A day late, but yesterday was Edgar Allan Poe's two hundredth birthday! Happy birthday to one of my favorite writers.
Tonight's midnight (well, two a.m., Tokyo time) promises to be anything but dreary, as I ponder (perhaps weak and weary due to a cold I've contracted) the inauguration. Obama's TODO list is infinitely long, but hope dawns across the land. Hmm, there are lots of comparisons to Lincoln, King, and Kennedy; I wonder if there's an appropriate Poe quote?
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Monday, January 12, 2009
Anniversary of Two Eras
This past week was the anniversary of two important eras in Japanese history, one symbolic and high profile, the other of enormous practical impact but much lower profile.
January 7th was the twentieth anniversary of the death of Emperor Hirohito, the end of the Showa Era, and the start of the Heisei Era with the ascension of the current occupant to the throne.
That same day, Jun Murai was at Narita Airport, on his way to Washington, D.C., for some rather obscure technical work. On about January 11th, he got it running: Japan was connected to the Internet, via IP over X.25, for the first time.
Several years later, when I left Japan for the first time, I gave my email address to many Japanese (and foreign) friends. Most said, "What's this?" I replied, "Hang onto it, in a few years you'll know." And indeed, I occasionally am contacted by friends from that time, though I suspect they come upon my address now via Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, or another, mutual friend.
January 7th was the twentieth anniversary of the death of Emperor Hirohito, the end of the Showa Era, and the start of the Heisei Era with the ascension of the current occupant to the throne.
That same day, Jun Murai was at Narita Airport, on his way to Washington, D.C., for some rather obscure technical work. On about January 11th, he got it running: Japan was connected to the Internet, via IP over X.25, for the first time.
Several years later, when I left Japan for the first time, I gave my email address to many Japanese (and foreign) friends. Most said, "What's this?" I replied, "Hang onto it, in a few years you'll know." And indeed, I occasionally am contacted by friends from that time, though I suspect they come upon my address now via Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, or another, mutual friend.
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
ToN Quantum Paper Online
Our Transactions on Networking paper, "System Design for a Long-Line Quantum Repeater," is now available in final form in the IEEE's Digital Library. Print edition is not due until August 2009. Thanks as always to Thaddeus, Bill and Kae for their hard work on it.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
MARA in Infocom!
Congratulations to Yasu Ohara and Shinji Imahori! Yasu's paper (on which Imahori-san and I are coauthors), "MARA: Maximum Alternative Routing Algorithm", was accepted to INFOCOM 2009, one of 282 acceptances out of 1,435 submissions. This work is follow-through on Yasu's Ph.D. thesis, completed and defended in our lab last academic year. It's good work on how to do route calculations to support multipath forwarding in a network.
A trip to Rio for Yasu next April!
A trip to Rio for Yasu next April!
Monday, December 22, 2008
New Campus Web Site
For those who aren't allergic to Flash, our campus has a new website for faculty & research profiles. Check it out, let me know what you think.
Saturday, December 20, 2008
Tell Me a Story
What he said. Robert Krulwich, you da man.
Now, if only I could write like that...I can't, but sign me up, I'm willing to give it a shot.
Now, if only I could write like that...I can't, but sign me up, I'm willing to give it a shot.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Sustainable Sushi
...is largely a hopeless prospect in this country (let alone the rising appetite for it world-wide, especially in China) for the foreseeable future, but: the Monterey Bay Aquarium's sustainable sushi guide is a win.
A translation to both Japanese language and Japanese market availability would be a plus...
FWIW, a sushi bar here is actually a reasonable place to take a non-squeamish vegan. At a good place, there are a number of pure vegetable rolls. Not clear how much goodwill you earn with the sushi chef that way, but it's a much better menu bet than a tonkatsu (deep-fried pork) restaurant.
I can't promise perfection, but I can promise to do my best to follow the guide.
Now, how to popularize the ideas here?
A translation to both Japanese language and Japanese market availability would be a plus...
FWIW, a sushi bar here is actually a reasonable place to take a non-squeamish vegan. At a good place, there are a number of pure vegetable rolls. Not clear how much goodwill you earn with the sushi chef that way, but it's a much better menu bet than a tonkatsu (deep-fried pork) restaurant.
