inverse problems

this month's issue of inverse problems has a number of articles on imaging and inverse scattering.

math for people

blog post in response to 'math for programmers'. for those of you with an interest in math education.

the pragmatic programmer

book on programming recommended by travis oliphant. promises to take me from journeyman to master, if i decide to become a master someday.

interactive brokers news pages

ib has news pages on interest rates in various countries, fx markets (including an rss feed), and futures and options (also with a commentary rss feed on a few individual tickers). the futures and options page includes a summary explanation at the top that explains what things like implied vs. historical volatility and futures arbitrage can tell you about what derivatives traders believe will happen in the market short-term.

the eagle and the lion

partway through reading a very good (if scholarlyly dry) book by james a. bill on us-iran relations covering the installation and deposing of the shah and the aftermath of the islamic revolution. only through chapter 7 so far, and the shah has just been overthrown. given the prominence of iron in world news these days, i think this history is important to understand.

cleaning up the office

found an old paper in my office: 'analytical parametric analysis of the contact problem of human buttocks and negative poisson's ratio foam cushions'. dead serious research, and i'm not sure but i think i did cite it once. it has the only account i could ever find for an analytical solution to hertz-like contact with a finite-thickness plate.  'game theory, maximum entropy, minimum discrepancy and robust bayesian decision theory', peter d. gr\:{u}nwald and a. philip dawid. shows the connection between maximizing entropy and minimizing worst-case expected loss. hefty tome, but relatively readable. the book, 'the statistical mechanics of financial markets', j. voit, 2005, looks like an interesting read. goes into some of the real areas of interest in quantitative finance from a physics perspective.

scipy india 2009

some interesting stuff to check out from the scipy conference in india. chandrashekhar kaushik is using cython to do sph simulations, apparently using python down to a fairly low level. senthil kumaran gave a talk explaining how the gil affects code speed. i will probably need to understand this at some point. chris burns talked about the fmri project, nipype. i'm curious to see if they have written some ica code in there. david cournapeau is coming out with a new package distribution system. might look at that as a possible alternative to distutils. akshay srivivasan showed how to use python with an avr microcontroller to make cheap and easy instrumentation. asokan pichai of fossee showed how they use open source software to make web video tutorials. travis oliphant very briefly alludes to ultrasound imaging as a scipy application area. i wonder if i can get more detail on that. stefan van der walt mentioned his github repository with scikit addons, with goodies like image processing and gpu algorithms for python.