Science and productivity by Dr. Christine Corbett Moran
Back in the spring, I had some fun doing experimentation around machine learning models for labelling satellite imagery with atmospheric conditions and various classes of land cover/land. You can check out my work in an open source Kaggle notebook. For this I trained on the data provided in the Planet Kaggle competition, Understanding the Amazon Read More …
As you might have heard on my website, my newsletter, my Twitter, or, if we’re colleagues at Caltech, at work, I am currently working on the South Pole Telescope (SPT) onsite at the South Pole in Antarctica for January-November 2016 (I am employed by the University of Chicago). I have taken a sabbatical from my NSF Astronomy Read More …
Gravitational lensing results from the fact that General Relativity describes our universe: mass bends light and can function in effect like a lens, bending light in ways that can be used to infer the mass distribution itself. Gravitational microlensing is due to this same effect, but refers to the detection of objects which are of Read More …
Some months ago, I reviewed a paper about the efficiency of human space exploration versus robotic space exploration. The question isn’t as simple as you might think. Read More …
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 …
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 …
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 …
So the basics are there, with full recovery from 23 failures over 1000 timesteps on 32 processes: context: https://cosmicrays.wordpress.com/2011/07/06/fault-tolerant-computing/
Since last we spoke a couple of months ago, I had a hell of a time personally: I moved house, went from one location to another too often, had a major and very stressful financial crisis and had some rough times with friends which rocked the emotional boat. Although there are many things which didn’t Read More …
