transient literature

I reviewed the literature on transient surveys and projects today. I learned that PTF, CRTS, and Palomar-QUEST (all projects at or near or involving Caltech, I note) all have a very simple design: Find epochs that are significantly out-of-line, follow up, and classify with follow-up observations. It is shoot first, ask questions later, almost literally. This is good because (a) you get the low-hanging fruit very fast, and e (b) you aren't model-dependent in your selection. It means, however, that there are necessarily many un-mined and un-discovered events in their data streams, because model-fitting and model-selection methods (when the models are reasonable) are always more sensitive. It also means that Kepler is in many ways more analogous to the projects we are proposing with GALEX.