2017-06-14

cryo-electron-microscopy biases

At the Stars group meeting, I proposed a new approach for asteroseismology, that could work for TESS. My approach depends on the modes being (effectively) coherent, which is only true for short survey durations, where “short” can still mean years. Also, Mike Blanton (NYU) gave us an update on the APOGEE-S spectrograph, being commissioned now at LCO in Chile. Everything is nominal, which bodes very well for SDSS-IV and is great for AS-4. David Weinberg (OSU) showed up and told us about chemical-abundance constraints on a combination of yields and gas-recycling fractions.

In the afternoon I missed Cosmology group meeting, because of an intense discussion about marginalization (in the context of cryo-EM) with Leslie Greengard (Flatiron) and Marina Spivak (Flatiron). In the conversation, Charlie Epstein (Penn) came up with a very simple argument that is highly relevant. Imagine you have many observations of the function f(x), but for each one your x value has had noise applied. If you take as your estimate of the true f(x) the empirical mean of your observations, the bias you get will be (for small scatter in x) proportional to the variance in x times the second derivative of f. That's a useful and intuitive argument for why you have to marginalize.

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