Listening to the Astro2010 Decadal Survey

Here are some streaming comments as I'm listening to results of the 2010 Decadal Survey. A shortlink to the report is here.

11:10 am EDT: Excellent placement of "what were the first luminous objects, and when did they form" second from the top of "Major questions to address this decade".

11:20 am EDT: Ooh, even better. "Cosmic Dawn" is the first of the 3 over-arching fields. Good fielding for EoR as a top science priority in the next decade!

11:23 am EDT: Now we're starting into descriptions of the panels. I was involved in several of the RMS (Radio, Millimeter, and Submillimeter) submissions, and am looking for HERA (the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array). I'm also rooting for the Allen Telescope Array's Radio Sky Surveys Project. Finally, I'm hoping for some mention in the TEC (Technology development) program of prioritizing the development of shared solutions to digital signal processing hardware and libraries, which was the recommendation of a white paper I drafted with the help of the CASPER community.

11:45 am EDT: Mention of SKA as a priority for Radio Astronomy, unsurprisingly.

11:47 am EDT: Looks like Roger's wrapping up here. Turning to Q&A.

Meanwhile, I'm reading through the report. I see radio instrumentation is listed as a funding priority on ES-4, linking to 7-39. A good sign.

A painful line on 1-18: "U.S. participation in projects such as the Square Kilometer Array is possible only if there is either a significant increase in NSF-AST funding or continuing closure of additional unique and highly productive facilities." Ouch.

But on 2-12, my own sky map (well, with "permissions pending" for now). Now that's something!

12:01 pm EDT: An interesting question. "Why such a priority on habitable planets in the decadal review?" Sounds like the answer is that it's particularly primed to make big breakthroughs. I think I agree with that. I wasn't surprised that it was on there. There's some rumors going around that Kepler has found earth-like planets in earth-like orbits.

12:02 pm EDT: What about the surplus of post-docs relative to faculty positions? Answer: there are a wide range of careers and positions available to astronomers, so it's not unreasonable to have a larger number of post-doc positions where budding astronomers get training. I'm not sure that answer fully appreciates the scale of the problem.

Continuing with reading, on page 3-13, "The HERA program, a project that was highly ranked by the RMS-PPP and included by the committee in its list of compelling cases for a competed mid-scale program at NSF, provides a development pathway for the SKA-low facility. Progress on development of the SKA-mid pathfinder instruments, the Allen Telescope Array in the U.S., the MeerKAT in South Africa and the ASKAP in Australia, and in new instruments and new observing modes on the existing facilities ... will provide crucial insight into the optimal path towards a full SKA-mid." That's good to see mentioned. Sounds like it lays the groundwork for a strong future proposal to get funded. It's not a promise of funding, though. Not that such a promise was expected.

12:11 pm EDT: Second use of "tripwires" for projects. A very colorful phrase.

Interesting plot on 4-15: papers in all astronomy fields are increasing. Instrumentation papers seem to be low in number, but holding their own against other fields (same percentage contribution to total paper number).

On 5-14 for Data Reduction and Analysis Software: "Flexibility, openness, and platform independence, modularity, and public dissemination are essential to this effort. Focused investment in a series of small-scale initiatives for common tool development ... may be the most cost-effective approach, although there are undoubtedly synergies with the pipeline development needed for the large-scale projects." Sounds helpful for some of my projects like AIPY, SPEAD, and CASPER.

12:18 pm EDT: Comments on the SKA? Answer: SKA is the future, but the US can't pay for the construction on the proposed time scale (but slower might be ok). Technology development should be prioritized though. Low-frequency SKA, though, targets EoR, and we're interested in projects targeting that. Yes!

On 5-21 for Technology Development: "The committee received community input in the form of white papers on the funding needs for technology development in areas such as ... high speed, large N correlators. In these areas and others, researchers ... had come together to plan a coherent strategy for the decade. The OIR and RMS panels made a convincing case that the current level of ATI funding needs to be augmented in order to successfully pursue these highly-ranked technology development programs and roadmaps." Looks like my white paper fell on receptive ears.

