New distances to RAVE stars
  Probability density functions are determined from new stellar parameters for
the distance moduli of stars for which the RAdial Velocity Experiment (RAVE)
has obtained spectra with S/N>=10. Single-Gaussian fits to the pdf in distance
modulus suffice for roughly half the stars, with most of the other half having
satisfactory two-Gaussian representations. As expected, early-type stars rarely
require more than one Gaussian. The expectation value of distance is larger
than the distance implied by the expectation of distance modulus; the latter is
itself larger than the distance implied by the expectation value of the
parallax. Our parallaxes of Hipparcos stars agree well with the values measured
by Hipparcos, so the expectation of parallax is the most reliable distance
indicator. The latter are improved by taking extinction into account. The
effective temperature absolute-magnitude diagram of our stars is significantly
improved when these pdfs are used to make the diagram. We use the method of
kinematic corrections devised by Schoenrich, Binney & Asplund to check for
systematic errors for general stars and confirm that the most reliable distance
indicator is the expectation of parallax. For cool dwarfs and low-gravity
giants <pi> tends to be larger than the true distance by up to 30 percent. The
most satisfactory distances are for dwarfs hotter than 5500 K. We compare our
distances to stars in 13 open clusters with cluster distances from the
literature and find excellent agreement for the dwarfs and indications that we
are over-estimating distances to giants, especially in young clusters.
