Daily Archives: November 5, 2021

Big money is pouring into Pa. school board elections, proxies in wars over COVID and culture – WHYY

Posted: November 5, 2021 at 10:33 pm

As debates about national issues are playing out across the region, students are watching.

Gabrielle Johnson, a sophomore at Springfield Township High School, said its disheartening to hear adults fight against critical race theory. Few, she thinks, actually understand the concept; too many use it as a catch-all for any acknowledgment of race in classrooms.

Im honestly disappointed in how adults are handling it, because, out of everybody, theyre the ones that really do control a students learning. So they should understand what theyre talking about, said Gabrielle Johnson, a sophomore at Springfield Township High School. People say its going to teach white children to hate themselves when its really just teaching about the history of how race has affected America since its founding.

Johnson, who is Black, said she would like to see inclusive history classes that teach about multiple cultures. She pointed to a class project she worked on in her 7th grade history class, where she focused on ancient Mali.

That was the first time in school that I have ever been taught about African or really any minority history, and that was really important to me, she said, adding that it was especially meaningful to learn about 14th century ruler Mansa Musa.

Im usually used to seeing Black people being told, Youre not going to be successful or Youre not going to be anything in life. It was nice to see that one of the richest people to ever exist was a Black man.

Jeffrey Henig with Columbia University said the increased focus on school board races is part of the nationalization of education politics in the U.S.

Increasingly, national groups of various kinds have seen local school board elections as tactically important and have put money and people into local communities to try to have some influence on the local political outcomes, but also because they perceive the chance to use education as a way to build support for broader political goals, he said.

In suburban districts, injecting culture war politics into school board races is one potential way to mobilize voters and recapture Republican support in areas where it has waned recently in presidential and congressional and county-wide races.

Henig says the fact that these larger, coordinated campaigns are catching fire on the local level reflects actual grassroots backlash.

I dont think that outside actors can make a movement jump up on demand. They can move in strategically where there are real grievances, Henig said. If the discontent isnt there, then their throwing matches would be like throwing matches on wet ground.

In districts across the state and country, demand for change in school board leadership comes after an extremely challenging 18 months, when nearly every option for schools and families was less than ideal.

No matter what decision we made last year, a third of the people would be angry, a third would be furious, and a third would be just plain upset, said Wood. It was a terrible situation for everyone. We did the best we could.

Studies have shown that virtual school resulted in significant learning loss for students, both academically and from a social-emotional standpoint. The remote school year was incredibly challenging for parents, juggling work and other responsibilities while helping their children learn. It was also incredibly challenging for students, many of whom struggled with feelings of isolation and felt disconnected academically.

Even for those happy with districts that approached the pandemic in the most risk-averse ways, there has been a near universal understanding that virtual education presented steep challenges, especially for children from the most disadvantaged backgrounds.

Now, even with most, if not all, Pennsylvania schools fully reopened, many parents remain wary, fearing another COVID surge could send students right back into virtual classrooms. That has been the constituency pushing hard for candidates vowing to keep kids in the building.

Many of those candidates, though, are also finding support from voters who are increasingly skeptical of a laundry list of other decisions school leaders make.

At a Radnor School Board meeting last week, a small but passionate group of parents turned up to rail against what they called pornographic material in the school libraries.

Parent Clark Engel said frustration about the schools books pushed him to move his two youngest children to private school.

Lots of little things go on throughout the year that are all subliminally designed to tell students that they dont have to listen to their parents that they can decide for themselves what gender they want to be, what sexual orientation they want to be, what religion they want to be, he told Keystone Crossroads. Its all designed to subvert parents. Theyre laying the groundwork in these very early, formative years.

He supports the slate of candidates backed by the Reopen Radnor Committee.

Even if Im pulling my own children out, I feel like I need to do this as a public service for those that cant afford to go to a private school, he said.

Some observers watching the more radical Pennsylvania school board races have noted, potential board members who are too focused on national, hot-button issues will be in for a surprise if they get elected.

When you actually get seated on the board, youre going to sit through a lot of boring discussions and presentations, said Larry Feinberg, president of the Haverford School Board, where hes served for more than two decades. Thats what democracy actually is. A great deal of it is not very exciting.

For Josh Tessler, the Radnor High School student, the past year has made him pay more attention to the school board race. For him, the biggest issue isnt around the districts handling of the mascot controversy or coronavirus pandemic. Hes passionate about two issues no candidates seem to be talking about: hands-on learning and feeling overwhelmed by homework.

I think they should be focused on the experience of students, he said.

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COP26: where does all the climate finance money go? – Financial Times

Posted: at 10:33 pm

On the Caribbean island of Antigua, builders will soon put hurricane reinforcements on hospital roofs and strengthen the windows on police stations. As climate change makes tropical storms more intense and more devastating, Antiguans are getting prepared.

This $46m storm-proofing project is just one part of a much bigger flow of money: a promised $100bn a year that rich countries pledged to spend helping poorer countries to cut their emissions and adapt to climate change.

The funding is shaping up to be a make or break issue at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow.

The $100bn target is an acid test for whether rich countries are sincere about tackling climate change, says Molwyn Joseph, minister of the environment for Antigua and Barbuda.

We are not asking for handouts, we are asking for compensation for damages, as a result of the profligacy of these developed countries, he says. Those that emit this carbon, that is causing climate events, should pay.

Many countries say they need the money to reach their climate targets and invest in projects that lower emissions. When Indian prime minister Narendra Modi pledged on Monday to reach net zero emissions by 2070, there was a demand attached: $1tn in climate finance to developing countries.

India expects developed countries to make $1tn available as climate finance as soon as possible, he said. As we are all increasing our ambitions with respect to climate action, the worlds ambitions with respect to climate finance cannot be [stay] at the same level.

In 2009, rich nations promised they would send at least $100bn a year in climate finance to poorer countries by 2020. That understanding formed the basis of the 2015 Paris climate accord, which aims to limit global warming to well below 2C, ideally 1.5C.

Suddenly you had this really emblematic $100bn where, unless you work this out, it is difficult to have the global agreement [at COP], recalls Josu Tanaka, who helped launch the climate finance unit at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. It became the signal, the base of trust, between developed and developing countries.

But last week, on the eve of COP26, donor countries admitted they missed that target in 2020. Now they expect to reach it in 2022 or 2023, years later than planned.

Everyone agrees there should be more money for climate finance. But that is where the consensus ends.

There is little agreement on how to spend the money, who should receive it, or how to make sure it is used effectively. There is even a dispute about how it should be measured, and what should be counted as climate finance.

While building storm shelters on hurricane-prone islands such as Antigua and Barbuda might seem straightforward, the issue of who will pay the $100bn, when it will arrive, and how it will be distributed, has at times threatened to derail COP negotiations. Climate finance has had a very mixed record in terms of impact. Yet the $100bn-a-year target has also become a lightning rod for disagreement between rich and poor countries.

