2018-09-23

finishing a paper; latents

I dusted off the draft of my paper with Eilers (MPIA) and Rix (MPIA) about spectrophotometric measurements of red-giant distances or parallaxes using Gaia SDSS APOGEE, 2MASS, and WISE. It is nearly done! But we put it on ice while Eilers finished other things. I worked through more than half of the text, making notes on what small things remain to do.

The biggest to-do item? We have a linear model (for the log distance or log parallax or absolute magnitude). That's sweet, because it is simple, and it is interpretable, at least partially. Now we have to make that true by interpreting. Interpreting a linear model is harder than fitting a linear model!

I also had conversations with Storey-Fisher (NYU) about models for the correlation function and Price-Whelan (Princeton) about Milky Way non-equilibrium dynamical models. On the former, we discussed the difference between the correlation function and any particular estimate of the correlation function. It's a bit complex, because I'm not sure there is even agreement in the community about what would be considered the true latent correlation function in the low-ish redshift Universe.

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