Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Application + trip

Just a job application and preparing things for our easter trip to Austria.

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posted by Cris Da Rocha @ 11:59 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Some stuff finished

Mammary gland analysis, finished (so far).

New application for a position, finished, to be sent tomorrow.

Proposal that I'm in but couldn't contribute much to the text finished and submitted.

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posted by Cris Da Rocha @ 10:09 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Too much non-science ...

So! Mostly since last post I've been looking for flats in Munich. Yep, is a dammed expensive city.

We've spent last week there visiting the flats and found something, one that is "livable and affordable". Now we "applied" to it and are waiting for the landlord to say "yes, we like you ..."

Besides that just some application material. Tomorrow I'll be back to science.

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posted by Cris Da Rocha @ 11:59 PM 0 comments

Thursday, September 17, 2009

Writing and rewriting

So, wednesday more on writing, thursday more on rewriting. Also today Matheus had a pediatrician appointment so that took most of the day, since he stayed home for most of it and I was the father "on duty" :-))

New application ready. Tomorrow submission.

Of course the weather didn't improve on wednesday. It did so for today, but no time for cycling ... maybe tomorrow afternoon for a little while.

Dinner at home with a good friend and collaborator of Fernanda, Elaine Del Bel (USP-Ribeirao). It's always great to talk to intelligent people, isn't it?

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posted by Cris Da Rocha @ 11:59 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Writing some stuff

So, writing stuff.

Updating some e-mails, asking for some information, some updated text for a new job application..

Reading a proceeding and a observational proposal to be submitted by collaborators.

Wrote most of my cycling magazine monthly text.

Basically that.

More to write for another application, some organization to do and if the weather improve as it's claimed, some cycling!! :-)

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posted by Cris Da Rocha @ 11:59 PM 0 comments

Monday, September 14, 2009

Getting back to normal!

So, today, comparing the implementation of the BIC (Bayesian Information Criterion) and the Akaike test. Of course the bad results the preliminary analysis gave were due to a small bug on the code ... now I'm to decide which one fits better my needs and, more important, to decide how to decide that!! Which would be the good tests for that, that can also characterize classification errors.

Also updating CV and texts for applications.

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posted by Cris Da Rocha @ 11:59 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Catching up

Application sent. Some work on catalogues, some updating bibtex ... catching up.

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posted by Cris Da Rocha @ 11:23 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Some things, no science

Dentist, wedding of a friend and text for application. No science today.

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posted by Cris Da Rocha @ 11:53 PM 0 comments

Monday, March 16, 2009

Studying, but now in Garching

Some redshift checking and a lot of studying ...

Just for the record, the new versions of linux SUX! My Fedora 10, was preventing me from entering from outside, some obscure configuration firewall that I can't find a way to change ... and now the window system decided not to login ... I'll try again on the weekend ... blah.

It's getting more and more difficult to do science.

Windows ... forget it, it's a joke.

MacOSX ... good, stable, but somethings don't work, and will never work because Apple don't care about us. The fact that we can work with Macs is just because in order to have a stable system they based it on BSD (a sort of PC Unix). They don't really care about science users. This is clear buy the X11 support they have ...

Linux, it's getting worse everyday! Every version is more unstable and full of obscure automatic things that crash or prevent you from doing what you want ...

Still, if you're thinking about buying a new computer buy a Mac ...

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posted by Cris Da Rocha @ 9:54 PM 0 comments

Friday, March 13, 2009

Week summary!

So! A week summary.

Red sequence fit ... there are some discrepancy with models in some cases, but that needs more attention than I can give now.

Applications.

Studying for my exam. That will have to go faster, otherwise I don't finish it on time.

Carolina Nunes, student at ESO, found here at this blog that I would be able to help here with GALFIT problems :-) This is not the first time that happens, some months ago, Mathias Zetzl, a colleague from Goettingen found information about KCORRECT here. Unfortunately that time it was out of my knowledge of the code. Also some IDL hints were asked here. I guess I could help Carolina.

Good to know that some information here is useful to the people!

With Carolina's problem, I decided to but basic hints here about GALFIT.

To run it properly, aside from the good initial guesses, a stamp that covers as much as possible from the galaxy and a good decision about which objects should be simultaneously modeled and which should be masked there are a list of things you must take care.

Coming to masking. As I learned from Marco Barden (Innsbruck) if an object is inside the isophotal radius of the galaxy it should be simultaneously modeled, otherwise it should be masked.

So, you need a correct header indicating the GAIN, RON and NCOMBINE, image in COUNTS and not COUNTS/SEC or ELECTRONS and the original sky level.

That is critical if you're using HST images. Multidrizzle, by default gives you the output image in counts/sec and sky subtracted. So you must multiply it by the exposure time and put back the sky level which is written in the header under "MDRIZSKY".

