CFP: International Workshop on Quantum Programming Languages

At Oxford in July. I haven't been to one of the workshops, but the papers from the first three were intriguing. Unfortunately, I'm probably too busy finishing my thesis to prepare a paper on my Aqua toolkit, which includes an assembler and circuit compiler.

See the call for papers; submission deadline is May 10.

T-minus 75 Days and Counting...

19 days until I give my thesis to my adviser.
40 days to my first presentation to the faculty on my research.
75 days (assuming that step goes well) to my final defense.

The Silk Road's Black River

Right now I'm watching an episode of NHK's Silk Road The imagery of course jaw-dropping, and the culture and history astonishing. Right now they are talking about (and visiting) the Black River area of Inner Mongolia. This is the poster child for desertification; there were a large lake, a roaring river, and cities supporting thousands until the fourteenth century. Then it all dried up for reasons that are still poorly understood. Nothing but desert, ghost cities and canals, and miles and miles of Buddhist monuments and graveyards.

It's a warning, a tragedy and a puzzle.

I would love to follow the Silk Road through central Asia, but the farther west you get, the worse the current atmosphere is for Americans. Some day...

Updated Cherry Blossoms

The Daily Yomiuri reported a couple of days ago on the "cherry blossom prediction wars". The government Kizocho (meteorological agency) is now predicting that in Tokyo the trees will be blooming around March 22 (this coming Wednesday). However, Weather News, a for-profit company that has only been doing this for four years, is predicting that they won't be blooming until about March 25 or later, and around March 29 in Kashiwa (not far from here). Their map is very cool, very interactive and detailed, but how accurate is it? Stay tuned...

I'm going to have to shift my "reference tree" from down near Teganuma to one in front of Abiko Junior High School. I'm just not getting down to Teganuma often enough.

The weather this week is going to be iffy, with rain off and on, and it has been windy enough the last three days to affect the trains, resulting in lots of inconvenienced commuters. If this weather keeps up, we won't get much of a cherry blossom season here around Tokyo this year.

DNA Smiley Face

Okay, this is way past cool. Just a reminder that people in fields besides quantum computing are doing awesome work in ways that may fundamentally change how we build things, including, by extension, how we build computers.

I'm actually most impressed with the world map.

Photos of Kyoto and Himeji

Recently Mayumi took Sophia to Kyoto and Himeji, where they met up with some photographer friends. Mayumi took some fantastic photos.

However, her friend who organized the trip took some even better ones. See especially, if you like technically difficult photography, the second picture here
.

P.S. Mayumi's in some sort of blog ranking thing, so if you like her pictures click on the animated GIF that says "Kumaneko".

Computer Networks: Heralds of Resource Sharing

[Update: the definitive version of this list has moved to Wikipedia, thanks to Edward. I have also been told that I misidentified Jon Postel.]

This ARPANET film, from 1972, discussed recently on the Interesting People mailing list, features many of the most important names in computer networking. Some of them have speaking parts; some are only shown in cameos. Here is a list of the ones identified so far. It would be better to actually annotate the video for this, or at least put up a wiki, but this is quick...comments encouraged!

Speaking parts:

• Fernando J. Corbato (Corby), more links here: (voice 0:45-1:15, face 1:00-1:15, 15:10-15:40) Turing Award-winning implementer of multitasking operating systems.
  
• J.C.R. Licklider: (1:00-1:40), and many times throughout the film
  
• Lawrence G. Roberts: (voice 1:40-2:25) SIGCOMM Award winner.
  
• Robert Kahn: (2:25-2:35, 3:15-6:25, 6:55-) Turing Award winner.
  
• Frank Heart: (2:35-3:15, 6:25-6:55)
  
• William R. Sutherland: (13:50-15:10)
  
• Richard W. Watson: (17:34-18:30, 25:05-25:15) Dick is one of the key mass storage researchers of the last thirty years.
  
• John R. Pasta: (18:30-19:25)
  
• Donald W. Davies: (19:25-21:55)
  
• George W. Mitchell: (21:55-24:05, voice only)
  

Non-speaking:

• Jon Postel: (8:27-8:32, with beard and glasses)
  

It would actually be nice to identify the locations and equipment, too...

Winny: Man Bites Dog

The file-sharing software Winny has been in the news a lot lately here in Japan, none of it good. It has security flaws that cause it to spread private info off of your PC out onto the Internet at large; that's rarely a good thing. Winny has been blamed for the leaks of 2,800 hospital patients, 1,500 crime victims, and, worryingly, door access codes for restricted areas at airports.

Now we have a case where crime was brought to light by Winny, a kind of "man bites dog" story: an illegal in-house betting ring was revealed at Kintetsu Railways because of a Winny data leak.

Most of these events that are making the news are cases where employees have used their private personal computers for work purposes. (I presume the reason it's not happening to more work PCs is that most companies here don't allow users to install software on their PCs; you have to use just what your IT folks provide.) This appears to be because, despite years of tax incentives for Japanese companies to buy IT equipment, many companies are still under-automated, leading people to bring their own PCs to work and use them. (They may also be finding this desirable because they're not allowed to install SW.) So, the government's solution to this (besides asking people not to use Winny) is to pony up money for the Self Defense Forces (which have also been hit by leaks) to buy 56,000 more PCs.

While it's not a bad thing that organizations will be improving their IT infrastructure, it's pretty busted when your solution to some form of malware is to buy more hardware. Just another reason to be angry about the state of the world of software today...

My memory tells me that the author is currently in jail and has offered to fix the problems if he's released, but at the moment I can't find a story on that...

Mobile Africa

An article in the Daily Yomiuri today, cribbed from the Times of London, talks about the explosion in mobile phones in Africa. In 2000 there were 8 million subscribers on the continent, now there are more than 100 million -- one for every nine people. 25% of those are in South Africa, but places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo have a million (compared to just 10,000 land lines), and Chad has gone from 10,000 to 200,000 in three years.

One of the bedrock premises of the mobile business is that it makes people more productive. In the case of Africa, it's not just mobile v. fixed, it's mobile v. nothing. Here's a chance to test that thesis. Will Africa's economic growth show a big boost in the next few years? It's hard to imagine the answer to that would be no.

And there's the human element -- the need to communicate is powerful. Analysts underestimated the demand for mobile phones in Africa, probably because of both the human element and the obvious business needs.

Of course, communications isn't Africa's only problem -- lack of infrastructure, poor education, infectious disease, and weak governance are all very serious issues. But I'm an optimist. The mobile phone has the ability to help overcome some of these other obstacles, if people demonstrate the initiative, including increasing citizen monitoring of governments, which has to be good (a la the Phillipines).

The Media Lab $100 laptop is a great thing, don't get me wrong. But my money is on the mobile phone as the Great Enabler in Africa, at least over the next one to two decades.

10th Red Planet Pojmanski Enceladus

Astronomy tidbits...

I've been getting up between 4:30 and 5:00 to look for Comet Pojmanski, but have failed to see it -- either cloudy or too hazy.

The announcement that Enceladus has liquid water was on the front page of the Daily Yomiuri yesterday. I wonder where it ranks on American newspapers -- I didn't even see it in the New York Times headlines at all, but maybe I just missed it.

The best news of the day is that the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter successfully inserted into orbit around Mars.

And, as we speak, I'm watching Mike Brown's Watson Lecture on the discovery of the 10th planet.

Traffic Pattern Analysis via Cell Phone

As long as I'm cranking up the posting meter...

A friend of Ted's spotted this one. The idea's been around for a while, I think, and someone finally got around to implementing it: count the number of handovers and number of phones in a particular cell, and you can estimate the traffic on the roads. Piggybacks on existing technology, doesn't require new hardware, and doesn't have to raise privacy concerns if done properly, either. It's a win. Without more directly tapping into the (rapidly increasing) ability to track the exact location of specific cell phones, the granularity of data and location is a little large, but this is such a straightforward hack (in the original, best sense of the word) with clear benefits for almost no effort that it should be a no-brainer.

Teganuma Cherry Blossoms, 3/11

One of the joys of living anywhere is the rhythm of the seasons, and the Kanto area has a very agreeable climate with wonderful changes. You'll lose few arguments staking out a position on the flowering of spring as the best here. If I were a poet, I'd be in heaven today, with a beautiful, warm, truly sublime spring day (my father-in-law said it felt like May).

It seems consistently slightly cooler here in Abiko than in Tokyo itself, so I'll bet on cherry blossoms around March 28. Here are two pictures taken today at Teganuma, the local lake. You can see there's a big range in how far they have progressed; most of the trees are at the slower end of this range. I'll try to post regular pictures here so you can see the progress.

Edo Castle

Mayumi and Sophia are off to Himeji Castle tomorrow, so I'm jealous, but I did get to snap this photo of a swan in the moat at the Imperial Castle here in Tokyo on a gray, drizzly day. It shows the limitations of the camera in my cell phone pretty clearly.

