Dodgers acquire infielder Ronnie Belliard

The Dodgers acquired infielder Ronnie Belliard in a trade with the Nationals. Um, why? What we really need are pitchers. I just don't see the point of this trade.

Pictures from Wroclaw

Here are some pictures from Wroclaw.

Also, here is my photoblog in case you haven't looked at it in a while.

Quote of the Day

The following comment just occurred in one of the modeling week talks: "If you ignore the bad parts, then it's a good model."

Comment: D'oh!

(To be fair, there is a reasonable version of this statement---namely, that they seemed to capture some features reasonably.)

Poland so far

I've been a bit silent for a few days, so here are some of the things going on in Wroclaw. I'll post pictures later (aside from the ones that are already in the photoblog) once I return to Oxford on Sunday.

1. I found a restaurant named "PRL", which you can already see in my photoblog.

2. Before I even arrived, I had it in mind to get some good perogis, and this trip has not disappointed. I have twice gotten beef perogis---on the first night where they unexpectedly came with bacon bits and last night at a Jewish restaurant called "Sarah" (though I was unable to find the mezuzah).

3. My hotel's restaurant was a Chinese restaurant, which I did not expect. I ate there one night when I was feeling lazy, and I was awarded with an epic fail.

4. Bicycles are big in this town, as are walking down.

5. Another thing that is huge here are the small statues of gnomes. I have been told that there are over a hundred of them, but a blog entry with an excellent description of their origin incorrectly claims that there are over 15. (Some of the students here claim to have taken pictures of over 20 of them.) You can find pictures of some of them on this website. I've taken pictures of two of them, and I will post them in my Wroclaw photo album.

6. I found a really nice hole-in-the-wall coffeehouse where I have been getting iced lattes and nice pastries, chilling out, and reading.

7. I also found a decent dessert place, which had a really nice environment right outside the shop on Sunday morning before other people showed up with their kids. I was outside with a blended coffee drink (this was before I found the other place, which I like much better for coffee) and was reading and enjoying the weather. I noticed some pigeons with a neat flocking pattern. Whenever the pigeons were disturbed, they would fly up from the ground and then they would make one or two cycles of a consistent size, and then they would return to their feast. Unfortunately, I was unable to get a good picture of this. However, I was wondering why there was usually one cycle and on occasion two (and to a lesser extent about the specific, consistent size of the cycle). When I was sitting there, it made me think of some lazy weekend mornings playing chess with Vito Dai outside of a coffee place---Vito with his tea and me with my coffee. I really felt the urge to be playing chess at that moment.

8. The 'old town' (marketplace) area is really cool---there are a lot of neat restaurants, places to sit, an awesome fountain, a plaza where live music could easily be done, etc.

9. Radiohead apparently is having a concert (or has had a concert) here during my trip. Leonard Cohen played in Vienna while I was there, and I slightly regret being lazy and not going to the concert. (I was feeling rather tired and a bit lazy at the time.)

10. Many of the churches here (unsurprisingly) have very similar architectural styles to each other.

11. Naturally, I got horribly lost while trying to find the university for the first time on Sunday. That was inevitable. Because of this and my prior explorations, I did a ton of walking on Sunday and my feet are still hurting a bit as a result of it. After lots of circling, finding my way in the wrong part of town, and going back to the hotel, I finally made it to the university and I even took a reasonable route (starting from my second time at the hotel, so ignoring/pruning the long closed-loop excursion)---although not the one that I had initially attempted. I got slightly lost again on the way back---though I quickly realized that I was on the route that I had attempted initially. It evidently got completely foiled by just one epic fail of a decision on that particular street. I knew where I was because I noticed the "W. Kruk" store (though I later found another one of those even closer to the hotel) that I had marked in my head earlier in the day because it made me think of the baseball player John Kruk. In general, the way I follow directions doesn't rely on cardinal directions because I get disoriented really easily---it takes me several days of being in a new city to do a decent job of where north is, and then if the sun is in my eyes, I go all deer-in-headlights and my internal compass just goes completely haywire---so I rely on "landmarks" that I have noted for some reason (large or interesting buildings, prominent signs, or whatever else) and also relative directions and distances a la logo. Ah well, I got back without any real delay.

12. One of the modelling week problems is how to climb (by foot) a mountain. It uses data that comie from a mountain by the name of "Wank" (yes, that is apparently the real name of the mountain). So the problem then becomes how to climb Mount "Wank". (It's not quite "Climbing the Mountain of Conflict", but it will do.) Another problem is called "Improving the Efficiency of Prick-tests", which I think could use a better name.

13. Food is extremely cheap here (though not at the level of Taiwan). My meat perogis with bacon bits + a drink + a tip cost me 35 Polish zloty, which amounts to roughly 7.5 pounds. My meat perogis + a drink last night + a tip cost me 20 zloty.

