China Built the World's Largest Telescope, But Has No One To Run It (arstechnica.com) 122
An anonymous reader shares a report: China has built a staggeringly large instrument in the remote southern, mountainous region of the country called the Five hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope, or FAST. The telescope measures nearly twice as large as the closest comparable facility in the world, the US-operated Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. According to the South China Morning Post, the country is looking for a foreigner to run the observatory because no Chinese astronomer has the experience of running a facility of such size and complexity. The Chinese Academy of Sciences began advertising the position in western journals and job postings in May, but so far there have been no qualified applicants. One reason is that the requirements are fairly strict: The candidate must have at least 20 years of previous experience in the field, and he or she must have taken a leading role in large-scale radio telescope project with extensive managerial experience. The candidate must also hold a professorship, or equally senior position, in a world-class research institute or university. Nick Suntzeff, an astronomer at Texas A&M University who helped lead the discovery of dark energy and is involved with construction of the optical Giant Magellan Telescope in Chile, said there are probably about 40 or so astronomers in the world who would qualify for such a job. Compared to other astronomy disciplines, radio astronomy is a relatively small field. "I am sure they will find someone," he said. "But most astronomers in the United States do not like to work abroad. It was hard to get people to apply to work in La Serena, something I could never understand, considering how beautiful it is and how nice the Chilean people are." Among the western community of astronomers there are also questions about the scientific purpose of the FAST telescope. As part of a recent National Science Foundation review of its facilities, US officials placed the similar Arecibo radio telescope near the bottom of its priorities list.
Wrong phrasing (Score:2, Insightful)
Astronomers love to work abroad. See the recent observation campaign for the MU69 flyby which took them to the backcountry of Argentina and South Africa if you need any evidence that they're willing to go out to the middle of nowhere.
The problem is living somewhere remote or hazardous. Nobody but hermits and crazy people want to live near the observatories in South America. China is one of the biggest "political risk" places on Earth.
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"Work abroad" for a short-term project =/= "Living in a remote mountainous area of China", where you're behind the "Great Firewall". Even if I had the requisite qualifications, I'd be hesitant to go to live in the "Hermit Kingdom" and run the risk of disappearing for some politically incorrect statement.
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If you worked for Google, you'd just get fired for a politically-incorrect statement.
Re:Remember kids... (Score:5, Informative)
Only if you don't bother to read the summary correctly or you are deliberately obfuscating: "The candidate must have at least 20 years of previous experience in the field, and he or she must have taken a leading role in large-scale radio telescope project with extensive managerial experience. . .there are probably about 40 or so astronomers in the world who would qualify for such a job. Compared to other astronomy disciplines, radio astronomy is a relatively small field."
Nowhere does it say the candidate needs 20 years experience in this telescope. The candidate needs 20 years experience in radio astronomy AND extensive managerial experience. And what kind of experience would you look for in a candidate to manage a $180M telescope? Some who just graduated high school?
Re:Remember kids... (Score:5, Funny)
Isn't that what Microsoft has been doing since Windows 10 was in development?
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Never was butt hurt about it - but I do find it remarkable how few things you actually have to *say* for someone who dreams of being a storyteller.
I don't dream, I am a storyteller. But what makes you think that Slashdot is a platform for telling stories? Last time I checked, it was non-fiction (or creative non-fiction, based on some of the shit that gets made up about me).
It's like you have 8 stories in your head, total, and you just keep trotting out variations on them every few days to remind us you're still alive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Basic_Plots [wikipedia.org]
But then, you are creimer, and we do expect very little from you.
Fortunately, I don't live by your low expectations.
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Like we needed to know that Charles raped you while Shirley watched.
Citation, please?
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Oh no, right, Charles "took a bucket of lard" to go have sex with a knothole.
Except Charles is my paternal grandmother's second husband. They got married in their 60's, IIRC. I'm sure someone can pull their marriage license to verify. At that age, you don't get marry for sex. It's physical impossibility that Charles raped a tree, raped me or my mother watching me be raped. This is just more shit made up on Slashdot.
