Reply to Bacon, Hawthorne and Uzquiano

Dualism: from Descartes and Bacon to AJNR.

T he Oxford English Dictionary defines duality as " an opposition or contrast between two concepts or aspects. " 1 In the American Journal of Neuroradiology (AJNR), I see these aspects reflected in the nature of our articles, which are either basic research or clinically oriented. Basic research articles tend to be multiauthored, hypothesis-driven, and thus prospective, blinded, and controlled,...

Hawthorne Effect

Morris Bacon

Decoherence, Control, and Symmetry in Quantum Computers

Understanding the Hawthorne effect.

Researchers investigated the effectiveness of patient controlled analgesia for patients presenting to emergency departments with pain from traumatic injuries. A randomised controlled trial with a parallel groups study design was used. The control treatment was usual care, with analgesia titrated by nurses according to hospital guidelines. The participants were patients aged 18-75 years presenti...

Optimal Bacon-Shor codes

We study the performance of Bacon-Shor codes, quantum subsystem codes which are well suited for applications to fault-tolerant quantum memory because the error syndrome can be extracted by performing two-qubit measurements. Assuming independent noise, we find the optimal block size in terms of the bit-flip error probability pX and the phase error probability pZ , and determine how the probabili...