In the case of Carolina, her fits were giving a CHI^2 of about 500 ... putting a dumb sky back it went down to 5 ... so with the correct sky level it will go down to the proper value.

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posted by Cris Da Rocha @ 11:59 PM 0 comments

Thursday, March 05, 2009

Each 2 days? :-)

So! The same as yesterday.

Some attention to the database, checking parameters of the red sequences of the clusters and studying.

The examinations for the position in Rio are 13th and 14th of April ... gotta prepare everything until then.

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posted by Cris Da Rocha @ 11:22 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, March 03, 2009

Updating the database

Monday and tuesday, including train time was compiling a small research project for a job application, finishing the corrections on the morphology database, now finishing the missing parameters for some objects and working on red sequences and studying.

Some discussion about proposals for the next period and some nice discussions with Miguel Verdugo who's visiting ESO for a month. Discussions like in the old times :-)

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posted by Cris Da Rocha @ 11:59 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Long time no post ...

Since the last post, STUDYING ... this week (yesterday and today) some work on the catalogues again and applications ...

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posted by Cris Da Rocha @ 10:50 PM 0 comments

Thursday, February 12, 2009

Studying

Studying, now star formation and evolution in galaxies.

Also finished some extra tables for the spectroscopic run.

Nice talk about Dark Energy by Jochen Weller.

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posted by Cris Da Rocha @ 11:44 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Things going ...

Finished the parameters determination for the spectroscopic sample. Now I need to incorporate these data to my sample :-)

Studying. First essay ready.

Today one year that I first arrived at ESO.

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posted by Cris Da Rocha @ 11:59 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Remodeling

On the train to Garching I worked on some things, but mainly the day was used remodeling the object of the new spectroscopic run and collecting material to study, and studying, of course.

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posted by Cris Da Rocha @ 10:12 PM 0 comments

Friday, February 06, 2009

From thursday and friday

The end of the week was used mostly to solve problems.

Summary :-) May 2008 we received the "bad" news that the place we reserved for Matheus at the MPIEM kindergarden didn't exist and we needed to find a quick and good solution. It was a "tagesmutter" (day mother), a system very common here in Germany and very reliable. After searching we've got a great one, for a good price but in the neighboring town. Everything was great, they were perfect, no one could take better care of Matheus, the only problem was the 1.5 hours by bike or 2.5 hours by bus to go and comeback. So the 8 hours day gets reduced to a 6.5 hours day.

On tuesday we've got a call from the kindergarden that they finally had a place for us. After visiting and thinking a lot we decided that this would be the best an sanest option. Spoke to Silke, the tagesmutter, who's got very sad. The only option we were doing it was the going back and forth. During this day she made us a "counter offer", that she would pick up and bring Matheus home everyday. For us the problem was solved, we've got the care we like for our son and don't spend long time going and coming back.

People say Germans are cold, they might be, but once you break their "ice" they are able to do anything for you. Thanks Silke!

This wouldn't be a problem if we had bought a car, but considering that we'll not stay in Germany after the summer, this wouldn't be the wisest thing to do.

The next problem to be solved was my visa, also solved.

Now about work. Reading and locating the topics I have to study for the positions I'm applying. No details now. Also finished the photometry of the new objects we have spectroscopy. Also working on my catalogues, as usual.

That was the weekend too.

Later a post about monday.

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posted by Cris Da Rocha @ 11:59 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, February 04, 2009

Since friday

Yep, posting is a bit erratic lately. Too much to think about, many things in mind.

By parts. Friday, a whole deal calibrating a run, using the individual frames, pretty consistent but still not taking me where it should. Now I'll try with another run from FORS2, instead of FORS1, but that was more complicated before friday when I've got the master files for BIAS and flats, thanks to Sabine Moehler (ESO). There's a small problem with the archive soft that it retrieves only part of the master calibration files, but all the raw ones are there. It was just not worth going from scratch.

On the train back more galaxy morphology. Found a group of missing objects in the CAS analysis of all clusters. Gotta identify them all and get the parameters. Together with retrieving missing objects from raw photometry to complement our last spectroscopic run. Together with studying for a very complex job application (I'll explain that later). All that has been happening since the weekend.

+ visa paperwork + repairing broken mobile + fixing some stuff at home + more important discussing kindergarden issues also takes a lot of time.

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posted by Cris Da Rocha @ 11:17 PM 0 comments

Thursday, January 29, 2009

Calibrations + solving problems

So! Basically solving problems (as usual, but this week more) and working on recalibration of our data for HCG 90.

Also some "applicating", tomorrow applications will be sent.

Hans-Walter Rix gave a nice talk at the JAC today about streams in the MW and how this can be used cosmologically, specially to solve the missing satellites problem.

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posted by Cris Da Rocha @ 11:13 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Lots of small things

Calibrations + morphology ... paper work + applications = solving problems.

Tomorrow will be a day with good news ...

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posted by Cris Da Rocha @ 11:08 PM 0 comments