We study the asymptotic dynamics of open quantum systems in the Heisenberg picture. We find an explicit expression for the attractor subspace and the dynamics that takes place in it. We present the relationship between the attractor subspaces in the Schrödinger and Heisenberg pictures and, in particular, the connection between their algebraic structures. An unfolding theorem of the asymptotics, as well as the fine structure of the recently introduced Choi-Effros decoherence-free algebra, are also discussed. Finally, we show how to extend all the results to the class of Schwarz maps.
The documentary La belle d’occident, en quête de l’Indochine d’hier et d’aujourd’hui (2023, 47’) discusses the place and investment of women in research and in the way that they see others, whether from an anthropological, artistic (particularly cinematographic), literary, gendered, post-colonial (i.e. historical) or involved point of view. The starting point for this research is the novel The western nice woman, by Mrs Huỳnh Thị Bảo Hòa written in 1927, a love story between a French woman and a Vietnamese man. This novel is based on a true story that praises the place of women and denounces certain colonial behaviours. Thi Phuong Ngoc Nguyen, a teacher-researcher at Aix-Marseille University, translated the novel in 2021, so that it could be used in the field to find clues about the customs of the period in relation to the soldiers involved. A teacher-researcher also at the University of Aix-Marseille, and as a documentary filmmaker, I accompanied her to Alsace and Verdun in France, and Vietnam, to make this documentary about this adventure and capture current realities while, at the same time, searching for traces of the colonial era. It takes now the form of a creative documentary. [...]
This paper describes the historical background that led to the development of the innovative Software through Pictures multi-user development environment, and the principles for its integration with other software products to create a software engineering environment covering multiple tasks in the software development lifecycle.
This essay, which reframes elements of my 2015 book, <i>Daguerreotypes: Fugitive Subjects, Contemporary Objects</i>, returns to the lacuna at the heart of Roland Barthes’s reflections on photo-graphy: the so-called “Winter Garden” photograph of his mother as a little girl. An image that is lovingly conjured but forever withheld, this photograph is the fulcrum of a theory of photography that emerged from the conjunction of mourning and desire. For Barthes, and all those working in his wake, the absent photograph is something of photography’s primal scene. With attention to the work of Eve Sussman and Simon Lee, their 2011 three-channel HD video <i>Wintergarden</i> and her 2018 NFT <i>89 Seconds Atomized</i> in particular, this essay takes readers “back to the garden” to think about the time of early photography. To do so, this essay considers a range of contemporary videos that mine and mime the conventions of photography to produce static, durational encounters with stillness in a medium that is anything but, ultimately, revealing the truths and fictions of photography’s founding moment and fundamental logic.
Since the beginning of the film industry in Japan, many short films and movies based on Western literary works were made, especially during the 1910s and 1920s. Several of those films were based on fashionable Russian literary works that had been staged in Shingeki (new drama) theaters. This study examines the adaptations of Russian literature produced from the early 1910s until the end of the silent-film era in the 1930s, focusing specifically on films based on Tolstoy’s novel Resurrection, the drama The Living Corpse, and Gorky’s play The Lower Depths. It is shown that the early adaptations, filmed in the 1910s, aimed to closely adhere to the original literary works by maintaining key plot events and recreating the cultural milieu through sets, costumes, and staging. However, starting from the 1920s, adaptations followed intercultural and intertextual processes, freely modifying the works to suit the Japanese cultural context. This shift in the approach to adapting Western literary works was influenced by the social, political, and cultural changes experienced by the country during those decades.
This article interprets David Lynch's Mulholland Drive (2001) to argue for the morphological influence cinematic images have on modernity's monstrous identity. It shows how Lynch's tactic of interweaving apparently discrete spaces of dream and reality – one often inverting or uncannily ironising the other – relies on the virtual space of cinema, which leaves a mark on understanding, irrespective of its apparent truth. To do so, I employ Peter Sloterdijk's philosophy of space – especially the spherology developed in his Spheres trilogy – and Bernard Stiegler's approach to cinematic phenomenology to consider the transferential force of cinema, and its power to cultivate and shape popular consciousness. Mulholland Drive is acutely aware of this force, and its interplay with the expectations and disappointments of Hollywood monstrosity inserts itself into the sphere-forming traffic of modern meaning-making. In doing so, I argue, the film takes up Lynch's familiar approach to irony and the weird to unwind the destructive uniformity of Hollywood hegemony. The productive bifurcations that result, inscribed in between cinema and consciousness, and forgettable as the very spheric intimacy of memory, gesture to what might live beyond discrete forms.
These are the lecture notes of guest lectures for Artur Ekert's course Introduction to Quantum Information at the Mathematical Institute of Oxford University, Hilary Term 2023. Some basic familiarity with Dirac notation is assumed. For the readers of Quantum in Pictures (QiP) who have some basic quantum background, these notes also constitute the shortest path to an explanation of how what they learn in QIP relates to the traditional quantum formalism.
The picture-word interference paradigm (participants name target pictures while ignoring distractor words) is often used to model the planning processes involved in word production. The participants' naming times are delayed in the presence of a distractor (general interference). The size of this effect depends on the relationship between the target and distractor words. Distractors of the same semantic category create more interference (semantic interference), distractors overlapping in phonology create less interference (phonological facilitation). The present study examines the relationships between these experimental effects, processing times, and attention in order to better understand the cognitive processes underlying participants' behavior in this paradigm. Participants named pictures with a superimposed line of Xs, semantically related distractors, phonologically related distractors, or unrelated distractors. General interference, semantic interference, and phonological facilitation effects are replicated. Distributional analyses reveal that general and semantic interference effects increase with naming times, while phonological facilitation decreases. The phonological facilitation and semantic interference effects are found to depend on the synchronicity in processing times between the planning of the picture's name and the processing of the distractor word. Finally, EEG power in the alpha band before stimulus onset varied with the position of the trial in the experiment and with repetition but did not predict the size of interference or facilitation effects. Taken together, these results suggest that experimental effects in the picture-word interference paradigm depend on processing times to both the target word and distractor word and that distributional patterns could party reflect this dependency.
Given a random binary picture $P_n$ of size $n$, i.e., an $n\times n$ grid filled with zeros and ones uniformly at random, when is it possible to reconstruct $P_n$ from its $k$-deck, i.e., the multiset of all its $k\times k$ subgrids? We demonstrate ``two-point concentration'' for the reconstruction threshold by showing that there is an integer $k_c(n) \sim (2 \log n)^{1/2}$ such that if $k > k_c$, then $P_n$ is reconstructible from its $k$-deck with high probability, and if $k < k_c$, then with high probability, it is impossible to reconstruct $P_n$ from its $k$-deck. The proof of this result uses a combination of interface-exploration arguments and entropic arguments.