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You may choose not to acknowledge them, but you certainly fail to achieve anything higher than my low expectations.
You mean commit suicide? Not happening.
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How do you arrive at that conclusion? Show your work.
This is Slashdot. The AC's answer to every problem is for the person to commit suicide. If you're too fat, too dumb, too poor, or too whatever, the AC's response is always to commit suicide (yours, of course, never their own). I call this Slashdot's nihilism. I've disappointed many ACs over the years by not committing suicide.
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Yeah, how you got from me saying, "You fail to outperform my low expectations," to me suggesting you "commit suicide," I can't imagine.
I sometimes take logical leaps. The highest expectation that ACs have for me on Slashdot is that I commit suicide. In fact, that's the answer for every inconvenient problem in life is to commit suicide. Too fat? Commit suicide. Too ugly? Commit suicide. Don't make enough money? Commit suicide. I call it Slashdot nihilism.
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Look where they've gotten you: a 47 year old virgin who is 200 pounds overweight and lives in a shitty studio apartment, bragging about his $2/day "business" of spamming a technology site.
1) Only Slashdot has a problem with me being a virgin.
2) My "skinniest" weight was 325 pounds. Even if I dropped 200 pounds (which is extremely unlikely), I'll still be obese by BMI.
3) My studio apartment is not a "shitty" dump. If anything, it's too large since I got rid of all the clutter.
4) A revenue stream is not a business, you're still low-balling the number, and it pisses off the trolls.
The actual advice would be:
On assumptions that say more about you than me.
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He thinks getting an associate degree from a community college is a significant academic achievement.
It is when you skip high school. It took me two years to get a high school education and then two years to complete the associate degree.
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"Two years" is the standard for Associate degrees. For people with average intelligence.
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that half of people are dumber than that.
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Nothing in what I wrote was arrogant. (Heck, it took me an extra year to get a B.Sci., since I radically changed majors half-way through.
The standard is still 4 years to get a Bachelor's degree.
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Was that when you lived on Karm Way or Estrade Drive?
Let me guess... you requested my credit report?
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Citation, please.
Asking about what street you lived on is a standard credit report verification method.
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It may be a matter of context. The person quoted as saying "40 or so astronomers...would qualify" MAY have been talking about actually qualifying in a practical sense, not necessarily about meeting the ads' requirements.
The ad is probably asking too much: a big-name degree, 20 years of big-radio-scope experience, AND esteemed professorship. Managers typically don't have time to be professors other than hit-and-run lectures perhaps; they are dealing with logistics, hiring, firing, office politics, budgets, s
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The ad is probably asking too much: a big-name degree, 20 years of big-radio-scope experience, AND esteemed professorship. Managers typically don't have time to be professors other than hit-and-run lectures perhaps; they are dealing with logistics, hiring, firing, office politics, budgets, screwy vendors, leaky plumbing, publish-or-perish pressure, etc.
They are asking for a lot; however, they are not asking for the impossible. The other astronomer who commented seemed like they are an ideal candidate if they were not working on another telescope.
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A couple of things... First, Neil de Grasse Tyson mentioned this telescope, and its prospects for drawing talent, in a recent interview. (Might be this one, [youtube.com] I don't have time to check.) Basically, he was talking about how the US was losing its leadership in science, citing the cancellation of the Superconducting Super-Collider back in the 90's. He mentioned this radio-telescope project in China as being a major draw for "talent" from the scientific community.
The second thing is about China itself. Culturall
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But if you emphasize credentials at the expense of experience and managerial competence, it could significantly hurt the end results. Expert test takers are rarely the best managers, even in China. But I guess ingrained cultural habits are a difficult wall to penetrate.
Likewise, in the US management hiring often over-emphasizes (projection of) confidence and bravado, even though the best managers tend t
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But if you emphasize credentials at the expense of experience and managerial competence, it could significantly hurt the end results. Expert test takers are rarely the best managers, even in China. But I guess ingrained cultural habits are a difficult wall to penetrate.
