Now THIS is the kind of idea we pay our Republican house representatives to come up with. A website where we can go through NSF grants and identify the ones we think should not be funded, balancing the budget, one NSF grant at a time.But clearly this is barking up the wrong tree! The NSF budget is only $7 billion-ish (and there is no WAY that this budget pays for itself by barely maintaining the most innovative economy in the world. Psah you say!) So…
Anyone want to help me build a website where we go around and identify senior citizens that are collecting social security but have not contributed enough in their life to merit this money? Grandpa can appear on youtube where he’ll describe what exact it is that he did in his life that merits his current social security check. Too young to fight in world war two, that no good lazy bum, cut his check! BAM, social security solved!
Next we can expand into hospitals where we will be able to identify tons of cost cutting measures. Does little Suzy really need that surgery? See little Suzy via a snazzy web interface. Ask her questions. Find out she is a very unproductive member of society, what with her 3rd grade reading skills and 4th grade math skills. No surgery for you little Suzy! BAM, Medicare problem solved!
Moving down the budget we get to the military. My first suggestion was that we take all members of the armed forces, count the number of people they have killed, sort the list, and start chopping from the bottom up. BAM, military spending cut! Okay that doesn’t use the web and well qualified internet surfers to help us solve this problem. We could have the surfers do the sorting (internet sort is a less well studied sorting algorithm taking 2N time to sort a list of length N, and usually results in the death of far too many neurons.) So instead we could put up videos of every member of the military and vote on whether they are dangerous enough looking to merit their pay. BAM, military spending cut! For a second time! And we’d win wars just by glancing menacingly at our enemies!
And what about income tax rates? Well I suggest we make a great tool where people can vote on what they’d like marginal tax rates to be. And then we can exactly INVERT the results. BAM, income distribution problem fixed!
Okay, enough with reason number 1231 why I am not a Republican.
P.S. If you go to the website for this spirited effort, http://republicanwhip.house.gov/YouCut/Review.htm, the web form doesn’t appear to verify that you’ve submitted a valid email address or a grant, and well, you know that those don’t have to be real anyway. Just saying. 😉
Quantum Job of the Teleportation Kind
teleportation technologists seek talented MBA (SOMA / south beach)
Date: 2010-12-03, 2:45PM PST
Reply to: [Errors when replying to ads?]
We are two engineers, brothers (both CalTech grads), who have developed and built a novel teleportation device. Over the last twelve months, we have tested our prototype system with up to 800 kg payloads, over distances of 300 miles. It is portable, safe, but does require a substantial (1800 W) power supply at both sending and receiving locations.
We believe our teleportation device could substantially disrupt many “last-mile” transit technologies and generate extraordinary returns for investors.
The only missing piece is YOU! We are looking for one or two newly-minted MBAs to help us develop critical assets — a logo, a Powerpoint deck, and Excel projections — needed to attract venture capital. In return, we would seek to retain a minority stake in the final venture.
Please send a resume and any other information that may set you apart from other MBAs with pitch experience. Can’t wait for you to join our team!
Life, Death, and the World is Such a Wonderful Place
I am not a big fan of THE NEWS. But then again, some days the universe just tees up some fun stuff. NyTimes obit, Frank W. Lewis, Master of the Cryptic Crossword, Dies at 98.
The younger Mr. Lewis attended secretarial school and the University of Utah (later earning a degree in absentia) and passed the federal government’s civil service test. He then headed for Washington, where he earned a master’s degree in music from the Catholic University of America and took government secretarial jobs.
Col. William Friedman, who ran the Army’s cryptography operations, was looking for very smart people on the eve of World War II. He heard about Mr. Lewis, who was bored “to tears” in the civil service’s death benefits section.
Colonel Friedman hired him as a civilian employee, and Mr. Lewis went on to help break the code used to coordinate Japanese ships. He became addicted to British puzzles while posted in England at the Bletchley Park decryption station at the end of the war. He then followed Colonel Friedman to the National Security Agency, where he won plaudits for his service, started the N.S.A. Glee Club and created English-style puzzles for an N.S.A. magazine.
