Okay so a few weeks ago at work a colleague asked me where I was from in the UK, and I replied “Oh, it’s a small little town, you’ve probably never heard of it, Coventry. It’s close to Birmingham”. This is a natural response for me given that I lived in the US for a…
I attended this conference in Aix-en-Provence this week. I gave a talk on my hierarchical analysis of galaxy clusters and there was a great turn out from the cluster community but lots of cluster environmentalists! Anyway some of the most interesting talks I found were: Michael Gregg from UC Davis, gave a really nice talk…
Relative entropy is a really cool tool that which haven’t heard of before you are in for a treat! Also known as Kullback-Leibler divergence, it is the measure of the distance between 2 probability distributions [e.g. p(x) and q(x) ] on a random variable X. It is defined as: Where H(P,Q) is the cross entropy…
Michael Betancourt recently wrote a nice case study describing the problems often encountered with gaussian mixture models, specifically the estimation of parameters of a mixture model and identifiability i.e. the problem with labelling mixtures (http://mc-stan.org/documentation/case-studies/identifying_mixture_models.html). Also there has been suggestions that GMM’s can’t be easily done in Stan. I’ve found various examples online of simple…
When publishing a paper on http://www.arxiv.org, here are some neat ways to make sure you maximise your impact. Getting to the top There has been research to suggest a correlation between the top Arxiv submission and the number of citations. As of 2017, Arxiv’s new submission deadline for the next day submissions is 2pm (EST), so in…
Its almost christmas and time to think about christmas presents. Below i list my top 10 christmas presents for the astronomy/space obsessed! 10. Time Travelling Toby and the Apollo moon landing by Graham Jones Graham Jones’ exciting take on the Apollo moon landings, this beautifully illustrated book is the perfect gift for those young kids (1-10)…
Ok this is going to be a really quick post and not much like my others but recently I met some fellow scientists and it wasn’t before long that our conversation steered towards that of space travel and in particular the prospect of a moon village. Now it would not be suprising to me if…
