedule at 3: 46 p.m...

MAP is a partnership between Goddard and Princeton University, NJ. Science team members are also located at the University of Chicago, the University of California, Los Angeles, Brown University, Providence, RI; and the University of British Columbia, Vancouver...

A CHANGING WORLD IS FORCING CHANGES ON MANAGED CARE

The backlash against managed health care that pushed a patients' bill of rights to the top of the political agenda in Washington has already forced important changes in medical care for millions of Americans.

Whatever the fate of the patients' measure passed by the Senate late Friday -- and it still faces passage by the House and a possible veto by President Bush -- managed care is evolving under pressure from doctors, patients, consumer advocates and employers...

"Health plans can no longer bully and threaten the providers of care," said Uwe E. Reinhardt, a health economist at Princeton University...

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In August 1998, the Organization of American Historians sent three scholars to Gettysburg to evaluate the park: James McPherson of Princeton University, a Pulitzer Prize winner considered by many the country's leading Civil War scholar; Nina Silber of Boston University, author of "The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900"; and Foner, the Columbia University historian... 

NASA spacecraft set to lift off this weekend to scrutinize oldest light in universe

A NASA spacecraft is set for launch this weekend on a mission to study the oldest light in the universe: the afterglow of the Big Bang. ...

The $145 million mission is a partnership between NASA and Princeton University. The spacecraft should have flown last November but was delayed in order to replace suspect electronic parts. 

Forecasters trying new techniques to improve predictions, tracking

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The biggest change this year is something that makes forecasters tingle all over, but may be lost on the general public. For the first time, the National Weather Service will be using a "coupled model" that studies the ocean as well as the atmosphere to track and measure storms.

Researchers now believe that warm ocean temperatures feed hurricanes. But as hurricanes spin in place, they cool the waters below them and become weaker.

"Until this year, that effect wasn't in our hurricane model," says Morris Bender, research meteorologist at the federal Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University. "And, as a result, it caused our model ... to overpredict how strong storms are going to get." ...

Carbon dioxide emissions rise 2.7%, U.S. agency says

Washington -- U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide, a major contributor to global warming, jumped nearly 3% last year while declining in other key countries, according to preliminary estimates released Friday by a federal agency. ...

"That's an astonishingly large increase in a single year," said Robert Williams, a senior research scientist at Princeton University Center for Energy and Environmental Studies. "The major reason is we don't have a policy to address this problem. We need to have a national target and some kinds of incentives (for business) and a regulatory system that will get us to meeting these national goals." 

Japan's Troubled Economy On Koizumi-Bush Agenda; Prime Minister Seeks U.S. Support for His Recovery Plan

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In outlining Koizumi's economic proposals last week, Economic Minister Heizo Takenaka warned that the measures would result in more corporate failures and layoffs and slice annual economic growth to between zero and 1 percent for as long as three years. That range is significantly lower than the government's previous official forecast of 1.7 percent growth for the current fiscal year.

Japan's economy contracted in the first three months of this year, and many believe it is sliding into its fourth recession in a decade. Some U.S. economists, notably Paul Krugman of Princeton University, have argued that reduced government spending and sterner banking policies will only compound the economy's woes...

Skywatcher probes mysteries of universe

UBC's Mark Halpern says he's never been a space nut, yet he spends his life seeking answers to questions about the universe

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At 5:30 a.m. Tuesday, Halpern watched as NASA closed the top of the rocket carrying the the Microwave Anisotropy Probe (MAP). It was the last time he and the other 12 scientists working on this project will ever see the spacecraft that will perpetually orbit the sun.

On Saturday, the rocket will blast off and begin its three-month journey into an orbit approximately 1.5 million kilometres from Earth.

Halpern and the other scientists from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Princeton University, Brown University, the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Chicago, will either be at the launch site or at NASA's Goddard Center where they will be monitoring computer screens and checking data to ensure that everything is working well...

Education: Higher: A smart move

A new alliance with Princeton is helping beleaguered Oxford shape up to the times - and offering the prospect of a joint degree...

Last year, Oxford's most famous student was at Harvard. Laura Spence became a symbol of the ancient university's inability to move with the times and open its doors to comprehensive school pupils...

Recently, however, there are signs of renewed vigour. A new alliance with impeccably Ivy League Princeton is putting a spring in the step, the cumbersome bureaucracy has been pruned back, and last week's award for "most innovative university" is at least useful PR, drawing attention to the success of Oxford academics in starting spin-off companies... 

Solar Housing Tracts Taking a Place in Sun;

Energy: A San Diego County subdivision is part of a growing revolution in building.

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For the solar industry, it is another important step in an uphill slog for respectability. Energy experts say solar's future could well hinge on whether the building industry embraces it for the thousands of new homes, offices and commercial structures erected each year in the Golden State.

Several factors have conspired to make solar an option for builders...

