Free Thought
skookumchick | February 10, 2009I recently got an email from a colleague, Rebecca Hartman-Baker, who works at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the National Center for Computational Sciences, and who would like some thoughts from you all on the following questions and context:
A colleague and I are holding a Birds of a Feather session (BoF) at the Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing in April (http://tapiaconference.org/2009/) and I was wanting to solicit some input from the readers of ScienceWomen. The title of the BoF is "Developing, Recruiting, and Retaining Underrepresented Groups in the National…
pontiff | February 9, 2009
Watch Bill Gates unleash that 'swarm' of mosquitoes on crowd - TechFlash: Seattle's Technology News Source
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.
(tags: malaria bill gates stunts)
Predictive Bet « Masteroftheuniverse's Weblog
A good friend of mine and I have been discussing the predictive nature of the markets, or as I…
dgmacarthur | February 5, 2009Regular readers will know that I'm at the Advances in Genome Biology and Technology (AGBT) meeting this week, one of the most highly-awaited meetings on the genomics calendar.
There's a huge amount of fascinating data being presented (anyone interested in a blow-by-blow account should follow Anthony Fejes' live-blogging), but there's definitely an overarching theme: the evolving battle between the new-technology sequencing companies. This is a competition that most researchers in genomics are watching with great interest, because it promises to bring about very rapid advances in the speed,…
pontiff | February 5, 2009
ReadWriteWeb - Web Apps, Web Technology Trends, Social Networking and Social Media
What do you do when your industry is shifting under your feet? Taking the lead with radical steps is one strategy. The New York Times did just that this afternoon when it announced that it has released a new Application Programming Interface (API) offering every article the paper has written since 1981, 2.8 million articles. The API includes 28 searchable fields and updated content every hour.
(tags: web 2.0 data new york times)
Different meanings of Bayesian statistics - Statistical Modeling, Causal…
pontiff | February 4, 2009
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…
drorzel | February 3, 2009
Bruce Springsteen misreads the national mood in his halftime performance. - By Stephen Metcalf - Slate Magazine
A desperately stupid article about the Super Bowl halftime show
(tags: politics stupid society sports music)
PHD Comics: Not a good sign
"I should be done in a year..."
(tags: academia comics silly)
Doing Physics is a two level system « Shores of the Dirac Sea
Oscillatory solutions are the worst.
(tags: physics blogs academia silly quantum)
The Quantum Pontiff : Teleportation Between Separately Trapped Matter Qubits
Lots of news about the Chris Monroe's group teleporting…
clock | February 3, 2009When I was a little kid, almost nothing was known about evolution of whales. They were huge, they were marine and they were mammals, but their evolutionary ancestry was open to speculation. Some (like Darwin himself) hypothesized that the terrestrial ancestor of whales looked like a bear. Others favored the idea of a hippo-like or even a pig-like ancestor.
Over the decades, two things happened. First, the revolution in molecular biology and computing power allowed scientists to compare many genes of many mammals and thus infer genealogical relationships between whales and other groups of…
pontiff | February 3, 2009
Computational Complexity: While I was Gone
"Paul Goldberg is looking for permanent faculty members (plural again) for a new Economics and Computation group in Liverpool. Economics is becoming the new quantum." If only this implied golden-ness about quantum were true
(tags: computing, quantum faculty positions, doom)
pontiff | February 3, 2009Lots of news about the Chris Monroe's group teleporting between ions in different traps.
The original paper in the January 23rd issue of Science: Quantum Teleportation Between Distant Matter Qubits, S. Olmschenk, D. N. Matsukevich, P. Maunz, D. Hayes, L.-M. Duan, and C. Monroe. Official press release here.
New York Times article. My favorite quote:
The method is not particularly practical at the moment, because it fails almost all of the time. Only 1 of every 100 million teleportation attempts succeed, requiring 10 minutes to transfer one bit of quantum information.
"We need to work on that…
drorzel | January 30, 2009I'm not sure what the BBVA Foundation is, but they've awarded a Basic Science prize to Ignacio Cirac and Peter Zoller:
The Basic Sciences award in this inaugural edition of the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards has been shared by physicists Peter Zoller (Austria, 1952) and Ignacio Cirac (Manresa, 1965), "for their fundamental work on quantum information science", in the words of the jury chaired by Theodor W. Hänsch, Nobel Prize in Physics. Zoller and Cirac's research is opening up vital new avenues for the development of quantum computers, immensely more powerful than those we…
bioephemera | January 29, 2009Weirdest lede ever?
A giant flower beetle with implanted electrodes and a radio receiver on its back can be wirelessly controlled, according to research presented this week.
