I grew up in the small town of Yreka, CA (“Yreka Bakery” backwards is…) that sits just minutes south of the Oregon-California border on Interstate 5. Yreka, population a little over 7000 brave souls, is the county seat of Siskiyou county. Siskiyou county is “god’s country” meaning, yes, (a) it votes strongly Republican 🙂 and (b) its scenery is awesome:
Siskiyou county is, however, not a wealthy part of the United States (yes, if you measure wealth in dollars :)) Unemployment in the county is currently 19 percent (not seasonally adjusted), the median income is $29,530, and about 18 percent of the population is below the poverty line. Most employment is in the services or retail trade, with government and agriculture/mining/timber being the next highest employers. The collapse of the timber industry during the 70s and 80s took a hard toll on the county and no industry has really arisen to take its place.
As you might imagine, given the above facts, the recent recession has cause some financial hardships for Siskiyou county. It comes as no surprise, then to read an article in the local newspaper, the Siskiyou Daily News, regarding drastic cuts in the funding of the Siskyou County library. The county is running a $3.7 million deficit, and many cuts are now on the county supervisor’s agenda. Among the cuts is one that hits dear to my heart, cutting the county library’s budget from $712,000 to $50,000, the later being enough to keep the utilities running at the library buildings. The county library in Siskiyou county is in danger of dying.
Read about this made me sad. Now I’m not a bystander without personal interest in this situation: my handicapped sister has worked or volunteered at the county library in Yreka for many many years. The “gainful” employment the library has given her has been a blessing for her and, I think, for those who get to spend time with someone who is much more wonderful than her oafish brother. It would be a shame if her job where to end, not because she costs the county much (she is a volunteer now) but because it brings great joy to her day, and I suspect, to many people who interact with her.
But I’m also sad for a different reason. I’m sad because of Spacetime Physics 1ST Edition
I’m sad because of a county library Calculus book whose author I do not remember, but where I first learned about Newton’s (and friend’s) great discovery involving wacko ideas like limits and infinitesimals. It will come as no surprise to learn that I was led to this book by a book on quantum theory. The quantum theory book started out with a discussion of something called blackbody radiation, and it was very important that the big sigma (I new this stood for a sum) was used instead of a big flat “S.” A science teacher said “Ah that’s an integral sign from Calculus.” Ah the indignation of having to learn calculus before you could learn quantum theory (now we know better!)
I’m sad because of all of the back issues of Scientific American with their wonderful articles on the game of life, computer bugs that evolved, and tinkertoy machines for playing tic-tac-toe (and whose author, in later life, seems to have become rather sadly confused.)
I’m sad for all of the many popular science books on the “mysteries” of quantum theory that allowed me, when it came time to really learn quantum theory, to know exactly where the line to those mysteries lay and that crossing that line tonight at 2 a.m. was not going to help me solve my problem set by 10 a.m. I’m sad for A Brief History of Time, From the Big Bang to Black Holes
Now I can’t say that I’ve been any great contribution to my country, given how big of a user of its library I once was. I live in Seattle and visit Yreka only occasionally now. But I do know with high certainty that a major factor in me ending up with a Ph.D. in theoretical physics and performing research on quantum computing can be traced back to that county library. And I’m guessing that for many others the library has provided a path towards their own self-education: may it be on black holes, sewing, or learning about the history of the world. If I had a soapbox I’d probably also go on about studies showing businesses not moving to the county due to it’s low literacy rate. But enough of the political whining. Tonight, I’m just going to be sad for the future kids who don’t even know that they just lost one more opportunity to expand and better their future world.
De Took Er DataBs Jrbs!
Over at Daily Speculations, Alan Corwin writes about database programming jobs that will never return. The gist of Alan’s piece is that the tools for databases are basically so turn-key and so easy that those who were trained to build their own database code by hand will be unlikely to see those job returns. He ends his article by noting: “For my friends in the programming community, it means that there are hard times ahead.”
Turn the page.
Here is a report from UCSD on “Hot Degrees for College Graduates 2010.” 3 of the top 5 are computer science related, and number 3 is “Data Mining.”
Now I know that database programming does not equal data mining. But it is interesting to contrast these two bits of data (*ahem*), especially giving the dire prediction at the end of Alan Corwin’s article. Besides my tinkering with iPhone apps, simulations for my research, and scirate, I’m definitely not a professional programmer. But I am surrounded by students who go on to be professional programmers, many of them being immensely successful (as witnessed by alumni I have met.) And when I talk to my CS students about job prospects, they are far from doom and gloom. So how to reconcile these two views?
Well, I think what is occurring here is simply that those who view themselves as a set of tools and languages they use to get their jobs are misunderstand what the role of a programmer should be. There are many variations on this theme, but one place to find a view of the programmer as different than someone whose skill set defines them is The Programmers Stone. And indeed, in this respect, I think a good CS degree resembles a good physics degree. Most people who come out of physics programs don’t list on their resume: “Expert in E&M, quantum theory, and statistical physics.” The goal of a good physics program is not to teach you the facts and figures of physics (which are, anyways, easily memorized), but to teach you how to solve new problems in physics. For computer science this will be even more severe, as it is pretty much guaranteed that the tools you will be using today will change in the next few years.