A study at Princeton University concluded earlier this year that two key states--California and New York--are ripe for explosive growth in solar. Both share the right combination of high electricity prices and white-hot housing markets... 

Study Finds Internet Users Have Distinctive Mindset: More Tolerant, Trusting, Optimistic Than Non-Users

COLLEGE PARK, Md., June 25 -- Internet users display a distinctive mindset, generally embracing attitudes more accepting of social and political diversity than nonusers, according to a new study conducted by University of Maryland and Princeton University researchers. In what may be the most comprehensive attitude survey to date, Internet users emerge as more open, tolerant, trusting, optimistic and literate than non-users...

Mapping Solutions To Cosmic Riddles

The fate of the universe may depend on NASA's next launch.

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With the distinctly inaccessible name Microwave Anisotropy Probe (MAP), this spacecraft should provide data that will allow cosmologists to say whether the universe will expand forever, or stop expanding and begin to collapse back down upon itself...

It is the task of MAP, which was developed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and Princeton University, to produce a better ''baby picture'' of the universe, one that will show temperature variations in the microwave background as small as one part in one million...

Astronomers find infinity scarier than ghosts

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Current measurements suggest that the universe will expand forever. That means that if space's topology is simple, the universe would have to be infinite in extent.

(Princeton professor) Dr. Spergel finds that prospect troubling.

"There's some disturbing things about an infinite universe," he said in a recent interview. An infinite universe would encompass an endless number of additional regions of space equal in size to what astronomers can see. But each region would contain a limited number of atoms, which could be arranged in a limited number of ways. With no limit on space, all the possible atom arrangements would recur over and over again. So every person, every event, would exist in multiple places. Every baseball game and presidential election would replay itself, somewhere out there...

Scientific Community Reconciles Differences about Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Scientists who once disagreed about the amount of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide is emitted by the United States have now reconciled their differences. The exact amount is important because it is a measure of how much the country contributes to global warming....

In a new analysis, an international consortium of scientists led by Princeton University predicts that greenhouse gases will build up quickly at the same time as the uptake of carbon dioxide slows down. "The greenhouse problem is going to get worse faster than we expected," said the study's lead author Princeton professor Stephen Pacala...

The new study reconciles previous differences by including 27 different atmospheric methods and by performing an exhaustive land based analysis...

Highlight: Controversial bioethicist Peter Singer talks about the difference between humans and animals...

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Singer's appointment as Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University's Center for Human Values in 1999 didn't go unnoticed. There were major protests from... people, who threatened to stop making donations to his former alma mater. Now, all the protesters are gone. The lectures by "Professor Death," as his critics like to call him, are not disrupted anymore. Actually, at a "practical ethics" class on a Monday morning not long ago, his students barely made a sound.

His ideas, however -- readily available to friends and enemies in the new anthology "Writings on an Ethical Life" -- have pretty much stayed the same. His central argument is elegant and simple... Humans are animals, therefore animals are in the same league as humans, and should be treated as such... 

JOURNEY TO THE BIRTH OF UNIVERSE

Paul Gallagher

IT WILL be the most ambitious mission of space exploration to date - a voyage to glimpse the dawn of time...

The MAP mission carries an unmanned probe with instruments to take pictures of the afterglow of creation - traces of radiation left over from the "big bang"...

MAP (microwave anisotropy probe) will be launched on Saturday with much less of the publicity associated with the Apollo or Space Shuttle missions...

Professor David Wilkinson, of Princeton University in the US, said: "The cosmic microwave light is a fossil. Just as we can study dinosaur bones and reconstruct their lives of millions of years ago, we can probe this ancient light and reconstruct the universe as it was about 14 billion years ago."...

NASA REACHES BEYOND THE STARS TO SHED LIGHT ON THE ORIGINS OF THE UNIVERSE

A $145 MILLION PROBE WILL LIFT OFF SATURDAY ON A MISSION TO PEER BILLIONS OF YEARS INTO THE PAST.

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The National Aeronautics and Space Administration plans to dispatch a small science probe this week that will peek billions of years into the past for a closer look at the cosmos's first light. The $145 million Microwave Anisotropy Probe mission -- dubbed MAP for short -- is scheduled to lift off aboard a Delta 2 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 3:46 p.m. Saturday.

NASA researchers are calling the mission one of the most important in space-science history...

"This will either strengthen the case for this model of our early universe or perhaps point the way toward some new physics," said David Spergel, an astronomy professor at Princeton University...

Travel stories

Job teaching English led to adventures in Asia

VALLEY CENTER -- When Todd Gluth left for Princeton University five years ago, he could not imagine that he would spend a year teaching English at a university in Malaysia or spend weeks traveling around Southeast Asia...

Gluth's travels began after he completed a degree in English literature and won a prize for his undergraduate thesis on poet Andrew Marvell...

