Posts

Posted on

Some Upcoming Talks

Some upcoming talks for those in Albuquerque or Ann Arbor (so many A’s!):

  • Feb 5, 5pm, University of New Mexico Center for Advanced Studies Seminars: The Symmetry Conjecture
  • Feb 6, 4:00 pm, University of New Mexico Physics and Astronomy Colloquium: The Race to Build a Quantum Computer
  • Feb 9, 4pm, University of Michigan Seminar: The Race to Build a Quantum Computer.
Posted on

links for 2009-02-04

  • A Simple Introduction to Quantum Groups « XOR’s Hammer
    (tags: quantum groups)
  • Backreaction: Corot-Exo-7b: A Venus in another World
    the discovery of an Earth-like planet around a Sun-like star in the constellation of Monoceros, at a distance of about 450 light years.
    (tags: planets astronomy)
  • You Can’t Count on the Data, from George Zachar : Daily Speculations
    "We document widespread changes to the historical I/B/E/S analyst stock recommendations database. Across seven I/B/E/S downloads, obtained between 2000 and 2007, we find that between 6,580 (1.6%) and 97,582 (21.7%) of matched observations are different from one download to the next. The changes include alterations of recommendations, additions and deletions of records, and removal of analyst names." Got clean data?
    (tags: finance)
  • Information Processing: Power laws, baby
    "When they analyzed these data-200 million of them-in exactly the same fashion that Bachelier had analyzed data almost a century earlier, they made a startling discovery. The pdf of price changes was not Gaussian plus outliers, as previously believed. Rather, all the data-including data previously termed outliers-conformed to a single pdf encompassing both everyday fluctuations and “once in a century” fluctuations. Instead of a Gaussian or some correction to a Gaussian, they found a power law pdf with exponent -4, a sufficiently large exponent that the difference from a Gaussian is not huge"
    (tags: finance powerlaws)
  • Physics – Relaxing the requirements for scalable quantum computing
    "In a paper appearing in Physical Review A, Panos Aliferis, who is at the IBM Watson Research Center, and John Preskill of the California Institute of Technology, rigorously establish a lower bound for the fault-tolerance threshold for one of Knill’s constructions that has relatively small overhead requirements. Their results indicate that fault-tolerant computation should definitely be possible with this scheme, if the error probability per logical operation does not exceed 0.1%."
    (tags: quantum computing)
  • Energy R&D Network Proposal Has Seattle, Boston Leaders Eyeing Possibilities | Xconomy
    "One intriguing idea getting shuttled around President Obama’s inner circle could end up pouring significant cash into the innovation hubs of Seattle and Boston. This idea, hatched at the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C., calls for building a national network of two dozen or more centers of excellence in cleantech R&D, with annual budgets of as much as $200 million from competitive research grants, to jumpstart innovation in alternative energy."
    (tags: cleanenergy grants)
  • Laid-off Microsoft worker offers passionate defense of company – TechFlash: Seattle's Technology News Source
    "As we reported last week, Woodman is the Microsoft solutions adviser who got a tattoo of the company's unofficial "Blue Monster" logo last year, only to find himself among the 1,400 people laid off by the company Jan. 22. Some Microsoft critics commenting on our post and on BoingBoing questioned Woodman's judgment for getting the tattoo.
    Here's the remarkable part: In a follow-up post, Woodman not only speaks glowingly about Microsoft but he goes out of his way to defend the past actions that helped shape its reputation. "
    (tags: microsoft tattoo)
  • Singularity University. Preparing Humanity For Accelerating Technolgical Change
    Via Roseblog. The name is not for me, but I'm all for crazy universities
    (tags: singularity university education names)
Posted on

Paper Reviewing Ratio

A long time ago, in a blog far far away, I ran a small poll about paper refereeing. The poll asked “What is your ratio of reviewed to submitted manuscripts?”. The results were

  • >=6 reviewed for every 1 submitted: 7 votes (8 percent)
  • 5 reviewed for every 1 submitted: 3 votes (4 percent)
  • 4 reviewed for every 1 submitted: 9 votes (10 percent)
  • 3 reviewed for every 1 submitted: 12 votes (14 percent)
  • 2 reviewed for every 1 submitted: 13 votes (15 percent)
  • 1 reviewed for every 1 submitted: 20 votes (24 percent)
  • 1 reviewed for every 2 submitted: 6 votes (7 percent)
  • 1 reviewed for every 3 submitted: 5 votes (6 percent)
  • 1 reviewed for every 4 submitted: 2 votes (2 percent)
  • 1 reviewed for every 5 submitted: 0 votes (0 percent)
  • 1 reviewed for every >=6 submitted: 7 votes (8 percent)

This works out to an average 2.2 papers reviewed for every one submitted.
But the question I didn’t ask is what should your ratio of reviewed (refereed) to submitted be?

Posted on

State of the ?

Amusing line from a New York Times article this morning:

“Are you aware under what conditions I worked in 1996?” he said by telephone from Mexico. “It’s only because of my lawsuit that you or anybody else can pick up a tape. In those days, I could not leave the archives with that material. I used state-of-the-lost-art equipment. I brought in a team of court reporters to help me with the first drafts.

State-of-the-lost-art? He used a telephonoscope?

Posted on

Brains, Brains, Brains, Brains

Like many an arrogant kid before me, when I graduate from high school in my podunk hometown (no, it wasn’t marshy, and I say podunk with all the warm feelings of a idyllic childhood), I was filled with confidence that I was one of the smartest people I knew. Oh, I’d never say it, and yes I knew I was good mostly at only one small thing, mathematics, but I’m pretty certain looking back that I was a pretty confident ass. As you can well imagine, then, transitioning from my high school to Caltech, an institution filled with near-perfect-SAT-scoring students, Nobel laureate faculty members, and a wide range of just frickin’ brilliant people, resulted in a large dislocation in my perspective concerning my own capabilities. But over time, I began to realize that, while I wasn’t the sharpest cookie in the cookie jar, every once in a very rare while I could do something worthy of interest to my fellow genii in grooming (mostly jokes, mad rantings, or random acts of bizarreness, if you must know.) Thus I came to the perspective that there was no such thing as a universal genius, that possibly, just possibly, there are people who are good at differing things—little genii of their own domains. It’s often disheartening to sit in a room with a large number of brilliant people, until I remind myself of this fact. And Monday, while doing exactly this form of sitting, I began to ponder the different ways in which these people have their own styles of brilliance. Or, in short, I made a list.

Continue reading “Brains, Brains, Brains, Brains”