Much of the money that has been raised so far has gone to large international institutions that are already well-funded.

Climate finance has been pivoting, says Nick Mabey, head of E3G, a climate charity. Everyone kind of points fingers, like there arent enough projects or there isnt enough money. But the system is broken, and how do you fix the system, that is the real question.

Traditional development banks have not really risen to the challenge. Just putting climate money through current development architecture will not get the impact that you need, says Mabey. This money needs to be used to help systemic reform, rather than just plugging a few gaps.

These arguments over climate finance will provide the backdrop to COP26. Donor countries are making a major push at COP26 to boost the sums involved Japan, Italy, the UK and Denmark have all raised their climate pledges in Glasgow. More private funding is coming to tie in with climate-related projects. And a new pool of tens of billions of dollars is being announced by multilateral development banks, with a special focus on helping countries quit coal.

A plan to redistribute special drawing rights to developing countries, to help fight climate change, is also under discussion. The IMF said last month that it would create a new trust for up to $50bn in reallocated SDRs.

The climate finance will happen [eventually], says Yannick Glemarec, head of the Green Climate Fund, which was set up by the UN to help distribute a portion of the $100bn. The problem is, will it happen fast enough to avert catastrophic climate change?

One of the challenges with the $100bn target is simply how to define it, and who gets to decide what counts and what doesnt.

Thats the real $100bn question what is climate finance? And no one has a real claim on that, says Tracy Carty, climate change policy lead at Oxfam. She says that donor countries use this to their advantage.

The OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, issues an annual report on climate finance that tallies what donor countries have mobilised including grants, loans and export finance credits from both public and private sources.

Many developing countries think that definition is too generous, but it is still short of the $100bn goal: OECD figures showed that climate finance reached just $79.6bn in 2019.

Calculations from Oxfam suggest the true level of climate-specific grants is about one-fifth of the OECD climate finance numbers, once loans are taken out.

As the total level of climate finance has expanded in recent years that increase has been on much harder terms for developing countries, says Carty. The amount of grant funding has increased much more slowly than the amount of loan funding, she explains.

The origins of the $100bn target lie in the COP negotiations that took place in 2009 in Copenhagen.

The $100bn figure is also part of a much longer legacy, one that goes all the way back to the inception of the UN climate change framework, at the Rio Conference in 1992. The concept that rich polluting countries should pay to help developing countries fight climate change has been a core part of the grand bargain that lies behind every climate treaty.

That hasnt always gone well though. In the Kyoto protocol, an elaborate system called the Clean Development Mechanism was introduced, which helped to channel hundreds of millions of dollars into climate-related projects in the developing world.

Abuses of the system, which was similar to a carbon offset market, were rampant. A 2017 study by the EU found that 85 per cent of Clean Development Mechanism projects examined failed to have the expected emissions impact.

When climate projects go wrong, its doubly bad, because it is a waste of money and also bad for the planet, says Brice Bhmer, head of programmes at Transparency International, which recently launched a corruption tracker for climate and energy projects.

We need to have much higher standards because if these investments are less, the consequences are terrible, says Bhmer. If it is a project that is supposed to reduce emissions, or a project that is supposed to help a population adapt, this is like penalising them twice.

The $100bn goal took a slightly different approach: channelling funding through existing aid programmes and development banks, allowing donor countries to self-report to the UN each year on the funding they had mobilised.

The UN also launched a dedicated institution the Green Climate Fund to help distribute the $100bn. The GCF became the largest climate-specific fund in the world, having raised about $18bn since its inception in 2010.

But the GCF has had a chequered record. Beset by infighting on the board, and accusations of mismanagement and abuse from staff, it has been less effective than many of its early backers hoped.

And once funding from donor countries started coming in 2014 the GCF raised $10bn in its first fundraising the board decided not to hedge its exposure to the currency fluctuations between the currency that pledges were made in, and the US dollar (the currency for GCF operations). By 2018, $1bn had been wiped off the dollar value of the fund as a result.

One former board member, Tosi Mpanu-Mpanu, says the rich countries backing the GCF were willing to turn a blind eye to the mismanagement.

If it was an African country, losing that much money would be a big deal, he says. The slow pace at which funds are handed out is also to blame, he adds, echoing a complaint made by many developing countries. If the money had been dispersed right away, maybe the loss would have been less.

Glemarec says that the $1bn was not a loss and that currency fluctuations are normal. By the time [the pledges] were translated into signed contributions, the dollar had significantly appreciated, he explains. The GCF is considering whether to adopt a hedging policy next year.

The GCF has not achieved its goal of working with local institutions: its biggest grantees are the UN Development Programme, and the EBRD, both giant development organisations that are already well-funded. Two of the UNDP projects awarded by the GCF are under internal investigation after corruption allegations were raised.

The way climate finance is being dispersed now is through huge institutions and big red tape, says Mpanu-Mpanu, who is a climate negotiator for the Democratic Republic of Congo. He points out the administrative overhead is also significant for these big multilateral institutions. In the meantime, runaway climate change is happening.

Climate finance has been beset by the same challenges of waste, corruption and inefficiency that have plagued traditional development aid.

In some ways, getting climate finance right is harder: people who work in the industry always say that the goal of climate finance is to be transformative and to trigger systemic changes, rather than just to build buildings and bridges.

But those goals are much harder to measure. Projects that aim to cut emissions known as mitigation projects typically compare their results against a hypothetical baseline of what emissions would have otherwise been. The results can often be subject to tricks of accounting: if $10m is invested in a better bus system in Hanoi, how do scientists measure how much emissions have been avoided?

When it comes to adapting to a warmer world, those projects can be even trickier to gauge, because they are based on projecting the likelihood of future events which are highly uncertain.

Mushtaq Khan, professor of economics at Soas, says that because climate projects are often trying to prepare for risks that are in the distant future, or threats that are perceived to be very far away, it can be harder to monitor them.

His research found that one-third of the funding for climate adaptation projects in Bangladesh was lost to embezzlement. Countries with high levels of perceived corruption also tend to be among the most vulnerable to climate impacts, according to Transparency International.

It is hugely politically incorrect to combine statements about climate change and corruption, because it looks like you are giving an excuse not to fund, says Khan.

Khan thinks better monitoring by local communities can help, but acknowledges that this is not usually the way that big development banks design their programmes.

To say that there is a lot of wastage and corruption should not be an excuse for saying, oh well this is not going to work, lets not do it, Khan continues. As the flows [of climate finance] are ramped up, a lot of it is likely to be wasted, if we dont get our heads together and think of out-of-the-box ways to reduce leakage [from corruption].

No one has tried to measure the total impact of the portion of the annual $100bn that has been spent so far.

Amar Bhattacharya, a researcher who chaired a recent UN report on the $100bn climate finance pledge, says this is an area where more research needs to be done.