Cartoons: Quantum and Geek

User Friendly isn't exactly your average comic strip, hey, it's still not that often that quantum computing shows up in a strip. The main gag isn't quantum, and the strip refers to uncertainty but not any of the phenomena such as superposition and entanglement that we know and love, but hey, any publicity is good publicity, right? Thanks to Ross for the pointer.

On the topic of comics, Thaddeus turned me on to PHD Comics a while back, and as I struggle to finish my thesis, I find it side-splittingly funny.

Cherry Blossom Predictions

Looks like predictions for when the cherry blossoms arrive are now posted. There's a map as well as more detailed lists, like the one for the Kanto (Tokyo) area. We are apparently scheduled for about March 24 in Yokohama and March 25 in Tokyo. For Tokyo, that will be three days earlier than "average" and 6 days earlier than last year, when they were late. Sendai will be announced (the prediction will be made, that is) mid-March, and Sapporo in early April.

I'd love to know how they calculate that average; I seem to recall reading that it was some like the average from 1975 to 2000? Have to dig the data back up...

MS+S: David Awschalom

Man, Santa Barbara is the place to be. David Awschalom has been there for years, and they just added John Martinis to the physics department. In CS, they have Wim van Dam (a quantum computing theorist), and have just added Fred Chong, who is a computer systems architect, strong in both classical and quantum. (There are more groups listed here, too.)

Anyway, David's talk at MS+S...I'm not going to have time to give a thorough accounting of David's talk (and probably couldn't do it justice anyway), but wanted to post a few tidbits. It was titled "Imaging spin Hall effect and current-induced polarization in 2DEG".

David is one of the world's best at imaging spin in semiconductors, among other things. David and his group have shown that it's possible to control spin electrically. This has the possibility to eliminate the need for large magnetic fields to control qubits, which would be a plus because the magnetic fields require a lot of power and hardware, and more importantly, are hard to confine to areas small enough to affect only a single qubit.

The spin is controlled electrically by moving electrons through an electric field at relativistic speeds. This motion changes the field felt by the electron from electric to magnetic, affecting the spin. This is done, generally, by taking advantage of the electrical field created by the epitaxial strain, the strain caused by mismatch of the lattices at the boundary between two materials, and is therefore a static phenomenon.

They are creating spins electrically and monitoring them optically. Numerous other schemes for creating spins electrically have been proposed; two that David mentioned that I managed to catch are Edelstein, Solid State Comm. 73, 233 (1990) and Aronov and Lyanda-Geller, JETP Letters 50, 431 (1989).

One truly startling image (to me, at least) was spins precessing in part of a wire. Moving in one direction, they are fine, turn a 90 degree corner and all of sudden they are moving perpendicular to the B field and begin to precess; turn another corner and they stop precessing. I don't see this image in the couple of papers I'm looking at; it might not be published yet.

The spin creation efficiency is largely temperature-independent, which is good news, and appears to be limited by classical gate speeds rather than any physical process.

A couple of very good papers in conjunction with his student Kato (who did his undergrad under my physics professor Kohei Itoh) are this Science paper and this PRL one.

Softbank to Buy Vodafone K.K.?

The Japanese government was supposed to auction off two bands for new wireless services sometime soon. I think the use of the bands was going to be less restricted than in the past, but the assumption was that they would be used for 3G services in the short run, and maybe something more exciting in the long run.

Softbank is one of Japan's most entrepreneurial companies. It had announced its intention to bid on one of the licenses. Apparently, they have decided that the Japanese market for basic wireless voice services is saturated, and that the only way to build a decent use base is to buy one. So, they are negotiating to buy "a controlling stake" in Vodafone K.K., the Japanese arm of the Vodafone group, for one trillion yen (almost ten billion dollars).

Vodafone K.K. is profitable, but not growing. Vodafone bought Japan Telecom, which owned J-Phone, in 2001, and in 2003 renamed it Vodafone K.K. and sold off the wireline part of the business. For their 3G service, they use standard W-CDMA and the same handsets as in much of the rest of the world, reasoning that the efficiencies gained in development, management, etc. would be worthwhile, and that people the world over wanted the same kind of 3G experience. But, they've been unable to convince most of their Japanese customers to switch from their 2G network to 3G. In the beginning, they had coverage problems and got bad press; surely that's corrected by now. But their handsets are still viewed as clunky, bulky, short on features, and not appropriate for Japan (as a former Nokian, it pains me to say that, since Nokia supplies many of their handsets).

So what does this mean? Is Vodafone giving up on its vision of a single worldwide network and single worldwide wireless experience? I'm not sure. What will Softbank do with the network? Well, as adventurous as they are, my guess is that they will have creative, very Japanese services running quickly, though better handsets have a long development cycle. I would also bet that Softbank will find a way to deploy a faster network within a few years, too.

In other words, this will probably be good both in the short and long run for Japanese customers. Whether it will be good for Japanese handset and wireless equipment makers depends on Softbank's ability to work in the world standards market, both as a customer and standards-maker, which will affect handset costs inside Japan and competitiveness of Japanese companies outside Japan.

For those of us who want a single worldwide phone number and cheap international roaming service, it's probably a push; I used to think that was a big deal, but I now believe we are more likely to get that through something like Skype over WLAN than directly from our 3G phone provider.

Cherry Blossom-Flattered Castles

It's still a little early for the annual "cherry blossom front" maps to be appearing on TV and in the newspapers, but Nikkei (Japan's Wall Street Journal) published a poll in their life section today on castles and cherry blossoms. I think the poll is just taken over the Internet, so not very scientific, but in this case plenty good enough to be useful. Readers' votes for "Cherry-Blossom-Flattered Castles" (in order):

• 1) Hirosaki Castle (Aomori Prefecture, up north): 2600 cherry trees of 52 varieties; will bloom late April-early May
  
• 2) Himeji Castle (Hyogo Pref., out west between Kyoto and Hiroshima)
  
• 3) Takato Castle (Niigata, Japan Sea side of the mountains)
  
• 4) Aizu-Wakamatsu (Fukushima, north-central): 1000 cherry trees
  
• 5) Hikone (Shiga): 1200 cherry trees
  
• 6) Tsuyama (Okayama): 5000 cherry trees
  
• 7) Oka (Oita, Kyushu (down south)): 2000 cherry trees
  
• 8) Goryokaku (Hokkaido, up north): 1600 trees
  
• 9 (tie)) Osaka (Osaka): 4000 trees
  
• 9 (tie)) Takada (Niigata): 4000 trees
  

They also took a poll just on readers' recommended castles:

• 1) Himeji
  
• 2) Matsumoto (Nagano, up in the mountains)
  
• 3) Osaka
  
• 4) Hirosaki
  
• 5) Kumamoto (Kumamoto, Kyushu)
  
• 6) Hikone
  
• 7) Odawara (Kanagawa? Shizuoka? A couple hours south of Tokyo)
  

I've been to Himeji, Matsumoto, Kumamoto, Goryokaku, and Aizu-Wakamatsu, and I've walked past Osaka-jo. Himeji is undoubtedly one of the most spectacularly beautiful castles in the entire world; it's the canonical Japanese castle you see on guide book covers. Catch the small museum nearby, too. Himeji-jo is still the real thing; Japanese castles are wooden, and have a tendency to burn down during uprisings or aerial bombardment, so most of them, including most of the ones on this list, are now concrete replicas. The concrete ones often have nice museums inside, but still... Goryokaku is in a five-pointed star of stone walls, definitely go to the top and look out if you visit.

The picture is plum (ume) blossoms near our house.

Visited Countries

This is actually sort of pathetic. I may eventually visit all fifty states, but they're making countries faster than I'm visiting them.
Moreover, a short visit may be fascinating, but gives you only the most superficial understanding of a culture. Personally, I think it would be fun to live in several more countries over the next couple of decades, but we're tired of moving and want the girls to have some stability...

I'd love to see maps for Paul, Bill, and Suz...



create your own visited countries map
or vertaling Duits Nederlands

Visited States

Okay, I'm I geek, I think this is cool. Thanks Dave.


create your own visited states map
or check out these Google Hacks.

Japan News: Shinkansen, A-Bombs, and MOX

Several tidbits from yesterday's Daily Yomiuri and Japan Times:

JR East has tested a new shinkansen (bullet train), which they call "Fastech", at 366 km/h (229mph) in northern Japan. This isn't major news; the train has already run 398 km/h in previous tests, and has run 30,000km. But this might have been the first time the press was on board, and the first time it was tested on the tracks where it will run in service. It's scheduled to go into service in 2011. Currently, the fastest trains in operation are the TGV and the Sanyo shinkansen at 300km/h, so this one should claim the title.

