Lies, damned lies and …

SciRate stats.

A few days back Dave did some analysis on papers that were highly scited on SciRate in the past 12 months. He examined papers that had more than 10 scitations and tried to group them by region.

Papers that had multiple co-authors were split between regions and if an author had multiple affiliations between different regions it was split again. He found, somewhat interestingly, that the US beat out Europe and Canada for the number of highly scited papers. This is interesting mostly because the US spends comparatively less than Canada and Europe on Quantum Information theory research.

Somewhat foolishly I decided that it would be interesting to see what the outcome of a similar calculation would be if we did the same analysis by institution instead of geographic region. Well, after an hour or so of downloading papers and checking affiliations I cobbled together the calculation.

I decided to basically use the same scoring mechanism as Dave. Each paper with more than 10 scitations, ie 11 or more, was worth 1 point. If there were multiple co-authors they each received a fraction of that point. Again, if an author had more than 1 affiliation I split their allocation accordingly.

Oh, and I did the calculation taking into account papers from 365 days prior to the 3rd of November. Clearly, the choice of time-period over which this calculation is done makes a big difference.

Now, before presenting a summary of these results I should point out that this was all done on the back of an envelope (actually, the reverse side of a printout of a paper) and isn’t necessarily accurate. While I was happy to waste my time to do this once, it wasn’t really worth checking the stats too thoroughly. Mostly, I was only interested in the broad trends that emerged and I think I counted accurately enough to establish those. But, please, don’t take any of this too seriously. I’m only publishing these stats as a discussion starter!!!

Of the 46 papers that I counted, 37 separate institutions were listed by authors as affiliations. Only 10 of those institutions received a score of 1 or more papers (remember if there were multiple co-authors the score for a paper would be fractional). The top 10 institutions were:

So long and thanks for all the chips!

It’s been a really long time since I last posted here. Mostly, that’s because in the last few months I’ve been leading a rather nutzoid existence.

Some time back I posted that my contract in Bristol was ending and I was looking for work. Well, I went grant and postdoc hunting and eventually I decided to take an offer of a postdoc in Hannover in Reinhard Werner’s group.

Even since I made that decision I’ve been applying for visas, packing, throwing away loads of stuff, re-packing, throwing away more stuff, finding homes for various pieces of furniture and sending big boxes of stuff to various places. Oh, and there’s been leaving drinks like 15 billion times (or at least it feels like it).

Now I’m on my way to Germany (I’m actually writing this on the plane, I guess I’ll post it later) and it’s all suddenly much less about organizing and much more about doing. Doing is always a lot more exciting.

Somewhat weirdly the Lufthansa in-flight magazine has a feature on Bristol in it! They describe it as a "crazy, laid back" city. I think that somewhat paradoxical description fits pretty well. I doubt this needs to be said, most people that know me know that I’m going to really miss Bristol. I’ve made loads of really great friends and done so many wonderful things. I’ve been trying to think what I’ll miss most: Maybe bugging the guys in the office all the time with my incessant prattling? Having drinks with friends in ultra-hip or ultra-un-hip surrounds? The music and art? Good pie (and ale)?

Now, away from the reflective and back to the exciting. I’m (hopefully if the paperwork is sorted) starting my new job next week! It’s going to be interesting to adjust to another group’s style of working, hopefully I manage to do it quickly! I’m a little concerned that my skill set is very different to that of a lot of the people in the group, but I guess that just means that I’m gonna have to learn more (and hopefully I can teach the others some new tricks as well). Oh, and I’m gonna have to get a lot better at German!

In any case, the next few months are going to be very interesting. There’s going to be loads of challenges but there are also going to be heaps of opportunity to experience new things.

Oh, and at some point I might have to change the name of this blog. I need to think more about that.

QIP deadlines are up

Just a heads up for all of those wanting to go to QIP in Zurich this year. It seems that the submission deadlines are now up on the website:

• Submission deadline for contributed talks: October 22, 2009
• Notification of acceptance: November 23, 2009
• Submission deadline for posters: December 7, 2009

OK everyone, I guess you’ve got a little over 3 months to crack out all sorts of wonderful theoryness.

Any tips or bets on results that will fall by October?

AQIS ‘09 – deadline 14th of June

Just a quick post to remind folk that the AQIS ‘09 submission deadline is just around the corner (June 14th at 11:59 p.m. in US Pacific Standard Time).

This year’s AQIS will be held in Nanjing from August 26 – 29.

QIP 2010 dates announced

The dates for QIP 2010 have been announced – it will take place in Zurich from the 18th to the 22nd of January 2010.

Keep your eyes on the QIP 2010 website for submission and registration info etc.

The Tricki looks awesome

I just had a look at the Tricki that Tim Gowers has set up, it looks like it is going to be an incredibly useful resource for solving mathsish problems!

I walked past Royal Albert Hall on my way to work this mornin

This week I’m attending the IMA conference on quantum computing and the complexity of quantum simulation.

Looks like it’s going to be a good conference. Daniel Gottesman is kicking off with a review(ish) talk on “Computationally hard problems in spin systems”…

Looking for work

Observant readers may have noticed that I have added a few new pages to this blog recently – a “Research” page and a “CV” page. Those of you who have hung around the sciencish blogs enough will realize that the appearance of these sort of pages is normally a pretty clear symptom of someone looking for a new job.

I’ve now been living and working in Bristol for almost 20 months. I don’t know if my colleagues realize this but I have really enjoyed working here. The Quantum Information group and the Theoretical Computer Science group have really been a wonderful collection of folk to work with. I would strongly recommend Bristol as a place for anyone to pursue these lines of research.

Quite a few people have asked why I am leaving if I enjoy my job in Bristol so much? Well, I could say the answer is money, but I probably could have hunted down money to stay if I really wanted to. I guess part of the answer is that I don’t want to commit to staying here in the long term, staying here probably won’t get me to where I want to be in two or three years time. On top of that I’d very much like to live somewhere that makes it easier to see my girlfriend (who lives in Germany) more often.

So, right now I’m writing this blog post when I should be polishing up my research statement to send off to prospective employers… Why am I procrastinating? Well I guess it is because this is the part of being a scientist that I hate the most. Applying for jobs has the tendency to make me focus on all my own failings, it makes me think about all those things in my career that I should have done better.

One thing that I take some comfort from has been the direction that my own research has taken in the last year or so. Being around people who encourage my whacky ways has helped a lot and now I’m pursuing questions that I think are genuinely interesting and, thankfully, it seems that other people also believe this.

Now, back to the job applications… cross your fingers for me if you are so inclined!

Congratulations Dr Will

Yay! Will Matthews is now Dr Will Matthews. Congratulations Will!

Yay! I’ve now been published in a Royal Society journal

Yay! My paper with Dan Shepherd that was previously titled Instantaneous Quantum Computation has been appeared online in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A with the title Temporally Unstructured Quantum Computation.

I wonder if any royals read the Proceedings A?

Update: I forgot to add that the published version is roughly 100 bazillion times easier to read than the version that appeared originally on the arXiv. So if anyone out there was wanting to dive in and learn this material they should start with the published paper or possibly the latest arXiv version.