From: Robert A. Knop Jr. (robert.a.knop@vanderbilt.edu)
Date: Tue Feb 25 2003 - 10:44:05 PST
Several people have called for re-doing the analysis based on this,
that, or the other thing. Some say, (e.g. Greg on the Jha U-band stuff)
that "this won't cause much of a delay".
I beg to differ. This will cause a HUGE delay. Doing all of these fits
and so forth takes time. (Training somebody else to do it will take
just as much time, so that's not a real solution.) Depending on how
much we want to do, we should be aware that we're potentially talking
about a lot of time. Putting in a different U-B intrinsic color means a
solid week of work on my part-- and that's a real week, not a week
interupted by meetings and the other things that happen. That's pretty
early in the analysis chain (i.e. whole new uberspectrum, probably a
whole new U-band template), and must be propogated all the way through.
I can guarantee you that the next draft of the paper will not come out
until April, at the earliest, if we insist on making this change. We're
not talking about plugging in a small change for a number quoted in the
paper, we're talking about redoing everything here.
Is Jha's work published in a refereed journal, or is it just available
as his thesis? If the latter, I think we are justified in ignoring it
for now. If it is published, where and when?
Another issue: WMAP. So far as I can tell, that work is not published
either, just submitted. I used that as a justification not to mention
what they'd done in the last draft Doing a lot with that -- even a lot
of discussion -- will take time and delay the paper. If their paper
isn't published, only submitted, we can make the argument that this is a
"simulatenous" paper, or that their results weren't available when the
paper was written. Reason: to get this paper out the door. That should
be the main goal. A perfect paper will never be published; by the time
we deal with all of that, more stuff will have come out that we will
have to deal with, and we'll be stuck like Xeno's paradox never reaching
the finish line. I would rather get this one out the door, and then
write a separate paper that combines these results with WMAP results.
I understand that we want to do this right. We also want to get it out
the door. Even if there is something better around the corner, I'd
rather we publish than we keep waiting to plug in the next best thing we
see coming. I realize this wouldn't be an issue if I'd gotten the
bloody draft written last August, but, well, that didn't happen.
-Rob
-- --Prof. Robert Knop Department of Physics & Astronomy, Vanderbilt University robert.a.knop@vanderbilt.edu
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