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Posting Remorse: Deleting isn’t Permanent on the Internet

May 1, 2013 by

The internet is great for sharing. But what happens when you are done with sharing?  The internet isn’t a chalkboard that you can write on and erase at your leisure. Once something is out there in the internet, it will more or less be there forever.

Take such simple things as posting a picture on Facebook to share with your friends. It may be a goofy picture of you and your college buddies but in a few years, that photo seems tasteless and may make you look bad for whatever reason. So, you delete it. Problem solved. However, your picture still lingers on the internet though you may not be able to see it and it can always be dug up to haunt you.

Anthony Weiner was just a regular old politician before his scandal leaked. Now a simple Google search defines him as a sexual deviant with his humiliation dubbed Weinergate. He may bounce back from his shame but the power of the internet will make it hard to forget what he’s done.

In an op-ed for The New York Times, Bill Keller discusses why the ability to permanently delete information off the internet is a measure that needs to be taken. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger discusses this idea in depth in his book Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. The ability to forget allows people to move forward in life. Though he does not say that history should be forgotten (like Weinergate), there are certain pieces of information about individuals that should be allowed to be forgotten, such as news stories about convictions that were eventually resolved but did not have any subsequent media coverage discussing their innocence. Mayer-Schönberger proposes expiration dates on information that may help fix this problem among other ideas that may help make internet posting remorse a thing of the past.

Delete looks at the surprising phenomenon of perfect remembering in the digital age, and reveals why we must reintroduce our capacity to forget. Digital technology empowers us as never before, yet it has unforeseen consequences as well. Potentially humiliating content on Facebook is enshrined in cyberspace for future employers to see. Google remembers everything we’ve searched for and when. The digital realm remembers what is sometimes better forgotten, and this has profound implications for us all.

In Delete, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger traces the important role that forgetting has played throughout human history, from the ability to make sound decisions unencumbered by the past to the possibility of second chances. The written word made it possible for humans to remember across generations and time, yet now digital technology and global networks are overriding our natural ability to forget–the past is ever present, ready to be called up at the click of a mouse. Mayer-Schönberger examines the technology that’s facilitating the end of forgetting–digitization, cheap storage and easy retrieval, global access, and increasingly powerful software–and describes the dangers of everlasting digital memory, whether it’s outdated information taken out of context or compromising photos the Web won’t let us forget. He explains why information privacy rights and other fixes can’t help us, and proposes an ingeniously simple solution–expiration dates on information–that may.

Delete was awarded prizes in 2010 for its focus on media ecology and science and technology politics from the Media Ecology Association and American Political Science Association respectively.

Filed Under: Technology & Media, Twitter

PUP books on College

April 8, 2013 by

Students at the college that I attend know that it’s truly spring when high school seniors visit campus in flocks- no, in army sized battalions- for Accepted Students Day. Yesterday my college’s campus was filled to the rim with high schoolers and their parents, and for those students choosing to go to college, soon they will have to decide which colleges they will be attending in fall 2013.

College is undoubtedly the best time of your life. There will never be another time when you have limited responsibilities and, for the most part, total freedom. PUP has some great reads on what college is like now and what it could be like in the future. Here’s a list of some college related reading from PUP!

1. College: What it Was, Is, and Should Be by Andrew Delbanco- For so many, the point of college is to get a degree so that you can get a job. While this is the attitude held by many today, this is not what college was initially designed to achieve.

As the commercialization of American higher education accelerates, more and more students are coming to college with the narrow aim of obtaining a preprofessional credential. The traditional four-year college experience–an exploratory time for students to discover their passions and test ideas and values with the help of teachers and peers–is in danger of becoming a thing of the past.

In College, prominent cultural critic Andrew Delbanco offers a trenchant defense of such an education, and warns that it is becoming a privilege reserved for the relatively rich. In arguing for what a true college education should be, he demonstrates why making it available to as many young people as possible remains central to America’s democratic promise.

In a brisk and vivid historical narrative, Delbanco explains how the idea of college arose in the colonial period from the Puritan idea of the gathered church, how it struggled to survive in the nineteenth century in the shadow of the new research universities, and how, in the twentieth century, it slowly opened its doors to women, minorities, and students from low-income families. He describes the unique strengths of America’s colleges in our era of globalization and, while recognizing the growing centrality of science, technology, and vocational subjects in the curriculum, he mounts a vigorous defense of a broadly humanistic education for all. Acknowledging the serious financial, intellectual, and ethical challenges that all colleges face today, Delbanco considers what is at stake in the urgent effort to protect these venerable institutions for future generations.

2. Higher Education in the Digital Age by William G. Bowen- While Delbanco looks at what college used to be like in the past, William Bowen discusses what higher education looks like today in the digital age and where technology may lead us for the future.