45% of hibakusha (A-bomb survivors) have developed some form of thyroid disease, according to a JAMA study. Most had only chronic inflammation; only 2% had cancer. The younger you were and the greater your exposure to the blast, the higher your chances of disease.

A pluthermal nuclear power plant that will burn plutonium-uranium mixed oxide (MOX) fuel cleared another hurdle on Wednesday. It's down in Shikoku, and there have been several stories about the plant in recent months as various agencies issue their opinions. I think the 890 megawatt plant is already in operation; this would just be a change in fuel. They want to use MOX as up to 25% of their fuel. I don't know much about atomic power, but I think this will burn some waste from other plants. I'm not sure what it does overall to concerns about proliferation or the environment. The government has claimed it wants to have 16-18 pluthermal plants by 2010, but according to the article the others have "hit snags".

Finally, the central government is considering implementing what it calls the doshu system, doing away with the 47 prefectures (states, more or less) and creating 9-13 administrative blocs instead. Can you imagine someone seriously proposing eliminating U.S. states? I doubt very much that this proposal will be adopted, it hits too many power bases of people who will scream. The central government claims it will decentralize power and promote efficiency.

MS+S: John Martinis

John Martinis (UC Santa Barbara) talked about high-fidelity measurements of a Josephson junction flux qubit. Their device is Al wires, SiNx insulators, an external SQUID for measurement.

They have two qubits coupled through a capacitor. They think they have proven entanglement between the two via tomography on the |10>-i|01> state.

They have done four years' work on materials. A major part of the dissipation is from the on-chip capacitor. The cap is amorphous material, sometimes atomic bonds can oscillate at uwave freq that cause problems. At high power, SiO2 looks like a good dielectric,
but at very low powers, loss is ~1%, way too high. SiNx is 20x better, they think they have some materials that might be better still. Their current device uses SiNx.

Currently at a T1 of 110nsec, hoping 500ns or more with better caps.

John had wonderful animated data on the decay of a qubit.

John is very optimistic about systems of 4-10 qubits. One of his people (sorry, I didn't catch the name) has built a very scalable, distributed control system in software, 50-100KLOC (kilo-lines of code) to do the qubit initialization, tuning, and control.

Through their coupling system, each qubit can in theory be connected to maybe 3-4 others, over moderate distances. In other words, I think it's time for me to get involved :-).

They have also done work on improved dil fridges and getting the wires in and out of the fridge, which concerns me, so I'm happy to see that.

I'm planning on visiting Santa Barbara in October, looking forward to it.

Wikipedia on QC

Not only has Wikipedia just passed its one millionth article in English, but I noticed while pulling up a URL for that last post that the entry on quantum computing has improved dramatically since the last time I looked at it. Check it out.

Kudos to whoever did the work.

MS+S: Bob Clark

Bob Clark represented 150 people, funded by both the Australian and U.S. governments. The overall effort in Australia is major, including theory, semiconductor, and optical. He talked mostly about progress in fabbing their solid-state devices. They are famous for the Kane model, of course, but Bob says they have "moved on" from that somewhat.
In one sense, these guys set themselves a difficult task. Although it's based on standard silicon, the fabrication of their devices is complex, compared to the superconducting teams. The superconducting folks have their own problems, of course, including (for some devices) some issues with aligning structures to a particular axis of the crystalline lattice, but I think overall the superconducting devices are a little easier to fab.
In the Australian system, the idea is to implant phosphorus atoms below the surface of silicon, and the P will localize an electron that can then be used as a qubit. They have to put in the P, layer some more Si over it, then build standard CMOS gates aligned to the P atom. Their fab approach is to cover the Si with a protective layer, etch small wells down to the Si surface, sputter P atoms so that they get one into each well, then strip off the protective layer, put down some more Si, then build the gates.
One part of their fab uses an idea that had never occurred to me before: they build electrical structures on the chip that are then used during later steps of the fab. We're accustomed to passive alignment markers on the wafer to get proper registration between layers, but not active elements. In particular, when a P atom impacts the Si surface, it generates about a hundred electron-hole pairs, and they put a detector near each of the wells so they can know with absolute certainty when an atom has made it into the well. Bob says they have ideas that may scale to allow them to reliably implant a million atoms in precise locations (plus/minus a few nanometers) on the surface of a wafer.
Their first experiments are aimed at creating a charge qubit, and Bob expects that moving from charge to spin will be straightforward. They are currently doing experiments on a two-atom device, with the atoms placed 50nm apart, each coupled to an SET (single electron transistor). For this setup, T1 is 10msec. As the atoms are brought closer together, the lifetime will go down, but if they can make the spin device work, lifetimes will be very long; tens of msec, maybe hundreds of msec.
They have also been doing a lot of work on integrating various important control structures directly into the device, which will reduce the need for signal generators and whatnot outside the dil fridge. To me, this is critical work, and I hope they are successful, and that some of what they learn can be applied to other solid-state technologies.
Bob's talk included a number of fantastic pictures of their data; I wish the talks were online. One paper is this one by Schofield et al.
They don't really have a working qubit yet; hope to in a few months.

Overview of MS+S2006: Mesoscopic Superconductivity and Spintronics

I just got back from MS+S2006 (Mesoscopic Superconductivity and Spintronics). Over the next couple of days, I'll digest some of my notes and post my impressions. If you gave a talk and I don't cover your work, it's not because it wasn't impressive; I'll run out of blogging steam at some point.
This conference is held every two years at NTT's Basic Research Laboratory in Atsugi, organized by Dr. Takayanagi, and sponsored by NTT and JST. I went in 2004; it was the first experimental physics conference I attended.
The conference is medium-sized, probably 125 or so total participants; I counted around 100 in some of the sessions.
The program was fantastic; the organizers get a large number of world-class invited speakers, in addition to the submitted talks and posters. We heard Tord Claeson (Chalmers), John Martinis (UC Santa Barbara), Bob Clark (U. New South Wales), Charlie Marcus (Harvard), David Awschalom (UCSB), John Clarke (Berkeley), D. Esteve (Saclay), Prof. Tarucha (U. Tokyo), Per Delsing (Chalmers), Dr. Nitta (NTT), Dr. Semba (NTT), Y. Nakamura (NEC), Hartmut Haeffner (apologies, I'm not sure how to type an umlaut in this system), Andreas Wallraff, and more.
Of course, much of the physics is still beyond me (since I'm a computer systems guy), but there was exciting work presented. Although some of it was basic physics, I'll stick to the quantum computing-related parts of the conference, which were the majority.

Greek Wire Tapping

Hey, looks like I was right. Bruce Schneier is now reporting that the tapping of the Greek PM's phone was done by hacking the lawful intercept mechanism, not hacking the conference call controls.

Beer-Pouring Robot

Apparently I'm the last person in Japan to know this, but Asahi is running a promotion. They are giving away 5,000 robots that pour your beer for you. Follow the link, and click on "PLAY" at the top (written in English), and it will pop up a Real Player video of the robot doing its thing, or the "PLAY" next to the smaller images will run short clips.

The robot has a refrigerator built into its body, big enough to hold six cans of beer and two mugs. When you push the button, it gets out a beer, pops the top, and pours it for you.

I don't even drink beer, and I want one of these.

The comments here and here are hilarious.

If I have this right, you need 36 seals from "participating cans", send them in, and they'll pick the winners by lottery.

Apologies for the low-quality pics, they were grabbed with my cell phone from an ad hanging in a moving train.

Jurassic Beaver?

No, not the Caltech mascot...

This L.A. Times story says paleontologists have found a 164 million year-old mammal. It's aquatic, furry, had a beaver-like tail, and weighed 500-700 grams, which is a lot heavier that previously known Jurassic mammals. It's not directly related to the beaver, though it has some similarities, and would push back the history of aquatic mammals by a hundred million years or so.

Distributed Arithmetic on a Quantum Multicomputer

My paper "Distributed Arithmetic on a Quantum Multicomputer" was accepted for ACM's International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA). This is ACM's most prestigious and competitive architecture conference, and this year there were 31 acceptances out of 229 submissions.

See you in Boston in June!

Quantum Design Tools

Krysta Svore, Al Aho, Andrew Cross, Ike Chuang and Igor Markov published a paper titled A Layered Software Architecture for Quantum Computing Design Tools in the January issue of IEEE Computer.

The paper is a somewhat general summary of work this group has been doing for a couple of years. It covers their four-phase software architecture, compiling from high-level languages down to an optimized program for a particular circuit layout.

This is, in general, good news; we have definitely reached the point where we need serious, modular tools that can be adapted by various research groups to meet their particular experimental needs, without starting from scratch. And this is just the group of people to do it, and the article suggests that the tools will be open-source.

I have some tools of my own; I will investigate integrating what I've got with what they have accomplished...

