Select Page ::

One of Google’s Top Scientists Explains Artificial Intelligence’s Biggest Challenge Right Now – TheStreet.com

Posted on July 1, 2017 by Danzig

Google may be an "AI first" company, but few people who work there actually use the term artificial intelligence.

That's because it doesn't actually describe the seismic shift currently happening across all of the Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL) unit's products.The better word for that process is machine learning, which is the technology that's making our computers think and act more like humans, said Peter Norvig, an AI scientist and a director of research at Google.

"Sundar has come out and said we're an AI first company, and that's a pretty bold statement," Norvig told The Street. "Internally we use machine learning more...it's what we're going to use to become an AI-first company."

Google CEO Sundar Pichai has been charting a transformation at the company ever since he took over as chief executive in 2015. Google's next big step is to navigate a future where mobile devices fade away and are replaced by omnipresent intelligence assistants -- an "AI first world," as Pichai has said.

But before that future can become a reality, Silicon Valley giants will have to overcome the obstacle of helping average people understand just what exactly AI is, as well as how it can be used in their everyday lives. The invention of products such as Google Assistant, Amazon.com Inc.'s (AMZN) Alexa and Apple Inc.'s (AAPL) Siri has demystified a lot of the confusion surrounding AI, Norvig said. It's helped people realize that AI isn't going to materialize as Skynet from "The Terminator" oras the so-called singularity-- the theory that one day machines will become smarter than humans.

Alphabet is a holding in Jim Cramer's Action Alerts PLUS Charitable Trust Portfolio. Want to be alerted before Cramer buys or sells GOOGL? Learn more now.

One of Google's Top Scientists Explains Artificial Intelligence's Biggest Challenge Right Now - TheStreet.com

The Aerospace And Defense Trade Continues To Look Hot – Benzinga

Posted on July 1, 2017 by Danzig

The veracity of some of the once ballyhooed "Trump trades" has waned in recent weeks, but there is still one that appears very much intact, at least in ETFs: aerospace and defense .And if recent headlines out of Washington and elsewhereare any indication, this trade won't be cooling off any time soon.

The average year-to-date gain is close to 10 percent among the three largest, non-leveraged aerospace and defense ETFs, and all three currently reside near their record highs.

The trade is also supplemented by the recent launch of the Direxion Daily Aerospace & Defense Bull 3X Shares (NYSE: DEFN), whichseeks to deliver triple the daily returns of the Dow Jones U.S. Select Aerospace & Defense Index.

DFEN debuted in early May as part of a broader suite of Trump trade-inspired leveraged ETFs from Direxion.

The index tracked by DFEN is up over 11 percent year-to-date, no doubt helped by rallies in stocks likeBoeing Co (NYSE: BA) (up 26 percent), Lockheed Martin Corporation (NYSE: LMT) (up 9 percent), and General Dynamics Corporation (NYSE: GD) (up 13 percent). Those three companies combine to make up about 25 percent of the index.

For context, the S&P 500 is up a little under 8 percent for the year.

For aggressive, sophisticated traders, DFEN makes for a way to increase near-term return potential with a group of stocks that are not always known for being exciting or sexy. Much of the index is made up oflarge-cap names not usually known for big intraday moves.

Where DFEN could prove particularly useful going forward is around earnings season when batches of big-name aerospace firms deliver results over a single day or just a few days. Additionally, the ETF could prove to be useful on a tactical basis around announcements of increased defense spending by Uncle Sam, contract wins by individual components, or if geopolitical tensions continue to rise around the globe.

Posted-In: direxionLong Ideas News Sector ETFs New ETFs Markets Trading Ideas ETFs Best of Benzinga

The Aerospace And Defense Trade Continues To Look Hot - Benzinga

Aerospace company in Newport fined $500K for 2015 explosion – The Spokesman-Review

Posted on July 1, 2017 by Danzig

UPDATED: Thu., June 29, 2017, 3:30 p.m.

NEWPORT An Eastern Washington aerospace company has been fined $500,000 by the state Department of Labor and Industries, one of the largest penalties ever assessed by the agency.

The agency announced the settlement Thursday in its case against Zodiac Cabin & Structures Support LLC of Newport.

Seventeen workers were injured in an explosion at Zodiacs plant in mid-July 2015. An L&I investigation completed in January 2016 found 17 willful violations, one for each worker who was injured and hospitalized. The company was originally fined $1.3 million.

Zodiac appealed the citation and the two parties reached the settlement.

The explosion at Zodiac Aerospace on July 14 was due to defective equipment and the lack of proper safety procedures, L&I said upon completion of its investigation. Zodiac Cabin was required to fix problems and will be subject to follow-up inspections.

The Newport plant has reopened. It makes plastics and other composite materials used in the production of airplane cabin interiors.

Aerospace company in Newport fined $500K for 2015 explosion - The Spokesman-Review

Automated Inspection of Critical Aerospace Components and Structures with Complex Geometries – Quality Magazine

Posted on July 1, 2017 by Danzig

Aerospace components and structures come in all shapes and sizes and more importantly are made from different types of materials. These parts (components and structures) are also produced from different processes such as forging, casting, composite layups and even bonding of different materials. All of which require different verification methods. The only point in common is that they are all critical parts and need to be inspected to ensure quality and safety. Inspection of these parts varies greatly and can involve automated thickness measurements, bond quality detection for assembled components, porosity detection for parts made of composite materials, inclusion detection for forged parts, etc.

With the use of automated ultrasonic testing systems, we are able to decrease the inspection time, increase imaging and detection capabilities as well as conduct reliable and repeatable inspections. Ultrasonic immersion tanks and squirter gantry systems are well suited for automated inspection of aerospace parts. Parts with complex shapes and geometries require immersion tanks and squirter systems with advanced scanning tools, such as contour following or 3D inspection software. These tools allow inspectors to set up inspection scan plans by teaching the parts surfaces or importing a CAD drawing of the part.

Contour following can be described as the systems ability to perform a controlled displacement of one or multiple axes, with the objective to move around a curved, round or inclined surface with constant transducer orientation and distance (water path). When performing an ultrasonic inspection with a large immersion or squirter system, the orientation of the transducer must be controlled with a high degree of precision in order to follow the parts contour adequately.

Tridimensional inspection of parts with complex shapes uses computer-aided design (CAD) files to perform accurate inspection in 3D space. Sampling and interpolation are also performed in order to calculate a valid path trajectory for the scanners different axes.

An important step for contour following or 3D inspection is the validation of the scanners trajectories in the interpolated space. This verification can be done by comparing the deviation of the water path and probe incidence angle with a predetermined acceptable error.

While moving around the contour, a visual alarm can be set to advise the operator of deviations beyond this acceptable error. While water path deviations can be monitored from the time-of-flight of surface echoes, validating the incidence angle requires an indirect measurement. Setting a tolerance on the amplitude variations of the surface echo recorded at 0-degree incidence represents an efficient way of monitoring errors in the surface contour orientation; a large variation in the amplitude of the surface echo may indicate that the incidence angle at that location is not 0 degrees. If either alarm is triggered, a verification of the incidence angle can be done at the problematic locations and surface coordinates can be added or modified to increase the part definition accuracy.

After the part contour has been defined and validated, algorithms can be used to calculate the axes trajectories covering the complete part contour without any risk of collisions. Advanced ultrasonic software can map the selected part surfaces to the appropriate scanner axis and creates a 2D parametric space that defines the surface. The 2D surface can be defined in multiple ways from the defined surface contour (extrusion, angular revolution, rotational symmetry).

Bond testing of composites parts

New generation fan blades and cases are designed for medium-haul airliners and constructed from composite materials. For safety and reliability requirements, automated ultrasonic testing is performed to detect any manufacturing anomalies/defects. The biggest challenge to inspect these parts is that they have complicated curvatures, surfaces with free form shapes, no axis of symmetry and varying thicknesses.

Turbine blades used in aircraft engines are manufactured by investment casting. They are designed with internal air cooling channels which allow the blades to operate under extremely high temperatures. Thickness variation at the cooling channels, caused by the casting process, can affect the blade capacity to operate at elevated temperatures. Therefore, to ensure structural integrity of the turbine blades, it is important to control the material thickness at critical positions. Ultrasonic testing is typically done with the use of thickness measurement instruments with contact ultrasonic probes. This manual thickness measurement approach can be both time consuming and subject to human error. For proper and precise wall thickness measurement of multiple turbine blades, an automated inspection solution is highly desirable.

Wall thickness measurement of turbine blades can also be achieved from C-Scan thickness mapping. Using contour or surface following scans the full thickness mapping can be performed on large areas of the blades. The advantage of this approach is to eliminate uncertainties related to the blades channel positions as well as to detect any structural imperfections, including cracks and inclusions.

As aerospace parts are becoming more and more complex due to their shape, fabrication and materials automated inspections will become the only viable inspection method. These more challenging inspection criteria will pave the way for new and innovative automated solutions as well as inspection software that will enable operators to run inspections efficiently and, more importantly, more accurately.

Go here to read the rest:

Automated Inspection of Critical Aerospace Components and Structures with Complex Geometries - Quality Magazine

The Connection Between Chronic Illness, Cortisol, And Sleep – Information Nigeria

Posted on June 30, 2017 by ev1

How Your Chronic Illness and Poor Sleep May Be Related to Adrenal Function

A big focus in anti-aging medical science today is understanding how the hypothalamus, pituitary gland, and adrenal glands act together in concert. All three glands together are referred to as the hypothalamic-pituitary and adrenal axis or HPA axis for short. With this focus on the HPA axis, it has become more common in the treatment of chronic illness to look for deficiencies or abnormalities in the HPA axis through personalized and specialized testing. It is believed that by understanding how stress, sleep, and chronic illness affect the HPA axis, a personalized treatment plan can be developed. As a result, there have been multiple recent studies in these areas.

The Relationship Between PTSD, Cortisol, and Sleep In the study and treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), both abnormalities in the HPA axis and sleep disturbances have been identified as common symptoms and concerns. In an effort to study whether the abnormal HPA axis function and sleep disorder in people with PTSD are related, a study published in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology in 2005 evaluated twenty male patients diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

The PTSD Study In the study, the twenty men were compared to a control group of sixteen individuals. Both groups had their sleep patterns monitored overnight via a polysomnography. Levels of adrenal cortisol (one of the hormones associated with healthy adrenal function and homeostasis) were also measured, including a 24-hour urinary collection.

The authors noted that those study participants with PTSD had higher than normal cortisol levels in their urine when compared to the control group, which ultimately led to some interesting conclusions.

Conclusions About Cortisol and Sleep One of the conclusions that the study authors reached was that the presence of increased urinary cortisol is, in fact, associated with decreased delta wave sleep. In other words, having higher than normal cortisol levels affects your ability to transition into a deep sleep. The fourth stage of sleep after delta wave sleep is called REM sleep, the stage in which dreaming occurs. Those suffering from PTSD are likely never able to achieve REM sleep, a finding that will have significant impact on the understanding or the condition and the treatment and recovery.

But the study findings go beyond just the understanding and treatment of PTSD. It is this relationship between adrenal cortisol and deep sleep that may be responsible for the sleep disturbances common in other conditions characterized by increased levels of cortisol.

The Relationship Between Chronic Illness, Cortisol, and Sleep Much like the study of PTSD, cortisol levels, and sleep disturbances, there has been several other notable studies about the relationship between cortisol secretion and sleep in other chronic illnesses. One of the most interesting was a meta-analysis published in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology in 2013. The meta-analysis was a review of nineteen related articles that the study authors analyzed looking for important similarities and differences in observations and conclusions. The Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Meta-Analysis The investigators looked at nineteen other articles that evaluated cortisol levels in subjects with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). They all had one similarity: an increase in overnight cortisol production. If chronic fatigue syndrome is associated with increased urinary cortisol excretion, then what is the expected sleep pattern of someone with CFS? Based on findings like those from the PTSD study above, one would expect their sleep quality to suffer, particularly with regards to deep sleep and REM sleep. Another study of people with CFS shed light on the sleep experience.

The Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Sleep Study The study published in Sleep Medicine Reviews journal in 2014 attempted to study the presumed sleep impairment in people with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. What is interesting in this studys findings is that there was no significant differences in the sleep patterns on polysomnography between those with CFS and those in the control. Despite having no significant difference in sleep patterns, all study participants with CFS reported not experiencing a restorative sleep. The subjective and experiential difference may be due to the cortisol.

What This Means for People with Chronic Illness As a doctor of osteopathy and board-certified internist, I believe that stress and chronic illnesses like CFA and fibromyalgia are associated with not only adrenal fatigue but also alterations in the HPA axis. How do you test for this? This requires specialized testing by a trained practitioner in anti-aging medicine. Their focus of treatment is multifaceted and involves an evaluation of nutrition, your inflammatory status and risk, your sleep patterns, and your hormonal profile. I truly believe that this approach is the future of not only the treatment of chronic illness but medicine in general.

Source: Verywell

Go here to read the rest:
The Connection Between Chronic Illness, Cortisol, And Sleep - Information Nigeria

How Gotham Gave Us Trump – Politico

Posted on June 30, 2017 by Danzig

Trump Tower opened in 1983a gleaming, ostentatious building in a grimy, troubled city. At its base was an orange marble atrium with a waterfall and a clutch of boutiques that sold only the highest-priced jewelry, shoes and clothes. Outside, it was impossible to find a subway car not covered with graffiti, and a growing homeless population jangled cups for change; inside, the towers apartments were billed as totally inaccessible to the public and meant exclusively for the worlds best people, developer Donald Trump crowed. And in the aftermath of the fanfare-fueled debut of his eponymous towerhis grandest achievement as a builder, the most singular and physical manifestation of his ego and ambitionTrump walked into the bank of shiny gold elevators and ascended to his triplex penthouse.