Two of the most visible and important trends in higher education today are its exploding costs and the rapid expansion of online learning. Could the growth in online courses slow the rising cost of college and help solve the crisis of affordability? In this short and incisive book, William G. Bowen, one of the foremost experts on the intersection of education and economics, explains why, despite his earlier skepticism, he now believes technology has the potential to help rein in costs without negatively affecting student learning. As a former president of Princeton University, an economist, and author of many books on education, including the acclaimed bestseller The Shape of the River, Bowen speaks with unique expertise on the subject.

Surveying the dizzying array of new technology-based teaching and learning initiatives, including the highly publicized emergence of “massive open online courses” (MOOCs), Bowen argues that such technologies could transform traditional higher education–allowing it at last to curb rising costs by increasing productivity, while preserving quality and protecting core values. But the challenges, which are organizational and philosophical as much as technological, are daunting. They include providing hard evidence of whether online education is cost-effective in various settings, rethinking the governance and decision-making structures of higher education, and developing customizable technological platforms. Yet, Bowen remains optimistic that the potential payoff is great.

3. Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should Be Learning More by Derek Bok- Are we actually learning what we should be learning in college? Bok explores the challenges that academic institutions face in trying to help students accomplish more.

Drawing on a large body of empirical evidence, former Harvard President Derek Bok examines how much progress college students actually make toward widely accepted goals of undergraduate education. His conclusions are sobering. Although most students make gains in many important respects, they improve much less than they should in such important areas as writing, critical thinking, quantitative skills, and moral reasoning. Large majorities of college seniors do not feel that they have made substantial progress in speaking a foreign language, acquiring cultural and aesthetic interests, or learning what they need to know to become active and informed citizens. Overall, despite their vastly increased resources, more powerful technology, and hundreds of new courses, colleges cannot be confident that students are learning more than they did fifty years ago.

Looking further, Bok finds that many important college courses are left to the least experienced teachers and that most professors continue to teach in ways that have proven to be less effective than other available methods. In reviewing their educational programs, however, faculties typically ignore this evidence. Instead, they spend most of their time discussing what courses to require, although the lasting impact of college will almost certainly depend much more on how the courses are taught.

In his final chapter, Bok describes the changes that faculties and academic leaders can make to help students accomplish more. Without ignoring the contributions that America’s colleges have made, Bok delivers a powerful critique–one that educators will ignore at their peril.

4. Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America’s Public Universities by William G. Bowen, Matthew M. Chingos & Michael S. McPherson- I think everyone has had that one professor who told you to look to your left and to your right, and that only one of you would make it out alive from that class. Today less than 60% of students in American universities graduate. Why does this happen?

The United States has long been a model for accessible, affordable education, as exemplified by the country’s public universities. And yet less than 60 percent of the students entering American universities today are graduating. Why is this happening, and what can be done? Crossing the Finish Line provides the most detailed exploration ever of college completion at America’s public universities. This groundbreaking book sheds light on such serious issues as dropout rates linked to race, gender, and socioeconomic status.

Probing graduation rates at twenty-one flagship public universities and four statewide systems of public higher education, the authors focus on the progress of students in the entering class of 1999–from entry to graduation, transfer, or withdrawal. They examine the effects of parental education, family income, race and gender, high school grades, test scores, financial aid, and characteristics of universities attended (especially their selectivity). The conclusions are compelling: minority students and students from poor families have markedly lower graduation rates–and take longer to earn degrees–even when other variables are taken into account. Noting the strong performance of transfer students and the effects of financial constraints on student retention, the authors call for improved transfer and financial aid policies, and suggest ways of improving the sorting processes that match students to institutions.

Filed Under: Education, Sociology, Technology & Media, Twitter

(Harlem) Shaking Up Italo Calvino

March 21, 2013 by

Our anxiously awaited Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941-1985, masterfully translated by Martin McLaughlin and with an introduction by the inimitable Michael Wood, is still forthcoming. But in the meantime, writer João Chiodini has created a quirky little Harlem Shake-meme video featuring some of Calvino’s greatest hits. (The video features Portuguese editions, but you get the idea.)

Don’t forget to check out one of the letters from the Calvino collection in the latest issue of Harper’s.

Filed Under: Humanities, Literature, Technology & Media

Bernard Carlson, author of Tesla to tour college bookstores

February 22, 2013 by

W. Bernard Carlson, author of Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age, will tour the Northeast with a Tesla Coil in hand, visiting college bookstores at Johns Hopkins, U. Penn, Dartmouth, and Harvard during the first week of May.

j9941[1] Plenty of biographies glamorize Tesla and his eccentricities, but until now none has carefully examined what, how, and why he invented. In this groundbreaking book, W. Bernard Carlson demystifies the legendary inventor, placing him within the cultural and technological context of his time, and focusing on his inventions themselves as well as the creation and maintenance of his celebrity. Drawing on original documents from Tesla’s private and public life, Carlson shows how he was an “idealist” inventor who sought the perfect experimental realization of a great idea or principle, and who skillfully sold his inventions to the public through mythmaking and illusion.For details on the events, please visit the following links: 

 

 

[This post was originally published on February 4, 2013]
Filed Under: Events, Physics, Technology & Media

