Matt Leifer › Comments

Bibsonomy has a good mechanism if you have your pubs in its database (it can import bibtex and other things) and tag them appropriately. E.g. http://www.bibsonomy.org/publ... or http://www.bibsonomy.org/export... - Alec

I played around with citeline some time back. Have you seen it? http://citeline.mit.edu/ - Mr. Gunn

"This is typical of the mainstream UK political approach to IT issues. If you want something done then you just throw boatloads of money at private companies rather than having someone in government who actually understands IT. Look how well that worked out with the new NHS computer system, the result of which mainly seems to be wasting half the appointment time as a frustrated consultant tries in vain to pull up test results. OK, that may have been Labour's fault, but I don't honestly believe that any of the main political parties have a clue about IT. The reality of the situation is that you could easily put together a site of this type of crowdsourcing/social networking site using existing open source web-tools, e.g. Drupal, Elgg, etc. If you paid a developer to work on it for a month or two and made use of the open source community then you could have a working site for a fraction of a million. Also, the idea of a "competition" for this sort of thing is just silly political..." - Matt Leifer

"This is typical of the mainstream UK political approach to IT issues. If you want something done then you just throw boatloads of money at private companies rather than having someone in government who actually understands IT. Look how well that worked out with the new NHS computer system, the result of which mainly seems to be wasting half the appointment time as a frustrated... more... - Matt Leifer

Also deriving a great deal of satisfaction from removing the air bubbles from under the protective film, probably because it's hard work. - Ruchira S. Datta

and you haven't put in line ordinary book... - A.T.

"MathJax is an open source, Ajax-based math display solution designed with a goal of consolidating advances in many web technologies in a single definitive math-on-the-web platform supporting all major browsers." - Itachi from Bookmarklet

Aha, thanks for that. I didn't see the link on the mathjax site. - Matt Leifer

FF doesn't meet all your requirements but it does seem to work well compared to the specialized services - at least in some fields - Jean-Claude Bradley

Deepak, I think I was just using terminology incorrectly. I was assuming Facebook = social networking. - Steve Koch

"Here are a few ideas on how to write math equations on your computer and how to distribute them to your students." - Dan Hagon from Bookmarklet

My main interest for that blog post was the use of Wacom's Bamboo. I'm curious to know if anyone has any experience of using this specifically for mathematics and if so which third-party software tools they have found to work well with it. - Dan Hagon

Yes but Twitter users know that their tweets will be public when they signed up. In my experience, most people chose to sign up for Facebook primarily because everything was locked down to their network. User expectations are very different. - Matt Leifer

"Of course it is NP hard because NP is in QMA and the problem is complete for QMA. However, that does not mean that it is NP complete, since to be complete the problem has to actually be in the complexity class it is hard for. This problem is almost certainly not actually in NP, unless you believe that QMA is equal to NP, which seems very unlikely to me. It seems that we may be talking at cross purposes here. I thought that you were implying that finding ground state energies of local quantum Hamiltonians is no harder than the equivalent problem for local classical Hamiltonians. I simply don't see how this can be the case, because it would be a huge step towards proving that classical and quantum computation are equivalent. Perhaps I need to look at this Hilbert-to-Kähler pullback business more closely, but surely the resulting classical Hamiltonian must have some pathological properties." - Matt Leifer

"I would be very surprised if the Hamiltonian problem discussed in http://arxiv.org/abs/0705.4077 is in NP." - Matt Leifer

"Hmm, but what about all the results showing that determining the ground state energy of a general local Hamiltonian, even in 1D, is QMA complete? Admittedly, these rely on artifically constructed Hamiltonians that are far from what a physicist would call "natural", but, unless you believe that QMA=MA, it does seem to indicate that the quantum problem is much harder than the classical one. It is an interesting project to determine if there are any Hamiltonians encoding QMA completeness that do satisfy various notions of "naturalness", e.g. translation invariance, low Hilbert space dimension of the individual spins, etc. Nevertheless, I wouldn't like to rule out finding such a Hamiltonian in a condensed matter system a priori and, if we manage to build a quantum computer, then we can engineer them anyway. My main problem with your comment is not that there may be no practical problem simulating Hamiltonians that come up in nature, but that you seem to be implying that this means that..." - Matt Leifer

