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.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

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.

The new book Guaranteed to Fail, by Viral V. Acharya, Matthew Richardson, Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, and Lawrence J. White, explains how poorly designed government guarantees for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac led to the debacle of mortgage finance in the United States, weighs different reform proposals, and provides sensible, practical recommendations. Despite repeated calls for tougher action, Washington has expanded the scope of its guarantees to Fannie and Freddie, fueling more and more housing and mortgages all across the economy–and putting all of us at risk. This book unravels the dizzyingly immense, highly interconnected businesses of Fannie and Freddie. It proposes a unique model of reform that emphasizes public-private partnership, one that can serve as a blueprint for better organizing and managing government-sponsored enterprises like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In doing so, Guaranteed to Fail strikes a cautionary note about excessive government intervention in markets.

Listen to Viral Acharya’s interview with TheStreet: “Fannie & Freddie’s Future, Small Cap Growth Stocks, ‘Startup Success’.”

Plus, you can read Chapter 1, here.

Tune in to Between the Covers to hear John Miller interview Garry Wills on his new book Augustine’s Confessions: A Biography.

“[Augustine] doesn’t really talk about the things you expect in an autobiography. He doesn’t talk about his sister, his brother. He talks about his mother just briefly, when she dies…He was the court orator for the emperor in Milan. Never mentions his activities there, except to say ‘I was paid to tell lies’…He’s not interested in all that. He’s interested in internal spiritual growth and struggles,” says Wills in this fascinating interview.

Listen to more here and then go pick up this week’s New Statesman to read a terrific excerpt from the book.

Congratulations to Ben Wildavsky, winner of the 2010 Philip E. Frandson Award for Literature in the Field of Continuing Higher Education, by the University Professional and Continuing Education Association, for his book The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities are Reshaping the World.

In The Great Brain Race, Wildavsky presents the first popular account of how international competition for the brightest minds is transforming the world of higher education–and why this revolution should be welcomed, not feared. Ben Wildavsky is a senior fellow in research and policy at the Kauffman Foundation. Previously, he was education editor of U.S. News & World Report, economic policy correspondent for the National Journal, higher education reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, and executive editor of the Public Interest. He has written for the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, among other publications.

According to the UPCEA: “The award recognizes excellence in achievement for literature written about the theory or practice of continuing higher education.” Ben Wildavsky was presented with the award at the UPCEA annual meeting at the end of March 2011.

Read Chapter 1 from The Great Brain Race here.

To see other award winning PUP books, click here.

To help celebrate this year’s National Poetry Month in the United States, this week’s book giveaway is The Eternal City: Poems by Kathleen Graber.

A 2010 National Book Award Finalist, The Eternal City offers eloquent testimony to the struggle to make sense of the present through conversation with the past. Questioning what it means to possess and to be possessed by objects and technologies, Kathleen Graber’s collection brings together the elevated and the quotidian to make neighbors of Marcus Aurelius, Klaus Kinski, Walter Benjamin, and Johnny Depp.

Chosen by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon to relaunch the prestigious Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets under his editorship, The Eternal City revives Princeton’s tradition of publishing some of today’s best poetry.

“[N]othing short of a revelation. Graber is a new poet that we should have always had but didn’t until just now. Graber is the kind of poet who thinks out loud, though not in the tricky, needley way of John Ashbery, but like someone very smart and very well-read trying to get to the bottom of every troubling and exciting thought. She thinks about her day to day life, family and friends, their every day goings on, their deaths and big tragedies, and she thinks about big ideas–life, death, meaning–mostly in the same poem. She name-checks some of the big figures of Western thought–Marcus Aurelius and Walter Benjamin, for instance–but does so as if she were talking to or about friends. She manages to do a scholar’s work in these poems without the alienating haughtiness of many scholars. And despite their learned-ness, these are poems anyone could love. . . . If you only read one book of poetry this year, that’s not enough, but start with this one.”–Craig Teicher, Publishers Weekly

Here’s an Authors on Camera feature with Kathleen Graber reading from her book:

Can’t get enough? Then view this interview with the author at Virginia Commonwealth University and/or check out the book’s Facebook page.

To be a part of our weekly book giveaways, LIKE US on Facebook. Once you’ve LIKED US, you are automatically entered for our weekly random draw.