ATP: Astronomical Toilet Paper

Today's Daily Yomiuri has an article about astronomical toilet paper, created by a group of astronomy graduate students, planetarium employees, and others. It features the life of a star, from proto-star through main sequence to red giant. The paper itself is only in Japanese, so far, but there is an English web page linked from the above.

Great quote from one of the creators: "In your toilet we'd like you to feel the vastness of the Universe and realize that men and the Earth exist as part of the universe."

ACM's Globalization Report

Yesterday we were talking about globalization, and by coincidence, today ACM has released its report on globalization. While the focus is on software, if you believe that globalization doesn't affect whatever your personal specialty is, you're mistaken.

San Francisco's Japantown in Danger?

I just received (or, just read) mail saying that a big chunk of Japantown is for sale. Japantown has been through many ups and downs in its 100-year history, but it is currently only a small area, with only a few shops and businesses outside of the mall itself. It would be a real shame for Japantown to go away, but this is a long discussion involving the personal choices of many Nissei (Japanese-related Americans), history as far back as the forced relocations during WWII, the economic arc of various San Francisco neighborhoods, the one-time ghetto-ization of many American minorities, the current trend toward assimilation in much of the Japanese-American community, the current small number of Japanese immigrants (and short-term expats sent by the home office)...

There appear to be only three Japantowns left in the U.S.: San Francisco, San Jose, and L.A.'s Little Tokyo, plus undoubtedly a few other less-formal neighborhoods, such as what we called "Pico-Tokyo" along Sawtelle near Pico in west L.A.

GSM in Guam

We have experimental verification. GSM works on Guam, and roaming from NTT DoCoMo works properly. No GPRS (packet service), just basic voice service. And the GSM only works near the major tourist/population centers, not the remote south/east parts of the island.

The snorkeling, btw, was fantastic. We saw eels, triggerfish, wrasses, tangs, unicornfish, a few puffer-family fish, and some nice coral. Jealous yet :-)?

We met some guys from Wisconsin who were on a two-week diving trip to Truk and Palau. Man, if I did that and called home to Wisconsin where my wife was dealing with 30cm of snow and -19F (-28C) temperatures, when I got home the locks would be changed.

NEC Shutting Irish Plant

Forbes and others are reporting that NEC Electronics has announced it will close its plant in Ireland in September, laying off 350 workers. The plant makes micro-controllers for automotive electronics. The work will be transfered to China, Malaysia, and Singapore, according to Kyodo. Some 150nm lithography equipment will also be moved from Sagamihara (Japan) to some plant in the US.

For the last decade or more, Ireland has been considered one of the EU's most attractive places to do high-tech manufacturing, due to a combination of wages, education, local infrastructure, and more. Now jobs are starting to leave because of high salaries? Tom Friedman would say it's globalization in action, and the "long-horn cattle" such as NEC move capital around more slowly than the "short-horn cattle" (day traders and other investors), but they do move it around in response to market forces. Did the strong euro hurt Ireland?

Future of Classical Computing HW: Magnetic Quantum Cellular Automata

Geek Press points to a Wired article about some research on magnetic quantum dot cellular automata. This is based on a paper in Science by Imre, Porod and others from Notre Dame, and an associated perspective by Cowburn.

The research is fantastic. But I dislike Wired's characterization of it. Let's look at the science first. What they have done is used quantum effects to build classical logic; they are not using superposition or entanglement to run "quantum algorithms" like Shor's factoring algorithm. They have created nanometer-scale magnets which can be arranged so that they form a quantum cellular automaton (QCA). The magnets are a nickel/iron alloy, patterned using standard lithography on a silicon substrate. Set up properly, this QCA can perform a majority gate of three inputs. If two or more inputs are one, the output is zero, otherwise, it's one. This is a useful primitive, both directly (for e.g. calculating carry chains in adders) and because it trivially transforms to NAND or NOR. Similar work was done by Cowburn et al. a few years ago; the difference is that they used charge, whereas this work is spin (magnetism). The new work has two major advantages: it can be run at room temperature, and it can be non-volatile. They estimate that, running at 100MHz switching rate, 10^10 gates would dissipate 100milliwatts.

The Wired article described this as important for its nonvolatility (true), density (false), speed (false) and lack of wires (false). The technology has some things in common with FeRAM, and a good, low-power, dense, room-temperature, random-access, non-volatile memory will be a huge boon. But fast it is not, in its current form. 100MHz is not an especially quick switching speed, as Cowburn noted. As to density, as long as the structures are lithographically defined, they are not inherently dramatically better than normal chips (bits on magnetic tape or disk, in contrast, are much smaller than individual transistors).

More importantly, the lack of wires that Wired seems to like actually creates a problem: how do you get information from one part of a chip to another? Well, you have to create a chain of automata that form a switching channel, clocking data from place to place down the chain. This is going to be very slow, compared to standard electrical signal propagation in a wire. It may also be wider, I'm not sure, and space for wires is one of the biggest problems we have in chip design today.

But there are interesting possibilities in combining this with normal, charge-based logic. Something similar to FeRAM definitely has possibilities. One thing suggested is that you can put some processing with the data. This idea is not new; the Berkeley iRAM project has been pushing it for a decade or so. The success or failure of MQCA, in my opinion, does not hinge on the success or failure of iRAM, but might work well with it.

In summary: 1) this is fantastic work, and might change the way we build chips and ultimately systems; 2) Wired doesn't quite understand why it's fantastic; 3) I need to think about this more before I understand how to best take advantage of it; and 4) there are probably others with better ideas than me...

Experimental Verification: GSM in Guam?

According to GSM World, NTT DoCoMo has a roaming agreement with Guam Wireless for 1900MHz GSM service. This should allow my N900iG to work.

I'd never pass up the opportunity for experimental verification of something this important. The sacrifices I make in the name of science :-). I'll report back in a few days.

Keene's Chronicles

The Daily Yomiuri is publishing a series of short autobiographical essays by Donald Keene. Keene is a famous professor of Japanese studies at Columbia, where they now have the Donald Keene Center.

Keene first came to Japan right after the war, after having served as a translator. He lived here off and on, I think, while holding down duties at Columbia, for the next half century. He has written or translated dozens of books on Japan.

I have no idea how long DY will keep those essays up; they're bad about archiving things in a findable place. The online version doesn't include the nice illustrations. Perhaps this will be published as a book later.

In the course of the series, so far, he is a student at Columbia. I think the series will run all year.

Electric Super-Cars: 290kph, 370kph!

Various news outlets are reporting that Hybrid Technologies will unveil a electric car capable of speeds of 290km/hour. A two-seater, carbon-fiber body, lithium battery-powered rocket that runs as fast as a shinkansen.

A professor Keio University (my university) and his team have created Eliica, an eight-wheeled electric limo capable of 370 kilometers/hour. Now that's fast!

"Enjoy Your Failures": Akira Furusawa

Nine-twenty or so on Valentine's evening, and Mayumi is putting the girls to bed. I flip on the TV,looking for the Torino Olympics, and whose voice do I hear? Akira Furusawa's! In a minute or so, it becomes clear that I have stumbled into an hour-long show about Akira and his lab on NHK, the national network. It's part of a series on inspirational professionals.
Prof. Furusawa, of course, is one of the planet's leading experts on quantum optics and one of the experimentalists who first performed quantum teleportation. He's now a professor at Todai, the University of Tokyo.
What follows is the raw notes I typed during the last forty minutes of the show. I also have that part on tape. I'd like to have the whole thing.
Talking about enjoying failure. Science is like a sport. You challenge yourself, measure yourself against the best.
Saying "I'm busy," really, more than in body I'm busy in mind. I try to eat dinner with my family.
He even brought a teleportation setup into NHK's (stark black and white) studio. The announcer is amazed at him routing a laser through a half a dozen mirrors and lenses.
How much does this cost? Well, that piece is about three thousand dollars... total setup, could be millions? Yeah, runs into that range.
He said when he's working on a problem, he likes to go to sleep early. While he's asleep, (during REM sleep), he gets good ideas and wakes up with the solution.
Akira likes to ski (video of him on the slopes -- they went to a lot of effort to make this show)
He was a regular salaryman until 33. Then, seeing Nomo sign with the Dodgers, he decided he wanted a shot at the big leagues, too. He goes to Caltech, joins Jeff Kimble's lab, and immediately runs into a wall: his English isn't good enough. One frustrating day, he goes to Dodger Stadium, and sees Nomo hit his first home run in the majors. He comes back, thinking of sports, and takes up tennis with Kimble. Kimble says it helped their relationship.
"Enjoy your failures"
Talking about failures, didn't you ever fail? Well, really only walls you put in front of yourself. I did fail the driver's test three times.
How can you believe you're going to succeed when 99% of people fail? Everybody has the power to hit home runs, just not everybody believes in themselves.
Heck, they even went to his lab's bonenkai (year-end party).
Takahashi is experimenting on doing multiple teleportations at the same time (in a chain?) and is stuck. My students are actually doing outstanding work. Sometimes they don't think so, but compared to what we were doing eight years ago, this is great.
Home for dinner, nice looking family...
Another day, back to the lab. It's a month to a major international conference, and they're worried that they might not make it. Another try. Got it! Takahashi's face lights up. Akira at Narita Airport, "I'm looking forward to the conference, I think our results will surprise people."
"Being a professional means being able to enjoy what you do."
Ends with uplifting music.