If that elevator ride marked his ultimate arrival in New York, it also was a departure of sortsup and out of the dirty, rattled, crime-ridden metropolis in which he came of age. In the 1970s, the city had teetered on the brink of bankruptcy and been terrorized by a serial killer. In the 1980s, murders soared toward 2,000 a year, and muscled volunteers calling themselves the Guardian Angels patrolled the subways in red berets in an effort to put frightened riders at ease. This was a nadir of New Yorkand Trump used it to his advantage, leveraging the citys anxiety and uncertainty to secure the tax breaks that helped kickstart his career.

Story Continued Below

Ever since, his view of New York, and of urban areas in general, has remained as hardened as Mafia concrete. The Trump take on the city was evident in 1989, as he fanned the racially charged public frenzy around the Central Park Five rape case. Almost a decade later, it was on appalling display in his revealing pit stop as principal for a day at an impoverished South Bronx elementary school. During last years campaign, it inspired his statistically flimsy rhetoric about urban blight. And in the White House, it has informed his budget proposals that will punish cities in particular.

Almost uniquely among famous city-dwellers, Trump has made his bones railing against cities, constructing escapes from them, taking from them while complaining about themand, most remarkably, in his bid to be president, describing Americas now often prosperous cities in an alarming, arms-length way that resonates with many white rural voters and suburbanites but with few people who actually have lived in a city at any point in the past decade or more.

How could a guy who lived in New York have these provincial, redneck attitudes? says Ken Auletta, who grew up in Brooklyn and writes for the New Yorker. Im not sure I have an answerother than, obviously, he lived apart. He got into his elevator.

The Bronx, early 1980s In 1982, filthy train cars, crumbling infrastructure, crime and graffiti brought New York subway ridership to its lowest levels since 1917. | John Conn

What went wrong between Trump and cities? The roots of this antagonistic relationship go back to before even Trump Tower. Trump grew up in perhaps the most suburban setting possible within New Yorks municipal boundaries, in a columned mansion in quiet, leafy Jamaica Estates, Queens. His real estate developer father had his office in Coney Island in Brooklyn. But in 1971, at 25, Trump left to pursue wealth and fame in what he considered the most important arenaManhattan. He chose to live on the tony Upper East Side.

The city, for the admittedly shallow, ever-transactional Trump, was a place not to be experienced so much as exploited. The interest was not mutual: To most of New Yorks elite, whose acceptance he sought, Trump was far too brash and gauche. He was an outer-borough outsider, bankrolled by his politically connected father. He wanted to be taken seriously, but seldom was. Hes a bridge-and-tunnel guy, and hes a daddys boy, Lou Colasuonno, a former editor of the New York Post and the New York Daily News, said in a recent interview. There were people who laughed at him, former CBS anchor and current outspoken Trump critic Dan Rather told me. While his loose-lipped, in-your-face approach appealed to blue-collar types in spots in Brooklyn, Staten Island and Queens, many in Manhattan, Rather says, considered him repulsive.

For Trump, as inhospitable as he found the city on the street, the parlors of high society were equally problematicand he created a refuge. It was some 600 feet in the sky, where the faucets were gold, the baseboards were onyx and the paintings on the ceiling, he would claim, were comparable to the work of Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel. At the top of Trump Tower, biographer Tim OBrien told me, he could live at a remove from the city and its amazing bloodstream of ideas and people and cultureencased, added fellow biographer Gwenda Blair, within this bubble of serenity and privilege.

Times Square, 1980 In 1981, Rolling Stone called the section of 42nd Street bordering Times Square the sleaziest block in America. | Richard Sandler

Out his bronze-edged, floor-to-ceiling windows, Trump could see Central Park to the north and the Hudson River to the west. He could see south to the Empire State Building and the twin towers of the World Trade Center. He could see the tops of yellow cabs and the tiny people moving around on the sidewalks some 60 stories down. What he could not see, though, or hasnt, is the transformation that has taken place, as New York morphed from what it was in the 70s and 80s into the cleaner, safer enclave for the smart and the rich that it is today. The trend has held throughout America as well, as rural and suburban areas started to sag while urban cores became hip engines of growth and innovation.

Cities changed. Trump did not.

How, at a moment when American cities are at a peak of wealth and success, can Trump argue so persistently against them? The answer starts with the New York that made him.

***

The deal in the 70s that launched Trump, the refurbishment of the decrepit, aging-brick Commodore Hotel into the sleek, glass-wrapped Grand Hyatt by Grand Central Station, would not have happenedcould not have happenedif New York hadnt been a barely functioning hellhole. It required his fathers money, credit and clout. Just as definitively, it depended on his fathers long-standing relationships with the mayor (Abe Beame) and the governor (Hugh Carey), both of whom had deep Brooklyn ties. But it was the precise timing that led to the tax breaks, and they are what made it work. It is made possible, says Kim Phillips-Fein, the author of Fear City, her acclaimed, recently published book about New York in that era, in large part by the citys fiscal desperation.

The Manhattan Trump inserted himself into was at a low point, reeling and vulnerable, and the city as a whole was listing. In October 1975, President Gerald Ford said he was prepared to veto any bill that has as its purpose a federal bailout of New York City. FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD, read the blunt headline in the New York Daily News. Only two months later, Ford in fact would pledge $2.3 billion in federal assistance to the city, but budget cuts nonetheless necessitated layoffs of public employees in New York for the first time since the Great Depression. That included cops. WELCOME TO FEAR CITY, warned flyers distributed by the protesting police union to arriving tourists.

Subway, 1980 In 1979, police logged 250 felonies per week on the New York subway system. | Bruce Davidson/Magnum

In 1976, an elderly couple who had lived in the Bronx for more than 40 years killed themselves. We dont want to live in fear anymore, they wrote in their joint suicide note. And 1977 was worse. The serial killer David Berkowitz, or Son of Sam, murdered six people and wounded another nine before he was caught that summerNO ONE IS SAFE, blared the front of the New York Postand the citywide blackout in muggy mid-July triggered rampant looting that was seen by many as evidence of an angry, anxious populace, a city on the edge. This wounded Paris, this hemorrhaging Athens, Jack Newfield and Paul Du Brul wrote that year in their book, The Abuse of Power: The Permanent Government and the Fall of New York.

This is the context in which Trump was able to cross the Queensboro Bridge in a Cadillac convertible and ultimately secure the most extraordinary structure of city and state tax breaks ever arranged, in the words of the late Wayne Barrett in the Village Voiceunprecedented public subsidies of some $360 million over 40 years. He leveraged the fear that was rampant in New York, of the city going bankrupt, of racial unrest, of manufacturing fleeing, of imminent collapse, Blair says. The city helped Trump much more than Trump helped the city. But ever one to tell and sell his story before others can backfill facts, Trump pitched his breakthrough deal as an act of civic-minded selflessness. I think weve proven people still have a lot of confidence in the city, he said in 1977 to a reporter from the New York Times.

The Commodore Hotel he plucked for $10 million from the scrapheap of the bankrupt Penn Central railroad sat at 42nd Street and Lexington Avenue, adjacent to Grand Central Terminalan area that now feels like most of the rest of money-soaked Midtown Manhattan but at that point felt like shit, says Barbara Res, who was working for Trump on the Commodore project. There were cat-killing rats in the basement of the hotel, she recalls, and prostitutes operating out of its rooms. City leaders worried the area would turn into another Times Square, which had become a low-class bazaar of peep shows and pornography dives. The Commodore was really run-down, and Grand Central was in really bad shape, Res says. You didnt think of it as a nice part of New York at all.

For Trump, this beleaguered city was a personal stage as well, a kind of backdrop against which he could shine. Clad in three-piece, flared-leg suits, riding around Manhattan in a limousine with DJT license plates driven by a laid-off cop playing the role of armed-guard chauffeur, Trump preferred East Side bars and hot spots frequented by fashion modelsHarpers and McMullens and Maxwells Plum, and the sweaty, celebrity-spotting bacchanal at Studio 54, where he would watch supermodels getting screwed, he would say later to OBrien, the biographer, well-known supermodels getting screwed on a bench in the middle of the room. Trump wasnt out to get drunkhe was, and is, a teetotalerbut to be seen.

If he had expected New York to grant respect the way it had handed out tax breaks and opportunities for sheer publicity, he was mistaken. Critics in the pages of the Times called him overrated and totally obnoxious. It bothered him that he could put up such a glossy building and still be so readily dismissed as an arriviste. If I were Gerry Hines in Houston, he told Marie Brenner for a profile in New York magazine in 1980, referring to the billionaire real estate entrepreneur in Texas, I would be the most important man in the citybut here, you bang your head against the wall to try to get some nice buildings up, and what happens? Everybody comes after you.

But Trump attacked New York, too. He had, for instance, valuable art deco friezes jackhammered off the face of the Bonwit Teller building during its demolitioneven after he had promised to donate them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was a literal and visceral assault against the exact sort of New Yorker who found him so distasteful.

1981 Many New Yorkers welcomed the so-called Guardian Angels, private citizens who patrolled subways to deter crime. Others considered them vigilantes. | Getty Images

They were nothing, Trump said. They were junk.

They were not, said a man from the Met. They were irreplaceable architectural documents.

Obviously, huffed an editorial in the Times, big buildings do not make big human beings.

***

The building that took the place of Bonwit Teller was Trump Tower, a branding achievement that, once finished and polished, made Trump a new echelon of famous around the country and even the world. In the city, though, it did not broadly elicit the esteem from the elite that he craved.

An anonymous sniper in a story in Town & Country described him as a corporate vandal. The Times said his critics called him a rogue billionaire, loose in the city like some sort of movie monster. As Trump grew increasingly acquisitive in Atlantic City, people in Manhattan diminished him as a casino operator in New Jersey, essentially de-New Yorking him.

He was, says Pete Hamill, the longtime columnist who had stints as the editor of both the Post and the Daily News, an object of mockery.

Early ad copy for Trump Tower apartments embraced the escapist imagery of the elevator. You approach the residential entrancean entrance totally inaccessible to the publicand your staff awaits your arrival, the come-on cooed. Quickly, quietly, the elevator takes you to your floor and your elevator man sees you home. You turn the key and wait a moment before turning on the light. A quiet moment to take in the viewwall-to-wall, floor-to-ceilingNew York at dusk. Your diamond in the sky. It seems a fantasy. And you are home.

1979 About a dozen undercover policemen, armed with battering rams and hydraulic drills, forced their way into this fortified apartment. They confiscated boxes of drugs, but the distributors got away. A few years later, crack cocaine would arrive in the city, beginning a decade-long epidemic. | Leonard Freed/Magnum

Once ensconced in his towerTrumps office was on the 26th floor, and he and his first wife and their three young children moved into the penthouse in early 1984his vantage point had literally changed. George Arzt, a prominent public relations man in Manhattan, then was a reporter for the Post, and Trump, he told me recently, used to call him a lot. And he would say, Im looking down from my office A close former employee would get similar calls from Trump from the penthouse. One of the things he does a lot, this person said in a recent interview, is look down.

Trump looked down at Wollman Rink, the ice skating facility in Central Park, which the city had spent six years and $12 million trying unsuccessfully to renovateand he decided in 1986 he should be the one to fix it. Mayor Ed Koch and the city accepted his offer, and he did repair the rink, in less than six months and some $800,000 under budget. In the end, Trump not only celebrated what he had donehe highlighted what the city had not. I guess it says a lot about the city, Trump said at the grand opening, but I dont have to say what it says.

He looked down in the mid-1980s, too, at his plot of land over on the West Sideon which he wanted to put six 76-story buildings, 8,000 apartments and the worlds tallest skyscraper. It never happened, partly because Ed Koch refused his request for a billion-dollar tax break. Trump, as always a mixture of public-subsidy suckler, self-appointed savior and plainspoken critic of the city, lambasted the mayora moron, a disaster. Greedy, greedy, greedy, Koch retorted. Piggy, piggy, piggy.

From the opening of Trump Tower until earlier this year, when his address became 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Trump never moved. In the three and a half decades he lived at 721 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York, one of the greatest residential addresses in the world, he would say, the city below him changed dramatically.

New Yorks comeback from the trauma of the 70s was bumpy and unbalanced. Wall Street in the 80s boomed, as did Trumps Fifth Avenue, but the homeless population spiked, poverty continued to punish slums in Brooklyn and the Bronx, and the fear of crime still gripped the city. When the white vigilante Bernhard Goetz shot four black teens who allegedly tried to rob him on a train in Lower Manhattan in 1984, many New Yorkers all but cheered. A tip line set up by the Daily News was inundated with calls professing sympathy and supportfor the shooter. It did not seem to matter to the callers that the blond man with the nickel-plated .38 had left one of his four victims with no feeling below the waist, no control over his bladder and bowels, no hope of ever walking again, the newspaper wrote a week after the crime. To them the gunman was not a criminal but the living fulfillment of a fantasy.

Such was the psyche of the city in 1989, when a 28-year-old white, female, Wellesley- and Yale-educated investment banker was beaten and raped in Central Park. Five black and Hispanic teenagers were arrested, charged and convictedwrongly, on coerced confessions, it eventually turned out. At the time, though, the case became a milestone in the publics sense of helplessness, as the Times put it. News coverage clamored about these wilding teens, animals on a feeding frenzy. WOLFPACKS PREY, said the headline in the Daily News. The judge who sentenced them said in court that they had made Central Park a torture chamber of mindless marauding. He lamented that the quality of life in this city has seriously deteriorated.

Clockwise, from left Subway, 1980; Lower East Side, 1980; Subway, 1980; Brooklyn, 1981. | Bruce Davidson/Magnum (2); Jamel Shabazz (2)

Trump, who in the 70s had identified the citys insecurity and fear and found a way to benefit from it, now tried to do so again. He paid a reported $85,000 to put in four New York newspapers a full-page ad that called for the death penalty. What has happened to our City? he wrote in the ad. What has happened to the respect for authority, the fear of retribution by the courts, society and the police for those who break the law, who wantonly trespass on the rights of others? What has happened is the complete breakdown of life as we knew it. He seethed about roving bands of wild criminals and crazed misfits and longed for a time when he was a boy, when cops in the city roughed up thugs to give people like him the feeling of security.

