Search results for: “bayes”
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Normally, I would be writing about the discovery of the most distant quasar by Imperial Astronomers using the UKIDSS survey (using excellent Bayesian methods), but Andy and Peter have beaten me to it. To make up for it, I’ll try to get one of the authors of the paper to discuss it here themselves, soon.…
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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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[Apologies to those of you who may have seen an inadvertantly-published unfinished version of this post] I’ve just returned from a week at the Annual meeting of the Institute for Mathematical Statistics in Gothenburg, Sweden. It’s always instructive to go to meetings outside of one’s specialty, outside of the proverbial comfort zone. I’ve been in…
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Luckily, not all the astrophysics news this week was so bad. First, and most important, two of our Imperial College Astrophysics postgraduate students, Stuart Sale and Paniez Paykari, passed their PhD viva exams, and so are on their ways to officially being Doctors of Philosophy. Congratulations to both, especially (if I may say so) to…
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I was sitting in the lecture theatre of the Royal Institution at the Science Online London meeting (of which I hope to write more later, but you can retroactively follow the day’s tweets or just search for the day’s tags) when I realized I had missed the fifth anniversary of this blog this past July.…
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OK, this is going to be a very long post. About something I don’t pretend to be expert in. But it is science, at least. A couple of weeks ago, Radio 4’s highbrow “In Our Time” tackled the so-called “Measurement Problem”. That is: quantum mechanics predicts probabilities, not definite outcomes. And yet we see a…
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PAMELA (Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics) is a Russian-Italian satellite measuring the composition of cosmic rays. One of the motivations for the measurements is the indirect detection of dark matter — the very-weakly-interacting particles that make up about 25% of the matter in the Universe (with, as I’m sure you all know…
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Paul Davies had an op-ed in the New York Times, comparing scientists’ reliance “on the the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way” with religious faith. He wants to eschew both in favor of regarding “the laws of physics and the universe they govern as part and parcel of a unitary…
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This post is a work in progress, but I’ve decided to post it in its unfinished state. Comments and questions welcome! This week I went to a seminar on the new results from the MiniBooNE experiment given here at Imperial by Morgan Wascko. The MiniBooNE results have been discussed in depth elsewhere. Like MINOS last…
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I’m just back from a couple of days up in Edinburgh, one of my favorite cities in the UK. London is bigger, more intense, but Edinburgh is more beautiful, dominated by its landscape–London is New York to Edinburgh’s San Francisco. I was up there to give the Edinburgh University Physics “General Interest Seminar”. Mostly, I…