Princeton University - Council of Science & Technology

POPE PRIZE

Essays 1 & 2
The Buzz on James Gould
Mission to Mars
Natalie R. Ram

Essays 3 & 4
Powering Princeton
Academics as Outlaws?
David Robinson

Essay 5
How Does Your Garden Grow?
Alexis Schulman

Essays 6, 7 & 8
Killing Cancer at its Root
Backpacking with Lee Silver
Avocado
Lauren C. Turner

Essay 9
Not with a Bang, but a Whimper
Joshua D. Younger

Powering Princeton

In 1994, Ted Borer came to campus, charged with turning a blueprint into reality. Now, an ultra-efficient generator is running 'round the clock — Powering Princeton David Robinson Princetonian Staff Writer Princeton is famous for scientific innovation, but few people know that the University runs one of the most efficient power plants in America. The plant, an unassuming structure just south of the MacMillan building on Elm Drive, was built just to power campus. It is a marvel of energy efficiency, providing both electricity and heat to every dorm and classroom at Princeton. And for Ted Borer, the University's Manager of Mechanical Systems, it is a passion. When Borer arrived on campus in the summer of 1994, the plant existed only on paper. Two years later, a finished plant was producing its first electricity. By the middle of 1997, it was steadily online, continually producing power for the campus. Along the way, Borer managed construction of the plant, made sure that a staff was prepared to operate it, and above all saw to it that the plant would meet Princeton's needs. He had to juggle the competing demands of the engineering firm that had been hired to construct the plant, the University workers who needed to be able to maintain it once it was built and the architects who had designed it in the first place. His concerns ranged from the plumbing that would support the plant's main engine — a powerful turbine originally designed for lifting airplanes — to the locks on the doors. At the end of the day, it was his job to make sure that the University had a functioning power plant. At the same time, he had to worry about inking contracts with local utilities to assure that the University could buy extra power if the new plant was not enough, and getting all the permits needed to run the plant. "It was really good, really exciting, really challenging," he explained in an interview Monday. His office walls are covered with engine diagrams and maps showing the location of steam pipes. Graphs of campus power use crowd his desk. During the construction phase he was kept constantly busy. "I really didn't have a lot of free time," he said. But the intense effort was a labor of love. "I started out building train sets and tree houses," he said, noting that he has always enjoyed figuring out how things work. "It's a dream for someone who does project management to take on something like that," he said. Like a turbine on a jet plane, the one at the core of a typical power plant has a series of fans linked together in an airtight chamber. Each successive fan drives the air through more rapidly than the last. After air shoots through the fans, it is mixed with natural gas and ignited. It expands, turning the turbine and generating electricity. This process generates usable electricity, but it is inefficient. Less than half the energy involved actually ends up turning the turbine — the rest is released as heat. This heat is usually radiated into the air or into the water of a nearby river, without being put to use. Princeton's plant, though, is different. The hot gas pushed out of the turbine as it spins is allowed to flow by a network of pipes that contain water, turning the water into steam. The steam is then sent through a vast network of underground pipes, warming buildings all over campus. This makes Princeton's facility a "cogeneration" plant — it generates both electricity and useful heat at the same time. Most power plants — ones that cannot use their leftover heat — are only 25 percent efficient, but the University plant, heating buildings as it powers the campus, is fully 75 percent efficient. The plant works like a mechanical heart to warm the campus. One set of pipes, like arteries, takes pressurized steam out to every corner of campus. Once the steam has been allowed to flow through a building, spreading its heat and condensing back into water, a parallel set of pipes — like a system of veins —carries water back to the power plant. The plant runs 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. At peak power use times — the middle of the day, particularly in the summer – the campus plant cannot meet demand, so the University buys power from a local power company. Our local plant is "synchronized" with the electricity grid, allowing us to draw extra power without interrupting the flow of electricity to campus. Why did the University bother to build its own plant, instead of just buying electricity like everyone else? "The motivation is economic. Unabashedly, it is about saving money," Borer explained. "We can make electricity cheaper than we can buy it." Though the University pays all the plant's costs, it still manages to save money relative to the cost of buying electricity. Now that the plant is built, Borer works on making the University's power use more efficient. This summer, he introduced motion sensors that keep vending machines from running when no one is around, a measure he said will save up to $20,000 a year. "Over the life of the plant, we're projecting saving three to five million dollars a year," Borer said. The plant will probably last around thirty years, he noted. Borer's commitment to energy efficiency extends beyond his job. On his wall, along with the technical schematics, is a copy of newspaper story about his unusually efficient commute. Every day, he travels eight miles from his home to work on a bicycle. He explained that cost savings go hand in hand with environmental benefit. "This is the thing I feel really good about – we're making a huge reduction in environmental impact while saving the trustees a lot of money" by running an efficient plant, he said.

Academics as Outlaws?

