Slashdot Mirror

you might want to start with a guide like "How to Write & Publish A Scientific Paper" by Robert Day (ISBN-13: 978-1573561655).

Then search for the appropriate journal. One suggestion is: GPS Solutions (published by Springer),

http://www.springer.com/earth+sciences+and+geography/geophysics/journal/10291

Manuscript submission instructions and forms at: http://www.springer.com/journal/10291/submission

Hope it works out for you!

you might want to start with a guide like "How to Write & Publish A Scientific Paper" by Robert Day (ISBN-13: 978-1573561655).

Then search for the appropriate journal. One suggestion is: GPS Solutions (published by Springer),

http://www.springer.com/earth+sciences+and+geography/geophysics/journal/10291

Manuscript submission instructions and forms at: http://www.springer.com/journal/10291/submission

Hope it works out for you!

Two others come immediately to mind:

Mass resignation of Topology

K-Theory board resigns, with some odd weirdness described here

The Eureka journal watch page has more info, but it needs some updating.

I have felt your pain. I just got my used copy of Distributed Services with OpenAFS: for Enterprise and Education and it looks pretty awesome so far.

It's a textbook of explanations wrapped around a whole bunch of script(1) captures of them setting up ntp,dns,k5,ldap,openafs,samba, etc on Debian with Windows, Mac, Ubuntu clients. You can find the table of contents and an excerpt at the book's site: http://www.springer.com/computer/programming/book/978-3-540-36633-1

hth and Good Luck!

adric

The problem is still the efficiency, though. There are lots of ways to mark units of computation as "this could be done separately, but depends on Y"--- OpenMP provides a bunch of them, for example, and there's been proposals dating back to the 80s, probably earlier. The problem is figuring out how to implement that efficiently, though, so that the synchronization overhead doesn't dominate the parallelization gains. Does the system spawn new threads? Maintain a pool of worker threads and feed thunks to them? Some hybrid approach? How does it determine when it's worth the effort of doing anything for a particular bit of computation versus just doing it inline and saving the overhead? Etc.

Basically Grand Central is yet another in the decades-long line of proposals for specifying parallelizable computations. What's still an open question is whether they've solved the harder part, a way to, as you say, "[route] computation packets to wherever they can go, and then [receive] the results", without that routing and receiving taking inordinate overhead.

Wow, marketing is put forward as a serious alterative to scientific pursuits, and is +4 informative. I never thought I'd see the day slashdot. News for Nerds, Stuff that matters.

Then you know nothing about marketing.

Marketing is not entirely branding (which is what most people think of, when they hear marketing). There is a very, very heavy quantitative component to marketing that most people are not aware of.

I'm a strategy consultant, and I work a lot with marketing and promotions. A big chunk of marketing involves channel & distribution analysis, analytics to understand market segments, campaign management, pricing models etc. And that involves heavy, heavy statistics and a lot of data crunching to see what people use, what's the optimal pricing, how well discounts work out, how to run effective campaigns, how to measure the success/failure of any campaign (branding, price change, ad etc) and so on and so forth.

And with the advent of the web, web analytics is another very important component, as well. Hell, there are even products out there that help you manage a lot of this (e.g. Unica - their website even talks about modeling a lot of what I talked about).

I know people with PhDs in stats, math and physics who work in marketing. They do predictive analysis to see how the market will react to a new product, what customers are buying, how best to price an offering, what stores are doing well and what are not (and why), which channels are doing well and which ones are not (and why), forecasting inventory based on past performance and YTD etc.

And there are enough journals and publications out there (such as the Quantitative Marketing & Economics by Springer-Verlag) which do serious academic (and mathematical, if I might add) research into these areas. They borrow very heavily from other subject areas, particularly physics, statistics, economics and so on.

But hey, you're Mr. Strong. Marketing is for pansies.

Is this blog post for real, or is it just a way to grab some traffic and ad revenue?

I can't find a likely looking original article on the astro-ph preprint server, nor on the Astrophysics Journal site [subscription required?]. Furthermore, the researchers who made this alleged disocovery aren't credited or even mentioned in the blog post, so there's no names to Google for ("hubble AND unknown" only comes up with the original article). Does anyone know the original source, or this just some blogger's idea of a joke?

-JS

Reminds me of a former professor's work, "GenJam", from Al Biles at RIT.

It really sounds like something similar. Al Biles' software incorporates a genetic algorithm along with training from a human ear to choose "what sounds good".

It looks like the difference is that this generates full chord structures, instead of individual notes, and is designed to work with voices, which aren't as well trained.

Al's project has been at work for quite some time now, but he wrote a couple of chapters for "Evolutionary Music", released in 2007.

Hello,

Speaking from experience (I work in IT, I did an MBA, I chose the elective Business Ethics, I had to write an essay), my first guess is that your prof will tell you to be MORE SPECIFIC.

