Science
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NAM 2011 — On the Lookout for Cosmologists
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(Apologies to the non-cosmologists and non-Brits who won’t find much of interest in the following.) This year’s UK National Astronomy Meeting will be held 17-21 April, in Llandudno, North Wales. In the usual way of British “seaside resorts” (scare quotes are certainly appropriate for that phrase) Llandudno sticks frighteningly out into the Irish Sea but,…
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Tacos and Power Spectra in LA
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One of the perks (perqs?) of academia is that occasionally I get an excuse to escape the damp grey of London Winters. The Planck Satellite is an international collaboration and, although largely backed by the European Space Agency, it has a large contribution from US scientists, who built the CMB detectors for Planck’s HFI instrument,…
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Les autres choses (scientifique)
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I’ve been meaning to give a shout-out to my colleagues on the ADAMIS team at the APC (AstroParticule et Cosmologie) Lab at the Université Paris 7 for a while: in addition to doing lots of great work on Planck, EBEX, PolarBear and other important CMB and cosmology experiments, they’ve also been running a group blog…
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Planck: First results
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The Satellite now known as the Planck Surveyor was first conceived in the mid-1990s, in the wake of the results from NASA’s COBE Satellite, the first to detect primordial anisotropies in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), light from about 400,000 years after the big bang. (I am a relative latecomer to the project, having only…
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Bayes in the World II: Million Pound Drop
Embarrassing update: as pointed out by Vladimir Nesov in the comments, all of my quantitative points below are incorrect. To maximize expected winnings, you should bet on whichever alternative you judge to be most likely. If you have a so-called logarithmic utility function — which already has the property of growing faster for small amounts…
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Bayes in the World I: Wikileaks
I’ve come across a couple bits of popular/political culture that give me the opportunity to discuss one of my favorite topics: the uses and abuses of probability theory. The first is piece by Nate Silver of the New York Times’ FiveThirtyEight blog, dedicated to trying to crunch the political numbers of polls and other data…
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Beautiful Evidence
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One excuse for not blogging over the last month was a couple of weeks spent in North America, first in and around New York and New Jersey, visiting my family, and then a stop in Montreal for the annual collaboration meeting for the EBEX CMB balloon project, which we expect to launch on its science…
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Astrostatistics at the Royal Astronomical Society
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This week I’m co-organizing a meeting at the Royal Astronomical Society in London, “Novel methods for the exploitation of large astronomical and cosmological data sets“. It’s an unwieldy title, but we’ll be discussing the implication of the huge flood of astronomical data for cosmology and astrophysics. How do we deal with the sheer volume —…
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Light and Gravity
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Yesterday, we at Imperial hosted the latest instalment of the London Cosmology Discussion Meetings (LCDM, which is a cosmology in-joke, of course), with about 40 participants — most of them students — from Imperial, QMUL and UCL. We heard talks about observing clusters of galaxies, different theories of gravity, and the observational repercussions of cosmic…
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Science is Vital
I don’t suppose that there are many readers of this blog who are not aware of the Science Is Vital campaign for the support of UK science, but just in case: in response to the likelihood of continuing cuts to the UK science budget as spun by business secretary Vince Cable, we in the science…
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