Mediaboss Marketing

Letter writers| Fort Myers News-Press

Shade trees offer a number of advantages over palms for residential use. They are much better at storing carbon and therefore reducing atmospheric CO2. They also provide shade which lowers the ambient temperature. Temperatures are rising and trees are one of the most obvious ways for cities to counter this phenomenon. The state has recommended that palms should make up less than 30 percentof the trees in Florida cities.

The Naples city arborist seems hooked on planting palm trees around Palm Circle. This circle is in dire need of shade trees for walkers and bikers. It is too hot to walk that route. This current plan needs to be re-examined. Parts of Crayton Road also need to be examined.

Judy Hushon, Naples

Such good news to read that Republican Sen.Joe Gruters is promoting a bill to ban smoking on Floridas beaches.The benefits are many!It will eliminate secondhand smoke, decrease beach litter and protect birds, turtles and the waters of the Gulf.Wethe public should no longer have to walk in smokers ashtrays.

Dorothy S. Kuzneski, Naples

The 2022-2023 Florida legislative session is beginning. DeSantislegislative wish list begins with attacks on issues that dont exist.

After praising Floridas elections in 2020 and suggesting it be a model for other states, he now wants a new Office of Election Crime and Security to investigate fraud. It would cost Florida taxpayers $5.7 million and employ a staff larger than most police departments have to solve murders.

What in the world are 52 investigators going to do all year long? Wait for the phone to ring? said Andrew Warren, Hillsborough Countys state attorney.

Another focus is keeping critical race theory out of schools and workplaces. Attacking CRT israther a stroke of genius for the GOP. They took a 40-year-old law school course, turned it into a bogeyman, and told voters to be afraid of it. Now DeSantis wants to empower parents to sue if they detect critical race theory in schools although few can even define what it is.

DeSantis also wants to allow employees to be able to sue employers who use critical race theory as part of their training. Many employers -- and also church organizations, charities, and nonprofits -- conduct racial sensitivity training. Employees would be empowered to sue if they perceive this training to suggest that racism is systematic in our social institutions.

There is plenty of reality that DeSantis could be addressing instead of chalking up political points fighting false culture wars. Florida has poorly funded schools (ranked 46th), a struggling health care system (ranked 41st), unmanaged COVIDspreading out of control, and rampant environmental issues.

Florida needs serious legislators to address serious issues.

Susan McGuire, Bokeelia

Beth Petrunoff will hit the Naples City Council floor running and deserves your vote to make it happen!

Beth understands the complex issues facing future city councils to maintain a residential quality of life in Naples. She believes a most important agenda item is a pending update to the Naples Comprehensive Plan, a blueprint shaping the feel of the city for years to come. Beth believes it should be Values-Driven reflecting the Vision Plan approved in 2020.

She also supports Neighborhood Action Plans and believes they should be reinstated into the Comprehensive Plan.Beth advocates for a five-year Capital Improvement Plan with measurable goals, a mantra from her days as a GE executive. In addition, she supports a three-point plan to solve police staffing: raise pay to market standard, increase retention bonuses to reward loyalty and repeal union rule that mandates only entry-level rookie pay for experienced applicants.

The management skills she demonstrated as a successful executive vice president at GE will no doubt aid in our selection process to find an outstanding new Naples city manager which Beth calls out as one of her first priorities.

Beth Petrunoff deserves your vote!

Robert Patten Burns,Naples

First: I have attended many Naples City Council meetings and workshops in the past year. I have the utmost respect for the hard work and dedication of our current City Council members. I fully support the incumbents running for office, Ray Christman and Terry Hutchison. They spend countless hours preparing for the meetings and studying the issues. They support the vision clearly expressed by the residents.

Second: Beth Petrunoff has my support. She shares that same vision and has the same dedication that Ray Christman and Terry Hutchison have shown. She understands the issues facing Naples which must be addressed to maintain our residential and environmental quality of life. She has the knowledge, the qualifications and the energy to join our hard-working City Council.

Third: I urge all Naples residents to vote for these threecandidates who I believe will work together to make Naples the city the residents want it to be.

Diane Ladley, Naples

As a registered Republican I am embarrassed and offended by the extremely negative and partisan campaign being run by The Collier County Citizens Values PAC in support of John Dugan. They have even gone so far as to suggest Naples residents do not exercise their right to vote for threecandidates and only vote for John Dugan, leaving others to decide the full make up of our council. We do not need this divisiveness on our council.

