2017-03-29

ergodic stars; blinding and pre-registration

In the Stars group meeting, Nathan Leigh (AMNH) and Nick Stone (Columbia) spoke about 4-body scattering or 2-on-2 binary-binary interactions. These can lead to 3-1, 2-2, and 2-1-1 outcomes, with the latter being most common. They are using a fascinating and beautiful ergodic-hypothesis-backed method (constrained by conservation laws) to solve for the statistical input–output relations quasi-analytically. This is a beautiful idea and makes predictions about star-system evolution in the Galaxy.

In the Cosmology group meeting, Alex Malz (NYU) led a long and wide-ranging discussion of blinding (making statistical results more reliable by pre-registering code or sequestering data). The range of views in the room was large, but all agreed that you need to be able to do exploratory data analysis and also protect against investigator bias. My position is we better be doing some form of blinding for our most important questions, but I also think that we need to construct these methods to permit people to play with the data and permit public data releases that are uncensored and unmodified. One theme which came up is that astronomy's great openness is a huge asset here. Fundamentally we are protected (in part) by the availability of the data to re-analysis.

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