Free Thought
pontiff | November 24, 2009Some notes for quantum computing people:
IARPA will be hosting a Proposers' Day Conference for the Quantum Computer Science (QCS) Program on December 17, 2009 in anticipation of the release of a new solicitation in support of the program. Details here
Submissions for TQC 2010 in Leeds are now open at http://tqc2010.leeds.ac.uk.
Digging through my inbox I noticed that I forgot to advertise the following quantum postdoc:
The physics of quantum information group at the department of physics of the Universite de Sherbrooke invites applications for up to three postdoctoral positions. The group…
cortex | November 22, 2009Last week, a team of computer scientists led by Dharmendra S. Modha announced what sounded like an impressive breakthrough for neuroscience-inspired computing:
Using Dawn Blue Gene / P supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Lab with 147,456 processors and 144 TB of main memory, we achieved a simulation with 1 billion spiking neurons and 10 trillion individual learning synapses. This is equivalent to 1,000 cognitive computing chips each with 1 million neurons and 10 billion synapses, and exceeds the scale of cat cerebral cortex. The simulation ran 100 to 1,000 times slower than real-time…
clock | November 19, 2009There are 25 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
The Astronomical Orientation of Ancient Greek Temples:
Despite its appearing to be a simple question to answer, there has been no consensus as to whether or not the alignments of ancient Greek temples…
pontiff | November 18, 2009Last Friday I went to at talk by Brian David Johnson from Intel. That sentence sounds like any other that an academic could write--always with the going to seminars we acahacks are. That is until you hear that Brian David Johnson is a "consumer experience architect" in the Digital Home - User Experience Group at Intel. Okay that is a bit odd for a typical seminar speaker, but still lies in the "reasonable" range. And then you find out the title of his talks is "Brain Machines: Robots, Free Will and Fictional Prototyping as a Tool for AI Design" and you say, whah? Which is exactly what a…
drorzel | November 16, 2009
Michael Nielsen » The Wikipedia Paradox
"To determine whether any given subject deserves an entry, Wikipedia uses the criterion of notability. This lead to an interesting question:
Question 1: What's the most notable subject that's not notable enough for inclusion in Wikipedia?
Let's assume for now that this question has an answer ("The Answer"), and call the corresponding subject X. Now, we have a second question whose answer is not at all obvious.
Question 2: Is subject X notable merely by being The Answer?"
(tags: internet culture michael-nielsen computing silly)
On the Opinion that…
cpikas | November 14, 2009Thursday was a half day covering first the cyberinfrastructure and then some discussions of another system that can provide lessons learned to the RSN (reminder: regional scale nodes, the long cabled sensors).
My notes are (of course) at work, but I'll reconstruct some of what I heard. I would recommend interested folks consult the final design document (oh no! it isn't where I found it the other day).
The CI is pretty complicated - in many places it's closer to the cutting edge of science than other parts of the enterprise. The complications include: openness, interactivity, quantities of…
goodmath | November 13, 2009(This is a heavily edited repost of the first article in my original
Haskell tutorial.)
(I've attempted o write this as a literate haskell program. What that
means is that if you just cut-and-paste the text of this post from your
browser into a file whose name ends with ".lhs", you should be able to run it
through a Haskell compiler: only lines that start with ">" are treated as
code. The nice thing about this is that this blog post is itself a
compilable, loadable Haskell source file - so I've compiled and tested
all of the code in here in exactly this context.)
Haskell is a functional…
goodmath | November 13, 2009 A couple of people pointed out that in my wednesday post about Go, I
completely left out the concurrency stuff! That's what I get for rushing the
post - I managed to leave out one of the most interesting subjects! Go
provides very strong support for communicating processes.
I haven't done a lot of hacking with the concurrency stuff yet - so my
impressions of it are still very preliminary. But my early impressions are
very good.
