## November 11, 2011

### Unary Day

I wouldn't have spent this special day with unary sequence 11h1111s at 11/11/11 without a terrible pun, mentioning it as the anniversary of Attila, since it's "an invasion of the Huns" ("huns" for "ones", uttered with an awful accent); even made a Facebook page for that: Attila Fest. Not proud :) Yet this dull (not in the Ramanujan sense) sequence reminded me of two nice formula for the golden ratio (aka $\phi$, or the divine proportion): one rational, one radical. So it seems $\phi$ could be tamed (or approched) quite easily. Indeed, it is one of the simplest non-rational numbers, as a root of a basic equation of degree 2. Thus, far from being transcendental. Surprisingly, $\phi$ bears some kind of transcendence (in the religious sense) as it is, somehow, beyond the grasp of the human mind, meaning it cannot be approched easily in a "rational" way, i.e. worse that any other number, as stated in a theorem by Adolf Hurwitz (1856-1919). In the following formula, there exist infinitely many $m$ and $n$ for any irrational $\xi$, and the constant $\sqrt(5)$ cannot be improved, due to $\phi$.
The radical formula for $\phi$ above is the key: with divisions by ones, denominators increase very very slow. Contrary to common knowledge (in Age of Empires) that Huns are faster. Thus being, in think i'd better go back to a paper on applications of unary filters, instead of making dull puns.

# Call for papers: Dossier, Special issue on Advances in signal and image processing for physico-chemical analysis (pdf)

## Deadlines - Intent: December 12th, 2011 / Final manuscript: January 8th, 2012 Oil & Gas Science and Technology - Revue d'IFP Energies Nouvelles (online journal)

With the advent of more affordable, higher resolution or innovative data acquisition techniques (for instance hyphenated instrumentation such as two-dimensional chromatography), the need for advanced signal and image processing tools has grown in physico-chemical analysis, together with the quantity and complexity of acquired measurements. Either with mono- (signals) or two-dimensional (from hyphenated techniques to standard images) data, processing generally aims at improving quality and at providing more precise quantitative assessment of measurements of materials and products, to yield insight or access to information, chemical properties, reactive dynamics or textural properties, to name a few (for instance). Although chemometrics embrace from experimental design to calibration, more interplay between physico-chemical analysis and generic signal and image processing is believed to strengthen the two disciplines. Indeed, although they strongly differ in background and vocabulary, both specialities share similar values of best practice in carrying out identifications and comprehensive characterizations, albethey of samples or of numerical data.
The present call for papers aims at gathering contributions on recent progresses performed and emerging trends concerning (but not limited) to:
• 1D and 2D acquisition, sparse sampling (compressive sensing), modulation/demodulation, compression, background/baseline/trend estimation, enhancement, integration, smoothing and filtering, denoising, differentiation, detection, deconvolution and source separation, resolution improvement, peak or curve fitting and matching, clustering, segmentation, multiresolution analysis, mathematical morphology, calibration, multivariate curve resolution, property prediction, regression, data mining, tomography, visualization,
pertaining to the improvement of physico-chemical analysis techniques, including (not exclusively):
• (high-performance) gas, liquid or ion chromatography; gel electrophoresis; diode array detector; Ultraviolet (UV), visible, Infrared (NIR, FIR), Raman or Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction (XRD), X-Ray Absorption (EXAFS, XANES), mass spectrometry; photoacoustic spectroscopy (PAS); porosimetry; hyphenated techniques; electron microscopy (SEM, TEM),
in the following proposed domains:
• catalysis, chemical engineering, oil and gas production, refining processes, petrochemicals, and other sources of energy, in particular alternative energies with a view to sustainable development.