I can't promise perfection, but I can promise to do my best to follow the guide.
Now, how to popularize the ideas here?
Friday, November 28, 2008
Give Us This Day Our Daily Banana
In English, "bread" can be a synonym for "meal" or "food" (and for "money", though that's a later innovation), as evidenced by the line from the Lord's Prayer, "Give us this day our daily bread."
In Japanese, "gohan" is both (cooked) "rice" and "meal": "Gohan wo tabeta?" "[Have you] eaten a meal?" (Transliterated; a more natural rendering would be "Have you eaten?")
An article in a recent issue of Science, talking about bananas, informs me that in Uganda the word for "banana" is the same as the word for "food". Sadly, the article didn't give the word for it, or even name the language (presumably Swahili).
I read the article on the train on the way home yesterday, and when I got home I was dying for a banana. Fortunately, Mayumi had bought bananas. Unfortunately, my girls managed eat all of them before I got home :-).
That's perhaps an allegory for what's happening worldwide: the Cavendish banana, the most common around the world, is under attack by a fungus all over the planet. The plant can be grown only by cloning (it's sterile) and since all the plants are genetically identical, they are all equally susceptible.
Other strains of bananas might be less vulnerable, but are suffering from neglect. (The most fragrant bananas I've ever had were in Nepal, some small variety that smelled of cinnamon.) Let's not let the world's fourth-most-important staple crop (behind rice, wheat and corn) get away from us, people!
In Japanese, "gohan" is both (cooked) "rice" and "meal": "Gohan wo tabeta?" "[Have you] eaten a meal?" (Transliterated; a more natural rendering would be "Have you eaten?")
An article in a recent issue of Science, talking about bananas, informs me that in Uganda the word for "banana" is the same as the word for "food". Sadly, the article didn't give the word for it, or even name the language (presumably Swahili).
I read the article on the train on the way home yesterday, and when I got home I was dying for a banana. Fortunately, Mayumi had bought bananas. Unfortunately, my girls managed eat all of them before I got home :-).
That's perhaps an allegory for what's happening worldwide: the Cavendish banana, the most common around the world, is under attack by a fungus all over the planet. The plant can be grown only by cloning (it's sterile) and since all the plants are genetically identical, they are all equally susceptible.
Other strains of bananas might be less vulnerable, but are suffering from neglect. (The most fragrant bananas I've ever had were in Nepal, some small variety that smelled of cinnamon.) Let's not let the world's fourth-most-important staple crop (behind rice, wheat and corn) get away from us, people!
guGUttara?
"To google" is now a verb in English (at least, the American (correct) form of the language, not sure about other parts of the diaspora). "He googled it," "I'm googling it now...," "Why don't you google it?" and more.
The same thing is true in Japanese. "Google" in Japanese is "GUUguru" (or "GU-guru"), written in katakana, the syllabary used for "loan" (imported) words, with a long "uu" and the unfortunate but necessary mangling of the pronunciation. (Not that Americans can come close to pronouncing Chinese or even French correctly, but that's not the point here.)
By fortunate coincidence, "-ru" is the common ending for verbs in Japanese, so conjugating it is natural and trivial, but the emphasized syllable changes: "guGUrimasu", "guGUrimashita". You almost never hear the formal form of it, though, you usually hear the informal form "guGUtta" ("googled") or "guGUtte iru" ("am googling/is googling"). Japanese has a verb form (not sure of the technical name in either Japanese or English) for "why don't you..." or "if you...", which usually ends in "-ttara".
And if you don't believe me, guguttara?
The same thing is true in Japanese. "Google" in Japanese is "GUUguru" (or "GU-guru"), written in katakana, the syllabary used for "loan" (imported) words, with a long "uu" and the unfortunate but necessary mangling of the pronunciation. (Not that Americans can come close to pronouncing Chinese or even French correctly, but that's not the point here.)
By fortunate coincidence, "-ru" is the common ending for verbs in Japanese, so conjugating it is natural and trivial, but the emphasized syllable changes: "guGUrimasu", "guGUrimashita". You almost never hear the formal form of it, though, you usually hear the informal form "guGUtta" ("googled") or "guGUtte iru" ("am googling/is googling"). Japanese has a verb form (not sure of the technical name in either Japanese or English) for "why don't you..." or "if you...", which usually ends in "-ttara".
