Staking out knowledge

Staking Out the Physical Sectors of Hilbert Spaces

Dmitri Mogilevtsev,1,2 Yong Siah Teo,3 Jaroslav Řeháček,3 Zdeněk Hradil,3 Johannes Tiedau,4 Regina Kruse,4 Georg Harder,4 Christine Silberhorn,4,5 and Luis L. Sánchez-Soto5,6 1Institute of Physics, Belarus National Academy of Sciences, F. Skarina Ave. 68, Minsk 220072 Belarus 2Centro de Ciências Naturais e Humanas, Universidade Federal do ABC, Santo André, SP, 09210-170 Brazil 3Department of Op...

Staking New Ground

Sorting out Zero-Knowledge

The purpose of this paper is to explain the various notions involved and to offer a new terminology that emphasizes their differences. There are two orthogonal aspects to zero-knowledge interactive proofs. One is the notion of zero-knowledge and the other is the notion of interactive proof. Unfortunately, these two notions are often thought to be inseparable. This confusion is reminiscent of th...

Molecular Disjunctions: Staking Claims at the Nanoscale

Nanoscience may be surrounded by controversy but is characterized by its absence. Evidence for this comes from the reconstruction of a peculiarly muted scientific “debate” regarding the claim that a single organic molecule may serve as a wire in electronic circuitry. Even though there are fundamentally different theoretical approaches, the debate remains entirely implicit. This is because the r...

Staking claims in the biotechnology Klondike.

My first brush with intellectual property came through defending free data release from the human genome project. I was amazed at the tacit acceptance by some that this information could and should be privatized. The product was not an invention: a genome sequence is a clearcut case of public domain material. People need a robust system for handling intellectual property, but patents have ambiv...