smarterplanet: Google and NASA Launch Quantum Computing AI Lab Quantum computing took a giant leap forward on the world stage today as NASA and Google, in partnership with a consortium of universities, launched an initiative to investigate how the technology might lead to breakthroughs in artificial intelligence. The new Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab will employ what may be the most advanced commercially available quantum computer, the D-Wave Two, which a recent study confirmed was much faster than conventional machines at defeating specific problems. The machine will be installed at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Facility at the Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley and is expected to be available for government, industrial, and university research later this year. Google believes quantum computing might help it improve its web search and speech recognition technology. University researchers might use it to devise better models of disease and climate, among many other possibilities. As for NASA, “computers play a much bigger role within NASA missions than most people realize,” says quantum computing expert Colin Williams, director of business development and strategic partnerships at D-Wave.
“The fastest fiber-optic route between New Jersey and Chicago is approximately 16 milliseconds. In the world of algorithmic trading, according to Donald MacKenzie, it’s “a huge delay: you might as well be on the moon” (16) Indeed, Andrew Bach head of network services at NYSE Euronext said that “[t]he speed of light limitation is getting annoying” (Hecht). More recently, researchers are exploring the possibility of further shortening the time distance between financial centers by shooting neutrinos through the earth. Through the earth is, of course, the straightest line possible. However, since neutrinos cannot carry any information, the “encoding would be sent in one transmission using synchronized clocks on each end. By dividing time into 1000 nanoseconds… it would be possible to have a thousand pre-determined potential messages known on both ends… The time the signal arrived would determine which message is which” (Dorminey).”
Spain Produced 54% of its Electricity from Renewable Sources in April Taz Loomans, inhabitat.com Renewable energy is gaining major momentum in Spain. In April, the country set a new record with renewable energy accounting for 54 percent of the electricity generated in Spain. April’s figure just outpaced March’s record of 51.8 percent of electricity generated by renewables. And those numbers should continue to grow, as wind and solar development continues in the Mediterranean country. Spain’s electrical grid operator, Red Electrica De Espana (REE), reports that hydropower made up 25 percent of April’s overall electricity generation, wind power accounted for 22 percent, solar photovoltaic came in at 3.6 percent and solar thermal at 1.3 percent. If this current pattern holds, Spain may produce more electricity from renewables than it has in recent years. In 2006, renewable energy accounted for just 19% of the electricity generated in Spain. The percentage peaked in 2010 at 35 percent and kept steady around 32-33 percent in 2011 and 2012. Spain is targeting wind power to supply 40 percent of the electricity consumption by 2020, and the country is looking to grow its solar photovoltaic potential. To that end, Extramadura in Western Spain, which gets 3,200 hours of sun a year, just announced a new 250 MW unsubsidized solar plant. Once built, the PV plant is projected to be the third largest in the world.
Multiplier effects of tech jobs misunderstoodeconmajor: Multiplier Effects: Connecting the Innovation and Opportunity Agendas Mark Muro, August 23, 2012 12:00am My colleague Jonathan Rothwell already reviewed economist Enrico Moretti’s wonderful book, “The New Geography of Jobs,” but I wanted to jump in to highlight one particularly important point among the many Moretti makes. This concerns the matter of why everyone—including those of us worried about the fortunes of lower-income workers—should care about the innovation agenda we have made so much of here at the Metropolitan Policy Program. On this issue, Moretti speaks pretty insistently to those who remain skeptical about the benefits the high-tech, high-pay innovation economy confers on the rest of society. Put simply, he says that not only do innovative industries bring “good jobs” and high salaries to the communities where they cluster but that their impact is “much deeper” than their direct effect. And here Moretti deploys some fascinating original research on the nature and scope of “multiplier effects.” Multiplier effects reflect the full impact of a single job as measured by its associated additional economic activity and along these lines Moretti notes that attracting a scientist or a software engineer to a city triggers a substantial chain of economic effects with special relevance to both skilled and unskilled workers outside of the tech industry. Yet what is fascinating is that Moretti goes beyond asserting the general existence of multipliers to insist that high-tech jobs have especially large multipliers that are especially favorable for regular working people. Here’s Moretti: With only a fraction of the jobs, the innovation sector generates a disproportionate number of additional local jobs and therefore profoundly shapes the local economy. A healthy traded sector benefits the local economy directly, as it generates well-paid jobs, and indirectly as it creates additional jobs in the non-traded sector. What is truly remarkable is that this indirect effect on the local economy is much larger than the direct effect. My research, based on an analysis of 11 million American workers in 320 metropolitan areas, shows that for each new high-tech job in a metropolitan area, five additional local jobs are created outside of high tech in the long run. [And] it gets even more interesting. These five jobs benefit a diverse set of workers. Two of the jobs created by the multiplier effect are professional jobs—doctors and lawyers—while the other three benefit workers in nonprofessional occupations—waiters and store clerks. Take Apple, for example. It employs 12,000 workers in Cupertino. Through the multiplier effect, however, the company generates more than 60,000 additional service jobs in the entire metropolitan area, of which 36,000 are unskilled and 24,000 are skilled. Incredibly, this means that the main effect of Apple on the region’s employment is on jobs outside of high tech. Through this analysis, Moretti squares the circle between the economic value of super-productive, traded-sector innovation jobs and the well-being of everyone else. As far as job creation is concerned, there is, in his view, no inherent contradiction between the interests of high-income workers and those of low-income workers. The takeaway is critical: One of the best ways for a city or state to generate jobs for less-skilled workers is to develop and attract high-tech companies that hire highly skilled ones. http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/the-avenue/posts/2012/08/23-multiplier-effects-muro Why didn’t this cross my mind when I was learning the Stopler-Samuelson theorem? The idea that a job in a highly traded sector will create demand for some jobs in non-traded sectors seems obvious, regardless of actual evidence (I haven’t read the book because I’m too broke to buy it, so I can’t comment on the method). I wonder if this is about ‘net’ jobs created, or just jobs added through the demand chain. Because, if jobs in uncompetitive sectors are eliminated through free trade, then the numbers given here would be overestimated. Right? But yes, this post did make my day.

