rose.blog

This year’s Nobel Peace Prize was awarded 1/2 to Al Gore and 1/2 to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. My dad, Dr. George Rose, is a member of the panel. Very cool!!! Here is a link to one of their reports.

It’s pretty clear that we have a difficult and unsustainable relationship with our environment. Here is a link to a book that my dad just published which is a fascinating and important account of humans vs. the North Atlantic fish stocks. Iffen you’re not aware, cod have shaped the course of human history as much as almost any other species in our history.

This book is a must-read for anyone interested in environmental / sustainability issues. In addition to its scientific and historical content, the book is beautiful, full of full-color maps, illustrations and pictures. From the book’s description:

The devastation of many of the greatest North Atlantic cod stocks, particularly those of Newfoundland and Labrador and the Grand Banks, has become an icon for the unsustainable relation between human exploitation and Nature. Here, George Rose tells the full story of that devastation, in scientific detail, for the first time – from the formation of the North Atlantic marine ecosystems to the massive stock declines in the last half of the 20th century. Politics and the fisheries are inextricably entwined. In Cod, Rose recounts the many political influences on the fisheries over several centuries and describes how neglect from the late 1800s onward led to insufficient scientific knowledge and little protection for the stocks when massive Euro-Russian fleets targeted the Grand Banks after World War II, destroying the most prolific fishery the world has known. Cod is no armchair account, but a controversial one that includes original information on the North Atlantic fisheries.

Race walking is really stupid. Angry crazed Samurais are awesome. Put them together and you get this.

Here are some interesting Kimbo Slice facts.  He is related both to Rhadi Ferguson (pretty famous judo dude) and Emanuel Augustus (one of my fave boxers).

Yeah bend that inanimate carbon rod Kimbo. Scary.

Marc Feldman, one of the pioneers of superconducting quantum computing, passed away last week.

I had the pleasure to work with Marc on and off over a period of several years, dating back almost to the beginning of D-Wave. He was one of the good guys and he will be missed.

Powerpoint doesn’t have the term “decoherence” in its native vocabulary. If you ask the spell-checker what it thinks you may have meant to type, it has one suggestion: lecherous.

Imagine what a sentence would look like if you actually did mean to type lecherous and somehow typed decoherence instead.

(Almost) everything you ever wanted to know about MRT and how to use it to measure noise.

Here is a link to the experimental paper and here is a link to the theory paper. Here is a nice picture of some data.

… for some reason wordpress is having trouble with my pdf posts recently. With apologies to the gods of platform independence and download bandwidth here are my slides in ppt format: SC07 powerpoint slides .

You can also get to them by clicking on the following image:

D-Wave Senior Scientist and condensed matter physicist par excellence Mohammad Amin gave a talk at MIT yesterday. The abstract:

Adiabatic Quantum Computation with Noisy Qubits

Adiabatic quantum computation (AQC) is an attractive model of quantum computation as it may naturally possess some degree of fault tolerance. Nonetheless, any practical quantum circuit is noisy and one must answer important questions regarding what level of noise can be tolerated. Gate model quantum computation relies on three important quantum resources: superposition, entanglement, and phase coherence. In this presentation, I will discuss the role of these three resources and the effect of environment upon them with respect to AQC. I will also show a close relation between open AQC and incoherent tunneling processes as in a double-well potential. At a more microscopic level, I will present a non-Markovian theory for macroscopic resonant tunneling, together with recent experimental results on superconducting flux qubits which demonstrate excellent agreement with the theory and may shed light on the microscopic origin of flux noise in these devices. Finally, I will discuss the effect of low and high frequency noise on practical AQC processors and compare AQC with thermal annealing.

Here are the slides!

This is what a 28-qubit superconducting AQC looks like. In case you’re wondering, “unholey” refers to the types of transformers between qubits and couplers (no holes in groundplane), “CJC” means this chip used D-Wave compound Josephson junction couplers, and “Leda” is the mask name for this generation. We name our masks alphabetically using moons, so Leda is the 12th generation since we starting design/fab/test of superconducting AQCs. The demo in February was from the Europa mask.

Shortly I will be posting details of our demo at SC07 next week. As a teaser here is the mail-out we’re using. The application we’re demo-ing is an image matching application co-developed with Dr. Hartmut Neven of Google, a world-leading authority on image matching algorithms. The hardware we are using to run the application is a 28-qubit superconducting adiabatic quantum computer.