Pricing the Corporate Memory: User Fees and Revenue Generation in a Public Archives

In their current bestseller, Reinventing Government, David Osborne and Ted Gaebler have attempted to provide a map of entrepreneurial government by suggesting new ways of delivering public services. One of their basic principles, entitled Enterprising Government: Earning Rather Than Spending, argues that a profit oriented mentality can translate into more efficient and client-driven services. They provide several examples of successful government competition with the private sector, development deals, and the introduction of user fees. Not surprisingly, their arguments are similar to those presented in recent years by archivists when they debate funding issues. This author wonders how far we have come from the quiet, pleasant and powerless individuals that the 1985 SM Task Force on Archives and Society described; the resourceful ferrets that a Canadian government official once referred to; and the persons of impotent virtue caricatured by David Gracy in a number of his writings

Quantum error correction benchmarks for continuous weak parity measurements

We present an experimental procedure to determine the usefulness of a measurement scheme for quantum error correction (QEC). A QEC scheme typically requires the ability to prepare entangled states, to carry out multi-qubit measurements, and to perform certain recovery operations conditioned on measurement outcomes. As a consequence, the experimental benchmark of a QEC scheme is a tall order because it requires the conjuncture of many elementary components. Our scheme opens the path to experimental benchmarks of individual components of QEC. Our numerical simulations show that certain parity measurements realized in circuit quantum electrodynamics are on the verge of being useful for QEC