Kathryn Johnston (Columbia) organized a Local-Group meeting of locals, or a local group of Local Group researchers. There were various discussions of things going on in the neighborhood. Natalie Price-Jones (Toronto) started up a lot of discussion with her work on the dimensionality of chemical-abundance space, working purely with the APOGEE spectral data. That is, they are inferring the dimensionality without explicitly measuring chemical abundances or interpreting the spectra at all. Much of the questioning centered on how they know that the diversity they see is purely or primarily chemical rather than, say, instrumental or stellar nuisances.
At lunch time there were amusing things said at the Columbia Astro Dept Pizza Lunch. One was a very nice presentation by Benjamin Pope (Oxford) about how to do precise photometry of saturated stars in the Kepler data. He has developed a method that fully scoops me in one of my unfinished projects: The OWL, in which the pixel weights used in his soft-aperture aperture photometry are found through the optimization of a (very clever, in Pope's case) convex objective function. After the Lunch, we discussed a huge space of generalizations, some in the direction of more complex (but still convex) objectives, and others in the direction of train-and-test to ameliorate over-fitting.
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