CAS2010 Webcast
The webcast URL for CAS2010 is at http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/dvlwrap/live/live.ram
The workshop will run from 9:30am-5:30pm EDT on Aug 24 and 25.
CAS 2010
The schedule for the mini-Workshop on Computational AstroStatistics is set: http://hea-www.harvard.edu/AstroStat/CAS2010/#schedule
The Perseid Project [Announcement]
There is an ambitious project afoot to build a 3D map of a meteor stream during the Perseids on Aug 11-12. I got this missive about it from the organizer, Chris Crawford:
This will be one of the better years for Perseids; the moon, which often interferes with the Perseids, will not be a problem this year. So I’m putting together something that’s never been done before: a spatial analysis of the Perseid meteor stream. We’ve had plenty of temporal analyses, but nobody has ever been able to get data over a wide area — because observations have always been localized to single observers. But what if we had hundreds or thousands of people all over North America and Europe observing Perseids and somebody collected and collated all their observations? This is crowd-sourcing applied to meteor astronomy. I’ve been working for some time on putting together just such a scheme. I’ve got a cute little Java applet that you can use on your laptop to record the times of fall of meteors you see, the spherical trig for analyzing the geometry (oh my aching head!) and a statistical scheme that I *think* will reveal the spatial patterns we’re most likely to see — IF such patterns exist. I’ve also got some web pages describing the whole shebang. They start here:
http://www.erasmatazz.com/page78/page128/PerseidProject/PerseidProject.html
I think I’ve gotten all the technical, scientific, and mathematical problems solved, but there remains the big one: publicizing it. It won’t work unless I get hundreds of observers. That’s where you come in. I’m asking two things of you:
1. Any advice, criticism, or commentary on the project as presented in the web pages.
2. Publicizing it. If we can get that ol’ Web Magic going, we could get thousands of observers and end up with something truly remarkable. So, would you be willing to blog about this project on your blog?
3. I would be especially interested in your comments on the statistical technique I propose to use in analyzing the data. It is sketched out on the website here:http://www.erasmatazz.com/page78/page128/PerseidProject/Statistics/Statistics.html
Given my primitive understanding of statistical analysis, I expect that your comments will be devastating, but if you’re willing to take the time to write them up, I’m certainly willing to grit my teeth and try hard to understand and implement them.
Thanks for any help you can find time to offer.
Chris Crawford
[Book] The Elements of Statistical Learning, 2nd Ed.
This was written more than a year ago, and I forgot to post it.
mini-Workshop on Computational AstroStatistics [announcement]
mini-Workshop on Computational Astro-statistics: Challenges and Methods for Massive Astronomical Data
Aug 24-25, 2010
Phillips Auditorium, CfA,
60 Garden St., Cambridge, MA 02138
URL: http://hea-www.harvard.edu/AstroStat/CAS2010
General comments
For general comments.
An Instructive Challenge
This question came to the CfA Public Affairs office, and I am sharing it with y’all because I think the solution is instructive.
A student had to figure out the name of a stellar object as part of an assignment. He was given the following information about it:
- apparent [V] magnitude = 5.76
- B-V = 0.02
- E(B-V) = 0.00
- parallax = 0.0478 arcsec
- radial velocity = -18 km/s
- redshift = 0 km/s
He looked in all the stellar databases but was unable to locate it, so he asked the CfA for help.
Just to help you out, here are a couple of places where you can find comprehensive online catalogs:
See if you can find it!
Everybody needs crampons
Sherpa is a fitting environment in which Chandra data (and really, X-ray data from any observatory) can be analyzed. It has just undergone a major update and now runs on python. Or allows python to run. Something like that. It is a very powerful tool, but I can never remember how to use it, and I have an amazing knack for not finding what I need in the documentation. So here is a little cheat sheet (which I will keep updating as and when if I learn more):
Galileo’s Revenge
The Vatican adopts the FITS standard. Yes, really.
(via /.)
AstroStat Summer School [Announcement]
From Jogesh Babu:
First Announcement
Summer School in Statistics for Astronomers VI
June 7-12, 2010
with a supplement on Statistics and Computation for Astronomical Surveys
June 12-14, 2010
Registration Deadline: May 3, 2010 or when the enrollment limit reaches.
Penn State Universityhttp://astrostatistics.psu.edu/su10/
SDO launched
The Solar Dynamics Observatory, which promises a flood of data on the Sun, was launched today from Cape Kennedy.
[Jobs] postdoc position at UC Berkeley
A postdoc job announcement from Prof. Joshua Bloom of UC Berkeley:
http://members.aas.org/JobReg/JobDetailPage.cfm?JobID=26225
A short note on Probability for astronomers
I often feel irksome whenever I see a function being normalized over a feasible parameter space and it being used as a probability density function (pdf) for further statistical inference. In order to be a suitable pdf, normalization has to be done over a measurable space not over a feasible space. Such practice often yields biased best fits (biased estimators) and improper error bars. On the other hand, validating a measurable space under physics seems complicated. To be precise, we often lost in translation.
astronomy bibliography
Because of blogging and projects I worked on, I happened to collect quite many publications in Astronomy. The collection is biased toward my personal interests. However, these authors discussed statistics in a wide range. So, I felt my astronomical bibliography can be useful to slog audience. Some areas could match your interests. Or your own name can be found.
From Terence’s stuff: You want proof?
Please, IMS Bulletin, v.38 (10) check p.11 of this pdf file for the whole article.