General practitioners' reasons for removing patients from their lists: postal survey in England and Wales

The removal of patients from doctors' lists causes con­ siderable public and political concern, with speculation that patients are removed for inappropriate, including financial, reasons. In 1999 the House of Commons Select Committee on Public Administration noted that little evidence was available on either the frequency of, or the reasons for, removal of patients. National statistics do not distinguish between patients removed after moving out of a practice area and those removed for other reasons. Two postal surveys have reported why general practitioners might, in general, remove patients, and one small study has described the reasons doctors give for particular removals. We therefore determined the current scale of, and doctors' reasons for, removal of patients from their lists in Eng­ land and Wales

Quantum Teleportation of Optical Quantum Gates

We show that a universal set of gates for quantum computation with optics can be quantum teleported through the use of EPR entangled states, homodyne detection, and linear optics and squeezing operations conditioned on measurement outcomes. This scheme may be used for fault-tolerant quantum computation in any optical scheme (qubit or continuous variable). The teleportation of nondeterministic nonlinear gates employed in linear optics quantum computation is discussed.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure, published versio

Biology, fisheries and culture of tropical groupers and snappers

Groupers and snappers are important fishery resources of the tropics and subtropics, where their high values have caused most of their stocks to be heavily exploited, some even to the point of collapse. Trends towards heavy demand and decreasing natural supply, which are accelerating in several parts of the world, prompted various mariculture ventures. Focused research on biology and the population dynamics of groupers and snappers, and on their reproduction and growth under controlled condition will remain essential for dealing with the questions on how to better manage their fisheries. This volume of papers presents important scientific findings and views on these two important groups of fish.Percoid fisheries, Fishery biology, Fishery management, Conferences

A high bandwidth quantum repeater

We present a physical- and link-level design for the creation of entangled pairs to be used in quantum repeater applications where one can control the noise level of the initially distributed pairs. The system can tune dynamically, trading initial fidelity for success probability, from high fidelity pairs (F=0.98 or above) to moderate fidelity pairs. The same physical resources that create the long-distance entanglement are used to implement the local gates required for entanglement purification and swapping, creating a homogeneous repeater architecture. Optimizing the noise properties of the initially distributed pairs significantly improves the rate of generating long-distance Bell pairs. Finally, we discuss the performance trade-off between spatial and temporal resources.Comment: 5 page

In Defense of the Pure Pilgrim: De Re Defensionibus Peregrini Castiori

Does the pure pilgrim exist? Probably not as a person, but the idea of a pure pilgrim is very much alive, although under threat. John Muir (2002), environmentalist and mountaineer, argued that there is a proper way to climb a mountain. By analogy, there is a virtuous way, allowing for meaningful, spiritual experiences which can be applied to proper peregrination. The early medieval ascetic understanding of pilgrims (St Jerome c. 347-420), was that of wandering monks, forsaking the bustling cities as to immerse themselves in the mercy of Christ in the solitude of the country (Webb, 2002). In modern times, pilgrimage has become rather a process of self-exile, of social and physical isolation, time used to try to come closer either to God or to one’s self. However, the concepts of authentic pilgrimage and pure pilgrim seem to be anachronistic, waning in popular pilgrimage culture. The Camino, traditionally the apex of the idea of pure pilgrimage, has now been ‘app’efied’ and commoditised, so that being a pure pilgrim is near-impossible from the perspective of the comfort needs of the modern post-pilgrim. The model of personal transformation, through suffering, avoidance of comfort and overcoming obstacles, seems to many to be unnecessary, even laughable. Yet, for an activity to have any meaning, one must not skirt the perceived rules that make that activity possible (Suits, 2005). The goal of a pilgrimage is not to arrive at the destination, but to arrive by means of being a pilgrim. The medieval pilgrims wanted to show God their willingness to make sacrifices in hope of salvation, which idea C.S Lewis (2012 [1952]:145), contends, saying that as long as pilgrims are thinking of a reciprocal relationship with God, this relationship remains skewed. The pure pilgrim must then be simply pure rather than presumptuous

Giant optical Faraday rotation induced by a single electron spin in a quantum dot: Applications to entangling remote spins via a single photon

