Month: November 2008
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Anonymizing data without damaging it
If scientists are to study massive datasets such as mobile phone records, search queries and movie ratings, the owners of these datasets need to find a way to anonymize the data before releasing it. The high profile cracking of data sets such as the Netflix prize dataset and the AOL search query data set means…
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Cloaking objects at a distance
One of the disadvantages of invisibility cloaks is that anything placed inside one is automatically blinded, since no light can get in. Now Yun Lai and colleagues from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology have come up with a way round this using the remarkable idea of cloaking at a distance. This involves…
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Breakthrough calculations on the capacity of a steganographic channel
Steganography is the art of hiding a message in such a way that only the sender and receiver realise it is there. (By contrast, cryptography disguises the content of a message but makes no attempt to hide it.) The central problem for steganographers is how much data can be hidden without being detected. But the…
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Solving a quantum conundrum
“Can one be convinced of the correctness of the computation of every quantum circuit, namely, every quantum experiment that can be conducted in the laboratory?” ask Dorit Aharonov and colleagues from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. That’s an interesting question of quantum computer science. If you can’t simulate the answer to calculation on…
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Booms ‘n’ busts
The best of the rest from the physics arXiv this week: FeTe as a Candidate Material for New Iron-based Superconductor Selective Atomic Heating in Plasmas: Implications for Quantum Theory Can a Microscopic Stochastic Model Explain the Emergence of Pain Cycles in Patients? The Transmission Sense of Information Stirring Astronomy into Theology: Sir Isaac Newton on…