Ron Paul at the Fox News Iowa GOP Debate

Ron Paul Highlights at the Fox News Iowa GOP Debate

Full Fox News Iowa GOP Debate, Sioux City

The House of Rothschild

Secret History of the International Bond Market

The House of Rothschild

MUST READ! Physics Envy

Trained as a physicist, Emanuel Derman once served as the head of quantitative analysis at Goldman Sachs and is currently a professor of industrial engineering and operations research at Columbia University. With "Models Behaving Badly" he offers a readable, even eloquent combination of personal history, philosophical musing and honest confession concerning the dangers of relying on numerical models not only on Wall Street but also in life.

Mr. Derman's particular thesis can be stated simply: Although financial models employ the mathematics and style of physics, they are fundamentally different from the models that science produces. Physical models can provide an accurate description of reality. Financial models, despite their mathematical sophistication, can at best provide a vast oversimplification of reality. In the universe of finance, the behavior of individuals determines value—and, as he says, "people change their minds."

In short, beware of physics envy. When we make models involving human beings, Mr. Derman notes, "we are trying to force the ugly stepsister's foot into Cinderella's pretty glass slipper. It doesn't fit without cutting off some of the essential parts." As the collapse of the subprime collateralized debt market in 2008 made clear, it is a terrible mistake to put too much faith in models purporting to value financial instruments. "In crises," Mr. Derman writes, "the behavior of people changes and normal models fail. While quantum electrodynamics is a genuine theory of all reality, financial models are only mediocre metaphors for a part of it."

Throughout "Models Behaving Badly," Mr. Derman treats us to vignettes from his interesting personal history, which gave him a front-row seat for more than one model's misbehavior. Growing up in Cape Town, South Africa, he witnessed the repressive and failed political model of apartheid. Later he became disillusioned with the utopian model of the kibbutz in Israel. He started out professionally in the 1970s as a theoretical physicist. He then migrated to the center of the financial world in the 1980s, using a mix of mathematics and statistics to value securities for the trading desk at Goldman Sachs in New York. He had hoped to use the methods of physics to build a grand, unified theory of security pricing. After 20 years on Wall Street, even before the meltdown, he became a disbeliever.

He sums up his key points about how to keep models from going bad by quoting excerpts from his "Financial Modeler's Manifesto" (written with Paul Wilmott), a paper he published a couple of years ago. Among its admonitions: "I will always look over my shoulder and never forget that the model is not the world"; "I will not be overly impressed with mathematics"; "I will never sacrifice reality for elegance"; "I will not give the people who use my models false comfort about their accuracy"; "I understand that my work may have enormous effects on society and the economy, many beyond my apprehension."

Sampling from models that behave well, Mr. Derman gives an eloquent description of James Clerk Maxwell's electromagnetic theory in a chapter titled "The Sublime." He writes: "The electromagnetic field is not like Maxwell's equations; it is Maxwell's equations." In another chapter, titled "The Absolute," he outlines Spinoza's "Theory of Emotions"—a description of the nature of emotions that did for man's inner life, Mr. Derman says, "what Euclid did for geometry." But then he turns to financial models—behaving badly.

The basic problem, according to Mr. Derman, is that "in physics you're playing against God, and He doesn't change His laws very often. In finance, you're playing against God's creatures." And God's creatures use "their ephemeral opinions" to value assets. Moreover, most financial models "fail to reflect the complex reality of the world around them."

It is hard to argue with this basic thesis. Nevertheless, Mr. Derman is perhaps a bit too harsh when he describes EMM—the so-called Efficient Market Model. EMM does not, as he claims, imply that prices are always correct and that price always equals value. Prices are always wrong. What EMM says is that we can never be sure if prices are too high or too low.

The Efficient Market Model does not suggest that any particular model of valuation—such as the Capital Asset Pricing Model—fully accounts for risk and uncertainty or that we should rely on it to predict security returns. EMM does not, as Mr. Derman says, "stubbornly assume that all uncertainty about the future is quantifiable."

The basic lesson of EMM is that it is very difficult—well nigh impossible—to beat the market consistently. This lesson, or "model," behaves very well when investors follow it. It says that most investors would be better off simply buying a low-cost index fund that holds all the securities in the market rather than using either quantitative models or intuition in an attempt to beat the market. The idea that significant arbitrage opportunities are unlikely to exist (and certainly do not persist) is precisely the mechanism behind the Black-Scholes option-pricing model that Mr. Derman admires as a financial model behaving pretty well.

