Modern Astronomy in Indo – Persian Sources

Statistical challenges in modern astronomy

Despite centuries of close association, statistics and astronomy are surprisingly distant today. Most observational astronomical research relies on an inadequate toolbox of methodological tools. Yet the needs are substantial: astronomy encounters sophisticated problems involving sampling theory, survival analysis, multivariate classification and analysis, time series analysis, wavelet analysis,...

Reverse Addressing in Modern Persian

Reverse addressing is an interesting realization of kinship terms in interactive, face to face communication. This descriptive study was proposed to examine the use of family address pronouns in Iran as a function of the classical sociological parameters of age, sex, and social distance. It investigated various aspects of reverse addressing as a vernacular phenomenon. Data were reported from th...

Indigenous Astronomies and Progress in Modern Astronomy

From an anthropological point of view, the whole concept of a ‘path of progress’ in astronomical discovery is anathema, since it implicitly downgrades other cultural perspectives, such as the many ‘indigenous cosmologies’ that still exist in the modern world. By doing so, one risks provoking those who hold them and—as is most obvious in places such as Hawaii where the two ‘world-views’ come int...

TRANSLATION AND THE LANGUAGES OF ISLAM: Indo-Persian tarjuma

Statistical Challenges in Modern Astronomy Iv

We propose a new method to test for goodness-of-fit of a model for low-count Poisson data. Our approach does not resemble the usual methods of approximations to χ, but instead explicitly uses the full Poisson distribution. First, we propose to use a simple (Poisson-specific) multiscale model to characterize the “mismatch” between a best-fit physical model and the data. Next, we embed this multi...