Mr. Lewis’s 2,962 puzzles for The Nation were proofread by his wife of 74 years, the former Sylvia Shosteck….
One cannot make up, no matter how creative you are, the real life founder of the N.S.A Glee Club. In a similar vein, Sri Daya Mata, Guiding Light for U.S. Hindus, Dies at 96
:
Her death was confirmed by Lauren Landress, a spokeswoman for the group, the Self-Realization Fellowship/Yogoda Satsanga Society of India, which is based in what once was an elegant hotel on Mount Washington in Los Angeles.
….
Besides its headquarters, the society owns a 10-acre sanctuary in the Pacific Palisades, near Malibu, Calif., where a temple crowned by a golden lotus was built in 1966 under Sri Daya Mata’s guidance. Followers come from around the country to meditate.
Previous days obits included Samuel T. Cohen, Neutron Bomb Inventor, Dies at 89:
In contrast to strategic warheads, which can kill millions and level cities, and smaller short-range tactical nuclear arms designed to wipe out battlefield forces, the neutron bomb minimized blast and heat. Instead, it maximized a barrage of infinitesimal neutrons that could zip through tanks, buildings and other structures and kill people, usually by destroying the central nervous system, and all other life forms.
While doubters questioned the usefulness, logic and ethics of killing people and sparing property, Mr. Cohen called his bomb a “sane” and “moral” weapon that could limit death, destruction and radioactive contamination, killing combatants while leaving civilians and towns unscathed. He insisted that many critics misunderstood or purposely misrepresented his ideas for political, economic or mercenary reasons.
A specialist in the radiological effects of nuclear weapons, he relentlessly promoted the neutron bomb for much of his life, writing books and articles, conferring with presidents and cabinet officials, taking his case to Congressional committees, scientific bodies and international forums. He won many converts, but ultimately failed to persuade the United States to integrate the device into its tactical nuclear arsenal.
….
“It’s the most sane and moral weapon ever devised,” he said in September in a telephone interview for this obituary. “It’s the only nuclear weapon in history that makes sense in waging war. When the war is over, the world is still intact.”
In case you missed it, you just read an obit which included an interview of the deceased for the obit. Oh and then there is the moral question of killing people but sparing property.
Does Not Compute
Okay, last one. But damn I could make these movies all night and it would make me laugh and all of you cry:
Quantum Shwantum
The Demiurge's Bytestream
It’s times like these that I wished I’d kept my old Dell desktop around (hell I wish I’d kept my TRS-80 CoCo and my Apple IIGS!)
Won because I know my children’s literature 🙂
A Mailing List for Quantum Information Science!
A while back, Dmitry Maslov who is currently a program direct at the NSF pointed out to me that there wasn’t really a good mailing list for the greater quantum computing community. As you may have noticed this blog has turned into a place where I post such announcements. Of course this gets in the way of important blog posts that could occur at the Quantum Pontiff, like those discussing politics and conference “referee” reports. (*ahem*) So in order to get around this I’ve gone out and done created what Dmitry suggested: a quantum information science mailing list.
Okay so here is how this works. First of all there is a traditional mailing list. You can subscribe to it at this webpage. You can also unsubscribe from this same webpage. Of course email is for old farts like me. So all of the announcements will also be posted on the blog located at http://dabacon.org/qspeak. This blog, of course, has an RSS feed: http://www.dabacon.org/qspeak/?feed=rss2. The announcements will also be tweeted: http://twitter.com/qisannounce. I will also be rebroadcasting these announcement back here on this blog. Note that when I do this the main text will be in the extended text for the blog post. This means these should take up less space on the front of this blog or in your own personal RSS feed.