The Eternal City: Poems by Kathleen Graber.

Don’t miss your chance to see Patricia Churchland, author of Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us About Morality, on April 24, 2011 at the California Institute of Technology, Caltech Campus, hosted by The Skeptic Society. Patricia Churchland is professor emerita of philosophy at the University of California, San Diego, and an adjunct professor at the Salk Institute. Her books include Brain-Wise and Neurophilosophy. In 1991, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.

“The book is about: morality, fairness and the source of both. But don’t expect tight definitions of either term, let alone a didactic treatise on human evolution. Instead, sit back and let Churchland run her ideas past you. She’s so chatty you’ll never guess the University of California, San Diego, philosopher is associated with a school of thought called eliminative materialism. (Don’t ask. Even a philosopher friend was fuzzy on the details.) She’s just plain interesting.” -Leigh Dayton, Australian

Date: Sunday, April 24, 2011.

Time: 2:00 p.m.

Location: Baxter Lecture Hall, Caltech Campus, Pasadena, CA.

More Info: Here.

Tickets: First come, first served at the door. Seating is limited. $8 for Skeptics Society members and the JPL/Caltech community, $10 for nonmembers.

Be sure to check out Braintrust’s official PUP Facebook Page for upcoming events and book news!

In a special post in the Miami Herald, titled “Danticat Documents Truths About Haiti for the World to See,” Lydia Martin reports:

Music blares on a hectic Friday afternoon at Buena Vista Bistro, Edwidge Danticat’s favorite lunch spot, just a quick stroll from her house on the edge of Little Haiti. Patrons bellow in that wound-up, weekend’s-here way, and stressed-out servers do a valiant job of avoiding eye contact.

You’ve been sitting here 20 minutes, and no one has brought even water. But Danticat, who spent the morning wrestling with a deadline for one more op-ed piece about Haiti and will have to run soon to pick up Mira and Leila, her young daughters, is unperturbed.

‘After the earthquake, we went a year without deportations,’ she says, explaining in her unhurried, even way the topic of the piece she just finished for The New York Times as the low pitch of her voice pulls you in and mutes the clanking and clamoring around you.

Read on…

If you haven’t read it already, be sure to have a look at William Byers’ post on Powell’s Book blog. Here’s a sneak peak:

When the financial crisis hit a couple of years back, we mostly blamed it on the greed of bankers and the lack of safeguards in the world’s financial system. No doubt these were and remain significant problems. However, what many people failed to notice, but which various astute observers pointed out, is that the crisis grew out of a culture that was rampant in financial circles at the time. You could call this the revenge of the nerds, the nerds being those “quants,” people with doctorates in math and physics who have taken up residence on Wall Street in recent times. They bring with them a culture of quantification and precision that they carry over from the mathematical and physical sciences and which they then apply to economic and financial situations. The complex mathematical models that they use may be brilliant, but the better they are the greater their potential is to misrepresent the actual human situation that they are looking at. Because they give people like CEOs and politicians the idea that everything is understood and under control, these models often have the perverse effect of making the problem worse — taking us from a problem that is a local blip to one that is a global catastrophe.

Read on…

A very warm congratulations to John Milnor for his recent winning of the Abel Prize for 2011, presented by The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

According to the Abel Prize website: “The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters has decided to award the Abel Prize for 2011 to John Milnor, Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Stony Brook University, New York ‘for pioneering discoveries in topology, geometry and algebra.’ The President of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, announced the winner of this year’s Abel Prize at the Academy in Oslo today, 23 March.”

The Abel Prize recognizes contributions of extraordinary depth and influence to the mathematical sciences and has been awarded annually since 2003. It carries a cash award of NOK 6,000,000 (close to EUR 750,000 or USD 1 mill.)

Besides this award, John Willard Milnor was also the recent winner of the 2011 Leroy P. Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement by the American Mathematical Society. Princeton University Press has published several of John Milnor’s books since 1963 including: Morse Theory, Singular Points of Complex Hypersurfaces, Characteristic Classes, Prospects in Mathematics, Introduction to Algebraic K-Theory and Topology from the Differentiable Viewpoint.

Again, many congratulations to John Milnor for this exceptional achievement!

To see other recent awards by Princeton University Press authors, please click here.