Such a quibble aside, it is undeniable that "Models Behaving Badly" itself performs splendidly. Bringing ethics into his analysis, Mr. Derman has no patience for coddling the folly of individuals and institutions who over-rely on faulty models and then seek to escape the consequences. He laments the aftermath of the 2008 financial meltdown, when banks rebounded "to record profits and bonuses" thanks to taxpayer bailouts. If you want to benefit from the seven fat years, he writes, "you must suffer the seven lean years too, even the catastrophically lean ones. We need free markets, but we need them to be principled."

Source: WSJ - Physics Envy

“I can calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people” -Sir Issac Newton

Perhaps, time to read Mises's magnum opus - Human Action?

Practical Post Scarcity: Open Source Solutions | Open Source Ecology

This is a well-made explanation of artificial material scarcity and how it can be addressed by open source economic development.

This is the core of Open Source Ecology's work on the Global Village Construction Set. Scenes in the video from hay baling onwards are the developments taking place at Factor e Farm in Missouri, USA. This is part of going the last mile on the construction toolkit part of the Global Village construction set. This is the core of Open Source Ecology's work on the Global Village Construction Set. Scenes from hay baling onwards are developments taking place at Factor e Farm in Missouri, USA. This is part of going the last mile on the construction toolkit part of the Global Village construction set.

Practical Post Scarcity: Open Source Solutions

Distributive Enterprise

MUST WATCH! UCLA Econ Debate

Debate between Peter Schiff, David Rosnick, and Roger Farmer.

UCLA Econ Debate

China's epic hangover begins

China's credit bubble has finally popped. The property market is swinging wildly from boom to bust, the cautionary exhibit of a BRIC's dream that is at last coming down to earth with a thud.

It is hard to obtain good data in China, but something is wrong when the country's Homelink property website can report that new home prices in Beijing fell 35pc in November from the month before. If this is remotely true, the calibrated soft-landing intended by Chinese authorities has gone badly wrong and risks spinning out of control.

The growth of the M2 money supply slumped to 12.7pc in November, the lowest in 10 years. New lending fell 5pc on a month-to-month basis. The central bank has begun to reverse its tightening policy as inflation subsides, cutting the reserve requirement for lenders for the first time since 2008 to ease liquidity strains.

The question is whether the People's Bank can do any better than the US Federal Reserve or Bank of Japan at deflating a credit bubble.

Chinese stocks are flashing warning signs. The Shanghai index has fallen 30pc since May. It is off 60pc from its peak in 2008, almost as much in real terms as Wall Street from 1929 to 1933.

"Investors are massively underestimating the risk of a hard-landing in China, and indeed other BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China)... a 'Bloody Ridiculous Investment Concept' in my view," said Albert Edwards at Societe Generale.

"The BRICs are falling like bricks and the crises are home-blown, caused by their own boom-bust credit cycles. Industrial production is already falling in India, and Brazil will soon follow."

"There is so much spare capacity that they will start dumping goods, risking a deflation shock for the rest of the world. It no surprise that China has just imposed tariffs on imports of GM cars. I think it is highly likely that China will devalue the yuan next year, risking a trade war," he said.

China's $3.2 trillion foreign reserves have been falling for three months despite the trade surplus. Hot money is flowing out of the country. "One-way capital inflow or one-way bets on a yuan rise have become history. Our foreign reserves are basically falling every day," said Li Yang, a former central bank rate-setter.

The reserve loss acts as a form of monetary tightening, exactly the opposite of the effect during the boom. The reserves cannot be tapped to prop up China's internal banking system. To do so would mean repatriating the money – now in US Treasuries and European bonds – pushing up the yuan at the worst moment.

The economy is badly out of kilter. Consumption has fallen from 48pc to 36pc of GDP since the late 1990s. Investment has risen to 50pc of GDP. This is off the charts, even by the standards of Japan, Korea or Taiwan during their catch-up spurts. Nothing like it has been seen before in modern times.

Fitch Ratings said China is hooked on credit, but deriving ever less punch from each dose. An extra dollar in loans increased GDP by $0.77 in 2007. It is $0.44 in 2011. "The reality is that China's economy today requires significantly more financing to achieve the same level of growth as in the past," said China analyst Charlene Chu.