Go DARPA!
Article (MIT Technology Review) here. Video here.
drorzel | January 28, 2009The American Physical Society has sent out another of its email alerts encouraging people to write to Congress in support of more funding for science. Actually, they're urging people to send two messages: a thank-you to Speaker Pelosi for the generous science funding in the House stimulus bill, and a letter to your Senators asking for more funding.
The explanation from the message:
As you may be aware, the U.S. Congress is currently formulating a
stimulus package to help spur the recovery of our economy. In
addition to the tax cuts in the draft packages being discussed,
the packages include…
drorzel | January 26, 2009
We Need a Civilian GI Bill :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for News, Views and Jobs
"Unlike the original bill, which rewarded service, this new bill would be a rescue measure.
As in the past, a primary goal would be to decrease pressure on what today is a shrinking job market and limit growing unemployment rates. But another equally important goal would be to prepare the more educated labor force the nation needs for economic development and global competitiveness at a time when a dwindling number of jobs are available to individuals without a college education and its…
catdynamics | January 24, 2009"Making supplemental appropriations for job preservation and creation, infrastructure investment, energy efficiency and science..."
So, the supplemental funding bill is moving through the House committee in sub-sections as different "Titles" of it are processed through the political sausage factory.
It is "House Resolution 1" - which is a statement on its priority level.
Huffington Post very kindly put up a pdf - all 647 seven pages.
Science is in Title III - starting page 48.
What have we got?
NASA: $400M for science - at least $250M of which to accelerate climate research missions; $150M…
oracknows | January 24, 2009It's no secret that I'm a Mac geek, at least not to any of my readers, family, or friends.
Neither is it a secret at my job that I'm a Mac geek, mainly because, although the university where I'm faculty is perfectly fine with Macs, the cancer center where my laboratory, clinic, and office are housed is not. Indeed, one might even say it goes beyond that in that it borders on being Mac-hostile. Oh, the IT department doesn't actually forbid Macs (although until a recent change in organization it was clear to me that they would clearly very much like to do so), but, until the recent hire of one…
drorzel | January 23, 2009
McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Sestina: How to Build a Sestina Template in Microsoft Excel.
" Open a new Excel workbook. In cell B1, write your title. Leave row 2 blank.
In cells A3 through A8, place the letters A through F. These letters are the cues
for your repeating words (teleutons). Leave row 9 blank to denote a stanza break.
In cells A10 through A15, put the letters F-A-E-B-D-C. Then skip a line. Likewise create
your teleuton template for the rest of your stanzas
based on the standard sestina form (left to you to find)."
(tags: silly language computing poetry)
The Agitator »…
drorzel | January 22, 2009
Steven Chu Addresses the National Labs | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine
"The new Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu, addressed the national labs in an all-hands video transmission today. I was not there, but my colleague and friend Rob Roser at Fermilab was there, and sent me a very nice bulleted summary. "
(tags: science energy environment politics US)
What Are Freshmen Thinking? :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for News, Views and Jobs
"âThe American Freshman: National Norms for Fall 2008,â a longitudinal study now in its 43rd year, is based on a fall 2008 survey of…
catdynamics | January 20, 2009New calculations suggest the question of whether the universe is holographic or not is testable, and recent data is consistent with the model, and consistent with the universe actually being holographic.
h/t Jake at Pure Pedantry
Prof Craig Hogan, the new director of the Center for Particle Astrophysics at Fermilab, has written a series of very interesting papers suggesting that space-time quantization at the Planck scale ought to show up as white noise in the transverse displacement of laser interferometers, with a power spectrum that is just √(tp/2), independent of frequency, given some…
pontiff | January 19, 2009From a crazy model to a concrete question: is there a nice mathematical structure hidden here?
Once upon a time I wrote a crazy paper (arXiv:quant-ph/03091189) on quantum computation in the presence of closed time-like curves. In this model, one identifies two types of quantum systems: those that are "chronology respecting" and those that traverse "closed time-like curves." These two types of quantum systems can interact amongst themselves and also between each other. A typical setup is as in the figure at the right, where n chronology respecting qubits interact with l closed time-like qubits…
mspringer | January 19, 2009There's an interesting post over at Sentient Developments about the simulation argument.
The SA essentially states that, given the potential for posthumans to create a vast number of ancestor simulations, we should probabilistically conclude that we are in a simulation rather than the deepest reality.
Most people give a little chuckle when they hear this argument for the first time. I've explained it to enough people now that I've come to expect it. The chuckle doesn't come about on account of the absurdity of the suggestion, it's more a chuckle of logical acknowledgment -- a reaction to the…