Congratulations to Finbarr B. Flood for his book, Objects of Translation:Material Culture and Medieval “Hindu-Muslim” Encounter, winner of the 2011 Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize, Association for Asian Studies, South Asia Council. Finbarr B. Flood is associate professor in the Department of Art History and the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. He is the author of The Great Mosque of Damascus: Studies on the Making of an Umayyad Visual Culture. Objects of Translation has been praised as “[A] brilliant, far-ranging study [...] This book is essential reading for anyone who seeks to understand the medieval ‘Hindu-Muslim’ encounter.” –John E. Cort, Religious Studies Review

The prize is awarded to the best English-language work in South Asian studies, with a preference for “broad scholarly works with innovative approaches that promise to define or redefine understanding of whole subject areas.”

According to the Selection Committee Citation: “Finbarr Flood’s Objects of Translation is a magisterial study of material culture and community identity in South Asia from the eighth to the early thirteenth century. …Objects of Translation is a timely contribution to medieval Indian historical studies, a major addition to translation theory and historical-cultural studies, and a field-changing work of art history. It is a landmark.”

Read the Introduction to Objects of Translation here.

To see other recent awards by PUP authors, please click here.

Fact: There are now more than 200 million migrants in the world, making up almost 3 percent of the world’s population.

Exceptional People:
How Migration Shaped Our World and Will Define Our Future
by Ian Goldin, Geoffrey Cameron & Meera Balarajan

Throughout history, migrants have fueled the engine of human progress. Their movement has sparked innovation, spread ideas, relieved poverty, and laid the foundations for a global economy. In a world more interconnected than ever before, the number of people with the means and motivation to migrate will only increase. Exceptional People looks at the profound advantages that such dynamics will have for countries and migrants the world over. Challenging the received wisdom that a dramatic growth in migration is undesirable, the book proposes new approaches for governance that will embrace this international mobility.

A guide to vigorous debate and action, Exceptional People charts the past and present of international migration and makes practical recommendations that will allow everyone to benefit from its unstoppable future growth.

Ian Goldin is director of the Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford, and professorial fellow at Balliol College, Oxford. He has served as vice president of the World Bank and advisor to President Nelson Mandela. His many books include Globalization for Development. Geoffrey Cameron is a research associate at the Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford. He currently works as a senior policy advisor with Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada. Meera Balarajan holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge and works for a research organization in the United Kingdom. She has also worked for the United Nations, a UK government department, and a grassroots NGO in India.

We invite you to read the introduction online at: http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i9301.pdf

David Runciman, in delivering the first annual Princeton University Press in Europe lecture in London on Wednesday night (http://www.goodenough.ac.uk/fileadmin/docs/Alumni/PUP_lecture.pdf), posed an extraordinarily timely question with the title of his lecture “Can Democracy Cope?”. The lecture was an intellectual tour de force, with Runciman distinguishing two prominent schools of thought on democracy, the “confidence trick” view that democracy is essentially a sham, and the “confidence trap” view that democracy is actually too successful and therefore becomes complacent. In Runciman’s memorable paradox, the “trick” is that democracy is too good to be true, while the “trap” is that democracy is too true to be good.

Runciman explored the “trap” view in detail, arguing that this view originates in Tocqueville’s highly prophetic view of democracy, as destiny but also as complacency. In this melancholy view, it will be difficult for democracies to escape the confidence trap.

David will explore this theme in more detail in his forthcoming PUP book, The Confidence Trap (2012).

If you missed the lecture, there is a terrific overview of the arguments in David Runciman’s interview on BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week programme, a review on the Enlightenment Economics blog, and an article “In Praise of David Runciman” in the Guardian.

David is Reader in Political Thought at the University of Cambridge and the author of two PUP books, Political Hypocrisy and The Politics of Good Intentions.

The Princeton University Press in Europe lecture series provides an international platform for discussion of ideas that enrich scholarly communities and inform public discussion of important issues. Future speakers include economist Paul Seabright of the University of Toulouse (2012), biologist Sunetra Gupta (2013) and religious historian Diarmaid MacCulloch (2014).

The Princeton University Press in Europe lecture marked the inauguration of the Press’ European Advisory Board, a distinguished group of scholars, journalists and writers who will work with us to publish the most exciting and intellectually ambitious work possible (see the PUP European Advisory Board PDF for a list of our collaborators).