citing things

I spent a big part of today working on finishing up a paper with Megan Bedell (Flatiron). My job was to fill in missing references. I'm still not efficient at this, more than 30 years in to my astronomy career.

Gothamfest

Once a year (and differently every year), we get together as much of the astronomical community in New York City as we can and have them give fast talks. Today was great! I learned a huge amount, and no highlight reel would do. But here are some examples: Amanda Quirk (Columbia) has great data on M33 stars that maybe we could use to build images of the orbital toruses using technology that Price-Whelan and I developed over the last few years? Marc Huertas-Company (Paris) said (confidently?) that many of the star-forming galaxies found by JWST at very high redshift are likely prolate. Michael Higgins (CUNY) and Keaton Bell (CUNY) have a beautiful system to separate sources of variability out in NASA TESS data using structure in frequency space. Kate Storey-Fisher (NYU) showed results from Giulio Fabbian cross-correlating her ESA Gaia quasar sample with the ESA Planck lensing map, with better error bars than any previous survey! Ben Cassese (Columbia) showed a moving-object pipeline with NASA TESS imaging that detects outer Solar System objects, much like old work by Dustin Lang and myself.

doing cosmology differently

Today Chirag Modi (Flatiron) gave a really great lunchtime talk about new technologies in cosmology and inference or measurement of cosmological parameters. He beautifully summarized how cosmology is done now (or traditionally): Make summary statistics of the observables, make a theory of the summary statistics, make up a surrogate likelihood function for use in inference, measure covariance matrices to use in the latter, and go. He's trying to obviate all of these things by using the simulations directly to make the measurements. He has nice results in forward modeling of the galaxy field, and in simulation-based inferences. Many interesting things came up in his talk, including the idea that I have discussed over the years with Kate Storey-Fisher (NYU) of enumerating all possible cosmological statistics! So much interesting stuff in the future of large-scale structure.

defining passive and active symmetries

What is a passive symmetry, and what is an active symmetry? I think I know: A passive symmetry is a symmetry that emerges because there are choices (like coordinate system, units system, gauge choice) in the representation of the data. An active symmetry is a symmetry that is observed to be there (like energy conservation). The passive symmetries are true by definition or by construction. THe active symmetries are subject to empirical test. Today Soledad Villar and I spent time talking about a truly formal definition in terms of commutative diagrams.

publication and collaboration policies

I spent some time in travel working on ideas for the Terra Hunting Experiment's publication, collaboration, and data-release policies. Megan Bedell (Flatiron) and I are not doing this in any official capacity; we are just brainstorming things that might be a good idea. One theme of our comments is that we want to make sure that the rules very strongly incentivize participation in the project by postdocs and students, who often don't have long enough time horizons to be at one institution for the full scientific arc of a project in this space. Another theme of our ideas is transparency: The Sloan Digital Sky Survey rules do a lot with transparency, and it works well there. When things are transparent to all, you often need fewer rules, because transparency leads to constructive, inclusive discussions.

is it possible to write a conceptual ML paper?

With Schölkopf (MPI-IS) and Villar (JHU) and others I am trying to write a conceptual paper about the structure of machine-learning methods. Physicists love conceptual papers! But the ML literature is all about performance of implemented methods. That makes it hard to write a conceptual paper. Referees expect to see performance that beats SOTA on some problem (at least a toy problem). I'm struggling.