So doom and gloom for programmers? Only time will tell, of course, but I suspect this answer is a strong function of what kind of programmer you are. And by kind I don’t mean a prefix like “Java” or “C++”.
(And yes I realize that this is an elitist position, but I just find the myth of the commodity programming job as an annoying misrepresentation of why you should get a degree in computer science.)
Update: more here.
Dmitry Maslov, who is a program director at the NSF, made a good suggestion to me the other day that I’d like to follow up on (can you tell my full paternity leave is up?) In particular he noted that there is no central mailing list for announcements in quantum information science.
Google Hella Cool
Fellow Yrekan Austin Sendek’s quest to get “Hella” the official prefix for 1027 has scored a Googol-sized success. Err I mean a Google-sized success:
Austin also writes to inform me that there is an official petition, which can be found here.
Also I’m amused to note that the google-monster also recognizes smoots.
Portrait of a Reviewer as a Young Man
Science is dynamic. Sometimes this means that science is wrong, sometimes it means that science is messy. Mostly it is very self-correcting, given the current state of knowledge. At any given time the body of science knows a lot, but could be overturned when new evidence comes in. What we produce through all of this, however, at the end of the day, are polished journal articles. Polished journal articles.
Every time I think about this disparity, I wonder why different versions of a paper, the referee reports, the author responses, and all editorial reviews aren’t part of the scientific record. In an age where online archiving of data such as this is a minor cost, why is so much of the review process revealed to only the authors, the referees, and the editors?
Theory Matters Vision Nuggets
One result of a workshop held in 2008 that “broad research themes within theoretical computer science…that have potential for a major impact in the future, and distill these research directions into compelling “nuggets” that can quickly convey their importance to a layperson” is this set of nuggets. Among the summary of nuggets we find quantum computing and three questions:
In the wake of Shor’s algorithm, one can identify three basic questions:
(1) First, can quantum computers actually be built? Can they cope with realistic rates of decoherence — that is, unwanted interaction between a quantum computer and its external environment? Alternatively, can we find any plausible change to currently-accepted laws of physics such that quantum computing would *not* be possible?
(2) Second, what would the actual capabilities of quantum computers be? For example, could they efficiently solve NP-complete problems? Though quantum computers would break many of today’s cryptographic codes (including RSA), can other practical codes be found that are secure against quantum attacks?
(3) Third, does quantum computing represent the actual limit of what is efficiently computable in the physical world? Or could (for example) quantum gravity lead to yet more powerful kinds of computation?
I would have added (a) are quantum computers useful for physical simulation of chemistry, biology, and physics?, (b) can quantum computing theory overcome roadblocks that have plagued classical computational complexity?, and (c) is quantum computing useful for understanding how to build classical algorithms for simulating physical systems?
What To Do With Scirate?
One interesting thing about quantum computing is that because it is a very new field, a large amount of the research in the field is on the arXiv (interestingly the worst users have historically been computer scientists.) Back in 2006 whenever I would sit around BSing about the arXiv with other quantum computing people, the idea of improvements that would bring the arXiv more up to date would come up. After hearing repeatedly about such ideas, in January 2007, I got fed up of hearing about these ideas and so I sat down and wrote scirate.com, a Digg-like front end for the arXiv. Okay well mostly I did it to learn PHP and Python. Oh, and because coding is fun and I can actually succeed at it as opposed to opened ended research which if hard. Also I did it because I hated spending time filtering through the arXiv each day and wanted to use the power of group knowledge to help save me time. I figure if I add up the time Scirate has saved me versus the time spent reading it I’m pretty close to having gained time. What you didn’t know the point of this blog is to slow down all you competing quantum researchers and thus effectively increase my own effective research speed? 🙂
After some initial development, however, I mostly stopped working on Scirate. Why? Well first of all because I didn’t think I’d succeeded in a very elegant way. Second there was never much traction: there is a group of quantum computing theorists who use scirate fairly often, but outside of that it is not widely used (though there are around a thousand users signed up.) Probably this is also because the development of scirate was essentially closed, consisting of me, hacking away in his spare time. Third, well this thing called a “real job” called (but I keep getting this “hold” music, heh.) I am, however, very proud that until last week, I basically haven’t had to touch the website in any way (last week my host moved Scirates server and didn’t copy over my crontab jobs, thus there is a day missing where I didn’t catch this) besides fixing a few double votes (that occur via a mechanism I’ve never been able to track down.)
So now the question is: what should I do with Scirate?
Some things I’ve been thinking about.
- One problem with Scirate is it’s closed nature. Thus it seems that it would be useful to open up an API for Scirate, allowing for its integrated functionality in other Science 2.0 websites. Indeed I’ve been thinking a bit about a very general framework for the type of functionality Scirate provides, but haven’t mapped the idea out fully.
- I’d like to learn more about Google App engine. Seems like what I do next would be a good opportunity to achieve this.
