Posted by barb on Nov 7, 2003 in
Thesis/Grad Life I was getting frustrated with the data I’ve been fitting, so it was good to finally meet with them to talk about it. The goal for the past month was to take a previously published data set to compare the results I get from the automated pipeline to the published results. We, of course, were hoping to find that the pipeline was getting comparable results, because that would bolster my pipeline.
Instead, I found that my data showed the exact opposite trend as the published data. I did everything I could think of to re-analyze and re-fit the data to see if I could extract their trends. In the end, my data just doesn’t show the same trend. This is a potentially interesting and very exciting result. One difference between the way I’m analyzing the data and they way they are is that all the points in my spectra are temporally adjacent, whereas they extract all points in the observation according to flux level with no attempt to keep temporally adjacent points together. What we’re thinking this might do is smear out the time scales of change in some of the parameters. This may produce spurious relationships between parameters that can’t really show the true picture of variability in the source.
I’ll be testing this theory by re-extracting my data using their technique. If I find their same trends, that will be a strong case that their work was not the right way to do things. If I find something else, then we’ll have to look more closely at my work to see what’s going on.
Posted by barb on Nov 4, 2003 in
Random Thoughts I watched the first hour of the “America Rocks the Vote” forum tonight for the democratic candidates. My first impression was quite like that of King Arthur in Peter David’s Knight Life (a novel in which King Arthur comes back to modern day New York and runs for mayor) — for each question asked, the candidates didn’t so much as answer the question as go on a diatribe of their own choosing, book-ending it with a sentence peripherally related to the question asked.
The first hour had many questions, naturally, on America’s place in the Iraq conflict (war? occupation? travesty?) There seemed to be two lines of thought. Some of the candidates (e.g. Kucinich, Sharpton, Edwards) thought that the US should pull out and turn control over the the UN forces, or at a minimum turn the civilian ruling body over to UN control. Mosely seems to want the US to at least get Iraq back to the shape it was in before we attacked before pulling out. I’m not sure that their stands are mutually exclusive. I’m not sure where I stand. I’m absolutely against the way Bush has been handling the situation (and most other international situations), but, hopefully, the bulk of the damage has been done. On the other hand, we have troops dying every day over there, and that needs to stop. In theory, the worst of the combat is supposed to be over, and yet there are still troops dying daily. Would the UN do better? I have a sinking feeling that they couldn’t do any worse…
Paging through the transcript of the event a bit, it looks like I left before things got good. After I left, they talked about sex education, gay rights, and who used marijuana.
I don’t think I can pick one of the candidates, yet. I do know that the democratic party is going to need to get a strong frontrunner, though, to unseat Bush. There are too many candidates to keep straight right now, and that’s not good for the party. I hate to say it, but I don’t think I could vote for Sharpton, simply because he’s a reverend — I don’t know that I can trust a reverend to continue to support the separation of church and state (though it’s not like Bush is doing that either…). And as much as I’d like to get behind my gender, I’m not sure this is the year to put a woman in office — we need to unseat an incumbent, and I’m not sure the American people (particularly the crusty old white men) are ready to put a woman in office (though I wish they were). I’m also worried about gay rights becoming an issue this election. I’m all for gay rights, but if it becomes a strong issue, it’s likely that left-leaning Christians may lean a bit to the right come election day. The mission needs to be: get Bush out of office, so the strongest candidate to do that needs to come to the forefront. Unfortunately, I think that means a crusty old white male.
Check out all the candidates here on CNN’s page.
Posted by barb on Oct 31, 2003 in
Pictures,
Random Thoughts Along with my pun’kins, a large spider web and some lighted bones, I left out some trick-or-treat books for the kids tonight. These books are all registered with Bookcrossing, so it will be fun to see if anyone journals the books in the coming weeks.
The books were actually a big hit with the kids. Most of the kids stopped to look at the books before ringing the doorbell (though the first two kids that came around didn’t know that I had candy as well…oops). The books were gone with the fourth or fifth group of kids to come around. Andrew and I are going to remember this for next year — there is a used bookstore nearby that has a bunch of the Goosebumps books for just 50 cents each, so we’ll probably stock up next year and leave a bigger selection).
