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A Tactic Named Sue

A puppet commenter informs me that El Naschie is suing Nature. El Naschie, you may remember, was the journal editor of Chaos, Solitons and Fractals who was accused of not reviewing his own papers in the journal. To be expected, I suppose. But the commenter that pointed this out is entertaining:

Sarah Limbrick [Pontiff: writer of the above linked article about the suit] would surely be interested to know what the leading libel expert in England had to say about the Nature article complained of. He said he is in a state of disbelief that the worlds most respectable scientific journal Nature should publish an article which bears all the hallmarks of the tabloid press. Another interesting point is the conspiracy theory linking the plagiarism of El Naschies work published in Scientific American with the Nature article as well as a far worse article published in Die Zeit. Interestingly all of these three publications are owned by Macmillan. I understand from confidential sources that a mega surprise will be released at the trial engulfing highly reputed names some of whom are Nobel laureates.

OOooh, Nobel laureates in a libel case and conspiracy theories to boot! That’s bigger than the Scopes monkey trial!

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Seattle Signs

Not helpful:
In Seattle if a road bends ever so slightly you are on a new street, but the above is…confusing.

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Living the Relativistic Life

Over the summer I started running a not so insignificant amount: 6 miles in the morning on the weekdays and 10 to 15 miles on the weekends (insert commenter telling me why this is wrong.) So, one or two or more hours out running around beautiful Seattle (My favorite route is Queen Anne to Fremont to Ballard Locks, around Magnolia and back up Queen Anne.) Which brings us to the subject of time. During my runs it seems that my watch, which runs using mechanical energy, decided that it had a new setting: relativistic mode. In other words I’d go out and run for two hours, and when I got back my watch would be ten minutes behind the clock at my home. At first I thought, cool! I get to experience time dilation in person! And then I thought: boy I’m fast. And then finally: I’m always late.
Damn you relativity!

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12th Annual SqUiNT, Feb 18-21 2010

SqUinT will be held in Santa Fe, NM from Feb 18-21, 2010. The submission page is now open and available at http://panda.unm.edu/SQuInT. Note that speakers outside the network should contact the organizers if they wish to inquire about attending. It’s an El Nino year, so New Mexico should have some good snow this year 🙂

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TQC 2010 First Announcement

The 5th Conference on the Theory of Quantum Computation, Communication and Cryptography has put up its first announcement. It will be held at the University of Leeds, United Kingdom, from 13th – 15th April 2010. The first upcoming deadline to be aware of is the submission deadline of Monday January 4, 2010:

The 5th Conference on Theory of Quantum Computation, Communication, and Cryptography
—- TQC 2010 —-
University of Leeds, UK
13 – 15 April 2009
http://tqc2010.leeds.ac.uk
====================================================================
Quantum computation, quantum communication, and quantum cryptography are subfields of quantum information processing, an interdisciplinary field of information science and quantum mechanics. TQC 2010 focuses on theoretical aspects of these subfields. The objective of the conference is to bring together researchers so that they can interact with each other and share problems and recent discoveries. The conference will be held from April 13-15, 2010, at the University of Leeds. It will consist of invited talks,
contributed talks, and a poster session.
The scope of the conference includes, but is not limited to:
* quantum algorithms
* models of quantum computation
* quantum complexity theory
* simulation of quantum systems
* quantum cryptography
* quantum communication
* quantum estimation and measurement
* quantum noise
* quantum coding theory
* fault-tolerant quantum computing
* entanglement theory
Invited Speakers:
* Julia Kempe (Tel-Aviv University)
* Kae Nemoto (NII, Tokyo)
* Frank Verstraete (University of Vienna)
* Ronald de Wolf (CWI, Amsterdam)
* Anton Zeilinger (University of Vienna)
Post Proceedings:
As has happened for previous TQCs, a post-conference proceedings volume
will be published in Springer’s Lecture Notes in Computer Science, to
which selected speakers will be invited to contribute.
Program Committee:
Andrew Childs (University of Waterloo)
Matthias Christandl (Ludwig-Maximilians-University)
Wim van Dam (University of California, Santa Barbara; Chair)
Nilanjana Datta (University of Cambridge)
Aram Harrow (University of Bristol)
Peter Hoyer (University of Calgary)
Rahul Jain (National University of Singapore)
Elham Kashefi (University of Edinburgh)
Debbie Leung (University of Waterloo)
Hoi-Kwong Lo (University of Toronto)
Juan Pablo Paz (University of Buenos Aires)
Francesco Petruccione (University of KwaZulu-Natal)
Martin Rotteler (NEC, Princeton)
Miklos Santha (Universit? Paris Sud)
Simone Severini (University College London; Co-chair)
Seiichiro Tani (NTT, Tokyo)
Jean-Pierre Tillich (INRIA, Rocquencourt)
Pawel Wocjan (University of Central Florida)
Takashi Yamamoto (Osaka University)
Local (University of Leeds) organising committee:
Katie Barr (Physics and Astronomy)
Katherine Brown (Physics and Astronomy)
Barry Cooper (Maths)
Peter Crompton (Maths)
Vladimir V. Kisil (Maths)
Viv Kendon (Physics and Astronomy; Chair)
Neil Lovett (Physics and Astronomy)
Rob Wagner (Physics and Astronomy)
Conference series steering committee:
Yasuhito Kawano (NTT, Tokyo, Japan)
Michele Mosca (IQC, University of Waterloo, and Perimeter Institute, Waterloo, Canada)
Vlakto Vedral (CQC, University of Oxford, UK, and CQT, National University of Singapore)
Important Dates:
* Submission deadline: Monday 4th January 2010 (23:59 local time)
* Notification of acceptance/rejection: Thursday 11th February 2010
* Conference: April 13-15, 2010
* Post-proceedings submission deadline: End of May 2010
* Final copy deadline: End of August 2010
* Published: November 2010
To receive announcements, calls for papers, and reminders of deadlines, subscribe to the mailing list by following this link:
http://lists.leeds.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/tqc2010
(You may also use this link to unsubscribe at any time.)
To contact the organisers, please send emailto: tqc2010 [at] leeds.ac.uk.