- One thing that was clearly missing was the ability to use Scirate for some sort of social networking. I’m a bit of a skeptic of “scientific social networking” sites, simply because I don’t see how scientists are all that special in their needs for social networking. Or to say it another way I don’t quite see how a more general social networking tool can’t be “extended” to be useful for scientists, but also be very useful across a wide swath of society. This would imply that I should investigate integration into other social networking sites. But does anyone really want Scirate on Facebook? (Farmville proves to me, however, that I have no idea what people want with Facebook.) And something like LinkedIn doesn’t seem to me to be as widely used as a social networking site (it’s more of a contacts / job site) nor does it allow for extend-able apps as far as I know. Actually this makes me realize that there is a huge hole in the professional social networking genre, though I’m sure that there are people out there attacking this problem. Anyone have any leads?
- There are rumors that the arXiv will soon be accessible in “the cloud.” What sorts of functionality would this allow that it currently missing?
Anyway it seems that I’m due to be working on something new…and yes I know I need to update my iPhone apps as well 🙂
Hybrid Research/IT Position at PI
Rob sends me information about an interesting new position at the Perimeter Institute (more info here):
The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI) is looking for a Scientific IT specialist — a creative individual with experience in both scientific research and information technology (IT). This is a new, hybrid, research/IT position within the Institute, dedicated to helping PI’s scientific staff make effective use of IT resources. It has two clear missions. First, to directly assist researchers in using known, available IT tools to do their research. Second, to uncover or develop cutting-edge IT resources, introduce and test them with PI researchers, and then share the things we create and discover with the worldwide scientific community.
By “tools”, we mean almost anything. Coding techniques are an obvious example. Collaboration and communication technologies are another: tools for peer-to-peer interactions (such as skype), virtual whiteboards, video conferencing tools, platforms for running virtual conferences (that can do justice to talks in the mathematical sciences), and novel ways of presenting research results such as archives for recorded seminars, blogs, and wikis. Further examples include tools for helping researchers organize information (e.g., specialized search engines and filtering schemes), and end-user software that facilitates bread-and-butter scientific activities like writing papers collaboratively, preparing presentations, and organizing references.
We are seeking a person who brings an independent and ambitious vision that will help define this vision. The job is as yet quite malleable in its scope and duties! We’re looking for someone who is inspired by the possibility that new IT tools can improve or perhaps even revolutionize the way that physics research is done, and someone who can take full advantage of a mandate to create and implement that vision.
Some Duties and Responsibilities:
- Act as a knowledge broker among Researchers. That is, find and test new programs and practices, advertise them, and be prepared to train others in their use.
- Participate in the creation of a high quality “standard” Researcher IT environment (desktop hardware, software set-up), built from a mix of open source software and popular commercial packages.
- Help with High Performance Computing demands.
- Maintain expert level knowledge in the use of the main packages used by Researchers, including Mathematica, Maple, LaTex, etc.
For the official job ad, go here:
http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/Scientific/Applications/Scientific_IT_Specialist/
An Adiabatic Tale of the Cat and Mouse
Customer X: Hi, D-wave? So, I hear that you have this computer that can be used to solve computationally hard problems. Oh, yes, sorry, should have said a quantum computer, my bad. Well, you know we’ve got this hard computational problem, [Editor: problem description deleted to protect identity of involved company.] So what do you think, can you solve this problem for me? Great! Let me put you in contact with my technical guy. Yes, I’ll wire the money to your account today.
Months later.
Customer X: Hi D-Wave, thanks for all your help with getting us set up to use your machine to solve these hard computational problems. We ran the adiabatic algorithm a few times, but it doesn’t seem to be working. Do you have any suggestions? Oh, try a different adiabatic annealing schedule, okay, I’ll pass this on to my technical guy. Thanks for your help. Is it still raining in Vancouver?
A day later.
Customer X: So we tried a new annealing schedule, but it didn’t seem to help. Well it helped on a few of our instances, but not all of them. Any suggestions? Okay I can hold. [Celine Dion music ensues for twenty minutes.] Right. Your tech guys suggest this particular annealing schedule. Great, we’ll try that! How’s the rain?
An hour later
Customer X: Well okay, so we tried that one and again it got a few more answers correct, but now it doesn’t work on the other instances. Can you tell me where that annealing schedule came from? Oh, I understand company secret. Okay can you send me another annealing schedule? Rain again? Sheesh, Noah would have loved Vancouver.
Days later, many annealing strategies shown not to work.
Customer X: So, um, I guess I should have asked this when we started, but what understanding do you have about the speed-ups guaranteed by your machine? I mean, certainly you have at least some evidence that the machine will be able to solve the instances that matter, right? Or at least tell me if my instances will be sped up on your computer? Hello? Hello?
[This blog post brought to you by the letter R and the quote “For now the adiabatic quantum optimizers have the upper hand.”]
Not True in Any Base
Yes, dear Gray Lady, you certainly sound more sophisticated when you use the word “prime number” in your newspaper. But perhaps you might want to look up the actual meaning of the word before placing those words prominently beside two times five times five.