Ms Chu warned that there had been a "massive build-up in leverage" and fears a "fundamental, structural erosion" in the banking system that differs from past downturns. "For the first time, a large number of Chinese banks are beginning to face cash pressures. The forthcoming wave of asset quality issues has the potential to become uglier than in previous episodes".

Investors had thought China was immune to a property crash because mortgage finance is just 19pc of GDP. Wealthy Chinese often buy two, three or more flats with cash to park money because they cannot invest overseas and bank deposit rates have been minus 3pc in real terms this year.

But with price to income levels reaching nosebleed levels of 18 in East coast cities, it is clear that apartments – often left empty – have themselves become a momentum trade.

Professor Patrick Chovanec from Beijing's Tsinghua School of Economics said China's property downturn began in earnest in August when construction firms reported that unsold inventories had reached $50bn. It has now turned into "a spiral of downward expectations".

A fire-sale is under way in coastal cities, with Shanghai developers slashing prices 25pc in November – much to the fury of earlier buyers, who expect refunds. This is spreading. Property sales have fallen 70pc in the inland city of Changsa. Prices have reportedly dropped 70pc in the "ghost city" of Ordos in Inner Mongolia. China Real Estate Index reports that prices dropped by just 0.3pc in the top 100 cities last month, but this looks like a lagging indicator. Meanwhile, the slowdown is creeping into core industries. Steel output has buckled.

Beijing was able to counter the global crunch in 2008-2009 by unleashing credit, acting as a shock absorber for the whole world. It is doubtful that Beijing can pull off this trick a second time.

"If investors go for growth at all costs again they are likely to find that it works even less than before and inflation returns quickly with a vengeance," said Diana Choyleva from Lombard Street Research.

The International Monetary Fund's Zhu Min says loans have doubled to almost 200pc of GDP over the last five years, including off-books lending.

This is roughly twice the intensity of credit growth in the five years preceeding Japan's Nikkei bubble in the late 1980s or the US housing bubble from 2002 to 2007. Each of these booms saw loan growth of near 50 percentage points of GDP.

The IMF said in November that lenders face a "steady build-up of financial sector vulnerabilities", warning if hit with multiple shocks, "the banking system could be severely impacted".

Mark Williams from Capital Economics said the great hope was that China would use its credit spree after 2008 to buy time, switching from chronic over-investment to consumer-led growth. "It hasn't work out as planned. The next few weeks are likely to reveal how little progress has been made. China may ride out the storm over the next few months, but the dangers of over-capacity and bad debt will only intensify".

In truth, China faces an epic deleveraging hangover, like the rest of us.

Continue reading - Telegraph - China's epic hangover begins

Georgia Tech Identifies Coming Media Megatrends in FutureMedia Outlook 2012

The coming years will bring increased personalization, innovation and flexibility in the media landscape, according to the Georgia Institute of Technology. These findings were announced in today’s release of the FutureMediaSM Outlook 2012, a multimedia report that offers Georgia Tech’s annual viewpoint on the future of media and its impact on people, business and society over the next five to seven years.

“Georgia Tech’s work in Future Media is part of our new Institute for People and Technology,” said Georgia Tech President G. P. “Bud” Peterson. “By partnering with business and industry on interdisciplinary research, we are able to identify trends and challenges and work to develop transformative solutions.”

According to FutureMedia Outlook 2012, six megatrends will have a pervasive impact:

Smart Data: In an increasingly noisy world, we'll have to sift, filter and be smarter about what matters.
People Platforms: Beyond “true personalization,” people will not just be consumers. They will be socially driven platforms made of algorithms from personal and associated data that they design and tailor themselves.
Content Integrity: Pervasive mobile devices, sprawling networks, clouds and multi-layered platforms have made it more difficult to detect and address our digital vulnerabilities, drawing us to trusted content sources.
Nimble Media: Media is evolving from a set of fixed commodities into an energetic, pervasive medium that allows people to navigate across platforms and through different content narratives.
6th Sense: Extraordinary innovations in mixed reality will change the way we see, hear, taste, touch, smell and make sense of the world – giving us a new and powerful 6th sense.
Collaboration: We will harness the power of many in an increasingly conversational and participatory world.

