Scientific stuff

Latest: Follow the JWST@SXSW tweets as the James Webb Space Telescope struts its stuff at SXSW.

Not-quite so latest: I tracked the tweets for the 221^st meeting of the AAS (#aas221 or #hackAAS), which has just started over in Long Beach. See my AAS221 pages for more information.

Really not-quite so latest: I am trying an experiment in "live-blogging" some Chandra data analysis, in honor of Open-Access Week (#OAWeek). Unfortunately the CIAO release came along and stopped this in its track; I hope to get back to this in 2013.

Presentation and minimal analysis of tweets from previous AAS meetings can be found at:

• AAS220 was missed thanks to the hard drive on my laptop going on permanent vacation;
• #AAS219, Austin, January 8 to 12, 2012;
• #AAS218, Boston, 2011;
• and #AAS215, Washington DC, 2010.

I am interested in using clusters of galaxies to elucidate the evolution of structure in the Universe. Or some-such high-fallutin one-line research description. A more accurate view of my research interests - which also cover galaxy evolution and studies of the major baryonic components in the Universe - can be found by perusing my publication list (last update: 31 January 2011).

There is also my Southern SHARC survey page, which provides machine-readable (ASCII format) versions of the data in Burke et al. 2003, "The Southern SHARC Catalogue: a ROSAT survey for distant galaxy clusters".

Recently some of my time has been spent on projects related to the Virtual Observatory, in particular how semantic-web technologies can be used to improve the use of the data that is now available to us (and that is changing the way we do science if you believe Wired). There is a report now available on my study of faceted browsing and its application to Astronomical searches in the VO era. A simple demo (using the Exhibit framework) shows a facet-based view of the Chandra Short-Term schedule. This work has lead me to collaborate with the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System Digital Library on using semantics and enhanced search techniques as part of its nascent ADS Labs effort.

I created the AstroMOAT server to investigate whether "semantic tagging" can be coupled to the work done to create Astronomical vocabularies.

I run the Chandra Twitter feed; more information can be found from it's home page, although it is currently somewhat moribund. I have also created a timeline of Chandra discoveries and events which uses the SIMILE Timeline widget.

For more information on Semantic Astronomy and AstroInformatics, see the Practical AstroInformatics web site, in particular its conferences and workshops page. I was on the organizing committee for the Practical Semantic Astronomy Workshop 2009, on the Programme Committee for the Web Semantics in Action: Web 3.0 in e-Science workshop at the 5th IEEE International Conference on e-Science, which was in Oxford, UK (December 9-11, 2009), and an organizer of the Practical Astroinformatics: An Emerging Discipline special session at the 115^th AAS meeting in Washington, DC (January 3-7, 2010). I serve on the Program Committee for the NASA Conference on Intelligent Data Undertanding (CIDU); the deadline for the 2012 conference has just passed (June 4), so it's time to get working on next year's presentation!

Press releases and news items:

• 3C186: Precocious Galaxy Cluster Identified by Chandra, Chandra X-ray Observatory, October 26, 2010
• Largest Ever Survey Of Very Distant Galaxy Clusters Completed, Science Daily, July 3, 2009
• Most Massive Galaxies have Surprisingly Diverse Origins, Gemini Observatory, May 14, 2007
• Missing Mass Exists As Warm Intergalactic Fog, CfA 03-06, February 19, 2003
• Scientists ID intergalactic cold front, Honolulu Star-Bulletin, March 2 2000.
• Cosmic Pressure Fronts Mapped by Chandra, CXC PR: 00-08, March 1 2000.
• Chandra telescope's first light, Honolulu Star-Bulletin, August 26 1999.

Obligatory geek stuff

I use (well, used) PDL - an "IDL-like" set of packages for perl - to do some of my scientific stuff. I wrote the support for "bad-values" (i.e. PDL::BadValues and PDL::Bad) in PDL, as well as provide bug-fixes and updates to the whole module. If you are interested in PDL, or wonder what it can do for you, then have a look at some success stories or read about PDL, Perl 5, and Perl 6 in Perl 6 Now: The Core Ideas Illustrated With Perl 5.

I use the CIAO software package, so you should too. I released, in May 2010, the download_chandra_obsid script that simplifies downloading public datasets from the Chandra Data Archive; this is now available as part of the CIAO contributed software package so you should already have it.

I have recently taken over maintenance of the Swish semantic-web toolkit package for Haskell. You can get to the repository and bug tracker on the bitbucket site, or read about it in the May 2011 Haskell Communities and Activities Report.

See my perl pages for some useful astronomy-related software for perl (these packages are feeling a bit neglected, so if you want to take over maintaining any of them please contact me):

• Astro::Cosmology, a PDL package that makes calculating cosmological distances, volumes, and times a doddle.

  The last update of this page was: 23 November 2012.

• Inline::SLang, which allows you to include and use S-Lang code in your perl programs. This may be of interest to Perl-minded astronomers who use CIAO 3. Note that version 1.00 of the module was released on January 4 2005.

  The last update of this page was: 23 March 2009.

If you are interested in an editor for XML, in particular for text-orientated formats such as DocBook, then you should look at the Conglomerate editor. I provided some bug fixes and feature enhancements to the display widgets.