A brief Q&A with Lance Fortnow, author of THE GOLDEN TICKET: P, NP and the Search for the Impossible

January 18, 2013 by

GA Tech portraits/headshot/group pics of the science and technology department.In April we will publish The Golden Ticket: P, NP, and the Search for the Impossible by Lance Fortnow. This is the clearest possible explanation of P, NP available. Fortnow, a leading computer scientist, covers the history of the problem and how various mathematicians have attempted to solve it. He probes which areas of research seem most promising and explains what would happen if it ever were solved (spoiler alert: we could solve problems and do medical research super fast, but we’d also lose all encryption, privacy, and banking would be a disaster). But, don’t start living off the grid just yet. Ultimately he argues that we are far more likely to solve for P /= NP than we are to solve P=NP.

 

He recently sat down with PUP and answered a few questions about P,NP and the book.

 

 

PUP: Why did you write this book?

Fortnow: I wrote a survey article on the P/NP problem for a computing trade magazine, Communications of the ACM, that quickly became the most downloaded article in that magazine’s history. Clearly there was great interest in the P/NP question and there is no popular science book focused on P/NP or many on any computer science topic at all, so I took the survey I wrote as a template and started writing.

PUP: Ok, let’s start with the basics, what is P/NP?

Fortnow: The P/NP problem is best described by an example question: Are there 1000 people on Facebook whom are all friends with each other? Even if you worked for Facebook and had access to all its data, answering this question naively would require checking more possibilities than any computer, now or in the future, could possibly do. The P/NP question asks whether there is some very clever algorithm that can answer this problem and others like it.

PUP: What is the history of this problem? When was it first formulated and by who?

Fortnow: The development of the P/NP problem has two histories, in North America and in Russia with researchers separated by the Cold War in the early 70′s. In North America the problem developed in a rather conventional way, first defined by Steve Cook, a young professor, at the University of Toronto in 1971 as he looked at ways to connect logic and computation. A year later, Richard Karp of the University of California at Berkeley made the P/NP problem famous by tying it into a number of well-studied combinatorial problems. In Russia, progress was slowed by strong politics in their mathematical community, but eventually a young student, Leonid Levin, discovered the P/NP problem by looking at the difficulty of computer search. I devote a chapter of the book to the history and personalities leading up to the development of the P/NP problem on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

PUP: Why does it matter?

Fortnow: It matters because if P=NP it would make a large number of difficult computational tasks immediately easy to solve and it would transform our lives beyond measure: we’d cure major diseases, make accurate predictions of weather, get near prefect translation, and much more. The computer could find solutions to virtually any question we could ask of it.

PUP: It really sounds like the “golden ticket” of your book’s title. But in the book, you also talk about some of the less positive outcomes to solving this problem. Can you describe those too?

Fortnow: We’d have a near complete loss of privacy as P=NP would allow anyone to reverse engineer any attempts to hide your activities. Also if P=NP virtually any job could be automated potentially leading to large-scale unemployment.

PUP: What makes it so difficult to solve?

Fortnow: If P is not NP as most computer scientists believe, to show this requires that there is no algorithm out of an infinite number of possible clever algorithms, to solve a problem like the Facebook question above. It’s very difficult, though hopefully not impossible, to show that no algorithm exists.

PUP: So, scientists are also trying to disprove P/NP? Why is that also important and do you think this is more likely than solving P=NP?

Fortnow: Either P=NP or not, there exists one algorithm that solves most of the computational problems we care about or no such algorithm. Understanding which is the case will help us understand the best modes of attack on difficult computational problems. Because we don’t expect the world to be so clean, with one algorithm that solves everything, the common belief of computer scientists is that P and NP are not equal.

PUP: Have there been any near solutions–people who thought they had a solution, but ultimately didn’t? etc.

Fortnow: The P/NP problem has a $1,000,000 bounty for a solution offered by the Clay Mathematics Institute, so many people discover “solutions” they believe are correct but are usually flawed at a fundamental level. In 2010, HP researcher Vinay Deolalikar sent around a transcript that caused some initial hopes, but after an extensive discussion, was also found to have fundamental flaws. That experience was recounted by an article in the New York Times (http://nyti.ms/XXeWAk).

PUP: What would solving P/NP mean for the world?

Fortnow: Showing P=NP would greatly transform the world as I mentioned before. Showing P and NP are not the same would be an amazing mathematical result but wouldn’t have quite the dramatic effect on society. The power of the P/NP question doesn’t really come from whether or not we find a solution. Rather P/NP tells us what’s possible. Even if P and NP are different, the problems we can imagine solving if P=NP are often still solvable, it will just cause us considerably more effort instead of a single magic bullet.

PUP: What are the most promising areas of research on P/NP right now?

Fortnow: Very few. There is an interesting approach using an area of mathematics called algebraic geometry spearheaded by Ketan Mulmuley of the University of Chicago. But several people doubt this approach will work and even Mulmuley believes his program could settle P/NP, it would likely take well over a century.