To date there has been very little impact measurement, says Bhattacharya, a senior fellow at Brookings. It is a very important issue.

People look at impact in terms of the composition of finance, things that relate to the financing side. But in terms of real impact of climate finance, and efficacy across different donors, there has been no development impact or climate impact study done to date, says Bhattacharya.

At COP26 a major topic of discussion is not only the $100bn but also how to redirect financial flows from all sources and channel them towards cutting emissions.

It is indisputable that there is capital out there, but is the capital going to where it needs to go? That is the problem, the capital is not going where it needs to go, says Mafalda Duarte, chief executive of the Climate Investment Funds (CIFs).

A new wave of money is starting to head towards more climate projects. Some of this is starting to come from private sources one example is a $600m BlackRock fund for climate projects, which is paired with government funds that take the risk out of the investment.

Public investors are starting to rethink their approaches: The CIFs is raising a $2bn fund from rich countries including Canada, Germany and the US, to help countries transition out of coal. Duarte says it will use this money to leverage funds from other public and private investors, so that every $1 from CIF brings in $10 from others.

Another potential big source of new funding could come from the Article Six negotiations at COP, which will iron out rules for global carbon markets.

That will put in place a system by which polluting countries transfer millions or billions of dollars for carbon-reducing projects in other countries. Done right, it could help lower emissions and send climate finance in the right direction.

But done wrong, it risks re-creating the same problems that plagued the earlier Clean Development Mechanism. If negotiators leave a lot of loopholes in the carbon market rules, such as allowing countries to double count their emissions, then the system could push emissions up rather than reducing them.

Still, developing countries warn that it may all be too little, too late. In Glasgow, negotiations will start over how to set a bigger climate finance target for 2025, even before the $100bn has been reached.

All this will come to a head in the next few days. As a political issue, the funding will be keenly debated. Even though there are questions about whether the money can be spent effectively, and how it should be distributed, politicians and activists admit that no one has found a better solution. However imperfect it is, climate finance is a central part of fighting climate change and also the hardest to fix.

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COP26: where does all the climate finance money go? - Financial Times

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Things to do in Greater Cincinnati this week – Hamilton Journal News

Posted: at 10:33 pm

Hotel California: The Original Eagles Tribute

When the Eagles took a break in the mid-1980s, Hotel California filled the breach, and theyve been the worlds premiere Eagles tribute band ever since. See them at the Sorg Opera House, 57 S. Main St., Middletown, on Nov. 5 at 8 p.m. Tickets are $30-$35. For more information, visit http://www.sorgoperahouse.org.

The Menus

This charismatic rock band has been entertaining Cincinnati audiences for over 30 years. See them at the Sorg Opera House, 57 S. Main St., Middletown, on Nov. 6 at 8 p.m. Tickets are $25. For more information, visit http://www.sorgoperahouse.org.

Farewell Angelina

This female country trio blends vocal harmonies with double violins and a guitar. See them at the Fairfield Community Arts Center, 411 Wessel Drive, Fairfield, on Nov. 6 at 8 p.m. Tickets are $31-$34. For more information, call (513) 867-5348 or visit http://www.fairfield-city.org/tickets.

Winter Craft Show

This second annual show will feature over 50 vendors. Get all your holiday gifts and dcor at EnterTRAINment Junction, 7379 Squire Ct., West Chester, on Nov. 6 from 10 a.m.-3 p.m. There is no admission cost. For more information, call (513) 898-8000 or visit http://www.entertrainmentjunction.com.

Jason Bonhams Led Zeppelin Evening

The son of the late, legendary Led Zeppelin drummer has been rocking on is own since the 1980s. On this tour, hes recreating the iconic songs of Led Zeppelins entire catalogue. See it at the Icon Music Center, 25 Race St., Cincinnati, on Nov. 6 at 8 p.m. Tickets are $39.50-$75. For more information, call (513) 232-5882 or visit http://www.iconmusiccenter.com.

Styx

These progressive soft rockers released a string of multi-platinum albums in the 1970s and 80s. They are touring in support of their 17th album, Crash of the Crown, released last June. See them at the Hard Rock Casino Cincinnati, 1000 Broadway St., Cincinnati, on Nov. 6 at 8 p.m. Tickets are $59-$114. For more information, call (513) 250-3150 or visit http://www.hardrockcasinocincinnati.com.

Ledisi

This Grammy-winning R&B and jazz vocalist has released a live album, a Nina Simone tribute album, and an original album in just the last two years. Shes touring in support of her 2020 original album, Wild Card. See her at the Taft Theatre, 317 E. 5th St., Cincinnati, on Nov. 6 at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $31.50-$48.50. For more information, call (513) 232-6220 or visit http://www.tafttheatre.org.

Bill Maher

The old-school liberal host of Politically Incorrect and Real Time has never abandoned his stand-up comedy roots. Check out his rescheduled show at the Taft Theatre, 317 E. 5th St., Cincinnati, on Nov. 7 at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $47.50-$129.50. For more information, call (513) 232-6220 or visit http://www.tafttheatre.org.

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Things to do in Greater Cincinnati this week - Hamilton Journal News

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The hate is real: Wild claims and explosive blow-ups behind one of sports nastiest feuds – Fox Sports

Posted: at 10:33 pm

In the world of combat sports, the line separating reality and entertainment can often be blurred.

How often have you asked yourself: Do these two fighters really hate each other? Or are they putting on a performance to sell extra pay-per-view buys?

But on Sunday (Australian time), the potential for scepticism will be non-existent when arch enemies Kamaru Usman and Colby Covington lock horns again for the welterweight belt at UFC 268 at the hallowed Madison Square Garden in New York.

Watch UFC 268: Usman vs Covington 2 LIVE on Main Event available on Kayo and Foxtel, Sunday 7th November from 1pm AEDT. ORDER NOW >

Make no mistake, these two men have a lot of history and their hate for each other runs deep.

For starters, Covington is an unabashed supporter of former president Donald Trump, and even got invited to the White House when Trump was in office.

Given reigning champion Usman is of African descent, and what Trumps presidency represented for many black Americans, Usman was always going to be at loggerheads with Covington on politics, and went so far as accusing him of trying to divide the country with inflammatory remarks.

MORE: This terrifying beast is on a historic tear. Only the most hated man in the UFC can stop him

ULTIMATE GUIDE: How to watch epic UFC 268-Canelo combat double header in Australia

Covington is undoubtedly a firebrand with the gift of the gab who has adopted the heel persona seamlessly, largely by being politically incorrect.

Among his many outrageous comments, Covington accused Usman of using Erythropoietin (EPO) a banned substance which stimulates red blood cell production and assists with endurance for a couple of years in the lead-up to their first fight in December 2019.

Act or no act, most reasonable people would think Covington crossed the line when, again in the lead-up to UFC 245, he said Usman gave his late trainer Glenn Robinson a heart attack and that Robinson would be watching their main event showdown from hell.