Yes, but this has always been a problem for China (and other Asian cultures): "expert test-taker" has been the main qualification for a government gig since the days of Confucius. Somehow they seem to muddle through. I suspect they will end up with a mix of mostly native talent with as many 'heavy hitters' from abroad as they can get. They'll put in some crusty old fossil from the days of Mao as titular head of the Institution, and fill in the rest with a mixture of foreign and native recruits.
Something I s
Fucking magnets... How DO they work? (Score:2)
While the summary (and I presume the article) is trying to make it sound like Chinese have stupidly built a mega-expensive giant telescope they have no idea what to do with OR anyone to run it...
What if... naaah... Can't be... Chinese would NEVER think of hiring a talent magnet...
After all... it would only give them LOADS of publicity, access to that scientist's networks and it would poac... I mean draw in the best minds in the field, giving China a boost at the expense of the rest of the world.
Naaah... the
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A second major issue is buried deeper in the article: It may be physically much larger than the second largest radio telescope, but technical limitations due to the angle of observation (if you want to look anywhere other than straight up) means that it's not as powerful as its physical dimensions may make it seem. Add to this having to relocate to the middle of nowhere, China, and I can see them having a very hard time finding anyone for the post. More than likely, they'll have to grow their own.
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And what kind of experience would you look for in a candidate to manage a $180M telescope? Some who just graduated high school?
Well, no. At least a bachelors in fine arts.
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And what kind of experience would you look for in a candidate to manage a $180M telescope? Some who just graduated high school?
I'd look for a PhD holders with any radio telescope experience and choose the best candidate from those. Or better yet actively recruit candidates. If there are only like 40 people in the world who might fit the requirements you may as well just contact all of them and ask if they want the job. More realistically don't require 20 years of experience because that is ridiculous. After the first 2 or 3 years you aren't going to be learning much. You just need a highly intelligent person with appropriate educat
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It may be a cliche, but I have indeed seen a good many ads like that per IT. One insider who admitted to "playing the game" said he simply lied to get jobs like that. But those kinds of people will encourage HR and PHB's to do it again, which is probably why the practice persists.
Re:Remember kids... (Score:5, Funny)
It may be a cliche, but I have indeed seen a good many ads like that per IT. One insider who admitted to "playing the game" said he simply lied to get jobs like that. But those kinds of people will encourage HR and PHB's to do it again, which is probably why the practice persists.
I remember when the .Net framework was brand new (like a year or two old, tops) seeing jobs advertised that had requirements of 10 years of experience working with "C#.Net".
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The irony is they terminate you when you actually have 10 years for being too old. They want "experienced youth". Can we download John McCain's experience into a fetus? Unfortunately you gotta bullshit to get past HR and PHB's in order to talk to the real techies. Dev job hunting is a fashion & buzzword game.
Trump U could have been Yuuuge if they specialized in teaching you the bullshit needed in the work place
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I remember when the .Net framework was brand new (like a year or two old, tops) seeing jobs advertised that had requirements of 10 years of experience working with "C#.Net".
Back then, C# was so similar to Java that this wasn't even that unreasonable...
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Somebody please mod down the totally idiotic comment from creimer.
Or at least mod it up for the right reason. Insightful and informative for something that should be modded as funny?
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Or at least mod it up for the right reason. Insightful and informative for something that should be modded as funny?
That would require it to be funny. *puts on shades*
Re:What about Bill Nye? What about Stephen Hawking (Score:5, Funny)
If I had to select somebody to run something like this, my first choice would be Bill Nye, without a doubt.
My second choice would be Stephen Hawking.
Why not Al Gore, he invented the telescope.
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What about Jodie Foster? Unlike performer with no science training at al Bill Nye, Jodie Foster was at least in a movie involving radio telescopes.
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I thought it was a radio telescope? They don't have mirrors. So, even easier for the locals to clean.
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There's actually a nugget of truth to this. The technology's changed significantly such that familiarity with it may be of greater relevance than experience with an older installation. Our telescope mount, originally built almost fifty years ago, is now fully automated. Larger projects rarely have the luxury of keeping up. It may be more worthwhile to promote a local who's familiar with the science and technology and provide him with managerial experience than go
Experience Counts (Score:5, Insightful)
I believe the issue with the large amount of experience is understanding all the tasks that need to get down from a maintenance perspective.
