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Reuben Hersh and Vera John-Steiner talk about the love/hate relationship with math on InsideHigherEd

May 19, 2011 by

Reuben Hersh and Vera John-Steinver were interviewed about their new book LOVING AND HATING MATHEMATICS: Challenging the Myths of Mathematical Life  by the renowned education website InsideHigherEd.com.  Their interview has received numerous comments the moment it was posted yesterday so take a look here.

From the interview….

Q: What are some of the key changes you would like to see in mathematics education at the primary and secondary levels, and why are they needed?

Reuben Hersh: The most important is to pay math teachers enough so that the public schools can compete for mathematically talented people in the job market….

Filed Under: Author Q&A, Mathematics, Twitter

Q&A with Shumeet Baluja, author of The Silicon Jungle

April 20, 2011 by

We live in a society in which information is only a simple keystroke or click of the mouse away. Online chat rooms have become a virtual bridge for those who wish to meet with people across the world and websites have become the forum for online advertisements, but what could happen if all of the seemingly innocuous information we typed into our computers every day fell into the wrong hands?

Next month, Princeton University Press is proud to publish Shumeet Baluja’s The Silicon Jungle: A Novel of Deception, Power, and Internet Intrigue, a captivating thriller about the promise and perils of data mining, so we sat down with the author to learn more about the story–and the technology–behind his timely novel.

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Q: Why did you choose an epigraph from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to preface your novel?

“In nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it, and over it.”–Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Shumeet Baluja: The internet is, in every aspect, about connections – the connections between people and websites, products, programs, raw information, and more than ever, simply other people. Increasingly, we find the internet becoming the de facto medium for most of the connections we deem meaningful. The quote by Goethe beautifully captures the notion that we are defined in relation to our connections. Today this is truer than ever – it’s just that our latest connections are online ones. Perhaps most pertinent to this novel, for better or worse, is that these connections are becoming measurable, predictable, and steadily more
exploitable.

Q: In your letter to the reader you go on to write, “It’s not technology or a newfound ability that should be labeled ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ it’s what we choose to do with that ability.” How would you suggest we find an ideal balance between innovation and responsibility in cyberspace?

SB: Early in many scientists’ careers, it is common to be enamored with the lofty goal of finding scientific truths and making discoveries that advance human knowledge. Only later in one’s career does reality set in – that scientists have a responsibility when deciding what to explore and what to create.   There are real ramifications tied to the discoveries they make – history has proven time and again that some will be amazing, while others horrific. In the novel, for example, an internet behemoth routinely surveils, analyzes, dissects, and predicts the actions and interests of internet users.   While doing this, though, they offer us an amazing set of benefits – in the form of convenience, access to information and resources that were unimaginable even just a few years ago, and a way to reach and stay in touch with our friends and families.  But all of this comes at a price – the absolute and utter destruction of our privacy.

It’s not hard to imagine that a large proportion, if not all, of a person’s thoughts are represented online – through searches, emails, chats, status updates, etc. We willingly give all of this away. Maybe that’s okay. Maybe convenience is more valuable than privacy? But maybe it isn’t. The point is that a conversation about what we lose, and at what price, is worth having; it is not a conversation that should quietly be swept under the rug in the face of the latest bright-and-shiny service disguised as the next must-have technological convenience.

Q: The novel begins as a series of vignettes that seem unrelated but tie together as the story progresses. How and why did you decide to create your work in this way? Does it relate to your theme of interpersonal connections?

SB: There were three reasons for this. First and foremost, I constructed the scenes to be very visual. It’s amazing what photographs can do – the instant we see an image, we fill in a story, we bring in our own experience to make sense of what we see. My goal was to write visual guideposts to reveal the story and lead the reader through the inner workings of a world that most take for granted – but also to allow the reader to add his or her own experiences to make the story more personal.

Second, and this relates to the first point, whether as a writer or as a teacher, I cannot over-emphasize how important it is to me to treat people as intelligent beings. Too often books spoon-feed us and leave nothing to the imagination. I can only hope that I have struck a good balance.

Finally, as you mentioned, one of the pervasive themes of the book is connections – how are we connected to others and to events that we could never have foreseen? How is it that a well-intentioned intern is instrumental in the death of a would-be philanthropist? I made a concerted effort to connect the chapters in unexpected, and multiple, ways. Indeed, I hope that the form of the novel reinforces the theme.

Q: The theme of image versus reality also comes up again and again–especially in later chapters when, for example, Stephen’s girlfriend Molly creates a website and uses a pseudonym to disguise herself as someone [sic] from the Middle East. Do you want to encourage your readers to be skeptical of the credibility of certain websites and online chat rooms?

SB: It’s funny that you bring that up.  Having worked on the Internet for as long as I have, my first reaction is to distrust anything I find on the internet until proven otherwise. At the very least, yes, I certainly hope that I have encouraged readers to be skeptical of the characters they meet online.

Molly, the anthropologist, plays an important role.  Without giving too much away about the book, remember that she enters the book with the best of intentions. Though her character has a vastly different background and motivation than the Silicon Valley denizens who surround her, she shows just how far awry people can go, and eventually how dangerous they can become, in the maniacal pursuit of ‘the truth.’ The effects are intensely magnified when they possess the tools to dissect, analyze, and watch the behaviors of so many people so easily.

Q: On page 82 you even illustrate his rigid and demanding work schedule in detail–why did you do this?

SB: Stephen is a kid in a candy store. He’s just been granted an amazing array of resources along with access to people’s emails, searches, friends – basically an entrée into their thoughts. He finds it intoxicating. He’s the ideal candidate for the job he is in.  The title of the chapter is “The Life and Soul of an Intern;” he gladly trades his life outside of work for one inside the cocoon that has been meticulously built to harness employees who are willing to give so much.

Q: And he’s not the only one: In of the most memorable scenes, a fellow Ubatoo data-mining intern creates a program which allows users to clearly view any websites people are using from their homes without their knowledge-and all of the interns become mesmerized by the homes using adult sites. Stephen’s friend Aarti even remarks, “For everything else we do, this is what people decide to look at.” What did you want to get across about privacy invasion here?

