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“In this article, I’m starting a four-part series on developing a regular writing routine. In this column, I’ll discuss and debunk two popular myths about writing. In my next column, I’ll review two of my favorite articles, one on expert performance and the other on writing research and apply it to developing a regular writing routine. Then I’ll write a piece on what a regular writing routine looks like in real-time; that is, when you put your bum on the chair on your fingers on the keyboard, what really happens. To wrap up this series, I’ll present my new book, the whole of which is focused on getting you to develop a regular writing routine as you write your dissertation.”
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“”It’s a really funny movie, and I think people are going to enjoy it,” lied the 39-year-old performer, knowing full well that he was misleading viewers into making a decision that was not in their best interests. “It’s got something for everybody.”
Added Vaughn, in another willful distortion of the truth, “It’s got a really fun vibe.””
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“We discuss a novel method of efficiently producing multiphoton states using repeated spontaneous parametric down-conversion. Specifically, by attempting down-conversion several times, we can pseudodeterministically add photons to a mode, producing various several-photon states, e.g., Fock states and N00N states (number-path entangled states of the form |NA,0B>+|0A,NB>). This scheme is exponentially more efficient than previous proposals; we discuss expected performance and experimental limitations.”
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“We create a six-qubit linear cluster state by transforming a two-photon hyperentangled state in which three qubits are encoded in each particle, one in the polarization and two in the linear momentum degrees of freedom. For this state, we demonstrate genuine six-qubit entanglement, persistency of entanglement against the loss of qubits, and higher violation than in previous experiments on Bell inequalities of the Mermin type.”
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“All three of the laureates this year carried out their groundbreaking work while working at corporate research labs. And that’s actually a problem, because labs like the ones this year’s laureates worked in don’t really exist now. Congress needs to consider that too as it continues to weigh FY 2010 and 2011 research budgets, climate legislation, and indeed the nation’s economic future.
The problem the country faces is that the conditions in which Charles Kao, Willard Boyle, and George Smith made their breakthroughs are harder to come by today. Kao, for example, made his breakthroughs in fiber optics (the thin glass threads that now carry a vast chunk of the world’s phone and data traffic) while at Standard Telecommunications Laboratories in the U.K. Similarly, Boyle and Smith designed the first digital imaging technology while working at Bell Labs, the legendary research organization that was once part of AT&T. “
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“Every public health campaign that starts from the premise that there’s a simple and rational preventive behavior change that people of course should adopt is setting itself up for failure, because it’s not thinking clearly about how most human beings in general inhabit the landscape of habit and convenience and risk-calculation, let alone local cultural framings of those same things. Public health campaigns sort of start by taking educated professional white Americans and their particular cluster of common attitudes and cultural postures as the norm and everything else as uncompliant end usage or uneducated deviance. Among other things, if you want to convince people to better safeguard their own health and the health of other people around them, you’d better back up a bit and find out whether they care much about their own health and the health of other people around them. That’s not a universal, and not caring doesn’t make someone a monster or a sociopath. “