Interested in quantum error correction (who isn’t!) Daniel Lidar informs me that the talks from the QEC07 conference are now all available online.
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Rounding DeLong
IANAE (that’s I am not a person with severe physics envy but who is compensated for this fact by earning a higher salary than a physicist), but I do not understand Brad DeLong:
Traders! Read the second page of the statistical release before you press the button!
Meredith Beechey…and Jonathan Wright have details:FRB: FEDS paper 2007-5: “Rounding and the Impact of News: A Simple Test of Market Rationality”:
Abstract: Certain prominent scheduled macroeconomic news releases contain a rounded number on the first page of the release that is widely cited by newswires and the press, and a more precise number in the text of the release. The whole release comes out at once. We propose a simple test of whether markets are paying attention to the rounded or unrounded numbers by studying the high-frequency market reaction to such news announcements. In the case of inflation releases, we find evidence that markets systematically ignore some of the information in the unrounded number. This is most pronounced for core CPI, a prominent release for which the rounding in the headline number is large relative to the information content of the release.
If the market is only reacting to the rounded number, why should a trader pay attention to the unrounded number? Is this just a case of sipping at the cooler of the efficient market hypothesis (i.e. surely the market will eventually revert to the unrounded number.) Or am I missing something?
Open Access Talk
Last week, before I headed to my current location in the land of Coca Cola and the Cartoon Network (the hotel is so nice here that when my friend stopped outside so that I could drop my bags off, the concierge asked him if he wanted would like some water while he waited), I attended a very inspirational talk on open access by Jonathan Eisen. The video is now available online (lecture 2.) Well worth watching as it was a good talk laying out the case for open access to research journals (which Eisen makes sure to delineate from open science. Say the word open science, I guess, and some people go bonkers.)
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The Smell of Bacon in the Morning
Me, personally, I wake to the smell of Bacon every morning. But others may need help. Here it is: the Wakin’ with Bacon alarm clock.
Professor Demoted For Video Game Designer
Say it ain’t so Hasbro, say it aint so. From an NPR story on a makeover of the game “Clue”:
The characters have changed, too. Miss Scarlet has a first name: Cassandra. Colonel Mustard left the military; he’s a former football star. Victor Plum, formerly the professor who was always known as the smartest man in the room, became recast as a self-made video game designer — a dot-com billionaire.
Take that you stuffy academic professors, with your padded elbows and your pipes and your uncombed Einstein hair: you’re no longer the smartest person in the room (unless you’ve made a video game, that is.) But I still think you were the murder, in the spa, with the baseball bat.
Watching BioBarCamp From Afar
Over at Science in the open, the the ScienceOpener (Cameron Neylon) is attending BioBarCamp. Now, IANAB (that stands for “I am not a stamp collector” 🙂 ) but there are a ton of cool talks at BioBarCamp: many on open science / social media / science 2.0 etc (for which biologists are kicking everyone’s rear at.) Here is the schedule on google docs. Because I’m supposed to be working on a talk for an upcoming review, I need something to listen to and watch out of the corner of my eye, as I work on the review. And ScienceOpener provides: A lifefeed of the event.
Which is cool, because now I can hear awesome interesting ideas, while trying to work on my presentation (with less awesome ideas, BTW.) And I even get to see familiar faces (well…familiar people lounging while listening):
How cool is that. Science, it is a changing, my little pea sized mind thinks 🙂
Happenings in the Quantum World: August 7, 2008
Summer school in November, Quantum crypto is to legit to quit, quantum Pagerank, and no prayer in quantum prayer.
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Action Dog to the Rescue
No fun must go on without the dogs participation, of course:
Revolutionary Breakthough in Quantum Computing
Hot off the presses!
In an amazing breakthrough, which this press release has no room to describe in any real detail, scientists at research university BigU have made tremendous progress in the field of quantum computing. The results mean that quantum computers are one step closer to replacing your laptop computer
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Got Auditory Synesthesia? Test Yourself!
A very cool discovery out of Caltech: auditory synesthesia. Synesthesia, you probably know, is an effect wherein the stimulation of one sense causes automatic sensations in another sense. For example, grapheme-color synesthesia is where numbers or letters appear to those observing to be shaded or tinged with different colors. Now two researchers at Caltech, Melissa Saenz (Who I know! I know someone who discovered something really cool!) and Christof Koch, have identified a new form of synesthesia, auditory synesthesia. To describe it, it’s funner to read what Dr. Saenz has to say about how it was discovered.
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