SB: There are escalating levels of privacy invasion throughout the book–this is the middle one. First, the novel should be very clear:  there is nothing private on the internet. It doesn’t matter if it’s an email that nobody except your friends are supposed to read, or a picture that you’ve shared only with that special person, or the file that you’ve uploaded just to keep safe.

Perhaps one of the truly ironic aspects of this is that adult-content searches are first to enter people’s minds when they think of privacy invasion.   The problem is that, at least at the company detailed in the book, adult searches are so common that they are most often not what is most interesting about a person – it’s the other, less mainstream, pursuits (this is commonly known as the long-tail) that truly make a person interesting.  These are the things that often reveal the most about a person – and most people never even think to try to keep these private.

Q: I notice recurring themes of identity and of the classification of people. Why did you choose to highlight this theme?

SB: It’s a fortunate coincidence that you referred to it as a ‘classification of people.’ Classifying people, their actions, and intentions is one of the cornerstones of internet data mining. Is this person a good candidate for an advertisement? Will this person buy a $10,000 car or a $100,000 one? Will this person be a terrorist? Is this a compatible person to date? What zip code does this person live in, what is his occupation, where has he traveled? Who are his friends? It’s all about classification – from the beginning to the end. In the business of internet data mining, the faster and more accurately you can classify people, the closer to being omniscient you become.

Q: What was your biggest challenge in writing this book?

SB: From the very beginning, this was going to be a book about the abuse of the enormous amount of data we willingly reveal about ourselves through our everyday actions. The hardest question was how to best demonstrate this. In the end, I decided to turn to something  that is, at times, on the forefront of our minds, but always in the back of our thoughts – terrorism and the massive religious unrest and changes that seem to occur daily now. Once this direction was chosen, it was crucial to me to ensure that no group was stereotyped; that’s why the book very deliberately mixes the good and the bad across religions and races.

Q: Do you have any other novels in mind for the future?

SB: Looking back on the book, I believe it’s fair to say that it was heavily influenced by 1984 (George Orwell) and The Jungle (Upton Sinclair). My next project also owes a great deal to 1984, but from a perspective other than privacy.   Imagine a world (not ours, of course, because the next work is also fiction), but one that may have a lot of similarities to ours, in which the majority of people turn to a single place for all of their information. We would be crazy to put all that trust in that single place, unless we were absolutely sure that place was trustworthy, wouldn’t we? For all the rhetoric about the internet being the salvation for the democratization of information and giving a voice to those who previously had none, how do you find that information, those lost voices? Right now, access to and ways for finding that information are pretty limited, pretty funneled, pretty controlled, no?

The ramifications and exploits of the discoveries and inventions made in the past 10 years have yet to be uncovered. I suspect that all of them will not be as innocuous as they seem today.  There are many stories yet to be written.

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The Silicon Jungle will be published on May 18.
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Filed Under: Author Q&A, Twitter

Dan Drezner’s Q&A with i09

April 5, 2011 by

What would happen to international politics if the dead rose from the grave and started to eat the living? Daniel Drezner’s groundbreaking book Theories of International Politics and Zombies answers the question that other international relations scholars have been too scared to ask. Check out this recent Q&A Drezner had with i09:

What drew you to this particular science fictional trope? As you’ve said, there are a lot of things that are interesting for international relations scholars, aliens for example. Why this type of story?

In some ways it was truly accidental. What originally sparked this was that paper by a bunch of biomathematicians at Carleton University called “When Zombies Attack.” I saw that and thought, “There’s no politics here.” So I wrote a sort of lighthearted post about it and it got linked to by a lot of people. That led me to think there’s actually something useful and pedagogical about this. And as much as people get aliens, they also get zombies.

I think the other reason is, simply put, name any book, add the world “zombies” to the title and it’s automatically funny. War and Peace and zombies. Crime and Punishment and zombies. It’s impossible not to start laughing. And if you can make a student laugh, you sneak in the learning before they realize it.

Let’s say there’s an uprising of the undead tomorrow. How could an understanding of international relations, of the concepts in this book, help politicians respond?

The key thing to realize is different governments would respond differently. This is interesting in comparison to the trope you were talking about earlier. Most alien stories end with all of Earth uniting against the aliens. What’s fascinating about zombie stories is they almost always end with the apocalypse. When you think about diseases breaking out, governments don’t always cooperate terribly well. They sometimes have an incentive to conceal information. When there’s genuine concern about epidemics, you start seeing competition over scarce resources. There are different paradigmatic responses and cooperation would be one possible outcome. But the book shows that’s hardly the only one.

I see, so there are any number of scenarios, and different governments might act on different paradigms?

It’s possible. Again, one of the interesting things as I was writing it was how often I could go to the well of zombie movies and say that this scenario plays out in this particular movie or this particular book. Obviously, none of these theories perfectly captures the dynamics of world politics. They’re all partial pictures at best. But hopefully, by reading the book, when people are looking at real world situations, they can say, “Oh, I see, constructivism is playing itself out here.” And then also see what they can expect going forward.

Click here to keep reading…

Daniel Drezner is professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. His books include All Politics Is Global (Princeton). He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Zombie Research Society.

Filed Under: Author Q&A, Princeton University Press, Twitter

A Pi Day Q&A with Our “Einstein” Authors (#PiDay)

March 14, 2011 by

Happy Pi Day, everyone! Today, we thought it would be a fun idea to showcase a piece on how Einstein influenced our current PUP authors’ research and career decisions.

We’ve chosen two questions that will show how influential Einstein’s ideas really were – across a wide spread of fields:

[1] How did Einstein influence your research or career choice?

[2] What would be the perfect 21st century birthday present for Einstein if he were still alive?

Check out what our authors had to say:

Alice Calaprice, author of The Ultimate Quotable Einstein

Q: How did Einstein influence your research or career choice?

AC: Einstein didn’t influence my career choice–he serendipitously became part of my career in publishing! I happened to be around at the right place at the right time: in Princeton at the start of the Einstein Papers Project, i.e., the preparation of The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein series for publication by PUP, in the mid to late 1970s. I happened to be looking for a full-time job and I happened to have the right qualifications to work as assistant to John Stachel in producing a computerized index of everything in the Einstein Archive, housed at the Institute for Advanced Study at the time. This work gave me the opportunity to read almost everything in the archive–most of it in German–and to familiarize myself with what’s in it. It also gave me the chance to witness the Einstein Centennial firsthand in 1979 at the Institute, and to participate in the centennial of the special theory of relativity in 2005. A very rewarding and long career in publishing followed my years at the Institute, for which I’m still grateful.

