Free Thought
gregladen | March 18, 2009As has been predicted, with the economy in a down turn, businesses (and everybody) are abandoning sucky proprietary software for free and excellent OpenSource software ...
A February survey of IT managers by IDC indicated that hard times are accelerating the adoption of Linux. The open source operating system will emerge from the recession in a stronger data center position than before, concluded an IDC white paper.
Sixty-five percent of the 330 respondents said they plan to increase Linux server workloads by 10% or more this year. Sixty-three percent said they will increase their use of…
drorzel | March 16, 2009Scientific American has an article by David Albert and Rivka Galchen with the New Scientist-ish headline Was Einstein Wrong?: A Quantum Threat to Special Relativity and the sub-head "Entanglement, like many quantum effects, violates some of our deepest intuitions about the world. It may also undermine Einstein's special theory of relativity."
An alternate title for this post might be "Son Of Why I Won't Make It as a Philosopher," because I really don't know what to make of it. The authors make authoritative-sounding references to a bunch of papers I haven't read, but then they also drop in…
thusspakezuska | March 10, 2009Just in time for Women's History Month and the second edition of the Diversity in Science Carnival, the Association for Computing Machinery has announced that the 2008 Turing Award goes to Barbara Liskov! Here's all the info from the press release:
ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, has named Barbara Liskov of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) the winner of the 2008 ACM A.M. Turing Award. The award cites Liskov for her foundational innovations to designing and building the pervasive computer system designs that power daily life. Her achievements in programming…
pontiff | March 9, 2009Via Swans on Tea: Academic Earth: a collection of top lectures on a variety of academic topics. Nothing on quantum computing yet :)
catdynamics | March 5, 2009NASA's Science Mission Directorate produced a cross-discipline report on medium term needs for computational modeling capabilities; ie what serious iron NASA might want to get to play with
report is up here (pdf)
Panels from Earth System Modeling and Assimilation; Solid Earth and Natural Hazards; Astrophysics; Heliophysics; Planetary Science and Mission Engineering, considered current and near future needs and desire, scalability and both state of the art of the codes and development issues.
It is an interesting read, if you like that sort of thing.
Just for fun I did a keyword search:…
pontiff | March 3, 2009Martin writes to tell me that there are student internships in quantum information technology available at NEC this summer (see here and here):
The Quantum IT group at NEC Laboratories America, Princeton, NJ has summer internship positions available for graduate students interested in quantum computing. Areas of interest include:
Quantum algorithms
Quantum communication
Quantum complexity
Quantum cryptography
Quantum error correction
Quantum fault tolerance
More information about the Quantum IT group can be found at Quantum IT Group Website. Interested students can send their resume to…
drorzel | March 2, 2009
Foodie Politics | The American Prospect
"Good food -- the sort Waters features at her restaurant -- is considered a luxury of the rich rather than a social justice issue. As Waters frequently argues, no one is worse served by our current food policy than a low-income family using food stamps to purchase rotted produce at the marked-up convenience store. Her vision is classically populist: It democratizes the concrete advantages health, pleasure, nutrition -- that our current food system gives mainly to the wealthy. But her language is suffused with the values and the symbols of, well, the…
pontiff | February 25, 2009David Kribbs sends along info about a quantum information position at the University of Guelph:
The Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Guelph invites applications for a full-time tenure track position to start 1 July 2009 or thereafter, at the rank of Assistant Professor. The successful candidate will have the opportunity to become a member of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research program in Quantum Information Processing. Guelph is centrally located in southern Ontario, and the candidate will have the opportunity to participate in activities at the nearby…
drorzel | February 23, 2009
editors / 23 / 02 / 2009 / Views / Home - Inside Higher Ed
Inside Higher Ed has done a comprehensive redesign of the site, including a bunch of new features. The best online academic journal just got better.
(tags: academia computing internet)
The Reality-Based Community: Annals of sexist oppression
"In the middle of a long thread on a writers' list-serv, provoked by my post on fashion models, it occurred to me that one of the unrecognized ways women are kept dependent and threatened is simply denying them pockets. This is more important than one might think, right up there with hobbling…
pontiff | February 23, 2009Quantum computing continues to grow in Canada. Congrats to the IQC at the University of Waterloo who now, truly are the center of the quantum computing universe:
With matching funds from the province of Ontario and RIM founder Mike Lazaridis, University of Waterloo's Institute for Quantum Computing will receive $150 million to build a research facility and attract talent
Canada will become home to the largest concentration of quantum computing talent in the world, thanks to $150 million in funding from government and the founder of Research In Motion Ltd.