For comparison, how comfortable would you feel flying on a new plane and the person whom you hired to maintain it is a auto-mechanic. Where to look and what to look for before things become a problem comes only with experience. If the Chinese built something this big, I believe that they don't want to hire some guy to learn on the job, and fix stuff after it gets screwed up.
They should have been apprenticing someone to learn how to take on this task while they were still constructing it, but apprenticeships seem like a dirty word in today's world.
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Unlike the movies, director jobs for day to day business have little to do with construction. It's not clear to me how an apprenticeship would do any good here.
For your analogy, a pilot might learn some interesting things watching a 777 being built, but isn't going to learn anything about dealing with air traffic control, the setup of different airports, dealing with the crew, ....
Terrible analogy (Score:2)
Hundreds of people aren't going to die and the equipment isn't going to be completely destroyed if you make a dumb mistake while managing a radio telescope facility.
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Spherical (Score:1)
The full name of the thing is "Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope", and despite being round, it's not even close to being "spherical".
I'm pretty sure they just slapped "Spherical" in there so that the acronym didn't spell FART.
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They use spherical because the collector is spherical. For most telescopes, the collector is parabolic.
Five-hundred-meter Aperture Parabolic - FAP
Bigly skills (Score:2)
"I have the best radio gastronomy skills, believe me! I know more about the stars than Hollywood boulevard and Grassy Tyson combined. When you know stars, they let you grab uranuses, and I've grabbed some yuuuuge uranuses, let me tell ya. It's fake news they were neptunes. Neptune grabbing is for total looosers and I will ban neptune grabbers from serving in the military! We must have quality troops to successfully invade Australia, Germany, and Mar-a-Lago competitors. Make Astrology Great Again!"
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Unfortunately, the telescope doesn't run on steam power.
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Don't knock it until you try it.
But would they ever be allowed to leave? (Score:1)
Once you are there how likely is it that the government would let you leave?
The Hotel California: (Score:2)
"You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave."
OK, now what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Did it somehow come as a surprise to them that they built this telescope? Wouldn't you think it would have occurred to someone along the way that at some point they needed to turn it on and operate it, and plan accordingly? In fact, the obvious place to look would be the scientists and engineers who developed the design and specified the requirements for the thing in the first place.
Something doesn't smell quite right about this story - either it's wrong/misleading, or it's a ChiCom vanity project that was unplanned from science perspective.
"Build it and they will come" might be an OK premise for a movie but it makes *no* sense for a multi-billion-yuan science project. I have to believe there is something else to this story than is being described, because it's too crazy/irresponsible to be what it seems.
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Money was allocated to each area to build projects--part of the government economic developing. Someone suggested a telescope given aspects of the area. Money was bookmarked. The project design was started and handed to people who went as far as building it. Maybe money was never bookmarked for actually running the thing? Seriously, as crazy as you make it sound, it's an incredibly common thing for governments and corporations to blow through, in aggregate, billions of dollars without any real long-term thinking or possible even short-term thinking. Governments just tend to do it larger, faster, and with more dubiously negative outcomes since they don't tend to hold themselves accountable; corporations are only marginally better because short of outright malicious or gross negligent acts, government rarely interfere with their dubiously negative outcomes either.
The less-accountable a government is to the people who are forced to fund it, the more of this type of government behavior you'll have. Why? Because it doesn't matter to those in government, there are no negative, and quite a few possible positive, consequences to doing so. It's the same behavior as US military weapon systems contracts that are approved and money spent for weapons the military does not want or need, and which have serious design/engineering flaws. Unacountability & corruption go hand-in
Re:OK, now what? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Build it and they will come" might be an OK premise for a movie but it makes *no* sense for a multi-billion-yuan science project. I have to believe there is something else to this story than is being described, because it's too crazy/irresponsible to be what it seems.