Some fifteen years later, in 1995, after having finished the index and by now a longtime senior editor at Princeton University Press, I was asked by Trevor Lipscombe, the physics acquisitions editor, to write a book of quotations on a variety of topics by Einstein. I had–just for fun and unbeknownst to Trevor–already gathered quite a few quotes while working on the index and while copyediting the first few volumes of the Collected Papers, so Trevor’s request was surprising but seemed timely, doable, and reasonable. About a year later the first edition of The Quotable Einstein was published with 400 quotations and their sources. The initial print run was something like 3,000 (the director didn’t think the book would sell well), but the volume went into six or seven re-printings of that first edition. Three more editions followed, spaced about five years apart, and around 25 translations were contracted, some in languages I had never heard of. The Ultimate Quotable Einstein, published last December, is my last contribution to this genre, with a total of around 1,600 quotations. In the meantime, I also wrote three other popular Einstein books for Johns Hopkins University Press, Greenwood, and Prometheus. So, who knew I’d become a specialist on Einstein?! Certainly not me! But maybe it was a good fit, and so it happened. I’ve loved working with all my Einstein colleagues and Einstein aficionados over the past 31 years–they’ve enriched my life tremendously and provided many good times.

Q: What would be the perfect 21st century birthday present for Einstein if he were still alive?

AC: Of course, the best present for Einstein would be a world at peace–something he longed for more than anything else, in my opinion. He felt close to all of humankind and I think it pained him that we couldn’t all just get along. Peace for Einstein would also imply the elimination of weapons of mass destruction, and certainly of automatic assault weapons at home. Maybe for his birthday, Princeton Pi Day organizers, in concert with local peace groups, could burn representations of these weapons in a bonfire in his honor.

Jean Eisenstaedt, author of The Curious History of Relativity: How Einstein’s Theory of Gravity Was Lost and Found Again

Q: How did Einstein influence your research or career choice?

JE: As a student in gravitation in the sixties my question was about black holes, their structure and their very existence. Years before, Einstein himself could not stand the idea of a crushed star and he was not alone in thinking so. Still, very few people believed in crushed stars. The word “black hole” was only invented in 1968 and black holes theory had to be constructed. Nobody knew whether or not black holes did exist for real. Thus, I wanted to understand the black hole concept physically and theoretically – from a historical standpoint and more precisely why it had been invented so late: fifties years after General Relativity! Why didn’t Einstein understand completely the theory that he invented?

Q: What would be the perfect 21st century birthday present for Einstein if he were still alive?

JE: A world at peace.

Steve Gubser, author of The Little Book of String Theory

Q: How did Einstein influence your research or career choice?

SG: Einstein’s influence on my field of research, string theory, is profound.  String theory is an extension of Einstein’s general theory of relativity that includes quantum mechanics in a consistent way.  Many problems in string theory can be attacked using the methods of general relativity, and objects like black holes, discovered in general relativity, are objects of intense study in string theory as well.

Q: What would be the perfect 21st century birthday present for Einstein if he were still alive?

SG: Einstein deeply desired to find a unified field theory.  He spent much of his time in Princeton searching for such a theory.  String theory is arguably the closest we have come to a unified field theory.  But it is incomplete and experimentally unproven.  The perfect 21st century birthday present for Einstein would be a breakthrough, either on the theoretical or experimental side, that would give us clear confirmation that string theory is essentially on the right track, or (equally valuable) guide us toward a novel way of realizing Einstein’s final goal of a unified field theory.

Robert P. Kirshner, author of The Extravagant Universe: Exploding Stars, Dark Energy, and the Accelerating Cosmos

Q: How did Einstein influence your research or career choice?

RK:  When I was a kid, “Einstein” was always used as a synonym for “annoyingly smart” – in a pejorative way.  If you knew 6 x 7, somebody would say, “Who do you think you are? Einstein?” Or if you swung and missed at a fastball, somebody would pipe up, as the next one came zooming in “OK, Einstein, hit this!”

It wasn’t until much later that I began to understand what Albert Einstein had done in theoretical physics. His contributions were unique, and truly revolutionary — General Relativity had very little to do with the problems other people were trying to solve, and Einstein came at the problem from a geometric viewpoint, which nobody else was doing.  This was a feat of imagination, and a great creation.  It also matched the observational facts, and predicted new phenomena.

Curiously, my own work in observational astronomy has pointed right at the weakest spot in Einstein’s reputation.  When he applied General Relativity to the universe, he added in the “Cosmological Constant” to produce a static universe.  Denoted by the Greek letter Lambda, it acts like a kind of anti-gravity to balance out the attraction of stars and galaxies for one another.  But only a decade later, observations showed the universe is not static– it is expanding. Einstein was a little grumpy about this and banished the cosmological constant from further discussion.  Whether he actually said it was his “greatest blunder,” I’m not sure, but he certainly thought it was not worth talking about.  It became a kind of poison ivy for theoretical physics– nobody wanted to touch it.

But only a decade ago, we found that the expansion of the universe is speeding up.  We need something that acts just like the cosmological constant.  Today’s astrophysicists have gone diving in Einstein’s wastebasket to retrieve his discarded idea.  Even when he said he was wrong, he was wrong about that!

Q: What would be the perfect 21st century birthday present for Einstein if he were still alive?

RK: I would enjoy telling Einstein that the latest astronomical observations show that we need something very much like the cosmological constant.  His eyes would bug out!  Maybe he would express some affection for that Lambda he threw away in 1932.

Abraham Loeb, author of How Did the First Stars and Galaxies Form?

Q: How did Einstein influence your research or career choice?

AL: The mathematical beauty, elegance, and simplicity in Einstein’s approach to understanding nature convinced me at a relatively young age to study physics. His famous mistakes (involving the cosmological constant and the nature of quantum mechanics) convinced me at a later age to continue doing physics even after some of my ideas (as a practitioner in the field of cosmology) failed.

