Online Radio Explosive Growth
A new survey of all forms of radio revealsthat online radio has surged in popularity, but satellite radio and AM/FM radio arestill growing, though at a lower rate.
The study reveals that more than half of those aged over 12 years have listened to online radio over the last month and that more of those listeners are using mobile devices to receive their favorite radio stations. The numbers almost doubled from 2014 to 2015, with 53 percent saying they have listened to radio online.
Still, traditional, terrestrial radio remains the most popular form of radio, with91 percent over 12 saying they had listened to over-the-air radio in the week before the survey was taken. This result is essentially unchanged fromthe 2013 survey.
Satellite radio has also grown since 2013 with XM subscribers up 7 percent.
Ad revenue for AM/FM was down, but at 3 percent, that is only slightly lower than 2013’s numbers. At 9 percent, revenue from digital posted gains. Off-air advertising was up 16 percent.
But Internet-based radio continues to show major growth.
“As smartphone listening grows, so too does Web-based listening in cars,” the article said. “As of January 2015, more than a third of U.S. adult cellphone owners (35%) have listened to online radio in the car. That is substantially more than the 21% who did so in 2013, and nearly six times the number (6%) who had done so in 2010.”
The Uncommon Core: Parents may go to Jail
Parents in South Carolina who are part of a nationwide revolt against Common Core say they are being threatened with “criminal accountability” if they prevent their children from taking the tests required by the controversial educational-standards program.
Tamra Hood, a member of South Carolina Parents Involved in Education, said the state Education Department’s Chief Operating Officer, Elizabeth Carpentier, warned parents could spend 30 days in jail if even a single day of testing is missed, Breitbart News reported.
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Arne Duncan
In addition, Hood said Carpentier warned that groups that encourage parents to refuse the Common Core-aligned tests could be charged with aiding and abetting a crime.
A memo from South Carolina state education Superintendent Molly Spearman to districts bluntly declared there is “no statutory provision for parents to opt their children out of testing.”
Dino Teppara of the state agency’s public information office denied any threats were made and also denied that Carpentier said parents can be held criminally liable if they remove their children from school on testing days, insisting she “simply noted the truancy provisions in state statutes.”
In any case, Education Secretary Arne Duncan has clearly warned that if states don’t fix the problem of parents opting out, the federal government will “have an obligation to step in.”
Despite the insistence of supporters that Common Core is a state-driven education program, last week Duncan criticized parents who opt out of testing, charging they are hurting minorities and the disabled.
National Review Online reported Duncan’s position is that in the past, English language learners, students in special education and racial minorities were “swept under the rug.”
“Folks in the civil rights community, folks in the disability community, they want their kids being assessed. They want to know if they are making progress or growth,” he said.
In 2013, Duncan chalked up the opposition to Common Core to “white suburban moms who– all of a sudden– [realize] their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were, and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were.”
Resistance to Common Core, which has been adopted by 46 states, is building.
In Arkansas, a mother confronted the Arkansas State Board of Education about the program’s absurdly high demands, a high-school honors student in New Jersey blasted the testing publicly and an award-winning teacher in Ohio told a stunned audience she’s quitting because of Common Core.
Commenting on the resistance in New York state, where 184,000 of 1.1 million eligible students refused to take Common Core English exams earlier this month, renowned educator Diane Ravitch asked, “What if they threw a test and nobody took it? New York is about to find out,” the Long Island Press reported.
Common Core opponents have leaked a copy of an examination, and a number of states are formally taking action to withdraw from the requirements.
“Crimes of the Educators” reveals how the architects of America’s public school disaster implemented a plan to socialize the U.S. by knowingly and willingly dumbing down the population, a mission now closer to success than ever as the Obama administration works relentlessly to nationalize K-12 schooling with Common Core.
A parent in South Carolina, Artie Allen, has a Facebook page encouraging “Stop Common Core in South Carolina.”
He has no sympathy for state and district school officials fretting over funding-cut threats from the government.
“We got the sob story from one of our 3 kids schools that we kept our kids home from [testing] today that we could cause them to lose federal money. Maybe you should have thought about that before you took the money in the first place!! See what happens when you sleep with the devil.”
National Review Online pointed out that in Colorado, which voted for Obama twice, the state board approved a resolution that districts cannot be punished for test-taking rates, and lawmakers were working on a bill to protect parents who opt their children out of such tests.
The Home School Legal Defense Association noted Duncan did not clarify what he meant by “stepping in.”
