The University’s e-reader pilot program, which experimented with the use of the Kindle DX in three courses last semester, reduced the amount of paper students printed for their respective classes by nearly 50 percent, the University plans to announce today.

But in spite of the cost savings, some students and professors said they found the technology limiting.

The University awarded Porter Ogden Jacobus Fellowships to graduate students Vaneet Aggarwal, Melinda Baldwin, Charles Conroy and Joseph Moshenska on Saturday.

Google announced last Tuesday that it will award five Princeton professors combined grants of $500,000 for their promising research on Internet energy efficiency and privacy.

While many students scrounge and scramble for summer internships and jobs, this year’s eight Adel Mahmoud Global Health Scholars already have research grants lined up.

Mechanical and aerospace engineering professor Michael McAlpine and his team developed a new type of energy-generating device that can be powered by the human body. Their rubber films, made of silicone and a ceramic material known as lead zirconate titanate (PZT), capture mechanical energy from body movements and convert it to an electric current.

Over a four-day period last May, Carlos Roque ’10 trekked across campus from “Scully, to Bloomberg, then all the way to Holder,” collecting more than $15,000 worth of textbooks. Roque wasn’t hoping to start a library, but rather to make some cash.

Roque, a buyer for third-party vendor Belltower Books, made $1,000 last spring by purchasing students’ used textbooks with money provided by Belltower and then shipping them to the distributor.

It is common knowledge that most Internet file sharing is illegal, but Sauhard Sahi ’10 has proof. Analyzing a random sample of 1,021 files available on a variant of the file-sharing application BitTorrent, Sahi found that 85 to 99 percent of files were shared in violation of copyright law.

Princeton students fall victim to the “stereotype threat,” according to a study led by Adam Alter GS ’09. The “stereotype threat” is the phenomenon in which reminding people of negative stereotypes associated with their group identity can encourage the fulfillment of those stereotypes.

Unlike other universities’, Princeton’s architecture school is unaccredited. While many architecture programs concentrate on building regulations and construction, Princeton takes the unconventional approach of focusing on both liberal arts and architectural curricula.

A majority of college students use Wikipedia.org for course-related research, and students majoring in architecture, engineering and science are more likely to do so, according to a study published by Alison Head and Michael Eisenberg in the journal First Monday on March 1.

Psychology professor Bart Hoebel’s research group found that rats with access to high fructose corn syrup experienced a greater increase in body weight, body fat, and triglyceride levels than those with access to sucrose or table sugar.

The cuts come at a time when the total number of courses offered by the University has decreased over the last few semesters. The faculty members also discussed a memorial resolution on the death of politics professor Stanley Kelley Jr., changes to the graduate school’s curriculum and faculty nominations to various committees during the meeting.

“We were surprised at how high this number is,” Koofers CEO Glynn LoPresti said in a statement. “If textbooks go unused this frequently, that’s something students really deserve to know.”

In a ceremony last month held at Prospect House, Frassica and Marrone-Puglia were granted the title of “Knight of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic” by Italian consul Andrea Barbaria.

As a requirement for course completion, students in many courses must participate in four hours of experimental research for each of the first two courses they take in the psychology department. Through their participation, undergraduates form the human subject pool for graduate students and faculty researchers. Undergraduate psychology majors are not allowed to use the subject pool  for research because of size constraints.

For students like Adam Hesterberg ’11, the senior thesis — the culmination of four years of study at the University — will mark the beginning, rather than the end, of their academic careers.

The university will offer roughly the same number of courses next semester as it did last fall, Registrar Polly Griffin said. The University offered only 706 courses last semester, compared to the 738 courses offered this spring.

The first step in most students’ independent work is finding a faculty adviser in their department, but Jake Miller ’09 said he “kind of dropped the ball.”

Since he did not find an adviser on his own, the history department assigned him one: Dean of the College Nancy Malkiel. “I didn’t even know she was an adviser,” Miller said.  “It kind of surprised me.” Miller is a former sports editor for The Daily Princetonian.