For each of the six megatrends, the Outlook 2012 presents fresh and objective insights into those technologies and business practices that will significantly impact the converging media ecosystem. In addition, the report includes demonstrative clips and video interviews with leading Georgia Tech researchers offering real-world examples of how the Institute is proactively innovating in these areas.

“Breakthrough research, innovation and collaboration with our partners have given us a rich and pragmatic basis from which to formulate this annual FutureMedia Outlook,” said Renu Kulkarni, founder and executive director of FutureMedia.

The FutureMedia Outlook 2012 follows FutureMedia Fest 2011, an annual event that explores the media’s disruptive power on people and business. The three-day Fest, held November 15-17, featured compelling keynote addresses, panel discussions, dynamic start-up and research demos, and workshops with top executives, investors, innovators, entrepreneurs, academics and researchers. Panelists and speakers included leaders from Twitter, Mashable, Turner Broadcasting and CNN.

View Report: FutureMediaSM Outlook 2012

Source: Georgia Tech Identifies Coming Media Megatrends in FutureMedia Outlook 2012

Frontline Medicine - Rebuilding Lives

This program shows some of the latest medical advances towards healing injured soldiers and how this innovation may translate to the general public.

Frontline Medicine - Rebuilding Lives (Part 1)

Frontline Medicine - Rebuilding Lives (Part 2)

Frontline Medicine - Rebuilding Lives (Part 3)

Frontline Medicine - Rebuilding Lives (Part 4)

Isaac Newton’s Personal Notebooks Go Digital

The largest collection of Isaac Newton's papers has gone digital, committing to open-access posterity the works of one of history's greatest scientist.

Among the works shared online by the Cambridge Digital Library are Newton's own annotated copy of Principia Mathematica and the 'Waste Book,' the notebook in which a young Newton worked out the principles of calculus.

Other of his myriad accomplishments include the laws of gravity and motion, a theory of light -- pictured above are notes on optics -- and his construction of the first reflecting telescope.

Newton was also notoriously idiosyncratic and irascible, obsessed with the occult and vicious towards scientific rivals; a full account of his life and science can be found in James Gleick's Isaac Newton, and a partial but entertaining fictionalization in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. But the papers come straight from the master.

“Anyone, wherever they are, can see at the click of a mouse how Newton worked and how he went about developing his theories and experiments," said Grant Young, the library's digitization manager, in a press release. "Before today, anyone who wanted to see these things had to come to Cambridge. Now we’re bringing Cambridge University Library to the world.”

Approximately 4,000 pages of material are available now, and thousands more will be uploaded in coming months. On the following pages is a sampling of the the library.

Source: Isaac Newton’s Personal Notebooks Go Digital

Download: Sir Issac Newton's Trinity College Notebook

Visit: Cambridge Digital Library

US REVOLT - Large Protests at Port of Oakland

Protesters staged occupations across the United States this morning as part of a coast-to-coast day of action aimed to shut down shipping ports all over the US. Starting in the early morning hours, demonstrators waged protests up and down the West Coast in one of the most wide-impact attacks on the one percent yet

Occupy shipwrecks ports on West Coast

Raw Video: Large Protests at Port of Oakland

Occupational Hazard: OWS targets West Coast ports

Meanwhile...

Police arrest OWS protesters at World Financial Center

Why is the U.S. Fucked Up? 8 Lectures from Occupy Harvard Teach-In Provide Answers

Last Wednesday, the Occupy movement gained a little more intellectual momentum when eight faculty members from Harvard, Boston College, and N.Y.U. gathered in Cambridge to present a daylong Teach-In. In one talk, Archon Fung (Ford Foundation Professor of Democracy and Citizenship and Co-Director of Transparency Policy Project at Harvard) took a vague thesis of the Occupy movement — “Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit” — and gave it some academic depth in a data-filled talk called “Why Has Inequality Grown in America? And What Should We Do About It?” The other talks are available on YouTube (see links below) or via audio stream:

Archon Fung, Ford Foundation Professor of Democracy and Citizenship and Co-Director of Transparency Policy Project, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

Archon Fung - Why Has Inequality Grown in America? What Should We Do?

