A note on Talagrand's variance bound in terms of influences

Let X_1,..., X_n be independent Bernoulli random variables and $f$ a function on {0,1}^n. In the well-known paper (Talagrand1994) Talagrand gave an upper bound for the variance of f in terms of the individual influences of the X_i's. This bound turned out to be very useful, for instance in percolation theory and related fields. In many situations a similar bound was needed for random variables taking more than two values. Generalizations of this type have indeed been obtained in the literature (see e.g. (Cordero-Erausquin2011), but the proofs are quite different from that in (Talagrand1994). This might raise the impression that Talagrand's original method is not sufficiently robust to obtain such generalizations. However, our paper gives an almost self-contained proof of the above mentioned generalization, by modifying step-by-step Talagrand's original proof.Comment: 10 page

L2L^2 bounds for a Kakeya type maximal operator in R3\R^3

We prove that the maximal operator obtained by taking averages at scale 1 along $N$ arbitrary directions on the sphere, is bounded in $L^2(\R^3)$ by $N^{1/4}{\log N}$. When the directions are $N^{-1/2}$ separated, we improve the bound to $N^{1/4}\sqrt{\log N}$. Apart from the logarithmic terms these bounds are optimal.Comment: 13 page