Yet Another Snapshot of Foundational Attitudes Toward Quantum Mechanics

A survey probing respondents' views on various foundational issues in quantum mechanics was recently created by Schlosshauer, Kofler, and Zeilinger [arXiv:1301.1069] and then given to 33 participants at a quantum foundations conference. Here we report the results of giving this same survey to the attendees at another recent quantum foundations conference. While it is rather difficult to conclude anything of scientific significance from the poll, the results do strongly suggest several interesting cultural facts -- for example, that there exist, within the broad field of "quantum foundations", sub-communities with quite different views, and that (relatedly) there is probably even significantly more controversy about several fundamental issues than the already-significant amount revealed in the earlier poll.Comment: 11 pages, 16 bar graph

Adiabatic radio frequency potentials for the coherent manipulation of matter waves

Adiabatic dressed state potentials are created when magnetic sub-states of trapped atoms are coupled by a radio frequency field. We discuss their theoretical foundations and point out fundamental advantages over potentials purely based on static fields. The enhanced flexibility enables one to implement numerous novel configurations, including double wells, Mach-Zehnder and Sagnac interferometers which even allows for internal state-dependent atom manipulation. These can be realized using simple and highly integrated wire geometries on atom chips.Comment: 13 pages, 2 figure

Planning for Monitoring, Learning, and Evaluation at Small- to Medium-Sized Foundations

This report is based on findings from desktop research and interviews with selected foundations conducted between April and June 2016. It was developed to give the Oak Foundation a sense of how other foundations are tackling monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) questions, and to show a range of options for Oak to consider as it develops its own MEL Plan. This summary of findings was developed for public distribution, anticipating that it may be useful for other donors.Key trends that emerged from the interviews and desktop research included the following:1. Foundations are spending more resources and putting more staff time into evaluation than they did in the past. Staff at smaller foundations tend to spend more time on individual grant evaluations, while staff at larger foundations tend to spend more time on assessments of broad program areas and on learning processes. While many foundations do not have consistent systems for tracking evaluation spending, some are deciding it would be useful to capture that information more methodically.2. Less attention has been put on learning to-date, but recognition of the importance of purposeful learning is growing quickly. Many foundations are hoping to improve upon their learning processes, but finding that it is not easy. It often requires an internal cultural shift and testing a variety of approaches. In contrast, foundations tend to have fairly clear processes and standards for monitoring and evaluation. Foundations that do have explicit learning efforts remain more focused on internal learning rather than communicating and sharing lessons externally. Foundations tend to be more transparent with external audiences about their grant-making processes, goals, and strategies, and less transparent about how they assess performance or their lessons learned. That said, both grantees and foundations are recognizing that sharing more lessons externally would be beneficial.3. Foundations are exploring appropriate and useful ways to evaluate work done through sub-granting organizations. Some are focusing on building the internal monitoring and evaluation capacity of those organizations. It would be useful for donors to coordinate approaches to evaluate work done through sub-granting organizations, which can allow for pooled resources and avoid putting an extra burden on the subgrantor

Subwavelength metamaterial engineering for silicon photonics

Waveguides structured at the subwavelength scale frustrate di raction and behave as optical metamaterials with controllable refractive index. These structures have found widespread applications in silicon photonics, ranging from sub-decibel e ciency bre-chip couplers to spectrometers and polarization rotators. Here, we briefly describe the design foundations for sub-wavelength waveguide devices, both in terms of analytic e ective medium approximations, as well as through rigorous Floch-Bloquet mode simulation. We then focus on two novel structures that exemplify the use of subwavelength waveguides: mid-infrared waveguides and ultra-broadband beamsplitters.Universidad de M alaga,Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech. Ministerio de Econom a y Competitividad, Programa Estatal de Investigación, Desarrollo e Innovación Orientada a los Retos de la Sociedad (cofi nanciado FEDER), Proyecto TEC2013-46917-C2-1-R, Proyecto TEC2016-80718-

Statistical distributions in the folding of elastic structures

The behaviour of elastic structures undergoing large deformations is the result of the competition between confining conditions, self-avoidance and elasticity. This combination of multiple phenomena creates a geometrical frustration that leads to complex fold patterns. By studying the case of a rod confined isotropically into a disk, we show that the emergence of the complexity is associated with a well defined underlying statistical measure that determines the energy distribution of sub-elements,``branches'', of the rod. This result suggests that branches act as the ``microscopic'' degrees of freedom laying the foundations for a statistical mechanical theory of this athermal and amorphous system

Collective Bargaining and Walrasian Equilibrium

This paper contributes to the research agenda on non-cooperative foundations ofWalrasian Equilibrium. A class of barganing games in which agents bargain over prices and maximum trading con- straints is considered: It is proved that all the Stationary Sub- game Perfect Equilibria of these games implement Walrasian al- locations as the bargaining frictions vanish. The main novelty of the result is twofold: (1) it holds for any number of agents; (2) it is robust to di¤erent speci�cations of the bargaining process.strategic bargaining; Walrasian Equilibrium

Global Health Law Governance

The field of public health law traditionally focuses on law at the national and sub-national level. National legal systems, however, are inadequate to deal with major threats to humans. Despite the inadequacies of national governance, there are fundamental questions that need resolution in the field of global health law: Why should governments care about the health of people far away? Are profound health disparities just and, if not, is there a corresponding obligation to redress the injustice? Can international law effectively bind governments, foundations, and corporations to act for the global good? This article, based on a lecture at Emory Law School, asks the hard questions and offers some ways forward for the future of global health

What is "system": the information-theoretic arguments

The problem of "what is 'system'?" is in the very foundations of modern quantum mechanics. Here, we point out the interest in this topic in the information-theoretic context. E.g., we point out the possibility to manipulate a pair of mutually non-interacting, non-entangled systems to employ entanglement of the newly defined '(sub)systems' consisting the one and the same composite system. Given the different divisions of a composite system into "subsystems", the Hamiltonian of the system may perform in general non-equivalent quantum computations. Redefinition of "subsystems" of a composite system may be regarded as a method for avoiding decoherence in the quantum hardware. In principle, all the notions refer to a composite system as simple as the hydrogen atom.Comment: 13 pages, no figure

A quest for institutional foundations towards inclusive development in Sub-Saharan Africa

The paper explores the paths towards building institutional foundations for inclusive development in Sub-Saharan Africa. Viewing institutional configurations as a system of multiple equilibria, the concepts of endogenous institutions and institutional changes are used to address the question of how to build institutional foundations on a self-sustained basis. The paper discusses how institutional configurations have been shaped in Sub-Saharan Africa under prevailing domestic and international conditions. A resulting negative feedbacks loop in public-private interfaces has been detrimental to inclusive development. To overcome this, a strong coalition between governments and stakeholders should be developed as a social contract embedded in the taxation-public goods provision nexus

The Segment Ontology: Bridging Music-generic and Domain-specific

Existing semantic representations of music analysis encapsulate narrow sub-domain concepts and are frequently scoped by the context of a particular MIR task. Segmentation is a crucial abstraction in the investigation of phenomena which unfold over time; we present a Segment Ontology as the backbone of an approach that models properties from the musicological domain independently from MIR implementations and their signal processing foundations, whilst maintaining an accurate and complete description of the relationships that link them. This framework provides two principal advantages which are explored through several examples: a layered separation of concerns that aligns the model with the needs of the users and systems that consume and produce the data; and the ability to link multiple analyses of differing types through transforms to and from the Segment axis