"Hmm, but what about all the results showing that determining the ground state energy of a general local Hamiltonian, even in 1D, is QMA complete? Admittedly, these rely on artifically constructed Hamiltonians that are far from what a physicist would call "natural", but, unless you believe that QMA=MA, it does seem to indicate that the quantum problem is much harder than the classical... more... - Matt Leifer

"I don't understand why Hastings' result indicates the opposite Great Truth. There are Hamiltonians in nature that are not gapped. Cluster states do not obey the area law. Local Hamiltonians that have the cluster state used in measurement based quantum computation are not gapped." - Matt Leifer

"The derandomization result reminded me of various results in quantum computing which show that you can replace a unitary uniformly drawn with Haar measure by a random circuit composed of Clifford unitaries. Of course, this is not a dequantization, or even a derandomization, since it is just replacing a continuous measure by a discrete one, but perhaps there is a connection to classical derandomization results." - Matt Leifer

Can you recommend a good feed reader that uses this style? - Matt Leifer

Bookmarked so I can go back and add some to my feeds later. - Matt Leifer

I like Screenflow for Mac but it costs money. Camtasia for PC similarly is highly recommended. Jing and similar are fine for short videos less than a couple of minutes. - Cameron Neylon

ISHOWU is quite amazing ..its only US $10 or so. creates very compact H.264 codec using files - Hari

Summary of a couple of papers on giving effective public lectures and using them in the classroom. - Matt Leifer

"Regarding automatic population of metadata, have you tried a services like Papers, Mendeley or CiteULike, all of which can populate a record from the DOI or other identifiers, e.g. arXiv identifier. They are not perfect and require a little manual editing, but both can output bibtex files." - Matt Leifer

There are some wonderful waves and websites. If you are looking for anything specific please let me know. - Holly Rae

lol! - Mickey Schafer from email

"There are quite a few wiki engines out there that are backed by a distributed version control system. This means you can easily edit them online using the browser, but also checkout the repository and work with the files in a local text editor. I am working on getting one of these wikis LaTeX and MathML enabled as a possible solution for collaborative paper authoring. I can't solve the hosting problem, but I intend to make the installation as painless as possible, including on cheapo shared hosting accounts.Adapting this to a provide a simple engine should also not be too difficult, although it would not have all the features of Wordpress." - Matt Leifer

"I don't think so. If you use a DVCS backend then you could ditch the database completely and just store all the content in flat-files. The DVCS would make sure that the history would be stored efficiently and interacting with a DVCS is similar to dealing with an abstraction-layer.Anyway, I hope to come up with a proof of concept of this within a few months." - Matt Leifer

"Hmm, I've had a few email exchanges with Andrew about these issues and the basic difference is that he doesn't seem to buy into the whole web2.0, cloud computing fandango as much as I do. In my view, the distinction between "writing for the web" and "writing for print" is a big red herring. The web is a big place and there is room for putting a variety of content types on it, both long and short form. Also, I think that the distinction between "writing for the web" and "writing for print" will disappear in the near future, particularly as ebook readers get more sophisticated and widely adopted. Turning blogs into books is already quite common, which is something that I should not need to mention on this particular blog. I agree that distributed version control systems are a great solution, but they are not for the faint of heart. A good collaborative tool should offer straightforward web interfaces for the average user, whilst allowing technically inclined users to leverage the full..." - Matt Leifer

"Gellmu is really very nice, but it is a bit off-putting for people who are just looking for something to plug into their web-app. For example, I wish someone would come up with an implementation in a language that is commonly used for web programming, i.e. not Emacs Lisp, and I wish someone would write some documentation designed for end users that doesn't assume a lot of knowledge about SGML and LaTeX (or at least doesn't assume that the reader wants to wade through a lot of technical discussion about the SGML philosophy of Gellmu)." - Matt Leifer