Covington didnt stop there, though. The former interim champion claimed that Usman was not actually born in Nigeria, but was in fact born in America, in Dallas a kind of reversal of the birther movement conspiracy theory his hero Trump subscribed to which claimed former president Barack Obama wasnt born in America, but was born in Kenya.

It also plays nicely into Covingtons use of the nickname he has for Usman: Marty Fake News-man, a reference that also draws on Usmans nickname Marty which he acquired in high school because his coach was having trouble pronouncing his full first name, Kamarudeen.

Throughout it all, despite clearly harbouring deep disdain for Covington, Usman remained fairly calm and collected in the face of the verbal barrage. But while The Nigerian Nightmare put a lot of Covingtons theatrics down to attention-seeking, he did believe the 33-year-olds behaviour also showed what kind of person he was.

I dont think theres ever been a guy universally hated this bad, Usman told MMA Fighting back in 2019.

In response to Covingtons unfounded allegations about his nationality, Usman said he was proud of his immigrant story and went so far as to say he believed he was even more American than Covington, considering America is a country of immigrants and he, as an immigrant, has become a spectacular sporting success story.

Things really boiled over between the pair in August 2019 when they engaged in a live on-air bust-up after Covingtons win against Robbie Lawler.

And then came the fight itself, where Usman got the chance to shut Covington up in the best way possible, by breaking his jaw.

Widely regarded as one of the best welterweight fights in UFC history, Usman put his belt on the line in what was his first title defence, after usurping Woodley as king of the division earlier in 2019 at UFC 235.

In what was a back-and-forth contest full of huge hits from either fighter, only one judge had Usman in the lead going into the final round.

Usman needed to produce something huge in the fifth round, he needed a finish and thats exactly what he got. Twice he rocked Covington, sending the American to the canvas, before ending the contest with rapid-fire hammerfists to the head with just 50 seconds left the latest finish in UFC welterweight history.

But you didnt think that Usman successfully defending his title in such dramatic circumstances would keep Covington quiet did you? On the contrary. Inspired by his hero Trump, Covington labelled the result fake and referee Marc Goddard fake for finishing the fight when he did.

He also accused Usman of not only faking being hit in the cup, but also being poked in the eye in order to buy himself some time and get a rest during the fight.

It all blew over again live on air in September last year when they had another verbal stoush following Covingtons win over Woodley.

Whoevers side you might find yourself on in this gargantuan war of words, one thing is for certain these men are the two best fighters in the welterweight division.

In one corner you have Usman (19-1) who has won his last 18 fights, including each of his 14 bouts in the UFC, in an undefeated streak that dates back eight years. He has also defended his title four times since winning it.

In the other corner you have Covington (16-2) who won 15 of his first 16 fights before being stopped by Usman.

One way or another, with these two men so evenly matched, its not hard to envisage another fight for the ages at UFC 268.

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These Are Finally In Stock at Wegmans and Bills Fans Are Thrilled – wyrk.com

Posted: at 10:33 pm

It's safe to say that Buffalo Bills fever is at an all-time high. It's at least as big as it was back in the early 90s, the last time the team was this consistently good. I was too young to remember those days, but I do know that this current Bills team has made all of Western New York sleeping and breathing Bills Mafia.

You see Bills hats, jerseys, and shirts all over Buffalo, but I love when you see a fan wearing that "niche" piece of merchandise. You know, like a Wyoming hat or jersey (Josh Allen's college team), or maybe it's his high school team.

Back in early October, Allen wore a Firebaugh hoodie duringwalking into Highmark Stadium before the Houston Texans game, and then wore it during his postgame press conference.

Wegmans

Bills fans wanted to get their hands on that jersey, and it was made available through theShop One Buffalo store online. Now, you can get those signature Firebaugh hoodies at Wegmans!

This was at the Orchard Park Road Wegmans in West Seneca.

Josh Allen grew up in northern California, and went to Firebaugh High School. His team was called the Firebaugh Eagles and now Bills fans can wear the hoodie Josh Allen has been wearing.

I have a ton of Bills gear like most fans do, but there's something very cool about having Wyoming or Firebaugh gear. It just shows how much this community had adopted Allen as their own and wants to support anything associated with him.

Many of them aren't around any more, but our parents always took us to these Buffalo restaurants growing up.

The 20 best old-school restaurants and bars in Western New York.

Did you know these 35 celebrities are on the wall at Chefs Restaurant?

The best pizza spots in Buffalo!

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These Are Finally In Stock at Wegmans and Bills Fans Are Thrilled - wyrk.com

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Broadway musical The Book Of Mormon opens to standing ovation at Dublins Bord Gais Energy Theatre… – The Irish Sun

Posted: at 10:33 pm

BROADWAY's smash-hit musical The Book Of Mormon opened to a standing ovation at Bord Gais Energy Theatre earlier this week.

Penned by the geniuses behind South Park, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the irreverent satire about two Mormon chaps sent on a mission to a remote Ugandan village is a howl a minute.

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Between blissful profanity, sacrilege and politically incorrect mischief, it's probably most anarchic fun ever staged at the Bord Gais.

Although the show runs until December 4, sources predict word of mouth will see the Mormons selling out with the theatre selling a limited amount of day tickets.

Ireland AM star Alan Hughes, Keith Walsh and his son Finn, Graham O Toole and Nathan O Reilly - Spin Radio breakfast presenters were among those attending.

Alan said: I Loved it such fun lots of shock value too with some of the lines but that added to it, the cast looked like they were having a blast."

Last week, we told how Alan Hughes and fellow Ireland AM presenter Muireann O'Connell donned grass skirts for Daniel O'Donnell.

The pair were speaking to the Donegal star as he released the clip for hissingle Down at The Lah De Dah.

The video features the singer working a standard nine to five but daydreaming about sporting a hula skirt and a Hawaiian lei while surfing waves, sipping cocktails and playing the ukulele.

Muireann and Alan dressed up as Hawaiian dancers as a tribute to the Donegal crooner, wearing a grass skirt and a flower necklace.

Taking to Instagram, Muireann said: "Daniel O'Donnell was chatting to us this morning and we had to get dressed up in homage to his new vid.

Daniel told the presenters on Ireland AM: "I love your attire."

Laughing, Alan said: "Thank you very much.

"We went all out for you this morning darling."

At the end of the interview, Daniel said: "Thanks a million guys, and thanks for dressing up."

Alan replied: "We have to give you one last show."

The Virgin Media stars then got up and did a hula dance for Daniel and the Ireland AM viewers.

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Broadway musical The Book Of Mormon opens to standing ovation at Dublins Bord Gais Energy Theatre... - The Irish Sun

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Quantum Computing | Rigetti Computing

Posted: at 10:31 pm

Complex problems need powerful computing

We make it possible for everyone to think bigger, create faster, and see further. By infusing AI and machine learning, our quantum solutions give you the power to solve the worlds most important and pressing problems.