Multiplier effects of tech jobs

misunderstoodeconmajor:

Multiplier Effects: Connecting the Innovation and Opportunity Agendas

Mark Muro, August 23, 2012 12:00am

My colleague Jonathan Rothwell already reviewed economist Enrico Moretti’s wonderful book, “The New Geography of Jobs,” but I wanted to jump in to highlight one particularly important point among the many Moretti makes. This concerns the matter of why everyone—including those of us worried about the fortunes of lower-income workers—should care about the innovation agenda we have made so much of here at the Metropolitan Policy Program.

On this issue, Moretti speaks pretty insistently to those who remain skeptical about the benefits the high-tech, high-pay innovation economy confers on the rest of society. Put simply, he says that not only do innovative industries bring “good jobs” and high salaries to the communities where they cluster but that their impact is “much deeper” than their direct effect.

And here Moretti deploys some fascinating original research on the nature and scope of “multiplier effects.”

Multiplier effects reflect the full impact of a single job as measured by its associated additional economic activity and along these lines Moretti notes that attracting a scientist or a software engineer to a city triggers a substantial chain of economic effects with special relevance to both skilled and unskilled workers outside of the tech industry. Yet what is fascinating is that Moretti goes beyond asserting the general existence of multipliers to insist that high-tech jobs have especially large multipliers that are especially favorable for regular working people. Here’s Moretti:

With only a fraction of the jobs, the innovation sector generates a disproportionate number of additional local jobs and therefore profoundly shapes the local economy. A healthy traded sector benefits the local economy directly, as it generates well-paid jobs, and indirectly as it creates additional jobs in the non-traded sector. What is truly remarkable is that this indirect effect on the local economy is much larger than the direct effect. My research, based on an analysis of 11 million American workers in 320 metropolitan areas, shows that for each new high-tech job in a metropolitan area, five additional local jobs are created outside of high tech in the long run.

[And] it gets even more interesting. These five jobs benefit a diverse set of workers. Two of the jobs created by the multiplier effect are professional jobs—doctors and lawyers—while the other three benefit workers in nonprofessional occupations—waiters and store clerks. Take Apple, for example. It employs 12,000 workers in Cupertino. Through the multiplier effect, however, the company generates more than 60,000 additional service jobs in the entire metropolitan area, of which 36,000 are unskilled and 24,000 are skilled. Incredibly, this means that the main effect of Apple on the region’s employment is on jobs outside of high tech.

Through this analysis, Moretti squares the circle between the economic value of super-productive, traded-sector innovation jobs and the well-being of everyone else.

As far as job creation is concerned, there is, in his view, no inherent contradiction between the interests of high-income workers and those of low-income workers.

The takeaway is critical: One of the best ways for a city or state to generate jobs for less-skilled workers is to develop and attract high-tech companies that hire highly skilled ones.

http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/the-avenue/posts/2012/08/23-multiplier-effects-muro

Why didn’t this cross my mind when I was learning the Stopler-Samuelson theorem? The idea that a job in a highly traded sector will create demand for some jobs in non-traded sectors seems obvious, regardless of actual evidence (I haven’t read the book because I’m too broke to buy it, so I can’t comment on the method). I wonder if this is about ‘net’ jobs created, or just jobs added through the demand chain. Because, if jobs in uncompetitive sectors are eliminated through free trade, then the numbers given here would be overestimated. Right?

But yes, this post did make my day.

“In a twist straight out of the movie Inception, a duo of developers from Brooklyn, New York, have built a sleeping mask designed to allow people to have lucid dreams that they can control. While it may look like a standard sleeping mask, Remee has been billed as a special REM (Rapid Eye Movement) enhancing device that is supposed to help steer the sleeper into lucid dreaming by making the brain aware that it is dreaming. The goal of the product is to allow people to have the dreams of their choice, from driving a race car to flying to having lunch with Abraham Lincoln. The inside of the sleeping mask features a series of six red LED lights that are too faint to wake the sleeper up, but visible enough for the brain to register them. The lights can be programed to produce a sequence designed by the user. Sleep stages are divided into two main categories: non-REM and REM. People go back and forth between these stages throughout the night, with REM stages, where most dreaming occurs, lasting the longest towards morning. Remee apparently notices these longer REM stages and ‘enters’ the dream via the flashing lights. The device will wait for four to five hours for the sleeper to get into the heavy REM stages before the red lights turn on. The idea is simple: you are playing a perfect round of golf in a dream, and you see a pattern of red lights flashing in the distance. Because the pattern is in a particular sequence, it would signal to you that you are dreaming, not unlike the totem object in Inception. Once you realize you are in a dream, you can then decide what happens next, whether it be a quick trip to Antarctica or time travel. Rather than encumbering the mask with buttons and controls, its inventors set up a website called sleepwithremee.com where users can adjust the setups, such as when to start the light sequence and when to repeat it. The intensity of the lights can also be changed.”
Gesture recognition market to increase at a CAGR of 50% →
Voice recognition market to increase at a CAGR of 22% →
“This is the first time that quantum cryptography has been used for communication with a mobile transmitter and it demonstrates that quantum cryptography can be implemented as an extension to existing systems.”
mayhugh: (via Is Data Visualization Art? | Visual.ly Blog) See here for the enlarged version.
$100-million quantum computing fund established in Canada →
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