When Alex Halderman’s latest research got him threatened with a federal lawsuit, he handled it better than an average 22-year-old. His opinion, offered calmly to the stream of reporters who called and emailed, was simple: "I don’t think there’s any case." College students shouldn’t have to worry about ending up in court just for doing their homework, but Alex has had to worry, twice. At the root of his problem is a controversial law designed to fight illegal copying of music and movies on the Internet Alex is an unlikely villain. Lanky, blond, preppy and cheerful, he glided through four years at Princeton to graduate Phi Beta Kappa last June with highest honors in computer science. His hobbies are photography, a girlfriend and high-end stereos. His academic work – still at Princeton, where he’s staying for a PhD – focuses on security: making and breaking the systems that try to control what you can do with your computer. It’s a topic of keen interest for the media companies who see free online "sharing" of movies and music as a mortal threat. They’re desperate for new technologies that can put computer users in digital lockdown, ending the piracy binge. With a fire under their seat and a new federal law at their disposal, they’ve made life difficult for the researchers who specialize in finding ways to pick the locks. That’s what Alex learned two years ago. He cracked the earliest round of CD copy protection as his junior research project, and got a rude awakening from his professor. "I start to tell him what I’ve found, and his grin is getting wider and wider," Alex recalls. "It’s not a happy grin, it’s a mischievous grin. When I’m done he tells me, ‘congratulations, you might have committed a felony.’" Before he could tell the world about his findings, Alex had to get acquainted with Princeton’s general council, wait for the computer science department to spend thousands of dollars on an outside legal opinion, and persuade a university committee that the school should pick up the tab if anyone sued him over the research. He debated what to do, and cut some of the most revealing content out of his paper. After a five month delay it was finally published – and if the major record labels weren’t happy to see their encryption scheme demolished in public, they kept it to themselves. Without anyone filing a lawsuit, or even threatening to, an academic paper that was inconvenient to the music industry’s corporate interests had nearly been squelched. On Monday October 6, when he put his latest research on the web, he knew he was asking for another round of trouble. His paper detailed how the most recent attempt at high-tech copy protection on music CDs, introduced on a BMG record just weeks earlier, could be defeated with a single keystroke. The new disk contained a virtual fortress of carefully crafted code, known as MediaMax, that allowed users to share brief snippets of songs but prevented them from "ripping" a whole song or copying the disk. Alex tested this new system by trying to copy the disk with a range of different computers. At first he couldn’t figure out how the new system was operating – it seemed to prevent copying on some of the machines, but not others. "I was scratching my head for a couple of days," he says. "Then it hit me. There was this eureka moment when it flashed at me that what was different about all those systems that worked and all those ones that didn’t was that all the ones that could copy the disk had autorun turned off." Autorun, it turns out, is the Windows feature that tells the system to automatically launch a CD’s software when the disk is inserted. If you hold down the shift key while inserting the disk, Alex found, Windows doesn’t load the protective code – and you’re free to make as many copies as you like. The technology was developed by SunnComm, a tiny company that started out booking Elvis impersonators and then reinvented itself a few years ago as a software supplier for music companies. The firm is publicly traded on the "pink sheet" stock exchange – a financial backwater where shares trade for pennies and disclosure requirements are nearly nonexistent. Alex’s paper was quite a disclosure of its own, and it spurred investors into a frantic selling spree that cut SunnComm’s market value by a third, a $10 million drop in two days. This might have been an opportune time for the company to grin sheepishly, mumble an apology, and go back to the drawing board to write some better software. Or a new corporate motto, to replace the endearingly modest "light-years beyond encryption." But the company’s response was far from apologetic. On Thursday morning the CEO announced that they were suing Alex, and possibly Princeton, for millions of dollars in damages. By lunch time, "Princeton student sued" was all over the headlines. Making illegal copies is one thing, but you might wonder how there could be any legal problem to pointing out flaws in a consumer product. False and damaging claims are libel, but this was different – Alex was right. Investment analysts, computer nerds and music lovers around the country all confirmed that holding down the shift key stopped the new protection system dead in its tracks. Until a few years ago, the fact that he was telling the truth would have gotten Alex off the hook. But thanks to a 1998 law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it’s a federal crime to "circumvent" any technology designed to limit your access to copyrighted content – music, movies, books or whatever else you might want to store on your computer. Anyone, including an academic, who tells people how to get around a digital copy control has committed a crime under the DMCA. The law has an exemption for research, and it’s unlikely that Alex would have lost in court. As it happened, SunnComm’s announcement provoked thousands of angry emails and calls, leading the company to back off just 12 hours after it announced plans to sue. The case didn’t go to court, so nobody can be sure exactly how it would have turned out. And that, Halderman says, is just the point. "It’s much worse than anything that came before it. Even without anyone filing suit, there’s a huge chilling effect on research. We try to find the flaws in security systems so we can make better ones – as long as this threat is hanging over us, the job is much harder."