# Posts

### September 13, 2014

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Let xn be a sequence of non-negative numbers. Then the sum of their running geometric means is bounded by e times their sum. In symbols The inequality is strict unless all the x‘s are zero, and the constant e on the right side is optimal. Torsten Carleman proved this theorem in 1923.

### September 12, 2014

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Matthieu Puigt just sent me the following after we talked at today's meeting: As you offered during our chat, here is the advertisement I would appreciate you to share on Nuit Blanche. I thank you so much for your help. Best regards,Matthieu-- A few months ago, we had an opening for a Ph.D. student position (see below for the description of the subject). The thesis was about to start in October but the selected candidate just left us and, as the Ph.D. thesis is granted, we are […]
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On a sunny afternoon in July of 2008, I decided to join other residents of Tang Hall to a building barbecue. This seemed like a great opportunity to get some free food and meet some interesting people. But it was far more than that. It was probably the most marking moment of my stay as […]How could I build a flying bicycle?
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Nature Publishing Group claims on its website that it is committed to publishing “original research” that is “of the highest quality and impact”. But when exactly is research “original”?  This is a question with a complicated answer. A recent blog post by senior editor Dorothy Clyde at Nature Protocols provides insight into the difficulties Nature faces […]
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Today, I'll be at this meeting entitled "Compressive Sensing, What Practical Applications ?" organized here in Paris. « Acquisition/Echantillonnage comprimé : quelles réalisations/applications pratiques ? » Journée thématique conjointe GDR/ISIS et GDR/SoC-SiPOrganisateurs :Patricia Desgreys (LTCI/IMT/Télécom ParisTech, patricia.desgreys@telecom-paristech.fr) et Laurent Daudet (Institut Langevin / Université Paris […]