Q: What would be the perfect 21st century birthday present for Einstein if he were still alive?

AL: We currently have the technology to obtain a radio image of the silhouette of the black at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Once obtained, such an image could have been a perfect gift for Einstein’s birthday in the 21st century, since black holes were predicted shortly after Einstein came up with the general theory of relativity almost a century ago.  By now this theory had been tested over a vast range of scales, from neutron stars and black holes on the scale of a city to the entire Universe. I find it remarkable that all the data collected over the past century did not identify undisputed evidence for even a single failure of the theory across the broad variety of phenomena that it describes.

Fulvio Melia, author of High-Energy Astrophysics

Q: How did Einstein influence your research or career choice?

FM: What distinguished Einstein from other thinkers, particularly in the sciences, was the evident clarity of his thoughts. As an aspiring young physicist, I was drawn to him, both for the excitement he generated with his work, but also for the manner with which he explained what he was doing. He was a physicist’s physicist, arguably the best there ever was. Like many others, I was inspired by the elegance and depth of his theories, and was naturally drawn to his style of scientific investigation. For most of my career, I have studied phenomena directly coupled to his view of space and time—black holes, relativistic plasmae, and the expansion of the universe. And now that I spend a fraction of my time writing about them, I am often reminded of the impact Einstein has had on science and our culture. The 21st century would be very, very different without him – may we never forget this.

Q: What would be the perfect 21st century birthday present for Einstein if he were still alive?

FM: It would be difficult to impress an individual with Einstein’s intellect. Certainly a material gift would be insufficient. I am convinced that would moved him greatly was the joy of discovery, the glory of epiphany, the total satisfaction of knowing that he “understood” a truth of nature. Much has happened in physics to confirm or validate his great work after he passed away. Perhaps the most significant outcome has been the realization that black holes—the most exotic phenomena predicted by his theories—actually do exist. And in the next few years, radio astronomers will be making an actual photograph of the giant black hole at the center of our Galaxy, almost a century after his work on relativity. That photograph would be my gift to him.

Ze’ev Rosenkranz, author of Einstein Before Israel: Zionest Icon or Iconoclast?

Q: How did Einstein influence your research or career choice?

ZR: Einstein actually did not influence my choice to become an historian. That stemmed from other factors such astrying to understand my own personal and family history. Growing up Jewish in Vienna was also a major factor – it was very hard to escape the weight of history growing up in the aftermath of the Holocaust … However, Einstein has influenced my choice of research. Originally a German-Jewish historian, I now focus exclusively on the private and political aspects of Einstein’s life and work. And, strangely enough, even after all these years, it never get’s boring …

Q: What would be the perfect 21st century birthday present for Einstein if he were still alive?

ZR: Well, the serious response to this would be world peace. He would be greatly disheartened and sickened by all the continued turmoil and violence in the world (although he wouldn’t be surprised by it). On a lighter note, a great 21st century present for him would be a Facebook page so that he could keep close tabs on the status of his fellow celebs …

David A. Weintraub, author of  How Old Is the Universe?

Q: How did Einstein influence your research or career choice?

DW: I spent many years answering questions with “it’s all relative,” not knowing what that phrase actually meant but knowing that it sounded important.  I read biographies of Einstein and read as much about relativity as I could as a high schooler, so Einstein’s legacy certainly excited me about physics and helped lead me into the profession.

Q: What would be the perfect 21st century birthday present for Einstein if he were still alive?

DW: A unified field theory that was so elegant and beautiful that he would know that is was correct.

A big thanks to all of our authors for their contribution to our PUP Pi Day celebrations. Again, have a happy Pi Day, all!

Filed Under: Author Q&A, Mathematics, Pi Day, Princeton University Press, Twitter

PGS Dialogue: John Kricher, author of Galapagos: A Natural History #darwinday

February 11, 2011 by
Our final Darwin Day Q&A is with John Kricher, author of Galapagos: A Natural History. This book is a must-read for anyone curious about the flora and fauna Darwin might have encountered in his expedition to the Galapagos. Here, John discusses his favorite Galapagos species and the ecological changes the islands have undergone since Darwin’s visit. Oh, and did I mention the photographs? John has kindly provided photographs of two native species including perhaps the most famous of all — the giant tortoise.


Princeton Global Science: Your book Galapagos: A Natural History describes many of the flora and fauna of the Islands. What are some of your favorite species? Do you have any photographs or illustrations you could share?

John Kricher: As an ornithologist I obviously like birds and the Darwin’s finches and various seabirds of the Galapagos are real favorites. I very much enjoy visiting the waved albatross colony, for example. Plus the fact that where else is it possible to observe penguins and flamingos in close proximity to one another? Answer, no where else. And, of course, I very much like the reptiles of the Galapagos, the giant tortoises and the marine and land iguanas.

PGS: What are some of the species that Darwin studied? Are they still found on the islands?

JK: Darwin studied the Galapagos mockingbirds, the group that helped him to see the reality of evolution and he studied the famous Darwin’s finches. Those groups are still present and abundant.

PGS: Mockingbirds? We always hear about Darwin’s finches. Why aren’t mockingbirds given as much prominence in the Darwin narrative?

JK: Darwin found the mockingbirds much easier to study while he was on the islands. He saw that only one kind occurred on each island and that they were different from island to island (four species in all). He thought it odd that separate species should be on different islands given that the islands were so similar. The finches were somewhat overwhelming to him at the time. He didn’t even recognize that all were finches, thinking one to be a warbler or wren and another to be a blackbird.

PGS: Have there been any new species introduced on the Galapagos Islands since the time of Darwin’s travels?

JK: Too many “new species” have been inadvertently introduced ranging from goats to various aggressive non-native plants. Introduced species are a major threat to the ecology of the islands.

PGS: The Galapagos are now a popular tourist destination. What has this meant for the Islands’ biodiversity and habitat?

JK: Tourism helps preserve the biodiversity because it gives the Ecuadorian government reason to be diligent about its laws and conservation practices. Without tourism I doubt that many of the native species would endure.

PGS: Which species are most endangered at this point? And what can people do to help?