PUP: What do you hope people take away from your book?

Fortnow: I hope people come to understand the importance of the P/NP problem and more generally come to realize that computer science is about tackling major computational challenges and not just about programming a computer.

 

bookjacket

The Golden Ticket
P, NP, and the Search for the Impossible
Lance Fortnow
Filed Under: Mathematics, Technology & Media, Twitter

Princeton University Press Director Peter Dougherty Speaks at the Lunch and Salon Hosted by the Association of American University Presses at the Princeton Club of New York

December 11, 2012 by

November 29, 2012: Peter Dougherty and several other press directors discuss the accomplishments of University Presses and the future direction of books at the salon gathering entitled “What’s Next for Publishing? Rethinking the University Press.” Dougherty answwered questions from a group of journalists spectating at the event:

Several comments picked up on ideas from Dougherty’s July 23 article for the Chronicle of Higher Education, entitled “The Global University Press.” As he wrote: “University presses can become an even larger and more influential force in the global theater of ideas by capitalizing on two converging trends: the growth of global scholarship and the expansion of digital communications networks.” Though university presses reach a smaller audience of readers, in difficult economic times and rapid technological change, they remain committed to their authors and, as Jordan said, will pursue the “new digital reader” and “champion the spirit of innovation.”

 
Click here to read the rest of the article on the official Publishers Weekly website: Panel Debates The Future of University Presses

 
Peter J. Dougherty was appointed Director of Princeton University Press at the March 2005 meeting of the Press’ board of trustees. “We sought an individual of broad editorial vision and were fortunate that the field of candidates was rich in such talents. Happily, however, we found Walter Lippincott’s successor right here at Princeton,” said W. Drake McFeely, chair of the Press’ board.

“Peter Dougherty has been instrumental in the Press’ success over the past 13 years,” he continued. “More than that, his 33 years of experience in publishing affords him a clear vision of how to build on Walter’s great achievements. I am delighted that he has agreed to lead the Press into its second century.”

McFeely, president and chair of W.W. Norton in New York, co-chaired the search committee with Princeton University Provost Christopher Eisgruber, who added, “Peter Dougherty will be a great leader for the Princeton University Press. He has distinguished himself as a brilliant editor of books about economics, and his list of authors and titles in that field is the envy of every other university press.

Read more about Princeton University Press Director, Peter Dougherty: Official Princeton University Press Website

Filed Under: Events, Literature, Princeton University Press, Publishing, Technology & Media, Twitter, University Press

Want to score a internship with the Princeton University Press? Our current interns offer some advice on maximizing your chances

November 6, 2012 by

A few of our interns give us the insider scoop on what it’s like to work at a university press and offer some valuable advice on landing an internship with the Princeton University Press:

 

EDITORIAL

 

Juliana Fidler (TCNJ)

Title: General Editorial Intern
Department: Editorial
College Major: Majoring in English with a minor in Spanish
Year: Senior 

1.)    What does your list of duties for the Princeton University Press include?
I help the editorial assistants with any tasks they need/ask me to complete. The most common ones are compiling image permissions logs, submitting shipping orders, and creating contact lists. I’ve been working on two long-term projects: re-clearing image permissions for an upcoming e-book version of a 2007 book (which means finding and communicating with the various rights holders and keeping track of their responses) and researching courses that could potentially adopt a specific textbook. I also get to attend some editorial meetings.

2.)    Are there any special qualifications, skills, or training that you have brought with you to the internship?
I’ve been a writer and copy editor at my college’s newspaper, a file clerk at a law firm, and an intern at another publishing house. So I’d say my training has given me organizational skills—but with creativity mixed in. As an English major (and college student in general), I’ve brought an appreciation for a wide variety of literature and books.

3.)    What aspect(s) do you enjoy most about your internship with the Princeton University Press?
I’ve learned a lot by attending the editorial meetings here, so I’m grateful to be able to do that. I also love seeing my long-term projects bear results. And everyone has been very friendly and welcoming, so I’ve enjoyed getting to know people!

4.)    In what ways do you think this internship will help you in future job endeavors?
Working at a prestigious university press looks great on a resume, of course, but perhaps more importantly, I think I’ve acquired a lot of foundational skills that I would need to eventually start working in publishing/editorial full time.

5.)    What job skill(s) learned at the Press do you feel are most vital to your overall career success?
I have learned a lot about permissions, and I think a basic working knowledge in that area is great for any publishing industry hopeful. The editorial assistants also make a point to keep the editorial interns in the loop regarding the details of new and upcoming books PUP is publishing, so I feel that I’m gaining an understanding of the acquisition-to-manuscript-to-book process (so many hyphens, sorry) that’s beyond just the projects and tasks I complete as an intern.

6.)    Would you recommend this internship to others?
Yes!

