2007-07-04

other people's papers, by-eye morphology

I spent today writing papers for others. Blanton and I have a strict rule for the group that no-one ever writes text for a paper on which he or she will not be first author. But I am violating this rule all summer, as I finish up the paper with Barron and Stumm on cleaning USNO-B and the paper by Masjedi et al on the accretion rate onto LRG primaries. Barron, Stumm, and Masjedi are all now working at Novartis, Microsoft, and Goldman Sachs, so writing astronomy papers is below their respective pay grades. I spent much of today working on the Masjedi paper, particularly the data section.

There was a lively discussion over lunch with Bell about by-eye morphologies, with me arguing that by-eye results are (a) not repeatable and not objective, and (b) in this day and age, rarely useful for physics. Astronomy maybe, but not physics!

2 comments:

  1. Were you here referring here to the Galaxy Zoo (http://www.galaxyzoo.org/) ? Is your opinion the same about it? What does point b) exactly mean? That the results are useful only as single cases, not as an entire statistic?

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  2. I wasn't thinking of galaxy zoo at all, but my comments do apply there. My comment (b) is: what do we understand now, physically, about galaxies that we would not have understood without by-eye classification? You can say things about hot and cold components, but those can be determined more reliably by objective software.

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