JK: The most endangered are species such as the Galapagos penguin, which has declined quite a bit and species such as the Charles Mockingbird and Medium Tree-Finch. Likely the most endangered is the Mangrove Finch. Tourists should just respect the boundaries set by park officials and guides and try to understand that endemic species on islands such as Galapagos are usually very susceptible to invasive species and habitat loss. Opinions matter and the more folks adopt conservation values, the more likely it will be that the islands and their unique flora and fauna will endure.

PGS: What is your favorite anecdote or story about Darwin?

JK: Darwin failed to accurately record which islands he took finch specimens from and had to use the finch collection of Captain Robert Fitzroy instead of his own, when he got back to England and analyzed his specimen collection. Those finches were very influential in making Darwin and evolutionist and bear the name today of Darwin’s finches. Perhaps they should be called “Fitzroy’s Finches.”

PGS: How would you recommend people celebrate Darwin Day?

JK: Celebrate DD by thinking about the sweeping, indeed remarkable history of life on planet Earth, the only planet known to have life and consider how life has adapted over its 3.8 million year history to all the vagaries of climate, geology, etc. and the challenges that face biodiversity in this century.

Filed Under: Author Q&A, Biological Sciences, Birds and Natural History, Darwin, Natural Science, Twitter

PGS Dialogue: Thalia Grant & Greg Estes, co-authors of Darwin in Galapagos #darwinday

February 11, 2011 by
To celebrate Darwin Day, we are interviewing our Darwinian authors. Earlier I posted a Q&A with David Reznick focused more on Darwin as author. Here we speak with Thalia Grant and Greg Estes, authors of Darwin in Galápagos: Footsteps to a New World about Darwin as an explorer. Thalia and Greg are in the unique position of having retraced, step-by-step, Darwin’s expedition to the Galapagos. Here they speak about the challenges they faced in following in Darwin’s footsteps and also the insights they gained from the experience. Hover over the images to read descriptive captions.

You might also enjoy reading this excerpt from their book.
PGS: Your book Darwin in Galápagos: Footsteps to a New World takes readers step by step along Darwin’s travels. How did you reconstruct his expedition to write the book?

Our first discovery: Darwin’s first landing spot in Galapagos.Thalia Grant & Greg Estes: Greg and I came up with the idea to retrace Darwin’s footsteps through Galápagos after discovering that although it was known which 4 islands Darwin visited in Galápagos; it was not clear where on these islands he explored. In order to determine Darwin’s movements through the archipelago, we needed to examine his written works.

We traveled to England to immerse ourselves in archival research; to examine Darwin’s writings, and most importantly his original notes and manuscripts. Today all of Darwin’s works can be found on Darwin Online, but at that time his notes and manuscripts were buried deep within the Darwin archive of Cambridge University Library. There we unearthed, among other gems, a full volume of untranscribed geological notes that contained important clues to where Darwin had explored in Galápagos. At other repositories in England we found the log of HMS Beagle, and Captain FitzRoy’s charts of the archipelago, which showed the Beagle’s routes and bearings.

On Darwin’s trail into the highlands of Santiago Island.We then returned to Galápagos with all we had learned and embarked on our expedition. Some of the places Darwin explored were easy to pinpoint, others challenging. Some were found by trial and error, by going to places that sounded right in terms of the ship’s general anchorage, and when not finding the formations Darwin described, having to re-examine the clues and the coast line repeatedly until we got it right. It helped that both of us knew the Galápagos intimately from having spent years conducting ecological research on various islands and, in Greg’s case, leading natural history tours through the archipelago.

PGS: What are some of the challenges you faced in tracing Darwin’s footsteps?

TG & GE: Many of the places that Darwin led us to were off the beaten track, and new even to us. There were times when the terrain was “perilous”, the vegetation impenetrably thick, the seas and landing conditions unforgiving, and the heat withering, but the biggest challenges (and frustrations) we faced were where Darwin had left scant, vague, or even contradictory clues as to his movements. Nonetheless it was all very thrilling …like a treasure hunt …and a successful one at that.

PGS: Which areas of the Islands have changed the most/least since Darwin’s visit?

Greg collecting a sample of fresh water from the seep where Darwin got his drinking water while camped out on Santiago Island.TG & GE: The 5 inhabited islands have changed the most: Baltra, Santa Cruz, San Cristobal, Floreana and Isabela. Darwin visited three of these islands (San Cristobal, Floreana and Isabela), only one of which (Floreana) was inhabited at the time. The fourth island he explored (Santiago) has also undergone significant changes. The changes are a result of human activities within the islands and the exotic organisms that people have brought to the islands, both on purpose and by accident. We discuss many of the changes in our book. The islands that have remained most intact ecologically are the smaller, drier, uninhabited islands that lie at a distance from the more disturbed, larger islands.

PGS: Is there a single place in the Galápagos that most influenced Darwin’s theories of evolution?

TG & GE: It was the fact that Darwin visited not just one, but several islands in the Galápagos, that was important. It was the geographical distribution of the Galápagos organisms Darwin observed and collected, and his recognition of their affinity to organisms found on the South American continent and their representation as similar but distinct species on the different islands of Galápagos, that convinced him of the mutability of species. So in this sense, all the islands he visited were equally important.

Duplicating Darwin’s measurements of streams of basalt in a scoriaceous cliff, at Buccaneer Cove on Santiago Island.However if we were forced to pick just one place that was pivotal to his thinking, it would be Floreana. It was on Floreana that Darwin met Nicholas Lawson, the acting governor of the island, who told him the all-important fact that the tortoises of Galápagos differ in size and carapace shape between islands. It was on Floreana that Darwin first recognized that the mockingbirds differ between islands. The Floreana mockingbird looked distinct from the mockingbird he had just seen and collected on San Cristobal, and this inspired him to pay particular attention to their collection on the next two islands he visited.

PGS: What is your favorite anecdote or story about Darwin?

TG & GE: Darwin’s diary is full of wonderful anecdotes from various places he visited throughout the voyage, and several passages written in and about Galápagos vie for attention. He writes briefly about riding a tortoise, pushing a hawk off a branch with the muzzle of his gun, catching birds in a hat, and feeding land iguanas pieces of cactus, over which they fought like dogs with a bone. But my favorite story is when Darwin explored Beagle Crater on Isabela Island.