The ad for the first time reveals all the rest of the things that anybody would want to know about Donald Trump, columnist Jimmy Breslin wrote the next day in Newsday. Trump had destroyed himself with the ad, Breslin wrote, for all demagogues ultimately do that.

Getty Images; Library of Congress

The more complicated, uncomfortable reality, though, is that what Trump said in his ad about the Central Park Five was not universally unpopular around the city. Far from it. And he might not have been belovedbut that didnt mean he wasnt being listened to. The ad spawned stories in the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times and USA Today, as well as a spate of letters to the editor in New York.

It read like a crystallization of how he saw the city, that city, in the 70s and 80sand it reads, in retrospect, as a searing preview of the race-based, law-and-order rhetoric that powered his presidential campaign.

Mayor Koch has stated that hate and rancor should be removed from our hearts, Trump said in the ad. I do not think so. I want to hate these muggers and murderers and I always will.

Lets all hate these people, he said on CNN, because maybe hate is what we need if were gonna get something done.

***

The convictions in 1990 of the innocent Central Park Five coincided with surprising news of a different sort: that Trumps own balance sheet was even worse than the citys had been. The riches-to-riches kid from Jamaica Estates actually was billions of dollars in debt. CASH-TASTROPHE, screamed the Daily News. Arzt, the Post reporter who by now was the head of New Yorks Fox affiliate, did a whole week of special shows on Trumps collapse. He couldnt help but notice that his ratings more than doubled. He is a ratings generator, Arzt told me recently. People like entertaining, and hes entertainingand there are a lot of people who hate him. Some of the surge in viewership, Arzt figured, was simple schadenfreude.

Clockwise, from left New York, 1981; Manhattan, 1987 (LL Cool J); 34th Street, 1989; 57th Street, 1985.

To the consternation of those who loathed him, though, this was not the end of Trump. As he spent the first half of the 90s trying to avoid filing for personal bankruptcyhe pulled it off, of course, thanks to family money, permissive banks and corporate bankruptciesNew York and other cities began to boom, while leaving behind the areas at their outer reaches, practically reversing the dynamic that defined the socioeconomic tides of Trumps formative 70s and 80s. Once-derelict downtowns became trendy, glistening capitals of commerce, juice bars, yoga studios and million-dollar condos. Harlems first Whole Foods is set to open in July.

But Trumps view of cities did not appreciably keep pace with this shift. Throughout his presidential campaign, he talked to his crowds about the horrible inner cities, the terrible inner cities, the crime-infested inner cities, the inner cities that were sad, the inner cities that were suffering, the inner cities that were almost at an all-time low, the inner cities that were more dangerous than some of the war zones that were reading about.

You look at the inner cities, he said in Florida less than a month before the election, and you see bad education, no jobs, no safety. You walk to the grocery store with your child, and you get shot. You walk outside to look and see whats happening, and you get shot.

Were going to work on our ghettos, he said in Ohio less than two weeks before the election. The violence. The death

The Bronx, 1981 Crime on the subway became so common that, starting in June 1985, at least one police officer rode every train between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m. as part of an effort to restore public confidence in the transit system. | Martha Cooper

American cities have problems, to be sure, but people who live in them didnt recognize the way Trump talked about them. And on November 8, cities rejected him. And the city in which he was born and raised and in which he has lived and worked his entire adult life rejected him resoundingly. Every borough other than Staten Island posted a landslide against himHillary Clinton garnered 88 percent of the vote in the Bronx, 86 percent in Manhattan, 79 percent in Brooklyn, 75 percent in his native Queens. He was booed at his own polling placePublic School 59, on 56th Street, less than half a mile from Trump Tower. The first native New York president since Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected by people not in the city, but in depressed, drug-ravaged small towns and outer suburbsby people whose profound disconnection from urban America left them open to the twisted version of the city that Trump described.

Its amazing, says Mitchell Moss, a professor of urban policy and planning at New York University. He operates out of New York City, but his WeltanschauungTrumps worldviewis a suburban golf course, a suburban country club.

***

New York is either going to get much better or much worse, and I think it will get much better, Trump had predicted in the Times back in 1976. But he added: Im not talking about the South Bronx. I dont know anything about the South Bronx.

In 1997, he had a chance to learnon a trip to P.S. 70 to be principal for a day.

Trump was seven years removed from his near-fatal, early-90s failuresand still seven years away from his NBC-aided full resuscitation in the form of The Apprentice. He had talked about running for president in the late 80s, and he would talk about it again in 1999 as a member of the Reform Party, but mostly he was known for being known at the time, famous for being famous, and publicity was his fuel.

In this respect, his visit to the school made sense. It was set up through a program run by an organization called PENCILPublic Education Needs Civic Involvement in Learning. The point, the president of PENCIL told the Times, was twofold: to give students a burst of inspiration from a person seen as a success and to bring in people who should see the schools and who wouldnt otherwise. Trump fit the bill. He had told the Times, after all, that he had never even thought about sending his children to public school, which he explained was one of the advantages to wealth.

P.S. 70 was home to 1,700 students crammed into classrooms meant for 300 fewer students. All but 3 percent of the children were poor enough to qualify for free lunch. The chess team was having a bake sale to rent a bus to take them to a national competition in Tennessee.

Thousands of successful and prominent people had been PENCIL principals, giving schools money and books, as well as their attention and time. Trump, on the other hand, came off to the educators in the South Bronx like a Victorian lady forced to walk through a slum, clearly ill at ease with the real grit of street-level urbanity. Trump was scheduled to stay all day. He ended up leaving before noon.

Central Park, 1986 After renovations of Central Parks ice rink dragged on for six years, Donald Trump persuaded Mayor Ed Koch to let him fix the rinkin four months. | Harry Benson/Getty Images

Before he departed in his limo, on a tour of the school, according to a report from The 74, a news organization covering education in America, Trump took a tissue from his pocket and used it so he wouldnt have to touch the railing on some stairs. In the cafeteria, a mop-wielding science teacher on lunch duty joked to Trump, How are you with mopping up vomit?

I dont do vomit, said Trump.

At the bake sale for the chess team, he dropped a gag $1 million bill into a basketthen gave them a relatively meager $200 instead.

Hundreds of fifth-graders gathered in the auditorium to listen to Trump. Is there anyone here that doesnt want to live in a big, beautiful mansion? he asked them, the Times reported. You know what you have to do to live in a big, beautiful mansion?

You have to be rich, one student offered.

Thats right, Trump said. You have to work hard, get through school. You have to go out and get a great job, make a lot of money, and you live the American Dream.

Money does not buy happiness, but it helps, he said to the students. Always remember that.

And he asked them to write their names on pieces of paper so he could pick 15 of them to come get a free pair of sneakers at the new Nike store in Trump Towera building smack in the center of rich, bustling, flourishing Manhattan, a building, he told them, that was in the inner city called 57th and Fifth.

Michael Kruse is senior staff writer at Politico Magazine. Taylor Gee and Lakshmi Varanasi contributed to this report.

Read the original here:

How Gotham Gave Us Trump - Politico

US action on Microsoft email case could devastate cloud computing – Irish Times

Posted on June 30, 2017 by Danzig

The Microsoft case has been less headline-grabbing than Googles news-dominating mega-fine this week, but it is the far more important case of the two. Photograph: Brian Snyder/Reuters

A week may be a long time in politics, but in business, just five days has been time enough for two developments that will worry many tech multinationals with European Union operations.

First came the US department of justice (DOJ) decision late last week to request the US supreme court hear an appeal in the internationally significant Microsoft Dublin email case.

Then, early this week, the European Commission smacked an extraordinary 2.4 billion fine onGoogle, having determined, after a seven-year investigation, that it had violated EU anti-trust laws by using a dominant position in the search market to favour its own shopping listings service.

The two cases are different in scope and implication, but both will fray nerves in boardrooms and executive suites worldwide.

The Microsoft case has been less headline-grabbing than Googles news-dominating mega-fine this week, but it is the far more important and potentially devastating case of the two.

Thats because while the Google decision may restrict how some internet-based businesses operate across the EU, the Microsoft case, if overturned by the US supreme court, would devastate one of the fastest-growing areas of business cloud computing undermining the foundation for how data is stored and handled.

Because most businesses worldwide rely on at least some international handling of data, this exposes Business with a capital B, not just the tech or internet-based sectors.

The case involves a judges demand that Microsoft hand over emails held in Ireland for a New York state case. Microsoft refused. But importantly, it has not fought compliance with lawful government requests, but rather how this particular one was made: without going through existing international agreements by which US authorities would normally request permission from and work with Irish authorities to access the emails.

The US has argued that Microsoft is an American company, giving US courts the right to directly demand the emails, regardless of where they are held. However, this is misleading. First, the US is trying to treat digital data as a different category of evidence. If the desired evidence were concrete (say, paper documents) rather than digital, US authorities would have to use existing international law-enforcement agreements. Digital is, wrongly, a legislative grey area.

Second, as Microsoft president and chief counsel Brad Smith argued in a blog post last week, if the US government has the right to directly seize internationally-held data, then other countries will of course, expect the same right to in effect conduct international digital raids for American or other nations data, in the US or around the world, with near-impunity.

This raises obvious data-protection, data-privacy, and surveillance concerns. It also completely undermines the whole concept of cloud computing the movement and storing of data by organisations in international jurisdictions and suggests businesses would have to run stand-alone operations and data centres in every geography in which they operate.

Having the supreme court hear this case would be a pointless waste of the courts time. As Smith notes, US legislators already accept that fresh legislation is needed to clarify and better streamline access to digital evidence. In the US, bipartisan efforts have begun in this regard.

A supreme court ruling could curtail or prematurely affect needed legislation. Hence, the DOJ referral request is unneeded and potentially catastrophic.

As for the Google case, the writing was on the wall for this decision for some time, as the company had failed in several attempts to reach a settlement with the EU over those seven years. The decision is likely to have a number of impacts.

First, it signals the EU is willing to make business-affecting decisions, backed with gasp-inducing fines, against multinationals seen to compete unfairly in areas of market dominance. And keep in mind the EU competition commissioner still has two ongoing investigations into other areas of Google business, its Android mobile operating system and its Ad Sense online advertising.

Overall (and without knowing yet the details of the judgement), the EU is showing it will closely examine and regulate competition in market verticals. Many other market-dominating companies in such verticals Amazon, for example, or Apple must be nervous.

The willingness to impose major fines is a sharp shock, too. For years, EU actions have been seen as minor swats, not big wallops. Big fines will certainly focus corporate minds.

Finally, the EU, interestingly, is moving firmly into an anti-trust watchdog role the US has only dithered in for the two decades since the DOJ went after Microsoft on anti-trust grounds (using Windows to shoehorn its Internet Explorer browser on to desktops). The US abandoned its own anti-trust investigation of Google two years ago.

And that, of course, is an historical connecting thread in the two current cases.

Google says it may appeal the EU decision. Microsoft, when under further anti-trust investigation in the EU in past years, eventually decided the best, business-stabilising approach was to settle with the EU.

But these days Microsoft has led corporate efforts to confront the US government on over-reaching data access.

An interesting turn of affairs, indeed.

Originally posted here:

US action on Microsoft email case could devastate cloud computing - Irish Times

Microsoft Signs Cloud Computing Partnership with Box – CIO Today

Posted on June 30, 2017 by Danzig

Microsoft and file-storage startup Box have signed a deal to sell each other's products, the latest blurring of the lines between friends and rivals in the growing business of cloud-computing.

Box builds web-based file storage and management tools, services that compete head-to-head with Microsoft's own OneDrive and Sharepoint.

Despite that rivalry, the companies have agreed to jointly sell Box services and elements of Microsoft's Azure cloud-computing platform, they said on Tuesday.

The companies say their engineering teams are also working on building more links between their products, including adding Azure the Box Zones program. That effort lets Box customers opt to store their content in specific areas of Azure's massive global network of data centers. (Box Zones already includes Azure rivals Amazon Web Services and IBM).

Cloud-computing has made some partnerships that would have seemed bizarre in the world of out-of-the-box business software of a generation ago. Microsoft during its dominance of the personal computer heyday developed a reputation for pushing customers to use its range of products at all costs, and shunning those developed by others.

But as the company prioritizes growth in its Azure cloud-computing platform, which enables other companies to build services on Microsoft's network of data centers and rented software services, the Redmond firm has abandoned some of its scorched earth tactics. The company, analysts say, is betting that customers who plug into the cloud will demand that the products they use work well with those of other technology vendors.

Box, based in Redwood City, Calif., began as a startup founded by a pair of college students in Mercer Island. The company is among a slate of startups born in the cloud era that has thrived by building on-demand, web-based tools that replicate or improve on programs companies used to run from their own servers. Box held an initial public offering in 2015, and had sales of $425 million during the most recent 12-month period.

Follow this link:

Microsoft Signs Cloud Computing Partnership with Box - CIO Today

Quantum Computing – Scientific American

Posted on June 30, 2017 by Danzig

Quantum computing has captured imaginations for almost 50 years. The reason is simple: it offers a path to solving problems that could never be answered with classical machines. Examples include simulating chemistry exactly to develop new molecules and materials and solving complex optimization problems, which seek the best solution from among many possible alternatives. Every industry has a need for optimization, which is one reason this technology has so much disruptive potential.

Until recently, access to nascent quantum computers was restricted to specialists in a few labs around the world. But progress over the past several years has enabled the construction of the worlds first prototype systems that can finally test out ideas, algorithms and other techniques that until now were strictly theoretical.

Quantum computers tackle problems by harnessing the power of quantum mechanics. Rather than considering each possible solution one at a time, as a classical machine would, they behave in ways that cannot be explained with classical analogies. They start out in a quantum superposition of all possible solutions, and then they use entanglement and quantum interference to home in on the correct answerprocesses that we do not observe in our everyday lives. The promise they offer, however, comes at the cost of them being difficult to build. A popular design requires superconducting materials (kept 100 times colder than outer space), exquisite control over delicate quantum states and shielding for the processor to keep out even a single stray ray of light.