And if you don't believe me, guguttara?
Monday, November 24, 2008
ORF: QKD with IPsec
Our campus (Keio's Shonan Fujisawa Campus) just finished our Open Research Forum, the annual two-day big exhibit of students' work. It was a blast, a lot of interesting people show up (including, if I understood him right, the director of "Godzilla versus Hedora", and it's great to see the work being done by students in other "kenkyuukai" (research groups), as well.
At our campus, undergrads, usually, starting in their second year, join the "lab" or kenkyuukai of a professor, and by the end of their four years, I would say that many students have done a third to a half of their total learning in the context of the kenykyuukai. Classes provide breadth and theory, the kenkyuukai provides depth.
My students in the AQUA group integrated IKE, the Internet Key Exchange protocol, with QKD (quantum key distribution), so that traffic between two networks can be encrypted using a key created via QKD. I'll post more about the technical work on it a little later, but thanks to Satoh and especially Nagayama for the hard work on both the implementation and the display.
Thanks to NEC for the loan of the QKD devices! We look forward to continuing to work with you.
At our campus, undergrads, usually, starting in their second year, join the "lab" or kenkyuukai of a professor, and by the end of their four years, I would say that many students have done a third to a half of their total learning in the context of the kenykyuukai. Classes provide breadth and theory, the kenkyuukai provides depth.
My students in the AQUA group integrated IKE, the Internet Key Exchange protocol, with QKD (quantum key distribution), so that traffic between two networks can be encrypted using a key created via QKD. I'll post more about the technical work on it a little later, but thanks to Satoh and especially Nagayama for the hard work on both the implementation and the display.
Thanks to NEC for the loan of the QKD devices! We look forward to continuing to work with you.
Monday, November 10, 2008
Keio: Astronauts, Princes, Emperors, and Postage Stamps!
So, Saturday was the Keio University 150th anniversary ceremony. I didn't get to attend (there were only a few thousand tickets), and I found out about the live webcast after it was over. Oh, well.
I'm told that the Emperor made very nice remarks about the history of Keio.
Prince Charles also dropped by the Mita Campus on his visit to Japan a couple of weeks ago. There is a good photo of him examining a bamboo sword during a kendo demonstration. I heard that his talk was nice, as well.
Just as exciting, to me, was the talk that Akihiko Hoshide gave a few weeks ago. He was on the team that delivered the Kibo Laboratory module to the International Space Station this summer. He also took an aluminum soroban with him, made for him by our engineering department. Oh, Hoshide is a Keio grad -- at least the second to fly in space, after Chiaki Mukai. Hoshide-san gave a great, inspirational talk targeted at kids, and accessible to all ages. It was broadcast over the Internet, and translated into several languages in real time.
More to my surprise, the Japan Post Office has issued a commemorative stamp set. Now I know what I'm getting my great-aunt, the stamp collector, for Christmas.
I'm told that the Emperor made very nice remarks about the history of Keio.
Prince Charles also dropped by the Mita Campus on his visit to Japan a couple of weeks ago. There is a good photo of him examining a bamboo sword during a kendo demonstration. I heard that his talk was nice, as well.
Just as exciting, to me, was the talk that Akihiko Hoshide gave a few weeks ago. He was on the team that delivered the Kibo Laboratory module to the International Space Station this summer. He also took an aluminum soroban with him, made for him by our engineering department. Oh, Hoshide is a Keio grad -- at least the second to fly in space, after Chiaki Mukai. Hoshide-san gave a great, inspirational talk targeted at kids, and accessible to all ages. It was broadcast over the Internet, and translated into several languages in real time.
More to my surprise, the Japan Post Office has issued a commemorative stamp set. Now I know what I'm getting my great-aunt, the stamp collector, for Christmas.
Friday, September 26, 2008
New Papers
It occurs to me that I'm behind in doing the obligatory paper dance, as our pontiff would say. All from collaborators, one already published and two new submissions:
More to come in the next couple of months, I hope, on both repeaters and arithmetic circuits; there is also a pile of systems work from last year's QEC conference and other places that needs to be polished up and submitted, as well as a stack of half-completed things...
