Eideard

VLA at sunset
Image courtesy of NRAO/AUI

The most famous radio telescope in the world is about to get a new name. The Very Large Array, known around the world, isn’t what it used to be. The iconic radio telescope…is nearing the completion of an amazing transformation. More than a decade of effort has replaced the VLA’s original, 1970s-vintage electronics with modern, state-of-the-art equipment.

“The VLA Expansion Project, begun in 2000, has increased the VLA’s technical capabilities by factors of as much as 8,000, and the new system allows scientists to do things they never could do before,” said Fred K.Y. Lo, Director of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. “After more than three decades on the frontiers of science, the VLA now is poised for a new era as one of the world’s premier tools for meeting the challenges of 21st-Century astrophysics,” he added.

And so it’s time, the Observatory has decided, to give this transformed scientific facility a new name to reflect its new capabilities.

The Observatory is seeking ideas for a new name from the public and the scientific community. Here’s the online entry form.

Entries will be accepted until December 1, 2011, and the new name will be announced at NRAO’s Town Hall at the American Astronomical Society’s meeting in Austin, Texas, in January…

RTFA for details and history of the facility. I can tell you from experience it is a wonderful place to visit. You feel like you’re being watched from outer space every minute you spend wandering the site – watched in a friendly sort of way.

This is one of those worthwhile short lectures I need to keep in mind on the blog for whenever an avatar of “let’s pretend to be a skeptic” shows up like “jonolan” at this iceberg post.

There is no perception whatsoever of scientific methodology much less any useful processes for examining the bullshit he believes – other than that it fulfills his political preconceptions. No inclination to read, to check sources on either side of the questions he’s decided. Still, the suggestion to view this video should be made.

When Jägermeister suggested this video, he noted it might be needed most of all over at the “big blog” where I’m senior contributing editor. Though he doubted if there would be much attention paid.

I agree. I think it would be ignored – except by the more fanatical nutballs.

Though I may still offer it.

Thanks, Jägermeister

Professional skeptics and pundits should skip this article as it actually deals with science instead of talking about science as if you really read anything.

It’s worth remembering that the currency among professional researchers is in publications – research papers. They are the manifestation of a research group’s work, a reference document, the bar by which a researcher is measured and the stock-in-trade of the knowledge that they produce, use, share, and archive.

The problem has always been that those research papers are on paper…

“The manner in which you become ‘literature aware’ can be slow and is limited in scope to the views and criticisms of your physically immediate peers,” said Ali Salehi-Reyhani, a researcher in single cell proteomics at Imperial College London.

“Web 2.0 throws that open to a global community of experts with tools like f1000 and Twitter.”

F1000 is a tool that highlights high impact papers and allows scientists to subject them to post-publication peer review.

“The viral nature of Twitter allows information to be rapidly and critically spread to an audience thousands to millions wide,” said Mr Salehi-Reyhani. “Tweeting scientists can exploit this to quickly pass on that hot new paper to their peers with minimal effort yet maximum effect.”

The imminent release of Google Wave could also be a boon for the cat-herding exercise of collaborating on a research paper, as each participant in a given conversation – or “wave” – using the service can add, delete, or change a given document, with a live, most-current version of a document in progress visible to everyone in the wave, no matter the time zone.

“Science always builds on what’s gone before and sharing results and data and ideas is a core part of that – it’s just that in the past we haven’t been able to do that as efficiently as we can today.”

RTFA. It’s not so much about the software utilized for the process of collaborative research, writing, editing and discussion. It’s about developing the process with what the Web has to offer 24/7.