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November 19, 2009
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If all goes to plan, beams of particles will begin whizzing around the LHC on Friday evening for the first time since last year's explosion

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November 19, 2009
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It was an amazing weekend for us here at ConnectSolutions. We had the privilege of supporting the State Department in President Obama’s historic Town Hall in Shanghai, China with a group of university students. You may have read about the tenuousness of the Town Hall and the American and Chinese governments were negotiating up until the last minute to figure out if and how the event would be run.

In the end the decision was made that the event would go on, but it would not be broadcast on Chinese TV leaving the internet as the only vehicle through which Chinese citizens could view the event. Taking this challenge head on, the State Department enlisted us to help them reach as wide an audience as possible with the event.

On Friday, the Co.Nx team at the State Department opened up an Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro chat room on our QuickConnect Platform where Chinese citizens were encouraged to submit questions for President Obama and share their biggest concerns. What was most clearly articulated in the chat room was an apprehension over the censorship of the internet in China, and a growing movement was revealed. In fact, over 75% of respondents in the chat room cited internet censorship as their greatest concern. They dubbed this the “Great Firewall of China” and they aligned themselves with the 20^th Anniversary of the Berlin Wall coming down, speaking out against what they perceived to be widespread government censorship of the internet.

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This chat room proved to be pivotal, as cited in The New York Times, as it produced the infamous Twitter question asked of President Obama in the Town Hall in which he spoke out in favor of freedom of information and openness on the internet.

But our involvement did not end there. Needing a way to get the broadcast out to as many people as possible, the State Department enlisted the use of our ConnectSolutions Podium webcasting product to provide a video feed of the Town Hall to those inside China. The U.S. Embassy in Beijing and many universities in China would rely on this feed to host viewing parties where Chinese citizens could congregate and hold discussions after the event was over. Similarly, the event URL was proliferated by influential Chinese bloggers (and some here in the U.S.) to promote viewing by as wide an audience as possible.

Facebook was also utilized to get the word out. The Co.Nx program already has over 36,000 fans on the site and created a Facebook Event that was shared with their network.

We were truly blown away by the number of people who were able to reach the event, especially considering that promotion did not start until the day before due to the uncertainty around if the event was going to happen or not. In the end, we were able to help the State Department connect with 10,000 viewers from 60 countries with the event with our HD Quality stream of the event.

What’s more is that nearly 70% of this audience was inside China from over 200 cities. And the response to the video quality and overall experience has been something we are very proud of. While this raw number works out to something near 7,000, the actual number of viewers is likely much larger, as the State Department facilitated viewing parties at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing and at Universities around the country, and each individual view had the possibility of being consumed by entire households or groups of viewers.

I cannot articulate how honored we all were to part of this effort and I wanted to personally thank Mark and Tim at the State Department for the privilege of supporting their efforts. We are continually blown away by how they keep pushing the envelope and taking the State Department’s Co.Nx program to new heights.

If you missed it the first time around, here the Obama Town Hall meeting in China in its entirety:

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November 17, 2009
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www.ibuynow.co.uk

SANTA CRUZ, California — Four hundred years after Galileo’s telescope revolutionized humanity’s view of the universe, a gigantic telescope is in the works that could take us to a new, deeper level of understanding.

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The enormous Thirty Meter Telescope, with a primary mirror the size of a blue whale, is part of a new generation of super powerful ground-based telescopes. Scheduled for completion in 2018, it will have nine times the collecting power of the Keck telescopes and 12 times the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope. From its recently selected location atop the volcanic dome of Mauna Kea in Hawaii, the pioneering telescope will provide an extremely detailed look at the universe.

“As we learn more, the cosmos becomes more mysterious and requires more human ingenuity to get to the next step,” Jerry Nelson, UC Santa Cruz physicist and TMT project scientist, said at a public talk Thursday.

Once finished, the new telescope will allow astronomers to see faint objects clearer than ever before. It will be able to focus on and identify extremely distant structures that currently appear as blurry smudges in the Hubble Deep Field. As yet, no one knows what these objects are.

This new resolution will provide insights into the both dark matter and dark energy. And it will widen the search for planets orbiting stars outside our solar system. For the first time, we will be able to routinely image direct light from these exoplanets, garnering information on their atmospheric chemistry and dynamics.

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The new TMT will also be able to see further back in time than any previous telescope, all the way back to the formation of the first stars and galaxies that followed the universe’s “Dark Ages.”

An adaptive optics system will aid the telescope’s ability to see into deep space. Atmospheric turbulence usually distorts light coming from distant stars. So the adaptive optics system uses a sodium laser to probe current conditions, and information about the turbulence is fed into a small deformable mirror, which makes real-time corrections to the atmosphere’s quivering. The effect is sort of like putting glasses on to correct for blurred vision — the end result is a much crisper image.

Without adaptive optics, ground-based astronomy couldn’t compete with space-based projects such as Hubble. The system is considered so vital that Nelson refers to it as the “heart and soul of the mirror and telescope.”

Nelson has been called the father of the modern telescope, because it was his innovative design in the 1970s that allowed for the creation of big telescopes like the 10-meter Keck. His segmented mirrors have completely transformed the field of astronomy, leading UC Santa Cruz astronomer Sandy Faber to call him a modern day Galileo.

Previously, telescope mirrors larger than 5 meters were considered unfeasible because of many problems: They were hard to cast, their supports were delicate and breakable, and they would warp under their own weight.

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Nelson realized that segmenting the main mirror into separate hexagonal pieces could solve all these problems. His design positioned the individual mirrors in a honeycomb-like arrangement and used an intricate computer guidance system to make them act as one, larger unit.

The first telescope to take advantage of this new plan was Keck, which has main mirrors composed of 36 individual pieces. The reflector on the Thirty Meter Telescope will be an order of magnitude leap above this with 492 small mirrors.

Telescopes have doubled in size every 30 years over the last century, and in the not-too-distant future, Nelson predicts we will see 50- and even 100-meter telescopes.

This is not to say that such undertakings will be easy. At an estimated cost of $970 million, the TMT will require an international consortium that includes the University of California system, Caltech, Canada, and Japan. Further funding will come from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, which committed $200 million to the project.

“The discoveries we’re going to make from TMT will simply increase our thirst for even bigger telescopes with even greater capabilities,” says Nelson. “So as long as we retain our curiosity and have the wealth to build these kinds of things, I think we’re going to see bigger things.”

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