The Outsider's Inside View post#002 - Publish or Perish

First off, our group meeting looks to be postponed until Wednesday, same day as our science meeting, so I won't have much inside info to spill until later in the week, I guess. Oh well, I've given myself until Wednesday to draft the abstract for the paper/poster I'll submit for the Bioastronomy conference.

I enjoyed the discussion that arose out of my blog from last week. I can't say I'm terribly familiar with the Quicksilver Messenger Service, but they might have had a track on a K-Tel compilation LP my Dad has. I'm always looking for recommendations of interesting and challenging music, so keep them coming.

I also want to say that the story I read in one of the other forums about someone's laptop being recovered by tracing its SETI@home communications was just great. I would humbly suggest that "Countdown with Keith Olbermann" would be a good media outlet for such a story. He's always got stuff about criminals being caught in clever (or not-so-clever) ways.

I am up to 60 SETHI datacubes completed, so I'm 5/12 of the way there. I expect only about 3-5 more to finish this week, so I'll be concentrating on getting a lot of stuff done for my other radio astronomy projects. As a postdoc I'm supposed to concentrate on getting my name on a lot of refereed publications, so all this data analysis I do (and love to do) is great but I have to balance that with an effort to show that I can do good science with all the pretty images I am creating. Fortunately, I've struck up some very productive collaborations during my time at Berkeley. One such group is the GALFA consortium. GALFA is an acronym for Galactic ALFA (studies), where ALFA is the Arecibo L-band Feed Array, or what we refer to commonly in SETI@home and elsewhere as the new Arecibo multibeam receiver. This instrument has really improved Arecibo's imaging capabilities, which when combined with that telescope's massive collecting area, makes it an excellent facility for producing datasets with very good sensitivity, and in relatively little time too. I've probably processed more GALFA data than anyone on the planet at this point. There are some surveys for which I have to look at new data practically every morning, as well as some targeted smaller projects for which I've been in charge of the data processing. So I've gotten really good at making beautiful datacubes showing the HI emission in the Arecibo sky, and my SETHI data compliment the GALFA data quite well, though the GALFA data is of much better quality.

Here are some "slices" of the most recent datacube I've made. These are only a few channels from a much larger datacube, but they give the idea of looking at HI emission at different frequencies/velocities to get a sense of the 3-dimensional distribution of gas in the interstellar medium.





OK, that should be enough for now. I feel warmed up to do some actual article-writing.
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@ Kevin, Can Oxygen be found this way, or is that a stupid question?
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I Desire Peace and Justice, Jim Scott

@ Kevin, Can Oxygen be found this way, or is that a stupid question?

@Kevin,

I take it that the complex organic molecules that are known to exist in space can be found in a similar fashion?

List of molecules in interstellar space

It makes me wonder if these organic clouds could have had a seeding effect on planetary systems (not unlike the panspermia hypothesis).

So what do you do when all your datacubes are completed, will you still have a job?
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Join TeamACC

Sometimes I think we are alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we are not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.

@ Kevin, Can Oxygen be found this way, or is that a stupid question?

Not a stupid question at all. In the cold interstellar medium, oxygen is mostly locked up into molecules like CO, O2 & water (H2O). But atomic oxygen (which we'd label OI, just like atomic hydrogen is HI) has an infrared emission line at 63 micrometres, that has been detected toward many star forming regions, ie. protostars. What probably happens is that the CO molecules near the protostar are dissociated so that there are lots of free C and O atoms around that can radiate. It's easier to see CI than OI. Of course the real problem is all the oxygen in our atmosphere, so we need infrared space telescopes to see interstellar O.

@Kevin,

I take it that the complex organic molecules that are known to exist in space can be found in a similar fashion?

So what do you do when all your datacubes are completed, will you still have a job?

We probably would've talked about charging for work units, so the longer we can delay that conversation the better, I say.

We probably would've talked about charging for work units, so the longer we can delay that conversation the better, I say.

As in, paying to be a part of science?

We probably would've talked about charging for work units, so the longer we can delay that conversation the better, I say.

As in, paying to be a part of science?

As in, this isn't even an option as far as I'm concerned. Not gonna happen as long as I'm working here. Not like anybody is really considering this anyway. I think a more sensible option (if it comes to this) would be to shut down the project and spend our remaining funds doing whatever science we can as opposed to doing whatever science we can *while* trying to run the world's biggest supercomputing project.

- Matt

As in, paying to be a part of science?

As in, paying to be a part of science?

That’s actually been the rationale for my donations so far: 1¢ per Classic WU, and 0.1¢ per BOINC cobblestone earned here and in Beta. I realize that doesn’t come to a lot, but it should more than cover the costs of handling the work I’ve done, and in principle it makes a kind of sense to me … if even 10% of the users were to do so, I figure that would come to something on the order of $2500 a day.

I'd just like to point out that at 0.1 cent per cobblestone, if taken retrospectively, that at this time it would make $1043.35 and $176.88 for each of you.
[ not such a big ask, or is it? ]
Jason.

I'd just like to point out that at 0.1 cent per cobblestone, if taken retrospectively, that at this time it would make $1043.35 and $176.88 for each of you.

[ not such a big ask, or is it? ]

I'd just like to point out that at 0.1 cent per cobblestone, if taken retrospectively, that at this time it would make $1043.35 and $176.88 for each of you.
[ not such a big ask, or is it? ]
Jason.

Yes it is...I would/could not do seti of I had to pay.

@Kevin. Thanks for the interesting pics and explanations. It takes me back to my college days when I did a whole course on the interstellar medium....I remember calculating the angular momentum for rotating dust grains...but I can't remember why we did it.

Yes it is...I would/could not do seti of I had to pay.

You and thousands of other loyal volunteers, I'm sure. It's just too bad we're in a funding situation where such a thing even has to be considered. I agree with Matt that if we focussed our efforts on taking the results we do have and get them published in one of the major journals, we'd be on better ground to seek funding through the proper grant agencies, though it'd still be a steep upward climb.

@Kevin. Thanks for the interesting pics and explanations. It takes me back to my college days when I did a whole course on the interstellar medium....I remember calculating the angular momentum for rotating dust grains...but I can't remember why we did it.

Because you can, that's why! I'm just kidding - probably something to do with the polarization of starlight.

I don't think I'll get around to seeing Of Montreal in San Francisco this weekend. Yesterday was payday and I'm still trying to pay off my Ireland vacation over New Year's. I'll just stay home and watch my Magma and Gentle Giant DVDs.