Archive for the ‘News’ Category.
Mar 24th, 2009| 03:18 pm | Posted by chasc
From Jogesh Babu comes this announcement:
Summer School in Statistics for Astronomers V
June 1-6, 2009
Penn State University
http://astrostatistics.psu.edu/su09/
Continue reading ‘[Announce] AstroStat Summer School at Penn State’ »
Mar 10th, 2009| 12:41 pm | Posted by vlk
The iPhone App Store has a couple of apps that make life significantly easier for those of us inundated and overwhelmed by the stream of daily arXiv preprints. These are ArXivReader.app and ArXiv.app, both providing a means to browse and search the arXiv preprint database and both selling for 99c with the first selling for 99c and the second free. Check them out! The former even lets you save papers for off-line reading.
For me at least, the hardest part of going through the arXiv emails every day was to pick out the interesting papers in the deluge of text. These apps do the right thing and segregate the categories and highlight the titles. Fitts’ Law in action — suddenly the daily ritual is orders of magnitude more pleasant!
Mar 6th, 2009| 03:42 pm | Posted by hlee
Ah ha~ Once I questioned, “what is systematic error?” (see [Q] systematic error.) Thanks to L. Lyons’ work discussed in [ArXiv] Particle Physics, I found this paper, titled Systematic Errors describing the concept and statistical inference related to systematic errors in the field of particle physics. It, gladly, shares lots of similarity with high energy astrophysics. Continue reading ‘systematic errors’ »
Tags:
coverage,
Heinrich,
likelihood,
Lyons,
nuisance parameter,
objective priors,
p-value,
particle physics,
statistical error,
subjective priors,
systematic error Category:
Algorithms,
Bayesian,
Cross-Cultural,
Data Processing,
Frequentist,
Jargon,
Misc,
News,
Physics,
Stat,
Uncertainty,
arXiv |
Comment
Feb 1st, 2009| 10:45 pm | Posted by hlee
The first issue of this year’s IMS bulletin has an obituary, from which the following is quoted. Continue reading ‘Circumspect frequentist’ »
Jan 1st, 2009| 07:01 am | Posted by vlk
The year 2009 is the Darwin bicentennial and the sesquicentennial of the publication of the Origin of Species, but, um, even more importantly, it is the International Year of Astronomy, celebrating 400 orbits since Galileo started to look through a telescope.
Dec 9th, 2008| 07:35 pm | Posted by hlee
I do not rely much on my cell phone. It functions as a tool for confronting emergencies. On the other hand, it seems like people do lots of things with their smart phones and I like to add one thing to your “what I do with my phone.” Continue reading ‘Wapedia’ »
Dec 3rd, 2008| 12:31 am | Posted by hlee
Almost two year long scrutinizing some publications by astronomers gave me enough impression that astronomers live in the Gaussian world. You are likely to object this statement by saying that astronomers know and use Poisson, binomial, Pareto (power laws), Weibull, exponential, Laplace (Cauchy), Gamma, and some other distributions.[] This is true. I witness that these distributions are referred in many publications; however, when it comes to obtaining “BEST FIT estimates for the parameters of interest” and “their ERROR (BARS)”, suddenly everything goes back to the Gaussian world.[]
Borel Cantelli Lemma (from Planet Math): because of mathematical symbols, a link was made but any probability books have the lemma with proofs and descriptions.
Continue reading ‘Borel Cantelli Lemma for the Gaussian World’ »
Tags:
Borel Cantelli Lemma,
CLT,
families of distributions,
gaussian,
grand challenge,
measure,
non-Gaussian,
probability,
statisticians Category:
Astro,
Bad AstroStat,
Cross-Cultural,
Frequentist,
Jargon,
News,
Quotes,
Stat,
Uncertainty,
arXiv |
Comment
Nov 19th, 2008| 01:34 am | Posted by hlee
There will be a special session at the 213th AAS meeting on meaning from surveys and population studies (SPS). Until then, it might be useful to pull out some interesting and relevant papers and questions/challenges as a preliminary to the meeting. I will not list astronomical catalogs and surveys only, which are literally countless these days but will bring out some if they change the way how science is performed with a description of the catalog (the best example would be SDSS, Sloan Digital Sky Survey, to my knowledge). Continue reading ‘[SPS] Testing Completeness’ »
Tags:
completeness,
incompleteness,
normal,
SPS,
test Category:
Astro,
Cross-Cultural,
Frequentist,
Methods,
News,
Quotes,
Stat,
Uncertainty,
arXiv |
Comment
Nov 6th, 2008| 06:00 am | Posted by vlk
[9/30/2008]
The CfA is celebrating the 100th anniversary of the discovery of the Cepheid period-luminosity relation on Nov 6, 2008. See http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/events/2008/leavitt/ for details.
