Author: dabacon

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Spicy Pi Bacon Squared Wins!

Woot! Mrs. Pontiff’s entry into the Scienceblogs pie competition is the winner! Mrs. Pontiff is on a role. This year we decided not to buy each other gifts for Valentines day. So instead of buying a gift, Mrs. Pontiff entered a photo contest from a flower company and won me some beautiful flowers. We need to plan our trip to Las Vegas immediately.
Thanks to all who voted and to the dog for not jumping up and eating the pie off the table. And a special shout out to Bacon, is there anything it can’t do?

Lisa: I’m going to become a vegetarian
Homer: Does that mean you’re not going to eat any pork?
Lisa: Yes
Homer: Bacon?
Lisa: Yes, Dad.
Homer: Ham?
LIsa: Dad all those meats come from the same animal!
Homer: Right Lisa, some wonderful, magical animal!

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Discovery Channel Production Company Trademarks "Qubit"

Kamil sends along a pointer to www.playqubit.com. “Qubit,” according to the website is a new quiz show on the Discovery channel:

Qubit is a quiz show for the 21st century – fast-paced, cut-throat and fun!
Driven by stunning HD visuals, Qubit showcases science, technology and natural history. Not your ordinary quiz show, Qubit challenges convention by including the odd, unique and truly quirky aspects of the world of science.

Sounds like a fun show.
But “Qubit”? Really? I wonder if the PR firm that sold them on that name knew what the word meant and whether Ben Schumacher is offended or ecstatic? And I’m kicking myself for not, thinking of trademarking qubit myself (At the end of the about page: “Qubit is a trademark of Exploration Production Inc.”) Does this mean every talk I give I’m going to have to stick the little TM mark after qubit?

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Off to the March Meeting I Go

Tonight I hop on a red-eye to Pittsburgh to attend the APS March meeting. 7000 physicists in Pittsburgh, now that’s a scary thought for poor Pittsburgh (punishment for winning the superbowl, I guess.)
A list of highlighted papers includes some fun ones:

11:15AM, Tuesday Session B15: “Walking on water: why your feet get wet” Michael Shelley , Jake Fontana , Peter Palffy-Muhoray
1:15PM, Wednesday Session Q15: “Statistical laws for career longevity” Alexander Petersen , Woo-Sung Jung , Jae-Suk Yang , H. Eugene Stanley

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CRA Taulbee Survey

The New York Times has an article about the CRA Taulbee Survey, which is a survey of computer science enrollments in the United States. (The survey isn’t up on the CRA’s website, but when it does I’m guessing it will be here.)

For the first time in six years, enrollment in computer science programs in the United States increased last year, according to an annual report that tracks trends in the academic discipline.

I call bottom! Oops, a bit late.

He noted that seven or eight years ago, few students would think about the possibility of a computer science graduate education, and that it was all about wealth.
“The ability to make a billion dollars by the time you are 30 years old is a huge motivation,” he said.

With the added benefit that it’s hard to have clawbacks for a startup?

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Quantum Bacon Pontiff

Every wonder what “The Quantum Pontiff” looks like with a side of Bacon? Me neither. But now you can thanks to bacolicio.us: The Quantum Pontiff with a side of Bacon.
Simultaneous (at least in my reference frame) hat tip to Matt and Jacob.

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ScribTeX

This weekend I got a chance to play around with ScribTex which is a tool for collaborating on LaTeX. In my short test drive, I will say it’s one of the better solutions to this problem that I’ve seen.
(Of course the one thing that is a pain with all of these systems is the lack of good editors. There is a certain handicap that you get by working in a browser input box and not into a full fledged editor (a similar setup to scibtex that I use in MediaWiki has this same problem.) I’m not sure how solvable this problem is. Has anyone seen, for example, a javascript solution which allows automatic syntax highlighting, for example?)

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Spicy Pi Bacon Squared

3.141592…om nom nom nom! Behold! Mrs. Pontiff’s entry into the Scienceblogs pi day pie contest, variously known as “Spicy Brittle Bacon Chocolate Pie”, “Spicy Pi Bacon Squared”, or “Bacon brittle…om nom nom nom nom!”(On the March 14, a poll will open on scienceblogs for the pi contest. Then all two of the readers of the Quantum Pontiff (hi mom!) can then vote for Bacon Bacon Bacon Pi Pi Pie Pie!)
Continue reading “Spicy Pi Bacon Squared”

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TQC 2009 Registration Open

Dear Colleagues,
Online registration is now open for the 4th Workshop on Theory of Quantum
Computation, Communication and Cryptography (Waterloo, May 11-13, 2009) at
the following website:
http://www.iqc.ca/tqc2009
The deadline for early registration with a reduced registration fee is
March 29, 2009, which coincides with the deadline for booking
accommodation with guaranteed rate. Online registration will be closed
after May 3, 2009.
The program consists of invited talks, contributed talks, and poster
presentations.
(1) Invited speakers include:
Masato Koashi (Osaka University)
John Preskill (Caltech)
Miklos Santha (Universit Paris Sud)
Graeme Smith (IBM Watson)
Stephanie Wehner (Caltech)
(2) Contribuited talks include:
* Salah Aly. “Asymmetric Quantum Cyclic Codes”
* Cedric Beny. “A necessary condition for approximate quantum error
correction”
* Jean-Christian Boileau and Joseph Renes. “Optimal State Merging
Without Decoupling”
* Earl Campbell and Dan Browne. “Neither magical nor classical?”
* Wim van Dam and Qingqing Yuan. “Quantum algorithm for Online Memory
Checking”
* Demerson N. Gonalves, Renato Portugal and Carlos Magno Martins
Cosme. “Solutions to the Hidden Subgroup Problem on some Metacyclic
Groups”
* Min-Hsiu Hsieh and Mark Wilde. “Optimal trading of classical
communication, quantum communication, and entanglement”
* Takeshi Koshiba and Takanori Odaira. “Statistically-Hiding Quantum
Bit Commitment from Approximable-Preimage-Size Quantum One-Way Function”
* Michael Nathanson. “Asymptotic state discrimination with LOCC”
* Miguel Navascus, Masaki Owari and Martin B. Plenio. “Entanglement
Theory Applied”
* Miguel Navascus, Masaki Owari and Martin B. Plenio. “On the power of
PPT constraint in the symmetric extension test of the separability
problem”
* Masaki Owari, Martin B. Plenio, Eugene S. Polzik, Alessio Serafini
and Michael M. Wolf. “Quantum benchmarks for the teleportation and storage
of squeezed states for noisy squeezed states”
* Stefano Pirandola, Samuel Braunstein and Seth Lloyd. “On the
security and degradability of Gaussian channels”
* Jon Tyson. “Two-sided estimates of minimum-error distinguishability
of mixed quantum states via generalized Holevo-Curlander bounds”
* James Wootton, Ville Lahtinen and Jiannis Pachos. “Universal quantum
computation with a non-abelian topological memory”
For further details, such as the workshop program, registration,
accommodation and transportation, please refer to the workshop website:
http://www.iqc.ca/tqc2009
We look forward to seeing you in Waterloo.
Sincerely,
TQC 2009 Organizing Committee