I agree that skepticism is probably merited here, but I can also tell you that if somebody or multiple somebodies high up enough in the Chinese Communist Party wanted it done for prestige reasons (ie. "We have a big telescope too!"), nobody would dare raise these questions until it got done. Remember, this the country that has built cities that almost nobody has ever moved into and shopping malls that have no customers or stores in them.
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The same can be said of this [wikipedia.org] and this [wikipedia.org] and this [wikipedia.org] American projects.
I don't see any big problem there. I only see positive sign that China wants to recruit top-notch scientists to manage top-notch science projects regardless of one's nationality. I would be surprise if the US is this open.
And I also see their leadership want to advance China as a leader in scientific discovery, instead of going back to coal and blue-collar laboring. While the West continues to be skeptical and dismissive and eventually will be
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Certainly, that's the other possibility - a vanity project like the Concorde.
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Reminds me of the U of I "Laser Building" [nytimes.com].
Branstad pushed for it at the time because Iowa State University got their Molecular Biology building funded, so U of I had to have something too. I learned early in life how much to trust politicians. This Freedman guy - he ran because he knew his call was coming due.
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You forget it is China.
Half planned economy.
Half capitalism.
They planned for buildin the telescope, but relied on the 'free market' to have workers for it.
Which would perhaps work if they had not ridiculous requirements like 20 years experience.
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I have to wonder about the practical utility of this telescope. If they don't have someone in-country with enough experience to run the facility, how could they design it and be sure they avoided the technical problems associated with a large telescope sited on earth?
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Something doesn't smell quite right about this story - either it's wrong/misleading, or it's a ChiCom vanity project that was unplanned from science perspective.
Nowhere did I see that they said they weren't running the telescope. What I got from reading the article is the Chinese built this giant state of the art telescope and now want a prestigious celebrity scientist to head the project and will keep that position open till they get one. I doubt that head of project is really needed for anything but to put their name on the papers that are being written about the telescope and the for publication in astronomy journals.
Sounds like an opportunity for SETI (Score:2)
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The SETI project is entirely one of data analysis, not management of data collection. It's highly unlikely anyone on the SETI project has experience managing such a facility.
Another sign of the bubble? (Score:5, Insightful)
Among the western community of astronomers there are also questions about the scientific purpose of the FAST telescope.
I recall reading something about giant skyscrapers and economic bubbles. The construction of the world's tallest building is usually followed by an economic bubble bursting.
The argument I believe was, very tall skyscrapers are actually not economically efficient, because more and more internal space needs to be taken up with elevators. Also at some point the added cost of building higher and higher becomes greater than the cost of simply buying another lot and making another building there. Therefore whenever you see a new #1 tallest building in the world going up, that's a sign of economic excess and status-seeking ego, rather than an efficient allocation of capital.
Anyways it makes me wonder if this #1 gigantic radio telescope (which western scientists say is not even that useful) is another sign of China's economic bubble about to burst.
Re:Another sign of the bubble? (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyways it makes me wonder if this #1 gigantic radio telescope (which western scientists say is not even that useful) is another sign of China's economic bubble about to burst.
As a result of the decades long one-child policy, China has an excess of unmarried young males (with limited familial prospects). Gotta keep them busy. Having the government favoring making skyscrapers and radio-telescopes seems like a good way to keep people busy and out of trouble...
People said the same stuff about the International Space Station which was basically conceived to keep a bunch of Russian scientists who knew have to make rockets busy and out of trouble after an economic collapse. I'm not sure how much useful science has been accomplished by the ISS, but it's certainly kept some key Roscosmos/Energia people busy and out of some trouble...
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The idea that there's a severe gender imbalance may be a myth according to recent reports...
The exact size of the gender imbalance may be a little imprecise, but there's no doubt about the existence of the gap. Singles Day (11/11) was started as a bit of gallows humor by a single Chinese man. Now it dwarfs US Black Friday in one day retail sales. Obviously there are plenty of people bargain hunting, piggybacking on the original core of single men, but there's still enough single men to noticeably skew the exact nature of the items sold. Lots of consumer electronics, lots of toys for big boys,
Some things money can't buy (Score:2)