China Built the World’s Largest Telescope, Then Came the Tourists
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From https://www.guancha.cn/society/2017_08_25_424435.shtml :
> 据悉，平塘县依靠旅游观光，上半年的营收达46亿人民币，较去年同期增加了40％。
> It is reported that relying on tourism, the revenue of Pingtang town in the first half of the year has reached 4.6 billion yuan, an increase of 40% over the same period last year.
From http://www.wenxuecity.com/news/2017/10/03/socialnews-144514.... :
> 7天80万人贵州看“大锅” 五星酒店最贵一夜4888
> In 7 days, 800,000 people went to Guizhou to see the "big pot". Most expensive room in five-star hotel has reached 4888 yuan.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-economy-fraud/china...
So I'm not surprised if the 5 star room costs exactly 4,888. I wouldn't be surprised if the visitor number was rounded to 800k, but I doubt the number is made from whole cloth.
Just wok right in...
Whenever I see “machine-learning” in the context of scientific development I just mentally replace it with “magic”.
Employing machine learning, at the data acquisition stage, is a really bad idea. It can easily introduce biases...
This is all fine. However, the problem is suggesting that this is a somehow reasonable/tenable solution to solving the noise issues...
Maybe the noise can be removed by other methods, maybe the noise doesn’t matter, but magic doesn’t solve the noise issues.
The noise definitely matters. When you are observing with a telescope you are almost by definition working at the limit of the signal to noise ratio of the instrument, otherwise you would be asked to use a less powerful instrument (since the observing time on these larger instruments is so precious).
I worked on a project analyzing data from an X-ray telescope back in my research days. We spent 3 full years building an incredibly detailed model of the instrument noise, just so we could subtract it out and have confidence in our remaining signal. That was longer than the time we spent doing the actual science on the corrected data.
In that hypothetical setup, we end up storing every raw datapoint. If we think of these as parameters, then PCA is a non-parametric model; although it's maximally inefficient in terms of information/compression.
Just like parametric statistics, then?
> "Analyses that typically take weeks to months to complete, that require the input of experts and that are computationally demanding, can be done by neural nets within a fraction of a second, in a fully automated way and, in principle, on a cell phone’s computer chip,” says postdoctoral fellow Laurence Perreault Levasseur, a co-author of a study published today in Nature."
> "The team at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC), a joint institute of SLAC and Stanford, used neural networks to analyze images of strong gravitational lensing, where the image of a faraway galaxy is multiplied and distorted into rings and arcs by the gravity of a massive object, such as a galaxy cluster, that’s closer to us. The distortions provide important clues about how mass is distributed in space and how that distribution changes over time – properties linked to invisible dark matter that makes up 85 percent of all matter in the universe and to dark energy that’s accelerating the expansion of the universe."
> "Until now this type of analysis has been a tedious process that involves comparing actual images of lenses with a large number of computer simulations of mathematical lensing models. This can take weeks to months for a single lens."
> "But with the neural networks, the researchers were able to do the same analysis in a few seconds, which they demonstrated using real images from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and simulated ones."
[1] https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/neural-networks-mee...
Japan's domestic tourism boom was done in by the triple combo of recession (30 years and counting), depopulation and Japanese finding it cheaper and more interesting to travel overseas. Sooner or later these will hit China too.
In the case of the Tian Ma they seem to still have money for work on it, I found a 2017 proceeding[1] about adding a new system optimised for pulsar searches.
I'm guessing they simply aren't getting very exciting results, which is normal for a non-american dish, you don't hear about Effelsberg every day either.
It’s interesting though, China does appear to have a much stronger commitment to radio astronomy than the US (at least that’s how the article characterizes it).
I wonder why that is? The article didn’t really discuss why radio astronomy is so attractive...
Sure there are some common data analysis techniques, but they are common to a lot of applications.
Their plan to put a radio telescope on the far side of the moon would be a huge win for science.
Thank you!
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=84&v=ZTC_RxWN_xo
I think there is in general just a push in China to get world leading science experiments, and the simplest way to reach that is to build the biggest of something.
In contrast, if they primarily wanted to do radio astronomy science they would probably be working on getting to be part of the Event Horizon Telescope, China could really fill a gap in their coverage.
Some more data points: the US is member of ALMA but left SKA. China is a member of SKA, but not ALMA. I guess not being part of SKA is a pretty telling omission by the US, and it was mostly money related as I understand it.
In reality I think this is more a case of the US government having a waning interest in radio astronomy, possibly as a result of the optical astronomers stealing all the money to the three huge telescopes they plan to build: LSST, GMT and TMT.
[1]: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/06/spat-threatens-china-...
