The AstroStat Slog » calibration uncertainty http://hea-www.harvard.edu/AstroStat/slog Weaving together Astronomy+Statistics+Computer Science+Engineering+Intrumentation, far beyond the growing borders Fri, 09 Sep 2011 17:05:33 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.4 [ArXiv] 2nd week, May 2008 http://hea-www.harvard.edu/AstroStat/slog/2008/arxiv-2nd-week-may-2008/ http://hea-www.harvard.edu/AstroStat/slog/2008/arxiv-2nd-week-may-2008/#comments Mon, 19 May 2008 14:42:56 +0000 hlee http://hea-www.harvard.edu/AstroStat/slog/?p=306 There’s no particular opening remark this week. Only I have profound curiosity about jackknife tests in [astro-ph:0805.1994]. Including this paper, a few deserve separate discussions from a statistical point of view that shall be posted.

  • [astro-ph:0805.1290]R. Barnard, L. Shaw Greening, U. Kolb
    A multi-coloured survey of NGC 253 with XMM-Newton: testing the methods used for creating luminosity functions from low-count data

  • [astro-ph:0805.1469] Philip J. Marshall et al.
    Automated detection of galaxy-scale gravitational lenses in high resolution imaging data

  • [astro-ph:0805.1470] E. P. Kontar, E. Dickson, J. Kasparova
    Low-energy cutoffs and in electron spectra of solar flares: statistical survey (It is not statistically rigorous but the topic can be connected to dip tests or gap tests in statistics)

  • [astro-ph:0805.1936] J. Yee & B. Gaudi
    Characterizing Long-Period Transiting Planets Observed by Kepler (discusses uncertainty in light curves and Fisher matrix)

  • [astro-ph:0805.1994] the QUad collaboration: C. Pryke et al.
    Second and third season QUaD CMB temperature and polarization power spectra (What is jackknife tests? A brief scan of the paper does not register with my understanding of jackknifing. It looks more close to cross validation. Another slog topic shall come: bootstrap, cross validation, jackknife, and resampling.)

  • [astro-ph:0805.2121] N. Cole et al.
    Maximum Likelihood Fitting of Tidal Streams With Application to the Sagittarius Dwarf Tidal Tails

  • [astro-ph:0805.2155] J Yoo & M Zaldarriaga
    Improved estimation of cluster mass profiles from the cosmic microwave background

  • [astro-ph:0805.2207] A.Vikhlinin et al.
    Chandra Cluster Cosmology Project II: Samples and X-ray Data Reduction (it mentions calibration uncertainty and background, can it be a reference to stacking, coadding, source detection, etc?)

  • [astro-ph:0805.2325] J.M. Loh
    A valid and fast spatial bootstrap for correlation functions

  • [astro-ph:0805.2326] T. Wickramasinghe, M. Struble, J. Nieusma
    Observed Bimodality of the Einstein Crossing Times of Galactic Microlensing Events
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Mmm.. donuts http://hea-www.harvard.edu/AstroStat/slog/2007/far-side/ http://hea-www.harvard.edu/AstroStat/slog/2007/far-side/#comments Wed, 22 Aug 2007 17:01:06 +0000 vlk http://hea-www.harvard.edu/AstroStat/slog/2007/far-side/ Mmm.. chi-square!

The withering criticisms Hyunsook has been directing towards the faulty use of chisquare by astronomers brings to mind this classic comment by [astronomer] Jeremy Drake during the 2005 Chandra Calibration Workshop:

Remember that classic Far Side cartoon of the dog being admonished and only hearing its name? Well, that’s what happens when statisticians admonish astronomers. They might say “don’t use chisq”, and all we here is “chisq”.

Update [6/23/2010]: We had the modified cartoons here to illustrate the issue a bit more figuratively, but apparently Gary Larson doesn’t like that, so we have removed them.

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