pontiff | February 12, 2009Over at the fact builders blog, the fact master discusses The Physics of....Pink Floyd. Being two areas I greatly enjoy, I was reminded by the fact builders picture of the cover of "The Dark Side of the Moon" of a little known piece of Pink Floyd strangeness. Anyone notice something peculiar about the back and cover of DSOTM:
Update: Ian provides a picture of the inside of the DSOTM, where, we find, all hell breaks loose:
pontiff | February 12, 2009The Computing Research Policy Blog is reporting possible good news for science funding:
Speaker Pelosi's office just released a fact sheet on the conference agreement for the American Economic Recovery and Reinvestment Act and, wow, it looks good for science agencies in the bill. Here's the relevant bit:
Transform our Economy with Science and Technology: To secure America's role as a world leader in a competitive global economy, we are renewing America's investments in basic research and development, in training students for an innovation economy, and in deploying new technologies into the…
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…
pontiff | February 10, 2009
http://thisiswhyyourefat.com/
(tags: omg)
MMR doctor Andrew Wakefield fixed data on autism - Times Online
THE doctor who sparked the scare over the safety of the MMR vaccine for children changed and misreported results in his research, creating the appearance of a possible link with autism, a Sunday Times investigation has found.
(tags: autism vaccines)
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…
pontiff | February 8, 2009In a prior post I asked about the how the structure of fixed points of stochastic maps changes under composition of such maps. Robin provided an interesting comment about the setup, linking this question at least partially with zero error codes:
R has at least one fixed point. If it's unique, there need be no relationship between fixed points of P and R. (Q can project to a single vector, which becomes the unique fixed point of R.) If R has N > 1 fixed points, then things get more interesting. The fixed points are closed under linear combination, so they're a subspace (I'm actually…
pontiff | February 7, 2009
Madoff Victim Map
"Search the Interactive Madoff Victim Map"
SciRate Page For 0902.0912
We introduce the concept of mutual independence -- correlations shared between distant parties which are independent of the environment. This notion is more general than the standard idea of a secret key -- it is a fully quantum and more general form of privacy.
pontiff | February 6, 2009
Biocurious: Drew Endy on group meetings
Via he of uncertain principles
"OpenWetWare tweeted an interesting link to Drew Endyâs take on how to give a good group meeting presentation (though it is clear that this is useful advice for any presentation). Here are a few of my favourite slides:"
(tags: group talking speaking meetings)
pontiff | February 5, 2009I've never made it to Benasque, and am always profoundly jealous of those who have gone:
Dear Colleague,
We are pleased to inform you that following a very successful editions of Benasque 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, and 2007, we are organizing another workshop of the similar type in June 2009. This is to invite you to apply using the electronic form that you can find on the website specified below. We encourage you to apply as soon as possible and not later than the end of March 2009. The number of participants at the Benasque Centre at any given time is limited to about 50. We will do our best…
pontiff | February 5, 2009For subscribers to Physics World, an article I wrote The Race to Build a Quantum Computer has appeared in the February edition. Unfortunately unless you have a subscription you'll have to pay to read the article...or better yet, pick up a copy of the magazine!
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, 2009The view from my plane window this afternoon (thank you United Airlines for making me take this Delta Airlines flight):
Check out those lenticular clouds!
One of my fondest memories was on a trip with my father to the Sacramento in a small plane, and on the trip back falling asleep and waking up with spectacular Mt. Shasta right, and I mean right, outside the window.
pontiff | February 4, 2009Some upcoming talks for those in Albuquerque or Ann Arbor (so many A's!):
Feb 5, 5pm, University of New Mexico Center for Advanced Studies Seminars: The Symmetry Conjecture
Feb 6, 4:00 pm, University of New Mexico Physics and Astronomy Colloquium: The Race to Build a Quantum Computer
Feb 9, 4pm, University of Michigan Seminar: The Race to Build a Quantum Computer.
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…
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…
pontiff | February 3, 2009Sir Tobias Osborne of the Quantum Boolean Functions has made the plunge and is trying out open notebook science: Tobias J. Osborne's Research Notes.
Which reminded me of some dream software I've been thinking of writing (oh Time you Devil---why could you not expand to fit in all I want to create and do in this life!)
The basic idea is as follows. Blogs are great for a few reasons. One is they provide a journal system and date stamping system. Second they allow for commenting and this commenting can be done after some basic user authentication. But they are, it seems to me, not ideal…
pontiff | February 2, 2009A long time ago, in a blog far far away, I ran a small poll about paper refereeing. The poll asked "What is your ratio of reviewed to submitted manuscripts?". The results were
>=6 reviewed for every 1 submitted: 7 votes (8 percent)
5 reviewed for every 1 submitted: 3 votes (4 percent)
4 reviewed for every 1 submitted: 9 votes (10 percent)
3 reviewed for every 1 submitted: 12 votes (14 percent)
2 reviewed for every 1 submitted: 13 votes (15 percent)
1 reviewed for every 1 submitted: 20 votes (24 percent)
1 reviewed for every 2 submitted: 6 votes (7 percent)
1 reviewed for every 3…