[Cosmo-torun] MEiN (byly KBN) non-grant 2006 :(

[Bartosz Lew]

Hi Boud, Agnieszka,

Well, sorry to hear about the grant results.

> http://cosmo.torun.pl/Cosmo/AdminGranty
thanks.

my answers are:
>     * referee 1: score 4
>     * referee 1: report - not possible to reject the hypothesis, so not
>     worth funding

right, maybe polish science is more oriented on applied science and 
projects that must give positive results. Our project from the beginnig 
said "maybe". Of course we couldn't have said anything beyond that. While 
the referee seem not to get too deeply into details of the projetc itself 
- not mentioning the field related - since he doesn't understand that the 
simulations for proper statistical significance analysis are 
computationally consuming, apart from the search of the circles, and apart 
from the fact that the planck data details are already known but - he 
makes one good point - that we do not mention that the results will be 
e.g. PhD. Thesis and me and Agnieszka are Ph.D. students, so from his 
point of view it might be suspicious that maybe we will not be as involved 
as we should. I give him that.
The fact that he's not interested in topology is also obvious.


>     * referee 2: score 7
>     * referee 2: report - the project will not give a final answer to the
>     topology of the Universe

well, this report is more moderated and ballanced in words but to me it's 
just general mambo-jubmo just to say NO, however the score 7 is considered 
to be "very good".

>     * referee 3: score 6.5
>     * referee 3: report - researching the PDS model no longer has any sense
>     because of the [unrefereed] article AstroPh:0604616
>

well, I didn't have time to fully understand the seriousness of the 
m-weightning "mistake" - I just looked quickly through the paper, but my 
impression is that the "proper" weightning only recudes the signal.
Of course "badanie modelu PDF nie bardzo ma sens" is more less consistent 
with the conclusions from the paper of Shapiro et al. (however they 
rather say that he detection might be not possible) but the most 
annoying thing is that the authors of the paper

a) make remakrs on "*infamous* PDS model" and I take it that it straigt 
referes to our (Boud's) work.

b) they say "detection" and "claim" which is obviously NOT what was 
written in our paper - it was merly a "hint" and "naturally it's too soon 
to blablalba.... etc." in the conclusions.
So to me it's a kind of attack.

The fact that the detection as well as our whole paper lack ANY 
statistical significance estimation of the detection is obvious - and it's 
true and it's bad. It was not a big deal to do some estimation of how 
strong that at 10deg. feature is , just from a bunch of gaussian 
simulations. And I agree with referees and shapiro et al. that this is an 
obvious drawback. Why didn't we do that anyway ? :)

The other very important thing to me about the project is what Shapiro et 
al. wrote: it's that the circles at 10 deg. are small, and with smoothed 
map to 1 or 2 deg. it's natural to me that goin' on in this process - i.e. 
smaller circles, bigger smoothing scale - the probability of getting some 
arbitrary more less flat patterns correlated in some orientation rises. Of 
course this is just a qualitative argument - not quantitative but it's 
very important point which also should be studied - and can be studied by 
trivial MC sims. Well :) somehow this reminds me our conversation on the 
needed angular resolutions to resolve the circles at SLS. Higher 
resolution, less smoothing, less chance for fluke.



> Summary: unless there is a Nobel prize for discovering the topology of
> the Universe, research into the subject will not be funded.  The astronomy 
> community does not see fundamental research as a high priority.
>

yee, I see you're upset. m. :/
I don't know maybe it takes a bunch more  papers with different analysis' 
to prove and convince referees to the projet.

Anyway, I have a question. Does the PDS cut the low l's for all modes 
similarly or only those aligned with fundamental domain (FD). I guess 
rather the second one. In that case (in fact in any case) I don't 
understand how PDS can remove 
power from roughly all modes but m=0 as we observrve in WMAP at l=2 and 
l=3 ?



> Maybe we should get jobs in a Patent Office? ;) Apparently not much
> has changed since 100 years ago...

well, I get my paranoia about Ph.D. - so much work - so little time - but 
McDonalds has so much work offers :)

>
> Anyway, it's true we need to publish our followup paper to RLCMB04. Which is 
> in progress...

in that case don't you think you should give away some details, hm ?
I've calculated the effect of corrections from flat geometry of PDS to 
spherical. - well almost - I got the formula but I don't fully understand 
it. Seems to be really negligible.

pozdr.
b.


ps. I have lots of ideas to consider, work out and publish. But since I 
have so much things do to I might need some help. I'm thinking of some 
company to share ideas, work, and analyze results. I'm thinking who should 
I potentially interest with this as well. Onyone interested ? :)
Generally it's about the well,... sort of degeneracy between 
non-Gaussainity and non-randomness of processes. :/
i haven't worked it out yet but this thing seems to me *really* important 
and people seem not to see this problem. Perhaps it depends on how we put 
it but this is more for conference talk rather than email- email are too 
slow.