Today is the final day of our Bayesian working group meeting in Hannover. The last two days have been pretty intense, but we've got a lot of work done :) Today we'll do some coding together to get started on the right foot!
It's a shame I haven't had time to tour Hannover, I'm sure there's much more to it than Nordstadt, where the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational physics is (aka the Albert Einstein Institute) ... and naturally where I am. You might also be interested to know that I finally submitted my first 1st author paper (to Physical Review Letters)! Finally!!
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Right now I'm helping to develop a data analysis pipeline for the EPTA. Right now, that consists of translating C++ into python.
For anyone who was wondering, there are no switch statements in python. Use a dictionary! Birmingham hosted the last European Pulsar Timing Array meeting last week. We were very lucky to be able to host both Michael Kramer and Bernard Schutz, who stopped by to give us a talk on eLISA/NGO (depending on who you ask!) and the status of the project after the Paris presentation. For EPTA members, the slides are available on the wiki.
Thank you to all the attendees for coming from all over Europe and I'll see you all again either in Sydney or **drum roll Today I went to a "meet the press" lunch at the NAM and met some really interesting people. I also heard some rather alarming comments, like "string theory isn't a theory" from a scientist! I quickly corrected this misconception.
Afterward, a writer from New Scientist approached me about our group's work on PTAs and the famous yet-to-be-published paper. He said to keep him in the loop and he's really excited to work with us on writing an article :) Later on in the afternoon, Ben from The Naked Scientists asked for an interview for their podcast, and I was more than happy to oblige. I'll put up a link to the podcast when it comes out! You may have guessed by its conspicuous absence on the arXiv, that our group paper is not yet finished... but it's almost done, and the powers that be have been working their wee buts off, so no one can ask any more. I'll be really happy when this is done..
I'll be at the NAM in Machester next week giving a talk on the material presented in this elusive paper. It's during the Wednesday parallel sessions at 17:26, so come and check it out if you're there :) It's a beautiful day in Birmingham! No work today, just creative photographic stuff. I just updated my flickr account, and will probably add some more by the end of the day.
Yay for spring!! The paper still isn't done.. although I guess we're close now than we were (?). It's just dragging on forever! As far as my other work is concerned, I have a function that should give me a positive definite matrix, but doesn't. Why?! I don't know.
With 3 hours of teaching ahead of me this afternoon, I doubt I'll know the answer to that this week. Sigh... Today our group was "strongly encouraged" to send comments to the CBC group about 2 new papers. Being in the 2nd year of my PhD and working mostly with pulsar timing arrays (to date), I felt superlatively under qualified for this task... but did so anyway.
The comments were very basic, like " you didn't define this well-known term".. but whatever! I did it! This is a post for all the ladies studying here at Birmingham (at post graduate level or above). There is a now a wiki for the WIP group where you can find out about woman-oriented awards, travel funds and conferences.
If you are not currently on the group mailing list, please contact me and you can be added immediately. Or maybe it's lulling me into a false sense of security... We'll see. Things seem to be going really well right now with my code. Maybe a little too well... Hmm....
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AuthorChiara Mingarelli, science lover. Archives
January 2014
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