12:28 pm EDT: Neil Tyson is closing down Q&A. He is one cool dude. I'm glad he was on the panel.

On 7-7 for Science Objectives for the Decade: "Find and explore the epoch of reionization using hydrogen line observations starting with the HERA telescopes that are already under construction." Wham. And in Table 7.1 on 7-32, Priority 2, Projects thought compelling: HERA.

On B-2 for Program Priorization, in Table B.1, I see both ATA and HERA. I'd say ATA didn't necessarily win big in the review, but at least they're there.

And finally, in appendix D-1: "Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array ... is a multi- stage project in radio astronomy to understand how hydrogen is ionized after the first stars start to shine. The first phase (HERA I) is under way and will demonstrate the feasibility of the technical approach. The second phase (HERA II) would serve as a pathfinder for an eventual world-wide effort in the following decade to construct a facility with a total collecting area of a square kilometer and the power to make detailed maps of this critical epoch in the history of the universe. Proceeding with HERA II should be subject to HERA I meeting stringent performance requirements in its ability to achieve system calibration and the removal of cosmic foreground emission." We've got our work cut out for us!

AstroBaki on MediaWiki

I just started up a new wiki called AstroBaki. The main reason I did this was that my MoinMoin AIPY wiki was clunky to use and was getting spammed lots. I switched to the MediaWiki engine, which has better automated control over these kinds of things. As an added bonus, MediaWiki has support for latex math. This got me thinking...

When I started grad school, I had a hard time transitioning from feeling like I was producing and contributing (I was working as a development engineer for SETI) to just absorbing knowledge. To make myself feel better and more invested in learning, I started doing something for which I became moderately famous around the department: latexing lecture notes on-the-fly. For full disclosure, I should mention that I copycatted the idea of latexing on-the-fly from my friend Phil.

The key to success is to use lots of "defs", and to recognize when you need to def a sequence of commands. When the same sequence of symbols started popping up, I would pretend that I had already def'd the command and start using it, and when there was a pause in the derivation, I would remember to scribble down what that command should mean. In my later years, I also started drawing figures in paint for inclusion in latex.

Anyway, I now have about 4 or 5 latex'd class notes that I have put on my website. From what I hear, they are still regularly used in UCB classes, and I occasionally get happy emails from grad students thanking me for the effort. Meanwhile, I've been reading a book about Nicolas Bourbaki, a famous pseudonym for a group of (mostly French) mathematicians who collaboratively re-wrote mathematics from 1935 to the 70s. Nicolas Bourbaki was a wiki, ahead of its time.

"Now wouldn't it be cool," I thought to myself, "if students using these lecture notes could fix them when they are wrong (after all, they were written on-the-fly), and re-organize them to make more sense?" Could these notes become a sort of open-source textbook for astronomy? So AstroBaki was born.

The difficulty, I am finding, is in translating latex (especially latex heavy in defs) into mediawiki. The best tool I've found so far has been pandoc, which didn't do the defs, but did everything else pretty well. I'm loath to do things by hand, so I'll see what can be automated, and I'll keep you posted.

PAPER: 8 Station Results

Yesterday I submitted our paper on the 4- and 8-antenna deployments of PAPER to the Astronomical Journal & astro-ph. Although it does not place any meaningful constraints on cosmic reionization (when light from the first stars broke up the bulk of the hydrogen gas that had been sitting around since it originally formed), it nonetheless illustrates a first level of calibration and analysis towards that goal. This paper should have some impact in the community, as it shows that we are fairly well along in our experiment and it provides a first look at some of the astrophysical foregrounds that will interfere with detecting reionization. This paper also will double as the last chapter of my dissertation, so publishing it puts me in the endgame of my doctoral studies... This fall I'm going to take an NSF postdoc back at Berkeley. Basically, that just means I'll be doing the same research (along with some teaching), but with better pay.