Category: Go Ahead, Waste Your Time

Amazon's self publishing service

Here we study the performance of a concatenated error-detection code in a system that permits only nearest-neighbor interactions in one dimension. We make use of a new message-passing scheme which maximizes the number of errors that can be reliably corrected by the code. Our numerical results indicate that arbitrarily accurate universal quantum computation is possible if the probability of failure of each elementary physical operation is below approximately 10^{-5}. This threshold is three orders of magnitude lower than the highest known.

Now that's a Seattle swimming pool view.

Court documents from a settlement between Facebook and ConnectU showed that Facebook values itself at $3.7 billion, much less than the $15 billion that was speculated during the Microsoft investment. The AP uncovered this by cutting and pasting from the redacted court document. It’s the same thing we showed in our PDF redaction screencast last summer… and it will never cease to be funny.

"The town of 830 people on New Zealand's South Island is on a mission to protect the sight of the night sky, even as it disappears behind light and haze in many parts of the world.
The ultimate prize would be UNESCO's approval for the first "starlight reserve," and already the "astro tourists" are coming."

The reality check is that the social utility of the prediction markets is marginal. The added accuracy is minute, and, anyway, doesn’t fill up the gap between expectations and omniscience (which is how people judge forecasters). In our view, the social utility of the prediction markets lays in efficiency, not in accuracy. In complicated situations, the prediction markets integrate facts and expertise much faster than the mass media do. It is their velocity that we should put to work.

In a Rapid Communication appearing in Physical Review B, Vasile Garlea and collaborators at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA, the Hahn-Meitner Institut in Germany, and the Commissariat à l’Énergie Atomique in Grenoble, France, report an unusual magnetic-field-induced spin ordering in a geometrically frustrated quasi-one-dimensional compound, Sul-Cu2Cl4

In a Rapid Communication appearing in Physical Review B, Vasile Garlea and collaborators at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA, the Hahn-Meitner Institut in Germany, and the Commissariat à l’Énergie Atomique in Grenoble, France, report an unusual magnetic-field-induced spin ordering in a geometrically frustrated quasi-one-dimensional compound, Sul-Cu2Cl4

THE doctor who sparked the scare over the safety of the MMR vaccine for children changed and misreported results in his research, creating the appearance of a possible link with autism, a Sunday Times investigation has found.

Earlier this week, Bill Gates got a lot of attention for releasing some mosquitoes into a crowd while talking about malaria. The video is now available for viewing, and you can watch it below. The incident comes about 5 minutes into the speech, but the entire presentation is worth watching if you have time.

A good friend of mine and I have been discussing the predictive nature of the markets, or as I contend the lack of. Since he’s a follower of the pseudoscience of TA, he says he can predict the markets. He doesn’t trade, but is very interested in the markets and eats, sleeps, and breathes markets. He’s been trying to confuse me with all his mumbo jumbo and I finally said no mas. I proposed a small wager and he accepted. We’re both opening up two small accounts(I’m just segregating an account of mine) and he’s going to use TA to determine his trades. Instead of using my regular methods for finding trades, I’ve decided to use the device pictured below to give me trading guidance.

A meeting about new approaches to sequencing the human (or any other species) genome. Some of these sound pretty fantastic. One company claims to be able to sequence human genomes for $5000. In 8 days around Christmas, they assembled 254 billion bases of DNA data to create a draft sequence covering 92% of the genome. y June the cost will be $1000 and that they expect to sequence 20,000 by next year. Since little data, it is probably good to be a little skeptical.
Another group presented data on a method they claim will be able to produce entire human genome sequences in 3 minutes. Lets see about 3 billion bases in 180 seconds is 17 million bases a second. Wow.

Nearly a decade age, a Houston computer scientist posed this heretical question. Today, it’s led to a movement dubbed “probabilistic computing,” which he believes will revolutionize the future of computing.
This afternoon, Krishna Palem, speaking at a computer science meeting in San Francisco, will announce results of the first real-world test of his probabilistic computer chip: The chip, which thrives on random errors, ran seven times faster than today’s best technology while using just 1/30th the electricity

"Search the Interactive Madoff Victim Map"

We introduce the concept of mutual independence — correlations shared between distant parties which are independent of the environment. This notion is more general than the standard idea of a secret key — it is a fully quantum and more general form of privacy.

Via he of uncertain principles
"OpenWetWare tweeted an interesting link to Drew Endy’s take on how to give a good group meeting presentation (though it is clear that this is useful advice for any presentation). Here are a few of my favourite slides:"

What do you do when your industry is shifting under your feet? Taking the lead with radical steps is one strategy. The New York Times did just that this afternoon when it announced that it has released a new Application Programming Interface (API) offering every article the paper has written since 1981, 2.8 million articles. The API includes 28 searchable fields and updated content every hour.

