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Picture Gallery for listing 29003112Now that's a Seattle swimming pool view.
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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.
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New Zealand town is in the dark — and proud of it"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.
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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
Quantum Sloan Winners
Congrats to the quantum tenure odds booster award winners Sloan award winners:
Robert Raussendorf, UBC
Hartmut Häffner, UC Berkeley (Go Bears!)
Alán Aspuru-Guzik, Haavard
Scott Aaronson, MIT (that other Tech school)
Andrew Houck, Princeton
Subhadeep Gupta, University of Washington
Lance lists the theoretical computer scientist winners.
A What Bit?
A correspondent writes to me about a recent article in the APS News describingThe Top Ten Physics Stories of 2008 and notes a very troubling sentence:
Diamond Detectors
Work on the molecular structure of carbon continues to show great promise for quantum computing. This year scientists were able to construct a nano-scale light source that emits a single photon at a time. The team first removed a solitary atom from the carbon’s otherwise regular matrix and then introduced a nitrogen atom nearby. When they excited this crystal with a laser, single polarized photons were emitted from the empty space. These photons could be used to detect very small magnetic forces. Additionally the photons emitted contained two spin states and were able to exist in that state for nearly a millisecond before their wave function collapsed. The emitted photon is essentially a long-lasting qbit which could, with further development, be entangled with other adjacent qbits for uses in quantum computing. Another team at the University of Delft in the Netherlands, working in conjunction with UCSB, was able to detect the spin of a single electron in a diamond environment. At the same time, a group at Harvard was able to locate within a nanometer a single Carbon-11 impurity using its nuclear spin interactions.
Qbit? What’s a qbit? Doh.
links for 2009-02-16
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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
Perimeter Distinguished Research Chairs
In addition to the distinguished Dr. Hawking, the Perimeter institute lands nine very impressive distinguished research chairs, including some familiar quantum names.
Continue reading “Perimeter Distinguished Research Chairs”
Fault Tolerance – It's No LAFTing Matter
Conference of interest to the fault-tolerant crowd (hm, wording not quite right):
Event Title: Workshop on Logical Aspects of Fault Tolerance (LAFT)
(affiliated with LICS 2009)
Date: 08/15/2009
Location: University of California, Los Angeles
Description:
We are soliciting papers on logical aspects of fault tolerance. The concept of
“fault” underlies essentially all computational systems that have any goal.
Loosely speaking, a fault is an unintended event that can have an unintended
effect on the attainment of that goal. “Fault tolerance” is the term given to a
system’s ability to cope in some way with a fault, either inherently or through
design. Fault tolerance has been studied for its application to circuits, and then
branching out to distributed systems and more recently to quantum computers, where
the concern with fault tolerance is almost the paramount issue. The relevance to
biological computation is also obvious. Papers must be concerned with mathematical
logical approaches to fault tolerance, not simply fault tolerance.
Selected papers will appear in Logic Journal of the IGPL (Oxford U. Press).
IMPORTANT DATES:
Papers due: April 17, 2009
Notification: May 22, 2009
Final papers: July 10, 2009
Workshop: August 15, 2009
links for 2009-02-13
Dark Side of the…Whah?
Over at the fact builders blog, the fact master discusses The Physics of….Pink Floyd. Being two areas I greatly enjoy, I was reminded by the fact builders picture of the cover of “The Dark Side of the Moon” of a little known piece of Pink Floyd strangeness. Anyone notice something peculiar about the back and cover of DSOTM:
Update: Ian provides a picture of the inside of the DSOTM, where, we find, all hell breaks loose:
Stimulating Morning
The Computing Research Policy Blog is reporting possible good news for science funding:
Speaker Pelosi’s office just released a fact sheet on the conference agreement for the American Economic Recovery and Reinvestment Act and, wow, it looks good for science agencies in the bill. Here’s the relevant bit:
Transform our Economy with Science and Technology: To secure America’s role as a world leader in a competitive global economy, we are renewing America’s investments in basic research and development, in training students for an innovation economy, and in deploying new technologies into the marketplace. This will help businesses in every community succeed in a global economy.
Investing in Scientific Research (More than $15 Billion)
- Provides $3 billion for the National Science Foundation, for basic research in fundamental science and engineering – which spurs discovery and innovation.
- Provides $1.6 billion for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, which funds research in such areas as climate science, biofuels, high-energy physics, nuclear physics and fusion energy sciences – areas crucial to our energy future.
- Provides $400 million for the Advanced Research Project Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) to support high-risk, high-payoff research into energy sources and energy efficiency in collaboration with industry
- Provides $580 million for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, including the Technology Innovation Program and the Manufacturing Extension Partnership.
- Provides $8.5 billion for NIH, including expanding good jobs in biomedical research to study diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, cancer, and heart disease.
- Provides $1 billion for NASA, including $400 million to put more scientists to work doing climate change research.
- Provides $1.5 billion for NIH to renovate university research facilities and help them compete for biomedical research grants.
Extending Broadband Services
- Provides $7 billion for extending broadband services to underserved communities across the country, so that rural and inner-city businesses can compete with any company in the world.
- For every dollar invested in broadband, the economy sees a ten-fold return on that investment.
GQI 'Best Student Paper' Award at APS March Meeting (2009)
Fame and fortune could be yours. Tell your supervisor to nominate you:
Once again, GQI will award two “Best Student Paper” prizes at the APS March Meeting (2009): one for theory and one for experiment. The awards, each consisting of a $500 cash prize, are sponsored by Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, and the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo, respectively. All undergraduate and graduate students who are both first author and presenters of an oral or poster presentation are eligible.
To be registered for the competition, a brief nomination letter from the student’s supervisor stating that the results described in the presentation are substantially the student’s own work and that the student is currently enrolled at a degree-granting institute, must be sent via email to David DiVincenzo at divince (atatat) watson.ibm.com before the March meeting commences.
The two equally weighted criteria for the award are quality of scientific results and quality of the presentation. Judging will be undertaken by an ad hoc committee consisting of senior members of GQI.