When the computer is operational, five casings (like the white one shown at the top of the image) envelop the machine. These cans nest inside each other and act as thermal shields, keeping everything super cold and vacuum-sealed inside.

These photon-carrying cables deliver signals to and from the chip to drive qubit operations and return the measured results.

Beneath the heat exchangers sits the mixing chamber. Inside, different forms of liquid heliumhelium-3 and helium-4separate and evaporate, diffusing the heat.

These gold plates separate cooling zones. At the bottom, they plunge to one-hundredth of a Kelvinhundreds of times as cold as outer space.

The QPU (quantum processing unit) features a gold-plated copper disk with a silicon chip inside that contains the machines brain.

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Quantum computers: Eight ways quantum computing is going to change the world – ZDNet

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From simulating new and more efficient materials to predicting how the stock market will change with greater precision, the ramifications of quantum computing for businesses are potentially huge.

The world's biggest companies are now launching quantum computing programs, and governments are pouring money into quantum research. For systems that have yet prove useful, quantum computers are certainly garnering lots of attention.

The CIO's guide to Quantum computing

Quantum computers offer great promise for cryptography and optimization problems, and companies are racing to make them practical for business use. ZDNet explores what quantum computers will and wont be able to do, and the challenges that remain.

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The reason is that quantum computers, although still far from having reached maturity, are expected to eventually usher in a whole new era of computing -- one in which the hardware is no longer a constraint when resolving complex problems, meaning that some calculations that would take years or even centuries for classical systems to complete could be achieved in minutes.

From simulating new and more efficient materials to predicting how the stock market will change with greater precision, the ramifications for businesses are potentially huge. Here are eight quantum use cases that leading organisations are exploring right now, which could radically change the game across entire industries.

The discovery of new drugs relies in part on a field of science known as molecular simulation, which consists of modelling the way that particles interact inside a molecule to try and create a configuration that's capable of fighting off a given disease.

Those interactions are incredibly complex and can assume many different shapes and forms, meaning that accurate prediction of the way that a molecule will behave based on its structure requires huge amounts of calculation.

Doing this manually is impossible, and the size of the problem is also too large for today's classical computers to take on. In fact, it's expected thatmodelling a molecule with only 70 atoms would take a classical computer up to 13 billion years.

This is why discovering new drugs takes so long: scientists mostly adopt a trial-and-error approach, in which they test thousands of molecules against a target disease in the hope that a successful match will eventually be found.

Quantum computers, however, have the potential to one day resolve the molecular simulation problem in minutes. The systems are designed to be able to carry out many calculations at the same time, meaning that they could seamlessly simulate all of the most complex interactions between particles that make up molecules, enabling scientists to rapidly identify candidates for successful drugs.

This would mean that life-saving drugs, which currently take an average 10 years to reach the market, could be designed faster -- and much more cost-efficiently.

Pharmaceutical companies are paying attention: earlier this year, healthcare giant Roche announced a partnership with Cambridge Quantum Computing (CQC) tosupport efforts in research tackling Alzheimer's disease.

And smaller companies are also taking interest in the technology. Synthetic biology start-up Menten AI, for example,has partnered with quantum annealing company D-Waveto explore how quantum algorithms could help design new proteins that could eventually be used as therapeutic drugs.

From powering cars to storing renewable energy, batteries are already supporting the transition to a greener economy, and their role is only set to grow. But they are far from perfect: their capacity is still limited, and so is their charging speed, which means that they are not always a suitable option.

One solution consists of searching for new materials with better properties to build batteries. This is another molecular simulation problem -- this time modelling the behaviour of molecules that could be potential candidates for new battery materials.

SEE: There are two types of quantum computing. Now one company says it wants to offer both

Similar to drug design, therefore, battery design is another data-heavy job that's better suited to a quantum computer than a classical device.

This is why German car manufacturer Daimlerhas now partnered with IBMto assess how quantum computers could help simulate the behaviour of sulphur molecules in different environments, with the end-goal of building lithium-sulphur batteries that are better-performing, longer-lasting and less expensive that today's lithium-ion ones.

Despite the vast amounts of compute power available from today's cutting-edge supercomputers, weather forecasts -- particularly longer-range ones -- can still be disappointingly inaccurate. This is because there are countless ways that a weather event might manifest itself, and classical devices are incapable of ingesting all of the data required for a precise prediction.

On the other hand, just as quantum computers could simulate all of the particle interactions going on within a molecule at the same time to predict its behaviour, so could they model how innumerable environmental factors all come together to create a major storm, a hurricane or a heatwave.

SEE: Scientists are using quantum computing to help them discover signs of life on other planets

And because quantum computers would be able to analyse virtually all of the relevant data at once, they are likely to generate predictions that are much more accurate than current weather forecasts. This isn't only good for planning your next outdoor event: it could also help governments better prepare for natural disasters, as well as support climate-change research.

Research in this field is quieter, but partnerships are emerging to take a closer look at the potential of quantum computers. Last year, for instance, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF)launched a partnership with IT company Atosthat included access to Atos's quantum computing simulator, in a bid to explore how quantum computing may impact weather and climate prediction in the future.

JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo are all actively investigating the potential of quantum computers to improve the efficiency of banking operations -- a use case often put forward as one that could come with big financial rewards.

There are several ways that the technology could support the activities of banks, but one that's already showing promise is the application of quantum computing to a procedure known as Monte Carlo simulation.

SEE: Quantum computing is at an early stage. But investors are already getting excited

The Monte Carlo operation consists of pricing financial assets based on how the price of related assets changes over time, meaning that it's necessary to account for the risk inherent in different options, stocks, currencies and commodities. The procedure essentially boils down to predicting how the market will evolve -- an exercise that becomes more accurate with larger amounts of relevant data.

Quantum computers' unprecedented computation abilities could speed up Monte Carlo calculations by up to 1,000 times, according to research carried out by Goldman Sachs together with quantum computing company QC Ware. In even more promising news, Goldman Sachs' quantum engineers havenow tweaked their algorithmsto be able to run the Monte Carlo simulation on quantum hardware that could be available in as little as five years' time.

For decades, researchers have tried to teach classical computers how to associate meaning with words to try and make sense of entire sentences. This is a huge challenge given the nature of language, which functions as an interactive network: rather than being the 'sum' of the meaning of each individual word, a sentence often has to be interpreted as a whole. And that's before even trying to account for sarcasm, humour or connotation.

As a result, even state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) classical algorithms can still struggle to understand the meaning of basic sentences. But researchers are investigating whether quantum computers might be better suited to representing language as a network -- and, therefore, to processing it in a more intuitive way.