Members of the economics department, consistently ranked among the top few in the world, agree that the leadup to the financial crisis, and the recession that followed, have revealed flaws in their field’s approach.

Some of economists’ core assumptions — that people act rationally and that market prices reveal true value — did not hold during this tumultuous era. But rather than disavow their techniques, which rely on the use of such assumptions to understand complicated issues, members of the department have maintained faith in their approach, albeit with a larger dose of caution.

Classes may be over, but some seniors are still heading to lecture. The Last Lectures series, organized by the Class of 2010 commencement committee, packs more than a dozen speeches from some of the University’s most distinguished professors and other well-known speakers into a three-week period.

“It had always been my stated objective that I did not want to retire as president; I wanted to retire as a faculty member,” Shapiro said in an interview at his only slightly smaller office in Wallace Hall, which he occupies as a Wilson School professor. “When I turned 65, I thought to myself, ‘You better get on with it.’ In my judgment, the University was in good shape at the time, so I thought it was the right moment to go back to teaching.”

A new federal law requires that colleges and universities post, “to the maximum extent practicable,” the ISBNs and retail price details of all textbooks on their online course schedule, so that students can have the information they need to shop around in advance. Alternatively, according to a June announcement from the Department of Education, schools can link course schedules to a site such as an affiliated bookstore.

Princeton is compliant with the law because lists are posted on Labyrinth’s website and linked to the Registrar’s site, University spokeswoman Emily Aronson said in an e-mail. But the textbook buying experience remains unchanged for students, who still have to go through Labyrinth to find ISBNs and prices for most textbooks.

Astrophyiscs professor Adam Burrows, director of the new program, explained that a number of students were interested in exploring the potential for life on other planets, a topic that is garnering increasing attention nationally, internationally and locally.

America requires a new approach to energy policy that also diversifies the country’s workforce, Jones argued in his first public address as a visiting fellow on Monday afternoon.

In his speech, titled “Beyond Green Jobs: The Next American Economy and The Politics of Hope,” Jones said that the United States should strike a balance between government regulation and business innovation in its energy plans, focusing on renewable energy such as wind and solar power.

The researchers discovered that people who lean to the left are more likely to support liberal beliefs — a physical manifestation of the familiar left-right political division that originated in the 1791 French Legislative Assembly, where liberals sat on the left and conservatives on the right.

West described paideia as “this cultivation of critique, this bearing witness to love and justice and ... questing for hope, though knowing that we will need help,” in a speech Tuesday before roughly 250 students in McCosh 10. The African American studies professor’s talk, “Cultivating Critique in the Age of Obama,” inaugurated the Signature Lecture Series organized by Wilson College.

Planets and life is one of three new certificates established this year, along with one in values and public life and one in jazz studies. Nassau Hall has overseen a dramatic increase in its certificate offerings over the last five years, introducing 11 of its current 45 programs during this period.

Nick DiBerardino ’11 and Mark Jia ’10 received Rhodes Scholarships to study at Oxford, and Mohit Agrawal ’11 was awarded a Mitchell Scholarships to study at the National University of Ireland, Galway.

John Nelson ’10 has been awarded a Marshall Scholarship, the scholarship program announced Tuesday morning.

Jeffrey Aristoff, a post-doctoral researcher, and professor Howard Stone have been researching the physics of jumping rope since last spring, looking specifically at air resistance. In their efforts so far, they have created both a mathematical model and a miniature mechanical jump rope. The researchers presented their initial findings at a physics convention in California in mid-November and are still working on the project.

For students locked out of popular courses, their enrollment prospects are determined at the discretion of individual professors — one of the few areas of academic life not regulated by official University policy.

 University students can take courses at Westminster Choir College (WCC) and at Princeton Theological Seminary (PTS), a Presbyterian institution unaffiliated with Princeton University, to supplement their regular University courses. But while both schools are open to Princeton students, the logistical hurdles and accreditation policies involved vastly differ.