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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.
links for 2009-02-10
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THE doctor who sparked the scare over the safety of the MMR vaccine for children changed and misreported results in his research, creating the appearance of a possible link with autism, a Sunday Times investigation has found.
links for 2009-02-09
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Earlier this week, Bill Gates got a lot of attention for releasing some mosquitoes into a crowd while talking about malaria. The video is now available for viewing, and you can watch it below. The incident comes about 5 minutes into the speech, but the entire presentation is worth watching if you have time.
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Predictive Bet « Masteroftheuniverse’s WeblogA good friend of mine and I have been discussing the predictive nature of the markets, or as I contend the lack of. Since he’s a follower of the pseudoscience of TA, he says he can predict the markets. He doesn’t trade, but is very interested in the markets and eats, sleeps, and breathes markets. He’s been trying to confuse me with all his mumbo jumbo and I finally said no mas. I proposed a small wager and he accepted. We’re both opening up two small accounts(I’m just segregating an account of mine) and he’s going to use TA to determine his trades. Instead of using my regular methods for finding trades, I’ve decided to use the device pictured below to give me trading guidance.
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A meeting about new approaches to sequencing the human (or any other species) genome. Some of these sound pretty fantastic. One company claims to be able to sequence human genomes for $5000. In 8 days around Christmas, they assembled 254 billion bases of DNA data to create a draft sequence covering 92% of the genome. y June the cost will be $1000 and that they expect to sequence 20,000 by next year. Since little data, it is probably good to be a little skeptical.
Another group presented data on a method they claim will be able to produce entire human genome sequences in 3 minutes. Lets see about 3 billion bases in 180 seconds is 17 million bases a second. Wow. -
Nearly a decade age, a Houston computer scientist posed this heretical question. Today, it’s led to a movement dubbed “probabilistic computing,” which he believes will revolutionize the future of computing.
This afternoon, Krishna Palem, speaking at a computer science meeting in San Francisco, will announce results of the first real-world test of his probabilistic computer chip: The chip, which thrives on random errors, ran seven times faster than today’s best technology while using just 1/30th the electricity
More on Fixed Points
In a prior post I asked about the how the structure of fixed points of stochastic maps changes under composition of such maps. Robin provided an interesting comment about the setup, linking this question at least partially with zero error codes:
R has at least one fixed point. If it’s unique, there need be no relationship between fixed points of P and R. (Q can project to a single vector, which becomes the unique fixed point of R.) If R has N > 1 fixed points, then things get more interesting. The fixed points are closed under linear combination, so they’re a subspace (I’m actually assuming N is the dimension of the subspace). An N-dimensional fixed subspace gives an N-symbol noiseless code for N (not necessarily obvious, but see arxiv/0705.4282), and therefore an N-symbol correctable code for P. Q is the recovery map. So, the dimensionality of R‘s fixed-point space (N) is tightly bounded by the size of P‘s largest zero-error code, and the fixed-point set itself has to be a subspace of one of those codes. You can also transpose R and get an identical bound in terms of QT‘s zero-error codes. (Yes, I know QT isn’t necessarily stochastic, but it works anyway). The zero-error codes are independent sets of P‘s adjacency graph, so (a) there can be quite a few of them, and (b) finding the bound on N is isomorphic to Maximum Clique.
Robin scores double bonus old school points for linking to a paper by Shannon. Okay, so given that the general case seems hard (and my question was vague), maybe it’s better to work with a simpler concrete example of what I’m thinking.