The field is known as quantum natural language processing (QNLP), and is a key focus of Cambridge Quantum Computing (CQC). The company hasalready experimentally shown that sentences can be parameterised on quantum circuits, where word meanings can be embedded according to the grammatical structure of the sentence. More recently, CQC released lambeq, a software toolkit for QNLP that can convert sentences into a quantum circuit.

A salesman is given a list of cities they need to visit, as well as the distance between each city, and has to come up with the route that will save the most travel time and cost the least money. As simple as it sounds, the 'travelling salesman problem' is one that many companies are faced with when trying to optimise their supply chains or delivery routes.

With every new city that is added to the salesman list, the number of possible routes multiplies. And at the scale of a multinational corporation, which is likely to be dealing with hundreds of destinations, a few thousand fleets and strict deadlines, the problem becomes much too large for a classical computer to resolve in any reasonable time.

Energy giant ExxonMobil, for example, has been trying to optimise the daily routing of merchant ships crossing the oceans -- that is, more than 50,000 ships carrying up to 200,000 containers each, to move goods with a total value of $14 trillion.

SEE: Quantum computers could read all your encrypted data. This 'quantum-safe' VPN aims to stop that

Some classical algorithms exist already to tackle the challenge. But given the huge number of possible routes to explore, the models inevitably have to resort to simplifications and approximations. ExxonMobil, therefore, teamed up with IBMto find out if quantum algorithms could do a better job.

Quantum computers' ability to take on several calculations at once means that they could run through all of the different routes in tandem, allowing them to discover the most optimal solution much faster than a classical computer, which would have to evaluate each option sequentially.

ExxonMobil's results seem promising: simulations suggest that IBM's quantum algorithms could provide better results than classical algorithms once the hardware has improved.

Optimising the timing of traffic signals in cities, so that they can adapt to the number of vehicles waiting or the time of day, could go a long way towards smoothing the flow of vehicles and avoiding congestion at busy intersections.

This is another problem that classical computers find hard: the more variables there are, the more possibilities have to be computed by the system before the best solution is found. But as with the travelling salesman problem, quantum computers could assess different scenarios at the same time, reaching the most optimal outcome a lot more rapidly.

Microsoft has been working on this use case together with Toyoto Tsusho and quantum computing startup Jij. The researchers have begun developing quantum-inspired algorithms in a simulated city environment, with the goal of reducing congestion. According to the experiment's latest results,the approach could bring down traffic waiting times by up to 20%.

Modern cryptography relies on keys that are generated by algorithms to encode data, meaning that only parties granted access to the key have the means to decrypt the message. The risk, therefore, is two-fold: hackers can either intercept the cryptography key to decipher the data, or they can use powerful computers to try and predict the key that has been generated by the algorithm.

This is because classical security algorithms are deterministic: a given input will always produce the same output, which means that with the right amount of compute power, a hacker can predict the result.

This approach requires extremely powerful computers, and isn't considered a near-term risk for cryptography. But hardware is improving, and security researchers are increasingly warning that more secure cryptography keys will be needed at some point in the future.

One way to strengthen the keys, therefore, is to make them entirely random and illogical -- in other words, impossible to guess mathematically.

And as it turns out, randomness is a fundamental part of quantum behaviour: the particles that make up a quantum processor, for instance, behave in completely unpredictable ways. This behaviour can, therefore, be used to determine cryptography keys that are impossible to reverse-engineer, even with the most powerful supercomputer.

Random number generation is an application of quantum computing that is already nearing commercialisation. UK-based startup Nu Quantum, for example,is finalizing a system that can measure the behavior of quantum particlesto generate streams of random numbers that can then be used to build stronger cryptography keys.

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IonQ Is First Quantum Startup to Go Public; Will It be First to Deliver Profits? – HPCwire

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On October 1 of this year, IonQ became the first pure-play quantum computing start-up to go public. At this writing, the stock (NYSE: IONQ) was around $15 and its market capitalization was roughly $2.89 billion. Co-founder and chief scientist Chris Monroe says it was fun to have a few of the companys roughly 100 employees travel to New York to ring the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange. It will also be interesting to listen to IonQs first scheduled financial results call (Q3) on November 15.

IonQ is in the big leagues now. Wall Street can be brutal as well as rewarding, although these are certainly early days for IonQ as a public company. Founded in 2015 by Monroe and Duke researcher Jungsang Kim who is the company CTO IonQ now finds itself under a new magnifying glass.

How soon quantum computing will become a practical tool is a matter of debate, although theres growing consensus that it will, in fact, become such a tool. There are several competing flavors (qubit modality) of quantum computing being pursued. IonQ has bet that trapped ion technology will be the big winner. So confident is Monroe that he suggests other players with big bets on other approaches think superconducting, for example are waking up to ion traps advantages and are likely to jump into ion trap technology as direct competitors.

In a wide-ranging discussion with HPCwire, Monroe talked about ion technology and IonQs (roughly) three-step plan to scale up quickly; roadblocks facing other approaches (superconducting and photonic); how an IonQ system with about 1,200 physical qubits and home-grown error-correction will be able to tackle some applications; and why IonQ is becoming a software company and thats a good thing.

In ion trap quantum computing, ions are held in position by magnetic forces where they can be manipulated by laser beams. IonQ uses ytterbium (Yb) atoms. Once the atoms are turned into ions by stripping off one valence electron, IonQ use a specialized chip called alinear ion trap to hold the ions precisely in 3D space. Literally, they sort of float above the surface. This small trap features around 100 tiny electrodes precisely designed, lithographed, and controlled to produce electromagnetic forces that hold our ions in place, isolated from the environment to minimize environmental noise and decoherence, as described by IonQ.

It turns out ions have naturally longer coherence times and therefore require somewhat less error correction and are suitable for longer operations. This is the starting point for IonQs advantage. Another plus is that system requirements themselves are less complicated and less intrusive (noise producing) than systems for semiconductor-based, superconducting qubits think of the need to cram control cables into a dilution refrigerator to control superconducting qubits. That said, all of the quantum computing paradigms are plenty complicated.

For the moment, ion traps using lasers to interact with the qubits is one of the most straightforward approaches. It has its own scaling challenge but Monroe contends modular scaling will solve that problem and leverage ion traps other strengths.

Repeatability [in manufacturing superconducting qubits] is wonderful but we dont need atomic scale deposition, like you hear of with five nanometer feature sizes on the latest silicon chips, said Monroe. The atoms themselves are far away from the chips, theyre 100 microns, i.e. a 10th of a millimeter away, which is miles atomically speaking, so they dont really see all the little imperfections in the chip. I dont want to say it doesnt matter. We put a lot of care into the design and the fab of these chips. The glass trap has certain features; [for example] its actually a wonderful material for holding off high voltage compared to silicon.

IonQ started with silicon-based traps and is now moving to evaporated glass traps.