These are the books I released (with their Bookcrossing journal link):
Here they are all laid out:
Posted by barb on Oct 31, 2003 in
Pictures,
Random Thoughts I always have carved pumpkins for Halloween. I don’t remember when I started, but I remember each year, we would go out an pick out a pumpkin for each of us kids. Then, when my brothers were too old/and or had moved out of the house, Dad and I would go and pick out a couple for me to do. When I moved out on my own, I continued the tradition, only missing the year that I was trapped…er, living in the dorm (but I did decorate the door for Halloween — it was a way cool sarcophagus made from tag board that actually opened to reveal a mummy inside).
Andrew and I went out a couple weeks ago to Cox Farms, just up the road, and picked out two pun’kins for me to carve. Here’s the results of my handiwork (thanks in part to Pumpkin Masters):
(They’re fuzzy because I took them without a flash, and my hand jiggled a bit when I took them.)
I dressed up in costume, as a vampiress:
But, I put the costume on before dinner, complete with fake nails, so I had a bit of trouble eating the wonderful pizza Andrew made.
I estimated that we had just about 70 kids this year, which is about the same as last year. The cutest costume was a little kid, about 4, who was in a full-body lion costume. There were a couple Hulks, many witches, a couple fairy princesses, a football player (I think he was just wearing his uniform from school, though), a ninja, a clown, and so many more that I just can’t remember.
A very fun night!
Posted by barb on Oct 28, 2003 in
Random Thoughts Andrew sent me this link to ExtremePumpkins.com
At what point did the carving of pumpkins turn into a “cute” event? When did boys stop carving pumpkins and moms start? Where did we lose touch with one of the years coolest events?
Today we will seize back this ritual. Today is the day we throw away those safe, cute carving tools.
My favorites:
Posted by barb on Oct 17, 2003 in
Thesis/Grad Life I found out last week that a paper I worked on has been accepted to the Astrophysical Journal! And I’m the first author! Now I’m doing the happy astrophysicist dance (if you’ve never seen it, be thankful 🙂
This paper is based on work I did for my second year research requirement for my master’s degree. I analyzed time-separated observations of MCG -5-23-16, a Seyfert 2 galaxy. Seyfert galaxies are a class of active galactic nuclei, which are galaxies with a central region that put out so much energy that the rest of the galaxy can rarely be seen (there’s a more technical definition, of course, but that gives you the general idea). The energy that they put out comes from all parts of the electromagnetic spectrum — radio, optical, X-rays. My study was in X-rays. It is believed that these nuclei are powered by a super massive black hole with an accretion disk, and possibly another torus of material further out. In order to study the distribution of matter, I studied the changes over time of the X-ray spectrum. Our basic results were that the material that was “reprocessing” the X-rays (i.e. absorbing light from the central engine and reemitting them in another waveband) was not dominated by a nearby accretion disk. Instead it came from somewhere between 1 light day and 1 light year from the central engine.
Check out a preprint on astro-ph:
RXTE and BeppoSAX Observations of MCG -5-23-16: Reflection From Distant Cold Material (astro-ph/0310468)
Posted by barb on Oct 10, 2003 in
Thesis/Grad Life I had some preliminary results of running the pipeline on four different sources: 3C 111, Akn 120, IC 5063, and Mkn 348 I had tried using several different “minimum” time bins for extracting the spectra. Oddly enough, the change from 15 ks to 55 ks didn’t change the number of spectra by much for most of the sources (Akn 120 had 106 spectra for 55 ks bins, whereas it had 103 for 15 ks bins) — I think this is due to the count rate variability of the sources, though I may want to look closely at what the pipeline is doing just to make sure.