The 2009 federal budget plan…
catdynamics | February 20, 2009the disbursement of the stimulus funding through the science agencies is going to get real interesting
some disparate word has reached me on the stimulus funding
first, the NSF divisions won't hear for a while, like next month, how much they individually get to push out the door (NIH might be different since the bill specifies the funding goes pro-rate to the divisions).
But, the clock on getting the money disbursed is already counting, they basically have 120 days to dispose of the money from the signing of the bill.
Now, some calls for proposal are in current evaluation (oh to have a…
pontiff | February 20, 2009Okay, so keeping running notes on friendfeed isn't going to work for me. Just too hard to do this and make a readable record. Really we should just be taping the talks.
Summary of day one below the fold (this may be a bit off as this is being written a day later.)
Jack Harris, Optomechanical systems
Papers: arXiv:0811.1343, arXiv:0707.1724.
Jack talked about his cool work coupling optical systems to mechanical systems. Take a cavity and stick a mechanical system (a dielectric membrane of thickness 50nm and quality factor of about a million) into it. Jack showed how you could cool the…
pontiff | February 19, 2009
Most powerful ever quantum computer chip in tests - 18 February 2009 - New Scientist
the prototype chip built by D-Wave Systems in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada, is designed to handle 128 qubits of information.
Observation of Unconventional Quantum Spin Textures in Topological Insulators -- Hsieh et al. 323 (5916): 919 -- Science
Very cool result and agood step for topological quantum computing.
pontiff | February 18, 2009Charles passes along that Booz Allen Hamilton is looking for a few good quantum people:
JOB POSITION IN QUANTUM PHYSICS IN ARLINGTON, VA - BOOZ ALLEN HAMILTON, INC.
As you may already know from interacting with us at review meetings and conferences, our team at Booz Allen Hamilton provides scientific and technical expertise to a variety of government agencies. As consultants, we work with our clients to develop new research programs, monitor ongoing research, and to help transition technologies to other government agencies and industry.
Currently, we are looking to expand our physics team…
purepedantry | February 18, 2009An article by Evan Mills, a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, points out that scientific buildings use a lot more energy than average:
Improving energy productivity is a doubly worthy challenge, given that those making the biggest contributions to the science of sustainability often do so in highly energy intensive facilities such as laboratories, computing centers, and hyper-clean environments. There is a long way to go to meet the sustainable practices. According to a U.K. Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs survey, virtually all interviewed…
razib | February 17, 2009My post below outlining the possible future of genomics and intelligence made me recall a paper from last fall, Predicting Unobserved Phenotypes for Complex Traits from Whole-Genome SNP Data:
Results from recent genome-wide association studies indicate that for most complex traits, there are many loci that contribute to variation in observed phenotype and that the effect of a single variant (single nucleotide polymorphism, SNP) on a phenotype is small. Here, we propose a method that combines the effects of multiple SNPs to make a prediction of a phenotype that has not been observed. We apply…
pontiff | February 17, 2009I like poker and I like quantum computing and lo and behold here is a paper with both:
arXiv: 0902.2196
Title: Quantized Poker
Authors: Steven A. Bleiler
Poker has become a popular pastime all over the world. At any given moment one can find tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of players playing poker via their computers on the major on-line gaming sites. Indeed, according to the Vancouver, B.C. based pokerpulse.com estimates, more than 190 million US dollars daily is bet in on-line poker rooms. But communication and computation are changing as the relentless application of Moore'…
pontiff | February 16, 2009A 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…
pontiff | February 11, 2009Fame 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…
drorzel | February 11, 2009I didn't expect the post griping about the Best American Science Writing anthology to generate as much discussion as it did. Shows what I know.
In comments, "bsci" made a good suggestion:
Instead of complaining about this volume, I'd love it if you and your readers made a list of the best physics writing in the past year. I assure you that I would be one of many readers of the pieces on the list.
That's a good suggestion, so let's put it out there: What were the best articles about physical sciences published last year? These could be in general magazines (The New Yorker, etc.), in science…