What is interesting is that weve built the trap to have several zones. This is one of our strategies for scale. Right now, at IonQ, we have exactly one chain of atoms, these are the qubits, and we typically have a template of about 32 qubits. Thats as many as we control. You might ask, how come youre not doing 3200 qubits? The reason is, if you have that many qubits, you better be able to perform lots and lots of operations and you need very high quality operations to get there. Right now, the quality of our operation is approaching 99.9%. That is a part per 1000 error, said Monroe.

This is sort of back of the envelope calculations but that would mean that you can do about 1000 ops. Theres an intuition here [that] if you have n qubits, you really want to do about n2 ops. The reason is, you want these pairwise operations, and you want to entangle all possible pairs. So if you have 30 qubits, you should be able to get to about 1000 ops. Thats sort of where we are now. The reason we dont have 3200 yet is that if you have 3200 qubits, you should be able to do 10 million ops and that means your noise should be one part in 107. Were not there yet. We have strategy to get there, said Monroe.

While you could put more ions in a trap, controlling them becomes more difficult. Long chains of ions become soft and squishy. A smaller chain is really stiff [and] much less noisy. So 32 is a good number. 16 might be a good number. 64 is a good number, but its going to be somewhere probably under 100 ions, said Monroe.

The first part of the strategy for scaling is to have multiple chains on a chip that are separated by a millimeter or so which prevents crosstalk and permits local operations. Its sort of like a multi-core classical architecture, like the multi-core Pentium or something like that. This may sound exotic, but we actually physically move the atoms, we bring them together, the multiple chains to connect them. Theres no real wires. This is sort of the first [step] in rolling out a modular scale-up, said Monroe.

In proof of concept work, IonQ announced the ability to arbitrarily move four chains of 16 atoms around in a trap, bringing them together and separating them without losing any of the atoms. It wasnt a surprise we were able to do that, said Monroe. But it does take some design in laying out the electrodes. Its exactly like surfing, you know, the atoms are actually surfing on an electric field wave, and you have to design and implement that wave. That was that was the main result there. In 2022, were going to use that architecture in one of our new systems to actually do quantum computations.

There are two more critical steps in IonQs plan for scaling. Error correction is one. Clustering the chips together into larger systems is the other. Monroe tackled the latter first.

Think about modern datacenters, where you have a bunch of computers that are hooked together by optical fibers. Thats truly modular, because we can kind of plug and play with optical fibers, said Monroe. He envisions something similar for trapped ion quantum computers. Frankly, everyone in the quantum computing community is looking at clustering approaches and how to use them effectively to scale smaller systems into larger ones.

This interface between individual atom qubits and photonic qubits has been done. In fact, my lab at University of Maryland did this for the first time in 2007. That was 14 years ago. We know how to do this, how to move memory quantum bits of an atom onto a propagating photon and actually, you do it twice. If you have a chip over here and a chip over here, you bring two fibers together, and they interfere and you detect the photons. That basically makes these two photons entangled. We know how to do that.

Once we get to that level, then were sort of in manufacturing mode, said Monroe. We can stamp out chips. We imagine having a rack-mounted chips, probably multicore. Maybe well have several 100 atoms on that chip, and a few of the atoms on the chip will be connected to optical conduits, and that allows us to connect to the next rack-mounted system, he said.

They key enabler, said Monroe, is a nonblocking optical switch. Think of it as an old telephone operator. They have, lets say they have 100 input ports and 100 output ports. And the operator connects, connects with any input to any output. Now, there are a lot of connections, a lot of possibilities there. But these things exist, these automatic operators using mirrors, and so forth. Theyre called n-by-n, nonblocking optical switches and you can reconfigure them, he said.

Whats cool about that is you can imagine having several hundred, rack-mounted, multi-core quantum computers, and you feed them into this optical switch, and you can then connect any multi-core chip to any other multi-core chip. The software can tell you exactly how you want to network. Thats very powerful as an architecture because we have a so-called full connection there. We wont have to move information to nearest neighbor and shuttle it around to swap; we can just do it directly, no matter where you are, said Monroe.

The third leg is error correction, which without question is a daunting challenge throughout quantum computing. The relative unreliability of qubits means you need many redundant physical qubits estimates vary widely on how many to have a single reliable logical qubit. Ions are among the better behaving qubits. For starters, all the ions are literally identical and not subject to manufacturing defects. A slight downside is that Ion qubit switching speed is slower than other modalities, which some observers say may hamper efficient error correction.

Said Monroe, The nice thing about trapped ion qubits is their errors are already pretty good natively. Passively, without any fancy stuff, we can get to three or four nines[i] before we run into problems.

What are those problems? I dont want to say theyre fundamental, but there are brick walls that require a totally different architecture to get around, said Monroe. But we dont need to get better than three or four nines because of error correction. This is sort of a software encoding. The price you pay for error correction, just like in classical error correction encoding, is you need a lot more bits to redundantly encode. The same is true in quantum. Unfortunately, with quantum there are many more ways you can have an error.

Just how many physical qubits are needed for a logical qubit is something of an open question.

It depends what you mean by logical qubit. Theres a difference in philosophy in the way were going forward compared to many other platforms. Some people have this idea of fault tolerant quantum computing, which means that you can compute infinitely long if you want. Its a beautiful theoretical result. If you encode in a certain way, with enough overhead, you can actually you can run gates as long as you want. But to get to that level, the overhead is something like 100,000 to one, [and] in some cases a million to one, but that logical qubit is perfect, and you get to go as far as you want [in terms of number of gate operations], he said.

IonQ is taking a different tack that leverages software more than hardware thanks to ions stability and less noisy overall support system [ion trap]. He likens improving qubit quality to buying a nine in the commonly-used five nines vernacular of reliability. Five nines 99.999 percent (five nines) is used describe availability, or put another way, time between shutdowns because of error.

Were going to gradually leak in error correction only as needed. So were going to buy a nine with an overhead of about 16 physical qubits to one logical qubit. With another overhead of 32 to one, we can buy another nine. By then we will have five nines and several 100 logical qubits. This is where things are going to get interesting, because then we can do algorithms that you cant simulate classically, [such] as some of these financial models were doing now. This is optimizing some function, but its doing better than the classical result. Thats where we think we will be at that point, he said.

Monroe didnt go into detail about exactly how IonQ does this, but he emphasized that software is the big driver now at IonQ. Our whole approach at IonQ is to throw everything up to software as much as we can. Thats because we have these perfectly replicable atomic qubits, and we dont have manufacturing errors, we dont have to worry about a yield or anything like that everything is a control problem.

So how big a system do you need to run practical applications?

Thats a really good question, because I can safely say we dont exactly know the answer to that. What we do know if you get to about 100 qubits, maybe 72, or something like that, and these qubits are good enough, meaning that you can do 10s of 1000s of ops. Remember, with 100 qubits you want to do about 10,000 ops to something you cant simulate classically. This is where you might deploy some machine learning techniques that you would never be able to do classically. Thats probably where the lowest hanging fruit are, said Monroe.