Existing machines are still too small to fully solve problems more complex than supercomputers can handle today. Nevertheless, tremendous progress has been made. Algorithms have been developed that will run faster on a quantum machine. Techniques now exist that prolong coherence (the lifetime of quantum information) in superconducting quantum bits by a factor of more than 100 compared with 10 years ago. We can now measure the most important kinds of quantum errors. And in 2016 IBM provided the public access to the first quantum computer in the cloudthe IBM Q experiencewith a graphical interface for programming it and now an interface based on the popular programming language Python. Opening this system to the world has fueled innovations that are vital for this technology to progress, and to date more than 20 academic papers have been published using this tool. The field is expanding dramatically. Academic research groups and more than 50 start-ups and large corporations worldwide are focused on making quantum computing a reality.

With these technological advancements and a machine at anyones fingertips, now is the time for getting quantum ready. People can begin to figure out what they would do if machines existed today that could solve new problems. And many quantum computing guides are available online to help them get started.

There are still many obstacles. Coherence times must improve, quantum error rates must decrease, and eventually, we must mitigate or correct the errors that do occur. Researchers will continue to drive innovations in both the hardware and software. Investigators disagree, however, over which criteria should determine when quantum computing has achieved technological maturity. Some have proposed a standard defined by the ability to perform a scientific measurement so obscure that it is not easily explained to a general audience. I and others disagree, arguing that quantum computing will not have emerged as a technology until it can solve problems that have commercial, intellectual and societal importance. The good news is, that day is finally within our sights.

See original here:

Quantum Computing - Scientific American

Quantum computers are about to get real | Science News – Science News Magazine

Posted on June 30, 2017 by Danzig

Although the term quantum computer might suggest a miniature, sleek device, the latest incarnations are a far cry from anything available in the Apple Store. In a laboratory just 60 kilometers north of New York City, scientists are running a fledgling quantum computer through its paces and the whole package looks like something that might be found in a dark corner of a basement. The cooling system that envelops the computer is about the size and shape of a household water heater.

Beneath that clunky exterior sits the heart of the computer, the quantum processor, a tiny, precisely engineered chip about a centimeter on each side. Chilled to temperatures just above absolute zero, the computer made by IBM and housed at the companys Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. comprises 16 quantum bits, or qubits, enough for only simple calculations.

If this computer can be scaled up, though, it could transcend current limits of computation. Computers based on the physics of the supersmall can solve puzzles no other computer can at least in theory because quantum entities behave unlike anything in a larger realm.

Quantum computers arent putting standard computers to shame just yet. The most advanced computers are working with fewer than two dozen qubits. But teams from industry and academia are working on expanding their own versions of quantum computers to 50 or 100 qubits, enough to perform certain calculations that the most powerful supercomputers cant pull off.

The race is on to reach that milestone, known as quantum supremacy. Scientists should meet this goal within a couple of years, says quantum physicist David Schuster of the University of Chicago. Theres no reason that I see that it wont work.

Cooling systems (Googles shown) maintain frigid temperatures for the superconducting quantum processor, which sits at the bottom of the contraption. The system is enclosed in a water heatersized container.

But supremacy is only an initial step, a symbolic marker akin to sticking a flagpole into the ground of an unexplored landscape. The first tasks where quantum computers prevail will be contrived problems set up to be difficult for a standard computer but easy for a quantum one. Eventually, the hope is, the computers will become prized tools of scientists and businesses.

Some of the first useful problems quantum computers will probably tackle will be to simulate small molecules or chemical reactions. From there, the computers could go on to speed the search for new drugs or kick-start the development of energy-saving catalysts to accelerate chemical reactions. To find the best material for a particular job, quantum computers could search through millions of possibilities to pinpoint the ideal choice, for example, ultrastrong polymers for use in airplane wings. Advertisers could use a quantum algorithm to improve their product recommendations dishing out an ad for that new cell phone just when youre on the verge of purchasing one.

Quantum computers could provide a boost to machine learning, too, allowing for nearly flawless handwriting recognition or helping self-driving cars assess the flood of data pouring in from their sensors to swerve away from a child running into the street. And scientists might use quantum computers to explore exotic realms of physics, simulating what might happen deep inside a black hole, for example.

But quantum computers wont reach their real potential which will require harnessing the power of millions of qubits for more than a decade. Exactly what possibilities exist for the long-term future of quantum computers is still up in the air.

The outlook is similar to the patchy vision that surrounded the development of standard computers which quantum scientists refer to as classical computers in the middle of the 20th century. When they began to tinker with electronic computers, scientists couldnt fathom all of the eventual applications; they just knew the machines possessed great power. From that initial promise, classical computers have become indispensable in science and business, dominating daily life, with handheld smartphones becoming constant companions (SN: 4/1/17, p. 18).

Were very excited about the potential to really revolutionize what we can compute.

Krysta Svore

Since the 1980s, when the idea of a quantum computer first attracted interest, progress has come in fits and starts. Without the ability to create real quantum computers, the work remained theoretical, and it wasnt clear when or if quantum computations would be achievable. Now, with the small quantum computers at hand, and new developments coming swiftly, scientists and corporations are preparing for a new technology that finally seems within reach.

Companies are really paying attention, Microsofts Krysta Svore said March 13 in New Orleans during a packed session at a meeting of the American Physical Society. Enthusiastic physicists filled the room and huddled at the doorways, straining to hear as she spoke. Svore and her team are exploring what these nascent quantum computers might eventually be capable of. Were very excited about the potential to really revolutionize what we can compute.

Quantum computings promise is rooted in quantum mechanics, the counterintuitive physics that governs tiny entities such as atoms, electrons and molecules. The basic element of a quantum computer is the qubit (pronounced CUE-bit). Unlike a standard computer bit, which can take on a value of 0 or 1, a qubit can be 0, 1 or a combination of the two a sort of purgatory between 0 and 1 known as a quantum superposition. When a qubit is measured, theres some chance of getting 0 and some chance of getting 1. But before its measured, its both 0 and 1.

Because qubits can represent 0 and 1 simultaneously, they can encode a wealth of information. In computations, both possibilities 0 and 1 are operated on at the same time, allowing for a sort of parallel computation that speeds up solutions.

Another qubit quirk: Their properties can be intertwined through the quantum phenomenon of entanglement (SN: 4/29/17, p. 8). A measurement of one qubit in an entangled pair instantly reveals the value of its partner, even if they are far apart what Albert Einstein called spooky action at a distance.

Story continues after diagram

In quantum computing, programmers execute a series of operations, called gates, to flip qubits (represented by black horizontal lines), entangle them to link their properties, or put them in a superposition, representing 0 and 1 simultaneously. First, some gate definitions:

X gate: Flips a qubit from a 0 to a 1, or vice versa.

Hadamard gate: Puts a qubit into a superposition of states.

Controlled not gate: Flips a second qubit only if the first qubit is 1.

Scientists can combine gates like the ones above into complex sequences to perform calculations that are not possible with classical computers. One such quantum algorithm, called Grovers search, speeds up searches, such as scanning fingerprint databases for a match. To understand how this works, consider a simple game show.

In this game show, four doors hide one car and three goats. A contestant must open a door at random in hopes of finding the car. Grovers search looks at all possibilities at once and amplifies the desired one, so the contestant is more likely to find the car. The two qubits represent four doors, labeled in binary as 00, 01, 10 and 11. In this example, the car is hidden behind door 11.

Step 1:Puts both qubits in a superposition. All four doors have equal probability. Step 2:Hides the car behind door 11. In a real-world example, this information would be stored in a quantum database. Step 3:Amplifies the probability of getting the correct answer, 11, when the qubits are measured. Step 4: Measures both qubits; the result is 11.

Source: IBM Research; Graphics: T. Tibbitts

Such weird quantum properties can make for superefficient calculations. But the approach wont speed up solutions for every problem thrown at it. Quantum calculators are particularly suited to certain types of puzzles, the kind for which correct answers can be selected by a process called quantum interference. Through quantum interference, the correct answer is amplified while others are canceled out, like sets of ripples meeting one another in a lake, causing some peaks to become larger and others to disappear.

One of the most famous potential uses for quantum computers is breaking up large integers into their prime factors. For classical computers, this task is so difficult that credit card data and other sensitive information are secured via encryption based on factoring numbers. Eventually, a large enough quantum computer could break this type of encryption, factoring numbers that would take millions of years for a classical computer to crack.

Quantum computers also promise to speed up searches, using qubits to more efficiently pick out an information needle in a data haystack.

Qubits can be made using a variety of materials, including ions, silicon or superconductors, which conduct electricity without resistance. Unfortunately, none of these technologies allow for a computer that will fit easily on a desktop. Though the computer chips themselves are tiny, they depend on large cooling systems, vacuum chambers or other bulky equipment to maintain the delicate quantum properties of the qubits. Quantum computers will probably be confined to specialized laboratories for the foreseeable future, to be accessed remotely via the internet.

That vision of Web-connected quantum computers has already begun to Quantum computing is exciting. Its coming, and we want a lot more people to be well-versed in itmaterialize. In 2016, IBM unveiled the Quantum Experience, a quantum computer that anyone around the world can access online for free.

Quantum computing is exciting. Its coming, and we want a lot more people to be well-versed in it.

Jerry Chow

With only five qubits, the Quantum Experience is limited in what you can do, says Jerry Chow, who manages IBMs experimental quantum computing group. (IBMs 16-qubit computer is in beta testing, so Quantum Experience users are just beginning to get their hands on it.) Despite its limitations, the Quantum Experience has allowed scientists, computer programmers and the public to become familiar with programming quantum computers which follow different rules than standard computers and therefore require new ways of thinking about problems. Quantum computing is exciting. Its coming, and we want a lot more people to be well-versed in it, Chow says. Thatll make the development and the advancement even faster.

But to fully jump-start quantum computing, scientists will need to prove that their machines can outperform the best standard computers. This step is important to convince the community that youre building an actual quantum computer, says quantum physicist Simon Devitt of Macquarie University in Sydney. A demonstration of such quantum supremacy could come by the end of the year or in 2018, Devitt predicts.

Researchers from Google set out a strategy to demonstrate quantum supremacy, posted online at arXiv.org in 2016. They proposed an algorithm that, if run on a large enough quantum computer, would produce results that couldnt be replicated by the worlds most powerful supercomputers.

The method involves performing random operations on the qubits, and measuring the distribution of answers that are spit out. Getting the same distribution on a classical supercomputer would require simulating the complex inner workings of a quantum computer. Simulating a quantum computer with more than about 45 qubits becomes unmanageable. Supercomputers havent been able to reach these quantum wilds.

To enter this hinterland, Google, which has a nine-qubit computer, has aggressive plans to scale up to 49 qubits. Were pretty optimistic, says Googles John Martinis, also a physicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Martinis and colleagues plan to proceed in stages, working out the kinks along the way. You build something, and then if its not working exquisitely well, then you dont do the next one you fix whats going on, he says. The researchers are currently developing quantum computers of 15 and 22 qubits.

IBM, like Google, also plans to go big. In March, the company announced it would build a 50-qubit computer in the next few years and make it available to businesses eager to be among the first adopters of the burgeoning technology. Just two months later, in May, IBM announced that its scientists had created the 16-qubit quantum computer, as well as a 17-qubit prototype that will be a technological jumping-off point for the companys future line of commercial computers.

Story continues after image

But a quantum computer is much more than the sum of its qubits. One of the real key aspects about scaling up is not simply qubit number, but really improving the device performance, Chow says. So IBM researchers are focusing on a standard they call quantum volume, which takes into account several factors. These include the number of qubits, how each qubit is connected to its neighbors, how quickly errors slip into calculations and how many operations can be performed at once. These are all factors that really give your quantum processor its power, Chow says.

Errors are a major obstacle to boosting quantum volume. With their delicate quantum properties, qubits can accumulate glitches with each operation. Qubits must resist these errors or calculations quickly become unreliable. Eventually, quantum computers with many qubits will be able to fix errors that crop up, through a procedure known as error correction. Still, to boost the complexity of calculations quantum computers can take on, qubit reliability will need to keep improving.

Different technologies for forming qubits have various strengths and weaknesses, which affect quantum volume. IBM and Google build their qubits out of superconducting materials, as do many academic scientists. In superconductors cooled to extremely low temperatures, electrons flow unimpeded. To fashion superconducting qubits, scientists form circuits in which current flows inside a loop of wire made of aluminum or another superconducting material.

Several teams of academic researchers create qubits from single ions, trapped in place and probed with lasers. Intel and others are working with qubits fabricated from tiny bits of silicon known as quantum dots (SN: 7/11/15, p. 22). Microsoft is studying what are known as topological qubits, which would be extra-resistant to errors creeping into calculations. Qubits can even be forged from diamond, using defects in the crystal that isolate a single electron. Photonic quantum computers, meanwhile, make calculations using particles of light. A Chinese-led team demonstrated in a paper published May 1 in Nature Photonics that a light-based quantum computer could outperform the earliest electronic computers on a particular problem.

One company, D-Wave, claims to have a quantum computer that can perform serious calculations, albeit using a more limited strategy than other quantum computers (SN: 7/26/14, p. 6). But many scientists are skeptical about the approach. The general consensus at the moment is that something quantum is happening, but its still very unclear what it is, says Devitt.

While superconducting qubits have received the most attention from giants like IBM and Google, underdogs taking different approaches could eventually pass these companies by. One potential upstart is Chris Monroe, who crafts ion-based quantum computers.

On a walkway near his office on the University of Maryland campus in College Park, a banner featuring a larger-than-life portrait of Monroe adorns a fence. The message: Monroes quantum computers are a fearless idea. The banner is part of an advertising campaign featuring several of the universitys researchers, but Monroe seems an apt choice, because his research bucks the trend of working with superconducting qubits.