...ah, for a trio of clones! Then one of us could teach, one could spend time with the family, one could do research, and one would have to do the drudge work. I suppose we'd have to rotate; I love all three of those first topics, but no one would want to be stuck with the paperwork forever :-).
- Byung-Soo Choi and Rodney Van Meter,
Effects of Interaction Distance on Quantum Addition Circuits,
submitted;
available from the arXiv as quant-ph:0809.4317.
- Liang Jiang, Jacob M. Taylor, Kae Nemoto, William J. Munro, Rodney Van Meter, and Mikhail D. Lukin,
Quantum Repeater with Encoding,
submitted;
available from the arXiv as quant-ph:0809.3629.
- W. J. Munro, R. Van Meter, Sebastien G. R. Louis, and Kae Nemoto,
High-Bandwidth Hybrid Quantum Repeater,
Phys. Rev. Letters 101, 040502, July 2008;
available from the arXiv as quant-ph:0808.0307.
Selected for Virtual J. Quantum Inf. 8(8), Aug. 2008.
More to come in the next couple of months, I hope, on both repeaters and arithmetic circuits; there is also a pile of systems work from last year's QEC conference and other places that needs to be polished up and submitted, as well as a stack of half-completed things...
...ah, for a trio of clones! Then one of us could teach, one could spend time with the family, one could do research, and one would have to do the drudge work. I suppose we'd have to rotate; I love all three of those first topics, but no one would want to be stuck with the paperwork forever :-).
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Biden's Travels
I'm not going to get into politics on this blog, but one note: Joe Biden's team released a list of heads of state he has met with.
Now, the team claims the list is incomplete, but as an expat living where I do, there is a conspicuous hole: um, Japan? I realize that prime ministers here change often enough that it's difficult to keep up, but Japan is still the second biggest economy on the planet, and one of the U.S.'s top trading and defense partners.
Has Biden really not met with any Japanese leaders, or is the absence an oversight? It's not that he's shunning East, South, or Southeast Asia; he's met with leaders from almost every Asian country you can name, except Bangladesh and Thailand. Okay, he's allowed to not hit every single one; but still, Japan?
Likewise, another near the top of any U.S. list should be that Neighbor to the North, Canada. Hmm.
Now, the team claims the list is incomplete, but as an expat living where I do, there is a conspicuous hole: um, Japan? I realize that prime ministers here change often enough that it's difficult to keep up, but Japan is still the second biggest economy on the planet, and one of the U.S.'s top trading and defense partners.
Has Biden really not met with any Japanese leaders, or is the absence an oversight? It's not that he's shunning East, South, or Southeast Asia; he's met with leaders from almost every Asian country you can name, except Bangladesh and Thailand. Okay, he's allowed to not hit every single one; but still, Japan?
Likewise, another near the top of any U.S. list should be that Neighbor to the North, Canada. Hmm.
Monday, September 22, 2008
Sunday, September 21, 2008
No comment?
I'm a little disappointed that my glamorous new profile photo here hasn't drawn the attention of Paris, Milan and New York runway talent scouts.
I'm also a little surprised by the lack of comments from the peanut gallery.
I'm also a little surprised by the lack of comments from the peanut gallery.
The Candidate of Change
No, for you myopic Americans, I'm not talking about Obama, McCain, or anyone else on that continent. I'm talking about Yuriko Koike, a candidate for president of the Liberal Democratic Party here in Japan. She has held several cabinet positions, and is fluent in both Arabic and English, having received her degree from Cairo University. She's a bit of a long shot, but is supported by Koizumi, the former prime minister, who is still very popular. And, she has been dubbed the candidate of change, which many people would agree is desirable in Japanese politics.
The LDP's internal presidential election is tomorrow (Monday), Japan time. The rules for that election are apparently variable from election to election, but involve mostly members of parliament, and some local leaders, I believe. Taro Aso is expected to win.
Because the LDP is still the largest and strongest political party here, the person elected president normally becomes prime minister. Could Japan wind up with a woman chief executive before America does? Stay tuned.
