Workshop 2 Update

  Greetings fromSan Francisco, where the weather and hospitality has been awesome. If you live in the area, or palm to visit, definitely check out the California Academies of Science. It is likely the best science museum I've ever visited. We are the midst of day two of the 2nd Citizen Sky workshop. This morning I talked about the AAVSO database and then Michael Koppelman gave a conceptual talk about uncertainty in data. He had an awesome animated gif showing how binning data can increase precision to a point, but you go too far you lose the structure In the data - basically throwing the baby out with the bath water.Then, Bob Miller debuted a song he wrote about Citizen Sky! It is a rock song and really, really good. It's not your typical science geek song:) we had lots of requests for it and will place an mp3 online when the conference is over (and my computer is fixed, I'm typing this on an iPad). My boss, DocArne is currently talking about light curves of variable stars, which he has put into three classes: dips, bumps and wiggles. This afternoon the main even starts, as Grant Foster talks about data analysis of variable star data.Yesterday, Dr. Bob and Brian held court in the morning and updated us on the status of our knowledge of the epsilon Aurigae systems. We've learned quite a bit in the last year since our first conference. Much of it thanks to the work of Dr.Bob and Brian specifically. The ongoing joke of the conference is that Brian's dissertation is jetting longer and longer, each time someone fro the audience raises their hand and brings up a good question or suggestion. :)Steve Howell knave two talks about our knowledge of eps aur's spectra and suoerbinary stars in general. Steve is always entertaining and good at building enthusiasm while also sticking to real science. His explanations for the lack of spectral lines from the disk was the most clear and solid explanation I've yet heard. Now let's hope it turns out correct.:)David benn's workshop on star went well. We almost had a small emergency when the CS servers went down right before David's talk. But our intrepid sysadmin at the AAVSO, Doc Kinne, was up to the challenge and saved the day. Time Slater gave a rousing talk about how much trouble novice's sometimes have understanding light curves. Knowledgieable people can make lots of assumptions about graphs that the average Joe /Jane doesn't understand. So when presenting data we need to really think about it from the viewpoint of a completely novice user. Tim's talks are usually interactive and ful of jokes, so a number of running in jokes have their origin in this talk.:)Uh oh, lunch is about to start so I'll cut this bait short. Remember all presentations will be online in PDF and video format in a few weeks.