IgorCarron

Ableal,

one more thing, I just noticed the cool-er readers. In the specs there is:

"Formats JPEG, PDF, EPUB, TXT Languages 8 Content DRM PDF. EPUB"

Does it mean that it does what I am looking for, it reads directly a pdf with no translation that could misrender the math in my papers ?

Igor.

ableal.

It looks interesting but a little steep. Thanks,

Igor.

Thanks Yan

With regards to the Kindle DX, I think I am a little afraid of the DRM issues which for one reason or another might make it a brick because I am either in the wrong country when I am reading something or else. The DX is also not in the hands of users, as it will begin selling later this year, I am really looking for the point of view of an actual user of a real product that one can already buy.

I had to change some code on some of our data acquisition system while we were flying on NASA's KC-135 (also known as the vomit comet) back in the early 90's. Some water condensation was dripping from the ceiling on the keyboard while the other experimenters nearby were barfing their brains out. I've been in more optimal situations.

The convex optimization is used to reconstruct the original signal.

The underlying compressive sensing theory says that if you do a measurement of a sparse signal, then convex optimization should allow you to recover that signal with high to overwhelming probability. The reason compressive sensing is interesting is that: - the process of taking measurement is linear (no iteration a la JPEG), thereby allowing one to foresee very low powered sensors. - the number of measurements is expected to be much smaller than what the Nyquist-Shannon theorem says (Nyquist is just a sufficient condition, not a necessary one), thereby realizing a de-facto compression of the signal with no a priori on the shape of that signal (except the knowledge that it is sparse) - the measurements are automatically encrypted.

In the case of the broad-spectrum communications monitor, the message is known to be sparsely located all over the frequencies.

Igor.

One more thing, Stephen Boyd's class on convex optimization (he is one of the co-author of the book) can be found on Youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=&search_query...

a person has pit all the videos in notes and put the said notes on a blog:

http://minhva.blogspot.com/2009/02/convexoptimizationii-lect...

so you can watch the video and read the text of the video at the same time.

Igor.

As it turns out, convex optimization is being seen by a few folks as the new least square. As wwalker mentioned, convex optimization is currently being used in solving for measurements taken with hardware implementing compressive sensing (or compressed sensing or compressive sampling). The A/D converter is just one of the application of compressive sensing. One of the most well known example is that of the single pixel camera at rice but there are many others. I have listed most of the known hardware implementing compressive sensing here:

http://igorcarron.googlepages.com/compressedsensinghardware

One should note that while convex optimization has given some real impetus to the field (by providing theoretical bounds), signal reconstruction is also using speedier techniques nowadays even though linear programming techniques remains some sort of gold standard. For those of you interested in the subject, I write a small blog on the subject of CS:

http://nuit-blanche.blogspot.com/search/label/CS

and have written a page trying to summarize our current understanding in this page(it is a bit technical):

http://igorcarron.googlepages.com/cs

Cheers,

Igor.

Paul,

There is also another issue that seems to be overlooked, people create their own disruption. When I wrote about Gloria Mark's finding on working spheres ( http://nuit-blanche.blogspot.com/2006/07/designing-collabora... ) I was surprised of that finding as it would seem counterproductive to the need to having to load up the "code" in the brain's RAM. Another explanation is that what she described is a typical cubicle/large organization workflow that would be counterproduictive to the Hacker's brain (replace hacker by researcher and you have the same symptoms).

Igor.