45,000 Photographs of the California Coastline

In the process of avoiding work, I decided to drop in on www.californiacoastline.org, a project run by my friends Ken and Gabrielle Adelman. They have been taking photos of the California coastline for several years now, from a low-flying helicopter, documenting changes on the coast, both natural and man-made. They are nearing their 30,000th photo, and have added several photo databases extending back to 1972. They're most famous for having been sued by Barbra Streisand (they won), but the point is how human activity affects the coast, not who the people are and how fancy the houses are. Not that I contributed anything to the project, but I got to tag along on one short flight. Interesting work.

I would love to see a complementary set of ground-level photos of this, or any other, area (say, the town of Half Moon Bay), that resulted in a 3-D dataset showing how the town has evolved over the last century.

Mavericks

Mavericks.

'nuf said.

Farber Challenges Young Japanese Researchers

Dave Farber has just issued a challenge to the young Internet researchers in Japan, as part of his participation in the Mitou project.

The money quote: "There is a lot of pressure in the commercial world to turn the Internet into a television set... But we could instead produce a major change in the way people work, the way people live and the way people interact. Where we end up is still very much unknown..."

Lego Difference Engine

Andrew Carol has built a Lego version of Babbage's Difference Engine. Found via Geek Press.

Of course, afficianados of such things know that Danny Hillis and friends created a tic-tac-toe playing computer from Tinkertoys when Danny was an undergrad at MIT.

Imperial Intrigue

Congratulations are due to Japan's Princess Kiko, who, it was announced on Wednesday, is pregnant with her third child.

I'm sure she's happy, but must be dreading the political firestorm approaching.

What firestorm? Oh, uh, the imperial succession. You see, as the press here likes to phrase it, "No male heir to the throne has been born in forty years." In Japan, under current law, only men are allowed to sit on the throne. The current emperor has two sons, Crown Prince Naruhito (called "Kotaishi-sama" here; you never hear his name in Japanese) and Prince Akishino, who are 45 and 40, respectively. Naruhito and his wife, Princess Masako (a Harvard-educated commoner) have one daughter, Princess Aiko, who is four years old. Akishino and his wife, Princess Kiko, have two daughters who are both older than Aiko.

Under current law, the succession would go Naruhito, Akishino, then the current emperor's younger brother. After that, nothing.

So, since Aiko was born, there has been discussion of revising the imperial succession law to allow her to sit on the throne. The debate had been gathering momentum, with several possible proposals on the table. There are two issues -- the immediate successor to the throne, and the succession from that emperor/empress. For the immediate succession, there are two main options:

[1] Succession to oldest child, regardless of gender.

[2] Succession to oldest boy, if there are no boys, then succession to oldest girl.


For the following succession, there are two options:

[A] Succession to emperor/empress's children, regardless of gender of emperor/empress.

[B] Upon the death of an empress, succession reverts back to someone with an emperor on his/her father's side.


Under the 1/A combo, Aiko gets to be empress, and her children will follow her. Under the 1/B combo, Aiko sits first, then if she dies before her girl cousins, they will sit in order of age. When they are all gone, we're back to the current dilemma; the throne would potentially fall to some distant cousin (this would involve expanding the royal family to include more cousins).

Confused yet? Now it gets complicated. (Try drawing out some family trees and numbering them for different scenarios, just for fun.)

What if Kiko's child is a boy? Under current law, he would be third in line for the throne, after his uncle and father. Under the 1/B combo, he might never sit on the throne, but his children would in preference to Aiko's or even his sisters'.

Now, maybe to you, especially if you're, say, English, where things have been done another way for centuries, this might seem bizarre and byzantine. But not here.

Prime Minister Koizumi, who views himself as a reformer but often kowtows to the right wing, had supported a bill picking, I think, option 1/A. (There was a government-commissioned panel to investigate options that concluded a few months ago; I don't remember the details.) After Kiko-sama announced her pregnancy (or, more correctly, the Imperial Household Agency that controls her every movement announced it), Koizumi initially said he would press forward with the bill. But yesterday he backed off from that stance, saying the issue needs to be considered carefully; this is probably a prelude to shelving it at least until the gender of the baby is known.

There's more (including various interpretations of Japan's history with empresses, and a proposal by a distant cousin to revive the concubine system), but I'm out of steam. Google News will help you out if you want more.

Toshiba Chip Plant Investment

Toshiba said it will raise its semiconductor capital expenditure to 289 billion yen ($2.4B at 119 yen/dollar) for the fiscal year ending the end of March. That's a growth of 63B yen ($529M) since some previous announcement, and the bulk of the increase is to go to NAND flash memory production capacity.

Future of Classical Computing HW: FeRAM

Toshiba has announced a 64-megabit FeRAM. It reads and writes at 200MB/sec in burst mode, and incorporates ECC. I'm unclear on when, or if, it will be generally available, and what the price will be relative to flash, SRAM, or DRAM.

FeRAM, as I understand it, replaces the dielectric layer in DRAM with a ferroelectric film, creating "magnetic capacitors" that retain a particular polarization when powered off, making it non-volatile. The similarity with DRAM means it should be able to reach similar densities and price points, and the performance is much more like DRAM than flash, as well.

Back in the old days, there were stories of mainframes with magnetic core memory being powered, disassembled, shipped to a new site, reassembled, and powered on, and returning to execution right where they left off. With FeRAM, we can get similar behavior. FeRAM would aso allow the write cache memory in a host operating system or a RAID controller to be stable, without a UPS or battery backup. Given the rate those fail at, that would be a huge benefit. Peter Chen's Rio file system caching work is one way to go about managing such memory.

A short article comparing MRAM and FeRAM can be found here.

Tapping the Greek PM's Phone

The government of Greece is quite mad today, the Independent and others report. It seems that someone hacked into Vodafone Greece's network and tapped the cell phone calls of about a hundred people, including the Prime Minister, several cabinet ministers, and even a U.S. embassy employee, for about a year.

Of course, cell phones are made to be tapped. It's part of the design, especially in the network. The air interface is encrypted so that random eavesdroppers with a radio can't listen in, but when you run the back end network, it's no problem, in theory. Cell phone operators spend millions of dollars complying with government regulations that, in many (most?) countries require the operators to be able to tap phone calls when the government requests it. (In the U.S., it was widely understood, until recently, that the government had to have a warrant to conduct such a tap.)

The news here is that a hacker managed to get control of the network to do this, rather than the government requesting it. Worse, Vodafone simply killed the taps when they found them, without requesting help from the authorities in tracking down the perpetrators. The various media accounts conflict on when Vodafone actually informed the government that the phones had been tapped, but it may have been quite recently, and Vodafone found and killed the taps last March.

Designing the networks to make the tapping doable is actually a lot of work; you'd be amazed at the contortions the system has to go through to support this. It applies to both the circuit-switched and packet-switched sides of the network. This complexity is part of what keeps a cell phone (GPRS/W-CDMA) packet network from being as simple as an ordinary Internet ISP. The equipment is more specialized, slower, more complex, and has fewer customers, all of which contribute to making the equipment exotic and expensive.

None of the articles I've seen explicitly detail the technology used, but since the infrastructure is already there, my assumption is that what was hacked was control of the existing intercept gateways, so that rules or filters could be put in place. There's no need for particularly complex software, unless some was put in place to hide the taps from regular audits. The hacking itself could have been as simple as acquiring a carelessly controlled password, then running a few command-interpreter commands once into the system. It takes a lot of knowledge, but I'll bet the changes to the machines were ultimately very small.

The articles talk about cell phone calls being tapped, they make no mention of data (SMS/email/MMS/web browsing) being tapped.

[Update: Bruce Schneier points to an article that claims it was done by tapping into the conference calling system and making each of the phone calls into a surreptitious conference call. He also says it's Ericsson equipment.]

Future of Classical Computing Hardware: Plasmonics

A recent issue of Science had several interesting papers possibly relevant to the future of classical computing hardware. I'll try to review them one at a time over the next few days.

