  Interpreting the nature of starless cores has been a prominent goal in star
formation for many years. In order to characterise the evolutionary stages of
these objects, we perform synthetic observations of a numerical simulation of a
turbulent molecular cloud. We find that nearly all cores that we detect are
associated with filaments and eventually form protostars. We conclude that
observed starless cores which appear Jeans unstable are only marginally larger
than their respective Jeans masses (within a factor of 3). We note single dish
observations such as those performed with the JCMT appear to miss significant
core structure on small scales due to beam averaging. Finally, we predict that
interferometric observations with ALMA Cycle 1 will resolve the important small
scale structure, which has so far been missed by mm-wavelength observations.