The US and Europe also don’t have inferiority complexes where they feel like they have to build the tallest or biggest anymore. Look at skyscraper competitions — generally 2nd tier countries trying to outdo each other for bragging rights but for no real other reason. It’s like the Soviet Olympic team — they had to win to make the political statement trunpeting a triumph of communism. The US did the same thing once upon a time, but then we grew up (and not necessarily for the better.. it’s a lot of fun to be “first, bigger, best.”) 1990s Korea, modern China, 1950s USA, the Soviet Union — those places and eras were representative of a national need to foster patriotism to create unity against real or perceived competitors on the world stage as well as remind the proles of the power and achievements of their benevolent state.
Wasn't the whole space-race and moon landing a, excuse the language, rocket-waving contest?
As you point out, it is easy to not have "inferiority complexes" or "grow up" as you put it, when you have once established credibility. Don't dismiss achievements just because it is by others.
More substantively, my understanding is that while the space race turned into a PR exercise, it started out as a serious military exercise in demonstrating ICBM capabilities; "we can put a man on the moon" is more politically acceptable than "we can put a big bomb in Moscow" but it is understood just the same.
Indeed, fixed.
It's also important to remember that "space race == moon shot" was US PR. The USSR had the first satellite, man (and woman) in space, the first space walks, etc. Lunar landings were singled out by the US as something they could beat the Soviets to; once that was achieved, the US declared victory and mostly lost interest.
The USSR kept going, ratcheting up capabilities, which carried on all the way until their collapse. The ISS is basically a continuation of their space program (funded largely to keep soviet space/rocket/ICBM experts busy and off the open market). Whilst PR and politics undoubtedly drove the USSR's space budgets and spectacles, there did seem to some long-term thinking, both for science/engineering and more politically (e.g. outposts, potentially colonies, etc.).
In fact, trying to compete directly with the US seems to have mostly hindred the USSR's space program (e.g. the N1 moon rocket was a spectacular failure and the Buran shuttle only flew once). They got some decent engines out of it though.
I'll bet that those failed projects would not have been called a failure in China.
Germany and much of the West as a whole has largely stopped investing in anything but tax cuts and entirely pointless military spending. The neoliberal gamble is that private actors can produce growth if government just gets out the way. At this point, given the last forty years of so-so growth and massive inequality, it's not looking too good.
It's probably for the best since Germany is only going to get older and older [2]. They can use all the savings to build hospital beds etc while economic growth continues in Asia and Africa.
[1] https://www.economist.com/europe/2017/06/17/germanys-low-inv...
[2] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/01/germany-will-hit-a-si...
I don't understand this claim; Germany and many EU countries top the lists of tax-to-GDP and effective tax rates in the world, while its military expenditure (as % of GDP) is lower than China's.
And while it's now easy to say in hindsight 'Well, [insert new form of bigger, better, badder] is not particle physics.' This is true, but at time nobody knew where particle physics would take us. The idea of bomb the size of a small table that could destroy entire cities is something that would have seemed impossible before the US worked to to become 'bigger, better, badder' in what was at one time mostly theoretical particle research.
The worst part of this all is that while we don't know the future, we do have a very good idea of where it's headed. Space is likely where the nest greatest achievements and breakthroughs will come from. But predicting how or where is going to be all but impossible, which is why working to be the king of all pursuits is critical. China is headed straight in this direction. They have not matched our technical skills yet, but at the time when we were conquering the world through technology and taking the baby steps into the computer age -- China was a backwoods nation where people were literally starving to death by the tens of millions. That they're now the second most powerful nation in the world, pushing forward technology and development at an unprecedented rate, is way more than enough reason to believe that one should not underestimate their resolve and ability.
The real story here is that while China's strategy is risky -- there's no guarantee all this investment will pay off -- you could argue the neoliberal strategy is even riskier. Technology tends to be a winner take all affair and it's very often the first to market that wins.
Hanzho is 22 million people, Shanghai is 32 million people, Nanjing is 12 million people. That's just 3 of the over 100 cities larger than 1 million people. I'd expect their projects to be larger. I was blown away by the size of their bullet train stations. Japan's Tokyo station has like 4 bullet train tracks. Shanghai's has 30. Is that bragging or just planning ahead for a much larger population?
Me, I love the skyscrapers. I find it interesting that Tokyo no longer feels remotely "future modern" compared to Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and I'm sure a bunch of other cities in Asia.
If you're counting like this, you're over-counting radius and doubling up. Sue the region is populous, about 80mn in that radius but including Nanjing means a 45 minute ride on high-speed rail (400km/h) from Shanghai.
BTW spelling : Hanzho -> Hangzhou
And missed Wuxi ;)
I was pretty blown away by the scale and ambition of the Belt and Road Initiative
You can wait for the debt crisis to blow up in the next five years.
That can't be a decision of scientists involved in FAST. Only a bureaucrat would do something that stupid.
I have no idea how far away the towns are but that seems impossible to enforce with tourists. I guess it just doesn't operate during certain hours because of interference.
as can be seen on the picture of a lady snapping photos with her cellphone right on the telescope ring.
See also http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1086/588679 ("CONCLUDING REMARKS" section).