Looks good but what is the Maths department 😉 ?

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Where Quantum Computing Theory Is Done

Update 4/5/09: The wandering Australian does an analysis by institution.
Today, because I have way to many deadlines fast approaching, I needed to waste some time (procrastineerering), I decide to take a look at the last years worth of scited papers on the quant-ph section of scirate.com. The question I wanted to investigate is where quantum computing theory is occurring worldwide. So I took the top scited papers scoring over 10 scitations (42 papers in all) and looked at the affiliations of the authors: each co-author contributed a fractional score to their particular region (authors with multiple affiliations had their votes split.) And yes, I decided to lump all of Europe together and combined Japan and China (sorry). The results are as follows:

  • US: 40.07%
  • Europe: 30.68%
  • Canada: 18.75%
  • Singapore: 5.54%
  • China/Japan: 3.77%
  • Australia: 1.19%

Of course these results are subject to a plethora of problems: I mean the idea that one can extrapolate from a half rate voting website is silly! But that’s what blogs are for, no? So let’s plunge in 🙂
To me it was interesting to see that the U.S. is doing as well as it is, considering that fact that there have been considerably less hires of junior faculty in the U.S. in quantum computing that elsewhere. In looking at this it seems pretty clear to me at lot of this has to do with two institutions: Caltech (the IQI) and MIT. Another interesting fact for me was that Canada did not score as high as I would have expected, considering the vast resources that exist at the University of Waterloo and the Perimeter Institute. Finally it was quite impressive to look at the number of European contributions from the U.K.: far higher than I had appreciated.
So what conclusion should you draw from this? Probably none at all, considering the suspect methodology, but if you want something to write home about it’s probably: the U.S. is behind the combined juggernaut of Canada and Europe 🙂

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Is College Tuition a Bubble?

Over at Life as a Physicist, the Physicist for Life gets on a well deserved soap box and laments certain comments concerning articles about a recent College Board study: Trends in College Pricing 2009. The gist of the Physicist for Life’s comments concern the fact that one should not be surprised at rising tuition costs at public universities, given that state budgets have been shot to all hell in the present downturn.
But what I find interesting, and what I’ve never been able to figure out, is the larger trend (ignore the last two years, please). Why are tuition prices increasing at such a fast rate for four year colleges? For example, see slide 5 of this presentation where one sees that over the last three decades, the inflation adjusted price of college has more than tripled at public four year universities and gone up nearly as much a private four year universities. So that is question number one for me. Question number two is really related, and is where is this money going? (And of course the real question, as a pseudo-professor, how do I get some of it?)
Speculation below the fold.
Continue reading “Is College Tuition a Bubble?”

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What To Do When There *Is* Nothing Else?

Michael Green’s appointment to replace Stephen Hawking as the Lucasian chair, has, quite predictably, brought back into the spotlight the ever simmering STRING WARS!!!OMG!!!STRINGTHEORYRLZ!!. Okay, maybe not the spotlight, per se, but I did find the article about Green in the Guardian interesting (via the so wrong it hurts fellow):

But that was one of their arguments, that the academy is so biased towards string theory – hiring mostly string theorists, crowning mostly string theorists – that it has driven out all other ways of seeing (Smolin compared it to deciding that there was only one way to fight cancer, and pouring all available resources into that one way). “People do what they feel is going to be productive,” says Green. “It’s all very well to say they should be doing something else. But there is nothing else.”

Now, of course, this is all part of a long series of arguments about the validity of string theory as an approach to a physical theory merging gravity and the standard model. Yawn, that is *so* 00s.
What it did make me think, however, was what the equivalent argument would be in a different field. And because, while I posses my fair share of extralusionary intelligence, I thought, oh I’d better stick to my own field when I think about this. So what would the equivalent be in quantum computing?
I hereby declare that there are only two valid approaches to building a quantum computer: ion trap quantum computers and superconducting based quantum computers. It’s all very well to say that we should be spending our time working on other “ideas” for quantum computers. But there is nothing else.

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ArXiv in the Cloud Coming?

Via the arXiv api newsgroup comes the rumor that soon, perhaps, the arXiv will be available for full download sometime in the future:

or a full copy of (or particular subsets of) PDF for arXiv papers, we are in the process of setting up a service in the Cloud, which will offer the option for bulk download. I’ll let you know when that
becomes available.

Cool! All of physics since recorded arXiv time on my hard drive 🙂