Monroe and his small army of researchers arrange ions in neat lines, manipulating them with lasers. In a paper published in Nature in 2016, Monroe and colleagues debuted a five-qubit quantum computer, made of ytterbium ions, allowing scientists to carry out various quantum computations. A 32-ion computer is in the works, he says.

Monroes labs he has half a dozen of them on campus dont resemble anything normally associated with computers. Tables hold an indecipherable mess of lenses and mirrors, surrounding a vacuum chamber that houses the ions. As with IBMs computer, although the full package is bulky, the quantum part is minuscule: The chain of ions spans just hundredths of a millimeter.

Scientists in laser goggles tend to the whole setup. The foreign nature of the equipment explains why ion technology for quantum computing hasnt taken off yet, Monroe says. So he and colleagues took matters into their own hands, creating a start-up called IonQ, which plans to refine ion computers to make them easier to work with.

Monroe points out a few advantages of his technology. In particular, ions of the same type are identical. In other systems, tiny differences between qubits can muck up a quantum computers operations. As quantum computers scale up, Monroe says, there will be a big price to pay for those small differences. Having qubits that are identical, over millions of them, is going to be really important.

In a paper published in March in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Monroe and colleagues compared their quantum computer with IBMs Quantum Experience. The ion computer performed operations more slowly than IBMs superconducting one, but it benefited from being more interconnected each ion can be entangled with any other ion, whereas IBMs qubits can be entangled only with adjacent qubits. That interconnectedness means that calculations can be performed in fewer steps, helping to make up for the slower operation speed, and minimizing the opportunity for errors.

Story continues below table

Two different quantum computers one using ion qubits, the other superconducting qubits went head-to-head in a recent comparison. Both five-qubit computers performed similarly, but each had its own advantages: The superconducting computer was faster; the ion computer was more interconnected, needing fewer steps to perform calculations.

Source: N.M. Linkeet al/PNAS2017

Computers like Monroes are still far from unlocking the full power of quantum computing. To perform increasingly complex tasks, scientists will have to correct the errors that slip into calculations, fixing problems on the fly by spreading information out among many qubits. Unfortunately, such error correction multiplies the number of qubits required by a factor of 10, 100 or even thousands, depending on the quality of the qubits. Fully error-corrected quantum computers will require millions of qubits. Thats still a long way off.

So scientists are sketching out some simple problems that quantum computers could dig into without error correction. One of the most important early applications will be to study the chemistry of small molecules or simple reactions, by using quantum computers to simulate the quantum mechanics of chemical systems. In 2016, scientists from Google, Harvard University and other institutions performed such a quantum simulation of a hydrogen molecule. Hydrogen has already been simulated with classical computers with similar results, but more complex molecules could follow as quantum computers scale up.

Once error-corrected quantum computers appear, many quantum physicists have their eye on one chemistry problem in particular: making fertilizer. Though it seems an unlikely mission for quantum physicists, the task illustrates the game-changing potential of quantum computers.

The Haber-Bosch process, which is used to create nitrogen-rich fertilizers, is hugely energy intensive, demanding high temperatures and pressures. The process, essential for modern farming, consumes around 1 percent of the worlds energy supply. There may be a better way. Nitrogen-fixing bacteria easily extract nitrogen from the air, thanks to the enzyme nitrogenase. Quantum computers could help simulate this enzyme and reveal its properties, perhaps allowing scientists to design a catalyst to improve the nitrogen fixation reaction, make it more efficient, and save on the worlds energy, says Microsofts Svore. Thats the kind of thing we want to do on a quantum computer. And for that problem it looks like well need error correction.

Pinpointing applications that dont require error correction is difficult, and the possibilities are not fully mapped out. Its not because they dont exist; I think its because physicists are not the right people to be finding them, says Devitt, of Macquarie. Once the hardware is available, the thinking goes, computer scientists will come up with new ideas.

Thats why companies like IBM are pushing their quantum computers to users via the Web. A lot of these companies are realizing that they need people to start playing around with these things, Devitt says.

Quantum scientists are trekking into a new, uncharted realm of computation, bringing computer programmers along for the ride. The capabilities of these fledgling systems could reshape the way society uses computers.

Eventually, quantum computers may become part of the fabric of our technological society. Quantum computers could become integrated into a quantum internet, for example, which would be more secure than what exists today (SN: 10/15/16, p. 13).

Quantum computers and quantum communication effectively allow you to do things in a much more private way, says physicist Seth Lloyd of MIT, who envisions Web searches that not even the search engine can spy on.

There are probably plenty more uses for quantum computers that nobody has thought up yet.

Were not sure exactly what these are going to be used for. That makes it a little weird, Monroe says. But, he maintains, the computers will find their niches. Build it and they will come.

This story appears in the July 8, 2017, issue ofScience Newswith the headline, "Quantum Computers Get Real: As the first qubit-based machines come online, scientists are just beginning to imagine the possibilities."

More here:

Quantum computers are about to get real | Science News - Science News Magazine

New method could enable more stable and scalable quantum … – Phys.Org

Posted on June 30, 2017 by Danzig

June 29, 2017 by Ali Sundermier A false color image of one of the researchers' samples. Credit: University of Pennsylvania

Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, in collaboration with Johns Hopkins University and Goucher College, have discovered a new topological material which may enable fault-tolerant quantum computing. It is a form of computing that taps into the power of atoms and subatomic phenomena to perform calculations significantly faster than current computers and could potentially lead to advances in drug development and other complex systems.

The research, published in ACS Nano, was led by Jerome Mlack, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Physics & Astronomy in Penn's School of Arts & Sciences, and his mentors Nina Markovic, now an associate professor at Goucher, and Marija Drndic, Fay R. and Eugene L. Langberg Professor of Physics at Penn. Penn grad students Gopinath Danda and Sarah Friedensen, who received an NSF fellowship for this work, and Johns Hopkins Associate Research Professor Natalia Drichko and postdoc Atikur Rahman, now an assistant professor at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune, also contributed to the study.

The research began while Mlack was a Ph.D. candidate at Johns Hopkins. He and other researchers were working on growing and making devices out of topological insulators, a type of material that doesn't conduct current through the bulk of the material but can carry current along its surface.

As the researchers were working with these materials, one of their devices blew up, similar to what would happen with a short circuit.

"It kind of melted a little bit," Mlack said, "and what we found is that, if we measured the resistance of this melted region of one of these devices, it became superconducting. Then, when we went back and looked at what happened to the material and tried to find out what elements were in there, we only saw bismuth selenide and palladium."

When superconducting materials are cooled, they can carry a current with zero electrical resistance without losing any energy.

Topological insulators with superconducting properties have been predicted to have great potential for creating a fault-tolerant quantum computer. However, it is difficult to make good electrical contact between the topological insulator and superconductor and to scale such devices for manufacture, using current techniques. If this new material could be recreated, it could potentially overcome both of these difficulties.

In standard computing, the smallest unit of data that makes up the computer and stores information, the binary digit, or bit, can have a value of either 0, for off, or 1, for on. Quantum computing takes advantage of a phenomenon called superposition, which means that the bits, in this case called qubits, can be 0 and 1 at the same time.

A famous way of illustrating this phenomenon is a thought experiment called Schrodinger's cat. In this thought experiment, there is a cat in a box, but one doesn't know if the cat is dead or alive until the box is opened. Before the box is opened, the cat can be considered both alive and dead, existing in two states at once, but, immediately upon opening the box, the cat's state, or in the case of qubits, the system's configuration, collapses into one: the cat is either alive or dead and the qubit is either 0 or 1.

"The idea is to encode information using these quantum states," Markovic said, "but in order to use it in needs to be encoded and exist long enough for you to read."

One of the major problems in the field of quantum computing is that the qubits are not very stable and it's very easy to destroy the quantum states. These topological materials provide a way of making these states live long enough for to read them off and do something with them, Markovic said.

"It's kind of like if the box in Schrodinger's cat were on the top of a flag pole and the slightest wind could just knock it off," Mlack said. "The idea is that these topological materials at least widen the diameter of the flag pole so the box is sitting on more a column than a flag pole. You can knock it off eventually, but it's otherwise very hard to break the box and find out what happened to the cat."

Although their initial discovery of this material was an accident, they were able to come up with a process to recreate it in a controlled way.

Markovic, who was Mlack's advisor at Johns Hopkins at the time, suggested that, in order to recreate it without having to continually blow up devices, they could thermally anneal it, a process in which they put it into a furnace and heat it to a certain temperature.

Using this method, the researchers wrote, "the metal directly enters the nanostructure, providing good electrical contact and can be easily patterned into the nanostructure using standard lithography, allowing for easy scalability of custom superconducting circuits in a topological insulator."

Although researchers already have the capability of making a superconducting topological material, there's a huge problem in the fact that, when they put two materials together, there's a crack in between, which decreases the electrical contact. This ruins the measurements that they can make as well as the physical phenomena that could lead to making devices that will allow for quantum computing.

By patterning it directly into the crystal, the superconductor is embedded, and there are none of these contact problems. The resistance is very low, and they can pattern devices for quantum computing in one single crystal.

To test the material's superconducting properties, they put it in two extremely cold refrigerators, one of which cools down to nearly absolute zero. They also swept a magnetic field across it, which would kill the superconductivity and the topological nature of the material, to find out the limitations of the material. They also did standard electrical measurements, running a current through and looking at the voltage that is created.

"I think what is also nice in this paper is the combination of the electrical transport performance and the direct insights from the actual device materials characterization," Drndic said. "We have good insights on the composition of these devices to support all these claims because we did elemental analysis to understand how these two materials join."

One of the benefits of the researchers' device is that it's potentially scalable, capable of fitting onto a chip similar to the ones currently in our computers.

"Right now the main advances in quantum computing involve very complicated lithography methods," Drndic said. "People are doing it with nanowires which are connected to these circuits. If you have single nanowires that are very, very tiny and then you have to put them in particular places, it's very difficult. Most of the people who are on the forefront of this research have multimillion-dollar facilities and lots of people behind them. But this, in principle, we can do in one lab. It allows for making these devices in a simple way. You can just go and write your device any way you want it to be."

According to Mlack, though there is still a fair amount of limitation on it; there's an entire field that has sprouted up devoted to coming up with new and interesting ways to try to leverage these quantum states and quantum information. If successful, quantum computing will allow for a number of things.

"It will allow for much faster decryption and encryption of information," he said, "which is why some of the big defense contractors in the NSA, as well as companies like Microsoft, are interested in it. It will also allow us to model quantum systems in a reasonable amount of time and is capable of doing certain calculations and simulations faster than one would typically be able to do."

It's particularly good for completely different kinds of problems, such as problems that require massive parallel computations, Markovic said. If you need to do lots of things at once, quantum computing speeds things up tremendously.

"There are problems right now that would take the age of the universe to compute," she said.

"With quantum computing, you'd be able to do it in minutes." This could potentially also lead to advances in drug development and other complex systems, as well as enable new technologies.

The researchers hope to start building some more advanced devices that are geared towards actually building a qubit out of the systems that they have, as well as trying out different metals to see if they can change the properties of the material.

"It really is a new potential way of fabricating these devices that no one has done before," Mlack said. "In general, when people make some of these materials by combining this topological material and superconductivity, it is a bulk crystal, so you don't really control where everything is. Here we can actually customize the pattern that we're making into the material itself. That's the most exciting part, especially when we start talking about adding in different types of metals that give it different characteristics, whether those be ferromagnetic materials or elements that might make it more insulating. We still have to see if it works, but there's a potential for creating these interesting customized circuits directly into the material."

Explore further: Group works toward devising topological superconductor

More information: Jerome T. Mlack et al, Patterning Superconductivity in a Topological Insulator, ACS Nano (2017). DOI: 10.1021/acsnano.7b01549

The experimental realization of ultrathin graphene - which earned two scientists from Cambridge the Nobel Prize in physics in 2010 - has ushered in a new age in materials research.

The 'quantized magneto-electric effect' has been demonstrated for the first time in topological insulators at TU Wien, which is set to open up new and highly accurate methods of measurement.

University of Pennsylvania researchers are now among the first to produce a single, three-atom-thick layer of a unique two-dimensional material called tungsten ditelluride. Their findings have been published in 2-D Materials.

The global race towards a functioning quantum computer is on. With future quantum computers, we will be able to solve previously impossible problems and develop, for example, complex medicines, fertilizers, or artificial ...

Researchers have shown how to create a rechargeable "spin battery" made out of materials called topological insulators, a step toward building new spintronic devices and quantum computers.

In an article published today in the journal Nature, physicists report the first ever observation of heat conductance in a material containing anyons, quantum quasiparticles that exist in two-dimensional systems.

Scientists from India and Portugal recreated solar turbulence on a tabletop using a high intensity ultrashort laser pulse to excite a hot, dense plasma and followed the evolution of the giant magnetic field generated by the ...

By measuring the random jiggling motion of electrons in a resistor, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have contributed to accurate new measurements of the Boltzmann constant, a fundamental ...

Van der Waals interactions between molecules are among the most important forces in biology, physics, and chemistry, as they determine the properties and physical behavior of many materials. For a long time, it was considered ...

For surfers, finding the "sweet spot," the most powerful part of the wave, is part of the thrill and the challenge.

With leading corporations now investing in highly expensive and complex infrastructures to unleash the power of quantum technologies, INRS researchers have achieved a breakthrough in a light-weight photonic system created ...

Please sign in to add a comment. Registration is free, and takes less than a minute. Read more

Continued here:

New method could enable more stable and scalable quantum ... - Phys.Org

Qudits: The Real Future of Quantum Computing? – IEEE Spectrum – IEEE Spectrum

Posted on June 30, 2017 by Danzig

Photo: INRS University Scientists have built a microchip that can generate two entangled qudits each with 10 states, for 100 dimensions total, more than what six entangled qubits could generate.

Instead of creating quantum computers based on qubits that can each adopt only two possible options, scientists have now developed a microchip that can generate qudits that can each assume 10 or more states, potentially opening up a new way to creating incredibly powerful quantum computers, a new study finds.