7.)    Is there any advice you can give to those applying for internships, looking for jobs in your field, or ways to maximize one’s chance of getting an internship with the Princeton University Press?
For those applying to internships, I’d say emphasize whatever it is that makes you stand out. I included the link to my study abroad blog in my cover letter, and when I had my interview with PUP (via Skype, from Spain) I found out that the people interviewing me had read through it! I can’t say that’s what got me the internship, but it didn’t hurt. On a related note, I think a great cover letter is important, since it’s more personal than a resume. Also, keep an open mind; I wouldn’t have necessarily sought an internship at a university press (as opposed to a private textbook or trade publisher) initially, but I found PUP on my school’s online recruiting network, and I’m glad I ended up here. In terms of looking for jobs…I’ll be checking out the other interns’ answers for tips, since I’ll be doing that soon!

Closing Remarks:

“I’ve found that PUP is a great place to have an internship, because the experience is clearly intended to expose the intern to what publishing at a university press is like and how it works.”


Anna Sandberg (Rutgers University)

Title: Editorial Reference Intern
Department: Editorial
College Major: Double majoring in Italian and European Studies with a minor in Organizational Leadership
Year: Senior

1.)    What does your list of duties for the Princeton University Press include?
CPFS orders, Shipping/Mailing orders, Proofing PUP shorts & other minor publications, Research for editorial assistants such as address look-ups, phone numbers, potential blurbers for publications, etc., Image searches for publications (high resolution copies of images wanted for publications, but not provided by the author/contributor), Contacting sources for image permissions, Data entry, Contract entries, attending various Editorial meetings (Project Review, Hit, etc.) with editorial assistants.

2.)    Are there any special qualifications, skills, or training that you have brought with you to the internship?
I worked last fall as an intern with Rutgers University Student Life in an office setting. I was responsible for a lot of email communication and general office work like printing, scanning, photocopying, etc.

3.)    What aspect(s) do you enjoy most about your internship with the Princeton University Press?
 I like the variety. Sometimes I do get stuck on really lengthy projects, but I like when I do a lot of little things for a bunch of projects in one day. It really gives you an idea of how many different projects each editor is working on at one time. The meetings are also really good to gage how many projects are run at the same time here. I also like the continuity. One day I might be working on address look-ups for a whole bunch of people, and the next week I could be sending books to those addresses for review. It’s nice to see how some of my work is used later on in the process.

4.)    In what ways do you think this internship will help you in future job endeavors?
I would like to have a career in publishing (specifically in editing), so this internship is really helpful as experience for job applications. Although I do want to work in fiction for a large publishing company, I’m sure many of the skills that I’ve learned here will transfer or at least serve as a good basis for working elsewhere.

5.)    What job skill(s) learned at the Press do you feel are most vital to your overall career success?
I think knowing the process of book publication will be really helpful to my career success since I want to get into publishing. Of course it might not be quite the same for non-academic publishing, but it’s a start. Knowing how to complete mailings, etc. is another skill that I learned at this job and while another publishing company might use another type of database, it’s helpful to know for the future.

6.)    Would you recommend this internship to others?
Yes!

7.)    Is there any advice you can give to those applying for internships, looking for jobs in your field, or ways to maximize one’s chance of getting an internship with the Princeton University Press?
I think just getting out there an applying is an important step. You may not get every internship you apply for, but that’s why you need to apply to a few. I used my university’s career networking site where different companies post job offerings to find this internship, but if you are looking for an internship in a specific field, sometimes it is helpful to just look on a couple of company websites for information. I’m currently looking for an editorial internship with a large publishing house for next semester and my university’s career site is limited, so I’ve started researching a few prominent publishing houses in NYC and looking for internships at those individual companies.

Closing Remarks:

“The other editorial intern (Juliana) and I both studied abroad last semester in Europe. While it was difficult to find companies willing to interview me via phone or on Skype, PUP was more than willing. They have great communication technology here and they actually use it quite often for meetings with the PUP office in the UK, which I think is really great. It was a really different experience interviewing online that I don’t think many people have. I thought it was really interesting that studying abroad actually helped me get this internship rather than hurt my chances because some companies either don’t have the technology or were unwilling to communicate online or via phone with me.”

 

MARKETING

 

Emily Witkowski

Title:  Textbook Promotions Intern
Department: Marketing
College Major: Majoring in English with a minor in Interactive Multimedia
Year: Senior

1.)    What does your list of duties for the Princeton University Press include?
My job is focused on finding comparable textbooks to the ones we publish and pulling up reports on what universities and professors are using them for what courses so that I can find the professor’s contact information to inform them of the texts we publish. In addition to this, I pull reports on books that we publish to see how they are doing and I help prepare the launch of text books with mail outs and other details.

2.)    Are there any special qualifications, skills, or training that you have brought with you to the internship?
There is a lot of research involved in this position, navigating through university websites and textbook distributers like Amazon. So I think research skills were important to have coming into the position, as well as some knowledge of Excel.

3.)    What aspect(s) do you enjoy most about your internship with the Princeton University Press?
I love how interns are not only allowed, but encouraged to attend various meetings at the press. As an intern, you’re really focused on your department and what you need to do for your specific jobs, but the meetings provide a wider scope of what exactly this organization does.