Okay so that is how you can read and receive updates for this list. What about submitting and also what should be submitted? Well first of all the list is moderated. Moderated by…me. Hopefully in the near future I’ll add some more moderators so that posts can be made more rapidly. So basically the procedure is to email the list at: qspeak [[at]] dabacon.org. Subject? Well I’m hoping it’s things like jobs, conference announcements, funding opportunities, etc. The general rule is that it should be linked to quantum information science, broadly construed, meaning physics, computer science, foundations, etc. If it doesn’t seem to have enough quantum information content it will be rejected but how much is enough will be left up to the Supreme Court of the United States of America (they’re good at things like this, right?) Once the message is approved it will be posted immediately to the blog and tweeted. A weekly digest email will then be sent out for those who are subscribed to the email list. Right now this isn’t automated…there was a bug in the dreamhost api that they haven’t gotten back to me yet, but eventually this will just happen without me having to format the email, which will be very nice, timewise at least for me.
Anyway hopefully you all can spread the word about this new mailing list / blog / twitter feed. Comments, questions, concerns, catching problems with the system, etc are greatly appreciated. Leave a comment or send me an email at qspeak [[[at]]] dabacon.org.
APS March Meeting Quantum Goodness
Chris Fuchs writes in with some good news about the APS march meeting and quantum information science talks. In total there were 359 talks submitted to the GQI topical group this year, and increase from the 256 talks last year. This means that next year the topical group will get an extra invited session. Woot!
More details from Chris:
Just to highlight the details of the focus sessions, the submissions they got were:
Superconducting Qubits – 75
Semiconducting Qubits – 63
Quantum Information for Quantum Foundations – 58 (or at least that’s the number I’ll claim for that session from the various sorting categories)
Quantum Optics with Superconducting Circuits – 32
Advances in Ion Trap Quantum Computation – 12
Chris has also made a handy list of invited talks, both in GQI, and those of GQI general interest:
Sunday, March 20, tutorial
Ivan Deutsch (University of New Mexico) Quantum Simulation and Computing with Atoms
Tuesday, March 22, invited session, “Quantum Information: Featured Experiments”
H. Jeff Kimble (California Institute of Technology) Entanglement of Spin Waves among Four Quantum Memories
Christopher Monroe (Joint Quantum Institute and University of Maryland) Quantum Networks with Atoms and Photons
Till Rosenband (National Institute of Standards and Technology) Quantum-Logic Clocks for Metrology and Geophysics
Robert J. Schoelkopf (Yale University) Towards Quantum Information Processing with Superconducting Circuits
Anton Zeilinger (University of Vienna) Quantum Information and the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics: A Story of Mutual Benefit
Wednesday, March 23, invited session, “20 Years of Quantum Information in Physical Review Letters”
Charles H. Bennett (IBM Research) The Theory of Entanglement and Entanglement-Assisted Communication
David P. DiVincenzo (Aachen University) Twenty Years of Quantum Error Correction
Artur Ekert (University of Oxford and National University of Singapore) Less Reality, More Security
Richard J. Hughes (Los Alamos National Laboratory) Twenty-Seven Years of Quantum Cryptography!