A lot of people have been talking about Go as a language for distributed
computation. I don't think that's correct: Go programs run in a single, shared
address…
pontiff | November 11, 2009Last month a local restaurant group, Chow foods---among whose restaurants is one of our favorite Sunday breakfast spots, The Five Spot---ran a contest/charity event: "Chow Dow." The game: guess the value of the Dow Jones Industrial Average at the close of the market on October 29th, 2009. The closest bet under the closing value which did not go over the value would be the winner. The prize was the value of Dow in gift certificates to the Chow restaurants: i.e. approximately $10K in food (or as we would say in Ruddock House at Caltech: "Eerf Doof!" We said that because it fit nicely with…
drorzel | November 6, 2009Today's Quantum Optics lecture is about quantum computing experiments, and how different types of systems stack up. Quantum computing, as you probably know if you're reading this blog, is based on building a computer whose "bits" can not only take on "0" and "1" states, but arbitrary superpositions of "0" and "1". Such a computer would be able to out-perform any classical computer on certain types of problems, and would open the exciting possibility of a windows installation that is both working and hung up at the same time.
There are roughly as many types of proposed quantum computers as…
dsalo | November 5, 2009I read the RIN report on life-sciences data with interest, a little cynicism, and much appreciation for the grounded and sensible approach I have come to expect from British reports. If you're interested in data services, you should read this report too.
A warning to avoid preconceptions: If you pay too much attention to all the cyberinfrastructure and e-science hype, it's very easy to fall prey to the erroneous notion that most of science is crunching massive numbers via grid computing and throwing out terabytes of data per second.
It ain't so. It never was so. Will it be so in future? Not…
jdupuis | November 4, 2009Every year for the past 3 or 4 years I've been linking to and posting about all the "year's best books" lists that appear in various media outlets and highlighting the science books that are mentioned. From the beginning it's been a pretty popular service so I'm happy to continue it.
For my purposes, I define science books pretty broadly to include science, engineering, computing, history & philosophy of science & technology, environment, social aspects of science and even business books about technology trends or technology innovation.
This year, the first list is from Publisher's…
pontiff | November 2, 2009The 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,…
pontiff | November 2, 2009Update 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…
sb admin | October 30, 2009
Below, Margaret Turnbull answers our final question.
Even in my small area of astrobiology, the design of a single mission to find habitable planets orbiting other stars requires substantial input from the studies of astrophysics, space communications, space flight technology, optics, materials science, the interplanetary space environment, Earth's atmospheric system, microbiology, geology, computing, remote sensing, and signal processing. Within each of those areas, input from many sub-disciplines is required. For example, in the "astrophysics" portion of my work I communicate from…
gsmith | October 30, 2009
Below, Margaret Turnbull answers our final question.
Even in my small area of astrobiology, the design of a single mission to find habitable planets orbiting other stars requires substantial input from the studies of astrophysics, space communications, space flight technology, optics, materials science, the interplanetary space environment, Earth's atmospheric system, microbiology, geology, computing, remote sensing, and signal processing. Within each of those areas, input from many sub-disciplines is required. For example, in the "astrophysics" portion of my work I communicate from…
gsmith | October 28, 2009
image: a proposed example of an immune-inspired network system, source: SYMBRION & REPLICATOR
In identifying computer science as a nexus of interdisciplinary collaboration, Fernando Esponda cites Artificial Immune Systems (AIS) as research exemplifying this sentiment. Esponda describes AIS as an attempt by computer scientists and immunologists to "learn nature's algorithms for defending the body against pathogens and apply them as another security paradigm to other areas"—an intriguing notion. After a little investigation, one of the most incredible AIS initiatives that I came across…
jdupuis | October 27, 2009The September Communications of the ACM has a provocative article by Peter J. Denning and Paul S. Rosenbloom, Computing: the fourth great domain of science (OA version). It's well written and persuasive, certainly worth reading the whole thing.
Science has a long-standing tradition of grouping fields into three categories: the physical, life, and social sciences. The physical sciences focus on physical phenomena, especially materials, energy, electromagnetism, gravity, motion, and quantum effects. The life sciences focus on living things, especially species, metabolism, reproduction, and…
pontiff | October 26, 2009Michael 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…
razib | October 25, 2009When Mendelism reemerged in the early 20th century to become what we term genetics no doubt the early practitioners of the nascent field would have been surprised to see where it went. The centrality of of DNA as the substrate which encodes genetic information in the 1950s opened up molecular biology and led to the biophysical strain which remains prominent in genetics. Later, in the 1970s Alan Wilson and Vincent Sarich used crude measures of genetic distance to resolve controversies in paleontology, specifically, the date of separation between the human and ape lineage. Genetics spans the…