Classical computers switch transistors either on or off to symbolize data as ones and zeroes. In contrast, quantum computers use quantum bits, or qubitsthat, because of the bizarre nature of quantum physics, can be in a state ofsuperpositionwhere they simultaneously act as both 1 and 0.

The superpositions that qubits can adopt let them each help perform two calculations at once. If two qubitsare quantum-mechanically linked, orentangled,they can help perform four calculations simultaneously; three qubits, eight calculations; and so on. As a result, aquantum computer with 300 qubits could perform more calculations in an instant than there are atoms in the known universe, solving certain problems much faster than classical computers. However, superpositions are extraordinarily fragile, making it difficult to work with multiple qubits.

Most attempts at building practical quantum computers rely on particles that serve as qubits. However, scientists have long known that they could in principle use quditswith more than two states simultaneously. In principle, a quantum computer with two 32-state qudits, for example, would be able to perform as many operations as 10 qubits while skipping the challenges inherent with working with 10 qubits together.

Researchers used the setup pictured above to create, manipulate, and detect qudits. The experiment starts when a laser fires pulses of light into a micro-ring resonator, which in turn emits entangled pairs of photons.Because the ring has multiple resonances, the photons have optical spectrumswitha set of evenly spaced frequencies(red and blue peaks), a process known as spontaneous four-wave mixing (SFWM).The researchers were able to use each of thefrequencies to encode information, which means the photons act asqudits.Each quditis in a superposition of 10 possible states, extending the usual binary alphabet (0 and 1) of quantum bits.The researchers also showed they could perform basic gate operations on the qudits using optical filters and modulators, and then detect the results using single-photon counters.

Now scientists have for the first time created a microchip that can generate two entangled qudits each with 10 states, for 100 dimensions total, more than what six entangled qubits could generate. We have now achieved the compact and easy generation of high-dimensional quantum states, says study co-lead author Michael Kues, a quantum optics researcher at Canadas National Institute of Scientific Research, or INRS,its French acronym,in Varennes, Quebec.

The researchers developed a photonic chip fabricated using techniques similar to ones used for integrated circuits. A laser fires pulses of light into a micro-ring resonator, a 270-micrometer-diameter circle etched onto silica glass, which in turn emits entangled pairs of photons. Each photon is in a superposition of 10 possible wavelengths or colors.

For example, a high-dimensional photon can be red and yellow and green and blue, although the photons used here were in the infrared wavelength range, Kues says. Specifically, one photon from each pair spanned wavelengths from 1534 to 1550 nanometers, while the other spanned from 1550 to 1566 nanometers.

Using commercial off-the-shelf telecommunications components, the researchers showed they could manipulate these entangled photons. The basic capabilities they show are really what you need to do universal quantum computation, says quantum optics researcher Joseph Lukens at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in Tennessee, who did not take part in this research. Its pretty exciting stuff.

In addition, by sending the entangled photons through a 24.2-kilometer-long optical fiber telecommunications system, the researchers showed that entanglement was preserved over large distances. This could prove useful for nigh-unhackable quantum communications applications, the researchers say.

What I think is amazing about our system is that it can be created using components that are out on the market, whereas other quantum computer technologies need state-of-the-art cryogenics, state-of-the-art superconductors, state-of-the-art magnets, saysstudy co-senior authorRoberto Morandotti, a physicistatINRSin Varennes. The fact that we use basic telecommunications components to access and control these states means that a lot of researchers could explore this area as well.

The scientists noted that current state-of-the-art components could conceivably generate entangled pairs of 96-state qudits, corresponding to more dimensions than 13 qubits. Conceptually, in principle, I dont see a limit to the number of states of qudits right now, Lukens, from Oak Ridge,says. I do think a 96-by-96-dimensional system is fairly reasonable, and achievable in the near future.

But he adds that several components of the experiment were not on the microchips, such as the programmable filters and phase modulators, which led to photon loss. Kues says that integrating such components with the rest of the chips and optimizing their micro-ring resonator would help reduce such losses to make their system more practical for use.

The next big challenge we will have to solve is to use our system for quantum computation and quantum communications applications, Kues says. While this will take some additional years, it is the final step required to achieve systems that can outperform classical computers and communications.

The scientists detailed their findings in the latest issue of the journal Nature.

IEEE Spectrums general technology blog, featuring news, analysis, and opinions about engineering, consumer electronics, and technology and society, from the editorial staff and freelance contributors.

Sign up for the Tech Alert newsletter and receive ground-breaking technology and science news from IEEE Spectrum every Thursday.

A startup challenging Google and IBM sees opportunities for quantum computing in both the short term and long run 26Jun

Control of nuclear spin is key to a practical silicon quantum computer 18Apr2013

By the end of 2017, Google hopes to make a 49-qubit chip that will prove quantum computers can beat classical machines 24May

Connected quantum dots may form the building blocks of a solid-state quantum computer1Aug2004

Reading listings on the bulletin-board system was free, but posting cost a quarter 29Jun

HAX executives preview trends in hardware startups 26Jun

The massive 1 billion project has shifted focus from simulation to informatics 21Jun

Personalized medicine, self-driving cars, big data, AI, and machine learning will mainstream supercomputing 21Jun

For the first time since 1996, the U.S. holds none of the world's top three supercomputers. An upgraded Swiss machine takes third 19Jun

Silicon Valleys top employers made big staffing changes, according to Silicon Valley Business Journal 15Jun

Neuroscience will give us what weve sought for decades: computers that think like we do 2Jun

Why the merger of the Raspberry Pi and CoderDojo foundations makes senseand why it doesnt 2Jun

Large-scale brainlike systems are possible with existing technologyif were willing to spend themoney 1Jun

Massive efforts to better understand the human brain will deliver on the original promise of computer science: machines that think like us 31May

Modeling computers after the brain could revolutionize robotics and big data 31May

Researchers in this specialized field have hitched their wagon to deep learnings star 29May

Artificial intelligence might endow some computers with self-awareness. Heres how wed know 25May

Fujitsus new cooling system promises easy server maintenance while using less power and taking up less space 18May

Scott Borg, director of the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit, says hardware design engineers hold the future of cybersecurity in their hands 15May

Simulations suggest old ICs should consume less power than they did in their youth 12May

View post:

Qudits: The Real Future of Quantum Computing? - IEEE Spectrum - IEEE Spectrum

Global Quantum Computing Market Growth at a CAGR of 35.12 … – PR Newswire (press release)

Posted on June 30, 2017 by Danzig

The global quantum computing market to grow at a CAGR of 35.12% during the period 2017-2021.

The report covers the present scenario and the growth prospects of the global quantum computing market for 2017-2021. To calculate the market size, the report considers the revenue generated from sales of quantum computers only. The report covers the market landscape and its growth prospects over the coming years. The report also includes a discussion of the key vendors operating in this market.

The latest trend gaining momentum in the market is growth of AI and machine learning. AI is a branch of science that deals with computers, machines, software, and computer-operated robots to think intelligently to find solutions for complex problems in a manner that is like how a human brain thinks. AI is applied to the projects that require a human's intellectual processes such as the ability to reason, derive conclusions from the past, and generalize certain learnings. Machine learning is a type of AI that allows computers to self-learn. When a computer is exposed to new data, it can analyze it, make decisions, grow, and learn from this data.

According to the report, one of the major drivers for this market is increasing expenditure by stakeholders. There are different stakeholders in the market, namely governments and private enterprises, that have shown an increasing interest in quantum computing. Quantum computing will have potential applications in a variety of sectors such as aerospace and defense, civil aviation, cybersecurity, finance, healthcare, and logistics. The potential applications have compelled governments and companies to focus on developing quantum computers and related technologies. The investments by these stakeholders drive the global quantum computing market.

Further, the report states that one of the major factors hindering the growth of this market is quantum decoherence. Quantum decoherence is one of the major challenges that is faced by quantum computing firms. This is a process wherein a quantum state tends to become a classical computing bit. Any outside interference can lead to the destruction of the quantum state, which will make the bit transition into either a 0 or a 1 state. Outside interferences include heat, internal defects, and vibrations.

Key vendors

Other prominent vendors

Key Topics Covered:

Part 01: Executive summary

Part 02: Scope of the report

Part 03: Research Methodology

Part 04: Introduction

Part 05: Market landscape

Part 06: Five forces analysis

Part 07: Market segmentation by technology

Part 08: Market segmentation by end-user

Part 09: Future applications for quantum computing

Part 10: Geographical segmentation

Part 11: Key leading countries

Part 12: Decision framework

Part 13: Drivers and challenges

Part 14: Market trends

Part 15: Vendor landscape

Part 16: Key vendor analysis

Part 17: Appendix

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/nnnvmm/global_quantum

Media Contact:

Research and Markets Laura Wood, Senior Manager press@researchandmarkets.com

For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470 For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call +1-800-526-8630 For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900

U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907 Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716

To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/global-quantum-computing-market-growth-at-a-cagr-of-3512-2017-2021---latest-challenges-drivers--trends-300481865.html

SOURCE Research and Markets

http://www.researchandmarkets.com

Excerpt from:

Global Quantum Computing Market Growth at a CAGR of 35.12 ... - PR Newswire (press release)

Multi-coloured photons in 100 dimensions may make quantum … – Cosmos

Posted on June 30, 2017 by Danzig

An illustration showing high-dimensional color-entangled photon states from a photonic chip, manipulated and transmitted via telecommunications systems.

Michael Kues

Researchers using off-the-shelf telecommunications equipment have created a 100-dimensional quantum system from the entanglement of two subatomic particles.

The system can be controlled and manipulated to perform high-level gateway functions a critical component of any viable quantum computer the scientists report in the journal Nature.

The team, led by Michael Kues of the University of Glasgow, effectively created a quantum photon generator on a chip. The tiny device uses a micro-ring resonator generate entangled pairs of photons from a laser input.

The entanglement is far from simple. Each photon is composed of a superposition of several different colours, all expressed simultaneously, giving the photon several dimensions. The expression of any individual colour or frequency, if you like is mirrored across the two entangled photons, regardless of the distance between them.

The complexity of the photon pairs represents a major step forward in manipulating quantum entities.

Almost all research into quantum states, for the purpose of developing quantum computing, has to date focussed on qubits: artificially created subatomic particles that exist in a superposition two possible states. (They are the quantum equivalent of standard computing bits, basic units that are capable only of being switched between 1 and 0, or yes/no, or on/off.)

Kues and colleagues are instead working with qudits, which are essentially qubits with superpositions comprising three or more states.

In 2016, Russian researchers showed that qudit-based quantum computing systems were inherently more stable than their two dimensional predecessors.

The Russians, however, were working with a subset of qudits called qutrits, which comprise a superposition of three possible states. Kues and his team upped the ante considerably, fashioning qudits comprising 10 possible states one for each of the colours, or frequencies, of the photon giving an entangled pair a minimum of 100.

And thats just the beginning. Team member Roberto Morandotti of the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, in Chengdu, suggests that further refinement will produce entangled two-qudit systems containing as many as 9000 dimensions, bringing a robustness and complexity to quantum computers that is at present unreachable.

Kues adds that perhaps the most attractive feature of his teams achievement is that it was done using commercially available components. This means that the strategy can be quickly and easily adapted by other researchers in the field, potentially ushering in a period of very rapid development.

See the article here:

Multi-coloured photons in 100 dimensions may make quantum ... - Cosmos

Telecommunications, Meet Quantum Physics – Electronics360

Posted on June 30, 2017 by Danzig

Based in Detroit, Michigan, Americas capital for electric-vehicle manufacturing, Electric & Hybrid Vehicle Technology Expo highlights advances right across the powertrain. From passenger and commercial vehicles to off-highway industrial vehicles, this manufacturing and engineering event showcases the latest innovations across a vast range of vehicles. Running concurrent to the exhibition is the Electric & Hybrid Vehicle Technology Conference, which attracts technical leaders and executives from global technology companies to reveal what is driving demand, and shaping novel technologies and new innovations at the cutting edge.

The wide-ranging sessions cover performance vehicle technology transfer, technology transfer from aerospace to EV, technologies for improving efficiency and performance of H/EVs, the impact of autonomous driving features, 48V and low-voltage mild-hybrid architectures (including energy storage design considerations), electric and hybrid bus development, the commercial and vocational electric vehicle sector, P0-P4 architectures and more.

Since 2010 this dual event has experienced exponential growth achieving a sell-out exhibition and record attendance year on year, and bringing in some of the leading names as exhibitors, speakers, delegates and visitors, including Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, American Airlines, Hyundai, Ford, Valeo, BorgWarner, NovaBus, Chrysler, NASA, GM and many more.

Electric & Hybrid Vehicle Technology Expo is attended by industry leaders, businesspeople, technicians, consultants, and research and development professionals, all looking for greater efficiency, safety, and cost reduction.

Visit link:

Telecommunications, Meet Quantum Physics - Electronics360

How quantum trickery can scramble cause and effect – Nature.com

Posted on June 30, 2017 by Danzig

Albert Einstein is heading out for his daily stroll and has to pass through two doorways. First he walks through the green door, and then through the red one. Or wait did he go through the red first and then the green? It must have been one or the other. The events had have to happened in a sequence, right?

Not if Einstein were riding on one of the photons ricocheting through Philip Walther's lab at the University of Vienna. Walther's group has shown that it is impossible to say in which order these photons pass through a pair of gates as they zip around the lab. It's not that this information gets lost or jumbled it simply doesn't exist. In Walther's experiments, there is no well-defined order of events.

This finding1 in 2015 made the quantum world seem even stranger than scientists had thought. Walther's experiments mash up causality: the idea that one thing leads to another. It is as if the physicists have scrambled the concept of time itself, so that it seems to run in two directions at once.

