Typical Day
Perl McHertz wakes up at 6:00AM to the sound of Mr. Worf saying, "Course laid in, Captain." That's her alarm tone—Mr. Worf from Star Trek. Perl moves quickly through her morning routine to get to the lab as soon as she can. She tries to get to work early most days, as that's the best time to catch one of her researchers, Jerry, if he slept at the lab again last night.
He has a habit of doing that and while she doesn't necessarily mind, he won't even put on a clean shirt unless she reminds him. And since the VP in charge of research tends to drop in for early visits, Perl needs to get there to run interference.
It's her department and she figured out a while ago running interference between management and the researchers is an important function. Her company's management is made up of career executives and the computer researchers are, well, computer researchers. Asking these two groups to have meaningful conversation is a bit like asking an Amish farmer to do the Tonight Show's opening monologue. In theory it's possible, but in practice it is just flat not going to work.
Perl is Lead Researcher at the McCarver Institute, a technology outfit sort of like what would happen if Google and MIT merged their R&D departments.
As lead researcher in the computer science division, she is responsible for most of their high dollar projects including their top government contacts, like the one looking into the ability to xxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxx with a xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, or the one exploring the possibility of using store-bought computer parts and coleslaw to xxxxxxxxxxxxxx the xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx in Canada, plus a new tool to hack into xxxxxxxxxxxxxx from xxxxxxxxxxxxx using bathroom tissue combined with xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx and tuna fish cans.
Sorry about that. For security reasons, Perl can't divulge specific details on most of her work, but trust us, it's pretty cool. Anyway, Perl has been lead researcher at McCarver for about three years. She was originally an entry-level computer scientist at the Institute while working on her doctoral dissertation. Once she was awarded her PhD, she left McCarver and spent time working for Nokia, the FBI, and the Defense Department, which is how, all these years later, she scored the lead research job back at McCarver working on their government contracts.
She was doing hard-core research at those other outfits, and published pretty extensively the whole time. Having to work with government bureaucrats prepared her to work with executive management, which is why she does all the talking for her division. Because let's face it, no matter how brilliant her cadre of computer scientists is, white collar executives are only going to follow the technobabble for so long. They also aren't likely to get all the Battlestar Galactica references her team likes to throw out. She kind of needs to be there.
Aside from her team's contracts, their theoretical work focuses on quantum computing. Processors can only be made so fast because they're limited by the speed of electricity and the binary language. In theory, quantum computers wouldn't be, and would dramatically change how information processing could happen. The math is way, way too sticky to get into here, not because we don't think you could understand it, but because we're pretty sure if we tried to understand it, we'd all suffer aneurysms.
So you're on your own on that one. But basically the theory goes a quantum computer wouldn't be limited either by the speed of electricity or binary. We're talking about processing and computing power literally thousands of times more powerful than anything currently being manufactured or even designed. It would kind of be like comparing an F-15 to one of those theme park bumper car rides.
So that's what Perl and her team are researching, in addition to their other government contracts. This means they work in tandem with quantum physicists, so you can just imagine the kind of wild parties these two groups throw.
Anyway, Perl briefs the VP and checks in on her team's progress. No breakthroughs yet, but they keep plugging away. She also checks in with another team working on a special data-sorting algorithm for the FBI. The deadline is in about two weeks and so far the results aren't quite as clear as Perl had hoped they'd be.
Not that poor results on a contract ever stopped the government from paying for it, but Perl takes pride in her work. With any luck, they'll have that one sorted out by the deadline because Wired wants an interview next month and that would be at least one more bragging point.