- Cosmo-torun - cosmo.torun.pl

GNC meeting 2024
by Mariana Jaber 25 Mar '24

25 Mar '24

Apologies if you receive this multiple times. ---- I'd like to bring your attention to the conference organized by the University of Szczecin, in Poland. This meeting will focus on astrophysics research supporting various domains, including astroparticle (gamma-ray and cosmic-ray), X-ray, gravitational- waves, observational cosmology, exoplanet, and stellar astrophysics. There is no registration fee, and the meeting will be both in person and online. For further details, please visit the following link: https://gnc2024.physics.muni.cz/ The link for registration: https://gnc2024.physics.muni.cz/register.html ----

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Re: [Cosmo-torun] IAU B1 Newsletter No.6 Aug. 11, 2020
by Boud Roukema 15 Aug '20

15 Aug '20

Dear Dmitry, On Tue, 11 Aug 2020, Dmitry Bisikalo wrote: > With this letter, we kindly ask for your view on the format this > meeting should take and how it should be organized. Specifically, we > ask you to answer the following questions. You have omitted the most important question: 0. What practical and ethical guidelines do you recommend for (i) the software and (ii) the hosting services to use for the online meeting? Could you please send this question to Commission B1 members? Thank you in advance. My answers are below. > 1. Would you be interested in participating in such a meeting and in > giving a talk? If yes, please, provide a (very preliminary) title of > your presentation. Tentatively, yes: "A galaxy formation software pipeline aiming at full reproducibility on any POSIX-compatible operating system" > 2. Which way of giving a talk would be more suitable for you, live > presentations or pre-recorded ones? I see little point in pre-recorded presentations - conferences are most useful for their interactive aspects. > Should we include only short contributed talks in the program or > will some more extended review talks also be helpful? I think that reviews should be proposed as drafts on any git repository satisfying IAU ethical guidelines. (Repositories that forbid access to scientists based on their nationality or geographical location are disqualified under IAU anti-discrimination guidelines; this disqualifies github and bitbucket.) > 3. Should we plan a special session limited to topical discussions? > Can you suggest some issues to be discussed at the session? A topical discussion on reproducibility, free licensing and long-term sustainable astronomy software development would be very useful. Too many astronomers choose "direct action" - we publish software on a git repository with a fuzzy licence (or an absent licence, i.e. the Berne convention, which forbids copying, modification and redistribution) and ignore the question of long-term integration of astronomy software into the wider free-software and open-source-definition-software (FOSS) environment. Question 0 for Commission B1 members: What practical and ethical guidelines do you recommend for (i) the software and (ii) the hosting services to use for the online meeting? 0.(i) The conferencing software must be free-licensed, with a licence satisfying either the free software definition or the open source definition. The software must use open protocols that are compatible with free-software licences and that do not restrict astronomers to any particular vendors (corporations or citizens' associations or individual hosters). Practical videoconferencing possibilities include bigbluebutton (bbb), jitsi, jami [1], the matrix protocol (with a front end such as element.io) [2], and irc (well-tested over many decades and highly efficient). 0.(ii) The hosting services should (1) allow the astronomers using the service to install the conferencing software on their own servers, e.g. at their research institute; (2) allow wide interoperability with equivalent services; (3) allow easy and practical export of the astronomers' stored data from that particular service; (4) must not require the astronomer to install any unverifiable (e.g. binary) software on his/her computer. These reasons are all practical rather than ethical. Criteria (i) + (ii) imply that Zoom and Slack are excluded, because they violate most of the practical constraints (1)-(4). Moreover, the ethical violation with using Zoom or Slack (or MS Teams or an equivalent Google service) is that "the astronomer is the product to be sold to advertisers". Astronomy, especially in the context of the IAU, is meant to be an inspiration and example to the world. We should not give the wider public the bad example of humans becoming products to be sold to advertisers. For more details on bbb/jitsi/jami/matrix, see [1] https://switching.software/replace/zoom [2] https://switching.software/replace/slack For more details on the overall answers and the IAU's practical and ethical considerations to take into account for question 0, see [3] https://cosmo.torun.pl/blog/slack_zoom_prison . > Since we believe that a preference should be given to young > scientists (PHD students, young PHDs within three years after the > defense), we would be grateful if you spread this information among > young researchers in your home institution. The easiest way to do this is with a conventional mailing list, so I'm cc-ing this answer to our local publicly archived mailing list. I see nothing private in your questions, and after all, the IAU is a network of citizens' associations, so we really should be shifting to fully public, transparent, rational discussion. Commission B1 - Computational Astrophysics [4] - has even less justification for secrecy than any other part of the IAU! :) > We will be grateful to receive your responses by 1st September, > 2020. And do not forget that the IAU Symposium 362 is not cancelled > but just postponed till June 2021! > Yours sincerely, > Members of the IAU Commission B1 Organizing Committee Regards Boud [4] https://www.iau.org/science/scientific_bodies/commissions/B1/

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A possible crisis for cosmology - Cosmology Journal Club 18/11
by Matteo Cinus 14 Nov '19

14 Nov '19

Dear all, I am writing to invite you to our next meeting of the Cosmology Journal Club in which we will discuss the paper "Planck evidence for a closed Universe and a possible crisis for cosmology" from Eleonora Di Valentino, Alessandro Melchiorri and Joseph Silk, published recently on Nature Astronomy, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-019-0906-9, and also available on ArXiv at the link below, https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.02087. The paper has attracted the media attention since it calls for a serious rethinking of the concordance model of cosmology. The meeting will take place at the Institute of Astronomy, in the Conference room at 12.15. Come join the discussion if you want to know more. Best Regards, Matteo Cinus

