19,322 research outputs found
Teaching Data Science
We describe an introductory data science course, entitled Introduction to
Data Science, offered at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The
course introduced general programming concepts by using the Python programming
language with an emphasis on data preparation, processing, and presentation.
The course had no prerequisites, and students were not expected to have any
programming experience. This introductory course was designed to cover a wide
range of topics, from the nature of data, to storage, to visualization, to
probability and statistical analysis, to cloud and high performance computing,
without becoming overly focused on any one subject. We conclude this article
with a discussion of lessons learned and our plans to develop new data science
courses.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, International Conference on Computational
Science (ICCS 2016
Study of thermal protection requirements for a lifting body entry vehicle suitable for near-earth missions Summary report
Weight estimates of thermal protection systems for lifting body reentry vehicle suitable for near earth mission
The SDSS Galaxy Angular Two-Point Correlation Function
We present the galaxy two-point angular correlation function for galaxies
selected from the seventh data release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The
galaxy sample was selected with -band apparent magnitudes between 17 and 21;
and we measure the correlation function for the full sample as well as for the
four magnitude ranges: 17-18, 18-19, 19-20, and 20-21. We update the flag
criteria to select a clean galaxy catalog and detail specific tests that we
perform to characterize systematic effects, including the effects of seeing,
Galactic extinction, and the overall survey uniformity. Notably, we find that
optimally we can use observed regions with seeing < 1\farcs5, and -band
extinction < 0.13 magnitudes, smaller than previously published results.
Furthermore, we confirm that the uniformity of the SDSS photometry is minimally
affected by the stripe geometry. We find that, overall, the two-point angular
correlation function can be described by a power law, with , over the range
0\fdg005--10\degr. We also find similar relationships for the four
magnitude subsamples, but the amplitude within the same angular interval for
the four subsamples is found to decrease with fainter magnitudes, in agreement
with previous results. We find that the systematic signals are well below the
galaxy angular correlation function for angles less than approximately
5\degr, which limits the modeling of galaxy angular correlations on larger
scales. Finally, we present our custom, highly parallelized two-point
correlation code that we used in this analysis.Comment: 22 pages, 17 figures, accepted by MNRA
Evolution in the Clustering of Galaxies for Z < 1
Measuring the evolution in the clustering of galaxies over a large redshift
range is a challenging problem. For a two-dimensional galaxy catalog, however,
we can measure the galaxy-galaxy angular correlation function which provides
information on the density distribution of galaxies. By utilizing photometric
redshifts, we can measure the angular correlation function in redshift shells
(Brunner 1997, Connolly et al. 1998) which minimizes the galaxy projection
effect, and allows for a measurement of the evolution in the correlation
strength with redshift. In this proceedings, we present some preliminary
results which extend our previous work using more accurate photometric
redshifts, and also incorporate absolute magnitudes, so that we can measure the
evolution of clustering with either redshift or intrinsic luminosity.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figures requires paspconf.sty. To be published in
"Photometric Redshifts and High Redshift Galaxies", eds. R. Weymann, L.
Storrie-Lombardi, M. Sawicki & R. Brunner, (San Francisco: ASP Conference
Series
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