Stephen Marglin, Walter Barker Professor of Economics, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University

Stephen Marglin Heterodox Economics: Alternatives to Mankiw's Ideology

Richard Parker, Lecturer in Public Policy and Senior Fellow at the Shorenstein Center, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

Richard Parker - Wall Streetʼs Role in the European Financial Crisis

Andrew Ross, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis, New York University

Andrew Ross - The Occupy Movement and Student Debt Refusal

Juliet Schor, Professor of Sociology, Boston College

Juliet Schor - Economics for the 99%

Christine Desan, Professor of Law, Harvard Law School, Harvard University

Christine Desan - Booms and Busts: The Legal Dynamics of Modern Money

Brad Epps, Professor of Romance Languages & Literatures and Department Chair for Studies in Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University

Brad Epps - Fear and Power

John Womack, Robert Woods Bliss Professor of Latin American History and Economics, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University

John Womack, Vigilance, Inquiry, Alienation & Hope at Harvard and in the US

The Book of Jobs | Joseph E. Stiglitz

It has now been almost five years since the bursting of the housing bubble, and four years since the onset of the recession. There are 6.6 million fewer jobs in the United States than there were four years ago. Some 23 million Americans who would like to work full-time cannot get a job. Almost half of those who are unemployed have been unemployed long-term. Wages are falling—the real income of a typical American household is now below the level it was in 1997.

We knew the crisis was serious back in 2008. And we thought we knew who the “bad guys” were—the nation’s big banks, which through cynical lending and reckless gambling had brought the U.S. to the brink of ruin. The Bush and Obama administrations justified a bailout on the grounds that only if the banks were handed money without limit—and without conditions—could the economy recover. We did this not because we loved the banks but because (we were told) we couldn’t do without the lending that they made possible. Many, especially in the financial sector, argued that strong, resolute, and generous action to save not just the banks but the bankers, their shareholders, and their creditors would return the economy to where it had been before the crisis. In the meantime, a short-term stimulus, moderate in size, would suffice to tide the economy over until the banks could be restored to health.

The banks got their bailout. Some of the money went to bonuses. Little of it went to lending. And the economy didn’t really recover—output is barely greater than it was before the crisis, and the job situation is bleak. The diagnosis of our condition and the prescription that followed from it were incorrect. First, it was wrong to think that the bankers would mend their ways—that they would start to lend, if only they were treated nicely enough. We were told, in effect: “Don’t put conditions on the banks to require them to restructure the mortgages or to behave more honestly in their foreclosures. Don’t force them to use the money to lend. Such conditions will upset our delicate markets.” In the end, bank managers looked out for themselves and did what they are accustomed to doing.

Even when we fully repair the banking system, we’ll still be in deep trouble—because we were already in deep trouble. That seeming golden age of 2007 was far from a paradise. Yes, America had many things about which it could be proud. Companies in the information-technology field were at the leading edge of a revolution. But incomes for most working Americans still hadn’t returned to their levels prior to the previous recession. The American standard of living was sustained only by rising debt—debt so large that the U.S. savings rate had dropped to near zero. And “zero” doesn’t really tell the story. Because the rich have always been able to save a significant percentage of their income, putting them in the positive column, an average rate of close to zero means that everyone else must be in negative numbers. (Here’s the reality: in the years leading up to the recession, according to research done by my Columbia University colleague Bruce Greenwald, the bottom 80 percent of the American population had been spending around 110 percent of its income.) What made this level of indebtedness possible was the housing bubble, which Alan Greenspan and then Ben Bernanke, chairmen of the Federal Reserve Board, helped to engineer through low interest rates and nonregulation—not even using the regulatory tools they had. As we now know, this enabled banks to lend and households to borrow on the basis of assets whose value was determined in part by mass delusion.

The fact is the economy in the years before the current crisis was fundamentally weak, with the bubble, and the unsustainable consumption to which it gave rise, acting as life support. Without these, unemployment would have been high. It was absurd to think that fixing the banking system could by itself restore the economy to health. Bringing the economy back to “where it was” does nothing to address the underlying problems.

The trauma we’re experiencing right now resembles the trauma we experienced 80 years ago, during the Great Depression, and it has been brought on by an analogous set of circumstances. Then, as now, we faced a breakdown of the banking system. But then, as now, the breakdown of the banking system was in part a consequence of deeper problems. Even if we correctly respond to the trauma—the failures of the financial sector—it will take a decade or more to achieve full recovery. Under the best of conditions, we will endure a Long Slump. If we respond incorrectly, as we have been, the Long Slump will last even longer, and the parallel with the Depression will take on a tragic new dimension.

