pontiff | February 25, 2009Zotero, a Firefox extension for managing research sources, has announced the release of Zotero 1.5 beta. I've heard good things from those who use Zotero. This major update adds some nifty synchronizing and automatic backup. The next step after this for Zotero, I believe, is adding sharing capabilities.
By the way does anyone know what happened to arXiv on you harddrive? It's not been updated in over a year, which is a shame. Personally I find the arXiv's lack of publicity accessible methods for obtaining the full text kind of a bummer. There is so much fun you could have given the…
pontiff | February 23, 2009For those local to Seattle, I'm talking tomorrow in the Paul Allen center:
TIME: 1:30 -- 2:30 pm, Tuesday, Feb 24, 2009
PLACE: CSE 503
SPEAKER: Dave Bacon, University of Washington
TITLE: Symmetry in Quantum Algorithms
ABSTRACT:
Quantum computers can outperform their classical brethren at a variety of algorithmic tasks. Uncovering exactly when quantum computers can exponentially outperform classical computers is one of the central questions facing the theory of quantum algorithms today. In this talk I will argue that a key piece of this puzzle is the role played by symmetry in quantum…
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…
pontiff | February 21, 2009
Antenna on the Cheap (er, Chip)
Pringles antenna.
Billionaire Lifestyles: Checking In With Paul Allen and Charles Simonyi | Xconomy
Simonyi is slated to make his second trip to the International Space Station aboard a Soyuz rocket on March 26 (at a cost of around $35 million)
pontiff | February 20, 2009With apologies to Radiohead's "There, there":
in pitch dark i go walking in your codespace.
broken errors trip me as i speak.
just 'cause you don't see it doesn't mean it's not there.
just 'cause you don't see it doesn't mean it's not there.
There's always decoherence
Singing you to shipwreck
(Don't reach out, don't reach out
Don't reach out, don't reach out)
Steer away from these errors
We'd be a decohering disaster
(Don't reach out, don't reach out
Don't reach out, don't reach out)
just 'cause you don't see it doesn't mean it's not there.
(there's information on your shoulder)
(there's…
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, 2009Undergrad program which looks cool:
IQC will be hosting an Undergraduate School on Experimental Quantum Information Processing (USEQIP) from June 1st to 12th, 2009 and we would like to ask you if you could share the information below with potential students in your department.
This two-week program on the theory and experimental study of quantum information processors is aimed primarily at students just completing their junior year (third year of undergraduate studies). The program is designed to introduce students to the field of quantum information processing and allow to have hands…
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, 2009I know you're not paying attention the talk. So why not go to the FriendFeed room located here. Once sQuinT starts, I hope to live blog there and could use some help (Thursday evening.)
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…
pontiff | February 18, 2009
CreateSpace - On-Demand Self Publishing, DVD on Demand, CD on Demand, Books on Demand, DVD Duplication and DVD Replication
Amazon's self publishing service
SciRate Page For 0902.2658
Here we study the performance of a concatenated error-detection code in a system that permits only nearest-neighbor interactions in one dimension. We make use of a new message-passing scheme which maximizes the number of errors that can be reliably corrected by the code. Our numerical results indicate that arbitrarily accurate universal quantum computation is possible if the probability of failure of each…
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 17, 2009
Picture Gallery for listing 29003112
Now that's a Seattle swimming pool view.
(tags: real networks)
PDF redaction still not working - Hack a Day
Court documents from a settlement between Facebook and ConnectU showed that Facebook values itself at $3.7 billion, much less than the $15 billion that was speculated during the Microsoft investment. The AP uncovered this by cutting and pasting from the redacted court document. It's the same thing we showed in our PDF redaction screencast last summer... and it will never cease to be funny.
(tags: cut and paste)
New Zealand town is in the dark…
pontiff | February 17, 2009Congrats to the quantum tenure odds booster award winners Sloan award winners:
Robert Raussendorf, UBC
Hartmut Häffner, UC Berkeley (Go Bears!)
Alán Aspuru-Guzik, Haavard
Scott Aaronson, MIT (that other Tech school)
Andrew Houck, Princeton
Subhadeep Gupta, University of Washington
Lance lists the theoretical computer scientist winners.
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 16, 2009
Physics - A quantum phase transition for a spin liquid
In a Rapid Communication appearing in Physical Review B, Vasile Garlea and collaborators at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA, the Hahn-Meitner Institut in Germany, and the Commissariat à lâÃnergie Atomique in Grenoble, France, report an unusual magnetic-field-induced spin ordering in a geometrically frustrated quasi-one-dimensional compound, Sul-Cu2Cl4
(tags: quantum phase transition)
pontiff | February 14, 2009In addition to the distinguished Dr. Hawking, the Perimeter institute lands nine very impressive distinguished research chairs, including some familiar quantum names.
The presser:
Nine Leading Researchers Join Stephen Hawking as Distinguished Research Chairs at Perimeter Institute in Ontario, Canada
WATERLOO, Ontario, Canada, February 9, 2009 - Dr. Neil Turok, Director of Canada's Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI), is pleased to announce the appointment of nine more outstanding international scientists to the positions of PI Distinguished Research Chairs.
The new Chairs…
pontiff | February 13, 2009Conference of interest to the fault-tolerant crowd (hm, wording not quite right):
Event Title: Workshop on Logical Aspects of Fault Tolerance (LAFT)
(affiliated with LICS 2009)
Date: 08/15/2009
Location: University of California, Los Angeles
URL: http://www.aero.org/support/laft
Description:
We are soliciting papers on logical aspects of fault tolerance. The concept of
"fault" underlies essentially all computational systems that have any goal.
Loosely speaking, a fault is an unintended event that can have an unintended
effect on the attainment of that goal. "Fault tolerance" is the term given…