O brave new quantum world!
We all know about higher education being squeezed financially. Government support is falling and tuition is going up. We see academic jobs getting scarcer, and more temporary. The pressure for research to focus on the short term is going up. Some of these changes may be fair, since society always has to balance its immediate …
Gil Kalai has just posted on his blog a series of videos of his lectures entitled “why quantum computers cannot work.” For those of us that have followed Gil’s position on this issue over the years, the content of the videos is not surprising. The surprising part is the superior production value relative to your typical …
While many of us are just recovering from QIP, I want to mention that the submission deadline is looming for the conference TQC, which perhaps should be called TQCCC because its full name is Theory of Quantum Computation, Communication and Cryptography. Perhaps this isn’t done because it would make the conference seem too classical? But …
A long time ago in a mental universe far far away I gave a talk to a theory seminar about quantum algorithms. An excerpt from the abstract: Quantum computers can outperform their classical brethren at a variety of algorithmic tasks….[yadda yadda yadaa deleted]… This talk will assume no prior knowledge of quantum theory… The other …
Happy New Year! To celebrate let’s talk about error correcting codes and….aliens. The universe, as many have noted, is kind of like a computer. Or at least our best description of the universe is given by equations that prescribe how various quantities change in time, a lot like a computer program describes how data in …
US biologist Randy Schekman, who shared this year’s physiology and medicine Nobel prize, has made prompt use of his new bully pulpit. In How journals like Nature, Cell and Science are damaging science: The incentives offered by top journals distort science, just as big bonuses distort banking he singled out these “luxury” journals as a …
This Thanksgiving, even if we can’t all be fortunate enough to be presenting a talk at QIP, we can be thankful for being part of a vibrant research community with so many different lines of work going on. The QIP 2014 accepted talks are now posted with 36 out of 222 accepted. While many of …
Citations are the currency of academia. But the currency of your heart is another thing altogether. With apologies to my co-authors, here is a plot of my paper citations versus my own subjective rating of the paper. Hover over the circles to see the paper title, citations per year, and score. Click to see the …
Continue reading “Portrait of an Academic at a Midlife Crisis”
The main proof in one of my QIP submissions has developed a giant hole. Hopefully the US Congress does a better job with its own, somewhat higher stakes, deadline. In many ways their job is easier. They can just submit the same thing as last year and they don’t need to compress their result into …
When I was in graduate school (back before the earth cooled) I remember thinking the following thoughts: Quantum computing is a new field filled with two types of people: young people dumb enough to not know they weren’t supposed to be studying quantum computing, and old, tenured people who understood that tenure meant that they …
Continue reading “When I Was Young, I Thought It Would Be Different….”