Benjamin Schumacher (Kenyon College) A Brief Prehistory of Qubits
Thursday, March 24, invited session, “Symmetric Discrete Structures for Finite Dimensional Quantum Systems”
Berthold-Georg Englert (National University of Singapore) Pairwise Complementary Observables and Their Mutually Unbiased Bases (MUBs)
Asa Ericsson (Institut Mittag-Leffler) Quantum States as Probabilities from Symmetric Informationally Complete Measurements (SICs)
Steven T. Flammia (California Institute of Technology) The Lie Algebraic Significance of Symmetric Informationally Complete Measurements
Christophe Schaef (University of Vienna) Experimental Access to Higher-Dimensional Discrete Quantum Systems: Towards Realizing SIC-POVM and MUB Measurements using Integrated Optics
William K. Wootters (Williams College) Isotropic States in Discrete Phase Space
Focus Session: Superconducting Qubits
Chair: Robert McDermott (University of Wisconsin – Madison)
John Martinis (University of California at Santa Barbara) Scaling Superconducting Qubits with the ResQu Architecture
Christopher Chudzicki (Williams College), LeRoy Apker Award winner Parallel State Transfer and Efficient Quantum Routing on Quantum Networks
(+ 75 submitted abstracts)
Focus Session: Quantum Optics with Superconducting Circuits
Chair: David Schuster (University of Chicago)
Andreas Wallraff (ETH, Zurich) Tomography and Correlation Function Measurements of Itinerant Microwave Photons
(+ 32 submitted abstracts)
Focus Session: Semiconducting Qubits
Chair: Jason Petta (Princeton University)
Amir Yacoby (Harvard University) Control and Manipulation of Two-Electron Spin Qubits in GaAs Quantum Dots
(+ 63 submitted abstracts)
Focus Session: Quantum Information for Quantum Foundations
Chair: Christopher Fuchs (Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics)
Giulio Chiribella (Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics) Toward a Conceptual Foundation of Quantum Information Processing
(+ 58 submitted abstracts)
Focus Session: Advances in Ion Trap Quantum Computation
Chair: Jungsang Kim (Duke University)
Richart E. Slusher (Georgia Tech Quantum Institute) Trapped Ion Arrays for Quantum Simulation
(+ 12 submitted abstracts)
Non-GQI Invited Talks of General GQI Interest
Daniel Arovas (University of California at Santa Barbara) Momentum Space Entanglement in Quantum Spin Chains
Al an Aspuru-Guzik (Harvard University) The Role of Quantum Coherence in Excitonic Energy Transfer: Quantum Process Tomography, Molecular Dynamics and Efficiency Measures
David D. Awschalom (University of California at Santa Barbara) Quantum Control and Nanoscale Placement of Single Spins in Diamond
Patrice Bertet (CEA-Saclay) Probing the Quantum Fluctuations of a Nonlinear Resonator with a Superconducting Qubit
Immanuel Bloch (Ludwig-Maximilians University) Quantum Simulations with Ultracold Fermions and Bosons in Optical Lattices
Pasquale Calabrese (University of Pisa) Entanglement Entropies and Spectrum in One-dimensional Systems
Michel Devoret (Yale University) Prospects of Superconducting Qubits for Quantum Computation
Viatcheslav Dobrovitski (Iowa State University) Quantum Control and Decoherence of a Single Spin in Diamond
Sergey Frolov (Delft University of Technology) Spin-orbit Qubit in a Semiconductor Nanowire
Eran Ginossar (Yale University) Novel Approaches to High Fidelity Qubit State Measurement in Circuit Quantum Electrodynamics
F. D. M. Haldane (Princeton University) Identifying Topological Order from the Entanglement Spectrum
Ronald Hanson (Delft University of Technology) Control of Single-Spin Decoherence by Dynamical Decoupling and Spin Bath Manipulation
Kees Harmans (Delft University of Technology) DC-SQUID Quantum Non-Demolition Readout of Superconducting Flux Qubits
Ren-Bao Liu (Chinese University of Hong Kong) Control of Electron Spin Decoherence in Nuclear Spin Baths
Gavin W. Morley (University College London) Quantum Information in Silicon: Initialization, Manipulation, Storage and Readout
Jeremy O’Brian (University of Bristol) Integrated Quantum Photonics
Christian Schonenberger (University of Basel ) Cooper-Pair Splitter: Towards an Efficient Source of Spin-Entangled EPR Pairs
Emre Togan (Harvard University) Quantum Entanglement between an Optical Photon and a Solid-State Spin Qubit
Joel Varley (University of California at Santa Barbara) Quantum Computing with Defects
R. Vijay (University of California at Berkeley) Observation of Quantum Jumps in a Superconducting Quantum Bit
Joerg Wrachtrup (University of Stuttgart) Spin Quantum Measurements on Diamond Defects
Looks like a fantastic lineup. The fact that there are so many invited talks outside of GQI that are quantum related is a testament to the field (of course cynics will say it is a testament to hype and funding, but who listens to cynics anyway?)