4.)    In what ways do you think this internship will help you in future job endeavors?
I think there are skills and practices that I have learned here that will translate well to other positions, and I also think there is an impressiveness to working at  Princeton University Press that other employers will see.

5.)    What job skill(s) learned at the Press do you feel are most vital to your overall career success?
For me, though I feel I have learned some skills here, it is more about the knowledge that I have gained. I have learned a lot more about the different facets of publishing, as well as how universities work. In my employment future, I want to stay in academia, working with universities and schools in general. This specific position affords you the opportunity to read up on all different types of programs at different schools and helps you understand why they do the things they do, why we read the books we read.

6.)    Would you recommend this internship to others?
I would definitely recommend this internship to others. I think it is an amazing opportunity and something very interesting to a variety of different people.

7.)    Is there any advice you can give to those applying for internships, looking for jobs in your field, or ways to maximize one’s chance of getting an internship with the Princeton University Press?
Don’t be afraid to offer some personal information. What seemed to clinch the position for me here was my involvement in things that did not necessarily have to do with employment or English or publishing. Talk about organizations and clubs you are in even if they don’t seem relevant, and don’t downplay any of your responsibilities or accomplishments. The Press wants well-rounded, interesting employees and interns, so show that about yourself.

Closing Remarks:

“I think people often think a job associated with a top university or a prestigious organization seems unattainable. I would be lying if I said I didn’t feel the same way when I applied. But places like PUP need applications and interest too. I think what has surprised me here in talking to people is hearing about the openings they have and how they want more applicants, so never hesitate! Sending in the application was one of the best decisions I could have made for my college experience.”

 

PUBLICITY

 

Holly Jennings (Rider University)

Title:  Social Media Intern
Department: Publicity
College Major: Majoring in Public Relations
Year: Junior

1.)    What does your list of duties for the Princeton University Press include?
Scans print media into the shared drive for easy retrieval in the future, attends departmental meetings to get an overall view of the function of the publicity department, conducts research related to various books for marketing purposes, researches online blogs for specific topics to obtain information for marketing and publicity, and initiates and monitors blogs on various topics related to specific books, updates mailing lists in the database to ensure they are current and accurate, sets up Facebook pages for each trade title, adds events to the Princeton University Press Facebook site and individual book sites, posts articles and creates features on the blog, completes all other duties as assigned or requested for the general support of the organization.

2.)    Are there any special qualifications, skills, or training that you have brought with you to the internship?
I have been doing web design and HTML since I was fairly young – I’ve been self-taught since about 6th grade. My best friend and I used to build HTML/CSS layouts for Xanga, which is an online journal community. Having the skill set to build websites and become familiar with different types of coding is vital to the Social Media Intern position because this is a position heavily based around creativity and putting your own unique touch on things.

3.)    What aspect(s) do you enjoy most about your internship with the Princeton University Press?
The aspects I enjoy most about my internship is the freedom to make what you do your own projects. In my department, I’m given a lot of freedom to show off my creativity. I’m allowed to create my own projects and am autonomous in making a lot of decisions.

4.)    In what ways do you think this internship will help you in future job endeavors?
Building off of the previous question, I think being responsible for my own projects has taught me a lot about responsibility and self initiation. It’s easy to mess around when you have little guidelines on exactly how your work should be done. In a Social Media Intern position, you’re your own boss, in a sense – it is real sense of accomplishment knowing that your work comes from your own successes.

5.)    What job skill(s) learned at the Press do you feel are most vital to your overall career success?
The job skills I’ve learned at the Press that I feel are most vital to my overall career success would definitely be the social media postings. I’ve become very savvy with what types of language you should use in Facebook and blog posts. When you learn how to communicate to your company’s specific key publics in a way that resonates with them, you obtain a priceless skill that is transferable to any type of business you may venture into.

6.)    Would you recommend this internship to others?
I would absolutely recommend this internship to others. The Princeton University Press is a very friendly environment and there are an unlimited number of projects that greatly benefit your resume for future employers.

7.)    Is there any advice you can give to those applying for internships, looking for jobs in your field, or ways to maximize one’s chance of getting an internship with the Princeton University Press?
If there is any advice I can give to those looking to be chosen for an internship at PUP, I would have to say that building your resume is paramount. Play up your strengths, and try to keep job descriptions to the point while highlighting the important duties and accomplishments that apply  to the department you are looking to work for. For me, I made it a point to play up my previous employment in retail on my resume. Although one might not think retail relates directly to social media, the interactions with customers and fellow coworkers have taught me a lot about communicating with others, whether it be in person or through the internet. Another strength on my resume is my GPA. I work hard to maintain a very high GPA, because although a GPA may not be everything to employers, it does help you appear to be a promising employee with a steadfast work ethic.

