"That's not what I meant": human communication is fraught with
misinterpretation. Written out in longhand, words and letters
can be misread. A telegraph clerk can mistake a dot for a dash.
Noise will always be with us, but at least a new JQI (*) device
has established a new standard for reading quantum information
with a minimum of uncertainty. Success has come by viewing light
pulses not with a single passive detector with but an adaptive
network of detectors with feedback. The work on JQI's new, more
assured photonic protocol was led by Francisco Becerra and
carried out in Alan Migdall's JQI lab. They report their results
in Nature Photonics (**). Here are some things you need to know
to appreciate this development. HOW TO MODULATE? Digital data,
in its simplest form, can be read with a process called on-off
keying: a detector senses the intensity of incoming bursts of
electrons in wires or photons through fibers and assigns a value
of 0 or 1. A more sophisticated approach to modulating a signal
(not merely