14. The first restaurant that I've now mentioned a couple of times served some food in tinfoil that was shaped like a bird. It reminded me of R.J.'s---may that restaurant rest in peace!---though in this case it wasn't for leftovers being taken home. I definitely felt the pangs of nostalgia when I saw that.

15. I had dinner with some of the students on Monday night. Among the crowd were 3 of the 4 Oxford students attending the meeting (so, along with me, we had all of us except one person) and a few students from other places. The waiter was facetiously trying to get the women among us to order vodka. One of them ordered "half a liter of water", and the waiter pretended to misinterpret: "Half a liter of vodka?"

16. I was using my digital camera to get screenshots of whiteboards to help with the note-taking.

17. My students worked really hard and did an excellent job. The problem I gave them to study was ranking American football teams, and my goal was for them to come up with a different way of doing it than I had done in my prior research. (After a couple of days, I showed them what we had done.)

Headline: Naked man commandeers bus carrying students

I think the headline for this CNN article says it all. The only commentary I want to provide is that this incident happened in Atlanta and that apparently nobody was seriously hurt. (Otherwise the story would be far less amusing.)

Cockney option on ATMs

As reported by CNN, some London ATMs are now offering Cockney as an option. Awesome!

What happens in the Motherland stays in the Motherland

Tomorrow I am taking my first trip to Poland, which is the country where all my grandparents were born.* (Hence, I guess it's the Grandmotherland rather than the Motherland.) I am going to be an instructor in a mathematical modelling week in Wroclaw, which is not pronounced in a manner anywhere close to how it's spelled and which alas is nowhere close to any of the places where my grandparents are from. Because I am an instructor, and apparently need to be present both with my students and in meetings simultaneously during a couple of the days (I still haven't figured out how I'm going to manage this), escaping for a day to check those places out is not even remotely an option. Hopefully I'll be able to do that on another occasion, but I already some some interesting facts just by getting the names of places and looking them up on wikipedia, so I'll check things out in more detail online later. I'm hoping that maybe I'll be able to get some good latkas, kreplach, and matzah ball soup while I'm in Poland. :) We shall see.

Also, Poland will become the 8th different European country that I have visited (counting Ireland and Great Britain as European countries, because to an American they are such). I have invitations to visit Belgium and Germany, so those are the most likely candidates for me to visit next. (I also have an invitation to visit Singapore, though I'll really need to think about what timing will be good for that visit and I'd like to try to drop by and hang with friends even though the invitation is an academic one. Hence, there is some nontrivial coordination involved. The invitation to Belgium is also academic, and I have both academic and non-academic invitations for Germany.) Belgium will mostly like be the next country overall because the discussed plan was to try to get there this fall.

* Some of the places where they were born are no longer actually part of Poland.

Scurvy Cubs

It's official. The Chicago Cubs are being sold to a family by the name of Ricketts. I checked wikipedia quickly to see if it was the same family after whom the Hovse was named, but the signs seem to point to 'no' on this one. Note that my research was nowhere near what one might construe as thorough.

Human Cooker: Order now at Sears

Surely, this is somebody's idea of a practical joke, right? Right?

In case the Sears website in question gets altered or removed (and I'm guessing it probably will, as there will likely be some serious fallout), the top left of the page has the following tree to get to the page above: "Human Cooking > Grills to Cook Babies and More > Body Part Roaster"

I think somebody's head is going to roll (and then maybe be cooked with this thing)...

(Tip of the cap to Scott Porter.)

Flowchart for "Total Eclipse of the Heart"

Wow! This is just awesome! (It's also "awesome"!). The Huffington Post has posted a flowchart for the song "Total Eclipse of the Heart". Now I want to make one for certain other songs...

(Tip of the cap to Mariano Beguerisse Díaz.)

P.S. I know I have been posting a lot during the past few days, but there have been a bunch of quick things I wanted to mention. Rest assured, I will make up for this with a lower posting frequency later. :)

High School interventions

Here's the straight line (you provide the joke): My high school is adding "intervention periods" to its class schedule starting this fall.

(If you're interested, you can find the article about Beverly High's new fall bell schedule on the upper left of page 3 of the new issue of Beverly Hills Weekly.)

"Awesome" online security code

I was buying tickets to the February 20th 2010 Depeche Mode concert in London---Oh, Hell yes!!!!! (and the set lists for most of the concerts on this tour have even included both "It's No Good" and "Strangelove", which I really want to hear live and often aren't included on DM concert set lists these days!)---and the online security code to confirm that I was a human were particularly "awesome" (and maybe even awesome) on this occasion: "$10-billion castrate".

Now I just have to wait 6 months for the concert (which I'll be attending with a couple of friends)...

Dodgers sign Vicente Padilla

In an attempt to help address our continually-exacerbating starting pitching woes, the Dodgers have signed Vicente Padilla, who was recently released by the Rangers. Padilla is a warm body and can be useful given the situation, but I'd really like to do better than this. For example, I wouldn't mind if we pay a bit of money and rent someone like Aaron Harang. We have not been playing very well lately, and we need to do something about the pitching---especially if we actually want to go far in the postseason. We were coasting for a while, but I definitely don't feel as secure now as I did earlier in the season.