Closing Remarks:

“For anyone looking for a very respectable and enlightening internship experience, I highly recommend you fill out an application for the Princeton University Press. There are a number of departments that span across many types of college majors. I was really excited when I landed my first internship here as a Publicity Intern over the summer. When I was asked to come back for a second internship as a Social Media Intern, I was thrilled. Doors will open for you if you pursue an internship with PUP.”

 

To fill out an application for an internship position or for more information about internship opportunities with the Princeton University Press, please click below:

http://press.princeton.edu/jobs.html

 

Filed Under: Education, Employment Opportunities, Princeton, Princeton University Press, Technology, Technology & Media, Textbooks, Twitter, University Press, Writing

More on the (Overblown?) Trouble With Campaign Advertising from John McGinnis

October 25, 2012 by

From our Elections and Technology blogger John O. McGinnis, author of Accelerating Democracy: Transforming Governance Through Technology, a further response to the many objections that people have to our our current campaign finance system. In last week’s post he discussed the various informational benefits to widespread campaign advertising. But does permissive advertising empower special interests? What about the potential for a lack of disclosure of expenditures? Read his follow-up here:

In my last post, I argued that spending substantial money for campaign advertisements is necessary to inform inattentive voters and that these advertisements can improve as the information about the results of policies improves through  the new technology described in my forthcoming book.

Opponents of freewheeling campaign advertisements by politicians and their supporters have raised three thoughtful concerns about the expenditures needed to support such a flood of communications.  First, many have worried about the lack of disclosure of such contributions and expenditures.  They are right to do so.  All campaign contributions and expenditures should be posted immediately and transparently on the internet so that the public can see who is supporting whom.   With new mechanisms of aggregating information, opponents can highlight the connections between contributions to a candidate by special interests and the special interest programs that he supports. Intriguingly, as I discuss in my book, there is some suggestion that special interest spending on campaigns is less effective than other spending. Better disclosure should make it still less influential.

But one still might be worried that a permissive advertising regime will empower special interests, because they will be the most capable of supporting politicians.  Of course, special interests cannot be defined as any interest with which one disagrees.  Special interests are best understood as groups that can use special mechanisms provided by the government to aggregate money for their narrow goals.  Labor unions and for-profit corporations are examples. The corporate and union form permits these organizations to use people’s funds without their express agreement for political purposes.

Nevertheless, the concern expressed by President Obama and others about for-profit corporation spending is overblown. Corporations are forbidden from giving to candidates directly and despite the recent Supreme Court decision permitting independent expenditures by corporations, for-profit companies do not spend much money for independent expenditures on and behalf of candidates. Presumably, they do not want to alienate possible customers and employees.

The vast majority of corporate spending on campaigns is by non-profits. Non-profit corporations- so-call SuperPACs– generally represent like-minded individuals banding together to expressly pursue some social vision though political speech.  They are not presumptively special interests any more than are politicians themselves.  Like advertisements by politicians, advertisements directed by groups of citizens can provide valuable information about candidates and the policies they support. They have the additional advantage that they sometimes inject information into the campaign that neither candidate would provide.

One way of weakening the influence of special interests is to empower individuals to give more than they are now permitted to do so under our campaign finance laws. If individuals could give more, special interest spending would become a smaller percentage of campaign spending. The current $2, 500 ceiling for contributions to candidates in federal elections could be increased by four or even eightfold without any serious danger of corruption so long as contributions are disclosed.

But one might be concerned that the citizens who contribute to candidates and SuperPACs are richer on average than other citizens, thus skewing politics toward the wealthy. This is the most serious concern about permitting private money to finance politics. But we must compare its consequences with the alternatives.  The wealthy have a wide variety of views. In the last election people with incomes over $250,00  a year favored Obama, not McCain, although the former promised to  raise their taxes. This diversity of views flows from the nature of a market economy. New businesses are always arising and with them people who have different backgrounds, material interests and social visions.  Silicon Valley has a fundamentally different culture from Detroit.

Moreover, if one constrains donations by the wealthy to rent the media to propagate their views, insiders who own or who have otherwise more access to the media will then gain disproportionate influence.  Journalists, entertainers, and academics lean much more strongly to one side of the political spectrum than do the wealthy.  And since their work is less variegated than that in the business sector, we are also likely to get less varied perspectives as a result.  In Britain with limitations on campaign expenditures, politicians spend a lot of time currying favor with press barons, like Rupert Murdoch.

The best way to address concern about inequality is to give a tax credit to people of more modest incomes to encourage their contributions to parties or candidates. That program is likely to expand the amount of information in the campaign season rather than contract it, as would restrictions on independent expenditures or more severe limitations on contributions or expenditures. Such tax credits would be a cost to society, but as we gain more and more probative information about policy through putting politics in the domain of computation, it is rational to spend more money to help that information reach voters.  Because the decisions government makes affects us all,  money to help voters make wiser decisions is money well spent.

John O. McGinnis is the George C. Dix Professor of Constitutional Law at Northwestern University.

Filed Under: Election 101, Election 101 - Campaigns, Political Science, Technology & Media, Twitter

Are Campaign Ads Worth the Money?