### September 11, 2014

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This post was done in partnership with The Wirecutter, a list of the best technology to buy. Read the full article below at TheWirecutter.comIf I was looking to buy over-ear headphones for $300 or less, I’d get the PSB M4U 1, our recommendation for the second year running. After researching dozens of new headphones and testing 17, the PSBs remain the best for most people because they sound just as great playing acoustic concert guitar as thumping hip-hop.How We DecidedWe spent 20 hours […] + If you haven’t yet, I urge you to read Steven Pinker’s brilliant piece in The New Republic about what’s broken with America’s “elite” colleges and how to fix it. The piece starts out as an evisceration of an earlier New Republic article on the same subject by William Deresiewicz. Pinker agrees with Deresiewicz that something is wrong, […] + No summary available for this post. + … or talking about urban cycling in Oldenburg. Today I participated in a workshop on sustainable mobility which was held in the context of this year’s EnviroInfo conference. There I had the chance to present (slides here ) our research on bicycle safety as fundament of a comprihensive bicycle promotion strategy. Before I came to […] + Preliminary course enrollment numbers are in. Our new theory course, CS 125 (rapid introduction to theory), has 32 undergrads and 5 others, for an enrollment of 37. Salil and I had predicted and desired in the 20-40 range for the first year of this course, so we're on target. We hadn't thought about CS 125 being a class for grad students, but it actually makes sense. Entering CS grad students who haven't had background in theory, or grad students from other related areas […] + National Geographic writer Erik Vance recently blogged about his conversations with scientists and archaeologists about the problem of looting in their field. Academics pointed to Indiana Jones' character as more looter than archaeologist, who would rather attempt to steal a gold statue than study the amazing mechanisms built into the temple at the opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Vance studied the problem of looting of Mayan artifacts for this recent NatGeo feature, and a black market trade […] + The choice of a new fighter aircraft is not only dictated by technical requirements. At least as important as price, capacity or robustness, the origin of the supplier (nationality/ies, but also the coalition in which the country is implicitly or explicitly affiliated) is a key element. The chart below maps the distribution of fourth-generation fighters in the world (+ the small number of fifth-generation fighters already built). Major suppliers, the United States […] + We've seen happen in Hollywood again and again: the simultaneous production of two movies about the same subject. Whether it's asteroid movies, werewolf movies, or even two different takes on the Snow White story. Once an idea is in the zeitgeist, studios start a mad dash to see who gets a movie made about it first. And back in the mid-seventies, this happened with the first remake of King Kong.In 1976, producer Dino De Laurentiis got his version to the big screen, starring Jeff Bridges, […] + No summary available for this post. + Because the sensor technology is so important [0], I recently mentioned why long read technology was such a breakthrough (it's an information theoretic issue [5]). For the past two years, we have featured here on Nuit Blanche at least three makers of sequencing technology that will change the course of how we do many things. Those outfits are: Oxford Nanopore Technologies (see [1,2, 6] ) Pacific BioSciences (see [4,5] )Quantum BioSystems (see [3] ) Nick Loman is one of the few people […] + In May, Nuit Blanche reached 1 million visits and its 3,000th post, then it was 3 million page views in June and now we just passed our 2,000th post on Compressive Sensing in September. All this, ten years after the first set of communications on the subject.You want to show your appreciation ? Don't hesitate to provide a recommendation on LinkedIn under my profile like the few of you who already have. Also don't hesitate to join/comment on the Google+ Community (1086), the CompressiveSensing […] + What: A course for life scientists who do data analysis Where: EMBL (Heidelberg, Germany) When: 12-14 November 2014 Apply by: 26 September 2014 This course is open to researchers in the life sciences who are using computers for their analyses, … Continue reading → + This week, Will, Norm, and Jeremy discuss the Moto X, the Moto 360, and Apple's announcement of the iPhone 6, Apple Pay, and the Apple Watch. Enjoy! + “An entertaining freshness… Tic Tac!” This is Ferrero‘s tag line for its most successful product, the ubiquitous Tic Tac. And the line has stuck. As WikiHow points out in how to make your breath fresh: first buy some mints, then brush your teeth. One of the amazing things about Tic Tacs is that they are sugar free. Well… almost […] + This is the 2000th blog entry with a Compressive Sensing tag. Woohoo ! In the Map Makers, one can see that the sharp phase transitions can be used in many ways. One of the ways is to figure ut if a specifc mesurement essemble can be used efficiently. Another is to figure out if a specific technology can be improved. That discussion was somehow started for CT by Xiaochuan Pan, Emil Sidky and Michael Vannier in Why do commercial CT scanners still employ traditional, filtered back-projection for […] + This post is a review of the “GENERALIZED DOUBLE PARETO SHRINKAGE” Statistica Sinica (2012) paper by Armagan, Dunson and Lee. Consider the regression model $$Y=X\beta+\varepsilon$$ where we put a generalized double pareto distribution as the prior on the regression coefficients $$\beta$$. The GDP distribution has density $$$$f(\beta|\xi,\alpha)=\frac{1}{2\xi}\left( 1+\frac{|\beta|}{\alpha\xi} \right)^{-(\alpha+1)}. \label{}$$$$ GDP as Scale […] The […] + An interesting article in today's Crimson about the background to the announcement that Harvard's School of Public Health will be re-named the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, for a$350 million donation.  Feel free to comment on your feelings regarding the issue.  (The Kennedy School of Government notwithstanding, Harvard schools have not been "named" via donations historically, although certainly buildings and such have.)  I'm not publicly taking sides -- indeed, it […]

### September 10, 2014

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We've run through the basics of several types of remote controlled vehicles, from cars to boats to planes--and some tweaks to modify them. But one of the best ways to personalize an RC kit is to give it a fresh coat of paint. This guide will focus on the basics of painting bodies for RC cars--a genuinely fun and rewarding art form.Most RC car bodies are made from polycarbonate plastic (aka Lexan). It is incredibly tough stuff, which makes it ideal for absorbing the abuse that RC cars are […]
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Following up on those Saturday Morning Videos: Some ICML 2014 presentations, here is: Randomized Nonlinear Component Analysis by David Lopez-Paz, Suvrit Sra, Alex Smola, Zoubin Ghahramani, Bernhard SchölkopfClassical methods such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) are ubiquitous in statistics. However, these techniques are only able to reveal linear relationships in data. Although nonlinear variants of PCA and CCA have been […]
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Meg Lowman’s head is in the trees. She’s a botanist and the Chief of Science and Sustainability at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. Lowman was one of the first scientists to climb a tree in the name of science and ended up pioneering one of the most important fields of botany. Called “Canopy Meg” in scientist circles, she chatted with us about why the tippy tops of trees are the most important part of a forest and what it’s like to spend hours […]

### September 09, 2014

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Here it is. Apple's watch. And it's decidedly a watch, not a curved band or "wrist wearable" as we and some other people had predicted. Here's what you should know about it.The Apple watch is a touchscreen device worn on your wrist, running a special version of the iOS interface. The big deal here is the user interface--users will interact with it via touchscreen, voice, a dedicated button, and a crown dial on the right side. This digital crown dial is used to zoom in and out of applications as […]