HTML 5 Won’t Be Ready Until 2022. Yes, 2022

If you’re a web developer looking forward to the new tools in HTML 5, the next generation of the language that powers the web, we have some bad news for you — you’re going to waiting a while. Ian Hickson, the editor of the HTML 5 specification, recently outlined the time table for HTML 5 and, even assuming browser manufacturers embrace HTML 5 when it reaches the final draft stage, that puts HTML 5’s widespread adoption at 2012. Worse, the final proposed recommendation won’t be released until 2022.

Mark Gimein -> Swan Song: Why Nassim Taleb is Still Wrong

While for just about everyone involved in the markets the last two years of financial history have been a massacre, they have been a long victory lap for Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Taleb is the author of The Black Swan, the book about, as the subtitle puts it, "The Impact of the Highly Improbable." It came out in 2007, just before everything that seemed highly improbable became painfully actual. As everyone else's fortunes have shrunk, Taleb's have risen. Not only have his books made him the public face of the New Catastrophism, but his insights have turned out to be extremely profitable: The Wall Street Journal reports that Universa, a hedge fund for which Taleb serves as guru and adviser, gained more than 100 percent last year and now holds $6 billion.

Ant mega-colony takes over world

A single mega-colony of ants has colonised much of the world, scientists have discovered. Argentine ants living in vast numbers across Europe, the US and Japan belong to the same inter-related colony, and will refuse to fight one another. The colony may be the largest of its type ever known for any insect species, and could rival humans in the scale of its world domination. What's more, people are unwittingly helping the mega-colony stick together. Argentine ants (Linepithema humile) were once native to South America. But people have unintentionally introduced the ants to all continents except Antarctica. These introduced Argentine ants are renowned for forming large colonies, and for becoming a significant pest, attacking native animals and crops.

Mancur Olson (La Lógica de la Acción Colectiva, etc...)

Mancur Olson ( 1932 - 19 de febrero de 1998 ) fue un destacado economista y sociólogo estadounidense que, en el momento de su muerte, trabajaba en el College Park de la Universidad de Maryland. Realizó importantes contribuciones a los estudios de economía política en temas como las funciones de la propiedad privada, los impuestos, los bienes públicos, las acciones colectivas y el desarrollo económico. Olson destacó la base lógica de la participación en los grupos de presión. Las teorías políticas predominantes en su época atribuían un papel primordial a la pertenencia y la participación en los grupos de presión. Unas apelaban a la existencia de un instinto humano por la creación de grupos, otros atribuían el proceso de modernización a la formación de grupos basados en el parentesco. Olson ofreció una explicación radicalmente diferente del fundamento lógico de la acción colectiva organizada. En su primer libro La lógica de la acción colectiva: bienes públicos y la teoría de grupos, propuso que "sólo un incentivo individual y selectivo estimularía a una persona racional de un grupo latente a actuar con un espíritu grupal"; es decir, que sólo un beneficio reservado estrictamente a miembros de un grupo motivaría a alguien a unirse y contribuir al grupo. Esto significa que los individuos actuarán colectivamente para proporcionar bienes privados, no para proporcionar bienes públicos.

Examples of Mathematical Physics

One challenge in a course like this is to maintain the connection with actual applications of the techniques one is covering. Since I was originally taught this material in a set of courses as a mathematics undergraduate, my own take on the material can be rather formal, and I have worked over the years to balance this out. However, as you might guess, my own examples are predominantly drawn from those areas of physics with which I am most familiar - for example, supersymmetry, and the restrictions that holomorphy places on superpotentials, is a nice illustration of the power of complex analysis.

See this useful link.

Device Makes Radio Waves Travel Faster Than Light

A scientist has created a gadget that can make radio waves travel faster than light. Einstein predicted that particles and information can't travel faster than the speed of light, but phenomena like radio waves are a different story, said John Singleton, who works at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The polarization synchrotron combines the waves with a rapidly spinning magnetic field, and the result could explain why pulsars — which are super-dense spinning stars that are a subclass of neutron stars — emit such powerful signals, a phenomenon that has baffled many scientists.