Gluth applied to teach English through the Princeton in Asia program.

"It was a marvelous opportunity to live over there. When you live in a place you get to build some real friendships with the local people. You get invited to weddings and to eat in their homes -- all sorts of opportunities you would never have if you were traveling through."...

PAISLEY STATUE HONOURS NATIVE SON WHO FOUNDED TOP US UNIVERSITY

A STATUE of one of the world's most influential educationalists was unveiled at Paisley University yesterday by Princess Anne.

John Witherspoon not only founded the college which grew to become Princeton University in New Jersey but was also one of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence....

The new statue stands at the entrance to Paisley University and an identical copy will be shipped to New Jersey where it will sit in a new garden in the grounds of Princeton University...

Feature: Stem cells, adult and embryo

The science of stem cells is still in its infancy, but one of its biggest questions is as much philosophical as technical: Can stem cells from living adults offer the same promise in disease therapy, even cure, as those harvested from human embryos?

While stem cell transplants worldwide have topped 1,000, much research remains between question and answer, say experts such as Princeton University's Ihor Lemischka...

"The state of ignorance concerning our scientific understanding of stem cells currently is rather sobering," said Lemischka, speaking Friday at a meeting sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences...

Plugged In

The San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation filed suit earlier this month on behalf of a Princeton University professor and his colleagues, seeking an order that they be allowed to publish their research and also challenging the constitutionality of a federal copyright law.

The suit was filed in U.S. District Court in New Jersey against the Recording Industry Association of America, the Secure Digital Music Foundation, Verance Corp. and U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft.

At issue is Princeton Professor Edward Felten's research on technology intended to block consumer access to digital music...

DO THE CHINESE DESERVE THE COMMUNIST PARTY?

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At the beginning of this year, a book called The Tiananmen Papers was published in the USA. It contains private communiques, speeches, notes, memos and secret documents, covering a period beginning with the death of disgraced general secretary of the Communist Party of China, Hu Yaobang, on 15 April 1989, and ending with the fourth plenum of the 13th Central Committee on 24 June, at which the new party leadership under Jiang Zemin was approved.

The documents were purportedly smuggled out of China by a disaffected official who uses the pseudonym Zhang Liang...

He collaborated with Perry Link, professor of Chinese language and literature at Princeton University and Orville Schell, dean of Journalism School at the University of California at Berkeley...

Far From the Final Frontier

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For more than a decade, a busy band of intrepid attorneys has worked at the nonprofit, nonpartisan Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) "to protect fundamental civil liberties, including privacy and freedom of expression in the arena of computers and the Internet." Increasingly, those issues have to do with digital music. Just a few weeks ago, the EFF asked a federal court to rule that Edward Felten, a Princeton University computer science professor, and his research team have the First Amendment right to present a paper on digital music access-control technologies at a security conference in Washington, D.C., in August...

SHOOTING FOR THE STARS

If you build it, they will come, says Hayden Planetarium boss

NEW YORK -- As a child growing up in New York City, Neil de Grasse Tyson got his first clear view of the night sky when he visited the old Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History...

That first visit sparked an interest in space that hasn't waned over the years. Tyson is now director of the Hayden Planetarium, which in February 2000 moved into its stunning new home in the museum's Frederick Phineas and Sandra Priest Rose Center for Earth and Space...

A research scientist at Princeton University and head of research at the Hayden, Tyson said the advantage of having an elite cadre of scientists comes not in building a planetarium but in maintaining one, since scientific knowledge continues to expand...

Tuition Edges Upward at Private Colleges ...

While national data are not yet available, a number of private colleges are reporting tuition increases of about 5 percent -- slightly larger, in most cases, than those of the previous year. The increases also top the rate of inflation -- 3.3 percent for the 12-month period ending in April, according to the Consumer Price Index...

In the Northeast, tuition increases at Ivy League institutions have generally been 3 to 5 percent. Many of the Ivies, as well as other top-tier private colleges, put considerably more into financial aid this year, in some cases attempting to compete with Princeton University's decision to replace student loans with grants...

Princeton, in addition to spending $16-million on the loan-to-grants move, also has the lowest tuition in the Ivy League this year. (Columbia University had not set its tuition as of press time.)...

The Legacy of Princeton's Dr. Shapiro

Dr. Harold T. Shapiro, the 18th president of Princeton University, is stepping down from the position he has held since 1988 this June to return to his "first love."

"I am looking forward to my 'retirement,' because I will then be free to return to my first love, which is teaching," he said in a wide ranging discussion held recently in his office in Nassau Hall. "My Ph.D. is in economics and I will return to teaching right here in Princeton, following the choosing of my successor."...

Under Shapiro's leadership, Princeton completed this past summer, the most successful fundraising campaign in the history of the university, raising a total of $1.14 billion, with contributions from 78 percent of all undergraduate alumni....

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