A group at the University of Chicago, Department of Sociology, is involved in a study of how networking, distributed databases, grid computing, etc., are affecting both software development and scientific research.  The US National Virtual Observatory is of particular interest to them.  They have developed a survey to help judge the impact of these new technologies, and I encourage you to take a few minutes to fill it out (they say it takes 20 minutes, but it is more like 5-10).  Some of the language of the survey is pretty technical, but overall it is not too bad.  They will share the results with the NVO project, and this could be helpful to our understanding of how to focus our energies in the future to make the VO more useful.

So, please have a look.  What follows is the invitation to participate from the survey leader at U. Chicago, and then there is a link to the survey itself.

Thank you,
Bob Hanisch
US-VO Project Manager Read the rest of this entry