students

Not much got done in the last two days (I didn't have to post yesterday because I posted on the previous Sunday; see rules). But I did get a few minutes to talk with Bovy about his centroiding tests; he confirmed that Lupton's centroiding trick in SDSS Photo performs surprisingly well relative to the best that can possibly be done with a compact point-spread function.

I spoke with Jiang about his cross-correlations. After a conversation with Blanton we decided to do every small–big cross-correlation corresponding to each of the big–small cross-correlations we are doing. This permits us to check our results (there are symmetry relations), and it also permits us to compute a death rate analogous to the accretion rates we are currently measuring. Think big fish eating small fish, and small fish getting eaten!

George Lewis (NYU) had a candidacy exam about understanding QCD backgrounds for Higgs events at LHC ATLAS. He and Kyle Cranmer (NYU) are looking at a set of data-driven methods to constrain QCD events, since precise QCD calculations are impossible for many of the relevant interactions. Of course I am a huge supporter of data-driven data analysis at LHC; I am certain this is a necessary part of any precise measurements with that incredibly complicated machine.