It looks like the America COMPETEs act is making its way out of Congress (See here). One interesting part of the science and technology legislature being considered is the creation of ARPA-E, an Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (initial budget of $300M.) Similarly, a while back (former) Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte discussed an intelligence effort called IARPA. Both of these names are in reference to DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which used to be called just ARPA and was responsible for funding the ARPANET which eventually became the Internet (A minor funding sucesss, you might say 🙂 )
Hmm, it seems to me that ARPA is the new lower case letter “i” (“i” being the new lowercase “e”, of course.) Anyone seen any more ARPAs out in the wild? More importantly, when will I get my ARPAphone?
Research Grant Dollars
Over at Life as a Physicist Gordon Watts notes the email we received here at the University of Washington from our university president yesterday which told us that last year, for the first time, UW received over a billion dollars in research grants. Only John Hopkins receives more money. Of course the main reason for this is the UW’s school of medicine which brings in over half a billion dollars in funding every year. Holy moly that’s a lot of research grant dollars.
This got me thinking about research funding and I thought an incredibly stupid thought. Which is of course what this blog is for: sharing my incredibly stupid thoughts…in the public…so everyone can laugh at me. A big issue which comes up in physics graduate programs is the fact that the supply chain for academic jobs in physics is severely out of wack. The number of faculty positions versus the number of people who want these jobs is the source of an incredible amount of frustration and pain for the vast majority of graduate students and postdocs who will not obtain faculty positions. This is, of course, true across a multitude of fields, not just physics, but I’ll stick to physics as it is the field I know more about.
Of course part of the problem is that the incentive system for faculty members is askew: you get rewarded for bringing in money which supports graduate students. So in some form, the number of graduate students you mentor is a proxy for a measure of your success as a faculty member. Indeed there is very little incentive for a professor at a research institute to not add even more graduate students to the meat factory of the academic job market.
Now there are many things we can think about to fix this situation, almost none of them will probably ever come to fruition, simply because there isn’t much incentive to do so from the “winners”, who are also the ones who would be responsible to fix the system. From my own perspective I’m a big advocate of science departments owning up to the problem and providing a setting where, while research and the academic system is the core of graduate school experience, departments do a lot more to emphasize the general applicability of the degree they are earning. Physics, in particular, suffers greatly from the attitude that only a faculty position at a top research school is acceptible, ignoring the huge amount of success that physicists have had departing from this path (and yes, I think about this path myself, nearly every day, especially when my research isn’t working the way I want it to. Of course this is probably the reason I’m in my current position.) Of course, I’m sure there are those who don’t think there is a problem at all. If you’re one of those people you might as well stop reading now, since there ain’t no way what I’m going to say next is going to do anything beside cause an increase in your blood pressure.
So back to the stupid idea. My position at the University of Washington is as a research assistant professor. What this means is that I am supported entirely by grant money I raise. Of course one particular side effect of this is that it is much harder for me to take on a lot of graduate students. So my stupid idea was what would happen if this setup was much more widely in place. What if faculty were rewarded a lot more for paying their own salary than they currently are? What if the proportion of research faculty was much more in line with the proportion of funding coming in to a university? What if the proportion of research faculty to faculty rewarded more for teaching was more in line with the actual source of funding dollars? This would definitely change the ability to fund graduate students at the level they are currently funded.
But, of course it is a stupid idea. Increasing the number of research professors would cause all sorts of havoc with teaching. And really, do I want more people to have to raise their salaries like I do and the suffer the slings and arrows of funding fortunes? Maybe what I really need is someone to comiserate with 🙂 But it is an interesting model to consider: what happens if a university acknowledges the central nature of research in its endeavors and tries to accomidate this by more research positions, more teaching-emphasis positions, and a reduction in the number of traditional tenure positions? I’m not sure I know the answer, but I’d be curous to know if there are any examples of schools which have pushed in this direction and what the (probably insane) consequences of such a move have been.
