Weaving together Astronomy+Statistics+Computer Science+Engineering+Intrumentation, far beyond the growing borders
Author Archive
Diab Jerius follows up on LOESS techniques with a very nice summary update and finds LOCFIT to be very useful, but there are still questions about how it deals with measurement errors and combining observations from different experiments:
A GLAST-related opportunity: A Summer Science Institute at SLAC on Cosmic Accelerators is scheduled for August 4-15 in anticipation of GLAST science, and the co-directors welcome participation by students, postdocs, and researchers (even those with no background in astrophysics). The registration deadline is July 31. Continue reading ‘SLAC Summer Institute’ »
“It’s easy to get a good fit, which means that your fit doesn’t mean much…”
Ariane Lancon (from proceedings of “Starbursts: from 30 Doradus to Lyman break galaxies”, 2005)
Astronomers write literally thousands of proposals each year to observe their favorite targets with their favorite telescopes. Every proposal must be accompanied by a technical justification, where the proposers demonstrate that their goal is achievable, usually via a simulation. Surprisingly, a large number of these justifications are statistically unsound. Guest Slogger Simon Vaughan describes the problem and shows what you can do to make reviewers happy (and you definitely want to keep reviewers happy).
Continue reading ‘The Burden of Reviewers’ »
“Same data, different authors, different results.”
(Marco Sirianni, from a conference on starbursts).
Our colleagues at Chandra public outreach have started a new blog, ChandraBlog - http://chandra.harvard.edu/blog/ which appears to be dedicated to news about the latest discoveries from Chandra. Mosey over and take a look.