[Update 10/03] For a nice introduction to the story of Henrietta Swan Leavitt, listen to this Perimeter Institute talk by George Johnson: http://pirsa.org/06050003/
[Update 11/06] The full program is now available. The symposium begins at Noon today.
Tags:
2008,
cepheid,
CfA,
Henrietta Leavitt,
Henrietta Swan Leavitt,
history,
November,
period-luminosity,
symposium Category:
Astro,
Fitting,
News,
Stars,
Timing |
1 Comment
Nov 2nd, 2008| 08:42 am | Posted by vlk
Astronomy is known for its pretty pictures, but as Joe the Astronomer would say, those pretty pictures don’t make themselves. A lot of thought goes into maximizing scientific content while conveying just the right information, all discernible at a single glance. So the hardworkin folks at Chandra want your help in figuring out what works and how well, and they have set up a survey at http://astroart.cfa.harvard.edu/. Take the survey, it is both interesting and challenging!
Oct 23rd, 2008| 12:25 pm | Posted by vlk
Oct 19th, 2008| 12:33 am | Posted by vlk
Last month, Senator McCain (R-AZ) wildly dissed on Chicago’s Adler Planetarium, characterizing a funding request on its behalf as “planetariums and other foolishness.” Continue reading ‘“planetariums and other foolishness”’ »
Oct 18th, 2008| 11:27 pm | Posted by vlk
The iPhone is an amazing device. I have heard that some people use it as a phone, too, but it really is an extraordinary portable computer. It is faster and more powerful than the Sparcstations I used as a grad student, and will fit into your pocket. And most importantly, you can fit an entire planetarium on it.
There are many good planetarium programs that you can access on laptops, but it is really not that much fun to lug them around on camping trips or even out on to the roof at night. But now, thanks to the iPhone (and the iPod Touch) there has been a great leap forward. Continue reading ‘Killer App’ »
Tags:
AppStore,
GoSkyWatch,
iAstronomica,
iPhone,
iPod Touch,
iStellar,
planetarium,
review,
Starmap Category:
Astro,
Misc,
News,
Optical |
4 Comments
Oct 13th, 2008| 01:07 pm | Posted by vlk
Our hometown rag (the Boston Globe) runs an occasional series of photo collections that highlight news stories called The Big Picture. This week, they take a look at the Sun: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/10/the_sun.html
The pictures come from space and ground observatories, from SoHO, TRACE, Hinode, STEREO, etc. Goes without saying, the images are stunning, and some are even animated. The real kicker is that images such as these are being acquired by the hundreds, every hour upon the hour, 24/7/365.25 . It is like sipping from a firehose. Nobody can sit there and look at them all, so who knows what we are missing out on. Can statistics help? Can we automate a statistically robust “interestingness” criterion to filter the data stream that humans can then follow up on?
Tags:
Big Picture,
Boston Globe,
EIT,
Hinode,
SoHO,
Solar,
STEREO,
Sun,
TRACE,
XRT Category:
Astro,
Imaging,
News,
Stars |
3 Comments
Oct 1st, 2008| 04:16 pm | Posted by hlee
People of experience would say very differently and wisely against what I’m going to discuss now. This post only combines two small cross sections of each branch of two trees, astronomy and statistics. Continue reading ‘survey and design of experiments’ »
Tags:
213,
AAS,
Alanna Connors,
catalog,
census,
detection,
experimental design,
Long Beach,
special session,
SPS,
survey Category:
Astro,
CHASC,
Cross-Cultural,
Data Processing,
Jargon,
Methods,
Misc,
News,
Stat |
3 Comments