Robert Clark new chief defence scientist for Australian DSTO, Florida quantum computing conference, standard model quantum computing, and Ray Laflamme is Royal in Canada.
Continue reading “Happenings in the Quantum World, September 11, 2008”
Google Polarizes America?
The techno wonder pundits say that the internet revolutionizes democracy by leveling the playing field (everyone can be an ass online, oh yeah!) But what I find more fascinating about the internet and politics is the role that search plays in polarizing politics. I mean, sure there are dissenting voices all over the internet, but google “John McCain” or “Obama” or “Sarah Palin” or “Joe Biden” and you won’t discover a single dissenting opinion about any of these candidates on the front page of the search results (the exceptions to this rule are probably the small news items that Google includes: but these tend to be main stream media fluff pieces.) If the world is full of dissent but the main lens by which people view the world never reveals this, does this really make a positive impact on democracy? Indeed if I were totally crazy, I might even argue that Google was aiding tyranny when it decided to combat google bombing.
In other words what I’m saying is that I’m tired of blaming the white male voter for going against my political leanings and today I’ve decided it would be fun to pick on Google instead 🙂 (And yes I picked Google arbitrarily. If by “picked arbitrarily” you mean decided because it was most dominate search webite.)
Update: In a related note, has anyone tried Spinoculers?
The Looming Danger
The physics blogosphere is abuzz about the start up of the large hadron collider. There is a hole in Texas which is very jealous. And of course, everyone is happy that the Earth was not destroyed or a bubble universe wasn’t created.
Continue reading “The Looming Danger”
Weather Politics
The lore I heard when I lived in New Mexico was that the reason Gore won the state in 2000 was that there was a snowstorm in the southern part of the state (which is more conservative.) In 2004 there was no snowstorm in the state, and the state went to Bush. If you could control the weather by fixing particular weather in different locations (weather that was not too far beyond the typical weather for the area), I wonder how many electoral votes could you swing?
An Ad About Nothing
I propose that a good investment would be to short Bill Gates’ evil rating:
Want Fame? Be a First Mover
Is fame and fortune what you seek (or at least fame)? Be a first mover, according to a new paper, arXiv:0809.0522
The first-mover advantage in scientific publication
Authors: M. E. J. Newman
Mathematical models of the scientific citation process predict a strong “first-mover” effect under which the first papers in a field will, essentially regardless of content, receive citations at a rate enormously higher than papers published later. Moreover papers are expected to retain this advantage in perpetuity — they should receive more citations indefinitely, no matter how many other papers are published after them. We test this conjecture against data from a selection of fields and in several cases find a first-mover effect of a magnitude similar to that predicted by the theory. Were we wearing our cynical hat today, we might say that the scientist who wants to become famous is better off — by a wide margin — writing a modest paper in next year’s hottest field than an outstanding paper in this year’s. On the other hand, there are some papers, albeit only a small fraction, that buck the trend and attract significantly more citations than theory predicts despite having relatively late publication dates. We suggest that papers of this kind, though they often receive comparatively few citations overall, are probably worthy of our attention.
Guess what field was used as an example for this effect? Network theory.
Got NSF?
I really need to create a category for blog posts for things which Google’s products do which amuse me. Today in reading an email about the National Science Foundation:
Many a faculty member’s got NSF, I guess, and are damn sick or writing grants to continue having NSF.
Wisely Using Your Advantage
When I was a little kid I used to take a pair of dice and throw these dice repeatedly. At each throw I’d fill in a box for the corresponding number on some graph paper and I would essentially “race” the numbers against each other. I suppose for that reason I’ve always been fascinated not just by probabilities, but in the convergence of repeated trials to the limiting “probabilities.” Which explains not just why I’m an uber geekazoid, but also why I was quite shocked today when I Googled “gambler’s ruin” and found that the intertubes only returned about 16000 hits (“card counting,” by the way, returns about 845,000 hits.) Gambler’s ruin is one of my favorite basic probability exercises (and a reason why many a poor soul, even if they have an advantage, ends up losing their money.)
Continue reading “Wisely Using Your Advantage”
Google Thinks Anyone Can Fault-Tolerantly Quantum Compute
What a graduate student at UW discovered when searching for Kitaev’s paper on anyons:
Still a Lot to Do
Over hyped press releases are a standard for quantum computing research and a stable of what makes me sound like a grumpy old man. Really I’m not that grumpy (really! reall!), but I always forget to post the stuff which isn’t over hyped. For example, today I stumbled upon an article about a recent experimental implementation of a code for overcoming qubit loss done in China. In this article I find a graduate student whose was able to get a reasonable quote into the article:
While optimistic critics are acclaiming the newly achieved progress, the team, however, is cautiously calm. “There are still a lot to do before we can build a practically workable quantum computer. Qubit loss is not the only problem for QC; other types of decoherence are to be overcome,” remarks LU Chaoyang, a PhD student with the team. “But good news is, the loss-tolerant quantum codes demonstrated in our work can be further concatenated with other quantum error correction codes or decoherence-free space to tackle multiple decoherence, and may become a useful part for future implementations of quantum algorithms.”
Ah, that makes me happy.