Patrick Cox: The Quantum Leap of Quantum Computing

The electronics and computing industries are getting primed for a massive transformation in the years ahead. Quantum technologies that were only theories in scientific journals just a few years ago are being prototyped in labs now. These new components will change the way we live forever. They will also create transformational profit opportunities.

Quantum mechanical evolution towards thermal equilibrium

The circumstances under which a system reaches thermal equilibrium, and how to derive this from basic dynamical laws, has been a major question from the very beginning of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics.

Despite considerable progress, it remains an open problem.

Motivated by this issue, we address the more general question of equilibration. We prove, with virtually full generality, that reaching equilibrium is a universal property of quantum systems: almost any subsystem in interaction with a large enough bath will reach an equilibrium state and remain close to it for almost all times. We also prove several general results about other aspects of thermalization besides equilibration, for example, that the equilibrium state does not depend on the detailed microstate of the bath.

How to Avoid Yourself

Every Sunday morning you go for a walk in the city, heading nowhere in particular, with just one rule to your rambling: You never retrace your steps or cross your own path. If you have already walked along a certain block or passed through an intersection, you refuse to set foot there again.

This recipe for tracing a loopless path through a grid of city streets leads into some surprisingly dark back alleys of mathematics—not to mention byways of physics, chemistry, computer science and biology. Avoiding yourself, it turns out, is a hard problem. The exact analysis of self-avoiding walks has stumped mathematicians for half a century; even counting the walks is a challenge.

My own initiation into the trials of self-avoidance came when I began experimenting with a simple model of the folding of protein molecules, a story I told in an earlier "Computing Science" column (see Hayes 1998). Protein folding is close to the historical roots of the self-avoiding walk, which was first conceived as a tool for understanding the geometry of long-chain polymer molecules. A polymer writhing and wriggling in solution forms a random tangle—random, that is, except that no two atoms can occupy the same position at the same time. This "excluded volume effect" in the polymer is modeled by the walk's insistence on avoiding itself.

Swimming in the Fermi sea

When one “immerses” a particle in a quantum many-body system, for instance an electron in a solid, the particle “swims” shrouded by a cloud of excitations of its new environment. This composite object is called a quasiparticle and possesses the same features as the initial particle, but with modified physical properties ( mass, charge, etc... ).

As with other many-body phenomena, the ab initio calculation of quasiparticle properties is highly challenging, and in most cases it can only be treated approximately. To overcome this challenge, use of the versatility of laser-cooled gases to simulate many-body condensed matter systems has recently been proposed.

Writing in Physical Review Letters, André Schirotzek, Cheng-Hsun Wu, Ariel Sommer, and Martin Zwierlein from MIT in the US present a dramatic demonstration of this scheme by studying experimentally the behavior of an atomic impurity immersed in a Fermi sea of ultracold atoms: A very simple system that constitutes the epitome of quasiparticle physics.

Steven Weinberg: From BCS to the LHC

Steven Weinberg reflects on spontaneous symmetry breaking, and the connection between condensed-matter physics and particle physics, in a talk at the University of Illinois in Urbana, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the BCS theory of superconductivity. It was a little odd for me, a physicist whose work has been mainly on the theory of elementary particles, to be invited to speak at a meeting of condensed-matter physicists celebrating a great achievement in their field. It is not only that there is a difference in the subjects that we explore. There are deep differences in our aims, in the kinds of satisfaction that we hope to get from our work. Condensed-matter physicists are often motivated to deal with phenomena because the phenomena themselves are intrinsically so interesting. Who would not be fascinated by weird things, such as superconductivity, superfluidity, or the quantum Hall effect? On the other hand, I don't think that elementary-particle physicists are generally very excited by the phenomena they study. The particles themselves are practically featureless, every electron looking tediously just like every other electron.

