I will post more about Allerton soon (I’m still on the road), but I wanted to clear out some old links before doing that. I’m starting my new gig at TTIC this week, and the last few weeks have been a whirlwind of travel and internetlessness, so blogging has been curtailed.

• The 12 coolest libraries in the world (via MeFi).
• Todd Coleman shows you how to peel garlic efficiently via “shaking the dickens out of it.” No, not that Todd Coleman!
• Some scraps from an exterminated language have been found.
• Florence Nightingale’s statistical diagrams (via MeFi), but also covered by the BBC (part 1, part 2).

And a (not-so-recent) tour around the ArXiV — I haven’t had a chance to read these yet, but maybe once I am settled…

• Active Ranking using Pairwise Comparisons by Kevin G. Jamieson and Robert D. Nowak — this is related to a talk given by Constantine Caramanis at Allerton. Instead of looking at how to learn from total orderings, we have to learn the total ordering from pairwise ordererings (I like chocolate more than vanilla).
• Distributed Algorithms for Consensus and Coordination in the Presence of Packet-Dropping Communication Links – Part I and Part II by Nitin H. Vaidya, Christoforos N. Hadjicostis, and Alejandro D. Dominguez-Garcia (in different orders). This paper looks at consensus in asymmetric communication settings with packet drops and modify the update rule to achieve almost sure convergence. The analysis seems to rely on the “coefficient of ergodicity” approach for inhomogeneous Markov chains. It’s doubly appropriate for the blog!
• Distributed Algorithms for Optimal Power Flow Problem by Albert Y.S. Lam, Baosen Zhang, and David Tse. Power networks are hot and this paper studies an interesting problem of cost minimization in power flow networks. I found it a bit weird that the abstract and introduction assume you already know what the problem is… but that’s what happens when you are an outsider.
• Optimal Sensor Placement for Intruder Detection by Waseem A. Malik, Nuno C. Martins, and Ananthram Swami
• The Projection Method for Reaching Consensus and the Regularized Power Limit of a Stochastic Matrix by R. P. Agaev, P. Yu. Chebotarev
• Tropical Algebraic approach to Consensus over Networks, by Joel George Manathara, Ambedkar Dukkipati, Dabasish Ghose
• Fundamentals of Stein’s method by Nathan Ross
• A Learning Theory Approach to Non-Interactive Database Privacy by Avrim Blum, Katrina Ligett, Aaron Roth
• Bandits with an Edge by Dotan Di Castro, Claudio Gentile, Shie Mannor
• State-of-the-Art in Sequential Change-Point Detection by Aleksey S. Polunchenko, Alexander G. Tartakovsky
• Wasserstein distances for discrete measures and convergence in nonparametric mixture models by XuanLong Nguyen
• High-dimensional regression with noisy and missing data: Provable guarantees with non-convexity by Po-Ling Loh, Martin J. Wainwright
• Canonical Estimation in a Rare-Events Regime by Mesrob I. Ohannessian, Vincent Y. F. Tan, Munther A. Dahleh