We propose a quantum non-demolition method - giant Faraday rotation - to detect a single electron spin in a quantum dot inside a microcavity where negatively-charged exciton strongly couples to the cavity mode. Left- and right-circularly polarized light reflected from the cavity feels different phase shifts due to cavity quantum electrodynamics and the optical spin selection rule. This yields giant and tunable Faraday rotation which can be easily detected experimentally. Based on this spin-detection technique, a scalable scheme to create an arbitrary amount of entanglement between two or more remote spins via a single photon is proposed.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure

The Original Understanding of “Equal Protection of the Laws”

This Article reports on the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments and their legislative evolutions, and also looks at the historical environment in which the equal protection clause was developed, in order to gain an understanding of how that clause was originally read

Hybrid quantum repeater using bright coherent light

We describe a quantum repeater protocol for long-distance quantum communication. In this scheme, entanglement is created between qubits at intermediate stations of the channel by using a weak dispersive light-matter interaction and distributing the outgoing bright coherent light pulses among the stations. Noisy entangled pairs of electronic spin are then prepared with high success probability via homodyne detection and postselection. The local gates for entanglement purification and swapping are deterministic and measurement-free, based upon the same coherent-light resources and weak interactions as for the initial entanglement distribution. Finally, the entanglement is stored in a nuclear-spin-based quantum memory. With our system, qubit-communication rates approaching 100 Hz over 1280 km with fidelities near 99% are possible for reasonable local gate errors.Comment: title changed, final published versio

The Winning Narrative: The Social Genesis of Pilgrimage Sites

While pilgrimage sites may be sparked by historical events, their meaning is created by their accompanying narratives. A pilgrimage site becomes sacred to visitors not merely because of scripture, or supposed religious facts, but also because of social and psychological contexts. It is their winning narrative that supplies meaning and a framework for understanding. Without such narratives, it is conceivable that some pilgrimage sites would not have gained their enduring popularity and international appeal. This article not only describes a few instances of such sites rising to fame, but also the philosophy behind a winning narrative. The idea that narrative can construct the Identity of a place is based on the notion that a story can supply meaning by unifying discrete, and otherwise disjointed events, into a coherent account (McAdams, 2013). While the concept of narrative identity is most often associated with personal psychology (Hammack, 2011; Nussbaum, 1990), the authors of this paper find analogies between the function of narrative in personal psychology, and in pilgrimage. These analogies are applied to pilgrimage to illustrate how narratives function at pilgrimage sites to unite events with historical, religious, personal, cultural and political contexts. A pilgrimage narrative forms the framework for how people and institutions understand their roles and motivations, and thus how they will act, respond, and experience things. The authors identify five features that make some narratives more successful than others, claiming that ‘winning narratives’ are so powerful that a sacred site or shrine’s establishment and development could not have done without it, or at least, would not have enjoyed the rate of success in visitor numbers in comparison to similar sites that lacked a winning narrative and enjoyed therefore less popularity and visitors. The five features of a winning narrative are here illustrated with examples

Improved ESP-index: a practical self-index for highly repetitive texts

While several self-indexes for highly repetitive texts exist, developing a practical self-index applicable to real world repetitive texts remains a challenge. ESP-index is a grammar-based self-index on the notion of edit-sensitive parsing (ESP), an efficient parsing algorithm that guarantees upper bounds of parsing discrepancies between different appearances of the same subtexts in a text. Although ESP-index performs efficient top-down searches of query texts, it has a serious issue on binary searches for finding appearances of variables for a query text, which resulted in slowing down the query searches. We present an improved ESP-index (ESP-index-I) by leveraging the idea behind succinct data structures for large alphabets. While ESP-index-I keeps the same types of efficiencies as ESP-index about the top-down searches, it avoid the binary searches using fast rank/select operations. We experimentally test ESP-index-I on the ability to search query texts and extract subtexts from real world repetitive texts on a large-scale, and we show that ESP-index-I performs better that other possible approaches.Comment: This is the full version of a proceeding accepted to the 11th International Symposium on Experimental Algorithms (SEA2014