1. Surprising results from conditional probability. For example, if you test positive for a disease with a 1% prevalence rate, and the test is 95% effective, that you probably don't have the disease.
2. Bayesian data analysis as a way to solve statistical problems. For example, the classic partial-pooling examples of Lindley, Novick, Efron, Morris, Rubin, etc.
3. Bayesian inference as a way to include prior information in statistical analysis.
4. Bayes or Bayes-like rules for decision analysis and inference in computer science, for example identifying spam.
5. Bayesian inference as coherent reasoning, following the principles of Von Neumann, Keynes, Savage, etc.
6. [added at Larry's suggestion; see comments] Bayesian inference as a method of coming up with classical statistical estimators.

"A new startup company is in the works at the University of Washington, based on inexpensive, portable solar cells that could go far beyond the standard rooftop model. Conventional solar cells are made from expensive silicon, but the UW group, led by materials science and engineering professor Alex Jen, has come up with a way to harness solar energy using thin polymer film–akin to really thin cling wrap"

"Yes, they were real. No, they didn't carry malaria. And they definitely didn't qualify as a swarm. But they sure did get a lot of attention.
That's the word from a reliable source after the Microsoft chairman set the tech world, ahem, abuzz by opening a jar of mosquitos at the TED conference today — reportedly telling the crowd that not only poor people should experience the problem. We made a few calls and found out that the jar contained a relatively modest collection of mosquitoes: more than a few, but probably fewer than ten."

Eliminating the budget shortfall without raising taxes is difficult. It requires balancing what we need with what we value. What would you keep? What would you cut?

As Comet Lulin moves into the northern sky in mid February to rise around midnight, it should at least be spotted by comet watchers with binoculars and a good sky chart. Tracking observations indicate that the comet officially designated C/2007 N3 (Lulin) has now swung by the Sun and is approaching Earth on a trajectory that will bring it within half the Earth-Sun distance in late February.

In this work we describe how a single artificial multi-level Cooper Pair Box molecule, interacting with a superconducting microwave coplanar waveguide resonator, when suitably driven, can generate extremely large optical nonlinearities at microwave frequencies, with no associated absorption.

the discovery of an Earth-like planet around a Sun-like star in the constellation of Monoceros, at a distance of about 450 light years.

"We document widespread changes to the historical I/B/E/S analyst stock recommendations database. Across seven I/B/E/S downloads, obtained between 2000 and 2007, we find that between 6,580 (1.6%) and 97,582 (21.7%) of matched observations are different from one download to the next. The changes include alterations of recommendations, additions and deletions of records, and removal of analyst names." Got clean data?

"When they analyzed these data-200 million of them-in exactly the same fashion that Bachelier had analyzed data almost a century earlier, they made a startling discovery. The pdf of price changes was not Gaussian plus outliers, as previously believed. Rather, all the data-including data previously termed outliers-conformed to a single pdf encompassing both everyday fluctuations and “once in a century” fluctuations. Instead of a Gaussian or some correction to a Gaussian, they found a power law pdf with exponent -4, a sufficiently large exponent that the difference from a Gaussian is not huge"

"In a paper appearing in Physical Review A, Panos Aliferis, who is at the IBM Watson Research Center, and John Preskill of the California Institute of Technology, rigorously establish a lower bound for the fault-tolerance threshold for one of Knill’s constructions that has relatively small overhead requirements. Their results indicate that fault-tolerant computation should definitely be possible with this scheme, if the error probability per logical operation does not exceed 0.1%."

"One intriguing idea getting shuttled around President Obama’s inner circle could end up pouring significant cash into the innovation hubs of Seattle and Boston. This idea, hatched at the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C., calls for building a national network of two dozen or more centers of excellence in cleantech R&D, with annual budgets of as much as $200 million from competitive research grants, to jumpstart innovation in alternative energy."

"As we reported last week, Woodman is the Microsoft solutions adviser who got a tattoo of the company's unofficial "Blue Monster" logo last year, only to find himself among the 1,400 people laid off by the company Jan. 22. Some Microsoft critics commenting on our post and on BoingBoing questioned Woodman's judgment for getting the tattoo.
Here's the remarkable part: In a follow-up post, Woodman not only speaks glowingly about Microsoft but he goes out of his way to defend the past actions that helped shape its reputation. "

Via Roseblog. The name is not for me, but I'm all for crazy universities