linkedy links I

time for all new linkedy links here at the new digs

  • Quantum Frontiers - a new blog from the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, with kickoff by John Preskill hisself.
    Question of the day: explain quantum mechanics in five words
    My attempt: Probability Amplitudes, Observables don't Commute
    Good to know John still does khakis and chalk, but we gots to know: does he still have the diet pepsi?
    Took me years to break the habit... not that I was overly impressionable as a tender young grad turkey taking QFT or anything.
  • Subtleties of the Crappy Job Market - for Scientists, that is.
    From Julianne Dalcanton at Cosmic Variance.
    Conveniently summarizing the recent angst bubbling out about PhD production and labour demand.
  • How Many Hot Jupiters - Jason Wright at AstroWright blog tackles the interesting puzzle of why Kepler is finding fewer Hot Jupiters than expected from radial velocity surveys.
    Seems to be a real problem.
  • The Forgotten Cluster - another one from AstroWright - Ruprecht 147 is, apparently, the nearest decent open cluster, and is not appreciated well enough. Nice paper from Jason and the other Jason et al.
  • An Independent Planet Search In The Kepler Dataset - arXiv - interesting reanalysis of the public Kepler dataset fishing for many more candidate exoplanets. Claims to use prior information better than default Kepler pipeline to find more candidates. Indicative of how underfunded Kepler data analysis is.
  • Are there hints of stops in Higgs data - another arXiv missive - Dan Hooper et al speculate on the marginal anomalous branching ratios in putative Higgs decay modes as signs of the presence of a light stop - a supersymmetric partner to the top quark, which would be a coloured vector boson.
    Didn't take long, eh?
  • Hedge Fund Mirage - Steve Hsu at Information Processing explains that in the limit of large funds, even Hedge Funds can't beat the law of large numbers and at best regress to the mean.
    Or do they...
    Well, yes, most do. Be interesting if a few didn't, eh?
  • Whither higher education? - another one from Steve Hsu on the current fad for tech enhancement of higher ed and credentialing.
    For what it is worth, the US can not afford Oxbridge level tutorial systems for the top 10% of students, not as things are structured. It might be affordable for the top 10% of the top universities, ie about 1% of the higher ed student population.
    IMNSHO of course
  • Finance and the allocation of human capital
    - another one from inforproc - R&D innovation anti-correlates with financial booms.
    All My Former Classmates are belong to FIRE!

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