Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Dr. Scott Goes to Washington

Fellow blogger Scott Aaronson was chosen as one of 19 NSF PECASE awardees and wins a trip to the White House. Congrats to Scott! He received the award "for pushing the frontiers of quantum complexity theory, and for making the insights of theoretical computer science accessible to the general public."

For all those of you who wonder how having a blog could affect your academic career, Scott won the PECASE not despite his having a blog but because of it.

8 comments:

  1. congrats scott.
    having a blog must have been the main reason ;-)

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  2. Lance, thanks so much for the congratulations!! However, if I'm really getting this "because of my blog," then I wonder if the White House realizes just how rarely I've been updating it lately? ;-)

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  3. These PECASE awards are a terrific idea, and Scott in particular is well-deserving of a PECASE award, for his lively-yet-high-level weblog *and* for his outstanding research. That's my 2¢ anyway ... but IMHO most folks feel the same way.

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  4. Scott, maybe the award is the White House's subtle way of urging you to post more often.

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  5. Hopefully, you will post about your visit to the White House!

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  6. Yay, finally a place to post about this:
    Congratulations, Scott!

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  7. Congratulations, Scott!

    Two notes:

    1) PECASE's are also handed out by other agencies, not just the NSF. In the past, some "theory" people have received their PECASE from DoD. I couldn't find the DoD list online for this year but I'd be curious to know who is on it.

    2) Apparently speaking at the open session (for students) at QIP 2002 is a strong predictor of presidential preference:
    http://www.research.ibm.com/quantuminfo/qip2002/node.html#open

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  8. Do we know if Scott's work is PECASE-complete?

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