Universities in Boston need more minority professors

Boston area short on black, Hispanic professors

[…] Colleges across the country are struggling to bolster the faculty ranks of these underrepresented minority groups as student populations grow more diverse. Nationally, blacks and Hispanics constitute 8.8 percent of tenure-line faculty, according to the American Council on Education.

[…] Too few minorities enter academia, studies say. The ones who do often report feeling isolated, with poor mentoring and a campus climate that some perceive as unwelcoming. And unintended racial bias can make the quest for tenure, a long slog for any candidate, particularly grueling for some minorities.

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This post was going to be 14% funnier, but I pressed “publish” too early 😦

Nature: on writing popular-science books

Nature interviewed science popularizer Carl Zimmer about how to write popular science books. That is all.

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Leck mich im Arsch!
Laflt froh uns sein!
Murren ist vergebens!
Knurren, Brummen ist vergebens,
ist das wahre Kreuz des Lebens.
Drum laflt uns froh und frehlich sein!
Translation:
Lick me in the ass!
Let us be cheerful!
Grumbling is in vain!
Growling, droning is in vain,
is the true bane of life.
Thus let us be cheerful and merry!
-canon in B-flat major composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, K. 231 (K382c)

Periodic Boundary Conditions Group Picture

Periodic Boundary Conditions Group Picture
Periodic Boundary Conditions Group Picture

The new Aspuru-Guzik group picture for the group is a panoramic-but-wrap-around picture. This picture was a collective effort of several group members (Alan, Leslie, me), and even volunteers from other groups (Sabrina). If you want to see a larger and rotating version, go here.

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But I make a profit of three and a quarter cents an egg by selling them for four and a quarter cents an egg to the people in Malta I buy them from for seven cents an egg. Of course, I don’t make the profit. The syndicate makes the profit. And everybody has a share.
-Catch-22

2010 is a good year (so far)

2010 has been awesome so far. I’m having a hard time keeping up with blogging all the good news.

Talks

I was in invited The Winter Meeting on Statistical Mechanics in Taxco, Mexico. What a fantastic conference! I learned a lot about many different areas in Statistical Physics, got to meet many awesome researchers, and the keynote talks were in a natural amphitheater inside the Cacahuamilpa caves. Stunning! This was one of the best conferences I’ve been to.

I was also invited to give a talk at Reed College last week. This was my first time ever in Portland, Oregon, and I fell in love with the city. It felt like a mixture of Austin, Northern California and Seattle that I really liked. The academic culture at Reed is something that should be emulated everywhere: students honestly don’t care about grades, just about learning. One thing is to hear it, and another is to witness how true it is! The physics department at Reed has the most motivated and energetic physicists I’ve ever met. Wow.

Papers:

Finally, the paper that I had mentioned before appeared in PRL:

Time-Dependent Density Functional Theory for Open Quantum Systems with Unitary Propagation

Also, the PRA on assignment maps is out in the published wild.

Linear assignment maps for correlated system-environment states

How not to lie about Quantum Mechanics?

Writing for the general public about science news is hard. ArsTech has an article where they accuse many news organizations of deliberately lying in their science coverage, and discuss how they can get away with it do to double standards.

As a scientist with interest in informing the public of my research, are there any guidelines to follow when talking to the press? I want them to see them as allies, but most of the science news are so bad I can’t help but hating them.

I’ve thought much about how to describe my research to family and friends, and haven’t found any good and concise way to do it. More specifically, can any one suggest any good, simple, cocktail-party style one-liners to explain what is quantum mechanics and quantum computing, but that doesn’t make me feel like I’m lying? If I read again the phrase “what Einstein called spooky action at a distance” I might vomit.

Any ideas?

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When Men fly from danger, it is natural for them to run farther than they need.
-The Mischiefs that ought justly to be apprehended from a Whig-goverment

Open Science leads to a Quantum Theory Paper!

My friend and collaborator Kavan Modi had been posting on his blog his musings about Linear Assignments Maps, Correlations and Not-Completely Positive Maps. His original posts can be found here:

This was an experiment testing the possibilities of doing Open Science in theoretical research. It helped us to publicly discuss the issues, and after some discussion face to face, and private discussions using Google Wave (and the watexy robot for equations) we posted a paper in the arXiv!

Linear Assignment Maps for Correlated System-Environment States

An assignment map is a mathematical operator that describes initial system-environment states for open quantum systems. We reexamine the notion of assignments, introduced by Pechukas, and show the conditions assignments can account for correlations between the system and the environment, concluding that assignment maps can be made linear at the expense of positivity or consistency is more reasonable. We study the role of other conditions, such as consistency and positivity of the map, and show the effects of relaxing these. Finally, we establish a connection between the violation of positivity of linear assignments and the no-broadcasting theorem.

Very promptly, the paper was accepted for publication on Physical Review A, and should appear in the journal in a few weeks.

I’ll comment on my experiences of this clumsy and incomplete Open Science and remote collaboration attempt soon, hoping that the Open Science community will give me ideas of how to streamline this process.

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When a reporter asked Asher [Asher Peres] if quantum teleportation could teleport the soul as well as the body, Asher answered, characteristically, “No, not the body, just the soul.”