Susan Anderson, Naples

As a resident of Florida since 1962, a homeowner that has been insured all these years, never made a claim. My new insurance premium rose by 30percent for this year.

Also my automobile insurance has risen even though my driving record is impeccable. I'm guessing it's due to my age.

I'm being penalized for being a senior citizen.

I read in this morning's Daily News that FPL has been granted anincrease.Where does it stop?

Frank Setera, Naples

Ms. Pierson claims that the popes comments on the necessity of having children rather than dogs and cats is simplistic.However, her endorsement of being a pet parent over a kid parent because it is easier and less expensivebetrays the selfishness that the pope was trying to address. Pierson is of course correct that parenting children is not easy, but the infinite worth of human beings and the propagation of the species makes it worthwhile.

Reverend Michael P. Orsi, Naples

Nine Florida counties voted over 80 percentfor Trump:Baker, Calhoun, Dixie, Gilchrist, Holmes. Lafayette, Liberty, Union, Washington. The average rate of vaccinations in these counties is 41percent. The sixcounties (Alachua, Broward, Gadsden. Leon, Orange, Osceola, Palm Beach) thatvoted over 55 percentfor Biden have a vaccination rate of 70.6 percent.

In the ninepro-Trump counties the deaths averaged 2,556 per million. In the pro-Biden counties it was 1,446.

Food for thought!

Philip Wyckoff, Fort Myers

More here:
Letters to the editor for Wednesday, January 12, 2022 - News-Press

Quantum computing is expected to revolutionize a broad swathe of industries. But as the technology edges closer to commercialization, what will the earliest use cases be?

Quantum computing is still a long way from going mainstream. The industry had some significant breakthroughs in 2021 though, not least IBMs unveiling of the first processor to cross the 100-qubit mark. But the technology is still experimental, and has yet to demonstrate its usefulness for solving real-world problems.

That milestone might not be so far off, though. Most quantum computing companies are aiming to produce fault-tolerant devices by 2030, which many see as the inflection point that will usher in the era of practical quantum computing.

Quantum computers will not be general-purpose machines, though. They will be able to solve some calculations that are completely intractable for current computers and dramatically speed up processing for others. But many of the things they excel at are niche problems, and they will not replace conventional computers for the vast majority of tasks.

That means the ability to benefit from this revolution will be highly uneven, which prompted analysts at McKinsey to investigate who the early winners could be in a new report. They identified the pharmaceutical, chemical, automotive, and financial industries as those with the most promising near-term use cases.

The authors take care to point out that making predictions about quantum computing is hard because many fundamental questions remain unanswered; for instance, the relative importance of the quantity and quality of qubits or whether there can be practical uses for early devices before they achieve fault tolerance.

Its also important to note that there are currently fewer than 100 quantum algorithms that exhibit a quantum speed-up, the extent of which can vary considerably. That means the first and foremost question for business leaders is whether a quantum solution even exists for their problem.

But for some industries the benefits look clearer than others. For drug makers, the technology holds the promise of streamlining the industrys long and incredibly expensive research and development process; the average drug takes 10 years and $2 billion to develop.

Quantum simulations could predict how proteins fold and tease out the properties of small molecules that could help produce new treatments. Once promising candidates have been found, quantum computers could also help optimize critical attributes like absorption and solubility.

Beyond research and development, quantum computers could also help companies optimize the clinical trials used to validate new drugs, for instance by helping identify and group participants or selecting trial sites.

Quantum simulation could also prove a powerful tool in the chemical industry, according to the report. Todays chemists use computer-aided design tools that rely on approximations of molecular behavior and properties, but enabling full quantum mechanical simulations of molecules will dramatically expand their capabilities.

This could cut out the many rounds of trial-and-error lab experiments normally required to develop new products, instead relying on simulations to do the heavy lifting, with limited lab-based validation to confirm the results.

Quantum computers could also help to optimize the formulations used in all kinds of productsfrom detergents to paintsby modeling the complex molecular-level processes that govern their action.

For both the pharmaceutical and chemical industries, its not just the design of new products that could be impacted. Quantum computers could also help improve their production processes by helping researchers better understand the reaction mechanisms used to create drugs and chemicals, design new catalysts, or fine-tune conditions to optimize yields.