Do a google for, for instance, the Journal of Business Ethics ( http://www.springer.com/philosophy/ethics/journal/10551 ), and be surprised by the wealth of articles you'll already find about a really wide range of Ethics & IT topics. At the same time, once you have read the first few, you'll notice how immensely full of holes this area of research actually is. There's academic articles, for instance, about the morality of P2P File Sharing in Asia or the limitations that virtual personae should have with regards to knowing what they should remember about a given system. There's professors specialising in the combination of Business Ethics & IT; Jeroen van den Hoven (University of Delft) is the first one that jumps to mind for me.

So, if you wish to add something to this body of existing knowledge, you'd either go with something very specific (i.e. the behavior or a normal user when suddenly granted god access, on a tuesday afternoon, if he's exactly 42 years and two days old) and search what else has been written about your specific topic, OR you could do what your initial suggestion is, and give a high-level overview of a given topic. If you prefer the latter, the least that will probably be required is a quick overview of which topics are covered in research and which are currently barren. Summing up best practices or drawing up a directory of "hey, this is what slashdot users think" may be valuable, but only if you put it into a good context.

Hope this helps :-)

This is part of swarm intelligence research, which is in fact also my own area of academic research (specifically business applications of swarm intelligence and effects on adaptability and implications for non-hierarchical self-organised companies). This journal is nice reading if you want to learn more. This conference (organised by the IEEE Computational Society where I am a member) is also of interest, but the "classic" workshop is ANTS. Swarm intelligence is so important that one of the first researchers in the field got an award from the King of Belgium and the European Union. If you are curious enough you can learn even more... swarming has many applications including data mining. There are many business applications, particularly of ant-colony optimisation, but also other techniques (PSO is the one I like most). Interestingly there are whole spinoffs and consultancies making money solely by applying swarming in businesses. In fact this is a good niche for consulting.

How did I chose swarming as my research topic? Well, one day I was in my garden watching my beautiful ants collecting the food I feed them (especial cheese, they enjoy it a lot, but they also like meat and eggs but nothing is better than honey which I give to them drop by drop, although I should note that different species have very different tastes! it has been over 15 years that I feed ants and I like to capture them on camera and watch as they collect the food, it's extremely insightful how they organise around the food, and I like doing various funny experiments with them like placing the food on a level above their nest and watching them to see how they discover it, or placing the food in many locations around the nest in a multitude of distances, or placing some "good" food like meat farther away than some "bad" food like dry nuts or fruits etc to see what they prefer to collect first! the amount of fun and engagement these tiny creatures can give you is amazing). So while watching my ants, I was wondering what I should research in the area of business management. I wanted something to do with engineering or mathematics, but I wasn't sure what exactly would be the best area to research. I knew about swarm intelligence but it didn't came up to my brain at that moment. I also knew of various other ways to combine engineering and science with management, but I needed something I was particularly attracted to it... Coincidentally, I later saw a related slashdot story, so I said "this is it, swarm business applications!", so I credit slashdot for finding me a way to do business research without giving up my preferences for the exact sciences :)

http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?pr intable=1

Surely you have all read this?

Moore's Law is just the beginning... we have accelerating returns because we shift paradigms when an individual technology falls flat in growth. This is an example of just one possible future paradigm that may continue or even accelerate our exponential growth.

What will we do with all this computer power?

Eventually someone will implement an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) system (either by evolving or otherwise brute-force production, human brain simulation/reverse-engineering/uploading, or by actually understanding intelligence and developing a novel theoretical architecture). This piece of intelligent software will be capable of doing the high-level, common sensical, intelligent thinking and work that a human can do, and the computational resources that are cognitively available to this intelligence will grow extremely fast with its revenue and the continued acceleration of hardware development (not to mention its massively accelerating software architecture and data stores and optimizations thereof)- e.g. it will be able to do more and more work, more intelligently, and more quickly, as time goes on. If the efforts of the intelligence are focused on researching and developing more powerful hardware and software, it can self-improve in ways completely unimaginable by human intelligences, sending the growth of technology into a feedback loop with the growth of intelligence.

When this AGI exceeds the intelligence of any human (who run about 10^16 neural ops/sec, have mortal and error prone bodies, zero growth in computational resources, no access to source code or underlying machinery, no end-user-modifiable software-code (if it were accessed), etc etc), which may happen very quickly, it's called the Singularity.

Physics may or may not have some upper limit on the ability of a given computational process to control the Universe to its *desired* ends, but this is a quick way to find out.

We need to be sure we have a *Friendly* AI (check out Singularity Insitute)

Two different things

You have the Science Publisher Springer: http://www.springer.com/
And then you have the Axel Springer Verlag, which produces the Bild: http://www.axelspringer.com/

Do not let the common "Springer" part confuse you ;-)

How do you turn on automatic word wrapping in a tabular block?

You define the column as a p, followed by the width in braces; for example, p{1.25in}.