“Duncan’s statements reflect a growing pressure on education bureaucrats to keep states locked into the Common Core,” HSLDA said. “Students nationwide are still opting out of voluntary benchmark assessments, which are meant to prepare them for all-day Common Core tests.”
HSLDA said it is “concerned that federal officials will again resort to financial incentives – or threaten to withhold funding – to coerce students into participating in these tests.”
“As demonstrated empirically by 2009′s ‘Race to the Top’ grants, state governments have a track record of prioritizing federal funds over their own sovereignty. Lured by the promise of funding, many cash-strapped states could not or would not resist the offer of billions of dollars in exchange for what seemed, at the time, a small sacrifice: adhering to a set of K-12 learning standards.”
The HSLDA report said that as “grassroots movements and parental opposition continues to dismantle Common Core piece by piece, concerned citizens should remain vigilant and take Duncan’s threats seriously.”
“Whenever the government threatens to ‘step in,’ the right of parents to be involved in their children’s education is bound to suffer,” the group’s report said.
Commentator Alex Newman, co-author of a new book, “Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians Are Using Government Schools to Destroy America’s Children,” with Sam Blumenfeld, wrote recently that the Obama administration “has made no secret of its desire to control your children’s education from ‘cradle to career,’ as Obama Education Secretary Arne Duncan often puts it.”
“Top officials have also been very specific in terms of the radical ideas and values they plan to hammer into the pliable minds of America’s children.”
The U.S. Department of Education, he noted, says it is “taking a leadership role in the work of educating the next generation of green citizens and preparing them to contribute to the workforce through green jobs.”
Duncan boasted in a 2010 speech to a “sustainability” summit.
“Do you send your children to school to get indoctrinated as ‘green citizens’ so they can have ‘green jobs’? If you are like most parents, the answer is no,” Newman said.
“But that matters little to the Obama administration and its extremist allies in ‘education reform’ – the United Nations, crony capitalists hoping to profit, population-control zealot and Common Core financier Bill Gates, and the whole corrupt educational establishment. Using taxpayer-funded bribes, Obama’s Education Department has been very successful so far in imposing its controversial ‘Common Core’ national standards across most of America.
Quantum Computer is Coming
Yorktown Heights, NY — IBM scientists unveiled two critical advances towards the realization of a practical quantum computer. For the first time, they showed the ability to detect and measure both kinds of quantum errors simultaneously, as well as demonstrated a new, square quantum bit circuit design that is the only physical architecture that could successfully scale to larger dimensions.
With Moore’s Law expected to run out of steam, quantum computing will be among the inventions that could usher in a new era of innovation across industries. Quantum computers promise to open up new capabilities in the fields of optimization and simulation simply not possible using today’s computers. If a quantum computer could be built with just 50 quantum bits (qubits), no combination of today’s TOP500 supercomputers could successfully outperform it.
The IBM breakthroughs, described in the April 29, 2015, issue of the journal Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/ncomms7979), show for the first time the ability to detect and measure the two types of quantum errors (bit-flip and phase-flip) that will occur in any real quantum computer. Until now, it was only possible to address one type of quantum error or the other, but never both at the same time. This is a necessary step toward quantum error correction, which is a critical requirement for building a practical and reliable large-scale quantum computer.
IBM’s novel and complex quantum bit circuit, based on a square lattice of four superconducting qubits on a chip roughly one-quarter-inch square, enables both types of quantum errors to be detected at the same time. By opting for a square-shaped design versus a linear array — which prevents the detection of both kinds of quantum errors simultaneously — IBM’s design shows the best potential to scale by adding more qubits to arrive at a working quantum system.
“Quantum computing could be potentially transformative, enabling us to solve problems that are impossible or impractical to solve today," said Arvind Krishna, senior vice president and director of IBM Research. “While quantum computers have traditionally been explored for cryptography, one area we find very compelling is the potential for practical quantum systems to solve problems in physics and quantum chemistry that are unsolvable today. This could have enormous potential in materials or drug design, opening up a new realm of applications.”
For instance, in physics and chemistry, quantum computing could allow scientists to design new materials and drug compounds without expensive trial and error experiments in the lab, potentially speeding up the rate and pace of innovation across many industries.
For a world consumed by big data, quantum computers could quickly sort and curate ever larger databases as well as massive stores of diverse, unstructured data. This could transform how people make decisions and how researchers across industries make critical discoveries.
One of the great challenges for scientists seeking to harness the power of quantum computing is controlling or removing quantum decoherence — the creation of errors in calculations caused by interference from factors such as heat, electromagnetic radiation and material defects. The errors are especially acute in quantum machines, since quantum information is so fragile.
