Notebook: March 5, 1997
Feds Slash Budget for Plasma Research
The Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) will continue to do scientific research and build smaller fusion machines, but the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR) will begin shutting down in March due to cutbacks in federal funding. The laboratory is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and staffed by university scientists. Its mission is to harness fusion power, the nuclear energy that fuels the sun and the stars. Work has concentrated on building a reactor that produces more energy than it consumes, and studying how superheated atoms, called plasmas, flow and interact.
The lab signed an administrative contract with the Department of Energy in October to continue operations through 2001. Under the new contract, PPPL will concentrate on analyzing data from the facility's doughnut-shaped tokamak reactor, studying, for example, how to make plasmas flow efficiently without turbulence. Additionally, PPPL will continue collaboration with scientists worldwide, and build smaller, more economical plasma machines, according to spokesman Anthony DeMeo.
PPPL will begin constructing the National Spherical Torus Experiment this year. The device will cost about $20 million to build and will use parts of the shut-down TFTR. Additionally, the lab will develop a proposal for funding the Feedback Stabilization Experiment to test techniques for detecting and correcting instability in plasma. If approved, operations may begin in late 1998.
Current funding for the lab is about $65 million. About 520 people work at the lab, but another round of layoffs may follow the complete shutdown of the TFTR next October, DeMeo said.
Funding for fusion research was fueled by the energy crisis in the 1970s, said DeMeo. But in recent years, the "perception of an energy crisis has dwindled." Eliminating the federal budget deficit has put research funds under severe pressure, resulting in cutbacks that have cost the lab almost 400 jobs since 1990.
"We've got to be realistic," DeMeo said of PPPL's future plans. "Funding is not going to be what it was. But we are proceeding positively so that when things change, we're going to hit the ground running."
Images of Princeton Past
Campus life in the 1960s included this scene in Holder Hall of an unidentified student. The photograph, taken by a London press agency, is one of more than 80,000 images of university life newly preserved in the University Archives as part of the Historical Photograph Project.
Photographs documenting a broad array of campus life from the earliest days of photography to the present have been rehoused in protective mylar sleeves and acid-free boxes, according to archivist Ben Primer. The Archives is also copying the images most frequently requested by researchers, says Primer, who hopes that an electronic catalogue of all the collection will be available by the end of this year.
The bulk of the photos were taken for publication in The Daily Princetonian or PAW, or by students recording their college days, says Primer. The collection includes daguerreotypes, tintypes, and glass-plate negatives. Images from the collection are prominent in several projects relating to the 250th anniversary, including the books Princeton University: The First 250 Years and Going Back: An Oral History of Princeton; the film Princeton, Images of a University; and the video Defining Moments in Prineton's First 250 Years.
Support for the project came from the 250th Executive Committee and the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections through its John Foster and Janet Avery Dulles Fund, and the New Jersey Department of Education.
History Major Wins Sachs Scholarship
History major Justin Pope '97 has been named this year's winner of the Daniel M. Sachs '60 Graduating Senior Fellowship. He will pursue a master's of literature in modern history at Worcester College, Oxford. The award provides tuition and support for two years of graduate study.
Pope is writing his senior thesis on millenarian groups in 17th-century England. The study matches his long interest in British history with an interest in religious history that ripened at Princeton. His family visited Oxford when he was in high school. "I have been hoping to get back ever since," he said.
Pope serves on the history department's undergraduate program committee. He appeared in Theatre Intime's February production of A Few Good Men. He served as sports editor of The Daily Princetonian for 1996. He has also contributed sports articles to PAW and written for the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
Making German "Interaktiv"
Your assignment: Go shopping for Käsekuchen, Eier, Bananen. No problem. That shopping list is one of the computer assignments for German 101, Beginner's German. And thanks to interactive software developed by Jamie Rankin, a senior lecturer in German who teaches the course, students will turn up in class with virtual cheesecake, eggs, and bananas.
Here's how it works. On computers in the Jones Hall Language Lab, students see a map of a German village indicating the location of various shops. A click takes students to a bakery, for example, in search of their cheesecake. At the Bäckerei Schmidt they are greeted by a video featuring Talia Block touting the freshness of Schmidt's Käsekuchen and warning them against the stale goods at "the other bakery." Should they nonetheless be tempted to investigate that other bakery-the Bäckerei Müller-a click will let them see and hear Geoffrey Atherton *91 as a Bäckerei Müller employee, warning them against the second-rate goods at Schmidt's. After deciding which bakery to patronize, students return to the center of town for another foray into the virtual marketplace in search of eggs and bananas.
Students can repeat any part of the experience again and again. Thanks to the Aussprache element in each lesson, says Melinda Hwang '99, "I only need to click on the computer screen to hear a word, sentence, or complete dialogue repeated as many times as I want." Observes Kimberly Allen '97, "The computer lessons allow students to move at their own speed, making sure they've mastered a pronunciation or translation." And it doesn't hurt that each assignment provides entertainment as well-what Len Teti '99 calls "Professor Rankin's own brand of comic wit."
Rankin has designed the program specifically to complement the class textbook, Wie geht's? (How's It Going?, by Sevin, Sevin, and Bean, 1995). Each computer assignment uses the vocabulary and grammatical structures of the chapter under study, allowing students, says Rankin, "to hear other speakers than their own preceptor," and providing them "visual information that increases their understanding of German culture. The computer assignments are an adjunct to, an enhancement of, what we do in class, where students are able to practice spoken German."
Traditional language learning, says Rankin, "relies on repetition and drills: 'Repeat this sentence.' And people do repeat, often without understanding the sentence at all. The way such drills are constructed, it is perfectly possible to complete an exercise 'successfully' without having understood a word."
He prefers "meaning-based learning." He explains, "If you listen to five people talk about a restaurant, and then have to figure out whether they liked it or not, you are listening for content, for information. You are using language as language is normally used-not just repeating sounds as an exercise."
Rankin set out to improve upon the audiocassettes previously used in German 101, judged "boring" and "unhelpful" by the instructor as well as by students. With no previous computer experience-"I used only wordprocessing and e-mail,"-Rankin applied to the Princeton Language Consortium, a campus resource that funds curriculum development in foreign languages. With the resultant award, he upgraded his office computer and purchased software to enable him to write programs.
"I thought, in my naiveté, you could just throw things together," he says. "The project turned out to be a lot more labor-intensive than I expected. I had to learn every step. I learned how to digitize pictures, video, and sounds." He discovered that "the technical expertise, the ability to maniplate a program to make everything work," was only the beginning. More important, he points out, was the concept: "What kind of activities are you going to use to teach the chapter? What materials do you need to make that activity work?"
A 1996 winner of one of the university's Distinguished Teaching Awards, Rankin says that his desire to "improve language teaching" derives from his own experience as a nascent German scholar. "I began German in college. I loved the language and did well in the first-year course. But when I visited Germany the following summer, I discovered I could neither speak nor understand. I realized that learning rules about a language is not the same thing as learning a language."
So began "an odyssey of sorts, looking into different ways of language acquisition." After earning a Ph.D. in Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard in 1985, Rankin taught at the State University of New York, Binghamton, and did postdoctoral study in second-language acquisition at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. At Princeton since 1991, Rankin also teaches intermediate German and a course for graduate student assistants in instruction on second-language acquisition and teaching methodology.
The computer assignments, along with Rankin's classes, have earned German 101 the ultimate undergraduate accolade: Declares one student, "Well worth getting up for at eight o'clock five days a week."
-Caroline Moseley