Comments on: Spreading Galaxies Gospel on Facebook

By: Dark Matter Fisticuffs I: The Backdrop

Dark Matter Fisticuffs I: The Backdrop — Sun, 21 Nov 2010 15:30:13 +0000

[...] it accounts for the cosmic microwave background and its minute fluctuations, the non-Keplerian (but not flat) rotation curves of spiral galaxies. In 2006, X-ray observations of the colliding galaxy clusters [...]

By: John Gizis

John Gizis — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 19:06:28 +0000

Uh, I don’t get it. Those rotation curves are flat.

By: kelle

kelle — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 19:05:46 +0000

oh holy crap! I’d never heard of or seen CosmoCoffee before! That discussion board looks awesome! Who’s the admin? I’d love a post on AstroBetter about this site…and their thoughts on implementing in for other sub-disciplines.

By: sarah

sarah — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 12:45:47 +0000

I was originally going to use CosmoCoffee as an example of a successful SN platform for discussion in astronomy. I don’t know it quite well enough to comment on its success, but it’s always been my impression that it’s a very useful and well-run resource for cosmology (that doesn’t seem to take up lots of people’s time to moderate…).

By: Anais Rassat

Anais Rassat — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 12:35:25 +0000

Though it’s true that not much science happens on social network sites like Facebook (though I did get an invitation to the Moriond conference on FB) – doesn’t CosmoCoffee count as a “a platform for rapidly spreading news and ideas through a large community”? In my view CosmoCoffee has proven to be highly successful with over 1300 members (which is a high proportion of the cosmological community).

By: sarah

sarah — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 10:07:36 +0000

Hi Kurtis,
Yes I think you’re right – to the vast majority of us, the issue is one of semantics rather than bad science. But I can appreciate that we’re all a little more sensitive to semantics in our own field of work, I admit I’m pretty pedantic when it comes to language myself. Salucci also pointed out to me that scientists in other fields like particle phyics have adopted this “flat rotation curve” expression, presumable from astro papers, and may not have the background to understand the semantics. So you could maybe argue that our sloppy word choices can result in misconceptions in other fields.

Re. web 2.0 “research” – again, agreed. Too many papers or preprints are published about the role of social networking in science that use tiny sample sizes, anecdotal evidence or poor surveys to make grand statements. It would be really good to see some proper rigorous work done on the subject.

By: Kurtis W.

Kurtis W. — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 09:55:04 +0000

This preprint raised two big flags in my mind. The first you mentioned, that the experiment is ill-defined. The second is that the topic, as far as I understand the issue, is more one of semantics than actual science. I have not heard anyone make a serious claim that rotation curves are purely flat (maybe because it is not my specialization), and I take it for granted that all rotation curves have some sort of structure. To me, the term “flat rotation curve” means “non-Keplarian” or more generally “not following the luminous matter”. A truly flat rotation curve is just a spherical cow, a starting point for teaching DM halos and singular isothermal spheres. Perhaps we are guilty of being sloppy with language, but I don’t know that discussions over vocabulary choices are really a good test of the scientific utility of social networking.

The combination of the lack of discussion of the experimental design and the topic led the majority of astronomers I know who saw this paper to wonder if it was a joke, perhaps a late April Fool’s prank on the arXiv.

We are all scientists, and we are trained and knowledgeable in the craft of designing rigorous experiments on well-defined topics. As-is, this paper falls short on both counts. The publishing of a non-rigorous experiment only hurts efforts to have web 2.0 efforts taken seriously by the larger astronomical community.

By: Alberto Conti

Alberto Conti — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 20:53:28 +0000

Paolo was my advisor when I was at SISSA in Trieste. I remember well his arguments and admire his tenacity. I worked with him and Massimo Persic for almost 2 years on a sample (I still have) or over 1000 rotation curves…