Now for us to get to 100 [good] qubits and say 50,000 Ops, that requires about 1000 physical qubits, maybe 1500 physical qubits. Were looking at 1200 physical qubits, and this might be 16 cores with 64 ions in each core before we have to go to photonic connections. But the photonic connection is the key because [its] where you start to have a truly modular data center. You can stamp these things out. At that point, were just going to be making these things like crazy, and wiring them together. I think well be able to do interesting things before we get to that stage and it will be important if we can show some kind of value (application results/progress) and that we have the recipe for scaling indefinitely, thats a big deal, he said.

It is probably going too far to say that Monroe believes scaling up IonQs quantum computer is now just a straightforward engineering task, but it sometimes sounds that way. The biggest technical challenges, he suggests, are largely solved. Presumably, IonQ will successfully demonstrate its modular architecture in 2022. He said competing approaches superconducting and all-photonics, for example wont be able to scale. They are stuck, he said.

I think they will see atomic systems as being less exotic than they once thought. I mean, we think of computers as built from silicon and as solid state. For better for worse you have companies that that forgot that they supposed to build computers, not silicon or superconductors. I think were going to see a lot more fierce competition on our own turf, said Monroe. There are ion trap rivals. Honeywell is one such rival (Honeywell has announced plans to merge with Cambridge Quantum), said Monroe.

His view of the long-term is interesting. As science and hardware issues are solved, software will become the driver. IonQ already has a substantial software team. The company uses machine learning now to program its control system elements such as the laser pulses and connectivity. Were going to be a software company in the long haul, and Im pretty happy with that, said Monroe.

IonQ has already integrated with the three big cloud providers (AWS, Google, Microsoft) quantum offerings and embraced the growing ecosystem of software and tools providers and has APIs for use with a variety of tools. Monroe, like many in the quantum community, is optimistic but not especially precise about when practical applications will appear. Sometime in the next three years is a good guess, he suggests. As for which application area will be first, it may not matter in the sense that he thinks as soon as one domain shows benefit (e.g. finance or ML) other domains will rush in.

These are heady times at IonQ, as they are throughout quantum computing. Stay tuned.

[i] He likens improving qubit quality to buying a nine in the commonly-used five nines vernacular of reliability. Five nines 99.999 percent (five nines) is used describe availability, or put another way, time between shutdowns because of error.

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An Early Investor In Twitch Explains Why He’s Betting Big On Quantum Computing – Forbes

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David Cowan had already been an investor at Bessemer Venture Partners for 20 years when he came across an upstart company that was rapidly building an audience around a novel idea: Watching other people play video games. The company was called Twitch. Shortly thereafter, Cowan and Bessemer led a $15 million Series B investment in the business. Less than two years later, Amazon came calling with an acquisition offer Twitch and Cowan couldnt refuse. It was, in many ways, the dream scenario for a venture capitalist.

But it wasnt long before Cowan began to have regrets.

An early backer of Twitch, David Cowan is now investing in the transformative potential of quantum computers like this one.

I invested in the company at like a $65 million pre-money (valuation), Cowan says today. And then 18 months later I had the opportunity to sell it for a billion dollars. And I thought, Hurray. And that was a big mistake. Because, you know, only two years later, the company was clearly worth $10 billion.

Id say the biggest lesson of that was that I had to recalibrate my expectations for what successful companies can do."

These days, Cowan spends his days investing in areas like space technology, cybersecurity and sustainable agriculturesectors you might describe as deep tech or frontier tech. I spoke to him over Zoom this week about one particular investment thats been making headlines this month. And by the sounds of it, underestimating this companys potential is not going to be a problem.

Still a partner at Bessemer, Cowan is now also an investor in and a board member at Rigetti Computing, a quantum computing company that agreed to go public in early October by merging with a SPAC at a $1.5 billion valuation. Thats up from $129 million when Bessemer took its stake in the company last year.

Ive tried before to explain quantum computing, and you can certainly find other explanations elsewhere, so I wont go into too much detail here. Suffice it to say that quantum computers are a new kind of machine that exploits the inherent strangeness of very small particles to perform immensely complicated calculations, with the potential to be trillions of times more powerful than current supercomputers.

If the industry fulfills that potential, Cowan believes the consequences will be incredible.

I mean, simply put, curing cancer, he said.

Perhaps the most exciting applications of quantum computing are in medicine. There are trillions of atoms in each cell and trillions of cells in the human body, all interacting with each other in an unceasing biological dance. Current superconductors are seriously powerful machines, but unspooling that kind of choreography is beyond their reach.

Its also beyond the reach of modern quantum computers. The technology for these machines is still in its adolescence. Theoretically, though, a quantum computer could map the way molecules and data points interact in previously unimaginable ways. And doctors and researchers could use those maps to find new therapies and cures.

The potential is equally vast in a wide range of other industries.

Its not going to change how you get your scoop of ice cream from the local store, Cowan said. But anything that requires machine learning or optimization, or certainly anything that requires an understanding of physicslike biology, chemistry, materialsanything that involves simulation, like designing airplanes or cars, anything that uses heavy computation, which of course is lots and lots of interesting industriesall of those will get a huge boost."

Different companies are trying to build quantum computers in different ways. Rigettis technology is based in superconducting qubitsqubits being the quantum computing analog to the bits in a traditional computer. In Cowans view, Rigetti is engaged in a three-way race for supremacy in the superconductor space. You might have heard of its two rivals: Google and IBM.

But whats that old saying about the size of the dog in the fight?

David Cowan has been at Bessemer since 1992.

Why do I like Rigetti? Well, two reasons. One is that I can't buy a big piece of Google or IBM, Cowan said with a grin. But the second thing is that I've seen in many industries that, as formidable as the major tech companies are, a committed dedicated startup will usually out-innovate the tech giants. And so even though Google and IBM have more money and more people, I still believe that Rigetti is going to way outpace them."

Rigetti will bring in $458 million in proceeds from its SPAC merger to help fund its ongoing R&D and bring its quantum computing technology to market. Wall Street heavyweights T. Rowe Price and Franklin Templeton are both taking part in a $100 million PIPE investment to support the deal. So too is In-Q-Tel, the venture arm of the Central Intelligence Agency. And so too are Bessemer and Cowananother sign of his belief in Rigettis long-term potential.

Im a buyer, not a seller, Cowan said. This has the opportunity to become one of the massive tech companies on the planet. I mean, this is, this is no less important than the transistor for the 20th century in terms of computation."

It will be a while before we find out one way or the other. Quantum computers arent going to fully replace modern supercomputers any time soon. The technology is still developing. A lot could change for Rigetti over the next decade. One thing is certain, though: This time around, Cowan isnt going to have any regrets about cashing out early.

Who knows when, who knows how much money it'll take. It's a risky venture, Cowan said. But for this one, the payoff is worth it.

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