Ozbay wrote a review of plasmonics. Surface plasmons (SPs) are electromagnetic waves that are confined to the region near a metal/dielectric interface, theoretically much smaller than the (vacuum) wavelength of the light. You can't quite build a standard wire or even waveguide for SPs; proposed structures include an arrangement of nanoscale gold dots on the surface, so that the total layout creates a waveguide or mirror. Ozbay says that work on interfacing external ("normal") optics to plasmonics is proceeding well. However, plasmonics is being touted as a possible answer to the difficulty of intra-chip interconnect bandwidth and real estate, and that field still needs work (signal losses are apparently a big problem). In Ozbay's words,

[W]hen a lot of data need to travel from one section of a chip to another remote section of the chip, electronic information could be
converted to plasmonic information, sent along a plasmonic wire, and converted back to electronic information at the destination.
Unfortunately, the current performance of plasmonic waveguides is insufficient for this kind of application, and there is an urgent need
for more work in this area. If plasmonic components can be successfully implemented as digital highways into electronic circuits,this will be one of the "killer applications" of plasmonics.

But what I don't understand is how this will solve our bandwidth problem. Ozbay mentions that a fiber optic interconnect can carry >1000 times as much data as an electronic interconnect, but I'm not following either the logic behind that or why it translates directly to plasmonic waveguides on a chip. The signalling necessary to convert between plasmonic waves and electronic state is inherently limited in speed. Is it that a plasmonic wire supports faster switching because longer electronic wires have increased capacitance and slower switching times? It's not propagation time, which won't be much different. The structures are not smaller; if anything, they may be larger, and would seem to allow fewer layers of interconnect, so I don't think it's spatially more efficient. Frequency division is one possibility, but I think the plasmonic structures have to be optimized for a particular wavelength. I don't get it. I'm going to have to follow some of the references and figure this out...

The article includes discussion of all-plasmonic chips, plasmonic light sources, and plasmonic nanolithography. The lithography I don't quite grok, either, but a silver superlens helps focus (using near-field effects) lithographic exposure to features much smaller than a wavelength. That looks very promising.

Overall, a fascinating and possibly fundamental shift to how we move data, but it appears to be a long ways to commercial use yet.

Unwise Microwave Oven Experiments

A Friday afternoon link for you. Looks like fun, but we have a nice, new, microwave/convention oven combo I'm reluctant to destroy. Hmm, my mother-in-law's microwave is getting old, I should find an excuse to buy her a new one...

(I have a whole stack of quantum and classical papers I'm going to post reviews of Real Soon Now, I promise...)

CRA on SoU; and, Musing About the Future

I generally don't do politics on this blog (but I do it passionately via email), but Bush's State of the Union speech is generating a little interest in the computing research community.

The CRA has a response to the "American Competitiveness Initiative". W explicitly mentioned "promising areas such as nanotechnology, supercomputing, and alternative energy sources". He also proposed to "double the Federal commitment to the most critical basic research programs in the physical sciences over the next ten years".

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Will it mean more money for quantum computing? Fusion research? Particle accelerators? Or will it be more short-term, more applied?

It should be obvious by now that the biggest change currently under way is mobile & ubiquitous systems. If you're (still) working on those areas (I spent four years at Nokia, and think highly of the company as well as the importance of the area), my hat's off to you. Supercomputing, from Google-sized data systems to SETI@home to the grid work at SDSC and ISI, was rightly highlighted. The potential of both of these topics has only just begun to be explored. Both supercomputing and mob/ubiq will change society profoundly in the next decade.

Then what's next? Come 2015, what are the next big topics? My guess is robotics and quantum computing. I don't want to go into all of the reasons right now, but I think robotics is finally about to blossom, and I believe quantum computing is closer to reality than most people realize. In my opinion, robotics/autonomous systems will start having a big societal impact within about a decade (yeah, I know, if you count industrial robots, it already DOES have a big impact, and the research itself has had countless spinoffs). While a useful quantum computer probably will not be on the market, within a decade its debut will seem inevitable, and many, many researchers will be scrambling to be the first to build and deploy such a system.

Earthquake@home

Experience earthquakes live, in your own living room! No need to travel anywhere!

We just now (8:35 p.m. on Feb. 1) had a 5.1-5.3 (the numbers differ a little) centered essentially 118km directly beneath our house. I would call it a "shindo 2" on the Japanese scale. Mayumi thought it was a bus going past, but it was strong enough to give the girls a pretty good fright. I would guess it lasted about ten seconds.

Man, I love Hi-net. Real-time info.

I post these not because they frighten me (though the bigger ones do give me an adrenalin rush, this didn't), but because they fascinate me. There was a point in time when I considered becoming a geologist. A Caltech roommate and I used to sneak into Mudd, where they kept the remote seismographs, when we thought we felt something. This real-time web mapping is very cool, but there's something visceral about that wiggling needle on the scroll of paper.

I don't grok the sphere/circle info in the lower right hand corner of the picture...

Caltech Basketball

The Caltech men's basketball team has been in both the L.A. Times and Sports Illustrated recently. The SI article also showed up in the Daily Yomiuri here in Tokyo. Hey, we're famous!

Both articles are sort of bemused looks at a place where being on a sports team doesn't earn you much campus status. Theoretical physics majors who can't dribble, players who shoot with their eyes closed, more high school valedictorians than high school ball players, that kind of humor. But both columnists gave the team (and coach) credit for heart, effort, smart play (which is harder than it sounds), and a reasonably solid D (as in "defense", not "almost failing").

I was on the team when I was student. I'm proud of that, though the other players rolled their eyes when talking about my abilities. I was the worst player on the team, by a large margin. Since the team plays NCAA Div III, and has no depth, I like to claim I was the worst player in all of NCAA basketball. It might be true.

I made the team out of the good grace of the coaches, and because I was willing to show up for practice every day, which some of the other marginal players were not. I was junior varsity the first couple of years, but was privileged to hold down the end of the varsity bench on occasion, and kept stats and shot charts for a while. Basketball was what kept me sane; my grades were actually better during the season than not.

The team we had then had an excellent starting five. Ed Zanelli, Brett Bush, Chris Kyriakakis, Jim Helgren, and Jeff Lester could all shoot, rebound, play D, run the offense, do what it takes. Ed was a fierce competitor, quick and penetrating, seeing the floor the way a point guard should. Chris had beautiful shooting form. Brett was particularly athletic (he pitched for the baseball team, and may have been among the top 100 volleyball players in the country at one point, having been recruited to play at UCLA but choosing Caltech instead, where, yes, he majored in physics), though his six-five frame was overshadowed by many opposing centers. Jim provided muscle, and Jeff quickness on the wing. But it fell off rapidly after the starting five, bottoming out somewhere around me.

Caltech won one NCAA game in the 1970s (against Pomona, I think), then beat LaVerne when I was a student in the mid-1980s. (Rumor has it that both victories resulted in the firing of opposing coaches.) But that's it. Nothing since then. No NCAA victory in 21 years.

But this year, the team has been competitive in several games, losing one by only four points, and there is a building anticipation of victory.

Go, Beavers!

Remembrance Season

It's Remembrance Season.

Ten days ago was the eleventh anniversary of the Great Hanshin Earthquake, which killed more than 6,400 people in and around Kobe. We were down there visiting friends last year, and saw some of the memorials; the scale of the tragedy was immense.

Friday was the sixty-first anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, ending one of the darkest events in human history.

Saturday was the 20th anniversary of the Challenger disaster. At the time, I was a student at Caltech. Usually, but not always, I was in the habit of watching shuttle launches and landings. (My dad took my sister and me to see the first launch in 1981, and I had organized a group of students to go see a landing at Edwards Air Force Base the year before.) This particular time, I had forgotten about the launch, but I had my alarm set to the radio, and it happened to go off a few minutes after the explosion. I rushed down to our house tv lounge, where there were already a few people gathered. We watched as long as we could, then went through the motions of the day, stunned and empty. I had a job interview that morning; I recall not a thing about it, not even the name of the company or type of business they were in.

A day or two later, the basketball team had a game; someone (Ed Zanelli, I think) made sure the team members had black bands for their uniforms in remembrance.

Of course, a significant number of Techers aspire to be astronauts, me included; a few have actually made it (Harrison Schmidt, the geologist, even walked on the moon). But the accident had a more practical impact than postponing such dreams. One company I had interviewed with did aerospace work, and immediately put its hiring plans on hold. In a less anticipated fashion, it took Feynman away. I was taking his class on computing systems, and he was co-teaching it that year with Sandy Frey; after the famous "Dr. Feynman goes to Washington", we got to see very little of him, and Sandy took over most of the teaching.

Space afficianados know that this is the season not just of Challenger but all of the major U.S. disasters:

• January 27, 1967: Apollo 1, which took the lives of Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee.
  
• January 28, 1986: STS51-L (Challenger); Francis R. Scobee, Michael J. Smith, Judith A. Resnik, Ellison S. Onizuka, Ronald E. McNair, Gregory B. Jarvis, Sharon Christa McAuliffe.
  
• February 1, 2003: STS-107 (Columbia); Rick D. Husband, William C. McCool, Michael P. Anderson, Kalpana Chawla, David M. Brown, Laurel B. Clark, Ilan Ramon.
  

