Jan Mandel/Blog/2012 Jan Mar
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January 4: Janus cluster
January 5: NSF changes
The proposal peer review system as it exists now seems to be dying. What will they use instead?
Proposal success rates
- Too many proposals, number of PIs increasing number of funded proposals remains the same ppt local copy
- Stimulus funding effect
- NSF FY 2010 report to NSB showed funding rate down to 20%. It is much worse now.
Biology preproposals
- How to write a successful NSF preliminary proposal
- Much of NSF Biology is switching to a yearly cycle with required preproposals because they were getting too many proposals with a too low success rate... Why biology?
CREATIV
- Dear colleague letter: $1M grants, no external review!
- FAQ Webcast
January 6: ICCS paper
January 8: Level set methods in Matlab
January 11: EnKF convergence paper appeared
- Mandel-2011-CEK doi ucd: Jan Mandel, Loren Cobb, and Jonathan D. Beezley, On the Convergence of the Ensemble Kalman Filter, Applications of Mathematics 56, 533-541, 2011. Preprint arXiv:0901.2951, on journal site
January 18: Work in progress
- ICCS paper
- Megafires paper
- EGU abstract
January 19: Recruiting new PhD students for Teaching Assistantships
January 23: Data assimilation seminar: Square root ensemble filters
- Based on Livings-2008-UES doi ucd
- photos
- See also DelSole-2009-DA link and DelSole-2009-ESR link from GMU course
January 29: Reading some papers
Transformations that preserve exchangeability
An important component in our EnKF convergence proof Mandel-2011-CEK doi ucd was that the ensemble is exchangeable. It stands to reason that it should be. Is the ensemble exchangeable for the square root ensemble Kalman filter? If X=[x1,...,xN] exchangeable random elements, what about their linear combinations XT? Such T form an ideal containing all permutation matrices and the matrix of all ones, but is there anything else? The EAKF can be interpreted as AX which is always exchangeable (except for the little trouble when X is rank deficient, not sure what then)
February 4: About proposal writing and funding rates, again
- Twelve steps to a winning research proposal local great suggestions about solid, incremental research, but what about "transformative"?
- Enhancing support for transformative research NSB 07-32, 2007
- "All NSF programs encourage and support potentially transformative research proposals..." Where To Submit Potentially Transformative Research Proposals
- Important Notice No. 130: Transformative Research, 2007
- FAQ for Potentially Transformative Research
- Changes to NSF Merit Review Criteria: "To what extent does the proposed activity suggest and explore creative, original, or potentially transformative concepts? ... All proposals received since January 5, 2008 have been reviewed using this revised criterion. Program officers are instructing reviewers to pay special attention to those proposals that may include potentially transformative research."
- Professor Chaos: NSF funding rates and University tenuring policies
February 6: Data assimilation seminar: Convergence of the ensemble Kalman filter and exchangeability of the ensemble
February 13: Data assimilation seminar: Bryan Smith
- Towards an ENKF on a Riemannian Manifold: Tensors and Parallel Vector Fields - Part 2
- notes
February 20: Data assimilation seminar: Ensemble filters and random elements in a Hilbert space
February 27: Data assimilation seminar: Ensemble filters and random elements in a Hilbert space
March 5: Data assimilation seminar: Loren Cobb
March 9: Finishing the ICCS 2012 paper
March 9: Finishing the fuel moisture code
- code
- OpenWFM development notes
- A brief description in Section 7 of the ICCS 2012 paper
March 10: Global optimization
- The general class of methods is multi-start global optimization
- A nice intro though dealing more with the author's work
- BRST_algorithm, multi-level single linkage
- LNopt in C
- Stochastic ranking for constrained evolutionary optimization
- Parallel Simulated Annealing - clear description
- Single-linkage_clustering
March 12: Data assimilation seminar: Ensemble filters and random elements in a Hilbert space
March 15: NCAR IMAGE Seminar: Emmanuel Cosme
- A Parameterization of the Observation Error Covariance Matrix for Ensemble Filters
- Brankart-2009-EPO doi ucd
March 17: Bibliographies in the daseminar repository
- Now created by typing make in the references directory
- Recreates tex-geo.pdf tex-epi.pdf tex-other.pdf tex-bddc.pdf from the corresponding BibTeX files
March 19: Data assimilation seminar: Loren Cobb
- discussion of the NCAR seminar from the last week and other topics
- it is Spring Break!
March 22: OSX Lion annoyances
I wrote "parallel loops" (or so I thought) and the email went outsaying "parlor loos". Why?
OSX Lion seems to have an aggressive spellchecker/autocompletion that makes unwanted changes as you type without asking. It seems to interfere with typing in any application that comes with Lion. It disagrees with many technical terms and to convince it you need to return to the typed text and edit it again. One more major Lion annoyance, right there with file locking.
Watch out...
- http://osxdaily.com/2011/07/28/turn-off-auto-correct-in-mac-os-x-lion/
- http://osxdaily.com/2012/01/24/turn-off-file-locking-in-os-x-lion/ But, "without file locking enabled, apps that support auto-save will overwrite the existing file".
- http://tekonomist.wordpress.com/2011/08/06/mac-os-x-lion-file-versions-part-1/
- http://www.mehtanirav.com/2009/04/16/recursively-unlock-files-on-mac-os-x/ chflags -R nouchg *
- http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7.ars/14
March 23: The magic of doing one thing at a time
March 25: Moisture paper
March 26: Discrete Mathematics Seminar: Anatolii Puhalskii
Some asymptotics for connected components of a sparse random graph
See also
March 26: Data assimilation seminar: Ensemble filters and random elements in a Hilbert space
March 26: Data assimilation for wildfires and fuzzy logic
- Board photo
- Fuzzy Kalman filter references Sasiadek-2001-SFB doi ucd Grana-2009-RHK doi ucd - but is that what we want? How about minimization as in Jon's thesis p. 12 but with fuzzy quantities.
- Fuzzy Bayes FruehwirthSchnatter-1993-FBI doi ucd, Walley-1997-SIB doi ucd
- Symmetric difference of burned area as fitness Rodriguez-2010-TPD doi ucd or equivalently L1 difference of characteristic functions Gu-2010-DDD link. See blog Aug 6 2011 for more references.
- Wikipedia:Fuzzy logic, Wikipedia:Imprecise probability, Wikipedia:Fuzzy measure theory, Wikipedia:Possibility theory