clustering and optimization, functional testing

I spoke for a few seconds today with Hou, about using clustering of a set of samplers running in parallel (for an adaptive sampling technique) to find and eliminate trapping by local minima. This might be a very simple and effective technique for search, optimization, and sampling in dynamics problems.

Jiang and I tried to understand differences he is finding between A–B and B–A cross-correlations in the SDSS data. These differences look like bugs, but how to find out? I am confused.