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Jane Rigby

Seatguru

by Jane Rigby February 5, 2010

Does everyone already know this tip, or am I about to improve your lives?
Seat Guru shows airplane seating charts, specific to your airline and plane, color-coded for good and bad seats.  It’s prevented me from selecting ‘exit row’ seats that don’t recline or business class by the lavatory, and it’s found me the comfiest seat [...]

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Fitting surface brightness profiles

by Jane Rigby December 14, 2009

It’s time for another session of, “Which tool do you use to accomplish a given astro-task, and why that tool?”  The topic:  fitting surface brightness profiles.  Two likely suspects:  the Archangel package, and iraf’s stsdas.analysis.isophote.  OK, go.

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Beautiful illustration of risk analysis

by Jane Rigby November 18, 2009

I’m always on the lookout for beautiful illustrations of scientific data.  This one weights the tremendous benefits of the vaccine for HPV (the virus that causes cervical cancer), against the tiny risk.
This chart of flu death rates isn’t as pretty, but makes its point.  More at the CDC’s FluView.  Via the blog Science-Based Medicine.

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Join PDF files

by Jane Rigby November 18, 2009

This is a tip that sounds stupid, until you really need it.
Say you’re applying for a job, and have several PDF files:  a CV, a research statement, a cover letter.   Files are supposed to be emailed to an office assistant.   You can send separate files, but they may get confused, lost, only some get printed, [...]

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Your friend Convert

by Jane Rigby November 18, 2009

Do you use the tool “convert” to manipulate plots and images?  It’s simple, powerful and downright great!  Quick examples:
Modify a plot for presentation use, by swapping to a black background with white lines, so it’s easier to read on a screen:
> convert  -negate frompaper.ps  forscreen.jpg
Make a thumbnail:
> convert -geometry 50×50 big.jpg thumbnail.gif

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Preventing the AAS Ick

by Jane Rigby October 2, 2009

I’ve been to 4 winter AAS meetings.  Twice, I came back with the “AAS Ick”, a nasty cold that lingered and certainly did NOT make my Astro Better.
It’s understandable: the big meeting is right after the holidays — children are home from daycare & school, relatives have traveled from afar, and germs are zinging overhead [...]

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Spectral line analysis tools

by Jane Rigby October 2, 2009

This is an embarrassing post, but I’m going to forge ahead.  Time was, we used IRAF and we hated it, but what else was there?  Now, there are many choices, lots of them buggy and badly documented, some of them superb.
Say I have a one-dimensional, flux-calibrated, wavelength-calibrated spectrum.  (So, all the hard work of calibration [...]

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Keeping track of your PDF papers with Papers

by Jane Rigby July 31, 2009

The New York Times (of all places) wrote about the chore of keeping track of all the scientific papers on your desktop:  all those PDF files cryptically named 1998A+A__338_781M.pdf and fulltext.pdf .  Or worse, 0903(4).3037v1, because it’s faster to re-download the PDF each time you need it, than to find it in your download folder. [...]

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Presentations are a privilege

by Jane Rigby June 3, 2009

Blogger Seth Godin reminds us that presentations are a precious opportunity to change minds. To translate his advice to a scientific context, I’d make the following two substitutions:

“emotional pictures”  —> “screen-filling, well-explained, compelling plots”
“to change minds”   —> “to educate”.

Godin partially echoes Edward Tufte’s argument that slideware is a terrible way to share information. Which is [...]

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Deal with upper limits

by Jane Rigby May 29, 2009

Often we have datasets in which quantities are not detected.  Those upper limits contain information — the flux was definitely below X.  It turns out, there’s a rich statistical literature on how to consider both detections and upper limits.   Yet often astronomers don’t properly incorporate those upper limits in their analysis.
Fortunately, several authors have explained [...]

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