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👓 Hyde-Smith Attended All-White ‘Seg Academy’ to Avoid Integration | Jackson Free Press

Read Hyde-Smith Attended All-White ‘Seg Academy’ to Avoid Integration (jacksonfreepress.com)

U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith attended and graduated from a segregation academy that were set up so that white parents could avoid having to send their children to schools with black students, a yearbook reveals.

This is the second article I’m reading out of the Jackson Free Press in almost as many days. They’ve got some excellent coverage on this topic to be sure.

👓 Stakhanovite movement | Wikipedia

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The term Stakhanovite originated in the Soviet Union and referred to workers who modelled themselves after Alexey Stakhanov. These workers took pride in their ability to produce more than was required, by working harder and more efficiently, thus strengthening the Communist state. The Stakhanovite Movement was encouraged due to the idea of socialist emulation. It began in the coal industry but later spread to many other industries in the Soviet Union. The movement eventually encountered resistance as the increased productivity led to increased demands on workers.

👓 Alexey Stakhanov | Wikipedia

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Alexsei Grigoryevich Stakhanov (Russian: Алексе́й Григо́рьевич Стаха́нов; 3 January 1906 – 5 November 1977) was a Russian Soviet miner, Hero of Socialist Labor (1970), and a member of the CPSU (1936). He became a celebrity in 1935 as part of what became known as the Stakhanovite movement – a campaign intended to increase worker productivity and to demonstrate the superiority of the socialist economic system.

👓 Lecture notes! Intro to Quantum Information Science | Scott Aaronson

Read Lecture notes! Intro to Quantum Information Science by Scott Aaronson (Shtetl-Optimized )

In Spring 2017, I taught a new undergraduate course at UT Austin, entitled Introduction to Quantum Information Science. There were about 60 students, mostly CS but also with strong representation from physics, math, and electrical engineering. One student, Ewin Tang, made a previous appearance on this blog. But today belongs to another student, Paulo Alves, who took it upon himself to make detailed notes of all of my lectures. Using Paulo’s notes as a starting point, and after a full year of procrastination and delays, I’m now happy to release the full lecture notes for the course. Among other things, I’ll be using these notes when I teach the course a second time, starting … holy smokes … this Wednesday. I don’t pretend that these notes break any new ground. Even if we restrict to undergrad courses only (which rules out, e.g., Preskill’s legendary notes), there are already other great quantum information lecture notes available on the web, such as these from Berkeley (based on a course taught by, among others, my former adviser Umesh Vazirani and committee member Birgitta Whaley), and these from John Watrous in Waterloo. There are also dozens of books—including Mermin’s, which we used in this course. The only difference with these notes is that … well, they cover exactly the topics I’d cover, in exactly the order I’d cover them, and with exactly the stupid jokes and stories I’d tell in a given situation. So if you like my lecturing style, you’ll probably like these, and if not, not (but given that you’re here, there’s hopefully some bias toward the former).