Opinion Paper

I was recently invited to contribute an opinion on a paper by Stefan Schumacher et al. that extends some of my research on pattern-based all-optical switches to semiconductor systems. The paper appears in the January issue of Physica Status Solidi and should be available online now.

Download a PDF copy: A.M.C. Dawes, Towards a single-photon all-optical transistor, Phys. Status Solidi 3, A17-A19 (2009).

You may also notice this link will take you to my new website for the Photonics and Quantum Optics lab at Pacific.

acrobat.com

Now, finally some sweet looking competition for Google Documents. Of course, I have nothing against Google Docs, I used them all the time. But, I’m also a big fan of nice typefaces, PDF files, and screen sharing… all of which are features of the tools now available via acrobat.com. A free service (at least for now) acrobat.com has “buzzword” for wordprocessing and document collaboration, connectnow for screensharing, PDF creation (limited to a 5-document trial period), sharing and “My files”. All in all, an interesting set of features. Personally, I like being able to have documents online that use Adobe fonts. I have CS3 on both computers, but I’d rather not fire up InDesign just to write a letter with some nice fonts. Now if only I had some collaborative document I had to write…

Large Hadron Collider “Actually Worked”

For such a great moment in physics, I wish the PR had been controlled as well as the beam. Quotes like “Oh, wow, it actually worked!” don’t necessarily encourage government spending on 20-year-long half-billion-dollar research projects. There is enough skepticism working against science, I would have hoped for more confidence from the National Geographic press. On the other hand, I’m excited to learn more about the Higgs boson and see where things go in the high energy physics world. It should be a busy few years.

Nature: Future of open access

There was an interesting comment on open access in the latest issue of Nature. A previous comment suggested that open access models based on “pay to publish, free to read” hurt science in developing countries. I very much agree with the recent reply by Massimo Sandal which suggests the opposite. Massimo’s reply is based on the argument that scientists read many more articles than they publish and must first read journals before they can publish them. Of course one would have to look at the average price per article read versus the price per article published to do a full economic analysis. For my own research, I’m sure I’ve read thousands of articles, and published a handful of papers. Some have been in pay-to-publish journals, but most were not. OFf the top of my head, my reading costs have exceeded my publication costs by nearly an order of magnitude.

I think this is still an open question, and it would be interesting to see some data on it.

EPD for OS X: public beta available

My knack for checking for software releases on the release day shines again today. Several months ago I had heard a rumor about the Enthought Python Distribution (EPD) being developed for the Mac. Between writing my dissertation and packing up my family for our upcoming move, I hadn’t thought about it again… until today. And of course, today this announcement was posted. So I’m currently pulling down a 200 MB installer package and I’ll post again soon once I have a chance to tinker.

Subversion and mac bundles

I wrote earlier about using SVN and LaTeX for document management. While this has continued to work well for me, I did discover an issue with some document files generated by mac apps. It has become common to save documents as “bundles,” which from the filesystem perspective are directories but look like documents in Finder. Unfortunately, these bundles delete or overwrite any .svn folders they contain, so if you put an iWork document, or in my case a DataGraph plot, under revision control in SVN, you will get an error after you save it the next time:

svn: Working copy ____ is missing or not locked.”

I found a handy Ruby script that has a built-in list of extensions to look for (iWork files among others). I simply add dgraph to the list of extensions and it automatically downloads and replaces the missing .svn folders.

Walk Score

This is somewhat off topic, but I felt it was a good example of a technology mashup that serves those of us who would like to drive less. Of course it is most helpful to those of us who have a chance to choose a place to live based on how walkable that place is.

Walk Score is a hybrid google business map that tabulates the general distance to a wide range of typical business types.

Waves and Optics

It’s been a little while since CLEO and my last post. Things have been hectic to say the least. The past few weeks included:

• a trip to Forest Grove to look for houses
• a week at home with Carter (17 mo. old) while Leslie went to Volleyball tournament
• showing our house twice
• receiving two offers on our house
• signing one of them

We’ve had the home inspection and are waiting on the “Requested Repairs” paperwork, otherwise things are looking good.

“What does this have to do with Waves and Optics?” you ask. Well that is the course that I am responsible for this fall. I’m also teaching Geometrical Optics I and Workshop Physics (calc-based intro) but those courses are already put together.

Dr. T. H. Maiman (7/11/27 – 5/5/07)

I’m currently attending the CLEO/QELS conference in San Jose, CA. Yesterday there was a symposium honoring the late Ted Maiman, who was the first person to successfully build and operate a Laser. After the symposium, I was doing some follow-up reading on Wikipedia and discovered that the timing of this memorial session was very coincidental. Ted passed away a year ago today, and his famous invention, according to his notebook, took place almost exactly 48 years ago (May 16, 1960). For the Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics to take place between these dates is highly appropriate, and it has been interesting to consider the conference within the context of the historical origins of the laser. Hopefully Ted would be impressed with what we have all come up with using his invention.

SVN and LaTeX

For anyone curious about the process of managing a LaTeX document with the Subversion (SVN) version control system, I have to highly recommend it. Now that my dissertation is officially finished, I have a bit of time to explain the process I used to back-up, archive, and otherwise manage the beast.