In everyday language, that sounds nonsensical. But within the mathematical formalism of quantum theory, ambiguity about causation emerges in a perfectly logical and consistent way. And by creating systems that lack a clear flow of cause and effect2, researchers now think they can tap into a rich realm of possibilities. Some suggest that they could boost the already phenomenal potential of quantum computing. A quantum computer free from the constraints of a predefined causal structure might solve some problems faster than conventional quantum computers, says quantum theorist Giulio Chiribella of the University of Hong Kong.

What's more, thinking about the 'causal structure' of quantum mechanics which events precede or succeed others might prove to be more productive, and ultimately more intuitive, than couching it in the typical mind-bending language that describes photons as being both waves and particles, or events as blurred by a haze of uncertainty.

And because causation is really about how objects influence one another across time and space, this new approach could provide the first steps towards uniting the two cornerstone theories of physics and resolving one of the most profound scientific challenges today. Causality lies at the interface between quantum mechanics and general relativity, says Walther's collaborator aslav Brukner, a theorist at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information in Vienna, and so it could help us to think about how one could merge the two conceptually.

Causation has been a key issue in quantum mechanics since the mid-1930s, when Einstein challenged the apparent randomness that Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg had installed at the heart of the theory. Bohr and Heisenberg's Copenhagen interpretation insisted that the outcome of a quantum measurement such as checking the orientation of a photon's plane of polarization is determined at random, and only in the instant that the measurement is made. No reason can be adduced to explain that particular outcome. But in 1935, Einstein and his young colleagues Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen (now collectively denoted EPR) described a thought experiment that pushed Bohr's interpretation to a seemingly impossible conclusion.

The EPR experiment involves two particles, A and B, that have been prepared with interdependent, or 'entangled', properties. For example, if A has an upward-pointing 'spin' (crudely, a quantum property that can be pictured a little bit like the orientation of a bar magnet), then B must be down, and vice versa.

Both pairs of orientations are possible. But researchers can discover the actual orientation only when they make a measurement on one of the particles. According to the Copenhagen interpretation, that measurement doesn't just reveal the particle's state; it actually fixes it in that instant. That means it also instantly fixes the state of the particle's entangled partner however far away that partner is. But Einstein considered this apparent instant action at a distance impossible, because it would require faster-than-light interaction across space, which is forbidden by his special theory of relativity. Einstein was convinced that this invalidated the Copenhagen interpretation, and that particles A and B must already have well-defined spins before anybody looks at them.

Measurements of entangled particles show, however, that the observed correlation between the spins can't be explained on the basis of pre-existing properties. But these correlations don't actually violate relativity because they can't be used to communicate faster than light. Quite how the relationship arises is hard to explain in any intuitive cause-and-effect way.

But what the Copenhagen interpretation does at least seem to retain is a time-ordering logic: a measurement can't induce an effect until after it has been made. For event A to have any effect on event B, A has to happen first. The trouble is that this logic has unravelled over the past decade, as researchers have realized that it is possible to imagine quantum scenarios in which one simply can't say which of two related events happens first.

Classically, this situation sounds impossible. True, we might not actually know whether A or B happened first but one of them surely did. Quantum indeterminacy, however, isn't a lack of knowledge; it's a fundamental prohibition on pronouncing on any 'true state of affairs' before a measurement is made.

Brukner's group in Vienna, Chiribella's team and others have been pioneering efforts to explore this ambiguous causality in quantum mechanics3, 4. They have devised ways to create related events A and B such that no one can say whether A preceded and led to (in a sense 'caused') B, or vice versa. This arrangement enables information to be shared between A and B in ways that are ruled out if there is a definite causal order. In other words, an indeterminate causal order lets researchers do things with quantum systems that are otherwise impossible.

The trick they use involves creating a special type of quantum 'superposition'. Superpositions of quantum states are well known: a spin, for example, can be placed in a superposition of up and down states. And the two spins in the EPR experiment are in a superposition in that case involving two particles. It's often said that a quantum object in a superposition exists in two states at once, but more properly it simply cannot be said in advance what the outcome of a measurement would be. The two observable states can be used as the binary states (1 and 0) of quantum bits, or qubits, which are the basic elements of quantum computers.

The researchers extend this concept by creating a causal superposition. In this case, the two states represent sequences of events: a particle goes first through gate A and then through gate B (so that A's output state determines B's input), or vice versa.

In 2009, Chiribella and his co-workers came up with a theoretical way to do an experiment like this using a single qubit as a switch that controls the causal order of events experienced by a particle that acts as second qubit3. When the control-switch qubit is in state 0, the particle goes through gate A first, and then through gate B. When the control qubit is in state 1, the order of the second qubit is BA. But if that qubit is in a superposition of 0 and 1, the second qubit experiences a causal superposition of both sequences meaning there is no defined order to the particle's traversal of the gates (see 'Trippy journeys').

Nik Spencer/Nature

Three years later, Chiribella proposed an explicit experimental procedure for enacting this idea5; Walther, Brukner and their colleagues subsequently worked out how to implement it in the lab1. The Vienna team uses a series of 'waveplates' (crystals that change a photon's polarization) and partial mirrors that reflect light and also let some pass through. These devices act as the logic gates A and B to manipulate the polarization of a test photon. A control qubit determines whether the photon experiences AB or BA or a causal superposition of both. But any attempt to find out whether the photon goes through gate A or gate B first will destroy the superposition of gate ordering.

Having demonstrated causal indeterminacy experimentally, the Vienna team wanted to go further. It's one thing to create a quantum superposition of causal states, in which it is simply not determined what caused what (that is, whether the gate order is AB or BA). But the researchers wondered whether it is possible to preserve causal ambiguity even if they spy on the photon as it travels through various gates.

At face value, this would seem to violate the idea that sustaining a superposition depends on not trying to measure it. But researchers are now realizing that in quantum mechanics, it's not exactly what you do that matters, but what you know.

Last year, Walther and his colleagues devised a way to measure the photon as it passes through the two gates without immediately changing what they know about it6. They encode the result of the measurement in the photon itself, but do not read it out at the time. Because the photon goes through the whole circuit before it is detected and the measurement is revealed, that information can't be used to reconstruct the gate order. It's as if you asked someone to keep a record of how they feel during a trip and then relay the information to you later so that you can't deduce exactly when and where they were when they wrote it down.

As the Vienna researchers showed, this ignorance preserves the causal superposition. We don't extract any information about the measurement result until the very end of the entire process, when the final readout takes place, says Walther. So the outcome of the measurement process, and the time when it was made, are hidden but still affect the final result.

Other teams have also been creating experimental cases of causal ambiguity by using quantum optics. For example, a group at the University of Waterloo in Canada and the nearby Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics has created quantum circuits that manipulate photon states to produce a different causal mash-up. In effect, a photon passes through gates A and B in that order, but its state is determined by a mixture of two causal procedures: either the effect of B is determined by the effect of A, or the effects of A and B are individually determined by some other event acting on them both, in much the same way that a hot day can increase sunburn cases and ice-cream sales without the two phenomena being directly causally related. As with the Vienna experiments, the Waterloo group found that it's not possible to assign a single causal 'story' to the state the photons acquire7.

Some of these experiments are opening up new opportunities for transmitting information. A causal superposition in the order of signals travelling through two gates means that each can be considered to send information to the other simultaneously. Crudely speaking, you get two operations for the price of one, says Walther. This offers a potentially powerful shortcut for information processing.

An indeterminate causal order lets researchers do things with quantum systems that are otherwise impossible.

Although it has long been known that using quantum superposition and entanglement could exponentially increase the speed of computation, such tricks have previously been played only with classical causal structures. But the simultaneous nature of pathways in a quantum-causal superposition offers a further boost in speed. That potential was apparent when such superpositions were first proposed: quantum theorist Lucien Hardy at the Perimeter Institute8 and Chiribella and his co-workers3 independently suggested that quantum computers operating with an indefinite causal structure might be more powerful than ones in which causality is fixed.

Last year, Brukner and his co-workers showed9 that building such a shortcut into an information-processing protocol with many gates should give an exponential increase in the efficiency of communication between gates, which could be beneficial for computation. We haven't reached the end yet of the possible speed-ups, says Brukner. Quantum mechanics allows way more.

It's not terribly complicated to build the necessary quantum-circuit architectures, either you just need quantum switches similar to those Walther has used. I think this could find applications soon, Brukner says.

The bigger goal, however, is theoretical. Quantum causality might supply a point of entry to some of the hardest questions in physics such as where quantum mechanics comes from.

Quantum theory has always looked a little ad hoc. The Schrdinger equation works marvellously to predict the outcomes of quantum experiments, but researchers are still arguing about what it means, because it's not clear what the physics behind it is. Over the past two decades, some physicists and mathematicians, including Hardy10 and Brukner11, have sought to clarify things by building 'quantum reconstructions': attempts to derive at least some characteristic properties of quantum-mechanical systems such as entanglement and superpositions from simple axioms about, say, what can and can't be done with the information encoded in the states (see Nature 501, 154156; 2013).

The framework of causal models provides a new perspective on these questions, says Katja Ried, a physicist at the University of Innsbruck in Austria who previously worked with the University of Waterloo team on developing systems with causal ambiguity. If quantum theory is a theory about how nature processes and distributes information, then asking in which ways events can influence each other may reveal the rules of this processing.

And quantum causality might go even further by showing how one can start to fit quantum theory into the framework of general relativity, which accounts for gravitation. The fact that causal structure plays such a central role in general relativity motivates us to investigate in which ways it can 'behave quantumly', says Ried.

Most of the attempts to understand quantum mechanics involve trying to save some aspects of the old classical picture, such as particle trajectories, says Brukner. But history shows us that what is generally needed in such cases is something more, he says something that goes beyond the old ideas, such as a new way of thinking about causality itself. When you have a radical theory, to understand it you usually need something even more radical.

See the original post:

How quantum trickery can scramble cause and effect - Nature.com

Why can’t quantum theory and relativity get along? – Brantford Expositor

Posted on June 30, 2017 by Danzig

There are many popular memes on the Internet that have to do with differing perceptions.

They have multiple photos captioned: What I think I do; What my friends think I do; What my mother thinks I do; and, finally, What I really do.

The pictures usually show wildly differing perceptions of the same job. This also appears to be the case with science. There is often a vast gulf between what people think about science and what it truly is.

Most people tend to think of science as the queen of the intellectual disciplines - always sure and precise, having all the answers to any conceivable question. Sadly, nothing could be further from the truth. Even science itself recognized this as truth with the division between theoretical and practical sciences.

If science is the queen of intellectual disciplines, Physics is the king of science. It is the fundamental investigation into how the world around us works. It includes chemistry, biology, mechanics and just about anything else you can think of. Physics stands astride of science like a Colossus, proud, sure and confident. But this is only a faade. There is a fundamental contradiction inside physics that has defied explanation for the past 100 years. And we are, even now, only beginning to glimpse some faint ideas about how this contradiction can be resolved.

In physics, there are two theories that form the basis for our understanding of the universe. Quantum physics that has explained how matter is constructed and why it behaves the way that it does. Most nuclear physics deals almost exclusively with quantum physics.

On the other end of the spectrum of physics knowledge is relativity. One man, Albert Einstein, whose very name has become another way of saying genius, was responsible for this wonderful theory that is master of everything large. It deals with the structure of the universe, the nature of gravity and explains space and time. It is a theory that has stood every test that has been put to it and it has never failed to produce the expected results or even a slight deviation from the expected results.

Both quantum theory and relativity are two of the most successful theories that we have ever had. The problem is that they don't play well together. That's right, two theories that are as close to reality as we have ever come are not compatible with each other. Doesn't make sense, does it? When you try to apply relativity to the very small scales of the atomic realm, suddenly the mathematics does not make sense any more. Quantities become infinite and predictions go wildly astray.

How is this possible?

If I could answer that question, I would be preparing my speech for my Nobel Prize ceremony. The thing that makes this amazing is that each theory is so close to describing reality that it is almost inconceivable that it could be incorrect. If either or, indeed, both theories are wrong, it will bring about a complete revolution in our understanding of reality.

Some years ago, I visited CERN in Geneva just a couple of months before its discovery of the Higgs particle that controls the mass of matter. CERN is the world's largest scientific apparatus and is designed to smash atoms together at almost the speed of light and then analyze the pieces to understand how matter works. I managed to have lunch in the cafeteria there with some of the scientists working on this marvellous machine. Sitting not too far away were at least two Nobel Prize winners who were doing work at CERN.

The conversation took an interesting turn when I asked them what would happen if the machine did not find evidence of the Higgs particle. The fellow I was talking to got a faraway look in his eyes and said; "Then physics would become very interesting. Something unexpected means that we don't understand it all and we would have to become very creative to figure out what is going on because everything else fits our current theories."

Nobel laureate Richard Feynman agreed with this assessment when he said that physics required a great deal of imagination, but imagination in a straitjacket. This means that you cannot imagine anything you like. What you theorize must also conform to everything we already know. In other words, any new theory must not only explain the new phenomena, but must still provide an explanation for all the old phenomena as well, or, at the very least, not be incompatible with what we observe.

This is the situation for modern physics. We have two incredibly detailed and effective theories of how various parts of nature work, and they are not compatible.

It would seem that physics is indeed "interesting again."

Tim Philp has enjoyed science since he was old enough to read. Having worked in technical fields all his life, he shares his love of science with readers weekly. He can be reached by e-mail at: tphilp@bfree.on.ca or via snail mail c/o The Expositor.

Brantford Expositor 2017

Read this article:

Why can't quantum theory and relativity get along? - Brantford Expositor

Payments Innovation – A Quantum World Of Payments – Finextra (blog)

Posted on June 30, 2017 by Danzig

In nature, change is constant and inevitable. It is also fairly slow and mainly evolutionary. At the macro level, everything looks very logical, guided by the basic scientific laws of physics, chemistry and biology. We are comfortable with changes that we can observe and measure. We feel that we are in full control of predicting future movements, through elegant mathematical modeling and good enough approximations. The world of macro physics is full of order that is guided by clear scientific standards.