Mesoscopic Quantum Coherence Length in a 1D Spin Chain
Interesting experiment reported in Science, “Mesoscopic Phase Coherence in a Quantum Spin Fluid,” Xu et al (available here). The authors discuss a one dimenionsional spin chain where each site has a spin 1 system. This system is coupled antiferromagnetically to its nearest neighbor. Now such systems have a ground state whose two spin correlation, [tex]$langle S_i S_j rangle[/tex] decays exponentially as a function of the distance between site i and site j. However, if you examine the more complicated correlation function [tex]$langle S_i exp [ i pi sum_{i<k<j} S_k]S_j rangle[/tex] this tends to a constant as the distance between the two sites increases. Thus a more complicated order exists in this system, one which is not revealed by a simple two spin correlation function (In this traitorous world, nothing is true or false, all is according to the color of the crystal through which you look.) This order is known as a string order. In particular the ground state of the system is roughly a superposition over Neel states (over [tex]$S_z=pm 1$[/tex]) with [tex]$S_z=0$[/tex] inserted into these states. The amplitude of each of these states in the superposition is exponetially decreasing in the number of inserted $S_z=0$ states.
Okay, cool, so there is this nice model which has a very cool ground state whose order isn't in a two spin correlation but some other, more interesting order. But what is cool about this experiment is that the authors are able to examine the excitations in this system. In particular they examine the creation of a triplet pair excitation at rest and show that these propogate over a fairly large distance before losing their coherence (roughly fifty lattice units.) Indeed, if I am reading the article correctly, it seems that this coherence is limited only by the length of the chains themselves (at low temperature, at higher temperature thermal excitations can shorten this coherence length.) Cool! This, I think, should give hope to those who are interested in using spin chains for quantum computation, although, of course, TIALWFAQC (this is a long way from a quantum computer.)
Kielpinski Spaces
Reading Light
So at the begining of the book a main character kills a guy and returns to a lab (of course, doesn’t everyone go to lab after they’ve murdered someone?) where they are working with “q-bits” [sic]. Then this choice line (p.6):
“We can slow down the rate at which the q-bits pick up phase. We’re actually doing better than Kielpinski there – I’ve had factors of four and up this week.”
Despite the Cornell spelling (it’s so cold in Cornell that David Mermin loses the “u”?), cool! Hopefully, many of you will recognize the reference to Dave Kielpinski who did some amazing ion trap quantum computing experiments at NIST and is now at Griffith in Australia. Okay cool, a reference to a real quantum computing researcher.
But it gets better! A few lines later:
Somewhere off in its parallel mazes, the Beowulf system begam modelling the decoherence-free subspaces – the Kielpinski space – of an ion pair…
Not only q-bits [sic] but also decoherence-free subspaces (no subsystems, alas)! And indeed this is a direct reference to papers Kielpinski was involved in: “A decoherence-free quantum memory using trapped ions,” D. Kielpinski, V. Meyer, M.A. Rowe, C.A. Sackett, W.M. Itano, C. Monroe, and D.J. Wineland, Science 291, 1013 (2001) and “Architecture for a large-scale ion-trap quantum computer,” D. Kielpinski, C.R. Monroe, and D.J. Wineland, Nature 417, 709 (2002). That former paper saved my butt during my thesis defense. An AMO physicist, about half way through my defense, said something like “Well this theory is all good, but what about in the real world.” My next slide was a plot yoinked from that first paper showing the first experiment which demonstrated slower decoherence in a decoherence-free subspace under ambient conditions.
And, dude, from now on I am totally calling the DFSs in ion traps “Kielpinski spaces.”
Onion Laugh
Vatican Apologizes For Torture, Murder Of Stephen Hawking. I’ve seen his talking wheelchair. It says “beep! beep! beep!” often during the middle of his own scientific talk.
The Casinos Must Love This….Or Do They Hate It?
A New York Times article on computers playing poker heads up against humans opens with
For anyone stuck on a casino stool, playing hours of video poker, rest assured: humans can still beat a computer.
Um, well first of all, video poker is quite different from the heads up Texas Holdem the entire article is about. Significatly different from an artificial intelligence standpoint. Second, as far as I know, video poker machines have payoffs for an optimal strategy which are usually right around equal payoff and hourly wages you’d get from playing this strategy are pretty pathetic even for the machines with greater than even payoff. Since the majority of players are probably far from an optimal strategy, I’d guess video poker is quite the cash cow for the casinos.
But I wonder, when computers finally are able to beat humans at a poker (okay, some will say, “never!” I will say, you’re allowed to say “never” when you can run a thousand body simulation of a star cluster in your head. Reverse Turing Shazam!) whether this will actually hurt video poker machines. Hm, well seeing how they casinos still seem to rack in the mullah with their slot machines, probably not.
