Reparable Harm: Assessing and Addressing Disparities Faced by Boys and Men of Color in California

The California Endowment commissioned this report to highlight the most glaring inequities in socioeconomics, health, safety, and education faced by African-American and Latino men and boys in the state. In addition to presenting the statistics on these indicators, the authors outline a framework for addressing the disparities at the individual, community, and macro levels

Band Distributions for Quantum Chaos on the Torus

Band distributions (BDs) are introduced describing quantization in a toral phase space. A BD is the uniform average of an eigenstate phase-space probability distribution over a band of toral boundary conditions. A general explicit expression for the Wigner BD is obtained. It is shown that the Wigner functions for {\em all} of the band eigenstates can be reproduced from the Wigner BD. Also, BDs are shown to be closer to classical distributions than eigenstate distributions. Generalized BDs, associated with sets of adjacent bands, are used to extend in a natural way the Chern-index characterization of the classical-quantum correspondence on the torus to arbitrary rational values of the scaled Planck constant.Comment: 12 REVTEX page

Typical and extreme entropies of long-lived isolated quantum systems

In this paper, we investigate and compare two well-developed definitions of entropy relevant for describing the dynamics of isolated quantum systems: bipartite entanglement entropy and observational entropy. In a model system of interacting particles in a one-dimensional lattice, we numerically solve for the full quantum behavior of the system. We characterize the fluctuations, and find the maximal, minimal, and typical entropy of each type that the system can eventually attain through its evolution. While both entropies are low for some "special" configurations and high for more "generic" ones, there are several fundamental differences in their behavior. Observational entropy behaves in accord with classical Boltzmann entropy (e.g. equilibrium is a condition of near-maximal entropy and uniformly distributed particles, and minimal entropy is a very compact configuration). Entanglement entropy is rather different: minimal entropy "empties out" one partition while maximal entropy apportions the particles between the partitions, and neither is typical. Beyond these qualitative results, we characterize both entropies and their fluctuations in some detail as they depend on temperature, particle number, and box size.Comment: Additional comments are made in the caption of figure 10 (a). Equation 7 and a brief description are added in relation to figure

Renormalization of Quantum Anosov Maps: Reduction to Fixed Boundary Conditions

A renormalization scheme is introduced to study quantum Anosov maps (QAMs) on a torus for general boundary conditions (BCs), whose number ($k$) is always finite. It is shown that the quasienergy eigenvalue problem of a QAM for {\em all} $k$ BCs is exactly equivalent to that of the renormalized QAM (with Planck's constant $\hbar ^{\prime}=\hbar /k$) at some {\em fixed} BCs that can be of four types. The quantum cat maps are, up to time reversal, fixed points of the renormalization transformation. Several results at fixed BCs, in particular the existence of a complete basis of ``crystalline'' eigenstates in a classical limit, can then be derived and understood in a simple and transparent way in the general-BCs framework.Comment: REVTEX, 12 pages, 1 table. To appear in Physical Review Letter

Undamped nonequilibrium dynamics of a nondegenerate Bose gas in a 3D isotropic trap

We investigate anomalous damping of the monopole mode of a non-degenerate 3D Bose gas under isotropic harmonic confinement as recently reported by the JILA TOP trap experiment [D. S. Lob- ser, A. E. S. Barentine, E. A. Cornell, and H. J. Lewandowski (in preparation)]. Given a realistic confining potential, we develop a model for studying collective modes that includes the effects of anharmonic corrections to a harmonic potential. By studying the influence of these trap anharmonicities throughout a range of temperatures and collisional regimes, we find that the damping is caused by the joint mechanisms of dephasing and collisional relaxation. Furthermore, the model is complimented by Monte Carlo simulations which are in fair agreement with data from the JILA experiment.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figure

Increasing the coherence time of Bose-Einstein-condensate interferometers with optical control of dynamics

Atom interferometers using Bose-Einstein condensate that is confined in a waveguide and manipulated by optical pulses have been limited by their short coherence times. We present a theoretical model that offers a physically simple explanation for the loss of contrast and propose the method for increasing the fringe contrast by recombining the atoms at a different time. A simple, quantitatively accurate, analytical expression for the optimized recombination time is presented and used to place limits on the physical parameters for which the contrast may be recovered.Comment: 34 Pages, 8 Figure