May we somehow, someday, be worthy of the sacrifices they made and the risks they, and the other astronauts from all countries, took and continue to take.

English in Japanese Primary Schools

The Daily Yomiuri reports today that Prime Minister Koizumi's government has decided to allow English to be taught in primary school. That's right, allow. The national government takes a much stronger role in curriculum here than in the United States.

Up until now, if I have this right (the DY article is worded just a touch ambiguously), primary schools have been allowed to teach English provided that textbooks were not used and teachers did not grade work. In practice, this means that my daughter's first grade class has an Englishman come for forty-five minutes once every two weeks or so, and he plays a couple of games. (The net result is that the kids in the hall greet me with "Haro!" when I go to visit.)

If there are new limits on how formal the English classes can be going forward, the article didn't say, but it did say that local (city) school boards have to apply to the central government for permission to make the changes.

This Week's Sign of the Apocalypse?

There is now a Hello Kitty Stratocaster guitar by Fender. On sale in the U.S. since fall, now coming to Japan...

HDLs for Quantum Computers

Hardware description languages (HDLs) are languages for designing electronic circuits. Udrescu et al. published a paper on the topic of HDLs for quantum computing. I haven't had time to sit down and read it in detail yet, but I'm excited by the basic idea.

Of course, existing work on quantum languages often reads like circuit design rather than conventional programming languages, so this isn't the first time someone has worked in this area, but I'm happy to see more people working explicitly on the design of the quantum hardware.

My own assembler currently supports a variety of back ends which programs can be compiled for, but doesn't yet have a description language for architectures. It's on my list of things to do...

A Visit to Pluto

New Horizons, NASA's latest planetary probe, lifted off yesterday, headed for Pluto by way of Jupiter. It will pass Jupiter in about a year, getting a gravity boost, then arrive at Pluto in July, 2015 for a short flyby followed by a tour of the Kuiper Belt.

Barring intervening changes in official terminology, Pluto will be the last of the nine planets to be visited. Should be interesting.

Architectural Implications of Quantum Computing Technologies

My paper "Architectural implications of quantum computing technologies," coauthored with Mark Oskin, was accepted to ACM's Journal on Emerging Technologies in Computing Systems (JETC) (contents in the Digital Library here, though the issue which will contain my paper is not available yet).
This paper presents a taxonomy of quantum computing technologies from a computer architect's point of view, complementary to the DiVincenzo criteria.

As Dave Bacon would say, time to do the New Paper Dance!

4.5 in Abaraki-ken @ 15:30

Yawn, more earthquake fun. This one was strong enough here in Abiko that they pulled everyone out of the pool at my daughter's swimming school, did a head count, went through the basic drill, then went on about their business.

They said that near the epicenter it reached 4 on the Japanese scale, enough to cause some light damage.

Congratulations, Dr. Abe! (and, Phosphorus in Silicon)

Eisuke Abe is now Doctor Abe. He defended his thesis, Pulsed Electron Spin Resonance in Phosphorus Doped Isotopically Controlled Silicon, yesterday.

Some of Eisuke's papers are on the arXiv or at the Itoh group home page. His thesis isn't available online yet, but the papers are of course relevant.

This work has implications for the coherence time of qubits done with phosphorus-doped silicon, as in the Kane scalable quantum computer. The Kane computer now has its own Wikipedia entry, which has a couple of things that aren't completely accurate, I think... only some isotopes of silicon, for example, have nuclear spin zero, which is in fact the point of Eisuke's thesis -- measuring the behavior with changing silicon isotopic composition.

Facial Recognition, GPS Disasters, and Nikon Cameras

Today's Daily Yomiuri reports that the Construction and Transport Ministry is studying the introduction of a facial recognition system to be installed in every train station, tied into a central database to look for terrorists (though there is no reason why they couldn't look for wanted criminals, deadbeat dads and jaywalkers with the same system).

The diagram accompanying the article shows cameras pointed at the electronic ticket gates (kaisatsuguchi), but there's no indication in the article that the cameras will be limited to there. Out in the suburbs where we live, not all of the stations have electronic ticket gates; it's possible to enter the JR system without a ticket at all.

Of course, Japan suffered an actual terrorist attack (the sarin nerve gas attack) by the cult Aum Shinri Kyo on the subways in 1995 which killed a railway worker. Japan also tends to come down more on the side of public interest than personal privacy in most of these discussions. Nevertheless, I can't say I'm wild about this system, but it may well be inevitable, both in Japan and elsewhere.

The system will be deployed first at Kasumigaseki station starting in March of this year as a test. Kasumigaseki is the station closest to the Diet (Parliament) building, and was one of the targets of the sarin attack.

Officials declined to even estimate the cost of the total system, but it must be enormous, given the large number of stations and wickets that will have to be monitored. The system is being developed by NTT Communications.

On the other side of the technology coin, Kyoto University is testing a GPS-guided mobile evacuation system. Your GPS-enabled cell phone can notify the disaster management center, which in turn can make maps available to you showing where fires have broken out and buildings have collapsed, and mark your preferred evacuation site on the map. This one, I like.

Oh, and a minor tidbit -- Nikon is suspending production of all but two of its film SLRs, concentrating on digital.

Cell Phones in New York Subways?

Today's New York Times reports that the MTA is considering a plan that would put cell phone coverage in all 277 New York subway stations. The operators complain that, since most users have so many minutes, the operators' revenue won't increase, so they can't afford to put in the coverage. They are proposing some sort of joint effort to do it.

Man, to a Tokyoite, that's just bizarre.

By the same logic, a cellular operator who starts with one cell tower can never justify putting in the second. The second one doesn't increase the amount of money the users will spend, so why build it?

In Japan, where people (including me) spend hours a day on the subway, you can't live without coverage in the stations, many of which are far underground. A carrier without coverage there would be rightly thrashed in the media for poor coverage. It's assumed. Coverage means everywhere, not just where it's convenient for the operator. Coverage in the subway tunnels themselves is still poor, though a lot of signal bleeds into the tunnel when the stations are only a few hundred meters apart.

People complaining that it means putting up with loudmouths on the train (or airplane, where coverage is also being experimented with) just don't get it. In Japan, it's very rude to talk on your phone while on the train (though okay on the platform). But people do email and short messages constantly. It's not uncommon for half the people in sight to be tapping away on their phones (I've seen people doing it while driving a car or riding a bike, but that's another story).

The U.S. carriers should be embarrassed that their phones don't work in the stations. They should be competing to make their networks work better than their competitors'. What happened to "Can you hear me now?"

Vazirani ==> ACM Fellow

Umesh Vazirani is one of the new ACM Fellows. His citation says, "For contributions to theoretical computer science and quantum computation." I'm not normally an awards groupie, so I don't know, is this the first ACM Fellow citation to explicitly mention quantum computation? A quick skim of the full list doesn't show any of the obvious Big Names...

Congrats, Umesh!

Found via The Geomblog.

Feynman and Go

While perusing the book Feynman and Computation (which I highly recommend), I ran across Feynman's own "Computing Machines in the Future", a transcript of a talk he gave here in Japan in 1985. In the Q&A session at the end, he mentions that programming a computer to play Go is a lot harder than programming one to play chess.

If I knew that Feynman was aware of go (and perhaps even played), I had forgotten it. I'm racking my brain trying to remember if he mentioned it in the class I took from him in 1985-6 ("Potentialities and Limitations of Computing Machines", the basis for the book Feynman Lectures on Computation). My friend Ross (who took the Feynman class with me) introduced me to go in about 1983, but I didn't take it up seriously until 1992. I improved pretty rapidly until our first daughter was born, and progress stopped (still a good trade, in my opinion). I'm about shodan on the Japanese scale, which is about 2kyu U.S., I think...

This lecture is full of interesting little tidbits. Feynman says he found a method for turning a 2n-step irreversible program into a 3n-step reversible one, for example. Bennett's original formulation is at least 4n in that notation; I'm not sure if a better approach is known (and I should know, too).

Energy, Tuna, Jazz, and Population: Japanese News

[Update: Saturday's paper says Tsunanmachi has 370cm of snow, whereas Friday's said 389cm (and it snowed a LOT on Friday). Not sure which is actually right, but more snow is expected through Sunday.]

A collection of random notes from newspapers the last couple of days...

Tsunanmachi, in Niigata prefecture, has accumulated 389 centimeters (153 inches) of snow. Niigata is know as "Yukiguni", or "Snow Country", and now you know why. The same storm has dumped quite a bit in the Hokuriku and Tohoku regions, stopping some shinkansen service and affecting about 9,000 passengers. And we're stuck in boring ol' Tokyo...(well, we did have a nice visit down to Hakone over New Year's, but that's another story).

