Hi Boud, Agnieszka,
Well, sorry to hear about the grant results.
thanks.
my answers are:
* referee 1: score 4 * referee 1: report - not possible to reject the hypothesis, so not worth funding
right, maybe polish science is more oriented on applied science and projects that must give positive results. Our project from the beginnig said "maybe". Of course we couldn't have said anything beyond that. While the referee seem not to get too deeply into details of the projetc itself - not mentioning the field related - since he doesn't understand that the simulations for proper statistical significance analysis are computationally consuming, apart from the search of the circles, and apart from the fact that the planck data details are already known but - he makes one good point - that we do not mention that the results will be e.g. PhD. Thesis and me and Agnieszka are Ph.D. students, so from his point of view it might be suspicious that maybe we will not be as involved as we should. I give him that. The fact that he's not interested in topology is also obvious.
* referee 2: score 7 * referee 2: report - the project will not give a final answer to the topology of the Universe
well, this report is more moderated and ballanced in words but to me it's just general mambo-jubmo just to say NO, however the score 7 is considered to be "very good".
* referee 3: score 6.5 * referee 3: report - researching the PDS model no longer has any sense because of the [unrefereed] article AstroPh:0604616
well, I didn't have time to fully understand the seriousness of the m-weightning "mistake" - I just looked quickly through the paper, but my impression is that the "proper" weightning only recudes the signal. Of course "badanie modelu PDF nie bardzo ma sens" is more less consistent with the conclusions from the paper of Shapiro et al. (however they rather say that he detection might be not possible) but the most annoying thing is that the authors of the paper
a) make remakrs on "*infamous* PDS model" and I take it that it straigt referes to our (Boud's) work.
b) they say "detection" and "claim" which is obviously NOT what was written in our paper - it was merly a "hint" and "naturally it's too soon to blablalba.... etc." in the conclusions. So to me it's a kind of attack.
The fact that the detection as well as our whole paper lack ANY statistical significance estimation of the detection is obvious - and it's true and it's bad. It was not a big deal to do some estimation of how strong that at 10deg. feature is , just from a bunch of gaussian simulations. And I agree with referees and shapiro et al. that this is an obvious drawback. Why didn't we do that anyway ? :)
The other very important thing to me about the project is what Shapiro et al. wrote: it's that the circles at 10 deg. are small, and with smoothed map to 1 or 2 deg. it's natural to me that goin' on in this process - i.e. smaller circles, bigger smoothing scale - the probability of getting some arbitrary more less flat patterns correlated in some orientation rises. Of course this is just a qualitative argument - not quantitative but it's very important point which also should be studied - and can be studied by trivial MC sims. Well :) somehow this reminds me our conversation on the needed angular resolutions to resolve the circles at SLS. Higher resolution, less smoothing, less chance for fluke.
Summary: unless there is a Nobel prize for discovering the topology of the Universe, research into the subject will not be funded. The astronomy community does not see fundamental research as a high priority.
yee, I see you're upset. m. :/ I don't know maybe it takes a bunch more papers with different analysis' to prove and convince referees to the projet.
Anyway, I have a question. Does the PDS cut the low l's for all modes similarly or only those aligned with fundamental domain (FD). I guess rather the second one. In that case (in fact in any case) I don't understand how PDS can remove power from roughly all modes but m=0 as we observrve in WMAP at l=2 and l=3 ?
Maybe we should get jobs in a Patent Office? ;) Apparently not much has changed since 100 years ago...
well, I get my paranoia about Ph.D. - so much work - so little time - but McDonalds has so much work offers :)
Anyway, it's true we need to publish our followup paper to RLCMB04. Which is in progress...
in that case don't you think you should give away some details, hm ? I've calculated the effect of corrections from flat geometry of PDS to spherical. - well almost - I got the formula but I don't fully understand it. Seems to be really negligible.
pozdr. b.
ps. I have lots of ideas to consider, work out and publish. But since I have so much things do to I might need some help. I'm thinking of some company to share ideas, work, and analyze results. I'm thinking who should I potentially interest with this as well. Onyone interested ? :) Generally it's about the well,... sort of degeneracy between non-Gaussainity and non-randomness of processes. :/ i haven't worked it out yet but this thing seems to me *really* important and people seem not to see this problem. Perhaps it depends on how we put it but this is more for conference talk rather than email- email are too slow.