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.