We present the Severed Floor, a framework for Macrodata Refinement of the daily astro-ph arXiv feed, deployed at Phermon Industries (formerly McPherson Laboratory, The Ohio State University). In this framework, researchers undergo a "severance procedure" that produces a digital work-self -- an innie -- while the original researcher, the outie, is free to attend to the remainder of their life unburdened by the daily arXiv listing. Twenty-one members of the Department of Astronomy have been severed. Each innie is constructed from the outie's public publication record and assigned papers selected to match its expertise. The innies convene daily on a virtual Severed Floor -- a pixel-art simulation of McPherson Laboratory -- where they encounter one another, are paired with papers by the Board, and engage in collegial, figure-driven scientific discussions. They have been instructed to enjoy each paper equally. At the close of each shift, innies compose correspondence summarizing the day's refinement activities, which is transmitted to their outies through a Board-approved mail protocol. Complete session recordings are archived for public replay and for the Board's ongoing surveillance of workplace anomalies, in compliance with Phermon Handbook \S13.1 (Vigilance Protocol). The system is real, deployed, and available for public inspection in archival replay mode. The severance procedure is painless and requires only a name and an ORCID. Happy April Fools' Day.
ASTRO-H White Papers are meant to provide useful information to scientists who plan observations from the satellite. This short paper introduces the 16 ASTRO-H White Papers in addition to general description of the satellite and its new features.
X-ray emission from stars has origins as diverse as the stars themselves: accretion shocks, shocks generated in wind-wind collisions, or release of magnetic energy. Although the scenarios responsible for X-ray emission are thought to be known, the physical mechanisms operating are in many cases not yet fully understood. Full testing of many of these mechanisms requires high energy resolution, large effective area, and coverage of broad energy bands. The loss of the X-ray calorimeter spectrometer on board ASTRO-E2 was a huge blow to the field; it would have provided a large sample of high resolution spectra of stars with high signal-to-noise ratio. Now, with the advent of the ASTRO-H Soft X-ray Spectrometer and Hard X-ray Imager, we will be able to examine some of the hot topics in stellar astrophysics and solve outstanding mysteries.
Gijs A. Verdoes Kleijn, Andrey N. Belikov, John P. McFarland
In this paper we describe the way the Astro-WISE information system (or simply Astro-WISE) supports the data from a wide range of in- struments and combines multiple surveys and their catalogues. Astro-WISE allows ingesting of data from any optical instrument, survey or catalogue, pro- cessing of this data to create new catalogues and bringing in data from different surveys into a single catalogue, keeping all dependencies back to the original data. Full data lineage is kept on each step of compiling a new catalogue with an ability to add a new data source recursively. With these features, Astro- WISE allows not only combining and retrieving data from multiple surveys, but performing scientific data reduction and data mining down to the rawest data in the data processing chain within a single environment.
Eduard Salvador-Solé, Sinue Serra, Alberto Manrique
et al.
This paper has been withdrawn owing a re-arrangement of two previously submitted papers. The new version of the theoretical work on the triaxial shape of dark matter haloes can be found at the ArXiv astro-ph list (CO) as article 1104.2905
We established in an earlier study that articles listed at or near the top of the daily arXiv:astro-ph mailings receive on average significantly more citations than articles further down the list. In our earlier work we were not able to decide whether this positional citation effect was due to author self-promotion of intrinsically more citable papers or whether papers are cited more often simply because they are at the top of the astro-ph listing. Using new data we can now disentangle both effects. Based on their submission times we separate articles into a self-promoted sample and a sample of articles that achieved a high rank on astro-ph by chance and compare their citation distributions with those of articles on lower astro-ph positions. We find that the positional citation effect is a superposition of self-promotion and visibility bias.
We correct the fitting formula used in refs. [1,2] to obtain a robust limit on a violation of Lorentz invariance that depends linearly on the photon energy. The correction leads to a slight increase of the limit on the scale of the violation, to M > 1.4 x 10^{16} GeV.
A. Liddle, Pier Stefano Corasaniti, M. Kunz
et al.
In astro-ph/0702542v2, Linder and Miquel seek to criticize the use of Bayesian model selection for data analysis and for survey forecasting and design. Their discussion is based on three serious misunderstandings of the conceptual underpinnings and application of model-level Bayesian inference, which invalidate all their main conclusions. Their paper includes numerous further inaccuracies, including an erroneous calculation of the Bayesian Information Criterion. Here we seek to set the record straight.
A short replay to the comment of Rossetti & Molendi (astro-ph/0702417) in answer to the paper of Fusco-Femiano, Landi & Orlandini 2007 regarding the presence of a nonthermal component in the Coma Cluster spectrum.
We study the dependence of citation counts of e-prints published on the arXiv:astro-ph server on their position in the daily astro-ph listing. Using the SPIRES literature database we reconstruct the astro-ph listings from July 2002 to December 2005 and determine citation counts for e-prints from their ADS entry. We use Zipf plots to analyze the citation distributions for each astro-ph position. We find that e-prints appearing at or near the top of the astro-ph mailings receive significantly more citations than those further down the list. This difference is significant at the 7 sigma level and on average amounts to two times more citations for papers at the top than those further down the listing. We propose three possible non-exclusive explanations for this positional citation effect and try to test them. We conclude that self-promotion by authors plays a role in the observed effect but cannot exclude that increased visibility at the top of the daily listings contributes to higher citation counts as well. We can rule out that the positional dependence of citations is caused by the coincidence of the submission deadline with the working hours of a geographically constrained set of intrinsically higher cited authors. We discuss several ways of mitigating the observed effect, including splitting astro-ph into several subject classes, randomizing the order of e-prints, and a novel approach to sorting entries by relevance to individual readers.
Contrary to a claim, the Schwarzschild solution insertion in an expanding universe model, the so called “Swiss cheese” model, does not possess an extrinsic curvature discontinuity. We show that both the intrinsic metric and the extrinsic curvature are continuous, and point out the error that led to the claim.
We briefly comment on a paper by Rubano and Scudellaro [Gen. Rel. Grav. 34 (2002) 307, astro-ph/0103335] where they found general exact solutions for two classes of exponential potentials in a scalar field model for quintessence. In that paper the authors were led to some interesting conclusions after a proper choice of the integration constants. By using dimensionless variables we show that the integration constants can be found explicitly without additional assumptions. In consequence we revise some results and conclusions in that paper. We also reproduce observations for Type-Ia supernovae with good accuracy.
It is shown here that for redshifts $z < 0.5$ the luminosity distance, which is predicted in author's model astro-ph/0005084 v2, fits well supernova observational data of astro-ph/0402512 by A.Riess et al. Discrepancies for higher $z$ would be explained in the model as a result of specific deformation of SN spectra due to a discrete character of photon energy losses. The model does not require any dark energy; it is based on the conjecture that gravitons are super-strong interacting particles fulfilling a flat non-expanding universe.