The LDP's internal presidential election is tomorrow (Monday), Japan time. The rules for that election are apparently variable from election to election, but involve mostly members of parliament, and some local leaders, I believe. Taro Aso is expected to win.
Because the LDP is still the largest and strongest political party here, the person elected president normally becomes prime minister. Could Japan wind up with a woman chief executive before America does? Stay tuned.
Quantum Arithmetic
I get occasional mail from people asking me about quantum arithmetic. I usually point them to the Qwiki page on arithmetic I created a couple of years ago, which is a list of useful papers, rather than an actual technical description.
Most of the papers there are about specific arithmetic circuits, building from binary integer addition to modular exponentiation, and include some examples of actual experimental implementations.
This morning, I ran across some lecture notes by Ekert, Hayden, and Inamori on "Basic concepts in quantum computation," at Quantiki. The notes contain a nice intro to the theory behind reversible, binary, modular arithmetic.
Most of the papers there are about specific arithmetic circuits, building from binary integer addition to modular exponentiation, and include some examples of actual experimental implementations.
This morning, I ran across some lecture notes by Ekert, Hayden, and Inamori on "Basic concepts in quantum computation," at Quantiki. The notes contain a nice intro to the theory behind reversible, binary, modular arithmetic.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Competitiveness
BusinessWeek asks, "Is the U.S. Losing Its Edge in Tech?"
But their online article doesn't include an obvious link to the actual report from the Economic Intelligence Unit, sponsored by the Business Software Alliance. It's titled, How technology sectors grow: benchmarking IT industry competitiveness 2008", which tells you a little about their mindset.
Both the detailed data and their chosen methodology are interesting, though I haven't had time to digest them yet. The top 21 in their total index:
1. U.S.
2. Taiwan
3. U.K.
4. Sweden
5. Denmark
6. Canada
7. Australia
8. South Korea
9. Singapore
10. Netherlands
11. Switzerland
12. Japan
13. Finland
14. Norway
15. Ireland
16. Israel
17. New Zealand
18. Austria
19. Germany
20. France
21. Hong Kong
India, Russia, and China are 48, 49, and 50.
The disparities in "human capital" and "R&D environment" are interesting.
Even more telling are the drops from last year's index -- Japan fell from 2nd to 12th, South Korea from 3rd to 8th, due at least partly to shifts in their methodology. As always in some ranking system, you can engineer the results to fit your intuition :-).
But their online article doesn't include an obvious link to the actual report from the Economic Intelligence Unit, sponsored by the Business Software Alliance. It's titled, How technology sectors grow: benchmarking IT industry competitiveness 2008", which tells you a little about their mindset.
Both the detailed data and their chosen methodology are interesting, though I haven't had time to digest them yet. The top 21 in their total index:
1. U.S.
2. Taiwan
3. U.K.
4. Sweden
5. Denmark
6. Canada
7. Australia
8. South Korea
9. Singapore
10. Netherlands
11. Switzerland
12. Japan
13. Finland
14. Norway
15. Ireland
16. Israel
17. New Zealand
18. Austria
19. Germany
20. France
21. Hong Kong
India, Russia, and China are 48, 49, and 50.
The disparities in "human capital" and "R&D environment" are interesting.
Even more telling are the drops from last year's index -- Japan fell from 2nd to 12th, South Korea from 3rd to 8th, due at least partly to shifts in their methodology. As always in some ranking system, you can engineer the results to fit your intuition :-).
Tuesday, September 09, 2008
Happy Anniversary
Today is the twentieth anniversary of the Morris Worm. At the time, I had recently moved from ISI's computing center into the MOSIS Project, giving up my position as a sysadmin and becoming a regular programmer on the research staff.
I did get called back in to help a little, but since we were using VMS, the fix for MOSIS was pretty easy: unplug the network, and go back to work. Other folks I worked with, including Dale Chase, Jim Koda, Tom Wisniewski, had a much rougher day, dealing with several BSD VAXen and a large number of Suns.
I did get called back in to help a little, but since we were using VMS, the fix for MOSIS was pretty easy: unplug the network, and go back to work. Other folks I worked with, including Dale Chase, Jim Koda, Tom Wisniewski, had a much rougher day, dealing with several BSD VAXen and a large number of Suns.
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