October 18, 2012 by

Candidates spend daunting amounts of money getting out their message, with tens of millions invested in campaign advertisements alone. This year, even the Olympics were peppered with political ads, amid questions of whether all this advertising is ethical or even effective. While it’s standard to hear criticism of the money spent on extravagant promotions, John McGinnis, author of Accelerating Democracy, has some thoughts on the important informational benefits to our current campaign finance system. Read his post here:

 

Are Campaign Ads Worth the Money?

John McGinnis

 

It’s the campaign season and with it come the perennial complaints that there is too much money spent on politics, particularly on campaign advertisements. I am skeptical about this claim. Just as democracy is said to be the worst system except all the others, so a structure where candidates and groups can spend large sums to make their positions and that of their opponents known is the worse system of campaigning except for all the others.  In particular, it represents the only system we have for getting information about which candidates support which policies to the many voters who do not focus on politics except at election time and even then are hard to reach.

My book argues that democracy should take advantage of the computational revolution to improve information about policy results. Thus, a system of governance that promotes empirical testing of policies, prediction markets, and dispersed media on the internet, like blogs, can all help us better understand the likely consequences of policy and improve political choices. But to make the most difference, this information must get to voters at the election time.  But many voters are inattentive, particularly in a world that offers far more interesting distractions than politics. It is fact that very little money is spent on political advertising compared to advertising for material goods or for entertainment. Political advertisements must be numerous enough to break through a cacophony of nonpolitical information and that volume requires substantial funds to sustain.

Campaigns  and their advertising outreach are still the best way of reaching voters who mostly disregard politics.  Politicians and their supporters have incentives to inform them about the relevant policies and their consequences. To be sure, they will do so in a biased manner, but their opponents have incentives to correct them and they frequently do, running advertisements that show newspaper articles that debunk false claims. Sadly, the alternative to campaign advertisements is not a policy seminar but a beer commercial.

In my book I discuss the evidence that political advertisements make people better informed about candidates’ positions on policy.  Better information about policy consequences will not have much effect on voters if it cannot be connected to candidates’ positions on policies.  Political advertisements also directly address policy consequences, such as the state of the economy and its relation to policy. To be sure, they do so in a very rudimentary way, but these messages can be improved as the knowledge about likely the consequences of policies improve.    If empiricism and prediction markets can better evaluate policy results, political advertisements will focus on them more.  A President will be eager to tout that a market’s prediction that his election will lead to more economic growth than his opponent. A mayor will want to make it known that his school program has improved educational outcomes, according to the best empirical studies.   But campaign spending will still be necessary to convey this information by cutting through the clutter of nonpolitical information.

In my next post, I will address three possible downsides of permitting ample private money to pay for political advertisements—lack of disclosure, spending by special interests, and the excessive influence of the wealthy.

 

John O. McGinnis is the George C. Dix Professor of Constitutional Law at Northwestern University.

 

Filed Under: Election 101, Election 101 - Campaigns, Political Science, Technology & Media, Twitter

McDaniel College is reading Delete

July 5, 2012 by

Well, at least, the class of 2016 is. We were incredibly pleased to learn that the suggested freshmen reading for the incoming class at McDaniel College is Viktor Mayer-Schönberger’s rumination on the role of memory and forgetting in technology, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age.

As the Class of 2016 blog post announcing this reading program notes:

“Digital memory is never truly forgotten. Unlike faulty human memories that tend to lose the mundane in preference for the rare spectacular event, social networks keep a perpetual record of the everyday. A digital photo of your most unfortunate hairstyle, once posted to Facebook, Google, Twitter, or Tumblr can essentially live forever, replicating itself perfectly in their server farms long after you have forgotten.”

The plan is to read the book and take up these themes throughout the year in various activities. To kick things off, the students have assembled two video trailers:

Nice work!

Filed Under: Technology & Media, Twitter

Reinventing Discovery reviews abound

June 25, 2012 by

A video book review of Michael Nielsen’s Reinventing Discovery:

And if you’re more into print, here’s a review in Australia’s Inside Story magazine.

If those pique your interest, try reading this free chapter from Reinventing Discovery.

Filed Under: Technology, Technology & Media, Twitter

Einstein Online

March 20, 2012 by

Jerusalem’s Hebrew University announced yesterday that it will be launching a new public website in conjunction with the efforts of the Einstein Papers Project at the California Institute of Technology to make the entirety of Einstein’s writings available online.  The CNN blog Light Years provides additional details.  Princeton University Press and the Einstein Papers Project have so far published twelve volumes of Einstein’s writing and this new public website will unite the efforts.

Very exciting stuff for relativity fans.  Check out the Einstein Archives Online and the 2,000 documents currently offered to the public.  There should be close to 30,000 available this time next year!

Can’t get enough Einstein?  Check out more highlights in Einstein Before Israel and The Ultimate Quotable Einstein available now.

 

 

 

Filed Under: Princeton University Press, Technology & Media, Twitter Tagged With: , ,
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