The government aims to reduce energy dependence on foreign oil from the current 50 percent to 40 percent by 2030. This includes raising the percentage of nuclear power from 30 to 40. They claim Japan's economy is already very energy efficient, and if these numerical targets are met, it will be twice as efficient as during the first energy crisis in 1973.

Anybody who has lived in Japanese housing has to wonder about the efficiency claim; insulation here, at least around Tokyo, is not what it is in the northeast U.S. (Hokkaido is probably better). Double-paned windows are very rare, even in new construction. Walls are insulated with 35mm thick sheets of polystyrene foam, which is better than nothing, but I have a hard time believing that has an R-factor anywhere near what 100mm of pink fiberglas would have. I'm not sure what goes into floors or roofs.

Our place is probably typical. We have no central heat; wall-mounted heaters/air conditioners serve each major room (the bathroom and hallways aren't heated). These heaters can be gas or electric, ours are electric. We have on-demand heated water, not a large, standing water heater, and a gas range (no oven). My mother-in-law still uses a free-standing small kerosene stove, since electric heating is expensive. The current trend, at least in advertising, is to promote all-electric places, despite the price (it's certainly safer in an earthquake).

In the first fish auction of the year at Tsukiji, the highest price paid for a tuna (the whole fish) was 3.82 million yen (about $33,000) for a 191-kg fish, about $80/pound, bones and all.

There was an article about young women jazz players. I haven't heard any of them, but I may try to either find albums or catch them live, if I can. Nineteen-year-old saxophonist Saori Yano just recorded an album in New York; pianist Hiromi Uehara studied at Berklee. Trumpeter Hikari Ichihara and sax player Kaori Kobayashi are featured, as well, with shorter mentions of Akiko Grace, Saya, and Chihiro Yamanaka. Their staying power has yet to be demonstrated, of course, but given the dearth of international-quality Japanese women players to follow the groundbreaking path of Toshiko Akiyoshi half a century ago, it's a good sign. A few artists, such as pianists Junko Onishi (one of my favorites), Hiroko Kokubu, Keiko Kishino, flutist Rie Akagi and violinist Naoko Terai started appearing in the 1980s. I'm looking forward to hearing all of the ones I'm not already familiar with.

Okay, the big news from last year: the population of Japan declined in 2005, to 127,756,815 as of Oct. 1, about 19,000 fewer than a year before. The health ministry estimates about 10,000 fewer births than deaths for 2005. I'm not sure where the discrepancy lies, presumably that means that 9,000 more people emigrated than immigrated. This is two years earlier than previously predicted.

One consequence is that universities are scrambling for students. The Education, Science and Technology Ministry estimates that the number of students desiring admission will equal the number of places available in 2007. In 2005, 160 private universities, 30 percent of the nationwide total, failed to fill their entering classes.

Okinotorishima Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion

The Daily Yomiuri reports today that the Japanese government is considering installing an ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC) system on Okinotorishima. (The title of the article is "Ocean power plan mooted for island"; I have no idea what they meant by that. I suspect it's a mistranslation of some sort.) Okunotorishima is an atoll 1,740 kilometers south-southwest of Tokyo, in the general area of Iwo Jima. It's part of what the Japanese call the Senkaku Islands and the Chinese call the Diaoyutai Islands. Japan and China are still fussing over who owns them; they're just rocks, barely above high tide, but there's good fishing there, and believed to be substantial natural gas deposits.

Tokyo's right-wing governor, Shintaro Ishihara, has made development and defense of the Senkaku Islands one element of his platform. They technically fall under the administration of Tokyo-to, which Ishihara is governor of; Tokyo-to is something like the U.S. District of Columbia. (This is answer to a geography trivia question I like: "What is the geographic extent of Tokyo, north to south?" No one has ever been within a factor of five. Even just considering the inhabited Ogasawara islands, Tokyo is more than a thousand km north-south.) He convinced the Prime Minister, Koizumi, to support the project, and about two million dollars was allocated for a study in this year's budget.

Anyway, politics aside, the OTEC would use the 20 degree Celsius thermal gradient between the deep water and the surface to boil ammonia, which drives turbines, then is sent to the depths for cooling and recondensation. The technology has been proven in other demonstration projects, but I doubt it's economically viable when other power sources are available. The article doesn't say how much power would be generated, but does say the total cost would be "tens of billions of yen" (hundreds of millions of dollars). Quite a bit to power a small marine observation station, a few seasonally inhabited structures, and some ice-making equipment for the fishermen.

This website says the U.S. National Renewable Energy Lab is no longer working on OTEC, but doesn't say why. This article has a map showing that Okinotorishima actually is near the edge of a large swath of ocean north of the Great Barrier Reef that has very high thermal gradients, making it appropriate for this kind of power generation.

"Junk Science" 2005

Steve Milloy is Fox News and the Cato Institute's political pundit who pretends to discuss science, though in reality he's an ideologue using science to score his political points. He talks about what he calls "junk science", by which he means science that disagrees with his politics -- namely, any science that suggests that totally unfettered, laissez-faire capitalism requires any sort of check or balance. Milloy's not interested in what is important science or good science or bad science, he's interested in pushing a particular politico-economic agenda. To that extent, sometimes he finds good science that disagrees with his politics and disses it. Sometimes he finds good science that agrees with his politics and pushes that. Occasionally, he finds real bad science and rightly castigates its authors, funders, and overseers.

Milloy has published his list of "Junk Science" for 2005. I haven't had time to go through his list in detail and attempt to refute it point by point, but the line, "In a bid to blame alleged global warming for hurricanes and tsunamis...the United Nations..." alone suggests a lot. He's either misled or deliberately distorting the landscape by suggesting that any significant number of real scientists, government officials or even policy advocates would blame a tsunami on global warming.

As further evidence, I offer the list below -- the list of one working scientist/engineer (namely, me) on what could be considered the big stories of the year in ethics and science. The absence of the Hwang item from Milloy's list is proof enough by itself that the issue is not the science, it's the politics; there was no bigger story in science this year regarding ethics. It was a blockbuster breakthrough, making headlines around the world, offering both profound new fundamental science and the possibility of medical treatment for many conditions. It was also, apparently, false -- though the verdict is not final, so let's not be marching with pitchforks and torches just yet.

• Tops of the list has to be Hwang Woo-Suk and his stem cell cloning team. He claimed to have created 11 patient-specific stem cell lines, but that now appears to be questionable, at best. Likewise, Snuppy, his cloned puppy, is now being questioned, and his team seems to be unable to provide the expected evidence of their claims.
  
• The New Orleans levees demonstrated that Mother Nature is not to be messed with, not for political gain, squabbling, or general incompetence.
  
• The fuss over the discovery of the Kuiper Belt object 2003 EL61, a planet-sized object orbiting far from the Sun. Mike Brown's team at Caltech, which has found many important solar system objects in the last decade, got scooped by Santos-Sanz and Ortiz on this one. Or did they? Someone using the same computers as Santos-Sanz and Ortiz in Spain accessed telescope log files showing where Brown's team had been looking just days before announcing the discovery based on two-year-old data. Hmm.
  
• The Bush aministration's shift of money away from fundamental computer science research. You could throw in a whole bunch of administration moves that I disagree with, including folding PITAC into PCAST (a move which many people are trying to look on the bright side of).
  
• MIT immunologist Luk Van Parijs, fired in October for fabricating data on short interfering RNA in mice. He was also a postdoc in David Baltimore's lab at Caltech, though I haven't seen any suggestion that any of his misdeeds took place during his sojourn in Pasadena.
  
• The continued "nudge-nudge, wink-wink" of "scientific whaling". Note that I'm not saying it's necessarily wrong to eat whale meat, just that the current approach is not honest. These are separate questions. But what legitimate scientific purpose could be served by continuing to kill them? I'm no marine mammalogist, but I find it hard to believe that we really need to be killing tens or hundreds of whales a year to answer some obscure question.
  
• Ninety Japanese apartment buildings, most in and around Tokyo, for which seismic safety data were faked. They were supposed to survive a magnitude 8 earthquake, but officials now believe a weak six could take them down -- and we have those every couple of years. Arguably, this is a consequence of shifting the building inspection responsibility from the government to the building contractors, who obviously have an incentive to hire the "friendliest" inspector they can find. Technically "junk engineering", not "junk science", but it's my list, and another example of don't try to fool Mother Nature.
  
• Dover, PA and the rest of the intelligent design movement, for continuing to waste our time and money and water down or ruin science education. The "right" result was reached in both the court case and the election, but we shouldn't even be having this conversation in 2005. Science tells us what happened; religion tells us why. End of story.
  
• As long as I'm talking about intelligent design, it makes me sad that both President Bush and Bill Frist have endorsed its teaching.

All that and not a single mention of global warming.
You could make an entire list out of that alone.

You'll find a couple of excellent sources on Milloy here and here, and an earlier message of mine on Milloy on the IP list here.