Continuum directions for supervised dimension reduction

Dimension reduction of multivariate data supervised by auxiliary information is considered. A series of basis for dimension reduction is obtained as minimizers of a novel criterion. The proposed method is akin to continuum regression, and the resulting basis is called continuum directions. With a presence of binary supervision data, these directions continuously bridge the principal component, mean difference and linear discriminant directions, thus ranging from unsupervised to fully supervised dimension reduction. High-dimensional asymptotic studies of continuum directions for binary supervision reveal several interesting facts. The conditions under which the sample continuum directions are inconsistent, but their classification performance is good, are specified. While the proposed method can be directly used for binary and multi-category classification, its generalizations to incorporate any form of auxiliary data are also presented. The proposed method enjoys fast computation, and the performance is better or on par with more computer-intensive alternatives

Recent topics in CP violation

Recent topics regarding CP violation in heavy meson systems are discussed. As an introduction, the status of the Unitarity Triangle fit and CP violation in B meson mixing are briefly reviewed. Two topics are covered in more detail: Penguin pollution in the "golden mode" B_d to J/psi K has gained importance due to the apparent smallness of new physics effects, together with the outstanding precision expected from present and future collider experiments. A very recent analysis is presented, which yields a stronger bound for the maximal influence of penguin contributions than previous analyses and shows the corresponding uncertainty to be reducible with coming data. Direct CP violation in hadronic charm decays received a lot of attention lately, due to a measurement by the LHCb collaboration yielding an unexpectedly large result. While this value is certainly not generically predicted in the Standard Model, it might be possible to accommodate it nevertheless. Therefore a method is discussed to use flavour symmetries to distinguish between this possibility and new physics.Comment: 10 pages, 1 figure. To appear in the proceedings of the conference "Heavy Quarks and Leptons 2012", June 11-15, Prague. v2: Updated references, text unchange

Extraction of information about periodic orbits from scattering functions

As a contribution to the inverse scattering problem for classical chaotic systems, we show that one can select sequences of intervals of continuity, each of which yields the information about period, eigenvalue and symmetry of one unstable periodic orbit.Comment: LaTeX, 13 pages (includes 5 eps-figures

Status of dynamical ensemble generation

I give an overview of current and future plans of dynamical QCD ensemble generation activities. A comparison of simulation cost between different discretizations is made. Recent developments in techniques and algorithms used in QCD dynamical simulations, especially mass reweighting, are also discussed.Comment: 22 pages, 19 figures, plenary talk presented at the "XXVII International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory", July 26-31 2009, Peking University, Beijing, Chin