By digging deeper into the area of subatomic particles and quantum physics, things start to look blurry, counter-intuitive and completely unexpected. Old silos of physics, chemistry and biology, as distinct scientific disciplines, start to disappear. We cant clearly observe and freely measure any process, without danger of ruining and completely skewing the results of the very same measurement. We feel amazed and fascinated by the apparent chaos, but also confused and often scared by our inability to comprehend and predict whats next. Thats the domain reserved only for the fearless and most curious minds. Imagination and intuition rule this world, without clear standards and without obvious order.

The physics reality of payments

In the world of payments, I see similar patterns. The traditional payments are ruled by established standards and are protected by clear rules, regulations and relatively high barriers to entry. These sometimes rigid Newtonian laws of payments industry were established over several decades by payment networks like Visa, Mastercard, etc. Traditional FIs feel very comfortable here since they know how to play by the rules and they excel at it. Thats why we enjoy pretty good safety and security of in-store payments today. The standards like EMV, ISO 8583, ISO 20022, PCI DSS are just some of the examples illustrating the point. However, today some of these standards (not all) start to feel old and somewhat inefficient in dealing with some of the demands of the modern payments trends.

On the other hand, in the payments innovation space, we feel like operating inside the subatomic world and space of the payment industry. Similar to the world of quantum physics, frequently, there are no clear rules, and imagination and intuition are often required to be relied on in order to invent and launch new services and products. Disruption of the old business models is ultimately at stake. The new business models are often not easily understood by payment traditionalists. As such, the payments innovation space is opportunistic and exciting, wide open for creative players, but at the same time, it is full of risks for potential investors and incumbents, which are faced with the inability to clearly distinguish winners from losers early enough.

Take online payments as an example there is no clear standard here. It represented the Wild West of the payments industry in the last couple of decades. It is a space that is still filled with significant security risks and friction. Agile and nimble FinTechs may thrive in such an environment, feeling free to experiment, unbound by any of the regulations and unconstrained by a traditionalist mindset. No wonder that incumbent FIs together with Visa and Mastercard have been somewhat marginal players here, despite their ability to rule the world of physical POS payment rails for over half a century now.

Blockchain is an even better example of the financial industrys quantum world. It feels directionless, void of any clear standards and rules, combined with quirky and muddy explanations of underlying consensus-reaching algorithms. It is a fertile ground for buzzwords and skilled snake oil type salesmen, further amplifying the inherent sense of confusion and unpredictability. Despite all of the hype and attention, however, blockchains disruptive potential has not been realized in real life so far. Key questions still galore: which blockchain platform to choose? Are the empirics behind the various consensus recipes trustworthy enough and mathematically provable? How do we deal with inherent scalability challenges for real-time payments? The quest for suitable use cases still continues, but it is starting to feel like we are quickly approaching the point where the whole blockchain movement may need to detach itself from the original (traditionalist) route and creatively explore some of the unusual paths and back roads, to be able to deliver promised breakthrough innovations.

It should be obvious by now, that the two worlds of payments traditional and innovation are not compatible. How do we move forward then?

What can be done?

Lets go back to the physics field for potential inspiration and guidance. Physicists clearly recognized the chasm and impedance mismatch between traditional and quantum science and are patiently working together to bridge the incompatible views. The relentless pursuit of the (still elusive) theory of everything in physics is underway, with many colliding theories in existence, but with everybody marching toward the same important goal here. Physicists on all sides of the scientific spectrum clearly understand the need for healthy open-minded collaboration toward final convergence and harmonization of all of their existing incompatible views. Although it may not be obvious, they are in my opinion perfect example of agile innovators, not afraid to try any promising theory, challenge it and pivot if required or adopt and build on it. They are also brutal realists, well aware that their goal of ultimate convergence can only be enabled by solid standardization along the way.

Now, back to payments again. The good news is that standardization in the payments space is not limited, in any way, by our ability to understand unpredictable laws of the subatomic world, but purely by the willingness of all involved players to systematically collaborate and create necessary standards that enable progress. Nimble and agile FinTechs may feel they are more adept to play in chaotic innovation space, but it is in their best interest to realize as soon as possible that they shall enable their offerings for easy integration with the incumbents, in order to be seriously considered as future partners. Incumbents, on the other hand, must realize that they cant keep protecting their current business models forever, and shall become open-minded toward emerging payment innovations.

In online payments, for example, the upcoming W3C Payment Request and W3C Payment App standard APIs will enable direct communication between online merchants and the providers of online payment app browser plug-ins. Will both merchants and FIs recognize the potential of this standard and seize this opportunity? It can clearly give innovative FIs a chance to painlessly establish themselves as natural online payment providers for their current customers. It also enables merchants to integrate only with 1 standard API for initiation of online payments and thus eliminate the need for multiple Pay With buttons on their checkout pages, each involving costly integration with a different set of APIs today. This is a huge opportunity and a clear candidate for theory of everything in the field of online payments. The process of online payment space standardization may likely expose PayPal as obsolete and unnecessary, after several decades of ruling the same space. Since this clearly benefits online merchants and FIs, I hope they will start collaborating intensely in 2017.

In the blockchain space, FinTechs must recognize that lack of standards, lack of clarity on the underlying consensus mechanisms and lack of scalability for real-time payments seriously impedes the adoption of their incompatible platforms. In my opinion, the set of common industry-standard APIs for blockchain is long overdue and initiating work must be the next biggest priority for the blockchain community in 2017. Why not again use W3C as a natural and neutral facilitator for this standardization? One day, the FIs should ultimately be able to experiment efficiently by plugging in blockchain platform A, then plug in blockchain platform B, in order to evaluate and compare, without the need to completely rewrite their application code. Further, the required scalability for real-time payments is hard to deliver elegantly using any of the current blockchain platforms. Here, openness to new ideas which might be radically different than the current mainstream thinking is clearly needed.

Will future deliver tangible solutions for some of these challenges? No crystal ball here, but I personally feel pumped up and am enthusiastically looking forward to our collective quest for the much needed theory of everything and standardization for every amazing sub-field of payments.

Go here to see the original:

Payments Innovation - A Quantum World Of Payments - Finextra (blog)

I’ve Overestimated Donald Trump – New York Times

Posted on June 30, 2017 by Danzig

Photo Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times

I have to confess Ive overestimated Donald Trump.

Back in the day, he sent me a copy of a column he objected to, with some notes suggesting I was a dog and a liar with the face of a pig.

Ive had many opportunities to make use of that story since Trump became a presidential candidate, so its all fine for me. However, I have to admit that it did not occur to me hed keep doing that kind of stuff as president of the United States.

The latest story involves Trump taking umbrage at the MSNBC Morning Joe hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough. So he took to Twitter, insulting them both and claiming that Brzezinski had come to Mar-a-Lago bleeding badly from a face-lift. Both she and Scarborough are plenty capable of taking care of themselves. But the country is, you know, sort of a different matter.

Every time one of these tweeting disasters occurs, it reminds us that the United States president has no more discernible self-control than a 10-year-old bully who works out his failure to pass third grade by tormenting the little kids on the playground.

The tweeting took place around 9 a.m. on a weekday and I believe that I speak for almost all Americans when I wonder whether he should have been in meetings instead.

The official White House position appears to be that Brzezinski deserved it since she had said mean things about the president on TV. Among Trumps small band of pathetic defenders we found Dan Scavino Jr., who is in charge of White House social media, who claimed #DumbAsARockMika and lover #JealousJoe are lost, confused & saddened since @POTUS @realDonaldTrump stopped returning their calls! Unhinged.

The important messages here are A) the White House expert on social media thinks dragging this out is a good plan and B) the White House expert on social media used to be Trumps golf caddy.

A lot of top Republican leaders have expressed their dismay about what was obviously a sexist insult, but thats hardly sufficient. This is the same party, after all, that recently produced its Senate health care bill drafted by a committee of 13 men. A bill whose defenders have argued, in effect, that making maternity health coverage more expensive is not a problem because guys dont get pregnant.

Read the original:

I've Overestimated Donald Trump - New York Times

Angela Merkel, Donald Trump, Wimbledon: Your Friday Briefing – New York Times

Posted on June 30, 2017 by Danzig

Her tough tone to some degree served as domestic political posturing ahead of elections in the fall. Martin Schulz, her main opponent, criticized her for not standing up more forcefully to President Trump.

Mr. Trump is expected to meet with President Vladimir Putin of Russia on the sidelines of the meeting in Hamburg.

Germany infuriated the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is also expected to attend the meeting, by rejecting his request to hold a rally for Turkish expatriate supporters there.

_____

In the U.S., lawyers and activists fanned out to airports as President Trumps travel ban went into effect. The State Department issued new guidelines on how to enforce the close family test on visitors from six predominantly Muslim countries.

We obtained a diplomatic cable that lays them out: Parents, spouses, children, in-laws and stepchildren qualify as close family. But grandparents, aunts and uncles do not. Here are the details.

Separately, Mr. Trump faced a bipartisan backlash after he assailed a television host in strikingly crude terms on Twitter.

_____

In Britain, the shaky government of Prime Minister Theresa May won Parliaments approval of its legislative program thanks to the support of 10 lawmakers from the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland.

In a sign of the governments precariousness, it agreed to fund abortions in England for women from Northern Ireland amid pressure from an emboldened opposition and from within Conservatives ranks.

It was an early rebuff for the staunchly conservative D.U.P., which opposes abortion (and gay marriage).

_____

Sports roundup: Germany reached the Confederations Cup finals in a riveting 4-1 victory over Mexico. They will face Chile in the soccer tournaments finale in St. Petersburg, Russia, on Sunday.

Wimbledon looms. Rafael Nadal will seek to extend his victory spree, on grass courts. And Venus Williams is expected to play, despite her involvement in a car crash on June 9 in Florida that resulted in a fatality.

And the Tour de France begins tomorrow, in the German city of Dsseldorf. Heres a stage-by-stage guide.

_____

Station F, a new start-up incubator in Paris, is a symbol of Frances ambitions to become Europes start-up capital. But some wonder if the land of the 35-hour workweek can overcome its cultural and regulatory barriers to competitiveness.

Rupert Murdochs long quest to buy Sky hasnt ended. The British authorities asked regulators to further examine 21st Century Foxs deal for the European satellite giant.

A cautionary speech by Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank, spooked the European bond market, then selling spread to global stocks.

Heres a snapshot of global markets.

Iraqi troops recaptured what is left of the historic Al Nuri Grand Mosque in Mosul, which was destroyed by retreating Islamic State militants. Experts say the group is increasingly resorting to insurgent tactics. [The New York Times]

Pope Francis granted a leave of absence to Cardinal George Pell, the Vaticans de facto finance chief who has been charged with sexual assault, so that he could return to Australia to defend himself. [The New York Times]

A court in Russia convicted five Chechens in the 2015 assassination of Boris Nemtsov, an opposition leader. His family dismissed the trial as a cover-up. [The New York Times]

In a Parisian suburb, a man was arrested after apparently attempting to drive into a crowd outside a mosque. No one was injured. [France 24]

In Greece, the cleanup after a lengthy strike by garbage collectors has begun. [Kathimerini]

Prosecutors in Macedonia are seeking to arrest Nikola Gruevski, a former longtime prime minister, on charges that include election fraud. [Balkan Insight]

Our former Hong Kong bureau chief, now in Shanghai, writes that the former British colony is losing its luster 20 years after its return to China. [The New York Times]

Tips, both new and old, for a more fulfilling life.

Kubaneh, a Jewish Yemeni bread, was traditionally cooked overnight on a Friday, ready for Shabbat breakfast the next day. It is sweet and supple and shot through with butter to create a melting, airy delight. Heres a recipe.

Samin Nosrat, our newest food columnist, shares the quintessential books that informed the way she thinks about food, cooking and writing.

Stop Pretending Youre Not Rich. This opinion piece has been one of our most popular articles this month. Forget the 1 percent for the moment, the writer argues. Its the top fifth that rules.

And knotting cherry stems with your tongue doesnt have any practical purpose other than serendipity. Anyway, heres a guide.

Italys Klondike: Competitors from around the world descended on Piedmont for the Italian Goldpanning Championship. They found nuggets the size of bread crumbs.

The Diagnoses column looks at hard-to-solve medical case studies. The latest is about a woman surviving typhus, in part thanks to a joke about flying squirrels.

The rhythm of love: Palm cockatoos are the only animals observed to use tools for rhythmic drumming, seemingly to attract mates.

Many visit Bergen en route to dramatic fjords. But the city itself, Norways second-largest, is well worth a visit too. Come for aquavit (the gin of the Nordics) and an all-are-welcome cultural scene. But bring an umbrella.

Canada celebrates its 150th birthday tomorrow.

Ian Austen, our correspondent, tells us that not everyone will be partying for Canada 150.

Alethea Arnaquq-Baril, an Inuit filmmaker, is among those who say that Canada 15,000 would better reflect the countys history. And Quebec saves its party spirit for the Fte Nationale on June 24.

But in a country where summer can be all too brief, Mr. Austen writes, Canada Day remains the main event, and Ottawa is the place to celebrate.

Military jets will perform flybys, performers will perform, politicians will make speeches, and fireworks will burst. The government is promising that it will all be bigger and better for the special anniversary except possibly the political speeches, Mr. Austen says.

Queen Elizabeth of Britain, who is also Canadas head of state, is sending Prince Charles, though he gets a more indifferent welcome than his sons. (The photo above shows Charles and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, arriving in Nunavut yesterday.)

And, perhaps incongruously, the Irish band U2 will perform before a crowd of hundreds of thousands, a staggering number of whom will have red maple leaves painted on their faces, Mr. Austen notes.

_____

This briefing was prepared for the European morning. We also have briefings timed for the Australian, Asian and American mornings. You can sign up for these and other Times newsletters here.

Your Morning Briefing is published weekday mornings and updated online.

What would you like to see here? Contact us at europebriefing@nytimes.com.

Follow this link:

Angela Merkel, Donald Trump, Wimbledon: Your Friday Briefing - New York Times

Select Page ::