Formal Verification vs. Quantum Uncertainty

Quantum programming is hard: Quantum programs are necessarily probabilistic and impossible to examine without disrupting the execution of a program. In response to this challenge, we and a number of other researchers have written tools to verify quantum programs against their intended semantics. This is not enough. Verifying an idealized semantics against a real world quantum program doesn\u27t allow you to confidently predict the program\u27s output. In order to have verification that works, you need both an error semantics related to the hardware at hand (this is necessarily low level) and certified compilation to the that same hardware. Once we have these two things, we can talk about an approach to quantum programming where we start by writing and verifying programs at a high level, attempt to verify properties of the compiled code, and repeat as necessary

Regional Housing Partnership: A Housing Blueprint for the Chicago Region

This report summarizes some of the successes of the work of the organizations that participated in the Regional Housing Partnership (RHP), which was supported by the Chicago Community Trust

Memento Mori: The development and validation of the Death Reflection Scale

Despite its potential for advancing organizational behavior (OB) research, the topic of death awareness has been vastly understudied. Moreover, research on death awareness has predominantly focused on the anxiety‐provoking aspect of death‐related cognitions, thus overlooking the positive aspect of death awareness, death reflection. This gap is exacerbated by the lack of a valid research instrument to measure death reflection. To address this issue, we offer a systematic conceptualization of death reflection, develop the Death Reflection Scale, and assess its psychometric properties across four studies. Further, using a sample of 268 firefighters, we examine whether death reflection buffers the detrimental impact of mortality cues at work on employee well‐being and safety performance. Results provide strong support for the psychometric properties of the Death Reflection Scale. Further, moderation analysis indicates death reflection weakens the negative effect of mortality cues on firefighters' safety performance. Overall, these findings suggest the newly developed Death Reflection Scale will prove useful in future research on death‐related cognitions

Trends in Poverty and Inequality in Seven African Countries

This paper aims to analyse trends in poverty and inequality in seven African countries using an asset index constructed from comparable, nationally representative surveys using multiple correspondence analysis. Improvements in the asset index are largely driven by progress in the accumulation of private assets, while access to public services has deteriorated. Continued efforts at the expansion of access to public services such as waterborne sanitation and piped water, particularly in rural areas, are thus required. Overall poverty has declined in five of the seven countries. The trends in urban and rural poverty for the most part mirror these trends in overall poverty. Five of the seven countries experienced an improvement in overall inequality. Only in Zambia has overall inequality increased. Experiences in regards to trends in urban and rural inequality are mixed. These results, however, should be interpreted with caution, given the various conceptual and methodological limitations of the asset index approach to poverty analysis.Poverty, inequality, asset index, multiple correspondence analysis, Africa

New Data on Aramaic in Classical Piyyut – תשמיע ניחומים ללישה , a Silluq for Shabbat Shim‘u by Yo ḥ anan ha - Kohen

The present article briefly reviews the research that has been conducted to-date on the use of Aramaic in Classical piyyut, and provides new material in this field: the silluq ‮תשמיע ניחומים ללישה‬‎ from a qedushta for Shabbat Shimʿu by Yoḥanan ha-Kohen, which includes an Aramaic passage. One of the manuscript sources for this composition, ms. ENA 3443/2, is also analyzed, and its copyist is identified as Eli ben Yehoshua he-Ḥaver (11th century). The article is provided with an appendix, in which Sahlan ben Avraham’s Targum poem ‮איתחברו ירחי שתא‬‎, a dispute between the months, is re-edited on the basis of newly-discovered material.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Brill via http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/17455227-0130200