Princeton University Podcasts

Richard Pare, author of Lost Vanguard: Soviet Modernist Architecture, 1922–32

Andreas Wimmer, Hughes-Rogers Professor of Sociology, Princeton University. PIIRS Director's Book Forum

Helen Milner, B.C. Forbes Professor of Public Affairs; Professor of Politics and International Affairs, Woodrow Wilson School; and director, Center for Globalization and Governance. PIIRS Director's Book Forum

PIIRS research community, "Empires: Domination, Collaboration, and Resistance" Organizer: F. Nick Nesbitt, Department of French and Italian

Program in African Studies Lunch Lecture Ellis Goldberg, University of Washington

How planetary systems form with some final comments about transport of life between planetary systems

Introduction to cosmology and the implications for life in the universe.

Three experts on philanthropic planning explain how to get the most from your charitable giving: Victoria Baum Bjorklund ’73, partner at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP John A. Edie ’66, retired director at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP Juanita T. James '74, president and CEO of Fairfield County Community Foundation.

Susan Stewart, Professor of English The President’s Lecture Series was established by President Shirley M. Tilghman in the fall of 2001 to give Princeton’s faculty an opportunity to learn about the work of their colleagues in other disciplines and to share their research with the University community. First proposed by Alan B. Krueger, the Lynn Bendheim Thoman, Class of 1976, and Robert Bendheim, Class of 1937, Professor in Economics and Public Policy, the lectures are presented three times a year and are open to the public.

What does it mean to be literate at a time when you can search over billions of texts in less than 300 milliseconds? Although you might think that “literacy” is one of the great constants that transcends the ages, the skills of a literate person have changed substantially over time as texts and technology allow for new kinds of reading and understanding. Knowing how to read is just the beginning of it—knowing how to frame a question, pose a query, how to interpret the texts that you find, how to organize and use the information you discover, how to understand your metacognition—these are all critical parts of being literate as well. In this talk Russell review what literacy is today, in the age of Google, and show how some very surprising and unexpected skills will turn out to be critical in the years ahead. Daniel M. Russell is the Über Tech Lead for Search Quality and User Happiness for Google where he studies how people search for and organize information. He earned his PhD in computer science at the University of Rochester (NY), specializing in artificial intelligence until he realized that magnifying and understanding human intelligence was his real passion. Twenty years ago he foreswore AI in favor of HI, and enjoys teaching, learning, running and music, preferably all in one day. He has worked at Xerox PARC before it was PARC.com, was in the Advanced Technology Group at Apple where he wrote the first 100 web pages for www.Apple.com using SimpleText. He has also worked at IBM as a senior research scientist, and briefly at a startup that developed tablet computers a few years before the iPad. A Louis Clark Vanuxem Lecture