2009-02-16

image modeling, catalog matching, supernovae

In what little research time I had in the last few days I worked on the problems of catalog matching and of image modeling, which I think may end up being the same problem.

Last Thursday, Josh Frieman (Chicago, FNAL) gave a nice Department Colloquium about the SDSS-II supernova survey. He showed that conclusions about the dark energy were a function of analysis technique, because there are covariances between what is assumed about dust attenuation and what is assumed about the Phillips relation between Type Ia supernova brightness and time to fade. This opens up a few great questions in inference: It is a place where the freedom given to the inference affects the results. Time to get all Bayesian, I bet!

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