"Hi, As a Brit who has used Cheers as a goodbye greeting in person and over the phone for many years before email, I deplore the Supernova’s suggestion. You just have a prejudice against British slang. If I have to put up with a “Hi” at the top of every email then you can certainly put up with a “Cheers” at the bottom. Cheers, Matt" - Matt Leifer

I've had a very good experience with A2 hosting, and they have LaTeX installed on their servers in case you want to use the maths extensions with DokuWiki. - Matt Leifer

I've been using nearlyfreespeech.net for a couple of years now without any problems. Having said that I've not used it for anything but static web pages up to now. - Dan Hagon

"Nice to hear from someone in the Mozilla camp about this. I know of one javascript LaTeX->MathML converter, which is called LaTeXMathML. I tried to write an "on-the-fly" LaTeX editor using it, as you described, but it was a nightmare because the script is very buggy and the code is a mess. We really need a new implementation. Somewhat bizarrely, LaTeXMathML works with pages served as text/html already on Firefox because there seems to be a difference between converting client-side and serving a page. Somehow, the browser is "tricked" into displaying the MathML, even though it shouldn't do it according to the HTML4 specification. Strictly speaking, I guess this is a bug, although it is a feature from our point of view. There is also jsMath, which does a similarly good job of client-side mathematics conversion, although it is not using MathML.The main point is that we have had decent javascript technologies for mathematics for quite some time, and yet we have not seen the kind of rich..." - Matt Leifer

"I think I understand that application, but I am not sure how it could possibly work. You want to type E=mc^2, for example, into a search box and get back a whole list of articles about relativity. OK, well that example would probably work at the moment because the notation is so standard, but even with semantic markup I don't see how this can possibly work in general due to large differences in notation and terminology for representing the same concept. After all, content MathML and OpenMath may be more semantic than presentation MathML, but they are not magic. They can't tell you that two things are connected if you haven't told them that they are." - Matt Leifer

"That is so cool. You could run the output through a MathML->TeX converter and write all the math in your papers by hand. It's almost enough to make me want to buy a tablet PC and switch back to Windows. Anyone know of similar tools for Linux or Mac?" - Matt Leifer

"To clarify, there is content MathML and presentation MathML. I believe that content MathML is designed to solve the same problems as OpenMath, but I haven't compared the specifications so I could be wrong about that. In any case, content MathML is in much worse shape than presentation MathML, since we don't have many good translation tools and it would have to be translated into presentation MathML for display in any case.In my opinion, trying to get authors to markup semantics as well as presentation is a losing battle because in most cases people are just trying to get their mathematical content onto the web as quickly and simply as possible. I think this is the reason why both OpenMath and content MathML haven't really taken off, whereas presentation MathML is in comparably good shape. In fact, I am not entirely convinced that marking up semantics within the mathematics itself is an important issue. I mean, does anyone actually have any trouble looking up mathematical concepts in..." - Matt Leifer

"As I see it, we don't actually have a problem with *standards* at the moment, but with *implementations*. MathML is perfectly fine as a standard for displaying mathematics on webpages, but implementing it is still a bit of a nightmare. It will never be an authoring language, but there are plenty of decent ways of converting LaTeX to MathML and webpages could be easily coded to incorporate the original LaTeX markup as well as the MathML. The problems implementing MathML stem from the requirement to serve content as appication/xml, which isn't supported by Internet Explorer, and with the need to install extra fonts. The former is not a problem if you are serving static web pages, e.g. if you just want to convert an existing paper into an HTML+MathML webpage. There are plenty of existing tools that do this well. However, it seems to me that the idea that you might want to embed MathML into content management systems, e.g. Wordpress, MediaWiki, Drupal, etc. and other web-based..." - Matt Leifer

You want to write about the science you are doing or science in general? - Jean-Claude Bradley

If I may add my two cents, as Michael Neilson recently posted (http://econlog.econlib.org/archive...), consider the advice for non-fiction writing to be relevant to blog writing, too. I'm likely a bit more cautious in this area and so not a huge fan of "figure out what you want to say while you're saying it" -- I'd recommend considering what it is you'd like the blog to do for you, perhaps from the perspective of what kinds of questions/ conversations do you want to conduct publicly. - Mickey Schafer