‘Time Crystals’ Could Upend Physicists’ Theory of Time

BY NATALIE WOLCHOVER


In February 2012, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek decided to go public with a strange and, he worried, somewhat embarrassing idea. Impossible as it seemed, Wilczek had developed an apparent proof of “time crystals” — physical structures that move in a repeating pattern, like minute hands rounding clocks, without expending energy or ever winding down. Unlike clocks or any other known objects, time crystals derive their movement not from stored energy but from a break in the symmetry of time, enabling a special form of perpetual motion.

“Most research in physics is continuations of things that have gone before,” said Wilczek, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This, he said, was “kind of outside the box.”

Wilczek’s idea met with a muted response from physicists. Here was a brilliant professor known for developing exotic theories that later entered the mainstream, including the existence of particles called axions and anyons, and discovering a property of nuclear forces known as asymptotic freedom (for which he shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 2004). But perpetual motion, deemed impossible by the fundamental laws of physics, was hard to swallow. Did the work constitute a major breakthrough or faulty logic? Jakub Zakrzewski, a professor of physics and head of atomic optics at Jagiellonian University in Poland who wrote a perspective on the research that accompanied Wilczek’s publication, says: “I simply don’t know.”

Now, a technological advance has made it possible for physicists to test the idea. They plan to build a time crystal, not in the hope that this perpetuum mobile will generate an endless supply of energy (as inventors have striven in vain to do for more than a thousand years) but that it will yield a better theory of time itself.

more
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/04/time-crystals/all/

This Indian outsourcing giant is outsourcing its own jobs—to computers

Ailing outsourcing giant Infosys yesterday inked a deal with IPsoft, a New York-based firm that automates IT infrastructure management—the sort of dreadfully dull stuff grunts in Bangalore typically do.

Infrastructure management only accounted for 7% of Infosys sales in the last financial year, according to the Economic Times. That compares to a whopping 28% for HCL, which is doing rather well. But it’s enough (and enough of a drag) to gobble up chunks of Infosys’s manpower. The numbers aren’t public but IPsoft will train 4,500 Infosys employees to run the software, which indicates a many more employees must have done it manually. According to IPsoft, its software can automate up to 60% of the most basic tasks. The freed-up employees can now focus on other projects while Infosys can pitch for more infrastructure management projects without having to expand dramatically. The industry lingo for this is “non-linear growth.”

“The economics are simple—minimal human intervention with services delivered at unparalleled quality, and there are no annual wage increases, too,” IPsoft’s Asia-Pacific head told the Mint newspaper last year. At the time, the paper reported that Infosys competitors Wipro and Cognizant were hoping to tie up with IPsoft, so getting there first represents something of a coup for Infosys

The company certainly needs a morale booster. “The past 3-4 quarterly financial announcements from Indian service providers suggest that many are struggling to conserve their margins in a tough market environment and that their non-linear innovations have not progressed quickly enough,” Fred Giron, an analyst at Forrester, wrote on his blog. Infosys’s profits in the three months to the end of March were up 3.4% on the previous year but its forceast for the coming year was well below what analysts expected. Its stock lost a fifth of its value that day.

more

http://qz.com/79736/infosys-oursourcing-ipsoft/

Money actually does buy happiness

By Derrick Thompson,
Americans have a peculiar conviction that the one thing money can’t give us is satisfaction. You can’t buy happiness, we’ve all been told. “Mo Money Mo Problems”, Biggie concurred. And while we can all agree that desperate poverty is hideous, there is a broadly held view that after a certain level of income (around $75,000, say), more money doesn’t buy more well-being.

But it’s just not so. Economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers have been arguing for years that, yes, richer families tend to be happier, and no, there is not an automatic cut-off point. In other words: Mo money, fewer problems.

Their elegant and straightforward new paper can be nicely summed up in the two graphs below. The first graph looks at income groups within countries. In all nations surveyed, richer households reported more life satisfaction. (Statistical note: This graph is logarithmic. That means doubling your income from $1,000 to $2,000 raises satisfaction by the same amount as doubling your income from $10,000 to $20,000. You can imagine why this might make a good theoretical case for income redistribution.)