Dynamic communities in multichannel data: An application to the foreign exchange market during the 2007–2008 credit crisis

The title of this article, which was just officially published today, is a bit of a mouthful. This paper is the first foray by my research group into financial networks. We posted its sequel, which has a lot more detail and examples, on the arXiv in May. We don't have referee reports for that one yet, which we submitted to SIAM's new financial mathematics journal (and will give quite a different audience from Chaos, which is where the shorter paper appears). There will definitely be more of this from my group in the future, as D.Phil. student Dan Fenn (who did the heavy lifting on the paper) continues to produce excellent work and a new D.Phil. student (Martin Gould) will be starting to work on financial networks with my collaborators and me beginning September 1st.

Here is the author list for the short paper: Daniel J. Fenn, Mason A. Porter, Mark McDonald, Stacy Williams, Neil F. Johnson, and Nick S. Jones

Here is the abstract: We study the cluster dynamics of multichannel (multivariate) time series by representing their correlations as time-dependent networks and investigating the evolution of network communities. We employ a node-centric approach that allows us to track the effects of the community evolution on the functional roles of individual nodes without having to track entire communities. As an example, we consider a foreign exchange market network in which each node represents an exchange rate and each edge represents a time-dependent correlation between the rates. We study the period 2005–2008, which includes the recent credit and liquidity crisis. Using community detection, we find that exchange rates that are strongly attached to their community are persistently grouped with the same set of rates, whereas exchange rates that are important for the transfer of information tend to be positioned on the edges of communities. Our analysis successfully uncovers major trading changes that occurred in the market during the credit crisis.

Baseball Injury Cover-Ups

Jerry Crasnick writes about some baseball injury cover-ups. I'm not sure how he got through this article without mentioning Chris Brown's "sore tooth" or the injuries that Glenallen Hill sustained while apparently battling spiders during a nightmare. (Skip Carey often harped on the Hill incident, invariably bringing it up whenever the Braves faced a team that included Hill.)

Science Tattoos

Here is a blog entry on Accidental Mysteries about science tattoos

I have seen Schrödinger's equation a couple of times, and there was that infamous incident involving some Tech grad students that included one person with such a tattoo. Also, one of my undergrad researchers from Tech has a 5-clique tattoo.

Tip of the cap to Ravi Montenegro.

MIT Technology Review's Young Investigators (TR35) for 2009

MIT Technology Review has released its list of 35 investigators under 35 for 2009. Among the list is a very familiar name: Ellis Meng, a Lloydie from the class of 1997. Congrats!

Another familiar name is a Santa Fe Institute postdoc (Nathan Eagle), who I have either met or seen speak. (I don't remember whether I talked to him.) He's one of the people doing interesting things with mobile phone data.

Quote of the Day

Today's quote comes from an anonymous referee who wrote the tie-breaking referee report that caused a paper of mine to be accepted for publication:

While this manuscript is not a perfect or complete solution to the problem of community detection in networks...

You know, it's a good thing that such a perfect or complete solution of the problem of community detection (some formulations of which have been proven to NP complete --- that is, with an appropriate definition of community based on optimizing a particular class of quantities) isn't what's expected for publication. If so, I'd have only one answer: Good luck with that.

Anyway, the referee was perfectly fair and is completely correct with the implied comment that our paper doesn't blow the problem wide open but rather just makes a specific set of interesting contributions, but I was nevetheless somewhat amused by the use of that phrasing. Perhaps that comment was simply for the benefit of the editor who works in another research area? Presumably so, but I was amused nonetheless, and I wanted to share my amusement.

My wireless printer/scanner/copier is set up!

I bought my first printer ever when I purchased my new computer last month. In my immense laziness, I only set it up today. The printer isn't exactly fast, but it is nice to finally have one at home. I'll also be upgrading my computer desk soon, as Somerville is putting some furniture into storage, and the items in question include a couple of desks that are better than mine. I used the ad hoc wireless network option to set up the printer. For now, I am calling the network "Astral" and the printer "Styx", though that goes better with previous themes than with current ones. (Back in the day, the airport network that I briefly set up was "Phlogiston"---that's for all you Spelljammer aficionados out there---but I haven't bothered setting up my airport base station for many years. Maybe one of these days, I'll bother putting my Wii online. :) )

Quote of the Day: Bulwyer-Lytton edition

Today's quote comes from the curator of the Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest: "Your submission has arrived and will receive the treatment it deserves." (I guess such comments can also apply to submissions to scientific journals.)

For what it's worth, I was doing the equivalent of 'going for last place' with this particular submission: "Why are you looking at me like I have two heads?" said Officer Cerberus Jones to the criminal he was arresting."

(I want to get 'dishonorable mention' in the fantasy category.)