Dismanting camp and are “throwing” our gear down the cliff, on to the landing beach, where it can be loaded onto the boat. The green plastic containers are 5 gallon jugs that contained our drinking water for the duration of our stay.Beagle Crater is the grandest tuff crater in the archipelago, and Darwin, being primarily a geologist at the time, was clearly eager to explore it. However the conditions were less than favorable. The sun was burning, the day baking hot, and because the ship was low on drinking water, Darwin and the rest of the Beagle men were on half rations. It is an arduous climb to the top of Beagle Crater, from where he started. You can imagine Darwin’s reaction when, parched and panting he reached the summit, to be rewarded with a magnificent view of an immense glistening lake in the centre of the crater. He rushed and tumbled down the inner slope in his hurry for a drink, only to find the water as “salt as brine”. His disappointment was twofold; he was unable to quench his thirst and it meant that the Beagle would not linger to take on water, and he would not have the opportunity to climb to the top of one of the island’s immense shield volcanoes.

PGS: How would you recommend people celebrate Darwin Day?

TG & GE: Other than by buying our book? I would say, go for a walk outside. Go to the woods, or an open field, or down to the beach, and observe. Contemplate, as Darwin did, “an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth,” and reflect that it was the contemplation of the natural world that resulted in an idea that revolutionized the world. As we become increasingly alienated from the natural world, I can’t think of a better antidote, nor a better way to celebrate Darwin’s life.

Filed Under: Author Q&A, Biological Sciences, Birds and Natural History, Darwin, Twitter

PGS Dialogue: David Reznick, author of The Origin Then and Now #darwinday

February 11, 2011 by
To celebrate Darwin Day, we are interviewing our Darwinian authors. First up is David Reznick who is the author of The Origin Then and Now: An Interpretive Guide to the Origin of Species. Of the book, SEED Magazine wrote, “Reznick . . . succeeds where others have failed–instead of annotating the dense, Victorian prose of the Origin or recasting it as a popular narrative, he paraphrases each chapter of the book, adding fascinating elaborations on why Darwin chose a certain phrase, where he turned out to be wrong, and how the intervening 150 years have changed our theories. His account is a welcome tool for those who’d like to hear evolution from Darwin himself but find the master impenetrable.”

In this brief interview, Reznick talks about the initial response to On the Origin of the Species and why it continues to be such an important book. He also has a few suggestions for how to celebrate Darwin Day this year.

If you are in Calgary, David will present the 26th Annual Darwin Lecture tonight.
Princeton Global Science: You make the point that in spite of being one of the most important books ever written and being cited thousands of times, The Origin of the Species is a rather difficult book to read, right?

David Reznick: Yes. Also, it is cited far more often than it is read, I think. The difficulty lies in part in its being rooted in the science of 1859, so some of the ways he presents things are foreign. A second reason is that he had a much broader command of science than most people do today, so he skips lightly from geology to paleontology to comparative embryology to anatomy, etc.

PGS: Do you mean that the public at large had a broader command of science or that scientists were more inter-disciplinary?

DR: I actually mean both. Scientists have tended to become more and more narrow in their areas of specialization as science has grown. Darwin could be up on all of geology and the life sciences, but no one today can do so because there is now so much more to know. The general public can certainly have a better appreciation of what science is and of what evolution is.

PGS: How was The Origin of the Species received at the time it was written? Did people understand just how important this book was and would be for future scientists?

DR: Yes, it was received as a major contribution from the very beginning. Darwin already had a good reputation as a scientist and was well known to the general public because of his “Voyage of the Beagle”, so the book was taken seriously. It was also as controversial from the start as it is today. It was quite successful in making the case for evolution, but less so for natural selection.

PGS: I thought the case for evolution and the case for natural selection were one and the same. Can you explain this further?

DR: Actually, they are not. There was a long history to evolution that preceded Darwin. His grandfather wrote about it in the 18th century. Lamarck proposed a theory of evolution in the early 19th century. A widely read popular science book published in 1844 entitled Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation proposed a theory of evolution as well. Its reception by the scientists of the day was like our reception of tales of the abominable snowman and alien abductions, but it still got people thinking about evolution. It can be said that these predecessors prepared the way for Darwin. He brought much more coherent and extensive science to bear on the problem. Plus he proposed a mechanism that causes evolution, which was natural selection. In this regard, the two were separable from the start.

The fault with natural selection is that it assumed inheritance. In a later book (Variation under Domestication) Darwin proposed a mechanism of inheritance that was soon proven to be wrong. The way many people thought inheritance worked was inconsistent with natural selection.
When Mendel’s principles were rediscovered in 1900, they too were thought to be inconsistent with evolution by natural selection and were at first used as an argument against it.

PGS: How did Darwin deal with the controversial reception of his book?

DR: He did not engage in public debate nor did he generally respond to bad reviews. He corresponded extensively with others who were more than happy to defend him, like Thomas Huxley in UK and Asa Gray in the US. He also published books that promoted his ideas. He released a revision of the Voyage of the Beagle in 1860 in which he rewrote his observations and how they influenced him in a way that accommodated his later discovery of evolution.

In 1861 he published a book on fertilization in orchids in which he did an end run on those who argue that nature is too complex and beautiful to be the product of natural selection. He showed that the complexity of mechanisms by which orchids are fertilized and the complexity of their flowers can easily be explained by natural selection. He later published The Descent of Man, where he applied his principles to human evolution. There he especially expanded on sexual selection, which he proposed in Chapter 6 of the Origin. He also published the two-volume The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, which is a giant expansion on Chapter 1 of the Origin.

Incidentally, while Huxley was a staunch defender of evolution, he was not a fan of natural selection. Michael Ruse looked up all of his final exams at what is now UC London and found that he never asked a question about it.

PGS: What is one of the largest misconceptions about The Origin of the Species?