Estimation over Communication Networks: Performance Bounds and Achievability Results

This paper considers the problem of estimation over communication networks. Suppose a sensor is taking measurements of a dynamic process. However the process needs to be estimated at a remote location connected to the sensor through a network of communication links that drop packets stochastically. We provide a framework for computing the optimal performance in the sense of expected error covariance. Using this framework we characterize the dependency of the performance on the topology of the network and the packet dropping process. For independent and memoryless packet dropping processes we find the steady-state error for some classes of networks and obtain lower and upper bounds for the performance of a general network. Finally we find a necessary and sufficient condition for the stability of the estimate error covariance for general networks with spatially correlated and Markov type dropping process. This interesting condition has a max-cut interpretation

Providing Virtual Execution Environments: A Twofold Illustration

Platform virtualization helps solving major grid computing challenges: share resource with flexible, user-controlled and custom execution environments and in the meanwhile, isolate failures and malicious code. Grid resource management tools will evolve to embrace support for virtual resource. We present two open source projects that transparently supply virtual execution environments. Tycoon has been developed at HP Labs to optimise resource usage in creating an economy where users bid to access virtual machines and compete for CPU cycles. SmartDomains provides a peer-to-peer layer that automates virtual machines deployment using a description language and deployment engine from HP Labs. These projects demonstrate both client-server and peer-to-peer approaches to virtual resource management. The first case makes extensive use of virtual machines features for dynamic resource allocation. The second translates virtual machines capabilities into a sophisticated language where resource management components can be plugged in configurations and architectures defined at deployment time. We propose to share our experience at CERN openlab developing SmartDomains and deploying Tycoon to give an illustrative introduction to emerging research in virtual resource management.Comment: openlab Technical Documents and Publication

Motor preparation of spatially and temporally defined movements: Evidence from startle

This article is available open access through the publisher’s website at the link below. Copyright © 2011 the American Physiological Society.Previous research has shown that the preparation of a spatially targeted movement performed at maximal speed is different from that of a temporally constrained movement (Gottlieb et al. 1989b). In the current study, we directly examined preparation differences in temporally vs. spatially defined movements through the use of a startling stimulus and manipulation of the task goals. Participants performed arm extension movements to one of three spatial targets (20°, 40°, 60°) and an arm extension movement of 20° at three movement speeds (slow, moderate, fast). All movements were performed in a blocked, simple reaction time paradigm, with trials involving a startling stimulus (124 dB) interspersed randomly with control trials. As predicted, spatial movements were modulated by agonist duration and timed movements were modulated by agonist rise time. The startling stimulus triggered all movements at short latencies with a compression of the kinematic and electromyogram (EMG) profile such that they were performed faster than control trials. However, temporally constrained movements showed a differential effect of movement compression on startle trials such that the slowest movement showed the greatest temporal compression. The startling stimulus also decreased the relative timing between EMG bursts more for the 20° movement when it was defined by a temporal rather than spatial goal, which we attributed to the disruption of an internal timekeeper for the timed movements. These results confirm that temporally defined movements were prepared in a different manner from spatially defined movements and provide new information pertaining to these preparation differences

DEPAS: A Decentralized Probabilistic Algorithm for Auto-Scaling

The dynamic provisioning of virtualized resources offered by cloud computing infrastructures allows applications deployed in a cloud environment to automatically increase and decrease the amount of used resources. This capability is called auto-scaling and its main purpose is to automatically adjust the scale of the system that is running the application to satisfy the varying workload with minimum resource utilization. The need for auto-scaling is particularly important during workload peaks, in which applications may need to scale up to extremely large-scale systems. Both the research community and the main cloud providers have already developed auto-scaling solutions. However, most research solutions are centralized and not suitable for managing large-scale systems, moreover cloud providers' solutions are bound to the limitations of a specific provider in terms of resource prices, availability, reliability, and connectivity. In this paper we propose DEPAS, a decentralized probabilistic auto-scaling algorithm integrated into a P2P architecture that is cloud provider independent, thus allowing the auto-scaling of services over multiple cloud infrastructures at the same time. Our simulations, which are based on real service traces, show that our approach is capable of: (i) keeping the overall utilization of all the instantiated cloud resources in a target range, (ii) maintaining service response times close to the ones obtained using optimal centralized auto-scaling approaches.Comment: Submitted to Springer Computin