Unfortunately, there were some weird results with a couple of the sources. For example, in one of the Akn 120 spectra, the power-law index jumped up to 4 (which is not physically reasonable). The next step is going to be to run some well-studied (and published) data sets through the pipeline with a couple more models, and see if we can recover the published results. In addition, I will look through the pipeline results to find any spectra that are behaving badly, and re-analyze those by hand. We are agreed that I can’t possibly do all of the data by hand, but we are concerned that the pipeline is not giving physically reasonable results. So, we hope that most of the spectra are well-behaved, and that by re-analyzing the few that show odd behavior with the pipeline, I can reduce the number of spectra analyzed by had to a manageable number.
Posted by barb on Oct 2, 2003 in
Random Thoughts It’s hard to believe that the sniper attacks were only a year ago. At times it seems like a different lifetime.
As much as I hate to admit it, the attacks did change the way I behaved and thought while the perpetrators were still at large. I knew perfectly well that the chance of being shot by the sniper were slim. There were other murders in the region, numbering more than the number of sniper victims. There were fatal car accidents on the beltway. I was more likely to die in some freak accident. And yet, I was afraid to gas up my car. I was afraid to walk through a parking lot into a store. I found myself changing where I got gas — I chose a station that had fewer hidden access points were a sniper could hide. I was tempted to find one of the stations where the guardian angels were pumping gas for people who were too afraid to pump their own. In the end, I didn’t let the sniper attacks keep me from activities I wanted to do; though, I will grudgingly admit that fear pervaded much of the activities that required me to be outside the comfort of either my house or my car.
Posted by barb on Sep 27, 2003 in
Random Thoughts Last fall, amidst the sniper excitement in DC, I was up late one night unable to sleep. Actually, it was the night that one of the shootings occurred, and I couldn’t sleep because of all the sirens (this particular shooting was about 7 miles from our house). I crept downstairs and turned on the TV, which was on our PBS station, WETA. (Oddly enough, once we started hearing all the sirens, Andrew and I tried to see if it was another sniper attack by scanning local channels. Instead of finding it on the local NBC, CBS, ABC, or FOX station, we saw a headline scroll across the BBC news on our local PBS station.)
The BBC news was over, and I caught the tail end of some British comedy. I either love or hate British comedy series, so I stuck around for a few minutes. That was all it took. This particular episode was called Volcano, and I stumbled in when the group was at a dinner party (hosted by Susan and Steve). Susan had come across one of Steve’s videos called Lesbian Spank Inferno. Steve was trying to explain that the movie was actually an artistic expression, rather than porn. (It was a losing battle.) I found out later that the series I’d stumbled on was Coupling.
A few weeks later, Andrew and I started recording Coupling every weekend, and even bought the season one DVD.
When we heard about the NBC version, we were a bit skeptical. The BBC series has a short season (on the order of HBO), so that they can keep the same writers through out each season. This ensures that each season maintains a high standard of writing. NBC will have to stretch each season out to 20 or so episodes. Also I’m not sure NBC can get away with some of the jokes that appear on the BBC series.
We watched the first NBC episode, which felt a lot like the BBC’s first episode. A few jokes were lost (in the BBC version, Susan asks Patrick when he chose his favorite breast), and of course the actors are all different, which might be my biggest sticking point. I’m used to Susan being blond, and seeing her played by a brunette is just confusing (it took me a while to figure out who she was supposed to be). The only character who mirrored her BBC version quite well was Jane. I suppose the new cast 1) needs to get more comfortable in their characters, and 2) may want to distance themselves a bit from their BBC counterparts, so that they aren’t just mimicking the other cast. We will probably watch a few more episodes — I want to see what NBC does with Lesbian Spank Inferno — but I don’t know that we will become fans.
Posted by barb on Sep 20, 2003 in
Random Thoughts Andrew said that it took several tries, but the power is now back on. He’d woken up around 4:30 AM and the power was on, but flicked off a few minutes later. About 5 AM he said it came on again, but then he heard a big BOOM in the distance — a transformer breaking — and the power went out again. When I woke up at 5:30 AM, the power was on again. This time for good.
I’d like to say that I won’t take electricity for granted again, but we all know that’s not true.