DR: Well, there are many. One is that some scientists today argue that Darwin promoted sympatric speciation as the sole mechanism of speciation and competition as the sole mechanism of natural selection. He promoted both, but also presented a diversity of other ideas. You can find this point made in one of the reviews of my book<, written by my competitor who wrote The Annotated Origin for Harvard U. Press.
Another, promoted by Ernst Mayr, is that the book is really not about the origin of species, but rather is just about variation and natural selection. Mayr is guilty of applying a 1942 definition of species to a book written in 1859. He was a better biologist than historian.

PGS: Were any of Darwin’s theories later proven incorrect?

DR: He argued correctly that evolution did not cause progress, except in one regard, which is that descendent species would always be in some way superior to those of that they replaced. The idea was that descendent species drove their ancestors to extinction. He argued that you could not see the superiority just by looking at them, but that if you could in some way bring the animals of the past into interaction with the animals of today, that the contemporary fauna would “annihilate” them.

He may have been correct in principle, but our new knowledge about mass extinction dictates that the pattern of replacement is different from what he imagined.
Secondly, he was dead wrong on how inheritance works, as were all others before 1900 except Gregor Mendel. It was the absence of a known mechanism for inheritance that played a big role in the rejection of natural selection as the mechanism for evolutionary change before 1930.

PGS: Why is reading The Origin of the Species as important (more important) now than at any point in history?

DR: First, it remains a very lucid explanation of evolution as a theory, meaning as a unifying concept for the life sciences. While not intended as such, it is a potent argument against creationism and intelligent design, which is why they continue to focus their arguments on the Origin. One interesting feature that distinguishes it from modern books on evolution is the scope of science that is well explained. A final reason is that it gives you a good appreciation for the growth of ideas in science. Features of the Origin are certainly dated, but once you understand the Origin you can also appreciate how it became a guiding light for so much science that followed. Right or wrong, it did more than any one work to shape the way the life sciences were pursued thereafter. If you understand the Origin, then you can see how this happened. It also lead to the origin of new disciplines, such as branches of statistics that deal with individual variation, genetics (the Origin stimulated interest in inheritance that lead to Mendel’s rediscovery), quantitative genetics and population genetics.

PGS: What is your favorite anecdote or story about Darwin?

DR: His father saying that he would amount to nothing and be an embarrassment to his family. This occurred when he returned from medical school in Edinburgh at the age of 18 and announced that he did not want to be a doctor.

PGS: And now people are celebrating his birthday two hundred and one years later. Speaking of which, how would you recommend people celebrate Darwin Day?

DR: Well, buy my book so you can understand the Origin. To be less self-serving, I would say buy a copy of the later edition of the Voyage of the Beagle. It is very interesting and readable, but also is a window to how Darwin developed his theory. The catch is that the copy you buy will likely be the revision published in 1860. It thus postdates Darwin’s publishing of the Origin and contains many revisions not seen in the 1838 edition.

Filed Under: Author Q&A, Biological Sciences, Darwin, Twitter

Can this book be judged by its cover?: Shumeet Baluja’s The Silicon Jungle

January 31, 2011 by

“A Novel of Deception, Power, and Internet Intrigue” reads the subtitle to The Silicon Jungle, the latest work of senior staff research scientist at Google, Shumeet Baluja. Praised as being both “[a] cerebral, cautionary tale… credible and scary” as well as “[c]lever and prophetic,” this novel unravels a thrilling tale about a naive intern, granted unfettered access to people’s most private thoughts and actions. Undoubtedly, the novel raises serious ethical questions about technological advancements, and the growing availability to use online activity for private, political and personal gain.

The book’s cover, with its almost sinister, seemingly unidentifiable face mounted in an explosion of words, is effectively eye-catching and raises questions about the book’s content. After talking to the book’s cover designer, Lorraine Doneker, it became clear that there was meaning hiding between the lines of text and lurking in the gaps of this ominous image. The hint of mystery evoked by the book’s cover begs the reader to unlock the meaning breathing within the content –provoked by the words “deception,” “power” and “intrigue.” These ideas prompted us to ask Lorraine a few questions about the thought and work that went into the cover design of The Silicon Jungle.

Q: The cover of The Silicon Jungle is quite striking!  It definitely got my attention when I first saw it – I saw the face, and then I noticed the words.  How should we interpret this design?  Is it meant to be ominous, thought-provoking, attention-grabbing…?

A: All of the above, totally!  The author’s thoughts: edgy, revelatory, controversial, thriller, and dark – reminiscent of Brave New World or 1984. Big brother like… all of that meets modern Crichton thriller.

Q: How did you come up with the idea for this cover?  And how did you create it?  Did it take a long time?

A: The author actually sent his version “Our Significant Bits,” and I immediately saw the self portrait and knew it could work with some ‘tweaking’ and different colors. He actually created a program called fingerprint.jpg where he was able to place the text – I am sure it took him some time to create the effect he wanted.

Q: How did you decide which words to use to create the image of the face?

A: Text/Word art – words like ‘email, search, blog, cell phones…’ all composited together in the form of a person or face-signifying that these are the things we are composed of, and by looking at all of them in aggregate, it’s possible to get a complete picture of a person.

Q: Were there other versions of the book jacket design that you considered before choosing this one?  (If possible, could you send images of the other designs?)



A: The first is the original one the author sent – “Our Significant Bits.” The second one shows new color treatment and sizing of words that make up the portrait. The third is the one that was ultimately chosen. Colors are more effective with type placement for title, subtitle and author.

Q: Why did you ultimately settle on this design?

A: It gives the feeling that though, it is a technical book, it has a very real ‘human’ story behind it which is what the author wants to emphasize.

Q: Did the idea for this design come to you easily, or was designing this cover a more challenging process?

A: I am not sure how easy this concept was for Shumeet, like any artist, ideas grow and expand as your adrenaline surges. Kudos to Shumeet, I was happy to ‘put the icing on the cake.’ He was a delight to work with – he knew what he wanted and was very effective in conveying his thoughts.

Q: What’s your take on the saying, “never judge a book by its cover”?  Should The Silicon Jungle’s cover only be considered in conjunction with the book’s content, or is it able to stand on its own?

A: The cover is a nice ‘marriage’ to the interior. It conveys power and stature, almost the opposite of friendly– book is not friendly and the subject matter is a serious sense of timelessness. The author wanted something that is not solely appealing to techies, but instead reaches to a mass audience.