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Cosmo journal club 4.11.2019 @ 12:15 KRA, Piwnice
by Justyna Borkowska 03 Nov '19

03 Nov '19

Hi all, at tomorrow's journal club (KRA Piwnice, after the seminar) I'd like to discuss the https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.13489 article ("Another look at redshift drift and the backreaction conjecture"). See you tomorrow, Cheers Justyna

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Cosmo Jnl Club 12:15 Mon 28.X.2019 Mariana: ArXiv:1910.04750
by Mariana Jaber 25 Oct '19

25 Oct '19

Hello everybody, this is to tell you we’re discussing this paper (ArXiv:1910.04750) next journal club. The meeting will take place after Monday’s seminar, this is around 12.15hrs in Piwnice. The paper is titled “Deficit of Luminous and Normal Red Galaxies in Cosmic Voids” and I will be presenting it but please feel free to read it as well so we can discuss it together. Best, -Mariana

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LSST-PL 14 March 2019@NCBJ
by Boud Roukema 08 Mar '19

08 Mar '19

hi cosmo-torun, In case anyone is interested, a 1-day LSST-PL kick-off meeting for science and organising issues will take place on Thursday: LSST-PL 11:00-18:00 Thursday 14 March 2019@NCBJ https://events.ncbj.gov.pl/event/10/ If you are likely to attend, then please register, even if you don't intend to present a talk - this is for practical reasons in terms of handling things like the number of chairs and choice of room. pozdr Boud

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Inhomogeneous Cosmologies IV, Torun, 14-19 July 2019
by Boud Roukema 31 Jan '19

31 Jan '19

Inhomogeneous Cosmologies IV, Torun, 14-19 July 2019 During 14-19 July 2019 we are gathering experts in inhomogeneous cosmology for a small workshop of about 30 participants at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, the town where Copernicus was born. We wish to map out the most promising directions for analytical, numerical and observational investigations aimed to take into account both structure formation and cosmological expansion within the constraints of general relativity. Can we clarify the physics present in the relativistic cosmology software now being developed? Are the calculations artificially constrained or are they fully relativistic? Can we achieve accurate postdiction of cosmological observations and follow up by making predictions for the upcoming decade of new major survey projects? We expect vigorous, constructive debate between "one-percenters" and "order-unity" proponents, and practical hands-on sessions of free-licensed inhomogeneous cosmology software packages. Feel free to redistribute this announcement. Check the CosmoTorun19 website or subscribe to the inhom newsletter to know when registration is open. More info: https://cosmo.torun.pl/CosmoTorun19 Newsletter 'inhom': https://cosmo.torun.pl/mailman/listinfo/inhom Contact: cosmotorun19 at cosmo.torun.pl Organising committee: Boud Roukema, Eloisa Bentivegna, Krzysztof Bolejko, Thomas Buchert, Mikolaj Korzyński, Hayley Macpherson, Jan Ostrowski, Sebastian Szybka, Eleonora Villa, David Wiltshire Topics will include: * exact cosmological solutions of the Einstein equations * averaging and backreaction in cosmology * numerical cosmological relativity * observational tests

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Hubble-Lemaitre Law
by Andrzej Marecki 31 Aug '18

31 Aug '18

30th IAU GA resolution: www.iau.org/static/archives/announcements/pdf/ann18029e.pdf -- am

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some good links on scientific writing
by Boud Roukema 04 May '15

04 May '15

hi cosmo-torun, With a search engine, anyone can easily find some good "how to write good scientific English" guides, but here are a few that seem especially useful. For our writing of journal articles, PhD theses, and lic/mag theses, I think that these could be very useful. Even if you write in Polish, many of the principles are likely to be the same. * Grammatical and scientific correctness are necessary, but not sufficient, to provide a high probability of the reader understanding some scientific text. Gopen and Swan argue that writing short sentences is not necessarily enough either; and avoiding technical language does not necessarily improve readability either. They provide concrete examples and show how and why the examples could be rewritten more clearly: http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/the-science-of-scientific-writi… * The "see also" section of this Wikipedia article seems to be its most useful part: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_writing#See_also https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Scientific_writing&oldid=6275008… * European scientific writing guidelines, including a partly Polish guideline of how to write in English: http://www.ease.org.uk/publications/author-guidelines http://www.ease.org.uk/sites/default/files/ease_guidelines-june2014-polish.… Cheers Boud

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arXiv:1410.1687 - measuring inhomogeneity in the metric
by Boud Roukema 14 Oct '14

14 Oct '14

hi cosmo-torun, Our new observational method of measuring inhomogeneity in the metric, and the initial results, are now public: http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.1687 This will make it even harder to explain the FLRW interpretation of observations to people just learning standard FLRW cosmology - what do "comoving coordinates" mean physically when one of the best known "comoving" tracers - the baryonic acoustic oscillation peak at about 105 Mpc/h - is an environmentally dependent length scale? I have been telling almost every monograph or cosmology class at TCfA since I arrived in Torun that a scale as large as 100 Mpc/h should definitely be considered as comoving. Now we know that that's an oversimplification. pozdr Boud

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