Random Paper
A new paper, “On the Generation of Random Numbers.” Postscript available here. What do you think should I submit it to the arXiv?
Daydreaming About Storytelling
I have always been a daydreamer. There isn’t a place or distraction in the world which can keep me from somehow drifting off into a daydreaming state of mind. Which, of course, must be rather amusing for others observing my behavior. One second I’m talking about Barry Bonds and the San Francisco Giants, and the next second I’ve got black holes in my eyes and am in full monk mode. Daydreaming is definitely the appropriate expression, since rousing me from this state is a lot like trying to wake me up: not an easy task!
So what do I think about when I’m in daydream mode? Well mostly I tell myself stories, or think about how things fit together. Now these stories definitely aren’t page turning blockbusters, they’re mostly about a problem I’ve been working on. Mentally it feels like I am constructing possible stories of how this or that problem might be resolved. Knowing X what does this imply about trying to make progress on problem P. Does it imply Y? Is Y consistent with a solution to P? Does Y fit into the story I know about problem Q? Etc. Etc.
Which leads me to the following question. How much does storytelling shape “good” thinking? (Okay, so my thinking is mostly less than “good”, but every once in a while I’m not a dufus.) For many years I’ve wondered how it might be possible to teach a class, like say, introductory mechanics (yeah I’m still a physicist at heart, you know), which teaches the physics by tracing the history of the subject. (I told this idea to some faculty well versed in physics education when I was a grad student and you should have seen them recoil in horror 🙂 ) Now, however, I’ve come to think that this desire was a misplaced projection. What I really wanted to figure out how to do was how to teach a course where the students could build up their own consistent story of what was going on. This story, of course, must be routed in all the history of the subject: you too must come to realize the trials and tribulations which led people to believe what they do. But it isn’t necesarily a history centric endeavor, but is more squarely centered on thinking up your own story. And it has got to be a story you are constantly examining and checking, i.e. which is open to repeated examination for consistency. A story which you could come to by daydreaming.
Another piece of anecdotal evidence of the role of storytelling in sharp thinking comes from my undergraduate days. When I think about my years at Caltech, one of the most fascinating events I observed was to watch those super achieving students spin yarns. It was not uncommon to spend hours at a time, taking some departing idea and then spend hours working out the consequences of this idea. Sure, some would call this simple B.S.ing and often the point of departure involved a Simpson’s episode, but in retrospect, I think that this was a great indication that deep down in these students brains, they had built up a strong consistent storytelling mechanism for thinking.
So what role does storytelling play in shaping sharp minds? Of course, I don’t know, but I’d love to hear a story which lets me understand how storytelling fits in with how our brain works. Then I could daydream about it.
[Of course this post is a grand exercise in extralusionary intelligence, for there are certainly loads of educational data on the role of storytelling in education. A quick look this morning, however, didn’t turn up anything concrete. So like any ignoramus, I’ve written this post completely unaware of the story other, more savy, researchers have been able to peice together.]
Dude, a Higs Boson?
Best quote from an article in the New York Times about the search for the Higgs boson:
Joe Lykken, a Fermilab theorist who said he first learned of the rumored bump the old-fashioned way, over lunch in the laboratory cafeteria, said: “Pre-blog, this sort of rumor would have circulated among perhaps a few dozen physicists. Now with blogs even string theorists who can’t spell Higgs became immediately aware of inside information about D Zero data.”
Zing!
I’m also very jealous of Gordon Watts, a fellow University of Washington blogger:
In response, Gordon Watts, a physicist from the University of Washington and longtime member of the D Zero team, scolded Dr. Dorigo for speculating on rumors.
“Dude! If you get called by the press to comment on this rumor — you will be making secondhand comments on rumors!” Dr. Watts wrote on his blog, Life as a Physicist.
Why am I jealous? Because he just got quoted in the New York Times, the paper of record, as saying “Dude!” Dude that rocks.
Turducken?
Juiciest paper on the arxiv yesterday? 0707.3101: “Excision Without Excision: the Relativistic Turducken” by D. Brown, O. Sarbach, E. Schnetter, M. Tiglio, P. Diener, I. Hawke, D. Pollney.