The next graph compares different countries, rather than different households within countries. Here, each circle represents a nation, with the richest ones clustered on the right. If extra income didn’t matter for well-being, you’d expect the line to flatten. Instead, it steepens. More money doesn’t just mean happier families. It means happier countries.


more
http://qz.com/79725/money-actually-does-buy-happiness/

Tuesday Toon Roundup 5- The Rest

Economy





Health




Guns


Factory






Koch

Tuesday Toon Roundup 4- War and Bombs

Afghanistan



Syria









Bombers

Tuesday Toon Roundup 3- Collins comes out

Tuesday Toon Roundup 2- Sequester

Tuesday Toon Roundup 1- Perry and Bush

Drug-War Logic: These Costly, Failed Policies Must Continue Indefinitely

by CONOR FRIEDERSDORF

Did you know that the U.S. has been operating surveillance drones in Mexico, providing air support for the Mexican military, tracking the movements of Mexican citizens, sharing state of the art spy technology with Mexican officials, and sending CIA agents to help Mexico train drug informants? Did you know the DEA has more employees stationed in Mexico than any of its other foreign posts? That Mexican nationals trained and bankrolled by the CIA raid Mexican drug cartels? Or that the CIA runs high-tech "fusion centers" in Mexico City, Monterrey and elsewhere?

"For the past seven years, Mexico and the United States have put aside their tension-filled history on security matters to forge an unparalleled alliance against Mexico's drug cartels, one based on sharing sensitive intelligence, U.S. training and joint operational planning," Dana Priest reports in the Washington Post. "But now, much of that hard-earned cooperation may be in jeopardy." Enrique Pena Nieto, Mexico's new leader, reportedly dislikes the status quo, and was shocked, on taking office this December, at the degree of United States involvement in his country.

The article is worth reading in full.

What I can't help but remark upon is the way that it handles the spectacular failure of the War on Drugs. It notes "mounting criticism" that whatever success has been had against cartel leaders has also helped to incite "more violence than anyone had predicted, more than 60,000 deaths and 25,000 disappearances in the past seven years alone." Put another way, the period of maximum American involvement has coincided with a horrific spike in drug-related violence.

"Meanwhile," Priest continues, "the drug flow into the United States continued unabated. Mexico remains the U.S. market's largest supplier of heroin, marijuana and methamphetamine and the transshipment point for 95 percent of its cocaine." So the strategy was high cost, low reward.

Do Louisianans Have the Right to a Speedy Trial? Supreme Court says No

by
ANDREW COHEN

There has been for decades now an ideological split at the United States Supreme Court over the Sixth Amendment's right to a speedy trial -- one of the most basic of due process rights. Court conservatives have successfully limited the scope of the right by justifying and forgiving unconscionable delays in bringing criminal defendants to trial. And the Court's progressives, outnumbered now for a generation, have complained not just about the unjust results of those cases but about the indigent defense systems which have fostered trial delays in the first place.

And so it is again. On Monday, in a case styled Boyer v. Louisiana, none of the Court's five conservative justices were willing to come to the aid of a man who had to wait seven years between his arrest and his trial because of a "funding crisis" within Louisiana's indigent defense program. In fact, those five justices refused even to render a ruling on the merits of the matter, instead deciding after oral argument and all the briefing in the case that their earlier decision to accept the matter for review was "improvident."

It was left to Justice Samuel Alito to defend the Court's inaction. The long delay in bringing Jonathan Edward Boyer to trial on murder charges was not just the fault of Louisiana and its infamously underfunded and understaffed indigent defense program, Justice Alito concluded. "['T]he record shows that the single largest share of the delay in this case was the direct result of defense requests for continuances, that other defense motions caused substantial additional delay, and that much of the rest of the delay was caused by events beyond anyone's control," he wrote. That was enough to deny Boyer's claims.

All four of the Court's progressives disagreed. The majority's quick assessment of the facts and the record was flawed, they wrote, and by ducking the issue on its merits the Supreme Court abdicated its responsibility not just to the defendant in the case but to thousands of other criminal defendants in Louisiana who are similarly too poor to pay for their own attorneys. "The Court's silence in this case is particularly unfortunate," wrote Justice Sonia Sotomayor in a sharp dissent. "Conditions of this kind cannot persist without endangering constitutional rights."

more
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/04/do-louisianans-have-the-right-to-a-speedy-trial/275385/