A Decade of Dark Energy: 1998 - 2008

The years 1998 to 2008 were very exciting years for cosmology. It was a pleasure to accept this invitation to describe my contributions to the development of our knowledge and understanding of the universe over the course of the past decade. Here, I begin by describing some of my work on radio galaxies as a modified standard yardstick and go on to describe model-independent studies of the accelerating universe and the properties of the dark energy. During the course of these studies, I came upon interesting ways to study the spin and other properties of supermassive black holes, some of which are briefly mentioned.
Comment: Proceedings of the 2008 UCLA Conference "Dark Matter and Dark Energy in the Universe," submitted to AIP Conference Proceedings, 6 pages