Until now, the Depression was the last time in American history that unemployment exceeded 8 percent four years after the onset of recession. And never in the last 60 years has economic output been barely greater, four years after a recession, than it was before the recession started. The percentage of the civilian population at work has fallen by twice as much as in any post-World War II downturn. Not surprisingly, economists have begun to reflect on the similarities and differences between our Long Slump and the Great Depression. Extracting the right lessons is not easy.

Many have argued that the Depression was caused primarily by excessive tightening of the money supply on the part of the Federal Reserve Board. Ben Bernanke, a scholar of the Depression, has stated publicly that this was the lesson he took away, and the reason he opened the monetary spigots. He opened them very wide. Beginning in 2008, the balance sheet of the Fed doubled and then rose to three times its earlier level. Today it is $2.8 trillion. While the Fed, by doing this, may have succeeded in saving the banks, it didn’t succeed in saving the economy.

Reality has not only discredited the Fed but also raised questions about one of the conventional interpretations of the origins of the Depression. The argument has been made that the Fed caused the Depression by tightening money, and if only the Fed back then had increased the money supply—in other words, had done what the Fed has done today—a full-blown Depression would likely have been averted. In economics, it’s difficult to test hypotheses with controlled experiments of the kind the hard sciences can conduct. But the inability of the monetary expansion to counteract this current recession should forever lay to rest the idea that monetary policy was the prime culprit in the 1930s. The problem today, as it was then, is something else. The problem today is the so-called real economy. It’s a problem rooted in the kinds of jobs we have, the kind we need, and the kind we’re losing, and rooted as well in the kind of workers we want and the kind we don’t know what to do with. The real economy has been in a state of wrenching transition for decades, and its dislocations have never been squarely faced. A crisis of the real economy lies behind the Long Slump, just as it lay behind the Great Depression.

Continue reading - The Book of Jobs by Joseph E. Stiglitz

Lectures on Quantum Computation | David Deutsch

DAVID DEUTSCH is the founder of the field of quantum computation. Paul Benioff, Richard Feynman, and others had written about the possibility of quantum computation earlier, but Deutsch's 1985 paper on Quantum Turing Machines was the first full treatment of the subject, and the Deutsch-Jozsa algorithm is the first quantum algorithm.

When he first proposed it, quantum computation seemed practically impossible. But the last decade has seen an explosion in the construction of simple quantum computers and quantum communication systems. None of this would have taken place without Deutsch's work.

The main papers written by Deutsch that contained "achievement in scientific work that embodies extensions of the computational idea" were in 1985 ("Quantum theory, the Church-Turing principle, and the universal quantum computer") and 1989 ("Quantum computational networks").

His 1995 paper, "Conditional quantum dynamics and logic gates" (with A. Barenco, A. Ekert and R. Jozsa) was an important step in clarifying what sort of physical processes would be needed to implement quantum computation in the laboratory, and what sort of things the experimentalists should be trying to get to work.

"Universality in quantum computation", also written in 1995 (with A. Barenco and A. Ekert) proved the universality of almost all 2-qubit quantum gates, thus verifying his conjecture made in 1989 and showing that quantum computation and quantum gate operations are 'built in' to quantum physics far more deeply than classical physics. In 1996, in "Quantum privacy amplification and the security of quantum cryptography over noisy channels" (with A. Ekert, R. Jozsa, C. Macchiavello, S. Popescu and A. Sanpera), he brought quantum cryptography a little bit closer to being practical as opposed to just a laboratory curiosity.

His recent work as seen in the following three papers can be seen as new "applications" of the computational idea, rather than extensions of it.

In 2000, "Information Flow in Entangled Quantum Systems" (with P. Hayden) refutes the long-held belief that quantum systems contain 'non-local' effects, and it does it by appealing to the universality of quantum computational networks, and analysing information flow in those.

Also in 2000, in "Machines, Logic and Quantum Physics" (with A. Ekert and R. Lupacchini), a philosophic paper, not a scientific one, he appealed to the existence of a distinctive quantum theory of computation to argue that our knowledge of mathematics is derived from, and is subordinate to, our knowledge of physics (even though mathematical truth is independent of physics).

