Portraits on the Wall

The focus of “Portraits on the Wall” is discovering the history behind two family heirlooms. Through online archival and ancestry websites, a tentative history of the portraits was found. Once a more clear background was established, a complete line of descent was created starting with the current generations of the family and traced back to one generation previous to the portraits. While searching for answers about the subjects of the portraits, an abundance of family history was unearthed. Everything from local politicians, to Supreme Court cases against step-mothers, successful business owners, to friends of presidents. While investigating the subjects in the portraits, other family events are explored on the journey through eight generations of family history. The main source of information outside of family knowledge was ancestry.com. Through this website, pictures, censuses, marriage licenses, and birth and death records were found to provide additional resources. “The Ewing Genealogy” and bartondatabase.info are both compilations of family histories that intertwined with the descendants of the portraits, making them both extremely valuable sources. Additionally, other family heirlooms including photographs, books, and newspaper clippings were used

Detection of Ks-band Thermal Emission from WASP-3b

We report the detection of thermal emission from the hot Jupiter WASP-3b in the KS band, using a newly developed guiding scheme for the WIRC instrument at the Palomar Hale 200in telescope. Our new guiding scheme has improved the telescope guiding precision by a factor of ~5-7, significantly reducing the correlated systematics in the measured light curves. This results in the detection of a secondary eclipse with depth of 0.181%\pm0.020% (9-{\sigma}) - a significant improvement in WIRC's photometric precision and a demonstration of the capability of Palomar/WIRC to produce high quality measurements of exoplanetary atmospheres. Our measured eclipse depth cannot be explained by model atmospheres with heat redistribution but favor a pure radiative equilibrium case with no redistribution across the surface of the planet. Our measurement also gives an eclipse phase center of 0.5045\pm0.0020, corresponding to an ecos{\omega} of 0.0070\pm0.0032. This result is consistent with a circular orbit, although it also suggests the planet's orbit might be slightly eccentric. The possible non-zero eccentricity provides insight into the tidal circularization process of the star-planet system, but also might have been caused by a second low-mass planet in the system, as suggested by a previous transit timing variation study. More secondary eclipse observations, especially at multiple wavelengths, are necessary to determine the temperature-pressure profile of the planetary atmosphere and shed light on its orbital eccentricity.Comment: 14 pages, including 4 figures. Accepted for publication in ApJ Letter

A Typical Model Audit Approach: Spreadsheet Audit Methodologies in the City of London

Spreadsheet audit and review procedures are an essential part of almost all City of London financial transactions. Structured processes are used to discover errors in large financial spreadsheets underpinning major transactions of all types. Serious errors are routinely found and are fed back to model development teams generally under conditions of extreme time urgency. Corrected models form the essence of the completed transaction and firms undertaking model audit and review expose themselves to significant financial liability in the event of any remaining significant error. It is noteworthy that in the United Kingdom, the management of spreadsheet error is almost unheard of outside of the City of London despite the commercial ubiquity of the spreadsheet.Comment: 5 Page