The study of moduli spaces of holomorphic curves in symplectic geometry is the key ingredient for the construction of symplectic invariants. These moduli spaces are suitable compactifications of solution spaces of a first order nonlinear Cauchy-Riemann type operator. The solution spaces are usually not compact due to bubbling-off phenomena and other analytical difficulties.
The 2011 IGTC (International Graduate Training Centre) Summit was held as part of the Applied Mathematics Perspectives thematic program at the University of Victoria. There was a poster session, research discussion session where students and experts interacted, and an education session for IGTC students.
Some photos from the Hyperplane Arrangements and Applications conference which took place at UBC Vancouver, August 8-12. This conference was held in honour of Hiroaki Terao.
The PIMS 2011 Fall board meeting was held at the University of Saskatchewan. In addition to the board meeting, board members toured the Canadian Light Source facility.
The School schedule ran 4 days per week to give participants ample time for study, interaction with other students and discovering Vancouver and its surroundings. Many explored the old growth forests at Lighthouse Park and Lynn Canyon and Headwaters Parks on the North Shore. Those who enjoy more strenuous hiking discovered the beauty of the surrounding mountains and ocean on a number of organized hikes. This year we went to the top of Anvil Island which is only accessible by water taxi from Horseshoe Bay. The 2500 ft.
Despite its large sample efficiency, the truncated flat (TF) kernel estimator of long-run covariance matrices is seldom used, because it lacks the guaranteed positive semidefiniteness and sometimes performs poorly in small samples, compared to other familiar kernel estimators. This paper proposes simple modifications to the TF estimator to enforce the positive definiteness without sacrificing the large sample efficiency and make the estimator more reliable in small samples through better utilization of the bias-variance tradeoff. We study the large sample properties of the modified TF estimators and verify their improved small-sample performances by Monte Carlo simulations.