Higgs Boson
Yesterday was a big day for physics. A new particle was discovered, a boson, at the energy 126GeV, with every indication it is probably the much sought after Higgs. Read More …
Author: Corbett
Dynamic Bayesian Combination of Multiple Imperfect Classifiers
Using the new Voxcharta.org system, I was the only physicist at my institute to upvote this paper, Dynamic Bayesian Combination of Multiple Imperfect Classifiers (pdf), more in the realm of machine learning or computer science than traditional astrophysics or astronomy. As such I was nominated to discuss it at our weekly journal club. Here I give a brief review of concepts needed to follow the paper, and then go in depth into how we can use the opinions of multiple lay people as to whether an object is a supernova or not to achieve a highly accurate classification at the expert level. Read More …
Scientific Paper Reading, Voxcharta, Excellent Notation
I use the Stay Focused Chrome extension to block Wordpress, Google Reader, Hacker News, Twitter and Facebook at work, beyond 2 minutes of aggregate usage. Read More …
NASA Space Apps Challenge
Directly after coming back from Doha to Zürich, I got a quick 6hrs of sleep and took the train to Lausanne where I was a co-organizer of the NASA Space Apps Challenge sponsored by the Swiss Space Center, among others. We had over 30 people at the event, and 3 distinguished guest speakers and judges (including Dr. Prasenjit Saha from my institute, on crowd sourcing gravitational lensing measurements), and an action packed weekend. Read More …
TEDxSummit in Doha, recap
Last week I spent an incredible week at the TEDxSummit–a TEDx for TEDx organizers in meta TED fashion–in Doha, Qatar. Read More …
Oramics Machine
Daphne Oram was a pioneering British composer and electronic musician, I had the chance to see her Oramics Machine in person at the Science Museum in London when I was recently there, supporting the world premier of composer Vera Stanojevic’s newest piece, “The Tree of Glory”. Read More …
Banking
A few days ago I posted about my banking situation on Facebook–it’s a tad complex. and sounds almost elitist. In reality if I had enough money not to worry about fees, loans, credit cards, and having to run my own businesses to make ends meet I could stick with one bank. Here I’ll detail the Read More …
2011 in blogging
According to the dataviz folks at Wordpress, the concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. My blog was viewed about 9,800 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it. Go here http://cosmicrays.wordpress.com/2011/annual-report/ to see the complete report. Thanks everyone for stopping by and hoping to blog even more in 2012! Happy New Year! Read More …
The Elusive Higgs
The two CERN collaborations, ATLAS and CMS, are trying to independently find the Higgs and confirm each other’s results. Each excludes a standard-model Higgs above 135GeV at above 95% confidence (to about 450 GeV if I recall) and ATLAS finds an excess around 126 GeV consistent with a Higgs at this mass. CMS finds a very slight excess, slightly displaced from (around 124 GeV) though roughly consistent with the ATLAS result. It’s not a detection yet (ATLAS would need more statistical significance on their excess), but it’s tantalizing. They’ll continue running and analyzing data next year, and hopefully we’ll know for sure! Read More …