Indefinite hiatus

I may as well admit that the blog is on hiatus for the foreseeable future. I've got plenty of things to write about, but no time. Sabbaticals, they are busy! Expect this situation to continue until at least the fall.

Book on molecular communication

For the last 18 months, I've been working on a book on molecular communication. The final complete draft was just sent off for production. It should be printed later this year.

Many thanks to my excellent co-authors, Tadashi Nakano (Osaka University) and Tokuko Haraguchi (NICT); Tadashi in particular for doing most of the work, and for hosting my trips to Japan to hammer out the manuscript. Also many thanks to our contacts at Cambridge University Press for their help and support.

You can read a chapter here. Comments are welcome. (From: T. Nakano, A. W. Eckford, T. Haraguchi, Molecular Communication, Cambridge University Press.)

Just like the CCRAP party

In light of conference malware attacks, and conference phishing scams, and even the IEEE's crackdown on bad conferences, I'm going to suggest that IEEE SCAM is not the best possible acronym.

On Notation

I've spent the last week (and counting) trying to fix the notation in a long document that I've been writing, off and on, over the last 18 months. Since I wrote in fits and starts, I wasn't generally consistent with the notation, always thinking I could just fix it at the end. So when the end came, the results were predictably disastrous.

But I've had a long time to think/swear about notation, and I made some observations:

(Sorry for the image, it's much easier than trying to put LaTeX into Blogger.)

I used to think that there should be a notation stylebook, one notation to rule them all. Or that I would, once and for all, teach my graduate students the "right" notation. But now I don't think that's possible: there simply aren't enough degrees of freedom in a concise, readable notation to make it also rigorous and universally consistent. And you have to favor readability over universality, or what is a notation for?

Happy new year, happy new information theory blog

Via this month's IT Society newsletter, here's the Princeton-Stanford Information Theory b-log. Sergio Verdu is one of the authors.

I've already learned something useful, namely that I should have stopped using eqnarray years ago.

BIRS news

I'm delighted to report that my BIRS workshop proposal, entitled "Biological and Bio-Inspired Information Theory" (co-organized with Peter Thomas and Toby Berger), was accepted. The workshop will take place in October 2014.

BIRS is a gem of Canadian scientific research. My thanks to all the BIRS volunteers who make such a wonderful facility possible, especially the amazing Nassif Ghoussoub.

This Charming Man

As a fan of The Smiths from way back, I always thought Johnny Marr was the more talented member. After bouncing around several bands after The Smiths broke up, he'll be releasing his debut solo album early next year.