“Up until now, researchers have been able to detect bit-flip or phase-flip quantum errors, but never the two together. Previous work in this area, using linear arrangements, only looked at bit-flip errors offering incomplete information on the quantum state of a system and making them inadequate for a quantum computer,” said Jay Gambetta, a manager in the IBM Quantum Computing Group. “Our four qubit results take us past this hurdle by detecting both types of quantum errors and can be scalable to larger systems, as the qubits are arranged in a square lattice as opposed to a linear array.”
The work at IBM was funded in part by the IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity) multi-qubit-coherent-operations program.
Detecting quantum errors
The most basic piece of information that a typical computer understands is a bit. Much like a beam of light that can be switched on or off, a bit can have only one of two values: "1" or "0." However, a quantum bit (qubit) can hold a value of 1 or 0, as well as both values at the same time, described as superposition and simply denoted as “0+1.” The sign of this superposition is important, because both states 0 and 1 have a phase relationship to each other. This superposition property is what allows quantum computers to choose the correct solution among millions of possibilities in a time much faster than a conventional computer.
Two types of errors can occur on such a superposition state. One is called a bit-flip error, which simply flips a 0 to a 1 and vice versa. This is similar to classical bit-flip errors and previous work has showed how to detect these errors on qubits. However, this is not sufficient for quantum error correction, because phase-flip errors can also be present, which flip the sign of the phase relationship between 0 and 1 in a superposition state. Both types of errors must be detected in order for quantum error correction to function properly.
Quantum information is very fragile because all existing qubit technologies lose their information when interacting with matter and electromagnetic radiation. Theorists have found ways to preserve the information much longer by spreading information across many physical qubits. “Surface code” is the technical name for a specific error correction scheme which spreads quantum information across many qubits. It allows for only nearest neighbor interactions to encode one logical qubit, making it sufficiently stable to perform error-free operations.
The IBM Research team used a variety of techniques to measure the states of two independent syndrome (measurement) qubits. Each reveals one aspect of the quantum information stored on two other qubits (called code, or data qubits). Specifically, one syndrome qubit revealed whether a bit-flip error occurred to either of the code qubits, while the other syndrome qubit revealed whether a phase-flip error occurred. Determining the joint quantum information in the code qubits is an essential step for quantum error correction, because directly measuring the code qubits destroys the information contained within them.
Because these qubits can be designed and manufactured using standard silicon fabrication techniques, IBM anticipates that, once a handful of superconducting qubits can be manufactured reliably and repeatedly, and controlled with low error rates, there will be no fundamental obstacle to demonstrating error correction in larger lattices of qubits.
These results highlight IBM’s long commitment to quantum information processing that has spanned more than 30 years, beginning with IBM's participation in the very first workshop in this field on the Physics of Information in 1981.
Dark Matter Detection
Scientists on the Dark Energy Survey have released the first in a series of dark matter maps of the cosmos. These maps, created with one of the world's most powerful digital cameras, are the largest contiguous maps created at this level of detail and will improve our understanding of dark matter's role in the formation of galaxies. Analysis of the clumpiness of the dark matter in the maps will also allow scientists to probe the nature of the mysterious dark energy, believed to be causing the expansion of the universe to speed up.
The new maps were released at the April meeting of the American Physical Society in Baltimore, Maryland. They were created using data captured by the Dark Energy Camera, a 570-megapixel imaging device that is the primary instrument for the Dark Energy Survey (DES).
Dark matter, the mysterious substance that makes up roughly a quarter of the universe, is invisible to even the most sensitive astronomical instruments because it does not emit or block light. But its effects can be seen by studying a phenomenon called gravitational lensing – the distortion that occurs when the gravitational pull of dark matter bends light around distant galaxies. Understanding the role of dark matter is part of the research program to quantify the role of dark energy, which is the ultimate goal of the survey.
This analysis was led by VinuVikram of Argonne National Laboratory (then at the University of Pennsylvania) and Chihway Chang of ETH Zurich. Vikram, Chang and their collaborators at Penn, ETH Zurich, the University of Portsmouth, the University of Manchester and other DES institutions worked for more than a year to carefully validate the lensing maps.
"We measured the barely perceptible distortions in the shapes of about 2 million galaxies to construct these new maps," Vikram said. "They are a testament not only to the sensitivity of the Dark Energy Camera, but also to the rigorous work by our lensing team to understand its sensitivity so well that we can get exacting results from it."