New York City\u27s Locally Based Enterprise Set-Aside: Legitimate Exercise of Mayoral Power or Unconstitutional Quota in Disguise?

Within the realm of affirmative action, there is disagreement on the means selected to reach the ultimate goal. For example, some programs have involved preferential treatment for members of disadvantaged groups at the expense of those individuals who are not in the minority. Such programs have been challenged on equal protection grounds as reverse discrimination. In New York City, mayors have implemented executive orders prescribing minority hiring goals and other preferential treatment. Order No. 71, for example, conditioned the awarding of city construction contracts upon submission by the bidder of an affirmative action program. Executive Order No. 53 attempted to satisfy the court\u27s objections to the city\u27s earlier affirmative action efforts under Executive No. 71 by proposing a plan for preferential treatment that did not involve racial or ethnic classification, but rather relied on social and economic criteria. This Note argues that Order No. 53 should withstand judicial review because it is socially and economically based and, thus, does not trigger strict scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause. The LBE (set forth in Order No. 53) effectively increases the participation in city contracts of small businesses and residents from economically underdeveloped areas, while avoiding many of the adverse consequences of the set-aside programs. New York City mayors have the power to issue such orders to further policy goals and to aid locally based enterprises, provided they have independent authority to take such action

Energetic Suppression of Decoherence in Exchange-Only Quantum Computation

Universal quantum computation requiring only the Heisenberg exchange interaction and suppressing decoherence via an energy gap is presented. The combination of an always-on exchange interaction between the three physical qubits comprising the encoded qubit and a global magnetic field generates an energy gap between the subspace of interest and all other states. This energy gap suppresses decoherence. Always-on exchange couplings greatly simplify hardware specifications and the implementation of inter-logical-qubit gates. A controlled phase gate can be implemented using only three Heisenberg exchange operations all of which can be performed simultaneously.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

A Scalable Architecture for Coherence-Preserving Qubits

We propose scalable architectures for the coherence-preserving qubits introduced by Bacon, Brown, and Whaley [Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 87}, 247902 (2001)]. These architectures employ extra qubits providing additional degrees of freedom to the system. We show that these extra degrees of freedom can be used to counter errors in coupling strength within the coherence-preserving qubit and to combat interactions with environmental qubits. The presented architectures incorporate experimentally viable methods for inter-logical-qubit coupling and can implement a controlled phase gate via three simultaneous Heisenberg exchange operations. The extra qubits also provide flexibility in the arrangement of the physical qubits. Specifically, all physical qubits of a coherent-preserving qubit lattice can be placed in two spatial dimensions. Such an arrangement allows for universal cluster state computation.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Quantum Cellular Automata Pseudo-Random Maps

Quantum computation based on quantum cellular automata (QCA) can greatly reduce the control and precision necessary for experimental implementations of quantum information processing. A QCA system consists of a few species of qubits in which all qubits of a species evolve in parallel. We show that, in spite of its inherent constraints, a QCA system can be used to study complex quantum dynamics. To this aim, we demonstrate scalable operations on a QCA system that fulfill statistical criteria of randomness and explore which criteria of randomness can be fulfilled by operators from various QCA architectures. Other means of realizing random operators with only a few independent operators are also discussed.Comment: 7 pages, 8 figures, submitted to PR

Quantum Fidelity Decay of Quasi-Integrable Systems

We show, via numerical simulations, that the fidelity decay behavior of quasi-integrable systems is strongly dependent on the location of the initial coherent state with respect to the underlying classical phase space. In parallel to classical fidelity, the quantum fidelity generally exhibits Gaussian decay when the perturbation affects the frequency of periodic phase space orbits and power-law decay when the perturbation changes the shape of the orbits. For both behaviors the decay rate also depends on initial state location. The spectrum of the initial states in the eigenbasis of the system reflects the different fidelity decay behaviors. In addition, states with initial Gaussian decay exhibit a stage of exponential decay for strong perturbations. This elicits a surprising phenomenon: a strong perturbation can induce a higher fidelity than a weak perturbation of the same type.Comment: 11 pages, 11 figures, to be published Phys. Rev.

Cashing in on Seafood

Stephen Heard graduated from the University of Rhode Island in 1970 with a degree in business administration. He started his career by signing up as a management trainee at Woolworth’s Department Store in Wellesley, Massachusetts. It didn’t take him long to realize he missed his calling: being by the Rhode Island shoreline and employed in the fishing industry. Nearly 35 years later, Stephen is a self-made multimillionaire, having followed both his passion for entrepreneurship and for living his life on the Atlantic coast