In the eye of Apollo: world literature from Goethe to Google

“National literature is now a rather unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach.” Thus the Olympian poet Goethe spoke to his young disciple Johann Peter Eckermann in Weimar in 1827. In Copenhagen, 1899, the great European critic Georg Brandes revived the term as a response to the surge of nationalism in European literature and culture; and in 1952, the emigrant critic, Erich Auerbach, turned to Goethe’s enduring concept as a framework for the emerging future of philology and humanism after WWII. Recent years have witnessed yet another revival of interest in world literature fuelled by a growing concern with a globalized marketplace, migration and new modes of communication. Goethe’s conversations with Eckermann, from which the concept was popularized, inaugurated a dialogue, based on a new cultural awareness of a global modernity, in which we still take part today. This seminar will introduce to the shifting meanings and applications of the concept of world literature, especially as it relates to changing conceptions of international and national cultures and literatures, in order to suggest productive perspectives on the conditions of literature in a transnational space of globalized cultures and media

Predicting User-Interactions on Reddit

In order to keep up with the demand of curating the deluge of crowd-sourced content, social media platforms leverage user interaction feedback to make decisions about which content to display, highlight, and hide. User interactions such as likes, votes, clicks, and views are assumed to be a proxy of a content's quality, popularity, or news-worthiness. In this paper we ask: how predictable are the interactions of a user on social media? To answer this question we recorded the clicking, browsing, and voting behavior of 186 Reddit users over a year. We present interesting descriptive statistics about their combined 339,270 interactions, and we find that relatively simple models are able to predict users' individual browse- or vote-interactions with reasonable accuracy.Comment: Presented at ASONAM 201

Spikes in Quantum Regge Calculus

We demonstrate by explicit calculation of the DeWitt-like measure in two-dimensional quantum Regge gravity that it is highly non-local and that the average values of link lengths $l,$, do not exist for sufficient high powers of $n$. Thus the concept of length has no natural definition in this formalism and a generic manifold degenerates into spikes. This might explain the failure of quantum Regge calculus to reproduce the continuum results of two-dimensional quantum gravity. It points to severe problems for the Regge approach in higher dimensions.Comment: 20 pages, Latex2e, 11 figure

Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computation via Exchange interactions

Quantum computation can be performed by encoding logical qubits into the states of two or more physical qubits, and controlling a single effective exchange interaction and possibly a global magnetic field. This "encoded universality" paradigm offers potential simplifications in quantum computer design since it does away with the need to perform single-qubit rotations. Here we show that encoded universality schemes can be combined with quantum error correction. In particular, we show explicitly how to perform fault-tolerant leakage correction, thus overcoming the main obstacle to fault-tolerant encoded universality.Comment: 5 pages, including 1 figur

Quantum computation with unknown parameters

We show how it is possible to realize quantum computations on a system in which most of the parameters are practically unknown. We illustrate our results with a novel implementation of a quantum computer by means of bosonic atoms in an optical lattice. In particular we show how a universal set of gates can be carried out even if the number of atoms per site is uncertain.Comment: 3 figure

Identification of the age-period-cohort model and the extended chain ladder model

In this paper, we consider the identification problem arising in the age-period-cohort models, as well as in the extended chain ladder model. We propose a canonical parametrization based on the accelerations of the trends in the three factors. This parametrization is exactly identified. It eases interpretation, estimation and forecasting. The canonical parametrization is shown to apply for a class of index sets which have trapezoid shapes, including various Lexis diagrams and the insurance reserving triangles.

Separable states are more disordered globally than locally

A remarkable feature of quantum entanglement is that an entangled state of two parties, Alice (A) and Bob (B), may be more disordered locally than globally. That is, S(A) > S(A,B), where S(.) is the von Neumann entropy. It is known that satisfaction of this inequality implies that a state is non-separable. In this paper we prove the stronger result that for separable states the vector of eigenvalues of the density matrix of system AB is majorized by the vector of eigenvalues of the density matrix of system A alone. This gives a strong sense in which a separable state is more disordered globally than locally and a new necessary condition for separability of bipartite states in arbitrary dimensions. We also investigate the extent to which these conditions are sufficient to characterize separability, exhibiting examples that show separability cannot be characterized solely in terms of the local and global spectra of a state. We apply our conditions to give a simple proof that non-separable states exist sufficiently close to the completely mixed state of $n$ qudits.Comment: 4 page

Latency Analysis of Systems with Multiple Interfaces for Ultra-Reliable M2M Communication

One of the ways to satisfy the requirements of ultra-reliable low latency communication for mission critical Machine-type Communications (MTC) applications is to integrate multiple communication interfaces. In order to estimate the performance in terms of latency and reliability of such an integrated communication system, we propose an analysis framework that combines traditional reliability models with technology-specific latency probability distributions. In our proposed model we demonstrate how failure correlation between technologies can be taken into account. We show for the considered scenario with fiber and different cellular technologies how up to 5-nines reliability can be achieved and how packet splitting can be used to reduce latency substantially while keeping 4-nines reliability. The model has been validated through simulation.Comment: Accepted for IEEE SPAWC'1

Quantum states far from the energy eigenstates of any local Hamiltonian

What quantum states are possible energy eigenstates of a many-body Hamiltonian? Suppose the Hamiltonian is non-trivial, i.e., not a multiple of the identity, and L-local, in the sense of containing interaction terms involving at most L bodies, for some fixed L. We construct quantum states \psi which are ``far away'' from all the eigenstates E of any non-trivial L-local Hamiltonian, in the sense that |\psi-E| is greater than some constant lower bound, independent of the form of the Hamiltonian.Comment: 4 page