Lamport's LaTeX: A Document Preparation Manual still has one of the best summaries of basic LaTeX commands. For math, Gratzer's Math into LaTeX is an excellent book. Kopka and Daly's Guide to LaTeX is also well spoken of.

Gratzer also has a new book, The LaTeX Book , in preparation.

And, of course, there's lots of free documentation, as well.

How do you turn on automatic word wrapping in a tabular block?

You define the column as a p, followed by the width in braces; for example, p{1.25in}.

Lamport's LaTeX: A Document Preparation Manual still has one of the best summaries of basic LaTeX commands. For math, Gratzer's Math into LaTeX is an excellent book. Kopka and Daly's Guide to LaTeX is also well spoken of.

Gratzer also has a new book, The LaTeX Book , in preparation.

And, of course, there's lots of free documentation, as well.

At first I thought you were trolling, and you gave me a good laugh. After responding to this, my conclusion is that you know some quantum computing stuff, but you really don't have a decent understanding of the underlying quantum mechanics.

An isolated qubit is represented by a 2D (complex) vector space. Where does the group theory come in? Read Shor's paper on factoring numbers.

Okay, don't just take my word for it. Take a look at this book . Notice in the description it says "A group theoretic abstraction of Shor's algorithms completes the discussion of algorithms." Want another example? This course specifically teaches some group theory before getting to the quantum algorithms.

You suggested in your first post that any system of more than one qubit merely involves 'adding' their vector spaces. Ie, you said this

"What is enigmatic about adding two vectors in a vector space? I can't stand the way popular science press insist on making bizarre statements about the most trivial mathematics and science in an attempt to make it more interesting."

Okay, please demonstrate how to form the spin-singlet state by _adding_ the vectors of the two individual spinors. Now explain how to form the m=0 spin-triplet state by again adding the vectors of the two spinors. You cannot do this with 'baby stuff' arithmetic as you insinuated in your original post.

Ie, you're increasing the size of your Hilbert space, so it's not basic addition at all. You would be right if you said both could be formed as a linear combination of two individual up/down and down/up states. But each of the individual states themselves is a spinor, so by 'combining' these two states. you're not doing simple 'vector addition'. You are actually dealing with tensors, and group theory, only you're not realizing it. And while this might be relatively simple for two qubits, once you add many qubits to the system the complexity increases quickly.

In fact, you need to know next to nothing about group theory to understand what a qubit is. An isolated qubit is represented by a 2D (complex) vector space. Where does the group theory come in?

You're right that an isolated qubit can be represented by a two-element spinor. The group theory comes in for systems with multiple qubits. Here's a quick explanation for a two-qubit system. For reasons I explained in the original post, there are only two free parameters, hence an easy Bloch Sphere representation, for one qubit. Two qubits together, however, have SIX free parameters (the overall system state has four complex elements, but it's normalized and also has a meaningless phase). How do you take two qubits with two degrees of freedom, and combine them to get a system with six degrees of freedom? The combination itself is NOT simple vector addition, because you cannot merely _add_ two qubits together. The description of where the extra degrees of freedom come from when combining two qubits is described by the group theory. Or you can talk about from a tensor point of view by including irreducible tensors, etc.

As far as I can see you're just part of the grand conspiracy to make Quantum Mechanics, and especially Quantum Computing, seem far more mysterious than it is. Shame on you.

Coupled systems ARE enigmatic, and I'm sure you've heard of EPR and Bell's Inequality. If you think it's "baby stuff", then you seem to be one of those scientists that just follow through calculations 'plug-and-chug', without any comprehension of the underlying concepts.

So as I said previously, at first I thought you were trolling, but I now think I understand where you're coming from. I guess in your experience

To understand how this article could be published, you should be aware that for all scientific journals the editor has the last responsibility for accepting a paper, not the peer reviewers. In the case of Astrophysics and Space Science, the editorial board contains N.C. Wickramasinghe, who is one of the inventors of the panspermia theory. So, even although peer reviews might have been dodgy, it could have been an editorial decision to accept this paper.

I happen to know that Astrophysics and Space Science operates this way, as a manuscript I co-reviewed with a PhD student of mine several years ago appeared in the journal without taking any of our recommendations into account. This has not happened to me with any of the 30odd manuscripts I have refereed since and is even more astonishing since the journal decided to print the original manuscript, without even addressing the large number of grammatical mistakes and spelling errors pointed out by us (which were so bad that we, as referees, could not understand what the authors were trying to say). I have declined to referee for Astrophysics and Space Science since and consider the journal a "scientific tabloid" as opposed to a "scientific broadsheet". And you wouldn't believe the "Sun" and the "News of the World" either, right?

So, to conclude, "peer refereed" does not always mean what you might think it does, and although I am not a microbiology specialist, as long as a report on the "red rain" is not accepted by a mainstream journal, would doubt any claims made in the article.