Good and Bad News on the U.S. Deficit
Warning politics to follow! Politics with questionable data sources!
Recently the New York Times made a very cool web application in which you could select different methods for closing the deficit (which they break down into a short term 2015 and long term 2030 deficit.) I’ve always wanted to make sure a tool because I hate to say it, but most discussions of federal budgets have severe magnitude issues (order of magnitude physics, a great class to take!) Of course one can argue with the numbers and options the New York Times provides (see bottom of application for a list of where this data came from) but it is still an interesting exercise to carry out.
Even more interesting to me is that they allowed people to tweet the budgets they created and then they went out and collected data about these tweets. Here is that data. Of course the readership of the New York Times will not be representative, and this will be further biased by selecting people who tweet, but seeing as how I saw this tool linked to by several more conservative/libertarian blogs as well as by some of my more libertarian facebook friends, I’ll bet the demographic isn’t as bad as one might guess at first glance. One could probably figure out the bias from other surveys about these suggestions.
So, assuming that the demographic isn’t too distorted (big assumption of course, but roll with me on this one) what can one conclude? Well the first thing is the good news. I took the data from the 6898 twitter users and then started going down the line of most popular ideas until the deficit was balanced. This occurred at the 58 percent level (return estate tax to Clinton levels was the one that put it over the top.) So one could say that if this survey is in any way representative (not likely) that there is a path forward that has much more than majority support! The budget produced, by the way, consists of 41 percent tax increases and 59 percent reduction in spending.
Now the bad news. If I took the list and only implemented those for which there was a majority of support from those who were at the extremes of the survey (the Times broke out the people who balanced their budgets using 75 percent tax increase or 75 percent spending cuts) then there was a huge shortfall ($418 billion in 2015, $1345 billion in 2030.) Interestingly also the only such majority supported terms were spending cuts.
Another interesting breakdown is to take the identified taxers and spending cutters and to use the ones that they have a majority favoring and that the overall survey has a majority favoring. If one takes the tax increasing crowd and uses only the options that have an overall majority then one covers the deficit in 2015 (with a slight billion surplus) but fails to cover the long term 2030 deficit (has a $505 billion dollar deficit). If, on the other hand, one takes the tax cutting crowd and only uses their majority supported favorites, one does not close the short term 2015 deficit ($179 billion deficit) nor the long term ($390 billion deficit.) This comes all from spending cuts.
So there are some interesting things here if I close my eyes to the validity of the data. First it’s that there is majority support for addressing the deficit problem. Second, the extremes on both sides are incapable of solving this problem with majority supported proposals. So in short what is holding back deficit reduction is not support from the general public, but the polarizing climate in which reasonable people come together and compromise. Okay my own bias is that this is the main structural problem with the deficit 🙂
(Of course one should note that there are those who do not want to address the deficit today, especially in the short term where the U.S. economy is in uncertain times. There are also (separate) “reasonable” arguments to be made that a small deficit is not at all a bad thing.)
Toronto CIFAR Meeting
My last trip to Canada for a CIFAR conference was….interesting. This time I’m in Toronto for the quantum computing CIFAR meeting and I’m happy to report that the meeting is full of people who mostly believe quantum theory and who also happen to be doing very interesting work. My favorite talk, because I’m biased to this line of work, was Robert Raussendorf’s talk on the universality for measurement-based quantum computing on the 2D AKLT state (work he did with Tzu-Chieh Wei and Ian Affleck. The authors are TAR, heh.) It was also interesting to hear the state of position based quantum cryptography. It seems that history (bit commitment) is repeating itself? Marcin Pawlowski also gave a very neat derivations of Bell inequalities that I’d never seen….using an Escher drawing!
Some photos. First of all it was not clear if the pain the sign below was related at all to quantum information processing:
And then there was what some would consider computer scientist’s heaven:
I did manage to have a beer and write some equations in said bar. I’m certain they are correct.