“Why I Sing the Blues”: The Blues and the Individuals Who Played Them

Blues music is profoundly important to not only Black history but also to American history as a whole. While the blues has been examined by several scholars and writers throughout the years such as Samuel Charters, Paul Oliver, and Elijah Wald, much of the work done seems to be geared toward biographical information on these artists or defining what exactly the blues is. In my thesis, I argue that blues is important for another reason: it speaks to the individualism that was found within the African American community following Emancipation and this can be found primarily through a robust examination of the blues lyrics themselves. In this work, I focus on the early blues from the beginning of the 20th century up until World War II. These pre-war blues can be divided into three distinct regions: the Mississippi Delta, Texas, and the Piedmont. As a result, this work focuses in on major representatives in the blues of these three areas: in the Mississippi Delta with Robert Johnson, Son House, Charley Patton, Big Bill Broonzy, and Skip James, in the Piedmont region with Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Reverend Gary Davis, Blind Willie McTell, and Joshua White, and finally in Texas with Blind Lemon Jefferson. By examining three distinct themes in the blues, including religion, leisure, and relationships, I show how the blues lyrics themselves were important to understanding the lived experiences of these African American artists and the Black community at the time

Combined Error Correction Techniques for Quantum Computing Architectures

Proposals for quantum computing devices are many and varied. They each have unique noise processes that make none of them fully reliable at this time. There are several error correction/avoidance techniques which are valuable for reducing or eliminating errors, but not one, alone, will serve as a panacea. One must therefore take advantage of the strength of each of these techniques so that we may extend the coherence times of the quantum systems and create more reliable computing devices. To this end we give a general strategy for using dynamical decoupling operations on encoded subspaces. These encodings may be of any form; of particular importance are decoherence-free subspaces and quantum error correction codes. We then give means for empirically determining an appropriate set of dynamical decoupling operations for a given experiment. Using these techniques, we then propose a comprehensive encoding solution to many of the problems of quantum computing proposals which use exchange-type interactions. This uses a decoherence-free subspace and an efficient set of dynamical decoupling operations. It also addresses the problems of controllability in solid state quantum dot devices.Comment: Contribution to Proceedings of the 2002 Physics of Quantum Electronics Conference", to be published in J. Mod. Optics. This paper provides a summary and review of quant-ph/0205156 and quant-ph/0112054, and some new result

Overview of Quantum Error Prevention and Leakage Elimination

Quantum error prevention strategies will be required to produce a scalable quantum computing device and are of central importance in this regard. Progress in this area has been quite rapid in the past few years. In order to provide an overview of the achievements in this area, we discuss the three major classes of error prevention strategies, the abilities of these methods and the shortcomings. We then discuss the combinations of these strategies which have recently been proposed in the literature. Finally we present recent results in reducing errors on encoded subspaces using decoupling controls. We show how to generally remove mixing of an encoded subspace with external states (termed leakage errors) using decoupling controls. Such controls are known as ``leakage elimination operations'' or ``LEOs.''Comment: 8 pages, no figures, submitted to the proceedings of the Physics of Quantum Electronics, 200

Entanglement Survives Most Measurements

To prepare quantum states and extract information, it is often assumed that one can perform a perfectly projective measurement. Such measurements can achieve an uncorrelated system and environment. However, perfectly projective measurements can be difficult or impossible to perform. Using a sequence of weak measurements, we show that entanglement cannot be removed unless one of the measurement operators becomes perfectly projective through an extreme limiting process. Removing initial correlations and the scenario where measurement outcomes are not tracked are also discussed.Comment: Comments are welcome

Implicit racial biases can undermine liberal and moderate Whites’ support for Black politicians.

In new research Daniel Byrd, Deborah Hall, Nicole Roberts and José Soto seek to understand whether liberal and moderate Whites are biased towards Black politicians over White politicians, and if this favorability is mitigated by any implicit racial bias. They find that liberal and moderate Whites do have a preference for Black politicians over White politicians on a variety of measures of political support. They also find that this favorability disappeared among those who were more likely to rate Black politicians as less intelligent because of their implicit pro-White/anti-Black biase

Vaccinia Virus Binding and Infection of Primary Human Leukocytes

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)Vaccinia virus (VV) is the prototypical member of the orthopoxvirus genus of the Poxviridae family, and is currently being evaluated as a vector for vaccine development and cancer cell-targeting therapy. Despite the importance of studying poxvirus effects on the human immune system, reports of the direct interactions between poxviruses and primary human leukocytes (PHLs) are limited. We studied the specific molecular events that determine the VV tropism for major PHL subsets including monocytes, B cells, neutrophils, NK cells, and T cells. We found that VV exhibited an extremely strong bias towards binding and infecting monocytes among PHLs. VV binding strongly co-localized with lipid rafts on the surface of these cell types, even when lipid rafts were relocated to the cell uropods upon cell polarization. In humans, monocytic and professional antigen-presenting cells (APCs) have so far only been reported to exhibit abortive infections with VV. We found that monocyte-derived macrophages (MDMs), including granulocyte macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF)-polarized M1 and macrophage colony-stimulating factor (M-CSF)-polarized M2, were permissive to VV replication. The majority of virions produced in MDMs were extracellular enveloped virions (EEV). Visualization of infected MDMs revealed the formation of VV factories, actin tails, virion-associated branching structures and cell linkages, indicating that infected MDMs are able to initiate de novo synthesis of viral DNA and promote virus release. Classical activation of MDMs by LPS plus IFN-γ stimulation caused no effect on VV replication, whereas alternative activation of MDMs by IL-10 or LPS plus IL-1β treatment significantly decreased VV production. The IL-10-mediated suppression of VV replication was largely due to STAT3 activation, as a STAT3 inhibitor restored virus production to levels observed without IL-10 stimulation. In conclusion, our data indicate that PHL subsets express and share VV protein receptors enriched in lipid rafts. We also demonstrate that primary human macrophages are permissive to VV replication. After infection, MDMs produced EEV for long-range dissemination and also form structures associated with virions which may contribute to cell-cell spread