As Lorraine explains, the use of the face, although it evokes a certain ominous or mysterious feeling, allows the reader to understand a human aspect of technological innovation – accurately reflecting the content of the story to follow and the vision of both the author and the cover designer. Many thanks to Lorraine for this amazing cover, and for answering questions about this design!

Interested in The Silicon Jungle? Check out our Facebook Page and become a fan!

Filed Under: Author Q&A, Princeton University Press, Twitter

Princeton Global Science, Issue 9

January 14, 2011 by
We enjoyed a nice long break for the New Year, but we’re happy to present Issue 9 of Princeton Global Science.

Richard Crossley, author of The Crossley ID Guide, explains in two videos how you can make your backyard more bird-friendly by incorporating bird baths and bird feeders (Check out the gorgeous birds in this video!).

We have sneak peeks of two catalogs — Physics and Astrophysics and Mathematical Sciences.

And lastly we have two new PGS Dialogues — Robert Kurzban who is author of Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite, and Mircea Pitici who is editor of the The Best Writing on Mathematics 2010.

Like Princeton Global Science? Subscribe to our RSS Feed here: http://blog.press.princeton.edu/category/pgs/feed/.

Filed Under: Astronomy and Cosmology, Astrophysics, Author Q&A, Biological Sciences, Birds and Natural History, Cognitive Science, Mathematics, Physics, Princeton Field Guides, Twitter

PGS Dialogue: Robert Kurzban, author of Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite

January 13, 2011 by
In the last PGS Dialogue, I wrote “Math is everywhere,” and now I find that, with a small modification, this short statement is as applicable to the subject of this Dialogue as the last. I could just as easily write “Hypocrisy is everywhere” and still be on solid ground.

Robert Kurzban, author of Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite, spoke with editor Eric Schwartz about his new book, his research, and of course, what might be on the horizon.


How did you arrive at your field of research?

I was lucky enough to have the chance to learn from so many people – and arriving at a research destination is always about the people who take you there – that it’s difficult to say how I arrived. I’ll highlight three stops along the way that stand out to me. Going back to the beginning, as an undergraduate preparing to major in biology, I learned two key lessons. First, that organisms are incredibly specialized to exploit their niches and, second, that inhaling ether in a fruit fly lab was not going to lead me to a satisfying and fulfilling life. Next, in graduate school, a biological anthropologist and a cognitive scientist – my advisers – showed me how the lessons I learned in my biology classes could shed new light on human social behavior. In many ways, my graduate education is reflected in the subtitle of the book, “evolution and the modular mind.” The third stop was a workshop I was lucky enough to attend in which a bunch of really smart people discussed some really interesting issues about human behavior and made really little progress. What was clear from the workshop is that we humans are really inconsistent creatures, and modularity – the idea that the mind consists of a large number of different parts – helps to make sense of why. This book, Why Everyone (Else) is a Hypocrite, takes ideas from my particular academic journey to explain some puzzling aspects of human behavior. (I might have mentioned a fourth stop along the way. I spent some time working for Disney – long story – and worked on a show called Cranium Command. The attraction explains how the mind is made up of a lot of different parts. Did a theme park attraction influence my academic path? *Shrug*)

What is the most surprising finding in your research?

A lot of people don’t want other people to use recreational drugs. This is so obviously true that it’s easy to miss the fact that psychologists still don’t really know why this is. So, recently, some collaborators and I ran a study designed to try to figure it out. Most people would probably think that opposition to recreational drugs comes from being a conservative, or highly religious, or from some other philosophical commitment. We had a different idea. So, we measured people’s opposition to drugs, their politics, and – the heart of the theory that started this research program – their sexuality, including things such as views toward casual sex, number of prior sexual partners, and so on. From our data, it turns out that if you want to try to predict whether someone opposes drugs, the best questions to ask them – other than, you know, whether or not they oppose drugs – isn’t their political party, but something considerably more personal. (The final version of the book was written before these findings were all in, but the explanation for this link is in Chapter 9.)

Where do you see your work leading you in the future?

Well, if I knew where it was leading, I guess it wouldn’t be “research” – off into the unknown and all that – but I can say that there are two questions that I’m excited to be pursing. The first one is about morality. Along with graduate students past and present, I’ve been working to understand the function of morality. To return to the question above, people moralize all sorts of things other people want to do, and we’d like to understand why that is (and, maybe, what we can do about it). The second line of work asks why people seem to like some sorts of scientific explanations – neuroscience is currently all the rage – but dislike other kinds. This dislike is tangible; as an evolutionary psychologist, I not infrequently have people who have no training as scientists inform me, with quiet, serious confidence, that my field is not, in fact, a science. It’s unclear why this is, and one thing I’d like to do is to understand such people and figure out what, exactly, their problem is.

Filed Under: Author Q&A, Cognitive Science, Psychology, Twitter

Duina’s Winning in 90 seconds on Academic Minute

December 7, 2010 by

Dr. Francesco Duina of Bates College recently provided a brief 90-second explanation of his book, Winning: Reflections on an American Obsession on WAMC’s Academic Minute. During the segment, Duina explains the argument and relevance of Winning and explores why the U.S. is consistently outranked on lists of the world’s happiest countries.  Whew – that’s a lot for just 90 seconds!

Click here to listen, and here to learn more about the book!

Filed Under: Anthropology, Author Q&A, Cognitive Science, Psychology, Sociology

Mithradates of Pontus answers the Proust questionnaire

November 17, 2010 by

You’ve seen the Vanity Fair version on the last page of each issue, the one adapted from Proust and given to celebrities to answer.  Now check out Dorothy King’s blog where 2009 National Book Award Finalist and POISON KING author Adrienne Mayor channels her  subject and unlocks the key to the Man, the Mith, the Legend.

“The gift of nature that I would like to have is: I am already blessed by Nature, with a magnificent physique and superb athletic prowess!”

Nice timing leading up to the April paperback release but hey, Mithradates?  Would a little bit of modesty kill you?

Then again, this royal coinage shows off some luscious locks so maybe Nature really did spend a little more time crafting the king…

Filed Under: Archaeology and Ancient History, Author Q&A Tagged With: , ,
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