In 2002, he answered several long-standing questions about the multiverse interpretation of quantum theory in "The Structure of the Multiverse" — in particular, what sort of structure a 'universe' is, within the multiverse. It does this by using the methods of the quantum theory of computation to analyse information flow in the multiverse.

His two main lines of research at the moment, Qubit Field Theory and quantum constructor theory, may well yield important extensions of the computational idea eventually, but at the moment neither of them has yielded any results at all, to speak of, only promising avenues of research.

Born in Haifa, Israel, David Deutsch was educated at Cambridge and Oxford universities. After several years at the University of Texas at Austin, he returned to Oxford, where he now lives and works. Since 1999, he has been a non-stipendiary Visiting Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford, where he is a member of the Centre for Quantum Computation at the Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford University.

In 1998 he was awarded the Institute of Physics' Paul Dirac Prize and Medal. This is the Premier Award for theoretical physics within the gift of the Council of the Institute of Physics. It is made for “outstanding contributions to theoretical (including mathematical and computational) physics”. In 2002 he received the Fourth International Award on Quantum Communication for “theoretical work on Quantum Computer Science”.

In the Royal Society of London's announcement of Deutsch becoming a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2008, the Society described Deutsch's contributions thus:

David Deutsch laid the foundations of the quantum theory of computation, and has subsequently made or participated in many of the most important advances in the field, including the discovery of the first quantum algorithms, the theory of quantum logic gates and quantum computational networks, the first quantum error-correction scheme, and several fundamental quantum universality results. He has set the agenda for worldwide research efforts in this new, interdisciplinary field, made progress in understanding its philosophical implications (via a variant of the many-universes interpretation) and made it comprehensible to the general public, notably in his book The Fabric of Reality.


Lecture 1 - The Qubit [Worked Examples]

Introducing quantum theory, the quantum theory of computation, physical systems, observations, and the simplest quantum physical system, the qubit.

David Deutsch - Quantum Computation Lecture 1 - wmv

Lecture 2 - Interference [Worked Examples]

Performing and analysing a single-photon interference experiment.

David Deutsch - Quantum Computation Lecture 2 - wmv

Lecture 3 - Measurement [Worked Examples]

How to analyse pairs of interacting quantum systems.

David Deutsch - Quantum Computation Lecture 3 - wmv

Lecture 4 - The Schroedinger Picture

Introducing the Schroedinger Picture, density matrices, state vectors, pure states and the Schroedinger equation.

David Deutsch - Quantum Computation Lecture 4 - wmv

Lecture 5 - A Quantum Algorithm

The Deutsch Algorithm and how it works.

David Deutsch - Quantum Computation Lecture 5 - wmv

Lecture 6 - Grover's Search Algorithm

How to use quantum computation to search through N possibilities in a time proportional to the square root of N.

David Deutsch - Quantum Computation Lecture 6 - wmv

See also: Interview with David Deutsch - It's a much bigger than it looks

Visit:
Qubit.org
Quantiki | Quantum Information Portal
David Deutsch's Site | Old Site

Inside Google and Facebook

Maria Bartiromo takes viewers Inside The Mind of Google for a rare look at the world's most powerful technology company and its crown jewel, the Google Internet search engine. This is the fascinating story of how two grad students, in barely a decade, took a one-time research project and turned it into a global technology powerhouse... changing the way we interact with information, the Internet, and each other. See how Google came to dominate the search industry and turn it into a profit machine... and see where it's taking its next step... and how the company plans to address arguably the biggest controversy in today's digital age: privacy.

Inside the Mind of Google

In just seven years, Mark Zuckerberg has gone from his Harvard college dorm to running a business with 800 million users, and a possible value of $100 billion. His idea to 'make the world more open and connected' has sparked a revolution in communication, and now looks set to have a huge impact on business too.

Emily Maitlis reports on life inside Facebook. Featuring a rare interview with Zuckerberg himself, the film tells the story of Facebook's creation, looks at the accuracy of The Social Network movie, and examines Facebook's plans to use the personal information it has collected to power a new kind of online advertising.

Mark Zuckerberg Inside Facebook

Ron Paul on Iowa GOP Debate

Ron Paul Highlights at the ABC News / Yahoo Iowa GOP Debate

Complete ABC News Yahoo Republican Iowa Debate