Calibration of RAVE distances to a large sample of Hipparcos stars
  A magnitude limited population of 18 808 Hipparcos stars is used to calibrate
distances for 52 794 RAVE stars, including dwarfs, giants, and pre-main
sequence stars. I give treatments for a number of types of bias affecting
calculation, including bias from the non-linear relationship between the
quantity of interest (e.g., distance or distance modulus) and the measured
quantity (parallax or visual magnitude), the Lutz-Kelker bias, and bias due to
variation in density of the stellar population. The use of a magnitude bound
minimises the Malmquist and the Lutz-Kelker bias, and avoids a measurement bias
resulting from the greater accuracy of Hipparcos parallaxes for brighter stars.
The calibration is applicable to stars in 2MASS when there is some way to
determine stellar class with reasonable confidence. For RAVE this is possible
for hot dwarfs and using $\log g $. The accuracy of the calibration is tested
against Hipparcos stars with better than 2% parallax errors, and by comparison
of the RAVE velocity distribution with that of Hipparcos, and is found to
improve upon previous estimates of luminosity distance. An estimate of the LSR
from RAVE data, (U_{0}, V_{0}, W_{0}) = (14.9 \pm 1.7, 15.3 \pm 0.4, 6.9 \pm
0.1) km\,s^{-1} shows excellent agreement with the current best estimate from
XHIP. The RAVE velocity distribution confirms the alignment of stellar motions
with spiral structure.
