An Ergodic Walk

I’m grouping posts about ISIT vaguely by topic. Progress may be slow since I am trying to give my wrists a bit of a break from typing.

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Via Timothy Chow blogging at Terence Tao’s blog, I learned about outofprintmath, a kind of survey site for people to express their desire to have out of print math books brought back into print. One of the classic texts of information theory by Csiszár and Körner has been out of print for a while. Many grad students have been frustrated its unavailability (even the library copy is often checked out nearly permanently). There are (illegal) ways around this, but a photocopied book is just not the same as a real one you can take to a cafe and read.

Bobak (I think) has added Csiszár and Körner to outofprintmath. It’s number 51. Go vote!

I filed my thesis today. It was ok.

The next N posts will be about ISIT 2008 (which is where I am right now). Alex Dimakis will hopefully be guest blogging as well, so that’s something to look forward to!

As a quick comment — the exchange rate is very painful right now, as an American.

A. Doig, Fewer academics could be the answer to insufficient grants, Nature 453, 978 (19 June 2008). One’s first reaction is “of course!” Seems a bit too back of the envelope. Why not do a cycles of fear analysis?

Peter Greenaway takes on Da Vinci.

A scholarly article on being in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.

Michael Mitzenmacher notices the absurdity of the correspondence rules for the Transactions on Information Theory. Of course, they are doing away with correspondences entirely, so eventually it should be less of a problem.

Patterns for designing a reputation system — this has been a little topic of discussion in the office recently.