In the automotive industry, the technology could significantly boost prototyping and testing capabilities. Better simulation of everything from aerodynamic properties to thermodynamic behavior will reduce the cost of prototyping and lead to better designs. It could even make virtual testing possible, reducing the number of test vehicles required.

As carmakers look for greener ways to fuel their vehicles, quantum simulations could also contribute to finding new materials and better designs for hydrogen fuel cells and batteries. But the biggest impact could be on the day-to-day logistics involved in running a major automotive company.

Supply chain disruptions cost the industry about $15 billion a year, but quantum computers could simulate and optimize the sprawling global networks companies rely on to significantly reduce these headaches. They could also help fine-tune assembly line schedules to reduce inefficiencies and even optimize the movements of multi-robot teams as they put cars together.

Quantum computings impact on the financial industry will take longer to be felt, according to the reports authors, but with the huge sums at stake its worth taking seriously. The technology could prove invaluable in modeling the behavior of large and complex portfolios to come up with better investment strategies. Similar approaches could also help optimize loan portfolios to reduce risk, which could allow lenders lower interest rates or free up capital.

How much of this comes to pass depends heavily on the future trajectory of quantum technology. Despite significant progress, there are still many unknowns, and plenty of scope for timelines to slip. Nonetheless, the potential of this new technology is starting to come into focus, and it seems that business leaders in those industries most susceptible to disruption would do well to start making plans.

Image Credit: Pete LinforthfromPixabay

See more here:
These Will Be the Earliest Use Cases for Quantum Computers - Singularity Hub

The world of quantum computing has so many terms, starting with Qubit, QPU, and superposition, to entanglement, trapping ions, and photons, but the heart of quantum computation lies in Qubits. Traditionally, data is encoded in bits, where each bit has a value of 0 or 1. However, quantum computers encode data in Qubits, where each Qubit can be encoded as either 0 or 1 or in a linear combination of the two states. The phenomenon is called superposition. Researchers of DOE Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley, are trying to find the ideal version of Qubits by exploring properties like superposition and entanglement.

Unfortunately, Qubits are sensitive to their environment. As a result, they cant maintain their state for long periods, so they cant be used to store information long-term, and no one can retrieve the information further. In addition, quantum systems are characterised by a lot of noise, which results in a low coherence time (the time it takes a system to maintain a condition) and errors.

To assist in the development of Qubits, the DOE Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley are supporting a number of research projects.

The most advanced technology for Qubits is superconducting Qubits. Using a sandwich of metal, insulator, and metal, called a Josephson junction, can transform materials into superconductors in which electricity flows without loss. This is done by drastically lowering their temperatures. As a result, coherent electron pairs move through the material as single particles. Due to this movement, quantum states are more stable than conventional materials.

I Siddiqi and his colleagues, researchers at the University of California, inserted a thin insulating barrier between two superconductors in a quantum bit to scale up superconducting Qubits. The barrier affects the flow of electrons, making it possible to control their energy levels. In addition, it is possible to increase the coherence time by making this junction as consistent and small as possible.

Diamonds can develop nitrogen-vacancy centres by adding nitrogen to a place where a carbon atom would normally exist. To make these defect patterns, researchers created a stencil that was just two nanometers long, using the Center for Functional Nanomaterials. In this way, the coherence time of these Qubits was increased, and it was easier to entangle them.

Giulia Galli and her team, a group of researchers from NERSC and Berkeley Lab, using theory, predicted how to strain aluminium nitride in the right way to form Qubits. As nitrogen vacancies occur naturally in aluminium nitride, scientists should control electron spin in it just like they can in diamonds. David D Aschaloms team, the researchers at the Institute for Molecular Engineering, The University of Chicago, also discovered certain defects in silicon carbide that have coherence times comparable to or longer than nitrogen-vacancy centres in diamonds.

By using this method, custom materials can be created molecule by molecule. Danna E Freedman, a researcher at the Department of Chemistry, Northwestern University, and her team tailored the metals and molecules bound to create an environment with very little nuclear spin. The magnetic noise created by atoms containing nuclear spin makes it difficult to maintain and control the spin of electrons. They have achieved a one millisecond coherence time in molecules that contain the metal vanadium after testing different solvents, temperatures, and ions/molecules attached to the metal.

