Megan Bedell (Chicago) and I had a scare today: Although we can show that in very realistically simulated fake data (with unmodeled tellurics, wrong continuum, and so on) a synthetic spectrum (data-driven) beats a binary mask for measuring radial velocities, we found that in real data from the HARPS instrument that the mask was doing better. Why? We went through a period of doubting everything we know. I was on the point of resigning. And then we realized it was a bug in the code! Whew.
Adrian Price-Whelan (Princeton) also found a serious bug in our binary-star fitting. The thing we were calculating as the pericenter distance is the distance of the primary-star center-of-mass to the system barycenter. That's not the minimum separation of the two stars! Duh. That had us rolling on the floor laughing, as the kids say, especially since we might have gotten all the way to submission without noticing that absolutely critical bug.
At the end of the day, I gave the Königstuhl Colloquium, on the blackboard, about dimensionality reduction. I started with a long discussion about what is good and bad about machine learning, and then went (too fast!) through PCA, ICA, kernel-PCA, PPCA, factor analyzers, HMF, E-M algorithms, latent-variable models, and the GPLVM, drawing connections between them. The idea was to give the audience context and jumping-off points for their projects.
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