Day 316

Monday.  Missed Friday and Saturday, then the whole week at Pitt and Penn.  Missed Monday and Tuesday again, now it's Wednesday.

1210.6046
The space motion of Leo I the mass of the Milky Way's dark matter halo
Boylan-Kolchin, et al

HST measurement of position and velocity (proper motion) of Leo I, compare with sims, find MW mass to be > 1e12 Msun.

1210. 6049
Effect of our galaxy's motion on weak lensing measurements of shear and convergence
Mertens, Yoho, Starkman

Shear and convergence affected by Lorentz boost induced by MW's motion.  No ellipticity is induced to the first order in beta=v/c, the image is magnified.  Affects convergence at 10% level, most notable for low multipoles in the convergence power spectrum C_kappa_kappa, and for surveys with large sky coverage like LSST.  Experiments which image only small fractions of the sky and convergence power spectrum determinations at l>5 can safely neglect the boost effect to first order in beta.

1210.6232
Measurement errors and scaling relations in astrophysics: a reviewAndreon et al

Estimate model parameters or predict an observationally expensive quantity using trends between object values---review most common methods used in astronomy for regressing one quantity against another.  Awkward features: heteroscedastic (point-dependent) errors, intrinsic scatter, non-ignorable data collection and selection effects, data structure and non-uniform population (Malmquist bias), non-Gaussian data, outliers and mixtures of regressions.  Outline how least square fits, weighted least squares methods, Maximum Likelihood, survival analysis, and Bayesian methods applied in astrophysics literature when one or more of these features is present.  In particular we concentrate on errors-in-variables regression and advocate Bayesian techniques.