Ayuda de Webmasters

La finalidad de este foro es proporcionar un lugar de encuentro para que los webmasters se ayuden entre ellos y, en ocasiones, nosotros aportemos consejos, clarificaciones y os mantengamos al día de las novedades. Antes de enviar una pregunta os aconsejamos echar un vistazo a estos recursos y si quieres seguirla utiliza su feed: ...

W3C: Web Storage

This specification defines two APIs for persistent data storage in Web clients: one for accessing key-value pair data and another for accessing structured data.

HTML 5

HTML 5 ( HyperText Markup Language Version 5 ) is the next major revision of the core language of the World Wide Web, HTML. HTML 5 is said to become a game-changer in Web application development, one that might even make obsolete such plug-in-based rich Internet application (RIA) technologies as Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and Sun JavaFX. HTML5 specifies two variants of the same language, a "classic" HTML ( text/html ) variant known as HTML 5 and an XHTML variant known as XHTML 5. This is the first time that HTML and XHTML have been developed in parallel.

Let's make the web faster

We are excited to discuss what we've learned about web performance with the Internet community. However, to optimize the speed of web applications and make browsing the web as fast as turning the pages of a magazine, we need to work together as a community, to tackle some larger challenges that keep the web slow and prevent it from delivering its full potential: ...

Fuzzy Math

Have the votes for president been properly counted in Florida ?. On the surface, that's a question of simple math. But beneath the number crunching, Republicans and Democrats are waging a war of disguised biases. When data don't turn out the way your theory predicts, should you question the theory or the data ?. When a new vote tally contradicts an old one, should you distrust the first count or the second ?. When one kind of recount is more evenhanded but another is more comprehensive, which is better ?. These dilemmas form the hidden crux of the debate over whether to recount Florida's ballots by hand, as Democrats prefer, or to rely on a machine recount, as Republicans prefer. The two parties aren't being candid about these questions. And math won't answer them.

Guilt by Calculation

This kind of statistical gumshoeing has a long history. In 1936, for example, English biologist and statistician R. A. Fisher went gunning for Gregor Mendel, whose experimental results Fisher believed had been tweaked to be more favorable to Mendel's ideas. "Fictitious data can seldom survive a careful scrutiny," Fisher wrote, "and, since most men underestimate the frequency of large deviations arising by chance, such data may be expected generally to agree more closely with expectation than genuine data would." In other words, it was precisely the beautiful agreement of experiment with theory that exposed Mendel's thumb on the scale. Only once in 15,000 times, Fisher computed, could one expect such strong conformity. ( The controversy over Mendel's research practices continues to this day, with notable scientists lining up on both men's sides ).

AWT and mechanical models of entanglement

By AWT explanation of quantum entanglement is closely related to wave function collapse. Try to imagine, you're a sailor, who is staying at night on the end of floating wharf, to which some boat is attached. Because night sea is stormy, everything ( both sailor, wharf and boat ) are wobbling up and down, but in different phases. From the perspective of sailor this boat sways randomly. The observation of quantum particle is analogous to situation, when sailor touches the boat for a moment, thus exchanging some kinetic energy with it. What will happen, after then ?

Evidence found of lake, catastrophic flood on Mars

Geologists at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum have discovered a large former lake in the highlands of Mars that would cover an area the size of Texas and New Mexico combined, and which overflowed to carve one of that planet's largest valleys. The findings appear in the June 21 issue of the journal Science.

Tunable few-electron double quantum dots and Klein tunnelling in ultraclean carbon nanotubes

Quantum dots defined in carbon nanotubes are a platform for both basic scientific studies and research into new device applications. In particular, they have unique properties that make them attractive for studying the coherent properties of single-electron spins. To perform such experiments it is necessary to confine a single electron in a quantum dot with highly tunable barriers, but disorder has prevented tunable nanotube-based quantum-dot devices from reaching the single-electron regime. Here, we use local gate voltages applied to an ultraclean suspended nanotube to confine a single electron in both a single quantum dot and, for the first time, in a tunable double quantum dot. This tunability is limited by a novel type of tunnelling that is analogous to the tunnelling in the Klein paradox of relativistic quantum mechanics.