It is truly exciting to think that by using quantum simulations to view materials, it can be finally possible to develop technologically relevant technologies and materials that can completely transform the way of computations.

Read more:
Developing Qubits, the heart of a quantum computer - Analytics India Magazine

The University of Michigan has formed a collaboration with Michigan State and Purdue universities to study quantum science and technology, drawing together expertise and resources to advance the field.

The three universities are partnering to form the Midwest Quantum Collaboratory, or MQC, to find grand new challenges we can work on jointly, based on the increased breadth and diversity of scientists in the collaboration, said Mack Kira, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the College of Engineering and inaugural director of the collaboration.

U-M researchers call quantum effects the DNA of so many phenomena people encounter in their everyday lives, ranging from electronics to chemical reactions to the study of light waves and everything they collectively produce.

We scientists are now in a position to start combining these quantum building blocks to quantum applications that have never existed, said Kira, also a professor of physics in LSA. It is absolutely clear that any such breakthrough will happen only through a broad, diverse and interdisciplinary research effort. MQC has been formed also to build scientific diversity and critical mass needed to address the next steps in quantum science and technology.

Collaborators at U-M include Steven Cundiff, professor of physics and of electrical engineering and computer science. Cundiffs research group uses ultrafast optics to study semiconductors, semiconductor nanostructures and atomic vapors.

The main goal of the MQC is to create synergy between the research programs at these three universities, to foster interactions and collaborations between researchers in quantum science, he said.

Each university will bring unique expertise in quantum science to the collaboration. Researchers at U-M will lead research about the quantum efforts of complex quantum systems, such as photonics, or the study of light, in different semiconductors. This kind of study could inform how to make semiconductor-based computing, lighting, radar or communications millions of times faster and billions of times more energy efficient, Kira said.

Similar breakthrough potential resides in developing algorithms, chemical reactions, solar-power, magnetism, conductivity or atomic metrology to run on emergent quantum phenomena, he said.

The MQC will be a virtual institute, with in-person activities such as seminars and workshops split equally among the three universities, Cundiff said.

In the first year, MQC will launch a seminar series and virtual mini-workshops focused on specific research topics, and will conduct a larger in-person workshop. The collaboration hopes fostering connections between scientists will lead to new capabilities, positioning the MQC to be competitive for large center-level funding opportunities.

We know collaboration is key to driving innovation, especially for quantum, said David Stewart, managing director of the Purdue Quantum Science and Engineering Institute. The MQC will not only provide students with scientific training, but also develop their interpersonal skills so they will be ready to contribute to a currently shorthanded quantum workforce.

The MQC also will promote development of the quantum workforce by starting a seminar series or journal club for only students and postdocs, and encouraging research interaction across the three universities.

MQC also provides companies with interest in quantum computing with great opportunities for collaboration with faculty and students across broad spectrums of quantum computing with the collaborative expertise spanning the three institutions, said Angela Wilson, director of the MSU Center for Quantum Computing, Science and Engineering.

Additionally, bringing together three of our nations largest universities and three of the largest quantum computing efforts provides potential employers with a great source of interns and potential employees encompassing a broad range of quantum computing.

Continue reading here:
UM part of collaboration to study quantum science, technology | The University Record - The University Record

People often look at technology as some kind of a monolith, but the thing about that is that it does not reflect the reality on the ground. Technology is vast and varied, and there are specific kinds of tech that might be a great deal more life changing than others. We are going to discuss ten of the most prominent tech trends out there right now that are liable to change the world as we know it through their innovation.1. Quantum Computing Chart via:Statista.

The increase in the computing power of various devices has been exponential. For example, modern smartphones would have seemed like high tech supercomputers not too long ago. Quantum computing might enable this exponential growth in computing power to continue for many more decades in the future.

More and more erstwhile mundane items are being connected to the internet, and this has led to the rise of the Internet of Things. With smart homes and factories quickly starting to be adopted, its not unlikely that the IoT will comprise every single item we interact with on a regular basis! While this is not necessarily a good thing, its definitely an exciting development.

Read next:The Biggest Cyber Security Trends That We Can Expect To Encounter In 2022

See more here:
These Trends Are Revolutionizing The Technology World - Digital Information World