I've read through the New Journal of Physics article. The ``radio vorticity'' means that the phase of the signal goes through a 180 flip across the beam centre, and the zero-point of this phase shift rotates as you move along the beam. The receiving antennas in the experiment were a pair of yagis, used to create a radio interferometer. The math and experimental results behind this appaer sound, but there are a few limitations:
So for controlled channels -- perhaps even microwave links -- I'm optimistic about engineers being able to build something useful out of this. But the basic math isn't going to generalize to omnidirectional links, and it certainly isn't going to deal well with strong multipath interference. Simply being able to discriminate between modes requires straddling the beam centre, so this absolutely isn't going to work for general consumption.
Also, I don't think that practical antenna design will ever allow more than three or four channels of angular momentum outside of a lab setting. Even that may potentially be a huge win for fixed microwave links, though.
Since the energy is only required when information is erased, reversible computing can get around this requirement. Aside from basic physics-level problems with building these logic gates, the problem with reversible computing is that it effectively requires keeping each intermediate result. Still, once we get down to anywhere close to the kT ln 2 physical constraint, reversible logic is going to look very attractive.
In short, the paper repeats analysis and numerical simulations of a simplified 'agreement model'. People are abstracted as nodes on a graph, communication happens between them, and consensus is reached. If a graph is initialized randomly, with nodes 'believing' either A or B, eventually (in log(N) time) the graph reaches consensus with every node 'believing' A xor B.
This paper adds a twist; some fraction of nodes are 'committed' to A, and cannot ever be convinced of B. To quote the paper:
Here, we study the evolution of opinions in the binary agreement model starting from an initial state where all agents adopt a given opinion B, except for a finite fraction p of the total number of agents who are committed agents and have state A. Committed agents, introduced previously in [23], are defined as nodes that can influence other nodes to alter their state through the usual prescribed rules, but which themselves are immune to influence.
Now, if even one node cannot be convinced of B, then no consensus can be reached -- but it doesn't really matter. If the fraction is really small, then you can more or less ignore them.
The interesting part about that paper is their threshold effect -- once p gets to be over 10%, not only does A eventually win, but it does so -quickly-.
The applications to politics still hold, but not on the big, obvious issues. Those issues, like taxes and abortion and health care and anything else that really makes the news, have committed believers on both sides -- they're outside the scope of study. Where this research becomes really interesting is in quieter, uncontroversial issues -- like regulation details, or climage change before Al Gore. There, this research suggests that the influence of sockpuppetry and lobbying is nonlinear -- beyond a critical point, the lobbyists completely win.
Of course, caveats about "the real world isn't an abstract graph" apply.
"In general, Apache is a great Web server, but when we were looking at how we get the next half percent or percent of performance, we didn't need all the features that Apache offers," Recordon said. He added, however, that he hopes an open source project will one day emerge around making HipHop work with Apache Web servers.
Love may laugh at locksmiths, but he has a profound respect for money bags. -- Sidney Paternoster, "The Folly of the Wise"