Cholera revolts: a class struggle we may not like

Few have studied cholera revolts comparatively, and certainly not over the vast terrain from Asiatic Russia to Quebec or across time from the first European cholera wave of the 1830s to the twentieth century. Scholars have instead concentrated on the first European cholera wave in the 1830s and have tended to explain cholera’s social violence within the political contexts of individual nations, despite these riots raging across vast differences in political landscapes from Czarist Russia to New York City but with similar fears and conspiracy theories of elites inventing cholera to cull populations of the poor. Moreover, the history of cholera’s social toxins runs against present generalizations on why epidemics spawn blame and violence against others. Cholera riots continued, and in Italy and Russia became geographically more widespread, vicious, and destructive long after the disease had lost its mystery. The article then poses the question of why historians on the left have not studied the class struggles provoked by cholera, with riots of 10,000, murdering state officials and doctors, destroying hospitals, town halls, and in the case of Donetsk, an entire city. Finally, the article draws parallels between Europe’s cholera experiences and those in West Africa with Ebola in 2014

Distributed quantum computing: A distributed Shor algorithm

We present a distributed implementation of Shor's quantum factoring algorithm on a distributed quantum network model. This model provides a means for small capacity quantum computers to work together in such a way as to simulate a large capacity quantum computer. In this paper, entanglement is used as a resource for implementing non-local operations between two or more quantum computers. These non-local operations are used to implement a distributed factoring circuit with polynomially many gates. This distributed version of Shor's algorithm requires an additional overhead of O((log N)^2) communication complexity, where N denotes the integer to be factored.Comment: 13 pages, 12 figures, extra figures are remove

A Talk on Quantum Cryptography, or How Alice Outwits Eve

Alice and Bob wish to communicate without the archvillainess Eve eavesdropping on their conversation. Alice, decides to take two college courses, one in cryptography, the other in quantum mechanics. During the courses, she discovers she can use what she has just learned to devise a cryptographic communication system that automatically detects whether or not Eve is up to her villainous eavesdropping. Some of the topics discussed are Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, the Vernam cipher, the BB84 and B92 cryptographic protocols. The talk ends with a discussion of some of Eve's possible eavesdropping strategies, opaque eavesdropping, translucent eavesdropping, and translucent eavesdropping with entanglement.Comment: 31 pages, 8 figures. Revised version of a paper published in "Coding Theory, and Cryptography: From Geheimscheimschreiber and Enigma to Quantum Theory," (edited by David Joyner), Springer-Verlag, 1999 (pp. 144-174). To be published with the permission of Springer-Verlag in an AMS PSAPM Short Course volume entitled "Quantum Computation.